Abstract
Most international relations (IR) theory studies revolve around the question, ‘What shapes or drives state behaviour?’ Classical realism focuses on the motives of the state and sees world politics as a quest for security, power, prestige, and wealth. Neorealism privileges the states’ security motives and emphasises the role of international structures, most prominently the lack of a hierarchical order and the distribution of material capabilities among states, in shaping state behaviour. Liberalism rejects the view that states are the basic units of world politics and decomposes the state into individuals and groups. From the liberal perspective, state behaviour reflects the interests and ideals of the individuals and groups that capture governmental authority, or, in the neoliberal variant, it is determined by the domestic political structure of the state. While realists and liberals take the interests and ideals of individuals, groups, and states as given, constructivists contend that they are made, moulded and transformed by social forces. In the constructivist view, state behaviour is the result of complex and contingent processes of social construction.
In The Guanxi of Relational International Theory, Emilian Kavalski offers an outlook distinct from all these mainstream perspectives, outlining instead a relational theory of IR. In this outlook, state behaviour follows the logic of guanxi, Chinese for dynamic, reputation-based social relations. Specifically, Kavalski argues that the state is ontologically embedded within a network of reciprocal relations, and world politics is essentially the arrangement and management of these mutual relationships. The defining features of this relational theory are the assumptions that international actors are relations, and relations are ontologically and epistemologically prior to the actor.
The book begins its exploration of the relational theory with the case of the Congress of Vienna held between November 1814 and June 1815. Whereas the standard account depicts the Congress of Vienna as ‘discrete and calculated exchanges between distinct international actors’, Kavalski argues that ‘the participants at the Congress “waltzed” and “feasted” their way to an agreement on the post-Napoleonic international order’ (p. 11). He makes a contrast between the image of states as ‘billiard balls’ and that of ‘waltzing’ and ‘feasting’ among state representatives. The standard narrative regards the Congress of Vienna as a ‘revolution in diplomatic history’ for its institutionalisation of regularised meetings between the representatives of the great powers. With their ‘habitual, confidential, and free intercourse’, the face-to-face interactions of these state representatives nurtured their interpersonal camaraderie and furnished a socialising environment which made it possible for each of them to comply with the rules and expectations of the community (pp. 23–24). Although Kavalski acknowledges this ‘socialisation’ aspect of the standard account, he insists that ‘the moral of the accepted story of the Congress of Vienna is that all it takes to resolve international disagreements peacefully is statesmen capable of rational discussion and great powers willing to pursue their self-interest through calculated and dispassionate balancing’ (pp. 28–29). This implores the question whether the standard account is not a coherent one or Kavalski’s representation of it is arbitrarily selective.
Against the standard account, Kavalski advances an alternative narrative that emphasises ‘the figurational embeddedness of international actors in the everyday processes and practices of diplomatic interactions’ (p. 11). ‘Figuration’ is a key term in the book, but readers unfamiliar with it are left unaided. The term was coined by Norbert Elias (1978), a forefather of relational theory, who is not referenced in the book. Trying to overcome the limitations of both the individual-centric and the society-centric approaches in the sociology of his time, Elias (1978) proposed this new word to stress the interdependence of the individual and society and to capture the micro–macro linkages that make human groupings possible. The concept of figuration represents both the flowing configuration and the patterning process that make up a grouping of people.
Kavalski’s interest is not so much to make the case that a relational account is better than a substantialist narrative. Rather, he wants to rehabilitate the voices that are either omitted, silenced, marginalised, or oppressed because of the dominance of a theory which is ‘Eurocentric’, ‘instrumentalist’, ‘atomistic’, and ‘substantialist’. Kavalski advocates instead the recognition of ‘dynamics which are not only unknown, but probably cannot ever be meaningfully rendered comprehensible’ and ‘endeavours that can engage in thoughtful deliberation of the discontinuities, unpredictability, and non-linearity of global life’ (p. 90).
The book suggests that because of its ‘Eurocentric instrumentalism’, the current IR mainstream tries to force the straitjacket of ‘clear linear causation’ onto the world and employs a ‘deterministic mode of efficient linear inquiry’ to explore it. This is wishful thinking because the ‘“realties” [sic—this word should be “realities”] that inform both the materiality of the world and by extension the realms of IR are characterised as self-organising, intrinsically relational, permeable, shifting, open-ended, and always historically and geographically situated (thus contingent) properties’ (p. 99).
These characterisations of the IR mainstream and the realities of the world are, in my view, too simplistic at best. The IR mainstream, as I see it, is less coherent as the book suggests; it is not so rare that multilinearity and nonlinearity are acknowledged in this literature. Also, the realities of the world are not ‘all change and no continuity’, nor are they infinitely open-ended. There are limits to the contingency of social and world events; a good theory should find the right balance between determination and contingency, while a better theory should also draw a map for how to find this right balance. Forefathers of relational theory such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Norbert Elias have endeavoured to find such a balance and draw such a map, but Kavalski and some other proponents of relational theory have eschewed this spirit in their pursuit of a new mode of theorising.
Indeed, the aim of this book is ‘to recover a mode of IR theorising that it calls “itinerant translation”’. In contrast to the usual and dominant mode of theorising, itinerant translation does not subscribe to the ‘linear logics of detachment, coherence, and parsimony’, nor does it ‘demand impartiality and objectivity from the theorist’. Instead, ‘itinerant translation mandates tolerance of at least as much diversity, inconsistency, and contradictions, as evident in the complex entanglements of the worlds being narrated’ (p. 5). Theorising in this mode is less an endeavour to make sense of the world than an effort to facilitate ‘the dialogical encounter with and between pluralities of different perspectives and experiences’ (p. 7, italics in original).
Perhaps in this spirit, Chapter 1 contrasts the standard account of the Congress of Vienna with an alternative narrative that emphasises relationality, while Chapter 2 summarises four different works, two representing relational international theory in the West and two representing relational international theory in China. If itinerary translation is exemplified by these chapters, I find it better as a mode of literary critique than a mode of theorising.
The most ‘theorising’ part of the book is Chapter 3, which tries to construct a relational theory of IR with the aid of the Chinese concept of guanxi as a ‘heuristic device’. As he writes, ‘Guanxi implies both a propensity and a capacity for living with and in ambiguity’ (p. 76, italics in original). In the context of guanxi, ‘rules do not function as such outside of the relationships in which they emerge. In this respect, it is the interaction context that matters rather than the rules themselves’ (p. 76). The currency of guanxi is not power, not even legitimacy, but reputation. Kavalski elaborates that ‘reputation (especially the position of authority) is premised on recognition—one that emerges in the context of interaction and requires ongoing reiteration. The cultivation of reputation (a feature which IR observers tend to subsume within analyses of status) is probably the key aspiration of guanxi’ (pp. 79–80).
The introduction of the concept and practices of guanxi is a major contribution of this book to the literature of relational international theory. But it is unfortunate that Kavalski confines his heuristic device to guanxi alone. The ambiguity and relationality of guanxi, as well as its emphasis on reputation and recognition, can be found universally and not just in the ‘Sinophone sphere’ as the book suggests. The (supposedly Western) concept of social exchange (also called ‘diffuse reciprocity’) can do a better job than guanxi in this respect. It emerged from the encounter of Western anthropologists, pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss, with ‘primitive’ people in the South Pacific and the Pacific Northwest. But, the concept was honed by the reflection and elaboration of numerous anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists (of which Peter Blau is a notable example) on phenomena that are as universal as the exchange of gifts and favours. By dichotomising ‘billiard balls’ and ‘guanxi’, Kavalski both reinforces the binary scheme of West vs non-West and privileges the Chinese at the expense of the non-Chinese.
This privileging of the Chinese makes sense if the book endeavours to ‘translate’ Chinese international practices, but Kavalski insists this is not a goal of his project. Where Kavalski does discuss ‘how to think about and theorise China’, his explication of guanxi falls short of reaching the nuances that make China’s international behaviour interesting. Because of its diffuse reciprocity, social exchange is vulnerable to exploitation, and guanxi is no exception to it. Participants in guanxi, if not properly protected, can easily fall victim to what Raymond Firth called ‘indebtedness engineering’ (based on his observations of the Kula exchange among native people of the South Pacific). The recently acknowledged aspect of China’s international practices often referred to as ‘debt trap diplomacy’ is also a consequence of guanxi.
All in all, The Guanxi of Relational International Theory introduces some interesting concepts but could make a better contribution to relational international theory if its writing was not so dense and brief (it has only 102 pages of text with only three chapters between the Introduction and the Conclusion). A journey beyond guanxi to see the universality of social exchange would greatly improve this book’s contribution and provide a better relational theory.