Building Sustainable Couples in International Relations

A Strategy Towards Peaceful Cooperation

B. Vassort-Rousset

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137273543
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Politique économique

The contributors investigate processes of international conflict transformation and peaceful cooperation. They highlight how critical intermediary-level components have proved more conducive to promoting rapprochement between rival states than interstate diplomatic engagement through incremental identity-change.

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Introduction: Critical Components of Peaceful Couples in International Relations

Brigitte Vassort-Rousset

This volume applies the domestic metaphor of “couples” to peaceful cooperation between two international actors at various levels, and it aims to determine the key roles (e.g. policy reciprocation and self-restraint, societal integration or executive choices) in constructing such a relationship and its foreign policy outcomes at a time of acute trust deficit in international affairs.

As a collective research project it was launched by me with an international seminar at the Centre d’Etudes de Défense et de Sécurité internationale of the University of Grenoble in January 2005, and it continued with the publication of a special issue of Arès, its interdisciplinary review of strategic and diplomatic subjects in 2006 (Vassort-Rousset, 2006) and three subsequent panels at International Studies Association meetings in San Francisco (2008), New York (2009) and New Orleans (2010).

Metaphors are in international relations too an invitation to reason by analogy, and build constructions of the mind stressing specific aspects of reality, guiding reflection, raising and suggesting perspectives, provoking and mobilizing (Davis, 2005). The metaphor of “international couples” – that is, contemporary international actors involved in security cooperation, more or less tightly knit, and implied in processes of international transformation, conflict and regulation – applies to the following central question: under what conditions do international marriages/couples succeed or fail in promoting peaceful cooperation?

This approach to sustainable international cooperation opens up avenues of research on dynamic international partnerships within international society (not just between states as governments but between other formations, such as subnational regional units, and youths’ or artists’ groups), on the intersubjective representation of national interest in a multipolar world which remodels the structure of international power, and on alternative structures in a spectrum from conflictual politics to convergence or confederation via coexistence and cooperation.

During tense periods, international politics affects even more international and interpersonal relationships; hence national feelings and their meaning, which are at the roots of individual identity, may easily yield to confrontation. In contrast, what is at the roots of “friendship”, alliance, competition or hostility among nations? How durable are the processes of dissociation, differentiation and emancipation? How dependent are they on the international context, circumstances, hierarchical relations and cross-representations?

New attention to the concept of friendship in international politics has been given in the last few years (Roshchin, 2006, 2009; Berenskoetter, 2007; Vion and Oelsner, 2011). Correlative changes between the shift from vertical to horizontal friendship, and the emergence of internal and external princely sovereignty, signified a new era of international politics and the emergence of the Westphalian state system. In other words, the recognition of formally equal statuses of political friends prepared the ground for the regime of modern external sovereignty. This is also linked to peace promotion through individual leaders, with the recognition (and not destruction) of otherness, and the emergence of an analytical distinction between private friendships and public political or international friendship in political theory. Beyond the familiar normative content of friendship, another interpretation as a voluntary contracted relationship, or a conceptual tool employed to promote particular political projects, the concept of friendship remains a key tool for constructing political-legal orders, not necessarily based on the principles of sovereign equality.

According to Thomas Hobbes’s theory, while there is a political and a legal order within the boundaries of the state, the sovereign is placed in an uncertain international environment populated with other sovereigns who are not subjected to any supreme authority. Under the condition of international hierarchy, some kind of order, security and predictability are sustained by forming leagues or creating alliances, and ultimately by distinguishing friends from enemies. Trust of one another is then based on guaranteed compliance with rules, as later emphasized by Carl Schmitt, who argued that the declarations of war as decisions on the state of emergency in a situation of chaos are what constitutes the sovereign. And “amity” designates public relations and is constitutive of the public sphere, distinct from individual friendships.

This is to say that past models of political (public) friendships (“vertical” and a combination of “vertical and horizontal”) were gradually replaced with a horizontal model of public (international) friendship (associated with use of the word “amity”). Actually, the state as a political entity became a major party to friendly relations only in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Milton’s 18th-century view of the friend/enemy antithesis may also be remembered as an ideological tool designed to keep the polity more united and governable in the international environment. The reason for the enmity itself was not explicated, but the case was made for friendship to include all men as a preliminary condition for people to unite into society.

The concept of friendship is blurred, has undergone different transformations and was only exceptionally an interstate friendship. Rather, the concept of “couple” is used in this volume to refer to a type of international relations without equating it with wide or mutual support. Besides, international change is not viewed from a planetary, systemic perspective based on single causes, such as Gilpin’s.

The use of psychological and emotional terms in international politics reflects the finding that relations between nation-states are neither rational nor limited to either the confrontation or the collaboration of material interests; interests and passions are constantly intertwined, and this family-like emotional feature of international politics comes up strongly in bilateral relations – for example, of dependence/independence and equality/inequality. There is a need to focus on the affective intensity of global politics, as exemplified by the waves of variegated emotion created by the post-Cold War conflicts of the 1990s and post-9/11 wars related to terrorism – that is, a need to study how social interactions intensify and blend the emotional responses missed by research on identities, institutions or interests, and how emotions that are contingent on events are a creative source of collective agency and help to shape identities rather than appear as the result of fixed identities and conflicts (Ross, 2014). The international couple paradigm constitutes a bridge between the ideational and more conventional materialist components of national interest, and it sheds light on power and on conflict transformation in international relations.

These themes are not dealt with by political philosophy; international couples are not accounted for in contemporary reflections on ancient philosophers’ pieces on passionate love, or a sense of incompleteness accounting for search for love (Nichols, 2008). Furthermore, they do not fit either with Aristotle’s definition of friendship stemming from enduring acquaintance and reciprocated goodwill, without utility or material interest, resulting in mutually supportive commitments. Nor are they explained in depth by the cognitive model of state action and of individual perceptions to evaluate state strategies from statements of individuals and image theory, and by perceptions of the other based on gains, relative power and norms (Herrmann and Fischerkeller, 1995). Nor by Boulding’s hope that we can learn “to fly the great engine of change . . . that it may carry us not to destruction but to that great goal for which the world was made, a more satisfying life in a tolerable environment” (Boulding, 1988, p. 343). Nor by Mitzen’s primary focus on states as the principal actors responsible for human wellbeing, on conflicts as routinized relationships, and routines as securing identities in a realist-rationalist analogy with individuals (Mitzen and Schweller, 2011).

The persistence of friendship in political life is considered as promoting the cohesion of civil society, with an approach of political philosophy, but it sheds no light on international sustainable interaction (Heyking and Avramenko, 2008). This volume does not focus on presenting an array of views about friendship in the history of Western political thought, as engaging the entirety of the human personality with implications for the sense of belonging in political society. “Couple”, like “friendship”, refers to similarity and dissimilarity, and the difficulty is to find the appropriate conceptual language to describe it. But “couple” is distinct from “political friend” within the parameters of modern liberal democracy – that is, referring to the public sphere of common meanings sustaining a common reference model that signifies common purpose, action and aspiration of the members of society, who live together in virtue of the binding force of trust, which does not preclude values of dialogue, understanding and mutual support towards intellectual and moral virtue in the give-and-take of personal interactions and relationships.

As a pluralistic, synthetic, cross-national and cross-cultural analysis (with sufficient general relevance) of international political processes and conflict transformation, the volume embraces the exploration of increasingly complex and differentiated relationships, and examines how other international actors than state, such as mid-level elites and communities in dyads, actually behave and express preferences, in a variety of situations at different levels of responsibility, noting both the rational and the affective aspects of these choices. With incursions into or from political sociology, political and cultural psychology, history, geography, economics, administrative science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, textual analysis reflecting a variety of worldviews, linguistics, diplomatic and security studies, and music, it illustrates the subjectivity of decision-making, incorporates this subjectivity into models that further our understanding of international processes, and speaks to scholars in international relations theory, security/cooperation studies, multilateralism/international organizations, and global governance and the state, all of them dealing with issues of post-conflict reconciliation, conflict resolution, trauma alleviation and intergroup peace.

The framework is problematized in various ways, and chapters constitute a broad-based and integrated approach to state-level, regional and intermediate structure, community and individual influences. They contend that depending on the context and level of analysis, constructivist insights (neither idealism nor utopia) are compatible with a classical realist worldview (Barkin, 2003), and help to specify further the relationship between the study of power in international politics and the study of international relations as an identity-based and emotion-framed social construction. In accounting for political change, an exploration of conflict transformation thus includes not only postmodern theory’s study of subjective text and positivist realism’s account of objective phenomena, but also interactionism and constructivism’s study of intersubjectivity, and of norms and social rules.

This is not a paradigm, meaning a set of assumptions about how politics work; rather, it builds from a range of sources including a knowledge of history and a sense of perspective, an intuitive understanding of individual psychological forces, political acumen, recognition of the realities of structure, and skill in statistical analysis. It investigates levers of international change in a differentiated approach, and it addresses the relationship between normative structures, the carriers of emotional expressions, identity and political morality, and uses of power. It aims to provide a corrective to individual rationalism and materialism that have long confused definitions of realism, and searches what emotional expressions are more important than others in creating meaning, belief, knowledge, moral statements and involvement in world politics (Fattah and Fierke, 2009; Jeffery, 2011).

Interactions between the state’s relative national identity and relative national power ground its national interest, and countries evaluate one another by differences in internal and external identity, as well as by differences in power. Thus domestic images, international communities, shared values and identity may be explicitly incorporated into realism, and the structure of relative national power can operate along the structure of relative national identity to define continuous spaces, allowing for a rich variety of international systems and possible changes between them (Nau, 2002). The dual power and identity approach (Buzan, 2004) counsels intermediate strategies, and adds critical missing elements to the reified realist mental constructs of “national interest” (Burchill, 2005) and “balance of power”.

The Copenhagen School’s theory of securitization has mainly focused on the middle level of world politics in which collective political units, often but not always states, construct relationships of amity or enmity with each other. It argues that this middle level would be the most active both because of the facility with which collective political units can construct each other as threats, and because of the difficulty of finding audiences for the kinds of securitizations and referent objects that are available at the individual and systems levels (Buzan and Waever, 2009). Yet there is a gap between the middle and systems levels, and a need for a more analytical grip on what happens above (and below) the middle level.

The puzzle of security cooperation is approached here through the concept of international/transnational couples, which serves to order life experiences and establish similarities across a range of observations, yet defies operationalization on the basis of essential attributes, properties or relationships. International couples with variable geometry may be asymmetric, develop interdependence between autonomous players and supplement institutional organizations. They introduce both a human dimension and rules different from alliances. They act as a power multiplier, yet are simultaneously based on dialogue and communication. They articulate national stakes and strategies. Fear and shared risk-taking are instrumental in pulling and holding such couples together. They are also dependent on the regional and international environment. At the other end of the spectrum, the actions and words of individuals who control the levers of state power are a crucial dimension in understanding how the ends of policy are defined: they may act as kick-starters, brokers, certifiers, model-setters or institution-designers.

As a metaphor, the “international couple” underlines the importance of intersubjectivity in the conduct and expression of diplomatic behaviour and strategic choices. It sheds light on the progression from identity formation to interest recognition, by focusing on the political and cultural contexts in which national interests are constructed from shared ideas and meanings, and on normative practice (e.g. institutions and policy processes) as an interpretation of objective and material criteria.

Different perspectives are researched at various levels around the “international couple” relationship, and their links to narratives of its development and future course of bilateral relations. The volume is divided into three parts following this introductory chapter; and after the second, more theoretical chapter, the remaining ten chapters each deal with case studies.

The outline elaborates on three critical dimensions of an international couple’s strategy towards the potential peace-causing effects of cultural affinity and possibly societal integration at the regional level, taking into account supports and obstacles at each stage of the sequence of international political change, with the resulting changes in narrative, identity and cultural commonality. That is, accommodation and institutionalized reciprocal restraint (Part I, chapters 2–5), societal integration and identity change (Part II, chapters 6–8), and uncertainties from the lack of cultural commonality (Part III, chapters 9–11). Chapter 12 offers concluding remarks.

In Chapter 2, “Couples and Trust-Building in International Society”, the bases for interstate loyalty as a bridging variable, and the role of declining trust in terms of depletion of social capital, are looked into, shifting from isolated interaction or sporadic contact to a more steady interstate link, whatever its functional equivalence (trust, honesty, faithfulness). Yet loyalty is an uncertain landmark – variable, relative, multidimensional and interest-based (Laroche, 2001). It also expresses a dynamic of change in traditional international arrangements and emphasizes distributive justice, while reciprocity involves commutative justice.

While international relations scholars are mainly interested in trust because it can make the difference between peace and war, the interest behind this chapter rather stems from the fact that, hopefully before that threshold is reached, the level of mutual trust can today make the difference between effective governance and a situation in which the members of the international community no longer perceive themselves as stakeholders in the present multilateral order, and for this very reason cannot effectively meet the challenges that they jointly face. This prevents the social construction (or reproduction) of the problems’ indivisibility, the final result being a collapse of social construction (or reproduction) of group indivisibility, the very basis of any multilateral endeavour. How trust can be built and ensured in interstate relations is very relevant, but the neo-institutionalist approach lacked insights into the human dimension developing in interstate relations. And beyond Alexander Wendt’s assertion that a world state would grant recognition of, and respect for, the individuals’ and groups’ rights, the need remains to clarify whether couples in larger networks are apt to foster trust among states, and through which mechanisms trust may grow and influence security, peaceful cooperation and democracy-building.

From this perspective the couple metaphor is employed to explore the primary source of trust: interpersonal – or interstate in this case – capital. The subsequent step leads to reflect upon the possibility that what has been called “interstate capital”, being produced within dyadic relationships, may be “socialized”. Consideration for human feelings/emotions in international relations enhances dialogue with the cognitive-psychological approach to the study of foreign policy in dyadic configurations. It logically connects with social constructivism and larger international relations theory. It stresses manners in which reality is constructed socially, strongly values the notion of the mutual coconstitution of agents and structures, and captures the essential nature of the self-fulfilling prophecy. It suggests that a particular focus on collective ideas and norms constructs both identities and interests in a social world made up of intersubjective processes. It opens up an emotional reading of international relations, far beyond fear, which was at the roots of Morgenthau’s security dilemma. It emphasizes empathy and empathetic interdependence as possible key explanations to international order and change, according to Keohane and Linklater. It detects norms and identities, and trauma and humiliation (Fattah and Fierke, 2009).

As a matter of fact, psychological identification theory and the sociology of emotions explain how feelings contribute to mutual identification and understanding among members of a social group, following Durkheim and Simmel, and to the internalization of social norms. They easily correlate with approaches in international relations which imply the existence of stable social orders among and within statebound societies that are not purely based on intellectual attachment but on interpersonal, intergroup and transnational emotional embodiment. At each level and sometimes across levels (states, governments, nations, governments, policy-makers, civil society, intermediate subnational structures, cultural communities and transnational groups), the book chapters identify how feelings, emotional appraisals and expressions of groups and individuals are translated from the interpersonal to the international level.

States, and the policy-makers within states, “construct” their own realities, relations and interpretations of the surrounding world through a variety of identities and discursive formations rather than mere systemic or interstate relations. The definition of dyadic relations by policy-makers, and their u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Critical Components of Peaceful Couples in International Relations
• Part I: Conditions for Accommodation and Institutionalized Reciprocal Restraint
• Part II: Grassroots and Intermediate-Level Integration and Interest-Related Identity Change
• Part III: Attempting to Avoid Divorce for Lack of Cultural Commonality
• Index