The unfinished global revolution: Intellectuals and the new politics of international relations

Review of International Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 627-647

  Shaw, Martin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0035605159     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0260210501006271     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. Based on an inaugural professorial lecture delivered at the University of Sussex on 9 November 1999. I wish to thank Justin Rosenberg and this journal's reviewers for their helpful comments.
2. Ken Booth, Statecraft and Security: the Cold War and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 353.
3. As it happens, on 9 November 1989 I was checking the proofs of a chapter on the writings of E.P. Thompson, the historian and peace campaigner (who sadly has since died). I took the opportunity to comment, in an after-note, on the vindication of his vision which the overthrow of the Wall represented ('From Total War to Democratic Peace: Exterminism and Historical Pacifism', in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 250. For E.P. Thompson's own comment, see 'Ends and Histories' in Mary Kaldor (ed.) Europe from Below (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 7-26. We do not have to substitute a 'peace movements' explanation of the end of the Cold War for more conventional accounts, to acknowledge the significant roles which the peace and democratic movements played.
4. As it happens, on 9 November 1989 I was checking the proofs of a chapter on the writings of E.P. Thompson, the historian and peace campaigner (who sadly has since died). I took the opportunity to comment, in an after-note, on the vindication of his vision which the overthrow of the Wall represented ('From Total War to Democratic Peace: Exterminism and Historical Pacifism', in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 250. For E.P. Thompson's own comment, see 'Ends and Histories' in Mary Kaldor (ed.) Europe from Below (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 7-26. We do not have to substitute a 'peace movements' explanation of the end of the Cold War for more conventional accounts, to acknowledge the significant roles which the peace and democratic movements played.
5. Bruce Cumings has argued that the Korean reckoning of 1995 'ultimately went beyond anything in the global transition from authoritarianism that the world has witnessed in the last decade' and that 'the contribution of protest to Korean democracy cannot be overstated': 'Warfare, Security and Democracy in East Asia', in Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey (eds.), Democracy, Liberalism and War: Rethinking the Democratic Peace Debate (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner, 2000.) This was written before the Indonesian movement really developed.
6. In a more fundamental historical sense, of course, the contemporary wave of democratic revolution is a continuation of the democratic revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ultimately, neither the proletarian nor the militarized form of the 'socialist' revolution succeeded in surpassing the scope of the democratic revolution in which socialism originated. With their failures, we have been returned to historic democratic tasks.
7. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1968), p. 3.
8. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
9. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 459, quoted with approval by Robert Cox, 'Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an Alternative World Order', Review of International Studies, 25:1, p. 3.
10. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 459, quoted with approval by Robert Cox, 'Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an Alternative World Order', Review of International Studies, 25:1, p. 3.
11. Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 334-5. It would be a caricature to claim that his study is based in any simple way on the assumptions elaborated in the penultimate paragraph. But his failure to deal seriously with the democratic revolutions of our times seems to owe something to each of them.
12. Perry Anderson, 'Renewals', New Left Review II:1, 2000, p. 15.
13. Ibid., p. 16.
14. The Cold War system itself represented a substantial evolution from the inter-imperial state system of the earlier stages of modernity, under the impact of world war and the revolutionary wave of 1944-45. I deal with these issues in Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 3.
15. Worldwide relations are thus an extensive form of what are sometimes called transnational relations.
16. This is of course the most common definition, as in Anthony Giddens' assertion that 'globalization can ... be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.' The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 64.
17. A fuller discussion of these distinctions will be found in chapter 1 of The Global State. For an earlier, although in some ways quite different, discussion of globality see Martin Albrow, The Global Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
18. A fuller discussion of these distinctions will be found in chapter 1 of The Global State. For an earlier, although in some ways quite different, discussion of globality see Martin Albrow, The Global Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
19. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 130-2: this term makes partial sense, at least, of trends in places as far apart as South Africa and Britain, although both trend and concept are far from uncontested.
20. This increasingly notorious term is, of course, from Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
21. Of course, many leaders of secessionist movements are opportunist in their espousal of democracy; left to their own devices they often introduce new forms of national and other oppression.
22. See the classic modern study of these issues, in the context of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions: Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); also Halliday, Revolution.
23. See the classic modern study of these issues, in the context of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions: Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); also Halliday, Revolution.
24. Mary Kaldor, Old and New Wars: Organized Warfare in the Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
25. Clearly authoritarian, quasi-imperial states come in many shapes and sizes, and I do not intend to suggest a simple equivalence between the states listed here. There are (highly variable) reform processes, as well as repression, in some of these states. Nevertheless there are important commonalities in their responses to democratic movements and, especially, movements of national minorities. These lead to a growing contrast between major non-Western centres of state power and the democratized West, where secessionist movements are increasingly managed within processes of internationalization. I develop this contrast below, and more fully in ch. 7 of The Global Slate.
26. The following discussion is based on preliminary work for a forthcoming book on war and genocide: see, for example, 'On slaughter', http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hafa3/slaughter.htm.
27. For the full definition see Roy Guttman and David Rieff (eds.), Crimes of War (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 142.
28. Lucy Davidowicz, The War against the Jews (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
29. This form of war could also be said to be genocidal in the sense that the destruction of civilian populations was intended, as a means if not an end in itself, and it resulted in indiscriminate mass killing. The separation of genocide from such 'strategic' slaughter was another problematic element in the 1948 genocide convention, but one which I cannot explore further here.
30. See Michael Mann, 'Authoritarian and Liberal Militarism: A Contribution from Historical Sociology' in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
31. Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, quoted by Ralph Miliband, 'Marx and the State', in Miliband and John Saville (eds.), The Socialist Register 1965 (London: Merlin, 1965), p. 290.
32. Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, quoted by Ralph Miliband, 'Marx and the State', in Miliband and John Saville (eds.), The Socialist Register 1965 (London: Merlin, 1965), p. 290.
33. I prefer this term to looser concepts like 'international organization' and 'global governance' because there is a definite development of state-level international institutions and governance, which is closely linked to the general internationalization of national state institutions centred on the West. If it is true that non-state institutions also play parts in global governance, it is not true that these constitute 'governance without government', as the collection edited by James N. Rosenau and Otto Cziempel, Governance without Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) suggests.
34. In this sense the contemporary political West only partially coincides with the historic territories of Western civilization, and we should avoid collapsing these two concepts into each other.
35. John Major on ITN, 4 April 1991, quoted in Martin Shaw, Civil Society and Media in Global Crises: Representing Distant Violence (London: Pinter, 1996), p. 89.
36. Piers Robinson criticizes my Civil Society and Media for 'a failure to analyse the policy process itself'. As a result, he argues, I tend 'to privilege the role of the media while ignoring other possible motivations for intervention.' 'The CNN Effect: Can the News Media Drive Foreign Policy?', Review of International Studies, 25:2 (1999), p. 306. Since I did not claim to analyse the policy process, I cannot disagree that other factors may have been involved in this. However Robinson himself fails to take the opportunity to demonstrate that 'other possible motivations' were more important in Kurdistan than the media-driven politics of the refugee crisis, which I documented. Thus his criticism remains abstract and the force of my analysis is not seriously dented.
37. Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 212.
38. See my discussion in Civil Society and Media, pp. 30-70 and 175-8.
39. For example, television coverage can both spur intervention, by highlighting atrocities, and constrain it, by threatening to show the 'body bags' of Western soldiers. See my discussion in Civil Society and Media, especially pp. 178-81.
40. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 80.
41. For a definition of the transformationist view of globalization, see David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathon Perraton, Global Transformations (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), pp. 7-10.
42. See my 'The State of Globalization', Review of International Political Economy, 4 (1998), pp. 497-512.
43. Michael Mann, 'The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing', New Left Review, 232 (1999), and The Polymorphous State and Ethnic Cleansing' in Stephen Hobden and John Hobson (eds.), Bringing Historical Sociologies into International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, forthcoming). It is important to recall that democratic elections were held in the republics of Federal Yugoslavia in 1990, after the collapse of Communist dictatorship elsewhere in east-central Europe. These elections played a critical role in the process of break-up, since now each republican elite had a national constituency to play to. The principle of electoral legitimacy was established and ethnic-nationalist parties knew that they had to maintain electoral majorities in their new statelets. This principle continued to prevail in the Dayton division of Bosnia.
44. Michael Mann, 'The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing', New Left Review, 232 (1999), and The Polymorphous State and Ethnic Cleansing' in Stephen Hobden and John Hobson (eds.), Bringing Historical Sociologies into International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, forthcoming). It is important to recall that democratic elections were held in the republics of Federal Yugoslavia in 1990, after the collapse of Communist dictatorship elsewhere in east-central Europe. These elections played a critical role in the process of break-up, since now each republican elite had a national constituency to play to. The principle of electoral legitimacy was established and ethnic-nationalist parties knew that they had to maintain electoral majorities in their new statelets. This principle continued to prevail in the Dayton division of Bosnia.
45. These trends are clearly not inevitable in a simple sense. Theoretically we can envisage other outcomes, including the break-up of the Western state. However there are strong trends towards consolidation, and earlier prophecies of disintegration from both Marxists and realists have so far proved invalid.
46. Thus the internationalized global state is developing not only at the levels of military and economic institutions, but also through the harmonization of (especially commercial) law: see Jarrod Wiener, Globalization and the Harmonization of Law (London: Pinter, 1999).
47. For a useful summary and critique see John MacMillan, 'Democracies Don't Fight: A Case of the Wrong Research Agenda', Review of International Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 275-99.
48. I have refrained prefixing 'anarchism' with the ugly 'neo-' by which new variants of old positions are routinely labelled in International Relations (compare neo-realism, neo-Gramscianism, and so on).
49. The totemic attention given to one or two thinkers, like Anthony Giddens, has hardly reversed the deep-rooted divorce of politics from academia that has developed over decades.
50. William Wallace, 'Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice in International Relations', Review of International Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 301-21, and criticism by Ken Booth, 'Discussion: A Reply to Wallace', Review of International Studies, 23 (1997), pp. 371-7.
51. William Wallace, 'Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice in International Relations', Review of International Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 301-21, and criticism by Ken Booth, 'Discussion: A Reply to Wallace', Review of International Studies, 23 (1997), pp. 371-7.
52. Steve Smith, 'Positivism and Beyond' in Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11-46.
53. Michael Nicholson, 'The Uses of International Relations', plenary lecture, British International Studies Association Annual Conference, Sussex, 1998.
54. Kenneth Waltz, The Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979).
55. See R.B.J. Walker, Inside-Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
56. Mann, The Sources; the 'frontier' idea is from James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
57. Mann, The Sources; the 'frontier' idea is from James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
58. See my polemic, 'The Historical Sociology of the Future', against John Hobson's article 'The Historical Sociology of the State and the State of Historical Sociology in International Relations', Review of International Political Economy, 5:2, pp. 321-6 and 284-320 respectively.
59. See my polemic, 'The Historical Sociology of the Future', against John Hobson's article 'The Historical Sociology of the State and the State of Historical Sociology in International Relations', Review of International Political Economy, 5:2, pp. 321-6 and 284-320 respectively.
60. 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it', Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI, in Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965), p. 653.
61. 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it', Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI, in Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965), p. 653.
62. See Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).
63. I have always found puzzling this tendency towards 'anarchophilia' (the term is from Barry Buzan and Richard Little, 'International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations' in Hobden and Hobson, Bringing Historical Sociologies into International Relations).
64. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977); see also Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977). Wight's historically rich writing on state systems has set one parameter of the Sussex tradition of international relations. Another is the interest in political economy and civil society, for which see, for example, the essays by current and recent colleagues in my edited book, Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics and Agency (London: Routledge, 1999).
65. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977); see also Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977). Wight's historically rich writing on state systems has set one parameter of the Sussex tradition of international relations. Another is the interest in political economy and civil society, for which see, for example, the essays by current and recent colleagues in my edited book, Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics and Agency (London: Routledge, 1999).
66. Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977); see also Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977). Wight's historically rich writing on state systems has set one parameter of the Sussex tradition of international relations. Another is the interest in political economy and civil society, for which see, for example, the essays by current and recent colleagues in my edited book, Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics and Agency (London: Routledge, 1999).
67. Notably, Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
68. Ken Booth, 'Human Wrongs and International Relations', International Affairs, 71, 1995, pp. 103-26. For a further exploration of these issues inspired by critical reflection on Booth's ideas, see the essays in Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler (eds.), Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
69. Ken Booth, 'Human Wrongs and International Relations', International Affairs, 71, 1995, pp. 103-26. For a further exploration of these issues inspired by critical reflection on Booth's ideas, see the essays in Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler (eds.), Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
70. Ken Booth, 'Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice', International Affairs, 67:3 (1991), p. 540.
71. Cox, 'Civil Society', p. 28.
72. For critiques, see Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1996) and Held et al., Global Transformations.
73. For critiques, see Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1996) and Held et al., Global Transformations.
74. Cox, 'Civil Society', p. 13.
75. Shaw, Civil Society and Media, pp. 30-70 and 175-8.
76. It is a theoretical curiosity that new 'Gramscian' thought should have been caught in the political economy/civil society trap. Gramsci's own work was clearly all too aware of the state as the ultimately defining context of political change. For a parallel argument see Randall Germain and Michael Kenny, 'The New Gramscians', Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-28.
77. Cox, 'Civil Society', p. 12.
78. Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
79. Falk, pp. 150-51.
80. In effect, they have abandoned the state to realism - a serious mistake because realists have never had more than a superficial understanding of these problems. I have developed this argument more fully in 'The State of International Relations', in Sarah Owen-Vandersluit (ed.), State and Identity Construction in International Relations (London: Macmillan, 2000, forthcoming).
81. James N. Rosenau and Otto Czempiel (eds.), Governance without Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
82. Tribunal Update, 128 (London: Institute for War and Peace Reporting), 9 June 1999, www.iwpr.net.
83. The title of the Special Issue, New Left Review, 234 (1999) on Kosovo.
84. A prominent representative of this point of view is John Pilger. See, inter alia, 'Revealed: The Amazing NATO Plan, Tabled at Rambouillet, to Occupy Yugoslavia', New Statesman, 17 May 1999, p. 17.
85. Edward Said, 'Protecting the Kosovors?', New Left Review, 234 (1999), p. 75.
86. Edward Said, 'Hey, Mister, You Want Dirty Book?', London Review of Books, 21:19, 30 September 1999, p. 54, reviewing Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999).
87. Edward Said, 'Hey, Mister, You Want Dirty Book?', London Review of Books, 21:19, 30 September 1999, p. 54, reviewing Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999).
88. Edward Said, 'Protecting the Kosovars?', New Left Review, 234 (1999), p. 75.
89. There are of course imperial (and neo-colonial) echoes in the new globalism: but it is limiting to ascribe these to continuing American, rather than broader pan-Western, dominance, and even more to ignore the new, partial congruence between Western state interests and worldwide democratic movements.
90. This term is used by John MacLean, 'Towards a Political Economy of Agency in Contemporary International Relations', in Martin Shaw (ed.), Politics and Globalisation (London: Routledge, 1999, forthcoming).
91. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994).
92. Even from a narrow juridical viewpoint it is questionable if the Kosovo case can be regarded as substantially different from that of East Timor. First, Kosovo's incorporation in Serbia earlier this century had doubtful legitimacy. Second, international decisions to recognize constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia as legitimate bases for independent states, and to exclude Kosovo (an autonomous province with its own representative in the federal presidency) appear arbitrary. Third, the abuse of 'sovereignty' and constitutional order by the Serbian-Yugoslav state machine, in flagrant violation of international agreements and principles to which it had subscribed, can be held to invalidate its claims to authority.
93. Yugoslavia held, of course, a special place in 'third camp' left-wing affections as a state between East and West which had long developed its own more market- and worker-control-oriented model of socialism.
94. See for example, Tariq Ali, 'Springtime for NATO', New Left Review, 234, March-April 1999, pp. 62-72.
95. For an interesting reflection of this dimension, see the interview with Harold Pinter, The Observer, 5 September 1999.
96. Said, 'Protecting the Kosovors', p. 75.
97. For a representative collection, Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (eds.), Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (London: Pluto, 2000), passim.
98. See William Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
99. The Eritrea-Ethiopia war that began in 1998 is a seemingly textbook case of this problem.
100. David Held, Democracy and Global Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
101. Likewise, the internal politics of Western elites matter. It makes a difference to halt the regression to isolationist nationalism in American politics. It matters that the European Union should develop into a democratic polity with a globally responsible direction. It matters that the British state, still a pivot of the Western system of power, stays in the hands of outward-looking new social democrats rather than inward-looking old conservatives.
102. One of the most troubling aspects of the West's handling of Kosovo during the 1990s was the failure to respond to peaceful movements for reform, and in contrast the success of the Kosovo Liberation Army in helping to provoke Western military and political intervention. This was a negative lesson for the new century, after the unprecedentedly peaceful revolutions of 1989.