After the Globe, Before the World

RBJ Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135232276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the implications of claims that the most challenging political problems of our time express an urgent need to reimagine where and therefore what we take politics to be. It does so by examining the relationship between modern forms of politics (centred simultaneously within individual subjects, sovereign states and an international system of states) and the (natural, God-given or premodern) world that has been excluded in order to construct modern forms of political subjectivity and sovereign authority.

It argues that the ever-present possibility of a world outside the international both sustains the structuring of relations between inclusion and exclusion within the modern internationalized political order and generates desires for escape from this order to a politics encompassing a singular humanity, cosmopolis, globe or planet that are doomed to disappointment. On this basis, the book develops a critique of prevailing traditions of both political theory and theories of international relations. It especially examines what it might now mean to think about sovereignties, subjectivities, boundaries, borders and limits without automatically reproducing forms of inclusion and exclusion, or universality and particularity, expressed in the converging but ultimately contradictory relationship between international relations and world politics.

1
Prelude

In this book, I seek to resist the effects of a rich and diverse array of discourses expressing claims about a need for, and evidence of, an historical and structural transformation from forms of political life articulated through the presumed authority of the modern sovereign state and the system of such states to something more universal: claims, most specifically, about the need to move from a politics of “the international” to a politics of “the world.” I do so because I see scarcely any chance of thinking more imaginatively about our future political possibilities as long as these discourses continue to sustain desires for other ways of acting politically while simultaneously insisting that these other possibilities are entirely impossible, in principle as well as in practice.

It is not that I am unimpressed by various empirical claims about historical trends and structural transformations, or even by some of the visionary aspirations that are said to warrant such a move. I am nevertheless sceptical about widespread attempts to force evidence about and ambitions for historical and structural change into this particular account of what it must mean to make claims about a beginning, an ending and an intervening spatiotemporal trajectory. I am especially suspicious of the routines through which the terms “international politics” and “world politics” are assumed to be either interchangable or diametrically opposed – to be either synonyms or antonyms – in ways that mobilize both affirmations and denials of a specific philosophy of history, specific accounts of the necessary relation between spatiality and temporality, and specific accounts of where and what political life must be and who it must be for.

The book is thus constructed as an exploration of what it means to distinguish between an international politics and a politics of the world and, once this distinction is enacted as an array of constitutive contradictions, to frame claims about political possibilities and impossibilities – about freedoms, necessities, equalities, securities and sovereign authorities – that work by mobilizing accounts of political temporality promising to take us from one form of politics to the other while insisting, for very good reasons, that the promise can never be kept; while insisting, that is, that modern political life must be sustained within very precise spatiotemporal limits that are never only internal, never enacted only within the practices of modern subjectivity. In my view, it has become much too easy to assume that the distinction between a politics of the international and a presumed politics of the world (a distinction that I take to be a necessary, even if insufficient, condition of the possibility of specifically modern forms of political life articulated through relations and antagonisms between individualized subjects, sovereign states and a system of sovereign states) can be superseded, transcended or erased by imagining some sort of move from the one to the other.

A move from one political condition to another is now very easily envisaged as a journey from one space to another, one time to another, or perhaps even one spatiotemporality to another. This way of thinking about political possibilities may seem entirely straightforward, so to speak, even scarcely worth thinking about. Nevertheless, it is only possible to imagine this particular journey if we systematically refuse to think about what is at stake in the initial distinction, as well as in the metaphors of travel this distinction has enabled. For there is no doubt that both the distinction and the metaphors are far more troublesome than they usually appear; and quite obviously so to anyone attuned to the multiple conflicts over basic principles attending the articulation of modern forms of political life grounded in claims about liberty, equality, security and the bounded authority of territorialized sovereign jurisdictions. At some point, literally, the envisaged journey from an international politics to a world politics must cut, or must fail to cut, across the distinction between one condition and the other. Boundaries must loom ominously. Sites, moments and practices of contradiction must be politicized and/or depoliticized.

This is not to say anything that has not been known to many traditions of critical political analysis for several centuries, not least because what we now think of as critical analysis was partly generated by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European reflections about various manifestations of this problem, usually in relation to distinctions between secular and sacred, immanence and transcendence, or the finitude of human existence and some infinite world beyond. Familiarity in some quarters, however, has done little to constrain the popularity of discourses promising to solve the problems of modern political life through a shift from an international politics to a world politics, nor to inhibit the conscription of various forms of critical analysis into the ranks of those recommending such a shift. In my judgement, and despite their influence on many impressive scholarly traditions, the effects of the point, or moment, of intersection between a seemingly benign conceptual distinction and a proposed temporal trajectory cutting across this distinction, along with the vast topological field of political possibilities and impossibilities that it both expresses and enables, demands intensive and urgent scrutiny.

My overall argument, to put it briefly, is that anyone seeking to reimagine the possibilities of political life under contemporary conditions would be wise to resist ambitions expressed as a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world, and to pay far greater attention to what goes on at the boundaries, borders and limits of a politics orchestrated within the international that simultaneously imagines the possibility and impossibility of a move across the boundaries, borders and limits distinguishing itself from some world beyond. The point, that is to say, is precisely the point, together with the lines which flow from it in order both to discriminate and to connect: to include, to exclude, to both include and exclude so as to constitute a complex array of inclusions and exclusions, and to affirm both the possibility and the impossibility of some world beyond this array of inclusions and exclusions.

I cannot pretend that this will be an easy argument to make; on the contrary. It will require resistence not only to the currently popular but (as I will argue) conceptually fragile literatures that remain content to keep directing us down the road to some future politics of the world, but also to various literatures that may be fully aware that pervasive metaphors of travel from one spatiotemporality to another work to keep us where we are and what we are supposed to be, but nevertheless underestimate the importance of thinking about the ins and outs of a politics orchestrated within and beyond the spatiotemporal boundaries of an international order. In both contexts, I will insist that the boundaries of a politics of the international are at least as complex as the boundaries of a politics preoccupied with either individual subjects or sovereign states, and that it is to the boundaries of the politics of the international that we should look in order to understand the conditions under which modern claims to sovereignty and subjectivity have been sustained, and under which conditions these claims might be rearticulated.

While the argument will run in many different directions so as to break open patterns of analysis that have congealed into narratives about a move from an international politics to a politics of the world, it is one that I believe captures a broad consensus among many currents of critical scholarship concerned not only with claims about daunting transformations in political life, but also with the interplay between the limits of our capacity to understand these transformations and our understanding of what it means to be political within and between certain kinds of limits, borders and other sorts of boundary practices. With the partial but telling exception of some literatures about political economies, political ecologies, postcolonial situations, urbanizations, and so on, most of these traditions tend to frame their analyses in relation to practices of statehood or individual subjectivity rather than of the modern system of states. In my view, this is a profound mistake, even though I understand well enough why many scholars might be reluctant to engage with the literatures about the modern system of states that have emerged since the mid-twentieth century within the specific Anglo-American disciplines of political science and international relations. The boundaries, borders and limits expressed in the distinction between a politics of the international and a politics of the world – in the line transected by a line of temporal possibility and impossibility – suggests that we might want to be much less sanguine about our capacity to understand the workings of the boundaries, borders and limits of contemporary political life anywhere, but especially in relation to what we call the international, to what we might want to call the world, and to the collective voices that presume to speak about a politics of the international, a politics of the world, or a politics of states and subjects that simply assumes, without ever thinking about, a constitutive antagonism between a modern system of states and some other world beyond.

The broad array of discourses that concern me here rest, in part, on the assumption that a politics of the international generates problems resulting from patterns of particularism, pluralism and fragmentation (usually expressed through references to state sovereignty, nationalism and systemic anarchy) that must be solved by substituting patterns of commonality and universality (usually expressed in claims about humanity, reason, the planet or even the cosmos). Ultimate causalities might be identified in relation to other (usually “economic” or “social”) forces, but unless politics is simply reduced to such forces, their crucial political expression is usually identified as a lack of unity and a consequent surfeit of conflict and violence; although it is difficult to avoid some residual sense that an order characterized by disunity somehow manages to hang together as a system, as a structure, as a process or even as just an ever-present possibility of war. These discourses also rest, and more profoundly, on the assumption that the kinds of commonalities and universalities that can be imagined as solutions to problems generated by the politics of the international must eventually add up to a politics of the world as such.

For all their popularity, both assumptions are impossible to sustain. The politics of the international already express an extensive and powerful account of the proper relationship between a particular form of particularism/ pluralism in the sovereign nation-state and a particular form of commonality/ universality in the international system of sovereign nation-states. Consequently, problems arising from a politics of the international cannot be attributed to particularism or to pluralism alone. Moreover, the historical construction of a relationship between sovereign nation-states and an international system of such states rests quite famously on the rift between the political world of modern “man” and any other world as such, so that any attempt to speak about a politics of the world necessarily confronts both the achievements and limits of specifically modern forms of subjectivity and all the ontological, epistemological and axiological difficulties they imply; and they certainly imply a very impressive range of difficulties. Thus in the first place, claims about a move away from the politics of the international tend to counterpose principles of particularism/pluralism and universality/commonality that are already expressed as a complementary and mutually productive but also antagonistic relationship; and in the second place they tend to presume that all the standard problems that have characterized the modern ambition for distanciation from an objective world beyond itself can be overcome through an idealization of the world that must be the principled objective of our political ambitions.

What I want to do in this book, then, is to understand, in order to resist, some of the practices through which narratives about the need to move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world have come to have such widespread resonance, even though they are so fundamentally at odds with our received understandings of a form of political life constituted through relations and antagonisms between claims to particularity/plurality and claims to commonality/universality: understandings that have been shaped especially by prior accounts of the early-modern European rupture between man and world, man and God, and modern man from any other kind of man. Modern political life already affirms powerful assumptions about what it must mean to move beyond or to articulate claims about possibilities and impossibilities within. These assumptions might be traced, among many vast fields of scholarly speculation, to the canonical thinkers of classical Greece, to Christian accounts of time and eternity or immanence and transcendence, or, my preference here, to the convergence of both Greek and Christian inheritances with the geometries and topologies animating early-modern European attempts to articulate principles of sovereign authorization and its spatiotemporal delimitation. Whatever nuances might be read into competing historical resources in this respect, claims about historical and structural transformation are always in danger of endlessly reproducing very specific accounts of space, time and authority that are already at work in the politics of the international, even while affirming transformations promising to leave the international somewhere behind.

To put it succinctly, but also to draw attention both to the difficulties of succinct formulation and to the way I will keep circling back to some persistent themes in what follows, there can be no simple beginning, middle or end to an analysis that seeks to engage with this particular account of beginnings, endings and a normalized but always problematic middle ground inscribed somewhere in between. This is so whether the middle ground between beginnings and endings is understood as a territorialized space marked by clear geographical borders, by an historicized time marking a linear trajectory into a promising but impossible future, or as a sharp and intensely over-coded boundary marking the point at which promise and ambition meet claims of impossibility and limitation: the point at which the ambition to escape from a condition of linear extensions and projections must return to the original condition of beginning, end and middle. As I will keep insisting in various contexts, there can be no simple move beyond a structuring of here and beyond, no easy alternative to what is already constructed as a politics of similarities and alternatives, nor, to invoke the language that has recently marked the welcome return of sustained though still constrained analyses of claims about state sovereignty, no obvious exception to a politics organized as a contradictory structuring of norms and exceptions.

The possibility of sustaining more imaginative accounts of any future political possibilities, of who might be able to create them, and of the conditions under which they might be created rests very largely, I will argue, on much greater scepticism towards the accounts of beginnings, endings and spatiotemporal trajectories expressed in prevailing narratives about a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world. If alternatives to a politics of the international are to be identified or desired (and I am prepared to admit that this may be a very big conditionality in both cases), then they will have to be understood as alternatives to all those claims about what alternatives must be that are generated and reproduced in a politics of the modern international. A range of quite daunting questions is at stake in this respect: questions about what it means to make claims about the world; questions about the spatiotemporalities that are presumed to be somehow both within and in motion towards that world; and questions about the conceptions of authority that are at work in distinctions between the international and the world, in demands for a move from one to the other, and in prevailing assumptions about what it means to say anything intelligible at all about the world or the spatiotemporal articulations of political life within it.

Even from this brief formulation, it should be clear that much depends on how it has become possible to draw the lines of discrimination marking boundaries, borders and limits, in time quite as much as in space, and on how we have been encouraged to think about boundaries, borders and limits as if they were indeed just simple lines distinguishing here from there, now from then, normal from exceptional, possible from impossible or intelligible from unintelligible. The journey that is proposed as a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world may be easily understandable as a simple line drawn from one condition to another, but this line especially, with its capacity to mobilize claims about spatiotemporalities that must be at work in contemporary political life, ought to make us think much more carefully about how complex practices of drawing lines have come to be treated as such a simple matter.

Indeed, one of the two sustained predictions that I venture in this book is that the character and quality of any novel form of political life, and the credibility of scholarly attempts to evaluate such novelty, will depend on the degree to which boundaries, borders and limits are understood as complex sites and moments of political engagement rather than as lines that merely distinguish one form of politics here or now, and another form of politics there or then. Many readers may think that this is an easy prediction to make, especially given the recent proliferation of literatures on boundaries, borders and limits. I would certainly agree. Even so, in the present analysis I am less concerned to show how this particular prediction might be sustained than to explore the consequences of thinking that our political futures do indeed rest less on either what we have come to experience as the politics of the international or on what some have promised as a politics of the world, than on an increasingly complex politicization, depoliticization and thus politicization of boundaries, borders and limits, not least those distinguishing a politics of the international and a politics that somehow exceeds the international.

Consequently, while I am sometimes drawn to some of their superficial attractions, the underlying force of my analysis is directed primarily against a broad range of attempts to articulate forms of political aspiration that are assumed to be more “ethical” or “emancipatory” on the grounds that they claim to be able speak a language of greater universality, and thus to be more open to the world: on the grounds, that is, that they are able to take us across the line that both enables what we have become as modern subjects, as citizens of sovereign states, and as participants in the politics of the international but which also defines an impossible aspiration for what we might become in some other framing of what it means to engage in a world that is somehow political. It would be much more productive, I want to suggest, to think more carefully about that line, about the way particular accounts of drawing that line work to shape where, when and what we think we are and might yet be, and about how we might yet be able to enact and respond to the drawing of lines in some other way.

I take much of my inspiration for this analysis from a wide variety of research projects in which I have participated with many different people over a considerable period: projects on orientalist practices in internationalist readings of “culture,” on the co-constitutive relationship between concepts of space and epistemological dualism in early-modern science, on the rearticulations of concepts of temporal contingency from Machiavelli to Hegel, on various kinds of social movement seeking to reshape our understandings of local and global, on the ontological assumptions expressed in various claims about “the political,” on experiences of Partition in South Asia, on convergences between international and postcolonial theorizations of the co-optation of dissent, and on changing relations between liberty and security in Europe after declarations of a supposed war on terror, among others. However, I have tried to abstract these particular sources of inspiration into a general form that might have broader application in judgements about political principles, even at the cost of seeming to be remote from any specific situations.

I have also taken inspiration from the writings of two exemplary early-modern European thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. I do so in ways that are at considerable odds with the appropriation of these two figures in many claims about both a politics of the international and a politics of the world, and in a way that expresses both some annoyance at the continuing capacity of these thinkers to define the possibilities, limits and spatiotemporal topologies of our contemporary political imagination, but also some admiration for their capacity to undermine the canonical accounts of political possibility and impossibility in which they have been enshrined. To the extent that I draw on more contemporary writers, and especially on various historians of scientific reason, the early work of Michel Foucault, and many different people writing about postcolonial situations and the genealogies and topologies of modernity, it is less because they have somehow moved beyond (to some condition of some postmodernity, for example, as the kind of popularization that induces trivialization has sought to suggest) than because they have worked so hard to increase our awareness of how the modern world came to be shaped through multiple desires to move beyond predicated upon claims about a prior movement beyond whatever had supposedly come before. Whether understood as the rift be...

Table of contents

• GLOBAL HORIZONS
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prelude
• 2 Political, international, theoretical
• 3 The politics of escape
• 4 Sovereignties, origins, limits
• 5 Split finitudes, seductive hierarchies
• 6 Politics on the line
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index