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National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
10. The Helpless Colossus: The Politics of Identity and Hopeful Nondeterminism
“Est’ obichai na rusi, nochiu slushat’ bi-bi-si”
(There is a custom in Russia, at night to listen to BBC)—Moscow jingle, Rossiiskaia Gazeta
Reduced to its essence, political power is based on both moral authority and physical force. One group of people can not tell another group what to do without having both recognized norms for legitimacy and recognizable means for enforcement.
—James H. Billington
Neither “objective” in the sense of existing outside the constituent practices of its members and opponents, nor completely “subjective” in the sense of existing only when perceived to exist by members or opponents, a nationality or social class is here understood to be both socially and discursively constituted.
—Ronald Grigor Suny
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
I will conclude with the analysis of two puzzles that provide some interesting contrasts and tests for the scope of application of a theoretical framework predicated on changes in societal collective identity. The first of these puzzles also constitutes an anomalous case for the thrust of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century collective identity formation. Western Europe’s political institutions (institutional forms of collective action) had in general clearly been reconstituted after the First World War, and its borders redrawn, to service national collective identity and the new system legitimating principle of national self-determination that Wilson had helped to enshrine in the Paris peace. Russia and the East, however, had rejected bourgeois-nationalism in favor of its mirror image, proletarian-internationalism, as a domestic legitimating principle which the Soviets argued and believed was to become the legitimate organizing principle for the next (post-bourgeois-nationalist) phase of human history. The first puzzle regards why bourgeois-nationalist collective identity and institutions prevailed in the West, and proletarian-internationalist identity and institutions prevailed in the East. The question is important because the legitimating principles of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics constituted an alternative principle for the legitimation and organization of both the domestic and international social orders for most of the twentieth century. As such, Soviet Russia constituted an implicit challenge to the international order no less significant than had the legitimating principles of the domestic order of Revolutionary France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This challenge had not arisen as quickly or as earnestly following the Russian Revolution as it had in the case in the French case, in part because the Russian Revolution occurred in an economically and militarily exhausted Russia. As structural realists might correctly suggest in this context, Soviet Russia lacked the “capabilities” to carry the revolution beyond its borders. Yet the challenge to the bourgeois-nationalist order emerged in full force by the close of the Second World War. This war, I would argue, had constituted a communitarian-nationalist 1 (Germany-Italy-Japan) challenge to the liberal, bourgeois-nationalist (France-Great Britain-United States) order that had emerged between the wars. The events between 1917 and 1945 are too complex to be analyzed as consequences of the politics of identity within the pages of this volume, and are deserving of a book-length treatment in themselves. I shall have to leave the bulk of this discussion for another book. But the importance of the question of the emergence, by 1947, of a proletarian-internationalist challenge to the bourgeois-nationalist legitimating principle of national self-determination is adequately illustrated by the fact that by this date “one third of the human race...found itself living under communist regimes.” 2 These proletarian-internationalist regimes were to contend the future evolution of the international system with their bourgeois-nationalist adversaries rigorously enough for the conflict to dominate international systemic discourse for the next four decades following the postwar freeze. The history of international relations for much of the twentieth century is the history of cold war between competing visions of domestic and global social order.
The second puzzle is the question of why proletarian-internationalist identity and institutions suddenly collapsed in the late twentieth century. I hope to persuade the reader that if we analyze the demise of the Soviet Union in this context, and within an analytic framework oriented toward the politics of identity, the fragmentation of the USSR and the demise of the cold war are explainable post-facto, even if they were only a very limited sense predictable. It was at the least something we might have anticipated as a conceivable outcome of changing Soviet societal self-identification. The importance for international relations theory of resolving this puzzle is self-evident. The demise of the cold war was an event so momentous that no competent theory of international relations should have failed to predict it. Yet all of them did. 3
Serfdom, Class Identity and the Czarist Imperial Legacy
Let me deal briefly with the first puzzle, which is, in essence: why did not the collapse of Czarist autocracy with the abdication of the Romanov dynasty, in 1917, result in the replacement of the imperial monarchy with a series of bourgeois republics organized along ethnic or national lines, as had been the case in the West? Certainly part of this question is relatively easy to answer. Russia had withdrawn from the war late in 1917 when the Bolsheviks had turned out the provisional Kerensky government, whose major error had been that it had seemed quite anxious to continue to conduct the war. 4 Lenin and the Bolsheviks had offered the exhausted Russian people bread, land, and peace and they had at least delivered the peace. As a consequence of this withdrawal, with Russian soldiers deserting the trenches in droves, the Bolsheviks were forced to sign the harsh and putative Treaty of Brest-Ltovsk. This peace was signed quite irrespective of Leon Trotsky’s assertion that as proletarian internationalists, a Soviet foreign policy was a contradiction in terms, and that in his new capacity as Commissar for Foreign Affairs he would “issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop.” 5
But the fact that Nicholas II had allied himself with France and Great Britain had proved providential for the new Soviet government. The Czar’s former allies sat down in Paris and carved up the territory of Russia’s former enemies along rough ethnic boundaries, with significant exceptions dictated by Britain and France for strategic considerations to the considerable consternation of Woodrow Wilson. 6 The Hohenzollern, and especially the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian, dual) empire was apportioned by the victorious powers meeting in Paris for ethnic-nationalist foxes, who snapped up these portions and established their own national bourgeois republics. Hungary was cut loose from Austria, the southern Slavs in the Balkans were bound up in an independent Yugoslavia, the independence of Poland was reestablished, an enlarged and independent Romania was established, along with a Czecho-Slovak republic. While the new Soviet regime had forfeited a seat at the victor’s table, as well as Czarist possessions in the Baltics and Poland, by abandoning the allies of the Czar it had chosen to retain another component of the Czarist legacy and this was the multiethnic character of the Russian Empire. As with many East European states, the Soviet Union was never a “national-state” from the beginning of its life to the end.
One question that may be asked is why did the Eastern peoples who had populated this empire, and particularly the intellectuals among them, accede to a proletarian-internationalist solution to the collapse of the economy and of legitimate political authority in the First World War? Perhaps a better one, however is why did the disparate peoples of the empire fail to use this collapse to emancipate themselves from Russian rule and establish their own national states? This is a question that is somewhat distinct from that of why the Marxist Bolsheviks prevailed, rather than social revolutionaries or some other group. One cannot answer the question of why the non-Russian peoples did not break loose from the new empire of the Russian Bolsheviks simply by observing that the Bolsheviks possessed the military capabilities to prevent their departure. These capabilities were thin. And perhaps because they did not have this capability, Lenin insisted from the beginning upon the right of national republics to secede from the union. 7 Stalin and Bukharin, along with most of the non-Russian communists, opposed this policy—obviously with some success, as the civil war in Soviet Russia, following for several years upon the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution, took the form at various times of abortive national revolutions on the Russian periphery.
But the Soviet government prevailed in these conflicts, quite irrespective of its own quite limited military and economic capabilities, and irrespective of the fact that Soviet Russia was invaded at times by expeditionary forces of other powers who were lending support to various secessionist national movements in the hopes of strangling, or at least crippling, the new proletarian-internationalist regime whose very existence implicitly challenged the newly declared legitimating principles of the bourgeois-nationalist global order. The reader will not be surprised to learn that I recommend looking for the answers to the reasons that the revolution in Russia was not bourgeois-nationalist, and that non-Russian nationalists in the Russian periphery were unable to rouse their people to emancipate themselves from Russian rule after 1917, in the constitution of the collective identity commitments of these societies at this time.
First, the late persistence of quasi-feudal modes of social organization in the Czarist Russian empire had left the vast majority of people in the position of agrarian peasantry. The Russian Empire in the second decade of the twentieth century had been highly underdeveloped both industrially and commercially relative to Western Europe and thus had contained a small and marginal bourgeoisie. Bourgeois culture in Russia had not developed as the basis for national culture as it had in the West. Russia had more often borrowed from the bourgeois-nationalist cultures of others than it had sought to transmit an indigenous bourgeois-nationalist culture abroad. Unlike the European “new imperialism,” Russian imperialism had been driven by the dynamics of state-building and considerations of security. 8 Serfdom, which had bound the peasants legally to the land, had not been abolished until the 1860s. Peasant life under these conditions had ever been collective and dominated by a long ingrained attitude or equality of condition and right to subsistence—a “moral economy.” 9 The prevalence and significance of the “leveling” ethic of the Russian peasantry is indicative of a predisposition on the part of these peoples to the message of social equality inherent in the rhetoric of contemporary Bolshevism. This ethic is illustrated in a somewhat amusing and popular, if unflattering, Russian anecdote told to Hedrick Smith in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. According to the anecdote:
God comes to a lucky Russian peasant one day and offers him any wish in the world. The peasant is excited and starts dreaming his fantasies. “Just remember,” God says, “whatever you choose, I will do twice as much for your neighbor as I do for you.” The peasant is stumped because he can not bear to think of his neighbor being so much better off than he is, no matter how well off he becomes. Finally he is struck by an idea and he tells God, “Strike out one of my eyes and take both the eyes of my neighbor.” 10
Additionally, the peoples of the Czarist empire had been subjected to intensive and persistent administrative (and legal) Russification, engendered by bureaucratic absolutism, an instrumental self-Russification, or coercive cultural and linguistic Russification, as had been the case with the suppression of the Ukrainian language. 11 Administrative and cultural homogenization over a few generations mitigates distinctive national and ethnic self-identifications. Czarist imperialism had resulted in trans-societal integration in other respects as well, in the creation of an all-Russian market, in disrupting the isolation of village life, and in blurring kinship distinctions as these ties became less significant for assuring subsistence with the advance of imperial economic integration. 12 Yet the nature of Czarist imperial administration had entailed a “complex meshing of social and ethnic grievances in situations where class and ethnicity reinforced individual and collective positions in the hierarchy of power and powerlessness.” 13
For all of these reasons, class antagonisms and grievances were, in many locations, felt more powerfully than ethnic antagonisms. The Bolsheviks promised (irrespective of what they delivered) to address both forms of social grievance. They promised regional autonomy to constituent ethnic republics, but more importantly they promised land to the peasantry. Many a peasant who only weakly identified himself as a Ukrainian, or a Belorussian, 14 could still quite firmly identify himself as a peasant. As Suny suggests: “Almost everywhere the nationalist movements were either strengthened or fatally weakened by the nature of their class base...[w]here social, particularly agrarian reform was delayed or neglected, ethnic political aspirations alone did not prove strong enough to sustain nationalist intellectuals in power.” 15
The paramount form of societal collective identity of many of the peoples in the Russian periphery at this time was in no sense ethnically or nationally based at the level of the masses. Intellectuals are always another matter. Ultimately, the answer to the question of why the Soviet Union did not fragment into nationalist pieces when the Bolsheviks had freed the non-Russian peoples from Czarist imperialism, and was yet too weak to replace it with Soviet imperialism, was that in many areas “class based socialist movements were far more potent than political nationalism. Socialism as presented by the dominant intellectual elite answered the grievances of both social and ethnic inferiority and promised a social-political solution to the dual oppression.” 16
Matters were to change in the intervening years between the consolidation of Soviet power within the boundaries of the old Czarist Empire, 17 and the implosion of the Soviet Empire in 1991. The proletarian-internationalist institutions of the superstate gave way to what appeared to outside observers to constitute a rapid and spontaneous regeneration of bourgeois-nationalist movements, both within the Russian Federation, and what now again lies on the Russian periphery. As I shall shortly argue, neither can this event be explained without arguments drawn from the analysis of the politics of identity.
The Demise of the Preletarian-Internationalist Identity and Institutions
Throughout the Soviet era, the power of the Leninist machine and the totalitarian control that it exercised over society had simplified interest calculations of citizens of the Soviet Union, both in the Russian Federation and in the constituent republics. National identity in the constituent republics had been subordinated to class identity or “Soviet” identity as a matter of state policy. No effort had been spared by the regime to create novo homo Sovieticus. The regime had proscribed and exalted a Soviet, working-class morality. 18 The story of the terror that the Soviet regime had employed under Stalin to thoroughly atomize Soviet society and ensure utter command and control of society, and its application to the purposes of the regime, has been well told. 19 But with the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet society began to “de-Stalinize” and a nascent civil society to reemerge. 20 While the regime retained tight controls over the press, society was no longer so terrorized that domestic critics and opponents of the regime would not chance finding an outlet for their views in a burgeoning samizdat, underground press. 21
The literature of Western academics on conditions within the USSR had been so strongly dominated through the 1960s by this discourse on the totalitarian aspects of the Soviet regime that the Western mind had become acclimated to the monolithic view of Soviet society that the regime had in fact wished to project. Western liberal thought focused on dissidence within Soviet society as a confrontation between Soviet totalitarians and Soviet liberals more than between the Soviet government and nationalist movements. Both forms of confrontation were salient. Yet the USSR collapsed in no small measure due to declarations of the independence of ethnic national-states which had previously been half-recognized by the West only as constituent republics of the monolith.
The national states that separated from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were in large measure “formed” during the Soviet era. In doing so, they ultimately made nonsense of the notion of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 22 But it is important to note that they did not suddenly and spontaneously become aware of a latent national sentiment that had remained dormant in the subconsciousness of the constituent nationalities. The nationalist discourses that were translated into political action at the end of the Gorbachev years were formed during the long decades of Soviet rule, and in response to nationalist interpretation of the conditions of that rule. Ronald Suny has recently argued persuasively that these nationalist discourses depicted Soviet repression in many forms, forced Russification, imposed modernization, the suppression of nationalist traditions, and the destruction of village life. These discourses obscure the extent to which communist rule contributed to the continued process of “nation building.” 23 The regime had actively promoted the linguistic and institutional-administrative 24 bases employed by nationalist activists in the development of national collective identity. The regime had done much to foster peripheral resentments against the Russian center during the Stalinist period of crash industrialization. 25 Ethnic interests had been mercilessly subordinated to the requirements of economic efficiency during the collectivization of agriculture as well. 26 Ethnicity had been territorialized administratively, 27 and ethnicity had been institutionalized as ethnic administrative centers in the constituent republics, which had acquired their own governmental and cultural institutions over the years.
But the terror had not eradicated traditional kinship forms of association in the Russian periphery. As Suny reminds us, “[s]ocialization still takes place in the family.” 28 These kinship networks adapted Soviet economic institutions to their own purposes for the distribution of patronage and power, and more nearly represented corrupt, regional ethnic mafias (as they still do in the post-Soviet era) than the parochial administrative organs of a transcontinental proletarian-internationalist state. 29 The corruption and organization of Soviet society into regional and ethnic syndicates limits in a very substantial manner the extent to which post-Stalinist Soviet society can really be described as an emerging “civil-society.” 30 These organizations were so successful in resisting efforts from the center to reform them during the Brezhnev years that Moscow had dispatched career KGB officers Geidar Aliev and Eduard Shevardnadze to Azerbaijan and Georgia respectively to reform them, with little success. 31 The Soviet state had not been able to dispense with the primacy of primary social relations as a guide to social action. People continued to choose their own associations and objects of loyalty. “Favors done or received are the operative currency of both social and political relations. So powerful are the obligations to one’s relatives and friends that the shame incurred by nonfulfillment was, for many...much more serious than the penalties imposed by law.” 32
All of these factors served as the bases for nascent developments of national mobilization within the Soviet Union. Suny recounts how the stirrings of nationalist sentiment showed up early in Georgia and Armenia. It appeared in Tbilisi in 1956, during an essentially nationalist protest by students against the removal of a monument to their Georgian, Stalin, in which dozens were killed. It appeared in Armenia in 1965 during an unofficial demonstration to mark the fiftieth anniversary of genocide against Armenians by Kemalist Turks. It appeared in Tbilisi again in 1978 when students demonstrated against a government plan to change the an article in Georgian constitution which declaring Georgian to be the state language of the republic. 33 Nationalist protest was also frequent in the Baltics and Western Ukraine. Suny argues persuasively that all of these disturbances provide evidence that a “growing disillusionment in society with the goals and the competence of Soviet leaders was increasingly expressed...in the idiom of nationalism.” Proletarian-internationalist identity was already on the wane as the crisis of the command economy of the worker’s state deepened throughout the Brezhnev “years of stagnation.”
Upon Brezhnev’s death in November 1982 the Soviet regime set upon an essentially pseudo-Stalinist path of reform. They set out to whip up the performance of the Soviet economy through ultimately fruitless attempts to impose more strict labor discipline, at first in the corrupt and recalcitrant Caucasus, and then throughout the Soviet Union under the successive chairmanships of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. 34 When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with Chernenko’s death in March of 1985, he had initially inclined toward the model of the authoritarian disciplinarian of his predecessors, emphasizing work discipline, excoriating alcoholism and absenteeism in the workplace, and consolidating ministries. Even when he had settled on a course of real reform, he had behaved very much like a Leninist. He had employed Leninist tactics in constructing his program, appointing young professionals as a counterweight to the bureaucracy, constructing a vague policy slogan (perestroika), created a “super-presidency” to gather power into his own hands. 35 He began with the mission that had consumed Andropov and Chernenko, to break the power of the local and regional mafias that had captured the administrative apparatus of the state and the Communist Party. The ethnic, increasingly national state functionaries and party officials in the constituent republics had translated their positions into what at this point constituted more than generically bureaucratic resistance to reform. They were more than corrupt bureaucrats, and unfortunately for Gorbachev, “[c]orruption and nationalism grew hand in hand, limiting the Kremlin’s writ in the borderlands.” 36 When this “perestroika-from-below” was contained by continued resistance from the national apparatchiki, Gorbachev had begun the democratization process that he needed to loosen the press and invite the criticism of the apparatchiki that he needed to pressure them to reform.
The policy of glasnost that Gorbachev prescribed to correct his powerlessness in the Russian periphery itself began the process by which the institutions through which he exercised power, the Soviet state and especially the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), were to become delegitimated in a very short period of time. As Suny frames the issue:
Faith in the socialist project had long since eroded among educated people, but the subversive power of the new criticism undermined what was left of the authority and influence of the party apparatus. Glasnost eliminated within a few years the privileged position of Marxism-Leninism, and the rewriting of Soviet history moved back in time beyond the permitted critique of Stalinism into a fundamental rereading of Lenin’s revolution. 37
This internal relaxation of the terms of domestic political discourse, coupled with a relaxation of Soviet foreign policy toward both the West and toward Soviet client states in Eastern Europe, had given heart to political entrepreneurs in the constituent republics who wished to present their co-ethnics with an alternative model of their futures than the reformed, federative socialist commonwealth that Gorbachev had begun moving toward. Significantly, in the international arena, Gorbachev had begun to signal a shift in the zero-sum conception of Russian interests to which the West had grown accustomed. He had signaled a desire for a “partial convergence” with Western political and economic institutions, which was later to be expressed much more dramatically and emphatically in the Yeltsin government of Russia. 38
Gorbachev had also effectively renounced the Brezhnev doctrine which had insisted that the Soviet Union would forcibly ensure the socialist character of their client and satellite states in Eastern Europe. This change in policy also signified a shift in the familiar conception of Russian interests by indicating that the USSR’s relations with Eastern European states would be constituted on more equal terms. 39 When it had become clear that Moscow would not intervene, Eastern European peoples brought down communist regimes in Prague, East Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and Bucharest with a pace that left the watching world speechless. The failure of the command economy had long been evident to the citizens of these countries. Attempts by the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechoslovaks in 1968 to throw off these regimes had been crushed by Soviet tanks. The Soviets had hanged Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader who had supported the Budapest uprising, and his colleagues in 1958, and a decade later had exiled Alexander Dubcek, who had initiated the reforms that led to the Prague spring and its aftermath, to a menial position in forestry.
The Marxist regimes that retained power after these uprisings were seen by many denizens of these countries as oppressive organs of Soviet imperialism imposed on their nations. National collective identity had continued to persist, sullen and shackled. I was able to observe a vibrant Hungarian nationalism, which cannot have arisen recently, when I visited Budapest in June of 1996. I observed that Imre Nagy is now revered as a Hungarian patriot, and I was able to visit a monument that has been erected to him at the site at which he has recently been reburied at Kossuth Lajos tér, near the Hungarian Parliament building in central Pest. While thousands of people pass by this busy street corner every day, I noted on the day that I visited that there are always a dozen or so people standing at the site of the monument, hat in hands, contemplating the site in respectful silence. Not far from this site, at the intersections of Balassi utca and Szalay utca, 40 stands a building pocked and scarred with hundreds of rounds of Russian ammunition; an unintended monument to the Red Army’s 1956 visit to Budapest. It is difficult to observe these monuments without realizing that the 1956 uprising and the 1989 revolutions in Budapest were in large measure Hungarian national uprisings.
While all these national liberation movements were brewing in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev had faced the visible manifestations of surging national identity within the borders of the Soviet Union. Having abandoned the Brezhnev doctrine, and a credible threat to use force to prop up communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev could not control events there, and the pace at which communist power was demolished in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s demonstrates this was well understood in Eastern Europe at the time, if not in the West. What was less well understood, even within the USSR, was the extent to which Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost had generated the conditions under which more open political discourse had encouraged a reformulation of the structure of identities and interests in the constituent republics of the Russian periphery. The first flashpoint of this reformulation came in Karabagh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, when the Armenian denizens began a series of demonstrations for union with Armenia in mid-February of 1988. The Azerbaijanis responded with riots on the 28th and 29th resulting in thirty-one fatalities and hundreds of injuries and Gorbachev suddenly found himself mediating a bloody nationalist dispute within the Soviet Union over territory. 41 By the beginning of 1990 the Azerbaijanis were holding mass rallies in favor of separation from the USSR and Azerbaijani extremist nationalists were massacring ethnic Armenians in Baku. Gorbachev had responded by dispatching troops to both Karabagh and Baku, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Azerbaijanis who were crushed as armored columns rolled over manned barricades. 42 Soviet troops had similarly crushed huge demonstrations in Tiblisi which had called for Georgian independence, but these actions had been critically excoriated in the press that Gorbachev’s own policies had liberalized. Any coercive action Gorbachev would attempt to take from then on to forcibly maintain the territorial integrity of the USSR from secessionist movements would not be tolerated by the liberalized press. This had “made it nearly impossible for the Kremlin to use armed force again against the burgeoning nationalist movements.” 43
Matters were not improved by the political maneuvering that Gorbachev had to conduct to contend for power even within the Russian Federation with Boris Yeltsin, after his election as Chair of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Each of these men had employed centrifugal nationalist tendencies within the USSR as political tools to undermine one another’s power. Gorbachev had employed this tactic, during their 1990 power struggle, to encourage the nationalist sentiments of Yeltsin’s clients in the non-Russian ethnic autonomies of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin’s government is clearly still dealing with the consequences of this ethnic nationalism as the bloody war in Chechnya ground on irrespective of the cease-fire which Yeltsin had, perhaps, arranged in order to survive the 1996 elections in Russia. Yeltsin had encouraged centrifugal nationalist tendencies in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in order to weaken Gorbachev’s Soviet power base. 44
By the end of 1990 all of the union republics and most of the autonomous republics were moving toward declaring themselves sovereign or in other cases as independent states. If Gorbachev were to maintain his commitment to democratization and eschew maintenance of the Soviet Union by force, which would have cost him his “last shred of legitimacy,” he was forced to negotiate with the union republics on a more equal footing. 45 The Russian Federation had declared itself sovereign, and all union republics had been offered the opportunity to assess whether their interests were better served by mapping a course independent of federation with Gorbachev’s USSR. Lithuania responded to Vytautas Landbergis’s calls for civil disobedience and Lithuanian independence with upheaval, Gorbachev’s last attempt to suppress a secessionist movement militarily ended with a “demonstration of the limited value of bayonets” and he was reduced to complaining about the illegality of opposition tactics. 46 Lithuania declared independence in March 1990.
By April 23, 1991 Gorbachev was compelled to draft a new union treaty with Yeltsin and the leaders of eight other republics at a dacha at Novo-Ogarevo, which would reduce the Soviet center to an executive that would depend upon the revenues of the republics to sustain itself. Gorbachev then left for vacation in the Crimea and his absence from Moscow in the days before the union treaty was to be signed on August 21 precipitated the putsch that shredded the last remnants of the legitimacy of the army, the KGB, and the CPSU. Billington described this putsch as a shift from the “struggle for legitimacy” between the organs of the Marxist-Leninist Soviet state, to a “struggle for power” in Moscow. The institutions of proletarian internationalism had lost the “struggle for legitimacy,” and they knew it, as evidenced by Billington’s observation that the documents drafted by the junta that led the putsch to justify their actions to the public did not suggest that they were defending communism or socialism, but simply that they were combating chaos. 47 In Gramscian terms, the putsch leaders had lost the “war of position” and had gambled on a “war of maneuver” 48 to prevent the signing of a new union treaty that would have transformed the Soviet Union into a loose confederation of effectively sovereign states. They lost both wars, and Gorbachev was retrieved from his Crimean captivity. Billington suggests, however, that Gorbachev also lost his war to maintain a USSR in a looser, collaborative, reformist configuration, when he demonstrated during his address to the crowd which had gathered to greet him at Vnukovo Airport near Moscow, that he did not realize he had returned to a different country. As Gorbachev addressed the crowd “he soon lost them with his lawyerly manner, his self-justifying tone, and his assumption that the Communist Party as such would not be implicated...[and he continued to address them with]...formulaic languages about ‘stages in the development of perestroika.’ ” 49 The identity of the people that Gorbachev addressed had been thoroughly transformed by the experience of defending their rights as a democratic society in the face of mortal threat. Gorbachev’s address was oriented toward a people who no longer existed. When he had made it sufficiently clear that he did not understand this, his address was interrupted with “whistles of derision” and “calls to turn off his loudspeaker.” 50 It was turned off.
The putsch had capped the crisis of legitimacy of the proletarian-internationalist institutions of the USSR. The societal self-identity that had emerged from the tumultuous years between 1985 and 1991 was in a limited sense bourgeois (democratic, liberal, and willing to hitch its fate to the fortunes that market reforms might bring) and in a fundamental sense nationalist, particularly in the constituent republics and ethnic autonomies. Little remained for Gorbachev to do by the close of 1991 beyond acknowledging the fact that societal self-identity in the Soviet Union had been transformed, that the changed structure of identities had transformed the structure of societal interests, and to bow to these changes by transforming domestic institutions into forms of collective action that were capable of allowing society to express the identity it had declared.
Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the CPSU on August 24 and ordered the confiscation of all CPSU property in his capacity as President. 51 The Congress of People’s Deputies then dissolved itself and a maelstrom of independence declarations followed from the constituent republics. 52 Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich, as Presidents of the independent states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, announced the dissolution of the USSR and their union in the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 8. When the Central Asian states, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova agreed to join, Gorbachev bowed to the fait accompli and resigned as President of the USSR on the 25th. The proletarian-internationalist colossus had ceased to exist and had been replaced by more than a dozen genuinely national-states. A socialist superpower had collapsed, in full possession of enough military capability to devastate every capitalist nation on the planet. The policies of Gorbachev’s administration had loosened nationalist and liberal forms of societal self-identification on a proletarian-internationalist reformulation of the Eurasian empire of the Czars. Unfortunately for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union: “Nation and democracy both proved to be subversive to empire, for neither would tolerate the supranational relationship of superordination and subordination dictated by the imperial system.” 53
The significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attendant demise of the cold war for international relations theory has been adequately stated by others. I will give the last word on this subject to Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil, who have written the classic constructivist formulation of the argument.
Fundamental change of the international system occurs when actors, through their practices, change the rules and norms constitutive of international interaction. Moreover, reproduction of the practice of international actors...depends on the reproduction of practices of domestic actors...Therefore, fundamental changes in international politics occur when beliefs and identities of domestic actors are altered thereby also altering the rules and norms that are constitutive of their political practices. 54
Implications for Future Research
The present study has focused on the emergence and resurgence of national collective identity as the basis of an empirically distinct international system, a global social order, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Simultaneously, the post-cold war globalization of political and economic liberalism has caused other scholars of international relations to examine neoliberal assertions that a “new world order,” founded upon global democratization and a common global market, is at hand. As Barber has recently suggested, the forces of nationalist and religious particularism, and of liberal and consumer globalism, have both emerged to lay claim to shape a world that has been freed of a bipolar war of ideology. 55 As he suggests, the victory of either might have negative consequences for notions of civil society or democratic governance at the levels of both domestic and international society. I propose expanding a constructivist research agenda to encompass a study of the politics of identity to explore the causal significance of variations in the emerging, post-cold war forms of societal collective identity among states—from nationalistic particularism to liberal globalism—for the future organization of the international system. We should proceed rather from the proposition, which I have already elaborated in this book, that the notion of state interests varies with variations in societal self-identification. These variations have produced, and continue to produce, significant consequences for the behaviors of states, and for the evolution of social identities within the modern nation-state.
Analyses of the integrative processes of globalization have focused on the dangers to the national-state, and the classical notion of interests that ostensibly impel its action. In a recent, influential issue of Daedalus, analysts proceed with generally exogenous assumptions regarding the interests of states in the wake of the resurgence of the globalization of economic liberalism. They assert that in the teeth of these forces, the state is “diminished,” “defective,” “insecure.” 56 The “real-state” is “waning.” 57 All of these assertions beg the following question. If the “real-state,” or “national-state,” with exogenously and classically conceived interests is succumbing to the forces of the globalization of liberalism, then whose interests are prevailing, and how will the world be organized when (or perhaps we should ask “if”) the globalization of liberalism proceeds to transform national-states around the globe? What impact does this process have on societal self-identification? Are the societies that conceive of themselves as nations facing inducements by the forces of global liberalism to abandon national identity for new forms of social identities, with implications for global social order and global governance?
In examining these issues we should continue to treat societal collective identity as an independent variable. The emergence of post-national social identities arising from the globalization of liberalism—social identities that we must identify—should similarly entail consequences for the institutional forms of collective action by which, I argue, new social identities manifest themselves in social action. My work on the implications of the politics of identity to date has been largely historical. The research agenda that I propose, however, focuses strongly on the implications of the politics of identity as response to globalization processes in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the implications of emerging national and economic societal collective identities in the post-cold war period and for the future.
A small part of this agenda is also historical, and is oriented toward uncovering the manner in which the economic and security relations of the twentieth century, and the mass movements that have characterized them, have been so strongly structured by the politics of identity as a response to an earlier manifestation of the globalization of liberalism. This earlier manifestation constituted the industrial revolution and I argue that the history of the twentieth century has been structured by societal responses, in the form of transformations in social identity commitments, to the global depression which marked the culmination of the industrial revolution. In this context we should, in part, mine what promises to constitute some of the richest empirical veins for explaining societal and international responses to “globalization processes” with insights drawn from a theoretical approach centered on the politics of identity. Not a few of these veins will surely be found under the crust of the history of the interwar period between 1918 and 1939. This is the period in which not only European, but also Asian and American national states developed their strongest, most far-reaching and nationalist responses to global economic crisis and its attendant domestic upheavals.
The state crystallized quite firmly as the national-state in this period. The emergence of national-collective identity in the nineteenth century had demanded the replacement of the laissez-faire state with the eudomonic (welfare) state in response to global domestic economic distress. The responses of the national, eudomonic state ranged from Keynsian countercyclical stimulus in the United States and Great Britain, to National Socialism and Fascism in Germany and Italy, to Imperial fascist militarism in Japan. These phenomena and their security implications will be explained with reference to transformations in societal collective identity. 58
These investigations should focus in part upon the economic component of the notion of societal security and state security. In the heyday of popular nationalism no form of government that did not diligently seek to provide for the economic well-being of its people was capable of surviving the social upheaval attending the spectacle of the “world in depression.” 59 The competitive currency devaluations that each national-state practiced to mitigate the consequences of the depression for its populace, the redefinition of political citizenship attending the rise of National Socialism and fascism in Europe, the New Deal in the United States, and the emergence of Tokyo as a militaristic, imperialist metropole in the Pacific, 60 may all be evaluated as differing responses to the demands of nationally self-aware peoples for redefinition of their interests. Each of the nationally self-aware states that engaged one another in the calamity of the Second World War did so in pursuit of different notions of the security interests of their societies and the nation-states that manifested the agency of these societies to the world. Each entered the war with the firm conviction that these security interests could be obtained only by a successful prosecution of the war, although many of these societal collective identities were as thoroughly demolished in the course of the war as were the states these identities had legitimated.
The larger part of this research agenda, however, should seek to elucidate, through a theoretical focus on the politics of identity, key trends in national and international organization that has emerged in the wake of the demise of Cold War bipolarity. We should investigate the “new nationalism” which has emerged in the context of the demise of the Soviet Union and the postwar order of Cold War and strategic bipolarity. In the former USSR and former Marxist states of Eastern Europe, proletarian internationalist and Soviet collective identity have given way to social collective identities which are arguably capitalist and democratic, but decidedly nationalist in character. While the security interests of the new Russian, Chechnyan, Serb, Croat, and Bosnian national identities have apparently required violent ethnic conflict in order to realize new national collective societal goals, the security interests of many other new national-states have not. An analytic approach centered on the politics of identity explains these events by appending the list of strategically significant consequences of the nationalization of state actors with the emergence of secessionist and irredentist challenges to the existing international order. 61 These secessionist and irredentist movements have created conditions under which members of multilateral security institutions such as NATO have been forced to reconceptualize their own security identities and interests, as they have been called upon to restore order to areas that have been destabilized by these movements. 62 These events portend significant changes in the structure of civil-military relations, as the armed forces of national-states are deployed for purposes that fail to conform to traditional notions of the security interests of national-states, but may well conform to those of the post-national-sovereign state identities that may be emerging in the industrialized West. 63
We should examine these phenomena as a response to social and economic transformation in comparative analysis with a similar xenophobic response, in Europe and elsewhere, to the globalizing social and economic dislocation of the great industrial revolution near the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, while I assert the forms of national and global institutions to be dependent on the independent variable of social identities, I reaffirm that social identities do vary in response to globalizing, transnational forces.
In contrast to this response, we should examine the strongly integrative social identities that are emerging in the West—particularly in the United States and Western Europe—as quite different responses to the globalization of liberalism. If, as I claim, the institutional forms of collective action change with changes in social identities, we should be able to discover, and critically and comparatively analyze, for example, transnational European social identity commitments which impel the institutional form of the emerging European Union. We should be able to discover, and critically and comparatively analyze, particularistic national identity commitments in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union that helped to shatter proletarian internationalist identity commitments and the creation of national-states to manifest these emerging social identities.
These investigations should then continue with focus on the issue that we must clarify, according to my theoretical assertions, to provide us with the outlines of the future structure of global governance. While the question is necessarily generalized in the context of this short discussion, it essentially emerges as follows. If nationalist and religious particularism, and social and economic liberal transnationalism are both emerging as societal responses to the globalization processes of the late twentieth century which is likely to prevail? If the pattern of the late nineteenth century is not repeated, and ethnic and economic nationalism does not again rally social identities to construct socially insulating institutions against the atomizing forces of globalization, into what form will the institutional outlines of the post-national-statist world crystallize? Our social identities could be bound up with institutional forms of collective action that replace the national-state with transnational economic blocs, or with corporate feudalism, or a contemporarily unimagined institutional form. If my theoretical focus is fruitful, we must address the question of the transformation of international institutional forms by rigorous analysis of the changing social identities that mold institutions to their service.
Conclusion: International Change and Hopeful Nondeterminism
I will certainly have failed to accomplish my objective with this work if I have not persuaded the reader that the politics of identity cannot be neglected in the study of the historical development of the international system, or in the study of its contemporary development. Note that I employ the term historical “development” rather than, for example, “evolution.” I do so because it is not my purpose to argue that the international system evolves as a progressive outgrowth of social interaction among a rational or enlightened human species. I have not developed an evolutionary theory of human progress. I do not argue that the Kantian “enlightenment project” of global pacification and progress is in the process of being realized by rational man—infinitely perfectible through the expansion of human reason. 64 I have not argued, with the liberals, that human history has terminated in the triumph of democracy and the blessings of the self-regulating market. 65 There have always been limits to the level of human misery and deprivation that the many can suffer to reify a liberal paradise for the few. 66 The effect of the globalization of liberalism on human well-being has by no means been uniformly sanguine. 67 While resistance to this project has experienced difficulty in acquiring a globally coherent voice, 68 it is by no means clear that the left will not ultimately marshal an alternative program. 69 History is unlikely to “end” in accordance with the expectations of adherents of liberal Hegelianism and bourgeois eschatology, just as it failed to end in accordance with the expectations of Marxist Hegelianism and proletarian eschatology. The resurgence of post-cold-war nationalisms and their potentially brutal expressions would tend to preclude this. Ideologies such as liberalism and Marxism do not “triumph” or “end history.” They simply spawn eschatologies among their true believers, and persist in dominating public discourse in the regions where they legitimate rule until changes in social collective identities render them inoperable, and expose their eschatologies as infantile.
I have argued instead that the rules of the game, and not a few of the objectives of international relations have changed with variations in socially constructed conceptions of sovereignty. My outlook for the future development of the international system is neither the optimism of the Marxists and the liberals, nor the pessimism of the realists. What emerges from constructivist theory is an admonishment that the future of human social interaction and of relations between societies is in the hands of those of us now living. We are less impelled to international conflict by “anarchy” than by our will-to-manifest-identity. As Wendt has argued so effectively, “anarchy is what states make of it.” 70 As Onuf has argued, we live in a “world of our making.” 71 As Ferguson and Mansbach remind us, we construct and reconstruct new “polities.” 72 Our collective interests change with our collective identities. We construct the domestic and global social orders that provide the structural context of our relations. We possess social agency that may enable us to organize its future quite differently. I would leave the reader only with a caveat. We can organize that future as a dystopia as easily as we can construct a utopia. We have seen these dystopias arise from severe applications of both national and class identity in the twentieth century. We may see them arise from the severe applications of liberal or illiberal ideology in the twenty-first century.
Our social agency levies upon us the burden of responsibility for that future. If we lacked social agency qua social collectivities, we might well fall back upon arguments that the international political realm is an “amoral” rather than an “immoral” realm. 73 If we own up to the system-transforming capacity of our social agency, we must also own the consequences of the decisions we make in executing that agency. What we call ourselves says a lot about us. Our societal self-identifications segment the political realm. When we formulate them we include some and exclude others. This is as true of transnational collective identities as of national collective identity. We cannot formulate an argument regarding who we are without at least implying an argument about who we are not. If I am a Pole, then I am not a Czech. If I am a proletarian, then I am not bourgeois. If I am a denizen of Christendom, then I am not a Muslim. If I am a conquistador, then I am not a “savage.” If I am a liberal then I am not a socialist. We can see in these examples that historically we seem compelled to segment political space. We must define what is “inside” and what is “outside” this space. Liberalism is no guard against social closure if it results in the “secession of the rich,” 74 which entails designating the “other” through economic rather than ethnic criteria. This segmentation, however it is allocated, unfortunately appears to help us to avoid the ethical consequences of our social action with respect to that which is, and those who are, “outside” this space. 75
A collective identity that is wholly inclusive appears difficult to achieve, but does appear needed if we are to avoid segmenting the political realm in a manner that enables intersocietal conflict by defining those “outside” our collective identity schemas as “other.” We can arguably catch a glimpse of what a wholly inclusive collective identity would look like when we ponder the identity that the ecologists have constructed for each of us—denizens of spaceship earth. Certainly we can agree that none of us are “outside” the solution set that must be worked to keep the planet habitable for all of us. Only those who would deny the problem would find themselves “outside.”
History in the view of constructivist social theory is, in no small part, the history of human agency. Institutional forms of social organization are adapted to the needs of social collectivities which transform these as they transform their own societal collective self-identifications. The “interests” and motivations of those societies change with these changing self-identifications. If this is so—and I have argued that it is so—then history is neither cyclical nor progressive, and practitioners of international relations are neither necessarily rushing toward catastrophe nor toward global cooperation and passivity. History will go where the changes that we effect in global social orders lead it. We are doomed to repeat nothing, yet neither is there a utopian, eschatological goal or place toward which we are all heading. The evolutionary perspective of a constructivist theory centered on the politics of identity is that of hopeful nondeterminism. We may hope that the direction of human social agency will improve the nature of interaction between societies, though we may not necessarily expect such a sanguine outcome.
Endnotes
Note 1: Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, pp. 18&-;20. Back.
Note 2: E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, Vintage Books (New York: Random House, 1996). Back.
Note 3: See John Lewis Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,” International Security 17, No. 3 (Winter 1992/93): 5–58 and Friedrich Kratochwil, “The Embarrassment of Changes: Neo-realism and the Science of Realpolitik Without Politics,” Review of International Studies 19 (1993): 63–80. Back.
Note 4: See Bruce Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution 1914–1918 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 397–425. Back.
Note 5: See Robert Wistrich, Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary (Briarcliff Manor, NY: Stein and Day, 1979), p. 100 ff. Back.
Note 6: Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Major Foreign Policies, The Albert Shaw Lectures on Diplomatic History, 1956. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957) pp. 114–17. Back.
Note 7: For a discussion of Lenin’s view of self-determination in the Soviet context see Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917–1923, Revised edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 41–49. Back.
Note 8: See Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 24. Back.
Note 9: This ethic is not inconsistent with the peasant ethic that Scott has described in his explanation of peasant affinity for, for example, the Viet Cong in colonial French-Indochina. See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Back.
Note 10: Hedrick Smith, The New Russians (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 204. Back.
Note 11: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 25. Back.
Note 14: The persistent weakness of Belorussian national identity is even now limiting the new state of Belorus’s policy autonomy with respect to Russia relative to, for example, that of Ukraine. See, for example, John Edwin Mroz and Oleksandr Pavliuk, “Ukraine: Europe’s Linchpin,” Foreign Affairs 75 (3) (1996): 52–62. For another view see Jan Zaprudnik, “Development of Belarusian National Identity and Its Influence on Belarus’s Foreign Policy Orientation,” in Roman Szporluk (ed.), National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 129–49. Back.
Note 15: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 79. Back.
Note 16: Ibid. p. 81. This was not true in other areas, such as Armenia, where political nationalism prevailed. Back.
Note 17: But for Finland and Poland, which were never recovered, but were to become satellites after World War II. Back.
Note 18: See Mark D. Steinberg, “Vanguard Workers and the Morality of Class,” in Lewis H, Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 66–84, and Victoria E. Bonnell, “The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art,” in Ibid., pp. 341–75. Back.
Note 19: See, for example, Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Robert Daniels (ed.), The Stalin Revolution: Foundations of Soviet Totalitarianism (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1972); Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (2nd ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York: Harper, 1973); Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above, 1928–1941. Back.
Note 20: See, for example, Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (rev. ed.) (New York: Norton, 1971), and Frederick S. Starr, “Soviet Union: A Civil Society,” Foreign Policy, No. 70. (Spring 1988): pp. 26–41. Back.
Note 21: A collection of such material is found in George Saunders (ed.), Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Oppostition (New York: Pathfinder, 1974). Back.
Note 22: For an important related neoinstitutionalist argument see Rogers Brubaker, “Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and its Successor States: An Institutionalist Account,” in Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 23–54. Back.
Note 23: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 101. Back.
Note 24: Brubaker, “Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and its Successor States.” Back.
Note 25: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, pp. 106–7. Back.
Note 26: Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow. Back.
Note 27: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, pp. 110–11. Back.
Note 29: For a sobering account of the power of post-Soviet era organized crime in Russia, see Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Back.
Note 30: For an early argument that a civil society was emerging in the USSR), see Frederick S. Starr, “Soviet Union: A Civil Society.” Back.
Note 31: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 119. Back.
Note 33: Ibid., pp. 122–23. Back.
Note 34: See Timothy J. Colton, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union, Revised and expanded edition (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1986). Back.
Note 35: James H. Billington, Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 27. Back.
Note 36: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 130. Back.
Note 38: Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 60. Back.
Note 39: Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil, “Understanding Change in International Politics,” pp. 238–39. Back.
Note 40: The word “utca” is Magyar for “street.” Back.
Note 41: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, pp. 133–34. Back.
Note 44: Dawisha and Parrott, Russia and the New States of Eurasia, p. 67. Back.
Note 45: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, pp. 142. Back.
Note 46: Ibid. pp. 148–49. Back.
Note 47: Billington, Russia Transformed, p. 29. Back.
Note 48: Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 52–120. Back.
Note 49: Billington, Russia Transformed, pp. 68–69. Back.
Note 52: Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 153. Back.
Note 54: Koslowski and Kratochwil, “Understanding Change in International Politics,” p. 216. Back.
Note 55: Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine, 1996). Back.
Note 56: See the essays by Vincent Cable, Susan Strange and Stephen J. Del Rosso Jr. in “What Future for the State?, Daedalus 124 (2) (Spring 1994). Back.
Note 57: See Daniel Deudney, “Nuclear Weapons and the Waning of the Real-State,” Ibid., pp. 209–29. Back.
Note 58: For a very recent collection of essays dealing with some of these issues from a constructivist approach see Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as a Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Back.
Note 59: For a description of the political economy of this era which has become important in the context of neorealist scholarship, see Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Back.
Note 60: For a development of the notion of the imperial metropole see Michael Doyle, Empires. Back.
Note 61: For recent identity based arguments in the Balkan case see Franke Wilmer, “Identity, Culture and Historicity: The Social Construction of Identity in the Balkans,” World Affairs 60 (1) (Summer 1997): 3–16 and Mariia Nikoleava Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Back.
Note 62: A significant glimpse at this debate may be found in the following recent arguments. See Charles G. Boy, “Making Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs 74 (5) (1995): 22–38; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Back to the Womb?,” Foreign Affairs 74 (4) (1995): 2–8; Misha Glenny, “Heading Off War in the Southern Balkans,” Foreign Affairs 74 (3) (1995): 98–108; and Richard Holbrooke, “America, A European Power,” Foreign Affairs 74 (2) (1995): 38–51. Back.
Note 63: See, for example, the following recent contributions. G. John Ikenberry, “Funk de Siècle: Impasses of Western Industrial Society at Century’s End,” Millennium: Journal of International Relations 24 (1) (1995): 113–26. Vincent Cable, “The Diminished Nation-State: A Study in the Loss of Economic Power,” Daedalus 124 (2) (Spring 1995): 23–53. Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe.” Back.
Note 64: See Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (trans. H. B. Nisbet), Second Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93–130. Back.
Note 65: See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18. Back.
Note 66: Tony Judt, “The Social Question Redivivus,” Foreign Affairs 76 (5) (1997): 95–117. Back.
Note 67: See, for example, the collection of essays in James H. Mittleman (ed.), Globalization: Critical Reflections (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997). Back.
Note 68: For the reasons for these difficulties see Cecelia Lynch, “Social Movements and the Problem of ‘Globalization’,” Alternatives, 23 (2) April–June (1998): 149–73. Back.
Note 69: See, for example, R. Burbach, O. Núñez and B. Kagarlitsky, Globalization and its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms (London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997). Back.
Note 70: Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It.” Back.
Note 71: Onuf, World of Our Making. Back.
Note 72: Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identity, and Change (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996). Back.
Note 73: Richard Ashley criticizes structural realism and neorealism for a tendency to assert that the international political realm is “amoral” in the most severe terms in Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism.” Gilpin refutes Ashley’s argument in Robert Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism,” in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 301–21. Back.
Note 74: For a discussion of the current “politics of secession” see Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). Back.
Note 75: Walker suggests that segmentation by the principle of state sovereignty, for example, provides these convenient ethical blinders in the contemporary international system. See R. B. J. Walker, Inside / Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 67. Back.
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