Normative Dimensions of the European Crisis

European Journal of Political Theory

Special Issue: Normative Dimensions of the European Crisis

April 16, 2017

Miriam Ronzoni - University of Manchester

Juri Viehoff - University of Zurich

Introduction: Normative Dimensions of the European Crisis

The project of European integration is arguably currently facing its deepest crisis since its inception. In less than 10 years, what looked like a steady process of political enlargement, institutional consolidation, and economic convergence has come to a halt (or has even shown signs of backsliding). The project is now threatened in its very existence. This is true both for the Eurozone and for the European Union (EU) more generally.

The global financial crisis has exposed the vulnerability of the Eurozone governance structure to exogenous shocks, and highlighted the problem posed by deep economic discrepancies between member states. The crisis has brought into focus the profound and often adverse consequences that current forms of economic and financial integration have for the adequate functioning of both domestic and supranational institutions. Responding to these difficulties, some significant changes have been made to the Eurozone’s mechanisms – initially in the form of conditional lending to indebted Eurozone member states, and subsequently through the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, the incorporation of evermore stringent rules regarding national debt levels and deficits, and the implementation of debt-brakes through the Fiscal Compact. The Eurozone, however, continues to struggle to find the right balance between further integration on the one hand and protection of the diversity of welfare state arrangements and democratic institutions of individual states on the other.

Moreover, new institutions and practices (including, centrally, austerity programs) have been met with profound popular resistance especially in adversely affected countries. This has led to a grave legitimacy crises of Europe’s now fragile-seeming supranational institutions. Some scholars have suggested that this crisis calls for a further push towards supranational integration which, crucially, must replace austerity and debtor-punishment with genuinely democratic procedures and substantive economic solidarity in the form of an EU-wide redistributive mechanism (Habermas, 2015: 550). Other theorists have argued, to the contrary, that the Euro-system in particular, and the EU’s pro-market economic governance more generally, have failed member states, and that we should therefore revert to a ‘Europe of States’ in order to safeguard (or indeed rescue) both national democracy and national welfare systems (Scharpf, 2015: 394; Streeck, 2014: 272). By and large, however, the Euro-crisis, its institutional responses so far, and the political contestation it has encountered have remained relatively under-theorised by political philosophers – especially when compared to the detailed recent treatments by economists (see e.g. Krugman, 2012; Sandbu, 2015; Stiglitz, 2016).

To make matters worse, the whole EU, over and above the Eurozone, faces a deep legitimacy crisis. On the 23rd of June 2016, the United Kingdom voted in favour of leaving the EU. And as this special issue goes into print, Prime Minster Theresa May is pushing ahead to trigger Article 50 of the EU Treaty, formally giving notice that the UK will in fact exit the EU. Beyond its practical impact on the EU and the UK, ‘Brexit’ has great symbolic significance both in virtue of its modality (a popular referendum, thus symbolising the public rejection of what is largely perceived to be a technocratic, elitist, and undemocratic institution) and because the United Kingdom was already perceived as the EU member enjoying the highest level of autonomy within the Union. Brexit will be a first, and a first whose modalities and ripple-on effects are all but clear. Questioning EU memberships and the very existence of the EU has, moreover, ceased to be a taboo in many other countries, including several founding members like Italy, the Netherlands, and France. The role of policies of austerity, as well as the vitriolic popular debates that have split Europeans into ‘Northern-creditors’ and ‘Southern-debtors’, can hardly be overstated as we seek to understand this larger phenomenon of disaffection with European integration.

The aim of this special issue is to offer a range of perspectives and normative assessments of these recent events and to initiate further research into the fundamental issues raised by recent developments in European economic and financial integration. Specifically, the different articles investigate whether – and if so how – the economic and financial calamities, and the ensuing political crisis, demand a fundamental reassessment of the degree to which supranational arrangements of the kind we find amongst EU(-rozone) member states are (i) compatible with the advancement of social justice and democratic legitimacy within states and (ii) can realistically be designed so as to guarantee free and fair interaction amongst self-determining political communities.

Whilst building on the wealth of existing EU scholarship, the articles assembled here especially advance the existing debate along three dimensions:

First, they are all attentive to the quite profound changes that the Euro-crisis has brought to the project of European integration: Such changes have manifested themselves not merely in rapid institutional reforms in response to the crisis (e.g. massive extension of the mandate of the European Central Bank, highly intrusive prescriptions regarding the permissible level of debt and welfare provisions in Southern states, etc.), but also in dramatic shifts in public perception of the point and purpose of European institutions in more crisis-prone states.

Second, these articles seek to relate the existing normative EU literature both to wider theoretical discussions that have exercised political theorists in recent years (most notably to flourishing debates in international political theory and global justice) and to new conceptual tools that these discussions have made available (such as the practice-dependence approach as a method for assessing the normative performance of an institution; or the concept of demoi-cracy as an normative ideal for supranational institutions that is a genuine alternative to both intergovernmentalism and federalism).

Third, and related, they advance the existing debate by assessing the most pressing moral questions not merely in terms of the prevailing conceptual notions used in EU scholarship, many of which focus on questions of democratic procedure (viz. ‘democratic deficit’). Whilst questions of supranational democratic procedure must continue to play a prominent role in our normative assessment of European institutions, there is also room for assessing these institutions in light of other values, most obviously those bearing on political and distributive justice within and between states. These articles are therefore meant to update, advance, and enrich the existing political theory of European integration.

Andrea Sangiovanni and Juri Viehoff address the second and especially the third dimension, by exploring the compatibility of specific policies with relevant ideals of social justice, distributive fairness, and solidarity at the European level. But along the way, they also put forward arguments that are relevant to the first dimension, providing reasons in favour or against institutional proposals currently under discussion. Sangiovanni discusses, and rejects, the permissibility of in-work benefits, the welfare reform which David Cameron negotiated with the EU in the Winter of 2015/2016 in the hope of convincing the United Kingdom to remain in the EU after all. To make his case, Sangiovanni surveys and applies recent philosophical theories of discrimination, and marshals his own account as a justice-based objection to illegitimate differentiations between EU workers. Viehoff defends the idea of a European social minimum (a largely unconditional welfare contribution paid to each EU-citizen) as the object of a possible consensus among different relevant normative perspectives – i.e. as something which European federalists and intergovernmentalists, internationalists, and cosmopolitans about justice could all agree to. Stressing the particular urgency of such a proposal in the face of monetary integration, his case relies at least in part on recent Eurozone developments.

Inspired by recent applications of neo-republican thinking to questions beyond the state, Richard Bellamy takes by the horns fundamental questions about the EU’s institutional structure, asking in particular which model of sovereignty the EU should embody. The EU is often characterised as having challenged the sovereignty of the member states in ways that are both necessary and desirable. Bellamy disputes both these arguments, by defending state sovereignty as both functionally necessary and normatively desirable if citizens are to be able to reason publicly about issues of common concern, and to resolve their reasonable disagreements in a free and equal manner.

Finally, Francis Cheneval, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, and Miriam Ronzoni discuss the merits of the recently developed idea of demoi-cracy, according to which the EU does and should constitute an alternative to both federalist and intergovernmental institutional model. Drawing on the value of non-domination between heavily interdependent democratic states, Ronzoni offers a sympathetic reading of the normative ideal of demoicracy, but then introduces the distinction between institutional and normative ideals to raise doubts about whether demoicracy can be a distinctive institutional third way. In the final contribution to this issue, Nicolaïdis and Cheneval seek to move the recent scholarship on demoicratic theory a step further by exploring what they refer to as the social construction of the demoicratic reality. In so doing, they propose a conceptual framework for understanding how popular sovereignty could possibly be exercised concurrently by several rather than just one demos.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474885117704593

The Future of Western Democracies

Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley

Ralf Fuecks, President, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

May 3, 2017

Summer Readings

Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality, Andrew Delbanco

Public Research Universities: Why They Matter, AAAS

The Pope and the Planet, Bill McKibben

What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?, Edmund S. Phelps

The Mystery of ISIS, NYRB

China: The Superpower of Mr. Xi, NYRB

Dual Enrollment: Is High School the Future of Higher Education?, AHA Forum 

What Does It Mean to Think Historically?, Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke

How Long to the PhD?, Robert B. Townsend

How Do We Learn from History?, James J. Sheehan

After Waterloo, Marco D`eramo

The Failure of the EU’s Technocrats, AI

Escaping the Civil War Trap in the Middle East, K. M. Pollack and B. F. Walter

Democracy, Identity and Foreign Policy in Turkey

E.Fuat Keyman, Sabancı University
Şebnem Gümüşçü, Middlebury College 

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

The recent history of Turkey is dominated by the country's transformation into a modern democracy. Over the past few years Turkey has been increasingly recognised as a nation of economic, political and cultural significance as well as being a vital political connection between Europe and the Middle East. In this compelling volume, Professor Keyman and Dr. Gumüsçu put democratisation in Turkey under the microscope with an especial focus on recent transformations under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Accordingly, it explores to what extent Turkey's transformation under the AKP has led to democratic consolidation as well as asking if there is a disconnect between economic, cultural, and urban transformation, on the one hand, and democratic consolidation on the other? Furthermore, this book also takes the opportunity to explore several issues that have a direct effect on the consolidation of Turkish democracy such as globalization, foreign policy activism, the kurdish question, religious governance and civil society. By critically analyzing the dialectic between domestic transformations and global/regional dynamics, the book also discusses the ways in which Turkish transformation is affected by the Arab uprisings as well as how Turkey may inspire these countries.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Turkey's Transformation

3. Constructing Hegemony: the AKP Rule

4. AKP's Hegemony and Democratic Consolidation

5. Turkey's Proactive Foreign Policy under the AKP

6. Turkish Foreign Policy in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings

7. The AKP, Arab Uprisings and the Kurdish Question

8. Secularism, Democracy and Identity

9. Civil Society and Democratic Consolidation

10. Conclusion: Turkey at the Crossroads: Democratization through the Strong EU Anchor

• Sample Chapter (Introduction)

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/democracy-identity-and-foreign-policy-in-turkey-e-fuat-keyman/?K=9780230354272

For a Post-Sociological Analysis of Political Life

Alain Touraine, EHESS Paris, June 2014http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000022422

1. We usually call historical rather than modern societies whose systems of social organization are mainly defined by the resources they use and by their social institutions, which shape these resources in line with key cultural orientations which are first of all social representations and modes of construction of human creation and freedom. Our societies are defined not only by their activities but, even more deeply, by their creations and value-oriented interpretations of their productions, included their own limits. These interpretations are both economically and organizationally situated and universalistic in their meaning: they are cultural constructions of human creativity and of its limits, in materially defined social situations. In the western world - and in other societies – we usually define material situation and the cultural pattern in which we have lived during the two past centuries as the industrial society, in which human creativity and freedom are represented by their capacity to increase the productivity of economic activities.

2. These cultural constructions almost always have an evolutionary dimension. They are first of all theories both of Modernity (singular) and of processes of modernizations (plural).

Many cultural historians have accepted the idea of secularization, because universalistic, defined as the progressive elimination, in these cultural constructions, of all kinds of non-human, sacred principles of creation and creativity (but most of them criticize the general tendency of power-holders to impose on the people they dominate the idea that their own power is sacred). Other interprets of modernity and modernizations defend an opposite view, as I do myself. Instead of announcing and supporting the triumph of utilitarian rationalist and of functionally defined social norms, they describe the progressive interiorization, which is the humanization, of the representation of creativity. Among them it is common to call humanism the substitution of “human rights” or analogous notions for all “sacred” principles, from God to common good, Republican institutions Progress. These moral – or rather ethical – views of human creativity and freedom are opposed both to individualism and to all forms of social integration. To put it in different words, they reject all kinds of reciprocity or complementarity between social systems and individual or collective actors.

3. Over the XXth century our type of historical society has experienced two major transformations.

a/ The first one is that our capacity of self-transformation which was to a large extent limited to the awareness that industrial production had extended to all sectors of activity. Not only to information and communication, which have been identified by prominent sociologists, like Manuel Castells, with “post-industrial society”, but to all kinds of productions and consumptions and, in particular, to human opinions, representations and other attitudes. One of the most important consequences of this “production” of social behavior is the decline – not necessarily negative – of the traditional idea of a representative democracy which supposed that collective choices correspond to “objective” interests.

b/ The second one is quite different but has even more visible historical consequences.

The destruction of the western hegemony over the whole world – which was associated with a painful and often bloody liberation of dependent social categories in western countries has opened the way to the take-over of the universalistic components of the Enlightenment by leaders of all kinds of revolutionary - class, national or religious – movements, who have imposed their authoritarian or totalitarian power on the populations they had freed from the western and capitalist domination, creating new dictatorships over populations which are defined by identities and no longer by internal social relations.

c/ We are now in an extreme situation: the universalistic principles of the Enlightenment appear to be destroyed – more or less completely – in most parts of the world.

In the so-called first world a new kind of finance capitalism which has no economic function-investment or credit – is so global that no political institution can control it. In the second world Leninist regimes impose the absolute power of a communist party which is identified with an authoritarian state. In what we used to call the third world military dictatorships and sometimes religious political leaders impose an anti-democratic regime or try to do so.

The victory of all these non-democratic forces is not complete and even less stable. But there is a deep rupture between the advances of democracy and human rights in countries which refer themselves to universalistic values and the majority of the world population, which is governed by economic or political forces, which do not refer themselves to these values.

Modernity and traditions or identities can be equally destroyed by the absolute power of authoritarian and anti-democratic leaders of modernization processes from which the reference to a universalistic definition of modernity is increasingly eliminated.

4. There is no reason to think that sociology can go on with its previous concepts in spite of the fact we no longer live in societies which build a social image of themselves, which speak of themselves with social categories.

It is a fact, it seems to many observers, that what we call social problems, social conflicts, and even social movements are more and more difficult to analyze with social categories and more precisely with socio-economic categories. In industrialized countries unions are much weaker than a generation and political parties are no longer representative of social classes and of labor conflicts and during the last 5 years Western Europe was socially relatively quiet (compared with the’ 30 s).

In more radical terms, concepts like society, social system, integration and control appear to have lost most of their analytical usefulness. Sociological analysis appears to be an empty territory, surrounded by at least two very busy fields of study:

On one side cultural studies, and multiculturalist theories, to explain or to solve even social problems which are formulated by the actors themselves in cultural terms, especially in non-western countries, while in western countries problems and actors are more often defined in psychological terms.

On the other side it appears that a large part of what was we used to consider as sociological theory is now presented and analyzed in political terms. The analysis of social systems is transformed into an analysis of processes of change, which gives a central importance to a concept of justice which eliminates the substantive background of the traditional concept of common good or general interest. This evolution seems to correspond to the rapid wearing out of social democratic policies, especially since the victory of British New Labour and Schroder’s reforms in Germany. No social scientist has won a wider influence than J.Rawls.

Especially in European countries, but in the US as well, we feel the absence of basic political debates provided that socialist parties no longer propose the socialization of capital and that capitalist countries devote a large part of their resources to basic services, education, health, pensions and family allowances, which are controlled and financed by the state. We live in a world without conviction, to use M.Weber’s word.

5. In our situation, which is defined by the generalized process of market economy and by the predominant role of power – holders which eliminate or control social and political movements, that I have mentioned at the beginning of this short paper, is it possible to discover new conflicts and new narratives which play the same central role that class struggle did in industrial society or the conflict between monarchy and republican state in societies dominated by political categories? What seems clear is that central problems and actors can no longer be defined in social terms. Actors tend to be defined by a cultural identity, while social situations are mainly defined as political and economic processes of social change.

But why should we not accept this absence of correspondence between systems and actors as the new central conflict in our post-social collective life?

In front of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and of world-wide networks of speculation or of communication, we know, by our own historical experience, that it is not enough to assert and defend specific rights, political, social or cultural. The only force which is strong enough to win over uncontrolled political domination is the democratic spirit itself, if we define it by the subordination of all powers, rules and even laws, to universal human rights. This idea, which seemed so weak and often so corrupt in a recent past, is the only one which can prevail over absolute power, because it is defined in universalistic terms. Social and political movements leave the way to ethical protest which fights against scandals, violence and destructive power. These new ethical and democratic movements and these convictions are deeply different from revolutionary actions, which aim first of all at seizing state power by a violent action. Many dramatic experiences have made clear to us that revolution and democracy are contradictory processes of social change. At least if we define democracy not by its institutions but by the priority of universal human rights over all social and political rules.

In every major conflict today the defense of basic human rights is directly involved; interests are not strong enough to win battles against Big Brother. And expressions like the “masses” or the “people” are part of the vocabulary of the power-holders, not of democratic actors.

Democracy is based on the subordination of all rules and even laws to the universal rights of all human beings to consider their own freedom and creativity as paramount values. Democracy is a voluntary activity. Acts of resistance or dissidence against authoritarism regimes are considered as symbolically important because they manifest and strengthen the democratic spirit. To put it in slightly different terms, democracy is the substitution of universal human rights for all “sacred” ideas, forces or sovereignties, including popular.

“ The active defense of universalistic values is basically the same everywhere; but it takes different forms and uses different processes to adapt itself to different historical and cultural heritages, to different processes of modernization. Britain, France, Germany, The United States have followed very different processes of modernization and have created different kinds of social movements and of political action. This elementary observation gives us the only acceptable meaning of tolerance.

We must tolerate the differences among patterns of modernization and different democratic experiences.

But we must be radically intolerant of non-democratic regimes and policies and recognize, that in all political regimes, even in the democratic ones, non-democratic practices and even anti-democratic laws survive and even grow. Reforms are permanently necessary”.

The general approach I have just introduced can be defined by its opposition to two others.

The first one is influential mostly in post-colonial or dependent countries : it considers as the central world-wide conflict the opposition between global capitalism and identities; natural religious or linguistic. Such an interpretation leaves us as a unique choice the preference given to an economic or to a political and cultural absolute undemocratic power.

The second one redefines democracy by its capacity to incorporate basic conflicts into integrative tolerant and flexible political countries. It corresponds to the middle of the round parties or governments which are gaining ground in most European States, where both extreme nationalist right wing and revolutionary leftist parties are losing ground. But could very well increase their influence on a continent where xenophobia is the most powerful stream of opinion, especially in Northern countries.

The approach I have submitted to your attention has the advantage to be the only one which is formulated in general terms but the disadvantage not to correspond in most countries to organized political forces and, even less, to programs of government and ideologies. If I selected it, it is above all because I consider as the core of the democratic spirit the reference to universalist human rights and to rational thinking in agreement with the basic texts in which they were first formulated in particular in England, Holland, United States, France and in the former Spanish colonies from the 17th to the beginnings of the 19th and later for the United Nation and by modern scientists and logicians.

The weaknesses of the governments and societies which adopted these democratic states are not a strong enough argument against their central theoretical importance.

Let’s define them with more conviction than ever.  

Interview with IR Scholar Nicholas Onuf

E-IR Website

May 9, 2014

The interview was conducted by Rachel Denison. She is Deputy Features Editor at E-IR, and has a Masters degree in International Relations from the University of Sussex.

Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory, International History, and Social Theory. Onuf’s most famous work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which should be on every IR student’s must-read list. His recent publications include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida International University and is on the editorial boards of International Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.

In this interview, Professor Onuf discusses the professionalization of scholarship in IR and the effects this has had on the field in the US and globally; the influence that constructivism and World of Our Making has had on social theory; the transformations he has noticed in International Law Theory; and his top ten tips for flourishing in academia.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in contemporary IR?

I am not sure I see any exciting debates at this moment. I am not even sure we ever had a debate in the usual sense of the term. There have been moments better characterized as a parting of the ways. I like to think I participated in one in the late 1980s. Since then, well, these ‘ways’ have grown further and further apart. If such partings are generational (as I think they are), then we should now be seeing another such moment. If we do not (and I do not), then it is because IR has lost all coherence as a field—there is nothing left to render apart. Not that this distresses me. At the last parting, I suggested that we should think of international relations as a species of social relations and abandon IR theory for social theory.

What are the most important/interesting areas of IR Theory that are underdeveloped or understudied at the moment? Where is there most need and scope for new thinking?

As I just intimated, I do not believe IR theory can be made interesting. The question is, what area in social theory, broadly conceived, could help us—everyone interested in what we still call international relations—do our thing. Inasmuch as we in IR have rummaged around in social theory pretty superficially (and I count myself here), there is no area that could not be put to better use. That said, I am myself most interested in cognitive, evolutionary, and moral psychology these days. Mostly because I like to read around, and this stuff keeps me thinking.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I take this question—the way I understand the world—to concern the philosophical assumptions informing my scholarship. For the first 15 or 20 years of my scholarly career, I was a philosophical ignoramus. Still am, of course, though I can say that I have plunged into several philosophical seas and not drowned. I started off as an unthinking, and therefore utterly conventional, philosophical realist. Doubts came with exposure to postmodern and radical feminist theorizing, and theorists, in the early 1980s. Reading Wittgenstein pushed me into the linguistic turn and Oxford-style ordinary language philosophy helped me rethink the links between speech, rules, and rule, and thus the premises of much of social theory. I do not recall when I first dug into Kant’s First Critique, but I have never recovered from the experience—I still think of myself as a thoroughgoing philosophical idealist, not at all discomforted by the material appearance of the world. Around 1990, I took the better part of a sabbatical leave to read Aristotle from front to back, with cascading effects on my scholarship.

Having taught and spoken on IR theory all around the world, how would you say IR is studied and understood as a discipline in the US versus the UK/Europe, or indeed in South America or Asia?

I resist calling IR a discipline for reasons that should be obvious from my reply to the first two questions. Educated as I was in the US, I have always thought of it as a field of study in the discipline of political science, and I always took seriously the presumption that it was a field sufficiently at odds with the rest of political science to warrant excursions into other disciplines. In my case, this was history from the beginning (later reinforced by working with a brilliant historian who happens to be my brother). I also worked extensively in international law, but this was complicated by the vocational thrust of legal education in the US. Yet another complication is the vocational orientation of the so-called professional schools of international affairs, in which I taught for many years. Here again, disciplined scholarship and, especially, theory take a back seat to practical training and ‘real-world experience.’

Now, I think it is an open question as to whether IR is understood as a discipline in the rest of the world. There are, of course, the trappings of a discipline now almost everywhere: journals and professional associations specifically devoted to IR, not to mention clannish behavior. The big difference between the US and elsewhere is the lack of separate IR departments in the US and their proliferation in many other countries. This is a large result of the globalization of IR, while political science has always been and will always be country-specific for obvious reasons.

So let me shift the terms of discussion here just a little bit. What I saw happening in the US over the last five decades is the professionalization of scholarship (and more generally the professionalization of the professions). This was the deep issue in the so-called second debate: disciplined, highly trained US scholars, committed to rigorous positivist science, lording over English gentleman-scholars as dabblers. As a wealthy country, the US could afford the big science model of the scholarly profession, and reaps significant rewards in doing so—all this contributed to the imposition of set standards for scholarly performance, the normalization of scholarly practices, and the hegemonial presumption that everyone else in the world should and eventually would do things our way.

It is no surprise that some scholars in the US resented this development and there is less discipline than demanded, but professionalization won out domestically and has made great inroads in the rest of the world (just consider the RAE process in the UK and the English School today). Combined with so many other facets of US hegemony, the globalization/professionalization of IR in accordance with the big science model has also been a source of resistance, which I see (and sympathize with) whenever I am abroad. I also see a significant improvement in standards for scholarship. Even if higher standards are a consequence of US hegemonial discipline, as I think they are, they are nevertheless to be welcomed.

What did you feel was missing from IR theory, with Realism and Liberalism as the main schools of thought, that you felt a new school of thought—Constructivism—was needed? What blanks do you feel it fills in in our understanding of International Relations?

At the time I wrote World of Our Making, most of us in the US took realism to be the field’s frame of reference—indeed the umbrella theory that gave IR its coherence. Liberalism was on the outs, along with international law and institutions; realism had combined with a commitment to positivist science in deciding what counted as a contribution to knowledge. I did not feel a new approach was needed or, for that matter, that liberalism needed to be resuscitated. There are no ‘blanks’—the very term implies a philosophical/social theoretic stance contrary to the one that I have already sketched.

As I said in response to question 3, I had come increasingly to feel that a bottom-up revolution was needed. I also thought that a background in international legal theory gave me (and my friend Fritz Kratochwil) something distinctive and important to contribute to the cause. Constructivism’s subsequent erection as IR’s third pillar—in the US, no less—signaled the end of the uprising, the banishment of post-positivist, feminist, and critical renegades, and the normalization of IR as social science. As I suggested in my response to the last question, normalization and professionalization are hegemonial practices fueling the US vs. rest of the world dynamic. The question takes for granted that constructivism has been normalized. To the extent this is so, it is less by discipline than exclusion. That I, as a would-be revolutionary, should be among those who are effectively excluded is no great surprise.

What implications do you think that your book World of Our Making has had on the study of IR?

World of Our Making gives IR scholars an opportunity (incentive, excuse) to look beyond the world of states and their relations and ask how it, or any ‘world,’ has come to be what it is as a social arrangement, how people engage in world-making and to what effect, and how these two processes are, as we say perhaps too glibly, co-constitutive. The book also gives scholars good reasons to consider speaking as doing, rules as indispensable to social life, and rule, not anarchy, as the abiding condition of world politics.

I would say that constructivism thus conceived asks too much in a world where scholars have become ever more specialized in their interests and procedures. For that reason, it gets honorable mention when it gets any acknowledgment at all. Various people have gone ahead and worked on performative speech, rules in practice, and much else that I brought to attention, though often enough without realizing that I had already dealt with these matters. Few indeed have followed my initiatives with respect to rule and exploitation in world politics, even though there is much discussion of hegemony and hierarchy.

If identity and interests are a pre-given as constructivism argues, how would you argue that this framework can be used to help academics and students of IR understand and analyse current affairs, e.g. the crisis in Syria or in the Ukraine?

I would never say that identity and interests are pre-given. In my opinion, anyone who does say this does not have even the remotest idea what it means to talk about social construction. As a general proposition, ongoing processes of identity- and interest-formation give us little help in understanding crises in world politics. The converse proposition is, however, another matter:  What is the impact of crises on processes of identity- and interest-formation? When, for example, Stefano Guzzini talks about identity-triggers, I think he is on to something.

In International Legal Theory, you outline the key developments and problems in the field of International Law. What do you feel the most transformative have been and how have they affected the study and practice of International Law? Since its publication in 2008, are there any problems or developments that you wish you could address?

When I first started working in international legal theory, I saw three large issues needing further work. I used to think of them as the three S’s: the sources of international law, subjects of international law, and sanctions in international law. I wrote a great deal about the first, and some about the third, and very little about the second. I had my reasons at the time, but, looking back, I should probably have concentrated on the second, which has proven to be transformative. Instead I became increasingly interested in the properties of (legal) rules as instruments of social control, and this converged with a longstanding interest in world-order thinking and duly eventuated in my work on conditions of rule, to which I alluded earlier.

International Legal Theory marked my exit from active scholarship in/on international law. By happenstance, my departure coincided with a spirited revival of theoretical work among international lawyers, and something of a rapprochement between IL and IR. I have no regrets about bowing out when I did, because so many people today are working on the three S’s in blissful ignorance of what I and others had written about decades earlier. The one exception is the discussion of ‘the fragmentation of international law’ as a reaction to accelerating functional differentiation in global administrative practice. Unlike me, Kratochwil has continued to engage international legal theory; his forthcoming book, The Status of Law in World Society, has far more to say about this development and its implications than I could possibly hope to.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

As an old dog, I routinely dispense advice to young scholars whom I know well enough to think that my advice fits their circumstances. Rather than trying to guess what, in general, constitutes the most important advice I can give, let me list a few things. Ten, actually—ten rules for flourishing as a scholar in IR:

1) Preparing at length for classes does not make you a better teacher. Insofar as it dampens spontaneity, students will think you are boring; this will undercut the self-confidence you thought your lengthy preparations had purchased for you. And, of course, it steals valuable time from your scholarship.

2) Writing is a craft; writing well takes most of us a great deal of work. The usual practice is to think of a problem or issue, formulate a project, do ‘research,’ and then write it up. Bad idea. Keep writing at every stage, even if, in the end, you throw out most of what you have written. Writing makes the problem clearer, points up what more you need to do in the way of research, and, most of all, keeps your writing skills well-honed.

3) Don’t send sloppy, badly crafted papers out for review. As a frequent referee, I see them all too often. Many referees will punish you, not always consciously, for doing so, even if they think you are on to something. Once you think you have a well-crafted piece of work, do send it out, because most referees and editors take their duties seriously and will give you valuable feedback.

4) Be cautious about taking on collaborative projects. We all know that scholarship is a lonely occupation. Collaboration reduces the loneliness quotient and can result in better work than any of the collaborators could have produced on their own. It can also result in a piece of work that no one is entirely happy with. Sometimes collaboration causes damaging tension and bad feelings because of temperamental differences, greater or lesser commitment to the project, and perceived inequities in the distribution of work. All that said, collaborating with my brother on two book projects was hugely rewarding. That it might have been hugely risky never occurred to us.

5) Be even more cautious in participating in symposium projects. Their thematic foci may not match your interests very well; they tend to be superficially refereed and thus are not taken seriously; they also tend to disappear quickly from view. There are exceptions—symposia that mark major developments in the field—but you’ll have a pretty good idea if a particular symposium project has that potential. As a senior scholar, I contribute to symposia because it is fun to do projects with friends and I can afford the luxury. Most of all, avoid editing symposium volumes. This involves collaboration under the most difficult conditions. It is extraordinarily time consuming. Wrangling recalcitrant contributors is too often a thankless and disheartening responsibility.

6) Do not take on too many projects at one time. You will spread yourself too thin, miss deadlines, and make it all the more likely that you will succumb to the 90% rule—you run out of steam when any given project is 90% done and only needs some fine-tuning to be sent off. You will end up with a drawer full of nearly done projects that you have progressively lost interest in and will therefore never finish.

7) Dissertations are apprentice projects, immediately recognizable as such. Turning a dissertation into a book is probably the smart thing to do, but it will often take longer than writing the dissertation did. For most of us, it takes five years to write a good book; World of Our Making took me ten years. Whether you have that much time, institutionally speaking, is another matter.

8) Read every day. When I get up in the morning (early) and get my coffee, I read for 45 minutes. In my case, it has always been something that I do not have to read for whatever I am doing at the time. While this has broadened me immeasurably, for many scholars, a fixed time for reading is an opportunity—perhaps the only opportunity—to keep up on the literature in the field.

9) Whether to jump on a trend in the field’s scholarship, try anticipating a trend, come late to a trend but treat it critically, jump around from thing to thing, or plug away at something few others seem to be interested in is a tricky question, having much to do with temperament. It requires you to ask yourself how ambitious you are, how much you need validation from others, how long you can stayed focused on one thing, et cetera.

10) On the assumption that you are smarter than most people (or you would not be a scholar), seek out people whom you know to be smarter than you in various obvious ways. On the one hand, the more of these people you know, the less intimidating you will find them, and the more you will learn from them. On the other hand, knowing really smart people will remind you of your own limitations and help you be less arrogant. Arrogance is, of course, a constant hazard in our line of work. I like to think that hanging out with people who are smarter than I am has been the key to my own success as a scholar. Some of them have been my students. (I could name names, but it would not be appropriate here.) As for making me less arrogant as a human being, anything I might venture to say about that can only sound—what is the right word?—arrogant.

The Prospects for Arab Democracy

Stephen Grand

Brookings Insitution Press, 2014

Amid the current turmoil in the Middle East, Understanding Tahrir Square sounds a rare optimistic note. Surveying countries in other parts of the world during their transitions to democracy, author Stephen Grand argues that the long-term prospects in many parts of the Arab world are actually quite positive. If the current polarization and political violence in the region can be overcome, democracy will eventually take root. The key to this change will likely be ordinary citizens—foremost among them the young protestors of the Arab Spring who have filled the region's public spaces—most famously, Egypt's Tahrir Square.

The book puts the Arab Spring in comparative perspective. It reveals how globalization and other changes are upending the expectations of citizens everywhere about the relationship between citizen and state. Separate chapters examine the experiences of countries in the former Eastern bloc, in the Muslim-majority states of Asia, in Latin America, and in Sub-Saharan Africa during the recent Third Wave of democratization. What these cases show is that, at the end of the day, democracy requires democrats.

Many complex factors go into making a democracy successful, such as the caliber of its political leaders, the quality of its constitution, and the design of its political institutions. But unless there is clear public demand for new institutions to function as intended, political leaders are unlikely to abide by the limits those institutions impose. If American policymakers want to support the brave activists struggling to bring democracy to the Arab world, helping them cultivate an effective political constituency for democracy —in essence, growing the Tahrir Square base —should be the lodestar of U.S. assistance.

Chapter 1

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Table of Contents

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Advance Praise for Understanding Tahrir Square

"Judicious and far-ranging examination of how the experience of democratization from Central and Eastern Europe to Latin America, Asia, and Africa can help inform our understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing contemporary movements in the Middle East. A timely and practical guide for democracy activists as well as policymakers who want to support their aspirations."

—James B. Steinberg, Dean, The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, and former Deputy Secretary of State

"With rigor and clarity Grand assembles an enormous amount of insight and information about democratic transitions from around the world and highlights important possible applications of this comparative experience to the daunting challenges that democracy faces in the Arab world."

—Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"Understanding Tahrir Square is not just a name of a book. It is a long-forgotten fantasy, a desperate wish, and a dilemma more complicated than a daytime soap opera. So, if you really have a weird urge to still try to understand Tahrir Square, get an 8-ball, or better, try your luck with this book."

—Bassem Youssef, Host, Al Bernameg (“The Jon Stewart of Egypt”)

Modernization, Secularization and International Relations

Metin Koca, London School of Economics and Political Science
e-IR 

Introduction

“Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion”, says John Gray at the very outset of Black Mass (2007: 1).  Gray’s particular claim is that modern teleological ideologies inherited the apocalyptic vision of conventional religious thought. Yet, this claim that modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion might be made to mean many other things. For instance, it may mean that religion survived long before, and will survive long after, modern politics; or that religion discounts itself from being perceived as a pre-modern phenomenon, as its norms began, at some point, to penetrate into those of modern politics.  Common to all is the assumption of a “stubborn persistence of religion in the global arena” (Shupe, 1990: 17).  Furthermore, like many others, Bech and Snyder (Bech et. al, 2011: 208) claim that “religion presents analytical challenges to all […] traditional international relations paradigms”. The question must then be asked: why was it neglected in mainstream international relations studies? The answer is hidden in the way that modernization and secularization theses have influenced the discipline.

As is for any scientific objective, the received wisdom of the social sciences is that ‘the modern’ is he who devalues obsolete superstitious thought of the religious past, and values the compelling scientific thought of the secular present. In order to serve scientific thought in a fruitful way, one is expected to accomplish in one’s mind “the replacement of religious consciousness […] by an empirical, rational and instrumental orientation” (Bruce, 2002: 3). The universal historical process that the secularization thesis puts forward, however, is not limited with this very basic meaning of ‘secularity’ as anti-mythical. The multidimensional presence of secularity rather relates to its variegated meanings, through which the secularization thesis attained a paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences (Casanova, 1994). Having been positioned at the heart of modern science, these meanings have quite deeply established themselves behind International Relations (IR). It is, however, essential to unpack these different, arbitrarily mixed, and not necessarily interlinked definitions of the secularization thesis in order for IR students to examine its mark within studies of IR. This essay initially fleshes out the relationship between secularity and modernity as the social sciences construe it. Then, it examines the repercussions of three challenging definitions of secularization in the discipline. The essay concludes that the sociological, political, and institutional marks of the secularization thesis cannot only be reduced to IR’s scientific stance as a branch of the modern social sciences, since they also extend towards the theoretical and historical visions of modern IR.

Secularity and Modernity

Before moving into diverse secularizations and their respective effects on modern IR, the ties between modernization and secularization shall be clarified. It is commonly held that the latter is initially a facilitator of the former and, in return, the former deepens the latter irreversibly. In other words, the secularization process inter alia has been deemed a building block of modernity. Casanova uncovers the relationship: “[t]o be secular means to be modern, and therefore by implication, to be religious means not yet fully modern” (2011: 59). Within this context, Meyer (1989) claimed that accelerating religious fundamentalism was nothing more than a fight against modernity. This seemingly inseparable tie between the secular and the modern has led IR studies and the social sciences in general – which claim to be in and of the modern age – to treat this relationship as an axiomatic truth. After all, “modern international relations theory […] [is] about the modern state system and the means by which its constituent units (sovereign states) regulate their relations” (Holzgrefe, 1989: 11). Therefore, the popularly embraced assumption has been that modern IR shall claim no more to carry medieval elements in its substance. The secularization thesis, in other words, accepted secularity as an indisputable component of modernity.

However, it is necessary to distinguish between the main trends within those different, and not necessarily interconnected, claims of the secularization thesis, which is argued here to have a fundamental impact on the theoretical and historical visions of IR. Casanova (2011) classifies different forms of secularizations under three sub-arguments, which have been fallaciously mixed under one secularization thesis: (1) secularization as “the institutional differentiation” of secular spheres from the religious ones; (2) secularization as “the decline of religious thought concomitant of levels of modernization”; (3) secularization as “the privatization of religion” as a precondition of modern, secular, and democratic politics (Casanova, 2011: 60). Each of these disconnected meanings has its own repercussions in the conventional IR literature. The first is with respect to the scientific stance of IR as a specialized discipline: knowledge shall prevail over faith. The second one constitutes a doxa behind IR’s theoretical framings of international politics: a modern actor cannot behave with religious motivations. The third one relates to the starting point of the ‘identifiable history’ of modern international relations: the pre-Westphalian religious world is irrelevant to the modern international system. Whereas the first of those influences reflects an expectable development in accordance with the essential scientific objectivity, the latter come with several drawbacks. 

Definition I: Secularization and Scientism

Institutional differentiation set the general parameters of the modern governance. Amongst the consequences of this wide-range institutional differentiation, as the modern world necessitated it, religious and secular spheres were to be de-combined in a manner to set IR studies free from religious and cultural pre-modern elements. Functional differentiation has been regarded as a key to any activity of the modern life, in which the roles of institutions have been defined merely through their specialized functions as parts of a whole. Max Weber strenuously asserted long ago that “a really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment” (Weber, 1991: 135).

Functional differentiation of the religious and the secular did not only mean an institutional separation of the church from the state. It also meant for “the autonomization of societal sectors from the domination of religious meaning” (Berger et. al, 1966: 74). This paved the way for the dominant positivist thinking that has been determining the confines of the mainstream IR for so long. In line with this thinking, the faculties of the social sciences and the humanities were separated from each other: the former would function with value-freedom and scientific objectivity, as the latter would to continue studying on religion and moral philosophy.

In a sense, this transformation was a desirable one for true scientism, which is expected to deny ‘wearing glasses’ of mere subjectivity under the shadow of religious or cultural prejudices. Otherwise, it would have forced one to try to justify the scientifically unjustifiable in many circumstances. Within this context, the added value of secularization was apparent in its endeavour to free the social sciences from “the irrationality of belief” (Taylor, 2007: 269), as the secular mind confers the required value-freedom upon the scientist. However, this mind-set eliminates religious prejudices with the cost of bringing prejudices of its own. The following chapters are on the secularization thesis with its own prejudices.

Definition II: Secularization and International Relations Theory

The ‘secularization process’, as Durkheim, Bentham, Marx, Comte and many others foresaw it, was one of chronological religious decline. The purification of the individual mind from medieval religiosity, or assuming as such for the near future, had deep-rooted and misleading consequences in mainstream IR. These thinkers favoured what they called the human mind against the superstitious. By the time ‘knowledge’ prevailed over ‘belief’, it would inevitable that religious dogmatism would disappear according to the future projections.  This constituted a core claim of the secularization thesis.

It is a popularly embraced narrative that ‘the replacement of God by Man’ announced the end of the medieval ages and the beginning of modern politics, of which the writings of Machiavelli represent the introduction. Machiavelli was the first challenge presented by ‘modern’ thinking against ancient mind-sets. Within this context, Machiavelli’s non-merciful, pragmatic political morality was to be classified among the primary documents of the international relations theory of classical realism. On the other hand, from an uneasy pre-modern perspective, Machiavelli would be labelled as a “teacher of evil”, as was famously described by Strauss (1958: 10). Strauss rejects judging Machiavelli from a modern perspective:

To do justice to Machiavelli requires one to look forward from a pre-modern point of view toward an altogether unexpected and surprising Machiavelli who is new and strange, rather than to look backward from today toward a Machiavelli who has become old and our own, and therewith almost good. (Strauss, 1958: 12)

From this perspective, Machiavelli seems to be a historic newcomer to an ancient street; as seems modernity a short new scene of a long film, of which scientism is unsure whether it is the concluding part. Mainstream IR does not identify this continuity in history.

Religion is not only regarded as an ineffective element, but also as the antithesis of modern politics. Therefore, it would have been odd to expect religion to have any intelligible place in international relations theory. First, indeed, it should be noted that international relations literature is, at its best, depicted in the IR theories, that is, “collection of stories [claiming to be accurate] about the world of international politics” (Weber, 2010: 2). Under the conditions of a top-down removal of religion, it would have been unrealistic to expect the theorists to give religious identities primary importance in explaining what global politics is and with what motivations its actors behave.

By the time ‘irrational belief’ was eliminated at institutional level, it was taken for granted that political actors would follow the same path. However, this attitude misses the crucial point that “secularization on the societal level is not necessarily linked to secularization on the level of individual consciousness” (Berger, 1999: 3). The misleading theoretical consequence of this assumption has been that neither of the mainstream IR theories ([neo]realism, [neo]liberalism) are able to refrain from assuming that all decisive actors of the international political life are somehow secularized, and that all decisions are made through a process of secular rationality. The very basic illustration of this theoretical position is the mechanistic and materialist assumptions of state behaviour in the international system that dominates the structural theories of neoliberal institutionalism and neorealism. A more specific example might be Morgenthau’s classical realism that places “the actual conditions of human action” at the opposite pole of what is advised by the perfectionist ethics (Morgenthau, 1945: 3). The main point in all of them is that the modern IR was designed to ignore possible religious perceptions which may not seem rational at a materialist glance. Hurd crucially remarks that religion has been considered among the irrationalities which fall “outside the range of ‘normal’ politics, including belief, culture, tradition, mood and emotion” (2011: 170).

This is not, however, the manifestation of a kind of Eurocentrism in IR, as it may well be argued. The label ‘Eurocentric’ does not catch the difference between two very different arguments: (1) that the study may be a biased one; shaped in accordance with Western narratives and interests; (2) that the study may not be a biased one, but reflects a historical account in which ideas have been transferred from the European thinking outwards. The origins of ‘secular rationality’ unarguably belong to modern European intellectual thinking; yet the space it was internalized in was much wider than that.  Assuming as such is not a Eurocentric bias in IR. If so, Nehru would not have defined secularism as “a pillar of modernity” (Calhoun et. al, 2011: 6); Atatürk would not state that his policy derives its inspiration “not from heaven, or from an unseen, but directly from life” (“Turkish Grand”, 1937). After all, is not it “the normal condition of human affairs for cultural ideas to flow between areas of civilization” (Buzan, 2010: 10)? The geographical and intellectual scope that secular rationality reaches up to, therefore, does not reflect a Eurocentric tendency in the discipline of IR. An actual Eurocentric bias led by the secularization thesis is touched upon in the following section, which is connected to what Westphalia really meant to the West and the rest.

Definition III: Secularization and History

The third discrete sub-thesis, the privatization of religion, in fact constitutes ‘the big bang’ of modern international history. The cure for the exhausting Wars of Religion was invented in Westphalia: cuius regio, eius religio: ‘whose realm, his religion’. It conferred the local princes with the power to establish their particular religions on their territories as sovereigns. This is of historical significance, as it triggered the privatization of religion initially among the sovereign states. Additionally, in Westphalia, religion ceased to be a casus belli (Philpott, 2001: 89). Westphalia, the foundational myth of modern international relations, reduced religion down to a domestic issue by removing its existence as a potential source of war and ignoring its transnational presence. Religion has never been an identifiable object in modern international history and its point of origin, constituted by Westphalia, is not capable of dating further back comfortably.

As opposed to the assumed historical illusion that Westphalia brought secularism into modern European politics, it is a subtle distinction to argue that Westphalia instead shifted the hierarchy between the religious and the sovereign, with the upper hand given to the latter. Therefore, the tension between religion and sovereignty was only reversed in the aftermath of Westphalia, not resolved – and it seems theoretically irresolvable for many (Griffiths, 2003). Although the dichotomy has not been at the centre stage of post-18th century Western politics, it remains to be one of the major sources of conflict elsewhere, primarily in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The highly underestimated role of this tension in contemporary Middle Eastern politics is based on a Eurocentric interpretation that religion is an insignificant element in international politics, as though Westphalia had the same effects universally. As of 2013, the governmental consequences of the Arab Revolutions demonstrate a massive support for politico-religious prototypes of governance in Tunisia and Egypt, three decades after the Iranian revolution. These governmental changes do play a role in regional alliances, as well as influencing the behaviour of sub-regional actors. Therefore, religion and the actors who continue politicizing religious doctrines are of higher importance in these regions. However, since, according to the thesis, secularization is a universal historical process, modern IR is not equipped with sufficient capacity to combine geopolitical differences with studies of religion.

If nothing fundamentally challenged the conventional, secularized notion of modern international politics for a very long period of time, the events of 9/11 certainly did. As noted previously, secularization in the form of religious decline was the grandiose prediction of modernization. As first demonstrated with the Iranian Revolution, then with post-Cold War ethnic and religious conflicts, and eventually with the events of 9/11, religion does not survive today solely as a pre-modern phenomenon. It has already been explained that assuming it as thus has been among the remnants of the secularization thesis.  This persisted until the post-Cold War crises of identity finally forced new approaches to be embraced; approaches that, in contrast to the mainstream arguments, do not have the analytical tools to revisit this identity crisis. For instance, an analytical distinction between modernity and modernism has been made in relation to religious fundamentalism: religious fundamentalists have been against the ideology of modernism, but this does not make them substantively pre-modern (Lawrence, 1989). In the same vein, Abrahamian (1993) demonstrated through Khomeinism that the leading Islamic figures, such as Khomeini and bin Laden, are able to carry characteristics from the modern world alongside a populist reference to Islamic traditions. With this awareness in mind, cross-cultural scholars tried to eliminate the general tendency of black-boxing all religions with respect to their societal and institutional essences (see Haynes, 1994). These attempts aimed to bring religion back into the borders of ‘normal’, so that studies of religion may operate under the discipline.

Conclusions

The secularization thesis has more than one meaning in the ordinary political discourse, which makes it more difficult to assess it as single, falsifiable thesis. This essay has tried to demonstrate how different claims, which are mostly associated with the secularization thesis, have had different, and somewhat crucially deep-rooted, impacts on international relations studies. Modernity has meant many things, from industrialization of work and urbanization, to individualism and egalitarianism; but modernity was rigidly tied to secularity before any other thing. It was secularity which set the norms of modernity. It was modernity which constructed the cosmos that IR studies would recognize as ‘real’.

The strongest manifestation of the secularization thesis in IR was that religion – scientifically, sociologically, politically and institutionally – was to be left in the pre-modern ages. This is the leading reason for the inadequacy of IR’s current paradigmatic thinking to identify religion as a part of modern political life. The current developments in the international arena demonstrate that initiating an interdisciplinary reconceptualization of religion as an international entity is required. Nevertheless, students of IR should not underestimate how misleading, discriminative and destructive it would be to reinvent religion in its pre-modern form, which easily invites one into the historic trap of redrawing in-eliminable barriers between imaginary religious borders.

Bibliography

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Written by: Metin Koca

Written at: London School of Economics and Political Science 

Written for: Dr. Katerina Dalacoura

Date written: March 2013