Friendship and International Relations

S. Koschut, A. Oelsner, S. Koschut, A. Oelsner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137396334
• eBook ISBN: 9781137396341
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International friendship is a distinct type of interstate relationship, and that as such, it can contribute to capture aspects of international politics that have long remained unattended. This book offers a framework for analyzing friendship in international politics by presenting a variety of conceptual approaches and empirical cases.

Part I
Introduction

1

A Framework for the Study of International Friendship

Andrea Oelsner and Simon Koschut

In recent years, International Relations (IR) has seen the introduction of more focused research on the concept of friendship in international politics. Indeed, although the term ‘friendship’ has never been absent from IR, its application has been somewhat loose and without a clear definition or systematic analysis. It has often been used to describe non-confrontational or harmonious interstate relations in empirical studies, but studies have fallen short of giving the concept of friendship thorough analytical consideration.¹

This book advocates a more rigorous appraisal and inclusion of the concept of international friendship. In particular, we argue that international friendship is a special relationship within an already highly stable and integrated area that cannot be captured adequately by related IR concepts. This book does not align the concept of friendship with any particular strand of IR theory. Instead, it proposes a conceptual approach for analysing friendship in international politics. In doing so, the book pursues two main objectives.

First, to demonstrate that friendship can be an agent of change in international politics. Not only does international friendship exist, but the process of building and maintaining friendship actually transforms small pockets of the international system by revealing alternative forms of order as well as alternative patterns of interaction among particular actors, which also affect their immediate environment. In this sense, the book deals with international friendship as a political reality and not as a utopian ideal, and thus exposes its transformative nature.

The second objective of this book is to present a diversity of perspectives on international friendship, thus emphasising different ways of locating friendship theoretically and empirically in international politics. International friendship has been a global phenomenon, but its meaning varies according to historical periods, cultural and social contexts, and regional spaces. Where we see it depends largely on how it is conceptualised. In this sense, international friendship is to be understood as a concept with multiple meanings – a diversity this volume seeks to reflect and nourish.

While change and diversity provide the main threads of the book, the purpose of this chapter is to sharpen the ‘fuzzy’ concept of international friendship. It does so by proposing a conceptual and analytical framework, which accommodates the various conceptions of friendship discussed in this book. Since there are many ways to study friendship in IR, this chapter deliberately presents ‘a framework’, rather than ‘the framework’, to categorise and distinguish friendship from other concepts in IR.

The aim of the present chapter is thus to delineate the content of international friendship as a distinct category of interstate relations. In order to do so, the first section begins by locating the concept of friendship in IR. The second section offers a non-philosophical defence of the use and application of the term ‘friendship’ in IR, and the third section moves onto situating international friendship vis-à-vis other IR concepts that appear to be close relatives – the Kantian culture of anarchy, zones of stable peace, and security communities. The fourth section elaborates on the differences between these ‘close relatives’ and international friendship. This is a central issue because it addresses directly the question of what the added value is of talking about friendship in IR as different from what other concepts already offer. To this end, we distinguish between two types of international friendship – strategic and normative – and propose indicators to locate and analyse international friendship. Finally, in the concluding section we summarise the main aspects of international friendship and provide an outline of the structure of this volume.

Mapping friendship in international relations

Friendship has arguably figured as an integral part of IR research as many scholars have made either implicit or explicit use of the concept. In his classic essay, Wolfers (1962) conceptualises relations among states along an amity/enmity continuum. While some states prefer ‘to go it alone’, he identifies a number of friendly relationships where active cooperation and integration have convinced states of ‘going it with others’. Specifically, he distinguishes between friendship that is ‘inward-directed’ and results from a desire to improve relations with others, on the one hand, and friendship that is ‘outward-directed’ and is based on mutual assistance against an external threat, on the other hand. Wolfers’ conceptualisation serves as a reference point for the distinction between strategic and normative friendship developed later in this chapter.

In contemporary IR theory, Constructivism (at least in its conventional shape) has provided perhaps the most sophisticated effort to integrate friendship in the discipline. Wendt’s (1999) inclusion of friendship as a type of anarchical order in international politics may feature most prominently here. Apart from Constructivism, notions of friendship can be also claimed to represent a central element of Democratic Peace theory (Doyle, 1983; Russett, 1993). The perception of reciprocal states as ‘likeminded democracies’ can arguably be linked to the concept of friendship among (liberal) states as opposed to enmity vis-à-vis non-democracies.² The concept of a security community, defined as a group of people and states that have developed a collective identity and mutual trust, can be understood in this way as well (Deutsch et al., 1957; Adler and Barnett, 1998a). Moreover, Boulding (1978, p. 374) explicitly connects ‘stable friendliness’ to the concept of ‘stable peace’. More recently, practice theorists have ascribed the stability of patterns of cooperation and conflict in world politics to ‘straightforward habitual routines of enmity and amity’ based on non-reflective trust and ‘categorizations, or the “typing” of states as friends and enemies’ (Hopf, 2010, pp. 540, 550; Michel, 2012). Even Realists, who tend to be deeply sceptical about the possibility of friendship in international politics, make frequent use of the term for describing an alliance or a system of collective defence (Gartzke and Weisiger, 2013). Morgenthau’s realism, for example, is explicitly based on the Schmittian conception of enemy/friendship relationships as the foundational structure of international politics (Grieco, 1988; Williams, 2004).

If friendship is already such an integral part of IR, then what contribution can this volume make? Despite the several references to friendship in the IR literature, these threads have remained largely disconnected and have generally lacked systematic conceptualisation. As a result, inter-theoretical discourse or scholarly discussion about the concept have mostly been absent, even more so a systematic integration of the study of friendship in IR. This volume provides an intellectual and interdisciplinary platform for friendship scholars to exchange and develop original ideas and break new paths for the study of international politics. More importantly, it hopes to serve as a reference guide by showing the various ways in which friendship exists in and impacts on international politics. The remainder of this section briefly reviews the contemporary state of the art on friendship in IR.

The renewed interest in international friendship ‘as a site and tool for analysis both within the state […] and between states’ (Devere and Smith, 2010, p. 347) has produced increasing scholarship. With regard to friendship between states, research has mostly developed along three lines of enquiry. First, it has been advanced to demonstrate the existence of an epistemological and ontological space for friendship in international politics as well as IR theory (Wendt, 1999; Berenskoetter, 2007; Lu, 2009; Digeser, 2009a; Digeser, 2009b; Schwarzenbach, 2011; Smith, 2011; Koschut, 2012). Among other goals, this work has sought to conceptualise ‘friendship as a meaningful relation among states by providing a rationale for why it exists, what its characteristics are, and how it structures international politics’ (Berenskoetter, 2007, p. 648).

A second line of enquiry has concentrated on the use of the term ‘friendship’ in international treaties and the political discourse of international friendship across various historical periods and regions (Roshchin, 2006, 2011; Devere et al., 2011). Mostly through documentary and archival work, scholars have engaged in discourse analysis to identify the rhetorical role of friendship in international politics throughout history.³ Notably, they have found that the term ‘friendship’ has been present in military pacts and peace treaties, as well as in agreements on trade and colonisation, yet it is argued that its use has been largely instrumental (Devere and Smith, 2010).

The third area of research is centred upon friendship as a category of analysis of international politics. This work seeks to contribute to theory-building through empirical case-study research.⁴ Here, the focus has been on interpersonal bonds between political leaders as well as the institutionalisation of cooperation and trust-building at both the intergovernmental and civil-society levels.⁵ These types of friendship practices have been ‘presented as exemplar of emerging values of solidarity’ (Oelsner and Vion, 2011b, p. 5), and linked to notions of deep-rooted peace (Oelsner, 2007; Vion, 2007; Berenskoetter and Giegerich, 2010; Constantin, 2011; Patsias and Deschênes, 2011; Koschut, 2012). This introductory chapter will focus on the third strand, albeit without the in-depth case study element of previous works.

Defending friendship between states

While in the IR literature the term ‘friendship’ has been widely used – albeit with different degrees of conceptual thoroughness – to refer to friendly or peaceful relations at the international level in general and relations between states in particular, many scholars have preferred to avoid mentioning friendship and instead employ alternative notions. Simon Keller’s (2009) article is the only one we are aware of to make an explicit statement against the use of the term ‘friendship’ to refer to relations between states. The arguments put forward by Keller deserve attention; nonetheless; his open attack on international friendship calls for an open defence of international friendship.

Keller (2009, p. 59) bases his arguments on the assertion that ‘an analogy between interactions between persons and interactions between countries […] is ontologically and ethically dubious. Persons and countries are very different entities, meriting very different kinds of treatment’. Keller (2009, pp. 61–62) finds particularly concerning the fact that

(o)ur talk of friendship between countries makes for one of the cases in which we take language that is straightforwardly applicable to persons and their relationships and import it into discussions of countries and their relationships. We should hence ask two questions about the idea that countries should sometimes be friends. First, is it conceptually legitimate? (Are countries really capable of friendship?) Second, is it morally respectable? (Do we fetishise countries when we regard them as entities that should sometimes participate in friendship?)⁶.

The dangers of over-analogy and moral fetishism highlighted by Keller are not unreasonable, but they are not unavoidable either. To some extent, when the term ‘friendship’ is used in IR, it is used metaphorically because it resembles interpersonal friendship, not because it can be straightforwardly applied to states. It would indeed be difficult to justify the application of ‘friendship’ to the examples that Keller (2009, pp. 65–68) offers in his article, given that he does not use the term as an analogy but instead attempts to transfer directly the same understanding of interpersonal friendship to interstate relations.

However, even if the term used is itself the same, it would not be the first case where meaning varies from everyday language to academic language, or even from one academic discipline to another. As with most other fields of study, IR frequently employs concepts and categories that in other contexts – be these other spheres of daily life or other academic disciplines – mean something completely or slightly different.⁷ In a sense, Keller (2009, p. 71) himself recognises that identical concepts can have distinct contents: ‘when we speak of the virtues of peoples and the virtues of persons we speak about two different phenomena, even if we use the same words’. Therefore, it does not seem too great a risk to agree with Alexander Wendt (1999, p. 298) when he claims that

while it is important to take the problems of anthropomorphism seriously, if scholars are willing to treat states as enemies then it makes no sense to apply a different standard to ‘friend’. For all these reasons, it seems time to begin thinking systematically about the nature and consequences of friendship in international politics.

As long as researchers and scholars remain aware that international and interpersonal friendship belong to the same family of concepts, thus facilitating the analogy but with no actual claim regarding their nature being identical, then it will still be possible to resort to the term ‘international friendship’ as an additional, meaningful category of analysis in international relations. And indeed, as Graham M. Smith (2011, p. 20) points out, ‘the category is useful insofar as it highlights and allows examination of what would otherwise be hidden’. What may turn out to be more problematic, instead, due to the closer links between IR and diplomacy, is the different meaning that more theoretically and analytically inclined writers have ascribed to international friendship vis-à-vis the more instrumental utilisation it has seen in international treaties and pacts (see Chapter 10).

Having established that it is indeed possible to apply the term friendship to international politics, we now move to the more important question of why it is also necessary to analyse international friendship as a separate type of relationship. This will be done by distin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Conceptions
• Part III Practices
• Part IV Conclusion
• Index