CIAO DATE: 03/2013
Volume: 16, Issue: 1
January 2013
Politics, law, and the sacred: a conceptual analysis (PDF)
Friedrich Kratochwil
The sacred is a source of legitimacy for political rule, while at the same time remaining always beyond politics and law. This article examines this intersection and interaction of religion, politics and law as a semantic field, focusing on the conceptual analysis of practices. First, the article addresses and challenges the myth of a purely secular and contractarian international order, allegedly created by the Peace of Westphalia. Second, it shows how this contractarian metaphor generated the notion of the ‘sacralisation of the people’ in modernity, and it was transfigured into the ‘nation’ as the source of legitimacy for politics and law. Third, the article develops a critical assessment of the human rights discourse and on the potential of imperial projects — of a ‘rule of lawyers’ instead of a rule of law. I also argue that ‘religions’ do not have the monopoly for millenarian derailments, since even ‘secular’ projects, such as human rights, have that crusading potential. Modern law cannot effectively dispense with the ‘sacred’, and perhaps even with politics, by substituting abstract entities such as ‘human rights’ for it.
Governmentality's (missing) international dimension and the promiscuity of German neoliberalism
Hans-Martin Jaeger
An important insight from the recent publication of Foucault's governmentality lectures for International Relations (IR) is that international manifestations of governmentalities such as police and liberalism, rather than constituting mere domestic analogies, have inherently international dimensions. Police and liberalism are both constituted by and constitutive of the international contexts in which they emerge: historically, the European balance of power and a ‘globalisation’ of markets, respectively. However, Foucault's account of German and American neoliberalism in the twentieth century omits references to the international context. This article first reconstructs the ‘domestic-international nexus’ in Foucault's account of police and liberalism, and then recovers aspects of the missing international dimension of his analysis of German neoliberalism with recourse to Wilhelm Röpke's writing on IR. The upshot of this recovery effort is threefold. First, the international remains pivotal to (mid-) twentieth-century neoliberal governmentality. Second, (German) neoliberalism's association with multiple ‘international’ governmentalities, including liberal and non-liberal ones, exposes neoliberalism as a ‘promiscuous’ mode of governance. Third, German neoliberalism's promiscuity is underwritten by (though not reducible to) a conservative ethos of moderation. More broadly, this article contributes to efforts to theorise the relationship between domestic and international politics, and to understand neoliberalism as a ‘variegated’ phenomenon.
Locating the normative within economic science: towards the analysis of hidden discourses of democracy in international politics
Milja Kurki
Economic science has been overwhelmingly perceived as a ‘positive’ science, both among economists and many scholars in other social sciences. As a result, there has been an estrangement between the ‘scientific’ study of economics and the study of ‘fuzzier’ matters of normative nature. Crucially, it is often assumed that economists — whether academics or practitioners — have little to say about democracy, a concept that is famously normative and contested in nature. This article argues that this perception is mistaken and misleading. When several key figures in economic science are examined in detail, we can see that their economic theories are, in fact, deeply intertwined with certain normative visions of democracy, even if implicitly. Recognising the role of hidden normative theories of democracy within economic science perspectives is important theoretically, in re-reading the nature and scope of economic science discourses. It is also, however, important in understanding some key world political trends. It is argued here that we are in a better position to understand the curious ‘dabbling’ of global financial organisations in matters of ‘political nature’ when we remain attuned to the role of hidden democratic assumptions. Also, the complex role of these organisations in ‘democracy promotion’, and the nature of democracy promotion itself, can thus be better appreciated.
Caribbean development alternatives and the CARIFORUM–European Union economic partnership agreement
Anthony Payne, Matthew Louis Bishop, Tony Heron
The Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) signed in October 2008 between the Caribbean and the European Union has been the subject of much controversy. There has been a marked split within the Caribbean between the officials and politicians who negotiated — and thus championed — the EPA and the wider academic and civil society community that subjected it to heavy criticism. The paper examines these debates in detail and situates them within the broader intellectual and practical panorama of Caribbean development alternatives. Specifically, it discusses how the terrain upon which development has been both theorised and practised in the region has narrowed significantly since the 1980s, with the EPA being the latest manifestation of this evolving trend. The paper consequently goes beyond an analysis of the short-term politics of the EPA to elucidate the deeper, structural explanations for the divisions over the EPA between the policy and academic communities and the wider implications of the Agreement for contemporary Caribbean development.
The Common Agricultural Policy Health Check: time to check the health of the theory of the reform?
Marko Lovec, Emil Erjavec
In 2008, the ministers of agriculture of European Union member states made a political agreement on the Common Agricultural Policy reform, also known as the Health Check. The reform coincided with three things: the ongoing Doha round of the World Trade Organization negotiations; political pressures to limit the costs of the policy financed from the common budget; and various ‘new’ policy issues. Rational institutional and constructivist approaches, which are often viewed as theoretical alternatives with each explaining some aspects of the reform, have employed simplified and narrow abstractions in conceptualising the role of these policy contexts. In order to identify the mechanisms facilitating the Health Check, a critical realist approach is proposed here, arguing that the relationship among the trade negotiations, budget bargaining, new issues and the policy reform can be explained by theoretically endorsing the asymmetrical development of the agricultural production factors and of production relations. A qualitative analysis is used to determine which of these three approaches seems to be better able to explain the empirical evidence.
The feasibility of an expanded regime on the use of force: the case of the responsibility to protect
Douglas Brommesson, Henrik Friberg Fernros
This article addresses the question of whether an expanded regime on the use of force, based on the report The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) of 2001, would be feasible. The formula of the R2P has since found its way into the United Nations machinery via the final resolution from the World Summit in 2005 and can be seen as an emerging and more permissive norm on the use of force in cases of humanitarian catastrophes. The question of whether or not the theoretical framework of the norm is feasible is therefore urgent. Our analysis of feasibility is based on three logics of human action: the logic of consequence, logic of appropriateness and logic of arguing. We argue that each of these logics contains aspects that must be observed before a regime can be considered feasible. These logics are coupled with three mechanisms of socialisation of norms: strategic calculation, role-playing and normative suasion. We construct a minimal standard for a feasible regime by deducing requirements from the logics and their mechanisms, and then apply that standard to the content of the ICISS report. The empirical results show that the report must address the fact that it lacks qualities in regard to all three logics, before the expanded regime can be considered feasible.