Literature and International Relations

Stories in the Art of Diplomacy

Paul Sheeran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754646136
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Making a strong case for the relevance of literary production to understanding international relations, this persuasive volume highlights the potential rewards of developing a methodology to bring literature to bear on a discipline which has tended to neglect fictional sources. Paul Sheeran considers the deep insight that can be gained from the study of key works in fiction and literature to enhance knowledge of the social forces shaping world affairs. While there are numerous relevant works, the author has carefully selected multi-faceted and colourful sources of material to explore developments in contemporary global issues such as the demise of the Soviet Union, the attack on the World Trade Centre, infectious diseases and human conflict. This exciting book enthusiastically breaks new ground and is highly suitable for courses on international relations, cultural studies and literature.

Chapter 1 Utopia and its Discontents: Power and Morality

DOI: 10.4324/9781315592626-2

Introduction

The material in this chapter is concerned with the nature of politics. Specifically, the passages below reflect on struggle between coercion and freedom. Drawing on a range of texts such as William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Aldous Huxley's Island, the book seeks to consider the efforts to construct a perfect society, and the obstacles that frustrate the acquisition of it. This task is undertaken to illustrate the links between aspirations and consequences in international relations, a cycle seemingly without end.

In assessing the various creative influences that interpret the rise and fall of power in empires, nations and states, it is suggested that literature provides a valuable reference point. In seeking to make sense of the world of international relations, the sharing of oral and written stories reflects national and global concerns (small and large contexts), a hybrid narrative that reveals clues to the initial steps taken in the formation of civilisation and the concentration camp. In linking literature and grand designs, the forces that create and destroy various civilisations become apparent, unlocking International Relations.

Window to the Past, Door to the Future

Utopia and dystopia emerge from the atmosphere of optimism and strife, crafted by a solitary hand or a collective cast of ideas that spread or fall silent from rejection. Humerto Ak’abal's sublime poem Paradise, originally written in Mayan, captures the nature of paradise and its subsequent divisions orchestrated through the introduction of power and its need to acquire exclusive rights.¹ The piece demonstrates the fragility of utopia and the creative efforts mobilised in reaction to the denial of its potential.

History provides the benchmarks for various social projects that arise suddenly or evolve from laborious struggles. The blueprints for Utopia are frequently soiled in conception.

Every so often some visionary invents a new Utopia: Plato, Sir Thomas More, H.G. Wells. And always the idea is that the heroic image shall last, as Hitler said, for a thousand years, But the heroic images always look like the crude, dead ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island – why, they even look like Mussolini!²

Utopia need not be an unpleasant slap. It can evolve with good intentions.³ For example, experiences that produced the Amish and Mennonite communities in Northern Indiana are related to the strife found in the protestant reformation and the persecution that followed. In a modern sense both communities were formulated on the principle that violence and warfare are abhorrent, following strictly the guidance set out in the bible to “love thy neighbour”.

Pamela Wallace's Oscar-winning screenplay for the film Witness, based on the settlement at Lancaster County, Pennsylvania captured the tensions operating in a secular society and a community committed to ensuring maximum effort in ensuring commitment to the family, forgiveness and spiritual duty. Witness introduced a wider audience to the principles of the Amish community, which correspondingly led to the ‘opening-up’ of the everyday activities to visitors through international student exchanges and local dialogue with non-Amish communities.

Utopia and its discontents can be discerned in various settings. Value judgements in assessing the criteria for the heaven and hell need to be approached sensitively. H.G. Wells, in the short story, The County of the Blind uses two mutually incompatible systems to make explicit the clash of values and perceptions, a conflict intent on eradicating difference to ensure compliance to the dominant social norm. In the book, a mountain climber encounters a civilisation where all the citizens are blind. Recognising that the stranger uses sight and not the other senses that have been used to forge a natural existence, he is forcedly encouraged to remove his eyes to become part of the community.

Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia), attempted to introduce a utopian communist society in the South East Asian country located between Thailand and Vietnam. Applying radical agricultural reform that included policies to pursue and eradicate intellectuals, re-education programmes in rigid communal schools and the evacuation of the cities to stem a potential bourgeois infection produced a society driven mad by terror. Interestingly, it is easily forgotten how the Western powers were not opposed to supporting the regime, largely because of the anti-Soviet stance and concerns regarding the wider Vietnamese influence in Indochina. Bruce Robinson's screenplay for The Killing Fields, produced by David Putnam, raised the awareness of a Western audience of the consequences of the genocide that occurred in Cambodia. In a contemporary setting, Cambodia has released its energies in a social and economic sense, achieving stability and solid growth.

Reactions to the slide to chaos produce an inconsistent response from the international community, shaped by contending interests.⁴ Decision-making at the international level takes account of political manoeuvring and the promotion of specific interests, which benefit the dominant powers. This produces difficulties. The failure of international diplomacy to resolve the reaction by Israel to the kidnapping of its solders and aggression by Hezbollah demonstrates the double standards that undermine the legitimacy of the international community as a regime seeking to maintain order and stability between states.

It is conceded, however, that the issue of intervention is not straightforward. On the one hand, the UN charter states that sovereign rights should be respected with territory unimpeded by foreign intervention. On the other hand, there is an increasing belief that on the basis of an ill-defined moral obligation, military intervention is required to curtail genocide and humanitarian catastrophes. The commitment to initiate an action invariably includes an objective to reintroduce democracy and well-being,⁵ a calculation that is not separate from an ideology favourable to the export of globalization, which is contentious in respect to the nature of the democracy.

Utopia, and less erudite versions of it, is multifaceted and potentially deceptive. In the book The Beach, by Alex Garland, the central character lured by an interest in Vietnam War movies, seeks a mythical and magical beach hidden in the lush surroundings of Thai territory.

Every year backpackers, keen to experience the hedonistic promise of paradise, fall victim to the traps of a presumed utopia, and are kidnapped or harmed by gangs involved in the illegal trade of narcotics, weapons, oil or other valuable commodities. Correspondingly, this requires the intervention of Embassies usually using subtle measures of diplomacy or the less conventional methods used by mercenaries to rescue the abducted and detained.

The exotic, the unreal and the mysterious attracts travellers from all over the world. It is a pilgrimage to a place, a location imbued with the fiction of possibilities. Utopia is a noun depicting an imagined perfect place or state of things; it may also be a mask for sinister activities. Utopia – non-place and good-place – dates back to Thomas More's 1516 essay, penned in the first flush of European oceanic ‘discovery’ and early cartography, which encouraged voyages and travels in search of new lands and experiences.

In a contemporary setting, Japanese artist Satomi Matoba uses digital programming to construct a utopia that is part memory part cartographic imagination⁶ - influences derived from a similar mix of Pagan references, classical images and insight from legends, poems and ethnic stories.

In seeking to explore the uneven relationship between power and morality, the two works highlighted in this chapter have been selected to read the dominant themes in International Relations.

The nasty, brutish and short world of political life that continues to materialise in various forms with frequent and explosive terror is complemented by cooperative alliances, collaborative relations and integrated organisations, which offer an alternative sketch to adversarial relations, however temporal and contentious in an international setting.

All Roads lead to Rome: Empire and its Discontents

Before opening up the pieces by Shakespeare and Huxley, it is worthwhile reflecting briefly on the long-past and its influence on power and morality. This is a vast undertaking in itself, but one that can be narrowed by selecting key points that are relevant to this investigation. Olson and Groom in International Relations Then and Now, remark in their influential book that ‘in the Biblical tradition, the Old Testament represents a literature rich in political insight, all the way from the reference in Genesis to “their lands each with its own language, by the families, in their nations,” to the words in the oracle in Malachi summoning “all the nations against Jerusalem in battle…’⁷ Whilst the bible is rarely noted on the reading list of scholars of International Relations, it is, nonetheless, a phenomenally influential story that continues to impact on global issues. Particularly, the events that were shaped by the tensions between Rome and the appearance of a radical philosopher, is particularly relevant. The divided loyalties stem from an inconclusive struggle between the Kingdoms in this world with the Kingdom for this world. This is a particular story specifically related to the development of Christianity, but it has relevance for wider beliefs.⁸ Laurie Magnus in the book, English Literature in its Foreign Relations 1300-1800, comments on the foreign sources of the bible. In comment relating to bible of the middle ages, the author probes:

Where was the bible before it was written, before it was written in languages that could be understood? Passing over the Greek version by the Septuagint, or the seventy-two Hebrew scholars who were sent from Jerusalem to Alexandria in the third century B.C., we come down to the Latin Vulgate version chiefly effected by St Jerome and completed about A.D. 400.⁹

Whilst various cultural inputs flowed into the bible, its growth rested on the contributions that shaped the work and promoted its circulation. Further investigation on this issue is outside the scope of this book. Nonetheless, direction is taken from The Bible as Literature, which considers biblical writings through literary and historic analysis. The intention of this passage is to illustrate the fault-lines that appear between power and morality in international relations, and the use of literature from biblical sources is insightful in making sense of these events.

Rome and the origins of institutionalised Christianity are indelibly linked: the tangles between intellectual leadership and civil authority being complicated by the rhythms of history. The emergence of Jesus Christ and the Christian religion during the occupation of Judea under the governorship of Pontius Pilate¹⁰ and the imperial authority of Augustus Tiberius¹¹ generated legal complexities that continued with the Rome of the Popes, particularly in relation to the law and the arguments with the Emperor about who ruled what. Gibbon makes clear that ‘a candid but rational inquiry into the progress and establishment of Christianity may be considered as a very essential part of the history of the Roman Empire’.¹² Rome was occupying force that crucified dissidents of various backgrounds that attempted to undermine the authority of the Empire. Its ruthless reaction to social obstructions arising from the occupation generated deep seated hostility to the Roman structure that impacted on all areas of social life. Tilbey in the popular book, Son of God, makes clear how rebels against Rome were dealt with.

Crucifixion was a form of execution reserved for rebels, enemies of the state. Roman citizens were usually exempt. If they committed a criminal offence they would be beheaded, which at least was a quick death. Only for the most serious crimes of treason could a Roman citizen be crucified, but non-citizens ran a higher risk of ending up on a Roman cross. The very threat of it was a way of keeping subject peoples and slaves in their place.¹³

In an important passage from Jesus in the Gospels, which is relevant to the world of international relations, an important point relating directly to politics continues to vex commentaries and debates relating to political legi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Utopia and its Discontents: Power and Morality
• 2 Chivalry and Honour: Stories of Supermen and Terror(ists)
• 3 The Madness of Reason: Going Sane is Harder Than You Think
• 4 Building Worlds: Forgotten Homes and Recovered Lands
• 5 Border Flows: Crossing the State Line and Getting Caught
• 6 The Politics of Unreasonable International Relations: Coded Whispers in the Corridors of Chaos
• 7 Listening to Voices: Whispers from the Global Home
• 8 City-States: Words and Weapons in Urban Myths
• 9 Out of This World: Imperfect Future(s), Distorted Pasts
• 10 The Final Dance: The Beginnings of Stories
• Bibliography
• Index