Regionalism and Multilateralism

Politics, Economics, Culture

Thomas Meyer, José Luís de Sales Marques, Mario Telò

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000088427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book discusses the impact of cultural diversities and identities on regional and interregional cooperation, as well as on multilateralism.

Employing a comparative approach to organizations such as ASEAN, MERCOSUR, SAARC, and the African and European Unions, this volume seeks to understand their distinctive features and patterns of interaction. It also explores the diffusion of multidimensional interregional relations, including but not limited to the field of trade. Scholars from several disciplines and four continents offer insights concerning the consequences of both multiple modernities and the rise of authoritarian populism for regionalism, interregionalism, and multilateralism. The Covid-19 pandemic confirmed the decline of hegemonic multilateralism. Among alternative possible scenarios for global governance, the "new multilateralism" receives special attention.

This book will be of key interest to European/EU studies, economics, history, cultural studies, international relations, international political economy, security studies, and international law.

PART I

Multiple modernities and regional/interregional multilateralism

1

CONSTRAINED DIVERSITY

Modernities, regionalism, and polyvalent globalism in world politics

Peter J. Katzenstein

Apposite for this chapter, Jacob Viner (1991: 227) writes that “most abstract terms ending in ‘ism’ inevitably accumulate about them a haze of uncertainty and imprecision.”¹ The chapter focuses on civilizational and regional politics. It maneuvers between two sets of claims articulated after the end of the Cold War. Francis Fukuyama’s (2006) end-of-history thesis interpreted the victory of liberalism over communism and fascism as the end of different programs for modernity and the beginning of stultifying sameness. Samuel Huntington’s (1996) clash of civilization thesis viewed the same victory as setting the stage for bitter civilizational clashes across deep fault lines. The first views the world in terms of convergence toward harmonious cooperation, while the second views it in terms of divergence into fundamentally irreconcilable differences. Polyvalent globalism, I argue, describes a situation of constrained diversities that characterizes contemporary world politics more accurately than either of these perspectives. A recognition of constrained diversities makes it easier to resist Fukuyama’s urge of imputing to history a teleology and helps discover spaces for new political possibilities that Huntington’s language of clash conceals.

Multiple modernities and variants of modernity

How do we characterize and account for the mixture of difference and sameness in contemporary world politics? Explanations that feature “multiple modernities” or highlight variations on the theme of modernity offer related though different answers. Looking at historical developments dating back to the sixth century ce, the theory of multiple modernities stresses the never-ending potential for constrained diversities in the nature of constitutive institutions, including political orders, collective identities, and the character of public spheres. Informed primarily by the history of the last two centuries, variants-of-modernity theories emphasize instead the pervasiveness of constrained diversities. They focus typically on regulatory institutional and organizational arrangements, including the strength and autonomy of state agencies, societal groups, and social movements.

Multiple modernities²

Joined by many other scholars, Shmuel Eisenstadt (1982, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2003) developed the concept of multiple modernities and applied it to many different settings.³ The key distinction lies between two types of civilizations. Axial Age civilizations emerged together with the major world religions around the sixth century bce (Arnason et al. 2005; Bellah 2011; Bellah & Joas 2012),⁴ a formative period of religious innovation. The delayed impact of different religious traditions embodied in distinctive civilizational frameworks has had powerful effects down to the present. Continuous reconstruction of religious traditions creates struggles and innovations in political orders, collective identities, and public spheres. Proto-fundamentalism is an inescapable byproduct of those struggles. In this view, Jacobin impulses are not evanescent phenomena. The civilization of modernity (Eisenstadt 2001), by way of contrast, is a product of the very recent past, starting with the scientific and technological revolution brought about by the European Enlightenment and marked by an unprecedented openness to novelty and uncertainty. The two types of civilizations interact and reconfigure each other in unending dynamic relations of mutual reconstitution. Together they have helped bring about the emergence of one global civilization containing multiple modernities.

Eisenstadt took the concept of the Axial Age from Karl Jaspers (1953; see also Levine 1995, 2004). It denotes a formative period in world history when a number of powerful cultural developments in China, India, Iran, Palestine, and Greece occurred independently from one another. Humankind moved at that pivotal moment in world history from an instinctual disposition to a self-reflexive striving for human agency, transcendence, self-determination and, eventually, future-oriented progress (Eisenstadt 2000b: 3–5; Meyer 2018a: 5–7; Meyer 2018b: 17–20). For Jaspers and Eisenstadt, the sixth century bce is an axis that divides history, a transformative break brought about by the appearance of the world’s great religions and the onset of humankind’s spiritualization.

Eisenstadt’s core argument holds that the impact of different Axial Age religions and civilizations is eventually transmitted to one global civilization containing multiple modernities. Following Max Weber, Eisenstadt argues that the different religious cores and cultural programs of Axial Age civilizations are historically grounded, continually reconstructed traditions. The religious cores of civilizations thus continue to have a strong impact on the unending restructuring of their respective states. Eisenstadt dissents from Weber’s Eurocentrism by insisting that, in all civilizations, this reconstruction is shaped by specific antinomies: transcendental vs. mundane, universalistic vs. particularistic, totalistic vs. pluralistic, orthodox vs. heterodox. These antinomies motivate political struggles that affect political institutions, social and economic structures, and collective identities. It is noteworthy that all Axial Age civilizations have generated proto-fundamentalist movements. In the West, Jacobinism became an oppositional movement in European civilization that exploded in the twentieth century under the banners of communism and fascism. Modern fundamentalism in non-Western civilizations combines the impact of Western Jacobinism with indigenous fundamentalist movements. Jacobin impulses in modernity thus are not passing phenomena in the history of civilizations. Instead, they are its permanent features. Fundamentalism is an engine of change in all civilizations and a key aspect of the civilization of modernity. In general, Western patterns of modernity are not the only authentic ones; they merely precede other versions and thus often act as cognitive reference points (Eisenstadt 2000b: 2–3).

Early modernities (from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century) provide a transitional phase between Axial Age civilizations and full modernity that exemplify and deepen the theme of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt & Schluchter 1998). Language offers a good illustration of this period of transition. The turn to vernacular languages occurred in both Europe and India. In Europe, but not in India, it was accompanied by the emergence of more clearly defined territorial boundaries. In India, but not in Europe, vernacular languages complemented rather than replaced the sacred languages of Sanskrit and Pali (Pollock 2006: 259–80). In China and Japan, classical languages and political orders survived those turbulent centuries. While China experienced a major break in the age of axial religion, Japan, as the only state coterminous with a civilization, did not. Yet in both states a public sphere evolved in early modernity, although one that was not tied, as in Europe, to civil society. Instead, China’s public sphere became the world of the academies and the literati, which was closely linked to the official sphere (Woodside 2006). In Tokugawa Japan, people and territory were united (kokka). But even in that holistic conception, politically relevant distinctions emerged between the official and the non-official and between the social and the non-social. As in China, the realm of the private was denigrated and widely regarded as undercutting the pursuit of the common good. By contrast, in Islamic law, Sufi orders constituted a dynamic public sphere that operated quite independently from the political or official realm. Charting such a multiplicity of early modernities undercuts the charge of Eurocentrism in Eisenstadt’s civilizational analysis (Pasha 2007: 65, 70). Europe is, as Eisenstadt and Schluchter argue, an analytical ideal type, not a normative reference point (Eisenstadt & Schluchter 1998: 6–7, 15).

The first civilization of modernity was Western European. Based on the Enlightenment and crystallized politically in the American and French revolutions, it developed in the specific context of European Christianity. Its cultural core was a bundle of cognitive and moral imperatives insisting on more individual autonomy, fewer traditional constraints, and increased control over nature. The first modernity was constructed and reconstructed in the specific context of Judeo/Greek/Christian cultural universalism and in the political pluralism of its various center-periphery relations and political protest movements. Subsequently, Western European modernity spread to Central and Eastern Europe, North and South America, and other non-European civilizations. For Eisenstadt (2001), the civilization of modernity is defined not by being taken for granted, but by becoming a zone of contestation, an object of uninterrupted conflict engaging both pre- and post-modern protest movements (Kocka 2001). The civilization of modernity embodies a multiplicity of cultural programs and institutions that derive from the interaction between West European modernity and the various civilizations of the Axial Age.

In contrast to theories of variants of modernity, for theories of multiple modernities, modern societies are therefore not converging on a path involving capitalist industrialism, political democracy, modern welfare regimes, and pluralizing secularisms. Instead, the different religious traditions serve as cultural sources for the enactment of different programs of modernity. For example, West European modernity was transformed in the United States under the specific circumstances of a settler and immigrant society. In America fundamentalist religious movements remain relevant for the multiple traditions and various dimensions of political identities, political institutions, and collective identities of the American state (Roniger & Waisman 2002; Kurth 2010). A second example is provided by Japan’s reconstruction of modernity. Japan’s is the only civilization that did not experience a rupture during the Axial Age. It is based on specific patterns of emulation and selection that evolved a distinctive set of sociopolitical structures and collective identities. Since the Meiji revolution the country’s deeply anchored syncretism of religious belief systems has been highly eclectic in the values that it has adopted and flexible in the interpretation of the dramatic shifts in political context that it has confronted (Eisenstadt 1996; Leheny 2010).

As sources of cultural innovation, the legacies of different world religions thus create multiple modernities. In the evolution of the socio-economic, political/legal and technical/scientific dimensions of the civilization of modernity, forces of convergence are always balanced against forces of divergence. Modernity is inescapably multiple and undergoing a constant process of reinvention in which all traditional elements that rebel against it have a modern, Jacobin character. In sum, although the aspirations of the world’s important civilizational states may be totalistic, they are pluralistic in their cumulative impact on multiple civilizational modernities (Sternberg 2001: 80–81; Arjomand & Tiryakian 2004: 3).

Variants of modernity

Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, modernity acquired various conventional, interrelated markers: culturally, the Renaissance; scientifically, the Enlightenment; politically, the French and American revolutions; and economically, the rise of industrial capitalism. Variants-of-modernity theory regards these ruptures as fundamental and transformative. In its strong version, modernization theory holds that over time these ruptures will diminish greatly or eliminate the differences among all polities. Gaining in prominence in the 1950s, the strong version’s central claim holds that modernization is a homogenizing process that ultimately leads to a convergence in practices, policies and institutions. Daniel Lerner (1958) and Walt Rostow (1960), for example, acknowledged different rates of social change, but were confident that Western-style modernity would eventually prevail the world over (Huntington 1971). In this view, Europe is the maker of universal history, modernization is basically the same as Westernization, and all states and societies eventually will adopt the model of North America and Western Europe (Bhambra 2007: 2–5).

Rather than insisting on a monolithic form of modernity, weak versions of the variants-of-modernity approach recognize different outcomes confined by one general model of modernity (Schmidt 2006). German, Japanese, and Russian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave ample evidence that authoritarian modernization offered viable avenues for polities opposed to the Western model, even though these alternatives ultimately led to disaster (Snyder 2018). In our own day, the rise of China is a poignant reminder of the viability of authoritarian, illiberal modernization. Technical and bureaucratic rationality without political competition can produce stable growth. What remains an open question is how long authoritarian, illiberal modernization can succeed. Years or decades? A few decades or many decades? A century or several centuries? Advocates of multiple modernities tend to count in terms of centuries, while their variants-of-modernity counterparts count in terms of decades. Unavoidably, this discrepancy leads to different conclusions about present conditions and future trends.

Variants-of-modernity approaches also stress the interconnectedness of modernity in relations of dependence and interdependence. Modernity is not Eurocentric but global. “Methodological cosmopolitanism” begins with the observation that variants of modernity are profoundly interdependent. The era of the “world risk society” requires a rethinking of the concept of modernity. All societies are now marked by interpenetrations that run so deep that no society can withstand them. All translate aspects of the second, cosmopolitan modernity into their domestic structures and repertoires of practice (Beck & Grande 2007, 2010).

A third version of the variants-of-modernity approach focuses on capitalism as a driving force of modernity. Although capitalism existed before modernity, modern capitalism is more dynamic and encompassing than its forebear—hence the designation of capitalism in the singular rather than plural. The varieties of capitalism literature acknowledges capitalism’s different institutional and organizational forms: specifically, liberal and coordinated (Hall & Soskice 2001). It focuses primarily on regulatory norms and practices. This distinction is informed only by American and European models. Japan since the 1960s, the Newly Industrializing States since the 1970s, and China since the 1990s require us to go beyond the West in understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.⁵ Differences in the varieties of capitalism are family resemblances in one system of global capitalism rather than different types of capitalisms. Varieties of capitalism illustrate constrained diversity. They take “existing differences seriously without giving them too much weight” (Schmidt 2006).

Variants-of-modernity arguments are readily extended to other spheres that also show evidence of constrained diversity. Social policy regimes, for example, have shown constrained diversity among similar institutional and organizational forms (Esping-Andersen 1990). And so have public opinions as measured by public opinion surveys, and theorized by the world polity model (Inglehart 1995; Meyer et al. 1997). In these approaches economic and cultural modernization go hand in hand. Without insisting on it, like other variants-of-modernity approaches, they leave open the possibility of a delayed modernization in some community-oriented political cultures that, in due time, still may converge with the more individualistic mores that characterize some parts of the West (Schmidt 2006).

In short, theories of multiple modernities stress long-term historical development and focus on the effects of religious and cultural patterns of evolution on constitutive institutio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Multiple modernities and regional/interregional multilateralism
• PART II: History and drivers of regional cooperation: trade, identity, security
• PART III: Case studies: competing regionalisms or pluralistic and post-hegemonic multilateralism?
• Index