Hybridisation of Political Order and Contemporary Revisionism

Nik Hynek, Vít Střítecký

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000630244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume argues that contemporary political and security revisionism should not be considered a homogenous attack against the international order but rather a bag of tailor-made strategies to exploit opportunities found in various, highly localised contexts.

Scholars with backgrounds in Security Studies, Area Studies, International Relations and Political Theory are brought to examine revisionist tendencies in Central Eastern Europe, Post-Soviet Space, China and the Transatlantic Space. In doing so, they try to remedy the existing disciplinary separatism, or 'policing', which has obfuscated any theorisation of the connections between international and domestic politics for many decades. Part of the analytical focus is on novel phenomena, especially the utilization of cyberspace and new social media and technological innovation. One of the conclusions of this volume is that the rise in contemporary revisionism shows the oft-forgotten importance of the first image of international politics: political leaders, in other words, do indeed matter. The fact that they matter is only reinforced when they represent regional or even great powers, and especially revisionist regimes and states with the propensity to produce complex effects.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Europe-Asia Studies.

Contemporary Revisionism in the Multilayered Political Order: Operationalisation, Techno-Social Conditions, Dilemmas

Nik Hynek & Aleš Karmazin

Abstract

In opening this special issue, our conceptual essay reclaims the importance of revisionism for regional analysis. It identifies and offers key conceptual and analytical tools for a multifaceted analysis of revisionism, discussing its various forms in relation to the aims and risk propensity of a given country. As a transdisciplinary and theoretical eclecticism, dilemma analysis is utilised to bridge the divide between political science, international relations, and security studies. To ascertain the extent of revisionism, we offer and operationalise six dilemmas seen as central for grasping its contemporary parameters: political order, political regimes, technology, migration, the economy, and the international system.

In conceptually opening this special issue, our essay strives to bring together insights on revisionism, regionalism, and international political order, including its technological, socio-cultural, and economic conditions. The notion of ‘revisionism’ has been known to scholars for a long time. While there were older renderings of revisionism, especially linked to nineteenth-century geopolitics (Asworth 2011), many of the original discussions took place within the formative years of political realism. Edward Hallett Carr (2001) wrote about the difference between satisfied and dissatisfied powers, and Hans Morgenthau (1948) distinguished between status quo and imperialistic powers. Henry Kissinger (1957) made a distinction between status quo and revolutionary powers, whereas Arnold Wolfers (1962) pointed out the differences between the featured categories of status quo and revisionist states. In Wolfer’s (1962, p. 18) own words, the underpinning condition for revisionism originates in the idea that the state is ‘denied the enjoyment of any of its national core values’. In addition, the existing empirical material that documented the Cold War period produced yet another meaning attributed to revisionism. This time, the notion was not used to highlight the orientation of a country towards the security system or one of its parts but came to indicate a specific interpretation of the entire period. Revisionism and post-revisionism became allusions to specific schools of historiographic thought, also known as ‘new history’ (Williams 1959).

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding for this work from Charles University, Prague, UNCE project ‘Human/Machine Nexus and Implications for the International Order’ (UNCE/HUM/037).

The leading voice analysing contemporary security revisionism has been Randal Schweller, who has correctly noted the lack of attention given to states’ revisionist security considerations in the existing literature. As he makes clear, states should be understood as power-maximisers, balancing their interests, rather than security-maximisers (contra structural realism). While ‘the goal of revisionist states fits the neoliberal view of states as rational egoists’, they do so, ‘however, for very different reasons than those put forth by the neoliberal school’ (Schweller 1996, pp. 113–14). Combining Burke, Carr, and Kissinger’s discussion and using it to conceptualise the extent of states’ revisionist aims, Schweller (2015) makes a distinction between ‘limited-aim revisionists’ and ‘unlimited aims revisionists/revolutionary powers’. His key contribution is therefore situated in the combination of the above with states’ degree of ‘risk propensity’. As Schweller explains:

Risk-averse, limited-aims revisionists are opportunistic expanders that generally seek regional dominance. By contrast, risk-acceptant, limited-aims revisionists, aside from being more reckless in their strategies for gains, tend to have more ambitious aims than do their risk-averse counterparts; and, related to this, they often advance prestige demands as well as territorial ones. Moreover, risk-acceptant, limited-aims revisionists are typically more dissatisfied with the status quo order than are their risk-averse counterparts; that is, they tend to place less value on their current possessions than do the latter, and so their strategic plans for change exhibit shorter time horizons than those of risk-averse, limited-aims revisionist states. (Schweller 2015, p. 10)

Schweller primarily considers risk propensity and its relationship to revisionism a state attribute. Nevertheless, he allows for ‘focus on elite risk-taking propensity’ (Schweller 2004, p. 161), as represented by the three analysed heads of states in our essay. While the bridge between the two levels of analysis is provided by a neoclassical realist theoretical frame for Schweller, the literature on foreign policy analysis can arguably be utilised to further reinforce the connection (Haas 2001; Barkin 2009; Lobell et al. 2009). As we argue, the difference in risk-acceptance within the limited-revisionist category nicely assists one to understand the difference between contemporary Russia as a risk-acceptant, limited-aims revisionist state and China as a risk-averse specimen within the same category. The United States under President Donald Trump does not fit neatly as the country has long been the principal guarantor, both systemically and ideologically, of the international order’s status quo, a champion of what Ruggie (1982) termed ‘embedded liberalism’. Trump’s frenetic unmaking of some of the constitutive principles of the global liberal order deeply compromised the US embedded liberalism, as laid down by the United States and its allies after World War II. The United States can therefore be understood as a hybrid: a structurally embedded status quo power characterised by notable, erratic, risk-taking and possibly unlimited-aims revisionist behaviour under the current president. Unlike Schweller (2015), who argued that the United States could be understood as ‘the true revisionist power’ under George W. Bush due to his offensive-realist doctrine, we do not go this far since Trump may be remembered in history books as an episodic political aberration, the mercurial product of a deeply divided and informationally confused country. However, the discussion of leaders ought to be understood as complementing the analysis of the more general features of the international/regional order as well as the strategies of other states (Ikenberry 2016, p. 26).

We also take note of two very recent works on contemporary revisionism (Goddard 2018; Cooley et al. 2019). Both conceptualise and classify revisionist countries in relation to their international position or orientation. Neither of them, however, scrutinises domestic structures. While these works are interesting, we believe it is impossible to grasp contemporary revisionism in its multiple forms without analysing domestic conditions. To mention but one consequence, such ignorance obfuscating the nexus between domestic and international realms leads to a failure to appreciate the relationship between international revisionism and domestic populism. Cooley, Nexon and Ward’s distinction between various revisionisms based on what countries aspire to achieve vis-à-vis the principles of international order and Goddard’s focus on a revisionist orientation according to a given state’s position in international networks require, or at the very least benefit from, the formation (and preservation) of a specific worldview in domestic politics. The changing character of governance is a fundamental reason underlying the magnified importance of domestic dynamics.

Bringing regionalism back in

For the reasons highlighted above, namely the need to interconnect multiple levels of analysis to fully comprehend the parameters of contemporary revisionism, we wish to bring the insights of social scientific theorisation and institutions-centred regionalism back to the analysis. The objective is thus to contribute to the modern and dynamic rendering of area studies (Fawn & Larkins 1996; Fawn 2009). Specifically, this essay attempts to unpack the conceptual contours and security connotations of revisionism to comprehend and explain its importance in the creation and maintenance of regional and sub-regional security orders. The empirical focus is on Western Europe, Central Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states, Russia, the United States, Turkey, Central Asia, and China. Much of the global security revisionism is linked to contemporary Russian revisionism both in domestic politics and the country’s foreign and security policy, including blurring of the border between the two. To the dismay of defenders of liberal internationalism, China and the United States under their current presidents, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, have been playing, respectively, a catch-up and tit-for-tat game with the Russians concerning who, inter alia, can harm the Bretton Woods bedrock more seriously. The Russian leadership, wrapped around the personal cult of Vladimir Putin, has posed the greatest challenge to the systemic—both constitutive and regulative—features and institutions of the international political order and its (sub-)regional modalities.

The geographically delimited regional focus outlined above is where our interest lies. Such regional orders can be specified as ‘the governing arrangements among the units of a regional system, including their rules, principles and institutions, which are designed to make security-related interactions predictable and to sustain collectively salient goals and values’ (Stewart-Ingersoll & Frazier 2012, p. 20). Regional orders and their analysis allow one to extend the first—and in the realist form, largely binary/dyadic—understanding of revisionism. Simultaneously, we avoid the normative debate linked to the orientation of Cold War historiography. Revisionism is tackled as a politico-security orientation towards a given (sub-)system. Revisionist powers can therefore be studied in terms of their dissatisfaction with the distribution of power and goods, and their support for changing systemic rules (Stewart-Ingersoll & Frazier 2012, p. 158). Regional integration, of which formal institutionalisation is an important (albeit not necessary) manifestation, has been of interest to both international relations and international political economy scholars who have tried to explain the proliferation of regional institutions across the globe since World War II.

According to Risse (2016), ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Political Revisionism: Old and New
• 1 Contemporary Revisionism in the Multilayered Political Order: Operationalisation, Techno-Social Conditions, Dilemmas
• 2 Russian, US and Chinese Revisionism: Bridging Domestic and Great Power Politics
• 3 Russian Revisionism, Legal Discourse and the ‘Rules-Based’ International Order
• 4 Between Pastiche and Sampling: NATO’s Strategic Adaptation to Russian Revisionism
• 5 Building a Multiple ‘Security Shelter’ in the Baltic States after EU and NATO Accession
• 6 Accommodating Revisionism through Balancing Regionalism: The Case of Central Asia
• 7 The Perils of Path Dependency: Germany’s Russia Policy
• 8 From Revolution to ‘Counter-Revolution’: Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 30 Years On
• Index