The concept of solidarity in the study of world politics: Towards a critical theoretic understanding

Review of International Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 693-713

  Weber, Martin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34848836386     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210507007735     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. My thanks to one of the anonymous referees for pointing out that my originally rather glib dismissal of the GCS literature in particular was unsustainable. Among the former, M. Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003):
2. John Keane, Global Civil Society! (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003):
3. as well as various contributions in the annual Global Civil Society Yearbook stand out. Contributions among the latter include M. Keck and K. Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998);
4. and. much more theoretically thorough, and oriented by a rare commitment to an action-theoretic outlook, Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
5. On the latter, see for instance, T. Teivainen, 'The World Social Forum and Global Democratization: Learning from Porto Allegre', Third World Quarterly 23:4 (2002), pp. 621-32.
6. I have discussed this in more detail in M. Weber, 'Alter-Globalization' and Social Movements: Towards Understanding Transnational Politicization';
7. in P. Hayden and S. El-Ojeili, Confronting Globalisation-Humanity, Justice, and the Renewal of Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). There, I suggest that social theoretically embellished normative assessment of developments in civil society is inextricably linked with accounts of (the) public sphere(s). Lacking a dynamic conception such as this, the GCS literature remains continuously vulnerable to the criticisms that it simply idealises the conflictual sphere of civil society.
8. Ultimately, my critical take on the GCS literature is informed by a re-reading of Hegel's critical theory of civil society, which also informed Marx' conceptualisation of the problems of liberalism. In Hegel's Philosophy of Right, we encounter civil society as the realm of the pursuit of particular interests, conceived in the image of classical political economy; and while Hegel considers thefreedoms attendant to civil society necessary in the context of modern society, he is quite clear that they are insufficient for the realisation of freedom (which he understands inter-subjectively) - not least because, according to his analysis, the pursuit of particular interests produces poverty. This account underpins the critical sting in an argument like Justin Rosenberg's about the 'Empire of Civil Society'. I argue this in more detail in an unpublished conference paper; M. Weber, 'Hegel Beyond the State?'"(ISA 2007).
9. Again, thanks to an anonymous referee for challenging me to respond to this.
10. H. Brunkhorst, Solidaritaet (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004).
11. For this argument, I skip over significant contributions to broader concerns regarding collective agency in world politics, such as the 'global civil society', or 'activists across borders' literatures. For the main part, these arguments are not developed with much commitment to advancing or problematising conceptions of solidarity with reference broader theoretical frameworks, which is more my concern in this article.
12. 'Sta te-level', as opposed to either individual- or systems-levels.
13. It is clear that Bull's realist proclivities prompted him to remain politically sceptical of the scope for 'solidarism' as an expression of a 'Kantian' transformation of interstate relations from rivalry to friendship. The term is thus used in intrinsically evaluative terms in Bull's work, replicating in a devolved form the 'realism/idealism' constellation. Buzan aims to steer clear of such implicit value judgements, and promotes the analytical use of the 'solidarism'/'pluralism' distinction: The task is thus reformulated as a sociological one, seeking to identify the conditions in which value convergences lead to solidarist forms of international integration. See B. Buzan, From International to World Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
14. See also Emmanuel Adler, 'Barry Buzan's use of constructivism to reconstruct the English School: "Not all the way down" ', Millennium Journal of International Studies, 34:1 (2005), p. 174.
15. Adler, 'Barry Buzan's Use of Constructivism', p. 173.
16. Mervyn Frost. Ethics in International Relations: a Constitutive View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996):
17. Timothy Dunne and Nick Wheeler. 'Hedley Bull's Pluralism of the Intellect and Solidarism of the Will', International Affairs, 72:1 (1996), pp. 309-23.
18. Martin Hollis, The Philosophy of Social Science: an Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
19. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
20. Peter Lawler, 'The Good State: In Praise of "Classical" Internationalism', Review of International Studies 31:3 (2005). pp. 427-50;
21. Barry Buzan. 'Rethinking the Solidarist-Pluralist Debate in English School Theory', draft paper (2002). Buzan, From International to World Society.
22. Dietrich Jung, 'The Political Sociology of World Society', European Journal of International Relations, 7:4 (2003), pp. 443-74;
23. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Politica! Community (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
24. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
25. In exemplary fashion, one may think here of Max Weber's analysis of'rationalisation'. See Gerth and Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958).
26. Emil Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (London: Macmillan, 1984).
27. Durkheim. The Division of Labour, pp. 76-7.
28. Buzan, 'Rethinking"; p. 14.
29. Frost, Ethics in International Relations.
30. Buzan. From International to World Society, p. 152.
31. Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community. Linklater's exploration of dialogue as the mode through which emancipatory political transformations can be secured, aligns his argument with post-metaphysical Kantian scholarship, and with reflectivist concerns in theory-building advanced from a "participant-actor' perspective. Buzan's approach, on the other hand, remains within the parameters of rationalist theory, and adopts an observers perspective on value adherence, which is supplemented with the cited heuristic of different motivations.
32. See here the parallels in Buzan's argument, particularly those regarding the potential for 'solidarism' to emerge and consolidate among 'like states'. Buzan, From International to World Society, p. 59.
33. Durkheim, The Division of Labour, pp. xxxiv-xxxvi.
34. Micha Brumlik, "Souveraenitaet- der lange Weg zum kurzen Abschied' in Hauke Brunkhorst and Peter Niesen, Das Recht der Republik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999).
35. Ibid. p. 68 (my translation).
36. A similar point emerges out of the recent argument by Quentin Skinner, who critically reviews attempts to cast Hobbes' thought as an early formulation of a theory of representative politics; Quentin Skinner, 'Hobbes on Representation' European Journal of Philosophy, 13:2 (2005), pp. 154-88.
37. Reconstructing Hobbes' defence of absolutism out of the conceptual resources of methodological individualism and sovereign authority, Skinner argues that it is apposite to read Leviathan as a partisan political tract in a context of a wider debate on sovereignty and its limits (p. 154). As in Brumlik's contribution, we are faced with the heterodox observation that Hobbes, contrary to his avowed status in the canon as a key inaugurator of modern political theory and philosophy, in fact found common cause both politically and conceptually with those defending sovereignty from distinctly theological premises.
38. This tallies with Buzan's insistence in the compatibility of his reconstruction of ES theory as grand theory with Waltz's neo-realism, and particularly the latter's stress on homogenising forces of 'socialisation and competition". Buzan, From International to World Society, pp. 60-1.
39. Ibid., pp. 24-5.
40. These criticisms are familiar from the discussion of Parsons' functionalist social theory. Parsons had explored society from both, action-theoretic and systems-theoretic premises, before opting ultimately for the latter. To Parsons, as to Buzan, 'social structures' needed to be accounted for in terms irreducible to methodological individualist premises. Since Parsons wrote, however, this dichotomy has undergone fundamental revisions, so that, when Buzan appeals to it (see Buzan, ibid, p. 58), his arguments appear anachronistic. Most constructivist work, though certainly of varying quality, has at least grappled with the 'inter-subjective turn', and begun to think through its implications for social theory generally, and the conceptualisation of corporate identities, agency, and socio-political structures specifically. It is not a strength of Buzan's approach (though symptomatic), when, confronted with Luhmann's modern systems-functionalism, he simply refuses to engage with it because it is 'too alien to help much in thinking about world society in an English School context' (ibid., p. 72). In general, it is striking how much Buzan's strategy of argumentation reflects that of Auguste Comte, who ordered intellectual engagement with the world into a series of binaries, with the 'positive' opposing the 'speculative'.
41. I hasten to add that 'societalisation' should be understood as an often conflict-fraught, contradictory, and sometimes overtly coercive process, rather than merely a process of producing social cohesion and consonance, in the way implied by, for instance, the expanding literature on 'norm socialisation'. The identification of forms of societalisation, or their 'sites' (as, for instance, in the Global Civil Society literature) via sociological observation cannot simply be read as supplying adequate normative arguments (see, on the latter, Weber, 'Alter-Globalization'. The moral import of such patterns can, however, be understood to be integral, as the section on Honneth below indicates.
42. One of the classical formulations of this remains, of course, Isaiah Berlin's essay on positive and negative liberties: Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
43. See also the critique of the division, and its conceptual implications in C. B. MacPherson, 'Berlin's Division of Liberty", in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 95-119.
44. On the critique of the specific conception of the individual, and its place in the political discourse of liberalism, see C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
45. See n. 25.
46. Buzan, 'Rethinking', pp. 15-18.
47. Emblematic for such an approach, though more in the tradition of sociological Marxism, rather than NG theory, is for instance Benno Teschke's path-breaking study The Myth of 1648 (London: Verso, 2003), which not only questions the conventional historiography of the discipline of IR, but asks the far more important question of how the formation of the modern international system can be explained.
48. See Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, "Introduction: International Relations as Political Theory", Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8:4 (2005), pp. 383-93.
49. Adam David Morton, "A Double Reading of Gramsci: Beyond the Logic of Contingency', ibid, pp. 439-53.
50. See, for instance, Kees Van der Piji, Transnational Social Classes (London: Routledge);
51. Mark Rupert. Producing Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
52. and, critically Christoph Scherrer, 'Neo-gramscianische Interpretationen internationaler Beziehungen', in Hirschfeld (ed.). Gramsci-Perspektiven (Hamburg: Argument), pp. 160-74.
53. See particularly the debate between Germaine and Kenny on the one hand, and Murphy on the other over whether Gramsci's thought remains intractably bound to his historical situation and context. Randal Germain and Michael Kenny, 'Engaging Gramsci: international relations theory and the New Gramscians'. Review of International Studies, 24:1 (1998), pp. 3-21.
54. Craig C. Murphy, 'Understanding Gramsci: Understanding IR' Review of International Studies, 24:3 (1998), pp. 3-21.
55. See, for instance, A. Honneth, 'Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to Critical Questions", Inquiry, 45 (2002), pp. 499-520;
56. also, for a broader statement on the relevance, problems, and potentials of the project of a critical social theoretic inquiry into 'pathologies' of modernity, A. Honneth, 'A Social Pathology of Reason: on the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory', in F. Rush (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
57. See, for instance, Jeff Checkel, 'Social Constructivisms in Global and European Politics: A Review Essay", Review of International Studies, 30:2 (2004), pp. 229-44.
58. Checkel understands Habermas' communicative action theorem in terms of 'personified argumentative positions', and alleges that this unduly narrows the constructivist interest in motifs and motivations (p. 240). This criticism is actually not sustainable in the way Checkel thinks, though it is understandable in that it is developed with reference to derived versions of Habermas' theory as they have currency in IR: see, for instance, Habermas' discussion of G. H. Mead, in Juergen Habermas, 'Individuation through Socialisation', in Habermas (ed.). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, which clarifies the social theoretic aspect of what is, in Habermas' theory of communicative action, a project directed atclarifying the normative foundations of critical reasoning. Nevertheless, Checkel's hunch is correct insofar that the discourse theory of morality, which Habermas develops out of his exploration of communicative action, falls short of providing adequate resources for theoretically capturing a larger range of registers of morally inflected social and political interaction, than merely cognitive ones oriented towards clarifying and justifying generalisable norms through the discourse of critical reason.
59. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle, pp. 7-10. The break with methodological individualism is not unique to Honneth's approach, of course, though his work is certainly the most phenomenologically circumspect among this group. It underlines the degree to which IR-theory is given to idiosyncrasies, when Buzan, for instance, asserts that the "the only reason to hold the cosmopolitan position is (...) a dyed-in-the-wool methodological individualism', an assessment which cannot be reconciled with state-of-the art contemporary social theory, nor with the defence of cosmopolitanism offered within IR by, for instance, Linklater.
60. S. Bernstein problematised this split with reference to Habermas' language-philosophical reform of Critical Theory in Recovering Ethical Life.
61. This conception of a developmental logic in the historical unfolding of recognition-based moral registers is, of course, committed to weak teleology, and as such in need of further defence. Honneth provides some arguments in favour in the context of his explorations of developmental psychology; see, for instance, A. Honneth, 'Grounding recognition: A rejoinder to critical questions'; Inquiry, 45:4 (2002), pp. 499-519;
62. and also Honneth, 'Facetten des vorsozialen Selbst: eine Erwiderung auf Joel Whitebook', Psyche, 56 (2002), pp. 1-19.
63. For critical accounts of the impact and disciplinary consequences of the latter, see. for instance, Heloise Weber, 'Reconstituting the Third World', Third World Quarterly, 25:1 (2004), pp. 187-206.
64. See, for example, David Campbell, 'Why fight? Humanitarianism, Principles and Post-structuralism', Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 27:3 (1998), pp. 497-521.
65. Juergen Haacke, 'The Frankfurt School and International Relations: On the Centrality of Recognition', Review of International Studies, 31:1 (2005). pp. 181-94.
66. Honneth, The Struggle, p. 129.
67. It might be noted here that Honneth's reorientation of 'critical social theory with normative intent' in terms of a carefully integrated theory of social struggle also carries with it an answer to the perennial problem of Kantian cosmopolitan thought, namely the 'motivation problem".
68. Honneth, The Struggle, p. 129.