1 Introduction
To bring together into two volumes a selection of one’s prior writings is not as easy a task as it might seem. Quite aside from space limitations, the difficulty of achieving a coherent group of essays, and the need to edit out unnecessary duplication, one is compelled to confront some tough questions: What is the larger meaning of revisiting and publishing these essays? Am I deceiving myself ? In the guise of tracing intellectual development and contributing to knowledge in the field, am I doing little more than servicing my ego? Was a lifetime of probing the dynamics of world politics worth the effort? Will making these essays available have any lasting value for those who follow? Would it be better to heed the advice of an undergraduate who once reacted to a book of mine that I had assigned to his class by announcing, “You should have left it in the trees!”?
In short, compiling these essays has been a humiliating task, and I like to think that I have undertaken it only out of a long-standing commitment to the idea that the name of the game we play is circulating ideas and thereby contributing to the enlargement of knowledge. Idealistic? Perhaps. Rationalization? No, a lifetime of social science, of trying to capture the underlying dynamics that sustain, undermine, or transform social, political, and economic systems, has reinforced a longstanding conviction – call it an article of faith – that teaching and writing about world politics is a way of circulating ideas to unknown others and that, somehow, maybe, the ideas will be received and prove to be meaningful and influential. It is this article of faith that underlies the preparing of these volumes and the essays of which they consist. One doesn’t know how far the ideas will circulate or how consequential they may be, but my article of faith drives me to believe that circulating them will matter. More accurately, my ideas and writings are among those of many others who seek to fathom world affairs and who, collectively, will circuitously as well as directly make their way into policy-making circles and debate in the public arena.
All told, my article of faith as well as (early on) career considerations have resulted in the writing or editing of more than forty books and monographs and some 200 papers, some unpublished, some published in obscure journals, and some as part of the syntheses developed in my three most recent and important books that I have come to regard as a trilogy.1 Notwithstanding this extensive output, however, writing is for me a lonely and difficult task. One interacts with colleagues and critics, thrives on collegiality, and hears from and reacts to unknown others through e-mail, but nonetheless at its core the task of puzzling through and writing up the challenges confronting humankind is a lonely and humbling endeavor. It is a matter of one’s analytic and normative self against all the ambiguities and complexities of the human condition, all the competing interpretations of how and why events and trends unfold as they do.
Criteria of selection
In looking back over all the articles I have written, wincing at some of them and pleased with others, it is clear that they all focus on the challenge of understanding one or another aspect of world politics and that they are marked by two central and recurring themes. Hence the common title of the two volumes is The Study of World Politics and their different subtitles reflect the two recurrent themes. In this volume I have included articles and papers concerned with theory and method, whereas the essays in the other volume focus on the challenges of globalization and global governance. Of course, the main foci of the two volumes are not mutually exclusive. Several of the chapters in this volume anticipate or take note of the processes of globalization, just as theory and method are necessarily relevant to the chapters of Volume 2. On balance, however, the overlap of the two volumes is not nearly so salient as the distinctions between them.
In selecting the essays that follow I have sought to strike a balance between unpublished and previously published papers that are not well known either because they appeared in foreign journals or in books that have not been widely read. In addition, in this volume I have sought to strike a balance between recent papers and those written earlier in my career.2 Such a balance does not mark the other volume because it is only relatively recently that globalization and global governance have climbed high on research agendas.
Since all but two of the essays in this volume were previously published in one or another of the last four decades, there is a sense in which they reflect my intellectual development. The development is perhaps especially discernible in the narrowing of my interests from the general problems of theory and method presented here to the more specific foci of globalization and governance probed in the second volume. It must be emphasized, however, that tracing intellectual development is not a main purpose of the endeavor. Pieces of my intellectual autobiography can be found in several different sources3 and there is no need to elaborate it further here beyond the inclusion of Chapters 7 and 9. To repeat, the prime purpose is to provoke thought through the circulation of ideas.
Organization of this volume
The distinction between theory and method cannot be clear-cut. It is difficult to focus on theoretical challenges without touching upon their methodological implications, and vice versa. Still, the two are sufficiently different to warrant treating them as separate subsections of this book. In addition, an earlier but now largely abandoned focus of my work, the challenge posed by the analysis of how foreign policy is made and conducted, serves as the prime concern of a third subsection.
Conceptual foci
Throughout most of the ensuing chapters a restlessness is expressed with conventional approaches to the theories and methodologies used in the study of world politics. As will be seen, underlying the discontent is a conviction that the world is undergoing enormous changes and that therefore both our theories and our methods must be adjusted accordingly. Analyzing change poses problems that are not easily resolved – and in some respects they may not be resolvable – but I feel strongly that fear of failure is a poor reason to avoid seeking to trace the dynamics of transformation, that one must make the effort even if it falls short.
Thus more than a few of the ensuing chapters address the problem of change in one way or another. It should be noted, however, that despite this recurrent focus I am far from satisfied that extensive progress is being made in unraveling the dynamics that sustain change in social systems.4
A preoccupation with change and transformation sensitizes one to the rapidity with which events and trends become obsolete. To tool up on a current situation, teach students about its intricacies, and write up analyses of its underpinnings without locating it in a larger and more enduring context is to be only momentarily up-to-date. It is not to acquire concepts, perspectives, or information that enables one to grasp the dynamics of the new situations that evolve subsequently.
This is why most of my essays do not focus on particular issues or countries.
Chapters 21 and 22 are exceptions, but their analyses seek to generalize beyond the immediate circumstances that occasioned the writing of them.
Another intense conviction underlies more than a few of the chapters, namely, that objective analysis is not possible and that thus objective findings cannot be generated. One can never tell the whole story about an individual, event, situation, trend, country, or international system, thus forcing one to select some of its aspects as important and to dismiss other aspects as trivial, a process of selection that perforce renders the resulting analysis other than objective. To the extent that others do not subscribe to the resulting analysis it can be viewed as a subjective interpretation, whereas if the result is shared by like-minded others it becomes intersubjective. And it is intersubjective understandings created through further investigation, verification, and revision by others that serve as the foundations of knowledge in any field. In effect, these understandings are consensuses that continuously change as new formulations and findings lead to their revision or, indeed, to rival consensuses. In short, there are no ultimate truths about world politics, but rather competing consensuses about how the world works.
Although the various essays are marked by theoretical concerns, these are never far removed from the question of evidence, of what phenomena are empirically relevant. For it is data and evidence that renders theories credible. But data and evidence have to be credible too, and herein lies a difficult set of choices. A single instance or case can be illustrative and compelling, but can it serve as evidence? Or must the single case be included with many others to form a central tendency for it to be part of an interpretation that supports or negates a theory? And what about the outlier, the deviant case, the exception? Are these not potentially revealing of a theory’s worth or falsity? My response to such questions has undergone alteration across time. Early on it seemed clear that only central tendencies were relevant to the knowledge-building process, that any other form of empirical observation could not hold up as a meaningful insight into the human condition. Such was the presumption of my long-time commitment to the generation of quantitative, scientific findings. At that time the outlier, deviant case, and exception were viewed simply as noise in the system, as phenomena that did not require careful examination. More recently, however, I have come to realize that unique phenomena that deviate from central tendencies can be useful in the theory-building process if they are treated as instances of some larger pattern that may be at work. Obviously, one cannot devote time to pursuing the implications of every deviant case. That would be an endless process with little payoff. Instead one should pay attention only to those deviant cases that involve important actors or countries, as they might point to patterns that had not previously been appreciated.
Still another theme that recurs throughout the ensuing chapters concerns the rigidity of disciplinary or sub-disciplinary boundaries and the difficulty of spanning the boundaries through multidisciplinary inquiries. Put more positively, several of the essays seek to bridge the boundaries by highlighting the ways in which the concepts and methods on opposite sides of the boundaries are not nearly as antithetical as may be thought by those who champion them. The tendency of those committed to a particular paradigm to reject alternative perspectives or even to make minor modifications is, regrettably, widespread. Analysts become so wedded to their own formulations that the temptations to downplay the utility of alternative schemes are considerable and continuously reinforce the preferred paradigm. Yet, to be locked tightly in a conceptual jail is to run the risk of ignoring insights or data that may be relevant to the problems the investigator seeks to clarify.
2 The future of politics1
To reflect seriously on the future of politics in the coming decades is to proceed from several basic premises that we all hold but that we normally do not explicate. One concerns our presumptions relative to the nature of change and the capacity of human systems to undergo transformation. A second involves our assumptions about the location of causation in human affairs, whether it originates and is sustained by agents or structures. A third derives from our premises concerning the role of individuals and their vulnerabilities to change, their readiness to engage in collective action, and their capacity for adapting to new conditions.
It follows that to the extent we hold different premises about change, agents, structures, and individuals, then to that extent our understandings of the future of politics are bound to be discrepant. In the ensuing chapters I undertake to explicate my premises along these lines as a means of suggesting what the long-term future of politics is likely to be. To anticipate the central thrusts of my analysis, I believe we are well into a period of profound transformations in which such deep changes are occurring in both the agents and structures and the relationship between them that world affairs in the future will be substantially different than it is today. More specifically, I argue that new technologies have facilitated four simultaneous and interrelated revolutions – what I shall call an organizational explosion, a skill revolution, a mobility upheaval, and a major rearrangement of global structures – that are generating differences in kind rather than simply differences in degree and that, as a result, we are entering a new epoch.
Before outlining this new epoch, let me repeat that my understanding of it stems from my basic premises about change and causal dynamics and that those who proceed from very different premises are likely to anticipate a different future for politics. More than that, because our differences stem from divergent assumptions, they are not subject to empirical proof. We can articulate the logic of our initial premises and we can marshal evidence in support of them, but our conclusions are bound to be a function of our points of departure. Thus, even if we agree on the empirics of the human condition, we may still differ enormously on what they signify because we proceed from different ontological and epistemological premises. Accordingly, rather than attempt to demonstrate that my analysis is sound and accurate, all I can do is articulate my basic premises and hope that they serve to alert others to the need to explicate their underlying assumptions and the interpretations to which they give rise.
An emergent epoch
A key to grasping the emergent epoch lies in the contradictions that pervade the course of events. Each day brings word of a world inching slowly toward sanity even as it moves toward breakdown. And not only do these integrative and disintegrative events occur simultaneously, but more often than not they are causally related. More than that, the causal links tend to cumulate and generate a momentum such that every integrative increment tends to give rise to a disintegrative increment, and vice versa. The simultaneity of the good and the bad, the global and local, the coherent and incoherent – to mention only a few of the interactive polarities that dominate world affairs – underlies the emergence of a new epoch in human affairs and the differences in kind that distinguish it. Indeed, I would argue that the best way to grasp world affairs today is to view them as an endless series of tensions in which the forces pressing for greater globalization and those inducing greater localization interactively play themselves out. To do otherwise, to focus only on globalizing dynamics, or only on localizing dynamics, is to risk overlooking what makes events unfold as they do.
But it would be erroneous to view the emergent epoch as comprised of simple interrelationships, readily discernible, and easily understood. They encompass the tensions between core and periphery, between national and transnational systems, between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism, between cultures and subcultures, between states and markets, between patriots and urbanites, between decentralization and centralization, between universalism and particularism, between the global and the local – to note only the more conspicuous links between opposites that presently underlie the course of events and the development or decline of institutions. And each of these tensions are marked by numerous variants; they take different forms in different parts of the world, in different countries, in different markets, in different communities, in different professions, and in different cyberspaces, with the result that there is enormous diversity in the way people experience the tensions that beset their lives.
At the core of the emergent epoch and the tensions that sustain it are interactions between new technologies and the uses made of them by people and their collectivities. The acceleration of the microelectronic revolution in recent decades offers an obvious example. It has brought words and pictures, ideas and philosophies, statistical data and detailed scenarios, into homes and offices most places in the world from most other places in the world, and it has done so with a speed that renders the transmission and reception of the messages virtually simultaneous. Global television, the Internet, the fax machine, and the fiber optic cable are only the more conspicuous of the many electronic technologies that have reduced communication distances to milliseconds. Similarly, the jet aircraft has reduced geographic distances to less than twenty-four hours in the sense that every city in the world is less than a day away from any other city. Stated more succinctly, the emergent epoch is marked by accelerating processes in which global spaces are moving into local places and local repercussions are occurring on a global scale.
By themselves, however, these technological innovations do not fully explain the advent of a new epoch. Neither globalizing nor localizing dynamics are amorphous forces that somehow drive the course of events. They consist of processes as well as structures, processes that are initiated, expanded, contracted, disrupted, or otherwise sustained by human agency, by people acting individually or collectively to cope with challen...
