Worldviews and international political theory

13 Worldviews and international political theory

Anthony J. Langlois

Introduction Thousands of children die each day of mostly resolvable poverty-related causes. Millions of

displaced persons live on contested borders and in refugee camps – for many of these people, such camps are the only ‘home’ they have known. In other parts of the world, the ‘camps’ resemble another form of lost freedom, where multinational corporations (MNCs) provide employment at rock-bottom wage rates, complete with mandatory and highly restrictive accommodation systems and private militias for security. Within the Global South, the so-called ‘failing states’ have lost all but notional sovereignty over their populations and territory. In addition, the twenty-first century has witnessed the return to prominence of religion on the international stage (Carlson and Owens 2003; Norris and Inglehart 2004; Petito and Hatzopolous 2003). Religion was, of course, a significant factor in the creation of the modern international system (Philpott 2001). The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was in large part a response to wars that were caused by religious difference, and the Westphalian resolution subsequently subordinated religion to reason of state as a legitimate justification for war. The 9/11 and subsequent events have signaled a need to again engage with the question of religious violence in the international system. The religious fundamentalism that motivates and supports contemporary terrorism has complex roots. It has been argued that this particular clash, often billed as a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the West and Islam, will form the ideological structures that will shape International Relations (IR) for the foreseeable future (Huntington 1997).

Religious terrorism is condemned as a violation of the human rights of those who are terrorized. But, in one of the ironies of political life, some of the measures that have been put in place in and between states since the 11 September 2001 attacks have also demonstrated a lack of regard for human rights – the human rights of regular law-abiding citizens, along with those of people either suspected of or shown to have been involved with terrorism. In the name of security, civil liberties have been forgone, fundamental political principles have been overturned, and egregious breaches of protocol have been sustained. Both in the pursuit of terror suspects and in the provision of new regulative and legislative frameworks for security within and between states, governments have undermined many of the principles that – by virtue of being nonarbitrary and accountable regulators of the exercise of power in the pursuit of justice – set orderly government apart from the behavior of terrorists. The ‘war on terror’ falls into incoherence and internal contradiction if it is initiated and waged on any other basis than respect for human rights. This observation takes us back to one of the most influential traditions of thought-about war within the field of IR, the just war tradition (Walzer 2000, 2004). For a war to be just, two sets of criteria

Worldviews and international political theory 147 must be met: those that deal with the justice of the initiation of a war; and those which

deal with the justice of the prosecution of the war. On this basis, the war against terror will not be a just war if it is waged in a manner that undermines the rights of those whom it seeks to protect or, of those whom it seeks to protect us against (Bellamy 2005).

The necessity of international political theory These introductory observations about our world raise many questions. The debates with

which we engage in an attempt to provide answers to these questions are debates within international political theory. Before elaborating on the nature and development of this academic discipline, let us look again at the examples that I have given and probe them again, observing the ways in which they set before us problems which cannot be interpreted and understood, let alone resolved, without drawing on complex intellectual traditions within political theory.

First is the issue of poverty-related morbidity for children (on world poverty more generally, see Pogge 2002). The statistics regarding child morbidity are horrifying. And, given the likelihood of this strong emotional response, they are useful statistics to use when urging change in IR. The danger, however, along with many statistics of this nature, is that they cause a ‘we must do something’ reflex, which can lead to counterproductive measures (Kennedy 2004). There are two issues here. First, why is it that we must do something? Second, if we must, how should we proceed in our attempt to ameliorate the problem? The first question is about political and moral responsibility – the sense that something must

be done flows from deeply held commitments, for example, to the equality of all persons, and thus to the conclusion that it is wrong for one to live in luxury while children die for want of food in a world of plenty (Singer 2002). But where do such ideas come from, and why should we think them justified? These questions may disturb us when applied to our responses to the facts of child morbidity, but they are more obviously necessary when – having agreed that we must do something about the problem – we ask, ‘what shall we do?’ Is it legitimate, for example, to raise a tax on financial market transactions, and to then give the money to these children and their communities? It is all very well to speak of raising taxes, but who shall do it? Individual states? The United Nations? What are the grounds upon which one should be preferred to the other? To generalize from this specific problem, is it better for global issues to be managed by states operating autonomously or in concert, or for states to be managed by global authorities? Is the latter option realistic? Can we expect states to cede much of their authority to global authorities, and at what cost?

Further questions along these lines arise from my second example concerning displaced peoples and failing states. In the traditional story of IR, the state is the primary political agent, and all people are assigned to a particular state that ‘acts’ on behalf of its citizens. This assumption is clearly difficult to uphold under contemporary circumstances, raising the question of whether other states or the United Nations should intervene in the so-called ‘failed states’. Contemporary debates over the ethics and politics of humanitarian interven- tion require us to attend to our basic assumptions and presuppositions about the nature of international political community.

The same is the case for the question of our responses to terrorism and religious violence in international affairs. There are many questions that have been thrown up for scrutiny in the wake of 11 September 2001. One of the most fundamental is the question of the proper relationship between religion and politics. Western liberal democracies have, since the Enlightenment, proceeded on the basis of an institutionally entrenched separation between

148 Anthony J. Langlois church and state. This is a separation that some would argue has no analogue in the Islamic

religious tradition, thus complicating the pursuit of clear and legitimate lines of authority and responsibility for the prevention of terrorist activity. Furthermore, the manner in which the ‘coalition of the willing’ led by the United States has promulgated the ‘war on terror’ has caused further confusion regarding due process. As noted above, great confusion has been stirred about the just nature of the war because of the apparent inconsistency between the ways in which different constituencies have been treated. Universal human rights have been granted selectively, if at all, to those in the path of the military juggernaut. This poses in acute form one of the oldest questions for international political theory. Does might make right? If we are committed to the normative position that might does not make right then, among other things, international political theory is about setting out and defending alternative accounts of the nature of justice.

These reflections on the state of the world involve different accounts of the nature of justice and its application in political life, both at the level of the individual, the group and the state, and in the international arena. A common interpretation of the traditional realist position is that justice is irrelevant in the international world of realpolitik: might alone makes right (see, however, Lebow 2003 for a different reading of realism). At the other end of the spectrum are those who argue for the fundamental salience of justice by linking it to the well-being of each individual human person, frequently using the language of human rights (Tan 2004).

At whatever point one begins on this continuum, however, international political theory is being done: claims are being made about the nature (or absence) of political association,

the nature of community, the prerogatives (or limitations) of sovereignty, what is due to the individual, and the legitimacy of different kinds of action (or inaction). This is equally true whether one is a realist or a liberal internationalist. The evident necessity of international political theory to these different worldviews makes it all the more strange that, for most of the twentieth century, the discipline of IR routinely set itself apart from other disciplines within the field of politics, claiming – among other things – that there was no room for ethics, normative theory or political philosophy within its remit (Boucher 1997: 193–213). The key point of my argument, however, is that the worldviews that we use for our evaluation of IR will always and inescapably have normative or evaluative dimensions built into them (Frost 1996, 1998). Consequently, our worldviews themselves are political. By claiming variously to observe, create, monitor and evaluate the world in which we live, they become part of a larger political landscape in which they also are a feature. They do not and cannot function merely as the tool or instrument by which we see the landscape; they are inevitably themselves a part of that landscape (Walker 1993).