The utopia and reality of sovereignty: Social reality, normative IR and 'Organized Hypocrisy'

Review of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 313-335

  Karp, David Jason ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 42949107024     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210508008048     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 87.
2. Ibid., p. 10.
3. Ibid., p. 87.
4. Ibid., p. 10.
5. Ken Booth, 'Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice', International Affairs, 67 (1991), pp. 530-1.
6. A critic who objects to what follows on the grounds that Carr drops out of the picture from time to time has not understood the point.
7. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
8. William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
9. 'Realism' and 'realist' are terms that can have many meanings. As a general rule, this article will use these terms as defined by E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years' Crisis, unless otherwise specified: for example, by specifying 'scientific realism' or 'IR realism', the latter referring to the theory of international relations generated by Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle For Power and Peace, 6th edn. (New York: Knopf, 1985),
10. and amended by Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
11. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1995).
12. Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, pp. 1-44.
13. Carr's entire discussion in Twenty Years' Crisis, pp. 3-88 builds up to these points. For a succinct summary of the utopia-reality distinction,
14. see Michael Cox, 'Introduction', in Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, p. xxi.
15. Ibid., pp. 4-6.
16. On realism as a 'critical weapon', see Peter Wilson, 'The Myth of the "First Great Debate" ', in Tim Dunne, Michael Cox and Ken Booth (eds.), The Eighty Years' Crisis: International Relations 1919-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 10,
17. and Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (New York: Macmillan, 1998), p. 24.
18. Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, pp. 62-83.
19. Ibid., pp. 42-61.
20. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 2;
21. Alexander Wendt, 'On Constitution and Causation in International Relations', Review of International Studies, 24:5 (1998), pp. 101-18.
22. Two important critiques of a scientific-realist approach to IR are: Friedrich Kratochwil, 'Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt's "Social Theory of International Politics" and the Constructivist Challenge', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29 (2000), pp. 73-101;
23. and Fred Chernoff, 'Scientific Realism as Meta-Theory of International Polities', International Studies Quarterly, 46 (2002), pp. 189-207.
24. Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, pp. 6-10.
25. Krasner, Sovereignty, p. 3.
26. Thomas G. Weiss and Jarat Chopra, 'Sovereignty Under Siege: From Intervention to Humanitarian Space', in Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno (eds.), Beyond Westphalia?: State Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 89.
27. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
28. Susan Strange, 'The Westfailure System", Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), pp. 345-54.
29. Strange, Retreat of the State, p. 4.
30. Ibid., p. 3-4.
31. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 13.
32. Douglas Brinkley, 'Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine', Foreign Policy, 106 (1997), pp.111-27.
33. Ibid., p. 115.
34. Ibid., p. 115.
35. James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When: The US Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999);
36. Roberto Menotti, 'US Policy and NATO Enlargement: Clinton's "Unspoken Agenda" 1993-1996', International Politics, 36 (1999), pp. 235-71.
37. Especially on how Russia fits into the picture, see Menotti, 'US Policy', and Stephen J. Blank, 'NATO Enlargement Between Rhetoric and Realism', International Politics, 36 (1999), pp. 67-88.
38. Richard Holbrooke, 'America, A European Power', Foreign Affairs, 74:2 (1995), pp. 38-51.
39. Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds.), Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
40. See Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, pp. 29-35 on how very different descriptive aspects of 'democracy' can be emphasised to make the same normative point about its status as a good system of government.
41. For example, see (on the former point), E. H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945);
42. and (on the latter point), see R. J. Vincent, Nonintervention and International Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
43. Krasner cites Bull in the first footnote of the first chapter of Sovereignty.
44. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A. Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd edn. (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 8.
45. Ibid., p. 13.
46. Also see pp. 22-73 for the argument that the international system is an international society.
47. Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 51.
48. See Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992),
49. and Molly Cochran, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1-118.
50. Cochran, Normative Theory, p. 12.
51. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 53-73, 86-91.
52. Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 69-123.
53. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, pp. 21-26.
54. Weiss and Chopra, 'Sovereignty Under Siege', p. 88.
55. Lyons and Mastanduno, Beyond Westphalia, p. 3.
56. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, pp. 139-284.
57. Krasner, Sovereignty, pp. 20-40.
58. Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, p. 87.
59. On the distinction between 'explaining' and 'understanding' in international relations, see Hollis and Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
60. Krasner also highlights that neorealist and (neo)liberal-institutionalist approaches take Westphalian sovereignty as an analytical assumption, and he places himself in opposition to these theories on these grounds: see Krasner, Sovereignty, p. 45.
61. Krasner, Sovereignty, p. 43.
62. Alexander Wendt, 'The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory', International Organization, 41 (1987), pp. 335-70;
63. Robert O. Keohane, 'International Institutions: 2 Approaches', International Studies Quarterly, 32 (1988), pp. 379-96.
64. There is an intra-constructivist debate between social-scientific constructivists such as Wendt, and Wittgensteinian constructivists such as Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
65. and Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). The Wittgensteinian set rejects the naturalist idea - which Kratochwil, for example, finds present in Wendt's work - that the social world can be studied according to the same method as the natural world. The Wittgensteinians focus on language and intentions in their analysis of the way that humans collectively constitute the world. Having to choose one or the other side of this debate would overwhelm the present purpose. Using Searle's constructivism as a baseline allows one to do several things at once: to bracket off these debates while still bringing constructivist tools to bear on the 'sovereignty' questions at hand; to use tools from different IR constructivists, including Wendt and Kratochwil, where germane, without implying an across-the-board endorsement of either of their particular approaches; and to assess the relevance of some of Wendt's scientific-realist ideas while keeping them separate from 'constructivism'.
66. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing out that such a discussion might begin with Hart's jurisprudential account of rules. In H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), one finds an account of how a legal system is constituted by two types of rules and their interaction: primary rules, which regulate agents' actions, telling them what they ought to do; and secondary rules, which tell agents how to identify and perhaps to change the primary rules. I hesitate actually to begin the discussion with Hart's ideas about rules, because the parallels between Hart's primary-secondary distinction and Searle's regulative- constitutive distinction end at a fairly early stage in one's overall account of what rules are, whether and why they are 'real', and how they can be changed. I think an attempt to draw a straight line from Hart to Searle would be problematic, and would invite a misinterpretation of Searle's ideas, but this is a matter for another article entirely.
67. Searle, Construction, pp. 27-9;
68. Kratochwil, Rules, p. 26.
69. Searle, Construction, p. 27.
70. Wendt, 'Constitution and Causation". Wendt's analysis is based in part on the realist philosophy of science, language, and reference of Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)
71. and Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, Vol. I: Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975);
72. see Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 51-77. This is not addressed by Jonathan Joseph, 'Philosophy in International Relations: A Scientific Realist Approach', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35 (2007), pp. 345-59, in an article that offers a critique of Wendt from a Bhaskar-inspired perspective.
73. Nor is it addressed by Chris Brown in 'Situating Critical Realism', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35 (2007), p. 409. Brown, without offering a compelling reason except for 'general usage' in IR literature, explicitly equates 'scientific realism' and 'critical realism'. The point here is not linguistic nitpicking; realist philosophers such as Kripke and Putnam provide powerful analytical tools that Wendt is not wrong in applying to IR under the 'scientific-realist' - not 'critical-realist' - heading.
74. A good introduction to critical realism is R. Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science (London: Sage, 1999).
75. Compare with Carr's alchemy example in Twenty Years' Crisis, pp. 6-10.
76. Krasner, Sovereignty, p. 43.
77. Wendt, Social Theory, 279-83.
78. Krasner, Sovereignty, p. 5;
79. Searle, Construction, pp. 34-5.
80. Searle, Construction, pp. 43-51.
81. Krasner, Sovereignty, pp. 14-20.
82. Also see Keohane, 'International Institutions', pp. 385-6.
83. Krasner, Sovereignty, pp. 14-20.
84. Jürgen Habermas, 'The European Nation-State - Its Achievements and Limits: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship', in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation (London: Verso Books, 1996), pp. 281-94;
85. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Oxford and Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
86. R. B. J. Walker, State Sovereignty, Global Civilization, and the Rearticulation of Political Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988);
87. R. B. J. Walker, 'The Hierarchicalization of Political Community', Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), pp. 151-6.
88. Krasner, Sovereignty.
89. It depends upon one's understanding of whether one can label all prescriptions for appropriate behaviour as 'rules', regardless of whether the prescription is widely followed.
90. Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 105.
91. Wendt, 'Agent-Structure Problem'; Waltz, Theory.
92. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 282.
93. For a complex account of how human ideas can enable or disallow the possibility of certain forms of action, see the discussion of 'deontic powers' in Searle, Construction, ch. 4.
94. Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, pp. 1-44.
95. For example, restrictions on the absolute right to do as one pleases on one's own property have developed over time; see Friedrich Kratochwil, 'Sovereignty as Dominium: Is there a Right of Humanitarian Intervention?', in Lyons and Mastanduno, Beyond Westphalia, pp. 21-42.
96. Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, p. 74.
97. Krasner, Sovereignty, p. 238.
98. Christian Reus-Smit, 'Human Rights and the Social Construction of Sovereignty', Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), p. 520.
99. Sovereigns also make decisions about economic distribution inside and outside the state. Cosmopolitans argue that justice requires economic decisions about outsiders to be made in an identical manner to economic decisions about insiders, on the grounds that the distinction between insiders and outsiders is morally arbitrary. This conclusion is neither explicitly recommended nor explicitly excluded by the sovereignty framework presented in this article.
100. If some sovereigns lack the ability to take these decisions in the first place (as Strange and many others argue) - that is, if sovereigns make illegitimate moves because they lack the capacity to make legitimate ones - then this does constitute an important problem that the framework presented in this article helps to clarify.
101. Nicholas de Torrenté, 'Challenges to Humanitarian Action', Ethics and International Affairs, 16:2 (2002), pp. 2-8;
102. Ethics and International Affairs, 17:1 (2003), 'Roundtable: Evaluating the Preemptive Use of Force', pp. 1-36.
103. On 'international morality', see Carr, Twenty Years' Crisis, pp. 128-30.
104. Barak Mendelsohn, "Sovereignty Under Attack: The International Society Meets the Al Qaeda Network', Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), pp. 45-68;
105. Robert O. Keohane, 'The Public Delegitimation of Terrorism and Coalition Politics", in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (eds.), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 141-51.
106. ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001).
107. This entire analysis should not be misunderstood as though it suggested that sovereign states are the only agents that have duties in the international system. Sovereignty is a language that picks out a class of sovereign agents and allows one to discuss their duties "as sovereigns", It does not follow from this that non-sovereign agents have no important or relevant duties. Indeed, an analysis of the duties of non-state actors in a system in which sovereignty is an important institutional fact is an avenue for interesting future research.