State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity

Marc Lynch

Columbia University Press

1999

2. The Public Sphere Structure of International Politics

 

In the first chapter, I located the source of state interests in public sphere debate. The theoretical foundations of such debate must be unpacked, however. The location of this public sphere represents an important structural variable for International Relations. While the paradigm case has generally been that of a state engaging with a domestic public sphere, public spheres are not necessarily bounded by state borders. I argue that state behavior will differ depending upon whether or not a public sphere is present. In this chapter, I develop an international public sphere theory, discuss its relationship to constructivism and rationalism, and present a series of indicators for empirical research on international public spheres. I also provide an overview of the development of the Jordanian and Arab public spheres, which provides a foundation for the case studies to follow.

The Arab order is both a strong and a problematic case for developing international public sphere theory. While the existence of a potent transnational identity, with high levels of political interaction framed around shared identity and interests, suggests the existence of an unusually strong international public sphere, the theory has generally been applied in liberal democratic states, and is commonly associated with liberalism and Western models. Adapting the concept to the Middle East, with its repressive governments, different cultural norms and traditions, and high levels of military and political conflict, challenges many of these assumptions. International relations theory has rarely looked to the Middle East for theory building; despite wide recognition of the importance of identity and norms in Arab politics, few constructivists have focused upon its experience (but see Barnett 1993, 1995, 1998). Theoretically driven study of the international politics of the Middle East in recent years has downplayed the significance of Arabist norms and collective identities in order to render state behavior more amenable to rationalist models (Walt 1987; Telhami 1990; Mufti 1996). Area studies and historical literature have focused on Arabism and its competitors, but without explicit theory and with little impact on wider debates. My goal is not to reassert the cultural difference or uniqueness of Arab states, but rather to argue that the behavior of Arab states should be explained with the same concepts and theories used in other parts of the world. These theories are not necessarily rationalist, however; arguing against Orientalism or cultural exceptionalism does not have to mean accepting rationalism as the only available model of political behavior. Rather than viewing the Arab order as an exception, to be explained with unique theories, I argue that the Arab experience should inform a generalizable international public sphere theory.

 

International Society and the Public Sphere: Structure

The focus upon international norms and institutions was once associated with the International Society tradition (Bull 1977; Vincent and Miller 1991). Bull famously distinguished between a state system, “formed when two or more states have sufficient contact between them and sufficient impact on one another’s decisions, to cause them to behave as parts of a whole,” and a society of states, which “exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, forms a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another and share in the working of common institutions” (Bull 1977: 10–13). Bull made the extent of normative understanding and institutions within an international system a constitutive variable. In an international society, an overarching set of shared norms and expectations guide state behavior even as the system remained a formal anarchy. States in an international society felt like part of a community and behaved accordingly. Instead of only reflecting convergences of interest, institutions involve the evolution of communities of identity.

Bull’s emphasis on shared norms, expectations, and institutions involves communicative action and the public sphere dimensions of structure. This approach to international society drives the constructivist critique of neoliberal regime theory, drawing attention to the intersubjective structures that give meaning to interaction (Ruggie and Kratochwil 1986). The structural dimension lies in the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld.” This basic variation in structure mirrors Elster’s (1997) distinction between “the market and the forum.” The bargaining appropriate in the market, based on the pursuit of self-interest and power, is inappropriate in the forum, where persuasion and deliberation are the norm. The application of public sphere theory to international relations builds upon this basic observation of structural variation. Some international structures more resemble the market, with its strategic bargaining behavior, while others more resemble the forum, with communicative action and persuasion. The public sphere is the dimension of social structure which constitutes the “forum.”

Strategic interaction, as conceptualized by formal IR theory, takes place within an international “system,” anarchical structures characterized by little shared identity and minimal participation in any shared public sphere. Action is mediated through nonlinguistic steering media, such as money or power, which do not require or permit communicative contact between actors. Action is cut off from public justification, as states must pursue their own survival and self-interest in a competitive system. This dimension of structure roughly corresponds to the neorealist image of states as atomistic actors, isolated from communicative interaction, calculating purely in terms of interest and power, and unable to have access to the perceptions, interpretations, and fears of other actors. Rationalist modeling of behavior assumes a “system” structure, reducing state action to the strategic pursuit of predefined preferences in the absence of communication. Neoliberalism relaxes the anarchy assumption by demonstrating the ways in which international institutions can reduce transaction costs and uncertainty, increase transparency and predictability, and generate incentives for cooperative behavior. The basic assumptions of strategic interaction remain, however (Keohane 1984, 1988; Oye 1986; Baldwin 1993).

The lifeworld, on the other hand, is that dimension of structure characterized by communicative action, directly mediated by language and intersubjective understandings. Action is “socially integrated through interpretations of a normatively secured or communicatively created consensus” (Cohen and Arato 1992: 427). Within the lifeworld, actors share meanings and understandings which facilitate communicative rather than instrumental strategic behavior. This allows for the possibility of action geared to consensus rather than the naked power struggle of the Realist world. Where there is an expectation of and an institutional basis for the public interpretation and justification of action, behavior differs. Action could, at least potentially, be justified before a recognized community and according to shared norms. The lifeworld dimension of structure corresponds to those institutionalist or constructivist theories which emphasize the social dimension of international relations (Ruggie 1993, 1997).

The distinction between system and lifeworld focuses attention upon the presence or absence of a public sphere within which actors can communicate and produce shared frames, norms, and identities (Habermas 1996: 359). Communicative action, the routine exchange of argumentation oriented toward achieving consensus within a set of shared norms, defines public sphere sites. These sites are not necessarily identical with state boundaries or formal international institutions: “the public sphere comes into existence whenever and wherever all affected by general social and political norms of action engage in a practical discourse, evaluating their validity” (Benhabib 1992: 87). Public spheres exist when action is coordinated through discourse oriented to the achievement of consensus. Arab states, no matter how competitive, continuously exchange interpretations and arguments in pursuit of the goal of an Arab consensus. Dense interaction, with regular explanations of state positions framed in terms of the Arab interest, ensure that the interactions among Arab states involve communicative, rather than exclusively strategic, dimensions. No conception of the structure of Arab international politics is complete without this public sphere dimension; even sophisticated realists are forced to smuggle Arabism into their accounts in order to explain state behavior (Walt 1987; Telhami 1990, 1994). The presence or absence of a public sphere in which action is routinely justified, interpreted, and contested, is an integral element of any characterization of political structure, not only Arab or international structure.

Critics of the system/lifeworld dichotomy question the extent to which these constitute separate realms. Action in virtually every sphere, no matter how “systemic,” involves some degree of linguistic interaction (Berger 1983). Bourdieu (1977) sees violence in the most discursively mediated exchange. Even the intimate sphere of the family, which Habermas locates as the exemplar of communicative lifeworld, involves domination and power struggles (Fraser 1989). If systems are characterized by communication, and the lifeworld is penetrated by power, then what is the basis for the distinction? How can communicative action be relevant in the international arena which is generally seen as the most power-centric of fields? These arguments are persuasive, especially because few institutional structures fully meet either ideal type. Not even the most strategic, competitive international relationship is completely free of communication; during the Cold War, unspoken and negotiated agreements about spheres of influence, arms control, and crisis management helped to regularize interaction. Not even the most cooperative, institutionalized relationships are free of power and calculation of relative gain; within the European Union, states seek to maximize their gains within a shared identity and common interests. Therefore, I do not rely on a strict system/lifeworld dichotomy, but instead look to identify public spheres within the international structure, as the institutional form that permits communicative action.

Habermas distinguishes the public sphere from the political system, defined as the official, institutionalized decisionmaking system (Habermas 1996: 361–63). The political subsystem entails administrative and state bureaucracies that make and enforce binding decisions (McCarthy 1988). While the public sphere thematizes issues, frames and interprets their significance, and identifies alternative solutions, only the political system can act by taking authoritative decisions. The literature on deliberative democracy generally respects this differentiation. Deliberation does not itself produce decisions, even in the unlikely event of a perfect consensus. Some decision rule must, in the end, aggregate the preferences of actors at the end of the deliberative process (Knight and Johnson 1994). This division of responsibilities between a public sphere for deliberation and a political subsystem for decisions takes on rather different connotations in the international arena, where no sovereign decisionmaking body can enforce binding decisions. International public spheres serve as locations for norm formation and for deliberation over the shared interests of international communities, but in the absence of an authoritative political subsystem. In such an institutional structure, the international public sphere potentially carries substantial weight. Without centralized political institutions to act, the creation and manipulation of a public consensus in an international public sphere takes on significance in its own right. At the same time, the absence of a central decisionmaking body to influence might mean that public sphere deliberation is less weighty, since in the end every state maintains its sovereign decisionmaking capacity and can reject an international decision. This tension between international deliberation and formal anarchy, in which deliberation can produce only a nonbinding consensus, stands at the heart of the international public sphere theory. The absence of a fully differentiated political subsystem does not mean that the international public sphere does not exist; it does mean, however, a constitutive difference between international and domestic public spheres. The difference between international and domestic is more a continuum than a hard dichotomy: the more institutionalized the international society, the more that consensus can produce legitimate political decisions. Where an international consensus produces a Security Council Resolution which is enforced, such as the sanctions regime on Iraq, the international public sphere looks rather more like a domestic public sphere. The differentiation of an international political subsystem is not a necessary condition for the existence of an international public sphere, however. The forum itself changes the structural context of strategic interaction.

Public sphere dimensions of structure allow for specification of international change independent of shifts in the number or relative power of powerful actors and without presuming a change in the constitutive ordering principle of anarchy (Waltz 1979). International structure changes with the development or decline of public spheres. The rise in the 1950s of an Arabist public sphere or its decline in salience in the 1980s should be seen as structural changes tied to, but not reducible to, shifts in power relations. A public sphere provides the space for communicative action, embodying lifeworld aspects of international politics where actors strive to arrive at consensus. Each public sphere is a bounded sphere of communication characterized by a specific set of norms and practices, which authorizes particular kinds of entities as actors, and which defines the stakes of competition and cooperation. Variation in “anarchy” can take the form of variation in the degree of lifeworld aspects of structure and the extent of communicative action. Such a conceptualization of political order challenges the increasingly besieged idea that the international and the domestic comprise constitutively distinct realms of political life. International relations theory should respect the structural significance of the forum, without abandoning the strategic interaction of the market.

International Society and Public Sphere: Action

Public sphere theory emphasizes the articulation, contestation, and redemption of validity claims (Kratochwil 1990). For all the talk of international politics as the site of naked struggle, the pursuit of the self-interest, and the amoral exercise of power, states spend an inordinate amount of time justifying their behavior. Even when decisions plainly reflect the self-interest of a state, they are presented within a language appropriate to the normative expectations of international and domestic publics. “Statesmen,” argued Inis Claude (1966), “take collective legitimacy seriously as a factor in international politics” (Franck 1990; Brilmayer 1989). Actions are accompanied by, and in a sense inseparable from, justifications offered to some public sphere. It is from these justifications and the counter-arguments presented by competing actors, that actions are interpreted and become social acts. The empirical observation of state justifications offered to other states and to an international community demonstrates the existence of an international public sphere. Where state actors feel that they must justify and explain, then they are acting in the forum, with different expectations for strategic interaction.

This is emphatically not to say that public justifications necessarily represent the “true” motivations behind actions. Justifications often involve strategic calculations and cynical manipulation of normative structures. It is common knowledge that actors struggling to manipulate public opinion will say anything to win. But the strategic dimension of public discourse should not hide the fundamentally communicative nature of the act of offering justifications. Where there is an expectation and demand that the legitimacy of an action should be secured discursively through the exchange of justifications, there are very different constraints on and opportunities for action than in a structure where no justification is expected or needed. In a public sphere, “not all interests can be publicly advocated” (Habermas 1996: 340). Interests must be generalizable to the community, not selfish. Behavior that cannot be justified must be either concealed or abandoned, or else the actor must be willing to pay the price of community sanctions (Elster 1995, 1997).

Even cynical actors can become bound by their public discourse, forced to live up to their public commitments. This is especially the case during periods of competitive framing, in which actors strive to prove the sincerity of their discourse and the credibility of their claims against the challenges of other actors. In order to demonstrate credibility, action must match discourse; the more costly and irreversible the action taken, the more credible the argument (Fearon 1994b). At least in the short term, actors can be tightly bound by their argumentation: releasing dissidents to prove commitment to human rights; demobilizing troops in order to prove commitment to a ceasefire; deploying aircraft carriers in order to prove commitment to deterrence. Over time, particularly when engaged in ongoing rather than episodic deliberation, the defense of positions, norms, and identities can change the actor’s conception of her positions, norms, and identities, in what Elster (1997) calls “the civilizing force of hypocrisy.”

Rationalist uses of the public sphere emphasize the constraining force of norms and discourse rather than their constitutive potential (Checkel 1997). Fearon (1994b, 1997), for example, argues that leaders face the problem of demonstrating credible commitments in their strategic interactions with other states. One way of enhancing credibility is through generating “audience costs,” or by raising the costs of backing down from a position by going public with the position and investing political capital in its achievement. If other states can observe that a leader has staked his domestic political future on a position, they are more likely to believe in his sincerity. Such an argument conceptualizes the public sphere in instrumental terms, as a constraint upon behavior. Leaders act, “generating” audience costs by invoking the force of public opinion. The “audience” is entirely passive, despite its implied sanctioning force; the leader pursues predefined preferences which are not affected by his performance before the audience. This conceptualization contrasts sharply with the public sphere approach, in which leaders engage in argumentation with public actors over the definition of interests. Rather than leaders deploying audience costs in pursuit of predefined goals, leaders and publics engage in collective deliberation. Their public discourse produces shared conceptions of collective identity and interests, which in turn guide behavior. The rationalist emphasis on public sphere as constraint, while a weaker claim than the constructivist argument that public deliberation constitutes identity and interests, does demonstrate the difference that a public sphere makes for behavior: the more active and autonomous the public sphere, the more credible will be the generated audience costs.

The relevance of communicative action can be seen not in the irrelevance of power but in the mediation of power through structures in which action must be justified and legitimated. The point is not to find interest-free, power-free behavior but rather to identify the conditions under which the need for public justification oriented to shared norms, goals or identity produces behavior different from behavior absent such demands. Most action combines communicative and strategic elements. Frequently the talk accompanying action involves little effort to reach consensus, with justification only serving as a “fig leaf” over naked power. But where realists view this scenario as the norm and communicative action as exceptional, I would argue that the balance between strategic and communicative action varies dramatically across regions, issue areas, and time. The more that a public sphere provides the expectation of ongoing deliberation, and the greater the sense of belonging to shared identity and institutions, the more that states must justify their behavior with reference to shared norms. The Arab order was characterized by such ongoing communicative interaction over collective identity and interests; every action by every state had to be justified and explained before an Arab public sphere. States might act against Arab norms, but at such points they were clearly recognized as outside the Arab consensus and suffered material and normative sanctions: Egypt in Camp David; Jordan in the Gulf War. Strong domestic public sphere support for the “deviant” interpretation, such as the Jordanian public support for Iraq in the Gulf crisis, can deflect the international consensus by providing an alternate public sphere seen as more legitimate.

The relationship between compulsion and persuasion is a difficult one, because of the overlapping strategic and communicative action in almost every real international interaction. If material power directly determines victory in public argumentation, then Realists could convincingly challenge the value of the public sphere concept. Habermas’s ideal of communicative action would exclude power from the exercise of reason: a rational consensus is one to which all affected parties would agree in the absence of compulsion. This ideal presents a critical baseline for the evaluation of political behavior, but is not intended as an empirical description of any political reality. Justifications succeed where they satisfy the procedural rules of consensus formation and the demands of rational argumentation oriented toward mutually held norms (Bohman 1996). Cynical or not, the proffered justification represents a potentially redeemable validity claim which is judged, accepted, rejected, or contested by other communicatively competent members of the society. These procedural requirements at least in principle ensure that reasoned argument rather than power produces decisions. The structure of a particular public sphere, particularly the norms and interpretive frames available within it, determines the relevant power resources. Public deliberation allows for creative performances and potent articulations of shared identity, norms, and interests that can overcome imbalances of material power and persuade others of a course of action.

Justifications and argumentation appeal to the force of the better argument, but what counts as a powerful argument depends upon the ability to frame a validity claim in terms of shared norms, identities, and goals. Deliberation seeks to recast conflicts of interest into potential cooperation toward some higher, shared interest. Deliberation produces shared identities by establishing a common frame of reference and by asserting common membership and belonging. The goal of deliberation is to transform preferences through persuasion—or at least change strategies through an appeal to different preferences, rather than simply to aggregate preferences through voting or to impose preferences through the exercise of power.

The nature of justifications is of great importance for analyzing the status of a norm (Beirstecker and Weber 1996; Weber 1996). Kratochwil (1990) distinguishes between those justifications which accept the validity of a norm, those which reject its applicability, and those which reject its status and seek to change it. Justifications that admit violation of a rule but offer excuses for the violation actually reinforce the norm by demonstrating its general acceptance: for example, when a state claims that an intervention was justified, it accepts and reinforces the basic norm against intervention. Rejecting a norm’s applicability—“this action was not an intervention”—has ambiguous implications, tending to evolve in the course of contestation into acceptance of the norm or an attempt to change it. Justifications that contest the status of a rule or norm are more basic, representing a bid to change the norm. Egyptian arguments that the international norm of nonintervention could not apply to two Arab states because they were a single nation would mean a fundamental reinterpretation of sovereignty norms. Finally, a justification could simply repudiate a public sphere as the relevant site for contestation.

For a public sphere to have significant impact on behavior, actors must share a “will to consensus,” or a commitment to maintain the conditions for interaction (Bohman 1996). The will to consensus does not contradict the fact that every actor hopes to achieve its own interests within that consensus, nor does it assume that every actor will be fully convinced of every collective decision. The minimalist definition of the will to consensus might be that an objectively worse outcome within consensus is preferred to an objectively better outcome outside of it. By “consensus,” therefore, I do not mean a fully hegemonic discourse in which no other position is conceivable; I mean only that all actors accept an outcome reached through legitimate procedures. The “consensus” on the severing of ties, for example, does not mean that every Jordanian accepts and embraces the separation between Jordan and Palestine, or even that the separation is never challenged in public discourse; it means that all actors accept that the separation best serves their interests. Within the Arab arena, King Hussein accepted the Rabat Summit resolutions of 1974 declaring the PLO the representative of the Palestinian people, despite deep reservations and real fears, rather than be outside the Arab consensus. The preference to maintain the process of deliberation and the institutions of regional order outweighed the preference over the outcome on even this issue, which struck at the very heart of Jordanian identity, security, and even survival. No outcome could be legitimate or stable outside of this consensus. The commitment to consensus represented a constitutive norm of the Arabist order. Even Walt, who does not theorize consensus formation, admits that “regimes have gained power and legitimacy if they have been seen as loyal to accepted Arab goals, and they have lost these assets if they have appeared to stray outside the Arab consensus” (Walt 1987: 146). The formation and manipulation of this consensus, within an Arabist public sphere, is a fundamental structural characteristic of the Arab order, which observably shapes state behavior.

An example of the policy importance of the theoretical arguments developed to this point can be seen in the debates over containment of or engagement with “rogue states” (Lake 1994). Would political and economic engagement with China, for example, strengthen a hostile regime or moderate that regime and socialize it into international society? Realists, who argue that preferences will not change and that competition is structurally determined, argue that engagement simply strengthens an inevitable future enemy. Such “backlash” states should instead by contained, and their behavior influenced through the manipulation of sanctions and incentives. The election of the moderate reformer Mohamed Khatemi in Iran in 1997 energized an already simmering debate over American policy toward Iran, again posing the question of whether engagement in dialogue might moderate and socialize Iranian foreign policy behavior. Similar debates about Cuba, North Korea, Libya, and other repressive regimes have been heard. Each of these debates refers back to an implicit theoretical issue: can dialogue transform the preferences of these regimes in the direction of shared identity, norms, and interests; or is dialogue only a cover for the harsh realities of the struggle for power, such that any political concession will only strengthen a future enemy rather than moderate the reasons for enmity. Public sphere theory firmly supports the first view: given the proper conditions, engagement in public deliberation can change state identities and interests, and facilitate cooperation.

Power and the Public Sphere

Constructivists are aware of the importance of power in international politics, but seek to reconceptualize it in terms of the social structures in which it is exercised (Mearsheimer 1996, Wendt 1994/95). As Kratochwil suggests, “the embeddedness of the power-game in a shared normative structure shows that the alleged antimony between power politics and following the rules of the international game is largely mistaken” (1990: 52). While Habermas proposes an ideal in which power can not influence outcomes, empirical application of public sphere theory does not make any such assumptions. The procedural conditions for the legitimation of power matter, however. Agreements seen as compelled by power are perceived as illegitimate, as violations of the rules of deliberation and therefore unjust.

Most states in the modern international system do not seriously have the option of ignoring the international public sphere; those states designated as “rogue states” by the international community are the exception which confirm the membership of “normal states” in that community. In a public sphere structure such as the Arab order of the 1950–1960s, Arab states exercised power in large part by advancing claims in the Arabist public sphere which challenged the target to justify its deviance from this interpretation of Arabist norm or else to comply. The targeted state simply did not have the option of ignoring such accusations or claims, and had to either defend or modify its behavior. At the same time, “the usefulness of military and economic capabilities as bases of power was clearly restricted” (Noble 1991: 61). The threat to Jordan in the 1950s had little to do with a prospective Egyptian military invasion or economic sanctions, and much to do with persuasion, delegitimation, and the encouragement of domestic opposition. To account for such variation in the utility of power resources, international theory should recognize the social dimensions of structure.

Realists dismiss public justifications as empty talk, with no impact on the actual pursuit of policy. If material power determines outcomes, then what is gained by adding the complexities of discourse? The answer to this standard question must be that the initial premise is flawed: power cannot be usefully defined solely in terms of material resources (Baldwin 1989). When Walt’s neorealist explanation of Arab alliances asserts that “the most important source of power has been the ability to manipulate one’s own image and the image of one’s rivals in the minds of other Arab elites,” serious questions arise as to the coherence of neorealist power analysis (Walt 1987: 149). What has happened to material power? What is it about the Arab system which makes “the manipulation of images” a meaningful power resource?

Ideas and norms embody power resources within specific public sphere structures. Neither material power resources nor norms alone can explain outcomes. A powerful state might seem to have less of a need to seek international legitimation for its exertion of power, but it may well have more interest in doing so (Kratochwil 1993; Ikenberry 1998). An exertion of power that is viewed as illegitimate is far harder to sustain than one which the international community, however cynically, publicly ratifies as legitimate. For example, why did the United States perceive a vital interest in constructing a consensus at the United Nations for its actions against Iraq during the Gulf Crisis? The securing of legitimacy is in many ways a superior indicator of power than is a military victory: the American formation of the international coalition was a far more impressive demonstration of power than its subsequent military victory. The shifting perception of the international community toward the sanctions regime offers an example of the importance of legitimation: as long as the sanctions could be justified in terms of international interests and norms, they commanded widespread diplomatic support. As states came to perceive the sanctions as an instrument of American policy exceeding the international mandate, international support eroded (Brzezinski, Scowcroft and Murphy 1997). By the mid-1990s, only the exercise of American power or artificially generated crises kept the sanctions in place, and in November 1997 the United States could not find a single Arab ally, not even Kuwait, for a military attack against Iraq. The exertion of power, even at the international level, involves a communicative, discursive activity in which material capabilities play an important but mediated role. The exercise of military power, like repressive force domestically, tends to indicate a failure of power. Power involves the ability to establish rules and norms and to convince others of their legitimacy, as much as it involves the application of the means of coercion.

Because his framework does not take into account the specificities of multiple public spheres, Habermas fails to suggest how actors navigate the different power relations and structural conditions of different public spheres (Calhoun 1995). Each public sphere is composed of very different stakes, rules, and power resources. Bourdieu (1989) begins from the premise that each actor embodies competencies and power resources specific to distinct fields. Resources are specific to a given field, not necessarily fungible across fields, and encompassing both the material and discursive bases of power. Social structure involves a network of relatively autonomous fields, each characterized by specific modes of power resources, norms, and stakes.

Bourdieu’s description of power as symbolic capital specific to the normative and institutional structures of a field applies to power relations across multiple public spheres. Simply put, changing the place of the public sphere represents a shift in power relations by privileging different forms of capital. When the location of the struggle for consensus leaves the Arab arena and enters the international arena or the domestic Jordanian arena, Egypt loses very real power. The power commanded by Egypt relative to other Arab actors in the 1950s simply did not exist when Egypt acted in other, non-Arab, arenas. Egyptian power depended upon the maintenance of the Arabist public sphere. Similarly, when the place of the public sphere moved away from the Arab into the international arena, the power relations between Jordan and the PLO changed dramatically. This approach to multiple public spheres opens up a way of thinking about international power that captures the ways in which normative structures shape power relations.

A second dimension of the public sphere approach to power is the concept of interpretive frames (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 1996; Tarrow 1995). By defining the stakes and the meaning of interaction, framers confer significant power. All interaction takes place against a background of historical experience, institutionalized norms, and entrenched beliefs. Actors compete to mobilize powerful cultural symbols into an interpretive frame which defines the meaning and stakes of a political struggle. In the public sphere struggle, the actor “that succeeds in identifying itself with the interest of the collective... has framed the terms of political discourse and debate, and thus the limits of legitimate policy” (Gagnon 1994: 136). The ability of Islamists to frame their political agenda in terms of religion and authenticity within Arab public spheres confers great power—who wants to be “against Islam?” King Hussein might warn against politicizing religion, or complain that “violence and extremism and closed-mindedness are not how I understand Islam,” but this accepts the validity of Islam as a frame. The competition to establish a dominant frame for the struggle is crucial in determining its outcome. In the Gulf crisis, for example, the emergence of an interpretive frame of “United States/Israel vs. Arabs” rather than “Iraq vs. Kuwait” profoundly influenced subsequent behavior. The relationship between framing and power should not be described in the abstract; in each of the empirical chapters, I demonstrate the interaction between material and public sphere structures and the process of public argumentation which produces interpretive frames.

 

Public Spheres and States

Public sphere theory, like liberal theory in general, has implicitly accepted the ordering principle of sovereignty (Latham 1996; Walker 1994). Analysis of the public sphere has rarely been extended to explicit consideration of the international structure of the public sphere. For example, in his analysis of the future of Europe, Habermas notes that despite the growth of European bureaucracy, “so far the political public sphere is fragmented into national units... [and] by and large the national public spheres are culturally isolated from one another” (Habermas 1992). Whatever the empirical validity of this statement, it reveals Habermas’s state-centric assumptions. I have reservations at two levels. First, the cultural isolation of national public spheres is a contingent phenomenon subject to empirical analysis and should be a variable. In the Arab world, the opposite of Habermas’s characterization seems to be the case: an early period of cultural unity across state public spheres, with a secular trend toward increased isolation and insulation of the national public spheres. Second, this argument underrates the importance of legitimation of policies and debates at the international level even when state-centric public spheres are strong. The need to construct justifications for foreign policy—in other words, the tension between the pursuit of national interest and the need to fit into the international normative structure—and the shifting relevance of different public spheres should be taken into account.

Habermas’s concern with the development of the bourgeois print public sphere in specific states led him to assume the existence of a single public sphere in each country. Instead of conceptualizing the public sphere as a single, unified arena in which a unified public debates the affairs of a single state, it is possible to think about public sphere structure as a network of overlapping and competing publics, which are not necessarily bounded by state borders. Empirical public sphere theory often reveals the changing boundaries between these public spheres (Somers 1994; Benhabib 1996).

Can a concept developed to explain the processes by which individuals established democratic constraints on the state meaningfully be adapted to the interaction of states? In conventional levels of analysis formulations, the constitutive boundary between international and domestic politics is the lack of an international state able to make and enforce decisions. The concept of the public sphere can usefully be stripped down to its function as an institutional site of discursive communicative interaction, with a set of intersubjectively shared norms, an imagined site of consensus, and a set of media specific to public debate in that arena. In other words, the existence of a public sphere is not contingent upon a state taking authoritative decisions. The manipulation and contestation of an international consensus takes the place of the effort to influence state policy as the defining characteristic of public activity.

One of the most developed applications of public sphere theory to international relations has been in normative theory, with the attempt to develop the theoretical foundations of a cosmopolitan internationalism (Linklater 1998). The emergence of a “global civil society” would allow the articulation of global, rather than national, interests. While this does not necessarily imply the emergence of world government, it often leans toward the idea that such an international public sphere could serve as the foundation for “perpetual peace,” as states engage in deliberation rather than military competition and discover common interests and norms in this deliberation (Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann 1997). While this normative international theory holds out great promise, the international public sphere theory advanced here does not necessarily support this line of argument. Rather than the emergence of a single “international public sphere,” I argue for the existence of multiple public spheres, across regions and issue areas. While a truly universal international public sphere may exist around certain issues and at certain times, this is only a small part of the much richer network of public spheres. I do not assume that the existence of a public sphere necessarily reduces the prospects of war or competition. Public spheres change the structural context of strategic interaction, and could in principle offer the prospects for the articulation of shared identities and interests; but at other times, public deliberation could produce hostile, negative identification. An effective Arabist public sphere could, for example, produce shared Arab identities and interests that identify Israel, Turkey, Iran, or other non-Arab powers as enemies, thereby raising the dangers of war rather than reducing them. Perhaps a truly cosmopolitan, universal international public sphere could avoid this danger, but absent the assumption of a such a single institution the argument for “perpetual peace” does not follow.

With states embedded in multiple public spheres, the production of identity and interests takes place through multiple, overlapping dialogues. Jordanian debates over identity are interwoven with regional debates over Arab identity, just as German debates over state identity and interests interact with European debates over regional order (Katzenstein 1997b). The articulation of a specifically Jordanian identity in the 1990s depended upon shifts in Arab norms, as each Arab state has since the early 1970s advanced increasingly state-centric nationalisms and Arabism has been defined increasingly in terms of interstate cooperation. Jordan’s advances in the peace process were tightly interrelated with the expectation of regional transformation; since the peace process was seen as inevitable, Jordan’s peace treaty would secure the state’s position in a new regional order. The failure of the peace process on the Syrian and Palestinian tracks left Jordan in limbo, with a peace treaty and normalized relations with Israel that went rather beyond any other Arab state. These relations could be justified and even valued given a transition to a “Middle Eastern” identity, with a public sphere open to Israelis and framed around the pursuit of cooperative economic and political relations; these relations could not be justified given the reassertion of an “Arab” identity, with a public sphere closed to Israelis and framed around Israeli hostility and aggression. While the Jordanian public deliberated over Jordanian identity and interests, it also followed the debates in the Arab public sphere: when the peace process seemed to be advancing, many Jordanians remained open to the potential benefits of peace; when an Arab consensus emerged on the failure of the process, the Jordanian public easily tied their own positions to this consensus.

Because the state is embedded in multiple public spheres, its conception of identity and interests might well diverge from the dominant beliefs of the domestic public. A state engaged in deliberation over regional or international order can acquire an international identity that has not been secured in dialogue with the domestic public sphere. Public debates over American pursuit of international free trade agreements or the necessity for military intervention abroad, for example, often demonstrate a sharp contradiction between official and popular conceptions of American interests. Official Jordanian commitment to regional transformation failed to convince the majority of the Jordanian public sphere, which opposed these policies as contrary to Jordan’s Arab identity and detrimental to Jordan’s interests. Where consensus runs together in multiple important public spheres, such as the Arab, Palestinian, and Jordanian support for the severing of ties, they can powerfully reinforce and stabilize policy. When the consensus in important public spheres sharply diverge, however, states can find themselves forced to exercise power in one arena, often in the form of repression of the domestic public sphere or unilateral international action.

 

The Public Sphere and the Rationalist-Constructivist Debate

Rationalist models of incomplete information, signaling, and cheap talk have directed attention toward communication (Fearon 1996, Morrow 1997). The concept of deliberative democracy has generated a particularly productive engagement between rationalists and public sphere theorists (Elster 1998; Bohman and Rehg 1997; Johnson and Knight 1996). As discussed in chapter 1, deliberation and the stability of preferences represent an important point of convergence for a rationalist-constructivist dialogue.

Rationalism can incorporate the public sphere by conceptualizing public opinion as a constraint on action, and by introducing proxies for communication into their models. Conventional analysis of Arab public opinion, for example, takes an almost pure form of rationalist conceptions of public opinion. In most analysis of the “Arab street,” public opinion acts only as a constraint upon the pragmatism of Arab leaders (Pollock 1992; Telhami 1992a). State leaders calculate how far they can go without “the street” erupting in violent riots and threatening the stability of the regime. Leaders use propaganda and a mobilizational media as a unidirectional conveyor of opinion, information, and frames, attempting to impose rather than to deliberate or persuade. The failure of the Arab street to erupt during the Gulf War is explained by the successful control of information, the application of repressive power, or perhaps even that state policies were broadly congruent with societal preferences. The “street” is not a public sphere, however. It allows for no deliberation, no equal participation, no persuasion. Public opinion is almost purely a constraint in this understanding.

“Soft” rationalists are comfortable with the idea of norms as constraints. Henry Kissinger, no constructivist, recognized the role of normative structures as a constraint for Jordan in the 1970 crisis when he “feared that intervention on behalf of Hussein would totally discredit him in the Arab world” (Dowty 1984: 124). Language like “discredit” reveals the importance participants attribute to the ability to produce acceptable interpretations of actions. Within the Arab order, actors took the potential for justification and the likely reception of validity claims within an imagined Arab consensus into account. But this alone does not rule out rationalist approaches. Neoliberal regime theory, for example, conceived of norms as intervening variables that constrained states pursuing their preconceived interests. Norms affect behavior through their structuring of the environment in which states interacted, as an external force, not though an impact on the preference structures of the states themselves (Ruggie and Kratochwil 1986).

The constructivist claim is that norms are constitutive of actor identities and interests, and that interaction can change these identities and interests. Norms and regimes should be conceptualized as intersubjective practices constitutive of actor identity and interest. In other words, the norms of the international structure in which a state is embedded enter the political process at the point of the formation of identity and interests, as internalized norms, rather than solely at the level of action and external constraint. What distinguishes public sphere theory from either rationalism or constructivism is the the claim that the process of deliberation contributes to shaping actor identity and interests. It is here, in the process of argumentation, that norms are redeemed, actions are legitimated, and identities and interests are reshaped. This points to the production of identity and the articulation of interests through communicative practice. Interests are not read directly off of identities, any more than they are read directly off of structure. Instead they are contested, interpreted, and articulated in public spheres.

Constructivists who have studied norms and regimes as constitutive of identity and interest have paid little attention to the structures in which norms are redeemed (for exceptions see Reus-Smit 1997; Risse-Kappen 1995; Keck and Sikkink 1998). The structure of the public sphere should be seen as a variable: the locus and importance of justificatory practices in the international system are different at the turn of the century than in 1955. While the collapse of bipolarity has been the most evident factor in the structural changes of the international system, attention must also be paid to the transformation in information technologies and media, the spread of a truly international communications infrastructure (Rosenau 1990; Thompson 1995; Dreisler 1997). Public sphere analysis directs attention both to the changes in the structures of international political communication, and to the change in the underlying normative structure of world politics.

Habermas’s formulation of public sphere theory does not thematize identity (Habermas 1996). On the contrary, Habermas considers it to be a constitutive norm of the public sphere that the identity of participants must be bracketed. For consensual decisions to be reached in communicative action, appeal must be made to the strength of an argument, not to the identity and status of the individual making the argument or according to the distribution of power. This “bracketing” condition expressly discourages the thematizing of identity. To the extent that Habermas does not see identity as at stake in public sphere interaction and maintains that identity is formed in the intimate sphere of the lifeworld, he is consistent with rationalists who bracket identity as external to interaction. Where communicative action and lifeworld structures are prominent, however, actors’ interpretations of action are intersubjective rather than subjective, socially constructed rather than dependent purely on individual perception. Once the undefended assumption of the autonomous actor secure in his identity is opened to question, the constructivist implications of deliberation and the public sphere become unavoidable.

The choice between the rationalist and constructivist approaches to public sphere interaction and identity has high stakes for International Relations theory. In the former case, the public sphere would contribute to a structural theory in which public spheres of communicative action supplement the system structures of anarchy as a set of constraints on rational action. The identities and interests of those actors, formed in the intimate sphere and brought stable and fixed into public life, would remain outside the scope of the theory. In the latter case, the identity and interests of the actors are at stake in public interaction. While a rationalist public sphere account which focuses on the constraining role of norms and public opinion can help explain state behavior, a constructivist theory of international politics based on a theory of communicative action is needed to explain change. Holding actor identity and interests outside the process of interaction blinds analysis to a crucial pathway to political change.

 

Specifying the Public Sphere

The conceptual history of the public sphere is such that it cannot be uncritically adopted as a concept for International Relations theory. The ideal type of the bourgeois public sphere, according to Habermas (1989), emerged in modern Europe as an arena of rational-critical discourse irreducible to the state, the economy, or private intimate life. The institutional function of the public sphere, rather than its historical specificity, guides my adaptation of the concept. The public sphere is the site in which members of a society exchange justifications and arguments oriented toward establishing a political consensus. Public action is held accountable before some recognized and articulated public opinion, embodied in the critical commentary of the participating subjects.

The analogy cannot be stretched too far, of course. Where the bourgeois public sphere primarily attempted to hold the state accountable to its citizens, the international public sphere primarily aims at holding the participants (states) accountable to a set of norms which are the contested but shared foundations of international society. An imagined consensus without institutional manifestation obviously differs from a sovereign state, which is a way of restating the familiar domestic/international dichotomy. The functional similarity is crucial, though: the international public sphere, like the national public sphere, provides a site for the formation and contestation of norms, identities, and interests even where it does not mediate before an authoritative sovereign center.

The variance in the influence, locus, and content of justifications points to an operational definition of the public sphere as an element of international structure. The variation in public sphere structure can perhaps be best presented through a comparison of two ideal types. The Arab order of the 1950–1960s might be characterized as one ideal type, close to Elster’s “forum”: a strong international public sphere whose norms, media, and imagined consensus dominate the national public. The normative framework to which actions must be justified was located at the regional level. The pursuit of state interests never ceased, but a powerful norm of behavior, a will to consensus, insisted that inter-Arab action should be oriented toward achieving consensus. In contrast, the “Realist ideal type” international structure, like Elster’s “market,” involves a very weak public sphere, in which actions do not require justification beyond the self-evident assumption of the pursuit of self-interest. The dominant norm is the pursuit of national self-interest defined within a state apparatus insulated from society. Neither ideal type fully captures any empirically existing structure: as much as power permeated the Arabist arena, so did communication and norms structure the classical European balance of power.

This brief contrast between the idealized Arabist public sphere and the idealized Realist public sphere highlights the most important indicators for analyzing the public sphere: the place of the public sphere [to what imagined consensus are claims directed?]; the media of argumentation [how are arguments brought to the public?]; the efficacy of the imperative to justification [to what extent do actors modify their behavior? to what extent does contestation affect actors identities and interests?]; the nature of participation [who can legitimately speak?]; the quality of discourse [what constitutes a good argument?]; and decision rules [how does deliberation affect outcomes?].

1. The Place of the Public Sphere

The most basic variable in public sphere structure is the relationship between the public sphere and the state. The place of the public sphere should be established empirically through quantitative, institutional, and interpretive indicators. The structure of public communication has been empirically measured by researchers such as Karl Deutsch, Ernst Haas, and Bruce Russett: media density, transaction flows, and the relative levels of interaction within and across borders and regions. Patterns of political interaction can be seen in the use of particular media as sites for argumentation. For example, the rise of the Jordanian public sphere in the 1990s can be measured in part by the increasing volume of Jordanian newspapers publishing political analysis and commentary on local issues. The prominence of the Arabist public sphere in the 1960s can partially be seen in the circulation of newspapers across borders and the density of international broadcasting.

Quantitative indicators only partially captures the sense of this variable, however. Location also refers to the “imagined consensus” to which actors direct claims. Participants in a particular public sphere implicitly buy into a specific identity and normative structure. Since public debate aims at swaying some public opinion, the operational question should be “who is the imagined public?” In the Jordanian experience, the imagined public for argumentation during the 1950s was an Arabist public. By contrast, the 1994 debate over the peace treaty revealed a primary locus of argumentation in the Jordanian public sphere. The authors publishing in the 1990s Jordanian print public sphere orient their argumentation toward Jordanian identity, Jordanian interests, Jordanian norms. In each case, public sphere structure is characterized by a clear ranking of public spheres as relevant sites of contestation, in terms of the arguments and justifications presented. The shift from an Arabist to a Jordanian public sphere does not mean that the former ceases to exist, or that the latter emerged out of nothingness. The key question for the researcher can be formulated as such: to what imagined consensus must actors direct justifications in order to establish an authoritative interpretation?

Communicative action in the Arabist public sphere involved three principal fora: the Arab League, international media (broadcasting and the press), and Arab summit meetings. The Arab League never fully filled its intended function as an Arabist forum because of institutional limitations evident from its creation. During the constitutional negotiations over the form of the Arab League, proposals which gave more power to the regional organization were blocked by states anxious to protect their sovereignty. The decision rule of consensus was established specifically in order to prevent the enforcement of Arab decisions (MacDonald 1965; Maddy-Weitzman 1993). While it had symbolic resonance as the institutional manifestation of Arab regional order, the League never played a particularly active role. The Arab League failed to emerge as an authoritative site for the negotiation, contestation and ratification for Arabist norms. Debate within the League remained at a low level, either repeating hollow formulas or concentrating on the details of minor regional cooperative endeavors. The frequent appeals for the reform and revitalization of the League indicate the desire among many intellectuals and political activists for some such public institution that could serve as a differentiated, effective political system, but all such proposals have failed.

Arab summit meetings, from the time of their inception in 1964, played an ambiguous role as the embodiment of the Arab consensus: more effective at producing consensus but also more deeply entrenching the privileged position of states as actors and distancing the consensus from the participation of mass publics. These gatherings of Arab leaders to deal with specific crises became a signally important site for the contestation and evaluation of regional norms (Barnett 1998). The tremendous pressure to arrive at a consensus document at the end of every summit led states who knew that their position could not be reconciled with the Arab consensus to boycott the session rather than prevent consensus. The very act of convening a summit and its attendance took precedence over the contents of its resolutions. For example, “the fact that every single Arab League member except Egypt took part in the Baghdad summit meeting [after Camp David] turned its very convention... into an all-Arab court trying Egypt in absentia and unanimously finding it guilty” (MECS 1979: 5).

The emergent centrality of summit meetings had serious implications for the Arabist public sphere. Summit meetings exclude Arab publics, relying on the most rigidly exclusive of participation criteria: only states [and the PLO] and only their sovereign leaders. With the exclusion of non-state actors, the insulation of decision from the mobilized publics of the radio-dominant public sphere, and the secrecy of much of the proceedings, state leaders become far less bound by public norms. In Elster’s (1995) terms, the institutions of the Arab summit allowed a move from “open arguing” to “secret bargaining,” with the attendant reduction of the dangers of outbidding but also the decline in potency of the “civilizing force” of publicity. With each summit, Arab leaders could emerge with a consensus that redefined Arab norms, with public participation only entering as a latent constraint. Closed meetings of a relatively small number of leaders allowed for more bargaining, fewer audience costs, and less public posturing and denunciation over violations of norms. This allowed for more pragmatic decisionmaking, at the expense of the wide-ranging feelings of belonging through participation. Where the summit meetings served to facilitate consensus among Arab states, they also neutered the Arabist public sphere and contributed to its decline. The rise of the summit is therefore directly related to the increased “Realism” of Arab politics in the 1980s.

The public sphere created by international radio broadcasting represented the primary arena in the 1950–60s for the interpretation of action within a shared normative structure (Boyd 1993; Brown 1975; McDaniel 1980). An extremely dense web of broadcasting from every country, as well as from numerous non-state actors, constituted a forum for the exchange of justifications and interpretations of action. Between 1955 and 1970, radio broadcasting arguably stood as the most relevant site of political communication for the negotiation of consensus on norms, identities, and collective interests. The radio-centric public sphere invited mass participation in politics by speaking directly to mass publics, bypassing state control and the constraints of literacy and wealth associated with the press, and seeking to mobilize mass publics into political action as the instrument for translating discourse into political power. The radio-centric public sphere encouraged argument rather than bargaining, and carried powerful incentives towards outbidding and rhetorical appeals (Elster 1995). After the Arab defeat in 1967, radio broadcasting took substantial blame for distorting the reporting of the war, for misleading Arab publics about their states’ capabilities, and for inciting a war for which the states were manifestly unprepared. This critique delegitimized the radio-based public sphere. Radio broadcasting continued, but it lost its privileged normative position as the site of the Arab public dialogue.

Within Jordan, multiple sites of public consensus formation shaped patterns of integration and contestation. In the 1950s, the press located on the West Bank tended to invoke norms and identity claims at odds with those of the Jordanian state. The West Bank public oriented its discourse to the Arabist public sphere, struggling to bring the Jordanian polity into line with Arabist norms and goals and to break the general isolation and insularity that had characterized Transjordan prior to 1950. The political struggles of the 1950s can be characterized as a struggle over the place of the public sphere: would there be an efficacious public sphere?; would it be centered in the relatively autonomous West Bank press or in the state-dominated East Bank media?; and would it be oriented toward the emerging Arabist public sphere? In 1957, after elections won by proponents of Arabism, the regime carried out a coup from above and forcefully repressed political action (Mishal 1978; Dann 1989).

In the 1980s, the struggle over the place of the public sphere inflamed issues inside of the Jordanian state. One survey by a Jordanian academic found a significant difference among urban, rural, and bedouin Jordanians in terms of the media from which they obtained information about candidates in the 1989 elections (Sari 1991). Among urban citizens, 58 percent paid significant attention to the press, compared to 28 percent of those outside the cities. There has been tension between the state and the Islamist movement over the development of mosques into a political public space outside of state control. Equally important is the tension between national and local publics, as tribal leaders resented the usurping of their role in the expression and formation of public opinion at the local level (Layne 1993; Jureidini and McLaurin 1984; Day 1986). The Information Minister resigned, and the debates faded away, but the underlying issues persisted: what should be the balance between a national print public sphere and the traditional private lines of communication and patronage?

The importance of the Palestinian public sphere for many Jordanian citizens as a site of political identity formation and norm contestation complicated the development of any autonomous Jordanian public sphere centered upon Jordanian identity and concerns. The Palestinians after 1967 developed a nonterritorial public sphere in which the independent Palestinian identity emerged as the fundamental, constitutive frame of reference. This public sphere became an active site for the contestation of Palestinian identity, goals, practices, and ideals. “Palestinians” manifested their political identity through participation in the Palestinian public debates. The Palestinian public sphere became distinct precisely when actors began to orient argumentation toward a specifically Palestinian identity and interests, through a set of media created by and for actors espousing the Palestinian identity. A dense field of publications and radio stations provided the media for the exchange of arguments. The PLO and especially the Palestinian National Council represented an institutional manifestation for the authoritative ratification of the norms and goals that developed through public debates. The Palestinian public sphere is an exceptional example of the constitution of political identity through the process of public debate. Many Jordanians, and not only those of Palestinian origin, took this Palestinian public sphere as their primary source of identity and interests, especially in the absence of any compelling, open Jordanian public sphere. The Palestinian public sphere therefore represented a powerful competitor to the emergence of any distinctly Jordanian site for identity and interest formation; only after 1988 would this reality begin to change.

2. Dominant Media of Participation

The dominant media play an important role in both the structure and processes of the public sphere. The relative weight of press, radio, TV, and face to face interaction affects the nature of participation, the content of discourse, the process of deliberation, and the extent of the normative consensus. While I do not make a technological determinist argument, I do argue that the characteristics of the primary media of public discourse profoundly structure that discourse (Dreisler 1997; Thompson 1995). Different media forms create different relations between participants in discourse, and privilege different kinds of arguments. The radio-dominant public sphere of the 1950–1960s empowered mass participation, outbidding in the rapid exchange of claims and counterclaims, and strong Arabist identification. Television, at least in the Arab world, is a more state-centric media. The high startup costs virtually eliminate the possibility of clandestine broadcasting, which contributed to centralizing the position of the sovereign state. Television discourages mass participation, rapid exchange of argument, and direct engagement, instead offering a more unidirectional flow of information and discourse. Underground, clandestine media, whether Xeroxed Samizdat publications or pirated cassettes of Khomeini’s sermons, encouraged the emergence of underground, oppositional publics outside the discourse and observation of the state.

Because it was central to the unusually powerful international public sphere of the 1950s–1960s, radio broadcasting merits more attention. The rise of Nasser and the initiation, several years later, of wide scale political broadcasting, represented a structural change in the Arabist public sphere. Radio broadcasting replaced the press as the primary carrier of Arabist public contestation, immensely widening the scope of participation in, or at least consumption of, the political public sphere. From a small elite with very similar ideas about Arab unity, the public now expanded to include the recently mobilized classes. By the early 1960s, most Arab states had their own transmitters and were able to participate in the constant exchange of normative appeals, justifications, accusations, and argumentation which characterized Arabist public debate. This “contributed to a substantial change in the style of conducting international relations in the Arab world” which is inexplicable in neorealist terms (Dawisha 1976). The radio formed a strong sense of relationship among members of this public and enabled the imagined consensus to which claims were addressed. Shifts in the imagined audience of justificatory claims, in the relationship between publics and discourse, in the density of communicative action were independent of shifts in material power capabilities. Arab summitry was begun in the mid-1960s directly in order to remove inter-Arab dialogue from the radio public sphere and to stop the outbidding which was driving Arab conflicts. The radio ceasefire did not last long, primarily because of the power generated by this broadcasting, the temptation to use it, and the need to respond once challenged.

Press, arguably the most amenable media to reasoned discourse, is also the medium most effectively controlled across borders. The circulation of the press across Arab states has generally been small-scaled, unbalanced, and restricted by political censorship (Rugh 1987; Khalidi 1996). Nevertheless, the Arab political press has a long and important history, playing a major role in many of the anticolonial struggles (Khalidi 1996; Ayalon 1995). Virtually every Arab political party or movement has attempted to publish a magazine or newspaper in order to have a voice in the Arabist public sphere and thereby be recognized as an Arab actor. In 1990, according to one survey, 64 percent of Jordanians cited the press as their primary source of political opinion and debate, rather than radio or television (Muhadin 1992). This represents a huge change from the heyday of Arabist radio broadcasting in the 1950s, when large majorities of the public were oriented primarily to the news and heated exchange of opinion over the airwaves.

In the 1980s an Arab emigrant press based primarily in Europe emerged, as Saudi Arabia or Kuwait purchased leading publications, which openly encouraged a new style of discourse characterized by moderation, pragmatism, and abstention from inflammatory rhetoric (Khazen and Atwan 1996). Openly ideological discourse was deemphasized in favor of a pragmatism heavily biased toward the political status quo. This is not to say that this press abandoned norms or ideology—far from it. Instead, it advanced a competing model of the Arabist public sphere, complete with reinterpreted norms, style of discourse, and media. The conservative control of the international Arab press aimed at spreading a distinctive pattern of norms and an interpretation of political reality no less than had the “ideological” press.

Each of these forms of media must be contrasted with face to face communication. In the international arena, Arab summits emerged as an instrument for overcoming the distancing effects of politicized radio broadcasting. By meeting face to face, Arab heads of state sought a new dynamic for the exchange of ideas and arguments, explicitly hoping to bypass the inflammatory rhetoric of the media. These meetings proved far more effective at producing working consensus than did the exchange of accusation and defense over the airwaves. As noted above, however, this pragmatism came at the expense of participation.

Inside of Jordan, the emergence of the print public sphere brought politically important changes to established structures of face to face political communication such as private salons, tribal gatherings, and the royal court. A 1996 survey confirmed the growth of the national press: 52 percent of Jordanians reported regularly reading the daily press and 39 percent read at least one weekly newspaper (Hamarneh 1996a). This might be compared to Lerner’s 1950 findings in which a Jordanian sample found 44 percent reading newspapers, but “prefer[ring] newspapers, magazines and books from the more advanced Arab countries to the local product” (Lerner 1958: 310). As government repression of the press increased, readership plummeted in a rational response to the decreasing potential for real public sphere deliberation. In the 1997 survey, overall readership of the daily press fell to 34 percent and readership of the weeklies fell to 17 percent; in the 1998 survey readership fell even further. The fall in readership directly corresponded with increased repression; in 1997 the government passed a “temporary law” in the absence of Parliament which sharply limited the press and drove most of the weeklies out of print (Human Rights Watch 1997; MERIP special report 1998 for details).

The press coexisted uneasily with the salon, long the primary site of political debate in Jordan. These gatherings at private homes were the site of relatively unrestrained discourse. After a marked convergence in the early 1990s, the difference between unconstrained salon discourse and relatively bound press discourse rebounded after the peace treaty, to the dismay of liberals. Trends as varied as Transjordanian exclusivism, PLO-Jordanian cooperation, moves to peace with Israel, and political liberalization have all gestated within salons (Sha’ir 1987, 1995; Majali 1995; Sayigh 1997). The private audience with the King had long been the most important route toward efficacy in the Jordanian system. Rather than engaging in public debate through media available to all members of the polity, individuals or groups would directly present their positions to the King and seek to influence his decisions. The emergence of the print public sphere has produced an interesting hybrid of the salon and the private audience. On numerous occasions, King Hussein or Prince Hassan has convened public figures for discussions of particularly contentious issues. These sessions range from meetings with editors and writers to assemblies of politicians and public figures, to hear complaints and explain regime policies. Frank and open discussions focus on the most contentious of issues. They are widely reported in the press, offering a unique combination of face-to-face communication and press publicity. The King regularly holds open meetings and press conferences which are far more open and contentious than most counterparts in the Arab world.

Finally, attention must be paid to the mosque as a site of political communication. As one seasoned observer of the Jordanian polity pointed out in a conference on the media, “the mosque... is stronger than all other media.. there are more than 2000 mosques and the number of attendees at the smallest of them probably exceeds the number of readers of many newspapers or the viewers of most television programs” (Ayesh 1994). Throughout the 1990s, the liberalization of the press has coincided with state efforts to control the mosques. Members of the Islamic Action Front, including Parliamentarians, have been banned from delivering khutba, the Friday sermon to the gathered worshippers. The King has frequently warned of the politicization of mosques, but the centrality of the mosque to political communication for a large number of Jordanians is a political fact. The mosque has become a major dimension of the public sphere in Jordan as in other Arab states, serving as a location for the creation and defense of identity and norms and the articulation of interests.

3. Participation

One of the crucial questions in any public sphere, and especially in international public sphere theory, is the question of who participates. Is an international public sphere strictly an interstate affair (Barnett 1998), or does it primarily involve transnational discourse among nongovernmental actors (Lipschutz 1992)? Every public sphere specifies certain actors as legitimate participants while explicitly or implicitly excluding others (Benhabib 1996). Modern international relations uniquely specifies the sovereign state as the legitimate actor in international institutions, with the idea of the nation-state legitimating the notion that the state speaks for the nation. Domestic politics produces a leadership which then speaks in the voice of the people in the international arena. The proliferation of transnational and nongovernmental organizations, citizens advocacy campaigns, ethnic and subnational groups, and other nonstate actors in the international arena challenges this formal requirement of sovereignty. Studies of international norm formation, whether of anti-Apartheid (Klotz 1995), chemical weapons (Price 1996), land mines (Price 1998), or human rights ( Keck and Sikkink 1998) demonstrate the powerful voices of nonstate actors in international public spheres. I take as an empirical question the participation rules and norms of any public sphere.

Participation in the Arabist radio public sphere was relatively open, in that radio transmitters were inexpensive, easy to acquire, and cheap to operate. Besides the states, each of which by the early 1960s had at least one domestic and one foreign broadcast frequency, a wide array of clandestine radio stations contributed to produce an impressive density of communications. Palestinian broadcasting, from Lebanon and from various friendly states, was particularly important in contesting the norms of this emergent mass public (Browne 1975). This is not to say that broadcasting capabilities were evenly divided among actors. Egypt enjoyed a large advantage in broadcasting over most other Arab states. During the 1958 crisis between Jordan and Egypt, Hussein complained bitterly about the imbalance of resources, that Radio Cairo was heard in every coffeehouse in Amman while Radio Amman could barely sustain a 30 mile radius (Hussein 1962: 173). Richard Parker (1996) notes that the United States tried to help Jordan overcome this imbalance, but even providing a stronger transmitter, which was eventually accomplished, “could not supply them with their own Ahmed Sa’id [the popular editorialist of Voice of the Arabs].” As Parker points out, “no one would tune in to Jordan radio except maybe to find out what was going on in Amman.” The huge popularity of Egypt’s Voice of the Arabs, the wide acceptance of the Nasserist interpretation of Arabism, and, not least, cultural dominance gave Egypt significant power resources. This coincidence between ideology and dominance in public sphere media represented real power, which Nasser well recognized: asked by the UN to rein in Egyptian broadcasting after a Lebanese complaint, he responded: “If you ask me for radio disarmament, you are asking for complete disarmament” (Haykal 1973; Boyd 1977).

Despite the imbalance of resources, participation in the radio public sphere constituted actors as equals at the level of discursive contestation. Access to radio broadcasting equipment was relatively easy, with low capital requirements and few technical demands, which allowed a bewildering array of state and non-state actors to register their voices. Participation in this Arabist public sphere has several characteristics. First, by virtue of having a voice in the public sphere, groups were constituted as actors. Participation itself defined the identity of these groups, and this played an underestimated role in the consolidation of the Palestinian identity. Having a voice, participating in public debate connotes the reality of the group and its recognition by others in their responses to that voice. Second, some degree of formal equality governed this participation, in that a statement by a Palestinian group, when broadcast, took on roughly the same weight as an Egyptian broadcast, in the sense that Jordan felt obligated to respond and offer explanations. A voice heard over the radio challenging King Hussein to justify his decision not to arm the villagers of the West Bank demanded a response over the airwaves. While the source mattered, even the smaller voices could hardly be ignored. Once arguments were put out into the public sphere they demanded a response before the imagined Arab consensus. These three elements of the Arabist radio public sphere are crucially important: the constitution of actors through participation, the formal equality in argumentative status, and the norm of responding to claims.

Participation in the public sphere is intimately tied to the question of sovereignty. Who is authorized to speak in an international public sphere: heads of sovereign states? private individuals? social movements? Arab summits explicitly authorize only heads of state to participate, effectively excluding all other prospective actors. The radio public sphere, by contrast, enabled virtually anyone to register a political opinion and be taken seriously by other participants. Norms of sovereignty designated only states as actors in international society. But this is contingent rather than essential. Any kind of actor could be recognized as such through participation and the acceptance of others. Palestinian participation in the Arabist public sphere was extremely significant for their recognition as an international actor despite their lack of a sovereign state. Public sphere structure specifies which actors can legitimately participate, and whether exclusions are constitutive or incidental.

Participation in the Jordanian public sphere has changed significantly. Prior to 1990, the press was carefully controlled, with a limited number of opinionmakers in the major dailies offering a very narrow range of differences. The independent weekly press of the 1990s opened up dozens of opinion columns a week, which were filled by serious and influential writers and politicians of widely diverse views. Both the number of voices and their quality radically increased. The print public sphere allowed a wide, broadly representative spectrum of opinion to regularly engage in debate about specifically Jordanian issues. Furthermore, it could be reasonably assumed that all public sphere participants and many government decisionmakers regularly read this weekly press and took it seriously. The same cannot be said for the Jordanian electronic media, which remained tightly controlled and restricted to a narrow range of pro-government positions.

Critics of the Jordanian public sphere often attacked its alleged nonrepresentativeness. Particularly since the peace treaty with Israel and the growing conflict between regime and society, official spokesmen have argued that the public sphere does not articulate the beliefs of most Jordanians. King Hussein regularly asserted that the vast majority of Jordanians supported his policies, “no matter what the elite in Amman say.” The public sphere expressed the beliefs of a very narrow stratum of elites in the capital, whose political influence and articulate opposition masked their small numbers. At particularly tense moments, Hussein bitterly complained that “there are no media in Jordan that identify with Jordan and its concerns.” Such claims are notoriously difficult to prove: it is no easier in Jordan than in the United States to know whether a “liberal media” misrepresents the real preferences of “the silent majority.” Nevertheless, the regular electoral victories of the opposition in the Professional Associations, student organizations, and other civil society institutions gives some credibility to the claim that the public sphere consensus broadly represents the opinions of at least the politicized sectors of society.

4. Efficacy

Describing the location, media, and participation of the public sphere is not sufficient without evaluating its political efficacy. In the 1970s, for example, the Third World succeeded spectacularly at transforming the United Nations into an international forum for political debate and norm formation, but it was relatively ineffective in compelling the powerful states of the North to comply with these the norms and principles in material ways (Krasner 1985). This lack of efficacy, of course, has always been at the heart of the Realist critique of international organizations and norms. But the relationship between public sphere argumentation and material power must be seen as a variable rather than as a constant. It varies with power balances, but also with the legitimacy of the site, the kind of issue, the actors participating.

The efficacy of the Arab public sphere could be seen both in behavior and in the priority granted it by political actors. During the “Arab Cold War,” Arabist attacks leveled against Jordan and Lebanon led to domestic uprisings, political mobilization, and a real fear of regime collapse. Egyptian and Syrian broadcasting, mobilizing people as “Arabs” in pursuit of collective Arab identity and interests, had real power. What is often not sufficiently appreciated is that this mobilization was not a simple reflection of material power relations. Arab publics judged arguments, not only power relations. Actors advanced competing frames based on Arab identity and interests, and publics judged these frames rationally. The common picture of inflamed masses responding to emotional appeals does not fully capture the extent to which politicians weighed competing claims and attempted to determine the best way to achieve Arab interests. Jordan’s response to an Egyptian broadcast had to be framed as a reasoned argument defending Jordan’s position, or at least as a counterattack contesting Egypt’s interpretation or sincerity. Even Egypt, by far the most powerful Arab state, could be compelled into action by well-conceived broadcasts by weaker rivals. Most analysts agree that the Egyptian actions in 1967 which led to the Six Day War were in large part driven by the challenges to Nasser’s Arabism leveled by Syrian and Jordanian radio broadcasting. Needing to respond convincingly, Nasser took increasingly costly and provocative steps toward Israel, contributing to the spiral of crisis behavior culminating in the Israeli surprise attack.

The efficacy of the public sphere should be broken down into two analytical categories: constraining and enabling. This distinction becomes crucial for comparing rationalist and constructivist public sphere theories. The public sphere as constraint marks the modified rationalist conception: to what extent does public opinion constrain the behavior of state actors? Efficacy would be defined as the extent to which a publicly articulated position succeeds in forcing state actors to act contrary to their interpretation of their interests. In the Gulf crisis, for example, many rationalist analysts accept that the intensity and unanimity of Jordanian public opinion’s support for Iraq compelled King Hussein to refuse to join the American coalition against state interests. The constructivist conception of efficacy incorporates an enabling dimension: to what extent does participation in public sphere discourse change actors’ conception of their identity and/or interests? Did engagement with this Jordanian public opinion persuade Jordanian policymakers of the appropriate course of action?

5. Quality of Discourse

It is also necessary to consider the actual discourse within these structures (Habermas 1996: 304). Is there communicative action oriented toward achieving consensus, or is there only strategic action? An effective public sphere is one in which rational-critical debate oriented toward consensus is carried out within the structures of public discourse. In other words, it is not sufficient to only note “media proliferation” (Calhoun 1992: 276). It is also necessary to analyze the rational-critical potential, even if unrealized, of the discourse within these media. How do these media structures contribute to the constitution of community and to collective will-formation? To what extent are norms subject to rational criticism? What are the criteria for judging between arguments? Is consensus achieved through rational debate or compelled by power?

In terms of the quality of discourse, the communicative practices of international relations in the Arab world have often been characterized by a large gap between programmatic appeals to Arab unity and self-interested state behavior. Since 1967 this divergence has led to a reevaluation of the structural features of Arab politics by Arab critics, as well as by Western commentators, who rather smugly point to the divergence between Arabist proclamations and state-centric action in order to dismiss the significance of Arabism (Ajami 1991). Many observers have been content to explain this feature of Arab politics purely in terms of Arab culture or, even more problematical, in terms of unique features of the “Arab mind” (Said 1979, 1994). Journalistic and scholarly accounts of Arab politics alike attribute the gap between action and words to deeply rooted cultural history, to religion, to the distinctiveness of the Arabic language. Innovative social theory in the Arab world itself is devoted to explaining the formation of a uniquely Arab reason and its shortcomings in the field of public discourse (Jabiri 1992; Ghalyun 1985). A structural approach based on the public sphere can offer an alternative explanation for these observations. Divergence between justificatory claims in the public sphere and self-interested action is a fundamental characteristic of politics: the difference between Arab and Western international relations is one of degree, not of kind, and this difference can be explained by structural variables. The failure of most American politicians to deliver on their campaign promises is rarely taken to mean a unique American mind incapable of matching words and deeds. Arabism should be analyzed as a discourse specific to and rational within a particular public sphere structure, rather than as an aberration from “normal” politics.

The critique from within the Arab public sphere of the pathologies of Arab discourse highlights the political relevance of this issue. The selling of the state’s Realist agenda in Jordan, as in much of the Arab world, has been predicated upon the devaluation of the norms of Arabism. Most recent analysis of interaction within the Arab public sphere has focused on “pathologies,” the tendencies toward “outbidding, ideological grandstanding, accusations, impracticality, threats, zero-sum mentalities” and irrationality which supposedly characterize Arab discourse. And yet, most Arab leaders are seen by other policymakers as extremely shrewd, calculating, and rational in their behavior. This strongly indicates that the so-called irrationality of Arab behavior has more to do with the public sphere structures in which Arab leaders must justify their actions than with individual psychology or cultural pathology.

An example of the quality of discourse as a public sphere variable can be seen in one of the most pressing questions Jordanians have faced in their construction of a public sphere: “intellectual terrorism.” Many critics complain that Jordanian public debate has tended to be dampened by the browbeating tactics of opinion leaders who prevent the expression of independent critical thought. As direct state repression retreated, societal pressure to conformity took its place. Can a public discourse characterized by rigidly enforced unities of thought really be considered a public sphere? While the concerns about the potential repression inherent in the demand for consensus are valid, I would contest this description of the Jordanian public sphere. Despite the complaints of many writers who feel persecuted for their views, the evidence does not suggest that intellectual terrorism rules the Jordanian public sphere. Those authors who have expressed controversial opinions in the press have met with little retaliation; even the most extreme have only on rare occasions failed to find an outlet for their ideas. This is particularly the case since the popular consensus has often run against the will of the state, meaning that the means of coercion do not support the “intellectual” pressures. The “excesses” of the weekly press, and their alleged abdication of the responsibility which comes with freedom, became the major justification for the regime crackdown after 1995. American observers seem drawn to this idea of social compulsion; the assumption that such attitudes are the artificial product of indoctrination and the enforcement of political correctness protects them from being forced to grapple with the possibility that such positions have rational or reasonable bases (J. Miller 1996). The extent to which intellectual terrorism deters effective public sphere debate is nevertheless an important variable for assessing the quality of discourse, and as such should be taken seriously.

6. Decision Rules

No matter how effective the deliberative process, it is unlikely to produce a universal consensus, and eventually a decision will have to be made (Johnson and Knight 1997). Unresolvable differences of interest, time constraints, and other well-known problems intervene in the production of consensus. Indeed, even the demand for consensus can be seen as oppressive of difference and individual autonomy (Young 1996; Rescher 1993). While the point of deliberation is at least in part to transform preferences by producing shared frames of reference and shared conceptions of interest, it is unrealistic—and not necessarily desirable—to expect that all actors will adopt identical preferences. Therefore, as Habermas recognizes as well as do rationalist commentators, the political system must at some point end deliberation and make a decision. This decision can more or less accurately reflect the outcome of deliberation, but as rational choice theory has effectively demonstrated, will never transparently reflect actor preferences. Decision rules, or the procedure by which individual preferences are aggregated into a collective decision, have a strong independent impact on outcomes.

In the Arab arena, the decision rule has been consensus. This strong decision rule has often been blamed for the weakness of Arab institutions, since any consensus will reflect a lowest common denominator and will tend to avoid decisive action. Nevertheless, Arab League decisions are only binding upon those who accept them. Therefore, participation in an Arab Summit is tantamount to accepting the consensus achieved therein; where an unacceptable consensus is expected, Arab states prefer to boycott the Summit. While persuasion is often enhanced by the provision of positive sanctions, especially financial incentives from Gulf states, pure coercion and threats are excluded from this discourse. Negative sanctions can be applied against defectors, with the most prominent example being the expulsion of Egypt from the Arab League after its independent peace with Israel. In that case, Iraq drove the production of the Arab consensus; Iraqi and Gulf money provided material incentives to the frontline states (Jordan, Syria) to not join Egypt; and analysis of Camp David convinced the Arab public sphere that its provisions did not serve Arab interests. The failure of the 1990 Cairo Summit to find an Arab consensus on a response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait effectively destroyed Arab institutions for years.

Jordanian decision rules represent a more familiar example: an authoritarian system which is relatively open to public deliberation but retains executive power. As a constitutional monarchy, the Jordanian political system is designed to concentrate power in the throne, while also maintaining consultative bodies and an institutional structure of modern government. In 1989, the push to liberalization energized Parliament as well as the public sphere, generating a tremendous amount of public deliberation on controversial issues. As long as this deliberation produced broadly acceptable results—support for the severing of ties, support for Iraq, a National Charter—the government accepted and encouraged debate. When public deliberation began producing results contrary to the preferences of the King—over the peace process, relations with Iraq, and economic reforms—the executive branch reasserted its autonomy. Despite the furious resistance of the public sphere, little could be done to resist executive decisions within the bounds of Jordanian political rules, and few expressed an interest in extralegal or violent opposition. In the summer of 1996, for example, the decision to increase the price of bread was preceded by a spirited, reasoned, high quality debate, in which Prime Minister Kabariti actively engaged with opposition arguments. However, when this dialogue rejected the increased bread prices, Kabariti abruptly implemented his prior decision and ended the dialogue. The riots which followed could be traced as much to the violation of the rules of deliberation as to the increased prices themselves, which were compensated and had few immediate effects on the cost of living. The important point is that executive (monarchical) power carried the expectation of legitimation through hiwar.

 

Conclusion

The Arab and Jordanian public spheres underwent profound structural changes in the period covered by this book. The Arabist arena had been experiencing a relatively consensual period in the late 1980s, with the formation of the Arab Cooperation Council (Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen) in 1989 signaling the apparent emergence of a new subregional axis in the Arab heartland and the reintegration of Egypt into the Arab order. In 1990, the foundations of the Arabist public sphere were shattered, perhaps irrevocably, by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the failure of Arab summitry to find an Arab solution to the conflict. The Gulf crisis effectively ended Arab summits, creating deep rifts between Arab states and shattering the belief in both the will to Arab consensus and the meaning of Arab norms (Sayigh 1991). In terms of the Arab public sphere, Iraq became a pariah state, as most Arab states honored the international sanctions regime and refused to reintegrate Iraq into the Arab order. Huge popular sympathy for the suffering of the Iraqi people was expressed throughout most Arab public sphere platforms, but this did not translate into state action. Indeed, the contrast between official positions and popular sympathies encouraged the repression of the moves toward liberalization seen in many Arab states in the late 1980s. Only with the near-collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace process after the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in the summer of 1996 did some semblance of an Arabist order begin to re-emerge.

The Jordanian public sphere underwent equally dramatic transformation in this period. The uprisings of 1989 led to an unprecedented liberalization, including relatively free Parliamentary elections, the legalization of political parties, and a remarkably open and contentious press. After Jordan’s position in the Gulf crisis led to its ostracization from the mainstream Arab public sphere, the Jordanian public sphere became even more central to Jordanian political deliberation. The open and contentious press flourished until 1994, when the Jordanian government began its moves toward a peace treaty with Israel. During the negotiations and the conclusion of the peace treaty, the government became increasingly repressive of the press, but did not shut it down completely. Indeed, the struggles by politicians and journalists to maintain an open public sphere became a central feature in the configuration of that public sphere, as actors avowed the value of their participation in this Jordanian public deliberation, even where they disagreed about the issues under deliberation. Nevertheless, as deliberation produced and reflected public opinion hostile to government policies toward Israel, Iraq, political freedoms, and the economy, the state clamped down even harder. In 1997, the government issued a repressive new Press and Publications Law—eventually found unconstitutional by the Jordanian Supreme Court—and used it to shut down a number of the most outspoken independent political newspapers. This temporary law was followed by the passage of a hugely contentious new permanent Press and Publications Law in 1998, institutionalizing the relative closure of the public sphere. By the fall of 1998, however, the regime relaxed its grip, appointing a relatively liberal Prime Minister and initiating a new round of hiwar.

These structural changes in the Arab and Jordanian public spheres therefore frame the public deliberations discussed in the rest of the book. The collapse of the Arabist public sphere and the rise, and subsequent attempts to close, the Jordanian public sphere constitute the social structure of international politics of the period. I argue in the remainder of this book that the shift in the location and efficacy of deliberation, between and within public spheres, powerfully affect Jordan’s articulation of state interests and its strategic choices.