Politics Without Sovereignty

A Critique of Contemporary International Relations

Christopher Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, Alexander Gourevitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134113859
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by leading scholars, this volume challenges the recent trend in international relations scholarship – the common antipathy to sovereignty.

The classical doctrine of sovereignty is widely seen as totalitarian, producing external aggression and internal repression. Political leaders and opinion-makers throughout the world claim that the sovereign state is a barrier to efficient global governance and the protection of human rights.

Two central claims are advanced in this book. First, that the sovereign state is being undermined not by the pressures of globalization but by a diminished sense of political possibility. Second, it demonstrates that those who deny the relevance of sovereignty have failed to offer superior alternatives to the sovereign state. Sovereignty remains the best institution to establish clear lines of political authority and accountability, preserving the idea that people shape collectively their own destiny. The authors claim that this positive idea of sovereignty as self-determination remains integral to politics both at the domestic and international levels.

Politics Without Sovereignty will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, international relations, security studies, international law, development and European studies.

1 Politics without sovereignty?

Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch

It is standard fare to open a book on International Relations (IR) with a critique of realism, the theory of geopolitical rivalries and the balance of power. In this chapter we turn this convention around. We aim to deepen our theoretical investigation of the unholy alliance against sovereignty identified in the Introduction by isolating a particular strand of international theory for special attention, namely ‘reflectivism’.¹ We shall focus in particular on constructivist and poststructuralist theories. Both of these reflectivist schools of thought have established themselves by offering critiques of state sovereignty. Indeed, the rapid advance of these theories in the discipline indicates just how out of step with world politics realist theories of IR have become. It is for this reason that we believe it is time to begin theoretical reflection with reflectivist, and not realist theories. The putative purpose of the reflectivist critiques is, first, to enhance our understanding and appreciation of change in international affairs, and, second, to open up the possibility for new political actors to enter the global stage. Both of these theories claim that changing our understanding of international affairs is crucial to opening up new political possibilities. A further reason why we focus on these theories and their claims is that, given their recent origins, they are ostensibly best positioned to provide new insights into changing circumstances. Moreover, as we discuss in the Introduction, we agree with their basic premise that sovereignty is a constrained form of political activity. In keeping with the aims and methods of the book as a whole, then, we ask: How successful are new reflectivist theories at pointing to new forms of political creativity after having abandoned the sovereign, self-determining state? This is the question that we shall seek to answer in this chapter.

Despite their promising theoretical starting point, we believe reflectivist criticisms of state sovereignty miss the mark. Far from providing new conceptions of political agency, their theoretical claims do little more than reflect the attenuation of the already limited model of political agency embodied in the sovereign state. We open the chapter with a discussion of how these new theories are bound up with the end of the Cold War, which raised the pressing need to theorize change in international politics. We show how, in trying to theorize a greater role for change and political creativity in international relations, reflectivist theories are inexorably led to a critique of sovereignty, which has hitherto been the fundamental mode of political interaction in international affairs. We then pursue the theories of constructivism and post-structuralism, exploring how the nature of their critique of the sovereign state leaves them unable to grasp human agency in international politics. After that, we take a step back and provide two wider criticisms of reflectivist theory as a whole. The first is that it tries to recapture agency without sovereignty by elevating fluidity and change. The second criticism is that, as a consequence of its inadequate grasp of the role of human agency, reflectivist theorizing is left without a causal theory, and is forced to import external, objective factors to explain change. As we shall see, the desire to discipline political agency among reflectivist theorists eventually leads some of them even to fall back on the sovereign state as a way of constraining political possibilities. We demonstrate this by reference to Andrew Linklater’s critical theory. The presentation of our argument necessarily means that the differences between these various reflectivist theories are overlooked, doubtless to the detriment of their case. But this is made possible because of the common hostility across these theories towards agency and the sovereign state. A serious examination of reflectivist theories on their own terms shows, we argue, that the reflectivist critique of sovereignty neither improves our understanding of change, nor expands our sense of political possibilities.

Theorizing agency after the Cold War

Much of the thrust of reflectivist theorizing emerged as an attempt to inject conceptions of agency, contingency and historical context into a discipline dominated by the arid structuralism of Kenneth Waltz’s seminal 1979 work The Theory of International Politics.² Waltz’s neo-realism fixed on the structural arrangement of the international system, rather than states that make it up. It was the system, Waltz claimed, rather than the actions of any particular state that explained the dynamics of international politics, and in particular the recurrence of war. The defining aspect of this structure was the absence of any overarching authority – the states system is anarchic, thereby inhibiting the development of social order. Waltz described the concealed structure of international politics as functioning like the hidden hand of the market, which intercedes between the action of individual agents to generate common outcomes from vastly divergent inputs: ‘A market constrains the units that comprise it from taking certain actions and disposes them toward taking others.’³

This emphasis on structure was coupled with a tight link between IR theory and the practical concerns of the Cold War. Cold War historian John L. Gaddis observes that much of the political science that was forged in American academies during the Cold War was shaped by the political needs of the American state, grasping for an intellectual apparatus that would help it to steer the world under American hegemony. The result was an intense focus on prediction: predicting the decisions of Soviet leaders; predicting the outcomes of nuclear rivalry and nuclear exchanges; predicting the outcome of development – capitalism or communism in the decolonized world. This affinity for prediction influenced Waltz’s own work: ‘Theory explains regularities of behaviour and leads one to expect that . . . outcomes produced by interacting units will fall within specified ranges.’⁴ This entrenched tradition of prediction meant that the failure to foresee the end of the Cold War was acutely felt:

The abrupt end of the Cold War . . . astonished almost everyone, whether in government, the academy, the media and the think tanks. The end of the Cold War . . . was of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming.⁵

The end of the Cold War therefore powerfully strengthened the case for more flexible conceptions of international politics that better incorporated the possibility of change. What is more, since this change seemed to be the product of purposive action – popular movements in Eastern Europe, human rights campaigns and so on – it was felt that new theories had to incorporate human intentionality, rather than fixate on structure. In an article assessing the declining use of realism as an explanatory theory in scholarly journals across the years 1970 to 2000, Thomas C. Walker and Jeffrey S. Morton observe that with the ‘end of the Cold War, the expansion of democracy, and the increasing importance of global trade and international organizations, the world is no longer neatly suited to realist concerns’.⁶

While critical IR theories were already incubating in the discipline throughout the 1980s,⁷ the end of the Cold War gave them a dramatic new opening to seize the initiative. Critically minded theorists responded to this opportunity by putting forward arguments that challenged the deterministic emphasis on the structure of the states system, pointing instead to the importance of historical context and the interrelationship between ideas and structures. These arguments militated for an emphasis on change rather than stasis. Alexander Wendt, one of the first to try to systematize reflectivism, mobilized the insights of structuration theory, injecting a much-needed dose of intellectual sophistication into the entire discipline. This brought the discipline of IR more into line with a wave of theoretical restructuring that had occurred earlier throughout the social sciences, and allowed for greater theoretical ambition while also not drifting too far from empirical research.

This theoretical reorganization brought to the fore theories concerned with human agency and reflexivity in world affairs, as a way of trying to grapple with change. Robert Keohane coined the term reflectivism, because they all allegedly ‘emphasize the importance of human reflection for the nature of institutions and ultimately for the character of world politics’.⁸ As John Gerard Ruggie, former UNAssistant Secretary-General and one of the first to introduce reflectivist thinking to mainstream IR wrote, ‘constructivism is about human consciousness and its role in international life’.⁹ The ostensible purpose of this emphasis on reflexivity was to call into question what seemed natural and given, thereby pointing towards its potential for change. Wendt claimed that the point of these new theories was to ‘denaturalize’ human institutions: ‘constitutive or critical theory reminds us that social kinds like the international system are ideas authored by human beings’.¹⁰

As efforts to inject the discipline with a greater sense of agency, these reflectivist theories unavoidably converged on a discussion of the prime actor in international affairs: the sovereign state. As with their critique of structure, the reflectivist strategy was to call into question what had been taken for granted. Wendt’s work again was instrumental in opening up a far-ranging discussion about the nature of the state, which had hitherto been taken for granted as the key actor in international affairs.¹¹ Writing with James Fearon, Wendt argued ‘rather than taking agents as givens or primitives in social explanation . . . constructivists are interested in problematizing them, in making them a dependent variable’.¹² Calling the state into question pushed against the boundary that defined, some would say confined, the discipline.¹³ This was intellectually liberating. As post-structural theorist R.B.J. Walker, points out ‘Many [intellectual] differences . . . arise far more from disagreements about what it is that scholars think they are studying than from disagreements about how to study it.’¹⁴ Instead of oscillating between power politics (realism) and the possibilities for greater international cooperation (idealism), the floodgates opened to a whole slew of ‘awkward philosophical themes’ that traditionally had been bracketed under other disciplines – ontology, ethics, ideology and relations between theory and practice.¹⁵

Reflectivist theories were correct that agency had been understood as something self-evident in international relations, requiring little theoretical reflection. Historian A.J.P. Taylor exemplified this attitude when he defensively qualified what he meant in referring to ‘Great Britain’ or ‘Russia’ in his celebrated textbook of international history, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918:

I have written throughout this book as though states and nations were monolithic units, with defined personalities [as if implying] every Englishman and every Russian . . . The meaning is obvious enough, though no doubt technically indefensible. Nevertheless, there was something like a national outlook on foreign questions in each country, despite the indifference and the disputes.¹⁶

Leading realist scholar and political economist Robert Gilpin cheerfully admitted:

Of course, we ‘realists’ know that the state does not really exist . . . Only individuals really exist, although I understand that certain schools of psychology challenge even this . . . we do write as if some particular social or political entity really does exist and acts. It is a matter of convenience and economy to do so.¹⁷

Gilpin’s and Taylor’s blitheness about the role played by the agency of the state partially reflected the fact that this agency was relatively self-evident. The analyst could go quite far in international politics simply thinking in terms of the ‘Russians did that’ and the ‘British did this’.

The great virtue of reflectivist theory, then, is that it asks higher order questions, with a good deal more theoretical sophistication, about the nature of political agency in international relations and about the possibilities for change. By posing these questions directly, and by developing their intellectual apparatus around them, reflectivist theories seem to be better positioned to grasp what is distinctive about the contemporary phase of international relations than theories, such as realism, that developed in a different set of circumstances. What is more, in alerting us to the contingent nature of international relations, and in pushing beyond sovereignty, reflectivist theories seek to avoid the realist apologia for power politics, and to open up whole new realms of political possibility that once seemed unimaginable. As Ruggie, puts it, ‘ “making history” in the new era is a matter not merely of defending the national interest but of defining it . . . ’.¹⁸ But this begs the question. How successful are reflectivist theories at presenting a theory of agency without the sovereign state? Let us begin with constructivism.

Construc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The unholy alliance against sovereignty
• 1 Politics without sovereignty?
• 2 Sovereignty and the politics of responsibility
• 3 National insecurities: The new politics of the American national interest
• 4 From state of war to state of nature: Human security and sovereignty
• 5 State-building: Exporting state failure
• 6 Country ownership: The evasion of donor accountability
• 7 European Union: A process without a subject
• 8 Deconstructing sovereignty: Constructing global civil society
• 9 Legalizing politics and politicizing law: The changing relationship between sovereignty and international law
• 10 How should sovereignty be defended?