Critical Theory and World Politics

Citizenship, Sovereignty and Humanity

Andrew Linklater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415399302
• eBook ISBN: 9781134149414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Andrew Linklater has been one of the most innovative thinkers in international relations, introducing critical and ethical elements into the discipline which has forced it to rethink many of its basic assumptions. This book builds on this body of work to develop a radical new theory that calls for a cosmopolitan approach to international relations.

Key subjects covered in the book include:

• 
  
  

• citizenship and humanity
• critical theory and political community
• the problem of harm
• the sociology of states-systems.

Part I
The problem of community

1 ‘Men and citizens’ in international relations

Since Rousseau political theorists have had frequent recourse to a contrast between the fragmented nature of modern social and political life and the allegedly more communitarian character of the Greek polis. At the heart of this opposition was the belief that the polis represented a condition of unsurpassable harmony in which citizens identified freely and spontaneously with political institutions. Compared with their ancient counterparts, modern citizens exhibited a lower level of identification with the public world and a stronger resolution to advance their separate interests and to pursue private conceptions of the good. Nevertheless, the disintegration of the polis was not depicted in the language of unqualified loss. History had not been an entirely unmitigated fall, because the individual’s claim to scrutinize the law of the polis on rational grounds involved a significant advance in human self-consciousness. The positive aspect of its decline was found in the transcendence of a parochial culture in which neither the right of individual freedom nor the principle of human equality had been recognized. The modern world had lost the spontaneous form of community enjoyed by the ancients but it surpassed that world in its understanding and expression of freedom (Hegel 1956: 252–3 and Hegel 1952: paras 260–1, esp. additions; see also Plant 1973: ch. 1 and Taylor 1975: chs 14–15).

Much is made in the writings of Hegel of the necessity of integrating the ancient ideal of community with the modern principle of individuality. Indeed, for Rousseau, Hegel and the early Marx the modern political problem is how to make good citizens out of modern individuals, out of persons who are no longer spontaneously citizens (O’Malley 1970: introduction, esp. pp. xi–lxiii). This problematic relationship between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ combines with an equally important, if less discussed, political problem: how should human beings relate the obligations they acquire as humans with the obligations they acquire as citizens of bounded political communities? Again, Hegel’s account of the experience of Greece is important. Within the polis, only citizens lived properly human lives; neither slaves nor the citizens of other states were thought to have equal moral worth. Moreover, the citizen’s integration into the life of the polis involved an unquestioning acceptance of the roles and responsibilities of membership. This ‘immediate’ identification dissolved on account of the individual’s claim to criticize the life of the polis in accordance with principles of universal reason. A new type of moral consciousness challenged both the exclusiveness of the polis and the supremacy of its civic obligations. Later, it made possible the claim to belong to two societies: the natural society of one’s birth and the universal society embracing all persons by virtue of reason (Colletti 1973: ch. 12; Taylor 1975: pp. 385, 395–7). The distinction between ‘men’ and ‘citizens’ created an important problem for international political theory: the problem of how to reconcile the actual diversity and division of political communities with the newly discovered belief in the universality of human nature.

The conflict between citizenship and humanity is fundamental to the experience of the modern states-system. This is so because the emergence of moral and religious individualism or universalism divided the Western experience of morality between two dominant perspectives (see Walsh 1972). According to one conception of moral life, the individual understands morality as ‘an affair internal to a particular community’ (Walsh 1972: 19); the separate community is the source of concrete ethical life and the main object of political loyalty; the states-system is the inevitable product of the species’ division into a variety of particularistic social moralities; the idea of humanity, lacking expression in the roles and responsibilities of a form of life, exerts little or no constraint upon the relations between states. According to the second conception, ‘the moral law binds men as men and not as members of any particular community’ (Walsh 1972: 19); individuals may employ their rational faculties to determine the rights and duties that necessarily govern them all; the state, moreover, is an incomplete moral community, too limited to satisfy the individual’s sense of wider moral responsibilities, and the states-system is an obstacle to the institutional expression of the human race.¹

The earliest systematic writings on the modern states-system displayed deep tensions between these moral traditions (Pufendorf 1927, 1934a, 1934b; Vattel 1964). In the history of modern international thought these works comprise the first stage in the understanding of the relationship between humanity and citizenship. As human beings, it was argued, moral agents have duties to one another that are prior to the formation of separate states; as citizens they acquire specific obligations that they share with fellow members of bounded political associations. As political obligations are superimposed on primordial moral ones, individuals have to decide their relative claims on them. For the classical writers of the states-system ‘the services of humanity’ ought to survive the establishment of any ‘special bond with some particular society’ (Pufendorf 1934a: 242); they claimed that ‘no convention or special agreement can release [men] from the obligation . . . to fulfil the duties of humanity to outsiders’, a responsibility now assumed by the state and its rulers (Vattel 1964: 5–6). The classical writings assumed that states could deftly balance the obligations that individuals incurred as human beings with the obligations they have as the citizens of particular societies.

A second stage in the history of international thought highlighted an endemic weakness in these proposed solutions to the problem of relating two types of moral experience. Classical theory itself conceded that the processes of establishing special bonds within states were concluded without contractors conforming with their natural duties.² Rousseau and Kant made the important claim that universal ethical obligations were compromised by forms of competition and conflict that were inherent in a world of sovereign states. The species’ condition was transformed totally by the experience of living in and among states. It was necessary now for individuals to behave merely as citizens and to ignore the ties of humanity. Thus, for Rousseau each one of us is ‘in the civil state as regards our fellow citizens, but in the state of nature as regards the rest of the world; we have taken all kinds of precautions against private wars only to kindle national wars a thousand times more terrible; and . . . in joining a particular group of men, we have really declared ourselves the enemy of the human race’ (Rousseau 1970: 132). The states of Europe exhibited ‘glaring contradictions’ between ‘our fair speeches and our abominable acts, the boundless humanity of our maxims and the boundless cruelty of our deeds’ (Rousseau 1970: 135–6). Extending this theme, Kant wrote that ‘the same unsociableness which forced men into (a Commonwealth) becomes again the cause of each Commonwealth assuming the attitude of uncontrolled freedom in its external relations’; citizenship provided individuals with the security that facilitated the development of a kingdom of ends within the state while jeopardizing the goal of a kingdom of ends at the global level (Kant 1970a: 183). In this way, the contradiction between citizenship and humanity came to be regarded as the key ethical problem of international relations.

Insofar as there has been an impetus for Western political theorists to reflect upon the relations between states, it has been provided by this dichotomy. Theorists have confronted not a world of politics the ‘recurrence and repetition’ of which is alien to a discourse concerned with order and progress but a world of moral tensions, and their first business has been to discover a means of understanding and overcoming them. This ambition underwent a radically new development when, building on ideas that originated in the late eighteenth century, theorists inaugurated a new phase in the history of international thought. Underlying this departure was the historicist assault upon both the supposed uniformity of human nature and the alleged timelessness of universal ethical principles. The focus upon the diversity and incommensurability of moral systems was combined with a critique of that realm of human obligation that had been presumed to be in conflict with the ties that bind national citizens (Berlin 1976: xxiii; see also ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’ in the same volume; and Stern 1962: ch. 6).

Whether defensive or critical of the ‘man–citizen’ dichotomy, it is unsurprising that theorists of international relations made it their principal concern. Its preeminence corresponds with the view that ‘the need for philosophy arises when the unifying power has disappeared from the life of man’ (Marcuse 1969: 36). However, what must be at issue since the emergence of historicism, and relativism, is the validity of arguments that seek to defend the claim that the experience of living in and among modern states exhibits unresolved tensions. To consider this problem further, and to specify what turns upon it, I propose to analyse three conceptions of the ‘man–citizen’ dichotomy. Two of these perspectives have been mentioned – modern natural law and historicism. To these shall be added a third perspective that focuses on the historical development of the species’ capacity for self-determination.

The rights and duties of citizens

The dichotomy between citizenship and humanity appears in the earliest theories of the modern states-system. These writings reflected a broader movement in European culture, the rise of individualism, and its particular expression in political theory, the substitution of an ‘ascending’ for a ‘descending’ conception of government (see Ullman 1961: 24). Contractarianism was incorporated into these theories to account for political obligations and to justify the primacy of obligations to fellow citizens. Civil society was conceived as the outcome of individual negotiation. Individuals surrendered their inherent, absolute rights to obtain a condition of civility conducive to their ‘utility’ (Pufendorf 1934a: 103; Vattel 1964: 9a– 10a). Because of their natural equality and liberty, society could be constructed only through free, individual exchanges of equivalent benefits; reciprocity made social life possible and consent gave force to obligation. As a society of individuals was more necessary than a society of states, and since a universal political association was unobtainable anyway, contracts were concluded not by the whole of humanity collectively but separately within emergent political groups (Pufendorf 1934a: 274; Vattel 1964: 5–6). Individuals left the state of nature by granting each other determinate rights and duties, the rights and duties of citizens. Between their respective political associations, however, the state of nature continued to exist. As individuals were not parties to contracts with outsiders they were free from specific international moral responsibilities. States, moreover, had binding or ‘perfect’ obligations to those who had consented to their establishment, but not to other persons. By such compacts, individuals specified the ultimate obligations of citizenship within associations, the sovereignty of which expressed the necessarily bounded character of moral and political life.

Classical theorists did not presume that the states-system consisted solely of insulated moral enclaves, however. Had they done so the individual would have possessed a unified moral experience. On this assumption the state would have been the sole moral constituency and the states-system would have been an unproblematic form of world political organization. That these conclusions were avoided was a function of the belief that states were artefacts superimposed upon a primordial moral community coextensive with humankind. Classical theorists sought the theoretical integration of contractarianism and moral universalism. They developed that tradition of thought that originated in one of ‘the most decisive change[s] in political thinking’, a change that ‘came some time between the days of Aristotle and Cicero, and proclaimed the moral equality of men’ (Carlyle 1930: 7–11). The doctrine that human reason was endowed with the capacity to apprehend non-contractual, immutable moral principles inherent in the nature of things became part of the dualistic foundations of modern international theory. Thus, ‘the universal society of the human race’ arose as a ‘necessary result of man’s nature’ (Vattel 1964: 5–6). There was an obligation upon ‘the race of men’ to cultivate ‘a friendly society’ because of ‘nature’s will’ that all persons are ‘kinsmen’ (Pufendorf 1934b: 212). On account of this primordial and universal moral community, obligations to citizens could not constitute the outer parameter of the individual’s moral experience; and vertical divisions between states, correspondingly, could not be the sole, defining characteristics of the states-system.

The attempt to mediate between two distinct philosophical traditions made it impossible for those early theories to develop a coherent account of the modern system of states. Their failure is manifest in their discussion of the character of sovereign rights and the principles of statecraft. Ascertained within contractarianism, the constitutive principles of the states-system are rough reproductions of the principles of conduct observed by individuals within the original state of nature (Pufendorf 1927: 90; Vattel 1964: 7). The sovereign’s right to promote the interests of his association, by force if necessary, is analogous to the right of self-help that existed prior to the creation of society. States must possess these rights until and unless they consent to their amendment or surrender. But, from a perspective inclined to highlight the unifying capacity of human reason, the attempt to endorse these absolute, vertical divisions between communities is unjustified. It commits the error of forming ‘a plan of geographical morality, by which the duties of men in public and private situations are not governed by their relation to the great Governor of the Universe or by their relations to humankind, but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels not of life, but of latitudes’ (Burke, cited in Bredvold and Ross 1970: 17). Such a ‘plan of geographical morality’ violates the existence of a universal moral constituency upholding the rights and duties that bind all persons together in a world society. The ethical state cannot regard its rights and responsibilities as constituted by the transactions between its individual members alone; the former cannot emanate from a pact that excludes all but future citizens, and the rights and duties of insiders and outsiders must be harmonized. Indeed, as Fichte observed, to avoid being ‘in contradiction with the concept of right, a commonwealth . . . must embrace the whole globe, or at least, must contain the possibility of uniting the whole of mankind’ (Fichte 1869: 215). The dual foundations of classical theory advanced competing ways of ascertaining the scope of the individual’s moral sensibilities and their implications for the organization of international society.

Sharply opposed accounts of the morality of statecraft emerge from these diverse philosophical bases. Here, a familiar dichotomy between private and public ethics arises alongside the ‘man–citizen’ division. On the contractarian account, the principle of reciprocity facilitates the emergence of a society of states, but the reason for states is a constraint upon the level of sociability that can be exhibited in their external relations. Because of the structure of political obligation, states cannot allow that international obligations are permanently binding nor can they dismiss out of hand any act of duplicity or violence outlawed within domestic society. Because duties between human beings cannot be extended indefinitely into the space between states, moral and political experience is bifurcated into the distinct realms of private and public ethics. This bifurcation is an inevitable product of the compact that the sovereign, as trustee for the welfare of the community, must sometimes deny the validity of principles that are normally observed in the conduct of purely private relations. This dichotomy is not objectively given in the anarchic nature of the states-system but depends on the prior decision to confine the principal moral constituency to the boundaries of the political association. On account of the apparent rationality of this decision, morality can be neatly divided into two realms without disturbing the unity of citizens’ moral lives.

Nevertheless, if the states-system is an artefact superimposed upon a pre-existent world morality then the legitimacy of this division must be questioned. Considered alongside the belief in universal reason, the separation between private and public ethics is a reflection of the incomplete, one-sided nature of moral life. Artificial boundaries between states create an indefensible tension at the heart of the individual’s moral experience, whether apprehended or not. What is at issue, therefore, is the existence of particularistic social moralities that centre the individual’s moral sensibilities on the immediate, political group. Against this practice, moral universalism asserts that a person should be concerned with ‘the all-encompassing sphere of cosmopolitan sentiment’ (Kant 1964: 140); moreover, the moral self-consciousness of individuals and societies ought to develop to the point at which ‘a violation of right in one place of the earth is felt all over it’ (Kant, cited in Forsyth et al. 1970: 216). The sovereign should not be party to a division between the principles of domestic and international political life; and, as moral agents, sovereigns should honour obligations to collaborate to control the statessystem so that ‘it may be brought into conformity with natural right’ (Kant 1970b: 228–9). On this account, the attempt to weave universal moral principles into the affairs of states holds the key to overcoming the tension between the obligations of men and citizens.

Two conceptions of moral obligation were embedded in the classical reflections on the Western states-system. But the corresponding visions of world political organization were not made explicit and the internal contradictions of the argument were suppressed. Typical of these writings was the tendency to relax the force of obligations to humanity. Pufendorf and Vattel both relied on the argument that these obligations possess an essentially indeterminate status. Pufendorf (1927: 48) argued that it is only within civil societies that human beings have ascertained the precise composition of the rights and duties that should bind them together; the social contract established what they could not be certain of on the basis of the natural law alone. Vattel (1964: 7–8) stated that the content of the natural law is imprecise, that it lends itself to varying interpretations, and that states should therefore generally refrain from judging each other’s conduct. Obligations to citizens are determinate; obligations to other human beings are not. However, neither Pufendorf nor Vattel wished to deny the realm of human obligation with its supposedly civilizing effects on the relations between states. Perhaps the implication to draw is that the states-system is as rational a form of world political organization as human beings can establish prior to making obligations to humanity more concrete at some (improbable) future point. But, in neither writer’s work is there a suggestion that the states-system exhibits only an imperfect or qualified form of rationality. Indeed, the roles and responsibilities of members of sovereign states appear to pre-suppose the absolute rationality of the state and the finality of the states-system. Although ‘the services of humanity’ survived the formation of special political arrangements, citizens were urged to hold ‘nothing dearer’ than the ‘welfare and safety’ of the state; similarly, sovereigns were required to comply with the imperative that ‘the welfare of the people is the supreme law’ (Pufendorf 1927: 121, 144). ‘No convention or special agreement’ could cancel ‘the duties of humanity’, but a constitutive principle of the state-system declared that ‘the liberty of a Nation would remain incomplete if other Nations presumed to inspect and control its conduct’ (Vattel 1964: 5). The attempt to legitimize these propositions reveals that, at best, classical theory equivocated between contractarianism and universalism.

The principal merit of Kant’s political philosophy was its attempt to overcome the inadequacies of earlier international relations theory. In contrast to ‘the miserable comforters’ (Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel), Kant aimed to take the principle of equality seriously as a principle of international relations (Kant 1970b: 211; Gallie 1978: ch. 2). The main features of his conception of world politics are sufficiently well known to make recapitulation unnecessary here. In short, the approach sought to establish the absoluteness of reason and to overcome the division between contractarianism and universalism (Murphy 1970: 110–1). Nevertheless, the dominant trends in social and political thought did not coincide with Kant’s individualistic foundation for a world ethic; they ran counter to doctrines that supposed there was a distinction to be made between the norms of particular times and places and the values supplied by an overarching reason. Romanticism, for instance, criticized two key elements in the traditional contractarian theories of society and politics as exemplified in the writings of Pufendorf and Vattel: first, the belief that human arrangements were artefacts through which humans sought to satisfy pre-social needs; and, second, the belief that individuals possessed, irrespective of their cultural or temporal location, the same set of rational capacities (Lovejoy 1941). The second of these criticisms was presumed by later writers to undercut Kant’s critique of the states-system.³ Irrespective of the accuracy of this point, the impact of romanticism was to transform the basis on which traditional international relations theories had rested.

The historicist theory of international relations

Employing the romanticist critique of individualism and rationalism, historicism claimed that human capacities were inseparable from the forms of life in which they developed. By claiming that ethical capabilities were similarly dependent, it was thought possible to subvert the belief in a universal moral constituency required by transcendent reason. The latter worldview was predicated upon the wrongful abstraction of individuals from their social and historical contexts. Individuals, it was argued, were not human beings first and French or German afterwards (Treitschke 1915: 127–8). Only in the West had thinkers become preoccupied with analysing the human condition as it might have been prior to the appearance of different social and political practices (Treitschke 1915). The discourse that aimed to depict the natural characteristics of early humans simply underlined its cultural limitations; invariably, present day social categories were projected on to the thought and action of ‘natural man’. Culture’s unavoidable and irreducible qualities were no more evident than in the theorist’s ambition to transcend them.

It was therefore argued that the primordial fact about humanity is the existence of cultural individualities. Individuals are not undifferentiated members of a humanity that might one day attain political unification but participants in the diverse communities of ‘intellect and spirit’ which have developed in history (Sterling 1958; Aron 1966: 585–91). The function of states was not to maximize the pre-social requirements of their members but to preserve and enhance the cultures for which they were responsible. Human existence involved cultural pluralism and the necessity of recognizing divisions between sovereign states. But, if there is no moral law that is transcultural, on what basis can interna...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Critical Theory and World Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The problem of community
• Part II: The problem of citizenship
• Part III: The problem of harm
• Notes
• References