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National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
1. International Relations Without Nations?
There is no error so monstrous that it will not find defenders among the ablest men.
—Lord Acton
The abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times, because the abstraction of private life belongs only to modern times.
—Karl Marx
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Introduction
Nationalist and ethnic conflict, not cold war tensions or “superpower balancing in the periphery” now largely consume the agendas of the United Nations and NATO as well as the foreign policy concerns of powers, great and small. Curiously, these events, and the attention that the great powers would lavish on them, were as unpredicted and unpredictable by our current repertoire of international relations theory as was the end of the cold war. Yet until quite recently, little attention has been given to the issue of nationalism in recent literature in the discipline of international relations theory.
This book will address the issue of the consequences of the “nationalization” of state actors for the composition of the international system and the patterns of politics within it. Part of this endeavor is a clearer conceptualization and delineation of national-sovereign actors from the territorial-state-sovereign actors that had dominated the system prior to the nineteenth century. I will thereby address the question of how the nationalization of state actors results in change in the international system. While some have contended that the international behavior of state actors has been uniform throughout history, I will critically examine this argument. The eighteenth-century system consisted of territorial-sovereign state actors whose regimes relied upon dynastic legitimating principles. By contrast, the late nineteenth and twentieth century systems have increasingly consisted of national-sovereign actors whose regimes have relied upon the “imagined community” 1 of the nation as a legitimating principle. I will develop the consequences of this nationalization of international actors and the resulting behaviors, which cannot be explained with a state-centric theoretical approach.
I will seek to fill a gap in contemporary international relations theory, which fails to account for and explain nationalist phenomena in the international system. The currently dominant theories of international relations are strongly state-centric. They take the state as a fundamental unit of analysis that is unproblemmatically given, fail to inquire into its origins, or to delineate it from the nation. These theories relegate domestic-societal interaction, sources of conflict, or societal cohesiveness (such as ethnic, religious, or other domestic sources) to the status of epiphenomena. 2 The current resurgence of nationalism in the post-cold-war international system, and the potential conflictual consequences of past and present national movements, are therefore opaque to our current repertoire of international relations theory, even though the relative novelty of national collective identity has significant implications for the current practice of modern international relations.
An investigation of the systemic consequences of national collective identity, and its delineation from the consequences of earlier forms that supported a state system, will simultaneously help us to clarify several important issues. These include the origins of the modern nation-state system, historical variations in the institutional forms of collective action, and the distinction between territorial sovereignty and national sovereignty. I seek to uncover the consequences of national collective identity and nation building (as opposed to state building) in the modern era within a framework that results in a useful correction to an existing body of theoretical literature. 3
The advantage of integrating the literature on nationalism with the literature on international relations is that it may allow for the development of a “systemic” theory that is action oriented, and capable of explaining historical change in the international system. We cannot explain nationalism or its causal significance for international politics within a theoretical framework that is committed to a conception of structure that is largely static, or in which structure merely constrains action.
I will begin with the assertion that changes in the collective identity of societal actors transform the interests of relevant collective actors that constitute the system. Sovereign state actors may well have autonomous interests that help shape state policy, but the influences, beliefs and prejudices of individuals and sub-state groups within society help to determine how ostensibly objective state interests get translated into state policy. 4 The interests of societal groups are not immutable or objectively determined. Group interests are strongly conditioned by the self-identifications of members of these groups with respect to other groupings within society and with respect to the state.
Thus, to explain the differences in behavior of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century nation, with that of the eighteenth-century dynastic state, we must assert that “the ‘national interest’ cannot be the object of a rational determination.” 5 We cannot assume that the “interests” of eighteenth-century states and twentieth-century states are equivalent and determinable ex post facto by the analyst with recourse to logical inference alone. Nationalism brought with it the abstract notion of “citizenship.” The nineteenth-century manifestations of this notion range from full enfranchisement and “universal” suffrage in the United States (among white males) to, at the least, national populism and suffrage, weighted by social class, in constitutional-monarchical Europe. In all but autocratic Russia, the “Revolution of 1848” had injected into European regimes constitutional checks on autocracy, and the conception of the “rule-of-law” that was binding upon the monarch, as well as at least limited participatory, parliamentary institutions. Some conception of “citizenship” was emerging nearly everywhere in Europe and was replacing the more traditional self-identification of being “subject’ ” to a prince or state. The consequences of these events for the determination of “state-interests” is captured in a trenchant passage in a recent work by Michael Mann.
As classes and other actors attained civil and political citizenship, the state became ‘their’ nation-state, an ‘imagined’ community to which they developed loyalties. Its power, honor, humiliations, and even material interests came to be sensed as their own, and such feelings were mobilizable by the statesmen, pressure groups and militaries. Nationalist parties and pressure groups pressed these feelings on statesmen...[a]...populist, passionate, national tinge..[was given to diplomacy by the]...growth of national identities. But this lacked the precise rationality of interests pursued by classes or particularistic pressure groups and the precise, normatively rooted understandings of insulated old regime statesmen. 6
Actor Identities and System Changes: Systemic Consequences of changes in Social Identities
This book advances the argument that actor self-identification is a critical component of a historically changing “structure of identities and interests.” 7 Against the “will-to-power” of the state, in realist analysis, as the ultima ratio of international political interaction, I will posit the “will-to-manifest-identity” of social collectivities as agents that spawn the social construction of domestic and global social orders. Changes in the prevailing forms of societal self-identification generate changes in this “structure of identity and interests” and result in epochal change in the international system. I will employ the reconstructive theoretical framework developed in the following chapters to identify at least three epochal changes in the international system. The first is the transition from the medieval, heteronomous, feudal-theocratic order to a dynastic-sovereign (Augsburg, 1555) system, the second was the transition from the Augsburg system to the territorial-sovereign (Westphalian, 1648) system that is featured so prominently in realist analysis. The third is the transition to the national-sovereign (the first post-Westphalian) system. Variations in prevailing collective identities, system legitimating principles, institutional forms of collective action, and norms, rules and principles of interaction are the factors that constitute these systems. These generate the “structures of identities and interests” which, in my argument, constitute distinct, historically contingent, empirically identifiable international systems. As the empirical illustration of all of these transitions would be intractable in a single volume, I employ the bulk of the book to illustrate what I refer to as the “territorial-sovereign-to-national-sovereign” transition.
This book addresses, in an integrated theoretical framework, a need for international relations theory to account for and to explain nationalist phenomena and epochal change in the international system. Historical change in the legitimating principles, and of the institutional composition of the international system, are demonstrated to be (in positivist discourse) dependent on the independent variable of changing societal collective identity. The relative modernity of national collective identity is shown to have significant implications for the current structure of modern international relations. Societal self-identification is demonstrated to have had causal significance for the state identities and interests in the transition from what I call “territorial-sovereign” identity that arose at the Westphalian settlement of the Thirty Years War, to the “national-sovereign” identity that had manifested itself in Europe by the late nineteenth century. State interests, institutional forms, and behavior emerge from this analysis as variable products of the evolution of societal collective identity.
The emergence of national-sovereign identity has brought significant changes in the behavior of nineteenth- and twentieth-century national-sovereign nation-states relative to the behavior of the territorial-sovereign states of the eighteenth century. The behavioral differences are explained as manifestations of the transformation of the historically contingent notions of interest that derive from the distinct sovereign identities that emerge between the two periods. Historical events to be examined analytically include the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Concert of Europe, the Revolution of 1848, the Danish-Prussian War, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, imperialism before and after 1870, the First World War and, more contemporarily, the collapse of the USSR and demise of the cold war.
I delineate the structure of identities and interests of the territorial-sovereign from that of the national-sovereign. The emergence, in the nineteenth century, of national-sovereign identity and interests problematized territorial-sovereign legitimating principles and subsequently transformed the structure of state interests, practice, and institutions. The emergence of national collective identity in Europe resulted in the replacement of the territorial-sovereign legitimating principle of raison d’état with the national-sovereign legitimating principle of national-self-determination. Eighteenth-century dynastic, mercantilist absolutism and easy recourse to war were practices that developed from the norms, rules and principles of an international system legitimated by the territorial-sovereign legitimating principle of raison d’état. Territorial-sovereign imperialism was a commercial and strategic venture whose social purpose conformed to the zero-sum nature of dynastic, territorial-sovereign status competition.
The emergence of national-collective identity created problems of secessionism and irredentism, and thus new sources of interstate conflict. It enhanced the resources mobilizable by statesmen. Conflicting class and national identity commitments created tools for statesmen to “divide and rule” domestic society, but radically reduced the insularity of their decisionmaking processes as an enfranchised and nationalized “citizenry” took an interest in the affairs of state with which territorial-sovereign statesmen had not been required to contend. I will demonstrate that national collective identity gave statesmen such as Bismarck the tools to forge a German superstate from the many petty kingdoms and mini-states of German Central Europe. I will demonstrate that national collective identity constrained other statesmen, such as Napoleon III, from “balancing” the creation of a threatening German superstate, and from enjoying the flexibility to form alliances with other powers sufficient to meet the threat of this hostile superstate when the Franco-Prussian War commenced in 1870. These events defy the logic of dominant theories of international relations and cannot be convincingly explained without rigorous analysis of the social identities of the actors.
The emergence of national-collective identity also transformed the practice and social purposes of imperialism. What had been, in the territorial-sovereign system, a territorial and economic venture in the periphery became a crusade to transmit national culture and institutions to the periphery—a process that transformed peripheral societies. The practice and social purposes of imperialism were transformed by changes in the structure of sovereign identities and interests. National collective identity would ultimately not only mobilize entire societies, but also transform national economies for war (national status conflicts). Far from the secret treaties and smoke-filled rooms that characterized the insulated diplomacy of much of the nineteenth century, by the first decade of the twentieth century statesmen were forced to decide questions of foreign policy under the scrutiny of a nationalized press and shrill nationalist pressure groups. In this nationalized environment there is less opportunity for policymakers to make rational decisions. In the course of illustrating and describing these and other consequences of a historically changing structure of actor identities and interests I will demonstrate that transformation in the self-identities and interests of individuals and groups within society, linkage of individual and group interests to the interests of the state, 8 and transformation of the identity and interests of the national-state result from the process of nationalization of state actors.
Several separate historical time frames have been reflected in the cases that I have chosen, in order to trace the changes in the behavior of international actors. They will also provide the basis for interesting comparisons between the predictions of theories of the rational actor, as described by neorealism, and the structural variants of balance of power theories of classical realism. The cases chosen accord with the standards of comparative method. They provide for synchronic and diachronic variation of analytic referents. Synchronic variation is provided by studying the interaction of Westphalian territorial-sovereign actors and national-sovereign actors in well-documented historical events that exhibited a full range of the behaviors traditionally associated with international interaction. These include alliance formation; the initiation, prosecution and negotiated (or forcible) cessation of armed conflict; “internal balancing,” 9 and attempts to establish hegemony in a political 10 or economic 11 context. The cases therefore provide synchronic comparison of the behavioral consequences of the nationalization of state actors. They foster comparative analysis and tests of the presence and consequences of the notion of citizenship, the “eudomonic” relationship between the citizen and the state, mass participation and mobilization, the scope and objectives of foreign policy and armed conflict, the resources that statesmen may mobilize in a crisis, the freedom of policymakers to pursue “objectively rational” policy in the service of “state” interests, and the international transmission of social and political culture through various vehicles.
Diachronic variation of these phenomena is provided in the historical range of like phenomena to be analyzed. The historical scope will range from 1763, when the Seven Years’ War ended, to 1918, and the end of World War I, and then jump to the end of the cold war to deal with the demise of the proletarian internationalist identity that emerged in 1917 as a competitor to national collective identity. In testing for the presence of national-states, I use Anthony D. Smith’s recent definitions of the characteristics of a nation: 12
Even where nationalist phenomenology has been belatedly addressed by mainstream, particularly neorealist IR theory, they have been merely appropriated in a fashion that usually does not disturb or challenge the basic state-centric methodological assumptions of the hard core of the neorealist research program. 13 The preeminence of the concept of the “state” over either the “nation” or sub-state or subnational groupings, as the irreducibly significant social actor in the system, is still unproblematically given in the view of these recent appropriative theorizations.
Recent attempts by some mainstream IR scholars to recognize and account for the resurgence of nationalism as “one of the most explosive forces shaping domestic and global constitutional orders at the end of the twentieth century” 14 have generally constituted simple “theoretical appropriation.” In these accounts, nationalist phenomena and variables have been imported in a fashion that suggests that they are derived from more basic elements of neorealist theory. Contributions of this genre suffer from a failure to delineate between the nation and the state as well as a tendency to reaffirm the notion of historical continuity in global politics. This is a tendency to ascribe a systemic reproductive capacity to nationalism, but to deny it any generative or transformative capacity as an agent of systemic change. They also suffer from subsumption of nationalism under the distributional rubric of a power resource, obviating the “constitutive role of nationalism as a global ordering principle.” 15
It is significant that “historically there have been momentous changes in the international system that transcend modifications in the distribution of power among political units.” 16 Structural realist theory, however, lacks “transformational logic” that might illuminate these changes; it has only a “reproductive logic” that seeks to account for continuity. Classical realism escapes the static condition of neorealism by introducing a transformational logic that permits systemic change to result from hegemonic agency. However, much of classical realism exhibits a tendency to envisage this transformation largely in terms of positional shifts among the units that result from cycles of hegemonic war, and rotation in the identity of the hegemon, who imposes rules and order on the system. 17 While the system is “generated” in classical realist hegemonic theory, it is still a state-centric view, which demonstrates scant interest in historical changes in the institutional forms of collective action. Nationalist thought and action are among the causes of some of these changes.
When we glance about the post Cold War world, we see the rapid creation of new states and new nationalist self-identifications, in the former Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, and in the former Yugoslavia, for example. These events are, in no way a consequence of any new “distribution of capabilities.” Ukrainian statehood and Polish independence emerged during the peak of Moscow’s potency in terms of military capabilities. Rather, I would suggest that the creation of these new states is the product of the replacement of one set of societal collective identities, and the legitimating principles and institutional facts that had resulted from them, with a new set. This has required the construction of new legitimating principles and institutional arrangements, which generate new institutional facts. 18
I will begin the construction of a theoretical framework in which transformations in the collective identity of international social actors can be demonstrated to be causally significant, not only in helping to structure international outcomes, but also in transforming the international system. I hope to demonstrate that it is possible to construct a theoretical perspective that abandons many of the principal theoretical commitments of the neorealist core research plan without abandoning all of the parsimony of systems theory. I hope to demonstrate that by making a start at a reconstructive, rather than an appropriative theoretical approach to nationalist phenomenology, we can explain nationalist phenomena (e.g. the consequences of nationalization of state actors for behavior within the system), historical transformation in the institutional forms that constitute the “units” of the system, and historical transformation in the principles by which the system is constituted, and reconstituted, with recourse to the same set of analytic referents.
Thus a more coherent theory of international politics must be predicated, in part, on an adequate theory of the nation-state. The theory must permit social agents to demonstrate a systemic generative and transformative capacity, rather than seeing social actors as merely conditioned by a static reproductive logic. Examination of systemic variables alone will not help us to understand the disparate historical paths by which peoples in different parts of the world and in different times have arrived at national consciousness. Rather, examination of those variables which conclusively generate “potent ‘we’ feeling” is called for. 19 Yet it is crucial to my argument that nationalism is not just a unit level factor, or a “property” of the units which may be assumed to foster self-seeking of self-interested behavior. National identity is a relatively new form of collective identity whose development is contingent upon both domestic and international sources. Nationalism fosters or impels a specific legitimating principle—national self-determination—which has far-reaching consequences for system constitution and transformation. National sovereignty is a form of social institution distinct from that of state sovereignty.
I shall examine factors that conclusively generate strong collective self-identification to avoid the theoretical problems generated by the analyst’s imputation of actor identification. Not least among these problems is the problem of correctly designating the relevant social actors whose interaction one wishes to describe and understand. 20 To analyze any system one must designate actors and their interaction. The analytic ontology that results from doing so will very often determine, and limit, the range of phenomena one will be able to analyze. I wish to avoid designating nonexistent actors by projecting contemporary actor designations upon older social systems, as these mis-designations distort our understanding of the present by obscuring its essential differences with the past.
Units and Systems: Actor Designation, Structure, and Interests
It is a major argument of this book that the international system of national-sovereign actors is in many ways, though not in every respect, an essentially different system from the territorial-sovereign system that proceeded it. Why is this the case? A brief dissection of a highly influential passage from Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics will provide a useful backdrop for the answer. Waltz argues that:
A system is composed of a structure and of interacting units. The structure is the system-wide component that makes it possible to think of the system as a whole. The problem...is to contrive a definition of structure free of the attributes and the interactions of units. Definitions of structure must leave aside, or abstract from, the characteristics of units, their behavior, and their interactions...so that we can distinguish between variables at the level of the units and at the level of the system. 21
This is the assertion upon which Waltz proceeds to found his definition of political structure, and of political system. Waltz seeks to construct definitions of political structure without any recourse whatever to descriptive categorizations regarding the actors that he regards as behaviorally constrained by this structure. Had he actually done this, then we should feel entirely free to apply this definition of political structure to any range or class of social actor or any range of social phenomena that we can imagine interacting or transpiring within such a structure. 22
In constructing his system theory, Waltz has underspecified the relevant actors in the system. Designation of actors requires some specification of their attributes in a social context. Social contexts are not, however, static over time. For those of us interested in change in the international system, the Waltzian formulation underspecifies actor designation in two ways. The first means of underspecification is an artifact of structural neorealism’s “unitary” hypothesis. Designating a social actor that is comprised of a social aggregate as “unitary” provides theoretical parsimony, but in order to be valid “the actor-elements of the political system examined must be sufficiently cohesive, ‘billiard-ball-like’, ‘monadic’, or irreducible so that their further analytic decomposition would not significantly improve the conclusions.” 23 Structural neorealism has received more criticism for violation of this injunction of actor designation than can be comprehensively cited. 24
In this context, Waltz’s second form of underspecification of actors lies in his static designation of the character of the “units” of his system as states. The problem with a static actor designation for a system that one wants to analyze diachronically is obvious. Static actor designation may say more about the analyst than it says about the system. Waltz’s theoretical framework has been found useful, by many scholars, in the analysis of behavior in a system of Westphalian territorial-sovereign states precisely because he has designated these not as the primary actors in his system but as the only actors. In his view, the structure of these actors perpetually reproduces the system. But Waltz does not explain nationalist phenomena as he does not perceive nations as distinct from other forms of state actors. They are exogenized from his system, as are all other historically observed forms of political association that proceeded the Peace of Westphalia, as well as several which have succeeded it. 25 As Frey observes, regarding the impact of actor designation on the resulting systems 26 , the structures, 27 and significantly, on the imputed interests of the actors:
Actor designation often determines issue identification, and vice versa. From the former perspective, the key process is that actor designation leads to the imputation of identity and interests which, in turn, leads to issue perception when there is a perceived interest blockage by other actors. 28
Thus, in order to more convincingly define political structure in a fashion that renders the concept useful for dynamic rather than static transhistorical analysis, the analyst must take into account the self-designations of the actors of the system. Analyst imputation of actor identity, if it is inconsistent with actor self-identification, imputes interests and motivations to the actors that may be strongly inconsistent with actual, self-understood interests and motivations.
Critics argue that Waltz’s definition of systemic structure, therefore, actually follows directly from his assumptions regarding the “attributes and interaction of the units.” Anarchy, and the absence of functional differentiation, are not, in this view, objectively observable features of the system that may be divorced from imputation of the interests, motivations, and attributes of the units. Helen Milner has searched in vain for “anarchy” 29 and Paul Schroeder argues that he has found a great deal of historical functional differentiation among the units. 30 Anarchy and functional nondifferentiation of the units of the system are not, in this view, structural features of a historically continuous international system. Rather, they are imputed structural features of a system that results from the imputed interests, motivations and attributes of the self-interested, self-regarding, power-maximizing, survival-oriented, Westphalian territorial-sovereign state actors that Waltz has designated in constructing his system theory. Had Waltz designated a different sort of actor, or had he allowed for diachronic variation in the social identities and consequently of the interests of the actors, he might have discovered a different conception of structure, and might have formulated a very different systems theory.
Matters are better, but still unresolved, in earlier influential classical realist theories. A common assumption of both classical realist and neorealist theories of international relations regards the fixity of the “interests” and motivations of state actors in the conduct of social interaction. Hans Morgenthau’s formulation of the notion of interest obscures the relationship between interests and power by equating these two very distinct concepts. He asserts boldly, early on in his work, that “[w]e assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power.” 31 Possession of power resources might be variable among states, but the “interest” of statesmen in acquiring them is constant. Morgenthau asserts the “idea of interest is indeed of the essence of politics and is unaffected by the circumstances of time and place.” In other words, Morgenthau argues that a state advances its interests in the pursuit of power and failure to pursue power is the failure to act in accordance with one’s interests.
Morgenthau’s ambiguity on the issue of the consequences of nationalism for international politics provides an interesting means by which to critique his assumptions regarding the notion of interests, upon which the explanatory utility of realist balance of power theory rests. Morgenthau appears to delineate between the causal significance of nationalism (and ideology in general) for elites—who are the ultimate determiners, and executors, of the national interest qua power—and the causal significance of nationalism on the interests and motivations of individual citizens who belong to and serve the nation. He regards ideology in general to be a smokescreen behind which statesmen mask their preexisting interests in extending national power, particularly in the context of his evaluation of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin. The general line of the treatment of ideology in Morgenthau’s theory is that “ideology functions solely to legitimize or rationalize pre-existing national interests, not create them.” 32
Yet Morgenthau contradicts this starkly in his comparison of the functioning of the prenational “international society” with that of the postnational international system, though he does not designate them consciously as two different systems. Morgenthau waxes nostalgically in relative enthusiasm for the “cosmopolitan aristocratic society” and the “restraining influence of its morality upon foreign policy” before the French Revolution. 33 He credits (or blames) the French Revolution and the nationalization of state actors that its example provided to nineteenth-century Europe with a “decline of the international society and its morality,” such that one can scarcely speak of the existence of international society by the end of the nineteenth century. 34 This will appear strange indeed to British readers of Morgenthau, for whom the notion of international society is a central theoretical construct of their discipline. 35 Yet this English-school notion of international society is transhistorically reified in literature of this genre. The transhistorical character of this central theoretical construct disqualifies it as a starting point for my analysis, even though, like classical realism, the English school provides an ontological framework with enough flexibility to allow for a quite interesting analysis of nationalist and other cultural phenomena, as well as an appreciation for the dynamic character of the system. 36
Morgenthau argues that, bereft of the ethics of international society, national society becomes “morally self-sufficient.” This situation has, in Morgenthau’s view, “weakened, to the point of ineffectiveness, the universal, supranational moral rules of conduct, which before the age of nationalism had imposed a system...of limitations upon the foreign policies of individual nations.” 37 These moral rules were “supranational ethics, composed of Christian, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian elements [ostensibly discernible from] the diplomatic language of the time.” 38 One can hardly be accused of “deconstructing” Morgenthau in order to easily discern in his writing the “reactionary utopia” Hoffmann suggests that Morgenthau evokes as the ideal climate for the peaceful pursuit of state interests within the precepts of the balance of power. 39
One problem with this view, aside from its anachronistic elitism, is that it is simply a factual error to suggest that the aristocratic statesmen of the nineteenth century shared this cosmopolitan commitment to the balance of power in accordance with a commitment to supranational ethics and a common vision of international society. This has been adequately illustrated by Kratochwil’s discussion of the transformation of the patterns of European politics in this time frame. Morgenthau is quite correct in asserting that the transformation occurred, and that nationalist thought and action were substantive factors in inducing this transformation. Kratochwil, however, illustrates that this transformation could as easily be brought about by a statesman choosing to take Morgenthau’s conflation of interests as power quite literally, and “maximize power” irrespective of the ethics (or more properly, the constitutive rules) of international society. 40
As Kratochwil suggests, the statesman in question was the German aristocrat Otto von Bismarck. Among nineteenth-century European statesmen, it would be difficult to find a more pure, more constant, more regal disdain for democratic norms, democratic institutions, or the notion of popular sovereignty than that which Bismarck displayed. Significantly, though revered as the unifier of Germany, Bismarck was no nationalist. Born a conservative Prussian Junker, he lived and died a confirmed monarchist at a time when only liberals were nationalists and the monarchical principle was philosophically averse to both liberalism and nationalism. His achievement, in his own view, had been that of inducing, through an unrepeatable combination of war and diplomacy, the princes of Germany to hand an imperial German crown to his own King of Prussia. 41
Bismarck’s disdain for the concept of international society was apparent in the way, according to Kratochwil, Bismarck declined to pursue Prussian goals in a manner that recognized Prussian interests were defined with reference to the interests of other actors in international society. As Kratochwil suggests:
Here Bismarck breaks critically with the accepted tradition. When the Eastern question occupied the European powers in 1876 and Gortschakoff [the Russian Foreign Minister] had argued that the Great Powers had a European responsibility, Bismarck noted on the margin of the dispatch, ‘Anyone who speaks of Europe is mistaken,’ adding, one line later, ‘Who is Europe?.’...This is not yet the exclusivity of pure and unadulterated self-interest that emerges later, when social-darwinism makes a cult out of struggle....But it is already a decisive step, from interests defined within a set of conventions to interests conceived of, at best, allowing for ad hoc recognition of others through bargaining. 42
Yet Morgenthau can be lauded for tacitly noting the causal significance of the transformation of European societal collective identities—from territorial sovereignties to national sovereignties—in generating changes in the conduct of European international relations. It is, however, fascinating that a book which begins by declaring interests to be the ultima ratio of international politics, and which defines interests in terms of the will-to-power, turns later to “ethics” and “morality” as the arbiters of international conduct. Though he turns to them, these concepts simply have no place in Morgenthau’s theoretical schema. Morgenthau may tacitly note the causal significance of nationalist ideology, but it plays no role in his formulation of balance of power theory. In turning to treat the topic of the end of the Concert, Morgenthau simply changes the subject entirely by asserting the superiority of eighteenth-century aristocratic ethics over nationalist ethics. In so doing Morgenthau fails to recognize that one of the principal agents in bringing about the demise of the Concert of Europe was a conservative, Prussian, Junker dynast who had been reared entirely within the normative, aristocratic, ethical discourse that Morgenthau so confidently asserts had held the Concert together.
The larger problem with Morgenthau’s analysis of international politics in general, and with his analysis of the causal significance of nationalism for international politics in particular, is that even in acknowledging in a particular case that an ideational factor like nationalism has consequences that must be accounted for, Morgenthau merely asserts that the factor has been appropriated by statesmen and applies the factor as if it had no consequences for his description of state interests in terms of power. His analysis of the behavior of nation-state actors is simply an analysis of the behavior of nationalized “state actors” still ruled by the old power lust. The goals of this will-to-power alone have changed. The new goal, according to Morgenthau, is the transmission of the new, particularistic, national ethics with which these nations have replaced the ethics of his cherished reactionary utopia.
Even when generating insights into nationalist phenomena, Morgenthau must formulate them in the context of these constants of the “power monism” 43 upon which his theory of the balance of power is predicated. It is disingenuous for Morgenthau to suddenly suggest that “relative positions” within a commonly accepted normative framework of understandings and expectations are no longer at issue, only the “ability to impose” one’s moral vision on other nations. He is certainly correct in asserting that the normative framework of understandings of the reactionary utopia has been dismantled, with causal significance for the subsequent patterns of national-state interaction. But acquiring the ability to impose one’s views on others is certainly a positional issue, 44 and a very extreme positional consequence of what Morgenthau would regard as the failure to successfully balance the power of others. Morgenthau does not intend with this passage to abandon a positional model of international politics; a model that was to taken up at an ever higher level of ontological abstraction later by Waltz’s formulation of structural neorealism. He intends to bemoan the demise of the reactionary utopia.
This criticism should not be read as an element of a diatribe against Morgenthau who, unlike Waltz, does recognize and discuss at relative length the consequences of nationalism for international politics. But one wonders why the domestic analogies employed early in Morgenthau’s book in order, for example, to invoke a first image cause for the power lust of states cannot be applied here with the salutary effect of recognizing that “goals” of social actors change with changes in their own understandings of their interests. Morgenthau’s work is an exemplar of an entire genre of literature on international relations theory that imputes the interests of collective actors from their understanding of the structural effects of human nature. Collective interests are presumed to be a collective representation of the aggregated effects of these morose and intransient aspects of human nature. It is a major argument of this book that these collective interests change with changes in collective self-understandings as social actors, i.e. with changes in collective identity.
Nationalism and the Notion of Citizenship: Civil Society and Self-Determination
At this juncture we are left with the realization that any theory formulated in such a way as to describe the interests of social actors in terms of power, and in unitary terms, is not capable of making an analytic cut into the explanation of nationalist phenomena. This suggests that interests must sometimes be described in a different language, and that their formulation and expression are far from a unitary, or even a merely composite process. The analysis of the interaction of sovereign states will remain forever static if it provides no means by which to analyze transformations in collective identity and especially in sovereign identity. Justin Rosenberg captures the root of the problem succinctly when he argues that:
what is missing is any sense that the history of the states-system is more than the accumulation of successive power-struggles, any awareness that those competitions between great powers have mediated the continuing evolution, geographical expansion and global consolidation of a world political structure which in many ways is continuous with the changing domestic form, legitimacy and power of the state: that the meaning of sovereignty itself is historically specific. 45
It will not do to simply note that the territorial-sovereign states of modern Europe (and by extension non-European states), having become nationalized, will then suddenly imagine themselves to have become nations, and so proceed to analyze their behavior as if the same norms of sovereignty were applicable to nation-states as they had been for dynastic territorial-sovereigns. As I have demonstrated, Morgenthau does precisely this and attributes the observed differences in the international behavior of nation-states to a shift in the “ethics” statesmen bring to the same old contest. Contrary to Morgenthau’s implicit assertion, statesmen in the nationalist era have not spoken with one voice of the same set of prenational ethics and interests. They do not merely articulate a different set of ethics that now simply extend the goals of the state, in relation to those articulated in the pre-nationalist era. They have spoken in an entirely new voice and have articulated a new set of interests—those of an entirely new social entity. In the nationalist era, statesmen were no longer speaking with the voice of a prince, a dynastic house, or of a kingdom, or empire—the territorial patrimony of the traditional European conception of sovereignty. Nor did they any longer articulate these interests and goals. The statesmen of nation-states began speaking in the voice of a sovereign people, a collective actor possessed of a collective identity and collective interests and goals, in the context of both domestic and international social interaction. This is a very different social actor than was the dynastic-sovereign. The self-understanding, as a social collectivity, of a people who possess sovereign identity in their own name is very different from that of a people who ascribe sovereign identity exclusively to a prince who rules over them in his own name. The novel self-understanding provided them with social agency. One of the most significant consequences of their recognition of this agency is a significant adjustment of their own “interests.”
Habermas captures the issue nicely in a recent essay:
with the French Revolution, the nation even became the source of state sovereignty...Each nation is now supposed to be granted the right to political self-determination...The meaning of the term “nation” thus changed from designating a pre-political entity to something that was supposed to play a constitutive role in defining the political identity of the citizen within a democratic polity. 46
Of course, as noted above, not all states that developed national collective identity can be characterized in terms of a grant of citizenship within a democratic polity. Peoples with quite limited experience of democratic institutions and marginal exposure to republican ideals nevertheless became quite fervent nationalists in the nineteenth century. Yael Tamir has suggested that there is more than one variant of nationalism, and that identification of nationalism with citizenship in a democratic polity, cited by Habermas, is the liberal variant. There is also a communitarian variant that constitutes a more focused cultural identification and affiliation. These identifications and affiliations are regarded as “a matter of fate rather than choice.” 47
The liberal variant of nationalism, however, has origins that raise serious questions regarding the advisability of modeling international diplomacy and social interaction as a gentleman’s game between highly and similarly cultured transnational elites. This is especially the case in societies that did take up the claim of national sovereignty, as opposed to dynastic sovereignty, in the nineteenth century and beyond. The agency of a domestic society cannot be reduced to the international policy of the state. Something critical, and thus far unidentified, underlies this state policy when it is determined neither by dynastic “interests,” nor by a unitary societal consensus regarding the societal “interests” that Morgenthau argues are reducible to the extension of state power. 48 This move obscures transsocietal features that illuminate transformations in global social orders. 49 It is crucial to resolve the outlines of this transsocietal structure in order to gain an understanding of both modern international and domestic politics.
These observations lead us into a discussion that will more clearly reveal the relationship between the form of the modern state that is successful in international competition and the form that provides a favorable forum for the civil association necessary for the fostering of the concept of citizenship. In the nationalist era in particular, these successful state formations, and citizen-engendering formations, have been largely coterminous. The link between these twin successes has been that states that have been successful in both of these forums have provided favorable forums for capitalist production. Justin Rosenberg observes:
Under capitalism, the formal subordination in production which accomplishes the extraction of the surplus is not exercised through the state. Formal political inequality is therefore not inscribed in the relations of production...[rather]...the direct extraction of a surplus is accomplished through ‘non-political’ relations associated with new forms of social power. 50
Rosenberg suggests that Marx correctly identifies these new sources of social power, in the first volume of Capital, as “ ‘market forces and the rule of law.’ Rosenberg then goes on to help illuminate the link between the “liberal” and “pluralist” elements of a social order that Michael Walzer suggests are crucial to the health of civil society and the notion of citizenship. 51
It [capitalism] is a historically specific set of social relations between persons which effects the reproduction of the social order in a determinate form...because incorporation into this association through the labor contract takes the form of a relation of exchange between legal equals, the process of surplus extraction is reconstituted as a private activity of civil society. 52
The surplus extracted provides both the means of sustaining the material needs of the civil society engaged in generating it, and, through the extractive process of taxation, the material needs for the maintenance of the state, defense of its territorial integrity against international threats, or expansion of the territory administered by the state. More importantly for the evolution of both the notions of citizenship and nationalisms later built on this notion, the surplus extracted also provides the means for the ensurance of the material well-being of the citizen, as the nation-state begins to take an interest in ensuring a minimum level of subsistence for the promotion of the dignity of the citizen. The notion that the state has an obligation to concern itself with the material well-being of the citizen, who often becomes surplus labor in this privately administered system of extraction of economic surpluses, arises early in the nationalist era and is found even as early as the debates of the French National Assembly regarding the obligations of the new republic to rationalize the old regime’s system of bienfaisance. The nation-state thus acquires the domestic function of utilizing its increasingly rational administrative capacity to ensure that available means were directed at the most critical need. 53
Rosenberg’s analysis demonstrates rather effectively that the modern European international state system did not develop independently of domestic social and economic context. A specific form of the state was privileged, in part by the state-building aspirations of early modern and modern European monarchs. Michael Mann suggests that neo-Marxian arguments such as Rosenberg’s are correct, if incomplete. “The modern state did crystallize as capitalist, though not only as capitalist.” 54 By a highly complex and historically contingent set of interactions, classes and nations emerged as dominant powerful social actors in the nineteenth century. They emerge “entwined” in the sense that neither developed in the forms observed independently of the other. Upon emerging together, nation-states and classes later slowly squeezed out other relevant social actors and groupings of both a transnational and local or regional nature. 55
Classical Marxist class analysis, however, is only of marginal utility in unraveling the complex dynamics of the co-constitution of nations and classes in the nineteenth century. This is the case in large measure because classes are neither “pure” constructs with objectively given “interests” that are uniformly grasped and acted upon, nor are they constituted transnationally. Classes as they actually emerged were constituted with “shared norms and passions, inspiring them to recklessness, sacrifice, and cruelty...[which helped them to]...overcome their diverse economic membership to generate passionate collective behavior. Ideology may be immanent and transcendent among classes.” 56 But while capitalism is defined in transnational terms by classical Marxism it “actually emerged within and between the territories of states...became sociospatially structured by their domestic and geopolitical relations” 57 giving rise to national as well a transnational forms of capitalist social actors. As capitalism generally emerged within territorial boundaries it thus uniquely formed domestic civil societies in accordance with local peculiarities, prejudices and “interests.”
As the dynastic territorial state began to give way to the nation-state, the latter emerged as an institutional form of the agency of classes that are dominated by bourgeois interests and ethics, but by bourgeois interests and ethics that have developed in a specific cultural context. The capitalist class does begin to acquire attributes of a ruling class, and gains broad influence over the policy of the state. But the ethnic and cultural context in which the capitalist class has emerged within a given territory introduces a strong contaminant into the “purity” of class recognition of any “objective” transnational interests.
National and class collective identities contend for dominance in the formation of state policy. Neither nationalist sentiment or its class rival can wholly determine the policy of the nation-state. The state is certainly not simply an accumulation of private interests as the pluralists suggest; neither is it simply the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie” as orthodox Marxism proposes. Neither the state or the nation obtained a solid form without the rise of capitalism and the generation of classes, but the idea of the nation is broader than that of the classes which make the nation possible. At another level, the nation is not possible without the death of traditional forms of the legitimacy of constituted public authority. The idea of the nation arose subsequent to the notion of civic citizenship which had arisen to pluralize the sovereign authority taken on by the principle of popular sovereignty. The notion of citizenship is constructed to house this popular sovereignty. The assertion of the “rights of man” legitimated the pluralistic civil society, built upon the liberal notion of the rational pursuit of self-interest that arose to provide the network of free associations required for the establishment of capitalist production relations.
The notion of citizenship thus legitimates the eclipse of the notion of kingship. Dynastic and bourgeois notions of interest eventually diverge to the point at which the new forms of social power—created in the private extraction of surpluses that constitute capitalist production relations—are exercised to emancipate the bourgeois notion of interest from the unwelcome, grasping extraction of the dynastic state. The idea of the nation further legitimates this arrangement by providing a collective identity transcending the class identity that now largely controls these new levers of social power. National identity is integrative. National identity encompasses all of the spaces and spans the specific cultural, ethnic, territorial contexts within which class identities actually arise. Yet I am not making a Marxist argument that national identity merely serves as a figleaf to discreetly clothe an otherwise embarrassingly naked rule of capital within a national context. The idea of the nation has implications for behavior within and between societies every bit as “real” as the equally novel construct of socioeconomic class.
Now it might be fruitful to pause and relate this discussion to the earlier discussion regarding the notion of “interests” in the context of classical realism’s conception of the national interest. The development of the notion of citizenship ameliorated the domestic conflict that is latent within the requirement of the state to bow to the interests of capital in the pursuit of the “national interest.” The plodding, but inexorable, extension of the franchise to ever-broader circles of domestic European society after 1848, even in the heart of conservative, dynastic, Mitteleuropa, slowly introduced and expanded the novelty of domestic legal equality among “citizens” of the nineteenth-century state, and thus had no small part in the creation of a conception of common “interest” of a citizenry equal before the law. Even though their labor had been commoditized, those on the short end of nineteenth-century capitalist production relations had begun to obtain a domestic legal claim, however limited at first, to share in the regulation of the social order within their national context. The emerging civil societies of nineteenth-century Europe had begun to spawn legal freedoms of association, and of contractual relations, in order to provide a favorable legal infrastructure for capitalist accumulation. They thereby provided the context in which the extension of the franchise was proliferated throughout society. The generation of this framework, and the extension of the franchise, created an environment of common enterprise that could not have developed in the traditionally legitimated social order of the ancien regime. Even as many of their lives were being “rationalized,” in the Weberian sense, to the requirements of this new set of production relations, the common people of nineteenth-century Europe were everywhere, slowly being created “citizens.” It should not surprise us that, particularly for those lower “classes” whose economic life had been no better or worse under semi-feudal absolutism, proliferation of the franchise was an effective tool in forging a new collective identity.
Having criticized existing theoretical frameworks for their inadequacies in the analysis of the causal significance of changes in collective identities for international politics I must now suggest what an alternative framework might look like. This is the task that I turn to in the next chapter. I will not provide an overarching “theory of international politics” that competes with existing theories as an autonomous theoretical framework for the analysis of all phenomena of interest to students of international relations. I will not provide a “theory of nationalism.” I am agnostic as to whether either of these are attainable. I will provide, in the lexicon of Lapid and Kratochwil, a “reconstructive” theoretical framework in which I will attempt to liken changes in the collective identity of societies and collectivities to what I regard to be observable changes in the nature and functioning of the international system. To the extent that I am successful in this theoretical enterprise, I will hope to have introduced variables of systemic analysis that will enhance the application of systems theory to international phenomena. This will constitute my own first cut at a set of analytic variables I hope will illustrate how systemic structure may be augmented and corrected with a causally significant account of human agency.
Endnotes
Note 1: See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Back.
Note 2: An example of this type of theorizing is found in Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979). Back.
Note 3: For a description of the difficulties of dominant theories of international relations in contending with nationalist phenomenology see Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, “The Taming of the Shrew? Neorealist Appropriations and Theorizations of Nationalism,” Presented at the 35th ISA Annual Convention, Washington, D.C., March 1994. For an updated version of this argument see Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil. “Revisiting the ‘National’: Toward an Identity Agenda in Neorealism?” in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (eds.), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1995), pp. 105&-;26. Back.
Note 4: An important debate on the extent to which the state apparatus possesses, and is empowered to express, autonomous interests is ongoing in the comparative politics literature. For the strongest elaboration of the neo-statist view see Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research” in Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985), pp. 3–37, and Stephen D. Krasner, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics” Comparative Politics 16 (2) (1984): 233–46. Critical reviews of the neo-statist perspective may be found in Gabriel Almond, “The Return to the State” American Political Science Review 82 (3) (1988): 853–74, J. L. Himmelstein, and Micheal Kimmel, “Review Essay: States and Social Revolutions: The Limits and Implications of Skocpol’s Structural Mode” American Journal of Sociology 86 (5) (1981): 1145–54. and Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1) (1991): 77–96. Back.
Note 5: Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 285. Back.
Note 6: Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 74. Back.
Note 7: I will employ the theoretical construct of the “structure of identities and interests” throughout this work. Wendt is the author of this concept. See Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (2) (1992): 391–425. Back.
Note 8: William Bloom has expressed this as follows. “Nation-building requires that the mass of individuals make an identification with the nation-state this requires: 1) that the individual actually experiences the state and 2) that this experience is such as to evoke identification.” See William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 61. Back.
Note 9: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 168. Back.
Note 10: See Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Back.
Note 11: See Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 12: Anthony D. Smith, “The Problem of National Identity: Ancient, Medieval and Modern?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (3) (July 1994): 381 Back.
Note 13: Lapid and Kratochwil have made this observation. Lapid and Kratochwil, “The Taming of the Shrew?” For examples of the appropriative strategy criticized by Lapid and Kratochwil, see John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future,” International Security 15 (1) (1990): 5–56, and Barry R. Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power” International Security 18 (2) (1993): 80–124. Back.
Note 16: Richard Little, “Rethinking System Continuity and Transformation,” in Barry Buzan, Richard Little and Charles Jones, The Logic of Anarchy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 87. Back.
Note 17: See Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, and A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler. The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Back.
Note 18: For a development of the notion of institutional facts and their role in structuring action, see Friedrich Kratochwil, “Regimes, Interpretation and the ‘Science’ of Politics: A Reappraisal.” Millennium 17 (2) (1988): 263–84. For a new and more general development of the significance of institutional facts in social life, see John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995). See especially pp. 79–126. Back.
Note 19: Lapid and Kratochwil, “Revisiting the ‘National’,” p. 119. Back.
Note 20: Frederick Frey illuminates how ubiquitous this problem is for analysis in all of the social sciences in “The Problem of Actor Designation in Political Analysis” Comparative Politics 17 (2) (1985): 127–52. Back.
Note 21: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 79. Back.
Note 22: This would appear to be the case so long as Waltz’s other two definitional elements of systemic structure are addressed in the system under study. The ordering principle of the system must be “anarchic” and there must be no “functional differentiation” among the interacting units. Back.
Note 23: Frey, “The Problem of Actor Designation in Political Analysis,” p. 142. Back.
Note 24: Nevertheless, for samples of early and influential criticism in this vein, see the following articles, collected in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press 1986). See, for example, John Gerard Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,” pp. 131–57; Robert O. Keohane, “Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond,” pp. 158–203; Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” pp. 204–54; and Richard K. Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” pp. 255–300. Back.
Note 25: See Little, “Rethinking System Continuity and Transformation,” in Buzan et. al. Logic of Anarchy. Back.
Note 26: Frey, “The Problem of Actor Designation in Political Analysis,” p. 131. Back.
Note 28: Ibid. p. 136. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 29: Helen Milner, “The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A Critique,” Review of International Studies 17 (1991): 67–85. Back.
Note 30: Paul Schroeder, “Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory,” International Security 19 (1) (1994): 108–48. Back.
Note 31: Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (4th ed.) (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. 5. Back.
Note 32: Martin Griffiths, Realism, Idealism and International Politics: A Reinterpretation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 63. Back.
Note 33: Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 241 ff. Back.
Note 34: Ibid. p. 242 ff. Back.
Note 35: See, for example, Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). A very useful comparison of the theoretical constructs of the American and British academies within the large umbrella of the realist tradition of international relations scholarship is found in Barry Buzan, “From International System to International Society: Structural Realism and Regime Theory Meet the English School,” International Organization 47 (3) (1993): 327–52. Back.
Note 36: In addition to the works of Bull cited earlier see especially Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.) The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); James Mayall. Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992); Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977). In addition to Buzan’s 1993 essay, an elaboration of the distinctive contributions of the English school may be found in Peter Wilson, “The English School of International Relations: A Reply to Sheila Grader,” Review of International Studies 15 (January 1989): 49–58. Back.
Note 37: Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 243. Back.
Note 39: Hoffmann, “Commentary: Theory as a set of answers” in Stanley Hoffman (ed.), Contemporary Theory in International Relations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960), p. 35. Back.
Note 40: Kratochwil, “On the Notion of ‘Interest’ in International Relations” International Organization 36 (1) (1982): 21 ff. Back.
Note 41: See Eric Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire (New York: Norton, 1968). Back.
Note 42: Kratochwil, “On the Notion of ‘Interest’ in International Relations,” pp. 21–22. Back.
Note 43: Griffiths writes, “it is Morgenthau’s power monism and unidimensional view of international politics that is really the basis for his reification of political man, an idealist distortion of real man.” See Griffiths, Realism and Idealism in International Politics, p. 67. Back.
Note 44: I have recently provided elsewhere an explanation and illustration of the positional consequences of the ability to impose one’s moral vision on others. See Rodney Bruce Hall, “Moral Authority as a Power Resource,” International Organization 51 (4) (1997): 591–622 Back.
Note 45: Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), p. 36. The emphasis is in the original. Back.
Note 46: Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” in Ronald Beiner (ed.) Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 258. Back.
Note 47: Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 20. Back.
Note 48: The notion of “societal security” appears to be one such societal consensus principle offered recently. See Ole Waever, “Societal Security: The Concept” in Waever et. al., Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), chapter 2. Back.
Note 49: Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 30. Back.
Note 51: See Micheal Walzer, “The Civil Society Argument,” in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 153–74. For a different argument see Charles Tilly (ed.), “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 3–84. Back.
Note 52: Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 125. Back.
Note 53: See Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820 (New York: Norton, 1994). See especially chapter 8, “The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Bienfaisance.” Back.
Note 54: Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power Volume II, p. 69. Back.
Note 55: See Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) pp. 178–79. For a briefer statement of Spruyt’s institutional selection argument, see Hendrik Spruyt, “Institutional Selection in International Relations,” International Organization 48 (4) (1994): 527–57. Back.
Note 56: Mann, The Sources of Social Power Volume II, p. 31. Back.
Note 57: Ibid. pp. 31—32. Back.
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