Non-Western International Relations Theory

Perspectives On and Beyond Asia

Amitav Acharya, Barry Buzan, Amitav Acharya, Barry Buzan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135174033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Given that the world has moved well beyond the period of Western colonialism, and clearly into a durable period in which non-Western cultures have gained their political autonomy, it is long past time that non-Western voices had a higher profile in debates about international relations, not just as disciples of Western schools of thought, but as inventors of their own approaches. Western IR theory has had the advantage of being the first in the field, and has developed many valuable insights, but few would defend the position that it captures everything we need to know about world politics.

In this book, Acharya and Buzan introduce non-Western IR traditions to a Western IR audience, and challenge the dominance of Western theory. An international team of experts reinforce existing criticisms that IR theory is Western-focused and therefore misrepresents and misunderstands much of world history by introducing the reader to non-Western traditions, literature and histories relevant to how IR is conceptualised.

Including case studies on Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, Southeast Asian, Indian and Islamic IR this book redresses the imbalance and opens up a cross-cultural comparative perspective on how and why thinking about IR has developed in the way it has. As such, it will be invaluable reading for both Western and Asian audiences interested in international relations theory.

1
Why is there no non-Western international relations theory?

An introduction

Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan

More than 40 years ago, in a provocative essay that has since become a classic in the field, Martin Wight (1966: 20) addressed the question of ‘why is there no international theory?’ Wight asserted that ‘international theory, or what there is of it, is scattered, unsystematic, and mostly inaccessible to the layman’. To explain why this is so, he compared political theory with international theory. Political theory was informed by a widespread belief in the sovereign state as the highest form of political life, a belief which contributed to the lack of interest in the possibility of a world state. Whereas political theory and law were concerned with the good life featuring ‘maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of normal relationships and calculable results’, the realm of international relations could be equated with a repetitiously competitive struggle for survival, reproducing ‘the same old melodrama’.

In this project we take up a more specific question than Wight’s, but inspired by it. We start from the premise that there is now a substantial body of theory about international relations, some of it even meeting Wight’s normative understanding of political theory. The puzzle for us is that the sources of international relations theory (IRT) conspicuously fail to correspond to the global distribution of its subjects. Our question is: ‘why is there no non-Western international theory?’ We are as intrigued by the absence of theory in the non-West as Wight was by what he considered to be the absence of international theory in general. But our investigation into this puzzle follows a broader line of enquiry. Wight’s central message was that satisfaction with an existing political condition identified with the pursuit of progress and the good life within the state inhibited the need for developing a theory about what was regarded as the repetitious melodrama of relations among states. If so, then one may find a ready-made explanation for why non-Western international theory, or what there is of it, remains ‘scattered, unsystematic, and mostly inaccessible’. Today, the contemporary equivalent of ‘good life’ in international relations – democratic peace, interdependence and integration, and institutionalized orderliness, as well as the ‘normal relationships and calculable results’ are found mostly in the West, while the non-West remains the realm of survival (Goldgeiger and McFaul 1992). Wight maintained that ‘what for political theory is the extreme case (as revolution, or civil war) is for international theory the regular case’. One might say with little exaggeration that what in Wight’s view was the extreme case for political theory, has now become extreme only for the international relations of the core states found in the West, while for the non-West, it remains the stuff of everyday life.

But the absence of non-Western IRT deserves a more complex explanation than the simple acknowledgement of the conflictual anarchy of the non-West. Indeed, we do not accept Wight’s observation that international theory, in contrast to political theory, is or should be about survival only. We acknowledge the possibility of progress and transformation both in the West and the non-West. Our explanations for the absence of a non-Western international theory focuses not on the total lack of good life in the non-West, but on ideational and perceptual forces, which fuel, in varying mixtures, both Gramscian hegemonies, and ethnocentrism and the politics of exclusion. Some of these explanations are located within the West, some within the non-West and some in the interaction between the two. These explanations have much to do with what Wæver (1998) has called the ‘sociology’ of the discipline, which reinforces material variables such as disparities in power and wealth.

In this book, we set out to conduct an investigation into why is there no nonWestern IRT and what might be done to mitigate this situation. We focus on Asia, both because it is the site of the only contemporary non-Western concentration of power and wealth even remotely comparable to the West, and because it has its own long history of international relations that is quite distinct from that of the West. History matters to IRT, because as we will show in section 3 below, even a short reflection on Western IRT quickly exposes that much of it is conspicuously drawn from the model provided by modern European history. We are acutely aware that we are excluding the Middle East, whose history has an equal claim to standing as a distinctive source of IR. We also exclude Africa, whose history of state traditions was often tied into the Middle East and Europe, and whose non-state history perhaps has less immediate relevance to IRT (though this perception too, may be part of what needs to be rectified). We make these exclusions on grounds that our expertise does not lie in these regions, and that including them would require a much bigger project than we have the resources to undertake. We hope others will take up our challenge to do for these regions what we do here for Asia, and that they will find the approach adopted here useful in doing that.

Our goal is to introduce non-Western IR traditions to a Western IR audience, and to challenge non-Western IR thinkers to challenge the dominance of Western theory. We do this not out of antagonism for the West, or contempt for the IRT that has been developed there, but because we think Western IRT is both too narrow in its sources and too dominant in its influence to be good for the health of the wider project to understand the social world in which we live. We hold that IR theory is in and of itself not inherently Western, but is an open domain into which it is not unreasonable to expect non-Westerners to make a contribution at least proportional to the degree that they are involved in its practice.

There is, in addition, the powerful argument of Robert Cox (1986: 207) that ‘Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.’ IR theory likes to pose as neutral, but it is not difficult to read much of it in a Coxian light, especially those that offer not just a way of analysing, but also a vision of what the world does look like (realism, English School pluralists), or should look like (liberalism, Marxism, critical theory, English School solidarists). In the Coxian perspective, liberalism, especially economic liberalism, can be seen as speaking for capital. Realism and the English School pluralists speak for the status quo great powers and the maintenance of their dominant role in the international system/society. Though they are presented as universal theories, and might, indeed, be accepted as such by many, all three can also be seen as speaking for the West and in the interest of sustaining its power, prosperity and influence. Various strands of Marxism and critical theory have sought to speak for excluded or marginalized groups (workers, women, Third World countries) and to promote improvement in the position of those in the periphery. From this Coxian perspective, Asian states have an interest in IR theory that speaks for them and their interests. Neither China nor Japan fit comfortably into realism or liberalism. China is trying to avoid being treated as a threat to the status quo as its power rises, and the moves to develop a Chinese school of IR are focused on this problem. Japan is seeking to avoid being a ‘normal’ great power and its status as a ‘trading state’ or ‘civilian power’ is a direct contradiction of realist expectations. ASEAN defies the realist, liberal and English School logic that order is provided by the local great powers. South Korea and India perhaps fit more closely with realist models, yet neither seems certain about what sort of place it wants for itself in international society. To the extent that IR theory is constitutive of the reality that it addresses, Asian states have a major interest in being part of the game. If we are to improve IRT as a whole, then Western theory needs to be challenged not just from within, but also from outside.

The next section looks at what we understand by IR theory. Section 3 sets out the pattern of Western dominance in IRT. Section 4 surveys non-Western contributions to thinking about IR. Section 5 explores the possible explanations for Western dominance of IRT. Section 6 sets out the structure of the book and summarizes the arguments in the chapters that follow.

What do we mean by IR theory?

It is important at the outset to have some sense of what ‘theory’ means in IR. The question is problematic because of the dichotomy between the hard positivist understanding of theory, which dominates in the US, and the softer reflectivist understandings of theory found more widely in Europe (Wæver 1998). Many Europeans use the term theory for anything that organizes a field systematically, structures questions and establishes a coherent and rigorous set of interrelated concepts and categories. The dominant American tradition, however, usually demands that theory be defined in positivist terms: that it defines terms in operational form, and then sets out and explains the relations between causes and effects. This type of theory should contain – or be able to generate – testable hypotheses of a causal nature. These differences are captured in Hollis and Smith’s (1990) widely used distinction between understanding and explanation. They have epistemological and ontological roots that transcend the crude Europe-US divide, and it is of course the case that advocates of the ‘European’ position can be found in the US, and of the ‘American’ position in Europe. In both of these forms, theory is about abstracting away from the facts of day-to-day events in an attempt to find patterns, and group events together into sets and classes of things. Theory is therefore about simplifying reality. It starts from the supposition that in some quite fundamental sense, each event is not unique, but can be clustered together with others that share some important similarities. Each power rivalry (or development trajectory, war or empire etc.) will have both some unique features and some that it shares with others of its type. In this sense, and at the risk of some oversimplification, social theory is the opposite of history. Where historians seek to explain each set of events in its own terms, social theorists look for more general explanations/understandings applicable to many cases distributed across space and time. For historians, the goal is to have the best possible explanation for a particular set of events. For theorists, the goal is to find the most powerful explanations: those where a small number of factors can explain a large number of cases. Waltz (1979) aims for this type of parsimonious theory with his idea that anarchic structure makes the distribution of capabilities the key to understanding the main patterns of international relations for all of recorded history.

For the enquiry that we have in mind, we do not think it either necessary or appropriate to get engaged in the bottomless controversies about theory that emanate from debates about the philosophy of knowledge. We set aside concerns about whether the social world can be approached in the same way as the material one. We are happy to take a pluralist view of theory that embraces both the harder, positivist, rationalist, materialist and quantitative understandings on one end of the spectrum, and the more reflective, social, constructivist, and postmodern on the other. In this pluralist spirit we also include normative theory, whose focus is not so much to explain or understand the social world as it is, but to set out systematic ideas about how and why it can and should be improved. Although normative theory has a different purpose from analysing the social world as it is, it shares the underlying characteristic of theory that it abstracts from reality and seeks general principles applicable across a range of cases that share some common features. Privileging one type of theory over others would largely defeat the purpose of our enterprise, which is to make an initial probe to find ‘what is out there’ in Asian thinking about IR. A broad approach to theory will give us a much better chance of finding local produce than a narrow one, and those who take particular views can apply their own filters to separate out what is of significance (or not) to them.

Given the peculiarities of international relations as a subject, it is worth saying something about whether IR theory needs to be universal in scope (i.e. applying to the whole system) or can also be exceptionalist (applying to a subsystem on the grounds that it has distinctive characteristics). As noted above, the holy grail for theorists is the highest level of generalization about the largest number of events. That impulse points strongly towards universalist IR theories, like Waltz’s, that claim to apply to the whole international system and to be timeless in their application (though even Waltz can be faulted here for keeping silent about the vast swaths of history in which ‘universal’ empires held sway, overwhelming his supposedly indestructible self-reproducing logic of international anarchy – Buzan and Little 2000). Yet there is also plenty of room for exceptionalism. Perhaps the leading example is European studies, where the emergence of the EU has created a regional political structure that fits neither domestic nor international political models. It is too far removed from anarchy to be Westphalian, and too distant from hierarchy to count as either an empire or a domestic political space. This post-Westphalian experiment has a reasonable claim to be exceptional, and is theorized about in terms of ‘multi-level governance’ and other such specifically tailored concepts. In principle, area studies should be a main location for subsystemic theorizing. In relation to Asia, elements of this are visible in the idea that East Asia may be dressed up in Westphalian costume, but is not performing a Westphalian play. Because of its Confucian culture, East Asian states are more likely to bandwagon with power rather than balance against it. This line of thinking (Fairbank 1968; Huntington 1996: 229–38; Kang 2003) projects Asia’s past into its future. It assumes that what Fairbank labelled the ‘Chinese World Order’ – a Sinocentric and hierarchical form of international relations – has survived within the cultures of East Asia despite the superficial remaking of the Asian subsystem into a Western-style set of sovereign states. This line of exceptionalist theorizing about East Asia is not that well developed, and mainly emanates from the US. The problem with area studies is that although it might well be the right location for subsystemic, exceptionalist theorizing, area studies is generally dominated by disciplines that have a low interest in theorizing, effectively taking exceptionalism to be a reason not to theorize. Europe (in the form of EU studies) once again stands apart.

Subsystemic theorizing in IR is thus generally underdeveloped. Area studies experts mostly are not interested in it, and most mainstream IR theories concentrate on the system level (realism and great powers, liberalism and ‘universal’ values, the English School and international society, globalization and the world economy). It is noteworthy that English School theory has ignored the regional level generally and the EU in particular, even though there is no reason in principle why the idea of international society cannot be applied to subsystems, and many reasons in both theory and practice why it should be (Buzan 2004: 205–27). Even theorizing about regionalism is often done in universalist, comparative terms. Despite the effective dominance of system-level theorizing in IR, it is clear that if pushed to an extreme, the logic of exceptionalist claims would deny the possibility of universal IR theories – or indeed any universal social theory. If cultural differences are strong enough, then shared features at the system level will be too thin to support un...