Critical Theory of International Politics

Complementarity, Justice, and Governance

Steven C. Roach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415774840
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135173685
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Critical international theory encompasses several distinct, radical approaches that focus on identity, difference, hegemonic power, and order. As an applied theory, critical international theory draws on critical social theories to shed light on international processes and global transformations. While this approach has led to increasing interest in formulating an empirically relevant critical international theory, it has also revealed the difficulties of applying critical theory to international politics. What are these difficulties and problems? And how can we move beyond them? This book addresses these questions by investigating the intellectual currents and key debates of critical theory, from Kant and Hegel to Habermas and Derrida, and the recent work of critical international theory, including Robert Cox and Andrew Linklater. By drawing on these debates, the book formulates an original theory of complementarity that brings together critical theory and critical international theory. It argues that complementarity—a governing principle in international law and politics—offers a conceptual framework for working toward two goals: engaging the changing contexts and forms of resistance and redressing some of the difficulties of applying critical theory to international relations.

In adopting three critical perspectives on complementarity to analyze the evolving social and political contexts of global justice, this book provides an essential resource for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars interested in the application of critical theory to international relations.

1Critical theory, immanent critique, and the problem of the international

Critical international relations (IR) theory has reached an important crossroads. With many calling attention to the need for developing a policy-relevant theory, there has been growing interest in what some refer to as “a globally encompassing international” (see Diez and Steans 2005; Kratochwil 2007b; Palan 2007). This comes at a time when critical IR theory recently celebrated its twenty-five years as an IR approach, prompting wide-range reflection of its present and future challenges and evolving parameters (see Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007). Critical theory in IR has undoubtedly come a long way, thanks to the imaginative efforts and insights of many critical international theorists. Yet its future seems fraught with an uneasy mix of uncertainty, concern, and passion.

In recent years, for instance, the pressing problems of global warming, human rights crises, global terrorism, the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus, nuclear proliferation, and food shortages (prices) have all called increasing attention to the urgency of understanding and explaining the sources of these threats. For many, this has raised the methodological issue of whether critical theorizing can be practically oriented without being problem-solving; or alternatively, whether critical theory in IR can make a plausible tradeoff between its unwavering resistance to practical scientific thought and the adoption of pragmatic social policies that would counter the effects of these above-mentioned threats to global justice. The question we need to ask, then, is not whether critical theory is still relevant for understanding and explaining today’s problems. It is. Rather, it is whether today’s global and transnational institutions offer a constructive context (further) of integrating the different critical theory strands in and outside the IR discipline. I shall argue that they do, and that an overarching immanent critique helps to reveal the deeper, underlying problems and challenges of applying critical theory to IR, or, in this case, of developing a critical theory of international relations.

It is important to stress, then, that critical theory has maintained a longstanding and often uncompromising resistance to practical thought or problem-solving theory. Indeed what makes critical theory “critical” is its self-awareness as a theory. This reflects, in turn, the deeply interwoven strands of negativity (or the varying forms of negation and critique of status quo structures and dogmatic belief systems) in the critical theory tradition itself: from Kant, Hegel, and Marx to Habermas, Derrida, and Butler. Negativity in this sense is not resistance for resistance’s sake, but about becoming or being self-aware of the benefits of such resistance (affirming). This is what makes critical theory immanent, that is, how it refers to the desires and thoughts that reside or are inherent in the agent. Immanent critical theory, in short, is about becoming self-aware of our desires through our experienced resistance to, or negation of (given or transcendent), reality and existing social orders. For some, this negative dimension poses the problem of immanence itself, namely, how immanence problematizes the very act of thinking independently of experience and difference (Deleuze 1988). For others, it reaffirms an important fact: that immanence will continue to remain in tension with transcendence, since transcendence represents a realm that lies beyond our subjective experience.

As one can see, immanent critical theory often means embracing a subjectivity that prevents constructive engagement with the constituent sources of global policymaking (power sharing and compromise). The result is that critical theory either remains too abstract to be effectively applied to world politics, at least in terms of explaining outcomes, or alternatively, that it remains entrapped by its own ceaseless, often rudderless interrogation of the repressive effects of dogmatic ideologies and (positivist) scientific theory. Whether any reflexive social policy framework can permanently survive such ceaseless, heated interrogation remains dubious indeed. Perhaps a more hyper-globalized, inclusive theory of cosmopolitan democratic governance is the logical fit here. After all, transformational theories of globalization have made significant strides in explicating the transformative dimension of global institutions (see Archibugi and Held 1995; Held 1995, 2002; Hayden and el-Ojeilli 2006).

But it could also be argued that global institutions have failed to address or effectively manage the effects of state collapse and humanitarian emergencies. Such failure has led some to propose that the new priority in governing (especially in light of the shift in U.S. foreign policy) should be to move beyond the concept of global governance.¹ As Thomas Weiss (2009: 262) claims, the concept of global governance, which lies between realpolitik and a world state, is “a product and not producer. Agency and accountability are absent.” Here, Weiss, who has long been an advocate of the concept of global governance, assumes that global governance is a non-evolving and ultimately provisional arrangement, whose “absence of agency and accountability” necessitates reconsideration of the idea of a world government (cf. Wendt 2003).² Whether or not we agree with Weiss’s argument, it is difficult to downplay the perception of the limited jurisdictional reach and the enforcement capacity of global and transnational institutions. Still, one of the problems with Weiss’s argument is that it overlooks some of the promising avenues of theorizing about the evolving dynamics of global governance, including a global prosecutor, NGO participation, and the increasing normative pull towards international rules (see Rosenau 1995; Ferguson and Mansbach 2004; Deitelhoff and Müller 2005; Ougaard and Higgott 2005).

Indeed, it is here, in the conceptual interstices of an emerging global order, where critical IR theorists can begin to bridge what I believe is the ongoing gap between applied critical theory and the productive concept of global governance. Such a gap emerges from, and is sustained by the dichotomy between realism and idealism (or statism and cosmopolitanism) in critical theory approaches to IR; more particularly, the immanent tensions between instrumentalized state power and the political ideals in the critical theory tradition. Here the legalized resistance to institutionalized power (e.g., states that use their membership status and the rules of the system to politicize the actions of institutions) highlights the new political realities of the struggle for international justice, on the one hand, and the legitimizing capacities (democratic governance and procedural accountability) of global institutions, on the other. In short, the need for greater global responsibility constitutes a new trend in international politics: namely the adoption of reflexive or responsive frameworks of global governance, designed to advance a uniform code of rules through a differentiated system of representation (diverse participation and a wider array of actors capable of shaping the policies of these institutions).

To bridge this gap, then, we will need to orient critical theory toward the goal of understanding the (self-)reflexivity and meaning of complementarity, one of the novel principles of multilevel global governance in law and politics. How, in other words, should we understand the principle of complementarity as a context for extending and integrating normative critical theory within and outside the IR discipline? In this book, much of my institutional analysis will focus on the complementarity framework of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and of its counterpart, subsidiarity which is designed to implement and extend democratic practices in a top-down fashion, e.g., the European Union. In doing so, I shall also interpret the complementarity principle in a somewhat loose manner in order to theorize about and analyze the intellectual tensions within critical theory and critical IR theory.

Today, for instance, critical theorists in IR remain divided over a number of conceptual issues. These include the meaning and importance of universal communities, identity (logic) and difference, the role that critical theory should play in resisting hegemonic power, and whether critical theory in IR should facilitate only our understanding of issues, rather than our understanding and explanation of issues (cf. Hollis and Smith 1991). Much of this divisiveness can be attributed to what we might call the specialized effect of working strictly within the ontological parameters of the IR discipline (anarchy), that is, the tendency to isolate, extend, and apply particular critical theories to study the problems and issues in International Relations theory.³ Another, if not more important, primal source of division is the fracturing set of tensions within the critical theory tradition itself, or the assumption that critical theory is a purely negative theory concerned exclusively with epistemological issues. This, I argue, reflects a narrow and misguided impression of critical theory, one that ultimately works against constructive critical theorizing and the application of critical theory to IR.

Given these divisions two principal aims in this book are (1) to locate the main currents of immanent critique in the critical theory tradition and (2) to draw on the ideas and intellectual debates of this critique to shed light on the reflexive meaning of complementarity. A crucial distinction underlying my analysis is between complementarity as a reflexive matrix (or as an originating locus of an inter-linked network of agents) of multilevel global governance (e.g., the International Criminal Court and the European Union) and complementarity as a hierarchical, multi-tiered arrangement of a world state. The latter refers to the global manifestation of the hierarchical complementarity of medieval society, and the conversion of its tiers of holistic order (the church, aristocracy, and peasants) into global executive institutions, bureaucratic and representational entities (states, regional, and non-state actors), and the peoples. By contrast, the former represents a modular multi-tiered model encompassed by global society: a compromise and compromising framework lying between a world state and realpolitik.⁴ Complementarity, I shall argue, should not be treated simply as a formal operational principle of multi-level global governance; nor as a strict hierarchical arrangement that neutralizes resistance and instantiates a rigid global order. Rather, it offers a conceptual and immanent framework of global and transnational governance: a matrix for locating and understanding the concrete challenges and the constituent sources of the struggle for global justice.

Accordingly, history constitutes an important part of my critical investigation. Historical sociologists and some social constructivists stress the need to investigate the historical, sociological processes driving the logic of capitalism in the global age (see Mann 1993; Teschke 2003; Spruyt 1994; Rosenberg 2000; Lacher 2006; Hobson and Lawson 2008). Justin Rosenberg, for example, argues that globalization theory failed to fulfill the vacuum created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union (even though it became the Zeitgeist of the 1990s). Rather, its conceptual parameters became the “amplifyers” of a hollow theory: a false starting point of analysis of the transformation of social relations (Rosenberg 2005: 65–67; see also Luke 1996). Rosenberg’s criticism, as John Hobson and George Lawson note, holds that “the international can be theorized by virtue of the simultaneous existence of plural, but connected forms of economic, political, and social organizations” (Hobson and Lawson 2008: 433). Hobson and Lawson treat the international as a social process, part of what they refer to as a so-called third wave of historicist historical sociology, “in which contingent historical events, dramas and processes are part of broader interrelations, sequences, plots, and concatenations” (ibid., 428).

My historical approach in this book, by contrast, remains more broadly conceived and less anchored in the social logic of Marxism. As such it focuses primarily on normative issues of justice and the immanent link between these issues and the holistic forces of critical theory. Given this difference, our broader task is to further address what is “critical” in critical international theory, or to understand what is problematic about the “ International” in critical theory.

Framing the global problem of the international

The modern origins of internationalism can be traced to the writings of Jean Bodin, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant (see Ishay 1995). As is well known, Kant theorized that a confederation of states, which encouraged mutual cooperation, recognition, and assistance, offered the most stable, lasting arrangement for containing the warlike tendencies of the state. Habermas, as we shall see, draws on Kant’s ideas to theorize about the cosmopolitanization of international law, or the workings of what he calls a world organization. His world organization is an important example of the growing interest in the globally encompassing meaning of the international, or the return to the international in critical theory. Such a return is the product of several factors, including the role of hegemonic state power in global institutions, the increasing number of failed states during the post-Cold War era, the importance of difference (or post-colonialism; see Doty 1996; Spivak 1999; Chowdhury and Nair 2002), and the growing imbalance between states in the North and the South.

Together these factors help to underscore the difficulties of promoting global justice in an anarchical realm. For not only does the absence of a reliable enforcement mechanism expose the fragile solidarity of the global community, it also reflects the problematic political effects of hegemonic state power (e.g., the geopolitical interests of the UN Security Council permanent members). Understanding the globally encompassing international, then, underscores the novel challenge of re-framing the holistic meaning and importance of the international. As Robert Cox (2007: 531) puts it:

. . . the transitory and diversified products of the self-organization of human communities frame the problem of the international as global challenge, as an empirical point of analysis of critical theory’s social process. . . . the international traverses relations and social communities and shows just how peoples are helping to shape and create new forms of social organization.

One of the ways the international transverses communities is through the participatory and diplomatic role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which have helped to shape global policy by lobbying governments and pressuring state leaders and global authorities (protest). In this way, the globally encompassing international is also, one might say, encompassing problem fields (interconnected issue areas) that require particular hierarchical models of governance to regulate and direct the activities of a growing array of actors in global policymaking.

These new opportunities reflect what Ulrich Beck (2005) calls a “meta-game” of cosmopolitan politics, in particular, the “repoliticization” of states, and corporate agents, the increasing capacity of these agents to use the new and existing rules of the international system (e.g., charters, statutes, documents, and treaties) to counter hegemonic power. In short, it highlights the increased bargaining, negotiating, argumentation, transparency, monitoring, and democratizing in international politics—set against a growing sense of global community and solidarity (as defined by the perceived human-made threats to our shared existence).

Accordingly, there are two problematic dimensions of the globally encompassing international that we need to address: (1) the contradictory developments of the increasing uniformity of law, or the political tension between greater equality among states and individuals under international law (standard legal codes and encoded rights) and the sustained (and even increasing) disparities between developed and developing states; and (2) the weak, yet emerging, reflexive capacity of institutions to govern the effects generated by these contradictory forces. Both of these dimensions require theoretical analysis of the changing role of state power and the conflicting pressures associated with the struggle for international justice. The following three ideological perspectives—liberal internationalism, Marxist internationalism, and deconstructionism or post-structuralism—offer essential frameworks of analysis.

Liberal internationalism is the study of political ideals and moral obligations in international relations, which regulate and condition state behavior. For structural and (some) political realists, the international is a fixed space of power relations between and among states, rooted in ontological conceptions of stability, order, and the balance of power (Waltz 1979).⁵ Hans Morgenthau (1967) conceived the international as a system in which states formulated their political interests and objectives in terms of the pursuit of military and economic power. For him, the international represented the in-between space of state power struggles: a permanent site within a system composed of states and the institutions of law, diplomacy, and the balance of power. In opposing this approach, structural and political realism conceive the international in terms of the competitive tensions between and among states, or rather, the anarchical structure of the modern states system where sovereign states are analogized to billiard balls. From their perspective, state behavior is conditioned principally by distrust and fear, which, in turn, determine the structural constraints of the international state system and the persistence of outcomes.

Many of today’s liberal institutionalists argue that the legitimizing aspects of international institutions, such as transparency, accountability, and participation, help to reinforce the liberal democratic state model (Slaughter 2004).⁶ The roots of twentieth-century liberal internationalism can be traced to Woodrow Wilson’s vision for world peace and security during and just after World War I. Wilson’s vision was based on his fourteen points, which included the open covenants (agreements) of peace, the removal of all economic barriers to trade, and the free, open-minded, and impartial adjustment of colonial claims. These would help to shape and define the elements and provisions of the League of Nations’ founding principles of promoting and maintaining international peace and order and friendly relations among states (see Roach 2005: Chapter 1). Such principles also appear in the preamble of the UN Charter, and provide the basis for the Chapter VII mandate of the Charter, which allows the UN Security Council to use military, or nonmilitary, options, to counter acts of aggression. Critics of the League’s idealism, however, have emphasized its failure to address the political and social realities or hostilities of the late interwar period (1919–39). Germany, Japan, and Italy’s hostilities toward the League characterized what E.H. Carr described as the tension between realism and idealism in international politics (Carr 2001). As a social(ist) realist, Carr argued that the League’s shortsighted interests and inflexible commitment to the moral ideal of peace had allowed national aggression to take root and to destabilize world order. This is where Marxism-Leninism differs with liberal internationalism.

For Marxist-Leninist internationalism liberal internationalism constitutes a hollow ideological framework that disguises the effects of world capitalism and imperialism. Marxist internationalism stresses the resistance to these normative pretensions and collective security ideals of liberal internationalism, by treating the international as a social process. Lenin, and to a lesser extent Marx, argued that the international was a socially transformati...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Critical theory, immanent critique, and the international
• PART I Critical theory past and present: four currents of immanent critique
• PART II Critical international theory: perspectives on complementarity
• Notes
• References
• Index