The ideal river

How control of nature shaped the international order

Joanne Yao

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526154378
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto pubblico

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order. The ideal river examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers – the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilized authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship of domination over nature shaped three core IR concepts central to the emergence of early international order: the territorial sovereign state; imperial hierarchies; and international organizations. The book contributes to environmental politics and international relations by highlighting how the relationship between society and nature is not a peripheral concern, but one at the heart of international politics.

1
The taming of nature, legitimate authority, and international order

In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Hans Morgenthau begins with a puzzle of twentieth-century intellectual life: ‘We think in terms of the outgoing eighteenth century and live in terms of the mid-twentieth century’ (1946: 11–12). This intellectual bent upholds two principles based on rationalist assumptions – first, that the social and physical world can be understood through the same rational processes, and second, that understanding these processes will allow us to exercise rational control over the social and physical worlds in order to improve them. This faith in science and progress ‘sets our age apart from preceding periods of history’ (1946: 11). However, this faith is problematic because it ‘perverts the natural sciences into an instrument of social salvation for which neither their own nature nor the nature of the social world fits them’ (1946: 12). Despite this weakness, our abiding faith in science to solve all problems, a relic of the late eighteenth century, has continued to shape our political outlook even when ‘conditions of life … have undergone the most profound changes in recorded history’ (1946: 5). Since the mid-twentieth century, continued faith in rationality and social progress in mainstream IR theory and practice seems to confirm and extend Morgenthau's assessment into the twenty-first century.

Although situated in a different intellectual tradition, Timothy Mitchell interestingly begins his book on techno-politics in Egypt in a similar manner: ‘We have entered the twenty-first century still divided by a way of thinking inherited from the nineteenth’ (2002: 1). In this era, the progressive forces of human reason supplanted notions of divine will and natural balance to become the driving forces behind historical development. Mitchell argues that this mindset had several effects:

This moment of history could be ascribed to the growing technical control that reason acquired over the natural and social world, to the power of reason to expand the scope of human freedom, or to the economic forms that were said to flow from the spread of rational calculations and freedom. (2002: 1)

One outcome of this intellectual transformation is the division of the world – the social from nature, the economic and technical from politics, reason from the real world, and ideas from their objects. The same rational, technocratic logic, then, is applied across these divisions, allowing the first to dominate the second. Despite increasing evidence of deviation from these modernist assumptions, we continue to make abstract rationalist arguments about the interconnected social and natural world. Even as we advance into the twenty-first century, Mitchell echoes Morgenthau in maintaining that we remain ‘captives’ of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought (2002: 2).

The following chapter takes Morgenthau's and Mitchell's insights on the staying power of a certain way of thinking inherited from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the starting point for exploring how this prevailing confidence in society's ability to tame nature and usher forth social progress informed the development of the modern international order. Rooted in the European Enlightenment, this way of thinking sees the messy natural and social world around us as a barrier to human progress and places trust in scientific and technocratic governance to transform this natural messiness into rational sites of social improvement. Taming nature, then, legitimizes the people and institutions in power by securing increased economic growth as well as moral progress for the community. The immense staying power of this ideational frame in the international order, I contend, derives from its embeddedness in key international norms, hierarchies, and institutions, which gained global prominence in the nineteenth century and continues to hold sway over international politics. By examining how society's ambition to control nature shaped three core IR concepts – the territorial sovereign state, imperial and global hierarchy, and international organizations – this chapter outlines the key theoretical contributions that frame the historical narrative to follow.

The taming of nature and the sovereign territorial state

One central argument running through this book focuses on the quest to tame nature and its influence on the development of the modern territorial state. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, various intellectual, social, and material forces contributed to the consolidation of the modern state system – a system that ‘differentiated its subject collectively into territorially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion’ (Ruggie 1993: 151). One major force that contributed to this transformation was the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which, with its accompanying technological innovations in transportation and communication, allowed the state to concentrate and centralize its workings. This centralization created what Andreas Osiander called ‘integrated economic circuits’ (2001: 281) and what Barry Buzan and George Lawson describe as administrative functions that were ‘accumulated and “caged” within national territories’ (2015: 6). In this process, Jordan Branch stresses cartography as a key technology that helped reshape legitimate authority from non-territorial and overlapping forms prior to the nineteenth century to the linear, cartographically bounded states we know today (2011; 2014). Justin Rosenberg's (1994) and Benno Teschke's (2003) historical-materialist arguments foreground capitalist structure and state–society relations as central to the development of the modern state. In addition, emergent ideologies such as nationalism unleashed in the aftermath of the French Revolution enabled and legitimized the consolidation of territorial states as exclusive and exclusionary realms of domestic political order (Rejai and Enloe 1969; Gellner 1983; Mayall 1990; Breuilly 1993).

My focus on controlling natural resources such as rivers adds to these arguments by investigating how confidence in society's ability to tame nature and therefore control and improve a bounded territory helped constitute what it meant to be a legitimate modern state. Here, I contend that legitimate territorial authority did not rest solely in the state's capacity to control populations and police social behavior, but implied a hierarchical relationship with nature where the state bends nature to its will for moral and economic progress. The ability to control nature contributes to a well-functioning state by improving the productivity of the land and people, hence reinforcing the state's legitimacy over a fixed territory. Chandra Mukerji's work (2010) frames this control of nature as ‘logistical power’ that displaced traditional patrimonial networks and contributed to impersonal rule as a hallmark of the modern territorial state. In the nineteenth century, the taming of nature as a marker of a civilized state authority gained political traction among European states and enabled the creation of national and transnational projects to tame the river. In this section, I first outline the Enlightenment ethos that informed the state's mission to tame nature and its double economic and moral logics. Then I examine a central analytical blind spot inherent in this Enlightenment ethos and how reconceptualizing that blind spot challenges longstanding hierarchies between nature and society.

High modernism, science, and the double logics of taming nature

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott argues that the central objective of the modern bureaucratic state is to impose what he calls legibility on illogical nature and society. For the modern state that aims to maximize efficiency, the complexity and variations in local social practices present a major barrier to the state's consolidation of its bureaucratic capacity. To make these practices legible, the state imposes administrative standardization and simplification to transform idiosyncratic local practices into uniform and standardized information that the state can then process. Once these practices are made legible, the state can more easily control, govern, and profit from its domains and subjects. What I wish to highlight here is not so much Scott's emphasis on the all-seeing authoritarian state that can impose such legibility on its territories – a vision of the state that has taken much criticism (Bayly 2004; Mukerji 2007; Benton 2010). Instead, I wish to focus on the Enlightenment ethos that legitimated the state's desire to seek legibility as a standard of effective governance.

Here, Scott highlights high modernism as the driving ideological force. He defines high modernism as a ‘strong … version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialization’ in the Western world in the nineteenth century. It was, as Scott contends, a ‘sweeping vision of how the benefit of technical and scientific progress might be applied’ to ration...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction: The ideal river
• 1: The taming of nature, legitimate authority, and international order
• 2: Taming the international highway: constructing the Rhine
• 3: The 1815 Congress of Vienna and the oldest continuous interstate institution
• 4: Disciplining the connecting river: constructing the Danube
• 5: The 1856 Treaty of Paris and the first international organization
• 6: Civilizing the imperial river: constructing the Congo
• 7: The 1884–85 Berlin Conference and the international organization that never was
• 8: History is a river: the taming of nature into the twenty-first century
• Conclusion: The strong brown god of the Anthropocene
• Bibliography
• Index