Emancipatory International Relations

Roger D. Spegele

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317665137
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politik

International relations theory is witnessing a veritable explosion of works within the areas of modernism and postmodernism, yet there has been no attempt to compare these theories and their sources according to a common criterion or logical form. This author argues that while these pioneering, imaginative and exciting theoretical works are disparate, they also share a common thread that seeks to express emancipatory goals for international relations.

This book provides an in-depth critical study of this genre of theorizing that he names 'Emancipatory International Relations'. Spegele develops a framework to help the reader understand both the differences and commonalities in modernist and postmodernist emancipatory thinking in International Relations. He critically analyzes modernist theories, discourses, narratives and postmodernist theory and practice, feminist emancipatory discourses and postmodernist international discourse and concludes by examining the coherence, viability and plausibility of emancipatory discourses in international relations whether modernist or postmodernist.

This challenging and innovative volume will be of interest to students and researchers of international relations.

1 Emancipatory international relations A first cut

DOI: 10.4324/9781315768007-1

I see no reason why we should not be business-like about the nebulous.

Anonymous

1 Introduction

In the study of international relations there has long been a deep division between naturalist and emancipatory approaches to the study of global politics. The naturalist tradition which has dominated the American approach since the early twentieth century assumes that one can, and should, study international relations by emulating as far as possible the way science in general is studied. It focuses on describing and analysing the world of international politics in an ‘objective’ fashion. Although this approach now dominates the study of international relations, there is an older tradition based in European political theory that sees emancipation as the main purpose of such study. I define emancipatory international relations (EIR) as any theory, discourse, paradigm or approach which claims that the principal grounds for studying international relations is not to explain or predict events, search for laws or confirm or disconfirm hypotheses, as in competing naturalistic conceptions of the subject, but rather to radically transform, transfigure or liberate the political communities in which we live; that is, that our interest in international relations lies in its potential for liberating individuals, groups and peoples from structures or conditions that hinder them from actualizing freedom in thought and in practice.

Although the very idea of ‘an emancipatory international relations’ may strike some people as liberating and even perhaps indispensable to reforming the discipline, to others it may seem woolly, utopian and ‘idealist’ in the pejorative sense of that overused word. This book does not aim to endorse any of these caricatures but, rather, in seeking a more perspicuous view of what EIR consists of from a position only partially external to it, it hopes to show EIR’s intrinsic value, attractiveness and (possible) validity as an alter-native to the more naturalistic, proto-scientific styles of thinking discernible, for example, in rationalism (neo-realism and neo-liberalism) and some forms of social constructivism. ¹

On the other hand, this book accepts the challenge that, notwithstanding certain conceptual advantages of EIR vis-à-vis naturalistic styles of thinking in international relations, its proponents have not yet provided a sufficiently transparent account of what it consists of and, more importantly, how EIR differs from alternative worldviews and in particular from the naturalistic style of thinking still dominant in the United States. In this chapter, and elsewhere throughout this study, I will attempt to fill this lacuna and indicate some of the advantages that accrue to international relations theorists when they widen the gyre of their fundamental thoughts about the subject by being open to these different ways of approaching it. In attempting to provide a clearer view of EIR, I will argue that an indefinitely large range of EIR theory has a common logical form and that, notwithstanding the drawbacks of distorting special theories by using that form, the advantages in helping us to grasp some of the initial features of these quite disparate theories (approaches, paradigms, perspectives, conceptions, and so on) counsel its cautious deployment. To be sure, there will probably always be proponents of special theories who will complain that a procrustean bed has been used to fit their favoured theories into a pre-established mould, an activity, it will be said, that effectively bowdlerizes them to the point of unrecognizability. But to this complaint the appropriate response comes from John Dewey’s maxim that whatever shapes methodological speculation should not hinder inquiry. At a time when international relations seems to be an invitation to the privilege of saying what it consists of, there is urgency in the task of generalizing, clarifying and analyzing this exciting, but nonetheless problematic, genre of international relations theorizing with whatever tools and concepts we have available, even where this risks distortion.

Now, EIR is an attractive and appealing form of theorizing. Even those innocent of philosophy or theory will, I believe, be subjected to its allure. EIR’s appeal is virtually self-evident since its two central features, freedom and equality, have a tenacious hold on our intuitive sense of what an ideal international relations should be about, made all the more attractive by the pressing need to explore alternative ways of alleviating the misery and suffering of those around us. The freedom aspect is redolent in its etymology, the equality feature arises from intellectual history, and both of them come together in the philosophy shaped by Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment ideas he advanced.

In early Roman society ‘emancipation’ referred to the freeing of male children from the paternal jurisdiction of their father by granting manumission to a son. It was also used to refer to the freeing of a slave belonging to a master’s patrimonium or mancipium. The central idea of political activities designed to free an enslaved individual or group of individuals from a condition, structure or obstacle is a decisively important part of what is intended in referring to any international relations’ theory as ‘emancipatory’. It already resonates to a crude sense in which EIR differs from any naturalistically conceived international relations, namely, that, while the latter understands itself as directed to accumulating knowledge, EIR sees itself as a process, admittedly variously described and conceived, that will result in freedom or autonomy, an idea which has played a capacious role in the development of German idealist philosophy in the eighteenth century. Many such philosophers, and in particular Emmanuel Kant, also had a firm grip on equality, although few of them, it is true, could be described as advancing an egalitarian theory of social justice of the sort that came later in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the Kantian idea that human beings are autonomous agents means that each of us must be allowed social space within which we may freely determine our own action. For Kant this meant that the structure of society should reflect and express the common and equal moral capacity of its members, an idea that foreshadows Marx’s more radical theory of equality. For a large number of social theorists informed by Marxism, ‘emancipation’ came to refer to forms of collective struggle on the part of groups that felt themselves to be ‘underdogs’, a condition that was regarded as neither fair nor necessary. In this expanded sense emancipation began to include a whole range of social groups struggling for recognition as the equal of those who hitherto exercised political, economic or social power over them. In any case, it is these Kantian and Marxian ideas that lie at the foundation of emancipatory international relations, although the meaning of autonomy and equality has been subject to conflicting interpretations in post-Kantian political thought.

In international relations, emancipatory ideas – in a capacious sense of that term spelled out below – have decisively shaped the work of neo-Kantian thinkers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge, as well as Andrew Linklater and others who would identify themselves as ‘critical theorists’. As a reaction to such modernist scholarship, emancipatory ideas derived from postmodernist thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida have created the backdrop for the theorizing of such international relations thinkers as Richard Ashley, William Connolly and David Campbell. The influence of these thinkers has extended to the edges of international relations and includes within it such areas (or subfields) as security studies and extensions to ‘ecological security’. Emancipatory ideas derived from both modernist and postmodernist sources have also influenced the feminist international relations theories of Sara Ruddick, Jill Steans, V. Spike Peterson, Christine Sylvester and Cynthia Weber, among others. But despite this veritable explosion of theoretical works from very different perspectives in the general area of emancipatory international relations, and despite the attractiveness of theories which hold out the promise of widespread political and moral transformation towards greater freedom and equality, and the indisputable fact that they are extremely attractive to a large number of academics and students, there is still widespread confusion about the nature, scope and value of this sort of theorizing. This seems reason enough to justify the present study.

This introductory chapter has four goals. First, it characterizes emancipatory international relations in a capacious way intended to bring out the variety of transformative projects in recent international relations theory. In effect this means problematizing the alleged link between emancipation and the Project of the Enlightenment, a manoeuvre that might be regarded as quite perverse on the part of theorists who insist on emancipatory theory’s intrinsic connection with Kant and Marx. Nonetheless, if the manoeuvre succeeds, it will have the beneficial consequence of expanding the category of what will count as EIR and include, in particular, postmodernist international relations, including postmodernist feminist theories of international relations. Second, I will argue that a formula which I dub ‘the XYZ+Q formula’ provides an initial, but by no means final, framework for understanding, comparing and analysing various versions of EIR. Third, I will describe four kinds of EIR which currently compete with one another for attention and the privilege to say what international relations should now consist of. And, fourth, I will explain how EIR differs from scientifically oriented theories in the naturalistic tradition which trade on positivist philosophy and empiricist methodology to justify their special projects. To foreshadow a key result of this chapter, which will resonate throughout the study, it is this: to provide reasons why we should appreciate what emancipatory theories in international relations are trying to accomplish even though it would be intellectually prudent to remain sceptical about their viability, feasibility and ultimate validity.

2 Capacious emancipatory theory?

While, for a large number of theorists, ‘an emancipatory conception of international relations’ refers to all those modernistic Enlightenment-style theories and approaches which promote universal commitments to peace, justice and universal human rights, on my analysis the term refers to any theory, discourse or approach to international relations which claims that the principal grounds for studying international relations is not to obtain scientific knowledge or understanding of international relations, as in naturalistic conceptions of the subject, but rather to transform the political communities in which we live. Thus for EIR our interest in international relations lies in its potential for liberating individuals, groups and peoples from structures or conditions which hinder them from achieving radical freedom, which may be understood as freedom from structural encumbrances such as class, gender, state sovereignty, or binary linguistic structures of some kind. Understanding an emancipatory conception in this way rather than, say, as a conception that is bound up, as in orthodox Marxist conceptions, with a world-directed view of history, is important because it opens up the possibility of considering postmodernist views of international relations as emancipatory. For, although postmodernists reject a continuous, progressivist view of history as ‘totalism’ and certain forms of universalism as ‘essentialism’, they also see their ‘subversive’, transgressive projects as anticipating and, in some significant sense, furthering radical change in the way we should think and act now and in the future about international relations, irrespective of how differently we thought about it and acted from within its categories in the past.

In particular, EIR involves a decisive rejection of all those orthodox belief and desire structures, including such conceptions of the subject as are discernible in realism, liberalism, rationalism, social constructivism and the ‘neo’ variants of what are seen as these profoundly mistaken conceptions of international relations, which hinder the achievement of genuine freedom. ² For EIR (in its various versions to be described below) the goal of the study of international relations is radically different from what it is conceived to be in naturalistic conceptions of the field. That is, we engage with international relations not primarily to explain why things are the way they are in the world, nor to predict such phenomena as wars or increasing poverty, nor even, when it comes to that, to pronounce on how to achieve peace, stability and democracy if these are to be accomplished by slow, piecemeal reforms of the right kind. Rather, the goal is the transformative one of providing a conception of inter-national relations which makes genuine equality a possible option for human beings, a goal not beyond the human ken. As such, EIR has the monumentally ambitious task of providing a conception of the subject which, at least potentially, brings genuine equality into the frame of realizability.

This suggests another characteristic of a capacious understanding of EIR, namely that any theory under this rubric has to have a certain relation to practice, i.e. a relationship in which the theory has to give some indication of how the radical change required by the critique is to be achieved. If emancipatory international theory is to go beyond merely endorsing progress and recommending reforms – which it must do if it is to make good on its claim to embody a distinctively transformative understanding of international relations -it will have to show how the theory it proposes provides a basis for thinking that radical change is not just notionally possible but actually possible, that there is not simply an adventitious relationship between accepting the theory and things happening which would help actualize the theory, to make it come out true. ³ If it fails to provide such a basis, the theory would be in grave danger of slipping into the very positivism or naturalism it roundly rejects, i.e. into the idea that we study international relations to gain scientific understanding and that doing so is logically unrelated to change. Retreating to a voluntaristic view of change, to some vague, speculative hope for the future, would so weaken its internal coherence that EIR would be hard pressed to sustain its liberationist modality, provide a basis for radically opposing the status quo and pursue the search for radically different visions of how the world ought to be. An emancipatory theory in this sense, therefore, must show how change will occur in the structures, conditions and obstacles which resist radical transfigurations. On this view, a theory must not only describe the world but indicate how it can be changed to yield something radically ‘better’, keeping in mind that different EIR theories will fill out the term ‘better’ (if the theory sees fit to use it at all) in different and probably incompatible ways.

It might be pointed out that this characterization of EIR renders it incapable of making a place for postmodern international relations, notwithstanding the indisputable fact that this school of thought has played a major role in challenging the dominant naturalistic conception of international relations. On this view, postmodernists would dismissively reject the label of ‘emanci-pation’ or any cognate expressions as bound up with the Enlightenment Project, a project that postmodernists think of as redolent with metaphysical essentialism and practical vulnerability to ‘totalities’ of one kind or another. Such views are indeed to be found among postmodern international relationists, but this in itself would not undercut the usefulness of conceiving postmodern international relations as a form of EIR. For one thing, the form of postmodernism that rejects the emancipatory framework out of hand to describe its project is at the extreme end of interpretations of what postmodernism consists of, when applied to international relations. There is no good reason to invest the word ‘emancipatory’ with all the metaphysical freight which the Project of Enlightenment or orthodox Marxism attempts to give it and therefore no good reason for postmodernism to reject it out of hand before assessing its value. For another thing, it is hard to believe that most postmodernists would object to the two features of emancipatory international relations which, as we have suggested above, are central to what it consists of: freedom and equality. And, third, although bringing modernist and postmodernist variants under the same EIR rubric may still be viewed with some considerable scepticism, there does seem to be a sense in which the earlier internecine wars between these ‘schools’ of thought may be waning. For example, one self-identified critical theorist sees postmodernist thinking as humanistic, anti-conservative, and a variant of the Enlightenment project (Linklater 1998: 72–73).

On the postmodernist side we have it on the authority of someone regarded, whether rightly or not, as postmodernism’s most important philosophical founder, the late Jacques Derrida, that emancipation is very much on the postmodernist agenda. For, as Derrida writes:

Emancipation is once again a vast question today and I must say that I have no tolerance for those who – deconstructionist or not – are ironical with regard to the grand discourse of emancipation. This attitude has always distressed and irritated me. I do not want to renounce this discourse.

(Caputo and Derrida 1997: 87)

Moreover, at least one feminist international theorist, Jill Steans (1998), and one noted postmodern feminist, Christine Sylvester (1994, 2010), have adopted intellectual strategies designed to reconcile critical theory and postmodernist feminist theory in the interest of revitalizing the feminist emancipatory project. Such moves of reconciliation should make it possible to devise a working definition of EIR that brings out enough of what they have in common – their family resemblances – to pre-empt scuttling in advance of launching the project of considering them as challenging variants on a liberatory theme.

Without putting too much metaphysical pressure on the very idea of definition, let us then define EIR as follows:

Emancipatory international relations refers to any theory, discourse, paradigm or approach to international relations which claims that the principal grounds for studying international relations is not to explain or predict events, search for laws or confirm or disconfirm hypotheses, as in competing naturalistic conceptions of the subject, but rather to radically transform or transfigure the political communities in which we live; that is, that our interest in international relations lies in its potential for liberating individuals, groups and peoples from structures or conditions that hinder them from actualizing freedom in thought and in practice.

I see no good reason for denying that both modernist and postmodernist versions of emancipation may exemplify this definitio...