The Language of Interstate Relations

In Search of Personification

P. Twardzisz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349461844, 9781137332691
• eBook ISBN: 9781137332707
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Inchallenging the widely held belief in the ubiquity of the personification of the political state, this bookstrives to de-politicize research and to de-mystify conceptual metaphor. Opposed to mainstream cognitive assumptions, it provides detailed data-driven research and one realistic solution to many of the dilemmas.

1

The Language of International Actorness

Most of us have some preconception of world affairs, no matter how incomplete it is. Scholars of IR are not unanimous in their views on what precisely constitutes the scope of the discipline. While the political state used to be considered the major, if not the only, point of interest for theorists of IR, recent decades have witnessed an uncontrolled growth of other international entities. In this chapter, our focus is on the language used in both IR theory and practice whenever specific reference is being made to the major divisions of the world-system. Those divisions have traditionally been called actors (or agents). Both terms evoke the idea either of acting or of those who actively participate in relations and exert their influence upon other actors.

The language of international actorness generally conforms to the language used in any of the major schools of IR. Owing to the multiplicity of studies and approaches, those schools have been given different names. The well-established division of schools in IR can be enumerated as follows: (1) realist, (2) pluralist, liberal, or rationalist, and (3) structuralist, Marxist, or revolutionist. All three paradigms deserve a summary description.

Realism, the oldest tradition in IR, goes as far back as ancient Greece and has become the dominant paradigm within the contemporary discipline of IR (see Beer and Hariman, 1996: 1). The Athenian general Thucydides, Chinese strategist Sun Tsu, Indian statesman Kautilya, Italian diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and many others in more recent times have contributed substantially to the realist tradition. Among the commonly accepted characteristic features of the realist doctrine is the deeply flawed nature of humanity, that is, self-interest, pride, anger, and ambition provoking fear and suspicion among people, putting at risk the possibility of civilized life (Stern, 1998: 10). In order to maintain security for citizens and stability in day-to-day activities, some higher form of order-keeping is needed. A governor or a sovereign (which in present times usually manifests itself as the state) has become the central feature of realist thinking in IR. Or, as Brown and Ainley (2009: 70) put it, ‘realism offers a state-centric account of the world’. So, in realism, not only does the sovereign state take centre stage in the international arena, but it also interacts with other sovereign states. Foreign policy analysts in the realist camp understand the state as a unitary actor without probing more deeply and analysing the roles of the discrete components of the state’s executive or legislative bodies. For the realist, states are in constant competition for power, the pursuit of which is achieved through maximum concentration on rational calculation, with the least possible distraction by other issues (see Beer and Hariman, 1996: 6). As foreign policy is no philanthropy, competition between and among states may become tense at times, leading to open conflict. Though international wars have recently become infrequent, in classical realism, close to the Hobbesian view, peace ‘is a period of recuperation from the last war and preparation for the next’, as stated in Bull (2002: 23). It should not come as a surprise that ‘[h]istorically, realism flourished during periods of turbulence, articulated by those seeking stability, certainty, and […]increased control/domination’, as noted in Peterson (1996: 271). So, what began in Hobbes’s Leviathan as a theory of human nature became a theory of the state, regarded as a unitary actor which uses military and other forms of power. In an international context, there are no common sentiments or common purposes, but each state attempts to secure its own objective, possibly at the expense of other states (see Stern, 1998: 11).

The second IR paradigm, known as rationalism, liberalism, or pluralism, was elaborated in the writings of the seventeenth-century international lawyer Hugo Grotius, and further developed by the eighteenth-century social philosopher John Locke and the nineteenth-century thinker John Stuart Mill. In this, people are described as more ready to cooperate and to limit their own desires in favour of the long-term good of both individuals and society, which are supposed to remain in harmony. Rational thought, rather than fear, anger, and coercion, results in people behaving more sociably. Humans themselves are considered far more rational than realists have traditionally assumed, and because of this they are ready to limit their desires for their own and their society’s common good. As opposed to the realist assumption about the lack of common sentiments, rationalists have assumed ‘a harmony of interests between self and society’, with legal and social institutions overlooking ‘a just and reasonable order of things’ (Stern, 1998: 12). In the international arena, some inevitable conflict is mixed with mitigation, adjudication, and cooperation, regulated by accepted procedures of political and economic interaction. The Grotian (or internationalist) tradition, as rationalism is called in Bull (2002: 25), ‘describes international politics in terms of a society of states or international society’. In other words, all states interacting with one another follow the rules and principles founded by institutions of the society, or the collectivity, that these states form. With the growing importance of international institutions and international law, states are still the principal actors in the international arena. Interactions between and among states, through the rationalist lens, are neither fully conflict-bound nor completely harmonious. Pluralists have challenged the assumption that international interactions are limited to inter-state relations only, proposing a mix of other non-, supra-, or sub-state-actors, all weakening the traditional posture of the state. As a result of these proposals, the international arena has become increasingly congested, with multifarious players interacting at different levels.

The foundations of the third framework, referred to as structuralism, Marxism, or revolutionism, can be traced back to the writings of the eighteenth-century theorists Rousseau and Kant, the nineteenth-century philosopher Marx, and a host of writers and radical thinkers who followed in the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. For proponents of this paradigm, the existing order, domestic or international, cannot be tolerated and maintained, unless for strictly tactical purposes (Stern, 1998: 14). With more rifts across, rather than between, states, Marxists propose to criticize and undermine the existing order, as it is corrupt and unjust. The world as it is conserves unjust power relations which favour the stronger, or the privileged, over the weaker, or the underprivileged. Perceived conflicts are transnational, as they juxtapose and affect social strata both within and outside states, taking no account of state structures.

Although realism is presumably the most dominant framework, there have recently been other approaches to the study of IR, raising new issues (see Beer and Hariman, 1996: 6). There have been proposals for analysing international politics at different levels, generating different theories and findings, which makes it difficult to communicate vital subject matter across those levels and theories (Brown and Ainley, 2009: 67). Realism itself has been challenged by many of the newly proposed frameworks in the midst of ‘the intellectual turbulence of changing epistemologies that we identify as post-modernity’, as stated in Peterson (1996: 271). One of them, critical theory, has attempted to undermine the traditionally accepted order, including the international order, with the institution of the sovereign state as a major actor. Postmodernism has been suspicious of any theory claiming absolute and objective truth. Feminism has been both critical and deconstructive in a number of ways. Though not exclusively, it has challenged gender bias in numerous walks of life and has sought to promote women to play more significant roles in IR.

1.1 Actorness in international affairs

Today’s conceptions of the structure of the contemporary world differ from those evolving over the centuries in a number of ways. However, a common feature found in different epochs is the notion of identity, which leads to some form of togetherness among people. Tribalism is probably one of the first forms of such togetherness enjoyed by people. While it is true that some form of statehood has been present since ancient times, individuals have also played an important part in a political unit. As noted in Cassirer (1955: 61, 81, 94), a rational theory of the state has its roots in Greek philosophy, and it was Plato who first coherently posited a theory of the ideal timeless state. In terms of political identities, we refer to the ancient fundamental political community as the city-state or (Greek) polis, which is contrasted with the contemporary basic unit of the nation-state (see Zavadil, 2009: 220). However, it is also true that in ancient Greece it was the inhabitants of a given city-state (‘the Athenians’) rather than the place itself (‘Athens’) that received more attention, and therefore constituted what today we might call the actors (Brown and Ainley, 2009: 71). The tendency of ancient peoples to elevate themselves to the status of international actors was also observed in ancient China, Egypt, India, and possibly in other territories. Waltz (1959: 176) reminds us of the writings of the New Zealand/British philologist Eric Partridge and the Greek historian Herodotus, in which the authors repeatedly invoke various known groups of the ancient world, such as the Greeks, the Jews, and the Persians, who thought of themselves as better than other similar groups. The Greek city-state system, which had disintegrated by the middle of the fourth century BC, was displaced by the Roman Empire, which recognized no right to the independence of the peoples constituting this organism. Although the Roman Empire had collapsed by the fourth century AD, it gave way to a system formed by three competing religious authorities rather than states in the contemporary sense. These authorities were: the Western (Latin) Church, the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, and, from the seventh century, Islam. In the fourth century, St Augustine took up the problem of the state roughly as it had been left by Plato (Cassirer, 1955: 94).

One of the generally accepted dogmas in medieval political theory was that the principal task of the state was to maintain justice (see Cassirer, 1955: 119). Medieval Europe gave rise to a new set of international relationships (cf. Musolff, 2009, 2010). Thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas fostered the idea of the state as a properly instituted authority to fight a just war. Though the concept of state sovereignty was still to come, new loyalties were forming within Christendom around Europe’s powerful monarchs subduing constant local rivalries and challenging Papal dominance. This and other new phenomena, such as the development of Italian city-states, the rise of banking and commerce, the cultural and artistic revival, and the gradual transition of power from religious to secular authorities, paved the way for a new international system to arrive in Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. The drive for sovereignty among Europe’s secular rulers from the end of the fourteenth century onwards marked the beginning of a new era. Sovereignty, which was very soon to become a key term, designated an entitlement to supreme power and a policy of non-interference, leading to ‘the development of the secular nation-state’ (Griffiths et al., 2008: 299).

Despite sporadic voices expressing doubt over Westphalia’s importance for the concept of the state (see, for example, Brown and Ainley, 2009: 71), there is almost unanimous agreement over the significance of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, as noted in Kegley and Blanton (2011: 16). The peace treaties signed between May and October 1648 in Osnabrück and Münster, which marked the end of the Thirty Years War, constituted the turning point in the history of IR. Such notions and principles as sovereign statehood and non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other sovereign states were to be reflected in the international laws of modern times. A sovereign actor, normally a sovereign state, will have a central government which represents, protects, and rules over a population and territory. A sovereign state will form ‘a common power’, which will be able to defend its people from ‘an invasion of foreigners’ and ‘the injuries of one another’ so that its citizens may reap ‘the fruits of the Earth’, ‘nourish themselves and live contentedly’ (Hobbes, 1943: 89). Lack of security among people is due to the absence of a common power (Marks, 2004: 4). And the only way, according to Hobbes, ‘to erect such a common power’ is to reduce the individual wills and voices in favour of one will and voice, as well as to confer all individual people’s power and strength upon ‘one Man, or Assembly of men’. In other words, it is necessary, in Hobbes’s parlance, to

appoint one Man, or Assembly of men, to beare their Person; and every one to owne, and acknowledge himselfe to be Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act, or cause to be Acted, in those things which concerne the Common Peace and Safetie; and therein to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and Judgements, to his Judgment.

Hobbes (1943: 89; original spelling)

The above admonition is a call for a political unity of all citizens under a single person, that is, ‘a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person’ (Hobbes, 1943: 89). In return, the sovereign modern state will expect its population to have a sense of shared identity and to remain loyal to this state. Indeed, shared identity and loyalty to one’s own state were strongly advised by Hobbes, who proposed that people not only fix consent or concord, but, rather, pronounce a covenant ‘of every man with every man’ (Henderson, 1998: 61). As a result of such a unanimous covenant of all citizens, a union or a commonwealth is created, termed Leviathan by Hobbes. There is no unique way of referring to Leviathan, due to the fact that Hobbes himself resorts to different descriptive names, for example, person, man, assembly of men, union, commonwealth, and representative. No matter which of these is preferred on a given occasion, Leviathan corresponds to a unitary actor in the international arena, that is, a sovereign state representing and consisting of a multitude of people assembled for a common cause. At this stage, we will not concern ourselves with the postulated equation of Leviathan with ‘a man, an artificial man’ (Chilton, 1996a: 82).

What makes a sovereign actor primarily a state is the fact that, being imbued with sovereignty, a given political entity is geared to have a foreign policy, as noted in Hill (2003: 31). Sovereignty is also ‘the cornerstone of the state system’ for Chilton (2004), who makes the obvious observation that sovereignty does not have a referent in the world, being ‘rather a collection of ideas and practices associated with it’ (Chilton, 2004: 49). Also, sovereignty may be viewed as either a political or a legal concept (Stern, 1998: 78–81). Sovereignty may be subject to hedging, as in ‘de facto sovereignty’, which is applicable to the Republic of China (Taiwan), which, though legally sovereign, enjoys ‘a kind of sovereignty’. Definitely, sovereignty is a graded notion, since a state recognized as sovereign may find it difficult to exercise its sovereign power. That is, although in the eyes of international law a state either has or does not have sovereignty, politically, economically, and culturally some states may be more sovereign, in the sense of being more independent and viable, than others. As we will see later, neither having sovereignty nor conducting foreign policy is a necessary condition for making a given entity a state.

Judging by the growing complexity of interrelations in world affairs today, it is increasingly more appropriate to talk about either many different actors or the degrees of actorness on the world stage. While the assumption of the existence of several actors does not necessarily imply any status differences between their referents, the assumption of the gradation of actorness does. A given political entity may not exercise sovereignty, or even clear identifiability, but still may be capable of making autonomous decisions affecting other international entities (Hill, 2003: 41).

Let us return to our ‘theatre’ metaphor of actorness on the international stage. The major division of international actors is into state-actors and non-state-actors, which shows that the privileged status of statehood forms a critical watershed in actor identification. We will discuss these two groups separately in the latter sections of this chapter. At this point, let us briefly think over the possibilities of the application of the lexical category actor. The lexeme actor has been considered synonymous with state, which is indicative of the fact that the state has traditionally been considered a major player among all international actors. Especially for realists in international politics, who profess the anarchy of the international system, ‘states are the main agents or actors in world politics’, as stated in Bull (2002: 78). However, in an increasingly congested international arena, actor does not have to correspond to state. In a recent account, Kegley and Blanton (2011: 16) define an actor as ‘an individual, group, state, or organization that plays a major role in world politics’. Over two decades earlier, Kegley and Wittkopf (1989: 35) expressed a similar view on what an actor is, by including international organizations, multinational corporations, terrorist groups, and so on.

The term actor can be understood in at least two ways. In a more literal sense, actor can be morphologically analysed as ‘one that acts’, which makes it a subject -er/-or nominalization (for details, see, for example, Marchand, 1969; Bauer, 1983). In a non-literal sense, actor can be understood as ‘someone who performs (a role)’, and that image further necessitates a virtual stage on which fictitious performers act out their roles. In a play casting more than one actor, those in leading roles dominate the centre of the stage, while the others play peripheral roles. For many researchers, the theatre metaphor underlies the language used to describe major agents of the international system (see, for example, Kegley and Wittkopf, 1989: 35).

The metaphorization of actorness possibly has its roots in the conceptualization of the main actors not as abstract entities, but as concrete individuals. Those individuals are most often foreign policy makers who are responsible for making foreign policy decisions. Thus, the actual name used evokes an abstract actor that is conceived of as a decision maker (Hill, 2003: 20). Whether or not the actor’s name leads to the conceptualization of an individual decision maker will be treated as a stipulation at this stage. What remains unquestionable is the fact that there is no one individual that exclusively plays the role of a decision maker. Hill (2003: 53) enumerates several such functionaries, among them the foreign minister (or US Secretary of State), other ministers, and a head of government and/or state. While it is true that there are propositions that individual policy makers personify the state (Hill, 2003: 56, 66), the idea of the personification of the state-actor may also work the other way round (see Chapter 4). It is an abstract political entity (whatever actor) that is thought to assume human traits, and in this way becomes personified.

Quite apart from metaphorization, there has been a strong tendency in rational ap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Language of International Actorness
• 2. The Politicization of Linguistic Research
• 3. Metaphor and Methods of Metaphor Identification
• 4. The Metaphorized Language of IR
• 5. In Search of the ‘State Is a Person’ Metaphor
• 6. The Metonymization of the State
• 7. Semantic Extensions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index