Overcoming Poststructuralism

Rawls, Kratochwil and the Structure of Normative Reasoning in International Relations

A. O'Loughlin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137380739
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Through the use of a poststructuralist perspective, Antony O'Loughlin challenges the most basic tenets of International Relations Theory and deploys Rawlsian ideas of public reason in conjunction with Kratochwil's conceptions of practical reason in order to put forward a theory that overcomes the challenges posed by poststructuralism.

Part I

The Challenge – Poststructuralism and IR’s Responses

1

Inside/Outside: Walker, Ashley and the Poststructuralist Critique of IR

Richard Ashley claimed in 1996 that

[i]f ever there was a field of discourse whose parties’ every performance presupposes the necessity of thinking, acting and narrating political life in the service of some sovereign centre of decision that can at once represent and derive its powers from a familiar territory of its exclusionary being, international relations is surely it.¹

This presupposition, though seemingly innocuous, became the target of poststructuralist attempts to problematise and recast the most inherent assumptions found within the field of International Relations theory which, I contend, has lost none of its potency in the intervening decade and a half. Specifically, the work of Richard Ashley and R.B.J. Walker (among others) is designed to expose the imaginative limitations of traditional attempts to categorise the domain of world politics through a radical attack on the foundationalist methodologies incorporated by a discipline co-existent with the modernist project. The pervasive nature of this postmodern critique stems from the targeting and deconstruction of those characterisations of world politics whose self-evidence seems indisputable, specifically, the world as a system of bounded sovereign states, the anarchical nature of the spaces between these states and the necessarily self-serving, calculating actions of the states which flow from this anarchy. While these characterisations are generally identified with the doctrine of Realism, postmodern theory is not confined to an attack on the traditionally dominant theory of IR: basic concepts of sovereignty, universalism and foundationalism, and the ahistorically privileged position granted to them, not only by Realism but also by more normative international theory, are fundamentally challenged. These challenges allow an illumination into the ways in which IR theory itself becomes a form of power politics, through the creation of dichotomous extremes. As Cochran claims:

In directing this critique to the constructions of contemporary international theory, these writers problematise the dominant understanding of IR as a world of sovereign states which demarcate inside from outside, order from anarchy, and identity and difference. More generally, they challenge the notion of sovereignty as an ahistorical, universal, transcendent concept, be it applied to the sovereign state, the sovereign individual or a sovereign truth.²

Taken to its extreme, this critique denies the very possibility of obtaining a privileged position from which to make universal claims about international politics or ethical judgement. Without state sovereignty, the traditional distinction between international and political theory (or the inside/outside distinction) cannot be maintained; without the sovereign individual, the traditional privileging of what Ashley calls the ‘heroic’ ideal of rational man is ungrounded, and without the possibility of sovereign truth, the epistemological privileging of some forms of knowledge above others is unjustified. In short, without sovereignty, political space is endless.

My purpose here is to elucidate this poststructuralist challenge to IR theory. It is not a challenge which is universally accepted as having any real importance amidst the debates of IR; Chris Brown, for example, dismisses Walker’s work as an exercise in complication for complication’s sake.³ As I will go on to say, however, the postmodern challenge contains elements which go to the heart of IR theory, and which work to explain the tendency of IR to simplify, conservatise and at times exclude fundamental characteristics of world politics. Specifically, the contention that IR theory in actuality forms part of the historical fabrication of the domain it attempts to understand serves to critically reassess the creation of those apparently self-evident truths which traditional theory, particularly Realism, has served to perpetuate. Moreover, Realism’s reliance on a perceived continuum (or, in Ashley’s phrase, a ‘monologue’) of work which supposedly reinforces the central tenets of power politics through timeless political wisdom⁴ is frustrated by both Walker⁵ and William Connolly⁶ through an attempt to identify those elements of the thinkers relied on by Realism which do not correspond with their supposedly rigid espousal of the ‘realities’ of power politics. This is a fascinating project which forms part of the poststructuralist attempt to highlight the historicised and contingent nature of all attempts to locate a sovereign point of reference or a fixed notion of textual interpretation, and the relation between them.⁷ Walker, in particular, espouses a powerful critique and reanalysis of the concept of sovereignty as applied to the state, arguing that the apparently unquestionable presence of state sovereignty in any discussion of international relations arises from the universalisation of a particular spatiotemporal conception of sovereignty which turns out in actuality to be the product of a contingent historical imagination. If this critique of the concept of sovereignty is accepted, radical implications follow for the traditional distinction between international and political theory, with the opening up of the possibilities of political space and the blurring of the inside/outside dichotomy.

My claim is that the postmodernist critique of sovereignty and authoritative theoretical knowledge offers a relevant challenge to the more traditional theoretical approaches found in IR, and that this challenge necessitates the radical overhaul of the foundations relied on by these approaches, including examples of more normative IR theory. I specifically select the work of Walker and Ashley, as opposed to alternative versions of critical theory, as a means by which to consider the most vociferous and far-reaching theoretical challenge felt by the discipline of IR to date. The fact that the poststructuralism of Walker and Ashley has not been universally accepted as a legitimate challenge to the foundations of IR, I contend, means that systematic attempts to engage with and ultimately overcome the critique set down by these theorists have not been as comprehensive and forthcoming as is warranted by what I argue is a valid and radical attack on the discipline’s most fundamental assumptions and commitments. Moreover, I want to suggest that the methodologies employed by certain IR theorists to try to overcome challenges such as this (particularly ‘conventional’ constructivism, which I will explore in Chapter 2), while containing much that is useful in opening the closed categories of traditional theory, represents a theoretical discourse still tied to those concepts it attempts to critique. In particular, Alexander Wendt’s⁸ brand of agency-focused constructivism formulates its own theoretical identity in terms of its relationship with Realism, thus perpetuating those dichotomies of inside/outside, domestic/international that poststructuralist theory seeks to problematise and ceding much ground to the Realist theory purportedly being criticised. More radical versions of constructivism, such as critical and holistic varieties,⁹ gain far more critical purchase on the very foundations of Realism, but I will argue that it is precisely because they begin to develop theories which can effectively cohere with the more philosophical conceptions of international relations that they manage to overcome the gravitational pull of traditional characterisations of the nature of world politics. My central purpose will be to dispute the conclusion of poststructuralism that its critique of the wide concept of sovereignty (that is, sovereignty as applied to any attempt to privilege certain epistemological or ontological forms) necessarily leads to an acknowledgement of the impossibility of any legitimate means by which to ground an authoritative account of the conditions of international relations. Certain international political theories can function as a response to the poststructuralist challenge to IR by reformulating the possibility of sovereign knowledge through predicates which take seriously the poststructuralist insistence on contingency and the avoidance of the unjustified privileging of foundations which themselves turn out to be contingent. Chief among these, I will argue, is Rawls’ constructivist formulation of the concepts of the reasonable and public reason. Rawls’ constructivism is developed as a response to the contingency present in world politics (what Rawls conceives of as the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’) – and recognises the intellectual violence done by attempting to deny that contingency and to assert one unequivocal metaphysical foundation to the construction of meaning and understanding in IR – but is not therefore resigned to an all-out scepticism about the possibility of grounding a critical yet legitimate construction of an understanding of world politics. The possibility of grounding a robust and legitimate normative theory of international relations, however minimal, will always remain a contentious issue between philosophical constructivism and postmodernism, but it is my intention to attempt to espouse a conception of the reasonable and an account of the conditions of practical reasoning which may avoid poststructuralist accusations of illegitimacy. The framework of Rawlsian constructivism, rooted in a conception of the reasonable, and working in conjunction with the more sophisticated and critical forms of constructivism in IR (most notably, I argue, the unique account of normative structure and the conditions of practical reasoning developed in complex detail by Friedrich Kratochwil) gives rise to an understanding of the nature of international relations which, I will argue, contains the tools necessary to genuinely overcome the critique directed at the discipline of International Relations by Walker and Ashley.

Knowledge as power

Walker claims:

Theories of international relations . . . are interesting less for the substantive explanations they offer about political conditions in the modern world than as expressions of the limits of the contemporary political imagination when confronted with persistent claims about and evidence of fundamental historical and structural transformation.¹⁰

The years since Inside/Outside was published have done little to alter Walker’s central complaint about the nature of theorising about international relations. In his 2010 book After the Globe, Before the World,¹¹ Walker claims:

It is not that there is nothing to commend among at least some of the literatures claiming to be either politically realistic or ethically inspirational, especially those that find some way of refusing the overdetermining rhetorics counterposing the realistic to the normative. Nevertheless, both sorts of literatures have a bad habit of ignoring or crudely oversimplifying questions about what it means to claim political authority, and more specifically, what it means to make a claim to the forms of authority expressed by the modern sovereign state, and to knowledge about the forms of authority expressed by the modern sovereign state.¹²;

And:

[W]e are often overwhelmed by too much information, but also underwhelmed by scholarly traditions competing to interpret too many uneven and contradictory trends, often on the basis of overinflated claims about our capacity to decipher the causal secrets of the modern world and an underappreciation both of the clichéd character of the theoretical categories through which we are asked to make sense of empirical data, and of what it means to challenge the principles of modern sovereignty and subjectivity that are at work in these categories.¹³

Central to the poststructuralist methodology is an explicit analysis of the relationship between theory, history and power. An important point to note is that, in its critique of modernity, poststructuralism does not originate from an external point ‘outside’ of or independent to that which it criticises; hence the prefix ‘post’. Its theoretical identity is constructed in relation to the subject matter of the critique, due to the acceptance by poststructuralism that modernist logic is not a definite theoretical voice with fixed boundaries, but an attempt to systematise a contingent world through the construction of sovereignty. The purpose or ‘point’ of the poststructuralist critique is to make explicit that which is implicit in International Relations theory.¹⁴ This involves the dissection of the presumption, inherent in scientific methodologies within traditional IR, that the role of theory is to observe and explain an independent data set, a practice detached and separate from its subject matter, a complete break between theory and practice. Such a presumption is consistent with the self-perception inherent in much neo-Realist thought that it enjoys a consistent textual history through which its central propositions are reemphasised by an essentially homogenous literature. This perception is maintained, as poststructuralism claims, through a filtering process designed to attribute fixed textual meaning by the systematic universalisation of elements of a theory that support those propositions, and a systematic exclusion from consideration of those that do not. This process serves to turn the supposed ‘heroes’ of neo-Realism into, in Gregory’s term, ‘wraith-like caricatures’,¹⁵ writers whose sole conclusions are the espousal of Realism’s particular brand of power politics.

The homogenisation of theory into a timeless political voice identifies a key modernist practice which poststructuralism seeks to fundamentally undermine. The elucidation of this process of logocentrism (a phrase lifted by Ashley from Jacques Derrida) provides a useful point of departure in considering the wide poststructuralist critique of international theory, which can then be applied to the specific practices of the cannon of IR. This procedure is directly related to the central tenets of the poststructuralist critique: the privileging of a sovereign point of reference and the normalisation of predicates which constrain and order a world which is essentially open and contingent. It is also directly related to the practice of narrow textual reading which excludes historicity or ambiguity from sources which poststructuralism claim are essentially historicised and ambiguous. The poststructuralist response to logocentrism – intertextuality – allows a useful point from which to feed into the narrow poststructuralist critique of sovereign practices in IR theory.

The procedure of logocentrism is elucidated in Ashley’s seminal ‘Living on Border Lines’:

the expectation that all interpretation and practice must secure recognition and power by appeal to some identical consciousness, principle of interpretation, or necessary subjectivity having at least two qualities. First, it is regarded as a central interpretive orientation – a coherent sovereign voice, if you will – that supplies a unified rational meaning and direction to the interpretation of the spatial and temporal diversity of history. Second, as a sovereign voice, this principle is itself regarded as a pure and originary presence – an unproblematic, extrahistorical identity, in need of no critical accounting.¹⁶

This explanation perfectly captures the processes of rationalisation and normalisation identified with the project of modernity and evident within the traditional development of IR theory. It applies to the project of ordering and interpreting history in a manner which systematises apparently random, system-less events in conformity with an overarching principle, universal criterion or fixed grounding. The power of this grounding-point to provide order and rationality to history, once established, allows it to achieve an authoritative status in that it becomes the referential point of history, systematising the overwhelming range of events and categorisations into fixed points in relation to the unifying ground. Poststructuralism claims that this process relies on the creation of opposing categories which rely for their conceptual identity on their negation relationship with the other. In other words, the modernist project of rationalisation necessarily creates a transcendental sovereign viewpoint, which comes to regard itself as being self-evident, through its opposition to a state of irrationality:

It [logocentrism] inclines a participant to identify his voice of interpretation and practice with a subjective standpoint, a sovereign independent centre, from which one side in such oppositions can be seen as a highe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The ‘Enormous Creative Potential of Practical Reason’
• Part I: The Challenge – Poststructuralism and IR’s Responses
• Part II: The Solution – Constructing Normative Reason
• Conclusion: Poststructuralism and Beyond
• Notes
• References
• Index