Suchergebnisse

There is a recurrent discussion about the small size of the
U.S. House of Representatives in comparison with most democratic assemblies. A
few days ago, Danielle Allen from Harvard made a good case for increasing the
size of the House within a framework of democracy renovation (The Washington Post,
March 1). She argues that, as the U.S. House has the highest ratio of population per seat
of any OECD country, the representatives are much removed from their
constituents. My point is that the federal structure of the very large United
States and its multiple channels for people's participation may allow for a
functional explanation of a relatively small House that may not work for more
centralized nations.

From a worldwide perspective, it
has been found that the best approximation for the size of the democratic national
assembly in number of seats is to take the cube root of the population, as
initially formulated by Rein Taagepera. For most countries, the number of
inhabitants amounts to millions, so the cube root must be in the hundreds (that
is, some figures with six zeros can be transformed into figures with two
zeros). For example, as Mexico has about 122mn inhabitants, the cube root of
this number closely approaches the 500 seats of its Chamber of Deputies. In
Italy, with 59mn people, the Chamber of Deputies was oversized but it was
recently reduced via referendum from 630 to 400 seats, which fits the cube root
law.

According to this standard, the
U.S. House of Representatives is undersized. During the nineteenth century, the
size of the House regularly increased every ten years to account for population
growth according to the decennial census. But despite the further increase in
the country's population, the House has remained frozen since it was fixed at
435 seats in 1911. At that moment this was an almost exact fit with the cube
root of the population. A 1929 Act capped the size of the House until now.

Some studies suggest that the
discussion in the House at that time reflected the fear of third-party growth,
namely the Progressive Party and its left-wing cousins. Much less compellingly,
it was also argued that the room for plenary meetings on Capitol Hill would be
too small for much larger gatherings.

A larger assembly would certainly
create more competitive districts and would facilitate the election of more
representatives from minority parties and groups. However, in the complex
political structure of the federal United States, other institutional devices,
especially broad decentralization into a high number of states, have
compensated for the federal House's small size and its restrictive political
consequences.

The trade-off between federalism and
multipartyism comes from a long history. If in a large country, multiple
territorial governments are established, as it was from the very beginning in
the United States, much political action tends to focus on those local
institutions; it is then less likely that multiple political parties are formed
at the federal level, and as a consequence, there is less pressure to adopt a
large assembly and an electoral system favoring national representation of multiple
political parties.

The effect is extreme in this
country, which, with 50 states, is the most decentralized in the world. The
very high number of states somehow compensates for small federal representation.
A logical inference is that an increase in the size of the House would make it more
inclusive, with more diverse partisan affiliations, which would push for a
stronger federal government. Some issues that are now mainly debated and
decided by the state legislatures would be channeled to Congress as territorial
demands by the additional state representatives in Washington.

The trade-off can also be observed
from the inverse extreme case. In the oldest British democracy, the assembly
size has also been frozen for a long period, but on the other direction: the
House of Commons, with 650 seats, is largely oversized regarding the country's
population and the cube root law. Not by chance, the United Kingdom is the most
centralized large democracy, where most territorial tensions are channeled
toward London. Right now, there are ten parties in the House of Commons, six of
them based in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. Not surprisingly, the House
room is too small and many MPs have to stand up during its plenary sessions.

The main point is that in a
long-durable democracy, the trade-off between the size of the national assembly
and territorial decentralization must keep a consistently bounded relationship.
It is not possible to alter significantly an institution without affecting the
balance of the other.

---

See also my article:

"Equilibrium Institutions: The Federal-Proportional Trade-Off"
- click

James A. Dorn


Hong Kong, once one of the freest jurisdictions in the world, with a rule of law that protected freedom of speech and assembly as fundamental human rights, is now under the direct hand of Beijing after the passage of the National Security Law (NSL) in July 2020. One of the victims of that law is Jimmy Lai, founder of Next magazine and Apple Daily, two of Hong Kong's most popular and free‐​market publications.
His strong criticism of the NSL, and his support of mass protests against it, led to the shutdown of both publications and Lai's imprisonment for "subversion." By speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its cronies in Hong Kong and defending the rule of law and freedom, Lai now faces the possibility of life in prison. Like many others before him, he is a prisoner of the state.
In honor of his valiant effort to uphold the principles that made Hong Kong a bastion of freedom and his courage in standing up to Beijing's suppression of liberal principles in Hong Kong, the Cato Institute awarded him this year's Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Sebastian Lai accepted the award on his father's behalf.
Jimmy Lai, like other prisoners of the state, understands the key role a free market in ideas plays for both economic and personal freedom. In a recent documentary produced by the Acton Institute, he stated: "Information is choice and choice freedom." When the free flow of information is crushed by the state, there can be no criticism of current institutions and leaders: wrong ideas persist and good ideas are suppressed. Consequently, both economic development and personal freedom suffer (see Zhang 2015).
Peter Bauer (1957: 113), the first recipient of the Friedman Prize in 2002, held that "the principal objective and criterion of economic development" is to widen "the range of effective alternatives open to people." Restricting the flow of information and free speech limits the range of choices open to people, impedes the market discovery process, and weakens the moral fabric of society.
China's Attack on the Free Flow of Information
When Deng Xiaoping began to open China to the outside world in 1978, there was both an economic liberalization and an opening of the market for ideas. However, preserving the CCP's monopoly on power has always come first. Although freedom of speech is now embedded in the PRC's Constitution (Art. 35), the state has the upper hand, as expressed in Art. 51: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China, in exercising their freedoms and rights, may not infringe upon the interests of the State." Those interests are wide‐​ranging and offer no guarantee of free speech or other fundamental human rights.
The Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 stalled liberalization until Deng's Southern Tour in 1992. One of the many casualties of that crackdown was Zhao Ziyang, then Party General Secretary and a firm proponent of liberalization. When he spoke out in favor of a peaceful settlement with the protesters, he was purged from his position and put under house arrest for the remainder of his life.
Although Zhao's voice was silenced, his posthumous book, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (2009) became a New York Times bestseller. In that book, he argued that, if China wants to fully develop, it must move toward a parliamentary democracy with a genuine rule of law and a free press (pp. 270–71).
Another enemy of the Chinese state was Liu Xiaobo, one of the drafters of Charter 08. He was charged with "speech crimes" for "inciting subversion of state power" and imprisoned. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his strong support of democracy and human rights—especially free speech. The empty chair at the Nobel ceremony symbolized the struggle for truth against power.
In a statement released on December 23, 2009, Liu wrote: "Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth." Jimmy Lai would undoubtedly agree
Since Xi Jinping took over in 2012 as General Secretary of the CCP, there has been a carefully managed campaign to squash dissent within the Party and establish Xi as the paramount leader. Now the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, Xi has silenced all critics, including those in Hong Kong.
In January 2017, the cyber police in Beijing shut down the website of China's leading private, market‐​liberal, think tank—the Unirule Institute of Economics—as well as the personal websites of its scholars. The director of Unirule, Sheng Hong, in a memorandum dated January 24, 2017, pointed to the hypocrisy of Xi Jinping, who paid lip service to free trade in his remarks at The World Economic Forum, while cracking down on free speech at home. According to Hong, "As ideas are more valuable than commodities, anyone who truly defend[s] the freedom of trade will defend freedom of expression" (quoted from a personal copy of the memorandum). The Unirule Institute was permanently banned in August 2019, and the voice of its co‐​founder, Mao Yushi, who received the Friedman Prize in 2012, has been silenced.
Today, access to economic and financial data is being restricted in the name of national security, making it difficult for foreign firms and scholars to gather information necessary to conduct business in China and to understand policy changes (see Wei, Kubota, and Strumpf 2023). Without a free market for ideas and access to relevant databases, it will be difficult to make informed decisions and develop China's financial markets.
China's Future Development
In 2015, Zhang Weiying, a pioneer in China's transition from plan to market, predicted: "The future of China's reform will depend on the kind of ideas and leadership the new leaders, particularly General Secretary Xi Jinping, have. To succeed in a peaceful transition to a liberal society, China must get rid of the wrong ideas" (Zhang 2015: 13). The most serious wrong idea is that economic and social harmony come from top‐​down planning—not from the spontaneous order of free markets and free people bounded by a rule of law that protects persons and property.
Continuous improvement in people's lives comes from taking advantage of new opportunities to exchange goods and ideas. In that endeavor, there must be competition in all markets, including the market for ideas. China's one‐​party system and the lack of free speech are impediments to future development. That is why Ronald Coase and Ning Wang have emphasized that, "when the market for goods and the market for ideas are together in full swing, each supporting, augmenting, and strengthening the other, human creativity and happiness stand the best chance to prevail" (Coase and Wang 2012: 207).
Globalization and trade liberalization help bolster the free market for ideas and widen the range of choices open to people, thus increasing the wealth of nations. Crude nationalism and protectionism do the opposite. Politicizing trade and blocking the free flow of information risks losing the gains from globalization and marketization that have benefited both China and its trading partners.
Conclusion
Hong Kong's turn from the principles that made it a great society—namely, the rule of law, nonintervention, and a free market for ideas—has made successful entrepreneurs and advocates of freedom like Jimmy Lai enemies of the state. By silencing critics—under the guise of national security—both Hong Kong and China have sacrificed liberty in the name of "stability." Reversing that trend is the biggest challenge they face in achieving social and economic harmony.

After more than three decades of conflict and several bloody wars, the Republic of Azerbaijan recaptured the Armenian-inhabited enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh on September 28. Azerbaijan's lightning victory followed a nine-month blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only link between the Karabakh region to mainland Armenia, effectively depriving the roughly 120,000 Karabakh Armenians who lived there of food and other necessities.Following Azerbaijan's victory, there was a mass exodus of Armenians from Karabakh and the creation of a severe humanitarian crisis that reminded some of the Armenians' flight from the Ottoman Empire during 1915-16 when as many as a million people died or were killed — considered a genocide by Armenians and part of World War I's tragic collateral damage by the Turks.Many factors contributed to Azerbaijan's final victory in its long-simmering conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Some factors are rooted in the South Caucasus' complex history as part of the Iranian state until 1813, followed by the Russian and Soviet empires, the USSR's nationalities policies and its practice of using various ethnic groups as levers of influence, and finally the messy breakup of the USSR beginning in 1988. Other factors relate to the disparity in Armenia's and Azerbaijan's size, population, and resources. Unlike Armenia, which has few natural resources, Azerbaijan is an energy-rich country and thus capable of spending large sums on arms.Additional factors include Armenia's persistent internal political differences on the country's foreign policy orientation, as well as rivalries and disagreements between Armenian and Karabakh political elites.Since gaining independence after the Soviet collapse, Armenia has mostly depended on Russian support. But largely due to the 20-month-old war in Ukraine, Moscow's priorities have changed. Both Turkey and Azerbaijan became more important for Moscow, and its failure to adequately support Armenia, particularly by deploying its peacekeeping force to dismantle the blockade, sealed last month's outcome.Unfortunately for Armenia, Azerbaijan also became more important for the West in light of the Ukraine war. This meant that neither Europe nor the United States was willing to take major risks to restrain Baku.Lastly, international and regional geopolitical rivalries and Armenia's vulnerable geopolitical position contributed to its ultimate defeat. Among these factors were the larger Russia-West rivalry for control of Eurasia and Washington's 30-year-old efforts to contain and isolate Iran by denying Tehran any role in the emerging post-Cold War economic and security structures of the Southern Caucasus, most importantly in the construction of pipelines to transport oil and gas from Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, and Central Asia to Western markets.To accomplish this aim, the U.S. and Europe effectively assigned a leading role to Turkey in the Caucasus and Central Asia both as a model to be emulated by the Central Asian states and as the West's major regional partner. Perhaps, at the time, Armenia should have seen the writing on the wall and aligned itself more closely with the West while seeking some form of accommodation with Turkey. But given Armenians' history with the Ottomans and Turkey, this was not easy to do, and Yerevan chose to align itself more closely to Russia instead.Armenia did, in fact, retain ties with the West and even joined NATO's Partnership for Peace program. Yet, despite religious and cultural bonds with the West and a politically active Diaspora community, particularly in France and the U.S., Yerevan's closer ties to Moscow resulted in a lingering Western distrust. And, as time went on, the lure of Azerbaijan's energy resources became too strong for the West to resist.Surrounded by Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenia saw Iran with which it built a constructive relationship after independence, as a potential counterweight to Azerbaijan. But Iran, fearful of antagonizing its own Azeri population concentrated in the northwestern part of the country and concerned about antagonizing a fellow Muslim and mostly Shi'a country, was limited in its response. At the same time, Moscow worked to enhance Armenia's dependence on Russia, making it more difficult for Yerevan to develop closer economic and energy ties with Tehran. In short, U.S. containment of Iran and Russia's desire to control Armenia deprived Yerevan of alternative sources of support.The regional involvement of Israel, the Middle East's most important military power and a sworn enemy of the Islamic Republic, has further complicated matters. As a minority state in the Muslim world that was itself born in part as a result of the Nazi genocide against the Jews in Europe, Israel should theoretically have felt a natural affinity for Armenia. But a desire to expand its diplomatic relations with Muslim states (long before the 2020 Abraham Accords), the lure of energy resources and markets, and its hostility toward Iran have pulled Israel ever closer to Azerbaijan.Over time, Israel became a key supplier of weapons for Baku, providing it with as much as 69 percent of its total arms imports, including some of its most advanced weapons systems, between 2016 and 2020, a trend that intensified significantly as Azerbaijan prepared its offensive to take Karabakh. Moreover, Baku's principal patron and mentor, Turkey, which has its own regional ambitions, supplied additional weaponry and assistance, even to the extent of reportedly providing Syrian mercenaries for Baku to fight in Karabakh during the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.Since Ottoman times, Turkey has coveted what is now the Republic of Azerbaijan, as well as the Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Pan-Turkist and neo-Ottoman forces, with which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is identified, have long wanted to create a land bridge between, first, Turkey and Azerbaijan, and subsequently through northern Iran to Central Asia. In this way, Turkey hopes to realize a direct land route to link all Turkic peoples.Azerbaijan's conquest of Karabakh marks the first step towards this goal. Now, Turkey is insisting on the creation of a land corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhicevan, an Azerbaijani exclave bounded by Armenia, Iran and Turkey. This would amount to the incorporation of what the Armenians call Syunik and the Azerbaijanis call Zangezur into Azerbaijan, thus bypassing Iran. In a demonstration of Turkey's aims, Erdoğan himself visited Nakhichevan for a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on September 25, two weeks before Baku's Karabakh offensive, and talked about the opening of the so-called Zangezur Corridor.Iran is understandably concerned by all of these developments. While relations between Baku and Tehran have oscillated between warm and cold since Azerbaijan's independence, they have grown more tense in recent years, particularly as Israel became increasingly critical to Baku's military buildup, possibly in exchange for oil and reportedly also for access to Iran for Israeli intelligence operations. Iran has long been concerned that Azerbaijan may serve as a launch pad for an Israeli, U.S., or joint attack on its territory.As for Turkey's ambitions, it should be noted that the Nakhicavan exclave lies only 90 miles from Tabriz, the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, which Baku claims is occupied territory it refers to as Southern Azerbaijan. Erdogan appears to share that sentiment; in 2020, his recitation of a poem that claimed that Iran had usurped the region provoked protests in Tehran.Iran has said clearly that it opposes any other territorial changes in the region, especially the creation of a corridor that would eliminate its common border with Armenia. In early October, Iran's president, Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi, expressed this view to Armenian and Azerbaijani officials who met with him. Earlier, members of parliament had warned that Iran would not tolerate any changes to its border with Armenia, while an article that appeared in Tehran's influential "Iran Diplomacy" even suggested that Iran unilaterally create a 20-mile buffer zone within Karabakh, Nakhichevan, and Syunik in order to prevent any incursions into Iranian territory. A year ago, Iran held large-scale military exercises along its Azerbaijani border, signaling its determination to resist further territorial changes to its detriment.Against this background, the steady rapprochement between Turkey and Israel since last year's exchange of ambassadors — Erdogan was reportedly preparing to host Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu later this month or in November before the latest Gaza war broke out last weekend – has done little to calm Tehran's concerns. Earlier this year, 30-plus members of Israel's Knesset also called for international support for "the national aspirations of the peoples of South Azerbaijan."Thus, the latest Caucasus conflict is not finished, and larger clashes may lie ahead, especially if Azerbaijan pursues its irredentist claims against Iran with the backing of Turkey and Israel. In the last few days, there have been reports that Baku and Tehran are now trying to normalize bilateral relations and even discuss opening a new transit route through Iran to Nakhicevan, which could alleviate some of Tehran's key concerns. However, the deep-rooted sources of tension between Iran and Azerbaijan are unlikely to be quickly resolved, and thus the risk of possible conflict remains high, especially if Iran's rivals pressure Baku.

 Because actual history is rarely linear, let alone teleological, I read the repudiation of Hegel before I ever read Hegel. I had read arguments and polemics against Hegel in Althusser, Deleuze, and Foucault long before I had every cracked Hegel's books. A funny thing happened once I started reading, writing, and teaching Hegel, is that I started to warm up to him. It was not the idea of spirit that appealed to me, or even the dialectic as some overarching logic, but the more limited, finite dialectics of the different figures and moments of consciousness. If you need an example of what I am talking about just think of the famous dialectic of master and slave, the hit single of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This passage has been separated from the progression of spirit to take on a life of its own as a way to discuss everything from desire to anti-colonial violence. However, hit singles have a way of overshadowing the whole album. I have often thought that Hegel's Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right offer more than just that famous struggle, the figures of the stoic, sceptic, unhappy conscious, the struggle of culture and alienation, faith and enlightenment, could be liberated from the development of spirit, to become ways of thinking about the current state of spirit, which appears less and less as a culmination of progress than a motley accumulation of everything every believed. It is for this reason that I was delighted to learn of Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit. One aspect of this book is an attempt to put the figures of Hegel's Phenomenology, to work; the master and slave, but also the stoic, sceptic, and unhappy consciousness become critical figures of subjectivity, and not just moments of the development of spirit. It puts these figures to work in relation to figures of black struggle and thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, reading what could be called "the black radical tradition" as something more than a series of political contestations and positions, to see it as having its own intellectual foundation and development, even as counters the trajectory that Hegel charted. Gray and Johnson sometimes contrast Hegel's figure with the reality and history of black struggle. This can be seen clearly in the contrast between Douglass' struggle for freedom and Hegel's concept of the master/slave struggle. As Gray and Johnson write, "The lord' and the 'bondsman,' then are logical (dis)positions, figures who are both more and less than the historical people who were enslaved and who were exercising domination. 'The slave' had names. 'The master' did, too. And these names make a difference. They make differences." Logic and history connect and part ways. In Hegel's account the bondsman condition begins with fight, a struggle for recognition, and ends in work, work providing a sense of recognition that could not be found in struggle. Douglass' history inverts this order. As Gray and Johnson write,"With American chattel slavery, however, work was not the way out of slavery but the brutal institutions very engine. The more a slave worked, the stronger was the institution...In chattel slavery, work will never set you free. Work reinforces the chains and sharpens the sting of the whip. Douglass worked had and long, and saw himself in the fields, landscapes, ships and other objects into which he put his transforming labor. Yet freedom never came to him from work. The only way for him to set out on the path out of slavery and into freedom was to turn away from the object. on which he worked and face the master in order to fight."Gray and Johnson's analysis here cites and joins Chamayou's discussion of slave hunts, in which the historical inquiry calls into question the conceptual logic. Work cannot function as the basis for recognition in a system based on reducing human beings to their capacity for work. It is only the fight, the struggle that can break this logic. If Douglass deviates from Hegel's figures of subjectivity other historical moments would seem to not only confirm it, but Hegel's thought provides the concept that is otherwise missing. Booker T. Washington's ideas of individual freedom, merit, and self-reliance realizes Hegel's idea of stoicism more than even Hegel. The history does not contradict the concept, but confirms it and makes a case for its relevance. As Gray and Johnson write, "Here is a new form of recognition. It is not the recognition of another self-consciousness, directly in the form of self consciousness, but that of future self-consciousness, a higher form of self, or perhaps the promise of being recognized by a truly fair, just, and impartial form of subjectivity, above and beyond any particular determination of race, gender, age, etc., "No man whose vision is bounded by color can come into contact with what is highest and best" ( Washington, Up from Slavery) The recognition that the stoic seeks is not simply another person's recognition, not just recognition from this white man or Black man, but a general recognition from an ideal person. It is recognition of a hard earned merit that is mine."Reading Washington through Hegel makes it possible to see how the stoic appears not just once, as a figure of progression, but again and again, as a turn inward for recognition when the world becomes unreliable. It also makes it possible to see that Hegel's attachment to work, to work as an ethical ideal is less a matter of his own system, than the grey on grey of a philosopher reflecting the general norms of his time.  It also makes it possible to see in Washington not just a specific figure from one period, but something more of a refrain as stoicism, self-reliance, and merit, appear again and again as a conservative response to racism. The conservative attempt to reduce Martin Luther King Jr. to some future date where people would be judged only by the content of their character, to merit, is really an attempt to turn King into Washington. Speaking of King, it is with respect to King that we can see the real strength of Gray and Johnson's reading. As much as Hegel gives us figures of individual consciousness, stoicism, scepticism, etc., that can be seen not just once in the linear progression of history but appearing again and again, his real goal was to think something other than the individual, to think spirit as universality, sociality, or even transindividuality. In Gray and Johnson's reading of the black radical tradition this problem of collectivity appears again and again as the struggle of the individual, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis, to transcend individuality in their very individual struggle. This is what Hegel's unhappy consciousness makes it possible to think. As Gray and Johnson write:"Here is where the trouble lies: sacramental work is, undeniably the individual's work, in this case King's work. Put differently although this working is supposed to deny the self and attribute everything to God, it actually reaffirms the essentiality of the finite self, while God is reduced to a superficial element. At best, sacramental work and desire is done in the name of God. The same failure to to renounce and surrender oneself also applies to labour as a form of gratitude. The 'entire movement,' writes Hegel, 'is reflected not only in the actual desiring, working, and enjoyment, but even in the very giving thanks where the reverse seems to take place in the extreme of individuality' (Phenomenology of Spirit). The reason: we are the ones working on and changing things, while God is just a fictional idea, a fancy name, that contributes nothing to our work. We are the ones working, day in and day out; we finite persons change the world; no one and nothing but us. The individual self tried to overcome itself through work, to act merely as an instrument in God's handmade plan, but it inevitably ends up emboldening itself."Unhappy Consciousness returns from the medieval world of Christianity to become the dialectic of the modern movement and leader. The more the leader devotes him or herself in works, the more that devotion and dedication becomes the work. As Gray and Johnson argue the figures of the sixties and seventies, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis eventually give way to collective movements, to the Panthers, and Black Power as a new figure of reason (in Hegel's terminology), or collective consciousness, in ours. I have picked three moments from Gray and Johnson's book to illustrate the different relations between concept and history at work in the book, three different ways that it thinks the relation between its two different topics, Hegel and the black radical tradition. The relation between Hegel and the black radical tradition is sometimes one of negation, as the history of struggle in the case of Douglass negates the concept of struggle in Hegel; sometimes one of affirmation, as the philosophical concepts reveal and illustrate what is at stake in the political position of Washington; and ultimately it is one of transformation, as the dialectic of philosopher and history, contemplation and contestation, individual and community, pushes towards something else, pushes us to think through the limits of the civil rights era with its larger than life figures. As a last word I will cite a line that Gray and Johnson write with respect to Angela Davis' idea of coalition politics, but I think that such an idea can be used to describe the book's own strange coalition of Hegel and politics. "Difference, conjunction, and contradiction generate, rather than impede, political momentum." 

Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivsm, Turns
in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making






Can we really go on speaking about International Relations
as a 'discipline'? Even if social constructivism is often presented as a robust
theoretical cornerstone of the discipline, one of the thinkers that established
this theoretical position challenges the existence of IR. Surely, Nicholas Onuf
argues, we have a disciplinary machinery—institutions, journals, conferences
and so forth—but these form an apparatus built around a substantive void—in his
words, 'a discipline without an 'about''. In this Talk, Nicholas Onuf—among others—weaves an appraisal of
disciplinary boundaries through a discussion of social constructivism's birth
and growth, tells the material turn to get serious and provides a bleak
assessment of IR's subservient relation to political order.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge /
principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or
answer to this challenge / in this debate?



In my view, the
biggest challenge for IR is making good on claims (I'd say pretensions) that IR
is a discipline in its own right.  Such
claims presume that IR has a reasonably well-bounded subject matter and a body
of theory uniquely suited to that subject matter.  For 25 years I have been saying that IR fails
miserably in meeting this challenge. 
Much less do we acknowledge the challenge—there is no debate.  As it is, we have institutionalized a
so-called discipline (journals, conferences, workshops, PhD programs) that
reaches far beyond (lower case) international relations.  In short:  a discipline without an 'about.'  Were we to acknowledge the challenge, we
might be content to say:  Forget disciplines,
it's all about 'the social' and social theory belongs to us—too.  Or we might say, it's all about 'the
political,' and legal, political and
social theory also belong to us.  I'm not
sure there's much difference.  I am sure
that it's not enough to say our 'about' is 'the international.'  And I have said as much publicly, though
intemperate terms that I instantly regretted.



Given such a
negative assessment of IR, you might wonder why I stuck with it all these
years.  Why didn't I just call myself a
social theorist and (try to) publish in the few journals in which theorists
gets a hearing?  Actually, I did try a
few times, to no avail (just as I put 'social theory' in the subtitle of World of Our Making (1989) to no
discernible effect).  I think there's a
status issue lurking here.  Once
identified with IR, it's hard to get acknowledged outside IR.  Nobody reads
or cites us; we 'don't get no respect'; status ordering condemns us to be
consumers rather than producers of big ideas.  If (just perhaps) the era
of big ideas is over, then the next generation in IR may feel a little
braver than I was about jumping ship.  Not that I'm betting on it,
especially since publishing in a host relatively new, expressly interdisciplinary
journals, such as Global
Constitutionalism, International
Political Sociology and International
Political Theory, offer a safer alternative.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International
Relations?



I have to say
that events have never inspired me.  In
my callow youth, Hans Morgenthau's Politics
among Nations (1948) inspired me to think about spending a lifetime doing
IR, as did my teachers Robert Tucker and George Liska—both realists with a taste respectively for
international law and international institutions.  Working as Tucker's assistant in revising Hans Kelsen's Principles of International Law (1952) prompted
a longstanding interest in legal theory. 
As a doctoral student, I got hooked on systems theory à la Hoffmann, Kaplan, Rosecrance; the
special issue of World Politics (vol.
14, no. 1) on the international system left an indelible mark, as did Waltz's Man, the State and War (1959).  Working with Richard Falk a few
years later affected me a great deal—he remains one of my very few heroes.  So did Fritz Kratochwil,
briefly a student of mine and friend ever since.



In the 1980s
I got to know a number of mavericks: 
Hayward Alker, Rick Ashley, Dick Mansbach, John Ruggie and Rob Walker
are by no means the only ones on this list. 
More important, I think, were my feminist doctoral students, who changed
my life in a great many ways and were largely responsible for my turn to social
theory.  It was in that context that I
took the so-called linguistic turn to Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin et al. 
World of Our Making is pretty
clear about its many sources of inspiration. 
The big trick was fitting everything together.  Since then (and to keep the story manageable),
working with my brother Peter is responsible for my interest in Aristotle and in the making of the modern world; republican
theory links these two concerns.  I
cannot blame Peter for my ongoing fascination with Foucault.  





What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?



For me at least, this is a tricky question.  As I said earlier, I am not very much
interested in events—either as theoretical fodder or as a matter of what's
happening in the world at any given moment. 
Most of my friends and colleagues are fascinated by current events—how
often I find them glued to one news source or another.  Students are too, and it seems pretty obvious
they should be.  Most people in the field
engage in the skillful assembly of events, whether in 'cases' or as
statistically manipulated patterns. 
Learning the appropriate skills takes a great deal of time and
training.  At the same time, students
also need an exposure to theory—big picture thinking—and, in my view, the
philosophical issues that lurk behind any big picture.



Theory is a seductive.  I was seduced at the age of 19 and never
gotten over it.  Shifting metaphors, I always
told my doctoral students not to succumb to the theory bug, at least to the
exclusion of what I just called 'the skillful assembly of events.'  In other words, don't do it my way—I was lucky
to get away with it.  Disposition is a different
matter.  Students must love to work hard
for extended intervals with little immediate gratification.  Machiavelli said that warriors must be
disciplined and ardent.  I used to tell
my doctoral students, you have to be 'warrior nerds.'  If you don't fit this profile, find another
vocation.





You were immensely influential in
constructing the theoretical pillar of social constructivism in IR, starting
over 25 years ago. Looking back, has social constructivism delivered on the
promise you etched out in World of Our
Making?



No way, and for all kinds of
reasons.  This was all too clear within a
decade, as I intimated in a review of Peter Katzenstein's
The Culture of National Security (1996,
read introduction here)
and spelled out in Don Puchala's Visions of International Relations (2003).
To simplify unduly and perhaps unjustly, the constructivists who came to
prominence in the 1990s made three mistakes. First, they took for granted that a
norm (as in 'the norm') is normative without asking whether, to what degree, or
how this might be so.  I'm pretty sure this
mistake came from a mindless appropriation of functional sociology and utter
indifference to legal and political theory. Second, they substituted identity
('who am I?' questions) for agency ('who acts for what or whom?' questions) in
guessing at the implications of the end of the Cold War.  In doing so, they compounded the felony by
leaping from personal identity to collective identity and unreflectively
imputing agency to imagined collectivities. Third, they treated culture as an
aggregate residual and then assigned it enormous causal significance. Had any
of them taken the linguistic turn seriously, they might have extricated those
elements of 'culture' that (one might guess) are most consequential for social
construction.



More generally, I
came to see the constructivist surge of the 90s as a liberal-institutionalist
renaissance.  Standing in for legal
rules, formal institutions and corporate personality, norms and identity look
like a conceptual breakthrough to a generation of scholars who had been taught
to dismiss old-time liberal IR.  In the
2000s, a shifting panorama of events (genocide etc.) prompted a straight-on
liberal institutionalist revival with lots of help from lawyers.  Meanwhile, a much more diverse range of
scholarship has come to be styled constructivist for lack a better label.  Finally, there has emerged a gang of 'third
generation' constructivists who now actively repudiate their predecessors from
the 90s.  They speak my language, but
I'll let them speak for themselves.





How, do you think, do 'turns' in IR
relate to the broader context of real-world historical events? If the origins
of social constructivism have been located in the end of the Cold War, is there
some kind of dialectic whereby social constructivism then impacts on the course
of history? For instance, social constructivism is by now so established that a
big part of newer generations of practitioners in IR are probably social
constructivists. How does that influence international politics? In other
words, does social constructivism as an illocutionary theoretical approach hold
perlocutionary effect on its object of study?



I have some reservations
about the metaphor 'turn.'  Do we imagine
IR as a colossal ship that turns, however slowly, all of a piece?  I've already used the ship metaphor, but in
this context it's not appropriate—we're not that put together, and, besides, no
one is steering (not even those legendary gate-keepers).  Or a herd of wildebeests, in which all the members
of the herd turn together by keying off each other once one senses danger and
turns?  I don't think so, even if we do
sometimes see signs of a herd mentality. 




Back in the late 60s, Karl
Deutsch suggested that the field had even then experienced a succession of
waves.  I like this metaphor better
because it captures both the messiness of what's going on and a sense that
perhaps not much is changing in deeper water. 
You yourself switch metaphors on me when you mention a new generation of
constructivists.  As it happens, I like
this metaphor a lot (and have a piece entitled 'Five Generations of International
Relations Theory' forthcoming in a new edition of International Relations Theory Today, which Ken Booth and Toni
Erskine are editing).  It suggests a
dynamic internal to any field of study rather than one prompted by external
events.  Inasmuch as constructivism got
its start before the Cold War ended but afterwards changed its profile
significantly tells us the story is actually rather complicated.



The more interesting question
is whether constructivism will, as you say, impact the course of history.  The quick and dirty answer is, yes, but in
ways too subtle to document.  We already
know how difficult it is to establish any impact from IR as a scholarly pursuit
on world affairs.  That is, any impact
beyond realism and raison d'état.  As we become more specialized in what we do
and so does everyone else, it seems ever less likely that we'll be able to pin down
extended causal chains.  But I suspect
that you have something more like 'mood' in mind.  Once liberal institutionalists adopted a
slick kind of constructivism, they were pretty much in sync with the Zeitgeist, at least for a decade or
so.  So, yes, as a not very helpful
generalization, we can surmise that some degree of co-constitution was then at
work.  Always is.



One last point.  I don't have even the slightest sense that my
own scholarly work has had anything have much to do with large-scale world-making,
or that it will in any near-term.  I
don't have to be told that my work is too austere and forbidding to reach very
many people—though I am told this often enough. 
Years from now, who knows?  Yet my
teaching career convinces me that there's more co-constitution going on in the
classroom than anywhere else we're likely to find ourselves.  Interacting with hundreds of MA and PhD
students in Washington DC over 28 years—during which I noodled through what
would become World of Our Making—affected
me and them in ways beyond measure.  Some
of those students became scholars, but many more have spent their lives in
public service.





What has been, to you, the biggest
surprise or exciting move in IR since social constructivism saw the light?



The biggest and most
surprising 'move' has been the move offshore. 
I speak of course as someone raised, trained and employed in the US when
IR was 'AnAmerican Social Science.'  For the
last twenty years, IR has not so much left the US as gained strength everywhere
else.  Better to say, its center of
gravity has moved.  In the process, IR
has transformed, both as a claimant discipline and as a theory-driven
enterprise.  As a participant-observer, I
see IR as an institutional beneficiary of globalization and, to a lesser
degree, those of us in IR as agents in this hugely complicated process. 



Globalization has meant,
among much else, the extraordinary growth of higher education and its
institutional apparatus.  The
proliferation of universities is an acknowledgment of cosmopolitan imperatives and an accommodation of national needs, exemplified
in programs for the grooming of managerial elites.  For IR, this large process has been colored
by an ostensible rejection of American hegemony.  One expression of this anti-hegemonial
sentiment is the fashion for post-positivist scholarship and the sort of constructivism
that is now conventionally ascribed to Fritz Kratochwil and me.  For me personally, it's just wonderful to be
taken seriously everywhere but my own country.





You recently have turned attention
towards cognitive and evolutionary psychology. This is a pretty
underrepresented field, in terms of its being mined in IR. What challenge has
this literature to pose, in your view, to dominant IR?



Long ago, I ventured into cognitive
studies as a consequence of casting a broad net in social theory.  Since then, several disciplines have
converged in making cognitive studies just about the most exciting game in
town.  I cannot imagine anyone not being
fascinated (but then I am also fascinated by advances in cosmology, however
little I understand the technical stuff).  In recent years, I have developed a more
specific interest in what cognitive and evolutionary psychology might tell
about my mind, any mind, in relation to a world that my mind cannot access
directly, the world of appearances.  As
you can see, I'm a philosophical idealist—with many qualifications, a Kantian
idealist.  Most people in IR are
philosophical realists, for whom such issues are less compelling.  



Let me comment briefly on any
challenge the cognitive revolution might pose for IR in the philosophical
realist mode.  IR's substantive concerns
are so far removed from the stuff of cognitive science (neurons and such) that I doubt scholars in IR will ever feel
obliged take the latter into account. 
Nor should they.  Positivist
science is reductive—it always pushes down levels of analysis to explain what's
going on at higher levels.  But anyone
pushing down risks losing touch with what seems to be substantively distinctive
about one's starting point, and IR and its event-manifold are a long way up
from the synchronized firing of neurons. 
I would qualify this bald statement somewhat to account for the recent interest
of emotions in IR.  At least some of the
psychological literature on emotions taps into a deep pool of research where
the age-old cognition-emotion binary has finally been put to rest.





You have a broad experience in IR.
How do you see the evolution of the field? Is it a tragedy of unfolding
rationalization and increasing division of labor, or is something else going
on?



As I intimated earlier, IR has
failed as a disciplinary project.  I'm
almost inclined to say, there's no hope for IR 'as we know it.'  Better to say, IR has lost its self-told coherence.  A hundred flowers bloom, but just barely, and
there are a lot of weeds.  I don't see
this as a bad thing (your weeds may well be my flowers), although other
disciplines, such as sociology and a resuscitated geography, cast shadows on
our scraggly garden.  I do think larger
societal processes—modern rationalization and modernist functional
differentiation—have conjoined to impose a coherence we don't see.  Crudely, we are servants to other servants,
all of us ultimately minions to run-away capital and victims of its
techno-material seductions.  I guess you
could call this phenomenon a tragedy, though its very impersonality undercuts
the sense of the term.  I have no doubt,
however, that it will eventuate in a catastrophe from we moderns will never
recover.  I have been saying this ever
since the 1970s, when the debate over The Limits to Growth
persuaded me that we would never turn the ship around.





A new 'turn' seems to be developing
in the social sciences, possibly a swing of the ontological pendulum back to
materialism—this time with a more postpositivist undertone. How do you relate
to such a turn?



I am skeptical.  It looks like a fad to me—people casting
about for something new and interesting to say. 
Moreover, the vitalist, Bergsonian tenor of so
much of the new materialism turns me off—I cannot see the case for ascribing
agency (and thus purpose) to things when the language of cause suffices.  (And I am not among those constructivists who
will not speak of cause for fear of positivist contamination.)  But there's another issue that troubles
me:  the continued power of the
materialist-idealist binary.  In IR, we
call realists materialists and liberal institutionalists/soft constructivists
idealists when it should be obvious that whatever separates them (in my view,
not as much as they think) has nothing to do with idealism and materialism as
philosophical stances.  Security dilemmas,
arms races and terrorist plots are not ideationally informed?  Norm diffusion, identity crises and human
rights are not materially expressed?  Get
serious.



 I argued in World of Our Making that the material and the social are bound
inextricably bound together.  Rules do
the job.  They turn the stuff of the
world into resources that we, as social beings, put to use.  I think I got it right then.  Needless to say, I also think students afflicted
with mindlessly linked binaries can only benefit from reading that book.





Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned
as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also
known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory,
International History, and Social Theory. Onuf's most famous
work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social
Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which
should be on every IR student's must-read list. His recent publications
include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American
Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International
Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is
currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida
International University and is on the editorial boards of International
Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto
Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at
John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American
University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.





Related
links


FacultyProfile at the Florida International University 
Read Onuf's Rule and Rules in International Relations
(2014 conference paper) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Fitting Metaphors: the Case of the European
Union (New Perspectives, 2010) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Institutions, intentions and international
relations (Review of International Studies, 2002) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Levels (European Journal of
International Relations 1995) here (pdf) 












Print version of this Talk (pdf)