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Part I
Critique
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1 Postcolonial theory and the critique of International Relations1
Sanjay Seth
This essay is a postcolonial critique of mainstream IR, in which I include the English School. There have been many critiques of IR – constructivist, feminist, poststructuralist and other; I draw freely from such critiques, and some of the issues raised, and points argued in this essay, have been highlighted by others, who do not write under the aegis of postcolonial theory. What is nonetheless distinctive about the critique offered here is that it seeks to systematically ‘provincialize Europe’, in a threefold sense: it challenges the centrality accorded to Europe as the historical source and origin of the international order; it queries the universality accorded to moral and legal perspectives which reflect and reproduce the power relations characteristic of the colonial encounter, and which are thus far from being universal; and it questions the epistemological privilege accorded to an understanding of knowledge which is blind to the constitutive, and not merely representational, role of knowledge.
In the first part of the essay I argue that mainstream IR, where it has been interested in history at all, has misdescribed the origins and character of the contemporary international order, and that an accurate understanding of the ‘expansion of the international system’ requires attention to its colonial origins. In the second part I suggest that mainstream IR is deeply Eurocentric, not only in its historical account of the emergence of the modern international order, but also in its account(s) of the nature and functioning of this order. The third part of the essay addresses the human sciences as heirs to a tradition of knowledge which defines knowledge as a relation between a cognizing, representing subject and an object, such that knowledge is always ‘of ’ something out there, which exists independently of its apprehension. What this overlooks is that knowledges serve to constitute that which they purport to merely cognize or represent; in the case of IR theory, it serves to naturalize that which is historically produced. By the logic of my own argument, the same is true of other knowledges, such as liberal political theory; the difference is that whereas the unitary, rational individual of liberal political theory has almost assumed the status of an axiom, testifying to the success of historical processes, and of discourses (not least, liberal political theory itself), in naturalizing the individual, the naturalization of the nation-state and the world order is much less secure. This is precisely what makes ‘the international’ an interesting and revealing sphere of investigation, and one that can and should be integrated into wider philosophical and ethical debates; but inasmuch as mainstream IR scholarship serves as the agent of such naturalization, it obscures rather than illuminates what is interesting about the international.
History
A great deal of IR displays little interest in history, for history is unimportant if the defining feature of the international order is considered to be the transhistorical fact of ‘anarchy’. Kenneth Waltz writes that ‘the enduring anarchic character of international politics accounts for the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia…’.2 Waltz recognizes that there have been differing international systems in the course of the millennia, differing according to whether their primarily political units were city-states, empires or nations, but different ‘International-political systems, like economic markets, are individualist in origin, spontaneously generated, and unintentional.’3 Thus not only is history not necessary, given that the fundamental nature of international life has changed little over ‘millennia’; it would in any case be difficult to construct an intelligible account of historical change in the international arena. For Waltz, as for many other realists and neo-realists, reasoning
starts from the premise that there are at any time a multiplicity of states and domestic societies, where the paradigmatic differences between … domestic society and [international] anarchy are not questioned but simply assimilated as part of the premise … analysts are [therefore] able to conclude that modern international politics exhibits a sameness that is basic to its history. International politics appears as no more and no less than an eternal struggle of multiple sovereign states in anarchy …4
There are, however, those in the discipline who, even when they see anarchy as the defining feature of the international order, are nonetheless interested in how this historically evolved; and how an order which, in their account, first developed in Europe in the early modern period, came to encompass the globe. I refer of course to the ‘English School’, which has the considerable merit of enquiring into the historical origins of the contemporary international system.
However, as I argue below, the account of the ‘expansion of international society’ offered by the English School is Eurocentric and mistaken. And if even the historically sensitive elements in mainstream IR offer a mistakenly Eurocentric account of history, then one can begin to understand why the discipline is not of much help for those from other disciplines who seek its aid to better understand the origins and workings of the international order.
Adam Watson's detailed study of The Evolution of International Society partly grew out of the studies and papers of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, of which he had been a key member. It contains chapters on the state systems and empires of Sumer, Assyria, Persia, India, China and elsewhere, before arriving at an account of ‘European international society’. In Watson's account this began to emerge around the early sixteenth century, and was more or less formalized with the Westphalia settlement. It then spread beyond its original home, in an uncoordinated but orderly fashion: ‘the members of the European society regulated their expansion between themselves, from the first orderly partition of the transatlantic world between Spain and Portugal down to the nineteenth-century arrangements for Africa, Oceania and Asia which avoided the colonial wars between Europeans that had previously marked their expansion.’5 The spread was both necessitated and enabled by the Industrial Revolution, which gave Europe economic and technological superiority relative to other parts of the world, as well as a more general sense of superiority vis-à-vis these others. Europeans, Watson writes, ‘wanted to use their superiority to Europeanize and modernize the non-European world, to bring “progress” to it’;6 whether non-Europeans welcomed or disliked the Europeans, they were deeply impressed, and ‘found it difficult to resist what the Europeans had to offer’.7 Increasing numbers of non-European rulers sought to join the European society of states, and while initially they were rebuffed, and the criteria of ‘civilization’ was used to exclude them, eventually Europe and the United States decided that ‘all other independent states should be admitted to their international society on the same terms as themselves’.8 Decolonization, according to Watson, brought the undisputed dominance of European powers to an end, and a new, non-discriminatory global society came into being, albeit one which ‘inherited its organization and most of its concepts from its European predecessor’.9
Buzan and Little offer a similar, if more sophisticated (and less self-satisfied) account in International Systems in World History. Here they seek to document and explore the many non-European state systems that preceded the present one, a task that they see as necessary in order to avoid ‘Eurocentricism’,10 something that they claim has been avoided by the English School,11 on whose ideas they draw. They conclude that
the standard model [of what they term ‘American’ IR] assumes that international systems are composed of a number of units amongst which contact is direct, and processes include diplomacy, war and trade … Its Eurocentric vision underpins most of IR theory, and makes sense for most of the modern era. But its unconscious linkage to that particular patch of history means … that it is incapable of dealing with both past and future international systems …12
The Eurocentrism of IR mars its understanding of past international systems, and its capacity to comprehend changes that may lie in the future – but its Eurocentric assumptions ‘make sense for most of the modern era’ for there is no doubt that the existing international system, forged over the preceding few centuries, has its origins in Europe and must be understood with reference to a specifically European history. ‘The European empires can … be seen as the nursery, or mechanism, by which the political form of the modern state was transposed onto the rest of the world,’ write Buzan and Little, and since ‘the modern state is a quintessentially European phenomenon … it is therefore to Europe's story that one has to look to explain it.’13 Thus, while IR is admittedly Eurocentric in its understanding of the world, that Eurocentrism is warranted for the modern period – or as Hedley Bull and Watson had put it 16 years earlier,
The present international political structure of the world – founded upon the division of mankind and of the earth into separate states, their acceptance of one another's sovereignty, of principles of law regulating their coexistence and co-operation, and of diplomatic conventions facilitating their intercourse – is, at least in its most basic features, the legacy of Europe's now vanished ascendancy. Because it was in fact Europe and not America, Asia, or Africa that first dominated and, in so doing, unified the world, it is not our perspective but the historical record itself that can be called Eurocentric.14
What the above accounts all offer is a rather sanitized version of ‘expansion’. Watson's analysis, for instance, is one in which the violent and bloody conquest of the Americas appears as an orderly and regulated affair because it avoided colonial wars (between Europeans, that is); one in which Europeans subordinated and ruled over other peoples because they desired profit, but also because they sought to civilize non-Europeans, and bring progress to them; an account in which non-Europeans could not help but be impressed, such that they sought admission to the exclusive club of European powers; an account of how their importuning fell on deaf ears, until eventually Europe and the US relented and decided that they should be admitted as equal members; and the happy dénouement, one that saw a new international order come into being, but one which was an extension or expansion, rather than a departure from or repudiation, of the originally European society of states. An account of a period that includes the bloody conquest of the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, the expropriation and sometimes genocide of indigenous peoples, wars of conquest, land grabs, exploitation and oppression, somehow manages to elide much of this history. It also elides the many mass struggles, violent and less violent, that constitute the history of decolonization – a history that here has only one powerful actor, the white man, who eventually comes to see that the very principles of his club mandate inclusion rather than exclusion.
But let us not dismiss Watson's account, or other similar if less egregious accounts of the ‘expansion of international society’, on ‘polemical’ grounds; for there are other grounds for doing so. This narrative of the expansion of political forms is modelled on the conventional account of the expansion of economic and social forms, that is...
