Ideologies in World Politics [1st ed.] 9783658305116, 9783658305123

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-viii
Introduction: Ideologies in World Politics (Klaus-Gerd Giesen)....Pages 1-9
Islam and Ideology in World Politics (Carool Kersten)....Pages 11-31
Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis (Daniela Irrera)....Pages 33-50
Ideology and International Security (Thierry Balzacq, Pablo Barnier-Khawam)....Pages 51-70
Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics (David J. Blair)....Pages 71-86
The Ideology of the Global Commons (Frédéric Ramel)....Pages 87-102
Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism (Dieter Plehwe)....Pages 103-124
Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics (Andreas Nölke)....Pages 125-142
The Transhumanist Ideology and the International Political Economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Klaus-Gerd Giesen)....Pages 143-156
The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism and the Case of Brazil (Marcos Nobre)....Pages 157-178
Postliberalism in International Affairs (Laurence McFalls)....Pages 179-195

Citation preview

Staat – Souveränität – Nation

Klaus-Gerd Giesen Editor

Ideologies in World Politics

Staat – Souveränität – Nation Beiträge zur aktuellen Staatsdiskussion Series Editor Rüdiger Voigt, Netphen, Germany

Bis vor wenigen Jahren schien das Ende des souveränen Nationalstaates gekommen zu sein. An seine Stelle sollten supranationale Institutionen wie die Europäische Union und – auf längere Sicht – der kosmopolitische Weltstaat treten. Die Zustimmung der Bürgerinnen und Bürger zu weiterer Integration schwindet jedoch, viele Menschen sind der Ansicht, dass die supranationalen europäischen Institutionen zu viel Macht haben. Internet-Giganten, die Unmengen an privaten Daten speichern und vermarkten, aber auch multinationale Unternehmen und Milliardäre entziehen sich staatlicher Steuerung. Die demokratische Legitimation politischer Entscheidungen ist zum Gegenstand kontroverser Diskussionen geworden. Das unbedingte Vertrauen in die Politik scheint abzunehmen. Die „Staatsabstinenz“ scheint sich jedoch auch in der Politikwissenschaft ihrem Ende zu nähern. Aber wie soll der Staat der Zukunft gestaltet sein? Dieser Thematik widmet sich die interdisziplinäre Reihe „Staat – Souveränität – Nation“, die Monografien und Sammelbände von Forscherinnen und Forschern aus unterschiedlichen Disziplinen einem interessierten Publikum vorstellen will. Das besondere Anliegen von Herausgeber und Wissenschaftlichem Beirat der Reihe ist es, einer neuen Generation von politisch interessierten Studierenden den Staat in allen seinen Facetten vorzustellen und sie zur Diskussion anzuregen. Until a few years ago the end of the sovereign nation state seemed to have come. It was to be replaced by supranational institutions such as the European Union and—in the longer term—the cosmopolitan world state. However, public support for further integration is waning, and many people think that the supra national European institutions have too much power. Internet giants, which store and market vast amounts of private data, but also multinational companies and billionaires elude state control. The democratic legitimacy of political decisions has become the issue of controversial discussions. The unconditional confidence in politics seems to be declining. However, the “abstinence of the state” seems to be nearing its end in political science as well. But how should the state of the future be structured? The interdisciplinary series “State—Sovereignty—Nation” is devoted to this topic and aims to present monographs and edited volumes by researchers from various disciplines to an interested audience. The special concern of the series' editor and the board of advisors is to present the state in all its facets to a new generation of politically interested students and to stimulate discussion. Wissenschaftlicher Beirat/Board of Advisors: Oliver Hidalgo, Regensburg; Dieter Hüning, Trier; Violet Lazarevic, Melbourne; Oliver W. Lembcke, Bochum; Dirk Lüddecke, München; Massimo Mori, Torino; Peter Nitschke, Vechta; Emanuel Richter, Aachen; Stefano Saracino, Wien; Jula Wildberger, Paris; Anita Ziegerhofer, Graz.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/12756

Klaus-Gerd Giesen Editor

Ideologies in World Politics

Editor Klaus-Gerd Giesen Ecole de Droit Université Clermont Auvergne Clermont Ferrand, France

ISSN 2625-7076 ISSN 2625-7084  (electronic) Staat – Souveränität – Nation ISBN 978-3-658-30511-6 ISBN 978-3-658-30512-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Responsible Editor: Jan Treibel This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

1 Introduction: Ideologies in World Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Klaus-Gerd Giesen 2 Islam and Ideology in World Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Carool Kersten 3 Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Daniela Irrera 4 Ideology and International Security. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Thierry Balzacq und Pablo Barnier-Khawam 5 Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 David J. Blair 6 The Ideology of the Global Commons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Frédéric Ramel 7 Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Dieter Plehwe 8 Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Andreas Nölke 9 The Transhumanist Ideology and the International Political Economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Klaus-Gerd Giesen

v

vi

Contents

10 The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism and the Case of Brazil. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Marcos Nobre 11 Postliberalism in International Affairs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Laurence McFalls

List of Authors

Thierry Balzacq  is professor of International Relations at Sciences Po and Professorial Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po in Paris. He edits the “Oxford Series in Grand Strategy” (with Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski). His most recent volumes (with Reich and Dombrowski) are Comparative Grand Strategy: A Framework and Cases (Oxford University Press, 2019) and (with Ron Krebs), Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is working on two co-authored books with Simon Reich on grand strategy. Pablo Barnier-Khawam is PhD candidate in international relations and currently investigates the historical evolution of the claim to self-determination by the Aymara in Bolivia and the Mapuche in Chile from 1970 to 2019. He co-organizes the Seminar on Postcolonial Approaches of the Center of International Studies (CERI/CNRS) and the Center of Population and Development (CEPED/ IRD). His initial master’s research led to the publication of the book Les Mapuche et les revendications d’une nation by L’Harmattan and the article “La internacionalización de los Mapuche: entre pueblo indígena y nación”, Polis Revista Latinoamericana, 2019, n 52, pp. 106–120. David J. Blair  is a political science professor at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario. His teaching and research are in the areas of international relations, global political economy and global environmental politics. Klaus-Gerd Giesen is professor of political science at Université Clermont Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His teaching and research are in the areas of international relations and political philosophy. A publication list can be found at: www.giesen.fr.

vii

viii

List of Authors

Daniela Irrera  is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, where she serves as Erasmus Coordinator and Deputy Head for Internationalisation and Research. She is Secretary General of the Italian Political Science Association (SISP), President of the European Peace Research Association (EuPRA), member of the ISA Governing Council, Chair of the ECPR Standing Group on International Relations, review editor of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, chief editor of International and Political Studies. Carool Kersten  is Reader (Associate Professor) in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World at King’s College London. He is the author and editor of eleven books, including The Caliphate and Islamic Statehood (2015), A History of Islam in Indonesia (2017); Contemporary Thought in the Muslim World (2019). Andreas Nölke  is a (Full) Professor of Political Science, in particular International Relations and International Political Economy, at Goethe University Frankfurt and heads a research group at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE. Marcos Nobre  is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Campinas, Brazil, President of the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap), Co-Speaker of the Maria Sybilla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila). Laurence McFalls  has been professor of political science at Université de Montréal since his completion of his PhD in political science at Harvard University in 1990. His research and publications have addressed German reunification, Weberian and Foucaultian social theory, neoliberal humanitarian interventions, and digital humanities. Dieter Plehwe  is a senior fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research of the Berlin Social Science Research Center and Privatdozent at the University of Kassel’s Globalization and Politics Program. He is a general editor of Critical Policy Studies. Frédéric Ramel  is Full Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po, Researcher at the Center of International Studies (CERI) and Head of the Political Science Department. His current research focuses on sensitivity (especially music), multilateral action and the role of numbers in war perception (ANR Datawar). He participated in the creation of the Strategic Research Institute of the Ecole militaire, where he became the first Scientific Director from 2009 to 2013.

1

Introduction: Ideologies in World Politics Klaus-Gerd Giesen

Abstract

The chapter offers an introduction to the book by defining and problematizing the concepts of ideology and world politics. It also briefly introduces the individual contributions and shows the connections between them. Keywords

Ideology · Word politics

Having begun with a severe crisis, the 2020s are likely to be turbulent on all fronts, including that of political ideologies. However, the great systemic upheavals in world politics often seem to be accompanied, paradoxically, by the announcement of the “end of ideologies”. For example, at the height of the coronavirus crisis in 2020, the German Minister for Economic Affairs Peter Altmaier declared ideology to have firmly taken second place (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 28, 2020). As early as 1955—in the beginnings of the Cold War and bipolarity in world politics—Raymond Aron’s book L’opium des intellectuels already prophesied an imminent end to the ideological age (Aron 1955). Five years later Daniel Bell published his no less famous The End of Ideology (Bell 1960). With the implosion of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama went as far as to name this the “end of history”, with liberalism having demonstrated its

K.-G. Giesen (*)  Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_1

1

2

K.-G. Giesen

superiority and finally won the ideological competition; no new opponent was in view, however remote (Fukuyama 1989). One year later postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo equated the supposed end of modernity with the end of ideology (Vattimo 1990, p. 57). However, the spectre of ideology is not so easy to scare away. The rapid spread of various forms of religious fundamentalism over the last twenty years, and—at least until recently—the almost unstoppable triumph of neo-liberalism bear witness to this. In any case, the very thesis of an “end of ideologies” can only arise if we consider ideology as postulated in science, which relies on a radical separation of scientific analysis and value systems in the social and human sciences (Seliger 1976, p. 33; Sargant 1996, p. 11). The “scientification of the world” would then mean the victory over ideology. Such a view certainly bears quite some parallels with the origin of the concept of ideology. In continuity with the spirit of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy conceived of ideology in his essay Les éléments de l’idéologie (first volume published in 1803) as a kind of natural science of systems of ideas. Ideology as originally intended was a means to analyze the dogmatic, mythical and irrational value systems of the Ancien Régime, to see through them completely and at the same time—as an early form of social engineering— to rebuild a rational basis for society and to enforce it mainly through education and teaching. At the outset the idéologistes were positioned as scientists who empirically studied the foundations of ideas without any assistance from metaphysics, thereby able to create new foundations for science (which itself is primarily a system of ideas), as well as for the whole of society (Servier 1982, p. 3). Napoleon’s belated but devastating criticism of this project, who considered it too dangerous for the authoritarianism he practized (Eagleton 2000, p. 77–85), led to a shift in and finally an almost opposing new use of the term: from the definition of a sceptical scientific rationalism (with clear tendencies towards social engineering) to a designation of general stereotypical and partly mystifying doctrines. At the same time, the conceptual transition from idéologiste to idéologue took place, designating whomever developed and spread those doctrines. Since then, not only has the number of doctrines called ideologies multiplied, but also the number of theoretical conceptions of ideology, this volume being no exception. In the study of international relations, ideology has been analyzed above all through the liberal-constructivist conceptualization of political ideas. Among the first scholars to do this were Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, who stated that “even if we accept the rationality premise, actions taken by human beings depend on the substantive quality of available ideas, since ideas

1  Introduction: Ideologies in World Politics

3

help to clarify principles and conceptions of causal relationships, and to coordinate individual behavior. Once institutionalized, furthermore, ideas continue to guide action in the absence of costly innovation” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 5). Ideologies as systems of ideas serve to guide action in order to attain specific outcomes. Thus, ideas “affect strategic interactions, helping or hindering joint efforts to attain ‚more efficient‘ outcomes—outcomes that are at least as good as the status quo for all participants” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 12). However, “ideologies compete over the control of political language as well as competing over plans for public policy; indeed, their competition over plans for public policy is primarily conducted through their competition over the control of political language (Freeden 2003, p. 66)”. This shows the limits of the liberal-constructivist conception of “free-floating” ideas which are not connected to vested interests in the material reality of world politics. In his seminal essay Ideology and Utopia Karl Mannheim correctly points out social class, location and generation as the greatest determinants of knowledge and interpretation, and asserts that the related fundamental categories in society are functions of divergent interests, aspirations, and Weltanschauungen, which are in turn related to social status, role, and position (Mannheim 1936). Thus, his worldview-related concept of ideology allows for an account of competing ideological groups, as do Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches, from Marx himself to Gramsci, Althusser and Poulantzas, as well as Bourdieu and, to some extent, Foucault. To be sure, preceding from a single definition of ideology to a deliberately diversified book would mean artificially leveling or even eliminating the heterogeneity of its authors. At this point, therefore, only a rough and broadly defined concept should serve as a preliminary orientation: in following with Martin Seliger, ideology is here seen as a set of ideas with which the means and goals of organized social activities are postulated, explained and justified (Seliger 1976, p. 11). The emphasis is primarily on the justification of organized political action. A more extensive delimitation of the approaches that take up such systems of ideas is given further below in the text; a second issue relating to the definition of the term must however be addressed to enable a discussion on the interaction between ideologies and world politics. Nowadays it is often assumed that ideologies acquire an international if not worldwide presence almost immediately. After all, we live in the age of social networks in which—so the thesis would suggest—there are hardly any obstacles for systems of ideas in cross-border flows. However, this is by no means as ­self-evident as it appears at first glance. Pierre Bourdieu has shown that international intellectual relations are inferior to structural determinants: the texts circulate without their national or local context and without their fields of production,

4

K.-G. Giesen

falsifying their reception. The actual message (or intended message) of these texts, on their reception, is often less important than their potential use. The transfer of symbolic capital takes place by means of new interpretations and appropriations of all kinds as possibly radical transformations of the original ideas (Bourdieu 1990, p. 3–5). Not infrequently, planned strategy is behind the internationalization of an ideology, as Dieter Plehwe demonstrates in this volume by using the example of the institutionalization of neoliberalism across borders. He argues that much of the continuing confusion about neoliberalism stems from a lack of attention on the break of right-wing liberals with the growing democratic and social liberal orientations of the early 20th century, alongside the break of neoliberals with the “wait and see position” economists traditionally held in economic policy making. According to him, neoliberal interventionism is not equal to market fundamentalism, and the turn towards political interventionism was common to both ­left-leaning social liberalism and right-wing neoliberalism. A similar approach is taken by Carool Kersten in the second ­ chapter, in his conceptualization of the different discourses by Muslims worldwide as an “Islamic Resurgence”. He proposes a taxonomy that distinguishes ­traditional, reactionary and progressive ways of engaging with the transnational ­Islam-ideology nexus. Secondly, he contextualizes these three categories, in order to trace the genealogies of the ways in which Muslims relate to their religion for political purposes. Daniela Irrera’s chapter aims at discussing humanitarianism—as a political ideology—as related to past and present migration flows, as well as the ways through which it is adapted to changes in the global security environment. It recounts how humanitarianism faces the most recent crises and emergencies, and shows that migration has seriously challenged the capacities of the global system to properly manage human mobility, assure protection to people in need and guarantee the right of all people to look towards better or different living conditions. Thierry Balzaq and Pablo Barnier-Khawam also deal with the link between ideology and international security but in a much broader perspective. They explore the epistemological foundations, before focusing on one single empirical example: how neoconservatism informed U.S. grand strategy after 9/11, changing how the U.S. framed not only what international security is but also what it should be. Great care is taken in order to trace the relation between the theoretical core of neoconservatism and the strategic actions it sustained. Environmental ideas have also had a profound influence in many areas of global politics over the past several decades. However, David J. Blair insists in his text that there is no single environmental ideology in world politics. He identifies the

1  Introduction: Ideologies in World Politics

5

most prominent groupings of environmental discourses, drawing attention to the main differences between them as well as those ideas that some of them share. The influence of these ideologies is assessed within different areas of global politics. He shows that some of these environmental ideologies have had a much greater impact than others, notwithstanding some variance in the influence of each both over time and depending on the area of global politics examined. More specifically, Frédéric Ramel examines the ideology of the global commons. These are non-terrestrial spaces accessible to all and owned by none, such as international airspace, the atmosphere, the high seas and cyberspace. They are currently a major issue for governments. Maintaining an access to them is a fundamental aim both for the armed forces and prosperity in a globalized economy. The author sees a major shift in the way the U.S. discourse and opponent views are organized around the issue. Andreas Nölke states in his contribution that so-called exportism is one of the most powerful ideologies governing the contemporary international political economy. His premise is that through supporting the stabilization of export-driven growth models, this tendency has led to an unbalanced combination of e­ xport-led growth combined with little contribution of domestic demand. Core elements of this idea are wage restraint, undervaluation, low inflation guaranteed by independent central banks and low public expenditures. In recent times, exportism has also become a core ideology with regard to international institutions. Consequent instabilities in the global economy became evident during the 2020 economic shock. The editor of this volume, Klaus-Gerd Giesen, tries similarly to link international political economy and ideology. The focus is on transhumanism, which states that the “natural” human being has become obsolete and must be improved by fully merging with technology and machines. This ideology is being spread more and more rapidly on a global scale with the decisive help of powerful multinational business actors. The author argues that these are the true revolutionaries nowadays: transhumanism is above all a major political project, and one designed for the benefit of those industries and economic sectors most heavily involved in the fourth industrial revolution. The probable endpoint of such a movement is a complete redistribution of wealth in our societies, a large-scale reconfiguration of social classes, and above all a profound change in the way our societies and the entire world system function. Marcos Nobre conceptualizes the global uprising of conservative populism as a crisis of democracies. He takes the example of the far-right Bolsonaro government in Brazil (partly in comparison with the Trump administration in the USA) to show, among other things, that populist phenomena blew wide open the fact

6

K.-G. Giesen

that democratic regimes have always presupposed a model of society and a particular political culture that went along with it. Even recent conservative uprisings have paradoxically shown the profound nature of democracy. Because if they used existing democratic institutions to dismantle their legitimate base, they also revealed that democracy is in fact a form of life and not just a political regime. However, while democracy is no longer self-evident and in danger, the author also notes that the regressive political outcomes of the last few years do not point towards an irresistible historical tendency. As a sort of conceptual extension to this, Laurence McFalls’ essay in the final chapter is dedicated to postliberalism. Using a Foucauldian approach he differentiates between different branches of liberalism before dealing with the birth of postliberalism as a new epistemae, only able to arise because the liberal project already carried the seeds of its own destruction. Its role in international affairs is assessed: as politics of fear. These contributions by no means cover the entire spectrum of ideology production active in world politics, something this volume cannot and will not achieve. The aim is rather to stimulate discussion into the role and function of ideology in several constellations of world politics. So far, the concept of ideology—with some exceptions—seems surprisingly underdeveloped when it comes to the theoretical understanding of international relations. It could even be said to remain undeveloped, since a publication in German by the same editor around 15 years ago (Giesen 2004), the introduction of which is partly retained here as reference. Within this context of negligence, even denial, it seems important to get insights from various locations: the authors of this book originate from several countries and continents, therefore “epistemic communities”: Europe, North America and South America. Be it explicit or implicit, each adopts a different means to understand ideology and its role in world politics. The contributions can be considered as either materialistic or idealistic approaches to ideology research. It is an either-or; both poles can hardly be brought together. On the one hand we have liberal idealism, seemingly dominant in political science as well as political philosophy (as a Kantian heritage). There is an evident difficulty in defining constructivist idealism, at the risk of subsuming quite different approaches under this term. In a broad sense however, it can be conceived as the approach that gives “ideas” in the social world a greater significance than (exogenously given) interests. Via language as the articulation of ideas, the social world (politics) is first “constructed” (Fierke and Jörgensen 2001). Nicholas Onuf famously puts it this way: “Saying is doing. Talking is undoubtedly the most important way that we go about making the world what it is.” (Onuf 1998, p. 59) From this point of view, reality is a construction formed in epistemological procedures, which is mainly based on concepts and signs. Ideologies in world politics—

1  Introduction: Ideologies in World Politics

7

as systems of ideas—have thus had an existence in constructivist liberal ontology that is largely detached from the material conditions of international relations. The power they reflect as mechanisms for justification is located in the discourse on world politics, not within it. Postmodernism radicalizes constructivism by always and consistently considering systems of ideas as “texts” and as culturally and historically contextualized, thus adding semiological and historicist elements (a classical example: Derrian and Shapiro 1989). With this, all ideas inevitably mutate into ideologies and power can be found—as already with Nietzsche and Foucault—literally everywhere. Pierre Bourdieu, in his last lecture at the Collège de France, called this the “semiological world-view” or the “textistic bias”, which constitutes social reality exclusively as a (con)text: “Science would thus be only a discourse or a fiction among others, but capable of exerting a ‘truth effect’ produced, like all other literary effects, from textual characteristics […] The universe of science is a world that manages to universally impose belief in fiction.” (Bourdieu 2001, p. 59) From the point of view of materialist ideology critique, the resulting perspec­ tivism of the radical (de)constructivist postmodernists is in itself a ­reflection of material conditions: “By advocating that a plurality of conflicting views and idioms is in itself something positive, they set an idealistic vision of ­market-economy reality against monistic certainties that serve to keep them in their place. So they try to shake one part of capitalist logic with another.” (Eagleton 2000, p. 193) Contrary to the constructivist assumption of a far-reaching autonomy of ideas against material conditions, materialism—in its manifold forms—wants to emphasize that ideas are mainly shaped by social interests and that at the same time the respective ruling ideologies are suited to legitimize unjust rule. While in liberal constructivism the social being is the product of the idea, in materialism it is exactly the other way round: ideological content must be plausibly correlated with real structures and must be assigned to a certain social constitutional context (Gerstenberger 1984, p. 168). Thus, the materialists’ current criticism of constructivism represents little more than a renewal of Marx and Engel’s criticism of Hegelian idealism in The German Ideology: “Quite contrary to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. […] Also the fog formations in people’s brains are necessary sublimates of their material, empirically ascertainable life process, which is linked to material preconditions. Morality, religion, metaphysics and other ideology and the forms of consciousness corresponding to them no longer retain the appearance of independence.” (Marx and Engels 1969, p. 26) Marx then brought this to the famous formula: “It is not people’s consciousness

8

K.-G. Giesen

that determines their being, but conversely their social being that determines their consciousness.” (Marx 1971, p. 15) Depending on the social position in the conditions of production, ideologies are consequently ideas that either express, conceal or legitimize interests of domination more or less directly or consciously, or expose just such rationalizations as part of the social superstructure. In the latter case, “Ideology critique […] then deals primarily with the legends that make repressive structures and processes of power extinctions or rule based on the special interests of groups appear ‘legitimate’ and their particular interests appear objective.” (Ritsert 2001, p. 129) In political science, Robert Cox and a few others have rendered outstanding services in making these ideas fruitful for the study of world politics: The ideas (as collective conceptions of social order) are connected on three levels of action (social relations of production, forms of state and world orders) in dialectical relationship with material capacities and institutions (Cox 1996). In this way, Cox “internationalized” Gramsci’s proposal to regard ideology as part of hegemony, which can only truly function efficiently through the limited inclusion of the underdogs and their ideas. Ideology becomes the place of struggle for meaning and for counter-hegemony. What arises clearly is that the concept of ideology offers excellent terrain for competing arguments among materialists and liberal-constructivists; ideology may in fact provide excellent means to determine the advantages and disadvantages of these differing fundamental approaches to international relations. Further, in knowing world politics to be dominated by ideologies as justifications—in the sense of the initial definition—we are perhaps left little choice but to address them: a final and essential impetus behind this publication.

References Aron, Raymond. 1995. L’Opium des intellectuels, Paris: Calmann-Levy. Bell, Daniel. 1960. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées, Cahiers d’Histoire des Litteratures Romanes/Romanistische Zeitschrift fur Literaturgeschichte, 14 (1–2): 1–10. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Science de la science et réflexivité, Paris: Raison d’agir Editions. Cox, Robert. 1996. Approaches to World Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Der Derrian, J. and M. Shapiro, Eds. 1989, International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, New York: Lexington. Eagleton, Terry. 2000. Ideologie, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler.

1  Introduction: Ideologies in World Politics

9

Fierke, K. and K. E. Jorgensen, Eds. 2001. Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation, Armonk: Sharpe. Freeden, Michael. 2003. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fukuyama, Frances. 1989: Have We Reached the End of History?, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. Gerstenberger, Heide. 1984. Materialistische Ansatze in der Analyse politischer Ideen, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 25 (Sonderheft 15): 161–179. Giesen, Klaus-Gerd, Ed. 2004. Ideologien in der Weltpolitik, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Goldstein, J. and R.O. Keohane, Eds. 1993: Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledg. Marx, Karl. 1971. Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie, in: Werke, Bd. 13, Berlin: ­Karl-Dietz-Verlag. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1969, Die Deutsche Ideologie, in: Werke, Bd. 3, Berlin: Karl-Dietz- Verlag. Onuf, Nicholas. 1998. Constructivism: A User’s Manual, in: Kubálková, V., Onuf, N. and P. Koweit, Eds., International Relations in a Constructed World, 58–78. Armonk: Sharpe. Ritsert, Jürgen. 200. Ideologie: Theoreme und Probleme der Wissenssoziologie, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Sargant, Lyman Tower. 1996. Contemporary Political Ideologies, Belmont: Wadsworth. Seliger, Martin. 1976. Ideology and Politics, New York: The Free Press. Servier, Jean. 1982. L’ideologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Vattimo, Gianni. 1990. Postmodern Criticism: Postmodern Critique, in: Woods, David. Ed., Writing the Future, 57–66. London: Routledge.

2

Islam and Ideology in World Politics Carool Kersten

Abstract

This chapter offers a broad perspective on the ideological use of Islam in a global context. It begins by challenging the perception of the political use of religion in the Muslim world as an Islamic resurgence, because this obscures the continued and continuing political relevance of religion to Muslims throughout history. The chapter surveys the political significance of Islam’s universality claim, both institutionally and symbolically; the conflation and deconflation of religion and statehood; and the post-Cold War role of Islamism on the global stage. To capture the wide variety in which Islam features in public life and international relations, the chapter introduces an alternative taxonomy for categorizing different ways of engaging politically with religion, distinguishing between traditional, reactionary and progressive approaches. It also examines how Sunni-Shi’a polarization features in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran for control of the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East. The chapter’s scope extends beyond the Middle East to include the most populous Muslim country in the world: Indonesia and the unique dynamics of Islam in this second largest democracy in Asia. It also addresses ­counter-narratives, such as Post-Islamism and Moderatism. Keywords

Caliphate · Islam · Islamism · Jihad · Middle East · ­Pan-Islamism · Sectarianism

C. Kersten (*)  King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_2

11

12

C. Kersten

A wide-ranging topic like the role of a major world religion on the stage of global politics needs an equally broad treatment; capturing the widely varying ideas, strands of thought, trends, and tendencies in the political use (or not) of Islam by Muslims worldwide. For this purpose I have decided on a two-pronged approach. In order to organize the different Islamic discourses, I propose a taxonomy that distinguishes traditional, reactionary and progressive ways of engaging with the Islam-ideology nexus. Secondly, to contextualize these three categories, it is necessary to trace the genealogies of the ways in which Muslims relate to their religion for political purposes. Since the 9/11 attacks in the United States and subsequent atrocities elsewhere there is a tendency to present contemporary manifestations of political Islam, whether in domestic, regional or global contexts, as a recent ‘Islamic resurgence’. Before accessing the accuracy of that term, it is important to understand its framing in the context of the changing global order taking shape in the post-cold war era as the world moved toward the new millennium. On the one hand, there are the triumphant accounts, such as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (Fukuyama 1992). This was a self-congratulatory celebration in which the promotion of free market economics goes hand in hand with the advocacy of a worldwide wave of democratization along classical liberal lines. On the other hand, there are the much more menacing pictures sketched in Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs McWorld (Barber 1995) and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1996). Being located on the fault lines between various cultures, both authors singled out the Muslim World as the greatest potential threat to the stability and security of a world that is no longer bi-polar. Instead it is divided in civilizational blocs: not determined by political ideologies, but by religiously-informed cultural differences. One Muslim response to this doomsday scenario came from an unlikely corner: The Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1999, its reform-minded President Khatami (b. 1943, in office: 1997–2005) uses his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations to plead for a dialogue rather than a clash of civilizations—advocating moderation in order to play down differences. But then 9/11 happened, followed by similar atrocities in Istanbul and Madrid, Bali and Jakarta, London, Brussels and Paris. So the shift from a clash to a dialogue of civilizations gets another reset—this time in the form of the joint Spanish-Turkish initiative of Prime Ministers Zapatero and Erdogan for an Alliance of Civilizations. Replacing both ‘clash’ and ‘dialogue’, the term ‘alliance’ retains militaristic overtones, and it is symptomatic of the present-day dominant discourse on Islam in world politics.

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

13

It is therefore no exaggeration to speak of a securitization of both political writings and scholarship on Islam and Muslims in both domestic and international contexts. Many writings on Islam and politics in global contexts also tend to be alarmist or sensationalist in tone, more level-headed analyses have been written by, among others, Peter Mandaville (2001, 2014), Oliver Roy (2004) and Bassam Tibi (2012).

1 Religion and Ideology in the Muslim World: Context and Taxonomy Characterizing present-day political Islam as an ‘Islamic resurgence’ did not occur for the first time after 9/11. In fact, this designation was already present in political discourses, media coverage, and academic writings of the 1970s and 1980s, when it was used alongside the term ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. At that time its applicability and appropriateness seemed to be confirmed by a series of individual events and more long-term developments: The Islamic revolution in Iran of 1979 that ended the regime of the Shah; the occupation of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by Saudi religious zealots in that same year; the 1981 assassination of the Egyptian President Sadat by disaffected former members of the country’s Muslim Brotherhood, insisting on the continuing legitimacy of violent action to attain their goals; and the formation of an Islamically inspired resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–1989). Coordinated by Pakistan and financed by Saudi Arabia, this movement became known under the name Mujahideen—warriors on the path of God. With this, also non-Muslims became acquainted with the notion of jihad, armed struggle in the name of Islam. During the Iraq-Iran war (1980–1988), ideological rhetoric was also coined in religious terms. Using a long-lingering territorial dispute over the border demarcation in the Shatt al-Arab watershed as an excuse, under the direction of its autocratic leader Saddam Hussein, Iraq invaded Iranian territory. Expecting a swift victory over a country that was thought to be still in disarray after the regime change a year earlier, the conflict turned into a protracted and very bloody confrontation. On one side, an authoritarian secular Arab regime, dominated by Iraq’s Sunni minority, allied with the neighbouring Gulf monarchies, and supported by major Western countries. On the other side, the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran, using the Shi’i doctrine of velayet-e faqih, or ‘guardianship of the jurist’, as its ideological foundation and validation for the political dominance of its clergy. Both sides employed elements of Islamic history and symbolism to vindicate their actions (Gieling 1999). Although guided by a secular Pan-Arab

14

C. Kersten

ideology known as Baathism, the Iraqi regime presented the invasion of Iran as a re-enactment of the Battle of Qadisiya of 636 CE, in which the Arab Muslim forces decisively defeated the empire of the Persian Sassanians. The Islamic Republic exploited the underdog position and cult of self-sacrifice that has shaped Shi’i history and doctrine from its very beginning. The Iraqi attack was presented as another instance of the persecution of Shi’i Muslims by the Sunnis, collectively casting the Iranian people in the role of the martyred Imam Husayn, while depicting Saddam Hussein as a modern-day version of the Sunni Caliph Yazid, who massacred the founder of Shi’ism and his band of followers at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. The use of religious credentials for political legitimization is also evident in the change in title of the kings of Saudi Arabia, which occurred in the same period. In 1986, King Fahd replaced the designation ‘His Majesty’ with ‘Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’. This must be seen as a response to the earlier mentioned challenge of the ruling house by the religious zealots occupying the Grand Mosque of Mecca. The measure also fits into the wider picture of representing the Iraq-Iran as an Arab-Sunni and Persian-Shi’i confrontation, and consolidating the resistance against the Communist Soviet incursion in Afghanistan by framing it in Islamic terms. Historically, the title was one of the honorifics accorded to the office of Caliph. Although defunct since 1924, and without any clear indication of its re-establishment, this thinly veiled reference to the caliphate, clearly evinces the ambitions of the Saudi monarchy to claim global leadership of Sunni Islam (Ayoob 2008, pp. 43–56). The tendency to coin the regional conflicts erupting in the early decades of the twenty-first century in sectarian terms must therefore not be regarded as a new phenomenon. Nor have the underlying tensions been building up in just a few decades; rather, their roots extend much deeper into the Muslim past, traceable to the leadership issue that occurred in the earliest stage of its formative period, fourteen centuries ago. In the case of the Sunni-Shi’i standoff in the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf region, the eighteenth-century reactionary interpretation of Islam that underpins the political ideology of present-day Saudi Arabia, named Wahhabism after the Arabian religious scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), already distinguished itself by its intolerance toward Shi’ism (and Sufism as well for that matter). For the present situation, however, reducing the rivalry between Sunni and Shi’i dominated states in West and South Asia to sectarian tensions alone obscures the real political dynamics that are at work, when powerful countries, like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and—increasingly—Turkey, are vying for influence in the region and beyond. Not dissimilar to what happened during the Cold War on a global scale, also the ideological use of religion features

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

15

proxy wars and even a spill-over of these rivalries into expatriate Muslim communities outside of the historical world of Islam. Nor are examples of the political use of Islamic credentials and symbolism confined to West and Central Asia. Even at its eastern geographical periphery, in Indonesia—incidentally also the largest and most populous Muslim nation state in the world—General Suharto’s New Order Regime (1966–1998) began exploiting religion for political gain, even if that was done for other reasons than an agenda for an Islamic state. While he had always emphatically resisted using Islam as a political ideology, from 1983 onward, Suharto (1921–2008) turned to the devout segment of the country’s 90% Muslim majority as new political allies in fending off challenges by other senior members of the military establishment, which had been the mainstay of his power since the coup of 1965. The so-called ‘reactualization agenda’ allowed a more visible role for Islam in Indonesian public life. The financial means available since the 1970s oil boom, were used for expanding the state-supported Islamic education system and creating new possibilities for an increasingly affluent urban Muslim middle class to adopt a lifestyle that was also spiritually fulfilling. This phenomenon has been called penghijauan, the ‘greening’ of Indonesian society—a reference not only pointing to the symbolic colour of Islam, but also to the efforts of the military top brass to establish their own personal piety and commitment to Islam, culminating in General Suharto’s 1991 pilgrimage to Mecca (Kersten 2015a, pp. 39–40). Persuasive as these examples from the 1970s to 1990s may seem of a global Islamic resurgence or politico-religious awakening of the Muslim world, closer inspection will demonstrate that the ideological use of religion and the political employment of religious symbols on the part of Muslims in the late twentiethand early twenty-first centuries are not recently added features to Islam on the world stage. These have deeper historical roots. For that reason it is, first of all, more accurate to speak of a greater ‘salience’ of Islam in the political domain than a ‘resurgence’. Religion has never been away from the public sphere. Secondly, it necessitates a further historical excursion into the role of religion in the political ideologies used by Muslims. For the current purpose, this means tracing the roots to the discursive formations articulated by Muslims since their first encounters with modernity, usually in the guise of the European expansion overseas. In addition, making sense of the various directions into which Muslim responses moved necessitates a set of categories for ordering these discourses. For this last purpose, I suggest using a taxonomy consisting of the three categories, which I have already mentioned above: traditional, reactionary, and progressive. It is important to stress that the suggested designations apply to ideas or

16

C. Kersten

sets of ideas, rather than individual Muslims as religious or political actors. The reason for proposing yet another way of characterizing current strands of Islamic thinking is to provide alternatives for descriptions like radical, liberal, and moderate Islam, which come with a lot of baggage and often unwelcome connotations; not to mention the cavalier use of terms like Wahhabism, Salafism, Jihadism, Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism or even Muslim extremism for all kinds and forms of political Islam. As an alternative for the careless conflations of these last terms, I propose the designation ‘reactionary’, which I understand as having a two-fold meaning. First of all, it refers to a reaction against what is regarded as an undesirable situation. Secondly, to remedy that situation, the answer is thought to lie in the past; in some perceived golden age of Muslim greatness. Different Muslims point at different periods in time, which they consider worthy of emulation. For some it was the heyday of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad between the eight and eleventh centuries; for others the Ottomans, the Mughals of India, or—in the case of Shi’is—the Safavid dynasty that made Shi’a Islam a state religion in many parts of the Persianate world. However, throughout Islamic history, for many reformist Sunni thinkers, and especially since the confrontation with modernity, the point of reference has been the embryonic Muslim community emerging in the time of the Prophet and of the first three generations of his followers, known as the salaf salih or ‘pious ancestors’—from which the designator ‘Salafi’ is derived (Kersten 2019, pp. 12–16). Instead of gazing back at the Islamic past, ‘progressive’ interpretations are forward-looking; open to change and directed toward alternative definitions of a Muslim future. Progressive understandings tend to take Islam as a civilization with a rich cultural legacy extending beyond religious—and, in the case of Islam, also legal—doctrines, dogmas and tenets. Progressively-minded Muslims are also willing to use knowledge and scholarship from elsewhere, often relying on advances in the human sciences made in the Western academe. In terms of ideology, political theory and practice, progressive ideas translate into emancipatory agendas revolving around notions of equality, freedom and liberty, democratization, and upholding universal human rights standards (Kersten 2019, pp. 16–23). However, also in today’s world, I argue that the vast majority of Muslims— Sunni and Shi’i alike—continue to subscribe to ideas fitting into the category that I call ‘traditional’. They adhere to the orthodox doctrines that have been formulated over the centuries by the ‘ulama’; an intellectual class of religious scholars acting as the custodians of traditional Islamic learning. In relation to day-to-day Muslim conduct, traditional Islamic values can generally be qualified as socially conservative (Kersten 2019, pp. 7–12).

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

17

2 Islam and Politics: Global Reach, Universal Claim Traditional Islamic political thinking revolved around the institution of the caliphate, or imamate in the case of Shi’i Muslims, and the notion of shari’a. The Sunni caliphate started out as a historical contingency, resolving the question of community leadership following the death of the Prophet. On the back of the ensuing Arab conquests, which brought large parts of the then known world under the sway of the Islam, a Muslim worldview emerged that consisted of two realms: On the one hand, Dar al-Islam, or the Abode of Islam, where the caliph ruled (even if nominally); on the other hand, the lands that were not (yet) under his authority, referred to as either Dar al-Harb (the Abode of Warfare) or Dar al-Kufr (the Abode of Unbelief). In terms of Islamic religio-political thinking, this global reach was translated into a claim of universality. This also became reflected in the caliphal styles: In contrast to the first two caliphs who assumed office as successors of the prophet (khalifat rasul Allah), as the Arabo-Muslim empire expanded, caliphs began presenting themselves as God’s deputy on earth (khalifat Allah ­fi’l-ard), thus attributing a divine sanction of some sort to what was originally a very human and modest administrative position. The status of the Shi’i imamate was different from the outset. Direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through the marriage of his daughter Fatima to his cousin Ali, the Imams are regarded as divinely guided and infallible in their interpretations of the Islamic faith. Yet, through the ages, the Shi’is were by and large politically powerless, and often even actively persecuted by the Sunni majority. Consequently, their political thinking is very much preoccupied with the chasm between Islamic history as it actually unfolded in time and Shi’i soteriology or salvation history. This is further enhanced by the mystical dimension attached to the imamate—whereby the last Imam is thought not to have died, but gone into occultation. Traditional Sunni and Shi’i political thought has also been shaped by the status attributed to—or claimed by—their respective intellectual classes; the ulama or religious scholars, who, as part of the body of traditional Islamic learning they curate, have also developed the political theorizing that continues to provide the point of departure and founding principles for the ideological use of Islam. In the case of Shi’i Muslims, the notion of occultation makes for a symbiotic connection between the ‘Hidden Imam’ and the ulama. Acting in his absence as custodians of his legacy, it often made their relations with worldly rulers problematic. Also the relationship between Sunni caliphs and religious scholars was often complex and fraught with tensions (Zaman 1997). On the one hand, the ulama formed the

18

C. Kersten

human resources pool for filling the administrative offices needed to run what had become an Islamic empire, while they also theorized the divine sanction attributed to the caliphate. On the other hand, the ulama also acted as what we would nowadays call political ‘watchdogs’. As self-appointed ‘Heirs to the Prophet’, the ulama tasked themselves with admonishing incumbents of the office of caliph to uphold the tenets of Islam, as encapsulated in shari’a. Often translated as ‘Islamic law’, shari’a is best understood as a moral compass or ethical guideline than as a body of law in the conventional sense of the world. Only for a relatively short period of time in the history of its existence, the caliphate has functioned as an effective political entity exercising actual sovereign power and administering governance (Kersten 2015b). The growing gap between the political realities in the Muslim world and the projected ideals of unity and universality, forced the ulama toward increasingly pragmatic ways of political thinking and theorizing. From the eleventh century onward, there is tendency to underplay the sacredness of the caliphate and accept alternative ways of governance, even tolerating usurpation, if this is in the interest of the integrity of Islam’s tenets and the well-being of the umma, the Muslim community as a whole. For the ulama, the most central concern is upholding shari’a. This opens also a window of opportunity for the ulama to position themselves as interpreters of the law and thus an integral part of the government. As different types of Muslim rulers emerge, preserving, protecting and extending shari’a becomes increasingly prominent as an identifier of Islamic political ideologies worldwide. However, even after the end of the ‘high caliphate’, with its claims to universal leadership over the Sunni Muslims, the continuing symbolic significance of the caliphate as an idea, a rallying point for virtual global Muslim unity, can’t be ignored. Recent publications, such as Longing for the Lost Caliphate (Hassan 2016) and Caliphate Redefined (Yilmaz 2018) demonstrate that—from the Mongol conquest of Baghdad, in 1258, to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, by the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938)—the caliphate remained the central point of reference for ­tradition-oriented Muslims. Its ideological significance in global politics was also revived by the first Muslim reformers in countering Western imperialist designs for the Muslim world and continues to inspire Islamic political theorists to this day.

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

19

3 Confronting Modernity: Recharging the Caliphate and Pan-Islamism Early modern Muslim ideas for an Islamic revival consisted in a conflation of traditional, progressive, and reactionary elements. They were designed to respond to both the epistemological and political challenges Muslims face when encountering Western modernity. For instance, the influential reform-minded thinker and activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897) encouraged Muslims to be open to advances in scientific knowledge, but without being blind to the materialist tendencies that come with it and that are at the expense of religion (Keddie 1972). The benchmark for recapturing the spirit of Islam, al-Afghani found in the distant past: The time of the Prophet and the salaf salih or ‘pious ancestors’. With this he stands at the beginning of the modern reformist Salafiyya movement. However, the way in which al-Afghani and his erstwhile Egyptian collaborator Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) read this distant Islamic past stands in marked contrast to that of the interpretations by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and predecessors like Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855) and Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). The writings of this particular trio also shape contemporary reactionary Salafism. Al-Afghani translated these ideas into a Pan-Islamist ideology (Keddie 1968). For the implementation of its political agenda, al-Afghani took his recourse to the traditional Islamic institution of the caliphate; appealing to the Ottoman Sultan to emphasize his de facto caliphal status and use it to stand up as an international defender of Muslim rights threatened by global Western colonial expansion. But the Ottoman Empire did not survive World War I and also the institution of the caliphate itself was abolished in 1924 by Atatürk. Immediate attempts for its reinstatement between 1925 and 1931, at international caliphate conferences in Cairo and Mecca, and a world Muslim congress in Jerusalem, failed because of rivalry among the contenders for the office. However the enduring appeal of the caliphate as a symbol of global Muslim unity is evinced by the fact that, time and again, ideologues have returned to the idea that it must be re-established. It has been a constituent element in the political programme of Hizb ut-Tahrir (Taji-Farouki 1996). Founded in 1953 by the Palestinian religious scholar Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani (1914–1977), it has grown into an international Pan-Islamist organization. Its agenda can be considered as utopian, consisting of an admixture of both reactionary and progressive ideas revolving around a traditional Islamic institution. Hizb ut-Tahrir seems to be especially popular with highly-educated young Muslims; influential chapters have emerged among Muslim university students both inside and outside the Islamic

20

C. Kersten

world. Although no evidence has ever been presented of involvement in violent actions on the part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, its advocacy of overthrowing existing political structures and institutions, and its appeal to segments of the Muslim intelligentsia worldwide, make existing governments suspicious, and have resulted in measures ranging from surveillance to repression, and, in various instances, even a legal prohibition and disbanding of the organization. More recently, the havoc created by ill-fated Western interventions in Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with a spill-over of the chaotic effects of the ‘Arab Spring’, afforded an opportunity to another Islamist organization originally operating in the Iraqi-Syrian borderlands to establish a political entity alternately referred to as ISIS, ISIL, IS, Islamic State and Daesh, which, in the Summer of 2014, claimed to have set up a new caliphate. The ideological foundations of IS are provided by the writings of a Jordanian religious scholar trained in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia: Issam Muhammad Tahir al-Barqawi (b. 1959), who later assumed the name Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (Wagemakers 2012). His interpretation of the caliphate can be considered millenarian, in which the return of a caliph is an essential part of an end-of-time scenario that was subsequently turned into an obscene travesty by IS (McCants 2015). And yet, the ‘IS formula’ appeared attractive to Muslims around the world, and proved to be highly successful in exporting its ideas and establishing what can be called—with a nod to Barber’s Jihad vs McWorld—its own franchise in trouble spots elsewhere in the Muslim world, in particular in political vacuums existing in countries teetering on the brink of becoming failed states or actually tipping over the edge (Gerges 2016).

4 Ideological Divergence: Conflating and Deconflating Religion and Statehood The 1924 abolition of the caliphate has sent Islamic political thinking also into entirely different directions. The most important issue characterizing the ways in which the role of religion in public life has been conceived for the rest of the twentieth century and into the new millennium revolves around the notion of din wa dawla; religion and state. It has resulted into an ideological divide between what Armando Salvatore calls ‘conflationists’ and ‘deconflationists’ (Salvatore 1997, pp. 81–82). The deconflationist position was first articulated a year after the caliphate had disappeared. In a book entitled Islam and the Foundations of Governance, the Egyptian religious scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq (1888–1966) introduced the phrase

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

21

‘Islam is a religion, not a state’ (Ali 2009). Although it cost Abd al-Raziq his position at Al-Azhar Islamic university, the book provided a seedbed for thinking about secularity, and broke ground for political ideologies taken from outside the Muslim world, ranging from Marxism on the left to Fascism on the right, with a chequered midfield for exploring the introduction of modern constitutionalism and republicanism, or experimentations with nationalism, in the guise of territorially defined nation states and the much broader cultural notion of Pan-Arabism (Haim 1974; Hourani 1983). Abd al-Raziq’s views on the political role of religion continue to influence contemporary progressive Muslim thinkers, who want to move beyond a conflation of Islam with particular ways of governance or specific political institutions. The influence of Turkish Kemalism and the secularism inspired by Abd ­al-Raziq was not confined to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries. In the Netherlands East Indies of the 1930s, Atatürk was admired by one of the most prominent independence activists and founding President of Indonesia: Sukarno (1901–1970) (Formichi 2013). Sukarno’s secular nationalism has shaped early postcolonial Indonesia. Although he was the head of state of the largest Muslim country in the world, he outmanoeuvred Islamist politicians insisting on a reference to Islamic law in the preamble to the first constitution by introducing the Pancasila or Doctrine of Five Principles. The first one of these principles only prescribes an obligation on the part of Indonesian citizens to believe in a single supreme being and identify with one of the officially recognized religions. After hosting the Africa-Asian Conference of Bandung in 1955, Sukarno also spearheaded the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, alongside—among others—the leader of the most populous Arab Muslim country: Egypt’s Gamal Abd al-Nasser (1918–1970) (Lee 2010). So, even though Indonesia was the home of the largest Islamic mass organizations in the world and had an influential Islamic party, Masyumi, which even won the 1955 general elections, any designs for Islamizing Indonesian politics were pre-empted: First by the Pancasila Doctrine, then by Sukarno’s increasing autocratic ‘Guided Democracy’ (1957–1966), followed by the even more authoritarian military regime of General Suharto. Consequently, the dominant discourse remained decidedly deconflationist. This is further illustrated by the slogan launched in 1970 by Nurcholish Madjid, at that time chairman of Indonesia’s largest Muslim student organization: “Islam, yes! Islamic party, no!” (Kersten 2011, p. 56 and 93). From the 1920s onward, across the Muslim world, also the conflationists have explored alternatives ways for implementing their desired religion-state nexus, rather than simply campaigning for the restoration of the caliphate. Throughout

22

C. Kersten

the middle of the twentieth century, much of this took place against this current of widespread experimentation with secular political ideologies by independence activists and postcolonial leaders. Two illustrative examples of this are the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and the South Asian Jamaat-e Islami, established in 1941 in Lahore, Pakistan, but what was then still British India. It is instructive to look at both the similarities and differences between these two movements (Ayoob 2008, pp. 64–89). Established just a few years after the abolition of the caliphate, ­re-establishing this Islamic political institution was not a central concern in the programmes of either the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-e Islami. Also, in contrast to earlier Islamic reformers, both reactionary and progressive, the founders were not ulama: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949) was a teacher in the state education system, and Jamaat-e Islami leader Abu’l-Ala al-Mawdudi (also spelled Maududi) (1903–1979) worked as a journalist all his life. What was carried over from traditional Islam was a degree of religious charisma and a hierarchical structure reminiscent of the Sufi orders, the brotherhoods of mystics that had become of central importance for keeping the social fabric of the Muslim world together after the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate in the thirteenth century. This is reflected in the title of Hasan al-Banna as the first General Guide (murshid al-amm) and the honorific mawlana (or maulana—‘lord’, ‘master’) accorded to Mawdudi. Also the global reach of many Sufi orders is partly paralleled by the establishment of branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in other Arab countries and of the Jamaat-e Islami in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Of even greater significance is the influence of their ideologies beyond these geographical confines, because both are reactionary movements advocating the emulation of the conduct of the ‘pious ancestors’ (al-salaf al-salih). In the ideological domain it is even possible to speak of a symbiosis of the two movements, growing out of the cross-pollination between elements of Mawdudi’s thought and that of the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief ideologue of the 1950s and 1960s, Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) (Calvert 2018, Hartung 2013, Khatab 2006). Both shared the conviction that a truly Islamic society distinguishes itself by complete surrender to divine sovereignty (hakamiyya), exemplified by a political-legal system based on the integral implementation of shari’a, as had been the case in the time of Prophet and the ‘pious ancestors’. Any Muslim society failing to accept such a totalizing worldview and resisting its implementation is considered to have regressed to the same state of affairs found in pre-Islamic Arabia; jahiliyya (ignorance). Rather than a distinct period in history, in Mawdudi and Qutb’s interpretation jahiliyya refers to a condition that needs to be corrected. Efforts to that extent are referred by the traditional Islamic term jihad. Originally an abbreviation

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

23

for ‘exerting oneself for the divine cause’ (al-jihad fi sabil Allah), it became increasingly associated with violent action for the sake of spreading Islam. This is also the case with the Islamist ideologies formulated by Mawdudi and Qutb. Insisting that Islam provides the answers to all questions of human existence, captured in the slogan ‘Islam is the solution’ (al-Islam huwa al-hall), it is no longer regarded as simply a religion, but a comprehensive method (manhaj) and all-encompassing system (nizam) regulating every aspect of the Muslims’ public and private life. And with that, according to critics, the basis for totalitarianism. But there also differences. In contrast to Jamaat-e Islami, for most of its existence the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has been forced to operate clandestinely or in a grey zone between legality and illegality. From the beginning relations were tense with both the occupying British authorities and the puppet monarchy they were propping up. In 1949, al-Banna was assassinated in retaliation for the murder of Prime Minister Nokrashy Pasha by a student belonging to the Brotherhood. Although there was a brief honeymoon after Egypt became a republic following the Free Officers’ coup of 1952, relations between the military-dominated Nasser regime and the Muslim Brotherhood quickly soured. A botched attempt on Nasser’s life in 1954 inaugurated more than a decade of merciless persecution, mass imprisonment and executions of Muslim Brotherhood members, currently repeated under General al-Sisi. At the same time, the 1950s and early 1960s were also the years during which Qutb penned his most influential works. Both Milestones on the Road and In the Shadow of the Qur’an have shaped the thinking of many contemporary Muslims, from armchair intellectuals to reactionary Islamist activists. In order to survive in this hostile climate, the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to rethink its strategy. In a book that only appeared posthumously, al-Banna’s successor as General Guide, Hasan al-Hudaybi (1891–1973) proposed that the Muslim Brotherhood distance itself from Mawdudi and Qutb’s uncompromisingly Islamism and their propensity toward takfir: Denouncing Muslims who disagree with their positions as unbelievers (Zollner 2009). By changing its course, the Muslim Brotherhood managed to increase its political influence through unions of professionals like doctors, lawyers and engineers. In spite of this ideological recalibration, except for a brief period after the 2011 Arab Spring, throughout its ninety-year history the Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the Egyptian state has been problematic. The fortunes of Muslim Brotherhood elsewhere in the Arab world differed: From a degree of toleration in Jordan and Kuwait, to its virtual extermination in Syria, and its reincarnation as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in Gaza.

24

C. Kersten

The international reach and impact of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami was also stimulated by their friendly relations with Saudi Arabia. Especially from the 1950s and 1960s onward their ideologies began fitting increasingly well with the worldview of what was then the most powerful member of the Al Saud dynasty: Faysal ibn Abd al-Aziz (1906–1975) had been de facto foreign minister since attending the Versailles Conference of 1919, before becoming a viceroy (1926–1953), serving as crown prince and effective regent (1953–1964), and eventually ruling and governing as king (1964–1975). Faysal reinstated Pan-Islamism; not in the way envisaged by al-Afghani a century earlier, but refracted through the lens of Saudi Arabia’s reactionary Wahhabi ideology, and as a political tool in the proxy confrontations in the Middle East that mirrored the Cold War Era rivalry between the USA and Soviet Union. Fending of the threats of Zionism, colonialism, and communism, Faysal envisioned Saudi Arabia at the heart of three intersecting circles: the Arab world, the wider Muslim world, but also (most of the time) the ‘Free West’ (Quandt 1981). While the question of Israel and Palestine created an awkward situation for Saudi Arabia’s relations with the West, it suited Faysal’s designs in countering the influence of the left-leaning Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria, and in particular his chief nemesis: Nasserist Egypt. For Faysal this was reason to offer hospitality to members of Egypt’s persecuted Muslim Brotherhood. It also led to armed conflict in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia sided with the royalist resistance against the republican putschists supported by Egypt. Relations with Pakistan played an important role in extending Saudi Arabia’s influence beyond the Middle East. Already a member of the pro-Western Baghdad Pact, Saudi Arabia was a welcome additional ally for Pakistan in its frequent confrontations with ­Moscow-supported India. Bonds were further cemented during the decade-long presidency of General Zia ul-Haq (1978–1988). As mentioned in the beginning, together with the USA, the two countries supported the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet Union, while Saudi financial largesse helped Zia ul-Haq also domestically: Offering lucrative options for military personnel to serve in the armed forces of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, and driving through legislation for the further Islamization of Pakistani society (Ghattas 2020). On the non-governmental level, Faysal oversaw the 1962 establishment of the Muslim World League (MWL). Headquartered in Mecca and always presided over by a Saudi, other founding members included Jamaat-e Islami leader Mawdudi and the former chairman of Indonesia’s defunct main Islamic Party, Muhammad Natsir (1908–1993). In 1969, Faysal also took the initiative for an international political body: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has its administrative centre in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Both organizations

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

25

are used by the Saudi regime to exercise political and religious influence throughout the Muslim world and over Muslim communities elsewhere. Sunni-dominated global bodies, such as the MWL and OIC, movements and organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i Islami, as well as a wide array of institutions and ad hoc setups elsewhere in the Muslim world, have all benefitted from the support of cash-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, becoming vehicles for a religion-state conflation, but circumscribed by the political interests of these donors. A similar dynamics can be detected among the Shi’i parts of the Muslim world. The vanguard of state support is provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran, but here too, there are also non-state actors (Ghattas 2020; Sadeghi-Boroujerdi 2019). On the individual level, the influence of ideologues, such as Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb, is not only mirrored by clerics such as the Ayatollahs Khomeini (1901–1989) and Motahhari (1919–1979), but also a lay intellectual like the Iranian sociologist Ali Shari’ati (1933–1977) (Rahnema 2000). His ideas were a very influential driving force for the 1979 revolution, until power was monopolized in the hands of the clergy and zealots associated with what became Iran’s parallel army: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This also became the regime’s prime vehicle for supporting Shi’i non-state actors elsewhere, both through direct interventions of the IRGC’s Quds Brigade commanded by Qasim Soleimani in various theatres of operation, and through the training of foreign militias, including the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) in Iraq, the Afghan Fatemiyoun Division in Syria, and, perhaps most renowned, Lebanon’s Hezbollah (also spelled Hizbullah), which has morphed into a broad movement with considerable political clout (Alagha 2006, 2012; Levitt 2015). These expansive efforts on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran has given rise to a phenomenon, which one commentator has referred to as ‘a kind of “Shia international”’ ­(Fathollah-Nejad 2019). Sunni rulers, such as King Abdullah II of Jordan depicted it in more menacing terms as a rising ‘Shi’a Crescent’ casting its shadow over destabilized Middle Eastern countries. However, the architects of global political Islam are not always able to maintain the integrity of the structures they have put in place and retain control of the dynamics they have set in motion. An illustrative example is the Arab Services Bureau set up in 1984, with Saudi and Pakistani support as part of their supply chain to the Afghan Mujahideen (Hegghammer 2020). Envisioned as the conduit for pouring both money and foreign fighters into the conflict zone, its chief leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri decided to find new causes, when—after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from the Afghan theatre of operations- it was decided that their services were no longer needed. Reinventing themselves as the operators of a new Islamist organi-

26

C. Kersten

sation with global ambitions that became known as al-Qaeda, they orchestrated the spread of its influence in a ­franchise-like manner (Gerges 2009, 2011; Lawrence 2005). Not afraid to bite the hand that used to feed them, it built a notorious track record of coordinating violent attacks across the world and involvement in the emergence of other fluid Islamist movements, such as the Taliban and IS.

5 Conclusion: Trajectories for the Twenty-First Century Wedged into the attention for Islamist activism in the late twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first century is a phenomenon that has been dubbed ‘Post-Islamism’ (Bayat 2013). Remaining somewhat amorphous, it can be described as a strand of political theory and practice which retains an Islamic referent without pursuing an explicit agenda for establishing an Islamic state or introducing Islamic law. One such ‘post-Islamist’ interpretation, which has been spreading globally is called wasatiyya in Arabic. Translating as ‘moderatism’ or—in more specific contexts—‘moderate Islam’, this notion can be traced to Qur’anic references to an ummatan wasatan– ‘a community of the middle’ mentioned in verse 143 of the second chapter of the Qur’an. In present-day Islamic thinking, it has become an unstable notion: Wasatiyya has come to mean different things to different Muslims, making it conceptually obscure. Even the quickest survey of its use will show that it is employed by a wide variety of Muslims whose respective outlooks have little in common. In his book Islam without Fear, Raymond Baker traces the notion of wasatiyya to a manifesto entitled A Contemporary Islamic Vision. A condensation of the ideas of jurists like Kamal Abul Magd (1930–2019), Selim al-Awa (b. 1942) and Tariq Bishri (b. 1932), but also of religious scholars like Muhammad ­al-Ghazali (1917–1996) and Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926), it was published in 1991, and widely discussed at the 1992 Cairo Book Fair. But the ideas it contains had already been formulated more than a decade earlier (Baker 2003). It also provided the ideological foundations for the al-Wasat Party, with which the Muslim Brotherhood entered the Egyptian elections of 1996. In this context, wasatiyya can be read as a continuation of the earlier noted Muslim brotherhood’s strategic rethinking set in motion by Supreme Guide Hasan al-Hudaybi. A further shift away from Islamism is the emergence of new Muslim parties presenting agendas for attaining economic prosperity and promoting notions of justice. The Arabic word for justice, adl, shares the etymological root for another

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

27

term closely associated with wasatiyya, namely i’tidal—meaning balance, but also temperance.1 The most successful story fitting under this heading is that of the rise of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (b. 1954). During his prime ministership and under his presidency, Turkey has not just prospered economically, but also increasingly positioned itself as a major regional power in the Eastern Mediterranean, West and Central Asia, as it has turned its gaze eastward rather than retaining the 360-degree vision adopted in the ‘zero-problems with the neighbours’ doctrine of the AKP’s former foreign policy czar, Ahmet Davutoğlu (Davutoğlu 1994; Stein 2014). Turkey’s example also inspired reformed Islamists such as Rached Ghannouchi (b. 1941), leader of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party. Briefly charged with government responsibility after the 2011 Jasmin revolution, it had an opportunity to test the viability of its ideological recalibration (March 2019). Other interesting experimentations with Post-Islamism prosperity are found in Indonesia after the 1998/9 regime change (Kersten 2015a). More recently, Indonesia has become more assertive on the world stage, by introducing the notion of Islam Nusantara, or Southeast Asian Islam, to global audiences. The product of an Islamization process that began relatively late in comparison to many other parts of the Muslim world, from the late thirteenth century onward maritime Southeast Asia has developed its own unique Islamic tradition, culturally embedded in an ethnically, linguistically and religiously very diverse setting (Kersten 2017). In 2016, the senior leadership of the largest traditional Islamic mass organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) hosted an International Summit of Moderate Islamic Leaders (ISOMIL), where it promulgated the Jakarta Declaration, in which Indonesia was presented as a Muslim country that was not an Islamic state, but capable of accommodating religion. NU leaders were careful to note that Islam Nusantara is not an export commodity to be copied elsewhere in the Muslim world. Beyond Indonesia, its purpose is to stimulate and encourage Muslims to develop their own culturally sensitive interpretations of Islam. On a global level, Indonesia intends to promote Islam Nusantara as instructive example of a culturally embedded interpretation of religion that goes hand-in-hand with moderatism, with wasatiyya thinking.

1Turkey’s

Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and Morocco’s Parti de la justice et du développement (JPK: Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP, Hizb al-Huriyya wa’l-Adala) Indonesia’s Justice and Prosperity Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera PKS).

28

C. Kersten

The advocacy of moderate Islam (wasatiyya) has thus become a key element in finding a way out of the tight spot in which the Muslim world finds itself on the world stage since the turn of the century. And this applies even more so to Muslims living in communities outside the historical Dar al-Islam. All over the world, committed Muslims are facing a variety of challenging situations. Not only amidst fellow Muslims who disavow any political role for religion. They also have to face Islamists who have decided to dig in their heels when it comes to their political principles, including some who believe in an uncompromising vindication of violent actions. At the same time, Muslims are increasingly confronted with Islamophobia on the part of non-Muslims, who regard Islam and its adherents with suspicion, if not outright hostility. One consequence of this polarization is that, on both the individual and state level, moderate Islam is now claimed by figures and countries whose backgrounds or histories make it difficult to find them convincing as proponents of moderation and tolerance. In the twilight of his career, a figure such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi has begun engaging with the notion of citizenship, or muwatana; showing a more open attitude toward religious plurality and acknowledging full political rights of non-Muslims qua citizens in majority Muslim countries. But it seems that this is rooted in a relatively late realization of the importance of reciprocity when it comes to securing such rights for Muslims living in a minority situation. It is Qaradawi’s experience as the former Chair of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and its role in the formulation of fiqh al-aqaliyyat ­al-muslima, or Muslim minority fiqh, that acted as an eye-opener. Another instance are the attempts of Saudi Arabia to advocate wasatiyya. This can be traced back to the establishment of the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue in 2012. More recently, the current heir apparent, Prince Muhammad bin Salman, has positioned himself as a champion of moderate Islam as well. He has charged one of his protégés, former justice minister and now secretary general of the Muslim World League, Muhammad al-Issa, with making the rounds internationally and convening a conference on moderate Islam in the Spring of 2019. With so many different Muslim countries, organisations and individuals jumping on the bandwagon to lay claim to moderate Islam, wasatiyya is at risk of becoming an empty word. The uncertainties surrounding post-Islamism and moderatism as the latest additions to global Islamic discourses are symptomatic of the difficulties that make an accurate assessment of the extent to which Islam functions as a vector in world politics so challenging. It requires a simultaneous disentangling of terminologies and analysis of Islam’s ideological significance and political relevance, as well as the impact of less clearly defined Islamic referents. Such efforts are further obscured

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

29

by a polarized climate of what amounts to culture wars—real and virtual—featuring mutual demonization and essentialist representations by Muslims and nonMuslims, fuelling an upsurge of political populism that feeds Islamophobia among non-Muslims; and Muslim reactions ranging from s­elf-victimization and withdrawal, to defiant resistance. All these factors frustrate dispassionate engagement and critical analysis of the role of one of the most widespread and fastest growing religions on the global stage, and the multi-layered character of its influence in international relations and its impact on world politics.

References Ali, Souad T. 2009. A Religion, Not a State: Ali’Abd al-Raziq’s Islamic Justification of Political Secularism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press Alagha, Joseph E. 2006. The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Programme. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press Alagha, Joseph E. 2012. Hizbullah’s DNA and the Arab Spring. New Delhi: KW Publishers Ayoob, Mohammed. 2008. The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Baker, Raymond W. 2003. Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press Barber, Benjamin. 1995. Jihad vs Mcworld. How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World. New York: Time Books Bayat, Asef. 2013. Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press Calvert, John, Sayyid. 2018. Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. Revised and updated edition. London & New York: Hurst Publishers & Oxford University Press Davutoğlu, Ahmet. 1994. Alternative Paradigms: The Impact of Western and Islamic Weltanschaaungs on Political Theory. University Press of America. Lanham: University Press of America. Fathollah-Nejad, Ali. 2019. Will Iraq crack under the strain? Qantara.de https://en.qantara. de/content/the-islamic-republics-existential-crisis-will-iran-crack-under-the-strain. Accessed, 13 July 2019 Formichi, Chiara. 2013. Mustafa Kemal’s Abrogation of the Ottoman Caliphate and its Impact on the Indonesian Nationalist Movement. In Demystifying the Caliphate: Historical Memory and Contemporary Contexts, Eds. Madawi al-Rasheed, Carool Kersten, Marat Shterin, 95–115. London & New York: Hurst Publishers & Columbia University Press Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Simon & Schuster Gerges, Fawaz A. 2009. Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Gerges, Fawaz a. 2011. The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda. London & New York: Hurst Publishers & Oxford University Press

30

C. Kersten

Gerges, Fawaz A. 2016. ISIS: A History. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press Ghattas, Kim. 2020. Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry that Unravelled the Middle East. London: Wildefire Gieling, Saskia. 1999. Religion and War in Revolutionary Iran. London: Bloomsbury Academic Haim, Sylvia G. 1974. Arab Nationalism: An Anthology. Oakland etc.: University of California Press Hartung, Peter-Jan. 2013. A System of Life: Mawdudi and the Ideologisation of Islam. London & New York: Hurst Publishers & Oxford University Press Hassan. Mona. 2016. Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press Hegghammer, Thomas. 2020. The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hourani, Albert. 1983. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1798–1939). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York; Simon & Schuster. Keddie, Nikki R. 1968. An Islamic Response to Imperialism: The Political and Religious Writings of Jamāl ad-Dīn “al-Afghānī”. Oakland: University of California Press Keddie, Nikki R. 1972. Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn “al-Afghānī”: A Political Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press Kersten, Carool. 2011. Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam. London & New York: Hurst Publishers & Columbia University Press Kersten, Carool. 2015a. Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values. London & New York: Hurst Publishers & Oxford University Press Kersten, Carool. 2015b. Ed. Caliphate and Islamic Statehood. 3 vols. Berlin: Gerlach Press Kersten, Carool. 2019. Contemporary Thought in the Muslim World: Trends, Themes, and Issues London & New York: Routledge Khatab, Sayyid. 2006. The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb. The Theory of Jahiliyyah. London & New York: Routledge. Lawrence, Bruce B. (2005). Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden. New York; Verso Lee, Christopher J. 2010. Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Afterlives. Athens. Ohio University Press Levitt, Matthew. 2015. Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. Mandaville, Peter. 2001. Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma. London/ New York: Routledge Mandaville Peter. 2014. Islam and Politics. London & New York: Routledge March, Andrew F. 2019. The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press McCants, William. 2015. The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Quandt, William B. 1981. Saudi Arabia in the 1980 s: Foreign Policy, Security and Oil. Washington DC: Brookings Institute

2  Islam and Ideology in World Politics

31

Rahnema, Ali. 2000. An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari’ati. London & New York: I.B. Tauris Roy, Olivier. 2004. Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia University Press Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Eskandar. 2019. Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press Salvatore, Armando. 1997. Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity. Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997 Stein, Aaron. (2014). Turkey’s New Foreign Policy: Davutoğlu, the AKP and the Pursuit of Regional Order. London: Royal United Services Institute with Routledge Journals Taji-Farouki, Suha. 1996. Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate. London: Grey Seal Tibi, Bassam. 2012. Islam in Global Politics: Conflict and cross-civilizational bridging. London & New York: Routledge Wagemakers, Joas. 2012. A Questist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press Yilmaz, Hüseyin. 2018. Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought. Princeton & Oxford; Princeton University Press Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. 1997. The Caliph, the ˊUlāmā’ and Law: Defining the Role and the Function of the Caliph in the Early Abbasid Caliphate. Islam Law and Society 4(1): 1–36 Zollner, Barbara. (2009). The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology. London & New York: Routledge

3

Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis Daniela Irrera

Abstract

The chapter aims to discuss humanitarianism theoretically and empirically, the ways through which is adapted to changes in the global security environment, and how it faces most recent crises and emergencies, producing capabilities and responses. Humanitarianism is defined here as being a broad and comprehensive set of principles, values and norms which make all people in need deserving protection, relief, and support. This definition is investigated as an ideology, as a set of generalizing ideas designed to explain the social reality (namely conflicts, crises, and emergencies), as well as a practical and operative one, aiming at legitimizing and guiding those political action and decisions designed to mitigate the effects of war and deprivation. Migration is a paradigmatic case study. It represents a humanitarian emergency which has seriously challenged the capacities of the global system to properly manage human mobility. The chapter aims at contributing to the scholarly debate, by replying to the following research questions: • To what extent has humanitarianism changed and adapted to developments in the management of crises and emergencies’? • How did this influence human mobility, migrants and refugees’ issues and the policies to cope with them? • What innovations have been brought in this policy field, in particular as for actors involved and practices developed?

D. Irrera (*)  Università Di Catania, Catania, Italy © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_3

33

34

D. Irrera

Keywords

Humanitarianism · Migration · Security · NGOs · Emergencies · Refugees ·  Drivers

1 Understanding a Complex and ‘Inhuman’ World1 International Relations scholars have extensively debated on the ways through which the global political system has tried to provide security by managing emergencies and assisting people. They have also investigated policies and practices, as the result of interactions between governmental and non-governmental actors. Coherently with the objectives of this book the chapter aims at discussing the developments of humanitarianism in its theoretical and empirical terms, and the ways through which it adapted to changes in the global security environment, at all levels. It also deepens how humanitarianism faces most recent crises and emergencies and its suitability to produce capabilities and responses. Among them, migration has seriously challenged (and continues to) the capacities of the global system, and the state’s community, to properly manage human mobility, to assure protection to people in need, to guarantee the right of everyone to look at better or different living conditions. Starting from the assumption that the global security environment is subject to a constant and irreversible process of transformation and adaption and that this inevitably affects the policies and practices, the chapter discusses humanitarianism as a broad and comprehensive set of principles, values and norms which make all people in need deserving of protection, relief, and support. Humanitarianism is investigated as an ideology, as a set of generalizing ideas designed to explain the social reality (namely conflicts, crises, and emergencies), as well as a practical and operative one, aiming at legitimizing and guiding those political action and decisions designed to mitigate the effects of war and deprivation. The chapter aims at contributing to the scholarly debate, by replying to the following research questions:

1The

research leading to these results has received funding from the University of Catania Research Plan 2016–2018, within the project on “The Italian policy on asylum and visa among internal and external dynamics. Principles, actors, processes”.

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

35

• To what extent, humanitarianism has changed and adapted to developments in the management of crises and emergencies’? • How did this influence human mobility, migrants and refugees’ issues and the policies to cope with them? • What innovations have been brought in this policy field, in particular as for actors involved and practices developed? The chapter is based on a theoretical framework which combines the International Relations scholarship on the actors, norms, and practices of the humanitarian system with the more recent contributions on conflict transformation and transboundary crises. Additionally, the chapter consists of three parts. In the first one, a discussion on the state of the art is presented and focuses on the changes in crises, and in crisis management. The theoretical overview deepens both aspects, by listing the debate about natural and man-made disasters, as well as complex emergencies and integrated missions. In the second one, theories on humanitarianism and the changes brought into the security environment at all levels are analysed combined with the contributions produced by sociologists and political scientists on the specific context of migration policy. This will be functional for the investigation, in the third part, of the traditional and innovative practices which the development of humanitarianism has transformed in this field, particularly in Europe and in the Mediterranean. At the end of the chapter, despite the clouds on the horizons, some general conclusions are sketched, and possible further research trends are also presented.

2 Theoretical Reflections on the Changing Nature of Security and Crises Policies and practices aiming at relieving human sufferings and mitigating the effects of war and deprivation are far from being perfect. They are pervaded by the main contrast between the responsibility to protect humans and the need to safeguard state interests and priorities. The end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War era saw an enormous proliferation of actors in the humanitarian movement. A big community of individuals started working around the world for a wide variety of organizations, increasing the number of tasks and roles (Davey and Foley 2013; Irrera 2013). Some scholars have stressed the relevance of the ‘environment’, that is to say, the framework of competences and rules which govern relief activities. Thus, the term humanitarian space is used to name the environment in which humanitarians work according to the classical

36

D. Irrera

­principles (Taylor 2012; Maxwell and Walker 2014). Others have rather debated the nature of the involved actors and the interactions among them. The term network describes a situation in which various actors interact through various ­channels of communication (Stephenson 2006; Moore et al. 2003). Practitioners contributed to the debate, by introducing more empirical concepts, like ­‘humanitarian enterprise’ for describing a multi-layered machine in which different actors face major crises, trying to maintain fidelity to their ideals (Minear 2002; Smillie and Minear 2004; Donini et al. 2015). The debate is controversial, and the peculiarity of this topic contributes to further divides the scholars. However, even though there is no universal consensus, the constant interactions between academics and practitioners are conveying interest in the term ‘humanitarian system’. The space is more than its technical set of competencies and it is shaped by its actors. Also, the level of relationship among Non-governmental actors, intergovernmental agencies and states cannot be easily summarized only through the network structure. Therefore, the notion of humanitarian system can be used as a more effectual and comprehensive label. Here, it is used to indicate the set of principles, actors, policies, practices, rules and procedures shaping interventions because of recent global trends (Irrera 2013). Humanitarianism has then emerged and developed as a broad and complex ideology, bringing several approaches, tools and practices. Moreover, here it is analysed as being the main result of three key factors: first, the shifting nature of crises and conflicts; second, the establishment of innovative and more sophisticated tools and mechanisms, which require additional competencies, abilities, and expertise; third, and as a consequence of the previous one, the rising professionalization of organisations and agencies and the diversification of their tasks and mandates. It is necessary to focus on the many changes made within the world governmental system to act more collectively to understand the shifting nature of crises and conflicts, and by implementing and adapting traditional and new instruments, trying to avoid the exposure of big masses of people to the consequences of crises. The ‘classical humanitarianism’, expressed in the book A Memory of Solferino by the Red Cross founder, Henry Dunant was based on the consideration that the first civilians were the unaware target of violence and they had a right to be protected by being provided with neutral and independent help. This approach, formally endorsed by the UN General Assembly in the Resolution 46/182, is at the basis of the Red Cross Movement. Traditional principles of humanity (to be

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

37

addressed to the most vulnerable, wherever they are), neutrality (without engaging in hostilities or taking sides), and impartiality (without discrimination), have characterised the humanitarian system (Bugnion 2012; Weiss 1999). Since then, and during the 1990s, some different schools of humanitarianism developed and brought into the scholarly and practitioners’ debates the need to balance the efficiency in assisting people (particularly due to the scarcity of resources) and the respect of principles. On one hand, some scholars sustained that it was necessary to focus on the victims of man-made and natural disasters, which were already in place, by strictly adhering to the ICRC principles. On the other hand, some scholars tend to consider the root causes of crises and to prevent all those conditions which make people vulnerable emerged (Barnett 2005). This approach has resulted in a wide variety of positions and—sometimes—conflicting views. The first school stressed the importance of relation to politics. Crises and conflict emerging in the 1990s were the reflection of different systemic conditions as well as states’ preferences and coalitional trends. As Barnett argues humanitarian agencies used to define themselves largely in opposition to politics. After the end of the Cold War, it became difficult for many of them to manage political pressures and efficiently operate according to principles. Furthermore, they simply could not resist political contamination; thus, this affected their activities and outcomes (Barnett 2005). Although it is recognized that humanitarianism was linked to politics, that any humanitarian activities had political consequences, and that the humanitarian system is part of the political system, it was not always easy to accept the difficulties in remaining impartial, independent, and neutral, or at least to understand that principles had to adapt to the changes in the system itself. The expansion of donors and deliverers, as well as the new intergovernmental and ­non-governmental agencies, contributed to making the system bigger and more articulated (Barnett 2005). Moreover, principles have been developed and shaped over the decades, but also promoted more interactions within the humanitarian system, involving a wide variety of actors, including non-governmental ones, to adequately tackle the shifting nature of emergencies and crises. International Relations scholars have widely investigated the implications of armed conflicts, natural disasters and contemporary crises by using complex emergency to refer to any humanitarian crisis in a country or region caused by the total or considerable breakdown of the official authority, requiring a response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of a single actor. Such emergencies may be

38

D. Irrera

associated with ethnic conflict, human rights abuse, food insecurity, mass population movement, and/or displacement. Collective responses are needed to relieve human suffering and providing security to the system policies, but to, more importantly, avoid the costs of duplication and overlapping. Additionally, preliminary measures, like the preparedness and prevention of emergencies and the reinforcement of states’ resilience are required (Attinà 2012). Furthermore, the scholars who have widely analyzed the notion of crisis, have also provided a broader framework for understanding how new kinds of crises may affect policies. Generally, the crisis is used to label an event that marks a phase of disorder in the apparent ‘normal’ development of a system. Thus, it then implies the re-establishment of a condition of order upon a disturbing disorder (Boin et al. 2005; Saurugger and Terpan 2016). Additionally, crises can take several forms and affect different dimensions, depending on the context. However, crises’ spatial dimension is never limited to a single domain or issue. The analyses on ‘transboundary crisis’ stressed the existence of problems that play out across one or many types of boundaries (Boin et al. 2013). Therefore, if a complex emergency describes the shifting process in the humanitarian system it also implies the need to shape policies accordingly, a transboundary crisis better expresses the complexity of reality and, more importantly, its practical implications (Irrera 2018a). The second factor which needs to be considered, deals with the fact that the shifting nature of security and the diversification of crises have contributed to modify even the main assets of crisis management. First, scholars have concentrated on military missions and interventions as vital components of the humanitarian system. In particular, the analyses on the rising of interventions during and after the Cold War tries to explain how military operations have gradually developed a civilian dimension, including new tasks and personnel (Ayoob 2001; Western and Goldstein 2011). Besides, the spread of democracy may explain the diversification of crisis management tools and the involvement of more states. Additionally, quantitative research has also demonstrated that the number of n­ on-democratic countries participating in operations is growing, but the democratic ones are the majority. The existence of a democratic political regime increases the propensity of a state to be more committed to solving a crisis elsewhere. Furthermore, it is in the interest of democratic states to act, as part of the multilateral system, but also for strengthening its own security dimension (Lebovic 2004; Irrera 2018b). Therefore, crisis management is changing in its more exploited and meaningful tool. Scholars and practitioners have used the label of peace support operation and integrated peace mission to name all-important forms of multilateral intervention for peace, security,

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

39

and stability, which comprehend all developments of peacebuilding and related conflict resolution measures. Currently, the developments in crisis management involve the use of distinct resources, structures, and/or standard operating procedures devoted to addressing situations identified as a crisis. Whereas, transboundary crisis management implies the implementation of strategic activities thought to be effective in responding to crises and to limit the impact. The third factor, necessary to understand the developments of humanitarianism, is the rising professionalization of organisations and agencies, besides the diversification of their tasks and mandates. The second school of humanitarianism has already started to focus on the organizational structures and the feasibility to work on preventive action. The ‘root causes’ approach, which began to fascinate scholars and practitioners, was mainly based on the assumption that eliminating the conditions producing a demand for humanitarians aid was not only better than providing temporary relief, but also an efficient strategy for planning the use of financial and human resources and relevant to boost organizational capacities of big agencies. For example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has assisted populations after they crossed an international border, acquiring the status of refugees. After the 1980s, it also took on a preventive role, trying to prevent refugee flows, by facilitating conflict resolution and removing major causes for forced mobility. Crisis management, as well as human rights, rule of law, and economic development promotion, were not formally part of UNHCR duties and mandates. Likewise, they practically became part of its comprehensive strategy. A demonstration of how humanitarianism must adapt to the new forms of humanitarian space, its regular interactions among the members, and a most structured collective awareness. Humanitarian organizations and their workers became more professionalized, by recruiting full-time staff, provided with expertise and technical skills and started to be interested in the training program, run by private firms, NGOs, states, and academic institutions. Moreover, these important transformations implied an expansion of the practices and goals associated with humanitarian action. Again, as Barnett observed, humanitarianism turned into a broader ideology, no more focusing only on saving individuals and relieving their conditions. They rather started to build long-term strategies, particularly at transforming the structural conditions that make populations vulnerable. In doing so, it merged with the peace-building agenda and coherently fit into the global liberal order (Barnett 2005; Fassin 2007).

40

D. Irrera

Overall, the three factors, which are the shifting nature of crises and conflicts; the establishment of innovative and more sophisticated tools and mechanisms; and, the rising professionalization of organisations and agencies and the diversification of their tasks and mandates, contributed to change traditional approaches to humanitarianism, making it a very broad and complex ideology, usable by different actors and with several aims. Besides, serving a big and multi-layered humanitarian system has brought a variety of actions and interventions which exceed the traditional conflict resolution and crisis management, under which universal humanitarian principles had been conceived. Consequently, humanitarianism has also become associated with those policy fields in which human promotion has been managed in very different ways. Migration is a paradigmatic example.

3 Humanitarianism and Migration: Trends and Dilemma When and why have migration issues started to have a visible humanitarian dimension? In the contemporary era, international migratory movements are accelerated by global factors like globalization, economic, social, and demographic inequalities. The formation of regional and supranational institutions has transformed national borders into something to be adapted to the new conditions, generating, however, a noticeable paradox. The increasing porosity of state borders all over the world is producing, the simultaneous tightening of national borders regarding the movement of humans. People are forced to escape, due to unstable local conditions, like a political failure, institutional instability, civil war, the effects of organized smugglers activities. Waves of people trying to escape poverty, instability and conflicts from Northern Africa and Syria, crossing the Central and Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkan region have demonstrated that Europe is a region of immigration and not equipped (or willing) to tackle its implications. As it has been observed, the European Union should have been represented the ideal context in which humanitarian principle could have been applied to migration policies for hosting, protecting and integrating people in need (Wunderlich 2012). As sustained by Attinà, migration has only recently started to be investigated by IR scholars. He argues that ‘The phrase migration or migrant wave means that migration turns to be unusual on occasion, i.e. on some conditions a huge number of migrants, much larger than the usual one, travel towards a definite area’ (Attinà 2018, p. 50).

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

41

Immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees started to become the core topic of public debates, policy-makers’ speeches, and academic reflections since the 1990s and recently were dominated by the security paradigm. Migration is no more an occasional phenomenon and implies large numbers of people. Thus, may entail some changes in the society and its daily routine. The security paradigm has always been associated with migration studies, although it has produced more effects in recent times. The identification of threats is essential to structure political integration and for identifying the criterium, which makes people eligible to deal with one specific community. Security practices permeate the whole community way of life, by shaping a potential response to an existential threat. The community defines what corresponds to a good life and what should be considered as part of societal danger such as the criminal, the diverse, the invading enemy (Huysmans 2016; Bigo 2011; Nováky 2017). Migrants have been tackled for social and economic reasons. They are associated with the rising of petty crime criminal activities and blamed for their non-Christian identity, which fragments Western societies and, in the worst case, destroys its values through infiltration in terrorist groups. At the same time, and since it is visible in all European countries, migration implied challenges to public policies in several fields (economics, job market), impacting the budget and increasing costs. Moreover, such factors have been turned into political discourses particularly because of right-wing parties and populist movements’ propaganda, which have brought common efforts to restrict the mobility of people. Whereas, other actors, mainly non-governmental ones continued to focus on integration and humanitarian practices. In the case of the EU, the more recent events have contributed to amplify divergent views and to fragment the constellation of actors, practices and approaches, creating a shift in the focus from the need to integrate people to the need of managing the emergency. Moreover, with the involved actors in the migration policies, civil society organizations, particularly more structured NGOs, have played a pivotal role, over the years, by assisting migrants at all levels. The activities they have put in place, the influence exerted in the ­policy-making at all levels, the (often conflictual) relations they have established with state institutions in this field, and monitoring and denunciation effect they had on the overall debate are essential for understanding how humanitarianism (as defined in this chapter) has been applied to migrants and refugees’ issues, by supporting traditional approaches and practices, but also favoring innovative ones. Both aspects are investigated in the next paragraphs. On one hand, sociologists and migration experts have analyzed civil society as a factor of contestation and change in the policymaking in the field, particularly as for service provision (Ambrosini 2017). On the other hand, the investigation of political implications

42

D. Irrera

of the events in the Mediterranean have pushed political scientists and IR scholars to bring into the debate the consequences of the humanitarian dimension and the roles that n­ on-governmental actors play in that regard.

4 Humanitarianism and Migration: Between Tradition and Innovation Early migration studies have analysed the causes of human mobility as well as the consequences of the arrival of flows of people on the host countries. They have also focused on the policies and responses host countries have designed to integrate newcomers and to include them, particularly in the local job market. As for these aspects, the major contribution can be summarised into three main s­ ub-topics. Firstly, migrants’impact on policies at all level (local, national, European) and those actors which are more relevant in facilitating. Secondly, the preparation and implementation of specific development programmes; and, thirdly, efforts in promoting the return of migrants and their reintegration into their home countries.

4.1 Humanitarianism and Migration: Traditional Tasks and Approaches As for the first one, scholars have observed that most times state policies had not been efficient and responsive as expected. On the contrary, a constellation of different other actors (local municipalities, NGOs, churches, small enterprises) have bridged this gap, producing various forms of support, aid, and supply of essential services (Fernandez-Kelly 2012; Ambrosini 2015). In the EU context, this appears in a more visible way. Although it is more difficult for non-state actors to play a bigger role and exert more influence, due to the very asymmetric balance between European institutions taking the lead and Member states influencing decisions through their preferences, it is hard to identify the role of non-state actors. As in many other sensitive policy fields, NGOs working at the EU level have consolidated a set of formal and informal consultations with institutions and governments. NGOs are generally considered useful as implementing actors, informed about current initiatives and able to efficiently implement the EU humanitarian aid policy through projects and programs managed in destination countries (Irrera 2018a), at least to enrich the agenda with their own proposals. For increasing the level of information and participation among ­non-governmental actors working on the national level, several initiatives have been promoted in the specific field of European migration policies (Irrera 2016).

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

43

Although it is always remarked that NGOs often step supply the state directly or indirectly in the provision of essential services and basic rights during the buildup of development programs there is very little empirical data on the kinds of services NGOs in reality offer to immigrants that are not eligible for (certain) state-funded services and how they do so in different settings. Some NGOs and social movements instead of opposing pro-migrant policies and arguing against granting social rights to irregular migration. Thus, civil society organizations more or less openly play their role in supporting migrants who live in legal ambiguity (Ambrosini and van der Leun 2015). However, such support is not always easy. Local governments have to align with state policies, but they simultaneously face effective issues of residing populations. The fact that some services are not granted to people in need can increase insecurity and the sense of discrimination of minorities. Additionally, the moral legitimacy of public institutions can be weakened, as well as their capacity to obtain loyalty of citizens as bearers and defenders of basic human rights. The main consequence is the exclusion of a part of the migrant population, which may bear several problems for local authorities. Therefore, they often try to provide necessary services, not directly, but by delegating these tasks to NGOs or by indirectly facilitating or funding their activities. In the specific case of the EU humanitarian action, for example, the relations with NGOs have been strongly developed over the years through the aid programs and within ECHO activities. At the same, they have developed and strengthened direct relations with member states, in a more or less coordinated manner (Irrera 2018a). The third subtopic, return policies, represents the natural thing to do for migrants. In migration studies, the return is conceived as an indicator of the economic and social growth of a state and a way of contributing towards peace processes of post-conflict countries or, to reverse ethnic cleansing and other problem, related to divided societies. Towards return policies, NGOs involved in development and migration present divergent attitudes. While some NGOs working with migrants, refugees and development are very reluctant to see the perspective of return as a danger for many people, others focus on return, as a way to help migrants in facing the increasingly restrictive asylum policies. Therefore, many NGOs cooperate with partner organizations in societies of return, assisting migrants to return independently and safely to their country of origin, and contributing to viable resettlement. Although these NGOs involvement deals with a long-term impact on migrants’ life and may overlap with other research lines, that is to say, conflict transformation and state-building processes, scholars have developed some interesting contributions. On one hand, their assistance can lead to sustainability and even

44

D. Irrera

development creates expectations among potential returnees but also among policymakers. On the other, governments can use these claims of NGOs as a further legitimization of their return policies. Alternatively, since the efficacy and security of return depends on these internal migration policies, NGOs working with the issue of involuntarily returning migrants could push host governments to remove the inconsistencies in migration policies by applying more humane and less restrictive policies (Nyberg-Sørensen et al. 2002; De Haas 2012). Such debates emphasize the perception of migration as being essentially an economic phenomenon, which drives people in search of better jobs towards high growth and job opportunity areas. The migrants’ remittances contribute to the enhancement of the nexus migration/development, which is at the core of EU concerns and, the main concern of NGOs working in this field. Such investigations demonstrate that migration is definitively a humanitarian issue, which deals with the need to understand and tackle its root causes and drivers. Although states and international organizations’ policies have been shaped by their economic effects, they have also emphasized the relevant role of n­ on-state actors, particularly NGOs. Moreover, their actions are marked by a growing interplay between their traditional service-oriented role of NGOs and the political necessity to be more influential. Such interplay became more important and striving with respect to the rise of the security paradigm and the growing perception of migrants. Since invaders differ culturally and economically, from the rest of European citizens they need to be managed as a security threat. More innovative practices, developed by NGOs and other humanitarian actors, for managing the emergency phase and stressing the need to refocus on the humanitarian duties of the international community, have then emerged.

4.2 Humanitarianism and Migration: Innovative (and Controversial) Practices The most interesting innovations are represented by Search and Rescue (SAR) Operations which some NGOs started to implement in the Central Mediterranean, since September 2014, as a reaction to the very unstable and weak EU initiatives regarding border controls through military and civilian operations. In October 2013, the arrival by the sea of unwelcome people to Europe dramatically demonstrated there was a real humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean and forced to the Italian government to launch the Operation Mare Nostrum (OMN). It was established to tackle the dramatic increase of migratory flows during the second half of the year and consequent tragic ship wreckages off the coasts of Sicily. According to the

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

45

I­talian position, Mare Nostrum was complying to international law norms, like those on the Search and Rescue of persons in distress at sea, and the humanitarian values, endorsed by many international treaties and state constitutions and coherent with a 2004 national law, according to which the Migration Flows Control (CFM) was the competent authority (Attinà 2016). The debate on the efficacy of SAR and the pertinence of their use is still quite controversial. According to reports, NGOs claim that people die because or despite these operations, and they consider that border controls are a form of a military attack against migrants. Mare Nostrum was provided with ample powers and rescued over 100.000 people in the Central Mediterranean. However, NGOs expressed very critical views, in line with documents produced by UN agencies, like IOM and UNHCR. They were extremely critical toward Frontex operations because, even though the military are not deliberately killing migrants, they do not make efforts to save them and demonstrate no human approach. Instead, they constitute a militarization of EU borders by way of the implication of military personnel. The number of deaths at sea is of a military attack against responsibility between different actors that avoid taking action in a managerial process. Although it is not integrated, it is strongly heterogeneous in terms of goals, strategy and is definitely the result of the construction in a dangerous place, namely the Mediterreanean Sea (Bigo 2011). Such an approach was exacerbated by the launch of Triton, a Frontex operation, provided with specific (but limited if compared to Mare Nostrum) search and rescue tasks. Triton was officially presented not as a replacement for the Mare Nostrum, but as a new effective part of a comprehensive strategy, aiming at saving lives, protecting refugees, and managing the root causes. However, while NGOs previously expressed very critical views on the Mare Nostrum performance, they then decided to become more active. The Triton mission started its operations in November 2014 and was expanded (in terms of budget and equipment) in May 2015. From that date, its ships rescued about 10,600 people. However, it was not enough according to NGOs, which showed the same concern of other UN agencies, especially if compared to Mare Nostrum performances. The humanitarian duties requested to member states in the name of solidarity turned into a mixture of reluctant willingness, forced reactions and greater commitment by coastal states. Countries like Italy continued to be very actively engaged in the Central Mediterranean and these combined efforts, made by states, replaced OMN, to some extent, and contribute to mitigating the effects of the crisis. However, this was mainly due to the willingness—or to the necessity— of some member states, rather than a collective EU effort. In this period, more

46

D. Irrera

than in the past, NGOs started to be more publicly critical to align with views expressed by IOM and UNHCR. Moreover, NGOs denounced the inability of the EU to properly evaluate the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean and its member states to change current policies. Particularly, the critics were not only focused on the rescuing capabilities, but also on the ways migrants were gathered, once rescued, on the reception centres, which put together asylum seekers, refugees and irregular migrants. In spring 2015, some NGOs started to conduct a series of search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, as a way to sustain what was not done by the EU as a whole. Data on the rescues, provided by the Italian Coast Guard, summarizes what happened in the Mediterranean. Moreover, they demonstrate how different kind of interventions—intergovernmental, governmental, and non-governmental— interact. Since September 2014 until May 2918, NGOs have been able to save over 120.000 people, less than States (300.000), but more than Frontex (46.000) and EUNAVFOR (59.000). Obviously, NGOs are more limited in terms of budget and equipment, but their contribution is smaller if compared to states rather than Triton. Different actors operated in the same environment without coordination, but also without significant frictions, mitigating the effects of the emergency. The EU has demonstrated to be the weaker one, but even member states preferences and needs dominated the action, far from any solidarity approach. ­Non-governmental SAR operations offer a contribution which had been useful to partially help member states actions but, at the same time, they appeared unusual and not legitimized with no legitimation (Cuttitta 2018). As it is sadly known, recent events in Europe have brought to a ‘criminalization’ of non-governmental SAR operations, with NGOs targeted as smugglers and not allowed to continue rescuing people. However, what is relevant and worth mentioning, for the purposes of this chapter, is the fact that the emergencies in the Mediterranean arose in all their most visible and inhuman aspects. Migration appeared as something more than an economic and social phenomenon. Furthermore, as described here, migration fulfilled all factors, which have been used for analyzing the developments of humanitarianism. Migration has emerged as a real humanitarian issue, requiring the intervention of different actors (both governmental and non-governmental) as well as the use of more comprehensive strategies, norms, and practices, implying a higher level of professionalization. Developing non-governmental SAR operations constitute a real innovation in the field and the mirror of how crises and emergencies are making actors and task totally interchangeably. Therefore, in so doing, migration is definitively contributing to shape and expand humanitarianism.

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

47

5 The Future of Humanitarianism and the Migration Challenges: Towards a Better World? The global system is living, since several decades, a slow but constantly irreversible process of transformation and adaption. The shifting nature of man-made and natural disasters, the interdependence of problems and issues, the globalization and hybridization of security threats and danger have imposed to all actors more commitment in the building up of policies and practices. Thus, the humanitarian system emerged as a set of principles, actors, policies, practices, rules, and procedures shaping interventions because of recent global trends (Irrera 2013) and continues to expand and diversify. Humanitarianism, as an ideology which has contributed to developing the system, has been defined and analyzed by different schools in several ways. By trying to catch the complexity of the world it serves, it is here conceived as a broad and comprehensive set of principles, values and norms which make all people in need deserving of protection, relief, and support. Humanitarianism is investigated as an ideology, as a set of generalizing ideas designed to explain the social reality (namely conflicts, crises, and emergencies), as well as a practical and operative one, aiming at legitimizing and guiding those political action and decisions designed to mitigate the effects of war and deprivation. By using three key factors, humanitarianism has been investigated regarding the shifting nature of crises and conflicts; the establishment of innovative and more sophisticated tools and mechanisms, and the rising professionalization of organisations and agencies and the diversification of their tasks and mandates. Overall, these factors have demonstrated that humanitarianism has been more and more interrelated to the ‘root causes’ approach, based on the assumption that eliminating the conditions that produce a demand for humanitarians aid is better than providing temporary relief, and an efficient strategy for planning the use of financial and human resources. Migration is a paradigmatic example of a humanitarian issue which seriously challenges the capacities of states and international organizations to assure protection to people in need and to guarantee human mobility and the right of everyone to look at better living conditions. Although it has been analysed and tackled as an economic a social problem and, more recently as a security threat for the hosting communities, migration fits into the humanitarian system agenda and requires all its expertise and tools. It entails the intervention of different actors, particularly the non-governmental ones, the involvement of more competencies and expertise, developing more

48

D. Irrera

widespread strategies. Thus, it has contributed to enlarging the ideological aims of humanitarianism as well as its practical applications. It is true that currently, the global system is living an era in which the development of humanitarianism appears very idealistic. Despite the clouds on the horizon, it remains a research field which definitively deserves deeper and solid empirical contributions. The root causes approach and the management of effects should be both parts of further investigations on humanitarianism particularly in those policy fields, like migration, which is marked by hybridity and transboundary effects. Scholars, practitioners and policymakers should pay greater attention to those innovations, like non-governmental SAR operations, which can expand the effects of humanitarianism by bringing more expertise in, rather than emphasizing the difference. In this sense, humanitarianism continues to be a laboratory for nurturing and shaping the dream of a better world.

References Ambrosini, M. 2017. Why irregular migrants arrive and remain: the role of intermediaries, Journal of Ethnic and Migrations Studies, 43(11): 1–18. Ambrosini, M. 2015. NGOs and Health Services for Irregular Immigrants in Italy: When the Protection of Human Rights Challenges the Laws, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 13(2): 116–134. Ambrosini, M., and Van der Leun, J. 2015. Introduction to the Special Issue: Implementing Human Rights: Civil Society and Migration Policies, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 13(2): 103–115. Attinà, F. 2018. Tackling the migrant wave: EU as a source and a manager of crisis, Revista Española de Derecho Internacional, 70(2): 49–70. Attinà, F. 2016. Migration drivers, the EU external migration policy and crisis management, Romanian Journal of European Affairs, 16(4): 15–31. Attinà, F. 2012. Disaster and emergency policies at the international and global system level. In Ed. F. Attinà. The politics and policies of relief, aid and reconstruction. Contrasting approaches to disaster and emergencies. 21–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ayoob, M. 2001. Humanitarian intervention and international society, Global Governance 7(3): 225–230. Barnett, M. 2005, Humanitarianism transformed, Perspectives on Politics, 3(4): 723–740. Bigo, D. 2011. Globalisation and Security’ in The New Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, Eds. Amenta E., Nash K. and Scott A. London: Blackwell. Boin, A., Ekengren, M., and Rhinard, M. 2013. The European Union as crisis manager: Patterns and prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boin, A., Hart, P., T., Stern, E. & Sundelius, B. 2005. The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3  Humanitarianism and the Migration Crisis

49

Bugnion, F. 2012. From Solferino to the birth of contemporary international humanitarian law, Geneva. https://www.icrc.org/data/rx/en/assets/files/other/solferino-bugnion-icrc. pdf Cuttitta, P. 2018, Pushing Migrants Back to Libya, Persecuting Rescue NGOs: The End of the Humanitarian Turn (Part II). https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/researchsubject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2018/04/pushing-0 Davey E., Borton J., and Foley M. 2013, A history of the humanitarian system: Western origins and foundations. London: Humanitarian Policy Group. De Haas, H. 2012. The migration and development pendulum: A critical view on research and policy. International Migration 50(3): 8–25. Donini, A., Fast, L., Hansen, G., Harris, S., Minear, L., Mowjee, T., & Wilder, A. 2015. The state of the humanitarian enterprise. Final report of Humanitarian Agenda, 13. Fassin, D. 2007. Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life, Public Culture, 19(3): 499–520. Fernandez-Kelly, P. 2012. Rethinking the deserving body: Altruism, markets, and political action in health care provision, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(1): 56–71. Huysmans, J. 2016. The politics of insecurity: Fear, migration and asylum in the EU. London: Routledge. Irrera, D. 2018a, EU emergency response policies and NGOs, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Irrera, D. 2018b, The Relevance of Third-Party Intervention, (Virtual Special Issue), Conflict Management and Peace Science, November 2018, https://journals.sagepub.com/ page/cmp/collections/virtual-special-issue/the%20relevance%20of%20third-party%20 intervention%20in%20conflict%20management Irrera, D. 2016. Migrants, the EU and NGOs: The “Practice” of Non-Governmental SAR Operations, Romanian Journal of European Affairs, 16(3): 20–35. Irrera, D. 2013, NGOs Crisis Management and Conflict Resolution: Measuring the Impact of NGOs on Intergovernmental Organisations, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Lebovic, J. 2004. Uniting for peace? Democracies and United Nations peace operations after the Cold War, Journal of Conflict Resolution 48(6): 910–936. Maxwell D., and Walker P. 2014. Shaping the humanitarian world. London: Routledge. Minear, L. 2002. The humanitarian enterprise: dilemmas and discoveries. CT: Kumarian Press. Smillie I., Minear L. 2004. The charity of nations: humanitarian action in a calculating world. CT: Kumarian Press. Moore S., Eng E., and Daniel M. 2003. International NGOs and the role of network centrality in humanitarian aid operations: a case study of coordination during the 2000 Mozambique floods. Disasters 27(4): 305–318. Nyberg-Sørensen N., Van Hear N., and Engberg-Pedersen P. 2002. The ­migration-development nexus: evidence and policy options. International Migration 40(5): 49–73. Stephenson, M. 2006. Toward a descriptive model of humanitarian assistance coordination. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 17(1): 40–56. Saurruger, S. and Terpan, F. 2016. Eds. Crisis and Institutional Change in Regional Integration. London: Routledge. Taylor, G., et al. 2012. The state of the humanitarian system. London: Overseas Development Institute.

50

D. Irrera

Weiss, T. 1999. Principles, politics, and humanitarian action. Ethics & International Affairs, 13: 1–22. Western, J. and Goldstein, J. 2011. Humanitarian intervention comes of age: lessons from Somalia to Libya, Foreign Affairs, 90(6): 48–59. Wunderlich, D. 2012. The limits of external governance: implementing EU external migration policy. Journal of European Public Policy 19(9): 1414–1433.

4

Ideology and International Security Thierry Balzacq and Pablo Barnier-Khawam

Abstract

This essay examines both the epistemological underpinnings and implications of ideology in international security. It does so with an eye toward assessing the benefits of a constitutive approach, as compared to a causal perspective that understands ideology as falling within a causal-effect cognitive process. We then put our theoretical argument to work by studying neoconservatism’s influence on US foreign policy under George W. Bush. This case allows us to disclose competition between ideologies, understand the role of ideology in the process of decision-making and vet the extent to which ideology acts on policy choices. The essay advocates a social theory of ideology that can tap into the moral stances that shape discussions about ideology in international security. Keywords

Ideology · International security · Securitization · Neoconservatism · US foreign policy

The term “ideology”, as the introduction to this volume shows, has been employed by different theoretical traditions, sometimes in ways that are hardly compatible. According to Marxism, for example, ideology is “a system of thought that legitimated the existing economic and social order and its dominant class

T. Balzacq (*) · P. Barnier-Khawam  Sciences Po Paris, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_4

51

52

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

interests” (Maynard 2018, p. 481). However, this understanding has been criticised for its unilateral and monist perspectives, the former referring to direct domination of the hegemonic ideology on people through alienation, the latter to the neglect of ideology’s pluralistic reality. While the contribution of Marxism to the study of ideology has been noteworthy—especially that of Marx’s followers, including Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser—a functional definition of ideology provides access to a study of the relation between ideology and international security. Michael Freeden takes this route. Political ideology, he argues, is “a set of ideas, beliefs, opinions, and values that (1) exhibit a recurring pattern (2) are held by significant groups (3) compete over providing and controlling plans for public policy (4) do so with the aim of justifying, contesting or changing the social and political arrangements and processes of a political community” (Freeden 2003, p. 32). In this sense, ideology accounts for the content and direction of a nation’s international security choices. The underlying assumption is that international security depends on politics. In many contexts, the political landscape is divided along ideological lines, which affect international security’s policies, albeit differentially. Two aspects are very important in understanding the way ideology interacts with international security: the nature of the effect that ideology yields—causal or constitutive—and the extent to which we can trace the evidence of ideological impact in practice (Gerring 1997). This chapter focuses on these two axes. Few international relations scholars have dedicated their research to the link between ideology and international security. There are noticeable exceptions, however. Rasmus Ugilt (2017), for instance, develops an approach that relies mainly on the study of terrorism sparked by the global jihad. Building on Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) reflection on ideology, Ugilt tries to resolve the paradox between the low statistical danger of being directly hit by a terrorist attack and the feeling of fear it widely spreads. To do this, he studies the ideological power of enjoyment, namely “the kind of surplus-pleasure we can get from an experience of certain forms of pain” (Ugilt 2017, p. 8). He concludes that the ideology of security allows political leaders to spark the excitement of fear. Yet, this research seems to lack empirical evidence, contrary to Jeffrey Checkel (1993) who integrates the implications of ideology within the study of change in international security. Combining both domestic and international levels of analysis, Checkel explains the ideological change in Soviet policy under Gorbachev. His explanation relies on various mechanisms that are gathered in his main hypothesis, formulated in the following terms: “a changing external environment and the advent of a reformist general secretary created a series of policy windows through which

4  Ideology and International Security

53

aspiring policy entrepreneurs jumped” (Checkel 1993, p. 273). Supported by a thick empirical approach, Helen Milner and Dustin Tingley (2015) are concerned with the role of ideology in decisions about the proper instruments of foreign policy. They show that ideological divisions shape “preferences among policy instruments” (Milner and Tingley 2015, p. 57). Thus, ideology is a cognitive component that either shape nation’s approach to the world or is mobilized as a tool that enables leaders to justify threat construction, and the choices about which strategy and instruments are most appropriate to secure the nation. In other words, the relation between ideology and international security can be examined in three ways. The first relates to the competition between different ideologies in imposing their political conception of international security in an administration or a State. The second leads to the understanding of the cognitive map of the holders of this ideology and how they conceive what international security is or should be. The third links ideology to the process of decision-making and the result of action. In a nutshell, it studies the various relationships between ideology on international security. This chapter falls within two main sections. The first explores the epistemological foundations of the study of ideology within the context of international security. The second section is empirically oriented. Specifically, it insists on how neoconservatism informed US grand strategy after 9/11, changing how the US framed not only what international security is but also what it should be. Great care is taken in order to trace the relation between the theoretical core of neoconservatism and strategic actions it sustained.

1 Epistemology and the Study of Ideology in International Security Ideology belongs to cognitive factors that IR scholars examine in order to capture how and why state respond to external events. However, it seldom features explicitly in international security research (see Haas 2005). In fact scholars tend to utilize other concepts, including ideas, images, operational codes, and belief systems (McDermot 2002; Larson 1985; Farnham 1997; Holsti 1970). It is not the place to adjudicate between these different concepts, not least because some of them are difficult to separate from the way ideology operates. In this section, we examine how IR has attempted to make sense of the place of ideology in international security. In short, we are interested in understanding how ideology guides a nation’s treatment of external stimuli and the extent to which ideology can be regarded as an independent factor that shapes state’s interaction with the rest of the world.

54

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

1.1 The Causal Treatment of Ideology A great deal of realist theories has paid scant attention to the role of ideology in world politics. And when mainstream theories make room for ideology, they often do so through the study of ideational factors. For example, liberalism accords ideas a function in foreign policy’s choices and thus on the character of international security. In line with the rationalist approach, liberalism remains focused on causal explanations and less on how ideology can be a tool for understanding actors’ behaviour. Ideas thus influence policy when they play a role in the strategic behaviour of actors. Furthering the approach that considers ideas as a means of legitimising interests, Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane (1993) developed theoretical tools that elevate ideas to the rank of causal factors. As they put it, “even if we accept the rationality premise, actions taken by human beings depend on the substantive quality of available ideas, since ideas help to clarify principles and conceptions of causal relationships, and to coordinate individual behaviour. Once institutionalised, furthermore, ideas continue to guide action in the absence of costly innovation” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 5). Their definition of “idea” as a concept draws on “particular beliefs—shared by a large number of people—about the nature of their worlds that have implications for human action” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 7). To a great extent, this definition of ideas resembles Freeden’s specification of ideology. But, perhaps, an aspect that could separate them is the aim of changing political community which is absent from Goldstein and Keohane’s definition. What the two authors define as ideas seems to be slightly broader than what ideology, according to Freeden, encompasses. Therefore, one could assume that Goldstein and Keohane partly develop a liberal and rationalist approach to ideology in foreign policy and its possible impact on international security. The closest concept to ideology, theorized by Goldstein and Keohane, is what they call “world views”. They posit that world views “are entwined with people’s conceptions of their identities, evoking deep emotions and loyalties” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 8). A heap of evidence suggests that world views’ impact on human action is noteworthy. However, one could question the causal relevance of this concept due to its totalising characteristic. Be that as it may, there are three causal pathways associated with ideas. First, ideas can be road maps “when actors believe in the causal link they identify or the normative principles that they reflect” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 12). In this case, ideas serve to guide action in order to attain specific outcomes. Second, ideas are focal points which “affect strategic interactions, helping or hindering joint efforts to attain ‘more efficient’ outcome—outcomes that are at least as

4  Ideology and International Security

55

good as the status quo for all participants” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, p. 12). Taking into account ideas complements approaches that emphasize interests in explaining how actors strategically coordinate their actions. Thirdly, ideas can be embedded in institutions and specify policy in the absence of innovation. This last form of causal pathway takes the point of view of institution by asserting that ideas are embedded within institutionalised rules and norms, that is, they can influence the organisational design, and thus constrain public policy. Therefore, ideas are not only borne by individuals but also by organisations. Goldstein and Keohane’s theoretical reflection on the causal impact of ideas on foreign policy does not consider the question of why certain ideas obtain, as the two authors admit to. They rather seek to explain the causal pathway from ideas to human action thanks to the three categories of beliefs and causal situation they define. However, this rationalist view of ideas and ideology is methodologically unsatisfactory due to its inability to identify what the causal link between ideology and human action looks like. Further, it tends to conflate ideas and ideology while, in our view, the former is broader than the latter and does not necessarily have a political aim. In other words, ideology not ideas constitutes Goldstein and Keohane’s study. Their theorisation of the role of ideas in foreign policy aligns with the definition of ideology crafted by Michael Freeden than to the broader understanding of idea, the definition of which can be an abstract representation of a given element of reality. Besides, Goldstein and Keohane do not differentiate between ideas and beliefs while, in terms of political motivation, the two do not produce similar consequences. Beliefs are, perhaps, more motivating for human action than ideas, as they should engage emotions and thus contributes more strongly to one’s subjectivity, as Louis Althusser proposes in its affective definition of ideology (Althusser 2011; Mercer 2010). Therefore, ideology entails beliefs, but ideas do not, contrary to what Goldstein and Keohane assert. Yet, even if one considers this liberal and rationalist approach as closer to the study of ideology in international relations than to ideas in general, a methodological problem remains. Albert Yee (1996) proposes to review the lack of method in the search for causation of ideas on policies. He first integrates ideology as a specific level of generality of ideas and beliefs, almost replicating Goldstein’s and Keohane’s definition. He argues that the task of establishing a causal relation between ideas and policy is not facilely understood because different social entities can be imbued with diverse ideas. Yee refutes, then, the different methods used by behaviouralists to establish a causal link between ideas and policy. By the same token, he criticises scholars who tend to infer causation from associations and covariation based on statistical work. Because of the plurality of causes operating in the social world and the

56

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

confusion between probability and causation, regression analysis has many flaws that prevent it from being a valid method for researching causation. Two other methods implemented by behaviouralists rest on statistical research. The first is congruence. Starting with a deductive procedure, the investigator should study the congruency of actor’s beliefs and the characteristics of its decisions. If there is congruence, a presumption of causation can then be established. Yet, causation cannot be fully probed by using this method. The second method is process tracing. According to Alexander George (1979, p. 113), process tracing has to “establish the ways in which the actor’s beliefs influenced his receptivity to and assessment of incoming information about the situation, his definition of the situation, his identification and evaluation of options, as well as, finally, his choice of a course of action”. However, this method, too, is insufficient to set the conditions for causation. As Yee (1996, p. 77) puts it, “a distinction exists between citing the ways in which something occurs and knowing why it occurs in those ways”. These two methods draw on the will to reproduce an experimental design in social sciences. The causation of ideas has a much wider possibility to be achieved if ideas are viewed as language and discourse. At this point, ideas and ideology are methodologically and ontologically linked. As Freeden (2003, p. 66) explains, “ideologies compete over the control of political language as well as competing over plans for public policy; indeed, their competition over plans for public policy is primarily conducted through their competition over the control of political language.” Yee finally draws on the role of language and discourse for the causation of ideas on policy. Different instances allow the author to evaluate this role. The first is vocabulary and rules of language that can “define the range of possible utterance and hence the range of possible actions” (Yee 1996, p. 94). In some cases, the study of speech acts draw on the distinction established by J. L. Austin (1962) between illocutionary acts, according to which language produces a result, and perlocutionary acts, namely the effects of utterances on listeners. This is the instance of securitisation theory (Balzacq 2011). Inspired by Clifford Geertz (1973), Yee (1996, p. 95) specifies, in a second instance, that, “as cultural ‘webs of significance,’ [language and discourse] imprint meaning onto the minds of policymakers through their symbolic power”. Thirdly, the former proposition induces the importance of the intersubjective dimensions of symbolic language. According to an interpretivist approach, the investigator

4  Ideology and International Security

57

attempts to uncover the sense of a given action, practice or constitutive meaning; it does this by discovering the intentions and desires of particular actors, by uncovering the set of rules which give point to these sets of rules or practices, and by elucidating the basic conceptual scheme which orders experience in ways that the practices, actions, and experiences (…) are made intelligible, by seeing how they fit into a whole structure which defines the nature and purpose of human life (Fay 1975, p. 79).

Yet, it is useful to insist, intersubjective meanings do not have a direct causation. They represent conditions according to which actors can act. In Brian Fay’s (1975, p. 85) terms, that is, “these conditions must be understood not as causes but as warranting conditions which make a particular action or belief more ‘reasonable,’ ‘justified,’ or ‘appropriate,’ given the desires, beliefs, and expectations of the actors”. It is thus a “quasi-causal accounts of the ways in which certain configurations of conditions give rise to certain forms of action, rules and common meanings” (Fay 1975, p. 84). This approach can finally be deepened to reach a position according to which the constitution of meanings and practices stems from intersubjectivity. For this, two assumptions need to be handled. The first is the emphasis of the medium of language in constituting meaning. The second is that “intersubjective meanings (…) enmeshed inseparably with these practices and actions” (Yee 1996, p. 98). Therefore, “the relationship between the ‘intersubjective meanings’ which make up the ‘web of meaning’ and human practices is not one of correlation, where ‘intersubjective meanings’ serve as an ‘intervening variable’ in a causal sequence. Rather, the ‘intersubjective meanings’ are constitutive of those practices” (Neufeld 1993, p. 45). Thanks to this process of constitution, it is therefore possible to further our understanding of the role of ideology in international security.

1.2 The Constitutive View of Ideology Studying the role of ideology in international politics and security through a causal lens is only one among other ways of examining how ideology affects security and international relations. As suggested above, a constitutive approach brings additional benefits. But it implies an epistemological shift from positivism to post-positivism, relying mainly on the theoretical contributions of constructivism in international relations (Hopf 1998). In order to better understand the constitutive relation between ideology and international security, one needs, first, to deepen the distinction between causal

58

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

and constitutive effects on an epistemological basis and not solely on a methodological one, as it was done above. “Causal relationships can exist only between independently existing entities,” says Wendt (1999, p. 167). This proposition is a deduction of individualism according to which actors are self-organising entities whose isolation is logically essential to the possibility of causation. In this case, culture can have a causal effect on individuals because they are treated as isolated entities on which it is possible to have an effect. Therefore, the constitutive effect has to be temporary suspended. Otherwise, this effect would put an end to the independent constitution of individuals. Holism contrasts with the individualist approach and relies on the idea that “agency has an inherently relational dimension” (Wendt 1999, p. 171). The relation between agency and structure is no longer that of mutual separation, even though the two can interact, but it is that of mutual constitution. Opposing internalist to externalist perspective for explaining how the “content” of actors’ ideas of the world is constituted, Wendt demonstrates that the first is associated to an individualist approach while the second is tied to a holistic one. Externalism has three implications that matter for our purpose. “The first is that thoughts are constituted at least in part by external context rather than solely in the heads of individuals, since how thoughts get carved up or ‘individuated’ depends on what ‘conceptual grid’ is used. (…) Thinking depends logically on social relations, not just causally”, explains Wendt (1999, p. 175). Second, “truth conditions are ‘owned’ by the community, not by individuals” (Wendt 1999, p. 175). This is the case, for instance, when one relates to objects to which he or she cannot have a direct access and thus depend on the information of others. And third, “meanings depend on the practices, skills, and tests that connect the community to the objects represented in discourse” (Wendt 1999, p. 176). Be that as it may, in order to understand the constitutive role of security, and then how ideology has a major role in its explanation and understanding, it is necessary to go back to the role of security in society. According to Balzacq, security is a structuring practice, because it screens what is going to be considered as a security issue; it is also an exclusive activity to the extent that it divides what is security from what is not; finally it is normative practice, since it is about to save at all cost what is recognised as an important value of society. [S]ecurity rules at the limits of values, political identities and significations shared by a collectivity (Balzacq 2016, p. 57).

In their work on macrosecuritisation, Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver (2009) develop an argument that can aid us in understanding the ways in which i­deology

4  Ideology and International Security

59

relates to security. The two authors propose to deal with higher order securitisations levels rather than those of middle level, which the Copenhagen school has focused on. This predominance is explained by the difficulty of analysing securitisation “at both the individual level (where the referent object is human beings) and the system level (where the referent object is in some sense all of humankind)” (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 254). Securitisation theory, as a speech-act approach, implies three types of units: referent objects, securitising actors, and functional actors (Buzan et al. 1998). Middle-scale analysis of securitisation has been the most amenable due to the fact that “such limited collectivities (states, nations, and as anticipated by Huntington, civilisations) engage in ­self-reinforcing rivalries with other limited collectivities and that such interaction strengthens their we-feeling” (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 255). In addition to the concept of macrosecuritisation, the authors unpack the security constellations, namely the “link across all the levels and sectors in which securitisations occur” (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 256). This concept suggests the existence of larger patterns in social structures of securitisation, conditions of which are thus laid down by it. If macrosecuritisation entails the same rules as other securitisations, namely “identification of an existential threat to a valued referent object and the call for exceptional measures” (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 257), it has a more complicated structure because of the different levels of securitisation it embodies and the possible conflicts that can emerge between them. What, then, is the role of ideology within macrosecuritisation? Considering the Cold War and the “Global War on Terror” (GWoT), Buzan and Wæver highlight how ideology contributes to the understanding of macrosecuritisation. They put it in the following words: one key to understanding these macrosecuritisations, and the stability of the constellation they generated, is the availability of universalist ideologies that played not only to the core identities of the two superpowers, but also spoke to both elites and masses in the wider audiences of the West and the socialist world (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 260).

If ideology is not a necessary condition of macrosecuritisation, the presence of universalist ideologies facilitates the work of the securitising actors. The two authors distinguish between four types of universalism that can be invested by many types of ideologies: inclusive universalisms, exclusive universalisms, existing order universalisms, physical threat universalisms. The Cold War, for instance, opposed two inclusive universalisms each of which having a distinct ideology that contributed to the macrosecuritisation of this period.

60

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

If the example of the Cold War seems paradigmatic of macrosecuritisation, the GWoT embraces a much broader part of the world population than the opposition between US capitalism and Soviet communism would be able to. This part of world population integrates into the category of “all civilised or ­wanting-to-be-civilised people (all but the terrorists themselves)” (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 264–65). Thus, the GWoT mixes two sorts of universalisms, the existing order universalism and the US-centred inclusive universalism. GWoT is therefore an interesting case, if we are to illustrate the major role that ideology plays in international security.

2 Making It Matter: Neoconservatism and International Security The constitutive effect of structure allows one to both understand and explain the role of ideological components in the case of neoconservatism as one of the major set of ideas, beliefs, opinions and values that has achieved its hegemony for 21st century international security. Its ideological content is however ambivalent due to its in-between position, not completely belonging to international liberalism nor to political conservatism but being a mix of both. If the purpose of this part is not to carry out a history of neoconservatism, the study of its content can nonetheless contribute to the understanding of how an ideology might be crucial for the disruption if not change of international security. The question of why it could impose itself in the American administration during George W. Bush’s mandates will be receive a special attention throughout. Neoconservatism is a strange school of thought. It contains traces of different schools of thought including, realism, internationalism, and nationalism. With just a brief outlook of the political stances of neoconservatism, one could intuitively think that neoconservatism fits perfectly with offensive realism which states that “status quo powers are rarely found in world politics, because the international system creates powerful incentives for states to look for opportunities to gain power at the expense of rivals, and to take advantage of those situations when the benefits outweigh the costs” (Mearsheimer 2001, p. 21). John Mearsheimer (2001), one of the promoters of this branch of realism, even asserts that great powers can pursue non-security goals as long as these do not enter in conflict with the balance-of-power logic, and among these, he quotes ideology. Thus, offensive realism seems to fit naturally with neoconservatism in its understanding of international security and in the pursuit of national interest. However,

4  Ideology and International Security

61

Mearsheimer was one of the most fierce critics of the intervention in Iraq in 2003 (Walt and Mearsheimer 2009), among other realists (New York Times 2002). The other main pole of international relations theories that could share some affinities with neoconservatism is liberalism. Due to its will to spread liberal democracy around the world and defend human liberty and progress, neoconservatism could be a form of liberalism, even if the former is described by some as going awry from the traditional liberal theory (Reus-Smit 2005). Yet, because it undermines international law and grants little value to international institutions, neoconservatism clearly departs from the liberal tradition. Michael Williams (2005) has been instrumental in situating this ideology within foreign policy’s landscape. First, neoconservatism has been mainly unconsidered by international relations scholars due to its status between a theory and an ideology (although postmodernists would claim that any IR theory is a form of ideology). Williams’ aim is to consider seriously neoconservatism’s assumptions in order to shed light on its political action. Drawing on Irving Kristol’s thought, he shows that neoconservatism and realism do not understand national interest in a similar fashion. While the latter bestows a material basis to define national interest, the former understands it as a “symbol and barometer of the health of a political order, and particularly a mark of decadence or vibrancy and virtue in a society” (Williams 2005, p. 309–310). Here, the link to security is clearly brought out as national interest is fundamentally related to the identity of society. The ambivalence of neoconservatism is deepened by its modernist position that contrasts with the anti-modernist one of traditional conservatism. According to Kristol (1983), modern politics is “ideological in the sense that it consists of political beliefs that are oriented in a melioristic way—a ‘progressive’ way, as one says—toward the future. It is impossible for any set of political beliefs in the modern era to engage popular sentiments without such a basic orientation”. Thus, ideology is the basis on which modern politics can make agonistic struggles possible. This strengthens its ideological status and its tight relation with security. If the “neo”-part of conservatism is thus explained, the fact that liberalism has gone awry according to neoconservatives, justifies that they defend a return to the original sense of liberalism. To do this, they criticise three pathologies of modern liberalism: the individual, the social and the political levels (Williams 2005). At the first, the pursuit of self-interest in the characterisation of action leads to hedonism and despair. At the second, this kind of individualism contributes to the destruction of communal ties and values. At the third level, “the dynamics of a corrupted liberal society are mirrored in a destructive and debilitating pluralism” (Williams 2005, p. 312).

62

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

These three evolutions produce a decay of political commitment and by this a restriction of democracy to its technical aspect. However, liberalism does not have to be rejected as a whole but can be reoriented from Adam Smith’s thought and the “need for a sense of individual virtue and social mores in a stable, cohesive and economically vibrant society” (Williams 2005, p. 315). This is obviously the civic virtue’s ground in a republican regime. The consequence of this project is a renewal of patriotism, which in the American context becomes “an ideologically compelling, forward-looking and outwardly oriented form of American nationalism” (Williams 2005, p. 317). In this sense, neoconservatism goes a step further away from nostalgic patriotism by stressing a requirement to ideals, and not to the soil as it is the case for European nationalism. And this nationalism is domestic as well as international. As William Kristol and Robert Kagan (1996, p. 27) put it, theorising a form of benevolent hegemony, “American foreign policy should be informed with a clear moral purpose, based on the understanding that its moral goals and its fundamental national interests are almost always in harmony”. This nationalism is a resource, according to Williams (2005), that enables its proponents to unleash a populist discourse blaming the foreign policy of liberal elites while praising the neoconservative’s ambitions. Thus, the ideological weight of neoconservatism is established through its rejection of the dualist thesis according to which domestic and international spaces should be separated. According to Kagan (2004), “there can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign, therefore, and no clear distinction between what the democratic world thinks about America and what Americans think about themselves”. And, the notion that transcends both domestic and foreign realms is national interest. By rediscovering the notion of national interest, neoconservatism can supply a thorough criticism of realism. This criticism takes three forms. First, the endless debates on the nature of national interest within realism is a result of its strategic and materialistic perspective that is blind to the importance of value. The same argument underpins the second criticism according to which a realist foreign policy is unrealistic because, “without a sense of mission, [the American people] will seek deeper and deeper cuts in the defense and foreign affairs budgets and gradually decimate the tools of US hegemony” (W. Kristol and Kagan 1996, p. 28). As a consequence, and thirdly, realism fails to provide security due to its insufficient appropriation of the national interest (Williams 2005, p. 322). Williams paradoxically ends his argument by connecting neoconservatism to constructivism. The claim that could be the notch between both theories is the basis of constructivism, namely “ideas matter”. To assert this, Williams relies on

4  Ideology and International Security

63

a quote of Irving Kristol (1983, p. 106), which claims: “It is ideas that establish and define in men’s minds the categories of the politically possible and the politically impossible, the desirable and the undesirable, the tolerable and the intolerable”. This quote echoes neoconservatives’ self-perception as ideologists. Isn’t it “Ideas have consequences” the motto of the think tank Heritage Foundation— close to neoconservatism (Williams 2005, p. 328)? In sum, neoconservatism is an ambivalent ideology, which aggregates heterogeneous content in one same theory. Understanding this position allows us to capture its argumentative strength. Its appeal derives not from a neat and fast body of assumptions, but from its ability to speak to, and sometimes bring together, different intellectual traditions. However, ideas do not float freely, to use Thomas Risse-Kappen’s (1994) parlance. Therefore, the analysis of neoconservatism’s ideological content is not enough to explain how it was able to achieve its hegemony within the American administration, especially during George W. Bush’s mandates and partially during Donald Trump’s first years in office. To do this, another aspect of Freeden’s definition of ideology is crucial. In fact, according to Freeden, “an ideology is a wide-ranging structural arrangement that attributes decontested meanings to a range of mutually defining political concepts” (Freeden 2003, p. 65). This function of decontestation is close to that of hegemony. An ideology, in this context, achieves its domination thanks to “the ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates” (Eagleton 1991, p. 112). However, hegemony is a broader concept than ideology as the latter can be imposed by force, even if it should be more effective by relying on hegemony. As the two authors (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 268) put it, The ability to generate a successful macrosecuritisation depends not just on power, but on the construction of higher level referent objects capable of appealing to, and mobilising, the identity politics of a range of actors within the system. This is partly about generating a unity of positives based on values shared across different actors and identities, and partly about generating a unity of negatives where all the participants can agree on what they understand as threatening to them.

However, this political mobilization cannot be achieved in the absence of political leaders. Furthermore, neoconservatism stresses the importance of these leaders and thus encourages a strategy of personalisation in political action. The GWoT is a rather powerful example of the implementation of an ideology within the field of foreign policy, the operation of which leans towards a macrosecuritisation. The political renewal of distorted ideologies, according to neoconservatism, thereby

64

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam requires an intellectual endeavour to recover these traditions of thought, and a cultural and political strategy to ensure their prominence. Equally importantly, it requires a political leadership that can represent those ideals and mobilize political support by allowing the society to see its ‘populist’ values and identity reflected in the personal characteristics and policies of the leadership itself (Williams 2005, p. 320).

The analysis now focuses on this leadership in order to explain—if partially—the success of neoconservatism. To trace the effects of an ideology on international security, this section analyses George W. Bush’s administration, using primary and secondary data. Neoconservatism relies upon an offensive approach to international security. It can be characterized as an ideology that contributes to a macrosecuritisation. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 against the Twin Towers specific actors of the George W. Bush administration took advantage of a new threat to put forward their preferred picture of international security. This is why context can be considered as a factor that contributes the change of meaning within the international system (Goertz 1994). Buzan and Wæver (2009, p. 272) propose a summary of the change implied by the GWoT: The Al-Qaeda attacks on the US on 9/11 brought the post-Cold War period to an abrupt end, and triggered a substantial shift in the security agenda. The GWoT provided a potentially dominant macrosecuritisation around which US, Western and even Russian, Chinese and Indian foreign policy could be coordinated. Interestingly, it also brought the history of macrosecuritisation full circle, with the Manichean, zero-sum, rhetoric of the GWoT resurrecting the civilised vs. barbarian themes of both pre-modern and colonial times. Yet while backward looking in some respects, the GWoT also built on more modern universalisms. Partly it was about inclusive liberal universalism and terrorist threats to democracy, human rights and the market. Partly it was about existing order universalism and the threat posed by violent non-state actors to the institutions of sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy and the interstate order generally. And partly it was about physical threat universalism as embodied in the linkage of terrorists to weapons of mass destruction.

Now, this quote begs for details. The scene of the movie Vice (McKay 2018) on Dick Cheney during which the vice-president of George W. Bush calls his lawyer while the crisis room of the White House is boiling because of the terrorist attack of 9/11 fictionally illustrates this substantial shift. With some sarcasm, the narrator of the movie explains that Cheney is seizing this moment to implement a theory of American constitutional law dubbed unitary executive theory., On this account, the President possesses the power to control the entire executive branch,

4  Ideology and International Security

65

as an interpretation of the Article Two of the United States Constitution can infer (Lessig and Sunstein 1994). Even fictionalised, this political move is representative of how several actors, among whom Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, advocated institutional change based on neoconservatism. This change in favour of the power of the executive branch can be illustrated by several examples. First, the legislative branch accepts to be submitted to the President’s authority as a document of the Department of Justice clearly states: “In the specific context of the current armed conflict with al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations, Congress by statute has confirmed and supplemented the President’s recognized authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct such warrantless surveillance to prevent further catastrophic attacks on the homeland” (U.S. Department of Justice 2006, p. 2). The adoption of the Patriot Act on October 26, 2001 is a plain illustration of this. Since Edward Snowden’s disclosures, it is well-known that this executive act has had dramatic consequences on the private life of many American and foreign citizens. Second, this new equilibrium of the US balance of power entails what has been dubbed as the Bush doctrine, which is delineated in the National Security Strategy of the United States, published on September 17, 2002, and then updated in 2006. The content of Section V, the title of which is “Prevent Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of Mass Destruction”, clearly employs the ideological basis detailed above. As stated, The security environment confronting the United States today is radically different from what we have faced before. Yet the first duty of the United States Government remains what it always has been: to protect the American people and American interests. It is an enduring American principle that this duty obligates the government to anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage. (…) To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense (Executive Branch of the United States 2006).

Several elements support Williams’ theoretical insights (Williams 2005). First, a radical change is stated. Second, the protection of the identity and the values of the American people defines the priority of the US government. Third, the distinction between domestic and foreign spaces is blurred. And, finally, force is recognised as a legitimate means to preserve the U.S. national interest, including by using preemptive attack. A third example of the transformation of the executive branch in the aftermath of 9/11 and that fits with neoconservatism’s ideology, is the creation of the United

66

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

States Department of Homeland Security in November 2002. This new institution is a cabinet department of the US government. Its missions are to “prevent terrorism and enhancing security; secure and manage our borders; enforce and administer our immigration laws; safeguard and secure cyberspace; ensure resilience to disasters” (Department of Homeland Security 2016). The four first objectives are typical of transnational “threats” that can be committed by actors inserted in globalisation. Macrosecuritisation is here concrete as new objects are designated as “threats” that call for an institutional response because, according to neoconservatism, it endangers American identity and values. Yet, one could argue that all of this does not concern international security as there are domestic measures regarding international security but that do not necessarily have an impact on it. This would be misplaced. Indeed, as the ideological content of neoconservatism assumes, the distinction between the domestic and foreign sphere needs to be transcended by the notion of national interest that concerns both the American people and all civilized peoples. The implementation of this idea is the GWoT and, more specifically, the intervention in Iraq. As explained above, the GWoT produces a systemic change within the international system that modifies the foreign policies of major powers, such as China or Russia. The offensive conception of what is international security is the main feature of the American foreign policy implemented during George W. Bush’s mandate. This offensive strategy is in accordance with the special role of the President that the unitary executive theory claims. As Williams (2005, p. 320) puts it, “neoconservatism’s stress on ‘character’ in leadership and boldness in policy (especially foreign policy) is a product of (…) the need for American presidents to represent for (and to) the American people the greatness of the nation, and to demonstrate that it ‘owns the future’”. The macrosecuritisation of the GWoT mainly happens through the threat of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein presumably possesses. The famous image of Colin Powell holding a model vial of anthrax while giving a presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 is climactic of the will of the Bush administration to create a new threat that calls for exceptional measures. Furthermore, Powell’s speech illustrates several features of securitisation theory (Balzacq 2011). By stating that Saddam Hussein’s regime is a threat, Powell aimed to convince the Security Council to grant the US legal power to intervene. In this light, the audience concerned by the threat is institutionally and discursively framed as universal. The Security council is supposed to address issues that concern the whole world and the discourse of the Bush administration for the GWoT entails two forms of universalisms as specified above by Buzan and Wæver (2009).

4  Ideology and International Security

67

However, these theoretical universalisms do not imply that they are universal in practice. As Buzan and Wæver (2009, p. 264) put it, “the making of universalist claims does not necessarily mean that the macrosecuritisation is in fact universal in terms of participation”. Thereby, the unilateral and offensive foreign policy of the Bush administration, and more specifically the intervention in Iraq, is in synch with the theory of a benevolent hegemony, according to which the logic of international relations is one of “bandwagoning” (Mearsheimer 2005). It furthermore goes along with the neoconservative idea that the American society is at risk and that, to curb the threat, its duty is to spread democracy across the world (Schmidt and Williams 2008). Macrosecuritisation is finally achieved by singling out an “axis of evil” which does not only threaten the United States but world peace. As George W. Bush (2002) puts it in its State of the Union Address on January 29, 2000, States like these [Iran, Iraq and North Korea] and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger (…). They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.

At the international level, there are many benefits that accrue to actors who embark on macrosecuritisation. These can go from the demonstration and legitimation of a leadership to the demarcation of spheres of influence, by way of the facilitation of alliance formation. Yet, the foreign policy of unipolarity implemented by the United States during the GWoT also sparked resistance from other major and smaller powers “fearing to become the object of this project” (Buzan and Wæver 2009, p. 264). Unipolarity is therefore securitised by other actors to qualify it as a threat. It appears, therefore, that any ideology saws the seeds of resistance.

3 Conclusion This chapter has attempted to explore the ways in which ideology matters in international security. The choice we made was to embed the discussion within epistemological and methodological debates. We did so, as a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the concept of ideology in international relations has to do with the extent to which it actually affects the conduct of a nation’s security policies. Thus, ideology was first considered as a factor of explanation of foreign policy and international security relying on the rationalist theory. Several methodological

68

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

and epistemological problems pleaded against this approach, which brought us to focus on a constructivist strand. According to the former, ideas and, more specifically, ideology should be understood within an intersubjective comprehension of human action. Thereby, structure and individuality are mutually constituted. Ideology can, it seems plausible to assume, be thought as constitutive of political action regarding issues of international security. The two fundamental methods of investigation, namely understanding and explanation, are gathered in one same social theory. The study of the ideological content of neoconservatism, as deployed by George W. Bush administration, demonstrates that neoconservatism played a major role in the U.S. effort to shape the world after 9/11. Our case drew on macrosecuritisation in order to shed new light on the way neoconservative entrepreneurs justified their decisions and actions. That said, neoconservatism is an ambivalent ideology. Neither realist nor liberal, neoconservatism is inspired by and thus disposes of argumentative strategies of both classic theories of international relations that contributes to understanding its political success. The importance of any ideology wax and wane over time, however. That is, the study of ideology as it relates to international security presents us with the problem of time horizon. Because ideology tends to be treated negatively, it often lies in the eye of the beholder. In this sense, past “ideas” become present time ideologies. Alternatively, any idea a group dislikes would be called “ideology”, which departs, as we have seen, from the more neutral understanding of ideology that has guided this chapter. In this respect, we hope, our approach to ideology paves the way for the possibility of evaluating moral judgements that underpin discussions about ideology in international security.

References Althusser, Louis. 2011. Sur la reproduction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by James O. Urmson. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Balzacq, Thierry. Ed. 2011. Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve. London: Routledge. Balzaq, Thierry. 2016. Théories de la sécurité : les approches critiques. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Bush, George W. 2002. ‘State of the Union Address’. Miller Center. 29 January 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20111011053416/http://millercenter.org/president/ speeches/detail/4540.

4  Ideology and International Security

69

Buzan, B., and Wæver, O. 2009. ‘Macrosecuritisation and Security Constellations: Reconsidering Scale in Securitisation Theory’. Review of International Studies 35(2): 253– 276. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Pub. Checkel, Jeffrey. 1993. ‘Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution’. World Politics 45(2): 271–300. Department of Homeland Security. 2016. ‘Our Mission’. 11 May 2016. https://www.dhs. gov/our-mission. Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Executive Branch of the United States. 2006. ‘The National Security Strategy’. Washington, D.C. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2006/print/index.html. Farnham, Barbara. 1997. Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political ­Decision-Making. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fay, Brian. 1975. Social Theory and Political Practice. London: Routledge. Freeden, Michael. 2003. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. George, A. L. 1979. ‘The Causal Nexus between Cognitive Beliefs and Decision-Making Behavior: The “Operational Code” Belief System’. In Psychological Models in International Politics, Ed. Lawrence S. Falkowski, 95–124. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press. Goertz, Gary. 1994. Contexts of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldstein, Judith, and Robert O. Keohane. Eds. 1993. Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change. Cornell Studies in Political Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gerring, John. 1997. “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis”. Political Research Quarterly 50(4): 957–994. Haas, Mark L. 2005. The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789–1989. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Holsti, O. R. 1970. ‘The “Operational Code Approach” to the Study of Political Leaders: John Foster Dulles’ Philosophical and Instrumental Beliefs’. Canadian Journal of Political Science 3(1): 123–157. Hopf, Ted. 1998. ‘The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory’. International Security 23 (1): 171–200. Kagan, Robert. 2004. ‘A Tougher War For the U.S. Is One Of Legitimacy’. The New York Times, 24 January 2004, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/24/books/atougher-war-for-the-us-is-one-of-legitimacy.html. Kristol, Irving. 1983. Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead. New York: Basic Books. Kristol, William, and Robert Kagan. 1996. ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’. Foreign Affairs 75(4): 18–32. Larson, Deborah Welch. 1985. Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

70

T. Balzacq and P. Barnier-Khawam

Lessig, Lawrence, and Cass R. Sunstein. 1994. ‘The President and the Administration’. Columbia Law Review 94 (1): 1. Maynard, Jonathan Leader. 2018. ‘Ideology’. In The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology, Eds. William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner, 479–500. London: SAGE Publications. McDermott, Rose. 2002. ‘Arms Control and the First Reagan Administration: ­Belief-Systems and Policy Choices’. Journal of Cold War Studies 4(4): 29–59. McKay, Adam. 2018. Vice. Annapurna Pictures. Mearsheimer, John J. 2001. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Mearsheimer, John J. 2005. ‘Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq War: Realism versus ­Neo-Conservatism’. OpenDemocracy, 21 April 2005. https://mearsheimer.uchicago. edu/pdfs/A0037.pdf. Mercer, Jonathan. 2010. ‘Emotional Beliefs’. International Organization 64(1): 1–31. Milner, Helen V. and Dustin Tingley. 2015. Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Neufeld, Mark. 1993. ‘Interpretation and the “science” of International Relations’. Review of International Studies 19(1): 39–61. New York Times. 2002. ‘War with Iraq Is Not in America’s National Interest’, 26 September 2002. https://www.bear-left.com/archive/2002/OP-Ed.pdf. Reus-Smit, Christian. 2005. ‘Liberal Hierarchy and the Licence to Use Force’. Review of International Studies 31(S1): 71–92. Risse-Kappen, Thomas. 1994. ‘Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Structures, and the End of the Cold War’. International Organization 48(2): 185–214. Schmidt, Brian C., and Michael C. Williams. 2008. ‘The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists’. Security Studies 17(2): 191–220. Ugilt, Rasmus. 2017. ‘Security and Ideology’. In Rethinking Security in the Twenty-First Century: A Reader, Ed. Edwin Daniel Jacob, 3–18. New York: Palgrave Macmillan/ Springer Nature. U.S. Department of Justice. 2006. ‘Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National Security Agency Described by the President’. Washington, D.C. https://web. archive.org/web/20130113171414/http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/ nsa/dojnsa11906wp.pdf. Walt, Stephen M., and John J. Mearsheimer. 2009. ‘An Unnecessary War’. Foreign Policy. 3 November 2009. https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/11/03/an-unnecessary-war-2/. Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge Studies in International Relations 67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Michael C. 2005. ‘What Is the National Interest? The Neoconservative Challenge in IR Theory’. European Journal of International Relations 11(3): 307–337. Yee, Albert S. 1996. ‘The Causal Effects of Ideas on Policies’. International Organization 50(1): 69–108. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. The Sublime Object of Ideology. The Essential Žižek. London: Verso.

5

Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics David J. Blair

Abstract

This chapter begins by identifying the main elements of the most prominent groupings of environmental ideologies, drawing attention to the main differences between them as well as those ideas that some of them share. The influence of these ideologies is assessed within different of areas of global politics. This assessment is conducted by determining how well various developments in global politics reflect the positions advocated in each of these ideologies and by seeking evidence of deliberate efforts to promote them. What this survey indicates is that some of these environmental ideologies have had a much greater impact than others, although there has been some variance in each one’s influence over time and depending on the area of global politics one examines. Finally, consideration is given to the proposition that those ideologies whose influence has hitherto been rather limited may experience greater prominence as the nature of global politics evolves. Keywords

Environmentalism · Neoliberalism · Globalisation · Economic growth · Degrowth ·  Biocentric · Green · Localisation · Regimes · Global governance

D. J. Blair (*)  Huron University College, University of Western Ontario, Ontario, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_5

71

72

D. J. Blair

Discussing the influence of environmentalism as a political ideology is a challenging task, first of all because there is no single environmental ideology. The only unifying feature of the numerous environmental perspectives or worldviews is a shared concern for the environment, although even on that score the depth and nature of the concern varies. With respect to the other main elements of an ideology, such as offering explanations for social reality or providing a guide to political action, there is a considerable diversity of views. Another challenge is assessing the influence of each of these contending ideological strains on global politics, in part because there are areas of overlap between some of them but also because of the difficulty in separating the influence of ideas from other causal variables such as interests and the exercise of power. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a growing consensus that environmental ideas have had a profound influence in many areas of global politics over the past several decades. Despite the challenges, an attempt will be made here to identify the various ways in which these ideological influences appear to have been exerted. This overview begins by summarising the main elements of the most prominent groupings of environmental ideologies, drawing attention to the main differences between them as well as those ideas that some of them share. In the section that follows, the influence of these ideologies is assessed within different of areas of global politics. This assessment is conducted by determining how well various developments in global politics reflect the positions advocated in each of these ideologies and by seeking evidence of deliberate efforts to promote them. What this survey indicates is that some of these environmental ideologies have had a much greater impact than others, although there has been some variance in each one’s influence over time and depending on the area of global politics one examines. Finally, consideration is given to the proposition that those ideologies whose influence has hitherto been rather limited may experience greater prominence as the nature of global politics evolves.

1 Varieties of Environmentalism The sizeable literature on environmental political thought sets out in greater detail than is possible here the content of the numerous specific schools of thought that have been developed over many years (for example, Dobson 2007; Dryzek 2005; Kütting and Herman 2018; Lipschutz 2004). In order to render the task of assessing the influence of environmental ideologies on global politics more manageable, the most well-known of these are grouped together into four broad categories. There are many ways of categorising environmental ideologies, but

5  Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics

73

in view of the significant connection between environmental problems and the global economy, each of the categories presented here has a strong economic focus. The categorisation roughly follows that proposed by Clapp and Dauvergne (2011), although I have altered the labels and grouped some of these theoretical schools somewhat differently. These categories are separated according to the different explanations they offer for why global environmental problems exist and by the prescriptions they advance for addressing those problems.

1.1 Neoliberal Environmentalism The term neoliberal environmentalism is employed here rather than some of the alternative labels that have been proposed elsewhere because the term neoliberalism is widely recognised and its content is broadly understood, even if it is not necessarily one adopted by its advocates. Some prefer the term market liberalism, which is somewhat imprecise because other types of liberals also support a market economy but are critical of the version of a market economy proposed by neoliberals. One thing that the major liberal environmental ideologies have in common is that they are offshoots of theories of political economy for which the environment is but one of many issues of concern. According to neoliberal environmentalism, the major contributors to environmental degradation are insufficient economic growth, poverty and government policies that distort the functioning of the market in ways that incentivise environmentally harmful practices as well as undermine economic growth. Economic growth is viewed as necessary to provide the resources needed to clean up pollution, the technology to prevent it in the first place and economic opportunities for the poor so they can abandon the environmentally harmful activities that they are forced to engage in, such as the cutting down of trees to use as a source of fuel. Students of political economy are familiar with the prescriptions proposed by neoliberals for achieving higher levels of economic growth, including privatisation, deregulation, and the liberalisation of trade, investment and finance. Economic globalisation is supported as an important driver of economic growth. In the specific area of the environment, neoliberals argue that distortive policies such as subsidies for agriculture or fossil fuel production that foster inefficiency and encourage unsustainable resource use should be eliminated. There is some diversity among neoliberals in the emphasis they place on particular proposals. For some, privatisation of the commons is a priority, in order to encourage better environmental stewardship and overcome the so-called “tragedy of the commons” (Anderson and Leal 2001; Hardin 1968). Respect for national sovereignty,

74

D. J. Blair

at least in the area of environmental protection, is a theme that is often invoked in neoliberal environmental discourse, meaning that states should be free to determine their own approach to environmental protection, rather than have that freedom infringed on by some international authority or through coercive action by other states (Bernstein 2002; Ciplet and Roberts 2017). While more extreme interpretations of neoliberalism are opposed to most forms of government intervention in the economy, others support the use of market-based policy instruments such as environmental taxes and tradable pollution permits to replace traditional ­“command-and-control” environmental regulations. In general, however, voluntary self-regulation by individuals and corporations are preferred to both mandatory government regulation and market-based instruments. Neoliberal environmentalism acknowledges that the economic growth in developing countries that results from liberalising their economies will likely contribute to environmental problems initially, but that in the longer-run environmental degradation will diminish once a certain level of growth is attained (Grossman and Krueger 1995).

1.2 Interventionist Environmentalism A second form of liberalism that also has an environmental offshoot is interventionist liberalism. Alternative labels include reform liberalism, welfare liberalism and social liberalism. Like neoliberalism, this ideology supports a market economy and economic growth. However, it holds that an unfettered market will inevitably give rise to negative externalities, such as environmental degradation. Thus, government intervention in the market is necessary to correct these market failures. Corrective policies in the environmental field can include mandatory regulations such as emissions standards or requiring that companies use a particular pollution control technology, but also subsidies to encourage the adoption of cleaner production processes or products such as electric vehicles. Over time, interventionist environmentalists have also come to endorse the m ­ arket-based instruments advocated by neoliberal environmentalists, but as supplemental to other policy instruments rather than as a replacement for them. The goal of these policies is not to prevent economic growth, but to “decouple” growth from environmental degradation. Increasingly, these environmentalists are also advancing the ideas of ecological modernisation, which holds that policies designed to protect the environment will actually contribute to economic growth, by fostering innovation in clean technologies, promoting more efficient production and energy use, increasing demand for green products, and creating business opportunities in new environmental industries (Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000).

5  Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics

75

Economic globalisation is seen as both an opportunity to enhance economic growth worldwide, but also as a force that can undermine environmental protection by intensifying competition among producers for market share and among governments seeking to attract investment. This competition can lead to political pressure for governments to lower or refrain from increasing taxation, which may constrain public expenditure on environmental protection, and similarly to refrain from adopting more stringent environmental regulations. Thus, interventionist environmentalism also advocates international cooperation among national governments to develop international environmental standards that will prevent “races-to-the bottom” in taxation and regulation or avoid “regulatory chill” (Esty 2005). In addition to setting international standards, international cooperation should also seek to assist developing countries to build their capacity to protect the environment through the provision of financing and the facilitation of clean technology transfer.

1.3 Biocentric Environmentalism Biocentric environmentalism stands in stark contrast with the two liberal environmental ideologies presented above. Firstly, it is comprised of stand-alone ideologies with the environment as their core concern, rather than developing out of a broader ideological school. Also, as its name suggests, biocentric environmentalism rejects the anthropocentric orientation of the two liberal environmentalisms. For the biocentric approaches economic growth is one of the major contributors to environmental decline, rather than a solution to it. Economic growth entails the increased exploitation of the earth’s finite resources and generation of waste to the extent that the earth’s carrying capacity is being exceeded. Another biocentric position is that population growth adds to the unsustainable levels of human consumption (Ehrlich 1968). The neo-Malthusian character of this ideology is exhibited in the Limits to Growth report released in 1972 and updated in 2004. A number of biocentric environmentalists also see human migration from the global South to the global North as accelerating environmental degradation because of the larger environmental footprint of Northern societies (Hardin 2000). Economic globalisation has permitted the diffusion of polluting industries to more corners of the earth and expanded the scale of this unsustainable economic growth and consumption. A scaling back of economic growth is essential if there is any hope of rescuing the world from the brink of environmental catastrophe according to most biocentric environmentalists (Daly and Cobb 1989), and some argue that stemming

76

D. J. Blair

population growth and immigration to Northern countries is a necessary part of that effort (Cafaro 2014). These changes may come about by raising awareness among policy-makers and the public about the seriousness of this looming crisis and its causes. However, some have also suggested that more authoritarian governance, including at the global level, may be necessary to bring about the necessary structural changes (Heilbroner 1991). Proposals by so-called preservationists for the creation of biological reserves and calls from others for the inclusion of the rights of nature in constitutional documents are also ideas compatible with this biocentric ideology.

1.4 Green Environmentalism The category of “green environmentalism” is similar to what others have referred to as radical green or social green, and is the most eclectic of the environmental ideologies discussed here. In contrast to the biocentric ideologies, its adherents are as concerned with human welfare as they are with the health of the environment because they view the two as inextricably linked. For eco-feminists patriarchy entails the domination of women as well as nature, while for eco-Marxists and eco-socialists capitalism is responsible simultaneously for poverty, inequality and environmental degradation. According to these and other green environmentalists, the environment can only effectively be protected by addressing many of the social conditions that cause or contribute to environmental degradation. However, in common with biocentric environmentalism, large-scale industrialisation and unrestrained economic growth, accelerated by economic globalisation, are viewed as leading causes of global environmental problems. Over-consumption in the global North is a particular concern, because it contributes more than the rest of the world to resource depletion and pollution (Princen et al. 2002; Dauvergene 2010). Like neoliberals, most green environmentalists see poverty, especially in the global South, as associated with environmental degradation, but argue that neoliberal policies and the workings of the global economy are largely responsible for putting the poor into situations where they have no choice but to engage in environmentally harmful activities. Green environmentalism has in common with other critical ideologies an emancipatory vision, challenging the dominant political, economic and social structures that undermine both environmental integrity and social justice. Rather than simply modifying these structures through piecemeal reforms, more fundamental transformative change is needed. In particular, they p­ ropose a restructuring of economic activity from large-scale production and mass con-

5  Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics

77

sumption to smaller-scale economies and less materialistic societies. Thus, green environmentalists often advocate redirecting efforts away from the promotion of globalisation and towards greater localisation (Hines 2000; Goldsmith and Mander 2001). This vision is not the same as economic nationalism, in that the optimal economic scale is not necessarily viewed as that of the nation-state, and the goal is not to enhance national economic competitiveness or power. Opinions vary on how small small-scale economies should be, but for most countries they would be considerably smaller than current national economies. The environmental benefits of localisation would result from reducing the energy consumption and pollution created by long-distance trade and by connecting citizens more closely to the environmental impact of the goods and services they consume. But the benefits would not just be environmental. They would also be economic, by creating more local employment opportunities; political, by bringing decision-makers closer to the governed and making genuine participatory democracy possible; and social, by strengthening community life and reducing social alienation. While some green environmentalists emphasise localisation, others focus more on combatting materialism and over-consumption in the more affluent regions of the world. Most greens are supportive of efforts to encourage simpler lifestyles with less emphasis on accumulation and material consumption while freeing up time and energy for other more fulfilling human pursuits. In contrast to the ­pro-growth position of neo-liberals and the green growth discourse of interventionist liberals, many greens adopt a degrowth vision, and advocate the use of alternative metrics of progress such as quality of life indicators rather than traditional measures such as per capita GDP (England 1998; Kallis et al. 2018). Unlike biocentric environmentalists, these greens generally reject proposals for population control and restricting immigration on the grounds that such measures are discriminatory and target vulnerable populations who are not the most important contributors to environmental degradation.

2 The Uneven Influence of Environmental Ideologies Environmental ideologies have influenced many aspects of global politics, and not just by shaping international environmental agreements. While some of these ideologies have exerted greater overall influence than others, in certain areas of global politics there has been greater scope for some of the less influential ideologies to have some impact. The following discussion assesses the relative influence

78

D. J. Blair

of the main ideological categories presented in the preceding section in each of the main areas of global politics in which they have had an impact, examines the ways in which that influence has been exerted, and considers whether the relative influence of these ideologies could shift in the future.

2.1 Environmental Regimes and Institutions The most obvious influence of these environmental ideologies has been in the creation and shaping of international regimes dealing specifically with environmental issues. In just a few decades the world experienced a proliferation of international environmental agreements, and at the national level, a major increase in the number of environmental laws and regulations, as well as the creation of new ministries of environment. This activity was strongly influenced by the ideas of environmental researchers and advocates, particularly those popularised in publications like Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson, The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich, and the Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 1974). These books resonated with biocentric environmentalists and reinforced their call for global action to deal with what they viewed as impending environmental catastrophe. The impact of these voices culminated with the holding of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, which led to the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and helped to place the environment firmly on the international agenda. The Stockholm Conference was originally intended to focus on the environmental issues raised by biocentric environmentalists, but because of the concerns of developing country governments that the conference might interfere with their aspirations for economic development, the issue of poverty in the developing world and its connection with environmental degradation became a major theme through much of the conference. The role of the developing countries in international deliberations on the environment thereafter provided liberal environmentalists with an opportunity to build support for their position that economic growth and development were essential to effectively addressing environmental problems. From the Stockholm Conference forward the two liberal environmental ideologies have dominated the international community’s response to environmental concerns. The 1987 Bruntland Commission report provided a definition of sustainable development that both liberal schools of thought could present as validation of their own views on economic growth. The principle that economic growth and environmental protection were compatible goals was reaffirmed at the

5  Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics

79

subsequent earth summits held in 1992, 2002 and 2012. Interventionist environmentalists saw their prescriptions for correcting market failure adopted through a series of major international agreements designed to regulate such activities as trade in endangered species (CITES 1973), marine pollution (London Convention 1972, MARPOL 1973), the production of ozone-depleting substances (Vienna Convention 1985, Montreal Protocol 1987), the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes (Basel Convention 1989), greenhouse gas emissions (UNFCCC 1992, Kyoto Protocol 1997), trade in hazardous chemicals and pesticides (Rotterdam Convention 1998) and the production and use of persistent organic pollutants (Stockholm Convention 2001). These agreements and many others spurred the introduction of implementing legislation and new regulations at the national level as well. They also contained provisions for financial, technical and ­capacity-building support for developing countries, although most of the assistance targets have not been fulfilled. While these international regimes were consistent with interventionist environmental ideas, global environmental cooperation was increasingly influenced by neoliberal environmentalism from the 1980s onward. Bernstein (2001) points out that the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the summits that followed moved the international institutional agenda in a direction compatible with the prevailing neoliberal economic norms by endorsing the liberalisation of trade and financial policy as necessary for sustainable development to be achieved and by promoting market-based environmental policy instruments. He details how neoliberal prescriptions for alternatives to strict regulation, such as certification and labelling schemes and the assigning of property rights to ensure environmental protection, were also endorsed by a number of international organisations and incorporated into international environmental agreements (see also Lohmann 2009; Newell and Paterson 2010; Parr 2013). Bernstein also explains how policy entrepreneurs worked through international bodies to move some of these ideas into the mainstream of international politics. Ciplet and Roberts (2017) cite research on the UNFCCC, the Basel Convention, the Montreal Protocol and the Stockholm Convention as evidence that ­market-based principles have come to “eclipse and negate” earlier principles based on precaution and equity (150). They also point out that the text of the UNFCCC calls on Parties to cooperate to promote “a supportive and open international economic system that would lead to sustainable economic growth and development”, while a key feature of the Kyoto Protocol was the adoption of three market-based instruments: international emissions trading, the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation (152). The influence of neoliberal environmentalism was also evident in the “pledge and review” system introduced in the 2009

80

D. J. Blair

­ openhagen Accord and adopted in the Paris Agreement in 2015 which abandoned C the model of legally-binding, negotiated emissions reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and, reaffirming the sovereign right of states to set their own environmental policies, called upon Parties to make voluntary emission reduction pledges, aptly called “intended nationally determined commitments” (INDCs). There are no penalties for states that do not fulfill their pledges, but a process was established for Parties to review and comment on each other’s progress in meeting their pledged reductions. Although the influence of neoliberal environmentalism on the environmental regimes that have been developed over the past few decades has grown, it is probably not accurate to describe these regimes as entirely neoliberal in character. Instead they contain a mix of interventionist and neoliberal elements. The interventionist character of many international institutional agreements and activities has very much persisted. What does seem clear, however, is that the prescriptions of the biocentric school for strong global institutions to curb population growth and restrict immigration have had minimal impact on regime-building, as have green environmentalist prescriptions for degrowth or curtailing economic globalisation.

2.2 Global Environmental Governance A discussion of the influence of environmental ideologies on global politics that focuses exclusively on formal institutions and international regimes would be incomplete without also examining the alternative processes of international cooperation. More recent scholarship has broadened the study of international cooperation beyond the negotiations and agreements among national governments and the activities of international organisations to include the role played by subnational authorities, non-state actors, and alternative mechanisms of collective problem-solving (Rosenau and Czempiel 1995). A growing portion of this global governance literature includes analyses of these actors and activities in the area of environmental protection. This broadening of the field of study does not fundamentally alter the picture of liberal environmentalist dominance. Much attention in global environmental governance studies has been directed to the growth of private governance in which corporate actors play a central role (Clapp 1998; Falkner 2003; Potoski and Prakash 2013). Examples include the setting of environmental management standards in non-governmental bodies like the International Standards Organisation, voluntary disclosure of environmental performance through such international initiatives as the Carbon Disclosure Project and

5  Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics

81

the Global Reporting Initiative, environmental certification and labelling schemes such as the Forest Stewardship Council and the Carbon Trust’s Carbon Reduction Label, and corporate codes of conduct such as the Responsible Care initiative in the chemical industry. Regardless of the extent to which they are effective in improving environmental outcomes, which is hotly debated, the growing prominence of such corporate social responsibility initiatives is evidence of the influence of neoliberal environmental ideology and its preference for voluntary self-governance by private actors in place of government regulation. Another area of global environmental governance that is receiving increasing attention is the cooperative efforts among subnational governments connected across national boundaries to address environmental concerns. A number of these transnational ventures have adopted a vision that aligns with interventionist environmental ideas. The ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability network of over 1,750 local and regional governments from over a hundred countries recently adopted a strategic vision in which its members commit to apply sustainable development principles, decouple economic development from environmental degradation, undertake necessary regulation, and mitigate and manage social and environmental risk (ICLEI ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability 2018). In a nod to green environmentalism, the members also committed to undertaking “transformative actions” towards “equitable and people-centred development” and to build “more just, livable and inclusive urban communities and address poverty”. The C40 network brings together nearly one hundred global megacities pursuing cooperation to reduce climate emissions. Among its activities is providing a forum for city officials to share knowledge and policy ideas about how to shift cities toward a green economy (C40 n. d.). The development of transgovernmental links such as these is often in reaction to the perceived lack of progress being made by national governments individually and collectively to address environmental problems, particularly climate change. However, these subnational and local actors are still governments that regard economic growth as at least compatible with, if not essential for, environmental protection. Thus, it is not surprising that their environmental policies have for the most part been shaped along the lines of at least one of the liberal environmental ideologies. The influence of green environmentalism is more evident in other areas of global governance in which other types of actors are engaged. A number of environmental NGOs have adopted elements of this ideology and work actively across national borders to promote the goals they include. Some of the larger and more established of these ENGOs include Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, but many of the thousands of smaller and mid-sized organisations share similar

82

D. J. Blair

worldviews. These actors have participated in global environmental governance in part by attempting to influence governments and international organisations through such traditional avenues as lobbying, protesting and publicising government inaction. They have also at times by-passed governments and taken on governance functions on their own, such as agenda-setting through their public information campaigns, setting standards of behaviour for corporations, monitoring compliance with these standards, and even attempting to enforce them through public shaming exercises and by organising consumer boycotts (Wapner 1996). Some of these efforts have been effective in changing certain corporate practices and reducing consumption of targeted products, but they have not as yet resulted in major shifts in overall consumption levels or significantly altered economic structures such as economic globalisation. However, it is possible that if such larger scale global change is to come about, it may not be the result of efforts undertaken at the international level, but through the cumulative effect of myriad micro-level developments.

2.3 Grassroots Mobilisation: Fringe or Future? Although international relations scholars who focus on global environmental issues have drawn attention to the dominance of liberal environmental ideologies among the actors and processes operating at the international level, green environmentalism has been gaining adherents among individuals in communities throughout the world. One of the most significant effects of liberal environmental ideologies on global politics may be their provision of justification on environmental grounds for the continuation of efforts to increase economic growth and further economic globalisation. By challenging those liberal rationalisations, green environmentalism has the potential to re-shape global politics in profound ways. Green environmentalism has helped shape the political attitudes of millions of citizens who have voiced their opposition to corporate rule, globalisation and/ or capitalism. Recurring massive demonstrations in many parts of the world over the past few decades are testaments to the widespread dissatisfaction with current political, economic and social structures and a common refrain heard within these protests is the need for transformative changes in line with many of the proposals of green environmentalist ideologies. In addition to shaping the attitudes of large numbers of individuals, they have also inspired behavioural changes in multiple forms. There has been a growth in the number of initiatives to shift economic activity to the local level, including urban agriculture, community-supported agriculture, the locavore movement, the

5  Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics

83

use of local currencies, transition town initiatives and the development of ecovillages (Helleiner 2000, 2002; Hines 2000; Litfin 2013; Schreurs 2008). Other practices and movements aimed at reducing consumption and energy use have also proliferated through the global North, such as culture jamming, car and bike sharing initiatives, the bicycling subculture, minimalist living, voluntary simplicity, and the maker and repair movements (Bordwell 2002; Carlsson and Manning 2010; Maniates 2002). These alternative practices and movements have grown in part as a consequence of the consciousness raising effects of the campaigns and protests organised by NGOs, but increasingly also through the global diffusion of information through social media and online communities. In many cases the followers of these practices and movements have adopted lifestyle changes primarily because of appeal of green environmentalist ideas. In other cases, people’s changing material circumstances have led them to adopt these alternatives. Some of these circumstances have been shaped by the forces of economic globalisation and economic growth. Because of the dislocating effects of globalisation and the technological innovation catalysed by ever more intense global competition, employment opportunities in many industries have shrunk and wages either stagnated or fallen in real terms, even as the cost of housing spirals upward in many urban centres. For individuals affected by these developments, the reduction of consumption and simpler living may not be a deliberate choice but a necessity. Even for those who are more fortunate, the growing densification of urban centres and accompanying traffic congestion may make automobile ownership and operation increasingly undesirable. A shift towards degrowth and localisation is not inevitable, but these trends in the world of the 21st century could push things further in that direction. If they do, the impact on global politics could be significant, depending on how far the shift goes. A retrenchment of economic globalisation and redirection of economic activity to the local level may result in lower growth rates and levels of consumption, but healthier societies in terms of more employment opportunities for the local provision of goods and services, fewer working hours per employee, a less stressful pace of work and life, more time for leisure and other non-work-related activities, more opportunities for participatory democracy and equitable wealth distribution, and less stress on the environment as a result of reduced natural resource use and pollution. Relieved of the pressure to follow the same policies as their international competitors, these communities would be free to determine the economic path that best matches their own particular situations and preferences. Because most needs would be met by local providers, there would be less incentive for countries to exercise power to seek access to markets or resources in other parts of the world, potentially resulting in a less conflictual international system.

84

D. J. Blair

Of course, there is no guarantee that any of this will materialise to any significant degree, and it is possible that the various green environmentalist movements and practices will remain on the fringes of a largely unaltered global system. It can be expected that any signs that a major shift in this direction is underway will be met with more concerted resistance from powerful actors whose interests would be adversely affected by it. However, this resistance will be made difficult by the atomistic nature of the various movements. Efforts to bring about structural change are easier to crush when they are led by centralised and easily isolated agents. The most likely resistance strategy would therefore likely rely on attempts to shape public attitudes towards degrowth by issuing warnings of economic catastrophe and attempting to reinvigorate liberal ideological hegemony. The question is whether the movements inspired by green environmentalism can withstand this resistance and build support for their vision through their own narratives and actions. While the challenges will be great, green environmentalists can find hope in the success experienced by previous social movements in areas such as civil rights and women’s rights. These precedents, in addition to the firm belief that fundamental change is the only way to ensure the survival of the planet, may be powerful enough motivators for the advocates of green environmentalism to persist in their efforts to turn this vision into a reality.

References Anderson, Terry L, and Donald R. Leal. 2001. Free Market Environmentalism, revised edition. New York: Palgrave. Bernstein, Steven. 2001. The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Bernstein, Steven. 2002. Liberal environmentalism and global environmental governance. Global Environmental Governance 2(3): 1–16. Bordwell, Marilyn. 2002. Jamming Culture: Adbusters’ Hip Media Campaign against Consumerism. In Confronting Consumption. Eds. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates and Ken Conca, 237–254. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. C40 (n. d.). C40 Programmes. Available at: https://www.c40.org/programmes/green-economy-innovation-forum. Cafaro, Philip. 2014. How Many Is Too Many? The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carlsson, Chris and Francesca Manning. 2010. Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus? Antipode. 42(4): 924–953. Carson, Rachel.1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ciplet, David and J. Timmons Roberts. 2017. Climate change and the transition to neoliberal environmental governance. Global Environmental Change 46 (September): 148– 156.

5  Environmental Ideologies in Global Politics

85

Clapp, Jennifer. 1998. The Privatization of Global Environmental Governance: ISO 14000 and the Developing World. Global Governance 4 (3): 295–316. Clapp, Jennifer and Peter Dauvergne. 2011. Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment, 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Daly, Herman and John Cobb, Jr. 1989. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon Press. Dauvergne, Peter. 2010. The Problem of Consumption. Global Environmental Politics 10 (2): 1–10. Dobson, Andrew. 2007. Green Political Thought, 4th ed. London and New York: Routledge. Dryzek, John S. 2005. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ehrlich, Paul R.1968. The Population Bomb. New York: Sierra Club-Ballantine. England, Richard W. 1998. Measurement of social well-being: alternatives to gross domestic product. Ecological Economics 25(1): 89–103. Esty, Daniel C. 2005. Economic Integration and Environmental Protection. In The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy, 2nd ed. Eds. Regina S. Axelrod, David Leonard Downie, & Norman J. Vig, 146–159. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press. Falkner, Robert. 2003. Private Environmental Governance and International Relations: Exploring the Links. Global Environmental Politics 3 (2): 72–87. Grossman, Gene and Alan Krueger. 1995. Economic Growth and the Environment. Quarterly Journal of Economics 110: 353–377. Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162: 1243–1248. Hardin, Garrett. 2000. Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heilbroner, Robert. 1991. An Inquiry into the Human Prospect: Looked at Again for the 1990s. New York: Norton. Helleiner, Eric. 2000. New Voices in the Globalisation Debate: Green Perspectives on the World Economy. In Political Economy and the Changing Global Order, 2nd ed. Eds. Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey Underhill, 60–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helleiner, Eric. 2002. Think Globally, Transact Locally: The Local Currency Movement and Green Political Economy. In Confronting Consumption. Eds. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates and Ken Conca, 255–274. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hines, Colin. 2000. Localisation: A Global Manifesto. London: Earthscan. ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability. 2018. The ICLEI Montréal Commitment and Strategic Vision 2018–2024. Bonn: ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability. Available at: https://worldcongress2018.iclei.org/wp-content/uploads/The%20 ICLEI%20Montr%C3%A9al%20Commitment.pdf Kallis, Giorgos, Vasilis Kostakis, Steffen Lange, Barbara Muraca, Susan Paulson, and Matthias Schmelzer. 2018. Research on Degrowth. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43: 291–316. Kütting, Gabriela & Kyle Herman. 2018. Global Environmental Politics: Concepts, Theories and Case Studies, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Litfin, Karen. 2013. Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lipschutz, Ronnie D. 2004. Global Environmental Politics: Power, Perspectives, and Practice. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.

86

D. J. Blair

Lohmann, Larry. 2009. Neoliberalism and the calculable world: the rise of carbon trading. In Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets, Eds. Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi, 25–40. London: Mayfly Goldsmith, Edward and Jerry Mander, Eds. 2001. The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Toward the Local, revised and updated international edition. London: Earthscan. Maniates, Michael. 2002. In Search of Consumptive Resistance: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement. In Confronting Consumption, Eds. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates and Ken Conca, 199–235. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Meadows Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Mol, Aruthur P.J., and David A. Sonnenfeld. 2000. Ecological Modernisation Around the World: An Introduction. Environmental Politics 9(1): 1–14. Newell, Peter and Matthew Paterson. 2010. Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parr, Adrian. 2013. The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Potoski, Matthew and Aseem Prakash. 2013. Do Voluntary Programs Reduce Pollution? Examining ISO 14001’s Effectiveness across Countries. Policy Studies Journal 41(2): 273–294. Princen, Thomas, Michael Maniates and Ken Conca. 2002. To Confront Consumption. In Confronting Consumption, Eds. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates & Ken Conca, 317–328. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rosenau, James N. and Ernst Czempiel, Eds. 1995. Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schreurs, Miranda. 2008. From the Bottom Up: Local and Subnational Climate Change Politics. Journal of Environment & Development 17(4): 342–355. Wapner, Paul. 1996. Environmental Activism and World Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

6

The Ideology of the Global Commons Frédéric Ramel

Abstract

The degradation of commons, as non-terrestrial spaces accessible to all and owned by none, is a very well known tragedy explored by political theory and IR. But such a tragedy extends environmental issues. Nowadays, their militarization and even their weaponization shows a new interest for these commons, beyond the indifference that explains many behaviors towards them. The United States and the emerging powers tend to appropriate these global commons from high sea to extra-atmospheric space and of course cyber. A new front line arises between freedom of navigation in these spaces and the will of balkanization for protecting sovereignty by several States that adopt access denial grand strategies. A global state of war results from this opposition. It suggests new types of warfare (more opaque and clandestine). This context nourishes a contestation of american domination but also an unprecedented concern: global commons do not embody an object of disinterest but a source of confrontations per se beyond the quarrels of territories which punctuated the history of international relations in modernity. Keywords

Global commons · Acces denial · Freedom of navigation · Emerging states ·  Domination · United states · State of war · Grand strategy

F. Ramel (*)  Institut D’Etudes Politiques de Paris, Paris, Frankreich e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_6

87

88

F. Ramel

The notion of the “commons” designates a space available to all but which is destined to fall into decline over time according to Garret Hardin. Its users aim at developing a freerider behavior because they tend to defer the cost of maintaining the commons to others. Each wants to consume the resources of the global commons without having to contribute to their stabilization over time. For Garret Hardin, such a situation means the development of a new tragedy: the environment is endangered due to the excessive consumption of ecological resources. Negative externalities such as pollution lead to a scenario of destruction: the depletion of the planet’s natural capacities. While the author is deeply skeptical, he calls for a transformation in how natural resources are managed, which is one step in the necessary protection of the global commons (Hardin 1968). Dealing with the ideology of the Global Commons nowadays goes beyond this reluctance to ensure the commons. A new tragedy is taking shape. It relies on the will to appropriate the global commons, especially in the context of a new great game between states like the United States and the new emerging powers. The global commons—non-terrestrial spaces accessible to all and owned by none—are currently a major issue for governments. Maintaining access to them is a fundamental aim both for armed forces and prosperity in a globalised economy. No state can intervene militarily while ensuring its own prosperity without being assured of its access to the international airspace, the atmosphere, the high seas and cyberspace. In the beginning of the XXIst century, the United States had a form of monopoly over these spaces. Today, the emerging powers are more and more challenging the United States, by adopting a posture of “access denial”, i.e., a campaign carried out over long distances (Posen 2003). This campaign operates through the use of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, long-range intelligence and surveillance systems, anti-satellite systems, long-range submarines, resources for cyber attacks and even terrorist action against the American forces and bases. Another aspect of the campaign is area denial to those spaces that are in close proximity to the adversary. This is implemented mainly by air assets, air defence systems, short-range missiles, submarines and naval mines. In both cases (access denial and area denial), the aim is to limit the reach of American “domination” in armed intervention. Furthermore, these commons are being used for military purposes and states’ attempts to seize them for their strategic value. The outbreak of cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007 and the malfunctions in the Iranian nuclear programme due to the Stuxnet computer worm are a good example of the use of the commons for military purposes. The maritime claims in Asia, in particular by China, are an example of the desire of countries to seize these spaces. In other words, the discourse

6  The Ideology of the Global Commons

89

on global commons must be compared to an ideology. On the one hand, this discourse is a set of generalizing ideas designed to explain strategic reality in the post-Cold War. On the other hand, it tries to justify and guide political action of Great powers in a certain direction that reveals a new tragedy based on an appropriation rather than an indifference towards this kind of spaces.

1 The American Conception of the Global Commons Under Obama The concept of the global commons is first and foremost tied to the “anti-access” phenomenon, which “through military and political means, aims to hinder or prevent a force deployment operation” (Gentile 2010) This means a no-fly or marine exclusion zone is established by the United States, preventing access to the “global commons” (Bennett 2010). Such an approach encourages the U.S. to widen their strategic objectives in a post Cold War context (Gros 2011, p. 49). But these choices are also a result of the experience gained during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. At that time, military staff suggested a conceptual overhaul inspired by the man who would become the new Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Admiral Stavridis (Stavridis 1992). This innovative thinking was already a main feature of the Quadrennial Defense Review in 2001, under the initiative of Donald Rumsfeld. However, the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan imposed a different agenda, not without causing debate among military staff concerning asset employment (from counter-insurrection to interstate war). With the gradual disengagement from these two theatres, the concept of the global commons is becoming a structuring element of the American posture. It is therefore less an emergence of a new concept in strategic thinking than the reawakening of an old one under the Obama administration. There are two main reasons behind this renewed interest in the global commons during the Obama’s administration. Firstly, the projection of the armed forces as part of expeditionary operations is no longer limited to the task organisation of the air, land and navy components. Two new fields are essential to successfully carry out these tasks: space and cyberspace. This requires greater coordination between the branches: “simultaneous access to the different dimensions of the global commons as well as freedom of action within them are essential” (Redden and Hughes 2012, p. 55). The success of an operation depends on the cumulated control of these different domains. Worse still, a visible weakness in one of the domains (international waters, international airspace, the atmosphere, cyberspace) has a negative effect on the others. General Michael Moseley, former Chief of

90

F. Ramel

Staff of the US Air Force warns: “since the air, space and cyberspace domains are increasingly interdependent, the loss of control of one can lead to a loss of control of the others…No future war can be won without superiority in the air, space and cyberspace” (Posen 2003, p. 8). This diagnosis is based on the necessity to take into consideration the relevant strategic aspects (i.e. their militarisation, or the use of these spaces in support of military operations). Among the zones considered as priority, the QDR 2010 identified the Asia-Pacific region and the Persian Gulf (Rid 2013). Furthermore, and more fundamentally, access to the global commons is increasingly contested (Redden and Hughes 2010; Flournoy and Davidson 2012). The United States had the monopoly a decade ago. As Barry Posen pointed out at the time, the United States “control” the global commons. This “does not mean that other countries cannot access these zones in times of peace, nor that that they cannot deploy weapons systems if the United States does not prevent them. (It…) means that the United States, more than any other country, can make extensive military use of them; that they can credibly threaten to deny their use to others; and that they can overcome any State that attempts by force to prevent them from freely using them: the challenger will need time to rebuild its forces, while the United States will have no difficuly in maintaining, restoring or strengthening their hold after the battle” (Posen 2003, p. 8). However, the emerging powers are no longer lagging behind thanks to the spread of technological capabilities and the relative decline of the United States. Though it is dependent in energy and exports, China is not Washington’s sole competitor. Other countries also intend to participate in managing these global commons. “Countries like China, India and Russia will demand a role in the maintenance of the international system, in proportion to their perceived power and their national interests”. On top of the crumbling monopoly there are increasingly prominent tensions in the cyber domain. The United States complain of cyberattacks carried out against American private companies and government agencies via Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army (Rid 2013). China accuses the United States of disinformation and points to the creation of an American net army. In such a strategic context, the promotion of the global commons is borne by several think tanks, in particular the CNAS—the Center for a New American Security created in 2007 by Kurt Campbell and Michele Flournoy, who was also Under Secretary of Defense from 2009 to 2012—and the Atlantic Council. It has led to splits, however, in terms of the recognition of geographical priorities: the CNAS identifies Asia and the Pacific as a primordial zone, followed by the Middle East and Europe while the Atlantic Council defends the idea of a global power that does not create hierarchies of the different regions of the world. Think tanks

6  The Ideology of the Global Commons

91

attached to the military institution are also reflecting on this issue, including the Naval Postgraduate School through group studies headed by Captain Scott Jasper. A member of the Center for Civil-Military Relations and the National Security Affairs department, Capt. Jasper co-directed a publication on this concept (Jasper 2010). Maintaining superiority in the global commons brings about the adoption of a grand strategy that we can define as a “sustainment” strategy (in counterpoint to the “containment” strategy which was typical of the bipolar period) (Hoffman 2013, p. 27). This strategy consists in ensuring there is an American presence in the key regions likely to require the deployment of the armed forces (Flournoy and Davidson 2012, p. 63). As such, the CNAS calls for the creation of global regimes and agreements that protect and preserve the opening of the global commons; for the commitment of prominent actors who can contribute to the longevity of these regimes; the remodeling of the American military forces in order to defend and preserve the contested global commons, maintain the freedom of manoeuvre for the forces within these spaces and outside them, in the event that they may become unusable or inaccessible. The transformation of the image projected by the United States is one of the fundamental elements that can act as a basis when applying the “sustainment” strategy (Brimley 2008). Let us not forget that such a grand strategy should also serve as a ­counter-model in regard to the possibilities of entrenchment or strategic restraint aimed at protected the American territory in its strictest sense. The more the United States step back from the world, the greater the necessity to secure the global commons will become difficult, leaving in its wake nationwide vulnerability (Brooks et al. 2013). While voices are being raised in the hope of relativising the image of the United States as an “indispensable nation” (Nasr 2013), the Obama administration, on the contrary, spreads the idea of necessary involvement, such as the speech given at West Point in 2009, or the expression “America is back”, chanted during the second presidential campaign. This renewed affirmation of American leadership is moving away from the ideological messianism born by the ­neo-conservatism of the previous Bush administration. It is not without certain realist aspects, as it is based on the acknowledgement of emerging state powers or even the absence of a military engagement without reference to US vital interests (Laïdi 2012, p. 118). The 2010 QDR gives form to the renewed interest in the global commons concept. It launches a phase of conceptual, doctrinal and operational enrichment. The concept is conveyed in the documents that appeared throughout the interim period between the two QDRs, in particular the Defense Strategic Guidance

92

F. Ramel

2012. It is also being developed from the Air-Sea Battle concept (2011), the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) (2012), the Chairman’s Strategic Direction to the Joint Force (CSDJF) (2012), the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations 2012 (CCJO) (2012), and the Joint Forcible Entry Operations concept (2012). The common theme of these documents is preparation for a future war of high intensity, against a “peer competitor” in the form of a state or another player. Another of their aims is to ensure strategic freedom of action in any deployment zone. As the JOAC indicates: “as a global power with global interests, the United States must maintain its projection capacity for military forces within any region of the world in order to protect its own interests. This includes the entitlement to project forces both within the global commons in order to make full use of them and on foreign territories if necessary” (Henrotin 2013, p. 172). This text corresponds to a sweeping prospective movement concerning the definition of interventions and the makeup of forces from now to 2020 (Joint Force 2020). While the Air Sea Battle concept is not yet seen as a consolidated doctrine, it is symptomatic of a major concern at the strategic level that clearly aims to “render the air and naval forces more interoperable in order to prevent the enemy from destroying or overcoming their anti-access or area denial capabilities” (A. Schwartz 2012). Three additional remarks can be made here. Firstly, this promotion of the ­Air-Sea Battle concept is in relation to the Asia-Pacific pivot logic, in that it identifies an interstate war scenario, essentially against China (Charillon 2013, p. 20–21). As such, Andrew Marshall and Andrew Krepinevich alerted the Pentagon to this type of military configuration by organising a simulation entitled “Pacific Vision” for the US Air Force in October 2008 (Etzioni 2013b, pp. 37–51). Furthermore, the global commons follow on from the discussions launched in the 1990s concerning the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Indeed, they fit perfectly into the movement towards improved technology that the military is currently experiencing. They are based on a “holistic approach that dissolves the separation between domains and sees the global commons not as distinct geographical entities but rather as a complex and interactive system”. Taking the example of a naval operation, Captain Redden and Colonel Hughes highlight the fact that force projection requires real time delivery of electronic information by network (cyberspace support) and the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) (by satellite). In the Defense Strategic Guidance of 5 January 2012, this holistic approach is formulated. In view of adopting such a strategic posture, a bureaucratic decision was made in November 2011: an Air-Sea strategy coordination bureau was created within the Pentagon. Its aim is to prevent anti-access and

6  The Ideology of the Global Commons

93

strengthen the technological capabilities required to navigate the global commons (Garamone 2011). Lastly, the task organisation between the global commons and trade development should be highlighted: “though generally underestimated, the military role of the United States as a guardian of the global commons, in particular the high seas, has made possible the free circulation of goods across the world, thereby facilitating both peace and prosperity” (Krepinevich 2013, p. 7). This use of force in order to ensure an access to markets and the boom of trade exchanges is one of the aspects of this grand strategy. It also aligns with the “pivot” logic, an equally extensive concept. It is not limited to the geographical dimension (from the ­Middle-East to Asia and the Pacific). It includes two other points where shifts have occurred since the Bush administration: the priority given to emerging powers compared to the old European powers (with the idea that the United States cannot create a hierarchy amongst these various actors, due to their “pivot power”) and the shift from a military to an economic focus (Vaïsse 2012, pp. 14–15). This second aspect is growing stronger with the new priority in Obama’s foreign policy during his second mandate: trade and, in particular, the goal of doubling American exports between now and 2015. The relationship between the global commons and trade reflects an advocation of freedom in its widest sense (freedom of navigation is becoming a theme applicable to other domains, in particular the cyber domain today). The Defense Strategic Guidance 2012 insists on the necessary cooperation of the United States with its allies in order to assure effective access to the global commons. This posture is mentioned again in the preparatory documents for the defense budget 2014. In other words, the drafting of a Grand Strategy for the US includes the projection of the concept onto other organisational contexts and, primarily, the Atlantic alliance.

2 The Struggle Against American Domination Faced with the reformulation of American strategy, the emerging powers have not coordinated their response despite that fact that they are all driven by the same opposition to Western powers (Santander 2013, p. 538). Furthermore, the creation of regular fora, and even the birth of a unique diplomatic system such as IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) has not led to the creation of an institutionalised alliance. The States in question prefer a strategic partnership with a much more flexible format (Laïdi 2012, p. 338). Even though certain structures created have led to common military manoeuvres such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisa-

94

F. Ramel

tion (SCO), their goal is not to form an alliance strictly speaking; in other words, according to Stefan Bergsmann’s definition, “an explicit agreement between States in the field of national security” through which “the partners promise mutual assistance in the form of substantial contributions of resources in the event of a situation arising that may become unstable” (Bergsmann 2001, pp. 25–39). These structures, while aiming to standardise relations by providing extra mutual surveillance or neutralisation instruments (in the case of the SCO), the different perspectives of risks and threats prevent the formation of a strategically coherent unit that could lead to the birth of an international security community. The territorial anchoring is far too varied. This absence of strategic structure renders comparisons to a “new Cold War” or the “balance of power” system of pre-1914 inaccurate. It also generates multiple objections (Erbert and Maurer 2013, pp. 1054–1074) to the American posture, as evidenced in the Chinese and Russian examples. Such stances share a common feature, in that they are embedded in the regional environment of the two powers in question.

2.1 China’s Affirmation The very term “global commons” is little used in Chinese speeches, be they political, in media coverage or academic. It does not have the status of a strategic concept represented in doctrine. However, behind this relative discretion hides a strategic concern in terms of the “protection of” and the “access to” these spaces. This concern can be seen in the discourse, the analysis and a refocusing effort. The discourse does not reside in the use of the “global commons” as an expression but rather in the taking up of several specific positions. China is opposed to the weaponization of space, promotes greater cooperation in the field of computer and electronic networks, raises questions over the development of military capabilities in these areas (China’s National Defense 2010). All of these elements are in line with the peaceful development that China advocates: “China will not engage in invasion, plundering, war or expansion that Western powers used to practice. Our strength will be harnessed to serve world peace and integrate development with peace” (Bingguo 2010). Nonetheless, a dual diagnosis appears when interpreting these strategic trends. The U.S. interest in the global commons is seen as a desire to increase the American stronghold over them (Yan 2012, p. 16). Meanwhile, the consideration for this strategic concern pertaining to the global commons is essential in order to ensure Chinese prosperity. This is closely tied to the connecting points through which Chinese products travel (Weitz 2009, p. 277). More generally, the development

6  The Ideology of the Global Commons

95

of the country also depends on energy resources, in particular the oil necessary for the rapid growth of the world’s second-largest economy. In September 2013, China became the world’s leading importer with 6.3 million barrels bought every day. Securing the sea routes between the Middle East and the Gulf of China has therefore become a strategic priority which has resulted in the strengthening of Chinese naval capabilities and also the control of the Straits of Malacca, through which 85% of imports pass. Lastly, the People’s Republic of China is beginning to refocus in its head-on approach to the global commons, in relation to the United States. This refocusing is first and foremost limited to the Asia region. It is part of the development of a “total” power—i.e. the consolidating of material and non-material resources—the primary aim being stability in its immediate neighbouring areas (Etzioni 2013, p. 46). However, three significant sources of friction between China and the US clearly indicate the regional rivalry for the global commons for over a decade. The first is due to a collision between a Navy plane (EP-3) and a Shenyang J8 from the Chinese navy, resulting in the death of the pilot in April 2001 close to the island of Hainan (Chinese naval base with nuclear submarines), which is just above the PRC’s Exclusive Economic Zone in the South China Sea. The ­twenty-four members of the EP-3 crew were forced to carry out an emergency landing for interrogation. The Bush Administration had to give a public apology in order to end the diplomatic crisis. The second issue arose in the same zone but at sea (120 km from Hainan Island). On 8th March 2009 the “Impeccable” ocean surveillance ship (with a civilian crew employed by the US Navy) was approached by five Chinese ships that ordered it to leave the zone in question. The distance between the ships was so close that the Impeccable used its fire hoses to effectively perform the manoeuvres. The last of these friction factors concerns cyberspace access. On 13 January 2010, Google announced it had been subjected to several massive attacks coming from China. Using classic phishing methods and malware, several accounts belonging to Chinese militants for human rights in China and abroad were targeted. Following the creation of Google.cn in 2006, this episode was seen by the company’s directors as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as an attack on freedom of expression. In the three cases, the US exercises the right to freedom of navigation, both in the Exclusive Economic Zone or in cyberspace. However, China responds by asserting its sovereign rights in this field, in particular through the application of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, for the first instance. Indeed, this reference to the law reflects a form of normative socialisation of China, as it adheres

96

F. Ramel

to a series of principles and rules that have their origin in modern Europe and are today enshrined in international conventions. Such claims do however have a purpose: assert and even extend the Chinese security perimeter in relation to the United States, whose presence in the Asia-Pacific region is considered even more worrying than a nuclearised North Korea… It is a strategic response (Yan 2012). The priority is to dissuade or neutralise the American forces nearby or deployable in the region. The creation of C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), designed to render defense system components more interoperable and increase submarines, or the construction of Type 054A frigates and rocket-launching Type 022 catamarans, reflect the development of such a strategic posture. The idea of “offshore active defense” developed by Admiral Liu and which could extend much further than the region should not be startling. China’s key ambition would appear to be the preservation of its leadership in the region (Burilkov and Geise 2013, pp. 1051–1052) and therefore “push back any American military presence from its borders” (Cabestan 2010, p. 245) Beyond the move towards capability reinforcement or this notion of strategy, we must also highlight the extension of China’s “fundamental interests” in 2010. While its “core interests” were limited to Taiwan and Tibet in 2002 according to Wang Jisi (a close friend of Hu Jintao), they now include claims to the regional maritime zone (Godement 2012, p. 208). The national borders have therefore become a domestic policy concern, with certain military leaders unhesitant to declare “Chinese rights to an oceanic territory of three million km2 (Godement 2012, p. 168). The creation of a “red telephone line”, a direct line for emergencies between the two states (whether on the diplomatic level since 1998 or the strategic level between the People’s Liberation Army and the Pentagon since 2007) will not prevent this clearly defined Chinese objective from waning: total priority is given to sovereignty (Godement 2012, p. 235), conceived in an extensive perspective.

2.2 Russian Assertion Renewed With Vladimir Putin’s coming to office, from the year 2000 the Russian Federation’s foreign policy was marked by a reassertion of Russian power in the “near abroad”—the region of preferential interests—but also beyond this region

6  The Ideology of the Global Commons

97

(Freire and Kanet 2012, p. 2). The strategic issues concerning the global commons come under this policy all the same, and just like in China, the concept itself does not appear stricto sensu in official documents, such as the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation of 5 February 2010. The US policy in Russia’s neighbouring region, and globally, is considered a threat to international security. As such, the primary external military threat identified by Russia is the enlargement of NATO in its “near abroad” as well as the Alliance’s intention to become a strategic actor with global functions. This is fully coherent with the analyses formulated in the Foreign Policy doctrine adopted in 2008 (Omelicheva 2013, p. 103). Based on this strategic assessment, Russia has adopted measures that aim to strengthen its military capabilities deployed in the global commons, an ­anti-access strategy (at the conventional or dissuasion levels) and an appropriation posture in the Arctic Ocean. In terms of capability development, it is essentially in the naval and cybernetic domain that the most significant progress is being made. In October 2008, Russia provided a frigate in the anti-piracy combat in Somalia, but it simultaneously organised exercises with the Venezuelan navy (the first in the Western hemisphere since the end of the Cold War). Between 2007 and 2015, the Russian weapons programme has allocated 25% of its 4.9 billion rouble defense budget to the building of new warships. In the cyber domain, Russia is strengthening its assets and their usage, as demonstrated in the war in Georgia, defined as “hybrid combat”, as a series of cyberattacks accompanied force deployment. It also seeks to support “hacktivists” (politically active hackers) by making them “information soldiers”. As for the anti-access strategy, it was put to use in the war in Georgia, as Russia threatened to sink a NATO ship suspected of providing military support to the enemy under cover of a humanitarian aid operation. In the spatial domain, Russia can rely on its know-how and experience from the Soviet era, in particular since 1968 with the first anti-satellite capability test (Weitz 2009). This skill is used for dissuasion, as it bolsters its strategic credibility (an essential component for perceptions). Lastly, in 2007, several Russian explorers descended to a depth of over 4000 m in the Arctic Ocean. The planting of a titanium Russian flag at its bottom is considered as an extension of the continental shelf, and therefore a form of appropriation of the Arctic commons by Russia.

98

F. Ramel

3 Conclusion: From Trump’s Reset to a New “Global State of War” The new National Defense Strategy adopted by Donald Trump and diffused in 2018 takes distance with the Obama’s position. The document does not consider this issue as a priority on the agenda. Moreover, the Trump administration aims at putting America first without bearing in mind the normative pillars that have shaped the global commons for decades, i.e. the “international rules and regimes protecting the global commons [that] have also strengthened US primacy in world affairs” (Almond 2017). The outer space policy illustrates the orientation that Trump’s administration chooses for evolving in the global commons. On June 2018, Trump decides to set up a suitable military force—a sixth branch of the armed forces—for ensuring American dominance in space. It designates clearly Russia and China as the main competitors in this environment. But the militarization of outer space as an objective of national security calls into question the article 1 of 1967 Outer Space treaty that qualifies this global commons as a “province of all mankind”. As for Scott Pace from the National Space Council: “outer space is not a “global commons,” not the “common heritage of mankind,” not “res communis,” nor is it a public good. These concepts are not part of the Outer Space Treaty, and the United States has consistently taken the position that these ideas do not describe the legal status of outer space” (Pace 2017, p. 4). In other words, the Trump administration is prone to balkanize the commons by militarizing them (Kampmark 2018). Such strategic position will increase tension with the great emerging powers. With this new confrontation concerning the global commons, the front lines differ from conventional wars. A new global state of war emerges. Modern philosophers mobilized the state of war in order to understand strategic relations between States. They discuss the factors that explain the state of war. For Hobbes, this state is natural in every anarchical situation, before or after the social contract. According to Rousseau, this state depends on social conditions. War does not embody a natural relation but a political institution motivated by ostentation. Although their disagreements, both consider the state of war as a situation where States evolve. Nowadays, a new state of war appears between them. The confrontations take new forms because of globalization requires strategic restraint. As Chris Brown points out, “whereas in the past it was common for rising powers to feel that they had to define their new status by challenging existing ­power-holders, building empires and “co-prosperity” spheres, (…) this is no longer necessary, and indeed may be even more counterproductive than previously” (Brown 2010, p. 8). Kirshner adopts a similar perspective but he insists

6  The Ideology of the Global Commons

99

in the role of macro economic factors that makes “the resort to arms by States less likely because the macroeconomic discipline demanded by world financial markets, lending institutions, and powerful credit agencies is incompatible with military adventurism” (Kirshner 2006, p. 9).The new state of war also doubles because non-state actors are part of it. The qualification “War of terror” is not significant and incoherent conceptually. But it refers to this second state of war where actors of different nature are interrelated. This state of war is latent between major powers. When distinguishing the United States and other hegemonic powers in history, like Britain or France, Charles Krauthammer asserts: “We don’t hunger for territory. (…) For five centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans and new continents. Americans do not. (…)That’s because we are not an imperial power. We are a commercial republic. We don’t take food; we trade for it” (Krauthammer 2004). The American power focuses on a more decisive control: to access the global commons. The U.S. want to access this “major hub or hub of hubs of a network of global interdependencies” (Ikenberry 2011, p. 311). To evolve in these global commons means to use mobility and flexibility. Both were already developed in maritime strategy that provided the first framework of global commons management, as the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan exposed in his The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660–1783. They give body to a doctrine that focused on agility in international relations. The importation of global commons in strategy reveals a strategic conduct of the U.S. that must adapt their own resources to globalization: “the key idea behind coopting the notion of the global commons is to justify the effective and agile uses of power beyond the traditional sovereign realms, while at the same time making sure that the global commons remain accessible and secure to such forms of power. It may be further argued that these non-sovereign spaces are becoming increasingly important as a result of the expansion of the global realm of finance, trade and commerce, which relies on free access to and use of the global commons” (Aalatola et al. 2014, p. 95). The modern state of war depicted by Hobbes or Rousseau is embedded to logics of territoriality. The states were uncertain of their frontiers. They have to reinforce their protection towards their neighbours. The current state of war between states is no longer limited to a strictly material and territorial component. It concerns the way to evolve in the global commons or to maintain the flows that are substantial for their own economic (circulation of products) and social (digital and physical connexions between peoples) vitality. This confrontation infiltrates the civilian and private sector fields. “Sub rosa warfare” in the cyber domain (Libicki 2009) may become the adequate qualification of strategic interactions by

100

F. Ramel

focusing on confidential and secret combat. This ideology of Global commons shapes the strategic positions adopted by the Great Powers. To a certain extent, the movie Gravity that sheds light on a potential strategic usage of Kessler Syndrome by Russia illustrates the conflictuality to come in the near future…

References Aaltola M., Käpilä J., Vuorisalo V. 2014. The Challenges of Global Commons and Flows for US Power. The Perils of Missing the Human Domain, Farnham: Ashgate. Almond R. G., 2017. Preserving the Global Commons Is Putting America First. Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, http://jtl.columbia.edu/preserving-the-global-commonsis-putting-america-first/ Bennett, J.T. 2010. Pentagon Crafting Anti-Access Concept. Defense news. Bergsman; S. 2001. The Concept of Military Alliance. in Eds. Reiter, E. and H. Gartner, 20–31. Small States and Alliances, New York: Physica- Verlag Bingguo, D. 2010, “Poursuivre la voie du développement pacifique”. Ministère chinois des affaires étrangères. http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/fra/zxxx/t784931.htm Brimley, S. 2008. A Grand Strategy of Sustainment. Small Wars Journal Blog. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/a-grand-strategy-of-sustainment. Brooks, S.G., Ikenberry J. and Wohlforth, W.C. 2013. Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement. In Foreign Affairs. 130–142. Brown, C., 2010. Rules and norms in post-western world. In Kessler, O., Hall, R.B., Lynch, C. and Onuf, N. Eds. On rules, politics and knowledge: Friedrich Kratochwil, international relations, and domestic affairs. 213–225. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Burilkov, A. and Geise, T. 2013. Maritime Strategies of Rising Powers: developments in China and Russia. Third World Quarterly. 34(6): 1037–1053. Cabestan, J.-P. 2010. La politique internationale de la Chine. Entre intégration et volonté de puissance. Paris, Presses de Sciences po. Charillon, F. 2013. Triple redistribution stratégique. In Charillon, Frédéric and Dieckoff, Alain. Eds. Afrique du Nord. Moyen-Orient. 19–29. Paris: La documentation française. Ebert, H. and Maurer, T. 2013. Contested Cyberspace and Rising Powers. Third World Quarterly. 34(6): 1054–1074. Etzioni, A. 2013a. Who Authorized Preparations for War with China. Yale Journal of International Affairs. 37–51. Etzioni, A. 2013b. Accommodating China, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Survival. 55(2): 45–60. Etzioni, A. 2013c. Preparing to Go to War with China. In The Huffington Post. Flournoy, M. and Davidson, J. 2012. Obama’s New Global Posture. The Logic of US Foreign Deployments. Foreign Affairs, 91 (4): 54–63. Freire Maria, R. and Kanet, R. E. Eds. 2012. Russia and its Near Neighbours. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Garamone J. 2011. Pentagon Office to Coordinate New Air-Sea Strategy. American Forces Press Service, Washington, 10 November. Godement, F. 2012. Que veut la Chine? Paris, Odile Jacob.

6  The Ideology of the Global Commons

101

Gentile, Gian P. 2010. A Different US Military Narrative. Politique américaine, 17: 115– 121. Gros, P. 2011. Du Network centric à la stabilisation: émergence de nouveaux concepts et innovation militaire, Paris: Etudes de l’Irsem. Hardin, G. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science. 162: 1243–1248. Henrotin, J. 2013. Géostratégie et vision de la mer dans les conflits terrestres. L’interfaçage entre le lisse et le strié. In Etudes marines, 3: 168–176. Hoffmann, F. 2013. Forward Partnership: A Sustainable American Strategy. In Orbis, Winter: 20–40. Ikenberry G., John. 2011. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton, Princeton University Press Jasper, S. 2010. Security Freedom in the Global Commons. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Kampmark, B. 2018. Repudiating the Global Commons: Trump’s Militarization of Space. International Policy Digest. August 30. https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/08/30/repudiating-the-global-commons-trump-s-militarization-of-space/ Kirshner, J. Ed., 2006. Globalization and National Security. London: Routledge. Krauthammer, C. 2004. Democratic Realism. An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World, February, 12, 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture, AEI Annual. Krepinevich, A. 2013. Report of the CSIS International Security Program, March. http:// csis.org/files/publication/130319_Murdock_Preparing2014QDR_Web.pdf Laïdi, Zaki. 2012. Le monde selon Obama. La politique étrangère des Etats-Unis. Paris, Flammarion. Libicki, M. C. 2009. Sub Rosa Cyber War. In Czossek, C. and Geers, K. Eds. The Virtual Battlefield: Perspectives on Cyber Warfare. 53–65. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Nasr, V. 2013. The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat. New York: Doubleday. Omelicheva, M. 2013. Russian Foreign Policy: A Quest for Great Power Status in Multipolar World. In K. Beasley, Ryan, Kaarbo, Julet, S. Lantis, Jeffrey and T. Snarr, Michael. Eds. Foreign Policy in Comparative Perspective. Domestic and International Influences on State Behavior. 94–117. London, Sage. Pace, S. 2017. Space Development, Law and Values. IISL Galloway Space Law Symposium National. December. https://spacepolicyonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ S c o t t - Pa c e - t o - G a l l ow a y - F I NA L . p d f ? u t m _ c o n t e n t = bu ff e r 6 6 7 7 8 & u t m _ medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Posen, B. 2003. Command of the Commons. The Military Foundation of US hegemony. In International Security, 28(1): 5–46. Redden, M. E., Hughes, M. P. 2010. Global Commons and Domain Interrelationships: Time for a New Conceptual Framework? In Strategic forum n°259, National Defense University. Redden, M.E., Hughes, M.P. 2011. Defense Planning Paradigms and the Global Commons. In Joint Forces Quarterly, 60. Rid, T. 2013. “The Great Cyberscare”, Foreign Policy, March. Santander, S. 2013. Les puissances émergentes. In: Battistella, Dario. Ed. Relations internationales. Bilan et perspectives. 523–544. Paris, Ellipses.

102

F. Ramel

Schwartz, N.A. 2012. Air-Sea Battle Doctrine: A Discussion with the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and Chief of Naval Operation speech. The Brookings Institution. http://www. brookings.edu/~/media/events/2012/5/16%20air%20sea%20battle/20120516_air_sea_ doctrine_corrected_transcript.pdf. Stavridis, J. 1992. A New Air Sea Battle Concept: Integrated Strike Forces. Washington D.C., National Defense University National War College. Vaïsse, Justin. 2012. La politique étrangère de Barack Obama. Paris, Odile Jacob. Weitz, R. 2009. China, Russia, and the Challenge to the Global Commons. In Pacific Focus, (XXIV): 271–297. Yan, L. 2012. The Global Commons and the Reconstruction of US-China Military Relations. Asia Paper. 35.

7

Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism Dieter Plehwe

So many tears I’ve cried So much pain inside But baby it ain’t over’til it’s over Lenny Kravitz

Abstract

Ongoing controversies around the existence of neoliberalism can be resolved by way of more clearly delineating the neoliberal core. In addition to key concepts like property rights, freedom of contract and rule of law protecting property owners from discrete political intervention, the opposition to both laisser-faire liberalism and collectivism can be identified as central to the history and variety of neoliberalism within and beyond nation states. At the international level, neoliberals aimed at political arrangements that likewise protect property owners and promote economic globalization through GATT and the WTO, and a range of other international financial and regulatory organizations. To this end, neoliberal thought collectives within and around the Mont Pèlerin Society developed global performance indicators like the Economic Freedom Index, for example, which serve to direct and observe legislative and regulatory reform processes around the globe. Core values, principled beliefs and political approaches of the economic freedom movement subsequently have been institutionalized at the level of global financial institutions, where

D. Plehwe (*)  Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_7

103

104

D. Plehwe

global performance indicators like the World Bank’s ease to do business index have started to exert epistemic authority way beyond the scope of the original neoliberal thought collectives and yet remain subject to contestations. Keywords

Competition state · Global governance · Liberalism · Mont pèlerin society · Neoliberalism · Global performance indicators · Thought collectives

The most successful ideologies may be those that become invisible, trickle down into the fabric of societies and global institutions apparently without leaving evident traces. Some have become so invisible that their very existence can be denied. Neoliberalism appears to be one such case. If we define ideologies broadly we look at a quantity of ideas with which means and goals of organized social activities are declared, explained and legitimized (Seliger 1976, p. 11). Neoliberal quantities of ideas have germinated in the course of the 1920s and 1930s following the collapse of European empires and the Great Depression (Slobodian 2018; Schulz-Forberg 2020). Neoliberal ideology has been developed more consciously in the aftermath of the Colloque Walter Lippmann in Paris in 1938 as a program aiming to provide an alternative to both traditional (laisser-faire) liberalism and “collectivist” ideologies. Neoliberalism opposed ­ both socialism and fascism, and claimed to develop an early “third way” (Denord 2009). Whatever else exists in the contemporary mélange of ideologies, the core of neoliberalism will be missed if the constitutive principle of opposition to laisser faire and collectivism is missed. The neoliberal core is best summarized as secured market relationship, which requires control of the state. After the creation of welfare states, neoliberalism worked hard to transform the welfare states to bring them closer to neoliberal ideals. Groups of people in and around what was arguably the key organization of global neoliberalism, the Mont Pèlerin Society founded in 1947, have used the term neoliberalism to self-declare, explain and legitimize their interventions. Recently former MPS president Peter Boettke (2017) and the British think tank professional Sam Bowman (2016) came out as neoliberals following early leaders like Friedrich August von Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Jaques Rueff or Milton Friedman (Walpen 2004). Regardless of such evidence and nearly a century worth of history of neoliberal ideas and practices many scholars continue to voice doubts about the very existence of neoliberalism (for samples consult the preface of Mirowski and Plehwe 2015; Slobodian and Plehwe 2020a).

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

105

Neoliberalism denial has different reasons. Many of those who belong to the followers and successors of neoliberal intellectuals and leaders nowadays prefer the label “classical liberal” and a wide range of social scientists find the concept not useful inter alia due to the multitude of meanings attached to it, or due to the alleged lack of public representatives that are easy to identify. Thankfully, the deputy head of the Wilhelm Röpke Institute in Jena, Stefan Kolev, has recently pointed to the “static connotation inherent in the term ‘classical liberalism’”. Neoliberalism here runs the risk of dogmatic thinking of the past that can only be emulated. Kolev also ventures to clarify three possible meanings of neoliberalism. Firstly, the “self-description of a group of scholars who, from the 1930s onward, reformulated 19th century liberalism in order to correct earlier deficiencies and to adapt liberalism to the necessities of the 20th century…”. Secondly, the age of neoliberalism following the rise of Margarete Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. Thirdly, the evolution of liberalism in general, which turns new generations of philosophers following earlier liberals into neoliberals (Kolev 2018, p. 523). The second meaning goes beyond the sphere of ideas. If ideologies really matter they do because they are relevant in social life beyond talk, informing concepts that shape social relations and institutions. This is uncontroversial even if the focus on the Reagan and Thatcher years has been a source of confusion, which will be discussed below. The unresolved tension between the first and third meaning distinguished by Kolev is of immediate interest instead. Whereas the first meaning places an emphasis on a break with crucial dimensions of the liberal past, which would explain the rise of a new ideology, the third meaning places an emphasis on a general continuity of liberalism, which would deny the rise of a new ideology substantively different from its forerunners. Kolev embraces the procedural (third) meaning, which however does not help to understand why the relevant neoliberalism that concerns us to this day was born in the course of the 1920s and 1930s in a deliberate effort to counter the evolution of traditional liberalism, which turned more and more into social liberalism committing to substantive goals of greater social equality. Paradoxically, Kolev is right at the same time. Honoring the procedural dimension we can observe the evolution of not one, but two varieties of neoliberalism, one left and one on the right. While social liberalism conceived of the need to move liberalism beyond civic and political rights and became a key ideology of social forces of the center-left in support of social citizenship (Marshall 1950), economic—or rather: capitalist—freedom neoliberalism conceived of the need to protect economic rights and abstract individualism from the new focus on structural dimensions of social class, barriers to social mobility and inequality.

106

D. Plehwe

Economic freedom neoliberalism came out in defense of persisting, albeit perennially changing, patterns of social inequality. This line of reasoning became a central feature of social forces of the center-right wing of the political spectrum. Although right wing neoliberals needed to address the problems and issues related to the instability of capitalism much like social liberals and everybody else, they did so in critical distance to the perceived “collectivism” inherent in egalitarian conceptions of society.1 The key concept separating the two lines of ideas clearly was and remains social inequality. Norberto Bobbio (1994) explains the general distinction of the left and the right based on the diverging views of inequality. In contrast to traditional conservative understandings of and support for inequality based on race, gender, status or class differences in reaction to challenger ideologies (Freeden 1996, pp. 341 f.), neoliberalism carries a dynamic understanding of inequality due to differences between individuals in making use of the opportunities life and society have to offer under condition of private property and freedom of contract safeguarded by an appropriate rule of law. Although some neoliberals like James Buchanan support radical taxation of inherited property, structural constraints due to ownership relations, and the asymmetric distribution of wealth and power are not conceived as fundamental constraints as long as economic freedom exists.2 Since individuals and property rights have to be protected from discrete political power, interventions on behalf of disadvantaged groups cannot be sustained. Contrary to traditional conservatives, however, neoliberals do not have a dispositional distrust of change that results from the exercise of property rights and from the activities based on the freedom of contract (Hayek 1960). Freeden’s (1996) morphological approach helps to mark such differences between ideologies and to clarify overlapping areas. Contrary to traditional conservatism, neoliberalism embraces individualism. Neoliberals support merit based social mobility and dynamics of change resulting from economic opportunities much like social liberalism. Since modern post WW II conservatism warily moved towards center left positions with regard to social mobility and to the deliberate use of government to intervene in individual spheres of human conduct

1Ample

evidence can be presented by way of reading early pamphlets of Mont Pèlerin related think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs booklet “Pensions in a free society” (Seldon 1957). 2“When we turn to equality, however, it should be said at once that true individualism is not equalitarian in the modern sense of the word. It can see no reason for trying to make people equal as distinct from treating them equally.” (Hayek 1948[1934], p. 30).

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

107

to achieve particular ends, neoliberalism in fact became a force of the (far)-right during the post-war period because neoliberals remained hostile to the welfare state. Dominant parts of modern conservatism ceased to guard a strictly rule based human order, which offered neoliberals a singular space in opposition to ideologies in support of substantive social goal oriented interventionism. The far right position turned out not to be a bad place to be for neoliberals when the ambitious social reform programs of the 1960s and 1970s ran into trouble across the variety of welfare states. When Social Democrats and social liberalism more broadly (including its modern conservative variety) started to become critical of social equality and social mobility oriented redistribution, neoliberalism gained credibility and leadership capacity, even started to look normal or mainstream. Neoliberal core ideas at this point began to occupy the central space in the shifting ideological spectrum, which moved considerably to the right. This development—roughly from the late 1970s—preceded the collapse of socialism, although it has been strongly reinforced by the unexpected transition from socialism to capitalism. In this way Kolev’s third meaning of neoliberalism—evolutionary liberalism—actually has merit again, because the eclipse of strong versions of social liberalism has led to a new convergence on what appears to be the only liberalism left in town: center-right wing economic freedom liberalism, more and less cosmopolitan (Slobodian and Plehwe 2020b).

1 Economic Freedom, and Necessary Social Inequality: The Only Neoliberalism Left For convenience and due to the quite adequate identification of right wing economic freedom individualism with neoliberalism in contrast to the liberal tradition it nevertheless makes sense to reserve the term strictly for the followers of Hayek and his friends from the 1930s onward. The recent conflation of social liberalism and early neoliberalism focused on the common element of interventions and alleged convergence with regard to the social question (Jackson 2010). Such a reading falls prey to the fallacy of historical short-termism, clearly missing stark differences in terms of medium and long term orientations that diverged enormously between social liberals and neoliberals from the beginning and grew more pronounced in the process of building welfare states. Such perspectives also have a hard time explaining the deeper reasons for the perceived need of Hayek and other neoliberals to organize outside the liberal party establishments both at national and international levels (Walpen 2004, pp. 121 f.). It also hides the functional differences of the competing perspectives: Social policy as a central policy

108

D. Plehwe

goal in its own right and social policy as an if necessary possible element only to stabilize capitalist social relations. Still contrary to Kolev’s third (general procedural) meaning I thus argue that much of the continuing confusion about neoliberalism stems from a lack of attention to the break of right wing liberals with the growing democratic and social liberal orientations of the early 20th century alongside the break of neoliberals with the “wait and see position” economists traditionally held in economic policy making. Neoliberal interventionism is not equal to market fundamentalism. Regardless the opposition to planning, the turn towards political interventionism was common to both left leaning social liberalism and right wing neoliberalism. The differentia specifica is the neoliberal opposition to social equality, not the willingness to safeguard economic and social order. Searching for less social inequality and defending social inequality as a sine qua non of a free society provided for a fundamentally different compass directing the efforts to eventually stabilize and secure capitalist societies after WW II. Social liberals were committed to developing the welfare state and neoliberals constantly attempted to keep it small, preferably based on private insurance. Contrary to social liberalism, neoliberalism even raised doubts about political rights on many occasions because of the post WW II welfare state majorities. Many neoliberals lack a clear commitment to key liberal notions of sovereignty, democracy, and the freedom of coalition, particularly the right to form trade unions. A distinction is made between the realm of a borderless “dominium” of property owners and the political realm of “imperium”. In neoliberal perspective: the legal and political orders need to be designed in ways that protect dominium from imperium, which again requires political control of the imperial state at all relevant levels (Slobodian 2018). A common liberal denominator of civil rights and economic rights (property and contractual) in particular was certainly not enough to prevent the deepening division and eventual rupture within the spectrum of liberal ideology, which gave birth to the comprehensive discourse community—or Weltanschauungsgemeinschaft—of neoliberalism in the course of the 1930s and 1940s. The Mont Pèlerin Society arguably was and remains a central pillar in the neoliberal edifice. Mont Pèlerin neoliberals turned against laisser-faire and the naturalist understanding of “free markets” to secure capitalist social relations—hence the emphasis on property rights, freedom of contract and the rule of law designed to protect

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

109

property owners from discrete political intervention and popular demands.3 State activism was endorsed both to promote (and protect) property rights and freedom of contract in national and international spheres of conduct, and to prevent policies and regulation conducive to egalitarian or collectivist arrangements. Those who confuse neoliberalism with market fundamentalism miss the magic of the new approach, its versatility and creativity, which is not restricted to market relations and competition. The neoclassical market rhetoric is misleading when it comes to characterize neoliberal ideas, because the key agents of the neoliberal world view are owners of property in general and owner of means of production (capital) in particular. The market came in as a placeholder to defend capitalist relations of production at a time of public sectors encroaching upon the prerogatives of capital owners. A new approach was badly needed from the 1930s onward to enable neoliberals fighting the “wars of position” (Gramsci) raging both in capitalist democracies and authoritarian states. Only due to the English language culture neoliberals needed a different name, libertarianism for example, because liberalism became nearly synonymous with social liberalism and egalitarian civic, political and social rights in the United States—close to social democracy and the collectivism neoliberals were eager to contain. The language problem has arguably delayed the recognition, observation and analysis of neoliberalism, the forces and carriers of the new ideology born in the turmoil of the 1920s and 30s.4 Those who date the beginning of neoliberalism in the late 1970s (Harvey 2005) should think about the analogy of Marxism and Social Democracy: Most people would date

3Michael

Freeden’s (1996) great work on ideologies and political theory discusses Hayek as a pretender to liberalism and the work of Friedman and others enters the debate on American neoconservatism (pp. 208 f., pp. 399 f., respectively). It appears as if Freeden follows Kolev’s procedural understanding of liberalism and conservatism, though they clearly differ with regard to who belongs in the line and who does not. Freeden’s morphological approach to the study of ideologies and political theories allows instead to observe the formation and evolution of the new ideology of neoliberalism from both liberal and conservative conceptual roots, yet keeping a deliberate distance from both liberal and conservative ideologies for a considerable period of time. 4Edwin J. Feulner, head of the Heritage Foundation and longtime secretary treasurer as well as president of the Mont Pèlerin Society vividly describes the problem of the term neoliberal in the US context. „The Mont Pelerin Society was founded… to uphold the principles of what Europeans call ‚liberalism‘ (as opposed to ‚statism‘) and what we Americans call ‚conservatism‘ (as opposed to ‚liberalism‘): free markets, limited governments, and personal liberty under the rule of law.“ (Feulner 1999, p. 2).

110

D. Plehwe

the beginning of Marxism and Social Democracy in the second half of the 19th Century and not at the time of the Russian Revolution or the election of Friedrich Ebert in Germany.

2 Neoliberal Complexity: From Intellectuals and Schools… Despite the available literature attesting to the complex history and variety of neoliberalism it is still easy to find accounts of neoliberalism that are best considered “pars pro toto” arguments. Angus Burgin’s (2012) detailed account of leading neoliberals reduces neoliberalism at the same time to the great white men Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman. He wrote this big man study of Mont Pèlerin neoliberalism despite his knowledge of Walpen (2004) and subsequent studies of the far flung neoliberal networks of and around the Mont Pèlerin society (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009) involving about 1200 organized neoliberals and many others. Alleged market radicalism or “market fundamentalism” (Ötsch 2009) of the American libertarian tradition based on the Austrian school overpowers all the other elements of the neoliberal networks in such accounts. Although the Freiburg School and ordoliberalism with a clear focus on the limits of the market virtually disappeared from the academic and public view from the 1960s onward, the global financial crisis in conjunction with the translation of Fourcault’s biopolitics’ lectures into English (2008) resulted in a formidable come back of the German neoliberal networks around Walter Eucken and Franz Böhm on the one hand, and around the sociological neoliberals Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow on the other hand. While Foucault himself seems to sense the existence of linkages between some of the authors he examines and although he pays considerable attention to new developments like Gary Becker’s universalization of human capital ideas, Foucault’s version of real neoliberalism is Freiburg. Thirdly, Nancy McLean and Sonja Amadae have written important books on the Virginia School and rational choice as the real neoliberalism. While Buchanan and the decision theory (Rand) background of the Virginia school of public choice can certainly be considered one of the underestimated and ­under-researched sources of neoliberalism, exclusive focus on these circles comes at a prize. Hayek and Friedman turn into classical liberals because they are held to belief in free markets (Amadae 2016, p. 12) and both McLean and Amadae fail to observe the ways in which the sprawling networks of public choice scholars mingle and mix with the members of other neoliberal thought collectives. Knafo and colleagues (2019) go even further and suggest Hayek and others linked to

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

111

Mont Pèlerin neoliberalism are unimportant compared to managerialism emanating from the Rand tradition. These scholars are oblivious of the linkages between decision theory and public choice in persona of MPS member and President James McGill Buchanan, for example (Amadae 2016, pp. 175 f.). Rather than playing Mont Pèlerin against Managerialism it would be important to clarify the interplay of the different groups: the Mises wing helped revive entrepreneurship (Israel Kirzner in particular), which was turned into neoliberal managerialism in conjunction with rational choice based theories of the firm. The key person here was MPS member Ronald Coase. His work laid the basis of transaction cost economics, which explains the existence of firms rather than reducing economics to market relations observed by the neoclassical economic discipline. On this backdrop decision theory based management studies could be imbued with neoliberal concerns in contrast to competing planning objectives. The stubborn resistance to the need to study the ongoing neoliberal conversations across different groups can be explained by myopic focus of scholarship, by “strategic ignorance” (McGoey 2018) or the most important academic ritual: Every individual scholar has to invent a holy grail. Sadly, we are left with a collection of fragments. Contrary to widespread reductionism neoliberalism needs to be approached in a much more inclusive and comprehensive way. For this purpose, the ideas of Ludwig Fleck and Karl Mannheim with regard to the analysis of thought collectives and thought styles are productive and practical. Secondly, Michael Mann’s work on ideology and organization helps bridging the gap between the history of ideas and their institutionalization. His track laying metaphor for the role of ideas is particularly useful in the effort to observe the expansion of neoliberal influence in societies within and across borders.

3 …to Thought Styles, Thought Collectives and Transnational Organization Each secular ideology draws on the legitimacy of science. Contrary to all claims to pure knowledge, scientific work is necessarily imbued with normative concerns. Neither ideologies nor sciences can avoid the productive tension of normative and scientific concerns. Most important is a clear understanding of larger communities and relationships among the producers of both scientific work and ideology (Freeden 1996). Ludwig Fleck bridges the discussion of academic and ideology development, albeit still with a focus on scientific development. He observes smaller esoteric circles and larger exoteric circles with shared normative orientations that are

112

D. Plehwe

relevant to scientific development and innovation (Fleck 1979, p. 105), and he also discusses the importance of public opinion. But Fleck’s concept of a thought collective has problems that need to be addressed: In his scheme of things, one thought collective produces a specific thought style that is fully coherent (Fleck 1979, p. 100). Almost inevitably every thought style has to become orthodoxy, which contradicts Fleck’s own emphasis on the ongoing exchange of ideas as characteristic of thought collectives. Fleck is still focused on competing academic circles. Karl Mannheim’s work on thought collectives and styles helps to overcome Fleck’s limitations with regard to a political sociology of ideology. He originally transferred the notion of style from poetics and rhetoric to science and from individual to group: formations and related contexts of experience are considered socio-genetic rather than individually innate if they are at all attributed to a style (Mannheim 1922, p. 97). In his seminal essay on the sociology of knowledge Mannheim takes the notion of thought style beyond the field of science. Scientific facts are now presented as necessarily subject to interpretation by world views. A resulting thought style constrains and enables the sorting and interpretation of facts, and is still subject to change over time. Part of the dynamic of thought styles—or ideologies—Mannheim is interested in comes from scientific discoveries. He observes: “…it must be admitted that after one class has discovered some sociological or historical fact (which lay in its line of vision by virtue of its specific position), all other groups, no matter what their interests are, can equally take such fact into account— nay, must somehow incorporate such fact into their system of world interpretation” (Mannheim 1925[1986], p. 147).

Other dynamics arise from socio-economic conditions that are also in flux. Thinkers articulate the reality-demands of specific social strata. Inevitable dynamics are thus related both to changing reality-demands tied to socio-economic change and to the need to adapt to discoveries that are possibly made by members dedicated to other thought styles. Thought styles thus need to adjust, but also have the capacity to help their adherents adapt to new demands—unless they collapse, we might add. Every thought style is characterized by a specific perspective. It relies on core terminology and concepts and opposes competing terms and concepts. It is forced to interact with competing thought styles because other thought collectives do make discoveries that require attention, and the reality demands of different strata direct new discoveries and discourse in ways that cannot be ignored. Competition between ideologies is an important function of the knowledge system.

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

113

In contrast to Fleck’s ideas, Mannheim’s concept of thought style accommodates a variety of thought collectives as long as they fit under the umbrella of a common normative perspective or world view, and share core terminology and key concepts. Fleck’s views would require us to think of Hayek and Friedman or Buchanan as belonging to different thought styles, for example, because they differed on basic epistemological questions and on concrete issues of monetary theory and the understanding of the state (Hayek 1994, p. 144). Mannheim’s worldview-related concept of thought style instead allows for different and to a certain extent competing thought collectives like adherents to non-mathematical Austrian and the positivist Chicago currents, as long as they are broadly directed toward the same general normative and political perspective and share key concepts like property rights or economic freedom. They are linked by way of working on the reality demands of certain social strata. Over time, reality demands of social strata change, of course. Industrial age neoliberalism clearly will differ from postindustrial varieties of capitalism and neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has to confront similar problems related to the changing configuration of the business class socialist ideologies are forced to deal with regarding the changing configuration of the working class. Mannheim invites us in any case to move away from an overly monolithic view of both ideologies and thought collectives. Complementary and competing thought collectives within a common thought style are another important function of the knowledge system. Thought collectives provide the necessary detail for capturing the complex multitude operating within competing—progressive, conservative, or neoliberal—thought styles. In Mannheim’s view, the dynamic of scientific development is inevitably tied to the cultural phenomenon of competition sustained by thought collectives related to major world views (Mannheim 1928[1964]). Contrariwise this of course means that the dynamic of scientific development is hampered by a lack of competing thought collectives operating under different ideological umbrellas. While Bourdieu’s and others equation of neoliberalism with “pensée unique” (Geuens 2010) overlooks diversity within neoliberalism, the neoliberal convergence of both conservatism and social democracy may explain the uneasy circumstances of academic and public debates emerging under condition of one dominating thought style. Such hegemony creates the conditions for the invisible “third face” of power (Lukes 1974) to forcefully come into play. While such hegemony can always only be partial and temporary it explains why certain ways of reasoning (on choice architectures, financial markets or austerity, for example) can survive even a great crisis like the global financial crisis and the related Euro-crisis.

114

D. Plehwe

4 Institutionalizing Neoliberal Ideas Across Borders Based on the larger sociological understanding of competing thought styles and within such larger edifices, collaborating and to a certain extent competing thought collectives we can turn to the operationalization of the study of such units. Michael Mann’s model of sources of power is quite useful here because of the explicit transnational dimension of his understanding of ideology and because of the link he creates between power and organization (Mann 2012[1986]). Mann considers ideological organization in two ways. Firstly, a more autonomous form that is socio-spatially transcendent. “It transcends the existing institutions of ideological, economic, military and political power and generates a “sacred” form of authority (in Durkheim’s sense, set apart and above more secular authority structures” (Mann 2012[1986], p. 23). Ideology thus enables the exercise of collective and/or redistributive power (cooperation and exploitation, respectively) beyond other authorities. “Technically, therefore, ideological organizations may be unusually dependent on what I called diffused power techniques, and therefore boosted by the extension of such “universal infrastructures” as literacy, coinage, and markets.” (ibid.). Ideology thus can be considered generative, creating social relations rather than merely integrating and reflecting society. Mann opposes national container perspectives prevalent even in the study of ideologies and allows for the reflection of relevant transnational dimensions that are not only important with regard to the world religions, but also with regard to the major secular ideologies of Marxism, Social Democracy, Liberalism, Conservatism, and Neoliberalism. Secondly, the transcendent dimension complements ideology as an immanent morality related to an established social group, which is less autonomous from established power structures. Legally and spatially bound social orders are not the only aspect of relevance in this regard, but they do gain importance relative to the transcendent dimension of ideology. The focus here is more on the variety or specificity of an ideology like German Social Democracy or British Conservatism, or French neoliberalism, which frequently still comes at a price in a rapidly de-nationalized world as we can tell from Mann’s (2013) own Anglo-centric study of neoliberalism in the latest volume of sources of power. Students of neoliberalism still need to come to grips with the immanent morality of entrenched transnational neoliberal communities. The two dimensions co-exist in practical terms, of course, since ideology can emerge as a transcendent power only temporarily unless it fails to gain solid footholds in established social groups. But even at later and more established points

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

115

of development, an ideology can serve as an immanent moral in one place and as a transcendent power at the same time, by itself or in conjunction with economic, political and military power (e.g. the role of Catholicism and Jesuits in Latin American colonization or the role of the Chicago School and local neoliberals in conjunction with the military after the coup of Pinochet in Chile). Michael Mann’s approach to ideology as a social source of power that helps create social relations across borders and provides immanent moral to established groups within a society, along with his focus on organization in any case lends itself perfectly well to study both transnational networks and institutionalized varieties of neoliberalism. Beyond Weber’s famous switchman metaphor, according to which ideas determine the tracks along which action has been pushed by interests, Mann elaborates on the expanded role of ideas and ideology. His ‘track laying’ metaphor used to explain the capacity of religious ideas and norms (Mann 2012[1986], p. 341–372, 376–379) calls for a closer investigation of the constant effort required for ideas to shape the interpretation of interests, and for the ways in which ideational power has been institutionalized to perform the shaping of reforms within and across borders. The final section of this chapter will briefly examine the creation of the Economic Freedom Index by neoliberal intellectuals and think tank networks. A closer look at the origin and the ramifications of this global index project clarifies the ways in which neoliberal “technologies of persuasion” (Porter 1995) contribute to the contested character of neoliberal transformation at large.

5 Economic Freedom Index: Technology of Persuasion and Measurement of Transformation While considerable attention has been paid to the link between neoliberalism, governance and quantification in general (Cooley and Snyder 2015, p. 8), there has been a lack of attention to the substantive infusion of neoliberal ideas in many areas of the measuring of the world. Global performance indicators have been developed in the second half of the 20th Century by public institutions like the United Nations (Human Development Index) and by civil society organizations (Freedom House Democracy Index). Most quantification projects related to global governance are fairly recent. Contrary to the close association of quantification with neoliberalism, the proliferation of indexes in the new millennium provides ample evidence of the contested character of the present era. We can find competitiveness and economic freedom indexes alongside happiness indexes,

116

D. Plehwe

sustainability and economic democracy measures. Behind such competing projects are thought collectives informed by competing thought styles and world views. A quantification project designed to measure progress in terms of human development and equality can be opposed by a quantification project designed to measure economic freedom, which in turn can be opposed by a project designed to measure economic democracy and so on. The origins of the Economic Freedom index can be easily traced to the efforts of organized neoliberal intellectuals of the Mont Pèlerin Society and related think tank networks. The self-professed economic freedom movement behind the Economic Freedom Index emerged in the 1970s. Its roots go back to critical assessments of traditional economic indicators, which measured GDP and economic growth without due regard to perceived importance of issues related to economic freedom. Under conditions of competition between socialist and capitalist growth machineries, neoliberals were dissatisfied with pure quantitative GDP data. Even worse, looking at how well people do in different countries and economic systems moved a number of socialist countries in the developing world ahead of their capitalist competitors due to their performance in areas like public health— much to the dismay of neoliberals dedicated to placing a premium value on what they call economic freedom: property rights, freedom of contract and rule of law protection from discrete political interference. From the perspective of neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman or Douglas North, a different way was needed to assess the performance of economic systems around the world (Walker 1991). In the 1980s, MPS circles engaged in a multi-pronged effort to advocate what they perceived of as a close link between entrepreneurship and economic freedom. Funded by the Liberty Fund (Indianapolis), the Canadian Fraser Institute invited a group of neoliberal scholars from North America and Europe to discuss and eventually develop an alternative index focused on economic freedom. At the first conference organized by the Fraser Institute in Vancouver in 1986, William Hammett of the Manhattan Institute in New York suggested that “people think that entrepreneurship is bad and we are suffering from an overdose of it in this country.” (Hammett 1988, p. 127) Contrary to the support for political freedom, which is supported an end in itself; economic freedom is considered a mean, which is frequently hard to sell. Incidentally, Hammett used the difficulties Donald Trump faced when he wanted to evict a few rent controlled tenants to illustrate his concern. Hammett reports on his own limited success in strengthening the link between entrepreneurship and economic freedom on previous occasions:

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

117

“I organized two conferences overseas in the last two years on the topic of growth… In both cases we were trying to energize the debate on lowering taxes and encouraging growth and entrepreneurship…the whole George Gilder scenario, supply-side thing. At neither one of those conferences did the topic of economic liberties ever come up. It was treated strictly as a pragmatic thing. Will this produce more growth and more wealth or will it not? …We all believe in economic freedoms here, we know what it leads to. But it is almost an impossible chore to try to translate this to the general public who relate much more to the concept of growth, wealth, things like that, which is the end result of economic freedom” (Hammett 1988, p. 127).

Altogether three conferences dedicated to a clearer understanding of economic freedom and the ways to measure eventually led to the construction of the Economic Freedom of the World Index (1996)—and to the parallel Heritage Foundation Indices of Economic Freedom (produced in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal). Although a range of well-known neoliberal economists participated in the wide ranging discussion, much of the groundwork for resulting effort to define and measure economic freedom was carried out by less known MPS members like Alvin Rabushka (Stanford) and Gerald William Scully (University of Texas). In lieu of an accepted definition of economic freedom Rabushka’s combination of four central elements of economic liberty are considered the gold standard: 1) secure property rights; 2) voluntary exchange of individuals within and across borders; 3) absence of governmental control of the terms of transactions of individuals; 4) “freedom from governmental expropriation of property (e.g., by confiscatory taxation or unanticipated inflation)” (Hanke and Walters 1997, pp. 120–121). All but the first element (secure right to property) emphasizes the absence of restrictions by governments, not positive rights like a minimum social condition or a clean environment, or freedom of coalition. Quite to the contrary: legal rights to form trade unions and mandated minimum wages, for example, are considered restrictions of economic freedom because they impede the prize mechanism entrepreneurs depend on to fulfill their function in the economic system. The terms of transactions of individuals are subject to undesired external influence if trade unions determine the prize of labor rather than shifting conditions of supply and demand. The Economic Freedom of the World Index is composed of measures in five areas: 1. Size of Government (four components) 2. Legal System and Property Rights (nine components) 3. Sound Money (four components)

118

D. Plehwe

4. Freedom to trade internationally (four components and several sub-components) 5. Regulation (three components and many sub-components) (Source: www.fraserinstitute.org/economic-freedom/approach) According to the producers only “hard data” from third party sources is used to assess each of the five components (Murphy 2016, p. 72). Apart from all the problems and issues involved in the notion of “hard data” and the ways in which qualitative information is turned into quantitative measures (commensuration), the Fraser system relies on dedicated neoliberal networks. Local think tanks assist in the collection of data. The local partners are part of the global neoliberal networks of think tanks founded or directed by Mont Pèlerin Society members. The neoliberal thought collective behind the Economic Freedom Index thus can draw on a dedicated capacity that has been developed over several decades. A joint global project like the Economic Freedom Index in turn reinforces the thought style, which sustains the sprawling communities of neoliberal circles across the world. In each country, neoliberal think tanks use the event of the publication of the global index (numbers are news!) to report on the status of the own country in comparison to others, to promote reforms needed to improve the position, or to oppose reforms that would move countries in the opposite direction. Arguably as important as specific measures and valuations are in many policy conflicts in the area of economic and social policy making of course has been the overall message of the Economic Freedom Indexes: economic liberalization will be economically beneficial, support entrepreneurship and growth. Regardless of significant qualifications, academic studies that employ the Economic Freedom Index are held to confirm this expectation (de Haan et al. 2006). It remains unclear, however, why growth rates were higher across the OECD world and the Global South during the time of welfare state expansion and planning than during the recent era of welfare state retrenchment. The key question of economic freedom for who is also avoided if survey data are used for quantitative correlation exercises that neglect questions and issues of (re-)distribution. Mont Pèlerin Society members themselves took stock of the impact of the Fraser Economic Freedom Index at the Chattanooga regional meeting in 2003. Among the highlights reported were increasing media coverage of the Economic Freedom Index by quality journals like the Economist, increasing reliance of professional economists on the index data in academic journals, new software projects to make easier use of the data, regional spin off projects in China and North America, a better understanding of the link between institutional environment and investment, and, last not least, a number of individual country examples of policy

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

119

impact (Gwartney and Lawson 2003). The project since has expanded to cover more developing regions like the Arab World. Covering OECD countries only, a new set of data has been arranged to cover earlier periods in time in order to claim a more comprehensive set of data (Prados de la Escosura 2016). The history of this global effort to promote neoliberal understanding of economic has been discussed by MPS member Steve Hanke and his co-author Stephen Walters (Hanke and Walters 1997). Unlike competitiveness indexes like the Global Competitiveness Index put together by the World Economic Forum, Economic Freedom indexes do not aim at appraising endowments and infrastructures relevant for planning and forecasting. All measures are about institutions that can be changed by political means, explain Hanke and Walters. The economic freedom index endeavor has been conceived and developed as a comprehensive tool to promote neoliberal reforms. Apart from the strategic effort of the neoliberal thought collectives to intervene in political reform struggles the economic freedom index and subsequent efforts emanating from different institutional sources (the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index in particular) produce a notion of global similarity. The commensuration activity involved establishes each country as a unit that can be compared according to the criteria set by the neoliberal thought collective. The index and ranking tool thus becomes a meta-policy instrument. Not only the production of numerical hierarchy according to which the best country is the one that conforms most closely to the notions of neoliberal ideas of economic freedom, but the communication of theories regarding the institutional competitiveness of countries and regions can be considered an astonishing accomplishment, constantly sustaining and reproducing the neoliberal style of reasoning. Although the strategic tools developed by the neoliberal thought collectives around the Fraser Institute in Canada and by the Heritage Foundation pale in significance in comparison to the ease of doing business index of the World Bank (Doshi et al. 2019), the ideas and the influence of the Economic Freedom Index clearly matter. The World Bank index is significantly based on the ideas of the neoliberal intellectuals behind the Economic Freedom Indexes. Public choice ideas and rational choice based institutional design relevant to the Economic Freedom Indexes are clearly shaping Simeon Djankov’s economic understanding (compare the Ease of doing business background paper by Djankov et al. 2002). This Bulgarian economist is one of three frounders and arguably the key intellectual behind the World Bank Index. He has also been part of the Atlas network close to the Mont Pèlerin Society. In terms of the relation between the Economic Freedom movement and the Ease of doing Business Index we might think of the World Bank Index as a global institutionalization of the thought style promoted

120

D. Plehwe

by the thought collective behind the Economic Freedom Index. Unsurprisingly, many countries were opposed to the ways in which labor market flexibility were positively measured in the World Bank Index, which led to the removal of this part from the ranking. Countries like China and development NGOs like Oxfam have also attacked the World Bank Index, which in turn is defended by Steve Hanke of the Cato Institute, part of the neoliberal thought collective behind the economic freedom movement (Hanke 2013). For those who are interested in finding out the extent to which countries have been transformed by neoliberal ideas the tools inadvertently offer utility as well. In conjunction with information from competing indexes we can learn about the extent to which countries have driven neoliberal reform processes and where we can observe moves in different direction or setbacks from neoliberal perspective. Obviously scholars should not buy into the positivist notion of truth provided by the index numbers, but the social construction of neoliberal observation tools is quite useful also for progressive efforts to gain a better idea about the advances or retrenchments in the neoliberalization process. The data provided by the Economic Freedom indexes and the related World Bank Ease of doing business index are also useful to point researchers to the conflicts and social struggles over neoliberal reforms. Together with other sources they help us to gauge the changes in the condensed power relations that make up the more or less neoliberal state of the time.

6 Conclusions In this chapter we have observed the controversies around the existence of neoliberalism to more clearly delineate the neoliberal core. In addition to key concepts like property rights, freedom of contract and rule of law protecting property owners from discrete political intervention the opposition to both laisser faire liberalism and collectivism has been identified as central to the history and variety of neoliberalism. Much like the perspectives at evidence in competing projects of social liberals and socialists, capitalism is no longer regarded as an inherently stable economic system and consequently needs to be secured. Neoliberalism competed with other ideologies after WWII on the ways in which capitalist democracies are reformed and forged the principled opposition to the welfare state. At the international level, neoliberals aimed at political arrangements that likewise protect property owners and promote economic globalization. Karl Mannheim’s concepts of thought collectives and thought styles have been employed to study the complexity of neoliberalism, and to avoid the reductionism that continues to characterize much of the debate on apparently isolated neoliberal

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

121

schools of thought like Austrian economics, ordoliberalism, or public choice. Michael Mann’s understanding of ideology as a transnational source of power has been used to inform a case study of the institutionalization of neoliberal ideas. The economic freedom movement is a thought collective growing out of the organized neoliberal circles of the Mont Pèlerin Society and related think tank networks of the Atlas Economic Freedom foundation. It created the Economic Freedom Index in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, which was designed to provide a neoliberal global performance indicator capable to direct political reforms in partial opposition to Freedom House and the Human Development Index, for example. The Economic Freedom Index ideas have subsequently been institutionalized at the global level in the framework of the World Bank’s ease of doing business index. Neoliberal thought collectives thus can be observed to reproduce a global thought style, which in turn helps sustaining the sprawling neoliberal networks in civil society and government institutions around the globe. This chapter provides evidence of the ways in which erstwhile oppositional ideas in international development economics have become part of the core institutions of global economic and political governance. In order to still better understand this process, it is necessary to study the ways in which earlier opponents to neoliberal transformation have become promoters, actively driving neoliberalization processes in financial, labor and social policy. Contrary to homogenizing strands of the literature on quantification it nevertheless remains important to observe the ways in which both quantification and neoliberalization have been and continue to be contested projects and processes, driven and restrained by the relative influence of competing thought styles, thought collectives and ideologies.

References Amadae, S.M. 2016. Prisoners of Reason. Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press. Bobbio, Norberto. 1994. Rechts und Links. Gründe und Bedeutungen einer politischen Unterscheidung. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag Boettke, Peter J. 2017. The Reconstruction of the Liberal Project (Presentation at the Special Meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Stockholm, November 3–5 2017). Online: https://fee.org/articles/the-reconstruction-of-the-liberal-project/. Bowman Sam. 2016. I’m a Neoliberal: Maybe You Are Too. Online: https://medium.com/@ s8mb/im-a-neoliberal-maybe-you-are-too-b809a2a588d6. Burgin, Angus. 2012. The Great Persuasion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooley, A., & Snyder, J. L. Eds. 2015. Ranking the world: grading states as a tool of global governance. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

122

D. Plehwe

De Haan, Jakob, Susanna Lundström and Jan-Egbert Sturm. 2006. Market-oriented institutions and policies and economic growth: a critical survey. In: Journal of Economic Surveys. 20(2): 157–191. Denord, Francois. 2009. French neo-liberalism and its divisionsFrom the Colloque Walter Lippmann to the 5th Republic. In: Mirowski, Phil, Plehwe, Dieter. Eds., Road from Mont Pèlerin. 45–67. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Djankov, Simeon, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer. 2002. The Regulation Of Entry. In: The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. CXVII (February): 1–37 Doshi, Rush, Kelley, Judith G., Simmons, Beth A. 2019. The Power of Ranking: the Ease of Doing Business Indicator and global Regulatory Behavior. In: International Organization 73 (Summer): 611–643. Fleck, Ludwik. 1979 [1935]. Genesis and development of a scientific fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Feulner, Edwin J. 1999. Intellectual Pilgrims. The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society. Washington DC: Heritage Foundation. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 1979 (Lectures at the College de France). New York: Palgrave. Freeden, Michael. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geuens, Geoffrey. 2010. Les médiamorphoses du (néo)libéralisme. Propagande, idéologie dominante, pensée unique. Quaderni. http://journals.openedition.org/quaderni/484. Gwartney, James, Robert Lawson and Walter Block. Eds. 1996. Economic Freedom of the World, 1975–1995. Vancouver: Fraser Institute. Gwartney, James D., Lawson, Robert A. 2003. The Impact of the Economic Freedom of the World Index. Regional Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society Chattanooga. Tennessee, USA, September 18–21, 2003. Stanford: Hoover Institution, Mont Pelerin Files. Hammet, William. 1988. Discussion of Chapter 4, Preliminary Definition of Economic Freedo, by Alvin Rabushka. In: Walter E. Block, ed., Economic Freedom: Toward a Theory of Measurement. Proceedings of an International Symposium. Vancouver: Fraser Institute. Hanke, Steve H. 2013. “Doing Business, Singapore Style.” www.cato.org/publications/ commentary/doing-business-singapore-style, last access October 9, 2019. Hanke, Steve H., Walters, Stephen J. K. 1997. Economic Freedom, Prosperity, and Equality: A Survey. In: Cato Journal, Vol. 17(2): 117–146, 120-121. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Hayek von, F.A. 1948[1934]. Individualism: True and False, in F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order. 1–32. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. 1960. Postscript: Why I Am Not a Conservative. In: Hayek, F.A. The Constitution of Liberty. 519–533. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F.A., 1994, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue. In: Kresge, S.; L. Wenar. Eds. ???? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. JACKSON, Ben. 2010. At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, 1930–1947. The Historical Journal, 53(1): 129–151. Knafo, Samuel; Dutta, Sahil Jai; Lane, Richard & Wyn-Jones, Steffan. 2019. The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism. New Political Economy, 24 (2): 235–251.

7  Revisiting and Revising World-Wide Neoliberalism

123

Kolev, Stefan. 2018. Yet Another Neoliberal School? Geneva and Its Ordoglobalists. ORDO Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, (69): 523–528. Lukes, Steven. 1974. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan. Mann, Michael. 2012[1986]. The Source of Power. Volume 1. A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Michael. 2013. The Sources of Social Power. Volume 4. Globalizations, 1945–2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1922. Über die Eigenart kultursoziologischer Erkenntnis. In: Mannheim, Karl (1980) Strukturen des Denkens (Eds. David Kettler, Volker Meja u. Nico Stehr). 33–154. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Mannheim, Karl. 1925. ‘The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge’. In: Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. 1952. Ed. Paul Kecskemeti. 134–190. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mannheim, Karl. 1928[1964]. Das Problem der Generationen. In: Karl Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie. Auswahl aus dem Werk. Ed. Kurt H. Wolff. 509–565. Neuwied/ Berlin: Luchterhand. Marshall, T.H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class. In T.H. Marshall, Ed. Citizenship and Social Class and other Essays. 1–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGoey, Linsey, 2018, The Unknowers. How Strategic Ignorance rules the world. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press. Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter. 2009. Eds. The Road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mirowski, Phil, Plehwe, Dieter. 2015. Preface. In: Mirowski, Phil, Plehwe, Dieter. Eds. Road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McLean, Nancy. 2017. Democracy in Chains. The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Melbourne: Scribe. Murphy, Ryan H., 2016, Measuring Economic Freedom: A Comparison of Two Major Sources: A Comment. Journal of Private Enterprise. 31(3): 69–91. Ötsch, Walter. 2009. Mythos Markt: Marktradikale Propaganda und ökonomische Theorie. Marburg: metropolis Verlag. Porter, T.W. 1995. Trust in Numbers. The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Prados de la Escosura, L. 2016, Economic Freedom in the Long Run: Evidence from OECD Countries (1850–2007), Economic History Review 69. Schulz-Forberg, Hagen. 2020. Embedded Early Neoliberalism: Transnational Origins of the Agenda of Liberalism Reconsidered. In: Plehwe, D.; Slobodian, Q., Mirowski, P. Eds. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. London: Verso. Seldon, Arthur. 1957. Pensions in a free society. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Seliger, Martin, 1976, Ideology and Politics. New York: The Free Press Slobodian, Quinn, Plehwe, Dieter, 2020b, Neoliberals Against Europe, in: Callison, William, Manfredi, Zachary. Eds. Mutant Neoliberalism. 89–111. New York: Fordham University Press. Slobodian, Quinn. 2018. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

124

D. Plehwe

Slobodian, Quinn, Plehwe, Dieter, 2020a, Introduction. In: Plehwe, D.; Slobodian, Q.; Mirowski, P.; Eds. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. London: Verso. Walker, Michaelk. 1991. Setting the Scene: A Discussion of Freedom, Democracy and Economic Welfare. In: Block, Walter E. Ed., Economic Freedom: Toward a Theory of Measurement. Symposium held July 28–30, 1988. 1–8. Vancouver: Fraser Institute. Walpen. Bernhard. 2004, Die offenen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaft. Hamburg: VSA Verlag.

8

Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics Andreas Nölke

Abstract

Exportism is one of the most powerful ideologies governing the contemporary international political economy, since it has supported the stabilisation of export-driven growth models. The latter pursue a rather unbalanced combination of export-led growth with very little contribution of domestic demand. Core elements of this idea are wage restraint, undervaluation, low inflation guaranteed by independent central banks and low public expenditures. Exportism serves as an ideological glue that holds together the dominant social bloc in export-led economies, consisting of parts of unions, large parts of companies in the production sector as well their corresponding banks, political parties and independent central banks. Exportism, however, comes as a cost, because the pursuit of an unbalanced export-led model leads to economies that are very sensitive to changes in the global economy and can become easy victims of protectionist developments. At the same time, they are unstable because they lack a healthy dose of domestic demand that is typical for more balanced economic models. In recent times, exportism has also become a core ideology with regard to international institutions, given the German success of inscribing exportist ideas into the institutions governing the stabilisation of the Eurozone. Exportism, however, is not a purely European phenomenon but is also to be found in East Asia. In general, the radical pursuit of exportism leads to a rather unstable global economy, because it depends on the ability and

A. Nölke (*)  Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_8

125

126

A. Nölke

willingness of other economies to run permanent deficits—factors that were available for many decades but increasingly look fragile since the establishment of the Trump administration in the US. Keywords

Exportism · Ideology · Comparative capitalism · Inflation fears · Undervaluation regime · Wage restraint · Austerity · Dominant social bloc · Eurozone crisis

1 Introduction Some 10 years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, the Southern European economies of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece are still suffering from the effects of the crisis, with real wages still below pre-crisis levels. (Lübker and Schulten 2017). Stagnating or even falling real wages are also responsible for the yellow vest's revolt and have led to massive social tensions in France. While many economic data for Germany look much better, around 40 % of the population earn even lower real wages than in the early 1990s (DIW 2017). While much has been written about the economic causes of these highly problematic developments—with regard to the introduction of the Euro, wage restraint in Germany and the demand-compressing policies that have been pursuit in order to stabilize the common currency—much less is known about the ideology that holds these developments together. It is the core argument of this article that we cannot explain recent developments in the Eurozone—and, to a more limited degree, in other world regions— without taking into account its ideological foundations. Moreover, the dominant ideological account of recent developments in the Eurozone with their focus on austerity (Blyth 2013) provides only an incomplete picture. A more thorough investigation into the origin of the recent troubles of the Eurozone instead leads us to single out the German ideology of “exportism” as the main ideological foundation for the developments depicted above. As will be discussed in more detail below, exportism can be identified as an ideology in the sense of a set of generalizing ideas designed to explain social reality. Moreover, it clearly tries to justify and guide political action into a certain direction (Giesen 2004, p. 10). More specifically, this contribution pursues a Gramscian understanding of ideologies that most importantly have the function to sustain the dominance of a (cross-class) social bloc in a society by becoming culturally hegemonic, i.e.an ideology is not open to ideological debates but assumed as being common sense (Lears 1985, pp. 568–572). A culturally hegemonic ideology is not openly

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

127

contested, possibly with very minor exceptions at the fringes of a society. Thus, my claim is that the ideology of exportism has become culturally hegemonic within German society and, via the institutions for rescuing the common currency, is striving to extend its reach to the wider Eurozone. By focusing on exportism, we can more clearly grasp the direction of both German and Eurozone economic policies than by the widely used notions of austerity or ordoliberalism. In order to support this argument, I will highlight the theoretical background of the notion of exportism (Sect. 2), before disentangling the core elements of this ideology (Sect. 3). Next, I will contrast exportism to competing concepts such as financialization, ordoliberalism, or neoliberalism (Sect. 4). Subsequently, I will highlight the contemporary function of the ideology, before identifying more specifically the social basis of the latter (Sect. 5). In order to support the claim that this ideology can be blamed with the highly problematic developments in the Eurozone over the last decades, I will identify some of its social and economic consequences on the national level (Sect. 6), before highlighting its generalization in the Euro system rescue regime (Sect. 7). Finally, I will look at instances of exportism outside of the Eurozone, most notably in East Asia, in order to identify more specifically the conditions under which the ideology can flourish (Sect. 8).

2 Comparative Capitalism, Growth Models and the Role of Ideology The notion of exportism can only be understood in the context of recent developments in comparative capitalism scholarship (Bruff et al. 2013; Nölke 2016, pp. 145–147). Traditionally, comparative capitalism (CC) was dominated by the Varieties of Capitalism-approach that juxtaposed Coordinated Market Economies (CME), modulated on the example of Germany, with Liberal Market Economies (LME), modulated upon the example of the United States. Post-VoC research has overcome this increasingly stale juxtaposition by developing additional types of capitalism and incorporating the opportunity of change within these types of capitalisms. A third generation of comparative capitalism scholarship has taken these developments a step further, by highlighting the potential for the existence of different growth models within one variety of capitalism. A core factor for these developments has been the incorporation of the demand dimension into comparative capitalism research that traditionally has only looked at the supply side. The macroeconomic growth model perspective distinguishes between two basic growth models in the contemporary Eurozone: one debt-led (mainly in southern Europe) and one export-led (Germany and its periphery). In contrast to

128

A. Nölke

the stability assumption of the varieties of capitalism approach, the growth model perspective assumes less stability and allows for transitions from one growth model to another. In the case of OECD area this refers for the shift from a common wage-led model during Fordism to the two alternative contemporary models mentioned above (Baccaro and Pontusson 2016, 2018). Usually, this recent shift of emphasis in comparative capitalism is only been discussed with regard to economic developments. The focus mainly is on ­macro-economic data and the juxtaposition of different options for demand composition. More recently, however, this research framework has taken a “political” turn by looking at the balance of power between social-economic groups in a given society (Baccaro 2019). The core argument is that each growth model has to be based on a dominant social bloc in order to be stable (Amable and Palombarini 2009). Generally, it will be favourable to the members of this bloc and less favourable to those social groups that are not part of it. An export-led growth model, for example, favours other social economic interest than a domestic wageled growth model. Whereas the former favours both capitalists and workers in ­export-oriented sectors, the latter is more favourable to those social groups in the economic sectors that are protected from international competition. Given that growth models do not always have to be stable and not all social groups will be completely aware of the growth model most favourable to their interests, this raises the question how certain growth models become politically (and economically) dominant or even consensual. From a neo-Gramscian perspective, the notion of cultural hegemony is paramount for any answer to this question (Lears 1985). By being able to convince large parts of the population about the usefulness of a specific growth model for the economy as a whole, ideologies can play an extremely important role in forming and stabilizing a dominant social bloc. In this logic, ideologies are an important glue for keeping the various social groups together that form the dominant social bloc for the specific growth model. The study of ideologies therefore has to complement the study of (supply side) types of capitalism, (demand side) growth models and the (political) study of socio-economic groups supporting a specific growth model.

3 What is Exportism? Core Concepts of the Ideology The idea of exportism is focused on the perceived need to pursue a high level of industrial exports in order to have a viable economic model. A positive trade balance is considered to be as important an indicator for economic success as high

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

129

economic growth or low unemployment. The focus is on the export of industrialized goods, not on primary goods, although the latter implicitly could contribute to a positive trade balance. At the same time, the possibility of a viable growth model based on domestic consumption is reneged, at least implicitly. In a country where exportism is the ideology supporting the dominant social bloc, a positive trade balance is being staunchly defended in political debates, even if this balance is heavily criticized by international organizations or other countries’ governments. The statistics of the globally leading exporters are frequently mentioned in domestic press, in case of Germany including the unofficial title of a global export champion (Export-Weltmeister). International economic competitiveness is the most important performance standard in most economic policy discussions, in contrast to alternative concepts such as low inequality, low unemployment, high growth or high real wages. Interestingly, the idea of exportism implicitly is mainly based on the notion of competitiveness via lower prices, much less on competitiveness via superior products, even if the export performance of a country dominated by exportist ideas can at least in part be based on product quality (De Ville and Vermeiren 2016). However, it is highly unlikely that a whole economy could thrive on the basis of superior products in all economic sectors. And if export success is based on only a few economic sectors with highly specialized products, it would fail to serve as a general idea that is able to produce an intellectual hegemony. Therefore exportism is much more strongly linked to price competitiveness than to product quality competitiveness. Next to these general concerns, the idea of exportism contains a number of more specific concerns regarding issues of economic policy. Four concepts are key: 1) wage restraint, 2) low inflation as stipulated by an independent central bank, 3) limited public expenditures (austerity) and 4) an undervalued currency. Given that price competitiveness is portrayed to play a major role with regard to export success, wage restraint is considered to be a core ingredient for any successful export economy. While this particularly comes to the fore in a situation of economic crisis, even in periods of high growth we will find references to a potential loss of economic competitiveness by too strongly rising wages. Less clear is the way how wage restraint is being put into place. This could either be based on a conscious decision by well-organized labour unions and workers more general (voluntary wage restraint), but also on weakened unions and workers under threat of losing their livelihood. Moreover, wages are not only important with regard as input factors for specific export products, but also with regard to the general development of the wage level and the related price level. Here, exportism is based on the strong correlation between the development of the wage level and of inflation, at least within

130

A. Nölke

the Eurozone (Bobeica et al. 2019). For an export-led model to work, it therefore is necessary to control not only wage developments in companies in the export sectors, but also in the economy as a whole. Wage increases in other sectors and the associated inflation can also lead to a loss of competitiveness, in particular by triggering demands for higher wages in the export sectors, in order to keep up with rising costs of living. A very important instrument in this context are independent central banks with the mandate to keep inflation down at all costs. Labour unions in non-internationally exposed sectors considering fighting for strong wage increases are then deterred by the central bank's threat of tightening monetary policy in the event of inflation and, thus, risking higher unemployment. In the same way, exportism also prescribes restraint with regard to public expenditures, i.e. public sector wages and investments. Strongly increasing wages in the public sector could lead to undesirable inflationary developments by creating incentives to increase wages in the export sector as well and thereby leading to the loss of its price competitiveness. Large public investments could also contribute to the latter, for example by leading to the need to increase taxes. In order to avoid the latter, high levels of public debts have to be avoided as well (austerity). Finally, price competitiveness in an international perspective also depends on the valuation of the domestic currency. Following the ideology of exportism, an undervalued currency is desirable to maximize exports, even if this leads to lower real wages. The inflation risk of an undervalued currency is controlled by an independent central bank with a clear mandate for a low inflation rate, which will intervene if inflationary tendencies get out of hand. Countries governed by an exportist ideology therefore will seek an undervaluation regime for their own currency (Höpner 2019).

4 Exportism and Alternative Economic Ideologies Exportism is by far not the only powerful economic idea at work in modern societies. Some observers might even argue that there is a high degree of overlap between exportism and other contemporary economic ideas, such as neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, monetarism, austerity or financialization. A closer consideration, however, demonstrates that this is rarely the case. Many accounts of contemporary economic ideas focus on neoliberalism as a dominating ideology in modern societies (Biebricher 2015). However, neoliberalism, usually linked to the preference for the rule of free markets, is a much broader concept, which is not necessarily linked to the stabilisation of

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

131

e­xport-driven growth models. Neoliberalism can also work with consumptionbased models, particularly with credit-based consumption. It does not privilege any specific growth model. A more interesting case is the ideology of ordoliberalism. After the onset of the Eurozone crisis we have seen a renewed interest into this concept (Young 2015). The main reason for the renewed interest into ordoliberalism is the powerful role of the German government during the stabilization of the Eurozone and the assumption that German government policies are mainly motivated by ordoliberal ideas (see Sect. 7 below). In fact, there is one parallel between the idea of exportism defined above and the much more comprehensive intellectual enterprise of ordoliberalism. The core commonality here is based on the ordoliberal insistence on the importance of rules that have to be followed quite strictly in order for competitive markets to be working well—instead of continuously being modified or even misused by politicians. The focus on strict rules can be linked to the importance of an independent central bank and a clear inflation target. Other aspects of exportism, however, have no clear similarity with ordoliberal ideas. Ordoliberalism does neither necessarily imply wage restraint, nor an undervalued currency or low public expenditures. Exportism also is quite different from the ideology of monetarism, as developed by Milton Friedman. It shares with the latter the strong preference for low inflation rates and an independent central bank, but is much broader with its prominent incorporation of wage-setting institutions, currency relations and fiscal policy. Similarly, austerity is a much narrower ideology than exportism, since it is does neither refer to currency relations, nor to inflation targets. Other contemporary economic ideologies explicitly compete with the concept of exportism. Particularly the ideology of financialization often runs counter to exportist ideas. The notion of financialization usually refers to an empirical development, i.e. “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” (Epstein 2005). However, given that this empirical development is not a natural law, but rather is based on political decisions (Nölke et al. 2013), we can also identify an ideology of financialization, e.g. based on the principles of shareholder value and of the “democratization” of finance. Starting in the late 1970s it has become one of the most powerful ideologies that has transformed modern economies. Its main influence has been exercised in the ­Anglo-American economies, but it has also had some, albeit less pronounced, influence on Southern Europe (Gambarotto and Solari 2015). The focus of financialization on creating economic growth through the expansion of the financial sector and, in particular, on significantly increasing lending to private households is clearly

132

A. Nölke

at odds with some core tenets of exportism. More easy access to credit ceteris paribus leads to the stimulation of consumption, to higher wages and to higher inflation. In contrast, I would rather argue that there has been a natural symbiosis between exportism and financialization as ideologies behind contemporary European economic systems, where financialization stimulated growth in debt-driven growth models that in turn was exploited by export-led growth models, at least until the point where the long-term sustainability of debt-driven growth models had been cast into doubt by the global financial crisis.

5 Social Forces Supporting Exportism As mentioned above, the main function of exportism is to hold together the social bloc that supports the export-led growth model by generalizing the ideology so that it seems reasonable for society as a whole. In order to identify the social forces that are kept together by the idea of exportism we can draw on previous work by Martin Höpner (2019), who identified the social bloc supporting the German undervaluation regime. With undervaluation regime he refers to the fact that Germany is characterized by a steering of “economic behaviour towards deterioration of the real exchange rate and thereby towards export surplus accumulation” (Höpner 2019, p. iii). A focus on undervaluation is an important element of the exportist ideology as depicted above. Moreover, undervaluation systematically leads to an ­export-driven growth model. Therefore, we can assume that the forces supporting an undervaluation regime are quite similar to those supporting exportism. However, we need to slightly update Höpner’s accord, because the latter focuses on the German economic policy under Bretton Woods, i.e. before the most recent initiatives for European currency coordination. The first actor identified by Höpner as a staunch supporter of an undervaluation regime is the German Bundesbank. It features a very strong preference for low inflation and has an extraordinary degree of independence, even if compared with other European countries. While its distaste for inflation officially is being referred to the hyperinflation experience of the 1920s, the Bundesbank does not shy away from openly linking its strict disinflation policy to the support of German exports (Höpner 2019). The second social force supporting an undervaluation regime is German industry. German industry and its elite association the Federation of German industries (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, BDI) consistently fought for a low inflation regime and against a revaluation of the mark. While this preference is very consistent for export industries, it is rather surprising that Höpner

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

133

did not find any contestation of this perspective by either domestically-oriented or import-oriented companies (Höpner 2019). Equally remarkable is the stance of German banks during the period investigated by Höpner. They clearly sided with industry in their preference for low inflation and undervaluation. While the first is well understandable (low inflation helps to prevent spreads between assets and liabilities), the bank’s choice for undervaluation is less obvious, given that undervaluation could lead to an import of inflation. Höpner explains the close liaison between German banks and industry by pointing to the very close ties between German banks and industry due to their “Hausbanken” function and massive shareholding in industry (“Deutschland AG”). However, this leads to the question whether we can generalize this positioning in the long term, also for periods after the dissolution of the “Deutschland AG” during the 1990s and 2000s. Quite interesting also is the positioning of the trade unions with regard to exportism. Höpner demonstrates in his study of the 1950s and 1960s that the trade unions clearly operated within the exportist frame with regard to their preference for low inflation as a precondition for export success, with a much less obvious position with regard to undervaluation. Again, this survey needs to be updated in future research, also taking into account that we need to distinguish between labour unions in internationally-exposed and in sheltered sectors of the economy; the latter should have a much more limited preference for exportist ideas. At the same time, a more fine-grained study needs to distinguish between labour representation on the company and on the aggregate level; exportism is probably more pronounced on the company level, given the more direct exposition to international competition on the latter. Finally, Höpner highlights the broad societal support for undervaluation in the German 1950s and 1960s by highlighting the lack of contestation of related ideas among political parties. Höpner demonstrates that both Christian and social democrats, the dominating parties in Germany during the Bretton Woods regime, were broadly in favour of undervaluation, although this stance has not always been consistent over the years. Even until today, exportism has not yet been questioned as a dominant ideology by the major German parties, thereby supporting Höpners’s more specific observations for the subcomponent of undervaluation. Future research would need to generalize these observations for the other three components of exportism and update them for periods that are more recent. It would also be very useful to look at the important role of think tanks and their networks, as has been demonstrated for neoliberalism (Plehwe and Walpen 2004). For example, one proponent of exportism clearly stands out, that is the Initiative

134

A. Nölke

Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft, a very clearly exportist think tank financed by the German association of the metal industry, an industry with strong exposure to international competition.

6 Dangers of Exportism: The Case of the German Economy1 As in case of other economic ideologies, the implementation of exportism comes with strings attached. The potential disadvantages of the pursuit of exportist ideas can best be identified in the study of the German economy. The German export dependence is highly unusual for an economy of this size. Small economies very often have large export shares in relation to the size of the overall economy, but larger economies tend to concentrate more on the domestic economy. Although it is difficult to identify an indicator that accurately indicates the degree of export dependency, the share of exports in gross domestic product (GDP) is a rough measure for this purpose. In Germany, exports today amount to almost 50 percent of GDP, more than 50 % higher than in France or Italy (Nölke 2019, p. 64). With a current account surplus of over 300 billion dollars, Germany even overtakes the much larger China as a country with the largest export surplus. Germany’s export surplus contributes significantly to the global imbalances regularly criticized by global economic institutions as the IMF and OECD, as well as by the European Central Bank and the European Commission. Countries with a permanently high export surplus force other countries into indebtedness in order to finance their imports. A surplus in one country always means a deficit in other countries (as long as we cannot export to the moon). This doesn´t really matter as long as surplus countries occasionally also become deficit countries, as was the case with Germany in earlier times. Countries, however, that permanently realise high surpluses destabilise the economies of their trading partners in the long run. The political significance of these developments has become more than obvious in view of President Trump’s decision to punish Germany for its permanently trade high surplus. Current tensions between the US and Germany also show that a high degree of export orientation makes countries politically vulnerable to blackmail by their trading partners, as demonstrated by President Trump who linked German exports with an increase of German payments for NATO.

1This

section of the chapter is based on Nölke (2018, pp. 122–126).

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

135

The pursuit of an exportist ideology not only leads to problematical results in a global perspective, but even much more so in a European one. Studies on the causes of the Eurozone crises have demonstrated that Germany has exported most of its (potential) unemployment into other countries of the Eurozone, thereby destabilizing the European unification project (Nölke 2017). As unit labour costs in Germany have risen much more slowly than in other countries of the Eurozone and the latter are no longer in a position to devalue their currency anymore, German companies have increased their market shares to the disadvantage of companies from other countries of the Eurozone. At the same time, Germany did not import enough from these countries due to weak domestic demand based on the pursuit of exportism via wage restraint and austerity, the latter also supported by a type of fiscal federalism where most expenditures accrue on the Länder level, whereas the Bund controls the most important sources of funding. These developments led to a fundamental de-industrialisation in Southern Europe, the creation of ever-larger Eurozone rescue funds and to increasing social and political tensions in the European Union. In German domestic debates, the aggressive pursuit of exportism frequently is defended by pointing towards the need to accumulate financial assets in an aging society in order to pay for a large retirement wave with a decreasing amount of working population (e.g. Steltzner 2014). However, this expectation may turn out to be futile. Studies of the returns of the German assets financed by the balance of payment surpluses have shown that, for example, about 20 % of the surpluses that accumulated between 2000 and 2012 have been lost, an amount of about 270 billion euros (Klär et al. 2013). Germany thus is wasting a large part of its economic output, which could be much better used for consumption of imported goods or for domestic infrastructure investments and private sector productivity increases. Moreover, the idea that Germany could now save for an aging society is probably not realistic as it assumes that surpluses will be turned into deficits—a highly unrealistic assumption in the foreseeable future—and that countries with trade deficits today will be able to reimburse German claims when German pensioners need them. Particularly with regard to Southern Europe, this assumption seems to be highly overoptimistic. What is more, German assets abroad are mainly held by the highest income segments of the German population and will therefore be of use to large sections of the German population for old-age protection. Moreover, German under-consumption and under-investment driven by exportist ideology have also led to a deformation of the German financial sector, which has increasingly concentrated on risky investments abroad, instead of lending to German consumers or companies (Braun and Deeg 2018). The strong dependence of the German economy on exports also represents a major risk

136

A. Nölke

during a future global economic crisis because it makes the German economy heavily dependent on developments of global markets. The exportist German economy is highly vulnerable towards developments that neither German business nor German politicians can influence. While the German economy has not felt the massive risks that go hand-in-hand with exportism in recent years, it is very likely that it will do so in the near future. Over the last months, a number of developments have accumulated to become an essential threat for German exports both to Europe and globally. Brexit is the most obvious case. The most fundamental challenge for German exportism, however, stems from the possibility of a wave of global trade protectionism that may be triggered by the Trump government. German exports could even become a tragic case due to the strong focus of the German economy on automobile production. Putting most eggs into one basket always is a dangerous strategy. This is even more so if an industry is highly constrained in certain regions, as is the case with German automobile production cantered in Bavaria, Swabia and around Wolfsburg. About one third of German expenditures on research and development are spent in the automobile sector. If this sector gets into difficulties, the German economy will be hit much harder than a more balanced economy. And currently the traditional car production is confronted with major challenges, the Diesel scandal on the one side and automatic driving, electro mobility and the sharing economic on the other side. German exportism combined with a strong focus on automobile production could thus make German economy to the “sick man of Europe” (again) in the near future. Finally, exportism is not only an economic strategy that is highly risky and possibly not able to reap its rewards with regard to financial investment abroad but also has massive negative implications for large parts of domestic society. The German export success of the last decades was based in large parts on the fact that German business did not raise wages in a way that would have been in line with productivity developments. As discussed above, wage restraint is a major ingredient of exportism. The same is true for social security systems where major reforms—such as the Hartz reforms and the reduction of pension entitlements— have been motivated by exportist ideologies. Correspondingly, labour—at least outside of the centres of export production—and social security recipients have been the most obvious victims of exportism. However, in a broader perspective, the German economy also traded away considerable economic growth potential in those sectors of the economy that are shielded from international competition and would have benefited from higher wages and social security payments. Domestic losers of exportism are mainly to be found in the services sector, but also in the production of goods for domestic demand.

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

137

7 The Generalisation of Exportism via International Institutions: Eurozone Rescue Policies Traditionally, the discussion of ideologies and their functions for attaining cultural hegemony has focused on domestic politics. Robert Cox (1996), however, has demonstrated that similar phenomena can be identified with regard to world politics. More specifically, economic ideologies often develop their most important impact in global politics via their incorporation into international institutions. This has been forcefully demonstrated for the case of embedded liberalism and the post-war economic order (Ruggie 1982), as well as the later case of disciplinary neoliberalism enshrined in the European Union since the 1990s (Gill 1995). Recently, exportism has found a similar institutional support, by becoming incorporated in the Eurozone’s rescue policies. As discussed above, the national economies of the Eurozone traditionally are very different with regard to their most important economic institutions. German exportism coexisted with debt-driven economic models in Southern Europe for many years. However, the global financial crisis has led to a fundamental revision with regard to the provision of credit to the Southern European economies and, correspondingly, to their collapse. In order to stabilise these economies, the European Union has developed a Eurozone rescue regime, starting with the first bilateral credits for Greece in April 2010 (Nölke 2019, pp. 66–69). Since 2012, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) has become the most important fund for the support of Southern European economies. The latter have been provided with credit, against economic conditionalities. Crucially, these conditionalities follow the ideas of exportism by focusing on austerity in public budgets and wage restraint in the private sector. Following the preferences of the German government and its allies in Northern Europe, the Southern European economies are meant to be remodelled according to the German example of an export-led economy in order to enable them to pay back stabilisation credits and to develop export surpluses. Germany had already been able to implement some core tenets of exportist ideas in the treaties accompanying the introduction of the common currency. Next to the establishment of a highly independent central bank and a low inflation target, the Stability and Growth Pact in 1997 implies a limit of yearly public deficits to 3 % and the maximum volume of public deficits towards 60 % of GDP. These rules, however, neither have been fully implemented, nor have they been complemented by other core tenets of exportism. This has changed after 2010. Comprehensive regulations for modelling the European economies around exportist lines

138

A. Nölke

have been included in the so-called “six pack” and “two pack” in 2011, including not only austerity policies for public budgets, but also wage restraint via labour market liberalisations. Moreover, Germany succeeded in forcing most European member states to implement a “debt brake” into their constitutions, nowadays a precondition in order to access ESM funds in case of an emergency. German exportist ideas were less successful with regard to the ECB monetary policy that has been more expansionary than desirable from an exportist perspective. However, in a wider perspective, these policies have stabilised the exportist model pursued by the Eurozone economies, given that it has prevented a collapse of the common currency and that has led to an undervaluation of the Euro, thereby supporting Eurozone exports. All in all, the remodelling of the Southern European economies after the German blueprint has been successful in turning the export deficits of the latter into surpluses, except for Greece (Nölke 2019, p. 68). Whether or not the generalisation of exportism via the Eurozone’s rescue policy really was a success is the subject of heated debates. Their proponents have been pointing to increasing economic growth, a slight reduction of unemployment and the establishment of balance of payments surpluses of the Southern Eurozone during the last couple of years. Others have pointed to the high domestic costs of this austerity policy and highlight that this stabilisation has not been reached by an internal balancing of the Eurozone (with Germany pursuing less exportist strategies), but rather by a “forced structure convergence” onto the German model (Scharpf 2016). Since a strong increase in the export surplus of the Eurozone as a whole requires the willingness of other global regions to register equally high deficits, the long-term sustainability of this approach must be called into question. Another major source of the instability of this institutionalised exportism stems from the fact that the idea cannot be seen as the glue keeping together a stable dominant social bloc in Southern Europe but rather has been imposed from outside. In the long run, the implementation of Eurozone rescue policies and their conditionalities may increase the size of the dominant social bloc that favours exportist policies, but it remains doubtful whether political stability in Southern Europe will last long enough for this establishment.

8 Exportism Globally: The Case of East Asia The idea of exportism is not limited to Germany or the Eurozone. In fact, the notion of exportism was first mentioned in relation to East Asia. Scholars such as Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum have coined the notion of exportism to depict an accumulation regime has developed since the 1950s in East Asian countries such

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

139

as Korea and Taiwan (Sum 2001; Jessop and Sum 2006). In this economic model, growth is based on the leading role of an export sector, quite similar to the development of the German economy depicted above. One could even argue that both cases of export-oriented economies emerged at the same time and due to similar political reasons, since it were the US that had encouraged export orientation of these economies in the context of the cold war. Only more recently, the developmental paths of these export-led economies have departed to as certain degree, with the establishment of the Eurozone deepening the German export orientation, whereas the East Asian economies have become somewhat more balanced and derive a larger share of the economic growth from domestic consumption, inter alia based on increasing financialisation (Doucette 2018). However, in contrast to the utilisation of the notion of exportism proposed in this contribution, the debate on exportism with regard to East Asia does not refer to an economic ideology—the latter plays a surprisingly limited role in the accounts listed above—but to a complete accumulation regime. Nevertheless, it is highly likely that the pursuit of an export-driven economic model in East Asia has also been supported by exportist ideas, even though the authoritarian character of the East Asian states at that time probably required less emphasis on building a consensus through intellectual hegemony. Moreover, the coincidence of developments in East Asia and Germany leads to the question whether we can identify countries that are particularly open to the adoption of exportist ideas. One hypothesis would be that exportism is a typical strategy of late industrializing countries, while countries that act as global hegemons such as the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth century are much less inclined towards exportist ideas. Due to path dependencies, the previous late-industrializing countries remain wedded to exportist ideas even after they have matured and become quite dominant economic powers themselves. Furthermore, it might be tempting to develop a more fine-grained hypothesis linking the successful adoption of exportist ideas to the existence of favourable global economic and political conditions, as was the case with the Cold War that has been central to the rise of exportism in both Germany and East Asia. In order to be successful, exportist ideologies require the existence of economies that are willing to absorb substantial export surpluses on a permanent basis. The United States and their foreign policy priority of stabilizing major allies against Soviet influence after the Second World War therefore can be seen as a crucial prerequisite for the rise of exportism. Not all late industrialisers, however, seem to be open to the lures of exportism. Particularly very large late industrialisers such as China and India may be

140

A. Nölke

inclined to pursue a somewhat more inward-looking model, given that their large domestic markets provide the option for an alternative economic strategy (May et al. 2015). Somewhat ironically, the co-existence of countries pursuing exportist ideologies and countries less inclined to exportism is a necessary condition for exportism to work—otherwise there would be no recipient for export surpluses. At the same time, this coexistence may lead to a situation where there can hardly be an agreement on major issues of global economic regulation, given the very different preferences of exportist and non-exportist economies (Kalinowski 2013). Even worse, frustrations about deindustrialisation in countries with permanently high trade deficits may lead to the establishment of powerful populist movements that turn against trade openness altogether.

9 Conclusion Exportism is one of the most powerful ideologies governing the contemporary international political economy, since it has supported the stabilisation of ­export-driven growth models that pursue a rather unbalanced combination of export-led growth with very little contribution of domestic demand. Core elements of this idea are wage restraint, undervaluation, low inflation guaranteed by independent central banks and low public expenditures. Exportism serves as an ideological glue that holds together the dominant social bloc in export-led economies, consisting of parts of unions, large parts of companies in the production sector as well their banks, political parties and independent central banks. Exportism, however, comes as a cost, because the pursuit of an unbalanced export-led model leads to economies that are very sensitive to changes in the global economy and can become easy victims of protectionist developments. At the same time, they are unstable because they lack a healthy dose of domestic demand that is typical for more balanced economic models. In recent times, exportism has also become a core ideology with regard to international institutions, given the German success of inscribing exportist ideas into the institutions governing the stabilisation of the Eurozone. Exportism, however, is not a purely European phenomenon but is also to be found in East Asia. In general, the radical pursuit of exportism leads to a rather unstable global economy, because it depends on the ability and willingness of other economies to run permanent deficits—factors that were available for many decades but increasingly look fragile since the establishment of the Trump administration in the US.

8  Exportism as an Ideology in World Politics

141

References Amable, Bruno and Stefano Palombarini. 2009. A neorealist approach to institutional change and the diversity of capitalism. Socio-Economic Review 7: 123–143. Baccaro, Lucio. 2019. The politics of growth. Presentation. https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Institut_der_deutschen_Wirtschaft/Veranstaltungen/2019/Vortrag_ Lucio_Baccaro_Politics_of_Growth.pdf. Accessed: 2 May 2019. Baccaro, Lucio and Jonas Pontusson. 2016. Rethinking comparative political economy: the growth model perspective. Politics & Society, 44: 175–207. Baccaro, Lucio and Jonas Pontusson. 2018. Comparative political economy and varieties of macroeconomics. MPIfG Discussion Paper 18/10. Biebricher, Thomas. 2015. Neoliberalismus zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: history of a dangerous idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bobeica, Elena, Matteo Ciccarelli and Isabel Vansteenkiste. 2019. The link between labor cost and price inflation in the euro area. Working Paper No. 2235. Frankfurt: European Central Bank. Braun, Benjamin and Richard Deeg. 2018. From Secret of Success to Victim of Success? German Banks and the Export-Led Growth Model. In Taking back Control: Zur globalen Finanzkrise und den Ambitionen einer Steuerung des Finanzsystems, Ed. Schader-Stiftung, 14–30. Darmstadt: Schader-Stiftung. Bruff, Ian, Matthias Ebenau, Christian May and Andreas Nölke 2013. Vergleichende Kapitalismusforschung: Stand, Perspektiven, Kritik. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Cox, Robert. 1996. Approaches to word order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Ville, Ferdi and Mattias Vermeiren. 2016. The Euro crisis and the political economy of EMU-China monetary and trade relations. Comparative European Politics 14: 572–603. DIW. 2017. Einkommensverteilung und Armutsrisiko. DIW Mitteilungen 84: 70–84. Doucette, Jamie. 2018. Flexible exportism? Situating financialization within the Korean political economy. Marxism 21 15: 248–282. Epstein, Gerald A. 2005. Financialization and the world economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Gambarotto, Francesca und Stefano Solari. 2015. The peripheralization of Southern European capitalism within the EMU. Review of International Political Economy 22: ­788-812. Giesen, Klaus-Gerd. 2004. Einleitung: Ideologien und Weltpolitik. In Ideologien in der Weltpolitik. Ed. Klaus-Gerd Giesen, 9–18. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Gill, Stephen. 1995. Globalisation, market civilisation, and disciplinary neoliberalism. Millennium 24: 399–423. Höpner, Martin. 2019. The German undervaluation regime under Bretton Woods: how Germany became the nightmare of the world economy. MPIfG Discussion Paper 19/1. Jessop, Bob and Ngai-Ling Sum. 2006. Beyond the regulation approach: putting capitalist economies in their place. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Kalinowski, Thomas. 2013. Regulating International Finance and the Diversity of Capitalism. Socio-Economic Review 11: 471–496.

142

A. Nölke

Klär, Erik, Fabian Lindner and Kenan Sehovic. 2013. Investition in die Zukunft? Zur Entwicklung des deutschen Auslandsvermögens. Wirtschaftsdienst 93: 189–197. Lears, T. J. Jackson. 1985. The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities. The American Historical Review 90: 567–593. Lübker, Malte und Thorsten Schulten. 2017. Europäischer Tarifbericht des WSI 2016/17. WSI-Mitteilungen 70: 421–431. May, Christian, Andreas Nölke und Tobias ten Brink. 2014. Institutionelle Determinanten des Aufstiegs großer Schwellenländer: eine global-politökonomische Erweiterung der “Varieties of Capitalism”. PVS Sonderheft 54: 67–94. Nölke, Andreas, Marcel Heires und Hans-Jürgen Bieling. 2013. Editorial: the politics of financialization. Competition & Change 17: 209–218. Nölke, Andreas. 2016. Economic causes of the Eurozone crisis: the analytical contribution of comparative capitalism. Socio-Economic Review 14: 141–161. Nölke, Andreas. 2017. The Euro. Academic Foresights 17. https://www.academic-foresights.com/Euro.html. Nölke, Andreas. 2018. Linkspopulär. Frankfurt: Westend. Nölke, Andreas. 2019. Die südliche Eurozone—eine vergessene Dauerkrise. Gesellschaft Wirtschaft Politik-GWP 68: 60–72. Plehwe, Dieter and Bernhard Walpen. 2004. Buena Vista Neoloberal? Eine klassentheoretische und organisationszentrierte Einführung in die transationale Welt neoliberaler Ideen. In Ideologien in der Weltpolitik. Ed. Klaus-Gerd Giesen, 49–88. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Ruggie, John W. 1982. International regimes, transactions and change: Embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order. International Organization 36: 379–415. Scharpf, Fritz. 2016. Forced structural convergence in the Eurozone—or a differentiated European monetary community. MPIfG Discussion Paper 18/1. Steltzner, Holger. 2014. Trugbild Handelsbilanz. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 10 March. Sum, Ngai-Ling. 2001. An integral approach to the Asian ‘crisis: the (dis) articulation of the production and financial (dis-) orders. Capital & Class 24: 141–166. Young, Brigitte. 2015. Introduction: the highjacking of German ordoliberalism. European Review of International Studies 2: 7–15.

9

The Transhumanist Ideology and the International Political Economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Klaus-Gerd Giesen

Abstract

This chapter examines transhumanism from the perspective of international political economy. It shows in detail that it is a true political ideology which aims at promoting a “New Human Being”. By adopting a problem solving strategy, it fractures into numerous discursive fields specifically adapted to each specific context in order to achieve it. The analysis of the transhumanist discourse shows that it comes with, and justifies an additional commodification of human life as the result of the fourth industrial revolution through a massive use of NBIC technology convergence, leading to an important break within the evolution of capitalism. Hence, transhumanism—having now reached the level of a political “grand plan”—promotes at the international level the interests of the big high-tech multinational business companies which in turn support the world-wide dissemination of the ideology. Keywords

Transhumanism · International political economy · Technology · Commodifica­ tion · Industrial revolution · NBIC

K.-G. Giesen (*)  Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_9

143

144

K.-G. Giesen

1 Introduction Only in recent years have the media and public opinion in general begun to take an interest in transhumanist ideology. Its main aim is to overcome the natural human condition through a massive use of advanced technologies. Before further clarifying the concept and its implications for the world economy, it is important to say a few words about its historical evolution. The transhumanist ideology was in fact born several decades ago, and it has already gone through several stages of development: its first manifestations date back to the early 1980s, although the adjective “transhumanist” had already been used in 1966 by the American futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, who at that time was teaching at the New School of Social Research in New York, as well as in the books published by Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (1968), and by Robert Ettinger, Man into Superman (1972). However, the first attempts at systemization of what would soon become a coherent ideological set1 came about as a result of meetings in Southern California: Esfandiary, who grew in popularity after his official name change to the mythical “FM-2030”, with artist Nancie Clark, who later under the pseudonym Natasha Vita-More authored the Transhumanist Arts Statement in 1982, John Spencer of the Space Tourism Society, and finally the British Max More (formerly Max O’Connor). With the arrival—about one decade later—of academic philosophers such as Swedish Nick Bostrom teaching at Oxford University, and Anglo-Saxons David Pearce, Richard Dawkins and James Hughes, the ideological thought reached a critical mass sufficient to also penetrate academic debate as well. At the same time, political activism was emerging, initially with journals such as Extropy (from 1988) and the Journal of Transhumanism, as well as by founding associations internationally (the Extropy Institute in 1992, as well as in 1998 the World Transhumanist Association which became Humanity + in 2008) and nationally (Technoprog in France, Associazione Italiana Transumanisti in Italy, Aleph in Sweden, Transcedo in the Netherlands, etc.), while organizing itself through multiple discussion forums and mailing lists on the Internet, as well as by the famous biannual Extro conferences.

1The

following sections are partly translated and adapted from my French text: Giesen (2018).

9  The Transhumanist Ideology and the International …

145

In recent years, transhumanism has become considerably politicized and strengthened by the foundation of the first political parties dedicated to influencing decision-making processes and political visions (the Transhumanist Party in the United States, which presented a candidate in the last presidential elections in the person of Zoltan Istvan; the party of the same name in the United Kingdom; the Transhumane Partei in Germany, etc.), by creating private universities entirely dedicated to its cause (the Singularity University founded in 2008 by Google in California; the University thecamp which recently opened in France near Aix-en-Provence), private institutes, think tanks and foundations such as the XPrize Foundation or the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, as well as many Non-Governmental Organizations.

2 A Political Ideology The transhumanist doctrine is now quite coherent—despite the existence of several different subcurrents—and increasingly comprehensive, as it not only tries to explain the world and make sense of its evolution, but also gives explicit and precise instructions to guide political action for a radical change in and of society. Thus, transhumanism can now be defined as a true political ideology, and, therefore, be analyzed through the lense of Ideologiekritik, i.e. as one of those “legends which […] make appear as ‘legitimate’ [social] domination based on the specific interests of particular groups”. (Ritsert 2001, p. 129), at least in the sense developed in the introductory chapter of this book. The normative dimension of transhumanism, which was initially expressed through an ethical and legal debate on the limits not to be crossed in genetics (Giesen 2004) and neurosciences, has subsequently extended to the social debate on almost all technological mutations: advocating a real overcoming of the human condition in order to gradually develop—in a “proactive” way and thus in opposition to the precautionary principle (Fuller and Lipinska 2014)—a posthuman creature which should be genetically and neurologically modified and moreover fully integrated into the machine. Indeed, transhumanism advocates a headlong rush: human beings would be too limited biologically to be able to effectively face the challenges of the world’s growing complexity. Therefore, their capacities have to be increased by integrating them with all kinds of emerging technologies, or even by programming them in such a way that they move to a posthuman stage. Transhumanist authors consider that the Darwinian evolution is proceeding too slowly and that the biological condition of human beings it has established remains largely unsatisfactory. Limited sensory and intellectual capacities; submission of

146

K.-G. Giesen

the individual to poorly controlled and potentially destructive emotions; possibility of illness and inevitability of old age, then death: all limits from which it is theoretically possible to free oneself (Harris 2007). An essential point is that this liberation is expected from technology and not from the help of religion or wisdom. Very often, the objective of those whom Dominique Lecourt (2003, pp. 57–79) refers to as “techno-prophets” also takes on a quasi-religious gnostic dimension (Ganascia 2017), insofar as many authors believe strongly in the possibility of making human beings immortal in the long term, or even of technologically resurrecting the dead after a period in a state of cryogenization. The highly mediatized French author Laurent Alexandre calls this “the death of death” (Alexandre 2011). The political objective is therefore clearly stated. It is nothing less than the establishment of a new (post)human being (Robitaille 2007) and, consequently, an entirely new society, a grand plan that other political ideologies (communism, fascism, etc.) have pursued in the past in other, ultimately less radical perspectives. Within the transnational political movement of transhumanism there are certainly significant ideological differences, regarding which technologies ought to be focused on first and the transition paths to be followed are concerned: on the one hand a group of so-called “techno-progressists” such as James Hughes, Marc Roux and Amon Twyman advocate some social egalitarianism in the transition to the posthuman condition (see for instance Roux and François 2017), and on the other hand the so-called “extropians” or “techno-libertarians” such as Max More and Zoltan Istvan believe that any technological enhancement should remain within the sole responsibility of the individual, even if it means creating great social inequality or even a society of technological castes (see for instance Istvan 2017). However, these are only political struggles between different schools of thought within the transhumanist movement (Dorthe and Maestruti 2015), which otherwise agree perfectly on the ideological core around three main political purposes: 1° The “natural” human being is obsolete and must be improved by technology, which therefore becomes a vector for the artificial continuation of the hominization process. Transhumanism thus brings the human species, as such, abruptly into the political game, and immediately recalls the formulation used by Michel Foucault: “What could be called society’s ‘threshold of biological modernity’ lies in the moment when the species is at stake in its own political strategies…” (Foucault 1976, p. 187–188) (see also Dillon and Guerrero 2009). In other words, according to the transhumanists, mankind must be replaced by a post-sapiens-sapiens species. If necessary, zoologically speaking, this will be a moment of true speciation, i.e. a truly exceptional situation where a new, artificially created human species appears in the world.

9  The Transhumanist Ideology and the International …

147

2° The posthuman being and the machine must be fully merged, which goes far beyond the current human-machine interface (e.g. interaction with mobile phones or computers). The spectacular figure of the man-machine is a form of hybridization by permanently interconnecting the (post)human and the machine, as proposed repeatedly for instance by one of the most prominent transhumanist ideologues, Ray Kurzweil, who believes that the human being must become an integral part of the machine (Kurzweil 2005). It should become possible to program it like a software, reprogramming if necessary. This is the culmination of the machinist fetishism of the cybernetic movement born after the Second World War, as embodied by Norbert Wiener and other mathematicians and philosophers (Wiener 1948, 1950). It is nothing less than subjecting the human being entirely to technical rationality to the detriment of human subjectivity: a point from which technology, considered as the new driving force of hominization, paradoxically also becomes the main vector of dehumanization. Thus, transhumanist machinism is fundamentally anti-humanist, even if only because the machine is by definition inhuman. 3° Therefore, it is also necessary to go beyond what can be called the basic ideological matrix that underlies many other ideologies (liberalism, socialism, conservatism, etc.): humanism articulates all reflections around the human being which remains at the center of the world and is considered to be hierarchically superior to other species. While humanism focuses on a possible moral improvement of the individual through education and culture (“the humanization of the human”), transhumanist ideology proposes entirely new values by stipulating the need for a transition to a post-human creature that must constantly improve itself by integrating new technical artifacts. These are called on to replace the moral, educational and cultural effort.

3 The True Revolutionaries Based on this triple fundamental orientation, transhumanist ideology is divided into multiple discursive fields, specifically adapted to each new artifact to be conceived and developed to realize our “brilliant” future, perfectly illustrated by the sections II-VIII (out of nine) of the now famous Transhumanist Reader (More and Vita-More 2013, pp. 65–360). An example of this is the debate on genetic improvement of the human species. In 2018, a Chinese research team claimed to have successfully modified the human genome of two human babies for the first time, using the brand new CRISPR-Cas9 method. The new technology—illegal for the time being due to the risks involved—will soon make it possible, through

148

K.-G. Giesen

a single intervention, to eradicate diseases for all subsequent generations caused by any given person, making it indeed a reproductive genetic improvement. Here, as elsewhere, the function of medicine is to open the door, to break a taboo. After all, who can question the legitimacy of such an intervention in the genome? It is almost indisputable, even if the new person—and all his/her descendants—are the first to be (partially) genetically programmed, to become a true human GMO. With this the borderline not to be crossed is moved further away, and the next debate may already focus on a possible new shift towards modifying genes to be more resistant to fatigue or improving our vision or memory, for example. Is it possible to oppose it if we do not keep in mind the overall coherence of the three ideological dimensions mentioned above? Where exactly does the eugenicist risk begin? Another example presents itself as biohacking, defined as the attempt to manipulate brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine, and becomes increasingly attractive to many people in the developed world (Samuel 2019). This is the follow-up of Project Cyborg by British transhumanist Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Coventry: in 1998 and 2002, electrodes were attached to his arm that were directly connected both to his neural system and to a computer, therefore also to the Internet. From this position, he was able to remotely control a robotic arm that was physically on the other side of the Atlantic, and conversely remotely control his arm through a computer. In another experiment he had his brain and neurons communicate with his wife’s neural system, to which a microchip was also implanted. The two organisms were merged with the Internet. Such ­human-machine integration at the crossroads of neurosciences, medical surgery, digital engineering and robotics reveals a profoundly transhumanist attitude, as he himself admitted: “Those who have become cyborgs will be one step ahead of humans. And just as humans have always valued themselves above other forms of life, it’s likely that cyborgs will look down on humans who have yet to ‘evolve’” (Warwick 2000). To resume, wanting to modify the human being to adapt it to its environment is not the same thing as transforming the environment to make it viable for mankind, as Peggy Larrieu explains in reference to the role of the neurosciences in the service of transhumanism: “the meliorative ideology is at the opposite of the ideals of the Enlightenment which aimed to improve the human condition by establishing a more just society, without trying to format individuals in a preventive manner.” (Larrieu 2018, p. 86) She continues: “On the grounds of improving the human being, the [NBIC technologies] actually result in the ‘amputation’ of a number of dimensions to make it a one-dimensional being. The human being

9  The Transhumanist Ideology and the International …

149

is dislocated between distinct functions on which we hope to be able to act separately: memory, intelligence, endurance, conciliation, empathy, moral sense, etc. The problem is that such a reductionist approach takes absolutely no account of the overall balance, the need to respect proportions and the context. Any increase responding to a specific use, function, purpose, breaks the proportions of the whole and creates a deformation. […] The human being is reduced, diminished or simplified to be made techno-compatible.” (Larrieu 2018, p. 88) Jean-Yves Goffi is right to ask the political question par excellence: “Under these conditions, the tried and tested categories of politics cease to operate or become confused: how to classify researchers whose work (in genetic engineering, computer science, etc.) challenges the seemingly unquestionable principles that are supposed to organize human nature? Regardless of their position on the [classic] political chessboard, they are the true revolutionaries, unlike the most ‘radical’ politicians who simply want to modernize the […] systems of parenthood, family, school, money, work, dominant positions, governments, nations.” (Goffi 2019, pp. 52–53)

4 A Powerful Ideology for the New Industrial Revolution Since Warwick’s experiment, the ambition to create posthuman cyborgs has become both clearer and larger in scale, meaning it calls for political and legal inventiveness (Ienca and Andorno 2017). Apple and Cochlear have announced the launch of Nucleus 7, which will wirelessly connect an iPhone to a chip surgically implanted in the ear to allow deaf people to hear music of good acoustic quality, make calls and to hear the audio from videos. The Swedish firm BioHax and the American company Three Square Market are already offering their employees the opportunity to have microchips implanted under their skin free of charge, which automatically enter personal passwords into computers and office doors, backup information and can be used as a payment method in the company cafeteria (Howard 2017). The work of transhumanist artists such as Neil Harbisson contributes to the diffusion of the cyborg imagination (Bryant 2013). In the long term, will it actually be still conceivable to prohibit the implantation of a chip directly into the brain if this makes it possible—as a first step!—to stimulate the memory of a person with Alzheimer’s disease? These examples highlight the fact that the transhumanist ideology—often under the guise of medicine which is in reality highly humanist (saving lives, alleviating suffering)—presents new technological artefacts capable of altering

150

K.-G. Giesen

human nature as being indisputable, inevitable and above all eminently desirable. In this sense, the artefact goes far beyond the simple new object or process, and always imposes itself as a true communion between a technical object/process and a refined and targeted “discursive engineering”; it is therefore presented as highly attractive and/or useful. One does not go without the other; they are two sides of the same coin. The ultimate goal is always to depoliticize the debate as much as possible, advocating that a given specific technology is the perfect solution to a small, concrete and well-defined problem, with the whole ideological picture this stems from left undisclosed. Seen from this angle, the transhumanist discourse accompanies and justifies the development of countless high-tech objects and processes from the present and future: human genetic engineering, artificial uteruses, humanoid robots, biomechanical exoskeletons, artificial intelligence, neurological chips, xenografts from human-animal chimeras, etc. In most cases, they point in the same direction: increasing human capacity through the use of hybridization at the nanoscale. Indeed, it is the emerging NBIC technologies that will very soon revolutionize our lives: the increasingly systematic interconnection of Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, Informatics and Cognitive Sciences leads to the new “Great Convergence” which produces the advanced and growing integration between the infinitely small (N), the manufacturing of the biological living (B), the thinking machines (I) and the cognitive study of the human brain (C) (Besnier 2009). As a result, humanity will be reduced to the rank of a zoological species similar to others, to which the mechanistic image of a being-object produced by selection, elimination and manipulation techniques can be applied. (Stock 2002; Naam 2005; Young 2005). The concept of NBIC Technology Convergence—resulting, for example, in nano-bioinformatics, neuro-morphic engineering, bio-photonics and other synthetic biology as well as brain simulations—was first “formalized” in 2003 in an international report prepared by Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge for the National Science Foundation in the USA: Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (Roco and Brainbridge 2003). This is an enormous new market in the world economy, and therefore an additional commodification of human life: we will see the birth of the “body-market” (Lafontaine 2014). It will be the result of the fourth industrial revolution. Indeed, the NBIC technology convergence will undoubtedly introduce an important rupture in the evolution of world capitalism, just like the steam engine (1st industrial revolution), electricity (2nd), and electronics and computing (3rd) (Schwab 2015). Countless new products and services will appear on the market. Faced with the explosion of NBIC supply, the transhumanist discourse tries to convey the message that each new device corresponds to a specific need and demand. In

9  The Transhumanist Ideology and the International …

151

other words, transhumanism serves as the ideology that justifies this expansion into the world capitalist market. The more further commodification of the (post)human being becomes successful, the more state regulations will inevitably be disrupted, especially by the new inequalities that will soon appear between humans who will have remained “natural”—the “chimpanzees of the future” (as they have been called by transhumanist Kevin Warwick (2002, p. 4)—and the future, technologically enhanced posthuman species. Thus, transhumanism poses an immeasurable challenge to the welfare state insofar as the latter, deeply rooted in meritocracy, has been forged to erase the initial social inequalities as far as possible. Transhumanism is also a challenge for democracy and the rule of law, because of the increasing complexity of all issues related to technological hybridization and the intentional “accelerationism” (Mackay and Avanessian 2014) promoted precisely by the transhumanists: the classical advisors to the political decision-makers (bioethics committees and other technology assessment structures) can probably no longer effectively assist them in order to regulate in real time the new artefacts and their marketing. In other words, we cannot exclude the possibility that there will soon be technological limits to democracy. In addition, with the human-machine fusion, new perspectives are opening up for capital-labour relations. In the near future the worker and the employee can be fully integrated into productive systems (e.g. through chips implanted under the skin or directly into the nervous system) and better monitored. Their productivity—which is the key to competitiveness between firms—could be boosted. A prevalence of the transhumanist ideology, even partial, will undoubtedly cause further dehumanization of work. This would lead to the total adaptability of the individual to the demands of capital, and the very concept of human resources may become obsolete, insofar as the employee will simply merge with technological resources to become merely a production tool. Another possible consequence of transhumanistic policies: the struggles between employers and trade unions could intensify, focusing more on the degree of autonomy that the worker can still maintain in the face of the new productive system technologies than on wages and working time. Due to the mass unemployment that Artificial Intelligence will soon generate, “Luddite” revolts may arise, but probably remain occasional. Clearly, there is a risk that over the next decades we will gradually turn to a posthuman capitalism that will profoundly transform not only the relationships between individuals, to work and to the state, but also the way we relate to humankind itself.

152

K.-G. Giesen

5 The Ideological Outreach Transhumanism is above all a major political project for the benefit of those industries and economic sectors which are most heavily involved in the fourth industrial revolution which will probably lead to a complete redistribution of wealth in our societies, a large-scale reconfiguration of social classes, and above all a profound change in the way our societies and the entire world system function. We cannot ignore, however, that considerable parts of both the state apparatus and the private sector are promoting this project. The same Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge who had issued the now famous National Science Foundation’s NBIC report in 2003 raised the entire NBIC issue to the ideological level by publishing ten years later (with Bruce Tonn and Georges Whitesides) the voluminous Converging Knowledge, Technology, and Society (CKTS) report that aims to guide considerable social engineering efforts to contain within narrow margins any possible contestation of the NBIC technologies. The new concept of CKTS Meta-Convergence is part of a resolutely “solutionist” strategy, resulting from the transhumanist thinking of the “techno-progressive” branding which does not envisage the “progress” of technology without immediate benefit for society, or at least for a fraction of society. It expressly states that “the study identified barriers to progress; this report proposes a framework, methods and possible actions to overcome them” (Roco et al. 2013, p. 2). On several occasions, it points towards the urgent need for massive mobilization of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in the targeted dissemination of transhumanist “solutionism”: “traditional institutions have[now] a reduced role, being bypassed by[new] social-media-enabled movements.” (Roco et al. 2013, p. 372). In their view, steering the debate in the desired direction is essential because “emerging technologies have the promise to bring higher than normal returns on public and private investment because of their transforming and disruptive nature. Such returns also depend on the general […] governance methods, and international context.” (Roco et al. 2013, p. 364). If state agencies and international organizations—including the Council of Europe (Van Est 2014)—are heavily involved in most vectors of ideological diffusion, it is even less surprising that the elite of the big bosses of California’s Silicon Valley both adhere to and promote the transhumanist ideology. The same is true for many entrepreneurs of the countless start-up firms that revolve around them. The extraordinary financial investments made by, among others, billionaires Elon Musk (who has recently founded the Neuralink company for the creation of super-intelligent cyborgs inspired by Warwick’s experience), Peter

9  The Transhumanist Ideology and the International …

153

Diamandis and Peter Thiel, and even more so by the famous GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft), weigh heavily in this social debate, because their economic interests in the future of high tech are directly at stake. These firms have already invested heavily in the fourth industrial revolution, and are now also injecting huge sums into political lobbying and social engineering at the national and international level. One example is the Partnership on AI, which brings together almost all the giants of Silicon Valley (except Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who have launched their own structure, named OpenAI and funded by US$ 1 billion) to implement a kind of ethical self-regulation of artificial intelligence technologies. It does this however with the aim at spreading to the general public the message that the transhumanist big business is itself taking care of all possible risks incurred by, and limits to be imposed on, artificial intelligence, and this without any need for state regulation (Partnership on AI 2019). This is what may be called the ideological “valium for the people” function. The Partnership on AI is also well-funded and co-opts many academics, which underlines the extreme care with which the U.S. giants try to prevent any social contestation threatening their big business. And indeed, those who oppose the new NBIC convergence technologies, whatever they are and wherever they come from, simply do not have the same financial means to make their point of view known.

6 Conclusion Obviously, it is clear that the game is not equal. In the societal debate on the world level that has just begun, the dice are loaded: the transhumanist ideology is strongly driven by fractions of state apparatus and even more by those very powerful multinational companies that, objectively, have the greatest interest in ensuring that the NBIC convergence revolution runs smoothly. In this sense, transhumanism is already a dominant ideology, in that it overwhelms all other ideological positions in the face of rapid technological change—especially those of humanists from different backgrounds as well as those with a “deep ecology” stance—merely through the power of money. In any case, some industrialists have already adopted a plan B in case the practical implementation of the transhumanist ideology comes up against too much resistance from public opinion and from state apparatus: Peter Thiel and other industrialists co-finance the Seasteading Institute which, since 2008, has been developing projects under the direction of Patri Friedman to build floating islands in international waters, and therefore outside any national legislation, to carry

154

K.-G. Giesen

out (genetic, neurological…) experiments on volunteers which could be banned within the territorial boundaries of all states (Thiel 2009). For instance, an agreement was concluded in January 2017 with the Government of French Polynesia to build a prototype floating island of 7500 m2 off the Tahiti island (La Dépêche de Tahiti 2017) that would have the status of a “special economic zone”. While the project ultimately failed it shows how little attention U.S. transhumanists generally pay—there are exceptions—to the regulatory role of the State, as opposed to the fringe, a minority on the global scale, of the so-called “techno-progressists”, i.e. transhumanist ideologues, especially in Continental Europe, who advocate equalizing state intervention with regard to access to NBIC “Great Convergence” technologies, and who thus promote the diffusion of transhumanism in countries with a rather social-democratic tradition (in the very broad sense of the term). Transhumanism has now reached the stage of a major political project and massive ideological diffusion at the world level; it no longer remains confined to ethical and legal debates in academia. Given the clever strategy of “solutionist” fractionation of the social debate into multiple slices, which makes it difficult to get an overall view of all its ramifications, as well as the combined resources of scientists and large multinational firms, especially American and increasingly Chinese, it is to be feared that the transition to the fourth industrial revolution will be made without too much political controversy about the global political project of transhumanism that is emerging in the background. Everything is currently working as if the transition, through the “Great NBIC Convergence”, to a technologically enhanced (post)human being fully integrated into the machine, is already on track. In this sense, the ideological project of transhumanism perfectly embodies the anti-humanist programme dissected and denounced by the philosopher Günther Anders: to achieve “the obsolescence of humankind” (Anders 2002[1956]), and its extinction as a species. Can there be any greater ideological challenge for world politics in what remains of the 21st century?

References Alexandre, Laurent. 2011. La mort de la mort, Comment la technomédecine va bouleverser l’humanité, Paris: Lattès. Anders, Günther. 2002 [1956]. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. München: Beck. Besnier, Jean-Michel. 2009. Demain les posthumains. Le futur a-t-il encore besoin de nous?, Paris: Hachette. Bryant, Ross. 2013. People ‘will start becoming technology’ says human cyborg, Dezeen Magazine, November 20, www.dezeen.com/2013/11/20/interview-with-human-cyborgneil-harbisson/

9  The Transhumanist Ideology and the International …

155

Dillon, Michael and Lobo-Guerrero Luis. 2009. The Biopolitical Imaginary of Speciesbeing. Theory, Culture & Society. 26(1): 1–23. Dorthe, Gabriel and Marina Maestruti. 2015. Les transhumanistes aux prises avec des imaginaires contradictoires. Ethique, Politique, Religion. 6: 67–88. Ettinger, Robert C.W. 1972, Man Into Superman: The Startling Potential of Human Evolution—And How to Be Part of It, Kansas City: Ria University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité, volume 1: La volonté de savoir, Paris: Gallimard. Fuller, Steve and Veronica Lipinska. 2014. The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism, London: Palgrave. Giesen, Klaus-Gerd. 2004. Transhumanisme et génétique humaine, L’Observatoire de la génétique, 16, http://www.omics-ethics.org/observatoire/cadrages/cadr2004/c_ no16_04/c_no16_04_01.html Giesen, Klaus-Gerd. 2018. Le transhumanisme comme idéologie dominante de la quatrième révolution industrielle. Journal international de bioéthique et d’éthique des sciences, 29(3–4): 189–203. Ganascia, Jean-Gabriel. 2017. Le Mythe de la singularité. Faut-il craindre l’intelligence artificielle?, Paris: Seuil. Goffi, Jean-Yves. 2019. Contours et courants de la politique transhumaniste, Raisons politiques, 74: 51–71. Harris, John. 2007. Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howarth, Dan. 2017. US tech company offers to turn employees into cyborgs with microchip implants. Dezeen Magazine, 25 July 2017, https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/25/ us-tech-company-three-square-market-offers-employees-microchip-implants-cyborgsbiohax/ Ienca, Marcello and Roberto Andorno. 2017. Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society, and Policy, 13(5) https://lsspjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40504-017-0050-1 Istvan, Zoltan. 2017. The Growing World of Libertarian Transhumanism, The American Conservative, August 8, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-growing-world-of-libertarian-transhumanism/ Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Books. La Dépêche de Tahiti, 26 janvier 2017, http://www.ladepeche.pf/protocole-daccord-entrepays-seasteading-institute-devoile/ Lafontaine, Claire. 2014. Le Corps-marché. La marchandisation de la vie humaine à l’ère de la bioéconomie, Paris: Seuil. Larrieu, Peggy. 2018. La neuro-amélioration des sujets ‘sains’: enjeux anthropologiques, sociologiques et juridiques. In Larrieu, Peggy and Philippe Pédrot. Eds. Transhumanisme, Paris: Eska, 2018, pp. 71–91. Lecourt, Dominique. 2003. Humain, posthumain. La technique et la vie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mackay, Robin and Armen Avanessian 2014. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth: Urbanomic. Maslow, Abraham. 1968. Toward a Psychology of Being, New York: Wiley.

156

K.-G. Giesen

More Max and Natacha Vita-More. Eds. 2013. The Transhumanist Reader, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Naam, Ramez. 2005. More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, New York: Broadway. Partnership On AI. 2019, https://www.partnershiponai.org/about/#our-work Ritsert, Jürgen. 2001. Ideologie: Theoreme und Probleme der Wissenschaftssozologie, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Robitaille, Alain. 2007. Le Nouvel Homme nouveau. Voyage dans les utopies de la posthumanité. Montréal: Boréal. M. C. Roco and W. S. Bainbridge. Eds. 2003. Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, Dordrecht: Kluwer. M. C. Roco, W.S. Bainbridge, B. Tonn and G. Whitesides. Eds. 2013. Converging knowledge, technology, and society: Beyond convergence of nano-bio-info-cognitive technologies, Dordrecht: Springer. Roux, Marc and Agathe François. 2017. L’Homme augmenté, mythe ou réalité, Journal des Grandes Ecoles et Universités, 82, http://www.mondedesgrandesecoles.fr/lhomme-augmente-mythe-realite/# Schwab, Klaus. 2015. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Foreign Affairs, December 12, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-12-12/fourth-industrial-revolution Thiel, Peter. 2009. Talk at the Seasteading Institute Conference 2009, https://vimeo. com/7577391 Samuel, Sigal. 2019. How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies—and human nature, Vox, June 25, https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/ future-perfect/2019/6/25/18682583/biohacking-transhumanism-human-augmentationgenetic-engineering-crispr Stock, Gregory. 2002. Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, Boston: Houghton Mill. Van Est, R. et al. 2014. De BIO à la convergence NBIC. De la pratique médicale à la vie quotidienne. Rapport écrit pour le Conseil de l’Europe, Comité de Bioéthique, La Haye: Institut Rathenau. Warwick, Kevin. 2000). Cyborg 1.0, Wired Magazine, January 2, https://www.wired. com/2000/02/warwick/ Warwick, Kevin. 2002. I, Cyborg, Champaign: University of Illinois. Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Paris: Hermann & Cie, and Cambridge: MIT Press. Wiener, Norbert. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Young, Simon. 2005. Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto, Amherst: Prometheus Books.

The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism and the Case of Brazil

10

Marcos Nobre

Abstract

Taking the case of Jair Bolsonaro as paradigmatic, the chapter argues that “political parasitism” is the fundamental characteristic of any far-right populist elected for the first time President or Prime Minister. Bolsonaro’s “antisystem tactics” benefits from the fact that the “system” continues to work, benefiting at the same time from permanently attacking this same “system” as evil. In Bolsonaro’s case, claiming additionally that the best possible political model for Brazil is represented by the military dictatorship (1964 to 1985). Examining the period prior to the arrival of the pandemic crisis to Brasil—roughly Bolsonaro’s first year as President—the chapter tries to understand the reasons for his victory in the October 2018 election as well as the governing model he established from January 2019 on, when he took office. It shows in which way this initial period is a direct result of the country’s recent history, as well its importance to understanding his way of governing. It shows how this form of governing is tied to wider global processes, prompting comparisons with Trump. Finally, it considers the results under the light of the debates on the crises of democracies. Keywords

Brazil · Bolsonaro · Authoritarianism · Democracy · Far-right · Trump

M. Nobre (*)  UNICAMP & CEBRAP, Campinas & São Paulo, Brazil © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_10

157

158

M. Nobre

Jair Bolsonaro owes his election as President of Brazil in 2018 to a unique confluence of circumstances, a rare window in time, unlikely to happen the same way a second time. That is why, since the victory in the presidential election, he has had only two concerns: avoiding impeachment and seeking reelection. The tactic to achieve such double goal is the same: to maintain the loyal support of a constituency that does not represent the majority but is large enough to resist impeachment and to reach the second round in the 2022 presidential election. From his third month in office on, the core base of supporters stabilized around one third of the electorate. Even if such support drops to a quarter of the electorate, Bolsonaro still has a good chance of succeeding. The red flag for his project will only appear if his support falls below this threshold. For democracy, the big threat lies in the fact that the twofold goal—to avoid impeachment and to win reelection—is not an end in itself. It is just a means to Bolsonaro’s real end, which is to destroy democracy. This script may change of course. Bolsonaro may attempt a coup before 2022. This text is still optimistic in that it assumes that the conditions for a coup are not met and that the roadmap for the destruction of democracy via elections is still maintained. Any attempt to understand the Bolsonaro phenomenon requires understanding the reasons for his victory in October 2018 as well as the governing model established on the first of January 2019 when he took office as President. The effort to explain both will be the object of the two first parts of this text. In order to do that, the first year of his presidency will be taken into account and it will be argued that this initial period is a direct result of developments in the country’s recent history and that it constitutes a style of governing and not just a provisional arrangement. Also, it will be argued that this form of governing is tied to wider global processes, prompting comparisons with Donald Trump’s government. Thirdly, this article will try to consider some of the results under the light of the current debate on the crises of democracies. A final section will then present a brief summary of the argument together with its possible electoral consequences. *** In the political model that prevailed from 1994 to 2013 in Brazil, parties operated like companies that sold parliamentary support. Their business was to get votes in order to sell representatives to the government. This arrangement led to an increasingly fragmented party system with congressional coalitions that brought together as many as seventeen different parties. It was up to the party that won the presidential election to endow the archipelago of parties and interests that emerged from the electoral process with a certain homogeneity in order to establish a transversal governmental agenda. The Workers’ Party (PT) and the

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

159

Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) played this structuring role for over two decades. They provided a model based on the formation of mega-blocks that supported the acting government, with the resulting limitation of a nominal opposition to a parliamentary fringe. Parties that did not endorse the candidate who won the presidential election would consequently support the newly elected government the following day and thus claim their piece of the state apparatus. One of the many consequences of this arrangement meant that the government and the opposition’s roles became inflated and shrunk respectively. Any relevant role played by the opposition—to generate adherence and cohesion within a government coalition—is greatly weakened in a model in which congressional support for the government often peaked or reached over 75%. At the same time, this situation encourages “internal opposition” within the government’s own coalition, making internal cohesion increasingly difficult. It is a model based on two fundamental guarantees given by those who sell parliamentary support in Congress: effective access to public funds for party political machines and groups, and protection against prosecutions from the judiciary. When these two basic assurances are at risk, the political system reads such signs as symptoms of severe turbulence that may jeopardize the very survival of the political system as a whole. This is what happened during Dilma Rousseff’s second term and which led to her deposition in 2016. The great departure from this logic of governability, that has triumphed since 1994, came with the June uprisings of 20131 that showed visible signs that this particular model so characteristic of Brazilian politics since the redemocratization process had come to an end.2 The political system did not realize (or did not want to realize) that the political and economic stability secured by Plano Real,

1On the analyses above and below, see Nobre (2013a, b, 2014a, b, 2019). I will not have the time to present today those which I see as the two hegemonic interpretations in the Brazilian public sphere about June 2013 with what I see as their main problems and flaws. On this see: Nobre (2020). 2The current democratic Brazilian Constitution was promulgated in October 1988. From this point on, a great part of the political scientists has described Brazilian democracy as a “coalition presidentialism”. The alternative name I gave to this model was pemedebismo, in reference to the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), which has been the leader of the cartel of selling parliamentary support in the oversized government coalitions from 1994 to 2013 (Nobre 2013b). The party changed its name to MDB in 2018, the name it had during the military dictatorship (1964–1985), when it played the role of the only allowed opposition party.

160

M. Nobre

in 1994, was no longer tenable, and that a new political arrangement was necessary. It perceived the wave of dissatisfaction as something that would eventually disappear, and stuck with the usual pantomime and waited for the game to return to its traditional course. With the exception of very small political parties, the great majority of the components of the political system perceived June 2013 solely in terms of risk and threat. Instead of opening up to the possibility of new democratic configurations, political parties decided to shield themselves more and more from society, from the social unrest that grew on the streets and in social media. It was at that moment that much of June’s energy was channeled in opportunistic fashion into coordinated legal action levelled against political corruption known as “Operation Car Wash” (Operação Lava Jato in Portuguese), which led to an initial arrest in March 2014 and grew in strength and momentum as of 2015. “Operation Car Wash” proffered itself as a representation of diffuse popular indignation with the political system. Fuelled by social unrest, “Operation Car Wash” put the whole political system against the wall. The political system’s incapacity of self-reform opened the space for the judiciary to claim that it would perform this task. But the judiciary is not capable to produce a reform of the political system as such. From this moment on, a state of permanent stalemate prevailed. Under the permanent attack from the lower levels of the judiciary, the political system used the state apparatus for its own self-defense purposes, and such permissiveness between the political system and the state reinforced its profound separation from Brazilian society. It is true that the coalescence between the state and the political system has a long tradition in Brazil. But with Operation Car Wash’s relentless attack this amalgamation morphed into an infernal circle that produced an institutional collapse that provided the basis for Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018. Jair Bolsonaro understands himself as the leader of a conservative uprising. He does not seek assimilation on an institutional level. His known relationship with the organized crime in Rio involving the police notwithstanding, he associates his far right positions with the defense of everything that is ethical and decent, and identifies the rest—the entire political system—with “the left”: that is to say, with everything that is corrupt and corrupting of social life in general. At the height of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment process in July 2016, a Datafolha poll for president attributed 7% of the vote for Bolsonaro (when Lula was still a candi-

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

161

date3). At that specific moment, the former Army captain’s voting base consisted of people with a higher education (13%); people whose income was between 5 to 10 minimum wages4 (19%) and those with over 10 minimum wages (16%). This constituted the initial profile of the Bolsonaro’s supporters. A significant percentage of the upper echelons—in terms of income and education—began to dismantle the political system by challenging leaders close to them. The uprising was led by church attendees against their pastors, by ­ lower-ranking officers of the military against higher-ranking officers, by lower-ranking clergy against higher-ranking clergy in Congress, by small and medium businesses, rural and industrial producers against their representative entities and the so-called “national champions”—privileged companies that centralized government subsidies—, by low-level players in the financial markets against the spokespeople of the big banks. And so on.5 Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment marked the highpoint of this dismantling from the ground up that reached the top of the system for the first time. It struck the members of the Worker’s Party, the PT, very hard. Other leaders of the political system—like Michel Temer, Rousseff’s vice-president who took office after her deposition, and Aécio Neves, the opposition candidate who had been defeated in the 2014 election—were only targeted after May 2017, though not with the same force and as the PT. Not surprisingly, Datafolha’s June 2017 polls found a 16% rise in voters’ intention for Bolsonaro. The increase followed the same pattern within an initial electoral base: 21% of his voters had a college education; he was the front runner with those who earned between 5 to 10 minimum wages (25%) and above 10 minimum wages (20%). He secured the majority male vote and a significant base with evangelical denominations. The surprise was to come with voters who earned between 2 and 5 minimum wages (20%) and younger voters with whom the candidate gained ground. In August 2018, when the election campaign began, Lula’s definitive exclusion from the race gave Bolsonaro 20% of voting inten-

3President

of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, Lula has been sentenced and imprisoned in April 2018 on corruption charges for a 12-year jail time. In August 2018 the Supreme Court (STF) ruled against his candidacy for president. Lula was released from imprisonment in November 2019, after 580 days in jail. He is still being prosecuted in many different lawsuits, and it is highly unlikely that he will be able to be candidate for office again. 4The minimum wage in Brazil is about US$ 250. Roughly half of the Brazilian population live with up to one minimum wage. 5This process has striking similarities with those whom Paolo Gerbaudo (2019, p. 43) calls the “connected outsiders”.

162

M. Nobre

tion. More than that, it showed the grass roots of his electoral base: the spontaneous mention of the former Army captain’s name was around those 16% who had already joined him a year earlier. This solid starting point enabled him to remain competitive until he won the election. Brazil’s 2018 elections were primarily about Lula’s imprisonment, and then about Bolsonaro’s knife attack on September 6th, which led to his absence from public debates both in the first as well as in the second round. But most of all it was an exploitation of the sum of fears a populace that lives in a country in shambles faced on a daily basis. It was not about the country’s future but about an abominable present and a horrifying past. Under Bolsonaro’s leadership the discussion never turned to what the following day would bring. The reason for this is simple and terrifying and may also explain how Bolsonaro managed to expand his initial voter base until he won the election: people had already lost a lot, but they were (and still are) afraid to lose even more. The populace feared that the most basic and fundamental rights would be denied them: their lives, their families, their religion. It was by instilling and channeling fears and real anxieties that Bolsonaro managed to expand his initial base with the wealthy and more educated strata of society and make headway with voters who earned between 2 and 5 minimum wages, while gradually making headway with the electorate that earned up to 1 minimum wage and had a lower education. For many people the election was not so much about a hope of a better life as it was about the expectation of bring such prolonged suffering to an end.6

6Between

2014 and 2016, Brazil’s GDP shrank 8,1%, that is to say, the second most devastating economic crisis since the worst crisis the country ever endured, that between 1981 and 1983, when a real negative growth of 8,5% has been recorded. Up to 2019 the economy has still not really recovered, since the positive growth rate of 1,1% recorded both in 2017 and in 2018 barely corresponds to the 0,8% yearly growth of the population, and GDP per capita that fell by 10,4% in the 2014–2016 recession did not reach its former pre-recession value in 2019. According to a study by IBRE/FGV, after a positive record peak of 0,598 in December 2013, the Gini Index for Brazil only deteriorated, reaching a new negative record of 0,627 by March 2019 (See: “Desigualdade de renda sobre pelo 17o. trimestre e é recorde”, Valor Econômico, 18–20 May 2019). In December 2014 the unemployment rate that was of 4,3%, while in March 2019 it was of 12,7%. According to the “Atlas da Violência 2019” (IPEA and Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública), 65.602 people were murdered in Brazil in 2017, a murder rate of 31,6 per 100.000, an increase of 24% in a decade. There is a gender bias in these numbers: there has been an increase of 30,7% in the murder of women in this decade. There is also a clear color cut in these numbers: for the black population the murder rate per 100.000 is of 43,1, while the number for non-black population is 16. Jan Werner-Müller (2016) warms against the risks of

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

163

Bolsonaro put himself across as the leader who would prevent the political system from continuing to do evil. After his stabbing, he ran the show without real competition. He started to steer the election and shape it as the non-debate in which it was transformed. For those who no longer believe in anything that sounds “political”, to promise anything more than to prevent the political system from continuing to do evil would sound false. Even to debate is false, as it inevitably has a “political” ring to it. And Bolsonaro presents himself foremost as authentic, humble and straightforward. Not by chance, Bolsonaro managed to band together three institutions that the general populace still support and approve of within a barren political environment, because people do not perceive them as being “political”: the family, the church and the Armed Forces. The whole debate about an electorate fuelled by PT and anti-PT sentiments, which is indeed real and long-lasting, helped obscure the fact that a considerable portion of the electorate was feeling existentially threatened because it perceived the political system itself as a threat. Few people think that the suffering caused by this extensive crisis is coming to an end. For the poorer electorate, the 2018 elections represented the fear of losing the little that remained of what the period between 2004 to 2013 had improved on, which is also why there was a massive vote for Fernando Haddad, Lula’s substitute in the electoral race of 2018.7 Set aside since the June 2013 manifestations when it cried out against the political system’s modus operandi, the 2018 electorate was given a positive n­ owin alternative: either keep the political system as is and has been since 1994, or break it into pieces and destroy the existing allegiances. The majority chose the latter. Bolsonaro’s candidacy represented a unique confluence of electoral groups vested in very different and often conflicting interests. Although they sometimes intersected, they did not form a homogeneous body. His electorate was composed

overestimating ­social-psychological arguments to explain the rise of populism. But in terms of campaigning, in terms of the reasons given both by candidates as by voters, such reasons have been a central element in the Brazilian case. Even if it may not fully explain the results, it cannot be dismissed either. 7The final result of the presidential election gave Bolsonaro 55% of the vote, against 45% for Haddad. Polls from the eve of the second round of the election (Ibope, October 27th 2018) show that Haddad won 54% of the vote of the less educated (against 36% for Bolsonaro), while 53% of the voters with a college degree voted for Bolsonaro (35% for Haddad). 56% of the electorate that earn up to 1 minimum wage voted for Haddad (35% for Bolsonaro). In the 2 to 5 minimum wage range, Bolsonaro won 55% of the vote (33% for Haddad).

164

M. Nobre

of enthusiastic Operation Car Wash supporters, anti-PT voters, anti-system voters, people who vote out of anger or even abstain from voting (although the vote is compulsory in Brazil), conservative people (bent on protecting decent customs) and those who thought that “Law & Order” should triumph at all costs. *** At the end of March 2019, Ibope released the results of the surveys it had carried out at the beginning of the new government, from January 1st to March 19th. During this period the government’s approval rating fell from 49% to 34%. Correspondingly, its negativity rating (bad or very bad) went up from 11% to 24%. Surveys indicate that no first-term president since Fernando Henrique Cardoso has received such a low score.8 Political scientist André Singer (2019) highlighted the income bracket responsible for this drop. In the two to five minimum wage range, the Bolsonaro’s positive evaluation dropped eighteen points. Among those who earn up to one salary, a mere 29% view the government in a positive light. In contrast, only 8% of those who earn more than five minimum wages have lost confidence in him since his inauguration. Those who have the most confidence in the current ruler are male, white, evangelical, live in the country’s richest States (South and Southeast) and earn more than five minimum wages. The results of these surveys prompted many people to determine that the government would not survive. In addition to this dizzying fall in popularity—so runs the argument—critics cite the government’s lack of skill at political articulation and its daily ineptitude. On May 15, 2019, students and workers’ unions went to the streets in expressive numbers to oppose the cuts in Education and the pension reform. A general strike was held on June 14th. This helped promote a consensus that the president’s impeachment was imminent. But such a view, that foresaw a premature end to the government, ignored a reasonably successful ­counter-demonstration in support of Bolsonaro on the 26th May. It may also fail to understand a style of governing. It perceives his project as unsustainable, suicidal, and presumes that Bolsonaro will surrender to some principle of reality. But whoever thinks an impeachment is in sight is unaware of a method amidst the chaos. Or, rather, that chaos is the method. The general tactic is simple. There is no intention of governing on behalf of the majority. This would be typical of the old world, of “old politics”, which was

8Subsequent

surveys by Datafolha and by Ibope until December 2019 showed stability in the positive evaluation, although negative assessments grew and were close to the numbers of positive assessments. The Datafolha survey of December 2019 showed that 30% approve of Bolsonaro, whereas 36% disapprove of him, and 32% neither approve nor disapprove.

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

165

all illusion and deception. The tactic now is to govern on behalf of a social and electoral base that, though it might not be a majority, it is large enough to support a government. Which amounts to one third of the electorate. Maintaining this loyal base is critical to maintaining power. That is, the popularity survey showed that Bolsonaro retreated to the initial bastion from which he built his candidacy in June 2017: an electorate with higher education, an income bracket over two minimum wages and who are mostly male and evangelical. In a time when institutions are functioning in a dysfunctional way, it is more than reasonable to failing to see organization where there is none, of course. Like most new governments, Bolsonaro’s is more or less in improvised. But it is worth examining the degree of improvisation. It would be an exaggeration to say that Bolsonaro will fail if he does not stop being Bolsonaro. That it is to say, that the present government will cease to function if it does not play the game according to the rules. Because the rules may well have remained the same, but there is a strong likelihood that the game itself has changed. In the classical scheme of post-war mass democracy, party systems were supposed to be society’s arms within the state. With the transformation of parties into parastate entities, or arms of the State that control society, the split between mobilization and organization has established itself as a long-lasting feature. It is not just by chance that so many attempts to reformulate political institutions rebuild parties as movements.9 And this happens in a variety of ways. Take a platform like Podemos in Spain, or the prefabricated En Marche in France. Take a look also at movements that operate alongside existing parties, such those around Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, or Luc Mélenchon. Though within a different perspective, one can also look at Trump or Modi. In Brazil, this has not yet happened. Neither on the right nor on the left. Nor in the case of the far right that currently governs. The fact is that the Bolsonaro government has a solid and relevant base which is mobilized through a series of different networks. But it did not structure a movement, in the same way that it did not formulate a strong functioning party. Bolsonaro seeks normalization. He needs to do it because even right-wing and far-right figures from other parts of the world are keen to distance themselves from him. As occurred, for instance, with Chile’s president, Sebastián Piñera, and Marine Le Pen, Rassemblement National’s leader from the far-right French party.

9In

the formulation of David Runciman (2018, p. 148): “the political parties that have proved most successful in recent years are the ones that have turned themselves into social movements”.

166

M. Nobre

As Celso Rocha de Barros (2019) always stresses, Brazil, in fact, has elected a far more extreme politician than the other new authoritarian leaders. Bolsonaro is the most radical one to occupy the presidency of a democratic country in the world today. Bolsonaro’s self proclaimed model, Donald Trump, has never publicly supported a military dictatorship and all its crimes, as Bolsonaro himself did. But Trump not only has no reservation whatsoever about Bolsonaro but he resoundingly approves of the current Brazilian president. And yet, it is not just normalization that Bolsonaro seeks when he looks up at Trump. He also conforms to the U.S. president’s model of government. More than that, he also faced a similar situation to the one faced by the U.S. president in his first six months of government, which led to the ousting of the far-right strategist Steve Bannon. In the book Fear, journalist Bob Woodward (2018) describes in detail Bannon’s disappointment with Trump as an agent of change. It could be that such disappointment may well only be theatrical and that Bannon continues to support Trump behind the scene.10 But the way Woodward’s reconstructs this narrative is very revealing. Bannon considers that the old national security order and the Republican Party establishment suppressed the conservative uprising that Trump embodied during his campaign. In fact, over time, the U.S. president found unusual ways of operating in symbiosis with establishment forces. The Republican Party demanded that the president give up a mobilization strategy that would put the core of its voter base entirely out of the party machine’s control and turn it into a parallel organization. The president generated intense mobilization through a variety of networks—contrary to the Republican Party’s historical positions—only to acquiesce to party guidelines in order to operate. In exchange, he has been granted support in Congress and support for an organized and functional government. Trump defies the Republican Party’s limits without overcoming them. The Republican Party may even accept dismissal by Trump, as long as he does not set in motion a parallel structure. Likewise, national security representatives—known in the past as a “military-industrial complex”—accept that Trump will make military, geopolitical, and strategic decisions that are entirely at odds with their historical precepts. Their response is not to comply with or implement such decisions. In return, they guarantee the president some support in other decisions of comparatively minor

10A

reconstruction of Bannon’s influential position in Trump’s election may be found in: Moore (2018).

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

167

importance (but that displease them as much as the others), such as sending troops to the Mexican border. The Republicans demanded Trump remove Steve Bannon from the White House, who spearheaded a radical form of mobilization and also provided inspiration for Bolsonaro’s mobilization strategy. Bolsonaro cannot follow Trump’s lead on this: he does not have a party machine to tear apart, and thus no compromise to make based on a permanent conflictive coexistence. The Republican Party is still a solid and sully functioning machine, albeit for its internal ruptures, breakdowns and other problems. It continues to fulfill its role of providing the government with a backbone that gives it structure. Nothing similar exists in Brazil that would grant Bolsonaro the possibility of giving up parallel mobilization in favor of permanently challenging an existing political structure of a party. Bolsonaro needs his relatively autonomous radical mobilization stance. In the absence of a machine like the Republican Party to run the government, Bolsonaro appealed to the Armed Forces and to some old time officials that had been marginalized and that operate below the radar of the public debate. Instead of a party or a group of parties that provide the government with a backbone—as procured by PSDB and PT between 1994 and 2018—such a role was championed by members of the military that not only occupied important first echelon posts, but also controlled second and third echelon positions in the state machinery. As of October 14th 2019, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that at least 2,500 military, either retired or on active duty, occupy positions of command or assistance in 30 different government agencies or ministries. Nevertheless, the military does not generate electoral potential. It may well serve to organize the government, but not to pave way for the 2020 and 2022 elections, and the present government needs that prospect in order to continue the conservative uprising it began in 2018. On March 3rd 2019, O Globo published a report about an index created by the start-up Archimedes to measure social networks that could be used to understand the Bolsonaro government’s decisions and its retreats. According to Pedro Bruzzi, founder of Archimedes, there is a clear pattern: “When a certain controversy’s index drops below thirty the government reviews its position. When over thirty nothing changes”. For those who belong to a WhatsApp group linked to the government, or those who are pro-government and remain mobilized in social networks in general, there is a feeling of effectively participating in the decisions. Being in a WhatsApp group that brings thousands of other people together to support someone or a cause or demand someone’s head produces the feeling of directly participating in politics. For anyone familiar with institutional politics, it seems evident that this is an illusory participation, not actually related to fun-

168

M. Nobre

damental decision-making structures. But for a social base that had never seen itself before having any direct influence in political decision-making, it provides unprecedented participatory ecstasy. Trump was forced to fire Steve Bannon. Does Bolsonaro have any intention (or means) of getting rid of his anti-establishment wing? Nothing points in that direction during the first six months of his presidency. The Armed Forces are not going to become a party, nor will the core of Bolsonaro’s supporters surrender to the institutional logic of “old politics.” One way to enunciate this conundrum would be: the only way for Bolsonaro’s to secure power is to actively maintain the political institutions in the same state of collapse that led to his election. For his hard core supporters to remain as loyal to him as they were from the start the institutional collapse must be perpetuated. At the same time, government must be operational, it must fulfill its functions and duties as a government. This is the deep logic of the Bolsonaro government: it is fundamentally an a­ nti-establishment government, with all the constitutive tensions that come together with such a paradoxical constitution. One aspect of this may be seen in the relationship between the Executive Power and Congress. Bolsonaro rejects negotiations to form a stable parliamentary coalition. He is interested only in themes and legislation that pertain to the third of the electorate that supports him. All the rest is left to the “politicians”. This gives also the illusion that Brazil is now under a kind of non-declared parliamentarism. Bolsonaro even fired General Santos Cruz (on June 13th 2019) because he was trying to do exactly that, concentrate efforts on political articulations with Congress. Bolsonaro does not want to run a “normal” government. And whoever gets in the way is tossed under the bus, even generals. Santos Cruz’s dismissal was also a clear sign that Bolsonaro will not surrender to this government’s military wing. Not even the nomination of general Braga Netto, on February 14th 2020, to the position of Chief of Staff shows such an inclination. The logic of the Bolsonaro government remains one based on the permanent tension between the mobilizatory and the organizatory wing. One does not live without the other. At least two factors could possibly shake up this surprising arrangement. First, a clear economic downturn in which any prospect of alleviating the last five years of social suffering would be lost. Second, a drop in Bolsonaro’s popularity below the threshold of 25%. Only then would it be possible to think of alternative scenarios to the current one. However not promising both the domestic as the international economic scenario may be, Brazil’s brutal suffering of recent years has also put expectations so low that if the country simply stops getting worse and shows minimal improvement it should be sufficient to hold the current govern-

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

169

ment in place. Or at least that is what Bolsonaro is counting on. In this respect, it is a radically different situation from Trump’s government, which from the very start enjoyed a booming economy and full employment. Neither did Trump have to deal with anything like Operation Car Wash, essential to Bolsonaro’s social mobilization against any reorganization of the political system. Irrespective of the fact that Operation Car Wash has been tarnished by leaked messages between its former main judge, Sérgio Moro, and the Attorney’s Office11 that indicated political choices and potentially pointed to what Brazilian law terms as collusion. And yet opposition forces seem to count on the unforeseeable as a political strategy. It relies on an economic disaster and/or a dysfunctional government, an entirely passive position towards the government. And this when only the emergence of structured social opposition would provide a decisive enough novelty to affect change to this scenario. Despite impressive street demonstrations against Education cuts and a proposed pension reform in May 2019, such a forceful gathering did not take shape in the first year of the Bolsonaro’s government. There is no clear organizational gains in such initiatives. And such a state of affairs reinforces the weight of the digital armies that support the government, since they find themselves unrivaled in the cybersphere. Furthermore, the two parties that represented the political system’s two opposing poles from 1994 to 2013, PT and PSDB, are in serious difficulties. PT is in permanent auto-defense mode. It is big enough to block any reorganization of the left that excludes it; at the same time it is not big enough to unite the left around it. PSDB is going through both a generational and a political orientation change. It shrank in Congress and it is positing itself as a more moderate alternative to Bolsonaro’s extremism; it totally lost its “social-democratic” polish. No wonder, then, that the still nonexistent opposition is bewildered. Bolsonaro did not reorganize the system in the classic, partisan sense of the expression. Anything that opposes his rule is labeled part of the “system”, of “old politics.” Bolsonaro’s strategy forces whoever wants to make opposition to defend “politics”, to defend the existing institutions, the “system”. Anyone who wants to oppose is put in the position of those who defend institutions that, at least since 2013, have become indefensible. Bolsonaro is now president and no longer the 2018 outsider candidate. But paradoxically, he continues to be treated as if he is a candidate and as if he is still an outsider. The paradox has its reasons: he acts like an outsider president; and

11https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-car-wash-prosecutors-workers-party-lula/.

170

M. Nobre

is indeed a candidate. With less than six months in office he announced that he would run for reelection in 2022. The press (and the media more broadly) covers his government like the country is in presidential election year. More than that, both social media and political forces deal with the government as if we were in an election campaign. The democratic forces continue to underestimate the current president and his chances of accomplishing his authoritarian project. Like every convincing outsider, Bolsonaro always acts as if he is permanently cornered, although he is the President. And everyone believes it. *** The populist phenomena that arose from the global economic crisis that began in 2007–2008 made it crystal clear how democracy had been working in the preceding two decades. Such uprisings against the “elites” were directed against a modus operandi in which democracy had been effectively narrowed to a competition for power between party machines that wanted to represent the popular will. Even mechanisms of participation and deliberation that were introduced in recent decades to mitigate elitist democracy operated in a restricted and hierarchical way, still controlled by the system’s old political elites. Populist phenomena blew wide open the fact that democratic regimes, where they have established and where they lasted, have always presupposed a model of society and a particular political culture that went along with it.12 Even recent conservative uprisings have also paradoxically shown the profound nature of democracy. Because if they used existing democratic institutions to dismantle their legitimate base, they also revealed that democracy is in fact a form of life and not just a political regime.13 The distance between society and the political system was maintained, on the one hand, by a repressive political culture, which imposed pre-established rigid patterns of sociability to whomever wanted to debate in the public arena, or participate in citizenship more broadly. On the other hand, this same distance was secured by a political system that was barely perme-

12Nobre

(2013b, p. 22): “Model of society and political culture are forms rooted in social life, in formal political institutions, in economy, as in everyday life. They are notions that mark visions of the world, which legitimize the way in which wealth, power, environmental resources and social recognition are distributed and redistributed. A model of society is not just an economic program or a determined way of understanding politics, but a broader social regulation pattern. And this comprehensive way of regulating social life is expressed in a particular political culture.” 13On the notion of “form of life” in such critical theoretical sense, see Jaeggi (2013).

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

171

able to the effective participation of citizens, whose influence was reduced to the status of the electorate and—with many filters and barriers—the public sphere. At the same time, the conservative uprisings of the last decade drew on real deficits in order to take over state power. They deem any concept of a democracy that can effectively presuppose a shared set of rules of justice as an outright falsity. According to this discourse, it is plainly hypocritical to think it possible to find a common basis for democratic dissent. The conclusion of this scheme of thought and action is that democracy is necessarily the neutralization of those who do not belong to the winning social and political conservative electoral coalitions. Democracy becomes a weapon that an alliance of a particular stratum of the electorate openly points at the rest of the electorate, without subterfuges. Conservative uprisings do not point to any possible reconstruction of shared rules of justice in internal connection with institutionalized democratic forms. They do not set their sights on a horizon based on the construction of an institution that has a universal character. They highlight the gap between the “popular will” and the established mechanisms of political representation,14 but do not believe it is possible to—and do not intend to—overcome such a gap. Yet such conservative uprisings are based on social coalitions of convenience. They can only win elections and remain mobilized by making the institutional collapse that brought them together a long-lasting one. They use the same profound nature of democratic forms and their obsolescence to attain power, and the same exclusionary mechanisms they denounce to produce new models of exclusion. It is not by chance that the recent discussion on the crisis of democracy is full of references to the informal and implicit rules of formal-institutional functioning that were simply ignored until very recently.15 The regressive political outcomes of the last few years do not point towards an irresistible historical tendency: they come primarily from attempts to manipulate and block the democratic potential that emerged from the post-global economic crisis in the 2011–2013 cycle of democratic revolts, now reshaped and vested with new meanings, a new—or is it still the same?—cycle that has been probably inaugurated by the “Yellow Vests” in France, in October 2018. There is still no such thing as an established global reconfiguration model capable of imposing

14Bernard

Manin (2012, first edition 1995) famously showed that, in its genesis and historical development, representative democracy has no way antipode direct democracy, so that what today appears as a gap between popular will and representation should be thought in much more complex terms. 15The most salient example here is that of Steven Levitsky and Samuel Ziblatt (2018).

172

M. Nobre

itself as the new compatibility model between economics and politics, between a new capitalism and a new political form: a new model of society, in short. What we have is an environment of great confusion, where the most diverse attempts to produce such reconfigurations take place. A failure to see the multiplicity of confusions means not seeing opportunities for thought and action. That is also why conservative uprisings have been so far the most effective in seizing such opportunities. All the policies adopted to deal with the global economic crisis that began in 2008 saved the financial systems, but only pushed the crisis further ahead. The cycle of revolts from 2011 to 2013, which targeted this first non-solution, is now being resumed in different parts of the planet at a new level. At the same time, two things are already clear to the elite of global capitalism: inequality has reached unmanageable levels; the planet is effectively in a state of climate emergency. The Brazilian authoritarian project intends, on the one hand, to introduce the same neoliberal policies that led to the 2008 crisis, only with a thirty year delay. And, on the other side of the coin, the Bolsonaro government aims at destroying all environmental policies introduced in the last 35 years, so that Brazil is rapidly moving towards a worsening of its overlapping crises. The current president knows only too well that authoritarian proposals are all the more likely to prosper under deadlock situations like Brazil’s. Democracy is no longer self-evident, and it is in danger. And it will be all the more endangered the more democratic forces insist in holding to defensive positions, which aspire to return to an earlier political conjuncture, the support for which in reality has already been lost. As David Runciman (2018, p. 80) has put it: “attempts to make it [democracy] work better focus on what we feel we have lost rather than on what we have never even tried. Political arguments revolve around ideas of recovery and rescue—of the welfare state, the constitution, the economy, our security, our freedom. Each side wants to recapture something that has been taken away”. This makes us look the wrong way. But Runciman himself may also be, to some extent, looking the wrong way. Because his book, too, sticks with a founding well-known premise of mainstream political science: Schumpeter’s (2003, p. 242) assumption that democracy can only be understood as a “political method,” as “a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political— legislative and administrative—decisions.” It is this implicit premise that allows him to suggest, for example, that democracy may not live up to the challenge of the environmental crisis—and that perhaps the Chinese model will take advantage of it. This is what allows him to suggest that the democratic rule of law may not be able to compete with the new digital Leviathans, as in the case of Facebook—

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

173

which means that perhaps algorithms may respond better to political demands than existing democratic institutions. Be as it may, regarding his most fundamental assumption, it seems undeniable that Runciman’s diagnosis is accurate on some important aspects. The party systems, now obsolete, see the new forms of political organization as competitors to be destroyed and not as signs of a much needed reorganization. The survival tactic of these obsolete party systems consists in trying to reduce the problem to a choice between the survival of the establishment or life under authoritarian rule. To block democracy’s reaching out to new depths is tantamount to blocking the path in order to impede the rise of the far-right. All over the world, whenever something new appears, the novelty always presumes at least some arrangement between traditional parties and new grassroots movements. In most cases, traditional parties want to swallow the new movements and the movements want to take over the parties. When none of these things happen, the most varied forms of conflictive coexistence become possible. The most common arrangement involves competition between the two. In their struggle for survival, political systems have built a solid strategy of blackmail: they have merged with national states. If existing political systems sink, national states would sink with them. And national states are in many ways the last resource most people have to access public services and means of survival. National political systems use the return of the state to the central arena to say that one thing does not exclude the other. However, with the widespread rejection of political systems as they used to function and still function, this symbiosis has so far resulted only in creating the ideal fuel for conservative uprisings. And yet, in each place, the answers to this global crisis are ambiguous and hard to understand and evaluate. Much more than the simplistic answer that wants to put the genius of the global protest wave that began in 2011 back into the bottle. It is a perspective that surrenders to the simplifying logic that has decreed the brain death of democracy everywhere. But it is not just about simplification either. It is a theoretical and political positioning with far-reaching consequences. It is a perspective that despairs of any generous and open-ended universalistic perspective of transformation. Because, ever since the cycle of protests centered around 1968, emancipatory claims and projects depend on the maintenance of democratic rule—even if they are democracies with a low democratic content. Democracy for the far-right is just a means to an end—which is not democracy. The real question when it comes to the crisis of democracy and the crisis of the theories of democracy is actually: what is in crisis in democracy? It has become a political axiom, for example, that the state collects excessively and spends badly and unfairly. And yet, much of what was seen in the 2011–2013

174

M. Nobre

cycle of uprisings turned to national states in search of solutions. Asking for more state and not less is certainly at odds with the anti-globalization struggles of the 1990s and early 2000s, which sought global solutions and not national solutions.16 But it turns out that when national states are pressed to return to the role they once had they find it very difficult to respond to these demands: at least in the current fiscal and tax conditions. The generational clause has not been upheld, which is equivalent to the post-war democratic contract that stipulated that—at least in the long run and excluding periods of war and deep economic crisis— the next generation will live better than the present one. The second clause of the same contract, since 1968 at least, stated that democracy would democratize itself. That was not the case. An acute worldwide social security systems crisis is the most visible aspect of the rupture of intergenerational solidarity. Together with the absence of plausible positive images of the future, it is not surprising, therefore, that the absence of solutions to basic problems is accompanied by “post-democracy”, “de-democratization” or even “state of exception” discourses. So, the answer to the question “what is in crisis in the crisis of democracies?” relates to the fact that democracy did not democratize itself, but lasted long enough to bring into the public debate previously repressed or invisible societal divisions. Fundamentally: there is a distrust regarding the possibility of shared rules of justice. There is a fundamental, seemingly irreconcilable rupture that forces different social and economic strata into a war. It is a rupture that has to do with the rules and patterns of redistribution. It is not plain, old style, class warfare, therefore. The nation, for instance, is invoked to criticize the political systems as they functioned and as they still function. The reference to the nation does not unify, it divides, though. Nation, population and territory have ceased to coincide in the political imaginary—even if someone still thinks that these three elements really coincided at any point in the past. Each group has its own nation, incompatible with the neighboring group’s nation. In short, within a national state, there is no new model of society in sight. Arlie Russell Hochschild referred to some of these groups among a divided population as “strangers in their own land,” the title of one of her books (2016). Not really a “nation”, therefore. Hochschild shows how a far-right community in the United States feels that the rules of social justice have been applied selectively and without transparency. There arises additional anger, sparked by the stigma that affects the community

16It

was at least how I understood the attempt of synthesis presented by Gerbaudo (2017).

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

175

which is labeled as “white trash” by the educated and progressive population. As I understand it, the normative consequence of Hochschild’s proposal would be to reconnect with such groups, to reestablish ties of empathy between groups that have now become enemies rather than political opponents. That is to say, this would be one of the many necessary steps to build a common ground for a new democratic political culture capable of rescuing democracy, to build a new set of shared rules of justice. Maybe this means asking too much, maybe it is just not realistic to pursue that goal. The problem is: what alternative is left to those who oppose conservative and authoritarian regressions? This point is all the more important because the characteristic of the 2011 to 2013 cycle of revolts sets it apart from 1968. The revolts of over fifty years ago were entirely identified with the left. In the 2011–2013 cycle, right and left were together on the same street—along with a multitude of people wholly unconcerned with belonging to one side or another. But the street did not provide a common ground from which to establish new forms of democratic coexistence.17 Much of the energy that was seen on the streets between 2011–2013 did not address institutional politics. And this was not only because important autonomous constellations have resurfaced in new bases which consider that they do not have energy to waste on institutional politics. The widespread rejection of the political system and its workings also had a divergent effect. The communication channels between society and the political system are clogged, and as a consequence much of the energy at society’s base is no longer primarily directed towards institutional transformation. And the portion that is directed towards some project of institutional renewal is fragmented and divided, in often irreconcilable ways. When divisions at the base of society seem unsurpassable, to appeal to life’s non-democratic, authoritarian traits serves the agenda of national political systems in their bid to control the process from high up. As historical experience shows, capitalism can exist very well without democracy. The current situation is devastating, but it must always be remembered that democracy dies and is constantly reborn in a variety of ways. This statement should not be understood at all as a disregard for the general dismay towards institutional politics. Such discouragement has solid ground. Rather, it is a matter of drawing attention to the following question and insisting on it: Is what is dying one of the possible forms

17An

important attempt to find this common ground in a reformulation of the notion of “civil disobedience” can be found in Peeren et al. (2018).

176

M. Nobre

of democracy or is it democracy itself? And a possible answer is that this question is the main object of the current political disputes, and its outcome has yet to be decided. *** With some variation, opinion polls about the president show that the electorate is divided into three-thirds: approval, rejection, neither approval nor rejection. Also the main political forces organize around such division. For the argument here, it does not matter here whether the electorate is divided into exactly three thirds. What matters is that an organizational tactic has been consolidated in institutional policy that is based on the division into three parts, no matter how large each one is. To maintain this logic, what cannot happen is for either party to fall below a fifth of the electorate. The tactic of each third is the same: to retain the electorate that you believe is yours. No one is committed to undermining the base of other forces or extending their own beyond their third. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is comfortable for all other political forces to take it for granted, for example, that the share of the electorate with Bolsonaro cannot be regained for democracy. The tactics of each of the three thirds reinforce that of the others. And yet despite its growth in recent years, the far-right at no time has shown enough strength to win a presidential election fair and square alone. Jair Bolsonaro achieved this in 2018 through a peculiar coming together of certain electoral groups that in other circumstances would not have agreed in supporting a far-right candidate. To carry out his authoritarian project, Bolsonaro needs to invest in two simultaneous fronts. He needs to keep existing democratic institutions in the same state of collapse they have been in since June 2013. At the same time, he aims at introducing a new institutional culture, equipping the state with as many adherents of authoritarianism as he cans. On the other front, Bolsonaro hopes to make its support base more organic, gradually convincing it that the authoritarian way out is not only the best, but the only possible one. “System” is the place that the winner of the 2018 presidential election assigned to the losers. Whoever defends democracy today is part of the “system”. Bolsonaro succeeded in transforming into “system” even the party by which he was elected, which he left with clatter in November 2019. This is the logic of current politics. It shows Bolsonaro’s hegemony in public debate, even though he is supported by only a third of the population. The main challenge to his anti-establishment government is when and how to become institutional. Bolsonaro has already decided to create his own political party. He hopes to lead a conservative uprising that will not be limited to his

10  The Global Uprising of Populist Conservatism …

177

core supporters. By the time he institutionalizes his movement and wins the 2022 presidential election, democracy in Brazil will be through. An arrogant attitude, a merely passive and reactive stance on the part of the broad democratic opposition camp can give Bolsonaro just the time he needs to impose his project.

References Folha de S. Paulo. 2019. “Bolsonaro amplia presença de militares em 30 órgãos federais”, October 14th. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2017. The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2019. The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy, Londres: Pluto Press. Hochschild, Arlie Russel. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land, New York: The New Press. Jaeggi, Rahel. Kritik der Lebensformen. 2013. Berlin: Suhrkamp. The Intercept. 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-car-wash-prosecutorsworkers-party-lula/ IPEA; and Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. 2019. Atlas da Violência 2019. Accessible at: https://static.poder360.com.br/2019/06/Atlas-da-Violencia-2019.pdf Levitsky, Steven and Ziblatt, Daniel. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Random House. Manin, Bernard. 2012. Les principes du governement représentatif. Avec une Postface inédite. Paris: Flammarion. Marshall, T. H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class. And Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, Martin. 2018. Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age. London: Oneworld Publications. Müller, Jan Werner. 2016. What is populism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nobre, Marcos. 2013a. Choque de democracia. Razões da revolta. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Nobre, Marcos. 2013b. Imobilismo em movimento. Da redemocratização ao governo Dilma. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Nobre, Marcos. 2014a. La redémocratisation est terminée, la démocratisation commence. Les Temps Modernes. 678:????? Nobre, Marcos. 2014b. Brésil, Juin 2013: Mouvement Social et Refus du “Blindage” de la Démocratie. Mouvements. 76:????? Nobre, Marcos. 2019. The June Revolts. In Green, J. N., Langland, V., and Moritz Schwarcz. Eds. The Brazil Reader. History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press Nobre, Marcos. 2020. “O que, afinal, está em crise na democracia?”, in: Miriam Dolhnikoff and Maurício Fiore (eds.), Democracia à brasileira: Cebrap 50 anos, São Paulo: Sesc (forthcoming) O Globo. 2019. “Um governo obediente. Às redes sociais”, March 3.

178

M. Nobre

Peeren, Esther; Celikates, Robin; de Kloet, Jeroen; and Poell, Thomas. Eds. 2018. Global Cultures of Contestation: Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity, London: Palgrave. Rocha de Barros, Celso.2019. A queda. Piauí, 150: ????? Runciman, David. 2018. How Democracy Ends, London: Profile Books. Singer, André. 2019. “Reação popular”, Folha de S. Paulo, March 23. Schumpeter, Joseph. 2003. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, London and New York: Routledge. Valor Econômico. 2019. “Desigualdade de renda sobre pelo 17o. trimestre e é recorde”, 18–20 May. Woodward, Bob. 2018. Fear. Trump in the White House. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Postliberalism in International Affairs

11

Laurence McFalls

Abstract

Building on Michel Foucault’s critical analyses of liberalism and neoliberalism, this chapter elaborates the concept of postliberalism as the epistemological if not ideological framework for contemporary global politics. It argues that postliberalism is a new truth regime that entails a new form of government(ality). Whereas liberalism arose in the late 18th century with the probabilistic and pragmatic empiricism of the human sciences and the critique of rationalist absolutism, neoliberalism introduced a social constructivist, relativist critique of liberalism’s naturalization of the market as an arbiter of effective government. Neoliberalism thus reoriented government towards the activist creation and stimulation of a market(ized) society and entrepreneurship of the self. It also made (self-)doubt and salutary crisis a tool of government. Concomitant to the financialization of the international economy and the securitization of international relations, postliberalism breaks with liberal probabilism and neoliberal constructivism, replacing them “plausibilistic” verisimilitude. Thriving in a context of incertitude, it makes crisis not the limit of government but its very essence. Keywords

Liberalism · Neoliberalism · Postliberalism · Epistemology · Michel Foucault · Governmentality

L. McFalls (*)  Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 K.-G. Giesen (ed.), Ideologies in World Politics, Staat – Souveränität – Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30512-3_11

179

180

L. McFalls

Postliberalism is both less and more than an ideology—if by ideology we mean a relatively coherent, consciously held set of concepts and principles that give meaning to, or interpret, the state of the world and that guide political action to conserve, challenge, or change that state. It is less than an ideology since very few if any political actors would describe themselves as postliberal or acknowledge postliberalism as their guide to action, but it is also more than an ideology in that it establishes the very truth criteria by which it is possible to interpret, and act in, the world. Postliberalism constitutes, in fact, what the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) called an episteme. Thus, to understand how postliberalism ideationally if not ideologically shapes contemporary global politics, we must first briefly review the epistemological and political thought of Michel Foucault, notably his analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism, then extrapolate from his thought the emergence of what I call postliberalism, and finally explore how postliberalism as an episteme makes sense of, and even guides, current trends in global politics.

1 From Liberalism to Neoliberalism In a somewhat obscure passage in his 1979 lecture course posthumously published as The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault (2004, p. 94 f.) contrasts liberalism and socialism, explaining that liberalism, unlike socialism, never had to face the question of its veracity or of its conformity to some doctrinal text. Socialism always had to suffer suspicion, he argues, because it lacked its own intrinsic form of political reason, or what Foucault alternatively calls an “art of government” or “governmentality.” Instead, socialism found itself obliged to graft itself either onto the liberal logic of minimalist, cost-effective government through the more or less gentle guidance of self-interested individuals (liberal subjects) or onto the authoritarian logic of “reason of state,” where rational subjects subordinate themselves to sovereign rule. Or, in another variant of Foucault’s ­not-immediately-obvious political vocabulary, we might say that socialism did not offer an alternative logic either to the biopolitical management of populations or to the geopolitical control of territories. To see how the vocabulary and concepts of Foucault’s political thought can help us understand the (post)ideological politics of our postliberal present, we need to situate his political analysis within his broader intellectual project as first presented in The Order of Things (1966). That programmatic work ultimately won him a prestigious chair at the Collège de France, a chair he chose to call “the history of systems of thought,” for indeed Foucault’s oeuvre sought to trace the

11  Postliberalism in International Affairs

181

genealogy of contemporary Western civilization through the ruptures in the defining criteria of truth, subjectivity, and power from antiquity to early Christianity, the renaissance, the classical age, and in particular the birth of the modern subject in the late 18th century. In The Order of Things, Foucault notably dispelled the myth of continuous progress in Western scientific knowledge since the renaissance, exposing instead the epistemic ruptures in truth criteria. Thus, if during the renaissance the discovery of truth resided in the identification of resemblances (and infinite gradations of difference) between past and present, between celestial and terrestrial orders, between words and the things they name, etc., during the classical age of the 17th century the truth came to lie within the rational mind’s non-contradictory representations of reality. With the late 18th century Kantian critique of pure reason and the establishment of the human sciences (notably biology, economics, and linguistics), truth criteria escaped the purity of the mind to become empirical, external and probabilistic, ultimately alerting modern subjects to the finitude and fragility of their minds and existence. In order to underscore the political importance of these epistemic ruptures, Foucault begins The Order of Things with a lengthy analysis of Diego Velazquez’s mid-17th century painting “Las Meninas,” apparently a depiction of the Spanish infanta princess surrounded by courtiers in the royal palace in Madrid. The painting also includes a partial self-portrait of Velazquez standing at his easel to the side, a detail that alerts viewers to the fact that they occupy, off canvas, the space of the painting’s actual subject, namely the king and queen, whose reflection is barely visible in a mirror at the point of disappearing perspective in the painting’s background. For Foucault, the painting thus almost literally announces the rupture in the foundations of political legitimacy with the age of absolutism. Indeed, the source of the sovereign’s claim to absolute authority resides not in the monarch’s resemblance to God or to his or her traditionally legitimate noble ancestors whose blood pulses through his or her veins; instead, it springs from rational (political) subjects’ (or the painting’s viewers’) ability to imagine the role and the necessity of the sovereign in their minds and thereby to authorize the sovereign’s power to dictate the law. In his 1977 lecture course published as Society Must be Defended, Foucault (1997) makes abundantly clear this congruence between the episteme of representation and absolutist reason of state through his analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. In the Hobbesian version of the social contract, rational subjects escape the state of nature’s “war of all against all” by calculating that they would be better off by ceding their natural rights to everything (except their right to self-preservation) to an all-powerful sovereign whose right to pronounce the law (juris-diction) would guarantee peace and prosperity even as the sovereign

182

L. McFalls

remained at war with all. (Hobbes’ classic, entirely logical articulation of the theory of a sovereign above, beyond, or outside of the law, of course, left the West with huge constitutional legal problems including the American Justice Department’s extra-legal rule of not indicting a sitting president…) As Foucault argues, Hobbes’ apparently problematic claim that sovereign rule established through conquest is no less or no differently legitimate than freely contracted rule demonstrates that Hobbes’ theory rests on no historical, empirical truth. It is a purely logical construct of how entirely rational subjects would deduce both natural rights for themselves and the necessity of sacrificing them to a sovereign without regard to whether said sovereign was the fruit of a fresh contract, the successor to a contract inherited from time immemorial, or a brutal conqueror. The sovereign is always a purely abstract product of reason without reference to the vagaries of concrete reality: one obeys because it is reasonable, period. Rationally established, this “reason of state” nonetheless faced a serious problem: it was absolute in theory (whence its synonym “absolutism”) but only moderately successful in practice. The sovereign may well have held the right to edict a law on anything, but the sovereign could not know or anticipate everything. Absolutist authority thus had to confront an internal critique, namely that it was irrational to rely on the rationally recognizable imperfection of reason, as well as an external critique, namely that it was pragmatically inefficient. Political liberalism arose from this double critique. On the one hand, still from a rationalist perspective in the late 17th century, John Locke re-deduced, from an imaginary representation of a pacific state of nature, not only a pre-political natural right to individual private property, but also the principle of limited government. On the other hand, the traditional aristocratic resistance to absolutist rule in 17th century Britain and 18th century France contested the monarch’s concrete, historical usurpation of feudal privilege and the principles of divided government it entailed. In Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism, the latter historical-empirical argument had greater epistemological and hence ultimately political significance than the rationalist, Lockean critique because it was based on historicism, empiricism, and pragmatism and as such radically reconstituted the bases of truth and of political legitimacy. In Foucault’s account of the origins of liberalism, the rationalist thought experiment of a “war of all against all” gave way to the historical narrative of successive waves of conquest in which Norman kings, for example, usurped ­Anglo-Saxon nobles’ privileges, or Franks those of Galls. In this narrative, the 17th and 18th century feudal reaction took the form not only of particular aristocratic liberties’ opposition to the crown’s general, abstract jurisdictional liberty, but also of a concept of politics not as a rationalist transcendence of conflict

11  Postliberalism in International Affairs

183

but rather as its very embodiment. Thus, in Society Must be Defended, Foucault adopts as his analytical premise, as Carl Schmitt did before him, the inversion of Clausewitz’s celebrated phrase that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” For Foucault, the “murmurs of war” have permeated politics at least ever since the historicist, liberal-aristocratic critique of reason of state. Not only did absolutist monarchs lose their rationalist veneer of legitimacy; they became unjust usurpers of authority in an ongoing battle of empirical interests. To be sure, the ­aristocratic-turned-liberal critique of monarchical rule did not advocate anarchy, i.e. the absence of central authority. Instead, it proposed limited government either through a division of powers à la Montesquieu or, later on, Tocqueville or through the constitutional rule of law à la Locke or Kant. Above and beyond such formal restrictions, however, liberalism recognized an external, practical limitation on rule: its empirical effectiveness. A sovereign might proclaim the right to edict any law, but without the ability to enforce it, that right was meaningless. In other words, rational law was subordinate to empirical cost-benefit analysis. For Foucault, then, the liberal art of government rested on entirely new truth criteria: the probabilistic calculation of success replaced the justice of abstract reason. Or in Foucault’s vocabulary: jurisdiction ceded to “veridiction.” What is more, liberalism identified a new locus of truth. It did not reside in the pure representations of the mind, but rather in a place that escaped the mind’s intentionality and perspicacity, namely the market, a place that produced the truth of prices for goods and services (including those of government) through the blind forces of supply and demand. A ruler might of course try to impose a law at all costs, yet sooner or later those costs would outrun the benefits. Again, liberalism did not abandon all aspirations for order and social control; its art of government consisted in its reduction of costs through techniques of indirect rule. Instead of forcing compliance, it generated incentives for subjects to comply of their own free accord. It did so, in one of Foucault’s memorable formulations, by “producing and consuming freedoms” so that liberal subjects became their own taskmasters in a panoply of fields of action where they could exercise freedoms that liberal governmentality created for them: to buy, to own, to sell, to believe, to speak, to assemble, to vote, to marry, to reproduce, to run certain risks, and to die. In another Foucauldian formulation, whereas reason of state “let live and made die,” liberalism “made live and let die” in the sense that it abandoned the governmental ambition of total control (enforceable by death) in favour of a growing range of choices of manners of living. This freedom of choice and the uncertainty and risks it entailed, i.e. the liberal “culture of danger,” were possible only in equilibrium with a culture of security: liberal subjects could freely pursue their interests only insofar as they could limit the risks of their actions by being able largely

184

L. McFalls

to anticipate others’ actions and reactions. Liberal government therefore not only had to guarantee certain legal rights, notably of private property and of contract, but also had to normalize social behaviour. Such normalization did not require individuals’ total conformity (as under sovereign reason of state) but a certain predictability as well as standard deviations of behaviours and attitudes within the population as a whole around norms—and even around laws (which explains why liberalism could tolerate levels of deviance and even criminality that would have totally undermined the sovereign’s authority under reason of state). In short, liberalism constituted a total way of life. It was biopolitical in both a weak and a strong sense. Weakly, or descriptively, liberal biopolitics refers to a technique of government that targets populations as its object, leaving individuals free to act in accordance with the incentives established for the population as a whole. More powerfully, biopolitics refers to the total politicization of life itself, with power relations infiltrating all spheres of being from the public to the most intimate. Indeed, it is telling that Foucault elaborated the concept of biopolitics in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), where he showed that the sex act was a locus of power as the nexus defining the self and the population (whence the centrality of sexual politics from 19th century pro-natalism down to current LGBQT rights issues). Sexuality is, of course, only one of the facets of human existence that became the object of biopolitical regulation. The individual liberal subject, in both the political and the philosophical sense of the term, was the at once autonomous yet guided fruit of multiple, cross-cutting forces of normalization at work at the level of the population and more or less consciously and strategically manipulated through liberal technologies of government from individual-rights based law to social insurance schemes. At the centre of liberalism, however, lay the ideology of the market place as a site of truth in the form of the interests and incentives it simultaneously produced and mediated via its floating price mechanism. We can call the market an ideology in the sense that ideology, as a modern phenomenon born in the 18th century with the episteme of empirical science, generalizes or extrapolates from an empirical fact—in this case the price established by the “laws” of supply and demand—and asserts its universal validity for all (future) actions. Laissez-faire, let the market decide, whatever the domain: the stock market, the marriage market, or the market place of ideas! Late 18th century political economy’s discovery of the laws of the market and their deification as the “invisible hand” in fact marks the birth of ideology. Although Marx decried liberal political economy as bourgeois ideology and its propagation among the masses as false consciousness, his “scientific” socialism did not in the least question the epistemic underpinnings of liberalism. Marx’s critique of capitalism acknowledged the objectivity and

11  Postliberalism in International Affairs

185

even the fairness of market prices, notably for labour; they just happened to conceal the expropriation from freely contracted workers of the surplus use-value of their labour. Surprisingly, the fundamental, epistemic critique of liberalism came not from the left but from the right. Neoliberalism did, to be sure, foremost defend the market against the onslaught of socialist planning and Keynesian interventionism, both resurgences of reason of state and its rationalist pretentions to omniscience, but, as Foucault shows in The Birth of Biopolitics, neoliberalism at the same time proffered a fundamental epistemological critique of liberal empiricism. While championing the unsurpassed real-life efficiency of the market for allocating resources, neoliberalism contested classical liberalism’s naturalization of the market, that is, its ontological conviction that market relations were a universal, transhistoric force anchored in what Adam Smith called man’s natural “propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another” and that they would spontaneously emerge in the absence of arbitrary (government) restrictions. Instead, neoliberal thinkers recognized that the market was a fragile social construct whose empirically demonstrable efficiency depended on the volitions, knowledge and intentions of social agents who acted as if the marketed existed. As Martin Beddeleem (2017) has argued, the influence of philosophers of science such as Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi made the early neoliberalism of the interwar period more an epistemological movement than an economic one. More specifically, and quite ironically, neoliberalism at its beginning advocated the same relativistic social constructivism that the late 20th century conservatives who embraced neoliberal economic policy so vehemently denounced. Because of its constructivist epistemological underpinnings, neoliberalism rendered the ideology of the market much more activist than under laissez-faire liberalism. Social policy had to cultivate and groom a market society as well as individuals who understood themselves and thus behaved as homo oeconomicus. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault devotes considerable attention to the two main theoretical currents of postwar neoliberalism, namely (West) German ordoliberalism, with its ideological program of the social market economy, and American anarcholiberalism with its individualist vision of human capital. Often mistaken for a West German variant of the postwar Keynesian welfarist social democratic consensus, the soziale Marktwirtschaft, in Foucault’s original interpretation, was in fact the first complete neoliberal subordination of politics and society to the principle of market competition. The genius of ordoliberalism as put into practice by Ludwig Erhard, the Federal Republic’s first Minister of Economy and second chancellor, lay in the reconstruction of the totally discredited German state not only through the Wirtschaftswunder of economic growth but

186

L. McFalls

above all through the organization of society and law (from Germany’s celebrated labour training programs to cartel legislation) to guarantee the economy’s competitiveness. Foucault (2004, p. 96) succinctly summarizes: “Germany’s real miracle is to have made the jurisdiction of the state derive from the veridiction of the market.” As for anarcholiberalism in the form of Gary Becker’s rational-choice theory of human capital, its market truths addressed individuals in their constant quest to maximize their own competitive capacities. Thus marketized, the neoliberal subject, in distinction from the liberal “partner of exchange,” became an “entrepreneur of the self” always in pursuit of self-improvement to such an extent that Foucault even anticipated that reconfigurations of the body and genes would become not “science fiction” but “a currently ambient problematic” (Foucault 2004, p. 232 f.; see also McFalls and Pandolfi 2014). In this sense, we might say that whereas liberalism was a way of life, neoliberalism created new life-forms.

2 The Birth of Postliberalism Inasmuch as liberalism and neoliberalism offered clear prescriptions for how to arrange society and to lead one’s life in order to best profit from the future, they were clearly ideologies in the positive sense of the term. We hardly need to rehearse the Marxist, traditionalist, feminist, postmodernist, environmentalist or other critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism to know that they were also ideologies in the negative sense: illusions, apologies, false gods, power-plays, etc. More than ideologies, however, they were epistemologies. Whether a natural force or a social construct, and for better or for worse, market laws effectively produce the truth of prices, thus providing knowledge that guides behaviour. This historical effectiveness of the market not only for generating wealth but also for judging policy established pragmatism as (neo)liberalism’s criterion for truth. Knowledge was practical and experiential: if it works, it’s right; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Such empirical pragmatism is also what we might call “relatively relativistic.” Truth and knowledge may very well vary in the eyes (i.e. perspective and experience) of the beholder, but common experience shows that perspectives and experiences overlap or concur with a certain degree of probability. It was precisely the probabilistic calculation of certain incentives to produce certain behaviours that lay at the heart of the liberal art of government when it abandoned absolutist deductive reason’s illusion of pure knowledge and total control. What happens, however, when events such as suicide bombings or climate catastrophe defy previous experience?

11  Postliberalism in International Affairs

187

Epistemic crises or ruptures bring on epochal changes. Knowledge, power, and subjectivity all shift. Foucault thus famously concludes The Order of the Things with the image of a face drawn in the sand that the tide will soon wash away. He does so to evoke the impending death of the modern (liberal) subject, that t­o-us-still-familiar creation of the empirical episteme of the human sciences. He does not say what comes next, and in his lecture course of 1979 The Birth of Biopolitics he only hints at how neoliberal entrepreneurship of the self might remake the human experience before devoting his research until his own untimely death in 1984 to a return to the origins of Western culture in antiquity and early Christianity. Still, Foucault’s method, specifically that of looking at fringe phenomena and counter-discourses to detect what is hidden in plain view at the centre of culture and society, does suggest an avenue for exploring the episteme and politics emerging after liberalism. Postliberalism is not a scientific doctrine, a political program, or an ideology. Nonetheless, we can roughly see the contours of a new episteme and perhaps some of its origins in, and effects on, contemporary global affairs. At first glance, postliberalism would seem to be a marginal current of thought, and certainly so in the face of the continued legitimacy of empirical natural and social sciences. Although, as we shall see, it may feed into anti-liberal discourses such as increasingly widespread right-wing nationalist populism, we should not confuse postliberalism with (ideological) hostility to liberalism, the market, or capitalism. Indeed, I have elsewhere (McFalls and Pandolfi 2017) argued at greater length that what I here call postliberalism was inherent to liberalism from its very onset, or that the liberal project carried the seeds of its own destruction, though not in the Marxist sense of objective contradictions within the functioning of liberal capitalism. Instead, the worm lay in liberalism’s relatively relativistic epistemology. As we have already seen, the veridiction of the empirical human sciences supplanted the absolute verities of human reason under the episteme of representation, just as the implacable deductive reason of the Cartesian cogito had replaced the more pragmatic and experiential search for similitudes under the renaissance episteme of resemblance. Under postliberalism we see a move from veridiction to what I characterize as verisimilitude, or the semblance of truth or the appearance of what might be true. This move abandons relative relativism and even goes beyond radical relativism’s admission of multiple truths to question the very (pragmatic) utility of truth. It would be a mistake, however, to confuse postliberalism with post-factual politics (McFalls 2018). To be sure, a flagrant disregard for the truth characterizes contemporary politics with its populist prevarications that surpass previous propaganda, but at least lying or accusations of “fake news” flatter the notion of

188

L. McFalls

truth. Postliberal verisimilitude is more insidious. Its most candid, perhaps even ideal-typical expression came from the mouth of George W. Bush’s strategist Karl Rove, who in an interview with journalist Ron Suskind mocked those who believe in empirical truths: The aide [subsequently identified as Karl Rove] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ (Susskind 2004)

Rove’s disparaging remark about “the reality-based community” subsequently entered common discourse, usually un-self-critically by members of that community to denounce Rove’s apparent cynicism. What these unrepentant empiricists failed to see, however, was the connection Rove drew between truth and power when he stated, “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Empire typically refers to a geopolitical conception of government associated with reason of state: a sovereign’s control over a territory and an on-going quest for its defense and, by realist necessity, expansion. Empire contrasts with liberalism’s biopolitical strategy of controlling populations through the indirect rule of manipulating interests through incentives. To be sure, we cannot know exactly what Rove meant by “we are an empire now” (or even whom he means with “we”), and we can hardly expect him to have been versed in Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and his analysis of liberalism. Nevertheless, whether intuitive or informed, Rove’s statement announced the end of liberal government and the beginning of a new, postliberal world order, or rather disorder in which the quest for empirical truth has no particular purpose or purchase. To understand postliberal disorder, we can yet again turn to Foucault’s analysis of liberalism. In The Birth of Biopolitics, he proposes a three-point definition of liberalism: 1) the market as a locus of empirical veridiction; 2) the limitation of government through the calculation of its utility; and 3) “the positioning of Europe as a region of unlimited economic development in relation to a global market.” (Foucault 2004, p. 62) This final empirical point situates liberalism in its historical and geographical context, namely the European balance-of-power system within which no power could impose its imperium on the others. Liberal government and liberal economics allowed Europe to get out of this stalemate by

11  Postliberalism in International Affairs

189

overcoming the zero-sum logics of geopolitical competition and of mercantilism where one state’s gain necessarily meant another’s loss. “Unlimited” liberal peace and prosperity for all in Europe, however, came at the expense of most of the rest of the conquered, colonized world, Europe’s “global market.” Thus, the century of European liberal peace, from the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of World War One, was also the century of global imperialism. In the following century this dialectical unity of liberalism and imperialism articulated itself, on the one hand, crudely in the World-War and then Cold-War struggle between authoritarian reason of state (including the modern extremes of Nazism and Stalinism) and liberal democratic capitalism and, on the other, more subtly in the postwar and then post-Cold War project of European integration. The creation of a single European market amounted in fact to a hybrid of liberal and imperial logics and a response to Europe’s new incapacity to treat the rest of the world as its hinterland for economic expansion. No single country (not even Germany after reunification) could dominate the continent, but the European Union as a single liberal-imperial unit (Jacques Delors’ “Unidentified Political Object”) could hope to compete in a globalized economy, whether understood in neoliberal or ­neo-mercantilist terms. We can thus divide the liberal epoch into three: a period of liberal expansion until 1914; a period of violent crisis from 1914 to 1945; and a period of Cold War liberal-authoritarian stalemate (including an initial phase of liberal redeployment in the form of European integration) until 1989. We can add a period of ­neoliberal-postliberal transition between 1989 and the financial crisis of 2008 and since then perhaps speak of full-blown postliberalism. Whereas liberalism’s Cold War victory over authoritarian reason of state was supposed to mark the “end of history” understood as the unfettered rein of market veridiction, it in fact ushered in an “end of time” in the form of permanent crisis. If so far we have examined postliberalism in timeless epistemological terms of unbridled relativism that abandons empirical veridiction in favour of phantasmagoric verisimilitudes, we can identify a concrete temporal moment when this epistemological possibility became a reality. Indeed, my formulation of the concept of postliberalism arose in the empirical context of trying to make sense of the humanitarian crises and interventions of the 1990s and early 2000s. Together with my colleague Mariella Pandolfi, I came to recognize that sites of humanitarian intervention, with their simultaneous suspension and acceleration of temporality in an enduring state of emergency/exception, were in fact laboratories for the development of an entirely new form of governmental reason. Having observed that humanitarian interventions often sparked or perpetuated the violence they purported to cure or prevent, we saw that permanent crisis permitted a new form of authority that we dubbed

190

L. McFalls

therapeutic domination. Like emergency room doctors, therapeutic interveners apply an impersonal treatment protocol to victims of catastrophe without regard for their particular histories or cultural and social contexts. In urgent circumstances allowing no consideration for past or future, the validity of such therapeutic action resides not in the probability of its success but in its plausibility: emergency room doctors take no blame for losing their patients’ lives if they have done what seemed to be the right thing. We cannot explore all of the empirical and theoretical ramifications of therapeutic domination here (see McFalls 2008, 2010; McFalls and Pandolfi 2014, 2017; Pandolfi and McFalls 2009, 2014; Pandolfi 2003, 2011), but we can already see that the extension of its techniques of government and criteria of truth from the peripheral sites of humanitarian intervention to such central sites as southern Europe during the still on-going sovereign debt crisis has transformed the nature of politics globally. Indeed, the technical and epistemological lessons learned from what claimed to be short-term crisis management morphed into a form of government by crisis, a permanent crisis of order and of knowledge simultaneously. To be sure, the liberal art of government, as we saw with Foucault, flirted with crisis as it sought a precarious equilibrium between freedom and security, choice and predictability. Efficient liberal government—which “governed better by governing less” (Foucault 2004, p. 30)—thus ideally always found itself on the verge of crisis. Neoliberalism forced this logic farther by pushing society and individuals to question their adequacy for market competition. Entrepreneurship of the self left the neoliberal subject in a constant quest for self-perfection and hence in a permanent state of self-doubt or identity crisis. Postliberalism, however, makes a qualitative leap by turning uncertainty, which had been the asymptotic limit of order and government, into its central tenet.

3 Postliberalism, Populism, and the Politics of Fear Postliberalism thus makes a radical break with the Western tradition of political and philosophical thought from antiquity through modernity, namely the notions that politics seeks order and philosophy truth, no matter how fragile or elusive they might be. Perhaps the clearest symptom of this shift is the transvaluation of the concept “disruption.” Not to be mistaken for criticism or rebellion, which propose alternatives, disruption until recently referred essentially to a form of gratuitous violence. Today, business gurus and policy pundits herald it as a miraculous force for change, if not as an end in itself. Another telling key term in postliberal discourse is “resilience.” Imported from psychology into social

11  Postliberalism in International Affairs

191

thought and even into everyday parlance, resilience originally referred to individuals’ inborn capacity to overcome trauma or not. Now it describes a fitness that individuals must voluntarily cultivate in their fight for survival. Taken together in the n­ eo-Darwinian postliberal present, disruption and resilience constitute a perversely virtuous circle in which hardship and adaptation beget one another: the worse things get, the better I become; and the better I become, the worse I should make things get, and so on. Another common contemporary semiotic pairing also symptomatizes postliberalism’s neo-Darwinism: diversity and vulnerability. Transposed from biology, where the biodiversity of an ecosystem requires the protection of the most vulnerable species for the survival benefit of all, the concept of diversity (cultural, sexual, social etc.) of a population has become the hallmark of its viability, with the quest for identifying vulnerable subpopulations often encouraging groups to define themselves in terms of victimization (McFalls 2016). The postliberal epoch’s celebration and promotion of diversity would lend it an air of tolerance and cosmopolitanism if not for this discourse’s dark underside, namely its fear of extinction and its politics of competitive victimhood. Postliberalism thus embraces a catastrophic, eschatological worldview. To be sure, at a time when irreversible global warming, pandemics, and massive ­species-life extinction are realities with an overwhelmingly high degree of empirical probability and an even more powerful imaginary charge, it is not surprising that discourses of denial or implausible Salvationist myths should flourish. The postliberal “truth” regime thus offers fertile ground, counter to the diversity discourse, for right-wing nationalist-populist discourses to take root à la “the (sinking) boat is full.” Indeed, the epistemic as opposed to ideological character of postliberalism becomes clear through its ability to sustain diametrically opposite discourses: our survival depends on cultivating diversity or, alternatively, on expunging it. Common to these antithetical views is the precautionary principle, namely the idea that, in the face of uncertainty, we must prepare for the worst imaginable scenario. Here again we see the importance of plausibility replacing probability as a criterion of truth, or rather verisimilitude. Such “plausibilism” does not necessarily rest on bad faith or pure fantasy: the apparent irrationality of suicide bombing makes preventing terrorism more difficult today, even if the actual probability of dying in a terrorist attack is on the decline. Similarly, past experience, because inexistent, does not allow us to predict when global overheating will go exponential as, for example, more dangerous greenhouse gases get released from the thawing tundra. In such a meteorological and political climate of fear, it comes as no surprise that the “politics of survival” have replaced aspirations for a politically obtainable collective, or “convivial,” future, whether pragmatic or utopian (Abélès 2006).

192

L. McFalls

At the same time, plausibilistic thinking has nourished improbable if not false hopes. Undeniable technological advances in the information and communication sciences have led to the development and diffusion of “knowledge” whose ­truth-value derives not from its gradual empirical confirmation over time and space but from its instanteous ubiquity. Among these technologies, “big data,” artificial intelligence, and the “wisdom of crowds promise to overcome uncertainty and spur development of new products, particularly in the financial sector. For example, data mining, i.e. automated computer tracing of patterns within previously unavailable, uninteresting, or even trivial but huge data sets, allows post hoc formulation of hypotheses of causal relations that might be politically or economically exploitable. Under the conditions of empiricist hypothesis testing such establishment of relations in search of explanations was inadmissible, dismissed as “fishing” since a relationship observed after the fact might have any number of possible explanations. Today, the plausibility of an idea makes it sellable. In fact, the price it can command on a speculative market establishes its validity. Thus, insurance companies can float policies for protection against risks that actuarial—or empirical probability—calculations cannot establish. Instead, the demand for the policy, based on fear, fad, speculation, blind luck or whatever, determines what the risk might actually be. Similarly, new crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin draw on decentralized algorithmic block chain technologies to “mine” a value that exists entirely by virtue of speculative demand as becomes clear whenever an advocate of such exchange mechanisms is hard pressed to explain how and why it exists. (To be sure, the value of gold or paper currencies fluctuates with speculation but such speculation ultimately rests not only on empirical forces of supply and demand but also and ultimately on the relatively calculable solvability of a bank or government that backs the currency.) The idea that an empirically uninformed mass can generate plausible verisimilitudes has even invaded the heretofore highly empiricist field of political polling, where sociologically representative sampling and statistical probability analysis are giving way to betting games: the wisdom of the crowd, any crowd, can have predictive power when, in what can become an act of self-fulfilling prophecy, individuals wager not on the candidate they would like to see win but on the candidate they feel will win. Finally, letting imagination run wild has become a selling point for public policy think tanks. Whereas the policy prescriptions they traditionally pitched might have had an ideological bent, they nonetheless claimed empirical, scholarly expertise. Today, they offer scenario planning where their ability to imagine the unimaginable testifies to the seriousness of their work (cf. Faubion 2012). All of these fantastical verisimilitudes would merely be a source of amusement or even healthy scepticism if they did not nourish cynical indifference to

11  Postliberalism in International Affairs

193

facts and, more importantly, inflict real world pain. Indeed, I have dated the beginning of the postliberal epoch back to the outbreak of the world financial crisis in 2007–2008. Its origins lay in the collapse of the subprime market which traded a derivative financial product that packaged (bad) mortgages and mortgage reinsurance to create a product whose intrinsic value, if there was one, no one understood. The verisimilitudinous economy of financial speculation, whose volume vastly outweighs the real economy, thus caused massive pain to the real economy and to real people, as the subprime crisis provoked a liquidity and banking crisis which in turn led to government bailouts, sovereign debt crisis, the near collapse of the Euro zone, and austerity policies that often became an end in themselves or found their gratuitous justification in the ideology of disruption and resilience. Thus, while liberalism and neoliberalism promised prosperity for all (even if often always just around the corner), postliberalism delivers precarity for all, if necessary through self-inflicted adversity. Under such circumstances of insecurity, whether real or imagined, planned or spontaneous, it should come as no surprise that populism and its simplistic prevarications appeal to voters quite independently of their objective exposure to unemployment, falling wages, migratory flows, or cultural differences. In short, the postliberalism has ushered in a new epoch in which knowledge, subjectivity, and power are unashamedly arbitrary. Authority rests neither on rationality nor efficiency but on the audacity of imagination, not to say lies. Such authority requires no ideological justification, for it holds no promise for the future. It plays on our worst fears and, at best, offers scant hope for survival.

References Abélès, Marc. 2006. Politique de la survie. Flammarion, Paris. Beddeleem, Martin. 2017. Fighting for the Mantle of Science: The Epistemological Foundations of Neoliberalism, 1931–1951, Ph.D. diss, Université de Montréal. Faubion, James. 2012. “Scenario Planning and the Rhetoric of Risk,” paper presented to the conference, “Michel Foucault and the Global Post-Political Present,” Berlin (May), available online at http://vimeopro.com/altofilm/foucault-berlin-seminar. Foucault, Michel. 1997. «Il faut défendre la société». Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. McFalls, Laurence. 2008. “Les fondements rationnels et sociaux des passions politiques: vers une sociologie de la violence contemporaine avec Weber et Foucault.” Anthropologie et Sociétés 32(3): 155–172. McFalls, Laurence. 2010. Benevolent Dictatorship: The Formal Logic of Humanitarian Government. In Fassin, Didier and Mariella Pandolfi. Eds. Contemporary States of

194

L. McFalls

Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions. New York: Zone Books. McFalls, Laurence. 2016. Diversity: A late 20th Century Genealogy. In Lehmkuhl, Ursula, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Laurence McFalls. Eds. Spaces of Difference: Conflicts and Cohabitation, Münster: Waxmann Verlag. McFalls, Laurence. 2018. Qu’est-ce que la politique post-factuelle? In Les professeurs du Département de science politique, La polititque en questions, volume 2. Montréal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, pp. 33–42. Pandolfi, Mariella. 2003. Contract of Mutual (In)Difference: Governance and Humanitarian Apparatus in Albania and Kosovo. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies. 10(1): 369–381. Pandolfi, Mariella. 2011. Humanitarianism and its Discontents. In Bornstein, Erica and Peter Redfield. Eds. Forces of Compassion between Ethics and Politics. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Pandolfi, Mariella and Laurence McFalls. 2009. Intervention as Therapeutic Order. Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica 27–28: 91–111. Pandolfi, Mariella and Laurence McFalls. 2014. L’intervento come ordine terapeutico. In Giovani Pizza and Helle Johannessen. Eds. Il corpo e lo stato, Perugia: Morlacchi editore. McFalls, Laurence and Mariella Pandolfi. 2017. Too-late liberalism. In Philippe Bonditti, Didier Bigo, and Frédéric Gros. Eds. Foucault and the Modern International: Silences and Legacies for the Study of World Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 219–236. McFalls, Laurence and Mariella Pandolfi. 2014. Therapeusis and Parrhesia. In James Faubion. Ed. Foucault Now, Cambridge: Polity Press. Susskind, Ron. 2004. Without a Doubt. New York Times, 17 October.