Unveiling the 'international': Process, identity and alterity

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 741-759

  Guillaume, Xavier ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA   (Switzerland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36248980532     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298070350030501     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. I would like thank Matteo Gianni and Alexander Wendt for conversations that have helped shape the ideas behind this article. I would also like to thank Fiona Adamson, David Blaney and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier version of this article.
2. Following the now established convention, I will use by convenience the idiom 'IR' to designate the discipline of international relations. I would like to note at the outset, however, that I consider international relations to be primarily a field open to interdisciplinary exchanges rather than a circumscribed discipline.
3. See, for instance, the landmark essay by Richard K. Ashley, 'The Poverty of Neorealism', in Neorealism and its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 290-2.
4. See, Lars-Erik Cederman and Christopher Daase, 'Endogenizing Corporate Identities: The Next Step in Constructivist ER Theory', European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 1 (2003);
5. Xavier Guillaume, 'Foreign Policy and the Politics of Alterity: A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 1 (2002);
6. Xavier Guillaume, 'Reflexivity and Subjectivity: A Dialogical Perspective for and on International Relations Theory', Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research 3, no. 3 (2002);
7. Patrick T. Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, 'Relations before States: Substance, Process and the Study of World Politics', European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 3 (1999).
8. I understand alterity to simply mean other self-understandings/ representations in regard to a specific self-understanding/ representation. The concept 'identity' itself is highly problematic as it refers to a very wide range of referents and conceptions. I take as a principle that 'identities' are socially constructed in their 'trans-actions' (more on this below) with alterity; see, Xavier Guillaume, A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations: Politics of Alterity in Japanese History (Geneva: University of Geneva, 2006);
9. Guillaume, 'Foreign Policy and the Politics of Alterity'. Privileging the term alterity over difference is also to reflect on the fact that difference implicitly or even explicitly refers to a 'concrete' other possessing an existential reality. However, this would completely occult the fact that an 'identity' can be constituted in relation to a certain temporality or, also,vis-à-vis imagined others.
10. Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996);
11. Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). While it is often assumed that process philosophy is a synonym of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy and its followers, it should not, however, lead to the conclusion that process philosophy is to be reduced to the latter as to do so would limit the potential of a general approach to a specific author or articulation.
12. Patrick Jackson and Dan Nexon's 'Relations before States' provide an extended and rather similar account, yet less critical, of Rescher's reading of process philosophy.
13. Rescher, Process Metaphysics, 34.
14. Rescher, Process Philosophy, 22.
15. Rescher, Process Metaphysics, 38. The notion of causality here has to be taken rather abstractedly and should not be set in relation to a General Linear Reality model dominant in 'positivist' social sciences as depicted by Andrew Abbott;
16. see Andrew Abbott, 'Transcending General Linear Reality', Sociological Theory 6, no. 2 (1988).
17. See Rescher, Process Philosophy, 30-1.
18. John W. Lango, 'Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Book Review)', Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 32, no. 4 (1996): 690.
19. Inter-actionist perspectives are considering that 'thing is balanced against thing in causal interconnection'; see John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, 'Knowing and the Known', in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991 [1949]), 101. As Mustafa Emirbayer has noted, according to these perspectives, 'the relevant action takes place among the entities themselves. Entities remain fixed and unchanging throughout such inter-action, each independent of the existence of the others'. In other words, they participate in a 'variable-centred approach' to social life;
20. see Mustafa Emirbayer, 'Manifesto for a Relational Sociology', American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 2 (1997): 285-6, original emphasis.
21. Abbott, 'Transcending General Linear Reality', 170.
22. See Dewey and Bentley, 'Knowing and the Known', 101-2. According to Emirbayer, trans-actionist approaches are approaches for which 'the very terms or units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction. The later, seen as a dynamic, unfolding process, becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves';
23. see Emirbayer, 'Manifesto for a Relational Sociology', 287.
24. Self-actionist approaches are approaches in which 'things are viewed as acting under their own powers'; see Dewey and Bentley, 'Knowing and the Known', 101.
25. See Lango, 'Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Book Review)': 690-2.
26. In turn, these subordinate processes might be superordinate in relation to other events, occurrences or relations. For instance, citizenship might be seen as a superordinate process composed of subordinates such as politics of recognition or other forms of institutional acts participating in the constitution of citizenship as a process.
27. Rescher, Process Philosophy, 26.
28. Dorothy Mary Emmet, The Passage of Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 6.
29. Ibid., 6-7.
30. As quoted in ibid., 6.
31. See John Gerard Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (London: Routledge, 1998), 22.
32. See Alexander Wendt, 'Collective Identity Formation and the International State', American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1994),
33. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
34. See Guillaume, 'A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations', and Himadeep Muppidi, The Politics of the Global (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
35. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 176-7.
36. See as well the contributions in Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
37. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), ch. 1,
38. Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge, 2004).
39. See Peter Sahlins, 'The Nation in the Village: State-Building and Communal Struggles in the Catalan Borderland during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', The Journal of Modern History 60, no. 2 (1988).
40. Norbert Elias, What is Sociology? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 112-16.
41. On boundaries as processes, see Andrew Abbott, 'Things of Boundaries', Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995).
42. See Didier Bigo and R.B.J. Walker, 'International, Political, Sociology', International Political Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007).
43. Indeed, one nexus is not exclusive of the other while they are not necessarily linked together analytically. Some analysis might want them to overlap as is the case of critical IPE, which defines IPE as 'a particular cultural form characterised by an ongoing attempt to mediate the opposition between the principles of equality and social hierarchy and between identity and difference through the staging of competitions'; see Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference, 130.
44. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 11.
45. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990),
46. Cynthia Weber, 'Performative States', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 1 (1998).
47. Margaret R. Somers, 'The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach' Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 607.
48. Ibid., 616-17.
49. See Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 22-3,
50. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity, Ethnonationalism in Comparative Perspective (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), 3-8.
51. Somers, 'The Narrative Constitution of Identity': 617.
52. It should be noted, however, that the idea of a hypergood should not be seen as a return to a substantialist view of identity. A hypergood is a horizon which might determine, influence or override other horizons which do not have this capacity, in return, for this hypergood.
53. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63.
54. A distinction is to be made between dialogic and dialogical approaches to 'identity'; while the former refers to the idea of dialogue as an exchange between interlocutors and concentrates on the normative problem of reciprocity and recognition, the latter is to be situated ontologically before these important concerns as it primarily focuses on the characterisation of the processes, the transactions, constituting, performing, and transforming an identity in its necessary relations to alterity; see Guillaume, 'A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations'.
55. Ibid., Guillaume, 'Foreign Policy and the Politics of Alterity'.
56. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. extended edition (London: Verso, 1991), 6, emphasis added.
57. See Xavier Guillaume, 'Misdirected Understandings. Narrative Matrices in the Japanese Politics of Alterity toward the West', Japanstudien: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Instituts für Japanstudien 15 (2003).
58. As quoted in Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identities, and Change (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 32.
59. See Elias, What is Sociology?
60. Emirbayer, 'Manifesto for a Relational Sociology': 291.
61. See, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l'action (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 53-57,
62. Peter Digeser, 'The Fourth Face of Power', The Journal of Politic 54, no. 4 (1992),
63. Michel Foucault, 'Le sujet et le pouvoir', in Dits et Ecrits, 1976-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001 (1982)).
64. See Guillaume, 'A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations'.
65. Barry Hindess, 'Divide and Rule. The International Character of Modern Citizenship', European Journal of Social Theory 1, no. 1 (1998): 67.
66. See, for instance, Ibid,
67. Engin F. Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002),
68. Ruth Lister, 'Citizenship and Difference: Towards a Differentiated Universalism', European Journal of Social Theory 1, no. 1 (1998).
69. See, Engin F. Isin and Patricia K. Wood, Citizenship and Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1999),
70. Gérard Noiriel, État, nation et immigration: vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris: Belin, 2001), 188-90.
71. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 59.
72. See Isin and Wood, Citizenship and Identity.
73. Ibid., 155-60.
74. Ibid., 154.
75. See Wolfram Kaiser, 'Vive la France! Vive la République? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris 1855-1900', National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999),
76. Noiriel, État, nation et immigration,
77. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français. La société civile contre le jacobinisme: de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
78. See Noiriel, État, nation et immigration, ch. 4.
79. Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français.
80. Noiriel, État, nation et immigration.
81. See Matteo Gianni, 'I limiti del repubblicanismo francese come modello di gestione del multiculturalismo', Unpublished Manuscript (2004).
82. Bernard Stasi, Commission de réflexion sur l'application du principe de laïcité dans la République. Rapport au Président de la République (Paris: La Documentation Française/lesrapports. ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/BRP /034000725/0000. pdf, last consulted 05/18/2007, 2003), 36. It is also interesting to note that non-institutional production emerging from the public sphere was institutionalised by the French polity's apparatus. Indeed, it is interesting to note the place intellectuals took in the public debate, and in the justification of politics of alterity, both before and, interestingly, after the publication of the Report to the President of the Republic, which outlined different possible actions that the French government could undertake in face of religious demands for recognition; a report in which those same intellectuals were participating as contributors and interlocutors.
83. See Matteo Gianni and Xavier Guillaume, 'Unveiling Citizens: Veiling Democracy?' (forthcoming).
84. Stasi, 'Commission de réflexion sur l'application du principe de laïcité dans la République: Rapport au Président de la République', 32-6.
85. See 'Loi no 2004-228 du 15 mars 2004 encadrant, en application du principe de laïcité, le port de signes ou de tenues manifestant une appartenance religieuse dans les écoles, colIèges et lycées publics' (www.legifrance.gouv.fr/WAspad /Un TexteDeJorf?numjo=MENX0400001L, last consulted 05/18/2007).
86. Ibid., 18.
87. See Matteo Gianni, 'The Democratic Integration of Difference: Reflections on the Paradoxes of the French Republican Model of Citizenship', (forthcoming).
88. See Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj, Rapport au politique des Français issus de l'immigration (Paris: CEVIPOF, Sciences PO, 2005).
89. For a similar argument through the analysis of national myths see Arash Abizadeh, 'Historical Truth, National Myths and Liberal Democracy: On the Coherence of Liberal Nationalism', The Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2004).
90. See Centre d'études sur les conflits (ed.), Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (In)security Games (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006).
91. On securitisation, see Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CA.: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
92. David Weberman, 'Cambridge Changes Revisited: Why Certain Relational Changes are Indispensable', Dialectica 53, no. 2 (1999): 140.
93. David Weberman, 'Heidegger's Relationalism, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2001): 109.
94. For a discussion of the distinction between identity as an intrinsic or extrinsic property of a social continuant and its implications for IR theory, see Guillaume, 'A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations'.
95. See Ole Wæver, 'European Security Identities', Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 1 (1996).
96. Jean-Michel Berthelot, L'intelligence du social: le pluralisme explicatif en sociologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990), 23.