The process of cross-border flows of goods, services, money, people, information, and culture is termed globalization. It is not merely an economic or cultural process but it is also an ideology. Processes of integration and globalization have been largely matched, and perhaps exceeded, by co-occurring processes of fragmentation and disintegration. And whatever evidence there might be to support the end of the nation-state thesis, it can be easily matched by counterevidence attesting to the continued health of the nation. All considered, however, it is nonetheless questionable whether our world still hangs together in the international sense.
A sovereignty-based territorial pattern of segmentation (the “inter”) instituted at Westphalia in 1648 seems to fade away in this age of globalization. The territorial logic that held this state-centric “inter” together with started losing part of its legendary force, a more problematic national sovereign structuring formula emerged to institute the first post-Westphalian order. However, in a historical and intellectual context that continued to privilege territorial over nonterritorial principles of separability and individuation, in practice, the nation continued to be fully eclipsed by the sovereign part of this formula.
In IBO terms, the nation-state construct anchored a solidly stabilized international world, with national and statist identities, borders and orders consistently reinforcing and mapping into each other. For as long as the gulf separating nations and states remained a distinction with no theoretical or political difference, both of these concepts remained equally capable of “nationalizing” the contemporary IBO configuration. Escaping theoretical attention was the fact that a world nationalized by the nation would have been vastly different from a world nationalized effectively territorially.
Westphalian ordering and Westphalian bordering hence go hand in hand, but the question of which comes first seems to be case-specific rather than trans-historically invariant. Still, it may be possible to institute some analytical clarity in this context by judiciously situating the discussion in the IBO framework. Converging on the borders-to-orders and orders-to-borders sequences would be key to such an undertaking. The centrality of the borders-to-orders sequence becomes obvious once we apply it to events such as the implosion of the Soviet empire, the removal of the Iron Curtain, the reunification of Germany, the expansion of NATO, European integration, the collapse of apartheid, the multiplication of failed states and so on.
It is also a vital theoretical node in current debates on neo-medievalism, globalization, democratization, national self-determination, multiculturalism, immigration, citizenship, societal security, and more. Individually, and together, these events and debates convey an indisputable message acts of inscription, crossing, removal, transformation multiplication and diversification of borders carry momentous ramifications for the political orders (domestic, regional, and international) in which they transpire.
Westphalia is important because the modern system of states “came about by way of territorializing space. Second, the formative impact of territoriality as the organizing principle of the modern state system has been so decisive because it has penetrated our deepest normative understandings, not only of states and sovereignty but also of society and community. And third, although it may be premature to diagnose all-encompassing evaporation of the Westphalian normative order, it is high time to acknowledge a fundamental shift in the balance of territorial, semiterritorial, and nonterritorial vectors that shape the intricate texture of contemporary world politics.
The Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, designated state sovereignty as the primary constitutive principle of modern political systems in the context of a wider attempt to enhance domestic and international order and security. Since then, state sovereignty and security have evolved in a symbiotic relationship.
Mansbach and Wilmer depict a world in which the Westphalian state system, concerning the management of violence issues, is no longer the only game in town. A world of increasingly destabilized identities and blurred boundaries does not easily lend itself to territorially based Westphalian solutions. With the concept of “moral boundaries, ” these authors situate themselves at the identities/borders (IB) intersection to elucidate possible responses to an emerging world in which problems of war and violence are becoming daily more unmanageable in traditional (Westphalian) terms (Tharoor 1999).
Drawing and redrawing lines that separate good and evil is essential to the constitution and legitimation of both domestic and international orders. The related ability to differentiate between “zones of moral order and immoral disorder” is, in turn, central to both constituting order and waging war in modern times. Lipschutz takes us back to Westphalia to trace the historical evolution of territorial, and later national, states into focal moral authorities. The bulk of the argument deals, however, with the emerging contradiction between narrow state-centric moralities and the rise of liberal individualism. The more culturally homogeneous a nation is, the more it may resemble a community. At the same time, a community at the national level is likely to resemble a society. With these working definitions in mind, the chapter proceeds in the following way. First, we try to establish how the formation of state and nation interact and how closely nation-building has been tied up with the politics of territoriality. Second, we look at how globalization affects the relationship between the territorial state and the nation. In this context, we deal with the complexity of international relations under the Westphalian model, prominently presented by Stephen Krasner, or the “Copenhagen School.” Departing from the observation that the “logic” of fragmentation is at least in part a function of defining the effects of internationalization (globalization) as security qua survival problem, we will try to demonstrate that new patterns of differentiation evolve that cannot be adequately grasped in these terms.
Shifting attention to one of the major issues emerging from the continued unbundling of state, territory, and nation in the process of globalization, namely the transformation of the Westphalian system as a “normative order. In analyzing integrative and disintegrative tendencies in this system, we will have to take into account the fact that it may very well be the basic sociological concepts of society and community themselves that require a revision in the light of a continuing blurring, transformation, and redrawing of borders (around states, nations, etc.). “Transcending Westphalia” may then come to mean more than merely challenging the modern state by global homogenization on the one hand and national assertiveness on the other. Instead, new modes of differentiation and segmentation may be evolving that are more complex than dualistic concepts such as community-society, security-identity, or integration-fragmentation would suggest. Although we will not be able to pursue this in any detail, we will suggest that the historical form of Westphalia expresses and accommodates a normative structure of the social world. This normative structure is basically conceived in terms of Western ethics; its discursive field is demarcated by the positions of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Showing some of the intricate relationships in this regard will allow us to explore how factual change in international relations is inextricably linked to “normative” transformation. (Krasner, 1993 p.133).
The assumption that there is political life beyond territoriality continues to meet with harsh opposition in IR theory from a Westphalian perspective. On the other hand, there are interesting attempts to accommodate the arguments. Thus Stephen Krasner takes a close look at the claim “that sovereignty is now being altered because the principles of Westphalia are being transgressed”. However, Krasner concedes that territorial states cannot be regarded as “ontological givens.” They rather constitute historically specific forms of political order. Krasner even goes so far as to state that other forms of political order are not confined to pre-Westphalian times. On the contrary, they are part and parcel of international relations since Westphalia.
Taking the process of European integration as an example may also serve to illustrate that far-reaching predictions about the fate of the nation-state may be premature. It seems as if the viability of any change toward an innovative model of organizing rule in the context of the EU such as the model envisaged by Krasner depends on the compatibility of this model with the way that the individual nations conceive their identities.
While globalization optimists like Giddens or Beck emphasize the chances that globalization offers, there is ample reason to question the possibility of moving from the Westphalian to a post-Westphalian system in a gradual fashion. We rather expect increasing tensions within the system arising out of the need to fulfill socially integrative functions that the state cannot fulfill any longer. For instance, the way Mansbach or Ferguson constructs a continuum of polities, the way ZĂĽrn conceives of change as a process of optimizing governance, the way Keohane redefines sovereignty as a bargaining chip, all these efforts. Globalization or trans-nationalization destroys the rules of social and distributive justice. The frontiers of states are not frontiers of solidarity between the people. Some people abroad feel more proximate through political-religious solidarities than they do with people living near them in the same territory. So the question of the role of police and military force is not simply a question of a technical realignment or a process of adjustment on the merges of rules that themselves remain the same, but rather a challenge to the very rules that hitherto had shared out activities and missions based on a distinction between inside and outside.
The post-Cold War world continues in refusing to succumb to too many of the theoretical designs that are on offer in the IR marketplace. The only factor that remains certain seems to be a continuing uncertainty as to the prime defining characteristic of the present conditions. Such a situation provides fertile ground for arguments seeking refuge in concepts and solutions that promise at least some degree of certainty. These certainties need not take the form of simplistic concepts. They may be sought after in the form of complex research programs and designs. The ascendancy of a chronically ill-defined “constructivism” within the heartlands of IR theorizing may serve as the best example to underscore this point. There may hardly be an agreement on the appropriate connotations of the term, but no doubt a substantial degree of complacency about having found a new main route along which to explore world politics can be detected in the scholarly field of international relations. The present volume provides a counterpoint to such tendencies of prematurely fixing and “nouning” the new. With its conceptual setting as well as in the various thematic cuts represented by the individual chapters, it creates more of an unsettling experience than a point of crystallization for a new and coherent theoretical approach. The refusal to provide students of IR with certainties in times of flux is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than by choosing a triad of seemingly all-encompassing concepts as the analytic point of departure.
It is in this sense that this concluding chapter must be seen not as an attempt to instantly recap what has been just opened, but rather as an attempt to take up and combine some of the ideas and arguments of our fellow IBO travelers and provide them with some suggestions as to where they may be heading to, within, and beyond the IR academic field. As already elaborated by Lapid at the outset of this volume, IBO is about rethinking and disaggregating these terms, about opening up new routes of inquiry by utilizing techniques of cross-disciplinary hybridization. This observation and our argument about the emphasis of process over substance notwithstanding, we would like to hint at some possible substantial overlaps in how the contributions to this volume seek to reconceptualize fundamental problems as well as individual facets of world order. While we fully accept and applaud the attempt to utilize IBO as a heuristic device to move beyond what appears to constitute an increasingly arbitrary and only institutionally legitimized set of disciplinary boundaries, this volume in its own subtitle acknowledges that individually and taken together its contributions also carry subtexts that can be situated within the closer confines of IR theory. While we find the new directions within IR theory to be anticipated and reflected in quite many scholarly undertakings in the field, the IBO triad seems to have been particularly helpful in explicitly distilling them.
Contemporary IR theorizing still seems to be marked by a dividing line between those employing the gesture of anchoring knowledge about world affairs in grounds they take to be solid (without this necessarily precluding a theoretically rich reflection on these grounds) and those who prioritize the gesture of critically examining and unsettling these grounds and the ways they affect even the microlevel analysis of specific issues. This dividing line is, of course, not very clear-cut and not concomitant with many familiar ordering devices that are applied to the theoretical field of IR (e.g., “great debates”). Additionally, as witnessed in the rise of “constructivist” thought in the field, it is increasingly difficult to unequivocally associate a certain epistemological stance with a given theoretical label.
Be that as it may, it is clear where IBO and most contributions to this volume stand. They partake in the enterprise of critically examining and questioning the units and levels of analysis that are still taken as more or less given in many approaches to IR theory. They do so, moreover, without claiming to do it from the standpoint of a firm — or even privileged — method or epistemology. Although at first sight the IBO triad could be regarded as a new self-proclaimed candidate for yet another “grand theory, ” this impression certainly should have vanished at the end of the current volume.
Term Postmodern Condition denotes a state of knowledge in Western advanced industrial societies in which the “metanarratives” of romanticism and emancipation have lost their integrating force for legitimizing knowledge. The point of interest here is not whether the term “postmodern” is the most appropriate to describe the evolutionary state of modern society. It is rather to point out and reiterate that Lyotard’s observation is not logical, but historical-sociological. What Lyotard observes is the simple fact of a proliferation of legitimizing narratives that cease to be integrated by a metanarrative, and thus in many cases pose the only standard of validity to themselves. However, such a proliferation of narratives — standards of validity and knowledge — does in no way preclude some form of communication between those mini-narratives; it only precludes — again, not logically, but historically-sociologically — the reassertion of the dominance of a metanarrative. It is important to be clear about these issues in order not to commit the error of taking Lyotard’s dictum to mean that it is no longer possible to develop far-reaching (long-range, grand) theories and conceptual designs. The only thing that follows from the “end of metanarratives” is that theories, no matter how far-reaching, cannot seek recourse in the solid epistemological foundations of a metanarrative. It does not follow from it that theorizing in “grand style” per se would cease to be legitimate.
That grand-style theorizing is not in abundance in contemporary IR should be visible to students in the field. As such, the “grand old texts” from Morgenthau to Bull and Waltz stand unassailed. The great debates have not provided conclusive results, and currently, it does not seem to be at all clear whether there is such a thing as a great debate going on. Given Lyotard’s observation, such a situation should hardly come as a surprise. Even within a tiny academic (sub)discipline, the standards and legitimizing (meta)narratives have proliferated and disseminated to a degree where very often representatives from various corners of the field are unable to communicate with each other. However, it is exactly against this background that the IBO triad opens up some new possibilities and a fresh perspective. The IBO triad does not provide or attempt to provide a new big theory for the academic field of international relations. What it does do is deliver fully on the demand of (re)constituting international relations, including its numerous facets, as a social science—a demand that has been aired frequently in recent years. IBO tries to achieve this by placing IR at the intersection of some grand theorizings, within but also across disciplines, opening routes of communication between them, yet fully acknowledging the impossibility of coming up with an integrated grand theory under the postmodern condition in the end. But what would such theorizing look like when all the familiar givens are gone, when the familiar terms of neither nations nor states represent the foundations for our analysis? Rather than terms, conceptual relationships or practices (bordering!) provide the foci now. We believe that the IBO approach suggests a possible way for theorizing without submitting to the essentialist categories of the “state” or an unproblematic notion of an actor created for the sake of analytical convenience (such as the homo oeconomicus) or the speculations of a philosophy of history popularized by certain versions of globalization and the emergence of a world (civil) society.
References/Bibliography
Baylis, John and Steve Smith.The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2004. (The best text on international relations from the perspective of globalisation.)
Dunne T., Kurki M., Smith Steveh, International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Evans Graham, Newnham Jeffrey, The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations, Penguin, 1998.
Fligstein N. 2001. Is globalization the cause of the crises of welfare states? In The Architecture of Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Giddens A. 2000. Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping our Lives. New York: Routledge.
Gilpin R. 2000. The Challenge of Global Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Guillen MF. 2001. The Limits of Convergence: Globalization and Organizational Change in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Guillen M, Suarez S. 2001. Developing the Internet: entrepreneurship and public policy in Ireland, Singapore, Argentina, and Spain. Telecommun. Policy 25. Forthcoming.
Inglehart R, Baker WE. 2000. Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. Am. Sociol. Rev, 65:19-51.
Kapstein EB. 2000. Winners and losers in the global economy. Int. Organ. 54:359-84.
Krasner, Stephen. 1993. “Westphalia and All That.” In Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. J. Goldstein and R. O. Keohane. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Lawson Stephanie, The New Agenda for International Relations: From Polarization to Globalization in World Politics?, Polity, 2002.
Lawson Stephanie Lawson, International Relations, Polity Press, 2003.
Machiavelli N., The Prince, Penguin 1961.
Makinda, Samuel. 1998. “The United Nations and State Sovereignty: Mechanism for Managing International Security.” Australian Journal of Political Science 33 (1): 101—15.
Mittelman JH. 2000. The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Shimko Keith L., International Relations: Perspectives and Controversies, Houghton, Mifflin, 2005.
Tharoor, Shashi. 1999. “The Future of Civil Conflict.” World Policy Journal 16 (1): 1—11.