Realist International Relations theorists tell us that international politics is about states, power and interest and there is no reason to believe that this is not the case, but one of the founding principles of all the different variants of International Political Theory that will be examined in this book is that this is not the whole story. International politics is also about values and norms, and states are not always the most significant international actors. Another belief of International Relations theorists – this time liberal as well as realist – is that the discipline of International Relations is a twentieth-century construct, generated by the two World Wars. Again practitioners of International Political Theory do not deny that as a university discipline, International Relations emerged after 1918, and re-emerged, revitalised after 1945, but they also hold that thinking about topics that we now call ‘international’ has a long and deep history. Conventional International Relations theorists acknowledge the existence of a few forerunners to their discourse – Thucydides, Machiavelli, perhaps Hobbes and Kant – but International Political Theory draws on a much wider intellectual constellation, including many thinkers who are not obviously ‘international’ as that term has come to be understood in modern times (Brown et al., 2002). To summarise these differences, for International Relations scholars, their discipline is either a sub-field of contemporary Political Science (the dominant American view) or a cross-disciplinary focus informed by history, philosophy and law (the characteristic British view) but for International Political Theory, the study of the international is an exercise in Applied Political Philosophy. Just what kind of an exercise is the subject matter of this book, and this introductory chapter is designed to set the scene for what is to come, expanding these programmatic statements, clearing away some misunderstandings and confusions, and identifying key issues.
The normative framework of international relations
International Political Theory focuses on the normative framework within which international relations takes places. This involves some quite complex ideas but, and this cannot be stressed too often, it also involves getting down and dirty with the messy reality of international politics. There is obviously the potential for disjuncture here between the more high-flown realms of discourse and the very down to earth detail of day-to-day international relations, but part of the task of the international political theorist is not to allow a gap to emerge here, or at least not to allow it to become so wide that it distorts our understanding of either theory or the world. This will sound very abstract to the newcomer to the subject, so in the next few paragraphs one or two illustrations of the ways in which the normative framework of international relations both raises deep questions and impinges on the real world will be offered. In each case the short discussion offered here is a kind of taster for what will come later because all of the topics raised will be considered at much greater depth in later chapters.
Consider first the role of force in international relations – the modern discipline of IR arose from the ashes of the First and Second World Wars so this is an obvious starting point. The use of force is often approached instrumentally – we ask whether a particular tactic will bring about the result we want it to – but it is almost never approached solely from this perspective. There are figures in modern world history who have had a purely instrumental approach to force – in the twentieth century Hitler, Stalin, Mao – but they are rarely seen as appropriate role models. Rather, most people – statesmen and women, soldiers, citizens – want to think that when force is applied it is done so for good reason, and in an appropriate way, and there is a body of philosophical literature that addresses precisely the question of what constitutes a ‘good’ reason and what is an ‘appropriate’ way. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Jews have their own traditions to fall back on, but in the European West that body of literature revolves around the notion of ‘Just War’ and is deeply rooted in both Medieval Christian and modern secular thought. The categories of Just War thinking were established centuries ago by figures such as Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and have been adopted and sometimes transformed by modern international lawyers and political philosophers and part of the task of International Political Theory is to grasp these categories in all their philosophical depth. However, this would be an arid exercise if these categories, and the wisdom that has gone into developing them over the centuries, are not put to work in examining contemporary uses of force. We need to be able to relate such notions as ‘just cause’, ‘right intention’ and ‘proportionality’ to decisions which have been made, and have to be made, on the conflicts of our age. We need to find a way to work from the thought of Thomas Aquinas on the one hand to the decision by President Obama to employ pilotless drones to carry out targeted killings in the Yemen on the other. If we don't have anything to say about drone warfare then we will have failed in one way, but if what we have to say could have been said in an op-ed piece without being informed by the philosophical discourse then we will have failed in a different way. International Political Theory is an exercise in applied political philosophy and all three words are important.
For a second example, consider the issue of global social justice. For political philosophers, social justice is a topic that has never disappeared from view, and in the modern era one work, A Theory of Justice (1970) by John Rawls has dominated thinking on the subject. Rawls actually developed his theory in the context of bounded societies which were assumed for the purposes of the theory to be self-contained, but most theorists who have approached the subject since Rawls have regarded this as a strange, indeed perverse, way of approaching the subject, and many ‘Post-Rawlsian’ theorists have produced quite complex notions of global social justice, as will be explored later in this book. Some advocate quite dramatic changes in the global international economic order, others look to a change in the behaviour of individuals, arguing that large-scale transfers of wealth from the global rich to the global poor are required. The arguments presented by these political philosophers are sometimes simple, sometimes complex and often are counter-intuitive and require a genuine change in the way we think about the world – and this is good, because part of the purpose of any exercise in political philosophy ought to be precisely to unsettle established patters of thought. However, again, this would be an arid exercise if the work of these thinkers were not to be related very closely to the kind of campaigns for social justice that are conducted in the real world. Proposals to ‘Make Poverty History’ need to be related to the academic debates on global social justice, and criticised (and perhaps supported) from the perspective of these debates. Celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof and various other UN Special Ambassadors can make particular causes fashionable and, others, by means of omission, unfashionable, and one of the important tasks for International Political Theorists is to subject their thinking to the same kind of critique that is called for by, to take the above example, the US decisions on drone warfare. Looked at another way, when we write of the normative framework of international politics we are concerned not just with state behaviour but with the ways in which civil society groups promote particular normative positions, and we are not simply concerned with the ‘high politics’ of war and peace but also with the ‘low’ politics of e.g. AIDS prevention in Africa. These are themes that will be addressed in the main body of the book, but also explored in detail in the Further Reading sections.
International Political Theory, International Ethics and Normative IR Theory
Having attempted to make these connections between International Political Theory and the world of political action, it is now necessary to step back somewhat and examine a rather more abstract issue, that of nomenclature. The phrase International Political Theory employed in the preceding paragraphs is only one way of describing the subject matter of this book. Alternatives that are widely employed in the literature include ‘International Ethics’ and ‘Normative International Relations Theory’ and before getting down to more important matters it may be worth explaining why these terms are not employed widely here. This may seem pedantic, but terminology is important; the words we use have connotations in ordinary language which may be misleading and so it is important to get things straight from the outset.
‘International Ethics’, or variants thereof such as ‘Ethics and International Relations’, is a formulation that is quite widely used in book titles and – perhaps especially in the United States – in the context of university courses on such subjects as ‘The Ethics of Foreign Policy’. It also has the cachet of contributing to the title of a very important think-tank and policy institute The Carnegie Council for Ethics & International Affairs. The Council, which among its many activities publishes the key journal Ethics & International Affairs, is a very important resource for international political theorists, with the same kind of significance for the subject that the US Council on Foreign Relations or the British Royal Institute of International Affairs (‘Chatham House’) has for the study of foreign policy. So why is International Ethics unsatisfactory as a way of summarising the field?
The danger here is that an emphasis on ethics – at least as the term is understood nowadays – is rather limiting. Ethics is about shaping moral conduct, distinguishing right from wrong and, while it is good that we should think of such matters in an international context, this is too restrictive an account of what International Political Theory has to offer. More important, there is a danger that defining the subject matter in ethical terms will lead to the error of confusing analysis with advocacy. Scholars may sometimes choose to act as ‘norm entrepreneurs’ promoting a particular vision of how the world should be, but such an activity is, or ought to be, secondary to the task of analysing norms, discerning how they work and what effect normative change will have. To confuse the two distinct roles is potentially dangerous in so far as the tendency will be to take the wish for the deed. Such was the error of those Inter-War scholars who later came to be identified, somewhat unfairly, as ‘idealists’ or ‘utopians’ (Long and Wilson, 1995). They wanted to bring about a world governed by the rule of law and principles of justice, which is, of course, commendable, but they sometimes fell into the trap of behaving as though such a world already existed, which it does not. Because international political theorists are actually and necessarily concerned with norms, it is particularly important that they do not fall into this trap, even if, at times, the result is that they will seem not to be responding adequately to the bad things that go on in the world. The key point is that there is a difference between being a scholar and being an advocate. This may seem rather abstract and an illustration of the point may be helpful.
As will be considered at some length in Chapters 7 and 8, humanitarian intervention, that is an intervention by one or more states into the domestic affairs of another for ostensibly humanitarian reasons, is a deeply contested notion. In 2001 an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty produced a report entitled ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ (sometimes summarised as R2P) which was designed to find a non-contentious pathway through the thicket of issues that surround the idea of humanitarian intervention, a pathway that was partially adopted in the World Outcome Summit Document adopted by the UN General Assembly in the Autumn of 2005. A Co-Chair of the Commission was the Australian statesman Gareth Evans who became a major advocate for the ideas it contained and in 2008 produced a comprehensive book on the subject, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All. The Queensland-based journal Global Responsibility to Protect invited three academics – Michael Barnett, Robert Jackson and the current writer – to contribute short essays on the book, to which Evans would reply (see Vol. 2, No. 3, 307–27). Of the three academics, Michael Barnett is a regular co-author with Thomas Weiss, one of the academic authors of the ICISS Report, and gave a sympathetic review of the book, Robert Jackson is a leading English School ‘pluralist’ (on which see Chapter 3) and was predictably hostile while the present author produced an essay that was sympathetic to the aims of R2P but critical of the delivery mechanism. As one might expect, Gareth Evans was favourably disposed towards Barnett, hostile to Jackson and, to a lesser extent to Brown, but what is of interest in the present context is the tone of exasperation in his response. Clearly, the way he saw it was that his book was dedicated to ‘ending mass atrocity crimes once and for all’, a noble aim that his interlocutors, even the sympathetic Barnett, were responding to inappropriately by raising concerns that he regarded as ‘academic’ in the pejorative sense of the term. In this we can see the difference between advocacy and analysis – and the case is made more interesting by the fact that, before he became Attorney General and later Foreign Minister in governments formed by the Australian Labour Party, Evans was himself an academic lawyer; the point is he had himself changed his role from analyst to advocate whereas the three academics in question had stayed on their side of the fence that exists between these two vocations.
To return to the wider point of this story, the term ‘international ethics’ with its inevitable emphasis on morality, ‘doing the right thing’ and distinguishing between right and wrong encourages the scholar to become a moralist. Since we all have tendencies in that direction, anything that pushes us that way needs to be resisted. Turning to the next alternative to International Political Theory, ‘Normative International Relations Theory’ does not have quite so moralising a connotation as International Ethics (although it does tend in that direction) and it also features in book titles including, rather embarrassingly given the current argument, as a sub-title to the first book on the subject by the present author, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (1992). International Political Theory is certainly concerned with norms, so on the face of it ‘normative theory’ sounds as though it is helpfully descriptive. What's the problem?
In order to explain why the term ‘normative’ is actually unhelpful it is necessary to shift focus somewhat and look at the term ‘theory’, which, in the social sciences is understood in a number of different ways. The original Greek meaning of the term theory (theoria) involved contemplation and reflection and was contrasted with practice (praxis) which involved doing something; in the modern (natural) sciences a theory is a set of well-substantiated propositions about the world which have been tested and, for the time being, are considered to be true. These propositions take the form of law-like statements linking one set of observations (variables) with another, thus they involve propositions such as ‘if “x” (the independent variable or, loosely, cause) and “a”, “b”, “n” (intervening variables) then “y” (the dependent variable or, loosely, effect)’. A great deal of ink has been spilled on the subject of whether this formulation can also be applied to the social sciences.
One very influential answer to this question was offered by the economist Milton Friedman in a 1953 essay ‘The methodology of positive economics’, which draws on the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements probably best set out by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume in the eighteenth century (Friedman, 1966 [1953]; Hume 1739/1985). Friedman distinguishes positive economics, which he believes tells us how things actually are, from normative economics, which purports to tell us how things should be. Thus, to take a famous albeit simplistic example, the Phillips Curve was an exercise in positive economics which attempted to explain the relationship between the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment in a society – essentially lower unemployment was associated with higher inflation. If the curve is accurately described (which nowadays is doubtful, but that's irrelevant in this context) it should be possible to predict the level of employment associated with any particular inflation rate – this is positive economics, but what it cannot tell us is which particular combination of the two variables is desirable; that, according to Friedman's distinction, is a matter for normative economics. It is not something that can be decided by a fact-based calculation because whatever combination is chosen there will be winners and losers and deciding whether to punish savers with high levels of inflation, or disadvantage job seekers with low levels, is a policy decision that reflects values not analysis.
On the face of it, this positive/normative distinction seems very useful, and has in fact been adopted by many non-economists, including scholars of International Relations, and including those scholars who engage in what they call normative International Relations theory. So, again, what's the problem? In fact there are two problems, one concerned with the philosophy of the social sciences, the other with the sociology of academic disciplines. To take the latter point first because it is less important, for many social scientists, including Friedman, and for most mainstream International Relations scholars, although both positive and normative theory are, in principle, seen as legi...
