National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems

Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)

Columbia University Press

1999

Preface and Acknowledgments

 

This book is a result of my long-term fascination with who we are, why we do what we do, and how we came to be who we are. In the pages to follow I provide an explanation of the consequences of the nationalization of state actors within a systems theory that seeks to explain epochal change in the international systems, and that stems from changes in the social identities of the societies that construct these systems. My preliminary answer is that we do what we do because our ideas about who we are change, and we come to be who we are because these self-understandings change. They impel us to become something new.

I ask that the reader be patient with the elaboration of this explanation in the pages that follow. The elaboration requires both a great deal of conceptual development and a great deal of description. The conceptual development is most fully elaborated in two early, theoretically oriented chapters. Readers unfamiliar with social theory in general and international relations theory in particular may find these to be densely written. I hope their effort will be rewarded with an understanding of how changes in social identities generate epochal change in international systems. Description, developed in the form of analytic narrative, constitutes the rest of the book. I have labored to summarize the theoretical significance of each empirical chapter to assist the reader in understanding the manner in which the empirics support the theory. Some theorists of international relations will judge these chapters to constitute “thick description” and may feel that the theoretical framework could be supported with a more spare examination of empirical cases. I can only reply to colleagues who may provide this criticism by quoting Bismarck, who figures prominently in the text to follow, to the effect that respectfully “I am not of your opinion.” To understand a historically unique social order, we must spend some time there. We must characterize it completely enough to understand how it differs both as a domestic and as an international social order from those which proceeded and those which follow it. I cheerfully and consciously surrender parsimony for richer and more nuanced characterization of the societies and systems I wish to study. Social reality is complex. It always has been. Thus we cannot expect to apprehend the evolution of social reality without a serious foray into history. This requires the labor of patient and time-consuming scholarship. My argument is not that we cannot discover social realities that are transhistorically valid, but that we cannot discover them by theorizing in an ahistorical fashion and without digging deeply into the available interdisciplinary scholarship from which we derive our empirics.

 

Acknowledgment

I have acquired enormous debts, both intellectual and practical, to a number of individuals in the development of this work. I owe multiple debts that I can not repay to Friedrich Kratochwil, now at Geschwister-Scholl Institut für Politische Wissenschaft, Ludwig Maximillians-Universität, in Munich. The basic outlines of my intellectual formation in this discipline were developed under his tutorship as teacher, mentor, and friend. His pioneering work in international relations theory and his notion of “comparative international systems” have provided the major inspiration for this work. He generously offered to see me through completion of an earlier form of this work when he left the University of Pennsylvania for Munich in May of 1995 and was invariably responsive to transatlantic correspondence oriented toward its progress. He averted several false starts by encouraging me to improve the conceptual approach and scope, and patiently provided line-by-line criticism of each chapter as it was written, as well as critical advice regarding revisions of the book manuscript. This work could not have been attempted without his tutelage, encouragement, patience, personal kindness and friendship, or without access to the phenomenal scope of his scholarship.

I owe equivalent debts to Daniel Deudney for sparking my interest in nationalism and for numerous invaluable macro-theoretical discussions that improved the finished product. Dan read an earlier version of the entire manuscript and provided invaluable suggestions for revision. He introduced the issue of nationalism and unwillingness of International Relations theory to engage the issue in a course I took from him as a graduate student, and encouraged me to develop our mutual interest on long-term, historical, social, and political change. Without this stimulus, I would not have thought to develop this work. He was instrumental in helping to limit the project to tractable dimensions early in its conception. His commitment to methodological pluralism has induced me to carefully consider arguments in the development of this work that I might otherwise have missed. His persistent encouragement to emulate his own commitment to methodological pluralism has made this a much better and comprehensible work than it otherwise could have been.

I am grateful to Alexander Wendt of Dartmouth College for introducing me to the concept of the “structure of identity and interests” of actors in the international system and its causal significance for the patterns of politics within the system. He also has my thanks for his valuable comments on several drafts of the work, for useful suggestions for restructuring the final draft, and for many useful discussions.

Thanks also to Martin Heisler of the University of Maryland and to Michael Barnett of the University of Wisconsin at Madison who each read an earlier draft of the complete manuscript and provided valuable criticisms and recommendations for restructuring. Each have raised more issues in engaging my arguments than I can address without writing an entirely different book. Thanks to Hendrik Spruyt of Columbia University for useful discussions and comments about the nature of early modern sovereignty. He provided detailed comments and criticism on the bulk of an earlier draft of the book, challenged me to address several excellent and fascinating questions, and the final product has been improved by corrections made possible by his phenomenal knowledge of European social and diplomatic history. Thanks to Yosef Lapid of New Mexico State University for valuable discussions of the implications of nationalism for international relations theory, for useful epistemological discussions and helpful forays into useful and applicable literature. I am indebted to Richard Mansbach of Iowa State University for useful discussions of nationalism and IR theory, and for the suggestion that I include a more contemporary application of this theoretical framework, which resulted in the concluding treatment of the collapse of the Soviet Union and demise of the cold war. Thanks to Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard University for a providing me with a useful bibliographic introduction to the relevant literature on nationalism, and for brief but kind correspondence on the topic.

I am indebted to Mlada Bukovansky of Dartmouth College and to Ronald Deibert of the University of Toronto for valuable and detailed comments on several crucial chapters, for kind encouragement, and for moral support. Mlada provided particularly valuable criticisms to earlier drafts which led me away from potentially disruptive methodological errors, and many useful discussions. Ron’s continuous and thoughtful correspondence has been perpetually valuable, as have been his detailed comments on earlier drafts of the theoretical chapters. Thanks to Mark Zacher of the University of British Columbia and to Yale Ferguson of Rutgers University for valuable criticisms of the core theoretical arguments in the form of a paper that I delivered at a conference in Tokyo in the autumn of 1996. Thanks to Simon Duke, Eric Jones, and Stefano Guzzini for criticisms of a portion of this argument that I delivered in a talk at the Central European University in Budapest in the summer of 1996. Thanks to fellow former-travelers through the University of Pennsylvania graduate program for years of stimulating debate and discussion in which the ideas that led to this work were formed. In this context I am particularly indebted to Reynold Koslowski, now at Rutgers University, to Amir Pasic, now at the Rockefeller Foundation in Washington, and to Sujata Chakrabarti Pasic.

Thanks to Ellen Kennedy and to G. John Ikenberry, both of the University of Pennsylvania, who helped me in numerous ways while an earlier version of this work was in the process of becoming a doctoral dissertation. I am grateful to the staff of the Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania for bibliographic assistance and for obtaining for me materials essential to the work but unavailable among its collections.

Thanks to Dominique Arel and David Abramson of the Watson Institute for International Studies for comments and criticisms that helped me to avoid factual errors and misinterpretations of the impact of national collective identity in the demise of the Soviet Union. I am indebted to Peter Dombrowski of Iowa State University and Cecelia Lynch of Northwestern University for suggestions on restructuring of theory chapters in the final revisions. I am grateful to Thomas Biersteker and the overseers of the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University for providing me with a postdoctoral fellowship, superb facilities, access to Rockefeller Library, and the leisure to complete the final revisions of this book in a stimulating and supportive environment. I am grateful to my parents, James Raymond Hall and Claudine Thompson Hall, who have consistently promoted and encouraged my scholarship throughout my life and supported my life choices to pursue it, and to Letha Helen Hall, who delighted to listen to me talk about this book, but did not live to see it appear between covers.

My greatest debt of gratitude must be reserved for my wife, Joan Marie Hall, for her encouragement, support, and boundless emotional and material sacrifice and patience during long years of study, research and writing that have culminated in the present offering. Special thanks to my children, Joseph, Jacqueline, and Edward James (E.J.). Many an evening or weekend family event, which we might have enjoyed together, were forgone so that this work could take form. My family has permitted me and encouraged me to, sequentially, turn down promotions, reduce my working hours and income, and finally to turn my back entirely on a relatively lucrative career in industry in order to pursue this work and a life of scholarship, irrespective of the significant material sacrifice this has implied for them. My greatest wish is that I can in return give to them, from the knowledge and insight that I have gained in generating this work, something that I hope they will find to be a great deal more valuable than the banal, bourgeois affluence that passes for the good life in America today.

Rodney Bruce Hall
Providence, Rhode Island
March 1998