The Dao of World Politics

Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations

L. H. M. Ling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415603782
• eBook ISBN: 9781134526987
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book draws on Daoist yin/yang dialectics to move world politics from the current stasis of hegemony, hierarchy, and violence to a more balanced engagement with parity, fluidity, and ethics.

The author theorizes that we may develop a richer, more representative approach towards sustainable and democratic governance by offering a non-Western alternative to hegemonic debates in IR. The book presents the story of world politics by integrating folk tales and popular culture with policy analysis. It does not exclude current models of liberal internationalism but rather brackets them for another day, another purpose. The deconstruction of IR as a singular unifying school of thought through the lens of a non-Westphalian analytic shows a unique perspective on the forces that drive and shape world politics. This book suggests new ways to articulate and act so that global politics is more inclusive and less coercive. Only then, the book claims, could IR realize what the dao has always stood for: a world of compassion and care.

The Dao of World Politics bridges the humanities and social sciences, and will be of interest to scholars and students of the global/international, as well as policymakers and activists of the local/domestic.

PART I

ROOT

Why We Need a Dao of World Politics

1

THE PROBLEM WITH WESTPHALIA

The Fish and the Turtle

Once upon a time there was a fish. And just because it was a fish, it had lived all its life in the water and knew nothing whatever about anything else but water. And one day as it swam about in the pond where all its days had been spent, it happened to meet a turtle of its acquaintance who had just come back from a little excursion on the land.

“Good day, Mr Turtle!” said the fish. “I have not seen you for a long time. Where have you been?”

“Oh,” said the turtle, “I have just been for a trip on dry land.”

“On dry land!” exclaimed the fish. “What do you mean by dry land? There is no dry land. I had never seen such a thing. Dry land is nothing.” “Well,” said the turtle goodnaturedly. “If you want to think so, of course you may; there is no one who can hinder you. But that’s where I’ve been, all the same.”

“O come,” said the fish. “Try to talk sense.” [And Fish proceeds to ask Turtle a series of questions. Turtle answers “No” to all of them.]

“There now,” exclaimed the fish triumphantly. “Didn’t I tell you that this land of yours was just nothing? I have just asked, and you have answered me that it is neither wet nor cool, nor clear nor soft and that it does not flow in streams nor rise up into waves. And if it isn’t a single one of these things what else is it but nothing? Don’t tell me.”

“Well, well,” said the turtle, “if you are determined to think that dry land is nothing, I suppose you must just go on thinking so. But anyone who knows what is water and what is land would say you were just a silly fish, for you think that anything you have never known is nothing just because you have never known it.”

And with that the turtle turned away and, leaving the fish behind in its little pond of water, set out on another excursion over the dry land that was nothing.¹ This Buddhist tale gently alerts us to the nature of knowledge. It is impossible to teach and learn, the tale cautions, what one doesn’t want to know. I apply this lesson to International Relations (IR). It is like the fish that won’t learn, and critical scholars the turtle that tries but fails to broaden the fish’s horizons, both literally and figuratively. In this case, IR is more than a “silly fish” that believes “anything [it has] never known is nothing just because [it has] never known it.” The IR fish qualifies more as a whale – a giant, monstrous one named Leviathan by Hobbes. This whale-Leviathan does come into contact with both Earth and Sea – that is, diverse worldviews and experiences – but refuses to acknowledge the fact. Instead, the whale-Leviathan insists there is only one world and it happens to be his. (The male pronoun is deliberate here.) Moreover, the whale-Leviathan bears tremendous power upon the turtle-scholars to dismiss any kind of knowledge that counters or undermines or seeks to transform the conventional wisdom. Why? “Hegemony” resounds as the unavoidable answer. It comes by historically and institutionally, not just personally, rendering violence as the only way to think, act, be, and relate in world politics.

“Convert or suffer discipline!” the whale-Leviathan pounds mightily. European colonialists enshrined such imperialism as a “civilizing mission” from the sixteenth century on,² rebranded by the US and its postwar allies since the mid-twentieth-century as “development.”³ With neoliberalism triumphing after the (formal) end of the Cold War in 1989, institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Citigroup, CNN, and others now find ever new ways to demand conversion or discipline. Only two states in the recent past have defied the neoliberal diktat to convert economies and societies – Malaysia in 1998 and Argentina in 2002 – and both to positive effect.⁴ Yet the whale-Leviathan, now coated in a shiny neoliberal internationalism, targets what it regards as the next competitor for world order, if not a threat to it: a newly muscular China.

Some in China are responding in kind. Why not make real in practice what so many speculate in theory? Is it not a badge of honor to be feared today than derided as “the sick man of Asia” like two centuries before? Isn’t this how the “great game” of world politics is played? So these aspirants reason, turning a deaf ear and blind eye to their own ancient cautionary tale of global ambitions gone awry. The fourteenth-century epic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi) told of third-century lords and kings, soldiers and generals, battling one another for generations just for a glimmer of tianxia (“mandate of heaven”) to rule the world.⁵ Stories of heroes and villains may thrill but the epic also notes that little comes from the whole enterprise other than death and destruction, poverty and chaos, for the powerful and the ordinary alike. Moreover, the epic concludes, those who finally seize tianxia are not necessarily the same as those who fought so hard for it.

This book offers an alternative in worldism. It aims to transform, not simply problem-solve. Yet in reframing our understanding of world politics, worldism changes our practices in it. For example, worldism helps China revalue a rich, ancient archive of concepts, methods, goals, and worldviews not filtered through its experiences with the West and Westphalia. China cannot afford to reproduce what passes for IR in world politics. Representing the globe’s most populous nation now powered by its second largest economy, Chinese leaders do not simply have a ripple effect on world politics. They flood it. The same applies to the US. With the globe’s largest and most ubiquitous economy backed by a military unsurpassed elsewhere, the US is Westphalia World. Worldism can help to balance an “inside,” Cultural America with its “outside” persona, the National Security State. A new conversation can thus ensue between the US and China beyond an overly narrow definition of the “national self-interest.”

Let us review why we cannot continue with business as usual in IR.

WESTPHALIA WORLD

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) established the two pillars of contemporary world politics: territorial sovereignty and inter-state commerce. The first protects the latter, the Westphalian negotiators presumed, thereby ensuring peace. Since then, Westphalia World has evolved from European mercantilism, colonialism, and imperialism to declarations of universal human rights, democracy, and liberal capitalism; it sets the new “standard of civilization” for all.⁶

And Westphalia World’s prize creation? The State. Under Westphalian eyes, the State protects its territorially bound society by marshalling military capabilities to deal with other States. Why? In Westphalia World, States survive in an environment akin to Hobbes’ State of Nature. That is, individuals (i.e. States) must fight and steal and murder to live. Because the “international” has no Leviathan to guarantee law and order, the State cannot rely on any Other for its existence. (Commercial or trading relations vary, accordingly, to prevailing notions of national interest.) The State responds only to objective, rational calculi to optimize strength and survival. Since identical fears and motivations drive every State, neither history nor culture matters. Indeed, classical Westphalians portray States as billiard balls bouncing against one another in the global game of world politics.⁷ Neo-Westphalians extend this analogy to the system as a whole. Systemic pressures account for individual State behavior such as balance-of-power moves and other such strategies. The logic of this inter-State structure explains why, in the words of the founding father of neo-Westphalianism, Kenneth Waltz, order prevails even without an orderer.⁸

At the same time, Westphalians imbue the State with an ego – one that covets power above all else. Despite dismissing the need for history and culture, Westphalians still abide by a classic line from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (fifth century BCE): “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.”⁹ All great powers, John Mearsheimer declares, “searc[h] for opportunities to gain power over their rivals, with hegemony as their final goal.”¹⁰ The Westphalian State remains majestically aloof and singular despite such power needs. Much like a mushroom sprouting after rain in Hobbes’ State of Nature, the Westphalian State lives only for and by itself. It has no creation or gestation, no language, no memory, and certainly no family.¹¹

Yet Westphalia World has always depended on Others to make it what it is. Intimacy, not autonomy, marks this condition. What else accounts for Westphalia World’s persistent anxieties? From the very beginnings of the colonial state, those who spoke on behalf of Western civilization have excoriated “mixing” between the races, even though Europeans inserted themselves, uninvited, onto Other lands and peoples. Or, they favored “miscegenation” only to “cleanse” Others of their genes and cultures.¹² Racism, however, could not stop the Westphalian Self from desiring the Other both as a source of cheap labor and a magnet of pleasure. Immigration, for example, has always bedeviled the Westphalian Self. Concerns invariably arise about “invasion,” “contamination,” or “métissage” by the (non-white) immigrant Other against the (white) national Self, even as the latter’s economic demand grinds on unrelentingly.¹³

Westphalia World sanctions hierarchy and othering even while proclaiming universality, objectivity, and autonomy. This is the nature of its hegemony. As John M. Hobson shows with his review of IR theory from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, a Eurocentric discourse defines Westphalia World and its foremost agent, the State. The discourse institutionalizes a dichotomy whereby the first term – Self, White, West – always supersedes and sets the bar for the second – Other, non-White, Rest – rendering the latter either constantly trying to catch up or lagging hopelessly behind. Even a supposedly value-neutral, structuralist theory like neo-Westphalianism (neo-realism) smuggles in a “latent [Eurocentric] imperialism” where the West enjoys total agency and the Rest none at all.¹⁴ This sleight of mind comes from what Hobson calls the “Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics.” It propagates two related myths: (1) the West created itself ex nihilo, then (2) exported this standard of civilization to the rest of the world.

The world at large has noted such disparities. In Fall 1998, member states of the United Nations (UN) voted to designate 2001 the “UN Year of Dialogue among Civilizations,” an initiative spurred by the then Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Was it mere coincidence that Osama bin Laden unleashed his attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on a bright, September morn of that year? Though the attacks seemed to mock the UN’s designation, they also underscored its necessity. Four years later, the governments of Spain and Turkey sponsored an “Alliance of Civilizations,” under the auspices of the UN, the European Union (EU), and the Vatican. The World Public Forum (WPF) has also initiated a global network devoted to a “Dialogu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Root: Why We Need a Dao of World Politics
• PART II Branch: The Worldist Model of Dialogics
• PART III Buds: Towards A Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations
• Notes
• Index