Practical Judgement in International Political Theory

Selected Essays

Chris Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415564601
• eBook ISBN: 9781135157548
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Chris Brown is a prominent international political theorist who has contributed to debates on pluralism, justice and human rights. This book draws together seventeen of his most important and influential articles from the last twenty years.

These essays include influential statements on the role of normative theory and international ethics, the so-called 'cosmopolitan-communitarian debate' and anti-foundationalist thought in international relations, as well as important contributions to Rawlsian and Post-Rawlsian theories of international and global justice. The most recent papers address subjects such as the notion of global civil society, and controversies over the ethics of pre-emptive warfare, and the inevitably selective nature of humanitarian interventions.

The book includes a framing introduction written for this volume, in which Brown discusses his own influences, and the evolution of his thinking throughout his career. Although this evolution has involved a progressively less critical viewpoint towards liberal thought and liberal internationalism, and a greater commitment to universal values, some things have remained constant – in particular a focus on the importance of political judgement and scepticism directed towards the idea that there are simple solutions to complex problems. The collection ends fittingly with a critique of the popular cosmopolitanism of figures such as Bono and Bob Geldof.

This collection will be essential reading for all scholars and graduates with an interest in international political theory.

1 Introduction

A life in theory

Readers of the essays collected in this book will find an account of how my thinking on a variety of subjects has evolved, in some cases undergoing at least a 90-degree shift; my contention is that this evolution is actually symptomatic of some of the things that have been happening in the wider discourse, and in the world which this discourse is attempting to understand. I present an overview of this evolution and the individual essays later in this Introduction, but first, since this very enterprise involves a degree of immodesty in presuming that the development of my thinking might be interesting, it seems not inappropriate to go the whole hog, as it were, and begin by setting out how I came to be involved in the field in the first place.

My involvement with higher education began where it is ending, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I came to LSE in the mid-1960s to read for the BSc (Econ), an excellent degree that, sadly, no longer exists. The BSc (Econ) provided a broad education in the social sciences, with every student being obliged to study Politics, Economics and History for all three years of the programme; one’s specialist subject actually covered no more than one-fifth of the first year, and, at most, five-eighths of the next two, less than half of the degree as a whole. History was my subject at grammar school, and I actually went to the LSE with the intention of becoming an economic historian, but in my first year took the option ‘Struc-ture of International Society’ and was converted to International Relations by my class leader, Philip Windsor, certainly the most charismatic teacher I have ever come across. Philip’s infiuence was important in persuading me that IR was an important subject, but also in shaping how I saw the discourse. He was clear then, as I am now, that International Relations is not an academic discipline in the sense that, say, History is a discipline, or Political Science; rather, it is the name of a field of study where a range of different insights and techniques can be brought to bear, drawn from History, Political Science, Moral Philosophy, Law, Anthropology and so on. Philip himself had serious credentials as a moral philosopher, but his Oxford thesis (never submitted, but published as a book, Berlin: City on Leave ),¹ was a work of contemporary history, and his current interests in the mid-1960s focused on issues of arms control and nuclear strategy. This eclecticism seemed to me then, and seems to me now, highly admirable; in particular, I firmly believe that anyone who wishes to be taken seriously as a theorist of international relations had better be steeped in international history and have a very good knowledge of current affairs as well as familiarity with the classics of political thought.

Perhaps predictably, once into Part II of the BSc (Econ), I discovered that a great deal of the syllabus in International Relations consisted in learning more mundane subjects than those which interested Philip; in particular, the minutiae of the ‘Foreign Policy of the Powers’ and the United Nations system (the latter taught, for reasons neither he nor we could fathom, by an Assistant Lecturer whose interests lay in strategy, Robert Hunter, later US Ambassador to NATO –this was fun, although to this day I have difficulty remembering which is Chapter VI and which Chapter VII). Fred Northedge’s lectures on the International Political System were more promising, likewise the courses in International Relations Theory mounted by Michael Banks and Peter Lyon, although I was never convinced by the latter’s use of Martin Wight’s ‘three Rs’framework (rationalism, realism and revolutionism). Still, and at the risk of appearing to betray the Department in which I now teach, the courses which I enjoyed most were International Law (quite rightly compulsory then for IR students) and those taken by all the 300 plus students on the BSc (Econ), namely Economics, History and, especially, Political Thought. Nowadays one cannot claim to be an ‘economist’ without advanced applied mathematics but the three years I spent studying the subject certainly gave me a basic understanding of economic concepts that I have found invaluable. International History was more immediately enjoyable, an old love rekindled, but the real pleasure was the study of Political Thought.

I was one of the last generation of students to attend Michael Oakeshott’s lectures on the History of Political Thought, and I was privileged to have taken classes in the subject with one of his PhD students, Noel O’Sullivan, subsequently Professor of Politics at Hull University.² Oakeshott’s lectures were mainly a leisurely examination of Greek and Roman thought –leisurely in the sense that he took five lectures on the Greeks to reach Aristotle who, rather surprisingly, he covered before Plato –and have shaped my thinking on classical political thought to the present day; in particular they are at the back of my suspicion of those scholars who treat the thinkers of antiquity as though they are our contemporaries, also those who privilege Athens over Rome. Oakeshott believed the Romans to be more practically minded than the Greeks and perhaps less philosophically interesting as a result, but he never underestimated their importance, conscious as he was of the role of law (and thus of Rome) in the formation of the modern state. Noel’s interest in Hegel –in those days rather unusual –had less impact on my thinking at the time, but perhaps resurfaced twenty years later. In parenthesis, one might note that, on top of Oakeshott’s contribution, there were another forty or so lectures on the course over two years, covering various periods and thinkers, and given by scholars such as Ken Minogue and John Charvet. The final exam in Political Thought, taken at the end of the third year, invited the student to answer four questions from, as I recall, about eighty, on topics ranging from the Pre-Socratics to the English Idealists, with no restrictions on question choice. This is the sort of thing that would cause our current Teaching Quality Assessors to have kittens –but then virtually nothing that Oakeshott was involved in would be allowed nowadays and the fact that he was one of the two or three giants of twentieth-century anglophone political philosophy would be of no concern to our Quality Police. I count it a privilege to have seen him in action.³

After graduation, I began to read for a PhD in International Relations, focusing on an over-ambitious study of the way in which historical knowledge was applied, or as I saw it misapplied, by scholars such as J. David Singer with his ‘Correlates of War’ project. This subject seemed to combine my historical and theoretical interests, but I had bitten off more than I could chew, at least in those days, and little came of it. Fortunately from my point of view a PhD was not then a necessity for a university post and, after two years of desultory study, I was appointed to teach IR at the University of Kent at Canterbury (the PhD came some twenty years later, under Kent staff regulations). Kent provided me with a second education; the collegiate system there, since largely abandoned or at least attenuated, discouraged departmentalism, and encouraged inter-disciplinarity not simply in the social sciences, but across the board. For an LSE student this was a real eye-opener. I came into contact with scholars of literature with an interest in literary theory, philosophers and theologians as well as the historians, economists and sociologists I had known at the LSE. This undoubtedly broadened my interest in theory; for better or worse, I read a great deal of Marxist theory (much in vogue in the 1970s) and became very interested in radical approaches to International Political Economy (IPE), but I also read Foucault, Derrida and other poststructuralist theorists. The former interest was also stimulated by involvement in Susan Strange’s project to establish IPE as a core aspect of the study of IR; I was the rapporteur for a week-long seminar on IPE at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park in 1971, which led to the establishment of the Interna- tional Political Economy Group as part of the British International Studies Association. I found fewer opportunities to think in post-structuralist terms in the IR of the 1970s, but the reading I did then was of great value later; fortunately for me, in those days it was possible for young scholars to get away with reading a lot and publishing very little.

In the 1980s things began to come together for me, and I became set on the path that created the essays collected in this book. Looking back, I can identify three factors that shaped the sort of work I would produce over the next twenty-five years. First, in 1981/2, I spent a year on an academic exchange at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This was a very pleasant experience and I made a number of good friends, but, most importantly in career terms, I was privileged to spend a lot of time with William Connolly, one of the most important and creative of American political theorists. The son of a shop steward in Flint, Michigan, Bill Connolly had been a student of C.B. Macpherson in the 1960s and had produced a number of fine books in the 1970s, mostly written from the perspective of the traditional left; in the 1980s

he was reading Foucault and turning himself into the late-modernist political theorist he now is. Conversations with him were enormously stimulating, and although I no longer share many of his political attitudes I still regard him as one of the great intellectual infiuences on my work –his reading of the notion of pluralism being of particular importance.⁴

While in the course of the 1980s I remained deeply interested in radical political economy, Marxism and global inequality, increasingly I became convinced that the really important questions this interest generated were not to be found in the realm of explanatory theory, but rather were, in a broad sense, normative. Whether, or to what extent, the peoples or states of the rich world were actually responsible for creating the poverty of the global South was, and is, an interesting question, but equally interesting, and in those days less frequently asked, is the question whether they should be responsible in the other sense of that term. In other words, what do the citizens of one society owe to citizens of another? Do considerations of global justice require changing the world, or can the current inequality actually be justified? Con- ventionally, radicals had simply assumed the justice of such redistribution, but the debates in Anglo-American political philosophy stimulated by John Rawls showed that things were by no means as clear cut as one might have imagined.

This was the second factor that led to the essays collected in this book, but neither the stimulus of contact with Connolly, nor the impact of the burgeoning ‘justice industry’, would have had the effect they did had it not been for a third factor, the emergence within International Relations of a number of young, or younger, political theorists who, while sympathetic to the concerns of the generation of Hedley Bull and Martin Wight, were abandoning the idea that IR theory had to be sui generis and bringing new resources to bear on the subject.⁵ Aside from this intellectual community, I was also fortunate to meet, and be befriended by, the late Brian Barry, a major political theorist working in the shadow of Rawls and increasingly interested in the international dimension of theories of justice. In terms of my own politics and scholarly approach, I was actually much closer to the thinking of one of Brian’s bêtes noires, Michael Walzer, than to his own account of justice as impartiality, but my knowledge of contemporary theories of justice was enormously enhanced by this association. Walzer for me was, and is, a role-model both for his communitarian liberalism, and for his problem-oriented style of reasoning, but Brian Barry was a friend as well as a kind of mentor, even though, increasingly, we disagreed on matters of substance. Friendships aside, the core point is that an audience for a different kind of international political theory was developing. Of course, the majority of scholars in the field of International Relations were not oriented to this work, but that in itself stimulated those of us who wanted to take a different approach; there was a kind of missionary zeal in the air, and like most missionaries we had the support of an (intellectual) great power, contemporary Political Theory.

This atmosphere goes a long way towards explaining the first of the shifts that have taken place in my work over the last twenty years. Back in the late

1980s I described what I was writing about as ‘international ethics’ or ‘normative international relations theory’ – now, my preferred description is‘international political theory’. Why the shift, and why might this matter? The names we use to describe what we do are important. Think of the change in the nature of the discourse that the shift from ‘political economy’ to‘economics’ in the late nineteenth century both prefigured and perhaps partly produced; the latter term has a precise, scientic ring to it, the former suggests that the workings of the economy can never be divorced from the messy business of politics. Economists produce formal models which they test rigorously with the latest econometric techniques but which may not bear much relationship to issues in the actual economy; political economists, on the other hand, actually engage with the real world and might, just possibly, have something to say about genuine policy dilemmas, but their work is unlikely to be published in the best journals, because it is the economists who decide which are the best journals and what goes in them. Something not dissimilar happens in International Relations, where the leading figures (most of whom work in the USA, which is where the majority of scholars engaged in the field are to be found) have a strong sense of what good scholarship ought to look like, and have well-established ways of marginalising work that does not follow the required pattern. And, cutting to the chase, in the 1980s when I and others used terms like ‘international ethics’ and ‘normative theory’ we were trying to change this –but actually, I believe, ended up by inviting the mainstream to marginalise our work.

The 1980s was a period when International Relations theory, especially in the USA, was coming to terms with Waltz’s structural realism, and the recasting of liberal international thought into neo-liberalism, or liberal institutionalism.⁶ The anarchy problematic was dominant; the role of theory was to explain how egoists behaved under conditions of anarchy –restrained only by the balance of power said the neo-realists, capable of cooperation but only at sub-optimal levels said the neo-liberals. In neither case did the ethical dimension of state behaviour attract much consideration, and, more generally, an emphasis on the logic of expected consequences rather than the logic of appropriateness drew attention away from the role of norms in international relations.⁷ Whereas the classical realists always had a strong sense of the morality of statecraft, and classical liberals were explicitly driven by ethical orientations towards cooperation and peace, their successors were much less interested in such matters. As noted above, modern analytical political theorists on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to get interested in issues of global justice but International Relations as a discipline was uninterested. In the late 1980s I was one of those who thought that it ought to be interested, and who attempted to attract attention by writing about the global justice debates in IR journals, and by re-asserting the importance of the ethical considerations that actually the ‘righteous realists’ of an earlier age had taken for granted.⁸

International ethics seemed at the time to be a reasonable way of summarising what these issues were about, and it seemed equally reasonable to note the importance of norms by talking about normative International Relations theory. But this was a mistake for two, rather different, reasons. First of all, as suggested above, this terminology played into the hands of those within the discipline who were content to marginalise ethical concerns. Famously, Milton Friedman had drawn a distinction between positive and normative economics. The former, for example, produced objective accounts of the relationship between infiation and employment levels, while the latter concerned the political choice of the appropriate trade-off between these two indicators.⁹ Friedman clearly believed the former task to be the more important and scholarly one, and mainstream IR theorists employed a similar argument to the same effect. The result was that normative theory was understood to be a kind of add-on which was essentially parasitic on the real task of IR theory, that of producing explanations of international behaviour. The notion that all theory was actually, in some sense, normative by virtue of the nature of the social sciences and the way in which they differed from the natural sciences could not get a hearing, and by defining oneself as a normative theorist one was in effect marginalising one’s work. To be an international ethicist was, in some respects, even more limiting –just as Legal Ethics was a requirement for most Law degrees in the US so International Ethics 101 turned up on quite a few syllabi in American universities, but in both cases the programmes of study were seen as subsidiary to the real business of scholarship, and the idea that all foreign policy behaviour has ethical implications was easily sidetracked.

The second reason why international ethics and normative international relations theory were unfortunate terms is because they inadvertently reinforced the idea that International Relations is a sui generis discourse. American International Relations scholars were usually to be found in Political Science Departments and, for better or worse, had Political Science training. However, in Britain, separate departments of IR were quite normal, and the general trend was to see International Relations as distinct from the study of Government, as Political Science was often called in Britain. What this meant in practice was that for most students of international relations the resources of two and a half millennia of political theorising were reduced to Thucydides, a nod towards Hobbes and Rousseau, and a misreading of Machiavelli.¹⁰

For both these reasons, International Political Theory is a far better term to describe what I do than the alternatives. It makes it very clear that what we are talking about here is theoretical reasoning that is deeply embedded in at least Western political thought, and not to be marginalised as parasitic on the allegedly more important task of producing explanatory theory. What of matters of substance? The early essays collected here exhibit a strong pluralist and cultural relativist bias –something similar is present in later papers as well, but in a muted form and with nowhere near the same confidence level. Most of the work on global justice produced in the 1980s and referred to above assumed the universal relevance of the concept of human rights –as the name suggests, these are rights one is believed to possess simply by virtue of being human –and attributed the weakness of the international human rights regime to the self-interest of oppressors, aided and abetted by Cold War politics. Against this position I argued then in a number of essays, some of which are reproduced in this collection, that it could not be assumed that human rights as a concept could be divorced from its European and Enlightenment origins, and that the West needed to find a new way of engaging in dialogue with non-Western cultures. In the event, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights of 1993, which was intended to reassert universal values and reboot the Human Rights Regime after the ending of the Cold War, produced a document widely regarded as a fudge, Sa...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Practical Judgement in International Political Theory
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowlegment
• 1 Introduction: a life in theory
• PART I Communitarians and cosmopolitans
• PART II The discourse of international relations
• PART III The exercise of judgement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index