Freedom vs Necessity in International Relations

Human-Centred Approaches to Security and Development

David Chandler

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780324869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The last two decades have seen the remarkable rise to dominance of human-centred understandings of the world. Indeed, it is now rare to read any analysis of insecurity, conflict or development which does not discuss the need to 'empower' or 'capacity-build' local individuals or communities. In this path-breaking book, Chandler presents a radical challenge to such approaches, arguing that the solutions to the world's problems are now not perceived to lie within external structures of economic, political and social relations, but instead with individuals and groups who are often seen to be the most marginal and powerless. This fundamental change has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from state-based to society-based understandings of the world. Chandler provocatively argues that human-centred approaches have limited rather than expanded the transformative possibilities available to us, and if real change is to be achieved - both at a local and a global level - then a radical re-think in Western thought is required.

1 | INTRODUCTION: THE SUBJECT OF GOVERNANCE

Introduction

This book intends to break new ground in analysing the consequences of conceiving the world in human- or agent-centred terms. While placing the human agent or actor at the centre of the world is often understood to be progressive and empowering, this is very far from the case. Human-centred approaches start with the individual or community, often conceived as vulnerable and insecure, and consider ways in which individuals and communities can become empowered or capacity-built in order to have the agency to better cope with, withstand or challenge the vicissitudes of our global and complex world. This book makes the simple point that focusing on the inculcation of individual and community agency, ethical reflectivity or resilience, as a way of addressing problems of insecurity, conflict or development, tends to see the human subject as the problem, rather than the material social and economic relations within which it is embedded. In fact, once human agency is seen as the level at which problems can be resolved, material and structural constraints fade into the background or are seen as merely a product of poor behavioural choices. The focus on the differential subjective or cognitive aspects of human agency, and their social and cultural institutional constraints, in this way has replaced the rationalist understanding of the universal subject operating in specific social, economic and political circumstances.

The declaration that we are ‘humans’, radically proclaimed as if it were some new discovery, is a call for the recognition that the problems of the world need to be understood in the context of our richness and diversity: in the fact that we are emotional, social and complex beings, embedded in a world which is continually subject to change. This sounds like an empowering and radical shift, especially when discursively posed in contradistinction to a neoliberal rational-choice understanding of humans as rational calculators of self-interest with no normative considerations for others (Thaler and Sunstein 2008: 7).

Yet the trope of the natural, rational or autonomous individual has been a subject of critique at least since Karl Marx’s powerful indictment of the Robinson Crusoe figure of classical political economy for naturalizing the social relations of the market in Capital, Volume 1 (1954: 81). The difference between Marx’s time and today, of course, is that Marx wanted to extend the sphere of human freedom by revealing the coercive constraints of the structuring social relations operating beneath the surface of free market appearances. Today the purpose is entirely the opposite; instead we are told that it is our ‘human’ qualities, our distinct social, emotional and cognitive flaws and fallibilities, which explain why our freedoms need to be carefully managed and why our choice-making necessitates facilitative and empowering governance intervention.

Of course, it could be argued that an analytical focus on human agency and choice-making possibilities holds out the promise of social transformation, whereas the focus on historical, social, economic and structural constraints acts to rationalize or legitimize inequalities and differences. In fact, it is increasingly held that placing analytical emphasis on structural constraints limits the space for human agency and restricts the subjective choices available, thereby constraining possibilities for progress. This book seeks to argue the opposite: that, in fact, human-centred approaches to the problems of insecurity, conflict and development close down the possibilities for human freedom. Human-centred approaches limit the possibilities of social transformation because the problems are located in the behaviour and decisions of those considered to be the most vulnerable or insecure. The focus on empowering and capacity- and capability-building individuals and communities held to be ‘at risk’ emphasizes their need to develop, change or adapt to enable them to cope with, to survive, or to thrive in the world. The world as it exists is understood to be open to change and transformation, but increasingly this transformation is seen to be centred on human practices and understanding. In this way, the human becomes the determinant focus rather than the external world beyond the subject. Increasingly, rather than focusing on the problems of the external world, the inner world of the subject becomes the focus for aspirations of social transformation.

In this framework, rather than freeing the human subject, the freedom of the human subject is understood as the problem rather than the solution. In a world seen to be complex, globalized and lacking the laws and regularities that enabled instrumental, goal-directed policy-making and political aspirations, linear or teleological understandings of human progress are no longer deemed possible. Without modernist understandings of space and time, structuring and giving meaning to contingency, human freedom of choice-making apparently needs to be subordinated to the world through the inculcation of adaptive learning and ethical responsibility. In the subordination of the human to the world it appears, counter-intuitively, that we have a surfeit of freedom; our dominant discourses and interpretations of the world tell us that we have more freedom than ever before.

In our globalized world we are often told that, even without any political struggle or any wish to be free, we are increasingly responsible for the choices that we make. Governments are increasingly stating that they can no longer rule us in the old ways; that we, as citizens, are much too aware and reflective to passively accept advice or direction. Apparently we have access to so much information, are so diverse in our preferences and have so many opportunities, that they can no longer treat us as passive or obedient subjects, being instructed or told what to do.¹ We are also told that giving citizens greater responsibility provides a check on possible abuses of state power; more and more areas of life are becoming democratized as power and authority diffuse down to the level of the individual.²

We have so much freedom, in part, because we lack the previous constraints of inherited tradition or bureaucratic state regulation. We are regularly informed that we have been freed by the collapse of traditional frameworks of values and that we have demanded and voted for the end of paternalistic state interventions in our education and welfare. We now have to take responsibility for our decisions and choices. This is nowhere more the case than in terms of our increasing awareness of our freedom of choice in terms of our personal or private lives – in our lifestyle choices – where we are now aware that the decisions we make about how much we exercise, whether to smoke, what we eat and how we parent can have a major influence on our own lives and those of other people. In a world in which it appears that choice is all around us, it may seem paradoxical to argue that our freedom is, in fact, becoming the central problematic around which understandings and practices of governance are shaped.

The key point that is developed in this book is that choice-making does not equate to freedom today. The philosophical and political history of liberal modernity was one that revolved around the construction of the liberal subject as an autonomous, rational actor, capable of making choices that were in the interests both of the individual and of the society as a whole. The freedom of choice-making enabled the constitution of the subject, understood to be universal and entitled to equality at the ballot box and under the law. It was through our free choice-making – from the mythical construction of the social contract, founding the state of liberal modernity, through to the choice-making of elections, legitimizing government rule, and of the market, revealing our preferences and interests – that the liberal world was both constructed and legitimized. It is impossible to imagine the liberal world without the free – autonomous – rational, choice-making subject at the centre of it.

This book will argue that today we still have the legacy of a liberal world – a world of choice-making subjects – but that we no longer understand the human subject as the rational and autonomous choice-making subject of liberal modernity. Instead we are understood to be socially embedded subjects, within limiting institutional and cognitive frameworks – inherited from the past and shaped by hierarchical and problematic social relations and socio-environmental norms and constructs. While we are increasingly aware of the lack of universal rationality of the subject, the external world is also held to have changed or to need a different and non-linear framework of understanding in which rationalist approaches, which presuppose an external world of law and regularity, can no longer guide our policy-making.

It appears that our assumption of the ‘naturalness’ of the universal rational subject, supposing that autonomy is positive (rather than needing to be carefully nurtured and managed – and therefore potentially problematic), has been the greatest error of liberal modernity. In fact, the world appears to be full of problems caused by precisely this liberal or neoliberal lack of attention to the shaping of the frameworks through which our ‘freedoms’ can be safely exercised. Once autonomous choice-making is problematized, human freedom is transformed from a universal starting assumption of liberalism to a policy goal of managing and capacity-building the subject. Choice-making is increasingly viewed as problematic today precisely because we are not understood to be either rational or autonomous subjects. Our freedom is considered through a discourse of limits as we become aware that we are not somehow separate from the world but live as choice-making subjects which are entirely embedded within the world around us: both as beings who produce this world and as beings who are produced by it.

In this understanding of our embeddedness, our freedom as subjects is constrained both from above and from below. From above, we are not free because we live in a world increasingly understood to be globalized: a world whose problems can be traced back to our actions or decisions, however small or minor. If the common trope that ‘when a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world it can cause a hurricane in another part of the world’ is true, then it is clear that a globalized world makes us responsible for the supposed distant effects of our decisions and actions because, even without intention, we are causing effects in the world. Our increasing consciousness of the fact that even the most minor actions or choices we make in the world have consequences that we can now process-trace – as a method of inferring a causal mechanism (see, for example, Bennett and George 1997) back to our actions – necessarily restricts our freedom of decision-making. In the globalized world, without external laws and regularities, human subjects still exist as agents but lose their capacity to be subjects capable of acting to transform their external circumstances though conscious intention.

From below, our freedom of choice is also limited, again by a process-based understanding of what was previously understood as a series of separate and discrete acts. If the world demonstrates the problematic nature of human choices, then we increasingly believe that liberal assumptions of the autonomous and rational subject can no longer hold. We are perceived to be unable or incapable of making decisions or acting in our own interests or in society’s greater good. If we were rational subjects, we are told, surely we would save for our retirement, exercise, not smoke, etc. Increasingly, the choice-making subject is understood as bounded by its social context, its thought processes, life experiences, values, beliefs, environment and a myriad other factors. Rather than having a universal capacity for rational or non-problematic choice-making, we are understood to be universally poor actors and decision-makers, each bounded in our actions and decision-making in different ways. These limitations cause us to act and choose poorly. What we imagine to be freedom of choice is actually just an expression of very limited understanding of the causes of our actions.

Complex, overlapping and interlinking processes are understood to create chains of causation that remove the meaningfulness of contingency: which remove free choice-making. Once we understand the world as globalized, in the sense of being made up of causal relations that do not work through fixed structures of meaning, we can no longer act as subjects in the world. Projects of external transformation – of transforming ourselves through work in and through the world – depend on fixed structures of meaning; whether these are natural laws or laws of capitalism or other forms of social and economic relations. It is through these fixed structures of meaning that we understand ourselves as able to master necessity – the relations of cause and effect. It is only through mastering necessity that we are capable of producing our own freedom. Human freedom, in effect, is (or was) the story of the growth of science and knowledge enabling humans to master the world in which they lived: the story of the transformation of necessity into freedom. As we shall consider in this book, freedom of choice stems from the meaningful contingency of the world – the structured gap between our actions and their final ends – which provides room for experimentation and learning. We are capable of exercising our freedom only when we can conceive ourselves as acting meaningfully in the world – i.e. in relation to temporal and spatial structures – as subjects, capable of adapting our actions and decisions towards our chosen goals.

In today’s world, we are held to have learnt, precisely through the growth of science and technology, that the story of the teleology of human freedom is a mythical and, in fact, a dangerous one. We are told that relations of necessity, relations of causation exist, but that they can never be mastered. These laws of causation are too complex to be grasped in the simple mechanistic terms of incremental or linear cause and effect. Process-thinking (also termed ‘resilience thinking’, Walker and Salt 2006) understands the world in terms of dynamic complexity. The world is so complex – so full of unknowable and uncontrollable necessities – that modernist views of laws of social relations or laws of nature or traditional understandings of government control and regulation make little sense. In this world, human actions and choice-making become the one fixed point which appears to be amenable to conscious human intervention. How to act on this fixed point then becomes the key problematic, informed by process-tracing – working backwards from what are perceived as problematic actions. We then attempt to alter or address the causes of these actions, through shaping the cognitive and societal environments in which these behavioural choices are made.

As the freedom of decision-making ebbs away from our understanding of the world, the problems of the world become reproduced as the problem of human cognitive capacities and increasingly articulated as the problem of the human subject itself: not amenable to any easy remedy or solution. While the problematic of liberalism relied on a positive rationalist view of human choice-making, human-centred understandings rely on the problematization of human choice-making in order to rationalize a very different framework of governance. This is not government, in liberal terms, legitimized and limited by the sphere of human freedom but its opposite. Human-centred governance is legitimized by the recognition of the problem of freedom and autonomy, by the need to extend governance into spheres that were previously understood to be outside of the realm of liberal government. In making freedom, individual choice-making, the problematic at the heart of governance understandings, human-centred frameworks assert themselves as the rule of necessity against the realm of freedom.

After liberalism

This book is about the transition beyond liberal forms of rule and how this shift is reflected in dominant understandings of freedom and intervention, constructed through discourses of agent-centred or human-centred frameworks of capacity-building and empowerment. It will be suggested that what we understood to be the victory of liberalism with the end of the Cold War in 1989 can now be more fully appreciated as the beginning of the problematization of traditional liberal assumptions about the role of government in relation to social problems and the management of the economy. The rethinking of these relations was already set in chain from the late 1970s onwards, in the period dominated by neoliberal thinking, understood as part of a project of social contestation involving the curbing of trade union power and the rolling back of the state, pushing responsibility for social welfare on to society rather than the state. As many theorists and commentators have powerfully described, neoliberalism’s shift of emphasis from the state to society took a variety of forms in different national and international contexts, but all have rhetorically appealed to calls for human freedom and choice-making independence and been hostile to the alleged limiting of freedom by the paternalism of big-government provision of services and of top-down interventionist policy provision (see, for example, Harvey 2005).

In exploring the shift of policy emphasis from state to society, analysts of neoliberalism often emphasized and criticized this as responding to the needs of capitalism and big business but neglected to critique the ways in which the liberal project was understood in much more limited terms in relation to freedom – particularly the ways in which the role of government was being transformed as states were seen to lose their freedom to shape the societies which they governed. The neoliberal period understood states as heavily bureaucratized barriers to the unleashing of social capacities through the mechanism of market forces. The introduction of the market into areas previously highly regulated was understood as emancipating social potential which otherwise would be dormant – held back by the heavy-handed top-down regulation of society by the interventionist state. This shift towards a societal understanding of unleashing the immanent dynamic of the market reflected the disillusionment with state-led attempts at development, highlighted by the stagnancy and eventual collapse of the Soviet system and the economic crises of the early and mid-1970s with the end of the post-war boom, which created the social conditions under which trade union power, welfare benefits and professional privileges could be rolled back. As Hannah Arendt among others presciently noted, the early discourses of ‘freedom’ within neoliberalism already constituted a substantial critique of state interventionist, Keynesian approaches in which public policy-making had a central role in directing economic and social processes (Arendt 1998, 2005). The ‘freedoms’ of the market are freedoms of the private or social sphere, not those of the public or political sphere, as the possibilities for policy choice at the level of government are heavily limited.

For many Marx-inspired theorists, such as David Harvey, neoliberalism was mainly seen as an economic phenome...