International Relations as Politics among People

Hermeneutic Encounters and Global Governance

Hannes Hansen-Magnusson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429588969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Pioneering a hermeneutic methodology for analyses of global governance, this is the first monograph that makes Hans-Georg Gadamer's and Paul Ricœur's hermeneutic philosophy relevant for global politics research. Drawing on the concept of "horizon" as the element that captures the dynamics of understanding in social interaction in order to analyse processes of international politics, this book shows that what is required is the embeddedness of meanings and ideas in human action and reflection. By advancing theory-building with regard to particular questions of global governance, it reconceptualises international relations as "politics among people". Providing a contextualised constructivist approach that highlights the importance of processes to which people are central, it challenges the use of collective concepts such as "state" and "nation" as units of analysis which continue to dominate international relations but which cloud the details of interaction processes.

The two case studies of UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and Germany in NATO's mission "Operation Allied Force" in Kosovo in 1999 are structured around this contextualised constructivist approach developed in the monograph. The studies reveal how interaction processes can be made accountable, leading to new vantage points of our understanding of governance problems.

This book will be of interest to scholars interested in global governance, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricœeur and hermeneutic philosophy, the UN, humanitarian interventions, and foreign policy analysts.

1 Introducing Politics among People

Why politics among people?

Global politics is first and foremost politics among people. People engage in diplomacy and negotiate treaties as well as the broader norms of coexistence on the planet, including decisions about war and peace. They do most of this in an official capacity as representatives of a state or as part of a non-state entity, but also as private individuals. After all, money or fame can buy access to negotiation tables and get the attention of international audiences. The point is that politics is not determined by an assumed characteristic of the entities on whose behalf people interact but rather by people themselves. The practice of global politics is shaped by the ways in which people make sense of the problems that need addressing and by their success in finding common ground with others in the process. This does not necessarily mean meeting halfway and compromising but rather arriving at what those involved consider a shared vantage point. War is a special situation in this regard since it is usually characterised by non-communication, but nevertheless the difficulty of establishing shared vantage points after a conflict only emphasises the centrality and importance of people directly engaging with each other in the shaping of global politics and its governance structures.

Politics among People therefore focuses on cooperation, conflict, and the many different stages between these polar opposites. It proposes a fresh perspective on two of the perennial questions of international relations (IR) – “how does global politics work?” and “how can we know about it?” – by developing an approach based on hermeneutic scholarship. This scholarship comes in a range of flavours, but the common denominator is that human existence, which is also referred to as Being or Being-in-the-world, is marked by continuously making sense of or interpreting one’s surroundings (Ricœur 2004; Gadamer 2004 [1975]; Heidegger 2006 [1927]). However, this is not a unidirectional process, because understanding others, both human and non-human, establishes a relation towards the context of Being and also shapes what it is from the vantage point of the interpreter. In other words, making sense involves making worlds, to paraphrase Nicholas Onuf (1989); knowing who or what someone or something is creates entities and issues that enable one to interact with another or towards a problem.

By drawing on and adding to research that has employed hermeneutic approaches in philosophy and sociology as well as international relations, the book puts knowledge at its centre, arguing that it matters for politics among people in at least three ways. First, knowledge is linked to processes of interpretation, which matter when people engage in diplomacy or other practices. The ways in which they make sense of situations and thereby engage in shaping the course of politics are informed by the culturally developed knowledge they bring to the negotiating table and the knowledge they acquire anew in the course of debates as well as while they are interacting with an issue. Second, and relatedly, the knowledge they create as a result of their encounter may lead to new conceptual understandings of shared problems of human coexistence. Their encounters may be transformative for their own vantage points and those of the entities that they represent.

Third, making sense of these processes from the position of an observer follows the same assumptions about how understanding and knowing works generally, which is known as the “double hermeneutic”. By clarifying the basis of understanding, Politics among People makes hermeneutic approaches fruitful for research on global politics. To this end, the book develops an integrated research methodology that is demonstrated via two case studies.

Beyond anarchy – meaningful politics in strange places

Once upon a time, global politics was seen as being the outcome of struggles between sovereign states. One variety of this interpretation argues that states do everything in their power to survive by expanding their capacity to initiate or withstand war or by otherwise making sure they are not overtaken by others. Their efforts can include investment in military might or begrudgingly forming alliances. A related, though slightly different, version of this interpretation regards the strengthening of the economy and institutional cooperation as the prime drivers of states’ efforts to gain or maintain the upper hand over others. It is said that the prospect of nuclear annihilation ultimately prevented a large-scale confrontation between the world’s most powerful states and thereby contained the tension that a competition for resources and gains would necessarily entail.

Doubts were cast over the pervasiveness of these interpretations when central elements that lent them coherence ceased to exist more or less overnight. The period around the years 1989/90 was once dubbed the end of history. However, this did not result in a happy-ever-after. Obviously, global politics continued, but the new constellation of states meant that the way to understand and explain it would now require a new approach. The subsequent decades of international relations scholarship were therefore characterised by a blossoming of a variety of alternative explanations. They explicitly questioned the usefulness of encompassing interpretations of global politics, or grand narratives, instead developing explanations from a range of different vantage points, with different protagonists at their core and with a range of considerations of ethics and lessons to be learned.

The main shift in international relations concerned the two elementary questions to which this book speaks, concerning the workings of global politics and how one can know about it. Whereas in the olden days, scholarship was primarily concerned with so-called unobservables (Puchala 2003), the new pluralism moved towards the more concrete, probing the role of culture in global politics as well as the power of discourses and, relatedly, knowledge (Enloe 1990; George 1994; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Diez 1999; Milliken 1999; Grovogui 2001). In this context and over time, alternative accounts were developed: for example, assumptions about anarchy and enmity were contrasted with notions of friendship (Berenskoetter 2007) or trust (Michel 2013), as well as the role of emotions (Fierke 2014). This scholarship starts not so much with assumptions about how states behave but rather bases its discussion on empirical observations that directly contradict previous tales of global politics.

Similarly, the role of standing and honour is being explored (Lebow 2008) in contrast to previous assumptions of security and wealth as the main drivers of state action. Indeed, the centrality of the state as the core category of global politics has long since been placed under scrutiny; Kenneth Waltz’s position held that what happened inside the state did not matter for global politics because states would do whatever they had to in order to survive or thrive (Waltz 1979), but increasingly the notion that both inside and outside mattered took hold (Walker 1993). What happens within the state matters not only in terms of who is in charge of the government but also in terms of how society is organised and functions, including family structures and practices of consumption, all influencing the provision of security capacity as well as global economic relations (Enloe 1990). Regarding situations outside the state, it has been pointed out that looking at relations might prove more fruitful (Jackson and Nexon 1999), and the nature of such relations is to a large extent shaped by norms and international law (Kratochwil 1989), as well as the work of international organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and other advocacy networks (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998), which together create the discursive space within which global politics might unfold.

Once we accept that global politics does not take place in the perennial confrontation of anarchy but is much more complex, new sites for enquiry become available, raising questions about the workings of global politics. In this regard, the quality of German-Russian relations during the late 1980s and early 1990s was greatly enhanced by what textbooks would come to call “sauna diplomacy” (Clemens 2004: 33).¹ The term suggests that the trajectory of international politics might have been very different had it not been for the close personal ties between German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet General-Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and subsequently Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Sauna diplomacy characterises a specific process during which those involved shape the rules of their engagement. Those who are part of the process make sense and, thereby, worlds (Onuf 1989) – a notion which points again to the role of knowledge.

The hunch that international politics is indeed based on common sense-making is further strengthened by discussions of the proverbial special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, which apparently thrives through the amicable relations between policy-making élites of these countries (Louis and Bull 1986), even though this does not necessarily imply comprehensive agreement. As David Watt writes,

It is debatable to what extent Roosevelt and Churchill ever really liked or even fully understood each other; certainly, neither was always entirely frank with the other. But it is obvious that they established an unusual degree of personal communication and a reasonable degree of mutual trust. At lower levels, military and official, habit of easy intercourse also took root and many permanent friendships were formed.

(Watt 1986: 5)

Similar remarks can be made about subsequent relations between the Truman and Attlee administrations, as well as those led by Eisenhower and Macmillan (Horne 1986; Perkins 1986).

As in the case of German-Russian relations around 1990, we can see that global politics takes place in personal encounters – and sometimes in special settings. Saunas are not the usual location of global politics; most of the time, personal encounters involve people consuming coffee and perhaps cigarettes during breaks in meetings, which enables them to explore options for compromise (Witschel 2003: 77). Even though little is said by IR scholars about the ifs, hows, and whats of this feature of international politics, it seems intuitively clear that conducting state relations in heated and damp settings or around the water cooler is unusual and somehow puzzling to most of IR, because otherwise scholars would not feel compelled to prefix the term “diplomacy” with a defining attribute.

These examples highlight the need to look beyond the formal settings we often find in textbooks and beyond the conventional terminology which obscures who does what, where, and how by referring to international politics as a realm of anarchy and/or by populating it with unobservable concepts such as states. By contrast, as a common denominator of the previous examples, this book argues that global politics is a meaningful process that does not unfold through an inherent force, such as a general strife for relative or absolute gains in a world marked by anarchy. Moreover, it is revealing how the first quotation about the British-American “special relationship” mentioned the terms of trust and friendship, which is a recent conceptual addition to research on global politics (on friendship, compare Berenskoetter 2007; on trust, compare Michel 2013). Together with the anecdotal evidence presented previously, which illustrates that politics is driven by interpersonal interaction, an alternative vocabulary containing terms such as “trust” and “friendship” underscores the need for a perspective change in the discipline that takes account of the close proximity of protagonists and their sense-making practices. Politics among People develops such a perspective with a particular focus on the processes of knowledge (re-)creation.

Aims of the book: hermeneutic situations and how to find them

In light of these examples, the book pursues two aims. First, it argues that global politics is made in hermeneutic situations or encounters. A hermeneutic situation is a direct encounter between people who may be in a formal position to represent an abstract entity, be it a state or an international or non-governmental organisation, and who rely on their understanding of a particular situation to seek solutions. Their understanding is based on what hermeneutic scholarship refers to as a “horizon”, which denotes the socially acquired experience or vantage points, sometimes subsumed under the label of culture, which are potentially subject to change in the course of a hermeneutic situation. It is to these situations and the shaping of horizons that research should turn in order to understand what is happening.

The horizon that plays out in hermeneutic encounters reminds us that people cannot make politics out of nothing, but what they can draw on limits their scope. In conceptual terms, the horizon “is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point” (Gadamer 2004 [1975]: 301), while so-called “prejudices” or “prejudgements” are the result of what Gadamer terms the historically effective consciousness² that refers to a particular trajectory of the agent and limits the range of their vision of the horizon – their culture. That said, however, prejudgements do not determine the future trajectory, because they are also subject to change in what Gadamer refers to as a fusion of horizons (ibid. 305f.). What matters most in the context of the book is that knowledge in the hermeneutic understanding is process bound.

Because of prejudgements of a horizon, the hermeneutic understanding of knowledge holds that it is not necessarily free of values. Knowledge in this understanding refers particularly to one of several kinds distinguished, for example, by Aristotle. He mentions episteme, that is, the scientific “knowing why”; techne, that is, “knowing how” as expressed in art and craft; and phronesis, which describes action-oriented practical knowledge including a dimension of ethics and prudence (Flyvbjerg 2001: 56–57; Aristotle 2006: 1138b; Brown 2012: 445; Michel 2013). Because it contains not only a functional but also an inherently normative dimension, the examples of politics among people given previously show that it is phronesis which is the central kind of knowledge in this book. In its functional dimension, phrones...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Introducing Politics among People
• 2 Hermeneutic approaches to meaning
• 3 The topoi of interpretive research
• 4 The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
• 5 Humanity and German intervention in Kosovo 1999
• 6 Horizons of politics
• Index