Back to the Kantian 'Idea for a Universal History'? Overcoming Eurocentric accounts of the international problematic

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 575-595

  Patomäki, Heikki ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

^b RMIT UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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EID: 36249016972     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298070350031201     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. The title is derived from Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay 'Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent', available, for instance, in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. T. Humphrey, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 29-40. In that essay, Kant argued (i) that also because of technological developments, humanity constitutes a single community of fate and (ii) that universal learning and progress is possible, however difficult and fragile. Thus humanity should eventually overcome the problem of war and achieve a universal civil society. Research for this paper has been supported by the Academy of Finland. Kirsi Reyes has provided research assistance. I am also grateful for several insightful comments by Stephen Chan, Tapani Hietaniemi, Jamie Morgan, Juha Sihvola, two anonymous referees and the Editors. They bear no responsibility for the final outcome.
2. The main exceptions are a few rare attempts to bring in Islamic or Chinese thinking about diplomacy, war and peace, but these books are not widely read or cited. See, e.g,. James T. Johnson and John Kelsay (eds), Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991);
3. Stephen Chan and Peter G. Mandaville (eds), The Zen of International Relations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
4. Of the European origins of US American political realism, see Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
5. Morgenthau's main work is Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations. The Struggle for Power and Peace, 3rd edition, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
6. However, his perhaps most characteristically European work in English is Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).
7. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
8. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974);
9. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System 3: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989).
10. See R. B. J. Walker (ed.), Culture, Ideology, and World Order, (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1984).
11. Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy and History', trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 76-100.
12. Derridean deconstruction has been applied to international theory most notably by Richard Ashley, 'Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17, no. 2 (1988): 227-62;
13. and R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14. For very helpful discussions on the logic and problems of the use of counterfactuals in historical explanations, see Jon Elster, Logic and Society (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), 175-218;
15. and Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (eds), Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
16. For a discussion, see Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality (London: Verso, 1989), 20-36.
17. For criticism of the categorical rejection of the possibility of (any) meaningful predictions, also on the grounds that planning must be possible, see Petter Nzess, 'Prediction, Regressions and Critical Realism', Journal of Critical Realism 3, no. 1 (2004): 133-64.
18. Naess maintains that certain qualitative and rudimentary predictions concerning the aggregate-level effects of particular policies and measures are, and must be, possible. In a similar fashion, Pertti Töttö argues against the clear-cut dichotomy between open and closed systems and makes the reasonable point that almost all systems - including our solar system, the object of Newton's mechanical theories - are in fact situated somewhere between absolutely open and absolutely closed systems, i.e. they are in fact closed to a varying degree. We should therefore always expect to also find some regularities. Pertti Töttö, Syvällistä ja pinnallista. Teoria, empiria ja kausaalisuus sosiaalitutkimuksessa (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2004), 269-84.
19. For a more detailed ontological discussion on time and temporality, see Heikki Patomäki, 'Realist Ontology for Futures Studies', Journal of Critical Realism 5, no.1 (2006): 1-31.
20. See Philip E. Tetlock, 'Theory-Driven Reasoning about Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures in World Politics: Are We Prisoners of Our Preconceptions?, American Journal of Political Science 43, no.2 (1999): 335-66.;
21. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
22. Tony Lawson, 'Social Explanation and Popper, in Popper and Economic Methodology: Contemporary Challenges, ed. Tom Boylan and Paschal O'Gorman (London: Routledge, 2007).
23. Kant's thinking on the issues of peace and war culminated in his 'To Perpetual Peace. A Philosophical Sketch~, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. T. Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 107-43.
24. This section draws on ch. 1 of Heikki Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2002).
25. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
26. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2nd edn (New York: Harper Row, 1946), 22-88. Carr was not saying that claims of the harmony of interests are always totally false. On p.81 for instance he wrote that 'in the nineteenth century, the British manufacturer or merchant, having discovered that laissez-faire promoted his own prosperity, was sincerely convinced that it also promoted British prosperity as a whole. Nor was this alleged harmony of interests between himself and the community entirely fictitious.'
27. Ibid., 208-223.
28. For further discussions on the importance of Carr's notion of peaceful changes, see Heikki Patomäki and Ole Wæver, 'Introducing Peaceful Changes', in Peaceful Changes in World Politics, ed. H. Patomäki (Tampere: TAPRI Research Report No.71, 1995), 3-27.
29. Karl W. Deutsch, Sidney A. Burrell, Robert A. Kann et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
30. For an excellent discussion, see Arend Lijphart, 'Karl W. Deutsch and the New Paradigm in International Relations', in From National Development to Global Community: Essays in Honour of Karl Deutsch, ed. R. Merritt and B. Russett (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 233-51.
31. See Patomäki, After International Relations, ch. 8.
32. Ibid., ch. 1.
33. See Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially chs 2 and 3.
34. This is one of the key points of John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
35. Andre Gunder Frank, ReORTENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
36. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
37. Although many technological breakthroughs were made in the late eighteenth century, the mobilisation of resources in the war against France inhibited investments and civilian accumulation in Britain until the 1820s. Jeffrey G. Williamson, 'Why Was British Growth so Slow during the Industrial Revolution?', The Journal of Economic History 44, no.3 (1984): 687-712.
38. See also Nicholas Crafts, 'Forging Ahead and Falling Behind: The Rise and Relative Decline of the First Industrial Nation', The Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no.2 (1998):193-210.
39. The French Revolution greatly increased the capacities of the French state, while France was also the most populous country of Europe. During the Napoleonic Wars 1804-13, some 2.4 million men were drafted into the French Army, whereas the whole population of Britain numbered fewer than 10 million. I owe this counterfactual scenario to Hui, War and State Formation, 127-36.
40. For different layers of geo-history in the causal explanation of the First World War, see ch. 4 of Heikki Patomäki (forthcoming): Political Economy of Global Security. Future Crises and Changes of Global Governance (London: Routledge, 2007).
41. In this paper I am leaving aside the role of the Arabic and Islamic world, although it was critically important in reproducing and developing the Hellenic philosophies, science and technology, making the European Renaissance possible (also the fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought many Greek texts to Italy). Suffice it to mention that both modern science and credit-money were built upon the globalisation of a Hindu-Arabic place-valued decimal number system and Arabic numerals, written into an influential book called Liber Abbaci (1202) by a Pisan mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci.
42. The authoritative source for technical achievement and scientific advance in China is the seven-volume project initiated by Joseph Needham, and which documents developments far beyond the standard accounts of gunpowder, printing, etc. (the project website is at www.nri.org.uk/science.html). However, it is also true that the exact route of many of these ideas and innovations to Europe remains uncertain; it is also possible that Europeans may have developed one or more of them also partly independently. At any rate, Europeans made a number of technical improvements in the course of adopting these technologies for their own purposes, in the context of their own customs and traditions.
43. The First (Newtonian) Law of Motion had already been formulated by the Chinese in the fourth century BC by the Mohists, but'their brilliant scientific were also largely lost and made very little lasting impact on later Chinese history. Robert K. G. Temple, China: Land of Discovery and Invention (Wellingborough: Stephens, 1986), 161. There were some related advancements in mathematics and physics also in twelfth-century China, but Chinese mathematics became more practical and down-to-earth soon after the Song and Yuan dynasties (960-1368), i.e. during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) that attempted to reduce outward orientation, and thus learning, in various ways from the fifteenth century onwards.
44. See Guo Shirong, 'The Influence of Yang Hui's Works on the Mathematical Mainstream in the Ming Dynasty', in Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, ed. A. Chan, K. Glancey and H-C. Loy (Singapore: Singapore University Press (World Scientific), 2002), 358-67. However, Leibniz, the co-discoverer of calculus, was influenced through his Chinese contacts by the idea of point-moments, infinitesimals of time, drawn from Buddhist theories of time;
45. see Susantha Goonatilake, Toward a Global Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 47. As Leibniz was more directly drawing on Eastern sources than Newton, it is relevant to note that it is the Leibnizian system of notation that is closer to the modern dy/ dx formulation than Newton's.
46. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
47. The standard Eurocentric interpretation has been defended particularly by liberal economists, sometimes relying on apparently precise quantitative evidence that is nonetheless based on qualitative judgements and estimations and usually difficult to verify, for instance David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are so Rich and Some so Poor (London: Abacus, 1999);
48. and Angus Maddison, Growth and Interaction in the World Economy: The Roots of Modernity (Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 2005). The critics of Eurocentrism - and those trying to reach a balanced position - are global historians and critical political economists who often rely, however, on the primary research of others.
49. See in particular David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 335-439;
50. Frank, ReORIENT (1998);
51. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (2004);
52. McNeill and McNeill, The Human Web (2003), 116-212.
53. However, the magnitudes and their changes as well as the role and importance of this silver in the Chinese economy is another disputed issue, partly due to the lack of solid and systematic documentation. For an argument that a decline in silver imports in the Chinese economy - leading to the contraction of the volume of money circulating - contributed to the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 1640s, see William S. Atwell, 'Another Look at Silver Imports into China, ca.1635-1644', Journal of World History 16, no.4 (2005): 467-89.
54. Landes reduces historical counterfactual to 'accidents' in history and on that basis argues that these kinds of counterfactuals are meaningless. The West was culturally superior and thus the Industrial Revolution was bound to have started in Europe. Moreover, he claims the Industrial Revolution had to happen in England instead of France because the British were technologically more innovative. However, critical realist ontology explains why there are always multiple possible futures in any given point in geo-historical time. The actual is only a part of the real world, which also consists of non-actualised possibilities and unexercised powers of the already existing structures and mechanisms that are transfactually efficacious in open systems. These structures and powers are themselves historical and changeable and could be - could have been - otherwise. The real issue is the extent to which we would need to assume overtly many counterfactual components in order to get a particular counterfactual X. See David S. Lander, 'What Room for Accidents in History?: Explaining Big Changes by Small Events', The Economic History Review, New Series, 47, no.4 (1994): 637-56; cf. his flat ontology in Patomäki, 'Realist Ontology for Futures Studies'.
55. The new official inward orientation probably also had an impact on the trajectory of interpreting and practising Confucianism in China, making it a less open-minded, curious and learning-orientated belief-system. At key geohistorical points, decisions and choices can have far-reaching consequences. Choices made on the basis of transitory conditions can also persist long after those conditions change because many developments are path-dependent. See Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
56. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000), 42-68.
57. Also Frank, ReORIENT (1998), 202-3 agrees with this assessment. There was coal also in China, but located very far from the centres of its potential industrial use. Something similar applies also to Japan and India, where for instance steel-making was at the level of best European (Swedish) practices still in the 1790s, while remaining cheaper than British steel.
58. Cf. Yongjin Zhang, 'China's Entry into International Society: Beyond the Standard of "Civilization"', Review of International Studies 17, no.1 (1991): 3-16.
59. In his best-seller, Gavin Menzies claims that Zeng He's fleet actually reached America 70 years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Many professional historians, such as Robert Finlay, have disputed both Menzies' dogmatic attitude and the quality of his evidence. What is clear, however, is that the early fifteenth-century Chinese treasure ships were many times bigger and in some ways technologically more advanced than the ships of Columbus (though possibly less fit for sailing against winds and currents than the European ships of the late fifteenth century). They also covered a large part of the world, sailing at least as far as East Africa, and carried perhaps as many as 25,000-30 000 men and all the supplies they needed, including animals for meat and milk, rice, vegetables and water. Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004);
60. Robert Finlay, 'How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America', Journal of World History 15, no.2 (2004): 229-42.
61. See James Der Derian, On Diplomacy (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
62. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, K'ang spent a lot of time trying to learn Western ideas, sciences and administrative practices; later in his life he also either lived or spent long periods of time in, for instance, Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, England, Singapore and India. His heavy involvement in contemporary Chinese politics was characterised by rather modest reformism, as compared with the radical future visions of the 'One-World Book'. Parts of Ta T'Ung Shu appeared in a periodical in 1913, but the whole book was not published until 1935, eight years after K'ang's death. Routledge published an English translation in 1958, and this has been reprinted in 2005. K'ang Yu-Wei and Laurence G. Thompson, Ta T'ung Shu (London: Routledge, 2005).
63. H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902). available for free downloading at the site of the Gutenberg project, at (www.gutenberg.org/etext/19229).
64. W. Warren Wagar, The City of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 52.
65. Immanuel Kant, 'Perpetual Peace', 110.
66. These abstract stages or phases that concern only the dominant mode of production can explain merely some aspects of some geo-historical episodes and processes. They may evoke a sense of inevitability and teleology, but only retrospectively and at a high rate of abstraction. Unlike many other political economy stages from classical political economists to Walt Rostow, these stages are not Eurocentric. The main purpose of the scheme of three stages is to outline how the human condition and powers have changed and how these changes condition contemporary and futures options and possibilities. Cf. Johan Goudsblom, 'Human History and Long-Term Social Processes: Toward a Synthesis of Chronology and Phaseology', in The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilization, ed. J. Goudsblom, E. Jones and S. Mennell (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 15-30.
67. It is also possible to write schemes of increasing abstraction of dominant mode of practice and also include practices of exchange, communication, organisation and inquiry, but with a much higher risk of subsuming contingent geo-historical connections under presumably essential and linear developments; see Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In (London: Sage, 2006), 73-95.
68. Freeman J. Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 212.
69. Two hundred years of growth at the rate of 3 per cent will yield an overall growth by the factor of 370. That is, the world would consume and produce 370 times more energy in 2200 than at the moment. The idea that this would amount to reaching the level of Dyson's Type I civilisation is from a popular science author Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 18.
70. To make this point and the related estimation sound less speculative, let me use another example from the past. Simon Kuznets has estimated that, in the 200 years from 1776 to 1976, the US economy grew by the factor of about 1000, with the average growth rate somewhere between 3 per cent and 4 per cent a year (including relatively high population growth that has characterised the United States, which in 1776 had only c. 2.5 million inhabitants). Simon Kuznets, 'Two Centuries of Economic Growth: Reflections on U.S. Experience', The American Economic Review 67, no.1 (1977): 1-14.
71. Kant, 'Perpetual Peace', 1983 [1795], 125.
72. These will have to be worked out more systematically and in more detail in the future; thus far I have made some tentative articulations, for instance in Heikki Patomäki, 'Problems of Democratising Global Governance: Time, Space and the Emancipatory Process', European Journal of International Relations 9, no.3 (2003): 347-76.
73. See Heikki Patomäki, 'From East to West: Emergent Global Philosophies - Beginnings of the End of the Western Dominance?', Theory, Culture & Society 19, no.3 (2002): 89-111;
74. David Held and Heikki Patomäki, 'Problems of Global Democracy. A Dialogue', Theory, Culture & Society 23, no.5 (2006): 115-33;
75. and also Heikki Patomäki: 'Rethinking Global Parliament: Beyond the Indeterminacy of International Law', Widener Law Review, forthcoming in vol.13, in 2007.
76. See Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing Global Consciousness (London: Zed Books, 2003).
77. This is the topic and main theme of my 'Political Economy of Global Security'.