The Consequences of Humiliation

Anger and Status in World Politics

Joslyn Trager Barnhart

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501748042
• eBook ISBN: 9781501748684
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Consequences of Humiliation explores the nature of national humiliation and its impact on foreign policy. Joslyn Barnhart demonstrates that Germany's catastrophic reaction to humiliation at the end of World War I is part of a broader pattern: states that experience humiliating events are more likely to engage in international aggression aimed at restoring the state's image in its own eyes and in the eyes of others.

Barnhart shows that these states also pursue conquest, intervene in the affairs of other states, engage in diplomatic hostility and verbal discord, and pursue advanced weaponry and other symbols of national resurgence at higher rates than non-humiliated states in similar foreign policy contexts. Her examination of how national humiliation functions at the individual level explores leaders' domestic incentives to evoke a sense of national humiliation. As a result of humiliation on this level, the effects may persist for decades, if not centuries, following the original humiliating event.

1

National Failure and International Disregard

National humiliation can arise in response to a wide variety of events. Defeat is an oft-cited source of humiliation as are post-war treaties like the Treaty of Versailles, which has become virtually synonymous with national humiliation. Yet not all defeats or treaties humiliate to the same degree. The Six-Day War and the First Italo-Ethiopian War are frequently referred to as sources of deep humiliation for the defeated Arab states and for Italy while other instances of defeat, like the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882, are less often cited as causes of humiliation for the defeated state. Similarly, the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki is rarely invoked without reference to its humiliating effects while other treaties, such as The Potsdam Agreement at the end of World War II, are less often blamed for inciting national humiliation.

This chapter characterizes the features of the international events that are likely to arouse the deepest forms of national humiliation and are therefore the most likely to significantly affect world affairs. These events can assume two general forms: 1) those in which a state fails to perform in accordance with its status and 2) those in which a state is attributed fewer rights and privileges than expected. Though seemingly distinct in nature, events of both types engender the two key characteristic features of humiliation: a sense of other-directed outrage and a sense of self-doubt and impotence.

Definitions

The last chapter defined humiliation as the emotional response to the perceived undeserved decline of one’s status in the eyes of others. To develop a clearer understanding of the nature of humiliation, it is useful to distinguish this emotional response from the similar negative emotional states of anger, shame, and embarrassment. Like anger, humiliation involves a strong sense of other-directed outrage at the party deemed responsible for treating one unfairly.¹ Humiliation is distinct from anger in that anger is associated with a sense of empowerment and authority, whereas humiliation melds outrage with a sense of powerlessness that stems from one’s inability to defend against injustice. Humiliation is like shame in that both emotions involve the internalization of a lowered estimation of the self.² Those who feel shame believe that they deserve their inferior position. Humiliated actors, by contrast, believe that the threat to their status is undeserved and unjust.

Humiliation is thought to differ from embarrassment by a matter of degree. Embarrassment attaches to more superficial experiences, which are unlikely to have long-term effects on self-image, while humiliation involves a deeper sense of mortification at the prolonged loss of one’s self-esteem and status.³ Of all negative emotional states, social threat and humiliation have been shown to have some of the most deleterious physiological and psychological effects. Status threat has been shown to lead to high blood pressure, elevated levels of cortisol, and to increased harm to the cardiovascular, autonomic, endocrine, and immune systems.⁴ These negative physiological effects are conjoined with negative self-evaluations and lowered self-esteem that can persist over long periods.

Two related and important features of humiliation are directly implied by the definition. First, because humiliation resides in subjective experience, actors do not need confirmation that an event has eroded their social image to perceive the event as humiliating. They need only fear erosion of their social position as a likely repercussion of the event and to perceive this erosion as unjust. Second, the intention to humiliate is not necessary for others to arrive at the perception that they have been unjustly demeaned.⁵ Actors who feel they have been wronged may erroneously assign negative intention to others. Moreover, actors that fail to live up to social expectations in ways that threaten their status may blame others for their failure. Such actors likely fear the decline of their image in the eyes of others and themselves just as do actors who are intentionally victimized.

As the definition of humiliation conveys, humiliation and status are intertwined. “Status” refers to one’s position vis-à-vis a comparison group.⁶ While one maintains expectations about the status they think they should hold, the amount of status an actor ultimately holds resides in the perceptions of others. These perceptions are shaped in part by estimations of how an actor’s characteristics rank relative to others but also by estimations of how other actors estimate the actor’s relative ranking.⁷ Collective and intersubjective perceptions of status inform patterns of deference and expectations of behavior and rights.⁸ It is important to note that the effects of humiliation are not limited to concerns about what others think of us. Humiliating events have significant implications on how actors see themselves.⁹ Even though humiliated actors do not believe they deserve inferior treatment, they experience a loss of self-esteem associated with the perception that they have been unable to prevent others from degrading their image.

National Humiliation and Status

How do we extrapolate from this discussion of humiliation at the individual level to humiliation felt at the level of the state? Humiliation at the individual level arises in response to perceived undeserved threats to one’s own status while national humiliation emerges in reaction to perceived undeserved threats to the status of one’s state. What then constitutes an undeserved threat to the status of a state? The answer to this question stems directly from the nature of international status and its relationship to humiliation.

High international status commonly has been attributed to those states that possess distinctive military, economic, technological, and organizational capacities and that use these material capacities in service of an assertive foreign policy intended to promote a state’s interests in far-flung regions.¹⁰ Because precise estimations of the relative degree to which states possess a composite of such diverse characteristics are difficult to form, however, status estimations are also based on one’s beliefs about others’ beliefs about the status that each state should hold.¹¹ Beliefs about others’ estimations of a state’s rightful position are shaped by the amount of influence other states bestow on the state in question. Acknowledging that a state is deserving of the rights and privileges it expects to hold signals to others that you find the state to be worthy of its desired status. This signal may, in turn, shape what others perceive to be the rightful privileges of the state.

A state’s status is secured when two sets of expectations are met. The first set of expectations, held by the international community, involves how states of a particular status are expected to behave on the world stage and the characteristics they are expected to embody. High status states, for instance, are typically expected to succeed in military contests against lower status actors and to project more influence and power abroad. The second set of expectations, held by each individual state, involves the rights, privileges, and influence they expect to hold as a function of their expected status.¹²

States are likely to perceive an unjust challenge to their status when either of these two sets of expectations is not met. First, a state may fail to perform as would be expected of a state of its desired status. The failure to perform as expected given one’s perceived status threatens to generate the common perception that the state lacks the capacities needed to distinguish itself from lower status states and that the state does not deserve the status it has held. The failure to meet the expectations associated with one’s status threatens to generate common knowledge that the state lacks the capacities needed to distinguish itself from lower status states. The resulting threat to the state’s status evokes self-doubt as well as other-directed outrage. Why the latter? As Van Evera puts it, states confronting painful national circumstances will be “ ‘more willing to believe that others are responsible” for these public failings than they will be to accept blame for the failure of the state.¹³ The acceptance of blame forces reconciliation with lower status expectations and inferiority. State elites also have a clear domestic incentive to generate a national narrative that shifts blame to outside parties and triggers a sense of outrage directed at those seen to have been responsible for or to have profited from one’s failure.

Second, a state is likely to perceive an undeserved threat to its status if other states fail to acknowledge the rights and privileges the state expects to hold as a function of its status. For instance, lower status states may expect the respect of only those states’ rights that are codified within international law—the right to sovereignty, to bear arms, and to defend one’s waterways and airspace.¹⁴ Higher status states, by contrast, expect to exercise a set of privileges, or unique sets of rights attached to different strata of regional or global status hierarchies, without challenge.¹⁵ Great powers expect the right to maintain an uncontested sphere of influence within their geographic region and beyond, the right to disproportionate influence within international institutions, and the right to more deferential diplomatic treatment.¹⁶ Regional powers may expect similar privileges but on a more local scale.¹⁷

States that do not receive the rights and privileges they believe they deserve confront the non-recognition of their status. As Honneth notes, rights represent social standing.¹⁸ The respect and recognition of another’s rights are important because they represent the implicit acceptance of an actor’s rank.¹⁹ The denial of another’s rights deprecates the status of the other and is, by definition, humiliating. It also threatens the state’s status by shaping the beliefs of others about the status the state should rightfully hold. Failure to recognize another’s rights and privileges or to sufficiently attend to the state’s interests presents an image of the state on the world stage as inferior and weak.

Like instances of state failure, a lack of acknowledgment by others can lead to an internalization of a sense of impotence, which stems from the state’s inability to successfully demand the recognition it believes it deserves. Perhaps even more so than acts of state failure, disrespectful acts have the power to create a sense of injustice accompanied by outrage directed at the state responsible for one’s humiliation. Indeed, in cases in which an instance of disrespect is not accompanied by material loss or political instability, it is likely that the sense of inefficacy induced by acts of disrespect will be relatively short-lived and that humiliation will quickly morph into anger and soon thereafter be followed by confident acts of assertiveness.

This discussion begs the question of how states form collective beliefs about their rightful position within regional and global hierarchies. These beliefs are rooted in the state’s national identity, which is constituted by a set of ideas accepted by a majority within the state that define “what the collectivity is and the general rules under which it operates.”²⁰ I argue that national identity and collective status expectations are based primarily on the relative capabilities of the state and the state’s historical status, but also in part on the domestic political rhetoric of elites. States form subjective estimates of how they compare to other states on measurable status dimensions such as demography, military capabilities, and economic productivity. These estimations provide states with a baseline expectation of the standing they believe they deserve in the international hierarchy.²¹

In addition, identity and status expectations stem from temporal comparisons made with the state’s own historical status.²² National narratives about the state’s past greatness and accomplishments can instill a sense of national pride leading states that once held high status to seek it again in the future.²³ Negative estimations of the current status of the state with historic peaks in the past can also negatively impact collective self-esteem. States that once held high status states will want to stabilize their identity and to erase the resulting damages to self-esteem by restoring their image in the eyes of others. Those states will be reluctant to fully relinquish their claims to that high status if they believe their decline has been the result of injustices by others. It is typically only after repeated failures or the substantial and seemingly permanent decline in relative resources that national conceptions are restructured around lower status identities.²⁴

Finally, domestic elites can play some role in shaping collective status expectations and the national identity of the state. Elites may hold divergent ideas about appropriate national identity and may often self-consciously attempt to shape collective ideas and national narratives about the status that the state should hold and thus about how the state should be treated by others. These ideas often compete for dominance within domestic political discourse.²⁵ I argue that the degree to which leaders can shape the status expectations of the state is constrained by the state’s relative capabilities and historical status. It is unlikely that leaders will seek to shape national identity around great power status in states with few material resources and without a model of past national grandeur to build on.

Before turning to the conditions under which international events are likely to induce the greatest degree of humiliation, it is important to highlight that not all status decline will arouse intense humiliation. Some transitions within status hierarchies come in the form of the slow and gradual accretion or decline of relative capabilities and international influence. For example, the scale of China’s recent economic growth has in many ways been historically unprecedented, but talk of China’s (re)emergence as a great power has been ongoing for decades, prompted significantly by the gradual rise in the size of the Chinese population. Another example is the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, which occurred abruptly at the end of World War I, though the empire had arguably been experiencing a slow decline for centuries. States that have experienced repeated instances of internal and external failure or defeat may, over time, be forced to downgrade their status expectations. Less and less will they perceive each additional failure as an undeserved and inaccurate reflection of their rightful status. The declining state can often adapt to such gradual shifts without dramatic or violent state action.

By contrast, threats to social standing that come in the form of one-time sudden shocks, ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. National Failure and International Disregard
• 2. Withdrawal, Opposition, and Aggression
• 3. National Humiliation at the Individual Level
• 4. The Cross-National Consequences of Humiliating International Events
• 5. Soothing Wounded Vanity: French and German Expansion in Africa from 1882 to 1885
• 6. “Our Honeymoon with the U.S. Came to an End”: Soviet Humiliation at the Height of the Cold War
• Conclusion: The Attenuation and Prevention of National Humiliation
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index