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The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, by Peter J. Katzenstein, editor
Preface
The revolutionary changes that have marked world politics in recent years offer scholars an extraordinary opportunity for reflection and critical self-appraisal
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This is true, in particular, for scholars of international relations. One observer has likened the embarrassment that the end of the Cold War caused us as scholars of international relations and national security to the effects the sinking of the Titanic had on the profession of naval engineers. Although our analytical coordinates for gauging global politics have proven to be inadequate for an analysis of a world in rapid change, there has been remarkably little rethinking of our categories of analysis. Instead, in the first half of the 1990s North American scholarship on the theory of international relations was preoccupied with the issue of whether variants of realism or liberalism offered a superior way for explaining the world. Considering the dramatic international developments occurring during these years, many of the academic debates looked arcane to the interested bystander. For it is hard to deny that existing theories of international relations have woefully fallen short in explaining an important revolution in world politics.
What the writer Peter Schneider said of the German Left is also apposite for the field of national security studies: it slept right through a revolution. While the balance between demand and supply effected significant changes among security specialists working in think-tanks and, more slowly, even inside government, remarkably little changed in the academy. In a recent review of the scholarship published between 1989 and 1994 in International Security, one of the premier journals in the field, Hugh Gusterson concludes that "old stories have been bent to new times rather than questioned or cast away." 2 He identifies only one article between 1989Š94, published by a historian, which asks the obvious question--why and how virtually all of the established theories could have been so wrong.
Scholars have made some adjustments in their research. Various forms of realist theorizing, for example, have rediscovered nationalism and ethnicity and are doing so with a breath-taking lack of analytical discomfort. Ever since Kenneth Waltz published his seminal Theory of International Politics, this book had been invoked as a text that provided the field of national security studies with a firm base. However, Waltz was very clear that the internal characteristics of states were irrelevant to his theory. The analysis of nationalism and ethnicity thus is a sharp turn for those who previously had written on national security informed by this variant of realist theorizing. It is especially surprising that realists, with their natural focus on states, have not inquired more systematically into the effects of changes in state identity, for example from warfare state to welfare state in Western Europe, that have altered traditional conceptions and instruments of national security.
A second adjustment has been to look for new areas to apply realist theory. A spirited debate about the conditions of peace in Europe has led to an examination of those conditions in other regions of the world. Realist theory, for example, rediscovered in Asia the balance of power and the instabilities of multipolarity which so unexpectedly were missing in Europe in recent years. It was, however, odd that realist analysis continued to neglect domestic politics and transnational relations, the very factors that had much to do with the unexpected end of the Cold War. A style of analysis that had proven to be inadequate in Europe was not refurbished but, implausibly, simply reapplied to Asia.
These adjustments in the core paradigm informing national security studies have left unimpressed a growing number of graduate students and younger scholars unpersuaded because, in part, their political and intellectual sensibilities are more firmly grounded in circumstances that differ from those experienced by their elders. The younger generation lived through the waning of the Cold War, not its exacerbation. It was exposed to new intellectual currents in the humanities and cultural studies. And as had been true before, this was an impatient cohort, eager to push ahead.
This volume represents and speaks to these intellectual currents. It reports the results of a project conducted under the auspices of the Committee on International Peace and Security of the Social Science Research Council and funded by the Council through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. The project was deliberately designed to expose the participants to different intellectual climates at different universities. Workshops held at Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and Stanford University, attended by the project participants as well as graduate students and faculty members from the respective host institutions, elicited different reactions, depending on the local intellectual culture and the list of participants. The tenor of the discussions at the Cornell meeting, with a heavy representation of realists, was "why this effort?" At Minnesota, a stronghold of cultural and post-modern approaches, the reaction was "show us how!" And at Stanford, in the presence of sociologists and theorists of rational choice, both reactions were articulated at the same meeting. To say that the debates at these meetings were spirited would be misleading. The intellectual level of discussion was extraordinarily high and so was the emotional pitch of the participants. Differences in arguments mattered both substantively and personally.
"Identity" theory, in particular, is deeply contested because it raises for scholars of national security directly and unavoidably pressing moral issues. Even though all of the contributors to this volume show in their scholarship that they regard evidence to be of critical importance in adjudicating competing analytical and political claims, realists and rationalists, at times, tar their sociologically minded critics with the brush of being the vanguard of a new wave of intellectual fascism. The critics, less powerful and more polite, view these scholars at times as the vanguard of political and intellectual conservatism. Does truth speak to power? Does power exploit knowledge? For more than an hour the Stanford meeting erupted into an emotionally charged discussion of these issues, illustrating vividly, painfully and usefully for everyone around the table the magnitude of the intellectual, political, and moral stakes that are involved for all scholars, whether they choose to adhere to or depart from the conventional view of national security.
This project expresses an explicit commitment to engage realism on its own terms. Scholars tend to shy away from conversations that pose fundamental disagreements, preferring instead to live in the comfortable cocoon of the like-minded. Talking across deep intellectual divides is always difficult, often uncomfortable and occasionally hurtful. It is also a useful reminder of the pervasiveness of power in the world of scholarship, of the primacy of institutionally backed validity claims among competing analytical possibilities. Even when such confrontations do not lead to intellectual conversions, they help in sharpening key arguments and circumscribing general claims. Without the willingness of some distinguished scholars of national security to generously commit themselves and their time, this confrontation of perspectives could not have occurred.
In the view of these scholars this was, from the beginning, a fundamentally flawed enterprise. The critics argued that the issues raised in this book have been addressed by the extant literature in a promising way which is leading cumulatively to a theory of national security framed by neo-realist and realist writings. In their reading this volume offers no more than an intellectually incoherent mixture of postmodern interpretivism, nonfalsifiable claims, ex post facto description, and insignificant embellishments of what mainstream realism analyzes elegantly and with precision. I report these objections here and let the reader be the judge.
Science is a social process that develops, refines, and rejects ideas. It is not a football game in which players protect turf--intellectual and otherwise. Hence the inclusion in this volume of the self-critical chapter 12. Some colleagues supportive of this project have urged me quietly to drop this chapter. And, unsurprisingly, the vociferous critics of this bookÕs approach uniformly have applauded it as the most compelling piece in the entire collection. Both reactions are besides the point. The chapter points to some of the most noticeable weaknesses of this book and suggests some avenues for future improvement. This self-critical stance, not the waving of new flags or the dogged defense of received dogma, I take to be the task of an empirically oriented social science.
This project could not have been carried out without the generous support of the Committee on International Peace and Security of the Social Science Research Council. I would like to thank my fellow committee members for their vote of confidence in funding the project and for their useful counsel in its initial stages. I am also deeply indebted to the staffs at the Social Science Research Council and at Cornell University, the University of Minnesota and Stanford University for carrying the administrative burden involved in organizing the three workshops. And I would like to thank the many graduate students and faculty members at these three universities who were active participants and whose comments, criticisms and suggestions were indispensable for shaping my thinking on a broad range of issues. Without their intellectual energy and commitment all of us would have learned much less in the process, and the ultimate product would have been worse.
My special thanks go to the staff of Columbia University Press: to Kate Wittenberg for her strong interest in this project from the very outset; to two readers who gave detailed and searching suggestions that helped the authors to sharpen their arguments; to Jan McInroy for her extraordinarily careful work as copyeditor; to Alan Greenberg for putting together the index in record time; and to Leslie Bialler for much more than his humor and wit along the way.
Most importantly I would like to thank the project participants for their intellectual engagement and enthusiasm; for their ability to cooperate in friendship; for their willingness to disagree in civility; for their hard work; and for their toleration of an "old fogey" in their midst.
I dedicate this volume to all the graduate students at Cornell with whom I have worked over the years. I have learned an enormous amount from you. And without you I could not have conceived of this project. Contradicting current wisdom about the relation between research and teaching, it was our individual discussions and seminars as well as your research papers and dissertations that made me read in unfamiliar fields and thus lure me in new directions in both research and teaching.
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Note 1: See for example, the symposium on prediction in the social sciences introduced by Michael Hechter in the American Journal of Sociology 100, 6 (May 1995): 1520-1527. Back.
Note 2: Hugh Gusterson, "Reading International Security after the Cold War," paper prepared for the second workshop on Culture and the Production of Security/Insecurity, Kent State University, April 28-30, 1995, p. 6. Back.
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