The Puzzles of Politics

Inquiries into the Genesis and Transformation of International Relations

Friedrich Kratochwil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136924903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Friedrich Kratochwil is the author of the classic book: Rules, Norms and Decisions (1989), which introduced constructivism to international relations and has had a profound and significant impact on the discipline.

The Puzzle of Politics brings together for the first time a collection of his key essays to explain his approach to international relations and how his thinking has developed over the last 30 years. It addresses topical themes and issues central to his work including sovereignty, law, epistemology, boundaries, global governance and world society.

The book includes a framing introduction written for this volume in which Kratochwil provides an intellectual biography providing context as well as an introduction to his work.

This important volume will be of very strong interest to students and scholars of international relation, political theory and law.

Friedrich Kratochwil is presently Professor of International Relations at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and visiting scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton he taught at the in the US at Maryland, Columbia and Penn, before returning to the LMU in Munich, Germany. He has been the editor of the European Journal of International Relations and member of the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, World Politics, Review of International Studies, and the Journal of International Relations and Development.

1
A Wanderer between two worlds

An attempt at an intellectual biography

Where to begin?

The task of providing the reader with a brief intellectual biography is challenging for several reasons, especially at this stage of my life. But all of them actually boil down to the problem inherent in any biographical attempt, i.e. in the making out of the contingencies and accidents of one’s journeys some more encompassing narrative that gives every detail its place shows its role in the developments that are being traced. This makes it necessary to chose a proper beginning, or perhaps put better, one needs to select a decisive break that organises the “before” and “after” and lets us follow through to the present. Such a move imposes thereby the perspective of an all-knowing narrator whose perceptions might be at odds with the actual twists and turns of the ongoing process of life, but which tries to make sense out of the contingent and seemingly unrelated elements. Given the story line, things and events attain by hindsight an importance and coherence they hardly had when they occurred. Different from the “first inklings” or “antecedents” that play such a role later, both the “inklings” and the various attempts at dealing with the contingencies of life were in “real time” little more than the effort to deal with the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world.

In a rather generous and sympathetic appraisal of my work Richard Falk has recently argued that I had “always been a Humean”, and that he remembers me as one graduate student at Princeton who did not have to engage with lengthy soul-searching that is usually part of a graduate career.¹ True, by the time I met Richard and he had become my dissertation mentor I was well on my way to defining my approach to politics that – admittedly – was rather removed from the dominant “isms”, be it realism, liberalism, or (at that time still) Marxism. Robert Gilpin had encouraged me during my seminars to follow up on the issue of “conventions”, which seemed promising to him, but coming from a “realist” his suggestion left me somewhat puzzled at first. Actual help could have been available just a few buildings down College Walk since David Lewis was – if I remember correctly – at that time still in the philosophy department at Princeton. Unfortunately, I never met him and only later discovered his work which took off from Hume. Rather, it was Richard Falk who (in a long talk several months after the dissertation defense) twisted my arm and encouraged me to draw out the implications on signaling, on the emergence of custom, and of “unspoken rules” which develop through interaction, all of which had been the topic of my dissertation (which dealt with the emergence of the Cold War and attempts of détente).² What was needed was a much more integrated statement of a research program that could be built on such a conventionalist approach.

It is here that Hume became so important for me since following up on some of his ideas allowed me to integrate such issues as “salience”, the emergence of conventions, and the need for a “public entrepreneur” procuring public goods, but also the question of “emotions” and the extension of “sympathy” to others, of “interest” (that which is “in-between us” rather than a mere preference), of the role of language in social life, and of the “constructed character” of the social world and its inevitable “historicity”. Suddenly international law, particularly the discussions on custom or on “soft law” and a strategic analysis à la Schelling – with its emphasis on salience – showed some surprising elective affinities that could be brought together. The attention to history, so well justified by Bull and the British school, also seemed to fit with a focus on practical reason and the “classical approach” that took seriously the “particular” in politics. Rather than becoming enthralled by some grand “theory” and “science” that was based on an understanding of classical “physics that never was”, as Toulmin remarked later, there was much work to be done to give greater stringency to an approach that traditionally oriented itself on “prudence” rather than “theory” and which only in law had been worked out somehow. In short, all these elements seemed to define a research program of considerable scope and of heuristic power. Later my encounter with Berger and Luckmann’s work on the Construction of Social Reality, my deeper engagement with Austin’s and Searle’s language philosophy and with Luhmann’s often rather obscure sociology prepared the way for the “constructivist” approach with which I became later identified.

Even from this rather sketchy account it becomes clear that Richard Falk’s perception that I always had been a Humean was in a way fitting, but it also needed some correction. True, at the dissertation stage, when our meetings and discussions became frequent and covered a lot of ground, and following that, the one year I was at the Center for International Studies where both the Humean Perspective and The notion of interest were written, my approach had remained essentially in place for some time. What Falk’s interpretation underplays, though, is the years of graduate studies in the States, first at Georgetown and later at Princeton, that had provided me not only with a solid grounding in the discipline – I had entered graduate school without having ever taken a course on international politics – but also with an astonishing amount of food for thought that forced me to go back to and re-think what I had learned before.

Thus, I actually learned more about the “German tradition” in sociology (Weber, Marx, Schuetz, and Simmel) and history (Dehio, Hintze, and Meinecke) from Professors Allers (Georgetown) and Gilpin (Princeton) than from my teachers at the University of Munich. Richard Falk’s anti-formalist approach to law, although policy oriented – and here we did not always see eye to eye – was tremendously important for me breaking the sterile mode of a Kelseonian conception of law. It also impelled me to read some of the classics such as de Vitoria, Grotius, Vattell, or Savigny. Oran Young’s year long tutorial on the “Philosophy of the Social Sciences” at Princeton – which was an extensive course on both “scope and method” of political science (with occasional excursions to economics and sociology) – forced me not only to engage fully with the “scientific” study of politics but also to re-think some of the arguments that I had encountered in Germany, which later were referred to as the Positivismusstreit (which had pitted the Frankfurt School against logical positivists). So, if in a way I had hoped in 1967 to escape my past by “leaving town” and going to America, I quickly had to realise that such an escape was not viable. Nevertheless, I also quickly noticed that without such a sudden departure from the “old world” and its strictures, the new engagement with these debates and sources would not have been possible.

To that extent, the years in the US between 1967, when I arrived, and 1974, when I left Princeton for a job at Maryland (while 1969 I spent as an assistant at the Technical University back in Munich before returning to the States), were truly formative. They thus provide the justification for treating them in the sense of the all-knowing narrator as the crucial turning point that establishes the “before” and “after” and endows these categories with meaning.

The before

If I had to name the influences that most strongly shaped my early life, they were certainly not ideas but the brutal circumstances of the post-war period. Being a refugee from the former Czechoslovakia and expelled again by Austria – which had in time discovered that it had nothing to do with the Third Reich – we landed in the American occupation zone in Germany in a little village in Bavaria near Augsburg. My father, a lawyer by training, had found a job in a saw mill, while my grandfather went back to his trade and produced brushes in a “cottage” industry. My function was mainly to be a worry to my parents as I had contracted tuberculosis. With no antibiotics available, all one could do was to wait and pray. Even staying with my family had become a problem, since a couple – well connected with the military government – wanted to adopt me, alleging that my parents could not care for me. Later, also, school officials objected to admitting me to school because of the dangers of infection. Needless to say, it was not a happy childhood and our precarious situation in Germany was reinforced by the general anxieties which were induced by the increasing chilliness of the Cold War manifesting itself in the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, and the division of Europe.

These events and the hyper-politisation they engendered belong to my first recollections. I remember vividly the long debates that took place within my family as those parts of the family who were in Czechoslovakia and those who had been expelled to the German “Eastern zone” became increasingly unreachable. Even for me as a pre-school toddler the Marshall and Schuman plans, the debates about Western integration spearheaded by the much-admired Adenauer, and even the landing at Inchon (that turned the tide in Korea) became quite naturally part of my vocabulary. Living with politics and “history” was also powerfully reinforced by my grandfather and the many tales he told me from his life. He had been a POW in WWI, and having been captured rather early in the war he and some thirty Czech and Austrian soldiers had been put in a camp in the far Eastern part of Siberia. Yet, just before the Russian Revolution this group dared a breakout. They succeeded and embarked on a march “home”, to the newly emerged Czechoslovakia. The journey took five and a half years and followed – with some significant deviations occasioned by the circumstances of the Russian civil war – more or less the trans-Siberian railroad. The group took on odd jobs, traded salt that they had acquired in the southern steppes, fought for the “reds” or “whites” as circumstances commanded, or just hid in the forests and tried to live off of the land. Eighteen of them, among them my grandfather, finally made it back to Moravia. Listening to these tales it is hardly surprising that names like Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Alma Ata, or Omsk were familiar to me long before I could locate them on the small globe which my grandpa bought me when I entered school.

Materially things were looking up only by the mid-fifties when we had moved to Munich where my father found a civil service position and I had entered the Gymnasium (classical language branch). With hindsight I must say that I had some very remarkable teachers during my high school years in virtually all fields, ranging from classical languages to the sciences (the school proudly counted Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg to its alumni). Above all, what I took from there as the most valuable “good forever” (so to speak the Thucydidean ktema eis aei) was: the respect for the “word”. This meant first of all the close attention to the text and what is said (instead of construing some meanings through “free translations” or fanciful imputations of meaning). Perhaps my persistent uneasiness with “grand theories” derives from these early experiences of disciplining one’s imagination in order to understand what “the other” has to say. They also are a reminder that “grand schemes” turn out to be mostly trivial or untrue, as things seldom fit neatly together, all “elegant” representations notwithstanding. But second, respect for the word also meant the respect for the logos and for its critical potential as can be found in the early Platonic dialogues. There Socrates subjects some of the most “obvious” common sense concepts to scathing criticism while also showing the nihilist implications of “universal” suspicion and criticism for criticism’s sake, as exemplified by the sophists. Third, the respect for the “word” also entailed the respect for language that makes us human and special among all “gregarious animals” as Aristotle so beautifully elaborates in his Politics by making a crucial distinction between phone (voice) and logos (concept/reason). At the time, the most important implication of this argument for me was that the attempts of utilitarians to reduce everything to a calculus of pain and pleasure had to end up in a platitudinous social theory, unless one reintroduced – entirely inconsistent with the liberal program – again “higher” and “lower” pleasures à la Mill. Thus, long before I became a “constructivist” I had learned from Aristotle that the human world is not “natural” but that it is based on commonly accepted concepts without, however, thereby becoming arbitrary or meaningless!

Finally, there was the realization of the historical rootedness of our concepts and their semantics, most tragically exemplified by the case of Germany. Indeed, much of the traditional political language had become unusable due to its taintedness by the Nazi ideology. Establishing a basis for understanding in the absence of a general trust in a “common sense” and the good judgment of one’s interlocutors is difficult indeed. Perhaps this explains how for my generation the issue of “understanding” (now containing also dimensions other than the old epistemological controversies to which they could be related) has become such a preoccupation.

Yet, one had not only to watch out for “old” usages of some compromised concepts in the political discourses; one had also to be aware that similarly disastrous political projects could be pursued under an “antifascist” or “reformist” cover that could justify the worst crimes of the “proletarian revolutions” be they Stalin’s purges or Mao’s later antics. Germany, having distanced itself throughout the modern era from the West and its traditions and having insisted instead on a Sonderweg by taking pride in its high “culture” – as opposed to the “mere civilization” of the French or Anglo-Saxon world – seemed ill prepared for developing a Streitkultur (mode of dealing with controversy) that allowed for disagreements and cooperation. The tedious tendency to make out of everything a question of Weltanschauung, and of not only dismissing other arguments but to frequently consider them as issuing from ill will or treachery, did not ease communications across political differences. Frequently this tendency also led to instrumentalizing the past instead of facing the German catastrophe in a candid and honest fashion.

I liked going to school, I was doing well, and I acquired a quite good general education, despite the fact that my extracurricular activities, ranging from music to sports, often took more of my time than my school work. My passion, though, was politics. I edited the school newspaper (and twice won the award for the best paper in the state), joined the European Federalists, and later, at the University, the Christian Democratic Students Organization and soon served on the staff of a member of parliament while taking courses and seminars in ancient history, philosophy, and political science.

My Studienbuch of the LMU in Munich (i.e. the academic record of the lectures and seminars which the student had to keep and that s/he was supposed to submit to the examining board after some 4 or 5 years) shows a vast array of subjects. There are courses and seminars on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel but also courses on numismatics, on “historical sources” and the supplementary sciences of historiography, on the social teachings of the Christian Churches, on Weber and the Erklären/Verstehen controversy, on Heidegger and Kierkegaard, on the Contractarians, on Epistemology, on Aesthetics, on Thomas and the transcendental notions in scholastic philosophy, on the Greek colonies in Sicily, on Cesar and the end of the Roman Republic, on Hellenism, on Wittgenstein, on the Glorious Revolution, on Soviet politics, on Sources of Nazi politics, on the Codex Hammurabi and the Gilgamesh epic, on West European Party systems, on the German Constitutional Court, on modern logic, on the Florentine Humanists, on Descartes and his opponents, on the Federalist papers, on Thucydides and Greek historiography, on Roman Inscriptions, Napoleon and his time, on political systems in comparative perspective, on the 19th century French novel, on Rome from Augustus to Commodus, on the German Reformation, on the sources of Herodotus, on Hesiod and Homer, on the history of Roman Law, on the Exegesis of the Codex Justinianus, and on the European Powers and Imperialism. In addition, one also finds a workshop on the new production of Tannhäuser at the opera house, a seminar on Augustine’s Confessions, a Seminar on Giambattista Vico, on selected topics of electoral politics, on Rousseau’s political writings, on European integration, on Arendt’s work on Totalitarianism and so on…

Obviously the record shows far flung interests but no sharp focus. In the meantime, I had begun with the preliminary draft of a dissertation but on the whole I felt ill-prepared for an examination … in what? According to the guidelines, I could try in all three fields, history, philosophy or political science, as I had fulfilled all requirements. But the stultifying atmosphere in many of the university institutes at Munich, the lack of sensible curricula, the more or less benign neglect of the students who were left to fend for themselves – all justified in terms of academic freedom – did not help. Particularly problematic was the situation at the institute of political science where the strangest orthodoxy (allegedly based on Plato and Aristotle) was dispensed as the only “true episteme politike”. All other ideas were simply treated as “gnostic derailments”, (probably in order to dispose of them more quickly before the “thought police” formed at the Lehrstuhl by some zealot acolytes). After having been fortunate enough to enjoy a high-school education that was entirely anti-authoritarian (although never making such claims), I now had to face the music at the university. Needless to say, I did not like the tune.

Thus, the conjuncture of my dissatisfaction with the German university – not being helped by some parts of what later has been euphemistically called the “student movement” but which Habermas more appropriately characterised at the time as “red Fascism” – my personal problems in a relationship, changing career aspirations, and a rather problematic encounter with my then “mentor” concerning my dissertation on St. Augustine’s conception of community (of course “gnostic to t...