International Relations and Non-Western Thought

Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity

Robbie Shilliam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136903526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International Relations, as a discipline, tends to focus upon European and Western canons of modern social and political thought. Alternatively, this book explores the global imperial and colonial context within which knowledge of modernity has been developed.

The chapters sketch out the historical depth and contemporary significance of non-Western thought on modernity, as well as the rich diversity of its individuals, groups, movements and traditions. The contributors theoretically and substantively engage with non-Western thought in ways that refuse to render it exotic to, superfluous to or derivative of the orthodox Western canon of social and political thought. Taken as a whole, the book provides deep insights into the contested nature of a global modernity shaped so fundamentally by Western colonialism and imperialism. Now, as ever, these insights are desperately needed for a discipline that is so closely implicated in Western foreign policy making and yet retains such a myopic horizon of inquiry.

This work provides a significant contribution to the field and will be of great interest to all scholars of politics, political theory and international relations theory.

1
Non-Western thought and international relations

Robbie Shilliam

The challenge

In one of those strange yet telling silences, explorations of the post-9/11 world within the international relations (IR) discipline have predominantly examined the effect that the ‘war on terror’ has had on one ‘civilization’: the West. Debates on the ethical significance of the contemporary conjuncture, for example, have focused, primarily, upon the ambivalent relationship between liberalism, security and freedom within Europe and the USA (see, for example, Behnke 2004; Buzan 2006; and the collection of essays in Walker 2006). In general, debates in IR exhibit a serious lack of sustained consideration of non-Western discussions on the so-called clash of civilizations¹ even though there has existed for some time now a sustained debate in Islamic jurisprudence regarding the ‘law of minorities’ whereby Muslims living in the non-Muslim world are no longer treated as transients, but as permanent residents (see, for example, Sulayman 1987; Soroush 2000; Euben 2002). Few IR scholars have engaged seriously with this sophisticated and long-running debate (exceptions include Hashmi 1998; Mandaville 2002; Piscatori 2003). The current debates in IR over Islam and the war on terror form merely the latest episode of sidelining the significance and value of what might be termed non-Western thought.

Paradoxically, regular attention has been paid to non-Western actors and the shape of non-Western political and cultural structures. For example, following the Second World War one can find Western philosophers and political scientists engaging with the problem of cultural difference in international relations (see, for example, Northrop 1949; Iyer 1965). And even the so-called ‘godfather’ of American realpolitik, Hans Morgenthau, believed that, rather than Russian communism, East Asian independence movements presented the deepest ethical challenge to US foreign policy-making (Morgenthau 1960, pp. 134–7). Moreover, if the ‘English School’ can be criticized as having built a Eurocentric narrative of the historical rise of international society (expanding outward from its post-Catholic European milieu to encompass, after decolonization, the world), it cannot be criticized for having ignored the practical and ethical challenges to this expansion emanating from extra-European political forces (for example, Vincent 1982; Bull 1984; Gong 1984).

Why is it that the non-Western world has been a defining presence for IR scholarship and yet said scholarship has consistently balked at placing non-Western thought at the heart of its debates? To answer this question we must dig deep into the bedrock of the Western Academy itself. After all, the content of the modern social sciences and humanities was at least in part cultivated by reference to non-European bodies of knowledge and culture. As has been increasingly documented, the encounter with Amerindians provided the impetus for the intensive development within Europe of natural law, enlightenment humanism, social contract theory and modern categorization of the social and natural world (Jahn 2000; Wynter 2003; Blaney and Inayatullah 2004). Travelogues of Europeans in strange lands helped to define what should be considered philosophical, economically, culturally and politically unique to ‘civilized’ Europeans.² And the successful pursuit of colonial missions required sovereignty and exceptions to sovereignty to be formulated in international law (Anghie 2005).

Even the influential comparative tradition of knowledge production, developed in the later eighteenth century, owed a great deal to the study of non-European thought and practice. Comparative studies arose out of the philological tradition (Panikkar 1988, p. 117), and both shared a special affinity to Indian studies. For example, artefacts brought back by officials of the East India Company awoke Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Schlegel to Sanskrit, an empirical linguistic and religious touchstone for future romanticism in German thought (Davies 1998, pp. 62–74). One might even say in this respect that non-European culture was a crucial resource deployed within that most enduring battle amongst European thinkers over the form and content of modernity, namely rationalism versus romanticism. Over time the field of comparative inquiry shifted from philology to philosophy, and it is this shift that is significant for understanding why the figure of a doing and thinking non-Western subject haunts the Western Academy.

The attribution of who can ‘think’ and produce valid knowledge of human existence has always been political; but it was made all the more so in the nineteenth century when Georg Hegel gave the philosopher a central role in the development and cultivation of the modern self. Hegel narrated the trajectory of this development through a comparative analysis wherein the spirit of modernity had moved from the East to the West (see Shilliam 2009, Chapter 4). Hegel’s grand narrative of world development was, in part, informed by a deep pre-existing current in Enlightenment thought that had already started to draw a temporal division between a modern Western Europe and a premodern rest (Fabian 1983). Indeed, this is the broader context in which Hegel privileged European being as the teleological truth of human existence able to be legitimately uttered only by Europeans. And this context was defined by the rise to dominance of certain European powers over existing circuits of world commerce, the accumulation by these powers of overseas colonies, as well as their consolidation of control over the slave trade including the concomitant construction of plantation systems in the Americas. It is within this context that European scholars of the comparative tradition could assume a universal standard of civilization modelled upon an idealized Western Europe to define modernity tout court, and thus relegate all other peoples and cultures in the world to an object of inquiry rather than as thinking subjects of and on modernity (see, in general, Krishna 1988; Panikkar 1988).

Over the last twenty years a project has emerged that seeks to critically reinvent the comparative tradition of the Western Academy. Scholars associated with this project have sought to ‘provincialize’ thought on the Western experience of modernity, heretofore taken as a universal reference point, in order to provide anti-imperialistic resources through which to engage with the irreducible yet inter-related plurality of modern world development. Primarily, the project seeks to give legitimate standing to the traditions and figures of non-Western thought. This endeavour, it is claimed, has acquired urgency now that globalization has made it increasingly difficult for Western civilization to masquerade as the geocultural retainer of a universal experience of modernity.³ As a discipline, IR is far overdue an explicit and sustained engagement with the philosophical, historical and ethical challenges grappled with by this new project (see especially Dallmayr 2001). The most important challenge for IR, in this respect, is to find a way of engaging with – rather than ignoring – non-Western political thought in a manner that is not beholden to colonial ideologies that drain the non-Western world of all significant content for the study of a modernity that is now, and perhaps was always, integrally global.

There are precedents to this project, broadly conceived, within the history of IR. Individual scholars have always challenged the discipline with non-Western perspectives (for example, Mazrui 1964). Programmatically, there was the 1960s’ World Order Models Project (WOMP) that sought to interrogate global problems of war and poverty through a cross-cultural perspective (Mendlovitz 1975). The project eventually settled upon a comparative investigation of different national IR traditions that, although worthy in itself, has attended less to the global historical context within which to critically interrogate – and resolve – the relative absence of non-Western thought in the discipline.⁴ There are signs, however, that the cross-cultural challenge might be picked up once again (see, for example, Huysmans and Waever 2009). Moreover, a recent series of investigations into Islamic, Chinese and Japanese ‘schools’ of thought on international relations – past and present – have sought to highlight different meanings of key categories, such as ‘sovereignty’, as well as deeper philosophical differences related to the concepts of order, justice and change to those presented in the traditional Western canon.⁵ Some authors, such as Siba Grovogui (2006a), have undertaken detailed explorations of lineages and genealogies of international thought arising from encounters between intellectuals from the colonized world and the European halls of power. Additionally, intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Hommi Bhabha and Ashis Nandy, who in varying degrees have been situated both inside and outside the Western Academy, have been increasingly mobilized in IR scholarship to interrogate the essentialization of cultural identities (for example, Blaney and Inayatullah 1994; Persaud 1997; Jarvis 2001; Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Biswas 2007; Bilgin 2008). Finally, a number of edited collections have been published that emphasize the importance of non-Western experiences of modernity, especially its colonial/imperial dimension (Darby 1997; Neuman 1998; Chan et al. 2001; Chowdhry and Nair 2004; Gruffydd Jones 2006a; Acharya and Buzan 2007).

Contributing to these existing conversations, this volume seeks to cultivate an explicit and sustained critical engagement with non-Western thought on modernity and its importance to the subject matter and theories of IR. The volume sketches out the historical depth and contemporary significance of non-Western thought on modernity, as well as the rich diversity of its individuals, groups, movements and traditions. The main purpose of the volume is to use a set of geo-culturally diverse investigations in order to sketch out the theoretical and substantive contours of an engagement with non-Western thought that refuses to render it superfluous to or simply derivative of the orthodox Western canon of thought. The main aim of the volume is to highlight and explore the global, rather than European or Western, context within which knowledge of modernity has been developed. And for this aim, a fundamental assumption is made that imperialism and colonialism have from the start been co-constitutive processes of the typical understood routes into modernity, namely the development of the capitalist world market and the system of states. At a minimum, globalization is not an escape from this historical relationship, but a reordering – and possibly intensification – of it (Barkawi and Laffey 2002). The retrieval of this global context to the knowledge production of modernity in IR might help to provide deeper insights into the contested nature of a global modernity shaped so fundamentally by colonialism and Western expansionism. Now, as ever, these insights are desperately needed for a discipline that is closely implicated in Western foreign policy-making and yet has such a myopic horizon of inquiry.

Organization of the volume

Introductions

The next introductory chapter discusses the perils and prospects of investigating non-Western thought in order to better understand the global context of modernity. The complexities involved in this investigation are significant, especially when the case could be made that the very object to be retrieved has in large part been a construction of colonial/imperial epistemology. Is there – and should we conceive of – such a thing as ‘non-Western thought’? And, if there is, how might we encounter this diverse body of thought without in the process assimilating it within an existing archive or rendering it as profoundly ‘exotic’? In Chapter 2 I discuss these issues at a general level not to provide a programmatic statement for the collection as a whole, but to clarify the contentious aspects of this book project and to provide the theoretical and conceptual space for engaging with the more specific investigations that follow.

Part I: colonial conditions

That the colonial condition has been more the normal rather than exceptional historical path to modernity is woefully ignored in theories and approaches to IR that tend to bolt imperialism and colonialism onto existing frameworks and narratives that centre upon an idealized European experience. For example, despite their embededness within the writings of Hobbes and Locke, imperial and colonial rule have no home in the state of nature/social contract model and its derived dualism as utilized in the core framework of IR theory: anarchy/society. Alternatively, popular historical–sociological narratives of the making of the modern world – Weber’s rise of instrumental-rational rule, Marx’s primitive accumulation and the liberal appropriation of Kant’s ‘cosmopolitan point of view’ – do not require imperialism or colonialism to be conceived as core processes that drive modern social transformation; rather, they are supplementary to, derivative of, or derivations from the rise of the modern state system and/or global capitalist economy. The chapters in Part I seek to address these lacunae by exploring traditions of thought and specific thinkers that have had to engage with the content, meaning, and emergence/divergence of modernity from within a colonial – or more accurately speaking colonized – context. By paying attention to this fundamental global context of modernity each chapter in this part complicates the assumptions of various established theories, concepts and narratives in IR.

In Chapter 3, Gerard Aching engages with issues central to the English School approach to IR. Aching targets the diffusionist narrative of this School that describes the expansion of a European society of states into an international society of states moderated by the ‘standard of civilization’. A political community would be judged civilized and hence sovereign by this standard if it met two requisites: one material – a technologically advanced economy – and one politicoideological – a tradition of individual rights to persons and property. The English School narrative tends to conflate the attainment of ‘civilization’ judged by this standard with sovereignty, but it is this deterministic conflation that Aching argues is inadequate when studying the slave-holding Americas. Aching shows how, with regards to the nineteenth-century Cuban bourgeoisie, the technical prerequisite was present – an incredibly profitable, productive and complex slave economy – but at the necessary expense of a development of the politico-ideological – a tradition of rights to one’s own person. Hence, the Cuban bourgeoisie’s adherence to the idea of civilization emanating from Europe was precisely what undermined its legitimacy to pursue sovereign independence from Spain, an entanglement that succeeding Spanish governments took advantage of.

In Chapter 4, Branwen Gruffydd Jones prefigures some of the issues in Part III regarding normative theories that seek to go beyond the container of the nationstate. However, her argument is firmly embedded in the substantive struggles against injustices and racism that took place in colonial Lusophone Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Gruffydd Jones takes issue with liberal narratives in IR that speak of a progressive and future-oriented entrenchment of cosmopolitan values within international institutions while ignoring the preceding and coterminous struggles over colonial rule that sought to overcome the racial divisions of world order. Instead of abstract and future-oriented notions of fairness and equality, she examines how the thought and practice of the leaders of the Lusophone African anti-colonial movements, Agostinho Neto, Samora Machel, Amílcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, cultivated an internationalism that sought to transcend the colonial logics of racialized revenge or restoration. Taking their prompt from the phenomenal–colonial – rather than noumenal–liberal – world, these intellectuals worked upon a concept of a post-racialized humanity the relationality of which was arguably far denser than that promised by the abstract considerations of liberal cosmopolitanism.

In Chapter 5 Willi Goetschel questions the secularization narr...

Table of contents

• Interventions
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Non-Western thought and international relations
• 2 The perilous but unavoidable terrain of the non-West
• Part I Colonial conditions
• Part II Cultural contexts
• Part III Beyond the nation-state
• Part IV Reflections
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index