Ordering International Politics

Identity, Crisis and Representational Force

Janice Bially Mattern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135933180
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do states sustain international order during crises? Drawing on the political philosophy of Lyotard and through an empirical examination of the Anglo-American international order during the 1956 Suez Crisis, Bially Mattern demonstrates that states can (and do) use representational force--a forceful but non-physical form of power exercised through language--to stabilize international identity and in turn international order.

Forcing Anglo-American Order

In theory, representational force accomplishes a great deal. It provides the cornerstone for a postconstructivist model of identity that is capable of doing what the conventional variant cannot—support the logic that international identities can exist during international crises and so can be a source of international order, sufficient for imposing order upon disorder. Among the various possible implications of this theoretic “uncovery” is that statesmen who are interested in ordering international politics to their advantage might do well to put identity—or more exactly, forceful narrative realities of particular desired identities—at the center of their practical agenda. But how well does the theoretic uncovery of representational force, as part of an identity and an order-producing tool, gel with empirical practice? Can and do state-authors really use representational force to produce or re-produce preferred international identities? If so, do such forceful practices really have fastening effects on international orders?

In the next three chapters, I illustrate that they can, and they do. I demonstrate how, during the Suez Crisis when Anglo-American we-ness broke down, the British and American authors relied upon Terror and Exile to re-produce it. They did so by forcefully refashioning the links of the dissolved narrative “reality” of the Special Relationship against the phrases-in-dispute that had destroyed them. As they re-produced that collective narrative “reality” of shared values, trust, and common security fate, the British and American authors also fastened the nonviolent behavioral expectations that characterized the Anglo-American security community order. They relied upon a power politics of identity to force order back upon themselves. Beyond the obvious payoff of confirming that states can and do use representational force to order international politics, this postconstructivist analysis of the events of the Suez Crisis between the U.S. and Britain breaks new explanatory ground in the previously inscrutable Suez Puzzle. It demonstrates how, after all is said and done, Anglo-American we-ness was viable—in spite of its breakdown—as the normative and behavioral structure that shaped U.S. restraint from even threatening force against its allies. The postconstructivist analysis makes sense of the tendency of all compelling explanations of that outcome to refer back to we-ness.

Illustrating the forceful fastening of Anglo-American we-ness during the Suez Crisis, and so the solution to the Suez Puzzle, is a three-phase endeavor. Each phase, taken up in separate chapters, illustrates how key theoretical claims associated with the postconstructivist model are empirically actualized in the dynamics of the narrative of the Anglo-American we-ness identity (Special Relationship) during the Suez Crisis. The first phase (Chapter 5) focuses on the historical processes, through which the settled magnetic attraction that made the ongoing teaching, framing, and learning of Anglo-American we-ness possible broke down into an unsettled demagnetized environment. It is an exercise in understanding why and how dissent from the narrative of the Special Relationship became a collective possibility and desire among author-members. The second phase (Chapter 6) builds on the first. I trace out historically the particular manifestations of dissent articulated during the Suez Crisis, especially focusing on how the relevant political leaders and bureaucrats parlayed the events of the Suez Crisis into various antagonistic and hostile alternative interpretations of the Anglo-American association. The result, I argue, was to entirely dissolve the demagnetized we. In theoretical terms, this is an exercise in isolating the particular phrases-in-dispute authored during the crisis and illustrating how they were linked into dissident narrative realities that broke down we-ness. Finally, in the last phase (Chapter 7) I empirically examine the theoretical claim that relevant authors used representational force to squelch that dissent, with the effect of fastening Anglo-American identity and reproducing it as a source of international order. This requires a historical understanding of why the disputants felt the stakes bound up with eradicating the various phrases-in-dispute were so high as to require Terror and Exile, how they carried out those campaigns of force, and what their effects were for narrative, expectations, and behavior.

There are, however, two analytic qualifications worth highlighting. First, it is, unfortunately, artificial to conceptualize the identity rupture and repair process during the Suez Crisis as if it fell into three distinct, consecu-tive chronological periods. It did not. The schedule on which each demagnetizing event emerged was articulated as a dissolution-producing phrase-in-dispute of the Special Relationship, and was then squelched through Terror and Exile, was different. Indeed, some of the events that were parlayed into dissent were Terrorized or Exiled before others even developed (though there were always multiple pressures at once on the narrative of the Special Relationship). However, this kind of phase-oriented, chronological organization is useful both for helping situate the historical context of the crisis and for clarifying the interplay of identity, agency, and rationality in the practice of fastening. I urge readers, however, to keep in mind that at any given time, authors were engaged in and constituted by overlapping and sometimes interactive narratives that were at different phases of the process of rupture and repair.

This is particularly important in Chapter 7, where I demonstrate the practice of fastening through representational force. Authors deployed Terror and Exile to force phrases-in-dispute out of the realm of admissible discourse just as soon as they became high-stakes threats to other aspects of their subjectivity. Thus, each phrase-in-dispute was removed and replaced through a separate campaign of representational force. In this way, just as the dissolution of we-ness occurred piecemeal, so too did its re-production. But it did not occur ad seriatim, as implied by the way the information is organized here. It occurred in the messy, interactive way that life does.¹

A second analytic issue to bear in mind is that the kind of narrative analysis I undertake here is a meticulous, microlevel enterprise. It involves focusing on the structure of linguistic formations and interpreting their meaning in a given context. This raises the theoretical problem of demonstrating how the micropractices of Terror and Exile shape macrohistory. Theoretically, this would require an exhaustive analysis of every relevant author’s demagnetization from the we, their dissent from the we, and their forceful re-incorporation back into it. The problem is demonstrating with adequate certainty that dissent was squelched on a collective level, even though the practice of its squelching occurred on an individual level. Even accepting limitations on which actors count as the relevant embodiment of a state (Chapter 3), it is too ambitious to think that one could account for all the relevant speakers. Besides, not all texts are available for perusal, making some of the narratives unavailable for consideration. For these reasons, I have made’ choices proceeding on the assumption that a critical mass of systematically gathered evidence on most of the relevant authors can offer an adequate basis from which to rule out a coincidence between representational force and the re-production of Anglo-American identity and international order.² Even keeping the limitations of research in mind, the role that representational force played in re-producing weness—and so fastening the Anglo-American security community order—is undeniable. It counsels taking the international identity-order connection seriously.

CHAPTER 5
Demagnetization

Anglo-American we-ness broke down through a narrative process. Dissidents on both the American and British sides authored phrases-in-dispute of the Special Relationship, and those dissolved the links constitut-ing that narrative “reality.” But the process began even before those phrases-in-dispute were authored. It began when the idea of dissent occurred to British and American authors in the first place; when the events of the Suez Crisis were interpreted by each the British and the Americans in ways that demagnetized their attraction to each other and so halted the ongoing process of learning and teaching we-ness (Chapter 2). In this way, the Suez Crisis provoked the conditions that made it possible for the U.S. and Britain to conceive of dissolving their special friendship. In fact, this was precisely what set the Suez incident apart from the many disagreements the two countries had endured previously over the years. Whereas others never penetrated the settled magnetic attraction upon which the Special Relationship was built, the Suez incident did. But how did it accomplish this effect? What exactly happened during the Suez Crisis to unsettle the magnetic attraction that underwrote Anglo-American we-ness?

Nasser’s Unsettling

We-ness, which took narrative form as the story about an Anglo-American Special Relationship, had been formed and maintained on the basis of the settled shared conviction that British and Americans were kindred spirits. They were the apex of the West; the world’s most committed and sophisticated freedom-loving democracies (Chapter 3). So naturalized had this narrative become that it functioned as a fundamental truth, a prior epistemological order that drew the two countries together. As long as that order remained settled, and so the two countries shared an understanding of each other as freedom-loving democracies, they—or at least the specific British and American statesmen and bureaucrats who spoke for the two countries—had no problem legitimating and authorizing each other to teach and maintain the content of their we-ness (shared values, trust, and common security fate). In this way, the “reality” of freedom-loving democracy made possible the “reality” of the Special Relationship and the expectations and behaviors of nonviolence that followed on that.

But Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal unsettled the narrative “reality” of freedom-loving democracy. It created a crystallizing opportunity for a long-smoldering, latent conflict of identity between an important aspect of the British Self and an important aspect of the American Self. The Special Relationship, after all, was only one of many constitutive identities of each country’s subjectivity (Chapter 4). Britain’s Self, for instance, was also largely constituted by the identity of the great and powerful Lion, a leader in the West. Even though by the time of the Suez Crisis Britain’s decline was relatively clear in material terms, no substantive event had actually occurred to solidify Britain’s diminished postwar status, or therefore, to dissolve the “reality” of that narrative in the international system. It was in recognition of this point that Dean Acheson made his famous quip that Britain had lost an empire but had not yet found a role.³ The Suez Crisis offered Britain an opportunity to narrate such a role.

At the same time, however, the generally isolationist and unreliable U.S. had, at long last, begun to internalize the idea that its Self was bound up with being the leader of the West. Of course, in material terms, the U.S. had been the leader of the West for some time, but as Alan Dobson notes, the American Eagle—the identity that signified the U.S. as a proud and capable leader—was, up until this time, an identity inscribed in the American Self predominantly through the narratives of domestic politics. Indeed, because the Eagle as an international presence had not been incorporated in the configuration of identities that constituted the American Self, the U.S. had shunned international responsibilities acting unpredictably on the international stage. Since the end of World War II, though, this had begun to change—the Eagle as an international presence had been narrated so relentlessly by other states and by a smattering of new-thinking American authors that it had finally become the dominant narrative “reality” to the U.S. In this sense, the American Self conception was beginning to catch up with the material reality (Dobson 1995, 10). The result was that, although the U.S. and Britain shared a narrative “reality” as friends (the Special Relationship), the claims engendered by their respective narratives as Eagle and Lion also poised them for an identity competition over the “reality” of who, in “fact,” was the leader of the West.

For a time, the rivalry was averted as the awkward tension between the respective claims of the Lion and the Eagle and were funneled into a narrative “reality” that supported positive, collaborative behaviors. More precisely, the conviction that the two countries shared an incontestable kindred freedom-loving democratic nature enabled the key authors to accept narrative “realities” about the Eagle and Lion as equal partners in the protection of the free world (Kunz 1991, 25). Put in Lyotard’s terms, prior to the Suez Crisis, ‘the Eagle’ and ‘the Lion5 were not phrases that disputed each other within a larger narrative context; rather, they were commensu-rable. But during the Suez Crisis the complex confluence of Cold War politics, changing international norms surrounding colonialism and nationalism, and the idiosyncrasies of individual leaders and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic ignited conflicts that even Nasser understood would disrupt the enfeebled “reality” of unity between the Lion and the Eagle. He boldly pointed out that the U.S. was “the coming” and Britain was “the going,” and that although the U.S. was increasingly eager to take on its leadership role, the British were unwilling to let go of theirs. Nasser accurately anticipated what would occur if he nationalized the Suez Canal: a zero-sum competition for credibility between the Lion and the Eagle, and so between the British Self and American Self (Reynolds 1981, 26, 3). Nasser, it seems, was prescient. The Suez Crisis turned out as a competition for the right to claim leadership. The ‘Eagle’ and ‘Lion,’ rather than com-mensurable phrases in a larger narrative “reality” about freedom and democracy-loving partners in protecting the West, became competitive narrative “realities” in their own right.

Of course, that Nasser’s nationalization engendered a conflict of strategy and policy between the U.S. and Britain is obvious from the historical record on simple behavioral terms. One need not delve into the underlying identities and subjectivity of the two states to see this. And yet, only by doing so is it possible to make sense of why the divergence in their policies and strategies became so unsettling for Anglo-American we-ness. In behavioral terms, the divergence between the two countries was over whether or not to react to Nasser’s nationalization with (physical) force. Britain believed force was called for but the U.S. did not. Although there were also material reasons for this divergence, it was the Lion/Eagle conflict that made the divergence so divisive for the Anglo-American relationship. Whereas the British narrative “reality” of the Lion as leader of the freedom-and democracy-loving West hinged on the successful use offeree to reverse Nasser’s nationalization, the American narrative “reality” of the Eagle as leader of the freedom and democracy-loving West hinged on avoiding the use of force in dealing with Nasser’s nationalization. Thus, for the British, ‘Use of Force’ was a phrase that was logically supportive of the Western ideal of freedom-loving democracy, whereas for the Americans ‘Use of Force’ was a phrase-in-dispute of that same “reality.” These diametrically opposed interpretations of force unsettled the taken-for-granted truth that the two countries were kindred freedom-loving democracies—it revealed how the Lion and the Eagle had differing interpretations of what that meant in the first place. The prior epistemological order, which had made the Special Relationship between the U.S. and Britain possible, thus collapsed into uncertainty, or disorder.

But why did the narrative of the Lion require the use of force in the Suez context while the narrative of the Eagle could not tolerate it? The answer lies within the history of the Suez Canal conflict, in particular in the way that British and American identities developed conflicting interpretations of their interests in that region. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal he (possibly knowingly) ignited a complicated network of interests and conflicts between the West and the Middle East (Murray 1999). Nasser had come to power in 1950 in the wake of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Theorizing Identity
• Forcing Anglo-American Order
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography