Myths are part and parcel of contemporary international politics, and they are all around us. From the invocation of ‘the international community’ to talk of Afghanistan as a ‘graveyard of empires’ or home of ‘warlords’, and from ideas of ‘antiseptic battlefields’ in modern warfare to concepts of ‘coordination’, ‘participation’ and ‘effectiveness’ in the work of international organisations—international politics is replete with powerful narratives and commonly held beliefs that qualify as myths.
Unlike their classical Greek and Roman predecessors, whose narrative personae tended to be recruited from the exclusive circle of gods and larger-than-life heroes, modern political myths are usually less exceptional in nature. Yet, despite their seeming banality, they nevertheless constitute ‘myths’, understood by most modern theorists as either a powerful paradigmatic narrative or a deeply engrained commonly held belief (see Chap. 2).
This book explores how the theoretically informed study of myths can enhance our understanding of international politics.
What This Book Is About
The conceptualisation of myth has a long, complex, and contested history. The etymological and conceptual roots of myth reach back to Ancient Greece, but much of the ‘modern construction of myth’ (Von Hendy 2002) is influenced by eighteenth-century Romanticism’s rediscovery and reinvention of the concept and its subsequent adoption, adaptation, and critique in works of theology, philosophy, psychology, literature, linguistics, social anthropology, and politics [for overviews, see Flood (2013), Lincoln (1999), Scarborough (1994), Segal (2004), and Von Hendy (2002)]. Accordingly, definitions vary along lines of conceptualisations of what myth is, what it does (functions/effects), how it can be studied (methodology), and whether it should be judged as ‘ideological delusion’ or ‘necessary fiction’ (normative evaluation; Von Hendy 2002, 333–6). It may have been due to the dizzying complexity and variety of conceptualisations of myth that the concept has not resonated more widely in the study of international politics so far.
The authors in this book make a virtue of this conceptual complexity. On a theoretical and methodological level, they explore how myth-centred approaches can enhance our general understanding of international politics and world society. On an empirical level, they use these different concepts to analyse specific contemporary myths with regard to the agential-strategic, social-constructionist, and productive-performative sides of myth making and usage, as well as to myths’ ideological, naturalising, and depoliticising and/or their constitutive, enabling, and legitimising functions in different fields of international politics.
The double finding of an ideological and a constitutive side of myths runs through the book like a golden thread. This finding is not a contradiction—indeed, despite all conceptual differences and nuances, twentieth-century theories of myth in different disciplines share a general ‘persuasion that “myth” is the socially significant product of humanity’s irrepressible urge to construct meanings’ (Von Hendy 2002, 333). Ideology and constitution are, in this context, to be seen as two sides of the same coin: ‘The two parties [the esteemers and the denigrators of myth] are at odds only in their moral assessment of this product’ (Von Hendy 2002, 333).
This points to another common denominator of this book: myths are not understood as deviant exception, but as integral part of international politics and the related academic knowledge production, and they are different from dominant logocentric understandings of knowledge. In this sense, the book challenges conventional understandings of international politics by showing how powerful narratives and commonly held beliefs provide the non-logocentric ‘glue’ for the contemporary sociopolitical order, but possibly also the ‘dissolvent’ that may help altering it. It also encourages rethinking ideas that are widely unquestioned by policy and academic communities and shows what functions and effects these commonly held beliefs have in political and academic imagination and practice. Finally, the book offers conceptual and methodological guidance on how to make sense of different myth theories and how to employ them in order to explore the powerful collective imaginations and ambiguities that underpin international politics today.
What This Book Is Not About
With a concept as multi-facetted and widespread in common parlance and academic study as myth, it is useful to briefly outline what this book is not about. In International Relations literature, myths are strikingly absent—some very notable exceptions apart (e.g. Loriaux 2008; Lynch 1999; Hobson 2012; Teschke 2003; Weber 2001). As a rhetorical device, however, the term ‘myth’ enjoys some popularity in academic book titles, where it is mainly used to denote the opposite of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, thus often entailing notions of hollowness, (self-)deception, or outright lie.1 What distinguishes those works from the contributions to this book is not necessarily the critical impetus that the myth-as-rhetoric connotation carries, because a large number of modern myth theories have to be understood as profound critiques of the ideological, naturalising, and depoliticising functions of myth making, but rather their lack of foundation in any myth theory. The contributions in this book are not about the ‘uncovering’ of objective ‘truths’ behind the myths of international politics, like this sort of positivist understanding of ‘myth’ would suggest. Rather, authors are interested in the productive side of powerful narratives and commonly held beliefs, which are neither true nor false but point to different, more complex relationships between mythos and logos, and how they crystallise in sociopolitical conditions. They also assume, to different degrees, that their own knowledge production about international politics is affected by, and contributes to, myth making.2
The contributions in this book are akin to studies of national myth making, but the focus is decidedly not on national myths or their international dimensions. National myths have garnered much more attention than their international counterparts, most likely due to the shared origin of myth and nation in Romanticism. National political myths are ubiquitous. They are often encountered as represented in legend-like, historically simplifying, or selective stories about the founding of the state or the homeland of the nation, told around specific historical figures and events that were crucial in these processes, and re-enacted in state rituals and ceremonies on a regular basis (Bouchard 2013; Hosking and Schöpflin 1997; Migdal and Schlichte 2005, 22–4). In the United States, for instance, such foundational myths include the ‘discovery’ of America, the ‘Founding Fathers’, the USA as a ‘melting pot’, and ‘the American West’ (Paul 2014).
National myths can have international dimensions or implications, especially when they are at the heart of international disputes over contested state borders, territories, or citizenship, usually competing against contestants’ counter-myths. In the long-standing political conflict between Ukraine and Russia, for instance, a ‘myth of ethnogenesis’ of the Ukrainian people competes with the myth of a common origin of Ukrainians and Russians in an ‘Old Rus nation’ (Smith et al. 1998). The ‘1389 Battle of Kosovo’ myth at the heart of Serb national identity is another example of a foundational myth with international implications, namely in the Kosovo war and intervention in 1998–1999 (Kolstø 2005; cf. also Mertus 1999). Despite their international ramifications, however, the competing myths about Crimea and the Battle of Kosovo are first and foremost nationally confined narratives, meaningful to Ukrainians and Russians, or Serbs, respectively. On these grounds, they can easily be rejected as a sign of ‘historical revisionism’ or ‘ethnically grounded backwardness’ by Western policymakers and scholars.
Mythology at the international level, however, where interactions between states and societies are usually thought of in more rational-utilitarian, rather than cultural-ideational terms, is much harder to pin down. The contributions in this book make an effort to readjust the focus to similarly powerful, but unrecognised myths at the international level. The political myths studied here are international in that the groups who share these myths are border-transgressing and/or in that the myths have effects on the political conditions of world society, understood as the totality of the international sociopolitical order with all its inherent contradictions and inequalities.
The Contributions in This Book
The book is organised into three parts. Part I—Theoretical and Methodological Foundations—explores different theories and methods for the study of myth in international politics. Berit Bliesemann de Guevara develops a conceptual framework for the study of myth in international politics. The chapter gives an overview of the different myth theories drawn upon in the book, whereby it focuses on three dimensions: myths’ narrative and non-narrative forms; their sources in strategic calculation or unconscious social construction; and their effects ranging from ideological delusion to necessary fiction. It then explores four different categories of sociopolitical functions of myth in politics, namely determining, enabling, naturalising, and constituting functions. The author discusses how the myth concepts pertaining to these categories can be employed to study international politics and what their respective promises and limits are. The chapter concludes on a reflexivist note about myths in the discipline of International Relations, arguing that academia’s institutions and knowledge are inescapably based on myths and calling for an extension of mythographical enquiry into the ideological delusions and necessary fictions of the discipline itself (Chap. 2).
Sybille Münch explores the insights that the ‘interpretive turn’ in policy analysis has provided into the study of myth. Interpretive policy analysis highlights how language and discourse shape our knowledge of the social world and influence policymaking. In challenging the traditional assumption that problems are part of a pre-given neutral reality to which policymaking responds, authors have started to pay attention to argumentation and persuasion and to those elements such as narratives and myths that structure discourse. Münch shows that advocates of this post-positivist kind of research, which includes interpretive-hermeneutic and poststructuralist approaches, have been very prolific in developing conceptions of myths. She argues that, since policymaking is not restricted by national boundaries, interpretive policy analysis can also make a very valuable contribution to the study of myth in international politics (Chap. 3).
Robert Cooke strives to comprehend both the possibilities and limits of the mythographical approach to knowledge production through an exploration of its meta-theoretical conditions of possibility. The chapter questions the understanding of myths in terms of the dichotomy mythos/logos, in which myths have come to embody the creative fiction contrasted with the facticity of historical narratives or the immanent experience of reality, forming the ‘other’ of logos and logocentric metaphysics. Cooke employs the philosophical contributions of Jacques Derrida and Albert Camus to argue that ‘to know’ is itself a myth that silently haunts logos and logocentric discourse. The acknowledgement of the impossibility of logocentric discourse, however, enables the potential expansion of myth analysis to all forms of knowledge. In this sense, myths are not to be excluded but embraced, since they remind us of the necessity of constant suspicious reflexivity (Chap. 4).
Based on the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu, Catherine Goetze suggests a post-structuralist methodology to study myth and power in world politics. She introduces Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist methodology to study myths and Bourdieu’s development of a sociological analysis of patterns of power and domination based on Lévi-Strauss’ work. She suggests that this methodology can be used to analyse contemporary myths of world politics. Goetze’s chapter retraces Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist methodology and Bourdieu’s post-structuralist critique in order to show their contributions to the analysis of power and discourse in contemporary world politics (Chap. 5).
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