ECPR –SGIR 7th Pan‐European IR Conference: Stockholm, September 9‐11, 2010. Panel 58: Debates in Critical Security Studies Friday, 10/9, 11:15am – 1:00pm Cosmopolitanism, Emancipation and Critical Security Studies Chris Brown, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, [email protected]
My aim in this short paper is to question whether a commitment to ‘emancipation’ necessarily entails the adoption of a broadly cosmopolitan outlook on the world. I argue that it does not, and that any viable account of what it means to be emancipated must be linked to membership of a politically independent and self‐governing community, a state. The argument here draws on Hegel and Marx, but also has reference points in the modern debate on global governance. It is sometimes argued that the development of ‘globalisation’ has made irrelevant the debates of the first half of the nineteenth century. I want to argue that this is not the case. We do not live in a ‘borderless world’ and the ‘world is not flat’. We live in territorially‐defined states and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future – any viable account of emancipation has to take this into account; cosmopolitan accounts of emancipation do not do so and are thereby deficient. There is no necessity for this argument to be explored in the context of Critical Security Studies (CSS) but quite good contingent reasons for so doing. I appreciate that CSS is a broad church and resists easy summary, but it still seems to me that, taken as a whole, this discourse is still committed to a quite conventional notion of emancipation in a way that other contemporary branches of international studies which claim the label ‘critical’ are not. Post‐structuralist, ‘post‐colonial’, ‘late modernist’ thinking regards the notion of emancipation as tied into the kinds of Enlightenment thought that ought to be challenged and this kind of thinking certainly feeds into CSS, as is apparent from some of the contributions to authoritative collections in the field, e.g. Krause & Williams (1997) and Booth (2004), and the excellent recent overview by Peoples & Vaughan‐Williams (2010). Still, I take it that one of the founding statements of CSS by Ken Booth precisely makes the link between security and an Enlightenment‐influenced notion of emancipation that I want to build on and criticise (Booth, 1991); Booth – the doyen of CSS – has recently produced a manifesto for the field which continues to argue for this link, and, interestingly, has things to say about the role of community that I also wish to take up (Booth, 2007). So, placing the argument in the context of CSS makes a certain amount of sense – although CSS scholars who are not ‘Boothians’ (Boothies?) and do not share Booth’s commitment to a ‘universal human community’ may, if they wish, feel unaffected by my critique. The structure of the paper will be as follows: first, I’ll say something about the notion of ‘critique’ and ‘emancipation’ that can drawn out of (mainly German) Enlightenment and Post‐Enlightenment thought from Kant to Marx via Hegel. Nervously following in the footsteps of Francis Fukuyama, I’ll argue that the core debate is between Hegel and Marx and is over the relationship between political freedom and economic equality (Fukuyama, 1989) – the core issue is whether the political freedom available in a rational, ethical state is actually the only real emancipation available. The Frankfurt School’s attempt to combine Kant, Hegel and Marx in a new account of what ‘Critical Theory’ means was one important reaction to this debate and has entered into contemporary international studies as a major component of CSS, at least CSS of the Boothian variety. However, I’ll argue that this incorporation of critical theory has generally been one‐sided, leaving out of the equation the developed notion of community which was an important part of earlier debates. This is a serious omission because for the people who are suffering the most in our current world order the development of adequate political institutions is a sine qua non of any improvement in their situation. This is, to put it mildly, an ambitious agenda, and I will present the argument only as a sketch. The intention is to provoke a discussion, more explicitly to encourage advocates of CSS to question their presuppositions about what it means to be emancipated. Should a ‘universal human community committed to egalitarian principles’ (Booth, 2007: 8) really be at the centre of their project? The Meaning of Emancipation: Famously, Immanuel Kant answered the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ by the proposition that ‘Enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from its self‐
incurred immaturity’ (Reiss, 1970: 54). We are called upon to use our own understanding and powers of reasoning. Michel Foucault, in his essay answering the same question, challenges the Kantian/Enlightenment belief in the sovereignty of reason, but Kant’s answer was central to the Hegelian and the Marxian project, and remains central to, indeed definitive of, modern ‘Critical’ studies, including CSS (Foucault in Rabinow, 1991). 1
What political arrangements are mandated when we use our powers of reasoning, and emerge from immaturity? For Kant, in his essay Perpetual Peace and elsewhere, the answer is that what is needful is a political/legal arrangement which is based on (1) the civil rights of individuals within a nation (ius civatis), (2) the international right of states in their relationships with one another (ius gentium) and (3) cosmopolitan right in so far as individuals and states, coexisting in an external relationship of mutual influences may be regarded as citizens of a universal state of mankind (ius cosmopoliticum) (Reiss, 1970:98). To meet the 1 Here I employ a convention I suggested nearly two decades ago, and use upper case ‘Critical’ for those who follow Kant’s answer, including the Frankfurt School and their descendants, and lower case ‘critical’ for their post‐structuralist, Nietzschean opponents (Brown, 1994). 2
first we should create republics (political orders based on the separation of powers and the rule of law); to meet the second, these republics should then form a sort of confederation, albeit a confederation without institutions, to abolish war; the third is limited to conditions of universal hospitality. A key feature of Kant’s preferred form of polity is that it is what Michael Sandel much later termed a ‘procedural republic’ (Sandel, 1984). It is not based on a particular conception of the Good; its role is to provide a context within which the individual will find it possible to follow the Moral Law, but it will not, cannot, make the individual moral – obeying good laws is not in itself a moral act. The Kantian republic is very definitely not a democracy, and it does not have international interests beyond those of living in peace with its neighbours. It has no commercial policy – indeed, it is close to the ‘night‐watchman state’ often, wrongly, believed to have been advocated by Adam Smith. 2 We are alone in the world with our consciences and our God; our relations with our fellow men and women are governed by the moral law—we need to be citizens of a constitu‐
tionally governed state in order to realize ourselves as moral beings—but our relations with our fellow citizens are essentially contractual and not based on the warmth of the community. Putting these points together, we can see why Kant’s thinking is the starting point but not the end point for later Critical thought. One immediate reaction to Kant’s thinking was offered by the German romantics, who built on Herder’s notion of the ‘Volk’ to argue that emancipation had to involve membership of an affective community, a ‘nation’ and not simply a procedural republic. Without community, without the sense of sharing a culture, a way of life, with others, human existence is a grey business—and, in any event, it simply is not possible for us to be the sort of isolated individuals that the Enlightenment seems to want us to be. This romantic position, however, loses the idea that freedom is connected to reason. It is G.F.W. Hegel who offers an account of rational freedom, who attempts to reconcile community and freedom in institutions of the modern, rational and ethical state. The story here is well known. The first and most basic of these institutions is the family. In the ethical family each family member is loved and valued for his or her own sake, and this love is an important first step in the development of that person's individuality. However, love is based on feeling, not reason; a person can only become an individual by leaving the family and making his or her way in the wider world. Hegel's term for this wider world was ‘civil society’. In civil society human beings own property and enter into contracts with one another in order to satisfy their material needs. They perform these activities in an administrative context which provides a legal framework within which contracts are made and enforced, corporations established, and law and order guaranteed—all of which are necessary if civil society is to be possible. 2 These points emphasise the strangeness of attempts to associate Kant with the ‘democratic peace’ thesis, see e.g. the very influential work of Michael Doyle (Doyle, 1983). 3
If we think of politics as a matter of ‘who gets what, where and when’, then civil society is the forum where such matters are decided. But Hegel rejected this position. For Hegel, civil society creates individuals, but individuals who define themselves against all others, who experience the rules of society as externally imposed constraints. Such individuals have sacrificed the values of the community in exchange for an illusory freedom—illusory because the rules of civil society are every bit as oppressive as the ties that bind within traditional communities (or within the family). A third institution of ethical life is required—the state. The state is the institution within which individuals come to realize that constraints which appear to be externally imposed are actually the product of their own will. The state provides the element of unity necessary to overcome the separateness inherent in civil society – to perform this task the ethical state is necessarily a constitutional state, with a legislature based on the various estates in society, an executive based on a universal class of civil servants, and a constitutional monarch with the power of ultimate decision. (Hegel, 1991: Part 3). The ethical state necessarily exists in a world of other states. Persons are constituted as true individuals by the fact of the state's existence, but states themselves have an individuality which in turn depends upon the recognition of other states in a world of states. Hegel believed that states could not and should not surrender this individuality, and thus he saw international law and the various contemporary plans for peace unions as aspirations that could never achieve the status of actuality. Thus, war as an institution could not be eliminated – although the kinds of clashes of commercial interest that generate wars emerge out of civil society and not the state as such, a point developed by the English Idealists to produce an account of the ethical state as essentially peace‐loving (See Bosanquet in Brown et al, 2002). Hegel offers an account of emancipation as rational freedom within a state which is the product of the rational wills of its citizens. This state, however, is by no means a democracy (representation is by ‘estate’ not of individuals) and although the Philosophy of Right can be read as prefiguring a Bismarckian welfare state to meet some of the needs of the poor, its general drift is anti‐
egalitarian. Also, and unsurprisingly, since Hegel was writing in a pre‐industrial society he has nothing to say about the new world being created by what we are perhaps just about allowed to call the industrial revolution. These features lead the Young Hegelians of the left to develop an account of emancipation which is explicitly democratic, and, in the case of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, explicitly oriented towards addressing the issue of economic inequality and the possibilities for freedom in the emergent capitalist society that they experienced once exiled after the 1848 Revolutions in Germany. Marx famously claimed to have turned Hegel the right way up, replacing the latter’s idealist account of the emergence of freedom with his own materialist account. Whether this is an accurate account of their relationship is debateable, but in any event it was Marx and Marxism that came to be understood as the root to emancipation for the working class (and for bourgeois intellectuals such as Marx and Engels) in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This version of emancipation involved dismissing the significance of 4
representation, the rule of law and the separation of powers. The radical democracy Marx proposed, and which was made flesh by the Communards of Paris in 1871, discounted such restraints on the exercise of power as unnecessary and bourgeois (Marx, 1996a). The goal was the eventual ending of politics as such, replacing the government of men by the administration of things; in the meantime the International Worker’s Movement would strive for the power to bring about the revolution, by what ever means fitted local conditions, which might involve parliamentary politics in the advanced industrial world, or revolutionary politics in the periphery. Crucially this was an international movement; the assumption was that, in the words of the Communist Manifesto the workers have no country (Marx, 1996b). The global struggle is between workers everywhere, and capitalists everywhere. The goal remains rational freedom and emancipation, but is no longer seen in terms of the establishment of rational, ethical states. The revolution may not take place everywhere at the same time – the assumption was that it would begin in the most advanced capitalist countries – but it was in its essence a world revolution that the socialist movement both advocated and believed would occur. I have presented this potted intellectual history because the competing notions of emancipation offered by Kant, Marx and Hegel remain highly pertinent for today’s politics and in particular for those who describe themselves as Critical theorists. They stand in opposition to that account of freedom which is simply based on the absence of restraint, that is freedom as the ‘silence of the law’, a position that can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes, and forward through the Anglo‐American liberal tradition (Berlin, 1969). They also stand in opposition to the lower‐case ‘critical’ theory that also rejects the idea of rational freedom, but from a perspective which, unlike liberalism, is suspicious of rationality as such – or at least of rationality as defined by Kant, Marx and Hegel. These different visions of what is involved in emancipation have, of course, interacted with each other, combined and recombined over the last 200 years. They have also come up against the practical realities of politics. Thus, for example, the Marxist revolutionary account of emancipation has fared very badly in the countries of advanced capitalism; the revolutionary Social Democratic parties of the late 19th century became the labourist, reformist parties of the 20th century – they also discovered in 1914 that the workers did indeed believe themselves to have a country. The Communist version of emancipation became a device for forced industrialisation, with little contact with the original notion of rational freedom. It proved unable to produce a legitimate political order in the countries where it was developed, and unappealing to the working classes of the advanced industrial world. When the end came for this variety of emancipation in 1989; Francis Fukuyama invited derision when he declared that ‘History’ was over, but his core point – that revolutionary accounts of emancipation had lost their appeal – was valid (1989). The most ambitious 20th century attempt to reshuffle the basic vocabulary of emancipation was the Frankfurt School (the Institute for Social Research based at the JW Goethe University in Frankfurt) which in the inter‐war 5
period tried to merge the Marxist and Hegelian versions of emancipation into a new model. Exile after 1933, and later the outbreak of war led its founders to despair. What became the classic Frankfurt text, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), is a root and branch attack on the doctrine of progress and the supposedly liberating effects of science and rationality, culminating in an attack on advertising and the 'culture industry' which has made enlightenment a matter of mass deception. This profoundly pessimistic work—written in 1944 when the Institute was in exile in the United States—is a key text in defining the crisis in twentieth century thought but actually represents an abandonment of the older project of emancipation. The modern heirs of the Frankfurt School, in particular Jürgen Habermas, have, however, revisited that project; the work of Habermas is explicitly designed to recover the project of emancipation, albeit without the Marxism that the original Critical Theorists took to be at its heart. For the most part, 'early' and 'middle' Habermas developed his Critical Theory in opposition to the positivist notions of science and rationality attacked by Adorno and Horkheimer, but also in opposition to the non‐emancipatory hermeneutics of, for example, Hans‐Georg Gadamer (Gadamer, 1975). His aim was to create a basis for knowledge which is neither positivist nor a‐politically hermeneutic, and he approached this task by distinguishing different 'knowledge‐constitutive interests' which develop out of different aspects of human society. The interaction between society and its material environment develops an interest in prediction and control, met by the positivist empirical­analytical sciences. Human beings communicate with one another in ways which cannot be understood by these sciences, and this generates an interest in the historical­hermeneutic sciences. But on top of these two familiar categories Habermas goes on to write of Critical Theory—this emerges out of society seen as the site of power and domination, which generates an interest in freedom, emancipation from domination, and the achievement of rational autonomy. The two previous knowledge‐constitutive interests create sciences which are subject to the critiques of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but there is a third interest, an interest in liberation and emancipation, which creates another kind of science, Critical Theory, and this science is not simply a new form of oppression (Habermas, 1972). This formulation has been very influential for the work of those writers such as Mark Neufeld and Richard Wyn Jones who have brought Critical Theory to international studies in general, and explicitly CSS in the case of Wyn Jones (Neufeld, 1995; Wyn Jones, 1999 & 2000). Habermas’s later, more explicitly political, work has also been influential, but less so, I judge in CSS circles than in the wider area of IPT (Review of International Studies, 2005). To conclude the first part of this paper, the central point I wish to get across is that what I have sketched above amounts to a kind of core vocabulary for thinking about emancipation, or at least emancipation as understood by the heirs to the European Enlightenment. Those ‘critical’ scholars who do not wish to consider themselves in this light – post‐colonial theorists, for example – may offer alternative accounts of emancipation, but if you do not wish to go down this path, the vocabulary offered by Kant, Hegel, Marx and the classical liberals, perhaps as reworked by Habermas, is what you will find yourself working with. A good question then is, how does CSS use this vocabulary? 6
Emancipation and Critical Security Studies The obvious starting point here is Ken Booth’s article ‘Security and Emancipation’ (Booth, 1991). The original version of this paper was a plenary address at the BISA Conference in 1990 at Newcastle University; Booth’s intent was that this lecture would be a kind of manifesto for a new sort of security studies, and so it has proved. A few years before this lecture/paper, Barry Buzan had put in question the ‘referent object’ of security, challenging the view that ‘security’ is necessarily defined as state security, but Booth wished to take the argument to a different level (Buzan, 1983/2007). As with his later articles and books, this is a piece of activist scholarship, angry (though not as angry as his later work, e.g. Theory of World Security ) and committed. He is, or aspires to be, an ‘organic intellectual’ in the Gramscian sense of the term, that is someone who represents a distinct political position rather than occupying the traditional position of the intellectual as above the fray – in this case someone who gives voice to the underdog (Gramsci: 1971, Part 1). Still, we are entitled to ask how coherently he uses the vocabulary set out in the first part of this paper. Following Buzan, Booth defines security as the absence of threats. He continues: Emancipation is the freeing of peoples (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and the threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation not power or order, produces true security. Emancipation, theoretically is security. (Booth, 1991: 319) Later, addressing the notion that freedom is to be placed before equality, he argues that: [Liberty is] the central value of emancipation, but emancipation implies an egalitarian conception of liberty. (Booth, 1991: 322) and: Integral to emancipation is the idea of the reciprocity of rights. The implication of this is the belief that ‘I am not truly free until everyone is free’. … [Since] ‘my freedom depends on your freedom’, the process of emancipation implies the further breaking down of the barriers we perpetuate between foreign and domestic policy. (Booth, 1991: 322) Since I intend to be rather critical of this position, and it could be argued that a manifesto‐like article based on a lecture will not always generate precise language, it might be helpful to present a more considered definition of emancipation given by Booth in the Introduction to Part 3 of his edited collection on Critical Security Studies and World Politics, which is headed ‘Emancipation’: Emancipation is the theory and practice of inventing humanity, with a view to freeing people, as individuals and collectivities, from contingent and structural oppressions. …. [Security] and community are guiding principles, 7
and at this stage of history the growth of a universal human rights culture is central to emancipatory politics. The concept of emancipation shapes strategies and tactics of resistance, offers a theory of progress for society, and gives a politics of hope for common humanity. (Booth, 2005: 181 emphasis in original) Earlier in the same essay Booth describes the critics of emancipation as ‘[Western] political realists, neorealists, subaltern realists, postmodernists, poststructuralists, some post‐colonial theorists, opponents of human rights, political tyrants, and others’ (Booth, 2005:181) Tempting though it is to self‐
identify as a ‘political tyrant’, I fear I actually fall into the residual ‘and others’ category, although not so much as a critic of emancipation as a critic of this, to my mind far too inclusive account of what emancipation might involve. Before elaborating on this it is only fair to allow Booth to remedy one glaringly obvious problem with his earlier definitions of emancipation. In his recent book Theory of World Society his basic definition of emancipation is as follows: As a discourse of politics, emancipation seeks the securing of people from those oppressions that stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do, compatible with the freedom of others. It provides a three­fold framework for politics: a philosophical anchorage for knowledge, a theory of progress for society, and a practice of resistance against oppression. [Booth, 2007: 112 emphasis in original, additional emphasis mine] The underlined phrase recognises that freeing people from all constraints is a radically incoherent notion unless government is ruled out altogether. It is reminiscent of the phrasing of the first principle of John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others ‘ (Rawls, 1971: 52). But, of course, Rawls goes on to propose that the contractors in his version of the social contract would also choose a second principle, that given fair equality of opportunity, inequalities in a society are justified only if they benefit the least advantaged. Booth would probably regard this version of egalitarianism – the ‘difference principle’ – as insufficiently radical, but the key point for this discussion is that, for Rawls, these are both principles that govern just institutions within a society. He explicitly assumes a plurality of societies, and that there is no equivalent in this international order to the difference principle, and this for good reason – the ‘peoples’ that Rawls later analyses have ‘a reasonably just constitutional government that serves their common interests; citizens united by what Mill called “common sympathies”; and finally, a moral nature’ which characteristics are not present at the international level (Rawls, 1999:23). For Booth, this very evidently will not do. Groups and collectivities exist and are to be emancipated, and community is a guiding principle, but the focus is ‘common humanity’ – no‐one can be free until everyone can be free. Political institutions are required to bring about emancipation – apart from anything else, inequalities cannot be overcome without political intervention – but these 8
institutions cannot be simply domestic given the job they have to do. How are these apparently conflicting requirements to be met? Much here hangs on the understanding of community that is being deployed. Booth’s 1991 essay has little to say on this, but it is a key term in Theory of World Security. Emancipatory communities are central to his analyses – again an extended quotation is required: [communities] in general are social organisations whose separateness caters for individual belonging and human variety. An emancipatory community recognises that people have multiple identities, that a person’s identity cannot be satisfactorily defined by any single attribution …. [and] that people must be allowed to live simultaneously in a variety of communities expressing their multifaceted lives. An emancipatory community is therefore a free association of individuals, recognising their solidarity in relations to common conceptions of what it is to live an ethical live, binding people together with a sense of belonging and a distinctive network of ideas and support. (Booth, 2007: 138, emphasis in original) Very clearly, the aim of this is to disassociate the desirable version of the idea of community from the conventional notion that community is concerned with locality, is spatially defined. There is nothing particularly radical with the general idea that people can have multiple identities and that they may be in communion with others who do not live in the same political space, but there is a problem with so firm an assertion that an emancipatory community is necessarily as free association of individuals. Consider, for example, the case of gated communities, criticised by Booth as examples of the wrong kind of community (Booth, 2007:139). He suggests, plausibly enough, that they are animated by the wrong kind of values – but they are certainly free associations of individuals. The problem is that these individuals wish to avoid taking any responsibility for doing something about the unequal life‐chances of their fellow citizens, but before we can bring that charge home we have to establish that those less fortunate in the society in question are indeed their fellow citizens, which is difficult to do without quite a strongly spatial notion of community. The conventional liberal communitarian response to this situation, offered by figures such as Michael Walzer and David Miller, is that while I may choose some of my community memberships, there are others that simply come with living in a particular place (Walzer, 1983; Miller, 2007). Such communities cannot be taken for granted; it is the role of democratic socialist movements to promote a strong sense of communal membership, because without such a sense redistributive policies are unlikely to be acceptable. The privileged within a society need to experience fellow‐feeling with the disadvantaged, and that can only come, it is suggested, by developing the sense that we are engaged in a common project with our fellow citizens, that we and they are part of a ‘community of fate’. And, to avoid being too romantic about this process, there is another side to the spatial dimension of community, namely a degree of fear. If we are members of a spatially defined community we will have a strong interest in making sure that the least advantaged of our fellow citizens have some stake in the system, otherwise they will be a physical threat to our own well‐being. 9
One of the reasons gated communities are obnoxious is that they remove this incentive for their residents to be concerned with the fate of those who now live on the wrong side of the gate. Returning to the issue of what this version of CSS has made of the vocabulary of emancipation inherited from Enlightenment and Post‐
Enlightenment thought, the Marxist side of the inheritance is the most obvious reference point; the commitment to the oppressed everywhere, the universalist account of emancipation (no one is free until everyone is free) – these are very obviously positions congruent with that of the Marx and Engels of the Communist Manifesto. The problem is that there seems to be little recognition of the problems with that position. As noted above, the actual fate of the Manifesto version of emancipation has been either to develop along Social Democratic lines, with a party representing the workers but firmly embedded in the context of a democratic national polity, or to degenerate into a tyranny which, in practice, also leads to a national solution, ‘socialism in one country’. Booth’s hostility to both positions is clear, but what is less clear is why he thinks his version of universal emancipation can avoid one or other of these fates. The Habermasian element to be found in Booth’s later formulations – note the ‘three‐fold framework’ of the 2007 account of emancipation – could be useful here, but is not actually developed as a political programme. Habermas’s investigation of the ‘post‐national constellation’ provides a framework for thinking about politics within a democratic constitutional state which is embedded within a wider political formation (Habermas is interested here in particular in the European Union), but this is a path that Booth at least does not wish to take – although the work of Richard Wyn Jones, mentioned above, does go in this direction (Habermas, 2000). The result is that it is very unclear what shape the ‘politics of hope’ for humanity is supposed to take, and how progress is to be made manifest. Why this matters. I have no difficulty in imagining Booth’s irritated response to these points. 3 Given the poverty, violence and oppression which we can agree characterises so much of contemporary global politics, is not this kind of theoretical nitpicking a luxury we can do without? In broad terms, we call all agree on what emancipation means, and quibbles about the details of the concept distract us from the real task, which is to create a theory which, in Robert Cox’s terms, is ‘for’ the wretched of the earth (Cox, 1981). Leave aside a certain amount of scepticism about the proposition that theory necessarily has to be for some cause, I do not see a problem with the idea that some thinkers might define their role as that of promoting the interests of the underdog – this is a legitimate, if not necessarily the only legitimate role for the theorist. The question I would pose is 3 I have a certain amount of form in this respect. Booth rather enigmatically describes my ‘sceptical understanding of critical theorising’ as hard to beat (Booth, 2007:58 fn 79). 10
whether the CSS posture outlined by Booth actually works in the way that Booth and other CSS theorists want it to. This point is best illustrated by returning to the notion of ‘community’. Booth acknowledges the importance to individuals of a sense of belonging, a common conception of what it is to live an ethical life and so on, but this in the context of a free association. This sounds a bit like anarchism, but he clearly isn’t any kind of anarchist – anarchism, as nineteenth century socialists believed, is ‘liberalism without a police force’ and is clearly not compatible with the kind of political intervention required to produce and reproduce the egalitarian politics that Booth espouses. We cannot rely on the rich freely associating with a community that would deprive them of their privileges. To cut to the chase, welfarist politics demands a state – a political organisation that is territorially based and capable of executing egalitarian projects. One of the propositions of communitarian social democrats such as Walzer and Miller is that such projects will only work if they are tied to communities; this does not require of individuals that they give their loyalty exclusively to their community – indeed, such exclusivity is widely recognised as dangerous – but it does suggest that there is, or should be, something qualitatively different about one’s loyalties to one’s political community and one’s loyalty to the other communities to which one may actually choose to belong. Co‐nationals are bound together in a community of fate whether they choose to be so or not, and the social democratic version of emancipation that has developed over the last two hundred years builds upon rather than denies this fact about the world. The statism that this position mandates is not necessarily Westphalian. There is no necessity that the state be sovereign in the full sense of that term – for Hegel there was such a necessity, the state needs to be in a world of states so that it can recognise itself for what it is, but the kind of emancipation envisaged by the social democratic tradition, and, for that matter, that of the Anglicised Hegelianism of the English Idealists, is not hostile in principle to federalist arrangement of one kind or another. The Habermasian stress on the post‐
national constellation is precisely about finding ways in which such arrangements can work. But, I suggest, they will only work if built on the foundation of states which are already in a strong sense political communities, which is why most of the attempts to recreate the European experience elsewhere in the world have failed. This last point directs us towards what is to me a crucial issue, namely the policy implications of the CSS position for the global South. The fate of this part of the world is, I judge, of central importance to Booth and his colleagues – although poverty, poor education and political oppression are to be found in pockets everywhere, it seems to me obvious that it is in what used to be called the Less Developed World that these problems are most abundant. If the project of emancipation cannot be shaped in such a way that it is relevant to the problems of people living in the favelas of Latin America, the slums of African cities or experiencing rural poverty in India, then it loses all credibility. A Critical posture directed towards these problems needs to identify their exact nature, and indicate the direction from which a solution, or solutions, 11
might come. The literature on ‘development’ points us in two directions, one of which is compatible with the CSS posture, the other of which is not. Pretty much everyone agrees nowadays that there are some features of the world economy that are not conducive to economic and political development – in particular the protectionist trade policies of the developed world, and some aspects of the behaviour of international business enterprises, in particular the extractive industries and ‘big pharma’ whose patents can be very damaging to the health of people who live in the global South. CSS has no problems associating itself with this line of argument. Much more problematic is the other point of consensus in the development community, which concerns the importance of local policy, and the need for Southern countries to develop effective political structures. John Rawls in The Law of Peoples overstated this point by arguing that ‘burdened’ societies were simply suffering from an absence of a supportive political culture – clearly external factors are also important – but the key role played by policy at the national level is becoming the orthodox explanation for the poverty and backwardness of the ‘bottom billion’ (Rawls, 1999; Collier, 2008). An effective state is a precondition for emerging from poverty, as China and India are now demonstrating, and as Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan demonstrated in the past, and on the same small scale, Rwanda is demonstrating today. But, and this is where CSS perspectives ought to be crucial, but I think are not, effective states are not always just states or states oriented towards emancipation, however defined. Within many of the most successful states, including China and Brazil, inequality is actually increasing as overall levels of poverty fall. Human rights are often put on the back burner during the development process, and, as the example of Singapore suggests, elites are reluctant to focus on remedying this situation even when development strategies are successful. The key point, and the ultimate rationale for this paper, is that what people in these societies need is very definitely not some new and exciting vision of cosmopolitan citizenship. They don’t need the barriers to be broken down between foreign and domestic policy. What they need is good government, effective government, responsive government, a government capable of promoting economic growth while looking after the interests of the poorest in society. There may come a point in the (I suspect rather distant) future when the ‘politics of common humanity’ will become more important to, say, the inhabitants of Lagos, than the corruption and general fecklessness of the Nigerian elite, but we are nowhere near there yet – for the foreseeable future, the best hope for poor and oppressed is that they can develop minimally democratic and rights‐respecting governments at home. It is difficult to see what CSS can contribute to this process if it rejects the institution of the state. Conclusion: The answer that I want to offer to the question at the beginning of this paper is that a commitment to egalitarian principles is indeed desirable, but that a ‘universal human community’ is not going to be the referent object of that commitment for the foreseeable future. We live in a world where egalitarian, rights‐based democratic politics are inextricably linked to the admittedly 12
imperfect vessel of the modern state. The theorists who developed the project of emancipation in the nineteenth century understood this, and still have much to teach us for that reason. CSS, at least as developed by Ken Booth, is very much part of this project, but at times loses contact with the political context within which emancipation must take place. Having been very critical of this version of CSS in the rest of this paper, it is only fair to acknowledge that Booth’s project is in many respects superior to some of the other branches of contemporary international studies that claim the name of ‘critical’. It seems to me that a great deal of post‐colonial/post‐
structural CSS has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, if I may be excused the cliché. While quite rightly critical of some aspects of post‐Enlightenment ends‐means oriented rationalism, and certainly rightly critical of the blanket dismissal of the non‐European world by nineteenth century radicals – ‘historyless peoples’ is actually a term used by Friedrich Engels, but it could easily have been Hegel or John Stuart Mill – these critics end up finding it even more difficult to contribute to the solution of real‐world problems than the emancipatory CSS of Booth and his colleagues. But this is another story. References: Adorno, Theodor & Max Horkheimer (1979) Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Verso Berlin, Isaiah (1969) ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Isaiah Berlin Four Essays on Liberty Oxford: Oxford University Press. Booth, Ken (1991) ‘Security and emancipation’ Review of International Studies 17 (4) Booth, Ken, (1997) ‘Security and Self: Reflections of a Fallen Realist’ in Krause and Williams Critical Security Studies. Booth, Ken ed. (2005) Critical Security Studies and World Politics Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner. Bosanquet, Bernard (2002) ‘Patriotism in the Perfect State’ in Brown, Nardin and Rengger International Relations in Political Thought Brown, Chris (1994) ‘”Turtles all the way down” Anti‐foundationalism critical theory and international relations’ Millennium 23 (2). Brown, Chris, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger eds. (2002) International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buzan, Barry (1983/2007) People, States and Fear Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, ECPR Classics Ed. Colchester: ECPR Press. Carver, Terrell ed. (1996) Karl Marx: Later Political Writings Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13
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Reiss, H.J. ed. (1970) Kant's Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nesbit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Review of International Studies (2005) ‘Forum on Habermas and International Relations’ (31) 127 – 209. Sandel, Michael (1984) ‘The Procedural republic and the Unencumbered Self’ Political Theory 12 (1). Walzer, Michael (1983) Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books. 15