Bringing North-South relations back in

Duck of Minerva is currently running a symposium on "The end of IR theory?" special issue of European Journal of International Relations. In his article in that issue, "The Poverty of Grand Theory," Chris Brown (of LSE) calls for "critical problem-solving theory," i.e. theory which addresses real-world problems from the perspective of the powerless (or the underdog, to use the word in his abstract). I commented on Brown's DofM post (summarizing his article), and Nicholas Lees has a post on Brown's article here.

I think Brown is pretty much right that poststructuralist IR has not been sufficiently engaged with the real world and that both realist and liberal IR theory, while often quite engaged with the world, aren't concerned enough (or at all) with issues of global poverty and inequality. As Nicholas and I both point out, IR theorists could draw on resources in the literatures of international political economy, development, and applied ethics if they were to decide to make more concerted efforts to fill the gap(s) Brown identifies. 

One might ask why it matters who is working on a subject (in this case, global inequality and related issues) as long as it is being addressed by someone. I would suggest it's important that more IR academics focus on these issues partly because they do connect to the discipline's main concerns, in addition to being highly important in their own right. The other side of the equation, as Nicholas suggests, is that there need to be 'addressees,' people who are willing to consider the scholarship that's produced and who are or might be in a position to try to act on whatever is actionable.

Writing this post has led me to take a quick look at a piece I have long been intending to read: Giovanni Arrighi and Lu Zhang, "Beyond the Washington Consensus: A New Bandung?" (It was published in an edited volume [link] a couple of years ago but I have it in a separate pdf.) From a glance, Arrighi and Zhang contend that the economic rise of China may create the conditions for the formation of a new Southern bloc, held together as much or more by economic interest as by political/ideological solidarity. China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, the key countries in this scenario, are consciously promoting intra-South economic cooperation and activity. The focus on the possibility of 'a new Bandung' draws attention to issues that used to have a more central place in IR, including questions about how the interests of states and governments connect (or don't) to those of struggling individuals. If one wants to make a start on the tall order of 'critical problem-solving' theory ('grand' or otherwise), perhaps bringing North-South relations back to the field's center stage would be a good first step.

Chomsky on Reagan

Noam Chomsky is interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez about various things (including the Wisconsin protests) here. I don't have the time (or patience at the moment, quite frankly) to read the thing word for word, but I scrolled down through it and slowed down when I got to what Chomsky calls the "deification" of Ronald Reagan. Here's Chomsky on Reagan's actions abroad:

I won’t even talk about his international behavior. I mean, it was just abominable. I mean, if we gained our optimism by killing hundreds of thousands of people in Central America and destroying any hope for democracy and freedom and supporting South Africa while it killed about a million-and-a-half people in neighboring countries, and on and on, if that’s the way we get back our optimism, we’re in bad trouble.

This is dramatically put, but it's not wrong. Reagan did support the apartheid regime in South Africa. See here.

Of course, before some readers take severe umbrage let me acknowledge that there were other aspects to the Reagan foreign policy that Chomsky does not mention here. Reagan did reach agreement with Gorbachev in 1987 to remove intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. Reagan did give his so-called "Ivan and Anya speech" (Google it) in 1984 in which he talked about the danger of nuclear war, and he did take certain steps on arms control. (Don't forget the Stars Wars boondoggle, however.) But on balance, Reagan's foreign policy was not something to cheer about, and that's putting it mildly. (His other policies were bad, too.)

Multipolarity and normative convergence

What can someone who is not at all a China expert, makes no real effort to keep up with the literature on China, and is also not an expert on Northeast Asia (or Southeast Asia for that matter) or on the politics of international economic relations, have to say about Hu Jintao's U.S. visit that might be of interest? Probably not much. But as they say in the blogosphere, you get what you pay for, and I herewith hazard a thought or two on a visit that has already faded from the news cycle -- or rather, I use the visit as an excuse to reflect on more general issues.

Hu's statement that China has 'some work to do on human rights' (that was the gist if not the verbatim) is striking: it was not broadcast back in China but the fact that he said it is remarkable. Talk may be cheap but it is never completely empty or meaningless. Surrounded as it was by the standard stuff about China and the U.S. being different societies at different levels of development, needing to respect each other's sovereignty, etcetera etcetera, the statement stands out all the more sharply. It struck me as noteworthy that the first-among-equals in a collective leadership of an authoritarian state would publicly utter the phrase 'human rights' at all, as opposed to finding some euphemistic substitute.

There is a wide -- albeit not universal -- agreement among observers of international politics that the world is entering a period in which power is diffusing to more countries, as 'rising powers' (China, India, Brazil, perhaps Russia, and a few others) take a more assertive, visible role on the world stage and as the relative power of the U.S. continues to decline. Because China and Russia are not Western-style democracies (though Russia has some democratic forms), one line of thought holds that an increasingly multipolar world will also be one in which basic values become bones of contention, so to speak, as the standard-bearers of authoritarianism become more assertive not just about their geopolitical and economic interests but also about the supposed merits of their domestic arrangements. A contrary line holds that because no country can escape the 'liberal' international economic system, increasing integration into the world economy, plus economic growth and development in general, should lead eventually to a softening of authoritarianism and perhaps, even more eventually, to indigenously-driven, gradual 'democratization'. Sophisticated new versions of modernization theory, based on work by Ronald Inglehart and others, maintain that there is indeed a connection, however qualified and contingent, between development (in the sense of rising incomes, rising consumption, rising urbanization, growth of a middle class, etc.) and democracy. If this view is even partly correct, then multipolarity will mean not a fiercer fight over values, at least among states, but on the contrary a growing agreement on values (the 'normative convergence' of this post's title). The new multipolar world, on this view, will be closer to what Raymond Aron many years ago called a 'homogeneous system' as opposed to a 'heterogeneous system', or at least we can expect it to move slowly in the direction of the former.

The question just raised is more descriptive or predictive (what might happen?) than prescriptive (what should policymakers, say in the U.S., do?). In an article last fall in Foreign Affairs ("Not Ready for Prime Time," Sept./Oct. 2010), Jorge Castañeda argued that Brazil, China, India, and South Africa should not be brought into the inner sanctums of global governance because they are not sufficiently committed to "the notion that a strong international regime should govern human rights, democracy, nonproliferation, trade liberalization, the environment, international criminal justice, and global health." They remain too tied to outworn notions of 'noninterference in internal affairs,' Castañeda suggested, and until that changes, they should not be invited to assume positions of greater responsibility in international institutions.

I'm not sure Castañeda got it right. How do we know that increased commitment to international regimes will not be a consequence of more responsibility? Countries that remain shut out of positions commensurate with their growing material power are likely to become resentful and may look for opportunities to disrupt rather than strengthen the international regimes that exist (except, perhaps, on particular issues such as piracy and maybe terrorism where all states' interests 'naturally' converge).

In this context, does Hu's statement about China and human rights mean something? Very possibly. As one data point, it doesn't count for much, to be sure, but if it is followed by actions it may form one piece of evidence that the 'not ready for prime time' prescription has it backwards. I'll fall back here on that old friend of pundits: it's too soon to tell.

Rhetorics of empire

The calendar tells me that today is United Nations Day: a fitting day for this post (for reasons that will become clear).

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In Cosmopolitanism (Norton pb., 2007), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

The independence movements of the post-1945 world that led to the end of Europe’s African and Asian empires were driven by the rhetoric that had guided the Allies’ own struggle against Germany and Japan: democracy, freedom, equality. This [i.e., the conflict between colonial powers and independence movements] wasn’t a conflict between values. It was a conflict of interests couched in terms of the same values. (p. 80)

According to this view, the colonizers and the colonized framed their positions in the same language: both sides argued that they were upholding liberal principles. If so, did the colonizers genuinely believe that they were acting on behalf of such principles? No doubt some of them did, but that issue is beyond the scope of this post. The above-quoted passage from Appiah does, however, raise questions about the relation of words to concepts. Someone’s use of a word such as “freedom” does not necessarily indicate a commitment to anything that most people would recognize as freedom. A slaveholder in the act of beating a slave does not become a promoter of freedom simply by uttering the words “I am doing this because I believe in freedom.”

Admittedly this example is an exaggeration. In the conflict between colonial powers and independence movements, rhetoric was used in somewhat, but only somewhat, more subtle ways. The career of Jan Smuts (1870-1950) is instructive in this connection. In No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009), Mark Mazower devotes a lot of attention to Smuts, who was the leading South African politician of the first half of the twentieth century. Smuts viewed membership in the British Empire as a means to ensure the preservation and spread of white rule in southern Africa. During the first of his two terms as prime minister of South Africa (1919-1924), “the foundations of the future apartheid regime were being laid by eroding the last remnants of the native suffrage and introducing segregationist settlement restrictions.” (p. 51)

Smuts was also a believer in international organization. Among other things, he was a main drafter of the preamble to the UN Charter, which listed among the organization’s purposes the reaffirmation of “faith in fundamental human rights, …the dignity and worth of the human person, …the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small….” Mazower asks: “How could the new world body’s commitment to universal rights owe more than a little to the participation of a man whose segregationist policies back home paved the way for the apartheid state?” (No Enchanted Palace, p. 19) The answer – or at least an answer – is that for Smuts, and for some others involved in the UN’s founding, “fundamental human rights” did not in fact mean universal rights. Adhering to an “evolutionist paradigm of cosmic harmony under beneficent white guidance” (p. 57), Smuts saw “differential degrees of freedom and differential treatment of groups by the state [as] not merely reasonable but necessary for human progress.” (p. 64) As a young man, Smuts “had talked easily about the mission of ‘half a million whites’ to lift up ‘the vast dead weight of immemorial barbarism and animal savagery to the light and blessing of ordered civilisation,’” and he hoped the UN would be “a force for world order, under whose umbrella the British Empire – with South Africa as its principal dynamic agent on the continent – could continue to carry out its civilizing work.” (p. 65)

The UN Charter itself, as Mazower observes, did not specifically condemn colonialism, and few people of any prominence, except for W.E.B. Du Bois, objected to this omission at the time. Indeed an African journalist predicted that a new “scramble for coloured territories and spheres of influence” was in the offing, adding that “new life has been infused into predatory imperialism.” (quoted, p. 63)

However, the UN did not, as things turned out, conform to Smuts’s vision, nor did a new scramble for colonies occur. On the contrary, what Harold Macmillan called a wind of change (in his famous 1960 speech) was running strongly against the continuation of formal empire. This soon became evident within the UN itself. A complaint to the General Assembly about the treatment of Indians in South Africa, spearheaded by Nehru and first brought in 1946, presaged “the emergence in the General Assembly of an entirely new conception of world order – one premised on the breakup of empire rather than its continuation.” (Mazower, p. 185) The General Assembly’s December 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples called for quick independence for the remaining colonies, rejecting the argument that an alleged lack of readiness for self-government could justify delay.

The end of colonialism, an epochal change in world politics, represented an unusual case of a modern international institution becoming obsolete (cf. K.J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics [Cambridge U.P., 2004], p. 274). But although the institution became obsolete, the rhetoric associated with it has proven to be longer lived. Although virtually no one in authority extols, in Smutsian fashion, the superior wisdom of the “white race,” more nuanced versions of what Mazower calls imperial internationalism are still extant. In the context of the “war on terror,” references to “civilization” and “barbarism” have become common (see Mark Salter’s work on this); these words have overtones, whether intended or not, that cannot be fully grasped unless one remembers the once-widespread view that colonized peoples were “uncivilized.” The trope (to use a fashionable word) of civilization versus barbarism should not have been resurrected in recent years, no matter that the context is different. These words carry too many reminders of the old rhetorics of empire.

Note: For more on Smuts, see the sources listed in Mazower's notes. Also, Richard Toye's Churchill's Empire (Henry Holt, 2010) contains a couple of references to Smuts from a somewhat different perspective.