International Relations and the Problem of Difference

Naeem Inayatullah, David L. Blaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135940744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International Relations and the Problem of Difference has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation to the other.

Part I

Difference in the Constitution of IR

Chapter 1

The Westphalian Deferral

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

War’s a deal. It cuts both ways.

Whoever takes also pays.

Our age brings forth its new idea:

Total war—and total fear.

—Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children

The solution, however, wasn’t really a solution, nor the beginning a beginning.

—Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

Only recently has sovereignty appeared again as a puzzle. A review of academic and popular discourse suggests that the political and ethical certainties associated with the nation-state are under assault by, variously, the inexorable forces of global capitalism, the transnational mobilization of environmental and human rights activists, the progressive emergence of global governance, and the pervasive deconstruction of borders and identities.¹ The sense that humankind is thereby facing an uncharted future has also generated historical and theoretical interest in Westphalia, with the expectation that critical reflection on the origins, principles, and purposes of the state system might help us identify strategies by which we can remake the world (see Walker, 1993; Spruyt, 1994; Ruggie, 1998; Onuf, 1998b; Van Creveld, 1999; and Keene, 2002).

We share the expectation that a return to the puzzle of sovereignty is important for political and ethical inquiry. Cutting against the grain of much contemporary academic practice, however, we believe that sovereignty—as theory and practice —remains a site of political and ethical possibilities. Rather than an ethical dead end or a site of political closure, we suggest that the problems posed by sovereignty contain opportunities that extend, stretch, divide, and revise sovereignty more than they fully transcend it. We elaborate this set of claims in the latter stages of this book, where we explore the idea of multiple and overlapping sovereignties.² Here we focus on the way the formal sovereignty of states—conventionally attributed to the Westphalian settlement³—intensifies the difficulties we face in responding to differences in culture, religion, and mode of life. How does this “problem of difference” emerge with Westphalia?

Perhaps ironically, differences in culture remain less of a problem in an age of (premodern) empire, when the principle of hierarchy reigns supreme. As Michael Walzer (1997:15) suggests, “[i]mperial rule is historically the most successful way of incorporating difference and facilitating (requiring is more accurate) peaceful coexistence.” Subjugated peoples, though excluded from the apex of the social order and marked as inferior, paradoxically can find a kind of sufferance of their way of life, religious practices, and distinct customs. Walzer (1997:14–16) argues that, while this form of tolerance is partly rooted in a sense of “minimal fairness” that the imperial center extends to the conquered, it is also largely a practical matter: as long as imperial rule is respected—taxes are paid and imperial authority is acknowledged—further subordination is unnecessary. Preserving the peace of the empire entails merely enforcing peaceful coexistence among the “authority structures and customary practices” of the various conquered groups. And, though tolerance is extended primarily to groups rather than to individuals (this is not a liberal world), individuals may escape some of the pressures for communal conformity in the more cosmopolitan cities of the empire.

These days we are less comfortable with hierarchy and we do not openly sanction imperial practice. But neither have modern empires proved to be particularly tolerant, as we shall see. The rise of the principle of equality in international relations (in the centuries following Westphalia) has served, relatively speaking, to delegitimate and break the hold of the monopoly of social and political power of a particular group. But where groups of differing persuasions are placed on more equal (legal, if not social) footing, the imperial solution of sufferance of subservient others is mostly foreclosed. When the equality of others is acknowledged, we require the affirmation of those others instead of divine ordination to secure our own status. However, the presence of differences in ways of life, values, and visions also challenges the seeming naturalness of our social practices and threatens the certainty of our given sense of self (Benjamin, 1988: chapter 2). Walzer (1983:249–54) also points in this direction, explaining that hierarchical orders resolve the problem of recognition by giving everyone a fixed place in the social order. Whenever such a ranking breaks down, it presents a potential challenge to our sense of our own value and simultaneously we become unsure of our relations to others. In this way, the problem of difference emerges and intensifies under modern conditions of relative equality, often leading to the reassertion of (illicit or informal) forms of social hierarchy—the marking of the others as inferior and thereby as less of a threat. We comprehend and affirm our values as others recognize us. And yet, perhaps because of this dependence on them, others seem also to threaten us. How then should we reconcile need and threat? How do we realize equality with difference? These problems remain central to modernity.

These problems are also central to the very constitution of international relations. We read the geopolitical demarcations of a society of states as a spatial containment of cultural difference. Difference is placed at a distance (managed within the boundaries of “other” states and deterred by the defense of one’s own borders) and resolved into “sameness” within one’s own political community. That is, the state is the domain where difference is translated into uniformity, while IR remains eternally a site of potentially dangerous, but one would hope manageable, confrontations with others. This splitting of inside/outside (to combine Benjamin, 1988, and Walker, 1993) signals in our minds less a solution to the problem of difference and more a deferral of the need to face that problem frontally. The idea that international society represents a solution to the problem of difference is often linked to a reading of the legacy of the Peace of Westphalia. Thus, we examine the Peace of Westphalia in its historical context—as a response to the “religious cleansing” and material and psychological devastation of the Thirty Years’ War—in order to trace IR’s posture toward difference.

An Internal Crusade

Most historians consider the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia that brought it to a close among the major events of the latter half of the millennium. Ronald Asch (1997:7) calls the Thirty Years’ War “the best example of a political event which profoundly changed political and social structures, and perhaps even collective mentalities.” The decisiveness of these events is sealed by the predominant view of the Peace of Westphalia as signaling the move from a religious to a modern, secular world and from the accepted, if somewhat vaporous, goal of a united Christendom to a system, or perhaps society, of independent states (Pages, 1970:17, 250; Thomson, 1963: 814). There is nothing foreign about this interpretation: the decisiveness of these events is asserted, if not taken for granted, by most scholars in the field of international relations.⁴

This period is indeed notable for the central role played by religious conviction in instigating military conflict. While legal and political motivations— such as the limits of the emperor’s authority and dynastic rivalry—were certainly present, such factors took on a distinctly religious hue. Just as we today perceive the ubiquity of the economic motive, whatever else may be involved, both the ruling classes and the masses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are said to have seen the events of their time through a distinctly religious gaze (Asch, 1997:7; Langer, 1980:11; Thomson, 1963:800; Lockhart, 1995:1–2; Brightwell, 1979:418). The religious conflict flaring up in the sixteenth century and all but consuming the seventeenth century found its initial spark in the Reformation’s challenge to the ideological monopoly and material power of the Catholic Church (Friedrich and Blitzer, 1957:10–11; Van Creveld, 1999:67–84). This challenge persisted and escalated with the spread of various forms of Protestantism among the masses and the conversion of certain territorial princes in Germany.

The specific character of the religious conflict merits some discussion. In his War against the Idols, Carlos M.N.Eire evocatively frames the Reformation as a transition from an immanent to a transcendent notion of religiosity. In his account of the events of 1509, the year of John Calvin’s birth, Eire (1986:1) describes a Europe in which Christianity was tangibly expressed in the events and objects of daily life:

Heaven was never too far from earth. The sacred was diffused in the profane, the spiritual in the material. Divine power, embodied in the Church and its sacraments, reached down through innumerable points of contact to make itself felt: to forgive or to punish, to protect against the ravages of nature, to heal, to soothe, and to work all sorts of wonders.

But within a period of only two decades, a radical and sweeping change was initiated. The religious immanence of Catholicism came to be seen as a corruption of the Scripture; its form of piety branded as “idolatry.”

Condemnation of the papacy fell on prepared ground, as many lay persons shared a resentment of the privileges and abuses of the Church (Blickle, 1984; Jelsma, 1998). Thus, the beliefs of the reformers were soon translated into action, disrupting the sense of the role of the Church in society: “churches were sacked, images smashed and burned, relics overturned, and consecrated hosts fed to dogs and goats.” As this displacement of the dominance of a “religion of immanence” by a “religion of transcendence” spread from Germany and Switzerland to France, the Netherlands, and England, “the unity of the European religious vision was forever shattered” and “the image donors” rather suddenly became “image smashers.” The Reformation remade Europe (Eire, 1986:2; see also Head, 1998:95–96).

Though reformers were fractured along numerous lines, Eire (1986:2) emphasizes the competition among three major “streams of piety.”⁵ Catholics defended their own centuries-long history, “suffused with the immanence of the divine,” while reformers tended to divide between the relative moderation of the Lutherans and a Calvinist rigor and intolerance for compromise. Lutheran piety objected to the Catholic practice of “works-righteousness”—the belief that grace could be conferred through works—but accepted the Catholic use of material objects in worship so long as those objects were seen as a means to the divine and not as divine themselves. Calvinism, or the “Reformed stream,” flowed in a different direction, “surging with transcendence” and unleashing an “uncompromising and disruptive…crusade against idolatry that manifested itself in iconoclasm, civil unrest, and eventually even in armed resistance against legitimate rulers” (Eire, 1986:3; emphasis added).

For contemporary readers, the allusion to an “internal crusade” needs emphasis. Nor can we afford to minimize the moral and epistemic charge of the word idolatry, or the oft-repeated charge that “the Devil and his army of demons” stood behind the practices of the established church (Jelsma, 1998:27). Catholics fully understood the accusation, for they themselves hurled it when they vituperatively degraded, for example, the religions of the Amerindians. Here, a remark that serves Eire (1986:5–6) as peripheral and expository strikes us as prescient, given our focus on European assessments of Amerindians in the next chapter:

It is good to keep in mind that at just about the same time that the soldiers of Charles V replaced the “horrible idols” of the Aztecs with “beautiful” crosses and images of Mary and the saints in the New World, Protestant iconoclasts were wreaking havoc on these Catholic objects in lands nominally ruled by him in Europe. The grisly cult of human sacrifices led by bloodstained priests inside the Wall of Snakes in Tenochtitlan inspired the same kind of reaction among the Conquistadors as the celebration of the Mass in the richly decorated cathedral of Basel did among Protestants.

As Eire (1986:5) so rightly points out, “one man’s devotion was another man’s idolatry.”

And so it is that he who casts the first stone finds it returning with a vengeance that can only come from the deepest doubts of former believers. The Calvinists claimed that the medieval Church had fallen into idolatry in two ways. First, the Church as a whole was seen as an idolatrous entity. The Church, in other words, “had set itself up as an idol, substituting its own decrees for those of God.” Second, it used idols as a part of its worship, thereby directing the worshiper’s attention not to God, but to material artifacts (Eire, 1986:55–56; see also Blickle, 1984). Eire (1986:55–56) describes the Reformist judgment: “Like some vast Augean stable, the medieval Church was ankle-deep in the ‘filth’ of images, relics, altars, holy places, and miraculous hosts. The Calvinist attack on medieval piety sought to flood and cleanse the Church from the accumulated debris.” Such feeling was justified, it was thought, because what was at stake was not simply human lives, but human souls and the truth of God’s plan for humanity (Gregory, 1999: 345–46).

Such intense feelings could not but have had momentous political consequences. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt—Luther’s colleague at the University of Wittenberg—argued that because Catholic worship transgressed the word of God it was the duty of Christians to remove idols and idolatry even if this required violence (Gregory, 1999:78–82; Head, 1998:96–97; Skinner, 1978:27, 75; Eire, 1986:65). While Karlstadt’s revolutionary views were rejected by both Luther and Calvin, they nevertheless provide a sense of how the Catholic Church came to be seen by its critics as a “realm of darkness” and “the kingdom of the Antichrist.” By the 1520s, for those in Germany and Switzerland there were two opposing Churches and the question became which one to believe. A 1521 pamphlet poses this problem starkly—“should I then consider the pope and his cronies to be the Christian Church?” The Protestant answer to this question, as Eire shows through a sermon preached by Heinrich von Kettenback in 1522, is obvious: “Christ has his Church, and the Antichrist also has his Church, and the Church of the Antichrist is nowadays often mistaken for Christ’s Church” (Eire, 1986:102).

In response, Catholic enmity against the reformers was both symmetrical and asymmetrical: symmetrical because, while accused of spiritual pollution, they themselves saw the Protestants as polluting Christianity; asymmetrical in that while the Protestants focused their rancor on “idols,” the Catholics aimed their animosity at the bodies of “heretics” themselves. This meant that

while Protestants sought to overthrow Catholicism by attacking its cultic objects, the Catholics sought to defeat the Protestants by inflicting bodily harm on them. Protestants would feed consecrated hosts to a goat and say “now he can die if he wants, he has received the sacrament,” or spit into the holy water fonts; Catholics, however, regarded such acts as attacks on the sacred, and consequently vented their anger on the persons of the Protestants themselves. (Eire, 1986:161)

Thus, each faction regarded the other’s false worship as a threat of plaguelike pollution (Blickle, 1984; Gregory, 1999:85–87; Eire, 1986:228, 283–84). And plagues must be stopped. Put in terms we introduced above, the other’s demand for recognition was experienced as a deathly threat and death for one’s cause an act of martyrdom (Gregory, 1999).

Demands to return to orthodoxy—for example, the Edict of Worms (1521), the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), and the Diet of Augsburg (1530)—were resisted by reformers, especially where such resistance was buttressed by the support of Protestant princes. At the same time, attempts to forge a compromise that recognized the divisibility of Christianity (for example, the First Diet of Speyer of 1526) were repudiated by both sides (Lindberg, 1996: chapter 9). In the end, princes loyal to Catholicism leapt to or were drawn into a defense of the Universal Church—a Counter Reformation led by the Habsburgs, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the papacy. German Protestants responded in kind, and both sides mobilized for war. More than thirty years of indecisive hostility were brought to a temporary halt in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg (Thomson, 1963: 500–1, 791).

From our point of view, the Peace of Augsburg appears to have been an initial and relatively meager attempt to come to terms with the problem of difference. The treaty confirmed, if not strengthened, the autonomy of the princes within the empire, including recognizing the principle of ubi unis dominus, ibi una sit religio (“where there is one ruler, there should be only one religion”).⁶ While this established a minimal pluralism (Lindberg, 1996: 246–48; Thomson, 1963:791), the right of rulers to fix the religion of their own citizens worked ill in an “extensive, long-unified territory,” where migration by those of other faiths to a safe haven of coreligionists was difficult. It worked somewhat better in practice where jurisdictions were “fractured and fragmented,” such that “people of deep religious commitments need not move far to find, either a ruler who shared their convictions, or a tolerant free city” (Toulmin, 1990:49–50; see also Head, 1998: 98–100).

For us, however, it is the limits of Augsburg that stand out. The right of individual conscience was not recognized, and tolerance was established only between Catholic and Lutheran princes, excluding Calvinists, Zwinglians, Anabaptists, and other sects. In addition, even the minimal tolerance established by the treaty was seen by the signatories as an act of prudence in the face of a balance of forces, merely a pause in an ongoing struggle to eliminate the religious others (see Lindberg, 1996:146–47; Head, 1998: 99–101). As Asch (1997:10) describes the situation, “[T]hose who signed the Peace of Augsburg… did not yet see this principle as the essence of the settlement as clearly as the lawyers interpreting the Peace later were to do; for they had not yet given up the hope of re-establishing some sort of religious unity.” As would also be the case with the later Peace of Westphalia, the Catholic Church refused to accept the principle of tolerance among princes. The emperors—Charles V (r. 1519–1556) and Ferdinand I (r. 1556–1564)— saw the settlement as undermining the special relationship of empire and Church (or empire and God). Protestant princes and states also tended to accept the arrangements as provisional (Thomson, 1963: 500–1; Pages, 1970: 37; Parker, 1997:16–17).

A Purifying Hatred

The outcome seems scripted, and we are tempted to read the Thirty Years’ War as the inevitable culmination of a long period of religious zealotry in which difference is first translated into inferiority and subject to eradication and then glossed as the reason and basis for the gradual movement to a more tolerant modernity. While the events of the seventeenth century are usually read in this way, we would warn against accepting such a view too readily. Cary Nederman (2000) suggests that conventional accounts ignore the vast intellectual resources supporting tolerance within the thinking of the Middle Ages—from John of Salisbury and Marsiglio of Padua to Bartholomé de Las Casas (to whom we will return...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Difference in the Constitution of IR
• Part II: Studies in Difference and Contemporary IR
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index