Abstract
This in-depth conversation with Professor Andrew Linklater engages with his academic biography, his intellectual contribution to the field of International Relations (IR) and his reflections on the current state of, and challenges facing, the discipline of (IR). It thereby traces his biography from his undergraduate days in Aberdeen, via his first lectureships in Australia, back to the United Kingdom and eventually to Aberystwyth University; it engages with his main oeuvres from the 1982 book Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations to his most recent work on The Problem of Harm in World Politics, and covers the development of IR as a global discipline from the 1970s until today.
Keywords
This is an edited version of a conversation between Professor Andrew Linklater and, on behalf of International Relations, Dr Richard Devetak, Dr Sebastian Kaempf and Dr Martin Weber. The conversation began in 2008 when Andrew Linklater was the keynote speaker at the Oceanic Conference on International Studies, hosted by the University of Queensland’s School of Political Science and International Studies. His keynote address, ‘Grand Narratives and International Relations’ was published in Global Change, Peace and Security (vol. 21, issue 1, 2009). The content of the interview was added to and completed in 2012.
Andrew Linklater is a distinguished scholar in International Relations (IR) theory. After completing his PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE), he taught at the University of Tasmania and Monash University in Australia, became professor at Keele University before becoming the 10th Woodrow Wilson Professor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2000. He is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. He is the author of several books on IR, including Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations, published in 1982; Beyond Realism and Marxism, published in 1990; The Transformation of Political Community, published in 1998; Critical Theory and World Politics, published in 2007; and most recently, The Problem of Harm in World Politics 2011. 1 He is currently completing a second book on harm in world politics, which is provisionally entitled, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems.
We would like to start by discussing your intellectual biography. Could you perhaps tell us a little bit more about your personal background and what it was like growing up in Aberdeen?
I was born in Aberdeen, studied Politics and IR between 1967 and 1971 at the University there, at which point I left to study at Oxford. One of the great strengths of the school system in Aberdeen was the stress on education. There was a Presbyterian emphasis on self-improvement. I was the first member of my family to go to University – a not uncommon event at the time given the great expansion of the higher education system in the 1960s. Although it was largely taken for granted, students from my generation had enormous benefits. University education was free, for example. I enjoyed a total of 9 years of state funding, which is now impossible in the British system.
We were wondering what got you interested in IR? What shifted you into this particular set of interests?
I ended up in IR entirely by accident, having enrolled initially in politics and zoology, and in logic and metaphysics. That was a very natural combination because in those days it was not at all strange to take at least one science subject as part of an arts degree. But I discovered in my first week that there was a timetable clash for those who wanted to study politics and zoology. IR looked as though it fitted well with my main interest, which was to understand the development of modern political ideas. So, I came to the subject by chance.
You spent your student years in Aberdeen, at Oxford as well as at the LSE. What was the academic climate like back then? Who were the intellectual influences on your thinking during those years?
It was possible to study Politics and IR in the same department at Aberdeen. In my second year, I was puzzled by the fact that there was a rich tradition of political thought about the state, but almost nothing to speak of in the way of international political theory, as it has come to be called. It was around that time that I read Arnold Wolfers’ essay on statesmanship and moral choice, 2 and Stanley Hoffmann’s essays on Rousseau and Kant. 3 They were immensely influential. They set me on my way.
I was taught political theory in my third year by Brian Midgley who was a Thomist natural lawyer with a special interest in theories of IR. He published a fine book on that subject in the mid-1970s. 4 It was unusual at the time to be taught by someone with a major research interest in political theory and IR, and to be encouraged to think about the relationship between ethics and world politics.
The next stage involved studying political theory at Oxford where I hoped to deepen my understanding of the history of political ideas and think about how to apply them to IR, but there was little encouragement at the time to make connections between the two areas. The LSE was the next port of call – to study for a PhD – and it was my very good fortune to be supervised by Michael Donelan who had not long started work on political theory and IR and was exceptionally supportive of my PhD topic, which became my first book, Men and Citizens. 5
In 1976, you moved to the University of Tasmania, teaching and researching for 5 years, followed by a 10-year stint at Monash University in Melbourne. What triggered your decision to move halfway around the globe?
Necessity. Making a living in the university system. There was a freeze in academic positions in the United Kingdom around 1975–1976 when I was coming to the end of my PhD funding. Like many others at the time, I began to look overseas, to Canada and Australia. I had made enquiries about an Australian National University (ANU) studentship some years before – a PhD studentship – and at some point during my PhD thought about applying for a tutorship – I believe it was – in South Australia, at Adelaide University, I think. Anyway, in 1975, an application was submitted to teach political theory and IR at the University of Tasmania.
If you compare the experiences you have had in institutions in the United Kingdom and in this part of the world, how did the academic climate differ between your Australian experience and your previous UK experience?
The Department at Tasmania (it was a Department of Political Science in those days) consisted of political scientists and public administration scholars for the most part, but there was a group that studied IR as well as Asian politics and development studies that encouraged me to teach theories of IR. There was also a new sociology department and an opportunity to discuss sociological theory, which I had dabbled in as an undergraduate.
It sounds like there was a general openness towards the kind of work that you were doing at the time.
Yes, absolutely. It was a lucky break.
Let us ask you a question about whether you think that moving to Australia had any impact on the development of your research, Australia and Tasmania especially being so far away from what you might call the institutional core of the discipline in the northern hemisphere. Do you think that your move to Australia made any real difference to the development of your research?
Not initially since my mind was on taking forward earlier work on political theory and IR.
Moving on to some engagement with the intellectual climate that you were working in, the question arises about how you had come to develop your intellectual project as such, what happened in terms of your influences? It is very interesting that in a climate that was very much dominated in political philosophy by the work of John Rawls, your own engagement was one of the few early on in IR dealing with a different conceptual idiom. John Rawls, for instance, plays hardly any role in your work. It seems interesting that you seem to come at this, shall we say, sideways due to your engagement with your sociologist and political theorist training. Do you reckon that has that got something to do with it? Or are there other reasons?
There was a short section in Men and Citizens on Rawls. 6 Like almost everyone who read Rawls in the early 1970s, it was impossible not to be enthralled. But especially because of the opportunity to study Hegel and Marx at Oxford, Rawls seemed to be in the wrong tradition. Moreover, my instincts have usually led me away from the beaten track. Now that may be a tremendous psychological fault … but that is how it was.
One last question on your intellectual biography. In 1993, you returned from Australia back to the United Kingdom, took up a chair at Keele University before, finally in 2000, you moved to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. We are very curious to hear how British IR and academia had changed in those 16 years that you had been away from it.
It changed substantially as far as I could see between 1984–1985 and 1993. My impression from sabbaticals spent at the LSE and then in Oxford was that IR theory took off in the United Kingdom around then. It seemed to me that British IR was becoming more pluralistic and more supportive of theory in a period when Australian IR was going in another direction and was in danger of being subsumed within the study of the Asia-Pacific region. I had been working on a book on community and citizenship in my final years at Monash and thought the right environment for taking the discussion forward was the United Kingdom. But I had begun to think more about the question of difference specifically in connection with minority rights and indigenous peoples. And that remains a lasting Australian influence.
We may return to those ideas about indigenous people, difference and so forth. But we would like to take a more chronological order, turning now to an engagement with your works and starting with Men and Citizens. In that book, you trace the way that the conflict between obligations to fellow citizens and obligations to humanity gets handled in the history of political thought, starting with natural law thinkers, moving through Kant and Hegel, ending with Marx. It doesn’t draw directly from historical experience, as you say, it is really a speculative philosophy of history. There was a powerful figure, a spectre of Hegel operating here. What is the purpose of embarking on such a history, and can that kind of history be redeemed after various critiques by post-structuralism?
Those are very good questions. That book was not meant to be a history although I read a fair amount of historical material to write the final section. You are right about Hegel, and the scholar who should be mentioned here is Collingwood who developed the idea of a scale of forms that forms the basis for the last section of Men and Citizens. 7 That idea of placing societies on a scale indicating how near or far they are from commitments to universal moral principles still holds some appeal to me. But the idea is hard to defend and is perhaps more trouble than it is worth. There is a section in Norbert Elias’ writings where he maintains that early societies were not faced with a choice between our values and theirs and somehow made the wrong choice. At the same time, he maintains that there have been learning processes in human history that include greater sensitivity to the interests of others and to their differences as part of the quest to discover universal principles on which all can agree. That argument emphasises that social learning is not about coming closer to universals that existed all along – given in human nature, for example – but about learning how to live amicably with other peoples in conditions of interconnectedness. 8 So, Hegelian themes are preserved, although now viewed through an Eliasian or process-sociological lens.
As for post-structuralism, I would argue that post-structuralists also have their conception of advancement and backwardness, but they are very careful to avoid those terms because they are acutely aware of the dangers that are inherent in such language. That sensitivity has been very influential, as it should have been. I think it was Anthony Giddens who argued back in the 1980s that post-structuralism or postmodernity is a phase of the democratisation of modern cultures. That seems to be a fair assessment. If we had more time, we could discuss how far Adorno, for example, pre-empted poststructuralist sensibilities regarding otherness and difference. But let me just say that post-structuralism raised profound questions about universalistic commitments; but if I understand its advocates or interpreters, it did not argue for abandoning them entirely.
What about Deleuzianism and all that where Hegel is obviously a big figure in the background, and always has been in Deleuze’s works, which are unintelligible without it; there you get exactly that plethora of points about universality and the struggle with it rather than being able to bed it down.
And since you mentioned spectres earlier, it is worth recalling Derrida’s Spectre of Marx and the sections that called for a new universality in the light of unprecedented suffering. There is a direct appeal to Marx in that work. 9 Also significant, and running parallel to Derrida’s comments on the need for new forms of community and citizenship, was Foucault’s plea for a new kind of citizenship – a form of world citizenship – that could stand up against violations of human rights. 10 Parallels of that kind stand out perhaps because of my interest in intellectual synthesis – in proceeding in the manner of a ‘lumper’ rather than a ‘splitter’. 11
What interests me is the possibility of reaching a higher level of synthesis in the social sciences. We can come back to that, perhaps, but the point is that academic specialisation has led to the fragmentation of knowledge and to rival tribes rather than to greater synthesis and the quest for connections. The volume of literature forces many people in the direction of specialisation, and not towards the development of conceptual frameworks that show how different studies contribute to understanding human societies in long-term development. This is a central theme in process sociology and a link with Hegel and Marx although without preserving their notions of historical progress and their Eurocentrism.
Staying with Hegel’s ghost and synthesis, let us turn to Beyond Realism and Marxism, which presents a case for Critical International Theory by trying to absorb the strengths of realism and Marxism and jettisoning some of the weaknesses in an attempt to try and provide a unified theory that transcends both. What prompted you to bring realism and Marxism into dialogue, first? Second, in what sense does your version of Critical International Theory move beyond either realism and Marxism, and what of each theory remains in your own unified Theory of IR?
The starting point was Frankfurt School social theory and Horkheimer’s argument for a perspective that is true to the spirit but not to the letter of Marxism. That comment was in part a response to fascism, nationalism, the increasing state power and war. An interest in the Frankfurt School leads then almost necessarily to the question of what in realism should be incorporated within a post-Marxist critical social theory. When working on Beyond Realism and Marxism, 12 many Marxists were involved in rethinking the classical position on state power and devoting more attention to geopolitics. Around that time, more and more people in IR were absorbing the positive elements of world systems theory and dependency theory before that. There was a growing interest in radical social science and in critical orientations to the world. So, it just seemed essential to think about the tension between the anti-Enlightenment stance of realism on the one hand and Marxism, as one heir to the Enlightenment, on the other, and to consider Critical International Theory in that light. Part of the motivation was to reach a higher level of synthesis – although that is not how I would have expressed it at the time. At any rate, there is a section of the book that refers to the need to understand multiple logics in world politics – state building and war, struggles to create order, systems of production and exchange and moral and cultural development, for example. 13 The point of the synthesis is to try to understand more about the expansion and contraction of the boundaries of community, which, of course, takes us back to Men and Citizens and was the bridge to The Transformation of Political Community. 14
To what extent would you say that Men and Citizens and Beyond Realism and Marxism were actually ground-clearing exercises for The Transformation of Political Community? Or do you see them as separate enterprises? We were wondering to what degree there was a kind of Hegelian three-step going on in those books.
Around 1984 or 1985, it became clear that some of the central themes in Men and Citizens would need to be worked through in two other books, and there were plans in the late 1980s to write a book on historical sociology – a small start was made before abandoning a project that is now central to my current research. Those books are interconnected, but of course the sequence was not exactly planned in advance. I would like to think that there has been a progressive broadening of horizons along the way that has led to the current project on harm.
Thinking back to the mid-1980s, one of us was a student in one of your honours classes. It was called ‘Power, Order and Emancipation’. The title of the course echoes Chapter 1 of Beyond Realism and Marxism, but the content of that course was already very historical, wasn’t it?
To a degree since there were seminars on ancient Greece, on Rome, on empire, on ancient diplomacy and so forth. And quite some time was devoted to Michael Mann’s pioneering first book on social power that showed what was possible and led me to think about how to extend the earlier discussion on political theory and IR by making connections with historical sociology. 15
Do you think that with The Transformation of Political Community you have actually succeeded in setting down the framework that you wanted in terms of the normative theoretical material that you require for the critique to still work in your sociology, or do you think that it is a work in progress as you proceed with your sociological enquiries?
Work in progress. The normative theme continues in discussions of a global version of the harm principle. The sociological dimension survives in working on civilising processes in different phases of human history, and the awkwardly named praxeological dimension continues in thinking about the route to agreed principles. Earlier themes remain important then, but the focus on harm is, I believe, a more effective way of taking the discussion further.
The move towards a more sociologically grounded approach risks being exposed to the criticism made by Steve Hobden, who asked to what degree sociology can actually be critical at all? 16 Where do the criteria of critique of identity crisis come from in an account of ‘how things are’? At the same time, what would the move be, in the Marxist sense, from ‘the weapons of critique to the critique of weapons’? We mean here to invoke the need to get practical with the critical work in a way that makes sense to those subjected to real suffering, in your case, harm: Where is the critical element in those particular kinds of sociological works that you now engage with?
Well, the critical element is still drawn to a large degree from Habermas. Discourse ethics remains important but also Habermas’ reflections on the reconstruction of historical materialism in his book on communication and the evolution of society. 17 There is an embryonic sociology of morals in that work, one that focuses very much on the development of particular constructions of universality. Rather less attention was paid to the relationship between ethics and very basic features of human existence such vulnerability to various forms of suffering. Discourse, it might be said, is at least partly about aiming at an agreement about the forms of harm that are necessary for the existence of a society – forms of punishment, for example – and the forms that are surplus to requirements and should be eradicated. Habermas devoted little attention to the central issues here, which revolve around distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable suffering – issues about the body and vulnerability that have been central to process sociology – although Elias did not consider his work as a contribution to Frankfurt School social theory or have any inclination to support partisan sociology. Nevertheless, process sociology is central to any attempt to take the critical project forward.
So, this is getting back into the old frame, back to the Frankfurt School before which was always a critique of domination and marginalisation …
Yes.
The question remains: Where is it? Where lie the patterns of domination?
Elias on the civilising process is crucial here. 18 A central claim is that all societies have civilising processes in that they have conceptions of what is acceptable and reprehensible, what is civil or polite and what is vile or disgusting. All have particular conventions that explain who can harm whom and under what conditions, what forms of violent or non-violent harm are permissible or should be prohibited and so forth. The analysis suggested that modernity has made at least some limited advances in ruling out particular forms of cruelty and in either ending or contesting certain forms of domination and exploitation. But crucially there is no conception of the international in Elias. There is a recurrent interest in his writing – stretching back to the later 1930s to his last works in the late 1980s – in struggles for power between states and in the challenges of rising levels of human interconnectedness. The main works concluded that there was little in the way of global civilising processes. The discussion of such themes can be advanced by engaging with English School analyses of civility in IR, which can be read as explaining how the European civilising process operated at the international level, something that Elias recognised in passing in references to a ‘supranational court society’.
You have raised many interesting points, and we would like to unpack them one by one. We would like to get back to the question of connectivity you mentioned before returning to your main books, specifically how the three books – Men and Citizens, Beyond Realism and Marxism and The Transformation of Political Community – all fit together. Do you see them as a trilogy, as a work that somehow connects to one another? How do you see them sitting together?
One followed the other and not just in a temporal sense, but in a theoretical sense. In the course of finishing Men and Citizens, it seemed necessary to work on Marxism and realism and on critical social theory. The references in Beyond Realism and Marxism to questions about the expansion and contraction of the boundaries of political community were developed further in the next book (i.e. The Transformation of Political Community) and so on, as stated in earlier points about broadening horizons and about moving to a higher plane of synthesis. Those comments make it seem as if everything was more straightforward than was actually the case. Around the time work on Men and Citizens was coming to an end, the question arose of whether to spend the next few years doing more specialist work on international political theory. That was an appealing way forward although there was a feeling at the time that it might mean doing ‘more of the same’, and so the decision was taken to turn to other problems and different literatures in the attempt to extend the discussion in Men and Citizens.
If you then see The Transformation of Political Community as a synthesis that might bring a long strand of thought, not necessarily to an end, but to some sort of conclusion…
No, I don’t see it that way but rather as drawing together themes that then provide a foundation for the next inquiry. So, having finished The Transformation of Political Community, it seemed necessary to develop the points that had been made about transnational harm. Some reviewers such as Norman Geras raised issues that made that seem all the more necessary. 19
In recent years, your research has somewhat shifted from predominantly normative post-Marxist courses to more socio-historical investigations of cosmopolitanism, the problem of harm in world politics and Elias’ civilising process. At what point did that shift in thinking come about, and why was that the case?
Part of the reason for turning to the sociological literature was the feeling of not having much more to say at the time about normative issues, or philosophical issues, or meta-theoretical issues or whatever. It seemed possible to come back to them later, to take a fresh look. And I had long wanted to do some work on sociology, which I had enjoyed studying as an undergraduate at Aberdeen. A start was made in the mid to late 1980s, but the main questions were not clear at that stage, and the project was shelved. The idea had been to work on community and citizenship after writing a book on historical sociology. The Transformation of Political Community clarified the issues. Work on harm started in 1999. I rediscovered Elias’ writing around 2006, a turning point since they offered the higher level of synthesis, combining the material and ideational dimensions of social systems with the psychological, or as he calls them psychogenetic elements of human behaviour. The focus was on long-term patterns of change affecting humanity as a whole, and there were the scattered references to IR and even to the problem of humanity and citizenship. The deeper I went into it, the more it seemed as if Elias had solved problems or offered pathways to working on them that were missing in IR and perhaps across the social sciences more generally. Work on harm therefore came to be placed within an Eliasian framework, but with the Frankfurt School still in place and with an interest in synthesising process sociology and elements of English School analysis. That has been the basis for returning to global ethics and international political theory in some essays on cosmopolitanism and on the global harm principle.
We would like to enquire a bit more into Elias and harm conventions. In your writing, you have argued frequently that responsibility for harming others needs to include a Good Samaritan clause, that is, the indifference of bystanders to injuries that are caused towards others should be regarded as harmful in itself. So, bearing this in mind, would you therefore welcome the new norm of the Responsibility to Protect as a cosmopolitan harm convention that establishes positive obligations to the international community to respond to mass atrocities that despotic government cause upon their own people?
There has been a great deal of work on intervention. I realise that the idea of the Responsibility to Protect is not just about intervention, but it comprises a huge amount of work on intervention nevertheless, on human rights violations and also on reducing the harm that ‘we do to them’, the harm, for instance, to use Thomas Pogge’s expression, that is caused by global coercive regimes. 20 So, there is a broader cosmopolitan context in which to locate arguments about the Responsibility to Protect. We know that many people in what we used to call the Third World fear that intervention will simply lead to new forms of Western imperialism. Certainly, there are various things that Westerners can do to help the global poor without intervening in their internal affairs, quite possibly making matters worse than they were prior to intervention. Pogge points this out in his World Poverty and Human Rights. One of my aims in The Problem of Harm in World Politics was to draw up a taxonomy of harm, from violent harm through to the harm of indifference to suffering, and forms of humiliation, forms of exploitation and structural harm and to argue that a cosmopolitan project that is concerned with reducing human suffering needs to work across all those fronts.
This raises another question regarding your work on harm and has to do with how that fits into your theoretical programme as a whole. What do you think about who acts, as it were, in those kinds of contexts? Because there is a sense in which, when we talk of the Responsibility to Protect, for instance, there are certain people who have that responsibility, and they are thereby constituted as agents and others are constituted as patients in that particular context. One of the things that the Pogge book does in one of the chapters is to raise a fairly interesting story about how problematic that can be in accounts of justice when the agents and patients are connected. Another question is to what degree the old Frankfurt School concern with the harm we do to ourselves, and which enables us to harm others, is still alive in your project? The question of the constitution of a modernity that is actually troubled with itself and maybe not the best agent to be running around sorting out others. Do you see where we are coming from?
Yes, I do see where you’re coming from, and I think that some of these matters will come up in tomorrow’s lecture. 21 One issue is the extent to which people in different parts of the world are starting to appreciate that they have a harm narrative in common, a narrative that among other things highlights the fact that our survival as a species and our dominance as a species have been dependent to a very significant extent on past ingenuity in working out how to cause harm, whether it be harm to others in military conflict or harm to the physical environment and to other species. The success of the human species owes much to an extraordinarily creativity when it comes to inventing new forms of harm, and to less success in restraining that creativity through, for example, the development of cosmopolitan harm conventions.
In terms of agents and patients and so forth, I want to bring in the notion of the ambiguities of human interconnectedness, which perhaps echoes the notion of the ambiguities of modernity in The Transformation of Political Community. Modernity at one and the same time has unleashed extraordinary collective power over human beings, led to the capacity to wage destructive war in distant places, as well as the ability to dominate the physical world to an unprecedented extent. And it is the very same modernity that also has, and partly because of these forms of harm, developed various ideas about world citizenship, global morality, universal principles and so forth. Part of what is going on here is very much, as you rightly state, about Western – but not only Western – self-reflectiveness. It may seem that cosmopolitans should be quick to help people in distant places, but of course as the post-structuralists have argued, there are immediate dangers of new forms of domination and new forms of power in which the benevolent or more ‘civilized’ save other peoples from themselves.
Humanitarian assistance is crucial at times, but needs to be placed in a broader perspective that emphasises that peoples in the West have been enormously successful at harming other peoples and that therefore a large part of the cosmopolitan project has to be self-corrective. An increasing number of people are aware of the central issues, specifically in connection with problems regarding the environment. Some years back, a leading UK government minister talked about the need for cards that recorded individuals’ carbon footprint or something of the kind that many ridiculed at the time. But it is interesting to think about what such ideas tell us about demands for greater individual reflectivity and responsibility and about what they reveal about the sense of connections between routine everyday practices and global process that affect people more or less everywhere. One of the most remarkable transformations of recent times is the way in which more and more people recognise those connections and have been made aware of how mundane activities feed into long-term processes of change that are inherently destructive and could conceivably jeopardise the survival of the species itself in the long term. Now, of course, those ideas have a prehistory; they were around in the days when people were concerned about nuclear weapons and superpower rivalry. Even so, more people have caught on to a certain kind of harm narrative – that we as a species have invented all sorts of interconnections that bring enormous benefits but at the same time have clearly harmful and often unpredictable consequences, as stressed in studies of global risk society. Larger questions about redirecting the course of human history were identified by Marx and indeed by Kant in his writings on universal history. As noted earlier, they continue to be developed in ingenious ways.
Can we come in on this? In that big project, who are the most promising agents? Are these the states or non-state actors? Are these global citizens, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or international organisations? Or are these the aggregate sets that might come out of the potential for ingenuity of the individual global citizen?
I have not studied the issues closely, but an impression is that there is a role for all of them. There is no reason to think states are somehow unable to make contributions to cosmopolitan projects. The emphasis is usually on NGOs that clearly have a fundamental role to play, although it is important not to romanticise them. International organisations, formal and informal, also have a part to play, as do individuals in their everyday lives and business corporations that take notions of corporate responsibility seriously. Perhaps it is a question of how all those interact to produce new social and political structures, and new normative commitments and new emotional attitudes to one’s own society and its relationship with global processes and with other peoples – new sociogenetic and psychogenetic combinations to use terms that Elias used in explaining the civilising process and which can be employed to analyse the prospects for a global civilising process in which all those actors have a part. 22
Echoing Elias again, humans are still at a very early stage in what is likely to be a long process of increasing interconnectedness – they are still at an early stage in what may turn out to be a long collective learning process in which they work out how to live together with less violent and non-violent harm. 23 There is clearly a connection to be made here with Kant and Marx’s analysis of human history, future possibilities and desirable directions for the species as a whole. There is little evidence of this in our own time, but it is perfectly possible that universal social movements that command the support of millions – even hundreds of millions – of people will develop at some future point and find ways of agreeing, despite the odds, on how to create state structures and international organisations that steer humanity as a whole in a different direction. That may seem unlikely, even utopian, but it cannot be ruled out, and it is certainly desirable.
In making that kind of argument, accepting that there might be multiple agents that might push the agenda along towards something like a cosmopolitan political system, you in your work have drawn quite heavily on the English School and have seen the state as amenable to change; you have talked about the state becoming potentially a good international citizen, and you have drawn upon English School work on progress within the society of states. How important would you say the English School contribution has been to the development of your own research programme? A few years ago you co-authored a book on the English School, of course, with Hidemi Suganami, 24 and some critics perhaps might be a little surprised at the extent to which you have drawn upon Hedley Bull, Martin Wight and various others. Maybe you could say a little bit more about how you see the English School fitting in to this broader project of Critical IR?
Well the people you mentioned are not as surprised as I am because there was a time when I would not have thought that was likely at all. There is a footnote in Men and Citizens that drew out various tensions in Bull’s thought – between supporting some notion of world community but at the same time avoiding all the questions about the ethical foundations for such ideas. 25 Various discussions, and especially with John Vincent in the mid–late-1980s and with Paul Keal in Australia, encouraged a change of heart, later reinforced by the pluralism/solidarism debate.
What has interested me in the English School is the combination of deep scepticism about the human capacity to work towards perpetual peace or to implement cosmopolitan principles, and in John Vincent’s work, and then with Tim Dunne and Nick Wheeler, an interest in how far universal principles of human rights can be incorporated into the institutions of a society of states.
There are three other reasons for that interest in the English School. One is that the notion of harm is central to it although rarely analysed. In the book with Hidemi Suganami, I note that Robert Jackson and Michael Donelan, for example, highlight the importance of a principle of non-injury for international society. 26 Second, the English School refers occasionally to the civilising process or civility in world politics. Adam Watson uses those terms as does Robert Jackson. There are affinities with the sociology of processes of civilisation that seeks to explain the standards of self-restraint in different societies. But the English School has not placed the development of international society within the larger civilising process that was taking place in Europe, just as Elias did not discuss how far the civilising process was embodied in international affairs and not least through modern forms of diplomacy. So, there are interesting potentials for theoretical synthesis that would bring sociology and IR much closer together and provide a more synoptic standpoint in the social sciences. Third, and related to that, the English School examination of the expansion of international society and the revolt against the West lays the foundations for thinking about how future global civilising processes may develop, where civilisation in the technical sense of the term in process sociology refers to the prevalent social standards of self-restraint.
In a passing comment, Elias maintained that systems of states are the highest ‘steering mechanisms’ available to human beings. These are the highest levels of integration, the highest levels of global steering that we have. So, if there is going to be fundamental change of the kind that you referred to earlier, it has to be worked into the society of states. Or, to use Ian Clark’s language, new forms of complementarity between international society and world society will need to develop. 27 Perhaps such global arrangements can be infused with ideas about good international citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship and so forth, terms that can bridge the gulf between rising levels of human interconnectedness and the dogged persistence of loyalties to nations and states.
One critic, rather unkindly, has accused your version of Critical International Theory as being neither critical nor a theory. 28 Graciously, she does accept that maybe you are doing International Theory. According to her version, you have strayed a little too far from analysis of concrete phenomena in their social and historical totality by working with speculative histories of philosophy and so forth. Additionally, she also charges you with reproducing the modern requirement by endorsing discourse ethics, funnily enough. How do you plead, Andrew?
Everybody has to plead guilty from time to time and trust in a good lawyer. The question though is what are those concrete phenomena, and how should we study them? What is the appropriate theoretical framework to bring to the analysis? The criticism may not rest on the assumption that one can take a non-theoretical approach to those phenomena, although often those who refer to the concrete seem to privilege such a standpoint, or do not clarify the nature of their own theoretical position. There is a certain imbalance in IR as a result – an enormous amount of necessary concrete analysis but often without exploring how various inquiries contribute to the development of broad conceptual frameworks that can guide and integrate empirical research.
It may not be a good defence to say that none of us can do everything, but we all tend to focus on problems that we want to try to solve or find especially interesting. Certainly, I’ve spent most of my career thus far on theoretical issues, and understandably that will seem inadequate from the standpoint of those who focus on more empirical phenomena. The books on harm are more concerned with concrete historical issues as part of the attempt to work through the implications of a particular theoretical position, to develop theoretically informed empirical analysis or to engage in what some process sociologists have called ‘research-theorising’. 29
As for the modern requirement and discourse ethics, I have to say I do not understand this critique at all. Certainly ‘The Requirement’ as Chris Brown showed involved declarations in Latin about the rights of Christians to take control of the lands of the newly discover peoples in the Americas. There was no sense of an obligation to communicate with the ‘Indians’. 30 Discourse ethics is the complete antithesis because it is about engaging with particular people without preconceived ideas about who is right and who is wrong and no settled opinion about ‘who can learn from whom’. So, discourse ethics is – and this takes me back to an earlier comment about Giddens and post-structuralism, or postmodernity – part of the ongoing radicalisation of modernity 31 and about trying to ensure that any universals are reached by open communication and with sensitivity to the dangers of closure or the imposition of views on others. A number of different strands of social theory converge on those points. Rorty refers to non-repressive deliberation, 32 while Bourdieu to voluntary communication. 33 And Lyotard talks about similar notions of speech. I’ve forgotten the language that he uses …
The Amnesty Lecture … the rights of the other … 34
Yes, and Habermas was engaged in very similar reasoning but with greater theoretical sophistication by trying to work out what it means to be committed to non-repressive deliberation. The unpersuaded believe that there is an exclusionary notion of what counts as open discussion, but I think that is a misreading of the argument.
There is actually a more sympathetic critique of the kind that Richard Shapcott made in his book, 35 which is that there is still an expectation or an assumption that in order to enter into this dialogue, one needs to possess post-conventional ethics.
I don’t see that at all. Certain people might go into the discussion with post-conventional ethical commitments (a roughly Kantian position), but other people may not. In genuinely open discourse, it would be wrong to stack the deck in favour of post-conventionalism. I don’t think Habermas places that requirement on those involved in discourse. But whatever he may have thought or may now think, it is not obviously the logic of his position as is clear from his remarks about communication that does not efface difference. The radical implication of the perspective is that someone might enter into dialogue as a post-conventionalist and come out as a pre-conventionalist! Whether that is likely is another matter. At any rate, the approach underlines the kind of moral psychology that is essential for non-coercive communication to take place. But there is an openness to outcomes in Habermas, which I think defeats the critique.
And yet, if we reformulate the objection, it turns into something slightly different. Richard Shapcott could have played the objection by saying, well, you have to be prepared to change your mind, change your view and all the rest of it, and that would go for virtually anybody. The presumption then is that the conventionalist who goes in and says, well, you first have to become Catholic before I actually talk to you disqualifies oneself in an interesting or problematic way as a real interlocutor, and that this particular set-up favours a reflexivity that simply violates the interests of somebody deeply entrenched in a worldview.
That simply rephrases the earlier point and can be answered in the same way. In The Transformation of Political Community, somewhere in the footnotes perhaps, there is a statement to the effect that the notion of what counts as an open dialogue itself has to be worked through by processes of open dialogue rather than laid down in advance. 36 In reality, people can easily become bogged down in those issues, but the point about openness to other positions is worth restating here. Habermas does stress that deliberation must be open to the various forms of oppression, the various forms of victimisation and the various forms of suffering that have been caused in the past. More might have been said about that, and I think you have been right to stress the importance of Honneth’s work on the body and vulnerability. 37
You spoke then of safeguards against suffering. One of the concrete ways in which individuals have safeguarded themselves against suffering is to adopt citizenship and for states to promise to protect their own by conferring citizenship status on individuals. You, of course, have been pushing the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship, arguing that there might be potentials to develop a notion of cosmopolitan citizenship, which can safeguard ‘suffering strangers’ you might say. Communitarian critics have knocked the idea, of course, by asking where they might pick up their papers. Poststructuralist critics probably argue that citizenship itself is still beholden to a notion of the state, sovereignty and maybe even totalising tendencies. Do you consider yourself a citizen of the world? Or more seriously, how do you respond to the criticisms made of cosmopolitan citizenship and the possibility that it might be equally exclusionary or just plain delusional?
I take the Walzer–Miller line seriously because their position, as you know, is that citizens, as we normally understand them, already belong to particular societies and identify closely with sovereign states and not with humanity at large. 38 As they point out, citizens have passports and can vote in elections. There are no equivalents on the global level, and there are no counterparts to the forms of democratic representation or participation that exist at the national level. Walzer and Miller maintain that the emotional ties and the sense of trust that bind people together as the citizens of particular states do not exist at the global level. As a result, the idea of world citizenship is a non-starter in their view.
It is important however to keep the development of citizenship clearly in mind, noting how it moved up from towns to modern states, for example, and then went through interesting phases, as T. H. Marshall argued in connection with Britain. 39 That is, citizenship became more comprehensive with the movement beyond legal rights to political and welfare rights, to which we can add rights that take account of group identities, gender differences and so forth. That process continues in an admittedly still limited way as notions of European Union (EU) citizenship and cosmopolitan citizenship reveal. As humans become more integrated at the global level, questions inevitably arise about the legal, political and other rights that should be guaranteed everywhere. Rights and duties under international criminal law are part of that process. Other rights may follow that realise the aspirations of advocates of cosmopolitan democracy or the provision of welfare rights on a global scale. That may be a long way off, but the bridge to such a condition necessarily involves inventing a new political vocabulary of rights and duties that includes the entitlements that all people should have as world citizens. To say that current ideas about world citizenship are a pale imitation of what exists in the more robust liberal democracies is accurate, but in some ways it misses the point about human potentials, and it runs the risk of trying to shore up and preserve existing states when the task is to create new forms of community and citizenship that embrace sub-national, national and supranational loyalties and authorities. Notions of cosmopolitan citizenship are important for preparing ourselves for the next stages of global integration, assuming that recent trends continue, which seems likely although nothing is absolutely certain. They are crucial weapons in struggles to ensure that new structures do not promote the interests of elites but take responsibility for the needs of the more vulnerable. Walzer’s invitation to show the papers that provide evidence of world citizenship is an amusing rhetorical move, but the matter does not end there.
We will just ask you a few questions now, more general questions about the discipline of IR. Men and Citizens was published in 1982, a year after Cox’s famous article in Millennium, Ashley’s rather neglected piece in International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) and an article by Rob Walker in Alternatives, all in one way or another enunciated a Critical International Theory project. 40 At what point did you become aware of these writings, and how, if at all, did they inform your research or your thoughts about the discipline as such?
Men and Citizens was completed towards the end of 1980 before there was an opportunity to read Cox and Ashley on critical theory. The Cox and Ashley essays had a great impact on me, especially the latter’s piece in ISQ because it was the first attempt to apply an argument that had been around in sociology circles in the 1970s on the differences between positivism, hermeneutics and critical theory. The distinctions between them are considered in a slightly different way in the first chapter of Beyond Realism and Marxism. I became aware of the Walker piece in Alternatives much later.
Did you feel that you were a part of a kind of emerging project or part of a new esprit that was beginning to make an impact on the discipline.
I remember feeling heartened by the Cox and Ashley essays that appeared at a time when the discipline was in something of rut, and certainly International Theory seemed to be making no progress at all. Cox in particular sharpened the differences between neorealism and critical theory in perhaps the most quoted line in IR that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ and by separating critical theory from problem-solving approaches. Cox also opened up new avenues by developing his version of international political economy (IPE), which was too materialist for me, something that was corrected in his later essays on civilisations and civilisational identities. 41
As for the sense of an emerging project, there was indeed a realisation that alternatives to mainstream positions were developing within different intellectual traditions, many of which had little in common with the standpoints taken by Frankfurt School theorists. It quickly became apparent that critical approaches were going to develop in their separate ways, with little sense of commonality. Some are more concerned with normative ethics; there are different conceptions of how to explain the world, about whether it is meaningful to talk about emancipatory politics or human interests and so forth.
We would like to get back to another point that you made earlier, much earlier in our conversation and prompt you to talk about this expert culture within the social sciences that now sets up all these different discourses, which sometimes, you seemed to suggest earlier, may make conversations among people working on similar interests, but in very different idioms, extremely difficult, if not impossible. What is your sense of where we are heading in terms of the discipline of IR, which at one level encompasses the whole world, and at the same time seems open to the charge that there may be mutually exclusive idioms going on in there?
The suggestion is that different idioms are necessary, as are different modes of specialisation, so that what is missing from one area of inquiry is taken up elsewhere. That is the reason for divisions of labour in the academic world and the reason for welcoming intellectual pluralism. It becomes counterproductive when intellectual segregation or insularity sets in and when there is little interest in areas of convergence and in potentials for synthesis. IR has made great advances because of the different idioms, but there is still too little work, in my view, that tries to pull things together – not only weaving together ideas within IR but also forging connections across disciplines. The cupboard is not exactly bare. Post-structuralists have been actively involved in building connections between IR, aesthetics and so forth. But even the more synthetic work often tends to be within highly specialised areas of inquiry.
I do not think the balance is right at the moment or likely to change. The great explosion of IR literature makes specialisation more necessary at the PhD level, for example – or for synthesis to be promoted in the ways I’ve mentioned. So, there is a danger of an increasing fragmentation of knowledge. Perhaps that is the lament of someone with an unhealthy interest in synthesis. But I’m with Elias on the need to incorporate ideas from the biological sciences, evolutionary psychology and other disciplines in order to understand how humanity has developed over hundreds of thousands of years – culturally, politically and so forth. IR has a particular role to play in such an endeavour because it has been concerned with relations between human groups, with struggles for power but also with the development of international societies, the expansion of the modern society of states and globalisation. The discipline has been unique because the focus was on the global – it is no longer unique in that respect because other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology have their own explanations of globalisation and do not, for the most part, pause to consider what IR scholars have written on that subject. But IR still has a special role to play in the quest for higher level synthesis in the social sciences.
The footnote to add is that Foucault sent people off on the wrong track when he argued for specific rather than general intellectuals. 42 There was a critique of that position in Martin Jay’s book on Marxism and Totality, which highlights the importance – from memory – of analysing global problems including the need for controlling nuclear weapons. 43 And as noted earlier, Foucault did make some comments about the need for world citizenship. But there is much that can be done to breathe new life into grand narratives that are connected with cosmopolitan projects, to recover the kind of enterprise that was pioneered by Kant and Marx, and is now taken forward by different approaches to world history.
You’ve been talking about the discipline, and it doesn’t seem like the divisions within the discipline seem to concern you very much although they cause some consternation in the minds of some very eminent scholars. We are thinking of K. J. Holsti and others. 44 Do you think that the discipline at the moment has overcome the differences, or is it celebrating the difference to use poststructuralist parlance? How do you see the state of the discipline at present? But also, could we also ask you to talk to the state of the discipline in Australia, to the extent that you are familiar with it?
It is hard for me to comment about the discipline globally. You mention Holsti, whose book referred to IR in Japan, in South Korea and so forth. Others have developed the analysis as part of a questioning of the dominance of Anglo-American IR and with regard to the possibility of a global IR that is more open to non-Western perspectives and to the issues that have been central to postcolonial investigations. The fact remains that the discipline is largely what the United States has made it – increasingly sophisticated and professional – but highly conformist and restricted in its range, not least as far as Theories of IR are concerned. Perhaps that is partly because of what Theda Skocpol or Bertell Ollman called the absence of a Left academy in the United States. 45 US IR has not been particularly sympathetic to engaging with normative theory; there is a very significant contrast with the United Kingdom in that respect. There have been very sophisticated studies of anarchy, cooperation and so forth in the United States, but little engagement with broader movements in what is essentially European social and political theory. That I think is the down side.
As for Australian IR, it has been interesting to watch its development. Back in 1976, when I moved here, it was very regional, very historical, very empirical and very much concerned with the foreign policy of the great powers, and there weren’t, from memory, many scholars who focused on theoretical issues. Ralph Pettman was an exception. Hedley Bull had already left for Oxford, I think, but that was before it was meaningful to speak about English School theory, as scholars do today.
For a time, theory was strong at Monash. The department had a certain kind of distinction, or notoriety, for promoting theoretical work. I think in the latter part of the 1980s and early 1990s, IR in Australia lurched in a regional direction. My sense is that IR here continues to be pulled between the regional focus and the analysis of the issues that are usually regarded as central IR questions, including debates and discussions in IR theory. I would have thought it has never been more interesting to be an IR scholar in Australia – and not least because of the growth of the discipline, its popularity among students and the very considerable amount of work that is either theoretical or engages with IR theory as well as social and political theory. The most obvious parallel perhaps was back in the 1960s and 1970s when the ANU was a leading centre with a global reputation for work on strategic studies. But the agenda has broadened considerably since then.
Staying on the theme of Australia and its influence on your research, what has struck us are your references to aboriginal Australia. The articles you have written over the last 10 years, in particular your writings on citizenship and on forms of harm in world politics, seem to suggest that your personal encounter with aboriginal life and aboriginal culture have had some formative effect on your thinking and are somewhat tied around your own personal experience of Australia. Could you tell us about this particular experience and the extent to which it has had a lasting impact on your thinking?
Well, I came to Australia in 1976; I knew little about the place. I had followed the events surrounding the last few weeks and days of the Whitlam administration. I knew almost nothing about Australian society, politics and history. I remember marking an honours dissertation when I was in Tasmania that explored aboriginal health policy – in Queensland, from memory. That was eye-opening; it came as a shock to read some of the statistics about disease, life expectancy and the rest. So, there was that introduction, extended later by reading Henry Reynolds on the European invasion of Australia, reading the literature on land rights and so on. Thanks to my wife, there was then an appreciation of aboriginal art and the realisation that it was connected with land rights and demands for recognition – all hugely important for appreciating dimensions of the social world that I probably would not have encountered or thought about but for spending time in Australia.
Well, we are just curious to hear about your current project and maybe your future work.
The plan is to write three books on harm. The first is about theorising harm and is called The Problem of Harm in World Politics. 46 It is concerned with analysing the concept of harm, with considering how many forms of harm exist, with reflecting on the possibility of a global harm principle and with developing a research agenda that draws the best from process sociology and Wight’s essays on the sociology of states-systems. 47 The second book, which is well under way and should be finished in 2013, is about violence and civilisation in the Western states-systems. It is not a history, but an attempt to build on the sociology of states-systems that investigates claims that Elias and others have made about changing attitudes to violence, cruelty and suffering over approximately the last five centuries. The book will consider the extent to which the modern states-system is different from the phases of IR that preceded it – the Hellenic systems, IR in Latin Christendom, in the Italian Renaissance, for example.
The second book is concerned primarily with Europe or the West although it will have a chapter on the overseas empires. The third book will enlarge the discussion to think about harm in world history. That is still in the planning stage; but preliminary papers that have been published set out the general framework that I plan to use. The intention is to use Elias’ discussion of very long-term overall trends in human history that include the development of ever-larger monopolies of power, the evolution of longer chains of human interconnectedness and changes at the level of emotional identification and in moral ideas. To go back to an earlier point, it is possible to analyse collective learning process in those interrelated domains and to consider the consequences for global civilising processes that enable radically different peoples to coexist with the minimum of violent and non-violent harm. And that is where I started, I suppose, in some ways, when analysing how tensions between humanity and citizenship have been theorised and how they might be resolved.
The first volume on harm has drawn much from Elias and process sociology. What do you think process sociology – and the turn toward the historical sociology of world politics in recent years – adds to IR theory generally and Critical IR Theory, in particular?
The analysis of long-term social and political developments is the main contribution that historical sociology has made to the social sciences. Many approaches are heavily biased towards the analysis of material forces and social structures. They are relatively silent on, for example, the role of collective emotions such as anger or indignation, or pity or compassion. Those perspectives are not especially concerned with explaining the connections between those interrelated dimensions of social and political relations. Process sociology goes well beyond other forms of historical sociology precisely because of its synoptic inquiry into long-term patterns of change. In the main, Theories of IR lag behind process sociology in that respect.
I looked again at process sociology while searching for theoretically informed empirical analyses of changing attitudes to violent and non-violent. When I began working on harm in world politics, I assumed that somewhere in the social sciences I would find a sociological theory of harm that would contain, among other things, a basic conceptual framework that would be useful for the purpose of analysing the connections between attitudes to harm within states and in IR. There is no such perspective in sociology, but Elias’ study of the civilising process (first published by an obscure Swiss publisher in an inauspicious year – 1939) did set out to explain how European attitudes to violence and cruelty changed between approximately the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. Changing attitudes to violent harm were explained in a study that focused on how Europeans came to think of themselves as the most civilised of all peoples in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
Elias set out to explain the puzzle of how Europeans came to see themselves in that peculiar way. The investigation led to the analysis of state formation, advances in domestic pacification, lengthening webs of interconnectedness between peoples and changing emotional attitudes to violence and suffering. The approach was unusual because it also addressed the role of war in the development of European conceptions of civilisation. Indeed, one of the attractions of his explanation is its explicit rejection of many dualisms that have been central to social and political inquiry. They include the distinctions between the domestic and the international, the economic and the political, the material and the ideational, the structural and the emotional as well as the dichotomy between individual and society and between agency and structure. Those are all false dichotomies for Elias and barriers to sophisticated social–scientific explanation.
I want to stress the nature of the processual approach in order to suggest that its value goes well beyond the explanation of the European civilising process. I am persuaded by the analysis of that process, but those who are not as convinced can still learn a great deal from the approach – about how to think about society and politics in long-term perspective and about how to avoid concepts that are, to use one of the technical terms in that area, ‘process-reducing’ – that is, guilty of failing to think about how particular objects of inquiry are part of very long-term processes of change.
It is possible to develop process sociology in two ways. The first is to integrate the study of international society within its analysis of the civilising process. The case is set out in The Problem of Harm in World Politics. The follow-up volume (Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems, which I am currently completing) takes this further by developing a process-sociological approach to the comparative study of states-systems.
The second point is concerned with the relationship between process sociology and critical social theory. It is worth noting that Elias knew Adorno while assistant to Karl Mannheim in Frankfurt in the early 1930s. He rejected what he saw as the partisan approach to social inquiry in Frankfurt School critical theory. But Elias believed that the accumulation of knowledge through social–scientific inquiry could contribute to the long-term goal of enabling people to exercise greater control over their own history. He claimed at one point that a central aim is to try to distinguish between the constraints that are necessary for almost any decent society to function and the constraints that simply bolster powerful sectional interests. My own view is that the connections between critical theory and process sociology need to be strengthened.
What is the place of harm in world history and contemporary world politics? Has your research confirmed a moral-learning process overtime and one that is present within world politics today? In the context of the ongoing war on terror, climate change and global recession, do you expect international society to enhance its commitment to the reduction of harm of distant suffering, or the opposite?
There are many questions here, but perhaps I can have a stab at answering them by making some comments about the relationship between the idea of harm, social learning and international society.
First, the capacity for harm has been fundamental to the development of the human species – to the fact that it became, against earlier odds, the dominant species on the planet and succeeded in eliminating, marginalising and in various ways taming the challenges that other species posed to humans in earlier phases of development. The human species has in a relatively short period of time – although millions of years of social development were necessary to reach this position – acquired the capacity to cause more destructive forms of harm to more people over greater distances. But then, the development of the capacity to harm has always owed a great deal to the challenges societies have faced in dealing with externals threats – with the threats to security and survival posed by other peoples.
Second, radical developments in the power to harm are connected with fundamental forms of social learning such as understanding how to extract resources from the physical world and how to turn them into instruments of violence or learning how to organise people so that they can cooperate effectively for defensive or offensive reasons.
Third, the idea of moral–practical learning captures developments in understanding how to live with other people and not least adversaries who can neither overwhelm nor be overwhelmed. International societies have played an important role down the ages in establishing basic principles of coexistence between interdependent peoples. Returning to the first point, they have been spheres of social interaction where peoples have reached some agreements – but always connected with power asymmetries – about how to control the capacity to cause violent harm.
Fourth, what also develop in those domains – although this is more obvious in the contemporary universal society of states than in any of its predecessors – are disputes about how to assess different claims about principles of coexistence. Reflections on the justice of arrangements that may appear to be outgrowths of a particular region and expressions of particular cultural preferences and power arrangements are evidence of that development. In familiar disputes over human rights or ecological justice, we can see societies, academics and others deal not just with the question of how they might live together but also with the issue of how to think about such questions and assess different answers. Those dimensions of world politics can also be regarded as evidence of moral–practical learning where learning refers not to the convergence on ‘basic truths’ but to greater reflexivity about the social and political world. Let me add that many so-called post-positivist approaches such as feminism, post-structuralism and postcolonialism have all contributed to that development. In process-sociological terms, those have increased the pressure to become more detached from taken-for-granted institutions, to think from the standpoint of others and to learn how to coexist with others as equals.
Fifth, in the current phase in the development of humanity, more people are aware of the different ways in which they can harm and be harmed by others. Violent harm remains the scourge of people in many parts of the world, but for many, the main threat stems from economic exploitation, the subjection to global forces they cannot control and barely understand or environmental harm that is the outcome of what were until recently invisible processes or unintended side effects of the ways in which people have become bound together in the industrial era. Various NGOs lobby for the establishment of conventions that deal with one or other of those forms of harm. Many aim to change the regulative principles of international society so that people are free from the dangers posed by land mines or from labour exploitation, unregulated global financial institutions or free market activity that is governed by short-term horizons and is indifferent to long-term considerations.
Sixth, as for what might one hope from international society, it is perhaps best to regard that realm of social integration as pulled between the forces that were described earlier. Many societies are engaged in increasing their capacity to harm actual or potential adversaries. Many of them are engaged at the same time in the politics of restraining harm in different domains. It is impossible to predict how the balance of power between those dynamics will shift in the decades ahead. There are pressures on states to comply with universal and egalitarian principles or at least not to violate them openly. There are some pressures to comply with cosmopolitan principles that are associated with the well-being of all people and with the interests of future generations as well as non-human species. That is connected with rising levels of interconnectedness between societies and with forms of harm that affect all, although not equally.
And, to draw this fascinating conversation to a close, what are your final thoughts (at this point) about the prospects for the cosmopolitan principles you have been talking about?
Expectations of compliance with cosmopolitan principles may increase in the years ahead. Cosmopolitanism may become an important part of the political battleground as states and other groups struggle over what is in the ‘human interest’. That may result in changed practices and in agreements about how to make international society more responsive to the interests of all peoples including the most vulnerable. But there is no guarantee that such advances will take place. The tensions between those different forces have a long history and are not about to come to an end.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Samid Suliman and Shannon Brincat for their support in transcribing and editing the interview material and Ken Booth for his critical and supportive engagement.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
Author biographies
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