The Politics of International Political Theory: reflections on the works of 9783319932774, 9783319932781, 2018952234, 3319932772

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Notes on Contributors......Page 8
1 Introduction......Page 11
2 Intellectual Biography......Page 13
3 Framing and Reframing IPT......Page 15
4 Liberalism and Brown......Page 22
5 Political Judgement and Pluralism......Page 24
References......Page 26
Part I: Judgement, Reason, and Humanity......Page 28
1 Introduction......Page 29
2 Facts and Values......Page 32
3 Science and One World Realism......Page 34
4 Rortyian Pragmatism......Page 39
5 Conclusion......Page 42
References......Page 43
1 Introduction......Page 46
2 Doing International Political Theory......Page 47
3 The Meaning and Scope of Political Judgement......Page 54
4 Conclusion......Page 59
References......Page 60
1 Introduction......Page 61
2 Practical Judgement in Brown’s Work......Page 62
3 What Is Required of Practical Judgement?......Page 66
4 Solving Problems or Guiding Actions?......Page 70
5 Conclusion......Page 72
References......Page 73
1 Introduction......Page 75
2 Neutrality, Independence and Politics......Page 76
3 Impartiality, Selectivity and Practical Judgement......Page 81
4 Tragedy and Humanity......Page 85
5 Conclusion......Page 87
References......Page 88
Part II: War and Violence, Human Rights and Global Institutions......Page 91
1 Introduction1......Page 92
2 Setting the Stage: The Post-Cold War Gap Between the Need to Act and the Means of Action in the UN......Page 96
3 Failing to Fill the Gap: R2P as Anti-politics......Page 101
4 Working on the Gap: De-politicization as Part of Politics......Page 105
5 Reducing the Gap: Sticking with the Just War Tradition?......Page 107
6 Sovereign Judgment and the International Rule of Law: Moving Ahead in Circles?......Page 110
7 Conclusion......Page 114
References......Page 115
1 Introduction......Page 121
2 IPT in the World......Page 122
3 ‘Applied Political Philosophy’......Page 124
4 Our Peculiar Institution......Page 129
5 The Tragedy of Just War......Page 134
6 International Society and the ‘Sanity of Madness’......Page 138
References......Page 141
1 Introduction......Page 145
2 Establishing Brown’s Middle Ground......Page 147
3 The Curious Case of Torture4: An Illustration......Page 151
4 The Broken Middle......Page 156
5 Conclusion......Page 158
References......Page 160
1 Introduction......Page 163
2 Human Nature and Human Rights: A Dilemma......Page 164
3 Theories of Human Rights and Appropriate Determinacy About Human Nature......Page 166
4 A Practice Theory of Human Rights......Page 171
5 Sovereignty, Human Rights and Global Power......Page 174
6 Conclusion......Page 181
References......Page 182
1 Introduction......Page 184
2 The Ethics of Brexit......Page 185
3 Resolving the Conflict Between States’ Rights and Individual Rights......Page 193
4 The EU as an Ethical Solution to a Fundamental Tension in Contemporary World Politics......Page 196
5 Conclusion......Page 200
References......Page 201
1 Introduction......Page 202
2 The Requirement......Page 206
3 Justice and Tragedy......Page 209
4 Conclusion......Page 217
References......Page 218
1 Introduction......Page 221
2 Brown’s State Moralism......Page 223
3 Moving Beyond Groundless Utopianism—Or Staying in the Same Discourse?......Page 226
4 Ethics and Politics as Immanent Critique and as Trans-Communal Judgements......Page 229
5 The Missing Part: Collective Learning and Human Cultural Evolution......Page 233
6 Conclusions......Page 236
References......Page 240
Part III: Coda......Page 243
Chapter 13: In Response......Page 244
References......Page 256
1 The Challenges of ‘Festschrift’-writing......Page 257
2 Chris Brown Writings and Non-writings......Page 258
3 Formal Structures: The ‘Ring’ and Brown’s ‘Werke’......Page 260
References......Page 263
Index......Page 264

Citation preview

EDITED BY MATHIAS ALBERT & ANTHONY F. LANG JR.

THE POLITICS OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THEORY REFLECTIONS ON THE WORKS OF CHRIS BROWN

The Politics of International Political Theory

Mathias Albert  •  Anthony F. Lang Jr. Editors

The Politics of International Political Theory Reflections on the Works of Chris Brown

Editors Mathias Albert Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany

Anthony F. Lang Jr. University of St Andrews St Andrews, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-93277-4    ISBN 978-3-319-93278-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952234 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed 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. Cover image © Music-Images / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: Ran Shauli This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Christof Royer for his invaluable assistance in the editing process for this volume.

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Contents

1 Introduction: The Politics of International Political Theory   1 Anthony F. Lang Jr. and Mathias Albert Part I Judgement, Reason, and Humanity  19 2 Dogmatic Anti-dogmatism: Learning from Chris Brown  21 Colin Wight 3 The Politics of Judgement in International Political Theory  39 Kimberly Hutchings 4 Practical Judgement: Inconsistent—Or Incoherent?  55 Nicholas Rengger 5 Humanity in International Political Theory: Chris Brown and the Principles, Politics and Practice of Humanitarianism  69 Henry Radice

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Contents

Part II War and Violence, Human Rights and Global Institutions  85 6 Between Sovereign Judgment and the International Rule of Law: The Protection of People from Mass Atrocities  87 Lothar Brock 7 War and the ‘Brotherhood of Hooliganism’ 117 Ken Booth 8 Emotions and Political Limitations: Working Through the Broken Middle with Chris Brown 141 Brent J. Steele 9 The Politics of Human Rights 159 David Owen 10 The Ethics of Brexit 181 Mervyn Frost 11 Cultural Incomprehension and the Tragic Sense of Life 199 David Boucher 12 Chris Brown’s Liberal Conservatism, the Process of Moral Learning and Global Institutional Transformations 219 Heikki Patomäki Part III Coda 241 13 In Response 243 Chris Brown 14 Postscriptum: Chris Brown, and International Political Theory Anywhere Else but in Bayreuth 257 Mathias Albert and Anthony F. Lang Jr. Index 265

Notes on Contributors

Mathias  Albert  is Professor of Political Science at Bielefeld University. His latest books include Ordnung und Regieren in der Weltgesellschaft (ed. with Nicole Deitelhoff and Gunther Hellmann, 2018) and A Theory of World Politics (2016). Ken Booth  is a professor in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and an editor of International Relations. He is presently working on a book entitled International Relations: The Story so Far. David  Boucher  is Professor of Political Philosophy and International Relations at Cardiff University, and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg. His recent books include The Limits of Ethics in International Relations (2009); British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2011); and Appropriating Hobbes: Legacies in Politics, Law and International Relations (2018). Lothar Brock  is senior professor at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main and associate researcher at Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. His latest publications include ‘Cooperation in Conflict: Ubiquity, Limits, and Potential of Working Together at the International Level’, in Global Cooperation and the Human Factor in International Relations (ed. Dirk Messner and Silke Weinlich, 2016) and Fragile States: Violence and the Failure of Intervention (with Hans-Henrik Holm, Georg Sørensen and Michael Stohl, 2012).

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Notes on Contributors

Chris  Brown is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent book is International Society, Global Polity (2015) and—co-edited with Robyn Eckersley—The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory (2018). Mervyn Frost  is Professor of International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, and is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg. His recent work, with Dr. Silviya Lechner, includes ‘Two Conceptions of International Practice: Aristotelian praxis or Wittgensteinian language-games?’ in Review of International Studies 42/2 (2016), and Practice Theory and International Relations (2018). Kimberly Hutchings  is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of many books and articles, including International Political Theory (1999), Time and World Politics (2008) and Global Ethics: An Introduction (2010, 2nd edition 2018). Anthony F. Lang Jr.  is Professor of International Political Theory in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on issues at the intersection of ethics, law and politics at the global level. His most recent book is International Political Theory: An Introduction (2014). He is currently working on themes related to global constitutionalism. David  Owen is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Southampton. His most recent books include the co-­ authored Prospects of Citizenship (2011) and the edited volume Michel Foucault (2016). Heikki Patomäki  is Professor of World Politics at University of Helsinki. His most recent books are Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy: Exits and Conflicts (2018) and Brexit and the Political Economy of Fragmentation: Things Fall Apart (ed. with Jamie Morgan, 2018). Henry Radice  is a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is co-editor (with Tim Allen and Anna Macdonald) of Humanitarianism: A Dictionary of Concepts (2018).

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Nicholas  Rengger is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews. His most recent book is The Anti-Pelagian Imagination in Political Theory and International Relations: Dealing in Darkness (2017). He is currently finishing a book to be titled Global Politics as a Vocation. Brent  J.  Steele is the Francis D.  Wormuth Presidential Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. He publishes on international security, international ethics and US foreign policy. He is currently pursuing research projects on the topics of restraint, vicarious identity, micropolitics, and further studies on ontological security. Colin Wight  is a Professor of International Relations, and Chair of the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Rethinking Terrorism: Terrorism, Violence, and the State (2016). He was editor-in-­chief of the European Journal of International Relations from 2008 to 2013.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Politics of International Political Theory Anthony F. Lang Jr. and Mathias Albert

1   Introduction Chris Brown has been one of the most important figures in constituting International Political Theory (IPT). Others have played crucial roles as well, including some of those included in this volume. Yet it is Brown, arguably, who has been central to putting political theory in conversation with international relations theory. His ability to synthesize, critically assess, and push the boundaries of these adjacent theoretical perspectives has helped to frame world politics in ways that go beyond traditional and often staid debates. Perhaps even more importantly, Brown has connected sophisticated theoretical debates, both in contemporary and historical theory, with pressing dilemmas of global politics in the current age. He has consistently refused to keep theory distinct from the ‘world’ and has also refused to let the ‘world’ of politics resist normative theorizing. In so doing, he has brought forth the centrality of ‘judgment’, the ability to

A. F. Lang Jr. (*) University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK M. Albert Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_1

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draw upon forms of political wisdom to critique political practice. The cultivation of judgement about world politics is where Brown’s IPT makes its most distinctive mark. This introductory chapter will situate Brown’s work in relation to wider themes in IPT.  We provide some context to Brown’s development as a scholar, looking to the ways in which his ideas emerged in relation to different debates in both political theory and international relations. The first section provides a brief intellectual biography. The second section explores the idea of IPT through an engagement with three books through which he has defined the field: International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (IRT) (1992); Sovereignty, Rights and Justice (SRJ) (2002) and International Society, Global Polity: An Introduction to International Political Theory (ISGP) (2015). In the first work, he poses communitarianism against cosmopolitanism, in the second he poses sovereignty against rights, and in the third he poses international society against global polity.1 These overlapping frames, while different in important ways, reflect a core facet of Brown’s approach—negotiating the space between a world of states and a world of individuals. This structure remains at the heart of many treatments of IPT, and has, as such, shaped the theoretical orientation of many in the field. As Brown has moved away from his initial framing of the field in this way, this section instead looks more directly to how he understands the task of IPT; that is, how he moves from an idea of ‘normative theory’ to IPT. We will also briefly address the issue of Brown’s relation to the ‘English School’ of International Relations in this context, as this is an approach which also seeks to locate a relationship between the individual and the state, especially with the emergence of recent debates about ‘world society’ (Buzan 2004). The next part of the introduction looks to his engagement with the predominant liberal international order, particularly the ways in which powerful states in the Atlantic and wider European context have shaped discourses on human rights, humanitarian intervention, and the use of military force. This section looks at how Brown both defends and critiques liberal internationalism. For instance, he has argued in defence of human rights, yet also pointed out that such rights cannot work without developing cultural frameworks that enable the practice of such rights (Brown 2010b). He has defended the importance of a global polity in which rights and democracy are prominent, yet also noted that objections to universalism are not the result of simple selfish interests but arise from a principled resistance to colonialism and a valid moral defence of sovereignty (Brown 2015: 216).

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This section also explores briefly his reflections on cultural pluralism, an issue that animates a great deal of his work. The concluding section of the introduction turns to the theme of political judgement, which appears throughout his career and especially in the collection of essays entitled Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (2010). Brown draws his idea of judgement from a broadly Aristotelian account, though he is by no means confined to the ancient Greek understanding of this term. Inspired by Aristotle rather than following him, Brown points to the contextual process by which individuals in positions of leadership must make decisions about difficult matters. But those decisions are not simply for leaders. He writes for a wider audience than just the elites, having published books for classroom use, including his bestselling textbook, Understanding International Relations (Brown and Ainley 2009). He argues he is in the business of ‘public education’ which is relevant for the student as much as for the leader, suggesting that ‘we must try to cultivate the faculty for judgment in ourselves that we hope [political leaders] will also cultivate’ (Brown 2010a: 249).

2   Intellectual Biography One of the defining features of Brown’s scholarship is that he is grounded in both historical and contemporary international affairs. Indeed, he notes that ‘anyone who wishes to be taken seriously as a theorist of international relations had better be steeped in international history and have a very good knowledge of current affairs as well as a familiarity with the classics of political thought’ (Brown 2010a: 2). Theorists of IPT have benefited from this grounding not only by reading his work, but taking his classes, engaging with him at conferences, and even interacting with him on social media. In all these realms, Brown refuses to remain in the world of pure theory (though he is well-grounded in this as well, as will become evident below) but demands that theorists take seriously the tensions and complexities of the contemporary international order. This grounding in politics and history comes, perhaps, from the trajectory by which Brown became part of academia.2 In 1963, at age 18, Brown left his state Grammar School with better than expected exam results, and entered the Civil Service as an executive officer in what was then the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. His ‘A’ levels gave him the opportunity to go to university if he wished, and after sampling the Civil Service he decided he did so wish, taking three years unpaid leave

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in 1965 to attend the LSE and read for the BSc (Econ). Initially he intended to study history as his special subject, but in the first year of the degree he fell under the influence of Philip Windsor and so transferred to International Relations. After receiving a First (a much more difficult achievement at that time than it is in the modern British university), Brown received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation-funded Centre for International Studies at LSE, left the Civil Service, and so began working towards his PhD. Brown took up a post at Kent University before completing his PhD. In fact, he abandoned his thesis, which was on uses of history in international theory and the rise of post-behaviourist scholarship, a topic which informs some of his scholarship to this day. He realized in the 1990s that having a PhD might be a benefit, so took one on the basis of his then recently published book, International Theory: New Normative Perspectives (1992) through a staff scheme at Kent. Outside of a short stint as a visiting lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Brown remained at Kent until 1994. For four years, he was Professor of Politics at Southampton University, and was then appointed to a chair in International Relations at the LSE in 1998, where he remained until his retirement in 2014. Brown published only a few works during his early career, a period which allowed him to read widely and deeply across political theory and international relations, something, he notes, which is less available to many scholars in academia today as the pressure to publish has become intense (Brown 2010a: 3). Brown’s ability to speak to so many different theoretical traditions and connect those with contemporary political events both domestic and international reflects the benefits of reading before seeking to publish. He also notes that he benefited greatly from colleagues outside of his department as well as inside at Kent University, for they provided him insights into trends in the humanities that enabled him to better appreciate postmodern theoretical developments. The increasingly specialized nature of academic scholarship today militates against such humanistic learning, a fact that contemporary scholars of IPT should recognize and perhaps work towards altering. Indeed, one might argue that IPT can only work within a humanistic approach, for it requires training and knowledge of a broad range of different theoretical ideas. This background knowledge was further enhanced during his time in the USA, where he shared a department with Jean Bethke Elshtain and William Connolly during the academic year 1981–1982, the former a leading feminist (and later realist) thinker of international relations and

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the latter one of the most prominent postmodernist political theorists whose work continues to inform scholars in IR. Brown notes that Connolly has been a major influence on this thinking, particularly in coming to grips with the complexity of pluralism within liberal societies, though it is unclear whether or not Brown would continue to follow some of Connolly’s political and theoretical ideas (Brown 2010a: 4). Brown published only one journal article and one report in the 1970s, both on International Political Economy (IPE). These publications came, in part, through the influence of Susan Strange, who was seeking to develop IPE as a separate field within IR. Brown’s work returns to Strange at different points in his career (e.g., Brown 2002: 232–235), though perhaps her bigger influence is that, like Brown, she sought to carve out a space within a dominant discourse for an alternative framing of International Relations (IR). Beginning with his 1981 publication in the Review of International Studies (Brown 1981), Brown began to push IR scholars to a greater engagement with political and ethical theory. This work culminated in his book, IRT, which set the stage for his framing of IPT, explored in more detail in the next section.

3   Framing and Reframing IPT As noted in the introduction to this chapter, three of Brown’s books constitute a theoretical framework that integrates a range of theoretical positions in order to better understand and evaluate international relations. Only the third is written explicitly as a textbook, though really all three do not fall easily into a ‘textbook’ or ‘monograph’ category; undoubtedly, this reflects Brown’s approach to his career, where teaching and research inform each other. Brown has authored a bestselling general IR textbook as well, Understanding International Relations, now in its fourth edition (2009). This text should not be ignored in developing an understanding of how Brown conceives of IPT, for it presents IR theory as inclusive of ethical considerations, something that many other textbooks refuse to do, though we do not address it here at any length.3 In IRT, Brown proposes a conceptual distinction between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism as a way to categorize thinking within IR theory. This framing does not capture all the possible theories, but Brown uses it to understand the competing normative orientations that underlie IR theories. But because he largely leaves this framework behind, a better focus is on how he understands the task of IPT. This requires appreciating

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his initial approach to the idea of what it means to do ‘normative’ theory. In IRT, he defines it in this way: By normative international relations theory is meant that body of work which addresses the moral dimension of international relations and the wider questions of meaning and interpretation generated by the discipline. At its most basic it addresses the ethical nature of the relations between communities/states, whether in the context of the old agenda, which focussed on violence and war, or the new(er) agenda, which mixes these traditional concerns with the modern demand for international distributive justice. (Brown 1992: 3)

Brown goes on to qualify this definition, noting that IR scholars have a resistance to the term normative, for it assumes that the role of such theory is to prescribe norms, and, as a result, that scholars in this realm have ‘some special knowledge which enables them to solve the difficult moral dilemmas of the day’ (Brown 1992: 3). He disabuses readers of this notion, pointing out that normative theorists might consider such ethical dilemmas and read through works which address such questions more than others, but, even if this is the case, ‘none of [this] amounts to any kind of right to prescribe’ (Brown 1992: 3). The concern expressed here brings forth an important dimension of Brown’s work, one that not all normative theorists necessarily accept. There has emerged, in recent years, a style of normative theory undertaken largely by political philosophers that does indeed seek to prescribe. Such works draw largely on analytical philosophical traditions of thought in which problems of war, peace, justice, and rights appear largely as problems of logic. It follows that, if careful thought is applied to these ­problems, shared conclusions will result. Brown’s work does not fall into this category of scholarship, and he has been explicitly critical of it in areas such as just war (Brown 2017). As Brown argues, these matters cannot be solved simply by better logical thinking or analytical precision. Instead, such matters require a form of political judgement which results from study of not just abstract theory but concrete reality, philosophical tradition, and, perhaps, lived experience of political life. The question of judgement will be addressed later in this chapter, but it would seem to be prefigured by this caution about defining normative theory early on his scholarship.

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In defining his task in this way, Brown helpfully locates not just normative theorists but assumptions that orient much of the wider scholarship in IR. For instance, the importance of the national interest to many realist scholars relies on a valuation of the sovereign state over other institutional forms. While classical realists such as Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan were explicit about the moral value of the state (see Lang Jr. 2007), the same moral assumptions, usually unacknowledged, underlie much of the research agendas of neorealist scholars, such as Kenneth Waltz. This is not to disparage such works, but rather to highlight that their normative agendas should be acknowledged and perhaps better defended by those working in these areas. A second point arising from Brown’s framing is that he undertakes it through an engagement with the history of political thought. In his influential co-edited volume of texts drawn from this history, Brown (along with Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger) contextualizes and makes relevant this history (Brown et al. 2002). In his scholarship, this task is done rather lightly by Brown, in such a way that these historical figures inform his work without falling into a purely historicist approach. Brown uses these figures to both reveal how IR theory might be inheritors of traditions which it may not know of and also, more importantly, engage in a dialogue with them. For instance, in the chapter on communitarianism in IRT, Brown engages in an extended discussion of G.W.F. Hegel. One way to read Hegel in the context of IR theory would be to locate the ways in which realists such as Morgenthau inherited a Hegelian state worship which has informed the study of IR ever since. This link Brown acknowledges, but he also explores the subtleties of Hegel’s ideas in relation to other theorists, both those against whom Hegel was reacting and those who developed his ideas throughout the nineteenth and twentieth ­centuries.4 Even more importantly, Brown does not simply accept Hegel’s theories, but notes the difficulty of accepting a ‘secular’ Hegel (Brown 1992: 64). This critical encounter with Hegel suggests how Brown’s work moves from ‘normative IR theory’ to IPT; that is, instead of simply undertaking a history of political thought or IR theory, Brown is engaging in a critical dialogue with that history in order to better understand different positions within IR theory. Brown concludes IRT with a discussion of what was at the time of his writing a new set of approaches in IR theory—critical and postmodern theories. He provides a nuanced and careful overview of such theories.

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This overview is reduced to one paragraph in SRJ (Brown 2002: 17) and completely disappears from ISGP. He suggests that, Some of this work is certainly valuable, but, on the whole, it is regrettable that it has come to play so prominent a role [in IPT]. When difficult and complex ideas genuinely illuminate important topics they must be confronted, but difficulty for its own sake is not a virtue and the narcissistivc, hermetic quality of much of this work limits its relevance. (Brown 2002: 17)

This critique of postmodern and critical theory reveals a further important point about Brown’s approach to IPT. It is clear from his overview in IRT that Brown is well versed in this work; as noted above, William Connolly, a leading postmodernist theorist, was a crucial influence on Brown early on in his career. Unlike many today, Brown has read not just Richard Ashley and R.B.J.  Walker but Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, along with their forebears such as Nietzsche. That is, rather than the derivative work which constitutes so much of postmodern IR theory, Brown highlights how important it is for theorists to read those who provided the foundations for this work. In addition, Brown’s critique is not necessarily one of substance but of style. This point is not meant in a disparaging way about Brown. Instead, it indicates how important style is to his presentation of ideas. Any reader of Brown’s work will recognize his ability to make complex theoretical arguments accessible and relevant, something that many theorists—whether they are analytic moral philosophers, postmodernists, or neorealists—fail to do. IPT is about reading and drawing from theorists across a wide spectrum without falling into an overly specialized discourse that fails to connect with issues and concerns of the contemporary condition. SRJ continues with the broadly defined cosmopolitan/communitarian framework, though it largely eschews those terms; indeed, Brown argues that the distinction perhaps obscures things more than clarifies (Brown 2002: 17, 2010a: 8). Instead, by locating sovereignty in relationship to rights, Brown points to the underlying moral frame of the community and the individual. Here we begin to see the influence of liberal thought on Brown’s work, a topic explored in the next section. Brown also distinguishes this work from his previous one by seeking to set aside the idea of ‘normative theory’, suggesting that SRJ is about ‘interpretation’ (Brown 2002: 3). In so doing, and in highlighting the three terms sovereignty,

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rights and justice, this book has a stronger political theory orientation than the previous one. It is here that the idea of IPT begins to take shape as a conscious endeavour. SRJ explores a number of important themes, some of which extend those previously addressed in IRT.  Completed only weeks before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the book includes a short prologue addressing the significance of that event. At the same time, it notes that the work as it stands speaks directly to the underlying themes brought forth by the attacks and the ensuing debates about the clash of civilizations and the rise of violent non-state actors. The last three chapters explore cultural diversity and the state system, which became (and continue to be) directly relevant to the conflicts in Central Asia and the Middle East. One point he makes in responding to September 11 is directly relevant to how he understands IPT. He notes that Samuel Huntington’s idea of a ‘clash of civilizations’ while raising an important point, simplifies and essentializes a number of complex themes which the field of IPT seeks to interpret. In response, Brown argues: One, possibly desirable, alternative to a clash of civilization is cross-cultural dialogue – but only if it is understood that dialogue is not an easy option. The only dialogue that is worth having, that is not simply an exchange of clichés, is one in which all the parties examine critically, as well as set out, their own values. ‘Westerners’ must examine their role in the various conflicts that poison Middle Eastern politics, and must address the demands for global social justice that emanate from the losers in today’s world economy, but, equally, Muslims must ask themselves whether it is really plausible that all the woes of the so-called world of Islam are the responsibility of America, and, in particular, whether the savage theology of the al-Qaeda network and the Taliban deserves the respect it receives in many mosques and in the independent Arab media. (Brown 2002: xii)

This is a powerful call to those interested in international relations to avoid simplicity on either side of the debate. Asking all interested parties to critically assess and, perhaps more importantly, set out value orientations is a challenge and an opportunity. Brown’s efforts to set out the ‘Western’ tradition reflects one side of this approach, and his request that others do the same from within their own traditions represents a more vigorous and robust form of IPT than is sometimes found in efforts at interfaith dialogue or comparative political theory.

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His most recent book is the one most explicitly presented as an IPT textbook. ISGP (2016) moves his framing further away from the cosmopolitan/communitarian structure found in IRT.  Instead, ISGP presents the issues of war, justice, and human rights through the framework of a society of states versus a global polity of agents which includes states but also puts individuals and other actors forward as important parts of the international system. International society draws on both international law and ‘English School’ theories of IR, bringing them together in a creative way to understand the use of force, human rights, and humanitarian intervention. The global polity idea is not a purely cosmopolitan alternative, however, for Brown notes that to see the world as a global polity does not remove states but understands them as one among many agents in the international order. It does, however, like cosmopolitanism, put the individual person first and understands that person’s rights and responsibilities differently than a purely society of states approach. In so doing, Brown is able to reframe issues such as distributive justice, international criminal law, and humanitarian intervention in new and interesting ways. This alternative framing reminds IPT theorists of the importance of certain strands in IR theory. At one level, this should not be surprising, for Brown has always seen IPT as related to IR theory. But, for some who come to IPT from disciplines such as philosophy and who adopt more strictly liberal cosmopolitan orientations, the idea of a society of states makes little or no sense. As such, Brown’s framing here provides an alternative to some of the staid debates about just war, distributive justice, and human rights that often animate such theorists. In some sense, Brown’s approach in this book is to look at the same issues and events through the two different framing prisms, resulting in, for instance, two parallel ­discussions of intervention and humanitarianism. Importantly, his argument is not a progressive one in which the society of states is replaced by the global polity; rather, his argument is that the two sit side by side in the world order and result in conflicting understandings and moral valuations of what is going on around us. One interesting question in this context, and one certainly also suggested  by the title of the book, International Society, Global Polity, is whether Brown—or, more correctly, Brown-style IPT—actually is part of the so-called English School. While opinions on this issue vary, and the question about membership might not be that useful if the person in question repeatedly insists that he is not a member, the English School certainly features prominently in Brown’s thought. While not counting him in the

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inner circle, Buzan’s bookkeeping on the subject lists him as ‘regular contributor’, the definition of which being someone who has ‘written three or more substantial items directly on English school topics’ (Buzan 2014: 1). We argue that Chris Brown’s relation to the English School can best be described by three characteristics: Firstly, he seems to broadly agree that the analytical triptych of an international system (of states), and international society (of states), and a world society and/or community (of, according to some versions, non-states only or non-states and states together) is a useful figure for describing the social orders of international relations. However, secondly, he remains critical of the English School’s emphasis on international society in this context. This criticism pertains not primarily to empirical diagnoses about the existence of a social formation that can be described as an international society of states. Rather, in a criticism that actually resonates with much of Brown’s criticism of IR theory that is not IPT, he argues ‘that an approach that places primary emphasis on the nature of international society is likely to isolate itself from the wider discourses of political and social philosophy in ways that cannot be defended in terms of any alleged sui generis features of international relations’ (Brown 2000: 91; emphases in original). Thirdly, however, for all his professed non-membership in the English School, when it comes to confronting its thought with theoretically quite different takes on international politics and world order, there is an impression that he would rather err on the English School side (see, for example, Brown 2004 in relation to systems theory).5 In ISGP, Brown once more seeks to distinguish his approach from those more prescriptive theorists of IPT. In so doing, he differentiates IPT from ethics and international affairs, though he certainly acknowledges the importance of those undertaking this work, for instance, at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and their house journal Ethics & International Affairs.6 For Brown, though, his approach is that of a political theorist, one whose job is not to advocate for policy prescriptions but to interpret and clarify. This matches his call in the prologue to SRJ, in which he asks us to ‘set out our values’, a task sometimes assumed rather than undertaken. In sum, Brown has framed and reframed IPT through these three texts, along with many others. In so doing, he has developed the field of IPT in important and interesting ways. Admittedly, some issues and concerns slip through these frames, leaving us without his powerful insights into important matters such as world religion and the environment. But, despite

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these lacunae, Brown’s understanding of IPT has shaped our understanding(s) and provides a powerful tool by which to interpret and evaluate the world around us.

4   Liberalism and Brown Brown is not associated with liberal IR theory or even liberal political theory. As indicated in the previous section, his work seeks to interpret the ways in which various IR theories assume certain normative agendas and/ or value-based assumptions. One of the dominant underlying theoretical assumptions in the study and practice of international relations is liberalism. As a result, IPT, as with many other theoretical approaches, might be read as a response to this underlying liberal agenda. Can we read Brown’s work in a similar way? Brown was influenced by one of the leading theorists of liberal political theory, Brian Barry. In saying this, however, Brown notes that the shape of his political theory (and perhaps political views) is closer to a communitarian thinker, Michael Walzer (Brown 2010a: 4).7 He notes in his intellectual biography that he read widely and, one can imagine, sympathetically a number of Marxist and critical theory works on global politics. And, as noted in the previous section, he was greatly influenced by the postmodernist theories of figures such as William Connolly. It is clear, though, that in reading through the corpus of his works, Brown is less sympathetic to those works today. One reason for this is his argument that there has been a ‘loss of faith in rational discourse of the liberal left’ (Brown 2010a: 10), a category of scholars which includes both the critical/Marxist and postmodern perspectives. He is a strong critic of this failure of liberal theorists to think carefully through their presumptions and values, but at the same time he finds himself uneasy in this position. As he says, Had I realised then that the natural defenders of the Enlightenment were going to make such a poor fist of the task over the next two decades, I would have been a lot less willing to endorse their critics. I suppose I am really acknowledging a degree of hypocrisy here; along with a great many late-­ modern writers, I surmise, I was willing to kick against liberal rationalism largely because I thought it would always be there. Part of the story that unfolds in subsequent essays reflects a gradual realization that this might not be the case. (Brown 2010a: 11)

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This admission suggests that Brown sees part of his task as one of criticism, the kind of criticism described in the previous section, one of engaging in dialogue with others but only if they can engage in similar forms of critique. Liberalism provided a standard against  which all such critique took place, but as Brown notes here, if the underlying rational discourse assumed by liberalism fails, then perhaps liberalism itself may need rescuing? As expressed in this quote, though, Brown himself has been a rather pungent critic of many liberal assumptions. He acknowledges the importance of figures such as John Rawls (Brown 2002) and Charles Beitz (Brown 2005) in establishing liberal political theory and making it relevant for understanding the international realm. Indeed, he defends Rawls’ turn to the international more than some students of Rawls, such as Beitz and Thomas Pogge. In an essay on liberalism and the globalization of ethics, Brown acknowledges liberalism’s complexity, though he notes that it relies, ultimately, on the importance of the individual (Brown 2010a: 165). This essay explores one of the core dilemmas of liberalism, either domestic or international; the tension between the universalism of defending that individual and his/her rights and the necessity of accepting and tolerating differences among individuals and communities to pursue their own goals and life plans. This core liberal dilemma, one addressed by figures such as John Locke, informs much of Brown’s scholarship. That is, seeking to negotiate this space between the particular and the universal constitutes a central dimension of Brown’s work, and, one might argue, IPT more generally. A different approach to this same issue comes out in Brown’s reflections on human rights. His essay ‘Universal Human Rights: A Critique’ (Brown 2010b [1998]) provides a powerful and important assessment of the problems surrounding human rights. Criticisms of the universality of human rights abound, but Brown’s critique refuses to be a simple one of relativism. Rather, in a nuanced and powerful argument, he posits that human rights can only work in particular kinds of liberal societies, one from within which human rights defenders either write or act. Without this cultural context, human rights cannot be advanced globally. In making this point, he does not privilege the Western cultures which first generated rights, for he notes that they themselves have perhaps lost that culture; for instance, ‘Americans have more and more rights, but less and less of a society within to exercise them’ (Brown 2010b: 62). The conclusion of this chapter argues that, once more, liberal theorists need to better establish the theo-

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retical foundations and assumptions that drive their advocacy of human rights. He concludes the chapter by arguing that only a focus on cultivating a particular kind of civil society will allow the emergence and protection of human rights. On this point, we can suggest one way in which Brown’s approach to IPT can be seen in relation to liberalism. He has cultivated a particular understanding of pluralism, one that does not accept all cultures as good or worth pursuing, but as potential points of argument and debate. This means that engaging in debates about human rights cannot proceed from an assured assumption of a human nature which by necessity desires freedom. Rather, true pluralism requires careful understanding of and engagement with others and one’s own community. It requires judgement, for true judgement demands understanding not only the other but oneself. The final section of this introduction turns to this important political virtue in Brown’s work.

5   Political Judgement and Pluralism Brown entitles his 2010 collection of essays, Practical Judgement in International Political Theory. The book does not present a theory of practical judgement but includes five essays which ‘represent the kind of practical-minded thinking that I wish to promote’ (Brown 2010b: 15). In those essays, which cover contested topics such as humanitarian intervention and pre-emptive military action, Brown exercises his own judgement in relation to ethical debates within the global realm. His judgements, particularly on the use of force, stand counter to many assumptions and arguments that have framed these debates among his fellow scholars of IR and IPT. For instance, Brown argues, unlike many, that it is legitimate to be selective about when to engage in humanitarian intervention, which stands in direct contrast to those who argue that the consistency in these matters is fundamental to their moral legitimacy. And, in the matter of pre-emption, Brown argues that we cannot simply rule it out on legal grounds or through interpretive strategies which paint the US and UK use of this strategy in the Iraq war as evidence of the moral evil of Tony Blair or George Bush. He points out that the hatred for these two leaders does not necessarily ‘build the capacity for making the right kind of judgment’ (Brown 2010b: 249). The idea of practical judgement arises from a number of sources. Aristotle provides one well known formulation through his theory of the

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virtues. For Aristotle, the human condition is defined by two basic factors: our intellect and our communal living. These two things combined separate us from the rest of the physical world. For Aristotle, they also generate the two virtues that define what it means to be the best kind of person, the intellectual and practical virtues. In describing the virtues, Aristotle first explains the moral virtues, which are those shaped by habit and political life. They are designed to cultivate an ability to choose how to act, not how to think. Their importance derives from the fact that humans live in community and so must be able to act together. The second type of virtue is the intellectual one, which he treats in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics and  which is derived from the  discussion of scientific reasoning found in the Posterior Analytics. Scientific reasoning entails thinking from first principles and the reasoning that follows from them results in knowledge that cannot be otherwise. But reasoning must also take into account the particulars and the inductive process that provides a foundation for thinking. Scientific thinking is not the intellectual virtue on which Aristotle places his emphasis. Rather, it is deliberative thinking, or the dialectical process described in the Topics. Aristotle argues that practical deliberation should not lead us to downplay scientific reasoning, only that to be a fully happy human person we need the deliberative form of reasoning in order to move us towards action. Combined with habits and character, the practical wisdom of deliberative excellence results in the good person. Aristotle’s account of the virtues relies on a particular place and time, that of the fourth century BC Greek gentlemen scholar. Such a person no longer exists, and so perhaps we should not idealize this way of thinking. Indeed, his biology relies on assumptions about gender and generation that are fundamentally flawed, leading him to disparage the ability of women to achieve equality with men. Brown does not share those assumptions with Aristotle. Rather, Brown shares with Aristotle (and with many of the classical realists) the idea that any form of political reasoning must be dialectical rather than solely deductive and it must take into account the particulars of the situations within which such reasoning takes place. So, rather than being guided by a universal liberal or legal logic to which all participants must agree in advance, Brown suggests a different form of reasoning, one which demands taking seriously the contexts, often very conflictual and even dangerous contexts, that shape world politics. Simple solutions based on

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Western ideals of human rights or the rule of law cannot be the sole way of thinking through the problems that bedevil the world today. This brings us back to pluralism. As noted in the previous section, Brown’s scholarship speaks to a plural world. He demands that critical reflection take place among all participants. The standards against which such reflection takes place are related to and perhaps unconsciously parasitic on broad liberal ideas, but Brown does not allow those to serve as trump cards. Rather, he argues for a form of deep pluralism, one that respects the capacity of all persons to engage in critical dialogue and reflection on theirs and others practices. We may not agree on all his political judgements, but his demand that we think carefully about how to go about making such judgements, is perhaps his most important contribution to the field of IPT.

Notes 1. The books include much more than these simple dichotomies, and Brown has sought to resist the ‘cosmopolitan vs communitarian’ framework as the defining feature of his work and IPT. 2. At the time of this writing, Brown is working on a revised fifth edition of this textbook. 3. See Brown’s description of his intellectual trajectory in Brown (2010: 1–16). 4. Mervyn Frost is perhaps the most prominent Hegelian among IR theorists, who also contributes to this volume; see Frost (1986, 1996). 5. It’s like not being a FC Southampton fan, but still favouring it over all the others (if it’s not Chelsea, that is). 6. One of Brown’s early publications is in Ethics & International Affairs, an effort to redefine Hegel for a generation of theorists who saw him as a foundation for German militarism; Brown (1991), reprinted in Brown (2010). 7. To call Walzer communitarian rather than liberal, though, distorts his views to some extent. While his work clearly has a strong communitarian orientation, he defends liberal ideas and practices in much of his writing and in his role as long-time editor of Dissent magazine.

References Brown, C. (1981). International Theory: New Directions? Review of International Studies, 7(03), 173. Brown, C. (1992). International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, C. (2000). The ‘English School’: International Theory and International Society. In M. Albert, L. Brock, & K. D. Wolf (Eds.), Civilizing World Politics. Society and Community Beyond the State (pp. 91–102). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Brown, C. (2002). Sovereignty, Rights, and Justice: International Politcal Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, C. (2004). The English School and World Society. In M.  Albert & L.  Hilkermeier (Eds.), Observing International Relations: Niklas Luhmann and World Politics. New International Relations (Vol. 1., 1st., pp.  59–71). London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2005). The House that Chuck Built: Twenty-Five Years of Reading Charles Beitz. Review of International Studies, 31(2), 371–329. Brown, C. (2010a). Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2010b [1998]). Universal Human Rights: A Critique. In C. Brown (Ed.), Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (pp. 53–71). London: Routledge. Originally in Dunne, T., & Wheeler, N. J. (Eds.). (1998). Human Rights and Global Politics (pp. 103–127). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, C. (2014). The ‘English School’ and World Society. In M.  Albert & L.  Hilkermeier (Eds.), Observing International Relations. Niklas Luhmann and World Politics (pp. 59–71). London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2015). International Society, Global Polity: An Introduction to International Political Theory. London: Sage. Brown, C. (2017). Revisionist Just War Theory and the Impossibility of a Moral Victory. In C.  O’Driscoll, A.  Hom, & K.  Mills (Eds.), Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (pp. 85–100). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, C., & Ainley, K. (2009). Understanding International Relations (4th ed.). London: Palgrave. Brown, C., Nardin, T., & Rengger, N. (Eds.). (2002). International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buzan, B. (2004). From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buzan, B. (2014). The English School: A Bibliography (version of 2 September 2014). Online. Available from: https://de.scribd.com/document/277138693/TheEnglish-School-a-Bibliography. Accessed 22 Sept 2017. Frost, M. (1986). Towards a Normative Theory of International Relations: A Critical Analysis of the Philosophical and Methodological Assumptions in the Discipline with Proposals towards a Substantive Normative Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frost, M. (1996). Ethics in International Relations: A Constitutive Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lang, A., Jr. (2007). Morgenthau, Agency and Aristotle. In M. Williams (Ed.), Reconsidering Realism: The Legacy of Hans J.  Morgenthau in International Relations (pp. 18–41). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART I

Judgement, Reason, and Humanity

CHAPTER 2

Dogmatic Anti-dogmatism: Learning from Chris Brown Colin Wight

Had I realised then that the natural defenders of the Enlightenment were going to make such a poor fist of the task over the next two decades, I would have been a lot less willing to endorse their critics. I suppose I am really acknowledging a degree of hypocrisy here; along with a great many late modern writers, I surmise, I was willing to kick against liberal rationalism largely because I thought it will always be there. Part of the story that unfolds in subsequent essays reflects the gradual realisation that this might not be the case. (Brown 2010: 16)

1   Introduction Surveying the intellectual landscape post-Brexit, and after the election of Donald Trump as the President of the USA, one word sticks out: posttruth. Declared the word of the year for 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary, the term has a longer history. Stephen Colbert had coined the term ‘truthiness’ to refer to a situation where emotions take precedence over facts in public debate (Zimmer 2010). This fits well with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of post-truth: ‘Relating to or denoting

C. Wight (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_2

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circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2016). The term post-truth can be traced to a 1992 essay by playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation (Tesich 1992). The political context of Tesich’s piece was the fallout from Watergate and the Iran–Contra scandal. According to Tesich, the public reaction to these two events suggested that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’ (Tesich 1992: 13). The idea of a post-truth world horrified Tesich. It implied that the American people no longer wanted to hold the activities of their politicians to account on the basis of truth, but rather now expected their politicians to protect them from truth (Tesich 1992: 12). Truth was simply too difficult to deal with. Echoing Hannah Arendt’s deeply troubling account of totalitarianism (Arendt 1967), Tesich believed that ‘We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams’ (Tesich 1992: 12). The concerns here should be evident. How is rational public debate possible if politicians and elites can get away with lying so easily? Why has truth become such an unfashionable notion, and what should the response of academics be to these developments? Given that universities are the social institutions whose function is knowledge production, does a posttruth era threaten the role of universities in society? Since the emergence of post-truth, academics and public intellectuals have begun to turn their attention to the issue (Ball 2017; Davis 2017; Levitin 2016). There is much that could be said about the post-truth phenomenon. Importantly, it is clear that in some respects it is not new at all. Yet in other respects, it does represent a new problem facing late modern societies. On the one hand, the production of falsehoods, particularly in the political domain, is nothing new. We possess many concepts to deal with the deliberate attempt to deceive outright or to evade truth. Spin, propaganda, the noble lie, and dissembling are all concepts well known and much researched in politics and political communication. However, to search for truth in the field of knowledge production is to miss the point. If post-truth represents anything, it is a change in the field of reception, not the field of production. The ancient aim of telling the truth to power makes no sense if truth telling, or not truth telling, has no effect on publics deeply sceptical about all truth claims. What post-truth represents is not the production of more lies, more spin and more falsehoods, but the fact that publics do not seem to care if elites and politicians are caught lying. Hypocrisy no longer appears to be a negative marker of character.

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Many of the issues surrounding the concept of post-truth will be unsurprising to the majority of International Relations (IR) theorists. Mainstream scholars will perhaps feel a sense of vindication, as their predictions about the dangers of postmodernism and critical theory seem to be confirmed. Those on the critical or more reflectivist wing of the discipline may feel some discomfort with the ends to which the critique of truth is being employed. But notions such as alternative facts, and competing interpretations and perspectives towards knowledge claims will not sound as alien to them as they may do to publics still possessing naive views of truth. Indeed just as the era of -isms had been declared over, post-truth threatens to bring the corpse back from the dead (Dunne et al. 2013; Lake 2011). There is much more that could be said of this issue, but in this chapter, I use the post-truth era to illuminate one way to deal with the problem of knowledge production when the concept of truth seems to be once again up for grabs. In this context, the work of Chris Brown provides a useful, and I believe innovative approach to the issue. What is striking about Brown’s particular research trajectory is just how many of his concerns orientate around the Enlightenment and Modernity. Much of his early work is underpinned by a strong commitment to pluralism and cultural relativism, mainly based on an acceptance of the criticisms of the Enlightenment from late modern critics. The Brown of today, however, has come to see that all of these positions have their problems, particularly in terms of the kind of politics they enable or fail to impede. The upshot of all of this is that Brown provides a case study of a deeply sophisticated thinker able to admit where he got things wrong and to adjust his thinking to bring it in line with changing circumstances. This is why I characterise Brown as being dogmatically anti-dogmatic; he dogmatically refuses to be bound to one theoretical position. It also provides an opportune moment to consider the form, place, and function of critical theorising in the discipline. My interest is in Brown’s overall approach (Brown 1) to this issue when considered in the context of his research trajectory, rather than some of the positions he has embraced at particular points (Brown 2) in time. Thus, while I disagree with some of his attempts to ground normative judgements in a form of Rortyian pragmatism, I applaud his willingness to admit that he may have got some things wrong. Hence, I differentiate Brown’s overarching dogmatic anti-dogmatism from some of the positions he has advanced through his career. In particular, I suggest that in his earlier work the critique of Modernity and the

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Enlightenment was overplayed, but also that the Rortyian pragmatics he adopted could never bear the weight he supposed it could, without a commitment to what I call ‘One World Realism’. I hope that the Brown of today will agree with me about most of these issues, but he may not. Either way, it will be interesting to see his response.

2   Facts and Values Where would one place Chris Brown in the intellectual landscape of international relations theory? At times he has been deeply critical of realism, yet in his later work admits to an increase in sympathy for classical realism (Brown 2010: 22). Although in many ways a classic liberal, Brown has at times embraced socialist arguments, although he is certainly no Marxist. In some of his earlier work, he seems to be closely aligned with late modern or postmodern theory, but whatever his previous position on this form of theory, he certainly does not embrace it now. And of course, Brown is no advocate for the English school, believing it to be more closely aligned to classical realism than English school thinkers might care to think (Brown 2001). Brown is hard to locate theoretically into one of the -isms for two reasons. First, I suspect he views the dominant ways in which the discipline has dealt with the -isms to be an example of the kind of identity politics he is so critical of. Second, the fact that he has changed his mind regularly throughout his career does not display a lack of principled commitment, but rather that he is a critical and eclectic thinker, able and prepared to adjust his thinking as it develops and as the circumstances in the world change. Theory, for Brown, is of little use unless it possesses both a worldrevealing and an action-guiding aspect (Brown 2006: 685). Hence, when the world changes in fundamental ways, we should be prepared to examine our theoretical frameworks and assess if they are up to the task. This is the core of his dogmatic anti-dogmatism. Brown is typically thought to be a normative theorist, although he would now reject that label, preferring instead to identify himself as working within International Political Theory (Brown 2010: 6). However, he has come to believe that at the heart of any normative judgement, issues of truth, rationality, and the explanatory force play a fundamental role. Or as he puts it, ‘I am more willing now than I was 20 years ago to acknowledge that exercising judgment depends on the existence of good explanatory theory’ (Brown 2010: 13). In this respect, Brown rejects the harsh

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Humean separation of facts from values. But what is the implication of this? To cut to the chase, the question is: where do values come from? Throughout his career, Brown has maintained the view that values are embedded in communities. This is clear in his early essay, ‘The Modern Requirement’ (Brown 1988). As Brown puts it, for a long time Western thinkers had assumed ‘that a generally agreed, cosmopolitan set of values exists or could be created, and that globally relevant normative theory can be erected on this base… Such a view disregards the cultural pluralism of the modern world’ (Brown 1988: 339). Brown’s discussion of this point is framed around the ‘Requirement’; a legal document which was meant to be read aloud to the Indians in the Americas by the Spanish invaders. The ‘Requirement’, argues Brown, is nothing other than a means for the Spanish invaders to conform to their own moral codes. But such a document could mean nothing to the indigenous peoples of the Americas who occupied a different, non-Christian, moral universe. Each community will have its own set of moral standards, which emerge from within the community and determine appropriate modes of moral behaviour. Hence values come from a sociocultural, and often religious context. Brown is also scathing in his rejection of the view that moral values are arbitrary, or simply a matter of opinions. Still, the main point made here is somewhat different, and is designed to counter the popular belief that moral values are simply matters of personal preference, inaccessible to analysis or rational argumentation… This, I believe, is fundamentally wrong. It may be the case that ultimately our values do represent choices we have made, but it is certainly possible to trace the implications of these choices and their logical relationship to other things we value. (Brown 2010: 20)

So, for Brown, people are not born racists. People do not just wake up one morning and decide to be a fascist. Values do not change arbitrarily, rather they develop and change as circumstances change. Thus, there is the possibility for both moral progress, but also regression in moral values. Values are given to individuals through their interactions with the circumstances they inhabit. Although often a staunch critic of Marxism, I suspect Brown would agree with the maxim that ‘men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing’ (Marx 1969).

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This means that values are susceptible to explanation. And again, although Brown remains a staunch critic of a scientific understanding of human behaviour, to remain consistent he has to believe that values, or moral codes, are subject to systematic analysis. Indeed, I suspect that when Brown rejects the attempts to ‘produce the scientific understanding of the world’ (Brown 2010: 22), he has in mind a very particular view of what science is. Or more correctly, he rejects the ways in which scientific approaches have been developed in the discipline. But this cannot be taken to mean that he denies the possibility of systematic and rigorous enquiry. Brown is clearly a systematic, logical, and rational thinker.

3   Science and One World Realism Given the relationship between the world and moral positions, it is no surprise that Brown is deeply concerned with the practical implications of theoretical discourse. Indeed he has often expressed deep dissatisfaction with that type of theory that seems disconnected from the world (Brown 2006, 2013). He recognises the validity of what we might call meta-theory, but he expresses some dismay at the way the discipline became focused on theoretical debates about theories rather than theories about the world (Brown 2006, 2013). However, the world seems to have had its revenge on Brown. For it is the very conditions that make post-truth possible that require a return to theorising that initially seems divorced from that world, but which is, in fact, an intrinsic part of it. The nature of science, issues concerning knowledge production, the concept of truth, and the role of human rationality can at times seem like nothing more than philosophical parlour games, and what have these to do with the study of international relations? What the post-truth era has demonstrated is that without a solid understanding of these issues, political and moral discourse becomes a free for all. Alternative facts, fake news, the critique of expertise, and the fact that science needs defending, all indicate the pressing need to reconsider how we validate knowledge in late modern societies. The problem as I see it is that Brown’s natural dislike of theory that fails to engage with the world means that he has been reluctant to explore some of the theoretical work on the nature of science that might help ground his thinking in more systematic ways. And yes, let me be clear here, I am referring to scientific realism. This is not a critique of Brown. After all, the world we wish to study is that of international relations, not

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the practice of science. However, how we study that world is not self-evident. This means that there has to be some reflection on how we do what we do. Without this pattern of constant self-reflection, we could end up replicating many of the mistakes of the past. Moreover, some of the attacks on science, the rejection of objective truth, the critique of Modernity and the Enlightenment, and a blasé attitude towards reality, which are all aspects of the post-positivist critique, are now being used by the far right as weapons against those that developed them. This helps explain Brown’s admission about hypocrisy and late modern thinkers. Brown’s main excursion into this terrain was in his excellent, ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ (Brown 1994). After a careful detailing of the critical arguments, Brown comes down on the side of Rortyian pragmatics, suggesting that they provide a pragmatic way to construct rational political arguments in an age of anti-foundationalism. In his later work, he makes a strong plea for what he terms ‘critical problem-solving theory’ (Brown 2013), but it remains unclear how far he remains committed to the Rortyian perspective. I suspect that Brown may well consider the Rortyian pragmatism to be a useful aspect of any reconstruction of the Enlightenment, but he would surely have to admit that it requires supplementing by additional resources. One of which of course is the commitment to One World realism. This is something I think Brown will continue to look on with suspicion, despite the fact that he argues that if there is a theoretical crisis in the discipline, it is the refusal to engage with the real world issues (Brown 2013: 485). Of course, the concept of ‘critical problem-solving’ theory is a dialectical development of Robert Cox’s distinction between problem-solving theory and critical theory. Brown sees the wisdom, necessity, and possibly truth, of both critical theory and problem-solving theory, and argues that they should be complementary rather than oppositional. And in perfect consistency with his view that theory may need to change as world circumstances change, he argues that Cox’s distinction may have been valuable at the time Cox introduced it, but now it is an impediment to theoretical progress (Brown 2013: 494). Brown describes the concept of ‘critical problem solving’ theory as an ideal in which what is needed is, ‘work that is based on the ‘reality’-based community’, produced by scholars who believe that ‘solutions would emerge from their judicious study of discernible reality’ (Brown 2013: 494). But what exactly would the judicious study of a discernible reality

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involve? And by discernible is Brown intending to imply empiricism? This would lead straight back to the kind of science he rejects elsewhere. Equally, what particular form would the critical aspect of critical problemsolving theory look like? As Brown makes clear in his ‘Turtles’ article, the concept of critical theory is highly contested. These problems aside, invoking the concept of ‘critical problem-solving’ theory make visible his dogmatic anti-dogmatism because however one understands it, it is clear that Brown is rejecting any sharp distinction between critical theory and problem-solving theory. This may not win Brown many friends from the reflectivist wing of the field, but it is consistent with his refusal to take sides with one or the other approach. The vehement reactions to Robert Keohane’s 1988 presidential address at the International Studies Association (ISA) from those on the critical wing of the discipline attests to the fact that many see any attempt to combine critical theory with problem-solving theory as being not only a dead end but a betrayal of the critical cause (Keohane 1988). Much the same can be said of many of the reactions to Alexander Wendt’s attempt to provide a middle ground, or via media, between rationalism and reflectivism, to use the categories as defined by Keohane (Adler 1997; Wendt 2000). Brown, of course, is well aware of this and tackles the issue head-on. Insofar as Keohane had embedded his critique of reflectivism in a Lakatosian framework, then any appeal for the reflectivists to develop a research programme could legitimately be seen to be an argument about accepting the basics of Keohane’s programme. But Keohane does not have to be read this way. His use of Lakatos’s notions of a progressive versus a degenerative research programme can be taken to mean nothing other than we need some standards to assess whether research is progressing or not. Indeed, Keohane goes to some lengths to demonstrate the strengths of many of the reflectivist arguments (Keohane 1988: 391) as well as suggesting that both rationalist and reflectivist perspectives are needed (Keohane 1988: 382). Although Brown rejects Keohane’s Lakatosian framing of the issues, he insists that it ought to be possible to determine some standards for assessing whether progress is being made in a body of work without conducting social science in the manner defined by Keohane (Brown 2013: 490). However, he provides few examples of what such standards might be and offers only the potential to refine, deepen, or challenge an argument, as indicators of progress, albeit defined in the looser sense than might satisfy Keohane. As interesting as these criteria are, they still fail to identify what

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standards we might use to determine if an argument has been refined; if a body of knowledge is being deepened; or, if an argument has been challenged. It is also clear that Brown does not believe that critical approaches have delivered on their early promise. Neither the Frankfurt School, nor Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Schmitt, or Luhmann, he argues, have produced a significant change in terms of our understanding of the world. Indeed, he suggests, as did Heikki Patomaki and I in 2000 (Patomäki and Wight 2000), that in some respects continental late modern theorists and the formal modellers they criticise adopt similar positions. As Brown puts it: like the quantifiers of old, they have a hammer and looking for a nail; instead of bringing to bear the insights of a particular theorist to deal with a specific problem, too often it is the case of moving in the opposite direction, starting with the theorist du jour and choosing the problem as an afterthought. (Brown 2013: 490)

Despite the fact that Brown has now come to see the problems with these approaches, I still believe that he fails to grasp an essential element that binds all of them, that is their philosophical anti-realism. This antirealism stems from two main sources. First source is an incorrect belief that positivism is a form of philosophical realism. But positivism is only realist insofar it is empiricist. As is well known in philosophy, and as Martin Hollis (Hollis 1996) has pointed out in IR, empiricism is a form of antirealism, not realism. This is why scientific realists are some of the staunchest critics of positivism (Psillos 1999; Psillos 2009). Second is that many of the late modern theorists upon which Brown initially drew were attempting to put some distance between their critical project and that of Marxism, even if they were initially embedded within a Marxist framework. This meant that the realm of meaning or ideas was given priority over materiality. It is as if the material world did not matter to social science, since it was, in effect, something entirely malleable according to the meanings ascribed to it by different communities. This is why many Marxists were some of the most vehement critics of late modern thinkers (Callinicos 1989). I believe Brown adopted both this implicit anti-realism and the ejection of materialism which is why he views Rortyian pragmatism as a viable way out. Rorty, of course, is a paradigmatic philosophical anti-realist. It is

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worth noting, however, that the view that we need to stake out a position on the priority of ideas over materiality, or vice versa, is problematic. Whether ideas or material forces are the primary drivers of social change is an empirical question, not a theoretical one. Thus, Brown struggles in this area because he has an ambivalent attitude to One World realism. This is clear in both the ‘Modern Requirement’, but also the ‘Turtles’ piece and the issue in both is Brown’s commitment to anti-foundationalism. As Brown puts it: If, indeed, we can only find meaning in the world via frameworks (grids, horizons, paradigms, epistemes), the nature and formation of which are neither under our control nor fully graspable by reason, and if the great stories of liberation generated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution lose their ability to convince, then a reassessment of the contribution of the Western voice to the conversation of mankind is unavoidable. (Brown 1988: 344–345)

Despite the changes in Brown’s more recent thinking, it is not clear if he would also reject the implicit anti-realism of the late modern thinkers he once embraced. Had he done so, however, I believe he could have provided an alternative answer in the ‘Modern Requirement’, and considered alternatives to the anti-foundationalism he embraces in ‘Turtles’. For although the Spanish invaders and the indigenous people did not speak the same language and understood their world through different moral universes, there is one thing they did share in common. And this is what brings them together in the initial confrontation. They are together at the same point in time and space, even if they understand their encounter in different ways. A shared world is a necessary element if we are to say they occupy different universes of meaning. How could we possibly know that their meanings are different if we are unable to say that they are describing the same thing in different ways? Brown does not consider this possibility and although he never says it explicitly, I believe he unintentionally buys into a theory of incommensurability in some of his early work. But as I and others have argued, the incommensurability thesis has conservative consequences (Wight 1996), hence it is a problematic position to adopt. Brown’s strongest arguments against philosophical realism can be found in his ‘Turtles’ piece, where he turns to Nietzschean perspectivism, quoting approvingly Nietzsche’s view that ‘… physics too is only an inter-

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pretation and arrangement of the world... And not an explanation of the world’ (Brown 1994: 216). Yet Nietzsche is a remarkably elusive thinker to pin down, and there are places where he speaks of perspectivism as a philosophical realist, not an anti-realist. Thus for example, in the Genealogy of Morality he argues: There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be. (Nietzsche 1994: 87)

Here Nietzsche is referring to specific perspectives on a given thing, not perspectives divorced from anything. The thing—reality—is always present for Nietzsche. In fact, the definition of a perspective implies realism. It implies a perspective on something. When pushed, few late modern continental thinkers will admit to anti-realism, and the problem is that without its explicit incorporation into our theoretical accounts it is easy to get subsumed or ignored under a discourse that privileges language and meaning over all else. I do not believe that this is a position Brown would wish to endorse, but I do think that his rejection of a positivist account of science and the desire to avoid a materialist influenced account of social change, do push him in this direction.

4   Rortyian Pragmatism This is made clear in the way that he embraces a Rortyian pragmatism. Brown has been consistent in his commitment to this position. He adopts it in the ‘Modern Requirement’, and re-articulates it in ‘Turtles’. This Rortyian pragmatism seems to play less of a role in some of his later work, but I have not seen him explicitly disavow it in the same way he has some of his previous positions. Although he has argued, that, ‘I am nowadays more likely to look to pre-modern than to postmodern thought for the answer’ (Brown 2010: 12). Still, I think it worth examining this Rortyian pragmatism precisely because it demonstrates an inconsistency in the fact-value distinction that Brown rejects under the philosophical anti-realism that he appears to embrace. Rorty is, as Brown notes, a committed anti-foundationalist. Although not a continental late modernist thinker it is clear that Rorty shares much

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in common with many continental critics of the Enlightenment and Modernity. Brown argues, correctly in my view, that Rorty’s major text— Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979)—represents an all-out attack not only on the correspondence theory of truth, but also on any theory of knowledge (Brown 1994: 232). Importantly, Rorty’s position boils down to a rejection of the proposition that knowledge mirrors nature—hence the title of the book, and why I believe he has a clear commitment to anti-realism. But, unlike the pessimism of Foucault, and Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, or the optimism of a Habermasian reconstruction of Modernity, Rorty believes that we can save the Enlightenment merely by redescribing it. Or, as Brown puts it: Rorty argues that we need to redescribe liberal institutions, to find new metaphors to replace those that the undermining of the Enlightenment world-view has left without force, but that this need not involve a wholesale rejection of liberalism. Our redescriptions must be ‘ironic’, that is to say, aware of their contingent character, their ungrounded nature – thus avoiding the difficulties involved in Critical Theory’s attempt to find new foundations for its liberal positions – but they can still be ‘liberal’ – in contrast to the ironic formulations of, say, Foucault, who sees liberal institutions standing in the way of the sort of ungrounded desire for total autonomy that he seems to espouse. (Brown 1994: 233)

Equally, Brown also notes how Rorty embraces the Hegelian position that there is no frame of reference outside of the community (anti-realism). Indeed, Rorty makes this clear arguing that ‘it is impossible to think that there is something that stands to my community as my community stands to me, some larger community called humanity which has an intrinsic nature’ (Rorty 1982: 59). But why is it impossible? I can think of three things that stand to any community as my community stands to me. The first is the one world all communities exist within. The fact they might, indeed often do, understand this world differently does not mean that that world plays no role in how they come to understand it. The second is the total of all other communities they interact with. The third factor is that all these communities are part of a common humanity. If they were not, we would be unable to say that these were distinct human communities describing the world in different ways. We do not need to specify the nature of this human community, but we can specify its being and its ontological characteristics (Wight 2015). Moreover,

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I believe Brown would now accept the relationship between a common humanity and issues of natural justice (Brown 2015). Rorty, however, believes that we cannot promote liberal values on the basis of some transcendental signifier, such as reality, or our common humanity. But nor does he think this means we need to give up on promoting our liberal values. We simply promote them as liberal ironists; ironists, because we know we are promoting something that has no further foundation than our belief in it. In the ‘Modern Requirement’, Brown suggests that this perspective does not imply political quietism, nor does it preclude us from exercising moral judgement or engaging in cross-cultural dialogue. All of these are true, but they do not go to the heart of what is problematic about Rorty’s position. It is not that we cannot do these things, but rather that we do them simply because this is what we do. But what happens when we liberal ironists come up against an illiberal Other? We can engage in cultural dialogue only insofar as the illiberal Other thinks there is some value in doing so. If the illiberal Other is not committed to dialogue, but violence, our commitment to it could be our undoing. This has always been the concern of most realists, and may help explain why Brown now embraces some elements of classical realism. In ‘Turtles’, Brown admits that this Rortyian perspective has its problems and he agrees with one of his former mentors—William Connolly— on what those problems were (Brown 1994: 235). Yet despite this, he still seems to suggest that Rorty’s perspective may provide a possible way to work with notions of identity and difference without losing faith in the institutions of liberalism (Brown 1994: 235). Although this is Brown’s conclusion in ‘Turtles’, I do not believe it is consistent with the position he later adopts when reflecting on A Life in Theory. Brown is scathing about the loss of faith in rational discourse by the liberal left. Indeed, he notes that far too many figures on the left have been prepared to make ‘common cause with anti-modernist political movements such as radical Islam’ (Brown 2010: 15). Thus he argues that this: is a shift that I cannot personally countenance or indeed understand… I cannot understand the mind-set of those on the left who have been prepared to regard figures such as Fidel Castro or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as political heroes on the basis of their opposition to George W Bush. (Brown 2010: 15)

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Thus, and to return to the post-truth era, I am sure Brown will be appalled at contemporary political discourse where facts, truth, and yes reality, have come to mean so little. When the president of the USA can so blatantly disregard the real world and construct his own alternative facts and get away with it, we have to begin to examine the role of academics within this disastrous situation. Given Brown’s comments about the critique of the Enlightenment going too far, and the inability of liberal rationalists to defend Modernity I am confident he would agree with this point.

5   Conclusion So how can we characterise Brown’s approach, and how tenable is it as a response to the post-truth era? The answer is that Brown now recognises two problems with the trajectory of critical thought in international relations. The first is that the concept of critique can be taken too far; the second is that for all the negativities that follow from the Enlightenment and Modernity, there are many aspects of both worth preserving. In this he is not alone, as this point has also been made by Bruno Latour (2004) and others. Brown’s early work is certainly marked by a nuanced appreciation of the validity of many of the intellectual criticisms of the Enlightenment and Modernity. Yet, he refuses to be bound by the demands of belonging to one theoretical sect or another. He wilfully, and often playfully, adopts positions that to others might seem incommensurable. Or even worse, positions that seem to betray the very essence of the ‘ism’ to which they belong. But belonging and authenticity in this theoretical sense are not notions Brown seems willing to entertain. No theoretical position has a monopoly on certain ways of thinking, or particular theoretical concepts. If Brown can put them to good use, he will do so. But this is not mere theoretical eclecticism. Dogmatic anti-dogmatism does not simply entail a theoretical foraging exercise. Brown is much smarter than that. He combines and connects ideas with a clear sense of how they contribute to his stated aims, taking care to ensure that they form a coherent whole. But he achieves this by steadfastly refusing to be bound by the articles of faith that often orientate more committed members of a given tribe. What matters to Brown is less the source of the ideas than the content of them. And he will dogmatically reject theoretical dogmatism as long as he finds value in pursuing modes

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of analysis and forms of theoretical synthesis that others could never consider. It is certainly not the proposal of a new ‘-ism’ complete with systematising tendencies. But nor is it a form of theoretical centrism, or a middle ground between two extremes. In fact, Brown’s position can be understood as a rejection of the kind of identity politics that current framing of the ‘isms’ seems to represent. This very much represents the kind of identity politics that seems to infect political debate in the post-truth era (Lilla 2017). Brown wants none of this. So how can we characterise Brown’s approach, and how tenable is it as a response to the post-truth era? Brown identified the potentially problematic coming of a post-truth era in his ‘Turtles’ piece. Although perhaps not one of Brown’s most influential pieces it is striking how prescient Brown’s analysis was in this piece. His dogmatic anti-dogmatism may not be attractive to all given the need to belong is also strong within academic communities. But given that this is a function of how that community is organised there is always the possibility of change, and it seems to me that dogmatic anti-dogmatism would be as good a place as any from which to start.

References Adler, E. (1997). Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics. European Journal of International Relations, 3(3), 319–363. Arendt, H. (1967). The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Allen & Unwin. Ball, J. (2017). Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World. London: Biteback Publishing. Brown, C. (1988). The Modern Requirement? Reflections on Normative International Theory in a Post-Western World. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17(2), 339–348. Brown, C. (1994). ‘Turtles All the Way Down’: Anti-Foundationalism, Critical Theory and International Relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 23(2), 213–236. Brown, C. (2001). World Society and the English School: An ‘International Society’ Perspective on World Society. European Journal of International Relations, 7(4), 423–441. Brown, C. (2006). IR Theory in Britain: The New Black? Review of International Studies, 32(4), 677–687. Brown, C. (2010). Introduction – A Life in Theory. In C. Brown (Ed.), Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (pp. 1–16). London: Routledge.

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Brown, C. (2013). The Poverty of Grand Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 483–497. Brown, C. (2015). The Marxist Perspective from ‘Species-Being’ to Natural Justice. In A. Freyberg-Inan & D. Jacobi (Eds.), Human Beings in International Relations (pp. 95–112). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callinicos, A. (1989). Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Cambridge: Polity. Davis, E. (2017). Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It. London: Little, Brown. Dunne, T., Hansen, L., & Wight, C. (2013). The End of International Relations Theory? European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 405–425. Hollis, M. (1996). The Last Post. In S. Smith, K. Booth, & M. Zalewsk (Eds.), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (pp.  301–308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keohane, R. O. (1988). International Institutions: Two Approaches. International Studies Quarterly, 32(4), 379–396. Lake, D. A. (2011). Why ‘Isms’ Are Evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic Sects as Impediments to Understanding and Progress. International Studies Quarterly, 55(2), 465–480. Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. Levitin, D. J. (2016). Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era. New York: Dutton. Lilla, M. (2017). The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. London: Harper. Marx, K. (1969). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, with Explanatory Notes. New York: International Publishers. Nietzsche, F. (1994). On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford English Dictionary. (2016). Post-Truth. Online. Available from: https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016. Accessed 19 Jan 2018. Patomäki, H., & Wight, C. (2000). After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism. International Studies Quarterly, 44(2), 213–237. Psillos, S. (1999). Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. London: Routledge. Psillos, S. (2009). Knowing the Structure of Nature: Essays on Realism and Explanation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Tesich, S. (1992). A Government of Lies. The Nation, 6 January, 12–14.

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Wendt, A. (2000). On the Via Media: A Response to the Critics. Review of International Studies, 26(1), 165–180. Wight, C. (1996). Incommensurability and Cross-Paradigm Communication in International Relations Theory: ‘What’s the Frequency Kenneth?’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 25(2), 291–319. Wight, C. (2015). Realism, Agency, and the Politics of Nature. In A. FreybergInan & D.  Jacobi (Eds.), Human Beings in International Relations (pp. 195–211). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zimmer, B. (2010). Truthiness. New York Times Magazine. Online. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-onlanguage-t. html. Accessed 19 Jan 2018.

CHAPTER 3

The Politics of Judgement in International Political Theory Kimberly Hutchings

1   Introduction Chris Brown pioneered International Political Theory (IPT) as a recognised field of study. In his own account of his ‘life in theory’, he tracks a shift from labelling his work as ‘international ethics’ or ‘normative international theory’ to IPT because it makes ‘it very clear that what we are talking about here is theoretical reasoning that is deeply embedded in at least Western political thought’ (Brown 2010: 6). The aim of this chapter is to examine the distinctive features of Brown’s ‘theoretical reasoning’, and in particular the increasing importance he has given to concepts of practical and political judgement in his work. In his collected essays, Practical Judgement in International Political Theory (2010) and other more recent papers, Brown offers a distinctive account of what international political theorising should look like, drawing in particular on the Aristotelian notion of practical judgement (phronesis). This chapter interrogates Brown’s uses of the concepts of practical reasoning and political judgement.

K. Hutchings (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_3

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2   Doing International Political Theory It seems to me that Stephen Toulmin got it right when, in Cosmopolis, he identified the early seventeenth century as the point at which things went off the rails, when formal logic came to displace rhetoric, general principles and axioms were privileged over particular cases and concrete diversity, and the establishment of rules (or ‘laws’) that were deemed of permanent as opposed to transitory applicability came to be seen as the task of the theorist. (Brown 2010: 9)

Brown comes back to the above point repeatedly in his work, and is particularly critical of arguments in IPT, or in the related field of just war thinking, that turn normative theorising into a rule-based exercise. He is insistent that because cases differ so profoundly, in particular in the context of international politics, broad principles can at the most only give you a starting point for judgement, and there can never be a direct reading off from a principle, for example, the sanctity of human rights, to the rightness or wrongness of a particular line of action. In his earlier work, this distrust of ‘algorithmic’ thinking in international ethics is evident in his critical attitude towards strong cosmopolitan arguments and in his sympathy with strands of communitarian and pluralist thinking, in particular that of Michael Walzer. More recently, this distrust manifests itself not only in a continued critique of ‘tick box’ approaches to the articulation of principles such as ‘responsibility to protect’, but also in impatience with the lack of relevant expertise concerning the particular case of those engaging in theoretical and political arguments about the pros and cons of policies (Brown 2013a: 36). On the constructive side, it is linked to the development of an explicitly neo-Aristotelian approach to what international political theorising should look like. In the autobiographical essay at the beginning of Practical Judgement, Brown noted that his move away from the cosmopolitan/communitarian framing reflected a desire to engage in more practically minded theorising. The article, ‘Towards a neo-Aristotelian resolution of the cosmopolitan-­ communitarian debate’, first published in 2000, is a kind of bridge between Brown’s earlier positioning and his later concerns. In this piece Brown suggests a shift to virtue ethics as the appropriate resolution to the seemingly intractable opposition between universal and contextual accounts of moral knowledge: ‘the adoption of a particular version of Aristotelian ethics allows communitarian political theory to provide an intuitively

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a­cceptable account of universal values’ (Brown 2010: 73). Two things emerge as of particular note from this article: first, the idea of a universalism of values that follows from an account of what human beings do as opposed to what they are; second, the idea of virtue not only as specific to practices and ways of life but as a kind of knowledge that requires education and experience: ‘Virtuous behaviour may come naturally once developed, but there is no place in this scheme of things for a naturally good person whose capacities have not been developed’ (Brown 2010: 80–1). As Brown takes this Aristotelian turn forward, we see both an increased willingness to make a claim for what is morally right, or at least morally better, within specific contexts and dilemmas, and an increased focus on the significance of education and experience for the capacity to make the right judgement and do the right thing. The paper in which Brown does most to spell out his approach to doing IPT is in a piece about the so-called practice turn within International Relations Theory, even though the literature he is addressing is more engaged with questions of understanding and explanation than with prescriptive ethical or political judgements (Brown 2012). The paper compares different understandings of ‘practice’, focusing in turn on Bourdieu, Aristotle and classical realism (specifically Kennan and Morgenthau). In his discussion Brown mentions a text that he cites in several of his writings, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter (Flyvbjerg 2001). Flyvbjerg’s argument is that the problem with most contemporary social science is that it attempts to emulate natural science, and to think about social scientific knowledge in terms of the Aristotelian categories of either episteme or techne instead of the appropriate Aristotelian category of phronesis (Flyvbjerg 2001: 3). For Flyvbjerg, good social science is not about generalisation and prediction, but about ‘the reflexive discussion of values and interests’; his goal is ‘to help restore social science to its classical position as a practical, intellectual activity aimed at clarifying the problems, risks and possibilities we face as human societies, and at contributing to social and political praxis’ (Flyvbjerg 2001: 4). His argument depends on a particular account of human learning and what it means to be a genuine expert, which rejects purely cognitivist accounts of knowledge. As Brown puts it, ‘a phronetic social science requires an experienced social scientist; partly this is a matter of experience of the world in general, but it also involves experience in the relevant practice’ (2012: 447). Brown’s interest, of course, is not in social science per se, but Flyvbjerg’s account of good social science. Using the idea of phronesis in effect undercuts

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s­traightforward distinctions between explanatory and normative theory and provides Brown with a possible model for theoretical reasoning in IPT. He puts flesh on the bones of this model in his discussion of the links between the Aristotelian account of practical reason and classical realism (Brown 2012: 440). Within this comparison, two categories emerge as crucial to Brown’s understanding of phronesis: reflective reasoning and experience. For Aristotle, reason is central; the virtuous individual may seem to be acting on the basis of habit, but this habitual knowledge is developed consciously through processes of reasoning. For the classical realists, it is less easy to pin down their stance on this issue, but I will attempt to show below that, in the hands of a master, realist prudence involves both a deep knowledge of statecraft, that is, of how to practise international relations, as well as the possession of the intellectual ability to think through how things might be different, and to weigh the consequences of action. (Brown 2012: 441)

For Brown, Kennan’s and Morgenthau’s work reflects the kind of expertise that Flyvbjerg calls for as essential to good social science. It combines a deep level of knowledge and understanding of how the practice of diplomacy works, with the capacity to reflect on this understanding in concrete and action-guiding ways (Brown 2012: 448). In passing, Brown notes potential challenges to this way of thinking about how to do international theory, specifically, charges of conservativism (2012: 453), elitism (2012: 450) and problems with the position of the theorist (2012: 455). When it comes to conservativism, that is to say the charge that phronesis works to reinforce the status quo rather than to challenge it, Brown is very clear that this does not necessarily follow. In his view, practical reason keeps the political agenda open, in that it remains perfectly possible for experts to grasp radical changes in what they may have previously taken for granted as the parameters for political judgement. In this respect, Morgenthau is Brown’s exemplar rather than Kennan. Brown points to Morgenthau’s radical changes of view about international society in the wake of the invention of nuclear weapons: Sometimes reason can take you to unexpectedly radical places, can take you outside of existing arrangements, and, in the case under consideration, can lead you to believe that the political order that you have spent half a life time explicating is no longer valid. (Brown 2012: 453–4)

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When it comes to elitism, Brown has less directly to say, except that it is clear that there are quite demanding prerequisites for the satisfactory exercise of political judgement, and not everyone has either the developed capacity or the experience to become a virtuoso in practical reasoning about the practice of international politics. He uses the contrast between fictional characters, the ‘good natured simpleton’, Forrest Gump in the film of that name and the experienced police officer, Marge Gunderson in Fargo to bring home the point. From a phronetic perspective, unlike that of the film Forrest Gump, no one is just ‘naturally’ capable of getting things right. Gunderson ‘does the right thing because of her training, intelligence, common sense and personal rectitude’ (Brown 2012: 447). In the latter part of the argument, the reader receives a somewhat mixed message; whilst we have a clear sense of what does not count as good political judgement about international politics (immediate intuitions, generalisations based on book learning only), it is less clear what does. Instead we are given two warnings: first, that we should avoid hubristic claims and acknowledge the limits of our knowledge of international practices. Even if we are ourselves a practitioner, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we know everything that we need to know. Second, that even where claims are made on the basis of experience, ‘Wisdom is not something that can be claimed for oneself – it has to be recognised by others’ (Brown 2012: 456). This conclusion significantly undermines the trajectory of the analysis of classical realism that has just been given. It works in general to cast doubt on the confidence with which we can trust anyone’s political judgement; and it clearly undermines the value of Morgenthau’s ‘thinking outside the box’, since this was not generally recognised as any kind of wisdom at the time. It also leaves the question of the position of the theorist, whose experience does not include being a practitioner, even if it does involve different kinds of knowledge (drawn from interviews, ethnography, personal experience as well as books) of the practice concerned. The ambivalence surrounding Brown’s treatment of Morgenthau in this piece, which both asserts and undercuts the authority of his political judgement, reflects a broader ambivalence in Brown’s work about the role of the political theorist. On the one hand, theory practised in the right way according to the tenets of phronesis can be useful and action-guiding, on the other hand, there is quite a deep scepticism about the value of theorising other than as a clarificatory and retrospective exercise, with judgement being ultimately the task of the practitioner rather than the theorist. On the one hand, theory practised in the right way

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­ ecessarily requires expertise, experience and good character; on the other n hand, political theorising as the production of meaning within a context gains purchase only in relation to its audience, a de-centring and implicitly democratising move. In the 2012 article, Brown cites three of his papers as exemplifying his commitment to an IPT that follows the ideals of practical reasoning identified by Flyvbjerg as crucial to phronetic social science (2012, p.  448). These papers deal with issues of selectivity in humanitarian intervention (‘Selective humanitarianism: in defense of inconsistency’, 2010 [2003]), pre-emptive military action (‘Practical judgment and the ethics of preemption’, 2010 [2007]) and just war thinking (‘Just War and Political Judgment’, 2013a). On examination, all three of these papers exhibit similar ambivalences to those identified above. The paper on selective humanitarianism engages in a deconstruction of arguments from different ideological directions which use the selectivity argument as a line of criticism to support either more or less interventions. In response Brown suggests that ‘both sides of this debate mischaracterize the nature of the dilemma faced by policy-makers, largely because they understand moral behavior in terms of following a rule and this is not the most appropriate or helpful way of thinking about morality either in this case or, perhaps, more generally’ (Brown 2010: 222–3). Brown goes on to stress the importance of judgement, but also of the specificity of cases and the need for a certain holism in judgement, one that takes account not only of moral principles and values but also of knowledge of the particular circumstances and likely implications of action. Such judgement is not only about moral judgement per se, but also about other kinds of judgement, including diplomatic-strategic: ‘what is required is a practically minded judgement taken in the round based on all the circumstances of a particular case’ (Brown 2010: 232). At the same time, Brown is (unusually for him) explicit in his own judgement that the lack of action by the international community in relation to the Rwandan genocide was morally wrong: The only way to prevent a similar shameful denouement in the future is not to search for some illusory moral rule that will mandate intervention if such-­ and such a set of conditions apply, but for those that have the power to act to develop the kind of moral sensitivity that will enable them to recognize what is the right thing to do in such appalling circumstances, and the strength of character to act upon this recognition. (2010: 235)

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Brown is using the language of ‘moral’ judgement in this piece, but it prefigures his account of political judgement in his later work. What is interesting here is not only that the education of practitioners is central to the possibility of the morally right decisions being made, but that the theorist’s judgement although better than that of the practitioners in relation to the Rwanda example is also retrospective, and effectively yields the floor to ‘those that have the power to act’. The latter clearly refers to those in positions of power, leaders of states and international organisations. In the paper on pre-emptive military action in support of a more democratic and liberal world order, Brown makes a very similar point about the kind of judgement necessary to reason adequately about the morality of ruling out preventive warfare. It must be a judgement that takes account of the ‘totality of circumstances’, and that knows the specifics of the particular circumstances involved, ‘which are invisible to those who put their trust in universal rules’ (Brown 2010: 244–5). The point that ‘we need our leaders to cultivate the habits of political judgment’ is also reiterated, and it is suggested not only that in democratic states there is widespread distrust of the phronetic capacities of political leaders, but also that this is because democratic states have not shown themselves as particularly proficient in ensuring leaders have such capabilities (raising the interesting questions of which states have). The answer, it is suggested, is ‘that we must educate our masters, or, to put the matter less dramatically, we must try to cultivate the faculty of judgment in ourselves that we hope they will also cultivate’ (Brown 2010: 249). Brown’s substantive argument here about the issue of pre-emption is a controversial one, since he argues that there are good empirical grounds for revisiting current rules on this issue, effectively confirming the ‘legitimate’ but ‘illegal’ verdict made in relation to the bombing of Kosovo. But it is interesting to see what kind of action-­ guiding argument he is producing. The fundamental point is that it is good judgements rather than good rules that are needed to determine whether pre-emption might or might not be morally justified, pre-emptive or preventive military action should therefore not be definitively ruled out. At the same time, as a theorist, Brown both disowns and embraces his own capacity for judgement. He ‘has no practical advice… on how to make the right kind of judgments’ (2010: 248), and the implication of the argument, as with the selective humanitarianism piece, is that such judgements (good or bad) can only properly be made by the elite political class. The theorist acts as an underlabourer, clearing out obstacles in the way of phronetic statesmen making what they see to be the best call. Yet it is

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s­ uggested that an obligation of good citizenship is to cultivate the faculty of judgement in the hope that this will be something that our political masters also do. Here again the substantive retrospective judgement of the theorist can carry weight, but its contribution to the future is more indirect: ‘We cannot guarantee that our political systems throw up people whose judgment will be good, but we can do our best to make sure that scholars of international relations at least – and preferably a wider public – have a grasp of what is needed.’ (Brown 2010: 249) Brown’s article ‘Just War and Political Judgment’ (2013a) covers similar ground to the articles discussed above and is particularly scathing about the problem of ill-informed and self-righteous moral argument. Theologians and moral theorists are mentioned as particularly likely to be missing the experience and expertise needed to make good judgements in relation to the different elements of just war thinking. Again Brown invokes Aristotelian insights against algorithmic ethical theories, drawing on Flyvbjerg and Toulmin. Indeed, Brown expresses his position as explicitly anti-theory. Rather than a just war theory, dedicated to producing answers about when war is or is not justified at a general level, he promotes a just war ‘thinking’ focused on identifying the right questions to consider on a case by case basis when it comes to military action. Importantly these questions are not exclusively moral, but often about empirical circumstances and political calculations. In this piece, a clearer distinction is drawn between the moral, legal and political than in the previous articles, with ‘political’ identified most clearly with ‘calculation’ and the ‘diplomatic strategic’. The job of the just war thinker becomes one of balancing a wide range of considerations, which may mean that the criteria for successful judgement do not rest wholly on more obviously moral considerations such as principles of just cause, right intention or discrimination. Brown also suggests, for several different reasons, that the traditional list of just war questions might need to be revisited or their scope expanded. Requirements such as ‘right intention’, for example, entail belief in the existence of an immortal soul, and therefore lack meaning and resonance in a secular age. In addition, the effects of supposedly non-violent modes of intervention such as sanctions needed to be factored into understandings of proportionality and last resort. Finally, traditional just war theory had been focused on inter-state conflict, whereas now intra-state conflict is much more common. Once more, there is an ambivalence about where this leaves the international political theorist. The dismissal of much of theology and moral theory reflects the idea that judgement must be in the

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hands of practitioners, in particular for those aspects of just war thinking relating to diplomatic-strategic matters, being political and military experts and leaders. At the same time, shifting the focus from answers to questions, and raising issues about how those questions might be interpreted and extended in scope of application gives the theorist a substantial voice in the development of just war thinking. This plea for a certain kind of ambivalently theoretical voice is repeated in Brown’s critique of ‘grand theory’ in International Relations (IR), this time with a much clearer normative steer: What is needed is work that is based in the ‘reality-based community’, that is, is produced by scholars that believe that ‘solutions would emerge from their judicious study of discernible reality… but the reality with which they would be concerned would be oriented towards the needs and problems of the dispossessed. (Brown 2013b: 494)

3   The Meaning and Scope of Political Judgement There are very good reasons why Brown is so sceptical about predominant modes of theorising in ethics and political theory. He is quite right to point to the way in which much deontological and utilitarian theorising becomes an intellectual game, abstracted from the worlds of those who are actually making and being affected by judgements and decisions about world politics. For Brown ethics and politics must be this-worldly exercises, and his arguments are clearly aligned to contextualist and realist traditions in moral and political theory respectively. My purpose here is not to rehearse the arguments around universalism and contextualism, idealism and realism that Brown’s own work has done so much to illuminate (1992, 2002). Rather, it is to confirm that I agree with his critique of algorithmic, tick-box approaches to international political theory, with his critique of high levels of abstraction in political theory, and with his critique of decontextualised, ill-informed claims about the rights and wrongs of particular policy issues. Having said this, however, as I think the discussion above has shown, there are a variety of problems with, and tensions internal to, the answer Brown proposes for how IPT should be done. First, there are the issues of conservatism and elitism. By conservatism, I mean a tendency to be bound by, and reinforce, existing structures of authority and relations of power. As noted above, a common objection to Aristotelian ethics is that it keeps all judgement internal to relevant prac-

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tices and is therefore incapable of transcending what may be profound injustices built into those practices. Brown denies that this necessarily follows, citing the example of Morgenthau’s change of heart about the need for change in the structure of the international order. Yet this example is out of step with much else that Brown tells us about political judgement, which is required to be ‘action-guiding’—that is to say, capable of producing workable prescriptions as responses to ‘real world’ problems, and to be recognisable as wisdom by the audiences to which it is addressed. Morgenthau’s judgement in this case follows from abstract theoretical insights into the workings of world politics and mechanisms such as the balance of power, it is highly speculative, and it is not at all clear that Brown actually thinks it was right. In this respect, Morgenthau’s judgement seems to have more in common with cosmopolitan arguments that Brown contests on both empirical and ethical grounds, which identify trends in global capitalism or the growth of international regimes and use this to back up their arguments for world government. In most of the examples of political judgement Brown gives, the emphasis is very much on the need for specialist knowledge and experience from within the practice concerned, and the practice of international politics is limited to practitioners thinking within, rather than outside of, the box of established practices and inside knowledge. To the extent that Brown is insistent on leaving judgement up to those who already know how to do the job, the implications of his argument are conservative in the small ‘c’ sense of tending to reproduce the world as it is, and in being sceptical about the possibilities of radical change. The issue of elitism is rather different. Brown is unapologetic about his rejection of the possibility of moral goodness being a simple or immediate quality (Forrest Gump). For him, moral and political judgements require education, self-reflexivity, experience and character. This is not a simple intellectual elitism; it is not the cleverness of the moral or political judge that is at stake, but their understanding of their own practice and ability to reflect on it and the goals towards which it is oriented. Nevertheless, it does open up the question of whether everyone is capable of the relevant kind of knowledge and self-reflection, especially as relevant knowledge is not only about the values inherent in the practice in question but also requires a great deal of empirical knowledge and understanding of the specific issue at hand. Brown frequently refers to the importance of understanding the issue ‘in the round’ and holistically, and the need to utilise different kinds of phronetic and calculative reasons. The model of the good

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political judge is highly demanding. In addition, as we have seen, only certain people are in a position to act as the good political judge when it comes to international politics. Essentially, it is those who are already participants in the elite practice of strategic-diplomatic relations who will be capable of making the right political call. At the same time, Brown frequently undercuts his own call to leave political judgements up to those who are proficient in the practice in question. He is clear that the political class frequently get their judgements wrong, and, as we saw above, he calls for not only scholars of international relations, but also for citizens in general to hold elites to account in terms of the criteria for what good political judgement involves. In addition, on occasions, he calls for a major reorientation of the political judgement of elites in the interests of addressing major global inequalities, the needs and problems of the dispossessed. In summary, there are two tendencies inherent in Brown’s account of good political judgement. One tendency takes judgement out of the hands of all but the most knowledgeable practitioners, and leaves scholars and citizens only able to judge retrospectively. The other tendency suggests that the capacity of the political class to judge depends on the political judgement of scholars and citizens, and should be oriented by some conception of the good of all those affected by the decisions of the practitioners of international politics, in particular by those who are currently the main losers in the games that states play. This ambivalence is most apparent in the role of the theorist, who at times Brown seems to want to put out of a job altogether, and at other times assigns a significant role. This ambivalence, I suggest, stems from an ambivalence about the concept of the political in Brown’s thought. Brown moves between first, an idea of the political as equivalent to the ‘diplomatic-strategic’. This is a fairly standard means/ends account of the political as a practice of calculation driven by the interests of the parties involved, in which skilled practitioners work out the most economical means to attain a given end, and in which there is a right answer from the perspective of whichever ‘side’ you happen to be playing on, but no means of adjudication between sides within the game of the political itself. Second, an idea of the political as fundamentally about values, as oriented towards an idea of the good and as an essentially creative practice in which new worlds of meaning can be constructed and through which universal human flourishing can become possible. Putting it somewhat crudely, we might call this an instrumentalist versus an Arendtian (Arendt and Beiner 1982; Zerilli 2005) understanding of the political. Both ways of thinking about the political are fundamentally

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future-oriented, but they establish the horizon of the future differently. In the first mode of thinking the political, the future is defined in terms of a specific set of goals and a limited audience comprised of others engaged in diplomatic-strategic practice. In the second mode of thinking the political, the future is defined not by a specific set of goals but by a general orientation towards a good of human flourishing, and an audience that is implicitly all of humanity. In the first mode, political reasoning is calculative and probabilistic, in many ways it is a determinate form of judgement in which right and wrong answers according to logical and empirical standards are possible. Here, the political actor is primarily an expert. In the second mode, political judgement is constructive, a form of regulative judgement in which criteria for rightness and wrongness are not knowable in advance. Here the political actor is primarily a craftsperson, a world-maker. Both modes involve risks, but the risks are very different. The risks of the first mode of political reasoning are that you act on faulty knowledge or fail to second-guess the countering moves of your opponents—you may get things wrong in a straightforward sense. The risks of the second mode of reasoning are that no one will respond to your invocation of a particular kind of ‘we’, a project of world-making; this opens up a different mode of getting things wrong which is essentially out of the hands of those making the political call. In the first mode of reasoning the company of political judges and actors is quite tightly defined, because of the need for certain kinds of inside knowledge and because of the relatively narrow parameters of politics as a practice. In the second mode of reasoning, the company of political judges and actors is much less exclusive and is not predefined—it leaves out only those incapable of political judgement and action altogether, and we cannot know who they are in advance. At different points in his arguments, Brown moves between these different conceptions of politics and judgement. I don’t think this is just because of some sort of confusion in Brown’s thinking, he clearly sees both as important. However in his insistence on the specificity of the body of people able to make political judgements in the first sense, he sets up a stronger boundary between elite, expert decision makers and everyone else than is necessary, and ends up giving more emphasis to politics and judgement in the first sense than is wholly compatible with his account of politics and judgement in the second sense. This is compounded when he makes the boundary between elites and everyone else impenetrable by cashing it out in temporal terms, with policy and decision makers engag-

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ing in future-oriented political judgement, and scholars and citizens able to engage only in retrospective judgement. It is undoubtedly the case that elite practitioners will be likely to have some knowledge that either scholars or ordinary citizens do not. But one could respond to that in ways that would lessen the significance of that difference: first, as Brown himself suggests, by developing capacities for judgement in the general public, so that they could participate more directly in the conversation about what states should do when it comes to issues such as going to war. He himself does not make many explicit suggestions as to how this could be done, but his own work is an exemplary practice in this respect, unpacking different arguments in relation to specific issues and being as clear as possible about what we don’t know as well as what we do. Second, there could be greater levels of transparency in the reasoning of elite practitioners, so as to lessen the gap between their knowledge and that of the populations they represent, not only in terms of specific facts about a particular case, but also to make clear how their particular policy recommendations in relation to a case fit with the broader value-orientation of their practice. The explicit recommendations that Brown does make about case by case reasoning and humility in the articulation of judgement do seem good ways of lessening the distance between ourselves and our masters, in spite of his expressed scepticism about the capacity of democratic publics to think clearly about international politics. The question of how to bridge the gap between experts and the rest returns us to the fundamental concept of practice that is key to Brown’s account of political judgement. There is clearly a tension between an account of international politics as a practice for experts, politicians, soldiers and diplomats, and as a practice in which all of humanity is involved. Here, the case of Morgenthau, used by Brown to exemplify the potentially radical possibilities of phronetic judgement, is interesting. As Brown argues, Morgenthau was deeply saturated in the practices of international politics at the level of great power interactions. Nevertheless, in his judgement as to the need to revolutionise the structure of world politics there is an implicit acknowledgement that the parameters of the practice of international politics extend well beyond the boundaries of the strategic-­ diplomatic community. When Morgenthau judges that some kind of world government is needed, he is not theorising only as a member, or ethnographer, of an expert community, but also as a member of the humanity whose survival is threatened in a world of nuclear proliferation (Morgenthau

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1960: 509). The political is firmly attached to a range of values, and eligibility for judgement is effectively universalised, at least in its ambition. Looking back, Brown isn’t clear as to whether he thinks Morgenthau was substantively right or wrong, but to the extent that he (Morgenthau) operates as a model for the kind of reasoning Brown associates with phronesis, it seems Brown is encouraging a more inclusive attitude to political judgement in international politics than he seems to in other arguments. This is not to suggest that Brown is some kind of closet Habermasian, but it is to suggest that there is support in his work for enabling the opening up of political judgement to the people. In this context, given what he says repeatedly about education, this would seem to imply the need for greater transparency about the ‘inside’ stories of international politics and much more political education on the workings of international politics for citizens in general.

4   Conclusion Although Brown’s rejection of moralism in IPT, and the alternative that he crafts, is persuasive, there are certain problems and paradoxes attending his call for reality-based, contextual and action-guiding theory. The problems hark back to conservative and elitist legacies inherent in Aristotelian and classical realist thought. The paradoxes relate to the impossibility inscribed in the theorist’s own position as simultaneously ignorant and knowing, inside and outside of the political fray. Two key issues emerge from Brown’s account: first, how is the political in political judgement conceptualised; second who is eligible to judge. Teasing out one of the strands in Brown’s account, I conclude that a more democratic conception of practical and political judgement is preferable. Such an account opens up the question of its own authority not only to retrospective questioning but at the time and with regard to the future. Although Brown is right to stress the importance of knowledge and experience, and the deep political risks of judgement in global and transnational contexts, taking the risks of judgement should not be assigned solely to political, military or academic elites. We are all participants in the practices of international politics. In this context, the role of the scholar and teacher becomes extremely important. Interestingly, the pedagogy of Brown’s own practice as an international political theorist is much more inclusive than is implied by some of his substantive claims. In working through the complexities of cases, in being alert to the dangers of ignorance, in keeping a range of alternatives open for thought and discussion, he cultivates the capacity for political judgement in all of his readers.

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References Arendt, H., & Beiner, R. (Eds.). (1982). Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Brown, C. (1992). International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Brown, C. (2002). Sovereignty, Rights and Justice–International Political Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, C. (2010). Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2012). The ‘Practice Turn’, Phronesis and Classical Realism: Towards a Phronetic International Political Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(3), 439–456. Brown, C. (2013a). Just War and Political Judgment. In A. Lang Jr., C. O’Driscoll, & J. Williams (Eds.), Just War: Authority, Tradition and Practice (pp. 35–48). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Brown, C. (2013b). The Poverty of Grand Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 483–497. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgenthau, H. (1960). Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf. Zerilli, L. (2005). Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Practical Judgement: Inconsistent—Or Incoherent? Nicholas Rengger

1   Introduction Chris Brown has been a major figure in British International Relations scholarship for over twenty-five years. Having taught for many years at one of the major departments in the field, the University of Kent, he held chairs at Southampton and, for the last decade and a half at the London Scool of Economics (LSE), where he is now emeritus (and where he did his degree). He has mentored several generations of graduate students at all three institutions and has also been a hugely influential undergraduate teacher in all three institutions as well, both in person and through a number of major texts—textbooks would be far too bland a phrase for books where you can hear the author’s very distinctive voice on every page (Brown 1992, 2002, as well as Brown and Ainley 2009, now in its fourth edition; the first two editions were written by Brown alone). He has been influential in creating a whole subfield, now routinely called International Political Theory, in the early 1990s. Every single person in this collection has reason to be grateful to Chris for his support, friendship and intellectual provocation and stimulation. And speaking personally, when I was a

N. Rengger (*) University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_4

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young political theorist getting interested in the international in the early 1990s, it was Chris, alongside John Vincent, Brian Barry and Onora O’Neill, who encouraged me, supported me and made me believe that I could contribute something to the field. So, I have huge admiration for him and will be forever grateful for his friendship, and support (as well as the occasional kick up the backside), now extending over twenty-five years. So, people will understand that the invitation to contribute to this festschrift came as a great pleasure, indeed an honour. But one of Brown’s other major characteristics is his love of debate and argument. And he has never been one to be satisfied with a debate where the participants simply drown each other with compliments. So, I thought, on this occasion, I could best honour him by debating with him a particular theme in his mature work: the character of practical judgement. And although one might do that in a number of ways, I have chosen, in order to show what Brown thinks follows from such a focus, to concentrate on two of his most characteristic and provocative essays: ‘Selective Humanitarianism: In Defence of Inconsistency’ and ‘Practical Judgment and the Ethics of Pre-­ emption’ (both now collected in his wonderful essay collection Practical Judgement in International Political Theory (Brown 2010).1 My strategy in what follows will be in three parts. First, I will offer a brief summary of the notion of practical judgement in Brown’s work in general, and the manner in which he deploys it in the two essays in question. Secondly, I will probe a bit further what we might assume such an account of practical judgement requires and ask how far, and to what extent, Brown’s account meets these requirements. Finally, I will pose a question that I think applies not just to Brown’s account of practical judgement but to all similar accounts (many of which he has discussed in his work over the years) before finishing with a short conclusion.

2   Practical Judgement in Brown’s Work In 2010, as I say, Brown published a collection of his essays (Brown 2010), all published roughly over the course of the previous twenty years (the earliest in 1987, the most recent in 2009). They trace the development of his thought over the bulk of his career, divided into the three sections. The essays in the first section, entitled ‘Cosmopolitans and Communitarians’, focus on arguments that led into, and then led out of, his path-breaking International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (Brown 1992). The essays in the second section, ‘The Discourse of International

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Relations’ are more heterogeneous, but are largely concerned with the general discussion of Internationlal Relations (IR) theory and its relationship to normative theory. However, it is with the third section, ‘The Exercise of Judgement’ with which I shall be concerned here. The essays in this section all bear the stamp of Brown’s distinctive take on the notion of what it is to exercise judgement and why. As he puts it in the introduction to the collection as a whole, it seems to me that Stephen Toulmin got it right when in Cosmopolis [Toulmin, 1990], he identified the early seventeenth century as the point at which things went off the rails, when formal logic came to displace rhetoric, general principles and abstract axioms were privileged over particular cases and concrete diversity and the establishment of rules (or laws) that were deemed to have permanent as opposed to transitory applicability came to be seen as the task of the theorist. Toulmin suggests, plausibly to my mind, that at this time moral reason became theory centred rather than practically minded. (Brown 2010: 9)

He continues: Being practically minded means attempting to produce ‘action-guiding’, as opposed to ‘world-revealing’ theory, to use Stephen White’s helpful formulation [White 1991] …. All theory ought to be problem-solving – although deciding on what actually constitutes a problem can itself be problematic… but whatever the problem is, however it is defined, solving it should be the purpose of scholarly work… the shift over time towards action-guiding moral reasoning can be documented in those essays gathered below which focus directly on ‘real-world’ problems, most of which were written in the last decade [i.e. 1999–2009] rather than earlier. Or perhaps another way of describing the shift would be to say that in my later work the theme of ‘judgement’ comes to the fore. A consistent theme of all the essays collected here has been hostility to the idea that decision making on moral issues can be reduced to a mechanical process, the application of an algorithm. (Brown 2010: 9)

In this respect, and with an important caveat that I will come to in the last section of this chapter, it seems to me that Brown is quite right to want to steer international political theory away from ‘mechanical’ notions of ethics and towards ones that take cases and contexts seriously. But, as he suggests, it is helpful to have some particular cases in mind. So, to flesh

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this idea out, let me now turn to the two essays I mentioned above. The first, ‘Selective Humanitarianism: In Defence of Inconsistency’, looks at the thorny question—and Brown does not deny all kinds of definitional problems from the outset—of how we might justify intervening against some, not others, guilty perhaps of equally heinous (or possibly worse) wrong doing. He quotes Edward Luttwak’s pithy remark: ‘What does it mean for the morality of a supposedly moral rule when it is applied arbitrarily against some – but not others’ (Brown 2010: 222, quoting Luttwak 2000). Brown’s basic argument in this essay is to suggest that, in fact, the critics of selective humanitarianism, for example Chomsky from one perspective and Luttwak from a very different one (and he emphasises that while the essay itself focuses on armed intervention, similar arguments would apply to other kinds of intervention such as, for example sanctions), effectively misconceive the problem because (a) they rely on false dichotomies or bad empirical evidence—and along the way introduce a fair bit of selectivity into their own analyses—and (b) because they make the (mistaken) assumption that moral behaviour should be understood as some kind of moral rule following, precisely the assumption he follows Toulmin in criticising, as we saw above. He argues also throughout that, in a sense, one of the key, if not always visible, assumptions that guide critics of selective intervention is that consistency is itself a moral good. However, Brown suggests that, on closer inspection, this elevation of consistency as a moral good is manifestly absurd, and to illustrate his point borrows an argument (not about international politics) from the philosopher Stephen Clark, who asks, should I give money to Big Issue sellers? Clark (and Brown’s) point here is that it is almost impossible to specify a plausibly consistent response to the question, short of a blanket refusal to give any money whatever to any Big Issue seller. While consistent, this point hardly appears as a moral rule, but rather as a way of evading moral judgement at all. As Brown says, channelling Toulmin again, the kinds of cases he is talking about call for the kind of ethical reasoning that follows an Aristotelian injunction summarised by Toulmin (and quoted by Brown) as follows: ‘Sound moral judgement always respects the detailed circumstances of specific kinds of cases’ (Brown 2010, quoting Toulmin 1990). The point that Brown concludes with is the general one that echoes his earlier comments that there simply is no moral rule that a decision maker can use to say that in these kinds of cases we always intervene, whereas in these kinds of cases we do not. Each case has to be taken on its own merits

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and judgement has to be exercised. And that, of course, means that sometimes the judgement will be in error. People can make bad judgements as well as good ones, even from the best of intentions. That is simply what it is to exercise political judgement. This conclusion will not satisfy straightforward Kantians or Utilitarians but many might be sympathetic to it (I am myself). But in the next essay I want to look at, Brown shows how this form of reasoning can be employed in an even more controversial way. ‘Practical Judgement and the Ethics of Pre-emption’ is a critique of the assumption that, under twenty-first century conditions, there can be a hard and fast distinction between pre-­ emption and prevention. Moreover, we need to use a broadly Aristotelian mode of judgement to make distinctions in this area as well. He begins the essay with a detailed (and extremely penetrating) discussion of the 2002 US National Security Strategy which, famously, is held to have conflated pre-emption and prevention. His argument here is not that the discussion of pre-emption and prevention is wrong but that the claim implied—that this would add to the absolute security of the United States—is itself wrong. Nothing whatever could do this. That is the mistake. But Brown wants to insist that, under modern conditions—given technological change and so on—a hard and fast distinction between pre-emptive force and preventive force might be very difficult to make. His point (of course) is that one would have to make a judgement about whether an instance of preventive force might be justified. It might be, it might not be. And recourse to traditional distinctions between pre-emption and prevention will not make that judgement for you. It may be that the Bush/Blair administrations got it wrong in Iraq—but that does not mean that they were wrong to try. As he says in the introduction to the collection as whole, speaking particularly of this essay: The search for absolute security is doomed to fail, and realists are right to stress the importance of prudence, but sometimes the judgement that now is not the time for prudence has to be made. The decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 may, in the event, have represented a failure of judgement, but there are other ways that judgement can fail and, for example, the prudent refusal to stand up to Serbian aggression in 1990 and 1991  – praised by realists at the time – led to the miseries of Bosnia and Kosovo for the rest of the decade. (Brown 2010: 16)

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This leads, of course, to an obvious question. How do we enable, or encourage, people, especially key decision makers, to make good judgements? In the conclusion to the pre-emption/prevention essay, Brown offers a thought about this, on which it is perhaps appropriate to close this section of the essay: What then must we do? The answer, I think, is that we must educate our masters, or, to put the matter less dramatically, we must try to cultivate the faculty for judgement in ourselves that we hope they will also cultivate…We cannot guarantee that our political systems will throw up people whose judgement will be good, but we can do our best to make sure that scholars of international relations at least – and preferably a wider public – have a grasp of what is needed. (Brown 2010: 249)

3   What Is Required of Practical Judgement? So here we have a clear and well framed understanding of what Brown thinks is important about practical judgement and why he thinks it preferable to the alternatives. It is time to take a closer look at the idea itself. Brown is clear that his version is, as he calls it, a Neo-Aristotelian version, so perhaps it is well to start here. In an earlier essay in the volume, Brown saw Neo-Aristotelianism as a way out of the impasse (as he saw it) that his framing of the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate had reached. And the two writers most often cited by Brown as leading Neo-Aristotelians are Martha Nussbaum and Stephen Toulmin. Both clearly are Neo-­ Aristotelians, but it is worth emphasising, I think, that the Neo-­ Aristotelianism each espoused was, while linked in certain ways, also very different. Nussbaum is a classical scholar (originally) whose Aristotle very much comes from the texts. She edited versions of Aristotle’s texts as a young scholar (including De Motu Animalum) and her most obviously Neo-Aristotelian book The Fragility of Goodness (Nussbaum 1986) was an engagement with a swathe of Greek literature, not just Aristotle. It should also be noted—as a number of scholars have pointed out and indeed as she herself has admitted—that she has become noticeably less ‘Neo-­ Aristotelian’ in her most recent writings (without denying that there is still some connection). In Toulmin’s case, he was a student of Wittgenstein, whose Aristotelianism came much later and was based largely on Aristotle’s ethical writing, not his general philosophy, and on Toulmin’s own

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c­ommitment to casuistry—first explicated in his jointly authored book with Albert R Johnson The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Jonsen and Toulmin 1990). And, of course, there are other Neo-­Aristotelians who take Aristotle in a very different direction—perhaps most obviously Alasdair MacIntyre (MacIntyre 1981, 1988, 1991 and 2016). In all of these cases, the notion of practical judgement is certainly present, but the point is that it is present in rather different ways. The point here is to emphasise that I think Brown needs to be more explicit than he has been (up till now at least) about the form of his Neo-Aristotelianism. To say you favour a Neo-Aristotelian form of practical judgement doesn’t tell us very much unless you also spell out what form you are advocating (perhaps by criticising some that take practical judgement in a rather different direction). And there is also another problem, which perhaps reaches even deeper. By way of an introduction to this, let me refer to an argument of Toulmin’s. As Brown quite rightly says, for much of his career, Toulmin has argued for the centrality of a broadly Aristotelian conception of practical judgement. This concern dates back to The Place of Reason in Ethics but is central to all his later work, which emphasises the ‘rediscovery’ of the importance of this in the modern, even postmodern, context. In perhaps his most influential book, Cosmopolis (Toulmin 1990) and in his final book (a version of his 1998 Tanner lectures2) Return to Reason (Toulmin 2003), he calls it ‘reasonableness’. He points out that the whole notion of practical judgement (on an Aristotelian understanding at least) issues not in principles or hypotheses but in actions, and that its hallmark is ‘reasonable’ (and thus appropriate) action rather than simply rational (and thus perhaps inappropriate) action. ‘Reasonableness’ is contextual and can be sensitive to the specifics of any given case in a way that ‘rationality’—at least as conventionally understood, as, say in game theory or rational choice— cannot. Thus, human sciences which emphasise the rational at the expense of the reasonable are bound to fail (contemporary economics was a particular target of Toulmin’s here), but one might (Brown would, I think), include much contemporary Anglophone moral and political philosophy as well. This was also the argument that Jonson and Toulmin made in the context of their book on casuistry. It is not, of course, wrong to suggest, as Brown does, that ethics is/ can/should be action-guiding. An ethic that was not action-guiding in some sense would be a very odd ethic indeed. However, the development

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(in whatever form) of action-guiding ethical claims does not, I want to suggest, exhaust the requirements for practical judgement. For a key question—and one Brown has very little to say about—is what makes the kind of practical judgement he has in mind possible at all. Aristotle himself was quite clear on this point. Practical judgement— that is to say, correct practical judgement—comes about through a process of education that inculcates people to become virtuous in the appropriate way—ideally habitually—and therefore make appropriate judgements in appropriate contexts. That was a tall order in the ancient polis and, as Aristotle well knew, was not realised in any actually existing polis of his day (which was why both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics discussed how it could be brought about). It beggars belief to think about how it might be achieved in the context of a modern state or, even more, a multicultural world order. And, by definition, it would sit ill with contemporary democratic notions (not that this would have bothered Aristotle who was no friend of democracy, at least as he understood the term). It is fair enough to say, of course, that the people on which Brown is drawing are aware of this. They are Neo-Aristotelians, not full-blown ones. But that brings up a rather different problem, perhaps best illustrated in the argument of Jonson and Toulmin’s The Abuse of Casuistry. The central part of that book traces the rise and fall of casuistry between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the point about all the casuists discussed is that they broadly shared a set of background assumptions (they were virtually all Jesuits) about what was important/valuable, and so on. That was why they could take cases seriously and ‘judge’ when value x should outweigh value y in context z. Had there been no general agreement about first principles, the kind of case-based reasoning described by Jonson and Toulmin would have been impossible. It is perhaps significant in this context that the original backdrop to Jonson and Toulmin’s book were issues in medical ethics where, again, there is a broadly shared set of general principles held by the medical profession. But this is clearly not the case in many (or even any) contemporary states, except in very particular areas (such as medicine and even here there are outliers). So, on what basis should practical judgements be formed in the context of contemporary international action? Brown seems to assume (rather than argue for) some mixture of enlightenment values plus guidelines like the rule of international law, but that is surely a very weak reed on which to base a strong notion of practical judgement. Aside from anything else, like any general set of assumptions, enlightenment

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values are not all of a piece so one has to choose (and how does one do that?). And, obviously, the commitment of many states to any form of ‘enlightenment values’ is pretty weak at best, not to say—in some contexts—non-existent. One might say, of course, that Brown is really talking—in the essays discussed above—about contemporary Western states, where it might be supposed some general principles—the rule of law, acting in one’s own interests but also in the interests of others where possible, preventing, also where possible, mass atrocities and so on—do form a generalised backdrop against which judgements—about intervention, about pre-emption/ prevention—have to be made. And, of course, he is quite right to say that sometimes such judgements can be bad, as well as good, even when well intentioned. But to suggest that IR scholars—and perhaps a more general educated public—should cultivate the habit of practical judgement so as to ‘educate our masters’, is, to put it mildly, wishful thinking. There is little evidence that the kinds of conditions that even Neo-Aristotelian’s think would enhance the possibility of practical judgement are being encouraged either in contemporary universities—there seems precious little reason for supposing that the research and teaching evaluation exercises in the British university system would be interested in such conditions—or in a wider public culture where attention spans and the ability to trade off long-term gain against short-term gratification are diminishing almost by the hour. The difficulty of conceiving of the appropriate conditions for inculcating the habit of good judgement in contemporary conditions (whatever might have been thought about the possibility in the kind of small face to face societies imagined by Aristotle) is why some others who favour a ‘practical turn’ (e.g. Friedrich Kratochwil—see Kratochwil 1989, 2014) have turned to other contexts—such as law—as the appropriate way of thinking about making practical judgements; but if we have understood Brown right, we can see why this does not appeal to him. Practical ­judgement, as he understands the term, might sometimes want to make the judgement that in context x law y is not applicable, or even if applicable should simply be overridden. Toulmin was fond of saying3 that the difference for Aristotle between a theoretical argument and a practical one was that the conclusion of a theoretical syllogism was a hypothesis, but the conclusion of a practical syllogism was an action, and preferably an action performed habitually. He used to like to give, as an example, what he called the ‘Drowning Baby’

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example. We are to imagine a woman pushing a pram along a windy promenade. Suddenly an especially strong gust of wind blows the pram and its young occupant into the sea, where she is in danger of drowning. A passer­by jumps in and rescues the baby from drowning. If we then ask the passer-by why he/she did that, the answer we get will depend upon the assumptions that went into the moral calculus. A Kantian or a Utilitarian will both, Toulmin says, give reasons—different ones to be sure: for the Kantian, perhaps some variant on Kant’s universalisability argument, for the utilitarian, some version of act or rule utilitarianism—but nonetheless they will offer ‘reasons’ for the action. The Aristotelian, on the other hand, will not. Properly speaking, the Aristotelian will simply describe the events leaving it to us to realise that in context x, action y is the appropriate response. That is simply what it is to have good practical judgement. But that raises, in a very stark manner, the central difficulty for Toulmin’s (and Brown’s) conception of practical judgement—indeed really for any Neo-­ Aristotelian notion of judgement: how can we establish the conditions for the making of sound practical judgements in the public realm, absent the kind of personal development envisaged by Aristotle? Or rather can we establish such conditions at all? Brown wants to say we can—but gives no real guidance as to how we do that.

4   Solving Problems or Guiding Actions? I will come back to that question in the conclusion to this paper, but before I do, I want to turn to one other aspect of Brown’s argument that he shares with all the Neo-Aristotelians mentioned above and to which we have already had occasion to refer: the claim that ‘theory’ (of any kind) ought to be ‘problem-solving’ and ‘action-guiding’. Of course, the claim that theory should be ‘problem-solving’ and ‘action-guiding’ is not unique to Aristotelians; most contemporary ethicists and political philosophers (at least of an Anglophone bent) and most contemporary social scientists, of various different persuasions, would (and do) say the same. But it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment and considering the claim in a bit more detail. The original distinction that Brown draws on in his collection was made (as he says) by Stephen White who was distinguishing between two different kinds of theorising—‘world-disclosing’ (his kind) and ‘action-guiding’ (which would often also be called ‘normative’ theorising in moral and political theory). White’s point was that ‘world-disclosing’ theory did not

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aim to guide action at all, it was explanatory (though not in a social scientific way): it disclosed a world. He had in mind the early work (for example) of Michel Foucault elaborating the ‘order of things’ (Foucault 1966) and the nature and evolution of certain social categories such as madness or the notion of the prison and so on. The other point, for Brown, was that in IR theory, particularly since Robert Cox’s seminal Millennium article ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’ (Cox 1981), there has been a tendency, at least for ‘critical theorists’ of various different stripes, to contrast ‘problem-solving theory’ with ‘critical theory’, a distinction, Brown now thinks, without a real difference. Hence all theory ought to be problem-solving (in some form) and in international political theory at least, it should aim at being ‘action-guiding’, otherwise what’s the point? While I think that White’s distinction is still of value—it does point to very real differences of emphasis among theoretical traditions—and Brown is also right to suggest that the distinction between ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’ theory is far too simplistic and has probably outlived whatever usefulness it might once have had, I also think that this does not quite exhaust the issue. A ‘world-disclosing’ theory might not be action-guiding in the formal sense—it would not constitute a practical syllogism on Aristotelian grounds—but it might well enable or constrain certain kinds of understanding and therefore, at least in principle, certain kinds of action. And ‘action-guiding’ theory surely must rest on some understanding of the possibilities of action that exist in the world, in other words, it must rest on some vision of the world that, either explicitly or implicitly, is disclosed. To add to this complexity, we might also suggest that there is another kind of theory that is of equal merit (although, I suppose, one might see it as a subspecies of world-disclosing theory, but one very different from that which White envisages). Its exemplars (in my view at least) would be people like Oakeshott (who Brown briefly mentions in his introduction), Santayana, and perhaps above all Montaigne. In a wonderful recent short essay on the latter, the philosopher Raymond Geuss comments that ‘lots of philosophers have been terrible busybodies, never happier than when sticking their noses into other people’s business, reproving them, putting them to tights, correcting them, giving them unsolicited advice’ (Geuss 2017: 115). If I were to be unkind, I might say being ‘action-guiding’. As Geuss goes on to say ‘Montaigne is almost completely free of all of these pathologies. One cannot imagine him wagging his finger, asking an impertinent or intentionally embarrassing question, thumping a table or butting

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in where he is not wanted. As he says of himself ….’ Others form men, I tell of him’ (Geuss 2017: 117). The same is true, I think—at least to a very large extent—of the likes of Santayana and Oakeshott. It was, of course, a hallmark of the latter’s general philosophy that theory could simply not be ‘action-guiding’ since practice and theory were two different ‘modes’ of experiencing the world (see Oakeshott 1933) that could never be merged and only exist in oblique relations one with another. The most he would accept is that by understanding the world through theory we might be allowed to recognise the world for what it is and thus be less susceptible to what he called ‘the corruption of our consciousness’ (Oakeshott 1962). But even if one does not want to go that far, it seems reasonable to dissent from Brown’s claim that all theory must be problem-solving and action-guiding. That some kinds of theory certainly aim to do that is true and perhaps explicable but it is a choice, not a destiny.

5   Conclusion This volume as a whole—and indeed this essay—is intended, of course, as a tribute to Brown and so it seems a trifle unfair to finish on a disagreement (however mild, and however much, as I said at the outset, Brown himself revels in debate and discussion, including disagreement). So, in closing, I want to come back to the issue I flagged up in Sect. 2: how we might frame our polities and our public culture so that the kinds of practical judgement Brown has in mind might (at least) be possible, however uncommon or unlikely under present conditions. The title of this essay is, of course, a reference to the first of the essays I discussed in detail, Brown’s defence of selective humanitarianism and the claim contained therein that such inconsistency is of a piece with the very nature of practical judgement in an imperfect, messy and complicated world. As I suggested above, I am deeply sympathetic to this view in general terms. With Brown, I suspect that any attempt to develop a general ethic that will fit all contexts or cases is doomed to futility (at best) and likely to produce, in all probability, an ethical straightjacket that will do way more harm than good. Examples of such attempts litter the contemporary ethical landscape like clothes in a teenager’s bedroom. But as the Neo-Aristotelians with whom he makes common cause have made us so painfully aware (it is put very starkly in MacIntyre’s After Virtue) if the choice is not to be between an (illusory) universality and an

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ethically nugatory ‘anything goes’, we have to find a way of framing the notion of practical judgement and habituating citizens (at least some of the time) to recognising it. For MacIntyre, it was originally the notion of the virtues, now translated more into notions of narrative (see MacIntyre 2016). For Nussbaum, it has led her into the realm of trying to harmonise reason and the emotions (see, for example Nussbaum 2013). For Toulmin, it is the notion of ‘reasonableness’ and all he thought went with that. The question is what Brown might suggest in this context? It is certainly not incoherent (as my title rather misleadingly suggests) to try to do this and it would certainly lead to the recognition that inconsistency is the handmaiden of ‘action-guiding’ practical judgement and cannot be avoided. But as it stands, Brown’s development of his version of practical judgement needs fleshing out to illustrate how he thinks this might be possible. Brown’s notion of practical judgement is a singular contribution to contemporary international political theory, complex, alert to the nuances of history and context and to the varieties of multiple ethical traditions. Inconsistent: yes, but necessarily so; incoherent: certainly not; but, perhaps, as it stands, incomplete.

Notes 1. A confession: I was one of those—alongside David Owen, who pressed Chris to collect his essays. 2. Declaration of Interest here: I was one of the three respondents to his Tanner lectures, the others being Mary Hesse and Partha Dasgupta. 3. He says this in various places. The Drowning Baby example is drawn from personal correspondence and a discussion in the interstices of the Tanner lectures mentioned above.

References Brown, C. (1992). International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Brown, C. (2002). Sovereignty, Rights and Justice–International Political Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, C. (2010). Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Brown, C., & Ainley, K. (2009). Understanding International Relations (4th ed.). London: Palgrave.

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Cox, R. (1981). Social Forces, States and World Orders. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10(2), 126–155. Foucault, M. (1966). The Order of Things – An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Paris: Gallimard. Geuss, R. (2017). Changing the Subject  – Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jonsen, A., & Toulmin, S. (1990). The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kratochwil, F. (1989). Rules, Norms, Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kratochwil, F. (2014). The Status of Law in World Society: Meditations on the Role and Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luttwak, E. (2000, July 14). No-Score War. Times Literary Supplement. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1988). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1991). Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (2016). Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1986). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2013). Political Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshott, M. (1933). Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshott, M. (1962). Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen. Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New  York: Basic Books. Toulmin, S. (2003). Return to Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. White, S. (1991). Political Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Humanity in International Political Theory: Chris Brown and the Principles, Politics and Practice of Humanitarianism Henry Radice

1   Introduction Humanitarian intervention has been a central issue in the re-emergence of the field of International Political Theory (IPT), bringing together the fundamental questions of sovereignty, rights and justice that animate the discourse. Chris Brown has both mapped out many of the key issues in his work, and contributed normative perspectives on particular cases, sometimes controversially. But both IPT and the broader discipline of international relations have tended to neglect the equally interesting issues thrown up by the common and garden varieties of humanitarianism practised by the agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), among others. These rarely entail the use of force or even breaches of sovereignty, but nevertheless raise crucial questions of political ethics, making this kind of professional humanitarianism ripe for the attention of international political theorists. Moreover, it arguably represents a crucible

H. Radice (*) London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_5

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for the negotiation of the notions of common humanity that do so much work within IPT. In this chapter, I argue that Brown’s work has much to say about the issues raised by professional humanitarianism. Humanitarians tend to describe their practice in terms of four familiar core principles: neutrality, impartiality, independence and, most fundamentally, humanity. I will explore the issues thrown up by these principles, incorporating insights from Brown’s work that shed much light on these matters, and offer a number of entry points for mainstream IPT to engage with this fascinating area of practice. Furthermore, though Brown is perhaps seen by some as a neck-wringing, rather than hand-wringing, liberal, the exercise shows that a solid vein of unsentimental humanitarianism runs through his work. First, I will cast doubt on the possibility of humanitarian neutrality and independence in relation to Brown’s understanding of politics, drawing notably on his critique of the Responsibility to Protect’s anti-politics. Second, I use Brown’s argument on selective humanitarianism to de-­ fetishise the idea of impartiality in humanitarian action, and suggest that Brown’s notion of practical judgement fits exactly with the real politics of humanitarianism on the ground. Third, I argue that Brown’s understanding of tragedy provides a valuable space for humanitarians to consider the challenges they face in attempting to uphold humanity. I conclude by arguing that a sober recognition of the contingency of the notion of common humanity employed by humanitarians not only strengthens their practice but also suggests that Brown’s kind of situated, Walzerian internationalism may be a better vector for humanitarian politics than some of the more brittle variants of cosmopolitanism he critiques.

2   Neutrality, Independence and Politics Neutrality is perhaps the most talismanic of the core humanitarian principles, though also admittedly the most frequently contested. It carries a great deal of symbolic weight within humanitarian practice. It captures a consistent refusal to take sides, and articulates the notion of a third space amidst conflict within which those hors-de-combat may take sanctuary. Furthermore, in the negotiations constantly required to gain access to those in need, whether amidst conflict or other types of humanitarian crisis, an assurance of neutrality can clearly be vital in building the trust of belligerents or other types of gatekeeper.

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Set against this is the perennial question of whether neutrality can be maintained when faced with the most egregious examples of crimes against humanity. Two exemplary cases continue to haunt humanitarians here: the Red Cross’ decision to remain silent about what it knew of the Nazi death camps during the Second World War (Favez 1999); and the traumatic deliberations among many humanitarians about whether to stay or withdraw from the refugee camps where many génocidaires sheltered in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide (Terry 2002). As such, the notion of neutrality offers up a formidable set of challenges and dilemmas to professional humanitarians. But the extra dimension, and the point at which Brown’s work becomes especially relevant, is the way professional humanitarians see their embrace of neutrality as opening up for them a space outside of politics. The claim is at least credible for two reasons. First, since much of humanitarian action rests on technical expertise, notably medical expertise, humanitarians see this as a fundamentally different kind of endeavour to the often violent, clashing political projects that lie behind so many humanitarian crises. Second, because the purpose of professional humanitarians is to save lives and not to acquire political power, they do not see themselves as political players in the contexts in which they operate. To address the first point, if we think of medical practice at the domestic level, it is true that most people would not see the therapeutic actions of their doctor in relation to them as political in any meaningful sense (although in fact it might be infused with, for instance, patriarchal assumptions). But all of the decisions and debates that precede that encounter, about the resourcing of the system to ensure access and reduce waiting times, about the use of general practitioners as gatekeepers of specialist medicine, about investing in up-to-date training, about funding medical services through general taxation or insurance—the list could go on and on—are the very substance of politics. Occasionally one hears a plea to ‘take the NHS out of politics’, which seems to represent a very fundamental category error. Similarly, everything that surrounds the encounters between humanitarians and their beneficiaries is necessarily the object of political debate somewhere, whether within an organisation itself, within a host country, donor country, or all three. Delving further into the ostensibly technical, or alternatively/simultaneously ethical encounter between humanitarian and beneficiary, we discover that, to borrow the spirit and part of the title of one of Brown’s most famous articles, politics goes, as do turtles, ‘all the way down’ (Brown

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1994). Everything about the humanitarian enterprise is rife with contestation and contingency. Yet most would agree that it remains a valuable endeavour, perhaps pushing humanitarians towards the need to act, in the absence of firm foundations, with the kind of Rortean ironism Brown (not uncritically) evokes in that piece (Brown 1994: 232–235). Brown critiques the tendency, true of professional humanitarians as much as humanitarian-minded policymakers, to de-politicise their action, in his piece on what he terms ‘the antipolitical theory of responsibility to protect’ (Brown 2013a). The notion of ‘anti-politics’, as often with Brown’s work, cuts to the quick of a complex issue, and Brown’s ‘antianti-­politics’, as it were, is both refreshing and instructive. The point is not that advocates of the Responsibility to Protect lack a sophisticated understanding of the political tensions they are aiming to resolve. Rather, by failing to bring politics to the fore of the discourse, both in terms of the problems at hand and disagreements over how to address them, they are hampering its chances of success. As Brown puts it (in relation to the idea of a code of conduct governing the P5’s use of the veto in Responsibility to Protect related cases): Such a code of conduct would make sense if humanitarian crises could be understood as essentially non-political events likely to attract consensus about the appropriate response. … One could then treat the response to a situation where a gross violation of human rights was taking place in a technical manner, choosing the appropriate method to stop or avert a significant humanitarian crisis. But, to repeat, this is not the case. (Brown 2013a: 431)

The point is made in relation to one aspect of the application of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, but it arguably holds for the whole of humanitarian practice. It is usually both empirically wrong and counterproductive to remove the politics from the situation, if one is minded to intervene, since: Intervention is inherently a political act and to work on the assumption that politics can be removed from the picture is to promote an illusion and to [sic] thus to invite disillusionment. (Brown 2013a: 431)

Brown’s concern here is military intervention, but his point goes far deeper into other types of humanitarian action, which all involve degrees of intervention in the lives of others. Didier Fassin’s work is particularly

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good at highlighting the role of what he terms ‘humanitarian reason’ in  politics, often with unacknowledged de-politicising consequences (Fassin 2012). Michael Barnett also uses the term ‘anti-politics’ in his discussion, in the magisterial Empire of Humanity, of how humanitarianism’s relationship to politics has been crucial to its recent identity crisis (Barnett 2011: 195–196). Several decades of humanitarian soul-searching in response to repeated failures suggests that detachment from politics is indeed an illusion, and often an unhelpful one at that (Edkins 2000; Fassin 2012; Ticktin 2011; Terry 2002). Failing to acknowledge politics engenders a failing to understand the political consequences of aid, such as risks of fuelling war economies, displacing local political authority and perpetuating problematic global power dynamics, among other issues that have affected humanitarian action in recent decades (de Waal 1997; Duffield 2014; Anderson 1999). For some, this has led to a sense of disillusionment. This is not to say that humanitarians have been unable to learn the political lessons of their failings. The diagnosis of one of their most acute and insightful critics, Alex de Waal, is that they have learned and improved in many respects, partly as a result of that process of disillusionment (though other, more structural and tragic limitations remain—of which more below; see de Waal 2010). Instead, I wish to highlight a slightly different aspect of humanitarian engagement with politics, namely their reluctance fully to embrace the politics of their own endeavour as a strength, rather than limitation. Again, Brown nudges us towards this insight. His point is that anti-politics both misunderstands what’s going on, making a category error, but also deracinates the practice from the places in our political lives where we might want to embed it. He also shows, across his work, that it is a typical move of those who would make self-consciously ethical moves in the political realm. As such, for humanitarians, while there can be a benefit to being discreet about the politics they embody, there is also a cost, arguably a cost to us all. They are locked in struggle with those who would see particular lives as dispensable, and that struggle has an important place in our political, not just moral lives. In the same piece on the Responsibility to Protect, Brown makes the judgement that: The political cleavages that characterise the modern world cannot be wished away, nor is the desire to de-politicise world politics admirable, even if the

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c­oncern to lessen human suffering deserves our respect, and, if framed appropriately, our support. (Brown 2013a: 431) [my italics]

Brown’s key point, that there is nothing particularly admirable about the de-politicisation of humanitarian action, is particularly helpful. This is so partly for the reason evoked earlier, that humanitarian action often has profound political consequences, but more importantly because in a world of often violent, dehumanising political cleavages, the ‘concern to lessen human suffering’ represents a vital political, and not merely moral, position. The relationship between politics and morality is not a zero-sum game. Indeed, there can be genuine moral significance and added-value to the acknowledgement of politics, if the latter is not simply to become synonymous with suffering. But in their desire to be seen, and to some extent to see themselves, as apolitical, professional humanitarians are representative of others whose political action is driven by a strong moral purpose, they tend to downplay and contest the fact that their action is political, as though there need be an irresolvable clash between ethics and politics. Brown’s work displays a consistent scepticism about this kind of perspective, and an unsentimental recognition that meaningful moral agency in the political realm rests on having the power to act in the first place (Brown 2003a). Humanitarian independence may thus be operationally useful but cannot be an absolute principle of humanitarian action because part of the task of humanitarians is to exercise power humanely and to make others’ exercise of power more humane. As Barnett puts it: ‘Humanitarianism is a mixture of care and control; to make the world a better place requires power’ (Barnett 2011: 221). In engaging, around the turn of the century, with the New Labour government’s declared aspiration towards an ‘ethical foreign policy’ in the United Kingdom, Brown made the key point that, by reifying the dichotomy between altruism and self-interest, and excluding the latter from the realm of the ‘moral’, discussions of foreign policy lacked not only the more sophisticated oscillation and accommodation between the two characteristic of most ethical theories, but also departed from common-sense ideas of their co-existence within domestic policy (i.e. a successful transport or health policy is one that serves both ourselves and others; Brown 2010b). Brown had in mind issues such as state-led humanitarian intervention, but again, as mentioned earlier, he pinpoints a common set of erroneous assumptions, namely that humanitarianism must sit within a sphere of

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moral action, which is different from the foreign policy/politics nexus which is, by implication, amoral. This resonates in turn within the humanitarian soul with the instinct that self-interest should be disregarded and altruism guide action above all. The recognition that this simply is not a plausible account of our moral or political lives has fuelled a thoughtful yet often angst-ridden literature (Vaux 2001). The title of a fascinating recent ethnography by Liisa Malkki, The Need to Help, neatly encapsulates a more plausible account of what is going on (Malkki 2015). Arguably, though, humanitarians have yet fully to reconcile themselves with their own human neediness, preferring to critique their unacknowledged prejudices and abuses of power. Understandable of course, but the latter, while essential in its own right, will simply pinpoint the failings of their altruism, whereas an ongoing interrogation of what constitutes legitimate self-interest is also a necessary prerequisite of a more humane, egalitarian humanitarianism. But Brown’s concern is ultimately much less with retrospective soul-­ searching, and more about practical judgement and decision-making in relation to specific cases, which brings into the discussion of humanitarian politics questions about the application of the principle of impartiality and concomitant charges of selectivity.

3   Impartiality, Selectivity and Practical Judgement Humanitarians are not only haunted by their past failures but also by their perceived sins of omission. This links back to the centrality of notions of impartiality to professional humanitarians’ self-perception. Critics of humanitarianism who emphasise the selectivity of humanitarian action either consider the issue to undermine the whole enterprise, or see a deep need for rule-corrected solidarity. The issue of selectivity is a major concern throughout the world of professional humanitarianism, feeding on the multiple layers of imperfection and complexity that characterise it. Indeed, at every level of humanitarian engagement, charges of selectivity are a preferred way of attacking its coherence. Yet Brown has been a staunch defender of selectivity in humanitarian action, seeing it as a perfectly reasonable by-product of practical judgement. Ian Smillie and Larry Minear lay out the problem, noting ‘the unevenness of the response to emergencies, with human need going largely unaddressed in some crises while being inundated with attention and resources

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in others’. They go on to say that the ‘humanitarian imperative is difficult to take seriously when its application is so tattered’ (Smillie and Minear 2004: 1). These disparities of course reflect the extent to which the professional humanitarian sector is at the mercy of the wider social context in which humanitarian concerns are expressed and support for action formulated. The fact is that even in highly controlled and institutionalised contexts, professional humanitarianism is not at full liberty to determine its own priorities according to the principles it sets itself. Instead, it has to negotiate much the more fickle and contingent play of empathetic responses, navigating what Craig Calhoun has termed our humanitarian ‘emergency imaginaries’ (Calhoun 2008). Some professional humanitarian actors resist this. Famously, in the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami, MSF quickly shut down its appeal as it had more money than it could usefully spend (Redfield 2008: 211). For Rony Brauman, since ‘[mass] solidarity is not based on reasoning alone’, the role of aid organisations is especially important in bringing lucidity into decision-making (Brauman 2009: 109). They act as a kind of solidarity filter. Fiona Terry links this to the importance of independence in humanitarian action, of course at the heart of both the ICRC and the MSF approaches (but problematic for the reasons outlined above) (Terry 2002: 23–24). But arguably even those agencies cannot indefinitely remove themselves from partialist tendencies, as beyond the short-term solidarity has to be mobilised anew. The debate centres on the extent to which action that makes a moral claim is undermined by selective application. The charge is that selectivity is a major, possibly defining, feature of contemporary humanitarianism, and that it undermines even the initial plausibility of action. Arguably this focus reflects a belief that, rather than cruelty, hypocrisy is the worst thing we do. Indeed, Judith Shklar, while recognising the dangers of hypocrisy, considers that ‘To put hypocrisy first entangles us finally in too much moral cruelty, exposes us too easily to misanthropy, and unbalances our politics’ (Shklar 1984: 86). With regard to the practice of military humanitarian intervention, Brown defends a certain degree of inconsistency in decision-making, against the likes of Noam Chomsky, for whom hypocrisy clearly is the worst thing we do (especially the hypocrisy of liberals) (Chomsky 1999; Chandler 2006). For Brown, it is important to recognise that not all situations lend themselves to the establishment of rules, and that meaningful moral agency requires that we acknowledge the importance of practical

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judgement, especially when faced with situations of extreme complexity (Brown 2003b). He argues that the greatest humanitarian failures, such as the absence of any kind of meaningful intervention to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide, are above all failures of judgement and of political will. Of course, humanitarianism encompasses discussions about the first resort, about what rules and processes should be put in place to avoid situations of extreme human suffering, but if those discussions, or those processes, fail, humanitarianism also implies a response of last resort. The very failure of the former implies to a great extent the contingency of the latter, and the importance of practical judgement on the one hand, and the formation of political will on the other. In a recent piece, significantly featuring a sympathetic reference to Bernard Williams’ understanding of political realism, Brown hints at his own approach via a telling and pithy critique: I have no moral intuitions about what I should do if faced with the Trolley Problem. Runaway trains are not a problem I have encountered in my journey through life, and I have never had to decide between sacrificing one life or allowing six to die; as a result I do not have relevant intuitions to bring to the table. The simplicity of these fanciful cases is supposed to clarify; whereas, by omitting all the nuances, histories, and emotions that accompany actual decisions, such simplicity more plausibly serves to obfuscate. (Brown 2017: 362)

This emphasis on real cases and practice is of particular use to professional humanitarians, whose experiences may actually include life or death scenarios (although Brown’s friends will be familiar with his frequent travails at the hands of a commuter rail service that shall remain nameless). But they retain a concern that their emotional engagement and an impartial assessment of others’ needs sit in tension. This points to a profound paradox at the heart of professional humanitarians’ understanding of the principle of impartiality and the principle of humanity: to honour humanity seems to require that it be exercised impartially, yet it is nourished by the partial play of empathy and emotional engagement with particular instances of suffering. Tony Vaux acknowledges the point: At the heart of humanity are not only conflicts of selfishness and altruism, but the paradox of being emotional enough to feel concern while not being

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so emotional that we limit that concern unfairly. We need both attachment and detachment. And it is particularly tempting to feel ‘concern for the person in need’ rather more strongly in the case of those whom we like, and to attack those whom we do not like even if their ideas and objectives are similar to our own. (Vaux 2001: 70)

His account reminds us of the position of a doctor, who constantly needs to combine professional detachment with the nourishing power of a commitment to healing people. And if we take the example of professional medicine, we see that an apparently impartial concept like ‘greatest need’ is actually very hard to define in abstract, and has to be negotiated, often controversially, as we see in Britain with every controversy over guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), through a political discussion, in which not everyone can necessarily find satisfaction. This brings us to the concept of triage, which is evoked in different guises in the humanitarian context (Redfield 2008; cf. also the 2007 movie Triage: Dr James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma). The problem of selectivity will almost always rear its head again in practical contexts. The dilemma was already recognised by Dunant: Then you find yourself asking: ‘Why go to the right, when there are all these men on the left who will die without a word of kindness or comfort, without so much as a glass of water to quench their burning thirst?’ (Dunant 1986: unpaginated text)

The way that the principle of impartiality has evolved is to establish that the quenching of thirst should not be hampered by the colour of one’s skin, say, or one’s religion. However, deciding which kind of suffering represents the greatest need, inevitably reintroduces a hierarchy of suffering, in the absence of an unlimited supply of material and moral resources. It is not clear that different kinds of suffering are commensurable. Indeed, it may do a disservice to the principle of humanity to try to argue that they are. Vaux argues that ‘[we] need a rule of impartiality precisely because we are not impartial’ (Vaux 2001: 162). But it is not at all clear that a world richer in humanitarianism would necessarily ever, in practice, be a more truly impartial world. Indeed, it is very unclear on what basis the calculation of ‘more’ or ‘less’ would be established. Richard Rorty notes: ‘[free] universities, a free press, incorruptible judges, and unbribable police

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­ fficers do not come cheap’ (Rorty 2008: 318). These measures arguably o represent past humanitarian gains, and it would clearly be absurd on humanitarian grounds to neglect them. It would not make the world a ‘more humanitarian’ place to abolish the human rights protections from which, for instance, Europeans benefit. Yet equally clearly, if we were to decide ‘greatest need’ impartially, the resources poured into this would not be justifiable. Indeed, Rorty is profoundly sceptical that our ambition to widen the ambit of solidarity to all humankind can ever be achieved, for all the gains he undoubtedly thinks can be achieved through the spread of a human rights culture through a sentimental education. Once again the trope of triage comes up as a way to suggest that our solidarity is related to our sense of the possible (Rorty 2008: 321). This brings us back to Brown, both to his political realism and to his scepticism of overly abstracted, often cosmopolitan justice theorising. Brown’s intuition is that, pace the likes of Peter Singer, our humanity might be enhanced by attending the Sydney Opera House, rather than sacrificing it to a transcendental ideal (Singer 1972). Perhaps impartiality is, in the end, a transcendental ideal that, while serving as a sometimes useful corrective to excesses of partiality, does not provide us with a full account of how to make decisions. Moreover, the contexts in which the humanitarian impulse is called upon is frequently one within which tragic choices are a likely feature of any decision to act, or a conscious decision not to act (Brown 2007).

4   Tragedy and Humanity Returning to the notion of humanitarian triage in the context of Brown’s piece on tragedy and tragic choices cautions us to moderation of language: triage, if implemented according to some reasonable principle, throws up outcomes that are sad or unfortunate rather than tragic per se, in the sense of forcing the agent to choose between two demanding moral principles. However, humanitarians frequently do face genuinely tragic choices, often involving clashes between the core principles of their practice—there may be clashes between humanity and neutrality or impartiality for instance, or between their principles and the promotion of humanitarian concerns like peace or justice. The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, where agencies faced choices between leaving refugee camps and letting people die, or staying and reinforcing génocidaire power structures, was just such a choice.

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Alex de Waal, while acknowledging the progress made since his coruscating critiques of the 1990s, writes of ‘an inescapable tragedy of clashes among rights and unmet expectations’ (de Waal 1997, 2010: 131). De Waal’s examples of tragic choices range from the triage actions of individual aid workers to the possibility ‘that by making war less inhumane, [humanitarian work] can be said to be making it less intolerable. There is a curious synergy between warrior and humanitarian’ (de Waal 2010: 132–133). De Waal concludes that cruelty ‘is intrinsic to the humanitarian predicament’ (de Waal 2010: 136). Thus, the ultimate tragedy for humanitarians: if among those navigating the world’s political fault lines, they define primarily by their opposition to cruelty rather than hypocrisy, they may be condemned to cruelty themselves. The usefulness of Brown’s work here is recognition and acceptance of the tragic dimension of moral life, of dirty hands and of loose ends, in contrast to many in the canon of contemporary IPT (Walzer being a crucial exception). Humanitarians, who must deal with the loosest of political loose ends, are ill-served by political theory that pretends that every political and moral dilemma can be resolved. Brown’s reference to ‘the untheorisable complexities of human existence’ serves as a valuable reminder to professional humanitarians that adherence to their core principles is likely to only take them so far in confronting the challenges of their profession, in which the very notion of humanity is challenged daily by the extremity of the suffering they encounter (Brown 2007: 7). My intuition, reading and thinking about humanitarianism in relation to Brown’s work, must be that a truly humane response to such extremity can and indeed should be situated, partial and engaged, that this might render humanitarian work more, rather than less human. It is useful to remind ourselves at this point that the majority of humanitarian work is actually undertaken by co-nationals of the people they are helping, and it seems perverse to deprive them of the humanitarian label for that reason. Furthermore, regarding the more ‘traditional’ humanitarian figure of the international aid worker, we know from accounts by Malkki and others that humanitarians’ motivations are inevitably mixed, complex and situated (Malkki 2015). The idea of the humanitarian coming from nowhere is both empirically false and theoretically unhelpful. Humanitarianism is rarely a solidarity floating free, but rather builds on or relates to other, often more particularistic forms of solidarity. For instance, various forms of feminist politics and solidarities provide a motivational framework for particular humanitarians. They also help s­ ubstantiate

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in important ways the category of common humanity, by bringing to the fore particular vulnerabilities and dehumanising practices experienced by women. Catherine MacKinnon’s stark question ‘Are women human?’ remains of perpetual relevance to humanitarians, given how much their work depends on their understanding of what being human entails, and how much violence can consciously or unconsciously be done by imposing exclusive notions of humanity (MacKinnon 2006). Thus, the attachments that nourish humanitarian action cut across our moral and political landscapes in multifaceted ways. The task of humanitarianism is in large part, whatever one’s approach to it, about expanding the reach and content of human solidarity. It seems counter-intuitive in doing so to neglect existing resources of solidarity, which by definition are likely to be partial or particular in nature. To be suspicious about the fickle and contingent workings of our humanitarian impulses seems appropriate. But they remain at the heart of the possibility of humanitarian action (broadly understood). The problem that we cannot empathise with everyone will not go away and does not make processes of empathetic interaction any less important for envisaging a world in which more humanitarian action takes place. The size of the category of humanity is an important consideration, but so is the quality of our human relationships. The danger is of being equally indifferent to all-equal opportunities egotists. The contrasting danger is to reify altruism as the quintessence of humanity. This leads to a dichotomised morality, in which a lack of understanding of the complexity of ourselves as humans is likely to hinder a sophisticated and suitably malleable understanding of common humanity. Thus, Brown’s sympathy towards political realism, coupled with his sensitivity towards the tragic points at which experience defies neat theorisation, opens up interesting openings within international political theory to exploring the ‘real politics’ of humanity in the sense put forward by Raymond Geuss, that is, humanity as it is actually practised (Geuss 2008).

5   Conclusion To the extent that professional humanitarians would like to define themselves in terms of their core principles, taking Brown’s work as an entry point into IPT is likely to prove a bruising experience, confronting them repeatedly with the inescapability of politics. However, and perhaps paradoxically, it is in reminding humanitarians that they cannot escape the

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tragedy of their endeavour, and validating the difficult practical judgements they are forced to make, that Brown’s work might prove rather more consoling. This brings to the fore the underlying humanity of Brown’s writing and its concern to relate IPT to the real politics and experiences of real people. Brown’s grounding for this is clearly not the abstract cosmopolitan theorising he has consistently critiqued (though many professional humanitarians are actually existing cosmopolitans) but rather an internationalist politics in a tradition which includes, importantly, Michael Walzer. The thin universalism Walzer articulates, for instance, in Thick and Thin, and which, in a slightly different context Brown has explored in recent work on human nature, lends itself well to the ‘generous internationalism’ Brown evokes towards the end his autobiographical essay, ‘A Life in Theory’ (Brown 2010a: 16, 2013b; Walzer 1994). Tempered by Brown’s ironic Rortean recognition of the very fragility and contingency of universalist notions of common humanity, we glimpse a space in which many professional humanitarians might well recognise themselves and their everyday negotiations of what humanity actually entails. Of course, many would depart from Brown in important ways, for instance, in his willingness to countenance the use of force for humanitarian purposes. But the point is that the texture of his thought is much more amenable to the choices and judgements humanitarians are constantly forced to make, even as he challenges them to define their practice in terms of its politics, rather than its principles.

References Anderson, M. B. (1999). Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace – Or War. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Barnett, M. (2011). Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Brauman, R. (2009). Global Media and the Myths of Humanitarian Relief: The Case of the 2004 Tsunami. In R.  A. Wilson & R.  D. Brown (Eds.), Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (pp. 108–117). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, C. (1994). ‘Turtles All the Way Down’: Anti-Foundationalism, Critical Theory and International Relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 23(2), 213–236. Brown, C. (2003a). Moral Agency and International Society: Reflections on Norms, the UN, the Gulf War, and the Kosovo Campaign. In T. Erskine (Ed.),

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Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations (pp. 51–65). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, C. (2003b). Selective Humanitarianism: In Defence of Inconsistency. In D.  K. Chatterjee & D.  E. Scheid (Eds.), Ethics and Foreign Intervention (pp. 31–50). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, C. (2007). Tragedy, ‘Tragic Choices’ and Contemporary International Political Theory. International Relations, 21(1), 5–13. Brown, C. (2010a). Introduction – A Life in Theory. In C. Brown (Ed.), Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (pp. 1–16). London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2010b). On Morality, Self-Interest and the Ethical Dimension of Foreign Policy. In C.  Brown (Ed.), Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (pp. 208–220). London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2013a). The Antipolitical Theory of Responsibility to Protect. Global Responsibility to Protect, 5(4), 423–442. Brown, C. (2013b). ‘Human Nature’, Science and International Political Theory. Journal of International Relations and Development, 16(4), 435–454. Brown, C. (2017). Poverty Alleviation, Global Justice, and the Real World. Ethics & International Affairs, 31(/3), 357–365. Calhoun, C. (2008). The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress, and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action. In M. Barnett & T. G. Weiss (Eds.), Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (pp.  73–97). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chandler, D. (2006). From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention. London: Pluto. Chomsky, N. (1999). The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. London: Pluto. de Waal, A. (1997). Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Oxford: J. Currey. de Waal, A. (2010). The Humanitarians’ Tragedy: Escapable and Inescapable Cruelties. Disasters, 34(2), 130–137. Duffield, M. (2014). Global governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Books. Dunant, H. (1986). A Memory of Solferino. Geneva: ICRC. Edkins, J. (2000). Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fassin, D. (2012). Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press. Favez, J.-C. (1999). The Red Cross and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, R. (2008). Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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MacKinnon, C. (2006). Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. London: Belknap Press. Malkki, L.  H. (2015). The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. Durham: Duke University Press. Redfield, P. (2008). Sacrifice, Triage, and Global Humanitarianism. In M. Barnett & T.  G. Weiss (Eds.), Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (pp. 196–214). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rorty, R. (2008). Who Are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage. In T. Pogge & K. Horton (Eds.), Global Ethics: Seminal Essays (pp. 313–323). St. Paul: Paragon House. Shklar, J. N. (1984). Ordinary Vices. London: Belknap Press. Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. Smillie, I., & Minear, L. (2004). The Charity of Nations: Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press. Terry, F. (2002). Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ticktin, M. (2011). Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Vaux, T. (2001). The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War. Sterling: Earthscan. Walzer, M. (1994). Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

PART II

War and Violence, Human Rights and Global Institutions

CHAPTER 6

Between Sovereign Judgment and the International Rule of Law: The Protection of People from Mass Atrocities Lothar Brock

1   Introduction1 As Chris Brown reminds us in his book, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice (2002), force, coercion and violence are features of all political orders— even of those which appear peaceful enough to make us forget about it (for a while). The reason is that justifying, scandalizing and perpetuating the use of force go hand in hand. The chapter addresses the underlying mechanisms with regard to the protection of people from mass atrocities. It proceeds on the assumption that the introduction of human rights as an object of international concern has led to a widening gap between substantive and procedural norms in the UN (United Nations) system. The invention of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) was meant to fill this gap. Chris Brown argues that R2P is based on an anti-political theory. He therefore regards it as basically flawed. This chapter presents the

L. Brock (*) Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Frankfurt am Main, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_6

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c­ounterargument that de-politicization is part of any political process. Under this perspective, it comes to a more positive assessment of R2P. However, since it cannot be avoided that the use of force in the name of hedging violence will produce new violence, R2P can only work if it is embedded in the wider framework of an international rule of law. This will not necessarily lead out of the circle of justifying, scandalizing and reproducing violence, but it would make it more livable. Chris Brown is right: Violence is a feature of all political orders—even of those which appear peaceful enough to make us forget about it (for a while) (Brown 2009: 96). What do we make of this observation? From a normative point of view, it would follow that all political orders are lacking legitimacy, although to varying degrees. From a more pragmatic point of view, one could conclude that all political orders are confronted with the need to apply force as a political tool, the appropriateness of which does not depend on its normative status but on its effectiveness. How can this discrepancy between the normative and the empirical be handled? Chris Brown’s answer is: through political judgment. In his words: If we reject the pacifist position that violence is never justifiable (which we should, because we have no reason to believe that violence is always and necessarily the greatest evil) and if we reject the Clausewitzian view that violence is simply one tool to be used whenever it might be effective (which we should because although violence may not be the greatest evil, it is an evil nonetheless) then we will need to exercise judgment as to when violence is indeed the appropriate response to a situation…. (Brown 2011: 7)

However, political judgment, though in ubiquitous demand, is difficult to exercise, especially if one proceeds on the assumption, as Brown rightly does, that it is tied into changing constellations of interests and power (see further, Sect. 3). Therefore, political judgment needs some guidelines to go by in specific situations. In Brown’s view, the classical Just War questions provide such a guideline for acting in conflict (Brown 2002: 102–116). But there are reasons to doubt that Just War criteria suffice to cope with the exigencies of political judgment on the appropriateness of the use of force. Ideally, the Just War proposition presupposes a decision-­maker who, in a situation of intense conflict, is able to take the time to go through the proposed questions in a focused way and then to come up with a sober conclusion on whether to respond with violence. In the real world, this will not always work. The harder the cases, the more the respective judgment will be contested. So in addition to guidelines which address behavior in specific

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situations, a frame of reference is needed which helps to deal with contested judgment. This is where a Kantian perspective comes in. Kant was well aware of the central role of judgment as a feature of human conduct, but he was wary about how judgment works out in practice. He was not calling for a better human being as a precondition for peace2; he rather proceeded on the assumption that peace would be possible even in a world of devils if the latter were willing to yield to what reason called for. However, since humans (like devils) cannot be trusted to always live up to the reasonable, they need good institutions to usher them onto the right track. These institutions have to be geared toward enabling people to deal with contested judgment and this task is best being performed by a constitution (Kant 1795/1996). A constitution provides order in the sense of establishing norms and procedures for coping with contested judgment (cf. Bull 1986; Kelsen 1964/1986). It does so through guiding law-making. The idea behind law-making is to limit the freedom of political actors to deal with contested issues according to their individual judgment (Niesen 2010: 272). In Kantian terms, the curtailment of the freedom of the individual is necessary to realize the freedom of all. This, then, is the justification for the monopoly of power in the modern state and the institutionalization of the politics of coercion that go along with it. However, as post-Hobbesian political theorists have pointed out, the focus on monopolizing power in the state tends to neglect the issue of the misuse of power by the state. Consequently, a good Kantian constitution would call for the establishment of institutional and procedural provisions (division of power, the rule of law) to ensure that the curtailment of the freedom of the individual to decide on the appropriateness of the use of force does indeed serve the freedom of all (Kant 1793/1996). At the international level, there exists no monopoly of power. But there are norms and institutions to help cope with the tension between the legality and the legitimacy of the use of force.3 The evolution of these norms and institutions can be understood as the establishment of a, however rudimentary, rule of law at the international level or even as the incipient constitutionalization of international law (von Bogdandy 2006; Klabbers et al. 2009; see also von Bogdandy et al. 2017). An international rule of law would change the overall pattern of judgment by restricting the freedom of the individual state to follow its own judgment in favor of collective decision-making as provided for by the UN Charter. However, there is plenty of evidence that the institutions of the UN system (including

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the Security Council on one end and regional organizations under Chapter VIII on the other) are performing the tasks assigned to them quite insufficiently (if at all). So it would seem that decisions on matters pertaining to the use of force continue to be dependent on individual states’ sovereign judgment. As a matter of fact, in the context of the so-­called new wars (Chinkin and Kaldor 2017) much of the debate on the international rule of law, legalization and constitutionalization, responded to the continuing if not increasing recourse of major states to what has been called a ‘postCharter self-help paradigm’ (Arend and Beck 1998 [1993]). The issue to be dealt with in the present chapter is how political judgment on the use of force at the national level interacts with institution building and rule-making (concerning the use of force) on the international level. Commenting on the Kosovo war, Habermas suggested that the unauthorized decision of NATO to intervene against the Serbian government, under certain conditions, could be understood as a move in anticipation of a more adequately institutionalized world order (Habermas 1999). In this case, decentralized political judgment (NATO) and global institution building (improving the UN system) would have gone hand in hand. But did they? Can the invention of R2P be seen as a step in this direction? Or did R2P only produce new illusions about the institutionalization of collective humanitarian action? Did it inadvertently even contribute to a widening of the gap between substantive and procedural norms in the UN system? After all, R2P affirmed the need for coercion when countries were unwilling or unable to live up to their responsibility to protect people from mass atrocities. But it was not able to provide a procedural follow-up by modifying decision-making in the Security Council. In debating these issues, I will proceed in the following manner: first, I will address the gap between material and procedural norms in the UN system as it developed around the 1990s. In a second step, I turn to the invention of R2P as an attempt to fill this gap. Here I specifically refer to Brown’s criticism of R2P as resting on an anti-political theory. Refuting the anti-political approach of R2P which here as elsewhere would be bound to produce illusions and ensuing frustrations, Brown pleads for a narrow normative agenda, which would be confined to a strict prohibition of intervention accompanied by the anticipation of occasional breaches of the non-intervention norm. Whether to intervene or not, whether to use force or not would then rest on political judgment practiced with the help of the Just War tradition. I juxtapose this position with a wide normative

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agenda connected to the idea of an international rule of law and global constitution building, which I view as necessary and yet as a precarious if not contradictory approach to reducing the arbitrariness of the use of force. In conclusion, I will discuss to what extent narrow and wide normative agendas both remain bound to the circle of justifying, scandalizing and perpetuating the use of force.

2   Setting the Stage: The Post-Cold War Gap Between the Need to Act and the Means of Action in the UN Throughout human history, peace has been a period between wars. It was the central concern of the European Enlightenment as it may be perceived today (Doyle 1997; Habermas 1997) to move beyond this linkage by setting up a global order in which peace could be achieved and maintained without planting the seeds for another war. The issue was—and is—not to abolish the use of force altogether but to transform it from an act of discretionary self-help into an act of governance.4 This aspiration is at the heart of the intellectual movement which, partly based on Kantian ideas, calls for ‘peace through law’ (Kelsen 1944; Clark and Sohn 1958; Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann 1997; Justenhoven and O’Connell 2016). In more contradictory ways, the project to transform discretionary self-help into governance also was part of the political lessons learned from the experience of war and organized atrocities in the twentieth century. At the end of the First World War, these lessons materialized in the creation of the League of Nations; at the end of the Second World War, they led to the creation of the UN as an emphatic expression of the need to move beyond the historical linkage between war and peace. Needless to say that these ambitions were tied into specific constellations of power and interest and that from the very beginning, the League and to no lesser degree the UN were shaped by these constellations. In the context of these divisions the League faltered, the UN survived—though the UN, too, did not fare too well. One of its Secretary Generals, Dag Hammarskjöld, even got killed in the attempt to bring his own ideas to bear in a conflict marked by a strong engagement of the superpowers. In contrast to the League of Nations, however, the UN developed an organizational dynamic of its own and managed to secure a certain space of maneuver in spite of (or even driven by) the global

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divisions, especially between North and South. So at the end of the Cold War, the UN was not replaced by a new world order, it rather served as a framework for the aspirations of the ‘victorious’ democracies to establish one. This was a precarious role for the UN to play as became clear already in the ‘second Gulf War’ of 1991. For the first time, the UN Security Council decided to counter major aggression militarily under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But due to the lack of own troops, it had to authorize the UN members to take all measures, which they (the individual states) deemed necessary in order to reverse Iraq’s invasion in Kuwait (Resolution 678). These measures included the use of force. This force was provided by a coalition of countries under the leadership of the US. The authorization of the use of force by the Security Council was entirely within Chapter VII of the Charter. So it could be interpreted as the expression of a new determination of the international community to resist the unlawful use of force. But when the first American fighter planes took off on the night between 15 and 16 January 1991, collective peacemaking, as provided for by the UN Charter, quickly turned into a war of enforcement by the intervening states because the military operations were not controlled by the Security Council but by the US command. Instead of consulting the UN Security Council on its strategy, the US command was rather slow even in informing the UN about what was happening on the ground. This set a precedent for all ensuing instances of collective action under Chapter VII up to the intervention in Libya in 2011. The interesting point about this form of collective action (under Chapter VII) is that it combines multilateral decision-making on the authorization of the use of force with the sovereign judgment on the part of the member-states on whether and how to get involved. From the second Gulf War onward, this practice was quickly expanded in the early 1990s, as the Security Council redefined its competencies in the context of the so-called new wars (Kaldor 1999; Chinkin and Kaldor 2017). These wars were not all that new. But the debate on the new wars called attention to the fact that, since the end of the Cold War, most violent conflicts were intra-state and not inter-state. Since the Security Council, according to the Charter, is to protect or restore international peace, it had to find a way to address domestic conflict all the same. This happened when the Security Council at various occasions declared gross violations of human and minority rights (Iraq 1991, Bosnia 1995), the breakdown of public order (Somalia 1992) and even the violent disruption of a democratic process

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(Haiti 1994) as threats to international peace thus opening them up for coercive measures under Chapter VII. In each of the cases just mentioned, collective decision-making was combined with the sovereign judgment of the participating states on what they considered as adequate measures. In a way, this combination of sovereign judgment and collective decision-making was doubled up in the early 1990s. At that time, NATO—an alliance—was in search of a new role after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact as a collective security institution. So NATO decided to cooperate with the Security Council offering itself as some kind of enforcement agency for UN peacemaking. In 1992, NATO and the UN agreed on a cooperative scheme according to which the Alliance would, case by case, contribute to UN peace operations in the Balkans under the guidance of the Security Council (Brock 2005: 29). At that time, UN peacekeeping was expanding rapidly far beyond the UN’s means. Therefore the Secretary General hoped to be able to stock up the Secretariat’s ability to act by bringing in NATO as a ‘regional organization’ in accordance with Chapter VIII of the Charter. This agreement was in line with the Agenda for Peace, which the Secretary General, at the behest of the Security Council, tabled in mid-1992. All that looked quite promising, but only for a brief ‘Kantian moment’ (Brock 2005: 31). The Clinton administration felt uneasy about the ­ambitions of Boutros Boutros-Ghali to develop the UN secretariat into a more powerful global player. This uneasiness was enhanced by the changing constellation in domestic politics as the Republicans took over the US Senate (again). In addition, the failure of the US mission in Somalia dampened the willingness of the US administration to get involved in UN peacemaking operations. As a result, the cooperation with the UN in the Balkans began to give way to what in the end turned out to be essentially a US-led undertaking to coerce the war parties, through military means, to accept a peace agreement (Dayton agreement). The role of the Security Council was reduced to giving NATO a mandate to supervise the implementation of the agreement (Resolution 1031 of 15 December 1995). This way, a trend emerged in US-UN relations to follow a more self-­ assertive line of action on the part of the US. This trend was accelerated when the US decided to resume their bombing raids in Iraq to enforce no-fly zones put up as a follow-up to the second Gulf War in order to protect the Kurds and the Shiites from oppression by the Iraqi government. Even though the Security Council claimed the competence to

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decide whether the Iraqi regime acted in breach of the respective Security Council resolutions (UNSC Resolution 678), the Clinton administration decided that it was entitled to enforce these Resolutions without further authorization by the Council (Weller 1999). On the domestic scene, it organized huge public gatherings supposedly to get the people involved in the decision to renew the bombing, but more likely it served to mobilize public support when the Republicans were doing everything to restrict the Administration’s freedom of action on all fronts. So the US did resume the bombing in disrespect of the Security Council but with the seeming backing of the people in the US. In the case of Kosovo, NATO began to act on its own when it seemed impossible to get Security Council authorization for collective action in spite of the fact that Resolution 1203 of 24 October 1998 had defined the situation in Kosovo as a threat to international peace. Thus, NATO initiated a negotiation process at Rambouillet (France), which was to coerce both sides of the conflict into an agreement. When the Serbian side refused to back down, NATO began a military campaign bombing the Milosevic government into agreement to the terms presented to it by NATO. The resulting peace agreement brought the UN back in as party to the agreement and as the administrator of the international authority under which Kosovo was placed. As in the cases of collective action, unilateral intervention too was justified on humanitarian grounds (which included the restoration of public order and the shielding of democratic processes against spoilers). Thus, the interveners paid tribute to a diffusion of substantive norms, which was pushed by the liberal democracies under the label of universalism. The enforcement of these substantive norms called for collective action. But since the procedural provisions for the use of force remained basically unchanged, there emerged a gap between the need to act according to the substantive norms and the ability to act collectively in accordance with the Charter. The liberal democracies felt called upon to fill this gap by way of unilateral action. Those who supported this position inter alia argued in favor of a right to intervention deriving directly from international humanitarian law (Tèson 1988; Wheeler 2000; Elshtain 2002) or from people’s sovereignty, which had to be brought to bear against those who appropriated sovereignty to oppress people and enrich themselves (Reisman 2000). Habermas forwarded another tentative idea. Reacting to the reports on mass atrocities in the Kosovo, he suggested that NATO’s intervention could be regarded as an act of anticipation of an adequately institutionalized

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world order to the extent that the intervening states did consider their action as a precedent and that they did everything possible to bring the adequately institutionalized world order about or at least to move ahead with this project (Habermas 1999). In all of these cases, it was the population of weak or fragile countries which was to be protected by the international community. After the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, and after the US invasion of Afghanistan, this narrow perspective was opened up. Now it was the international protection of the individual as such against ‘new threats’, which supposedly was outweighing the norm of non-intervention. According to Anne Marie Slaughter and William Burke-White, the terror attacks constituted ‘an international constitutional moment’ in which a new ‘Grundnorm’5 was established, the norm of the ‘inviolability of the individual’ (Slaughter and Burke-White 2002; cf. Fischer-Lescano 2005). In their eyes, a threat to this indisputable norm justified the use of force by those who were able and prepared to defend the norm. If this meant going around the UN, so be it. This was, at first sight, diametrically opposed to the argument presented by Habermas when he suggested looking into the Kosovo ­intervention as the anticipation of an adequately institutionalized world order. In his view, this could, for the time being, only refer to an improvement of the UN system. Commenting on the verbal run-up in the Security Council to the Iraq war of 2003, Slaughter claimed that there were ‘good reasons to go around the U.N.’6 Paradoxically, Slaughter argued that going around the UN would ultimately strengthen the UN by increasing its flexibility. Acting in the pursuit of substantive norms which the international community shared would strengthen the UN by providing an output which could not be attained if the procedural limitations of the use of force were obeyed too strictly. This argument corresponded with the assessment of the Kosovo war as ‘illegal but legitimate’ (Simma 1999: 12; IICK 2000: 4). The difference between the arguments of Slaughter and Habermas was that Slaughter looked for improving the flexibility of the UN systems as it stands, whereas Habermas pleaded for a substantial improvement of the existing world order (see further, Sect. 5). The different approaches to the justification of the unilateral use of force obviously involved quite a bit of ideological thinking. But it was not all about ideology. As acknowledged by the Security Council, the violence exerted in the conflicts referred to in the debates on intervention was real—and shocking; so was the inability of the international community to

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respond in a way, which would indeed protect people from mass atrocities. So what was to be done? There were basically two answers to this question—the first was provided by reference to the Just War tradition, the second followed a long-term perspective on improving the international rule of law. The R2P was positioned in the middle between the two, encompassing Just War references as well as the commitment to the international rule of law. In the remainder, I will address this constellation with special reference to Brown’s views on the issues.

3   Failing to Fill the Gap: R2P as Anti-politics A myriad of books, articles, conference papers, and so on have been written on R2P. In the meantime, it has even become the object of two important handbooks (Knight and Frazer 2012; Bellamy and Dunne 2016). But the underlying issues remain unresolved and call for continuing efforts to come to grips with it. Brown has contributed to this task mostly with his reflections on human rights and humanitarian intervention (Brown and Ainley 2005: Chapter 11; Brown 2009). But in a more recent text, he also focuses on R2P more directly (Brown 2013a). Humanitarian intervention and R2P are, of course, closely linked. As a matter of fact, it was the failure of the international community to cope with mass atrocities (particularly in the cases of Rwanda 1994 and Srebrenica 1995), on the one hand, the critique of humanitarian intervention as part of a design of the liberal democracies to create a world in their own image, on the other, which led to the invention of R2P. In view of this critique and the ongoing violence, especially in Kosovo, the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, raised the much-cited question of how the international community should react to ‘systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity…if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty’ (ICISS Report 2001: VII). One answer to this question was the invention of R2P. Brown concedes that the progenitors of R2P went out of their way to come up with a new concept that would not simply rebrand the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. In Brown`s view, they were right to do so, but they followed the wrong path by producing an ‘antipolitical theory’ on a highly political issue: Responsibility to Protect as a doctrine was designed precisely to avoid what its creators regarded as the toxic politics of previous approaches to interstate

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intervention. Unfortunately, this was a very bad idea. Intervention is inherently a political act and to work on the assumption that politics can be removed from the picture is to promote an illusion and to thus invite disillusionment. Promoters of the doctrine not infrequently express exasperation at the unwillingness of critics to accept its self-description as an approach that all men and women of good faith should identify with – but the desire to appeal to everyone is bound to be self-defeating. The political cleavages that characterize the modern world cannot be wished away, nor is the desire to de-politicize world politics admirable, even if the concern to lessen human suffering deserves our respect, and, if framed appropriately, our support. (Brown 2013a: 425)

Unpacking this argument, Brown starts off by distinguishing three propositions which underlie Kofi Annan’s question: (1) there is an international community capable of a moral response to mass atrocities; (2) the international community ought to respond; (3) but this should be done in a way which would not constitute an unacceptable assault on sovereignty (Brown 2013a: 426). In Brown’s view, the Secretary General and subsequently the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS 2001) see an international community where others would see only a smoke screen designed to hide the interests of major powers, first and foremost, the US.  Brown concedes that this criticism might be simplistic or paranoid. Nevertheless, ‘it reminds us that there are genuine divisions in the world…and “one world” language should not be allowed to obscure this fact’ (Brown 2013a: 427). This statement of fact is obviously not meant to preclude the possible existence of an international community capable of a moral response to mass atrocities. At least Brown is willing, for the sake of his argument, to assume that such a community exists. If so, the kind of response to mass atrocities would depend on the understanding of what the term stands for. Here Brown juxtaposes two ‘camps’. In English School shorthand: a pluralistic understanding of community which calls for a mere verbal response to violations of human rights, and a ‘solidarist’ understanding of community which would call for positive action. For the former, intervention would always be inconsistent with sovereignty, while for the latter, intervention to protect people from mass atrocities would certainly not constitute an unacceptable assault on sovereignty though it could be regarded as problematic for various other reasons. In the relationship of the two camps ‘what is at stake is not a contingent disagreement over the

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meaning of a particular act, but the fate of two quite distinct accounts of what international obligation might entail’ (Brown 2013a: 427). In Brown’s reading, the ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) tries—necessarily without success—to bring together both positions in its vision of an ‘embryonic central administration for the world, with the UN Security Council acting as a kind of global executive, spotting potential conflicts before they turn deadly, if possible managing them without direct intervention, but if necessary taking the parties by the scruff of the neck and making sure that they behave’ (Brown 2013a: 429). As Brown sees it, this would be the fulfillment of a dream for the solidarist camp, whereas for the pluralists, it would be more of a nightmare as this would open up the possibility that a coalition of powerful states would be authorized to engage in the pacification of the weak. However, Brown shares this fear only in theory; in practice, there would be no danger of this happening because the Security Council itself is split among the two camps: the liberal interventionists and those who are unlikely to agree with their normative ambitions. The ICISS saw this problem. In order to cope with it, it suggested to introduce a code of conduct, which would prompt ‘a permanent member, in matters where its vital national interests were not claimed to be involved’, to refrain from using its veto-power (ICISS 2001: 51). The ICISS also suggested involving the General Assembly or regional organizations when the Security Council was unable to reach agreement (‘uniting for peace’). Finally, the ICISS argued that, if all of this did not work, then single states or a group of states might feel obliged to act on their own. If they were successful, this would have ‘enduringly serious consequences for the stature and credibility of the UN itself’ (ICISS 2001: 55). In Brown’s view, all these considerations would only make sense ‘if humanitarian crises could be understood as essentially non-political events likely to attract consensus about the appropriate response’ (Brown 2013a: 431). But the international community did adopt R2P in 2005, and authorized protective action in the case of Libya in 2011. The reform summit of 2005 adopted the basic idea that every state has the responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities and that this responsibility has to be exercised by the international community, if necessary by taking enforcement measures according to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, ‘should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations…’ (Outcome Document A/RES/60/1/ Oct. 24, 2005, para 139). However, the wording of the outcome document makes it clear, that there would be no tinkering with the veto of the

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P5 and that R2P would not create new legal obligations for the member-­ states. R2P was, indeed, only accepted on that basis (Brown 2013a: 434). After the Summit, R2P was recognized and invoked by the Security Council at various occasions. Also, ‘predictably’ (as Brown writes) a certain amount of institutionalization of the concept took place (Brown 2013a: 434). More importantly, R2P and peacekeeping drew nearer together even though they operate on different principles and the Secretary General originally wanted to keep the two apart in order to shield based peacekeeping from any negative repercussions of agreement-­ coercion-­based R2P. The successor of Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon, invested a lot of effort into his reporting on R2P. He produced a standard version of R2P, which actually reduced the ‘distance’ between peacekeeping and R2P by stressing the responsibility of the international community to enable national governments to fulfill their protective duties. This non-­ coercive stance amounted to a certain de-militarization of R2P while, at the same time, the military aspects of peacekeeping were being upgraded. So Ban Ki-moon made it clear that the protection of people not always implies the use of force. Nevertheless, many observers, including Brown, maintain ‘that the real test of the doctrine is when it might involve such force’ (Brown 2013a: 435). The crisis in Libya in 2011 supposedly provided such a test. In Libya, there was a clear threat to the people in Benghazi voiced in a crude language; there was agreement among the regional (Arab) powers, the African Union, the Human Rights Council and the Secretary General that something had to be done to ward off the further spreading of mass atrocities; furthermore, there was the readiness of NATO states to intervene militarily and there was the willingness of Russia and China to refrain from using their veto when Resolution 1973 was tabled, which authorized protective action with ‘all necessary means’. However, as Brown observes, only for a brief moment did the case of Libya confirm the concept of R2P through an impressive practice test. It soon was overwhelmed by the political dimension of the case which came to the fore with the unauthorized extension of the mandate to include regime change and the negative reaction to this move by the AU, on the one hand, Russia and China, on the other. Apart from these consequences, Brown argues that the adoption of Resolution 1973 as such bears out his critique of the concept of R2P: ‘The Resolution seems to have been voted for by some members of the Security Council, South Africa in particular, precisely on the basis that it was in some way possible to protect the Libyan people without interfering in the politics of Libya; a moment’s thought

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would reveal that this was obvious nonsense’ (Brown 2013a: 437). Brown had stated earlier: ‘Intervention is an act of power which involves taking sides and enforcing one’s choice by superior strength’ (Brown 2002: 165). ‘In Libya in 2011,’ he claims, ‘NATO did not wait to be taught this lesson  – right from the beginning its leaders understood that this was an intervention that had to end with the departure of Gaddafi, one way or another, and if that meant surreptitiously arming the opposition, so be it’ (Brown 2013a: 439). What does this imply for R2P as a normative framework for the politics of coercion? After a quasi-realist assessment of how states will always calculate their international involvement on the background of their national interests, Brown concludes on a discursive or constructivist note: Since the concept of ‘sovereignty as responsibility is now orthodox within the UN system the doctrine of R2P might actually feed into the calculation of the national interest of the individual states’ and this way ‘the hopes and desires of the promoters of Responsibility to Protect may actually be met even though the de-politicised conception of protection…has failed to take hold’ (Brown 2013a: 442).

4   Working on the Gap: De-politicization as Part of Politics Brown’s critique of R2P as a concept which involves the de-politicization of a highly political issue is interesting. He is right, of course, that the world is deeply divided in terms of interests and aspirations on the background of gross disparities in power and wealth. Ignoring this would, indeed, replace arguing with wishful thinking. So politics should be looked at as what they are: a constant struggle over who gets what including the power to say what is regarded as acceptable in this struggle. Not only the critique but the formulation of concepts like R2P is part of this struggle. So for R2P, as for other conceptual work, it can be said that ‘(w)ords are politics’, too (Koskenniemi 2009: 395). If this is true, we should be careful when we juxtapose political and anti-political positions in a discourse. Politics and de-politicization are closely linked. Politics involves de-­ politicization and so does writing on politics. In general, we cannot do without a certain degree of de-politicization even by just talking to each other. De-politicization is routinely applied in politics at both the domestic and the international levels. Since

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­ e-­politicization is an essential part of politics, it is not necessarily confined d to producing nothing but illusions (as Brown suggests). Quite to the contrary, de-politicization helps to establish space for communication on certain issues, for example, the environment, global health, non-discrimination or—as one of the most discussed issues—security. The Copenhagen School used to tell us that defining something as a security issue would consciously or strategically politicize an issue to a point at which it would gain special attention in the relevant political public (Buzan et al. 1998). That is certainly true. But, paradoxically, the appeal of ‘security’ has to do with the notion of an uncontestable good the attainment of which cannot be denied to anybody and therefore binds people together (‘We are all sitting in the same boat’). In this respect, when we talk about security, we de-­ politicize a highly political concept. This way, we engage in ideological talk—but only in part because security is indeed a public good and de-­ politicizing it is to help us talk about it. The same goes for law and the legalization or the juridification of international relations. Legalization or juridification refer to processes of conscious de-politicization which, as already mentioned, limits the freedom of action of each individual in order to protect the freedom of all. In this sense, de-politicization is an essential element of civilizing international relations (Albert et al. 2000). Also, legalization and juridification are closely linked to the historical process of the creation of international organizations, which was driven by functional considerations concerning the regulatory needs of a world that was rapidly growing together from the late eighteenth century onward. It is precisely the anti-political construction of regulatory needs in the context of globalization and the transformation of such needs into international organizations, which over time provoke the politicization of these organizations (Zürn et  al. 2012). From this perspective, the earlier critique of functionalism appears in a new light: functional de-politicization provides the room for political processes to evolve. This may then provoke contestation and contestation can either strengthen its object or destroy it (Brock and Deitelhoff 2012; Wiener 2014). Along this line, the acceleration of global cooperation after the end of the Cold War was driven by a certain degree of de-politicization of political issues (‘global governance’). As a matter of fact, the peaceful ending of the Cold War was in part the result of a de-politicization of the reform issue in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. The Soviet president took up the language of inherent necessity (Sachzwang) in order to overcome domestic resistance against his reform agenda. Part of this language was provided by the (western)

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e­ nvironmental discourse, which focused on (global) public goods instead of particularistic interests in the context of ‘world problems’. According to Brown’s argument, the post-Cold War optimism concerning new forms of international regulation, including the protection of people from mass atrocities, produced illusions because it rested on the de-politicization of the issues. But that is only one way of looking at the international protection of people from mass atrocities. Another way is to argue that it was precisely the partial de-politicization of the issue that helped to maneuver the ship of protection, which had gotten stuck in the fights over humanitarian intervention, into new waters and to allow for a surprisingly high degree of formal recognition and institutionalization of the idea of protection in a very short time.7 This way of looking at R2P would be more in line with Brown’s conclusion that the idea of protection (whether in R2P speak or some other language, one might add) may attain some political meaning after all, in spite of its anti-political—and therefore basically flawed—character.

5   Reducing the Gap: Sticking with the Just War Tradition? Brown has, of course, a clear understanding of the ups and downs of the idea of protection, which were accompanied by consensus-formation and sharp controversies in the Security Council as well as in the international community at large. These ups and downs were accompanied by a highly controversial debate within the liberal democracies and beyond on how to deal with domestic violence. The issues addressed were quite substantive. They ranged from changing statehood under globalization (Sørensen 1999), the nature of sovereignty (Deng et  al. 1996; Bothe et  al. 2005; Brown 2009), the specific role of the liberal democracies in handling conflict (Geis et  al. 2006) and the divergence in their behavior (Geis et  al. 2013), on the one hand, to more specific issues of the selectivity of protective action, the importance of motives underlying intervention, the means to be used and the complexities involved, on the other hand. R2P became an important focus of these debates for more than a decade. It helped to generate new ideas about what to do and extensive work on how to overcome the obstacles to their realization. In these controversies, the crucial point was and is how the states and the international community are to live up to basic standards of decency,

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which are accepted in general by almost everyone, but come to bear in quite different situations and therefore work out quite differently in practice. During the major part of the 1990s, non-Western states were willing to go along with liberal democracies and then turned against them. The liberal democracies themselves behaved quite unevenly too—not only among themselves but also as individual actors. They sometimes favored intervention or went along with it and sometimes were against it, they sometimes were disposed to pressure for the use of force and sometimes not.8 So they were quite selective in their humanitarian engagement depending on how their interests and perceptions of the different cases worked out. Even though the Global South itself practiced such selectivity, states identifying as such understood the contradictory practice of the liberal democracies as demonstrating the hegemonic character of the universalism propagated by them (cf. Mahdavi 2015 on post-colonialism). So the contestation of liberal norm politics was increasing and continues to do so. But that is not in the first place the result of illusionary assumptions about ‘one world’ and the promises that would go along with it. It rather accrues from the dominating aspects of Western norm politics. Brown stated as early as 2002: ‘norm creation requires a broader base in the international community than has been present over the last few years. The claim of the powerful, affluent Western states of Europe and North America to create such norms without the consent of the rest of the world is bound to be resisted, and rightly so’ (Brown 2002: 166). Since the needed consent was and is not on the horizon, Brown concludes that, instead of pursuing new normative schemes like redefining sovereignty and creating a norm of humanitarian intervention or of a responsibility to protect, ‘it may well be better to accept a firm norm of non-intervention which is broken occasionally and in exceptional circumstances’ (Brown 2002: 166). With this statement, Brown does not call for the reconstruction of a liberum ius ad bellum. To wit, wherever and whenever such a right was claimed in Western history, it was contested. This goes even for the nineteenth century which, under the sway of Clausewitz, most legal scholars understand as an era of unrestricted war-waging competences of the sovereign state (Simon 2017, 2018). Such an assessment suggests that Just War thinking did not survive the nineteenth century and was finally overcome by positive norms regulating the use of force in the twentieth century. Obviously, this was not the case. Neither was Just War reasoning

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abolished in the nineteenth century nor was it de facto replaced by positive norms in the twentieth century. The issue of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s rather unleashed an outright movement among scholars and practitioners to reintroduce Just War theory as a source of standards for deciding on the use of force (Walzer 1977; Elshtain 1991; Finnemore 1996; Wheeler 2000; Beestermöller et al. 2006; Brown 2009: 102–114). Refuting the ‘prosecution’ of Just War thinking by those who misunderstand the meaning of the Just in the Just War proposition or meet it with suspicion because of its affiliation with religious reasoning (Augustine Thomas Aquinas), Brown states that ‘(p)roperly understood, the Just War tradition provides a vocabulary and a grammar for examining issues of force that is the best currently available, even if some elements of the tradition certainly require revision, and Just War thinking can certainly be applied to contemporary conflicts’ (Brown 2009: 103; emphasis added). The inventors of R2P in principle would agree with this statement. They themselves relied on the criteria offered by the Just War tradition as elements of a general ethic of the use of force. Such an ethic would also be needed for decision-making within a multilateral framework (ICISS 2001: Chapter 4). In this sense, R2P tries to combine sovereign reasoning along moral criteria with the idea of establishing a legal framework for guiding and enhancing collective action. One might conclude that Just War thinking could go together with a process of global institution building for the protection of people beyond R2P. This conclusion could be supported by understanding the Just War tradition not only as an ethic offering advice on a case-by-case basis but also as a general critique of war. Thus, the Just War tradition can be read as favoring peace over war. The use of force always counts as an evil, so the aim of fighting a Just War must always be the recovery or the making of peace. As expressed by Brown: ‘If peace and justice are the norm, then acts which violently disrupt peace and justice are wrong’ (Brown 2009: 103). If that is so, it goes for both sides—the perpetrators at home and the interveners from abroad who have chosen to go against the perpetrators. Along this line, Brown even questions the right to self-defense. ‘There is no automatic right to self-defence, and, a fortiori, states cannot claim such a right simply by virtue of being members in good standing of international society. Self-defence is legitimate if exercised to preserve peace and justice but not otherwise’ (Brown 2009: 103).

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But Just War thinking is risky. While it may be confronted with a lot of unwarranted critique, in the concrete historical situation in which it was revived, it was closer to justifying action in material breach of Art. 2/4 of the UN Charter than to scandalizing it (cf. Elshtain 2002). It contributed to the general acceptance of the formula that the breach of Art. 2/4, though illegal, could be legitimate, and thus helped to change the balance between the legal and the legitimate in political discourse in favor of the legitimate (Chesterman 2002). In this sense, it helped to weaken rather than to strengthen the international rule of law. With this experience in mind, it seems important to discuss R2P in the wider context of the international rule of law.

6   Sovereign Judgment and the International Rule of Law: Moving Ahead in Circles? While R2P is seen by its advocates as part of developing the international rule of law, it is not seen this way by all.9 A central point of critique is that R2P would present new pretexts for the unilateral use of force and that, contrary to Brown’s appraisal, it would just offer a new language for dressing up the old practice of humanitarian intervention. Mary Ellen O’Connell therefore called for the recognition of a ‘responsibility to peace’ instead of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (O’Connell 2011). The present chapter does not take issue with the notion of R2P as such but rather stresses the need to link R2P with the project of developing and strengthening the international rule of law. The idea is to provide an institutionalized way for dealing with contested judgment on the need to act and the means of action. The Just War tradition reminds us that the use of force is always problematic (see the previous section). Therefore, it stresses the centrality of political judgment in all instances in which force is applied. But it does not provide a solution for the problem of how to proceed with contested judgment. This is serious because it is to be expected that under almost all circumstances, the contestation of political judgment will be the rule, not the exception. Such contestation will not only address unilateral action. States can err when they act together as they can err when they act alone. So arrangements for dealing with controversial political judgment are needed for both unilateral and multilateral action. As to unilateral action, building up the international judicial system would offer the possibility to sue governments for what they have done. This possibility already exists in

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nuce (e.g., in the form of the ICC or of special tribunals for war crimes; but the attempt of the Serbian government to sue NATO for bombing the country was turned down on formal reasons, and attempts by the ICC to hold decision-makers accountable met with various hurdles which are difficult to overcome—including the threat of countries to leave the Court). As far as multilateral action is concerned, the concept as such provides, in principle, means for dealing with controversial judgment by forcing the actors to come to an agreement on the substance of an issue and on the procedural question of how to deal with minority positions in the decision-­ making process. So multilateral decision-making can be expected to ­mitigate the problem of contested judgment and it may also help to deal with unintended consequences. Multilateral decision-making, especially on the use of force, would therefore be preferable to unilateral decisionmaking. This preference has been legalized by the UN Charter in the form of Art. 2/4. Not to use force unilaterally is no longer an issue of preference or opportunity but of legal constraints, which go together with provisions for collective action for the restoration or maintenance of peace and the peaceful settlement of disputes (Chapter VII and VI UN Charter). These provisions are constitutive elements of the UN system. The crux of the matter is, of course, that the Permanent Members of the Security Council (P5) have a veto. So their judgment on an issue counts more than that of the non-permanent members and it can block the Security Council—come hell or high water. As mentioned earlier (Sect. 3), the proposal of the ICISS to mitigate the veto with the help of a code of conduct was turned down by the US administration in 2005 (in silent agreement with the other P5 members). And the hope that it would be possible to shame a P5 member into accepting what an overwhelming majority calls for did not materialize in the case of Syria when the majority of the Security Council tried to pass a resolution condemning the violence to which non-combatants were exposed (together with a similar vote in the General Assembly). In the Security Council, the performative force of shaming obviously is rather limited. On the other hand, the Security Council has reformed its working practice (Malone 2004). It functions fairly well on ‘lesser’ conflicts, which do not involve conflicts of interest among the P5 (South Sudan, Central African Republic, DRC) and in spite of an unsatisfactory record, it may gain in importance as an arena in which conflicts are being ‘processed’.10 But progress toward a resilient international rule of law is rather slow. Does it make sense to keep up the idea that such a rule of law still has a chance of unfolding (Habermas 2012)?

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In the 1990s, the world seemed to be prepared to move forward toward the establishment of an international rule of law as a follow-up to the spreading of democracy and economic globalization and technological change. Today, mass atrocities continue; in and around the conflicts in the Middle East, the use of force seems to have emancipated itself from any legal concerns; some African states have left the ICC which they helped to bring about; the EU—the most advanced arrangement for multilevel ­governance—is in deep crisis; new technologies enhance extrajudicial killings by remotely controlled drones; minimal standards of decency—first and foremost the prohibition of torture—have been questioned in different parts of the world; the EU and the US both seem to practice ‘governing migration through death’ (Squire 2017), while the UN is overburdened and underfunded, and populism together with nationalism is popping up everywhere. The realm of what is accepted as adequate in politics seems to be shifting rapidly from a language of global governance to a language of ‘every state for himself and the devil take the hindmost’. So the ‘constitutionalists’ begin to wonder whether the rule of law is in decline (Krieger and Nolte 2016; Clark et al. 2017); whether (stringent) legalization will increasingly be marginalized by informal forms of cooperation and deal-­ making (Kratochwil 2014 on deformalization; Daase 2013) and whether the constitutionalization of international law has a future in the face of the ‘end of the West’ (Habermas 2006; Clark et al. 2017; Kumm et al. 2017). There are no clear-cut answers, except for the one that everything seems to be in deep crisis. As the normative hegemony of the liberal West is fading, do the agendas propagated by the ‘constitutionalists’ need a break until the international community has reconstituted itself? In their editorial statement on ‘(t)he end of ‘the West’ and the future of global constitutionalism’, Kumm et al. insist that, even in the event of a collapse of the West, there will be no demise of Western ideology comparable to the demise of Soviet ideology after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if that ideology is understood as a commitment to constitutionalism: to pluralist, open liberal constitutional democracies domestically and a global order in which claims relating to human rights, democracy and the rule of law are asserted, negotiated and contested across different institutional for a and contexts. On the contrary, what will become clearer than ever before is that the relationship between ‘the West’ and constitutionalism has always been a complicated one and that the category of ‘the West’ is a Cold War and post-colonial category that today is used primarily by anti-­

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constitutional elites to discredit the emancipatory ambitions of those who they aspire to rule. (Kumm et al. 2017: 3) The authors list three reasons for the most likely persistence of constitutionalism: that the constitutionalist ideas have long taken hold outside the West; that the ‘principled grammar’ of Global Constitutionalism ‘is hardwired into a dense network of treaties, institutions and practices globally and enjoys the general support of a wide range of stake-holders’; and that there is ‘no richly conceptualized alternative ideology with potential global appeal’—neither Islamic fundamentalism, nor nationalist authoritarianism, nor a combination of authoritarianism and nationalism with ideas of a merit-based technocracy (Kumm et al. 2017: 4). This sounds a bit like whistling in the woods. But it is certainly important to overcome the idea that the international rule of law is something that ‘belongs’ to the West and therefore depends entirely on Western leadership. After all, it was the West itself which not only contributed to the idea of an international rule of law but also challenged it (inter alia by using force at its own discretion).11 When the Trump administration decided to terminate US participation in the Paris climate agreement, it hardly affected the latter. That various African states left the ICC was more serious. But it did not spark a general withdrawal of African states and a breakdown of the ICC. On his question whether the constitutionalization of international law still has a chance, Habermas gave an answer that continues to be worth considering. Commenting on contradictory statements by Kant who in 1793 pleaded for the creation of an international body vested with public power and in 1795 reduced this body to an institutionalized assembly of free states (Kant 1793/1996, 1795/1996), Habermas (2006) suggests that the problem could be solved by discarding the idea that sovereignty is indivisible. In his opinion, as demonstrated by various federal systems existing in the world, it is not. But dividing up sovereignty remains risky business. Thus, the debate in the late 1990s on redefining sovereignty (Deng et al. 1996; Reisman 2000), while meant to strengthen the obligations of governments vis-a-vis the international community and the people, could also be read as undermining the very foundation of self-determination and popular sovereignty (Maus 2007). It seems that such objections are gaining in weight in the process of uneven globalization. That is to say that the tension between the rights of people and the rights of states (Brock 1999) cannot be defined away, it has to be faced in constant attempts to renegotiate the interrelationship between the two. In the respective discourses, international law will further emancipate itself

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from its European (and, later on, Western) history. If successful, it will work in two directions: moving from authoritarian to reflexive legalization and from international law as a mere inter-state affair to international law that involves people too. This has been taken up in the call for ‘international law from below’ (Rajagopal 2003). Bringing the law of states and the law of people closer together will not work smoothly. Perhaps it does not work at all. But it points beyond the ‘responsibility to protect’ to a ‘responsibility to progress’ in the task of guarding the historic achievements of the rule of law and building on it in order to achieve something resembling it on the international or global level.

7   Conclusion In his latest book, Friedrich Kratochwil (2014) suggests moving from arguing to meditating on the role and rule of law. That is a timely advice in a situation of growing uncertainty about where the world is going and what the role and rule of law is going to be in it. The present contribution still follows the practice of arguing. It proceeds on the assumption that the introduction of human rights as an object of international concern has led to a widening gap between substantive and procedural norms in the UN. This gap invites unilateral intervention to the degree that collective action is not forthcoming. But the gap is not simply given, it is constructed to suit the interest of governments as they define them. Brown is right when he reflects (in passing) on the possibility that the responsibility to protect as a political principle may yet turn into a factor codetermining what actors perceive to be in their interest. This would certainly enhance their sovereign judgment on the use of force, but it would not provide ways and means to cope with contested judgment. These ways and means have to be provided by some form of a rule of law at the international level. In part, it already exists. But it is inadequate and, at present, the prospects of changing that do certainly not look too good. The solution to this problem cannot lie in the attempt to retreat from the open battleground on human rights and global governance which involves states, peoples, organizations, networks and so on behind the trenches of an inter-state Stellungskrieg on conflicting claims on who gets what. Minding one’s own business is good advice, but the belief that that is possible without interfering with the business of others has always been a fiction. More important than agreement on global values are rules to deal with disagreement about them or with disagreement on what they mean in specific situations.

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The existence of such rules will not offer a way out of the circle of legitimization, critique and reproduction of violence, because the line between legal coercion for the public good and coercion which undermines the public good can never be drawn once and for all. It is constantly contested and rightly so. To keep open the political space which such contestation needs may be the most that can be achieved at both the national and the international levels for the time being and may even be in line with what Chris Brown calls for: ‘critical problem-solving’ (Brown 2013b).

Notes 1. Special thanks go to Hendrik Simon for comments, ideas and time shared. 2. In this respect, Kant fits into the tradition of liberalism identified by Waltz, which makes ‘no easy assumption about the rationality and goodness of man’ (Waltz 1962: 331). But Kant certainly was not simply a realist in disguise as Waltz suggests (Walker 2008: 452). 3. In this regard, the problems of intra-state and inter-state order are more similar than Realists would be willing to admit. This is what Brown emphasizes when he talks about the presence of violence in all political orders (Brown 2009: 96). 4. Cf. the debate on ‘just policing’ today (Schlabach 2007; Enns 2013). 5. On this misinterpretation of Hans Kelsen’s ‘Grundnorm’, see FischerLescano (2005): 338–339. 6. Anne Marie Slaughter: ‘Good Reasons for Going Around the UN’, New York Times, March 18, 2003. 7. See the contributions in Knight and Frazer (2012). 8. See the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new Europe’ in the run-up to the Iraq war. 9. See the contributions to Hehir (2011) by David Chandler, Philip Cunliffe and Mary Ellen O’Connell. 10. See the struggle over what to do with North Korean nuclear armament. 11. Cf. the contributions of critical IR, for example, Jahn (2012).

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Beestermöller, G., Haspel, M., & Trittmann, U. (Eds.). (2006). ‘What We Are Fighting for …’ Friedensethik in der transatlantischen Debatte. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Bellamy, A., & Dunne, T. (Eds.). (2016). The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect. Oxford: Oxford University Press. von Bogdandy, A. (2006). Constitutionalism in International Law: Comment on a Proposal from Germany. Harvard International Law Journal, 47(1), 223–242. von Bogdandy, A., Goldmann, M., & Venzke, I. (2017). From Public International to International Public Law: Translating World Public Opinion into International Public Authority. European Journal of International Law, 28(1), 115–145. Bohman, J., & Lutz-Bachmann, M. (Eds.). (1997). Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bothe, M., O’Connell, M.  E., & Ronzitti, N. (Eds.). (2005). Redefining Sovereignty. The Use of Force After the Cold War. Ardsley: Transnational Publishers. Brock, L. (1999). Normative Integration und kollektive Handlungsfähigkeit auf internationaler Ebene. Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 6(2), 323–347. Brock, L. (2005). The Use of Force in the post-Cold War Era: From Collective Action Back to pre-Charter Self-help? In M.  Bothe, M.  E. O’Connell, & N. Ronzitti (Eds.), Redefining Sovereignty. The Use of Force after the Cold War (pp. 21–52). Ardsley: Transnational Publishers. Brock, L., & Deitelhoff, N. (2012). Der normative Bezugsrahmen der Internationalen Politik: Schutzverantwortung und Friedenspflicht. In B.  Schoch et  al. (Eds.), Friedensgutachten 2012 (pp.  99–111). Berlin: Lit Verlag. Brown, C. (2002). Humanitarian Intervention and International Political Theory. In A. Mosely & R. Norman (Eds.), Human Rights and Military Intervention (pp. 153–169). Aldershot: Ashgate. Brown, C. (2009). Sovereignty, Rights and Justice – International Political Theory Today. London: Polity. Brown, C. (2011). Just War and Political Judgment in Theory and Practice (Paper 1092, ECPR General Conference, Reykjavik 2011, Section 49, Just Peace Governance, Panel 430: Just War Theory for the 21st Century). Brown, C. (2013a). The Antipolitical Theory of Responsibility to Protect. Global Responsibility to Protect, 5(4), 423–442. Brown, C. (2013b). The Poverty of Grand Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 483–498. Brown, C., & Ainley, K. (2005). Understanding International Relations (3rd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER 7

War and the ‘Brotherhood of Hooliganism’ Ken Booth

1   Introduction For many years, I have argued that those of us engaged in the academic project of International Relations (hereafter IR), and who do so with the hope of inventing a better world, will not help human society to move in that direction unless we show more realism about our actually existing world. By ‘better world’ I mean greater harmony and solidarity between human groups, and a more sustainable relationship between humans and the non-human. By ‘more realism’ I mean, in the words of Raymond Geuss, accessing the world realistically but doing so ‘committed to a certain kind of open-endedness, indeterminacy and context-­dependence of judgment, and agnosticism about absolute and categorical claims’ (2015: 5, 2015); crucially, this is a realism that is open to a ‘realistic’ engagement with ‘forms of human desire that cannot be satisfied by present society’ (2015: 2). Together, this combination of motivations and approaches constitutes a perspective on IR I have variously called ‘utopian’ or ‘emancipatory’ realism (Booth 1991, 2007).

K. Booth (*) Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_7

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2   IPT in the World International Political Theory (hereafter IPT) is a body of thought with something potentially useful to add to our practical judgement about the international level of world politics—the latter referring to a global perspective on ‘who gets what, when and how’ (Laswell 1950; Booth 1995: 329). As such, IPT is part of our disciplinary role in ‘the invention of humanity’ (Booth 2017). I share the view of the editors of this volume about the importance of Chris Brown’s contribution to IPT, and ever since reviewing (very favourably) his International Relations: New Normative Approaches (1992) I have followed his work enthusiastically and always profitably—including on matters of theory and practice. We share some positions, but as this chapter will show, far from all. This is not a cause for regret; in our highly ‘argumentative discipline’, disputation is a powerful engine for new knowledge (Booth and Erskine 2016: 1–10). Before examining some disagreements about Brown’s latest book, International Society, Global Polity: An Introduction to International Political Theory (hereafter ISGP), I need to offer an overview of the international level of world politics today; this is contemporary IPT’s context and test. The global-we (the human community of fate in our first truly global age) is living through a period not simply of quintessential international uncertainty, but of truly epochal turbulence. We face a world-historical challenge—‘The Great Reckoning’, and within it an immediate spike of anxiety, fear, and anger (Booth 2007: 395–470, 2014a). The Great Reckoning is nothing less than human society globally coming face-to-face with fundamental choices about the future directions for humanity. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the very ideas that once seemed to be answers to the biggest questions of politics, economics, and society have been weighed in the scales of history. Charges include the obsolescence of the Westphalian system of states, the disutility of the Clausewitzian philosophy of war, the dysfunctional mindsets of nationalist ideologies and proselytising religions, the iniquity of patriarchy and racism, the radical inequalities of triumphant neoliberal capitalism, the profound complacency about the natural environment, and the seduction and waste of rampant consumerism. Today, it is evident to many that the ideas that over the centuries structured a distinctive world politics do not work for countless millions of fellow humans, or for the natural world on which we all ultimately depend.

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How human societies engage with these great issues in the future marketplaces and battlefields of ideas could bring about a turning point in world history as profound as that following the end of the wars of religion in Europe, and the subsequent arrival and spread of the modern sovereign nation-state. This long-term outcome will partly depend on how states and societies deal with the short and mid-term spike of predicaments we face. Failure here will steal time and energy from coping more successfully with humanity’s long-term future. With the end of the Cold War, many assumed that the great global issues had been settled. Instead, what Antonio Gramsci would have called ‘morbid symptoms’ proliferated. By the start of this century, if not earlier, global politics had entered ‘a season of unreason’, and it was possible to draw comparisons with the dynamics of the 1930s (Booth 2007: 395–426). The discussion of such parallels has become common since the annus horribilis of 2016 (Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the further growth of populism and nationalism), which suggests that recent scares are not some passing phase but have deeper roots in world affairs. One harbinger of future turbulence was the election in 2016, as president of the world’s most powerful state, of an individual threatening to be an underminer rather than an underwriter of international organisations and treaties. The global securityscape is trembling (Booth 2014b). Snapshots include constant talk about the unravelling of institution-building, the growing salience of ‘great power politics’, high levels of militarisation, chaos in the Middle East, massive population movements, failed states, international terrorism, widespread poverty and famine, the strengthening of borders, globalisation challenges, new security dilemmas, proliferating strategic challenges, threatening ‘climate chaos’, food and water insecurities, new technologies with strategic potential, the uncertainty of the global balance of power, talk of trade wars, a shortage of enlightened leadership, the spread of disruptive populism, and much more, including new war talk involving major powers, something liberal opinion had comfortably filed away (The Economist 2018). We cannot assume that tomorrow will be like today. Against this concerning complexity, ISGP will be used as a provocation to examine what I will call the international society mindset. As its title suggests, the book is structured around two ‘poles’—‘international society’ and ‘global polity’. For reasons of space, the following argument focuses only on the international society pole, and within it on the problematique of war. The chapter has two related themes. First, it challenges the ­‘realism’

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of the international society mindset in relation to the so-called institution of war and the relevance of Just War to sound practical judgement. Second, it questions the utility of posing international society as one of the binary poles for considering theory as potential practice in this period of history. A critique of the international society (broadly ‘English school’) mindset in ISGP raises several tricky issues, not least the problem to which the editors of this volume draw attention in their Introduction, namely Brown’s own relationship with the English school. This matter is complicated because, as the editors point out, ‘for all his professed non-­ membership in the English School, when it comes to confronting its thought with theoretically quite different takes on international politics and world order, there is an impression that he would rather err on the English School side’ (Lang and Albert in the introduction to this volume). I agree with this, and in what follows will generally tend to make Brown complicit with the wider arguments being critiqued.

3   ‘Applied Political Philosophy’ As scholars of the same generation, growing up against the backdrop of the Second World War, it is not surprising that Chris Brown and I have similar concerns about the importance of war in the discipline, and the hope that IPT can contribute to practical wisdom. In a book on strategy, I once adapted a famous sentence of Karl von Clausewitz—widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of war—and characterised the nature of war as ‘a continuation of philosophy with an admixture of firepower’ (Booth 1979: 9). Such a line shares the same trajectory that Brown follows on the first page of ISGP when he writes that ‘the study of the international is an exercise in Applied Political Philosophy’. We agree on the trajectory, but before turning to discuss differences on the specific topic war, it is necessary to challenge several of Brown’s underlying assumptions about IPT in general: First: The Relationship Between ‘Analysis’ and ‘Advocacy’ Attempting to separate what is categorically analysis from what is categorically advocacy is a long-standing issue in the humanities and social sciences, and Brown warns of ‘the error’ of confusing them (2015: 4). To confuse the two ‘distinct’ roles, he claims, is ‘dangerous in so far as the tendency will be to take the wish for the deed’. This, he says, is what led to some inter-war scholars being identified (‘somewhat unfairly’ he notes)

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as ‘idealists’ or ‘utopians’—labels Brown clearly does not want attached to his own work. Advocacy, according to Brown, involves scholars acting as ‘norm entrepreneurs’, promoting ‘a particular vision of how the world should be’. This activity ‘is, or ought to be’ in Brown’s opinion ‘secondary to the task of analysing’ (2015: 4). In a discussion on R2P, he accuses the Australian academic/diplomat Gareth Evans of having been on the wrong side of ‘the fence that exists between these two vocations’ (2015: 5; my emphasis). The image of a fence is misconceived, and leads Brown in an unhelpful path signalled four decades earlier by Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society (1977), one of the most influential texts informing the international society mindset. Bull said that his intention in writing The Anarchical Society had not been to ‘prescribe solutions or to canvass the merits of any particular vision of world order or any particular path that might lead to it’. His ‘at least … conscious purpose’ involved ‘following the argument wherever it might lead’ (1977: xv). This claim was disingenuous, given that Bull had chosen where the argument would start, and pointed it in directions that matched his values. His position was also contradictory. He accepted that it would be ‘absurd’ to claim his study would be ‘value free’, yet he insisted that his aim was to be ‘detached or disinterested’. Then, towards the end of the book, Bull asked how the state system might ‘best be reformed or reshaped so as to more effectively promote world order’ (1977: 297); he had seemingly forgotten at this point his intention not to promote particular solutions, visions, or pathways. Several pages later he concluded: ‘It is evident that the argument has taken a definite direction, and that certain recommendations appear to be implicit in it, or may be read into it’ (1977: 307). So, while warning that his ideas ‘should not be read as a set of prescriptions or recommendations’, he admitted they clearly were. To put it bluntly: Bull in, Bull out. With somewhat similar self-contradiction, Brown in ISGP emphasises the priority of analysis over advocacy, and the ‘fence’ that separates them, but his norm preferences are rarely unclear, as the discussion of Just War will show later. Both authors accept that values are implicit in an analyst’s work, yet simply by force of repetition seek to convince readers that a fence exists between analysis and advocacy. The work of Robert Cox is instructive here. In line with the work of Jürgen Habermas in seeking to reveal the ‘interests of knowledge’, Cox

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posited that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ (1981: 128). While accepting that norms and values ‘permeate’ human behaviour, Brown nevertheless asserts, without justifying the point—but undoubtedly with Cox’s words on his mind—that ‘it is not necessary to go as far as those who argue that…all theory is normative’ (2015: 7). A Coxian reading of his words would have actually underlined just why it was necessary to go that far. In a later piece of work, Brown (2016: 46–50) argues that the Coxian position leaves an ‘ambiguous legacy’—a phrase which the present discussion suggests could be applied with more force to Brown’s own position in ISGP. Any veil of ‘detachment’ or ‘disinterestedness’ on the part of writers risks creating an impression of false authority, even ‘objectivity’, when it comes to proffering solutions, visions, and pathways. Brown and Bull identify themselves primarily as analysts, while accepting that their judgements are value-permeated: what emerges—as will be shown by Brown on Just War and Bull on international society—is a porous border, not a fence, between their examination of the empirics and their norm- and value-preferences. By insisting on the separateness of analysis and advocacy, while accepting that their scholarship is not value-free, Bull and Brown want to have their conceptual cake (showing that they are not vulgar social scientists) and also eat it (gather the influence that comes from an image of analytical detachment). Second: The Relation Between IR and Other Disciplines Brown is critical of the view that the study of the international rests on an assumption, and sometimes assertion, that the subject matter of IR is sui generis. He considers the use of such a term to be ‘very harmful’, and ‘simply does not hold’ (2015: 7). He wants it abandoned lest ‘we are to lose contact with the wider world of thought’. IPT, he believes, is one way to keep the discourse ‘plugged into that wider field’ (2015: 9). It is my opinion that it is Brown’s position that is potentially ‘very harmful’. Students of IR are justified on several grounds in continuing to argue that the subject matter of IR has highly distinctive characteristics. Briefly stated (see Booth 2011: 336–41, 2017: 28–32), the study of the international level of world politics stands apart from other disciplines because we ask the biggest questions in politics in the biggest political arena, because our scope is global, because our time-frame embraces the ancient world and the distant future, and because—in the words of Kenneth Waltz—

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international politics have profound ‘causal weight’ (Waltz 1959: 159–238, and 1979: 38–101) in ‘big and important things’ such as war (Waltz 2008: 43), as well as, in my terms, ‘small and important things’ such as an individual’s identity (Walzer 2015: 2–6). There is no other field where the stakes are higher, where the massive use of force is not excluded, and whose ‘cardinal rule’ is ‘Do what you must in order to win [the game]’ (Waltz 1959: 205). And my killer argument, showing why our subject and subject-matter is indeed unique, is that only IR engages comprehensively with the potential destruction of all civilised life globally in less time than it takes to read an IR book. Second, it is simply not true that ‘we’—the discipline—are not ‘plugged in’, and thereby risk losing contact ‘with the wider world of thought’. Perhaps some of us are not as plugged in as much as Brown would like, or in his preferred way, but that is a different matter. His sweeping argument in this regard seriously underestimates the engagement with political theory and philosophy of a significant body of IR theorists over the decades. Nobody can read the work, for example, of such mid-twentieth century founding figures of the discipline as E. H. Carr, John H. Herz, and Hans J. Morgenthau, and think they were not plugged into ‘the wider world of thought’. In recent decades, there can be little doubt that many scholars have enthusiastically been plugged in—too much so, perhaps. Since the mid-1990s, weighty issues on the traditional agenda such as war and international organisation have often been marginalised by many students of IR in their search for conceptual silver bullets in other disciplines. The argument that ‘we’ are not plugged into the ‘wider world of thought’ is the result of looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The fact is that other disciplines have an undistinguished record when it comes to engaging with, or even be aware of, the work of IR specialists. Writers in other disciplines on topics with a major international dimension (including development economics, military intervention, food and water security, political violence, and indeed the general condition of humanity, past, present, and future) would undoubtedly have produced richer texts had they been immersed in IR theory. Why they have not been plugged in goes beyond this chapter, but not beyond our discipline’s power to do something about it, beginning with being more assertive about the distinctive dynamics of our subject matter. Rather than worry about the term sui generis, I suggest seeking to promote recognition of IR as the ‘inconvenient truth’ of the humanities and social sciences (Booth 2011: 334–41). Our challenge as scholars of IR is

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to contemplate issues of security, prosperity, identity, citizenship, democracy, order, and the rest in the context of a ‘multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-class, multi-racial, unevenly endowed, unevenly developed world, all organised (or disorganised) in the form of multi-state international anarchy’ (Booth 2011: 336). Confronted by so much complexity, it is no wonder that so few of our colleagues in other disciplines attempt to grapple with our attempts at theorising the international. Third: The Reality of ‘International Society’ While Brown considers ‘international society’ to be an analytical construct, he nevertheless maintains that it represents ‘a reality in contemporary international politics’. He calls its ‘coexistence’ with global polity (the binary forming the argumentative structure of ISGP) a ‘central fact of our age’ (2015: 13–14). That said, Brown had earlier conceded that his ‘picture of a functioning international society could be seen as rather fanciful, obviously painted as seen through rose-tinted glasses’ (2015: 12). He then sought to escape the risk of being criticised for wearing such glasses by appealing to Weber’s concept of an ‘ideal-type’ (2015: 12). The latter, in Weber’s words quoted by Brown, involves ‘the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view … and by the synthesis … arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. ’ In ISGP, Brown argues that ‘the normative nature of inter-state relations … is one-­ sidedly accentuated’ in order to create what he calls ‘the analytical construct of a society of states’. Refuge in the authority of Weber and one of his methodological moves (Weber himself thought there was more to knowledge than method) is not the basis of a powerful case. The ability to construct an ‘ideal-type’ is no guarantee that there is a corresponding structure or agent with real causal power, and Brown wavers between projecting international society as a ‘reality’ and an ‘ideal type’. Without doubt, the state system exhibits some society-like features, but that is not the same as being a society. The daily realities of the prioritising of ‘national interests’, statism in loyalty and decision-making, and the strength of boundaries in the mind and on the ground, all suggest that the central fact is that it is an international system rather than a society. The most that can be said, employing a Kantian distinction, is that the state system does sometimes exhibit society-like behaviour, but this is in

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­accordance with the idea of a society, not out of respect for such a value. There is honour among thieves, sometimes, but the ‘honour’ is contingent, not categorical. Brown has long favoured using binaries to structure his way of dealing with big arguments about international relations. Such a trope of course requires the choice of the most realistic poles for clarifying the issue at hand. In the discussion so far, several arguments have thrown doubt on the choice of international society as one of the ‘poles’ to develop an IPT likely to produce the practical judgement and foresight to engage effectively with the challenges of the developing securityscape (recall that for reasons of space I am eschewing discussion of the global polity pole). The strength of the international society pole exists in the repetitious claims of English school advocates rather than in a structure with significant ‘causal weight’ in politics among nations. The following section develops these points by focusing on one of the English school’s classic texts on war.

4   Our Peculiar Institution Hedley Bull’s explication of ‘War and International Order’ in The Anarchical Society (1977: 184–199) is a work of fundamental importance for the international society mindset. Chris Brown usually does not hesitate to take intellectual prisoners when the opportunity arises, so it is significant that Bull’s overview of war through the lens of international society passes without criticism in ISGP, while Brown’s chapter on war in ISGP has the Bullish title ‘War as an Institution of International Society’. This assumption of approval is underlined by Brown’s endorsement of Michael Walzer’s work on the Just War tradition. That tradition, seeking the proportional and regulated conduct of war, requires the prior foundation of the ‘normative nature’ of war as an institution of international society in Brown’s view. It is this that justifies the attention he gives to Walzer’s normative engagement with war, though Walzer is not a card-­ carrying member of the international society school. The special significance of the idea of war as an institution of international society, according to Brown, is the different perspective it offers to the traditional ‘political philosophy of war’ associated with Clausewitz. To Clausewitz, the state was the key referent, and the driving idea was that war ought to be ‘a rational instrument of national policy’ (Rapoport 1968: 13–15). For Bull and his followers, the referent is ‘international society at large’, with the aim of ‘preserving the integrity of the existing state system’ (Clark 2015: 25).

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Apart from inserting a different referent into the debate about war, Bull’s chapter ‘War and International Order’ (1977: 184–199) offers thin gruel to his readers. He does not address ‘the pity of war’, and profound moral questions are left largely implicit. Bull adds nothing to our understanding of there being ‘a war system’, in which a range of structures— political, economic, anthropological, and others—interact (cf., e.g., the almost contemporaneous work by Richard Falk and Samuel Kim (1980), which opened up horizons to multiple explanations of war, and multiple disciplinary perspectives). Equally, Bull’s comments on the causes of war give little insight into multicausality. He does briefly assert that wars can be ‘blind, impulsive or habitual’ (Bull 1977: 186) but does not go further. Overall, his views about war at the time of writing echoed the conventional wisdom of the mainstream strategic studies community: the need for restraint, the decline of great power war, the idea of war as a breakdown of policy, and the changing cost-benefit calculations about the utility of using force (e.g., Knorr 1966). Bull’s is a narrow view of war written from a top-down perspective, focused on his international society referent and the shared values of its ‘members’. A bottom-up perspective on war is needed and missing. One explanation of this common failure to offer an image of war embracing both top-down and bottom-up perspectives is given in the work of W. B. Gallie, when he who pointed out that the word ‘war’ derives from ‘two main source words’. The Latin word ‘bellum’ stresses the aspect of the duel between armies; the Old High German word ‘werre’ stresses the confusion and collapse of human order, ‘which usually accompanies or results from war’. Here, Gallie wrote, are ‘two one-sided slants on war’— ‘one from the side of the contestants, one from that of the victims’ (1988: 21). Bull’s explication in The Anarchical Society is partial to the idea of war as a duel, and misses a great deal of what Clausewitz called ‘real war’, as opposed to ‘war on paper’. Gallie went on to argue, I think correctly, that Clausewitz’s famous ‘trinitarian’ conception of war helps us ‘straddle and hold together in our minds not only different aspects of war, but also different relations between these different aspects’. Unfortunately, Brown quickly passes over Clausewitz in his chapter on ‘War in International Society’, simply characterising his work as the symbol of a strictly ‘instrumental’ approach to war. Against Bull’s account of war as (largely) a rational ‘institution’ of ­international society, the Clausewitzian ‘trinity’ presents war as a complex

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mixture of primordial violence, chance, and the rational calculation of using force ‘to compel our enemy to do our will’ (Howard and Paret 1989: 89). Importantly, Clausewitz insisted that the attempt to use force for political purposes must always be read with a reminder about ‘Friction in War’—the set of dynamics separating ‘real war from war on paper’ (Howard and Paret 1989: 119–121). Bull’s narrow perspective is the result of the sharp distinction he made between ‘war in the strict sense’ and ‘organised violence’; the former is ‘international or interstate war, organised violence waged by sovereign states’, while the latter is violence carried out ‘by any political unit’ (Bull 1977: 185). While the distinction has some legal purchase, it falls well short of real war. Paul Keal has criticised the narrow perspective of ‘war in its strict sense’ by showing that ‘the part played by war in the globalization of international society has been more complex than simply that of being the means by which Europeans were able to dominate, subordinate, and “civilize” non-Europeans’ (2017: 165)’. More generally, and without the international society context of Keal’s critique, it is crucial to add that Bull’s narrow perspective does not give due weight to the manifold inter-­ penetrations of war ‘in the strict sense’ and other forms of more or less organised political violence: think of the reality of the violence in Syria since 2011. Hannah Arendt understood the interacting logics of contagion and escalation in real war when she wrote: ‘The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world’ (Arendt 1970: 80). Wars beget violence, and not only, or even mainly, ‘in its strict sense’. While Bull’s views on war in general offer thin gruel for those of us wanting more realism about the world, there are even grounds for considering whether he advanced the international society case as much as his reputation might suggest. From within the heart of the English school, Ian Clark has argued that it is possible to conclude that Bull’s picture of war as ‘the regulator of international society’ is ‘but half an argument’. Clark writes: ‘the preservation of the state system is but a means to ensuring the security and survival of individual states, even if the former does not guarantee always the latter’ (Clark 2015: 26). According to Clark, securing international society is not regarded by governments as ‘an end in itself’ but ‘more commonly as a means to state purpose’. In other words, what gets the work done are not shared values but state interests, though these will invariably be wrapped in value-talk.

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Bull himself, one suspects, was aware of the limitations of focusing on war ‘in the strict sense’, for he teased readers with the thought that he might be being ‘perverse’ in treating war as an ‘institution’ of the (so-­ called) society of states (1977: 184). In my opinion, his argument went beyond being perverse: it was also on the way to being anachronistic, for by the time he wrote war ‘in the strict sense’ was already in serious decline, as Hathaway and Shapiro have argued in their multifaceted defence of progress in the outlawing of war (2017). Bull’s conception of war, in comparison, was static, and served to sustain an image of war that was not only narrow, but was one on which governments and populations were calling time. Institutions can be regressive and anachronistic. This was the case with the ‘Peculiar Institution’ of slavery in the ante-bellum South of the United States, a tragic experience in human history that throws light on IR’s own peculiar institution: war. Kenneth M.  Stampp, in his account of The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, showed how slavery became ‘the symbol’, ‘the cornerstone’, and ‘inescapably part of life’ in the Old South (1989: 3–33). He concluded that ‘Southerners became the victims of their own peculiar institution’ and that ‘disaster was close at hand—in fact, that in itself was a disaster’ (1989: 6). The parallel with war in human history is striking. War is embedded in global political, economic, and cultural life as was slavery in the society, economy, and culture of the Old South. Stampp considered that ‘Ultimately Southerners became the victims of their own peculiar institution; they were unwilling to adjust it, or themselves, to the ideological and cultural realities of the nineteenth century’ (1989: 6). These words ring true for IR’s own peculiar institution as we face the multiple reckonings of the twenty-first century. Stampp insisted that slavery was a self-inflicted ‘institutional affliction’ (1989: 3), arguing that it was ‘a deliberate choice’ among several options, and that its rise ‘was inevitable only in the sense that every event in history seems inevitable after it has occurred’ (1989: 5). War too is a choice, and historical longevity does not mean inevitability. But war does have longevity on its side, and as such, has invariably been considered ‘natural’. Already by the time of Thucydides, war could be regarded as ‘the human thing’ (Coker 2018): but if men are so primed for war, why have states needed press-gangs, conscription, and all the nationalist propaganda necessary pro patria mori? Part of the explanation lies in the commanding grip of gloomy ideas about ‘human nature’, the ‘human

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condition’, and ‘human history’. Samuel Beckett wrote: ‘There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us’ (quoted by Allott 1998: 323, and see 323–337). Global structures—overwhelmingly institutional and attitudinal formations that divide us—systematically reconstitute the ‘institutional affliction’ of actually practised international politics. The memory of war helps perpetuate the constant re-materialising of the tools and culture of war. Consequently, improving the conditions of possibility for the invention of a more humane humanity is not conceivable without a commitment to abolish war in all its manifestations. Many will dismiss such a statement as ‘utopian’, accompanied by a knowing shake of the head. My counter-claim, and counter shake of the head, insists that the abolitionist argument is an expression of practical realism, properly understood. The disciplinary instinct since the Second World War has been to walk away from ‘idealism’, ‘unrealistic’ goals, and ‘impossible’ ambitions, just as there had been a widespread embracing of these very approaches after the First World War. Utopian investigations are marginalised (or ignored) in a discipline whose scholars are keen to be taken seriously by the policy world (see Weiss 2009 making this critique in relation to the idea of ‘world government’, at a time when he argued such engagement was increasingly rational). Our times call for a reconsideration of the disciplinary instinct. Geuss offers help. Critically, he argues, the use of the word ‘impossible’ in politics and society is often used in the sense of ‘physical impossibility’—contrary to the laws of physics for example: but the meaning of ‘impossible’ in politics is a different matter, and context dependent (Geuss 2015: 15). Indeed, in politics, the impossible is always happening if we accept long enough time scales: in the broad sweeps of history it is difficult to disagree with the words attributed to Lenin, to the effect that ‘There is nothing as radical as reality’ (Booth 2009: 47–49). Being ‘realistic’, according to Geuss, is usually assumed to mean ‘not asking for what is impossible’, but a deeper understanding of the word leads to an appreciation of its contextual nature, its social construction, and the variability of terms like ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’. A proper understanding of realism, in other words, refuses to accept what is ‘socially defined at any given moment to be the final and unquestioned framework for thought or action’ (Geuss 2015: 15). Consider those social and political forms that many now take for granted that were once unthought, before they could even be considered unthinkable. Being

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utopian about war is not therefore in principle inconsistent with realism: to the contrary, asking for the seemingly impossible is a starting point for ‘adjusting to the realities’ caused by our ‘institutional affliction’.

5   The Tragedy of Just War Wars occur in the anarchical states system, as Waltz influentially argued, because there is nothing to stop them: ‘Each state pursues its own interests, however defined, in ways it judges best. Force is a means of achieving the external ends of states because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of anarchy’ (1959: 238). Accepting that wars will occur, and that international society is a ‘reality’/‘central fact’, Brown in ISGP logically includes a defence of Just War thinking into his picture of a ‘normative’ inter-state world. Brown is one of many scholars who have argued that the Just War tradition ‘provides us with one set of tools for thinking through’ the problems thrown up by war, including the new problems war will throw up in future decades. Somewhat less confidently, he writes that ‘the decades ahead will decide whether these tools are actually up to the job’, adding ‘for the moment we can only work with what we have’ (2015: 181). These arguments challenge us to think whether these ‘tools’ have ever been up to the job, and whether there are alternative ways of controlling war. In other words: what does Just War offer practical judgement? As set out earlier, international society is Brown’s entry point for engaging with Just War. He claims: ‘The prevalence of war poses a challenge to the very notion of the society of states, but the Just War tradition has provided some language with which the use of force can be reconciled with the existence of a norm-governed international society’ (2015: 55). Leaving aside the rather low-key claim implied by the goal of ‘some language’, his general point is that Just War frameworks have provided guidance towards providing the ‘discrimination’ he thinks essential for societies in their use of force (2015: 41). Just War, he emphasises, is not simply a checklist, but an aide to the exercise of practical judgement and reasoning specific to the situation in question (2015: 44). Brown’s sketch of the development of the Just War doctrine since the Middle Ages reveals its ups and downs: centuries when it was ignored, world wars where it went absent without leave, and times (notably during the Vietnam War) when interest revived. The historical record exposes

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changes in formulations of Just War, but also the changeability of war itself—‘almost beyond recognition’ according to Brown. Despite this, he asserts with more confidence than in some earlier words: ‘Dramatic though these changes in the nature of war may have been, the Just War tradition … is well placed to cope with the shift in the mindset required to understand what is going on’ (2015: 177). Brown does not justify the huge claim that the nature of war has changed, as opposed to there having been radical changes in war’s technology and scope. Nor is it clear how we are to assess the claim—except by inference—that the tradition will actually assist in helping those involved to ‘cope’ with war in future, any more than in the past. The doctrine has clearly done nothing to eradicate war as an instrument of national policy, and it is difficult to see how the history of war would have been different had the Just War notion never been conceived. It is interesting in the latter regard to note that while a doorstep-sized Handbook of War contains an obligatory chapter (‘Morality and War’) in which the topic of Just War is discussed, the doctrine is otherwise absent from the chapters considering the theories, conduct, and consequences of political violence (Lindley-French and Boyer 2012). It is also interesting to question, by way of illustration, the practical impact of one of the most prominent principles of Just War, namely ‘proportionality’. While much has been said about this criterion, there has been a chronic difficulty in producing an actual proportionality protocol for commanders to pick of the shelf for strategic or tactical situations. Other principles or norms dominate: strategically, politics rule (the tradition of Clausewitz), and tactically ‘military necessity’ trumps recondite reasoning. At the sharp end of war, it comes down to winners and losers, the quick and the dead, and emotion over ethics: here, we all (or almost all) become realists in the tough-minded sense of the term. Roger Harris, a former US Marine, recalls what he was told by an old-timer as he tried to adjust to the agonies of the sharp end in Vietnam: ‘This is war. This is what we do’ (Burns and Novick 2017). In Brown’s ‘applied political philosophy’ in relation to Just War, he has shown particular admiration for the work of Michael Walzer (2015: 48–55). Significant aspects of Walzer’s contribution praised by Brown include his defence of the moral standing of states to protect themselves from outside interference, his elaboration of the ‘legalist paradigm’, his improvement of aspects of the traditional Just War framework, and his providing ‘one of the best contemporary defences of the notion of a

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society of states’. Unquestionably, Walzer has been and remains a major thinker on these matters; but no more than Brown or Bull (or myself) does he stand above the academic fray as a disinterested observer. He is a situated scholar, with a distinct political theory and geopolitical grounding (Brown 2015: 48–55). Moreover, Walzer’s occasional consequentialist reasoning and strategising validates my general description of Just Wars as just war (Booth 2000: 316–17). If we combine his state-as-referent assumption, his (conditional) justification of pre-emption and intervention, his defence of ‘supreme emergency’, and his acceptance of politics as an arena of ‘dirty hands’, we have grounds for placing Walzer’s Just War framework in the Clausewitzian (‘instrumental’) camp of Brown’s ‘realism’/ ‘pacifism’ divide in the applied political philosophy of war. The difference is that Walzer has not had the responsibility of command, or has directly witnessed defeat—experiences that led Clausewitz to write that ‘war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst’ (Howard and Paret 1989: 75). The conceptual toolbox available for considering war and its conduct contains a great deal more than the Just War criteria Brown sees as necessary for a ‘society of states’. Leaving aside all the advice offered about strategising, from Sun Tzu’s Art of War onwards, much has been written which, like Just War, is about discrimination and due process. This body of ideas lacks the religious and other baggage of Just War, and has the ostensible authority that comes from the initiators of these ideas having had experience in the policy world as opposed the academic cottage industry of Just War. Tests, checklists, criteria, and doctrines for the use of force have been designed, for example, by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, former US policy-makers Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell, and by the British government under Tony Blair in his April 1999 Chicago speech. Such attempts at guidance, as Lawrence Freedman has argued, are always crucially vulnerable to contextual factors (Freedman 2017: 107–124). Problematic as they may be, there are alternative ways of controlling war beyond the failed notion of Just War. Above all, politics— not to mention strategic culture—intrinsically can lead to an appreciation of the values of restraint and discrimination when considering, and when fighting war. This of course does not mean that politics will. Brown’s endorsing of Walzer’s development of the Just War tradition is accompanied by criticism of the tradition’s opponents, both from the political right or left. He identifies among the most prominent challenges raised by critics the idea that Just War thinking ‘actually encourages vio-

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lence’. He names Carl Schmitt from the political right as ‘perhaps’ the most serious opponent in this respect, with his claim that to describe a war as ‘just’ has encouraged ‘a self-righteous fury which will demonise the enemy and stand in the way of establishing limits in warfare’. Schmitt’s hostility to the notion of Just War, according to Brown, was his ‘his nostalgia for an era when (allegedly) interstate war was regarded as a kind of duel between legitimate enemies’ (2015: 178). From a ‘left perspective’ (Brown’s designation, not mine) he identifies a short and critical piece, I wrote (Booth 2000) discussing the flaws of Just War thinking in the immediate aftermath of the war over Kosovo (Brown 2015: 178). Brown argues that those holding this particular (‘critical security studies’) perspective are ‘rather less clear’ than Schmitt about what they want; he claims that this criticism of Just War thinking is ‘crucially without the endorsement of war as an act of policy’. He suggests that this comes from either a pacifist stance or an attempt to distinguish between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ uses of violence (2015: 179). He is mistaken. It is difficult to understand why Brown criticises the ‘left perspective’ for allegedly failing to deal with war ‘as an act of policy’ in the case of the particular piece of writing to which he refers. That article did address a number of specific criticisms of the war over Kosovo ‘as an act of policy’, both regarding the legitimacy and political wisdom of the war itself, and aspects of its conduct. (Whether one agrees with them or not is not relevant here.) More important, relating to the wider issue of Just War, the piece offered a philosophically derived standpoint on war ‘as an act of policy’. Beginning with the view that Just War thinking serves the function of ‘legitimising and honouring’ war, and that in practice, as mentioned earlier, Just Wars are just war (Booth 2000: 314–317) the final section of the article deals explicitly with war as ‘an act of policy’. In these ways, the article conforms to the ‘applied political philosophy’ aspiration in ISGP discussed earlier. Following Kant, it is postulated that war is always wrong, though particular wars might be regarded as ‘necessary or excusable’ (this argument summarises Williams and Booth 1996: 71–98). Kant hated war but thought that pacifism was an unrealistic posture in a world of states and the ‘self-incurred immaturity’ of human society. This did not necessarily mean that war will exist as a human phenomenon forever, for war is a choice: we have the capacity to choose differently, based on common reason. Under another (but thinkable) set of global social relations, in which the conditions of civil society operate, it may be rational to make a

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choice other than war. In the meantime, we should avoid notions such as Just War that serve old institutions and offer a more limited vision of the conditions of human possibility. This presentation of a Kantian position stands as a rejection of Brown’s assertion that war ‘as an act of policy’ was not addressed in the argument against Just War, while the article was also a brief exercise in practical judgement relating directly to the Kosovo ‘war’ (a word that dared not speak its name in some high places at the time). More generally, on the implication that critics from a ‘left position’ do not (perhaps cannot) address war ‘as an act of policy’, I could additionally refer to relevant writing on issues such as nuclear abolition, non-offensive defence, human rights, security communities, and peoples’ globalisation (e.g., Booth 2007) which have pointed to a less violent world order; these investigations seek to get to the roots of the problem of political violence, as opposed to trying to introduce a logic of restraint in a clash of force where the logic is one of escalation (Howard and Paret 1989: 76–77). Contemplating root causes conforms to ‘critical’ thinking in a Coxian sense; his distinction between ‘critical’ and ‘problem solving’ theory was not, as some critics have pointed out, a rejection of problem-solving as such, but rather a move to raise problem-solving to a different level: it was a call to scholars to focus not simply on problems in the status quo, but on the very problem of the status quo. With regard to the latter, human society globally will not get much right until we make progress towards abolishing war and all its manifestations, from nuclear strategies that threaten human and environmental catastrophe, through the opportunity costs squandered by over-militarised economies, to the daily realities of intra-­ society violence perpetuated by macho images of man-the-warrior.

6   International Society and the ‘Sanity of Madness’ There are manifold reasons for working towards the abolition of war: these range from the ‘little and important’—people being separated from their loved ones, perhaps forever—to the ‘big and important’. The latter, in this chapter, has largely referred to the way our ‘institutional affliction’ of war steals imagination, time, resources, and energy from engaging effectively with the global tests human society faces today. These c­ hallenges are widely understood; but they are often set aside in our world of political delusions.

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In The Twenty Years Crisis (1966), Carr discussed the relativity of thought and concluded that ideas such as the ‘harmony of interests’ professed by liberal idealists was a type of delusion; he argued that their ‘supposedly absolute and universal principles’ were ‘not principles at all, but the unconscious reflexions of national policy based on a particular interpretation of national interest at a particular time’ (Carr 1966: 87). In recent decades, the principles informing the international society mindset are equally suspect, and lead to the same verdict: using Carr’s words, ‘international society’ is a ‘slogan’, deriving from ‘unconscious reflexions’ of ‘selfish vested interests’; it is a means by which a school of thought seeks to impose its ideas, and ‘privilege their position’ (Carr 1966: 86–87). Fred Halliday understood this in the policy world in relation to the slogan ‘international community’. He called it an ‘All-purpose euphemism for whatever international policy the speaker, usually an official of the US or British government, approves of’ (2011: 299). In an essay on what one diplomat called ‘middlepowermanship’, Denis Stairs warned against over-standardising the image of ‘medium powers and middling roles’. He agreed with those who thought that the ‘middle powers’ were too diverse to constitute a ‘scientific category’, while accepting the view that the category had a glimmer of an ‘ideology of foreign policy’ (Stairs 1998: 276, 282). In this diversity of middlepowermanship, I want to argue that the international society school essentially resides in the Old Commonwealth, with its ideology cultivated in the English school. It is not an accident that the geopolitical home of this mindset has been influential English-speaking middle powers closely allied with the most powerful state in the system. Recalling Thucydides: the Melians are now propounding their principles under the secure protection of the Athenian superpower. In addition to the earlier problems raised about the international society mindset, the charge here points to the failure of its adherents to engage sufficiently in self-critique, and attempt to appreciate the extent to which the mindset and its associated principles are ‘reflexions’ of—to call on Carr again—‘the interests and values of the countries and power hierarchies in which they are situated, and from which they gain advantage’. At the same time, the notion of an ‘international society’ offers a space for theorising which eschews vulgar realism, but steers clear of radical positions such as cosmopolitanism or world government; in these ways, the mindset avoids the charge of ‘utopianism’, and thereby of the individual being dismissed as irrelevant in the eyes of the policy world. But the charge of ‘utopianism’

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is often misconceived (as was discussed earlier). In this regard, Geuss criticised Carr’s influential use of the term, on the grounds that it was ‘moralism’ that was his true target in The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Geuss is surely correct in arguing that the opposite of ‘realism’ is ‘moralism’ not ‘utopianism’ (Geuss 2015: 10–12). Nonetheless, Carr’s influence remains, and the false realism/utopianism binary continues to bedevil IR, including ISGP. At the outset of the chapter, it was proposed that the ultimate test of IPT was its helpfulness in sharpening our collective practical judgement in face of an era of ‘morbid systems’ and epochal questions across a particularly challenging global securityscape. So far, the record of the world of diplomacy is mixed: many issues are on the table (e.g., climate change) but collective decision-making falls well short of collective needs. Behind political sloganeering are fundamental state interests and associated priorities driven by the overriding principle of national security and economic well-being. Appeals to the idol ‘national interest’ have become increasingly prominent. The soul of such thinking was exposed by US President Trump when he delivered a speech to a packed General Assembly of the UN in 2017. He used the occasion to extol his ‘America First’ agenda to his domestic base, but also to entreat every nation to adopt the same approach. ‘I will always put America first just like you, the leaders of your countries, should put your countries first’ he declaimed. Calling on a reawakening of national patriotisms, he suggested this to be ‘the foundation for cooperation and success’ (The Independent 2017). This is another delusion: when all compete to maximise relative gains (the only meaning that can be given to the my-country-first mantra), the outcome is obviously sub-optimal from a collective point of view, not least because the most powerful are likely to get their way. In the eighteenth century, Jean Jacques Rousseau, discussing the ‘framework within which nations act’, said that ‘sanity can be downright dangerous, for ‘to be sane in a world of madmen is in itself a kind of madness’ (quoted by Waltz 1959: 181). Being ‘public-spirited’ in negotiations, he suggested, was not prudent when others are determinedly and unilaterally seeking to make relative gains. Similar pressure to succeed in negotiations is as evident today as it was when Rousseau was writing. Alix Strachey adds the thought that only a madman (or ‘hooligan’, to pre-empt a term of Rabindranath Tagore) would say ‘I am always right’, but these words can be said, consciously and self-approvingly, on behalf of one’s

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country. Nationalism regresses to a lower level of morality and mentality (Strachey 1957: 202–203). A century ago, as nationalist ideology spread, Tagore called the nation a ‘machine of power’ which sought to emulate other machines ‘in their collective worldliness’ (Tagore 2012: 24)—a polite expression for the sanity of madness described by Rousseau. The clocks are ticking: the longer human society globally is characterised by negative ‘collective worldliness’ the longer we will delay our collective ability to meet the predictable material challenges and shapers of our time. The global-we needs to accommodate—within the lifetime of babies born today—approximately half as many people again as are presently alive; we need, as the number of productive harvests threatens to get fewer, to build resilience and sustainability in food and water security; we need, as global warming occurs, to mitigate the risks of ‘climate chaos’; and we need, in a 24/7 shrinking planet, to adjust humanely to all its accelerating economic, social, and political dynamics. The international society mindset does not get to the collective heart of these matters. The Great Reckoning demands, from the bottom-up more global solidarity and cosmopolitan sensibilities than is acceptable to the ‘solidarist’ wing of the English school; and less statism and more supra-state governance and even government from the top-down than is acceptable to the English Schools’ ‘pluralist’ wing. Without such widening of the horizons, the international society mindset leaves state power and nationalist ideology essentially where it is. A century ago, the polymath Tagore recognised that ‘so long as nations are rampant in this world we have not the option freely to develop our higher humanity’ (2012: 24). The international society mindset is not up to the task of moving towards this ‘higher humanity’. While we give way to our chosen delusions, the global-we will collectively remain deformed by the ideas that made us, including the belief, in Tagore’s words, that ‘the only brotherhood possible in the modern world is the brotherhood of hooliganism’ (Tagore 2012: 24).

References Allott, P. (1998). The Future of the Human Past. In K. Booth (Ed.), Statecraft and Security. The Cold War and Beyond (pp. 323–337). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. Orlando: Harvest Book. Booth, K. (1979). Strategy and Ethnocentrism. London: Croom Helm.

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Booth, K. (1991). Security in Anarchy. Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice. Review of International Studies, 67(3), 527–545. Booth, K. (1995). Dare Not to Know: International Relations Theory Versus the Future. In K. Booth & S. Smith (Eds.), International Relations Theory Today (pp. 328–350). Cambridge: Polity Press. Booth, K. (2000). Ten Flaws of Just Wars. International Journal of Human Rights, 4(3–4), 314–324. Booth, K. (2007). Theory of World Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Booth, K. (2009). Changing Global Realities: Critical Theory for Critical Times. Spectrum: Journal of Global Studies, 1(2), 38–54. Booth, K. (2011). Realism and World Politics. Abingdon: Routledge. Booth, K. (2014a). International Relations. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Booth, K. (2014b). Global Security. In M.  Kaldor & I.  Rangelov (Eds.), The Handbook of Global Security Policy (pp.  13–30). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Booth, K. (2017). What’s the Point of IR? The International in the Invention of Humanity. In T.  Dyvik, J.  Selby, & R.  Wilkinson (Eds.), What’s the Point of International Relations? (pp. 21–33). London: Routledge. Booth, K., & Erskine, T. (2016). Introduction: The Argumentative Discipline. In K. Booth & T. Erskine (Eds.), International Relations Theory Today (pp. 1–19). Cambridge: Polity. Brown, C. (1992). International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, C. (2015). International Society, Global Polity. An Introduction to International Political Theory. London: Sage. Brown, C. (2016). Theory and Practice in International Relations. In K. Booth & T.  Erskine (Eds.), International Relations Theory Today (pp.  39–52). Cambridge: Polity. Bull, H. (1977). The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan. Burns, K., & Novick, L. (2017). The Vietnam War. A Film: Episode 5, ‘This Is What We Do’. Carr, E. H. (1966). The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan. Clark, I. (2015). Waging War – A New Philosophical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coker, C. (2018). Still ‘The Human Thing’? Technology, Human Agency and the Future of War. International Relations, 32(1), 23–38. Cox, R. W. (1981). Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10(2), 127–155.

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Economist, The. (2018, January 27–February 2). A Special Report, The Next War. The Growing Threat of Great-Power Conflict. Falk, R. A., & Kim, S. S. (1980). The War System: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Boulder: Westview Press. Freedman, L. (2017). Force and the International Community: Blair’s Chicago Speech and the Criteria for Intervention. International Relations, 31(2), 107–124. Gallie, W. B. (1988). Power Politics and War Cultures. Review of International Studies, 14(1), 17–27. Geuss, R. (2015). Realism and the Relativity of Judgement. International Relation, 29(1), 3–22. Halliday, F. (2011). Shocked and Awed: How the War on Terror and Jihad Have Changed the English Language. London: I.B. Tauris. Hathaway, O., & Shapiro, S. (2017). The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. New York: Simon & Schuster. Howard, M., & Paret, P. (Eds. and Trans.) (1989). Clausewitz: On War [1st pub. 1832]. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Independent, The. (2017, September 19). Donald Trump’s America First Doctrine will Destroy the United Nations. Online. Available at: www.independent. co.uk/trump-un-speech-america-first. Accessed 15 Feb 2018. Keal, P. (2017). Beyond ‘War in the Strict Sense. In T. Dunne & C. Reus-Smit (Eds.), The Globalization of International Society (pp.  165–184). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knorr, K. (1966). On the Uses of Military Power in the Nuclear Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laswell, H.  D. (1950). Politics. Who Gets What, When, How. New  York: Peter Smith. Lindley-French, J., & Boyer, Y. (Eds.). (2012). The Oxford Handbook of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rapoport, A. (1968). Clausewitz: On War. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stairs, D. (1998). Of Medium Powers and Middling Roles. In K.  Booth (Ed.), Statecraft and Security. The Cold War and Beyond (pp. 270–286). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stampp, K. M. (1989 [1956]). The Peculiar Institution. Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Vintage Books. Strachey, A. (1957). The Unconscious Motives of War. New  York: International Universities Press. Tagore, R. (2012 [1st pub. 1917]). Nationalism. New Delhi: Niyogi Books. Waltz, K. (1959). Man, the State and War. New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of International Politics. New York: Random House.

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Waltz, K. (2008). Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics. In K. Waltz (Ed.), Realism and International Politics (pp. 332–345). New York: Routledge. Walzer, M. (2015). Just and Unjust War (5th ed.). New York: Basic Books. Weiss, T.  G. (2009). What Happened to the Idea of World Government? International Studies Quarterly, 53(2), 353–371. Williams, H., & Booth, K. (1996). Kant: Theorist Beyond Limits. In I. Clark & I. B. Neumann (Eds.), Classical Theories of International Relations (pp. 71–98). Houndmills: Macmillan.

CHAPTER 8

Emotions and Political Limitations: Working Through the Broken Middle with Chris Brown Brent J. Steele

1   Introduction Chris Brown’s work is inviting, but also difficult to critically confront. Inviting, because his work, and Brown himself, is tangible, accessible, and enjoyable to engage. Difficult, because Brown’s work exhibits the tendency to find a middle ground between extreme positions, hence his focus on Aristotle in a variety of works (Brown 2000, 2010, 2012) that have in turn inspired a number of scholars extracting from Aristotle all kinds of counsel (Gould 2014; Amoureux 2016). This tendency is found as well in his calls for a ‘critical problem solving theory’ approach (Brown 2013), and of course in counseling his readers that Bob Dylan is a much more ambiguous political (and musical) figure than we’ve come to think (Brown 2009). Indeed, this middle-ground position is especially persuasive, measured, nuanced, and always attentive and sensitive to the positions Brown ultimately critiques. Brown’s persuasiveness comes through precisely

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­without dodging the core controversies or issues at stake, and it’s been this way for over three decades. Nevertheless, I do want to bring forth four points, some critical, others appraising, in what follows. First, I argue that one of Brown’s legacies for International Political Theory (hereafter, IPT) is this precise art of engaging both sides in nuanced and careful ways. From this position, Brown thereafter has consistently constructed a persuasive middle-ground approach from which to launch a series of sensibilities and policy prescriptions that maintain, largely, a fidelity to liberal internationalism. I examine the underexplored role of emotions in Brown’s works, via (for purposes of brevity) two particular studies—‘Universal human rights: a critique’ (1998) and ‘Introduction: a life in theory’ (2010). In these essays, we see how emotions open up the boundaries for both our political and ethical positions. Yet in his other work, the emotions of his intellectual opponents also foreclose—for him—the limits of political critique. So while we should be grateful (as I am) for Brown’s rare talents and especially this virtue of effectively and faithfully acknowledging different perspectives, my second, generationally inflected point proposes that Brown’s middle ground—with its faith in (violent) liberal power—is occasionally mismatched by our contemporary ‘moment’ (stretching back through the previous decade). After the Iraq War and the policies associated with the ‘War on Terror’, the Global Financial Crisis and the waves of austerity in the EU, the migration crisis, to Brexit, and now the election of Donald Trump, it is difficult for some International Political Theorists of my generation to maintain the faith in progressive and ‘liberal’ thought (and policies) that Brown in the 2010 essay expressed ‘sympathy’ toward. Thus, because of a set of grounded experiences we have had in our own ethical communities over especially the past 15 years, the measured and nuanced ‘middle’ where we have always found Brown, and now find ourselves as well, is instead for many of us, as Kate Schick (following from Gillian Rose) so trenchantly argued, ‘Broken’ (Schick 2012). Thus, my third point is that we might navigate this middle via a more nuanced, and likely more skeptical, sensibility. To that end, I consult Kate Schick’s (2012) aforementioned characterization of the Broken Middle, and her further Gillian Rose inspired counsel for ‘working through’ it. Schick’s arguments provide a roadmap for navigating between messianic progressivism on the one hand, and a despair-ridden anti-foundationalism on the other. This is also a middle-ground approach, but this middle is a site that is increasingly fractured and one of intense and perpetual struggle

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that not only contrasts with Brown’s approach by addressing contemporary politics in a slightly different way toward power, but also (rather than avoid them) channels the emotions of the moment (including those of the scholar) toward this middle as a way to work through it, to grapple with it, without losing hope. Schick’s approach proves useful for IPT students who may have difficulty mobilizing any energy at all for engaging the perpetually dire environment of contemporary politics. Further, it shifts not only what IPT is, but where we can look for it—not in the abstract debates of analytical philosophy but, rather, in the micropolitical formations and institutions that we participate within every day. Nevertheless, and fourth, centralizing the struggles of the Broken Middle has its own limitations (including, namely, exhaustion), and thus should be considered (as I do in my conclusion) as complementary to Brown’s approach to IPT going forward.

2   Establishing Brown’s Middle Ground Brown’s skill in establishing a middle ground comes through in almost all of his work. I will for the purposes of brevity focus here (largely) upon two particular studies that both demonstrate this tendency and express the role of emotions in his theory and engagement with critics. The first essay is a more recent one, the ‘Introduction’ from Brown’s Practical Judgement essay collection, published in 2010. Titled ‘Introduction: A Life in Theory’, we find a wonderful quasi-auto-ethnographic introduction that discusses his trajectory or twists and turns as a scholar and also a citizen, and it also serves to establish Brown’s articulation, and defense, of his move toward IPT as a field. I further focus on this essay because it is not only demonstrative but also illustrative of the way Brown is in conversations as well, someone with otherwise intimidating intellect who is also eminently approachable—whether you are a distinguished scholar or an anxious junior one like I was the first time I chatted with him at the San Diego ISA in 2006. The essay itself is also a fascinating review by Brown of the intellectual, political, institutional, philosophical, and social contexts that shaped and altered his international political theoretical views over several decades. Thus, it refreshingly sheds light (with the obvious benefit of hindsight) on both the ways in which certain essays or experiences proved to be the seeds for some of his gigantic contributions to conversations about international politics as well as how his thought has transformed and even transmogrified over time. And, finally, it also proves

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instructive for demonstrating the middle-ground position that Brown has occupied in his work for decades. The opening pages refer to one of his teachers, Philip Windsor, whose ‘eclecticism’ led Brown to ‘firmly believe that anyone who wishes to be taken seriously as a theorist of international relations had better be steeped in international history and have a very good knowledge of current affairs as well as familiarity with the classics of political thought’ (2010a: 2). Three factors in the 1980s were responsible for things ‘coming together’ for him in that decade. First, his academic exchange in 1981 to U-Mass Amherst and specifically meeting the iconic political theorist William Connolly. Second, the burgeoning of what he titles the ‘justice’ industry that included work of course by Rawls but others as well, all part of a more ‘radical’ approach to International Political Economy emerging during that time. And third, the emergence of a generation of ‘young IR’ scholars and political theorists (which included Nick Rengger and Terry Nardin),1 a ‘community’ of which he was a part, and one that gave the air a ‘missionary zeal’ at the time. As Brown notes, ‘an audience for a different kind of IPT was emerging’ (2010a: 4). Brown then discusses why he finds the term ‘IPT’ to be a better one for what he (and many of us) did and does compared to ‘International Ethics’, and I would like to spend some pixel on this reasoning since this current book is titled The Politics of International Political Theory, but also because I’ve entered the conversations and disciplinary conversion to IPT only in recent years (and only modestly at that). Brown argues that there are two main reasons for his switch in preferences. First, by calling what they (and, since I’m a part of it as well, ‘we’) did or do as ‘international ethics’, this was a self-marginalizing move that played into the hands of more mainstream approaches to International Relations—that there were explanatory and ‘real’ ways to analyze the world, on the one hand, and more ‘normative’ musings to talk about the way the world should be, on the other. Second, International Ethics also separated IR as something that was sui generis, as if the dynamics studied in IR were somehow exclusive from those found more broadly across other temporal and spatial contexts. IPT is for Brown a better term for what he has done, and will continue to do, as a scholar. It makes what we do in approaching politics ‘theoretical reasoning’ that is based on a more complementary relationship with positivism. He is not a post-positivist anymore, nor a postmodernist, but rather a ‘pre-modern’ who sees social science providing ‘action-guiding

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moral reasoning’. Judgment, in short, ‘needs good explanatory theory’, and standards play a role in these judgments (2010: 8). I am persuaded by both these reasons and of Brown’s defense of what IPT therefore captures that international ethics does not (an understanding shared by many contributors to this volume, no doubt). Yet I must admit that I’ve never really accepted the need to move away from calling what I do anything but ‘International Ethics’ as a subfield of ‘International Relations’. Brown himself discusses the development of IR in different contexts (the US vs. the UK) and how that also shaped his work. Perhaps because I have worked within the US academy for most of my career (while maintaining most of my research networks outside of it, including especially in and with colleagues in the UK), I have always viewed the field of international ethics as having two interdependent purposes—a social scientific one and a ‘normative’ one—and in order to get to a more persuasive argumentative form of the latter, I have always had to consult (when available) the former.2 So while I accept the reasons and the defense mentioned earlier, in the end, I am not persuaded that the field of International Ethics doesn’t already capture what Brown sees IPT better characterizing. Further, I have tended to be less concerned with how the labels I use will be turned around, or utilized, for marginalization purposes by others. That said, I recognize the importance and even richness that has emerged within the field of international political theory, with a series of institutions (including journals like the Journal of International Political Theory) as well as forceful and comprehensive statements on what IPT is by several of the field’s icons (Lang 2014). Brown’s essay further represents a series of persuasive middle way disclosures, critiquing ‘saloon bar realists’ on the one hand, the ‘Chomsky left’ on the other. It notes ‘the importance of cultural pluralism [as] central to [his] approach to IPT’ and yet ‘at the same time, readers will note that a certain uneasiness can be found in the later essays, a recognition that culture can easily become a kind of all-purpose alibi for awful behavior. Equally, there is a realization in these later essays that sometimes recognizing cultural difference can involve condescension’ (2010: 7). The Brown style comes through, perhaps most quintessentially in a later remark, following a passage from his ‘The Modern Requirement’ piece, ‘I’m quite sure that this ought still to be the case, but I’m equally sure it isn’t’ (2010: 10).3

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The second essay I draw attention to is his infamous study from 1997, ‘Universal Human Rights: A Critique’ that appeared in the Dunne and Wheeler volume on Human Rights (1998) and is also included in the 2010 collection of essays. Brown uses Hegel (once again) and then Rorty to develop an insight into how human rights both depend upon communities and the institutions therein (thus against the rationalist liberals), but also develop over time into different communities that are educated into an expanding culture of human rights. I chose this essay because it shaped my own work in graduate school, including how I taught my first few International Ethics courses. Here, there are several extremes Brown is playing against. He tells us that it’s not necessary to be a postmodern to be skeptical of certain universalist metanarratives, for one should chasten the ‘at-times facile optimism of the liberals’. And yet he also takes on (1) historical relativism creatively using Hegel’s Geist (its unfolding over time creates possibilities and ethical knowledge unavailable in prior eras), and (2) cultural relativism using Rorty’s notion of cultures as being deprived of ‘the security and sympathy that has allowed us to create a culture in which rights make sense’ (2010b: 99). I do not bring forth this notion of Brown’s middle way to claim he is a fence-sitter, or waffler, or a Stephen Douglas trying to have it both ways. On the contrary, the point is that Brown’s work is so hard to effectively critique because if you want to think two steps ahead, you must know that he knows your position better than you do. So, my guess is that my own limited, and friendly, disagreements with Brown’s especially later work are ones he has either already considered via other critics, or in my own case properly anticipated. I harbor no doubt that he will just as easily dispense with my concerns in a measured, persuasive, and devastating way in this volume. But there is one more aspect of Brown’s ‘middle grounding’ I want to point to, and it involves the role of emotions in Brown’s international political theory, both in how emotions perform part of the work necessary to make communities more ethical, and in how the emotions of critics of his position tend to limit the worth of their critiques. Combined, Brown’s middle-ground position gets carved out because it is both in-between particular extreme positions that are themselves also fueled and reinforced by emotional baggage, an additional feature that eludes his own analysis. Emotions are an important mechanism for developing a human rights ­culture, but only certain emotions are legitimate in formulating other positions on ethics, or IPT more generally, it seems.

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Read alongside contemporary (or current) affairs, it is this latter tendency that brings forth my own quibbles regarding Brown’s work, and his political positions more recently. In short, Brown’s work evinces a nuanced but still progressive logic and movement, and at times an additional faith in power, sometimes violent power—as he notes via Hegel (Brown 1991), war has a positive side—to carry this progressive movement forward. And contrary to his own counsel that judgment requires good ‘explanatory’ theory, good ‘social scientific’ work, this faith in power clouds (but never completely obscures) Brown’s own judgment on some of the most important topics of our time.

3   The Curious Case of Torture4: An Illustration Torture is a case in point namely (1) of the faith that Brown has in liberal power doing the right (or, in this case, wrong) thing but for the right reasons, (2) why we need good social scientific work (and, broader than that, historical work) to inform judgments, and also (3) how liberal power may be reversing the Geist that once pushed our ethical communities into more progressive understandings of right versus wrong. Brown (2015: 168) notes in a more recent text that ‘one of the most disturbing features of the Global War on Terror has been the way that prohibitions on torture have been violated by participants on both sides of the “war”’. And yet, after working through the hackneyed (he calls ‘stock’) ‘ticking time bomb’ (TTB) scenario that was often used by the Bush administration to justify its torture regime, Brown finds another scenario and real-life experience that violent power (and especially the CIA, with some assistance from a Hollywood film) used to justify torture (somewhat after the fact): Is there actually any evidence that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (EITs) have produced the goods, that is actually prevented terrorist attacks or led to the capture or killing of terrorists? The film Zero Dark Thirty sparked debate along these lines by suggesting that the trail that led to Osama Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad in Pakistan began with acts of torture. [Here, in contrast to the TTB scenario], the aim of EITs was to break the will to resist of prisoners, to get them to co-operate in general terms rather than to extract specific nuggets of information … as a by-­ product of the process rather than as its direct aim—and it seems that this is actually relevant to the Bin Laden case; it was casual references by prisoners to a ‘courier’ that put the CIA on the track of the person who handled messages for Bin Laden. (Brown 2015: 170, emphasis added)

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‘Actually relevant’—based on what exactly? At the time that Brown was writing this, the only bases for this claim were the musings by officials in the former Bush administration (who had changed their tune on which scenarios would justify torture, ending on this breaking the ‘will to resist’ one), as well as (more spectacularly) the claims of the former CIA officials and the CIA itself, which was consulted in the making of the aforementioned film Zero Dark Thirty (Steele 2013, 2017). Perhaps those claims will eventually be proven ‘correct’, but the claims themselves are not the type of good social scientific work upon which to base a judgment that torture ‘worked’ to produce ‘actually relevant’ information. Indeed, shortly after Brown wrote this passage, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) detention program of the 2000s. The report concluded succinctly and unequivocally in 3 (#s 1, 2, and 10) of its 20 core findings that the ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques were ineffective in acquiring intelligence from detainees (US Senate 2015: 3–12). Using the CIA’s own documents, statements, and records, the report took apart the 20 most frequently cited claims by the CIA of plots disrupted, or terrorist aides or suspects captured, directly linked (by the CIA) to their ‘enhanced interrogation’ program. The last of these focused on the aforementioned claim noted in Brown’s passage (III, G, US Senate 2015, 276–289), as well as in Zero Dark Thirty: torture had provided information that led to bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti. While some information about the courier came from detainees who were tortured, the ‘most accurate information on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti obtained from a CIA detainee was provided by a CIA detainee who had not yet been subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques’ (US Senate 2015: 277, emphasis added). In fact, the report noted that the ‘CIA was actively targeting’ the courier as far back as January of 2002, when the name of the courier was discovered by sources and documents outside of the CIA’s interrogation program. And then again, in 2004, a detainee—Hassan Ghul—prior to being subjected to torture, ‘listed Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti as one of the three individuals likely to be with UBL’ (US Senate 2015: 280). In each and every instance, the courier’s name and whereabouts were issued by detainees prior to being waterboarded, or through documents discovered as far back as January of 2002 before the CIA’s torture program began, or by individuals not in CIA custody. As the report also detailed, when detainees, including Ghul

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(‘the CIA detainee who provided the most accurate “Tier 1” information linking’ the courier to ‘UBL’) were tortured, they provided no or even false information that could not be corroborated (US Senate 2015: 286–287). Other detainees who were tortured, such as Abu Faraj al-Libi, while being waterboarded provided information at-odds with that provided by Ghul under normal interrogation conditions, regarding the courier (288), thus slowing down or misdirecting the CIA in its search. I don’t bring this information up as a cheap ‘gotcha’ moment for Brown (or the CIA, for that matter). But I think it illustrates how much faith Brown has even on some of the most ‘illiberal’ topics in liberal power and authority. So we have a dual-role for emotions in Brown’s work. In the aforementioned ‘Human Rights’ essay, there is for Brown, via Rorty, a ‘sentimental education’ for the next generation in communities where the meanings of human rights are fostered, expanding ethical communities in the process. One doesn’t develop in such communities some ‘knock-down’ argument about rights, but an ethical education expanded in the form of a human rights ‘culture’ (1998: 68). Yet other emotions are more problematic for Brown. In his ‘Life in Theory’ essay, he notes that the reaction to his ‘Practical Judgement and the Ethics of Preemption’ (2010c) essay that he originally presented at the 2006 International Studies Association meeting in San Diego (where I, incidentally, first met him over an enjoyable breakfast with him and Tony Lang at the end of that conference) attracted a great deal of criticism. Brown argues that the essay’s defense of preemption follows from the ‘US National Security Strategy of 2002 [which was] for the most part, a thoughtful document’. Yet his paper drew much criticism at the time, the ‘intensity of which leads me to think that the hatred for former President Bush present in the American intelligentsia, and for ex-Prime Minister Blair in their British equivalent, actually stands in the way of clear thinking’ (2010a, 16). My point here is threefold. First, Brown recognizes in his work how emotions can cloud ‘judgement’, but they might also be integral toward fostering that judgment, including important and even effective and justified judgment, in the first place. That said, ‘sentimental education’ can work in a number of directions, and in 2006 that sentimental education for not only the ‘intelligentsia’ but for the broader US and UK publics worked in a direction that would prove critically predisposed against preemption. In fact, judging by polls taken at the time, a majority of the US public had

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become opposed to the Iraq War, not just the ‘intelligentsia’ that criticized positions on preemption.5 Second, and more directly, Brown’s later work, like that essay, on occasion lacks the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that Cian O’Driscoll argues is needed to ‘guard against sanguinely accepting the pious nostrums of those who proclaim themselves to be agents of the good as they go about their business waging war’ (2007: 88). These two points combined leads me to suspect that it was not necessarily a ‘hatred’ of anything that the Bush (or, in the UK, the Blair) administration said or did that shaped some of the opposition by critics to liberal interventionism and policies they saw connected to it in the 2000s. Or, at least, not only that. It was a broader skepticism regarding power during a decade when not only ideologies but also authoritative incompetence permeated politics and thus fueled the skepticism for some of my generation’s IPT scholars. This skepticism flowed on the one hand from a similar ‘middle ground’ terrain that also viewed social science as having the potential to provide ‘action-guiding moral reasoning’. This middle ground was however and on the other hand not firm, but shifting. It was not a rational environment but a broken one from which judgments, and thus certainty, needed to be chastened and caveated. And if that means withholding advocacy for imperfect, and even dangerous, policies, rather than coming out ‘for’ or ‘against’ them, perhaps all the more better. Further, and third, the problem of torture, like other blights on our contemporary political-ethical landscapes, is deeper than how ‘we’ as scholars face violent power. It’s about more than, that is, a one-time ‘heroic’ act of preemption (in an emergency situation) or torture to save lives, but an embrace of those practices as a general policy by broader publics. Thus, the problem here is how we resolve the retrograde and regressive tendencies that also exist within our ethical communities that (should?) know better, and where those tendencies are being reinforced? In other words, how do we respond to the increasing popularity of torture, for instance, among the US public (Steele 2008, 2013), to the observation that one of the biggest applause lines the then Republican presidential candidate, and current US President, Donald Trump received on the stump was when he said ‘we are going to waterboard them and do a helluva lot worse’?6 What are we to do when such a community is definitely not, in the language of the 1998 Brown essay, ‘deprived of security and sympathy that allows one to create a culture in which rights make sense’ but embody discourses like these as if they are?

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Is it perhaps because there is in fact less security and sympathy in our communities? Or is it due to the breakdown of institutions so important in the Hegelian account of society? As Brown noted via Hegel in his human rights essay: The United States functioned as a community when it had a strong family structure and an active civil society to go with its constitutional arrangements; in recent years the former institutions have gone into decline and, as a partial response, the constitutional framework has grown in significance. Americans have more and more rights, but less and less of a society within which to exercise them. (2010b: 62)

Indeed, the breakdown of these civil societal settings may be part of the reason why the US, and other Western democracies, has seen some retrograde slippage when it comes to ethical communitarianism. Without such settings, the unfolding of a human rights culture gets stunted, and even reversed. Nevertheless, it’s important to point out that one of those societal institutions—churches and religious institutions—as part of a key exercise of the right to worship via the freedom of religion, has produced mixed results when it comes to views on torture. One of the best predictors of support for torture is religiosity, with the nonreligious least supportive and those attending church services (especially evangelicals and white Catholics), most supportive of torture (Posner 2014; Steele 2013). Perhaps, then, there simply is no unidirectional movement at all, but rather a set of ‘small contingent facts’ (in Rorty’s words, 1998: 188), that have and always will push us into a jagged set of multiple, including dark, directions. This, too, can come from liberal democracies, generated not only by their leaders but their citizens as well. Thus, the puzzle for me is not only that we should maintain a healthier skepticism toward liberal power than Brown evinces in his later work, or that we need to check our emotions to make way for better judgments, but rather how we can both maintain a healthy skepticism of power and its resources without falling into the same kind of knee-jerk cynical indifference, and even nihilism, that Brown rightfully calls our attention to. Thus, we need to stay in this ‘middle’ with Brown but provide something additional to the conversations with him. Is there a way to make Brown’s approach, for lack of a better term, ‘grittier’, so that this less than pristine, and less rational, middle can be worked through?

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4   The Broken Middle As mentioned, the ‘Broken Middle’ is a phrase used by Kate Schick (2012) in her book that marshals insights from philosopher Gillian Rose. Let me lay out Schick’s approach, what she titles (in an appropriate invocation of a middle-ground perspective) a ‘Good Enough Justice’, and how I think it confronts (if not resolves) not only some of the tensions that Brown’s work has called our attention to but also some of the aforementioned tensions within Brown’s work. Yet it also maintains a common influence with Brown in its Hegelian approach via ‘speculative dialectics’, and shares a concern with the same extremes Brown situates his work against. Schick identifies four features found throughout Rose’s work, individually and combined, that help one work through the Broken Middle without ever fully mending or ending it—indeed, it never ends. The first is diremption—or the brokenness between the universal and particular, a ‘mismatch’ between two things that weren’t originally matched to begin with (e.g., too abstract of thought and actuality). Diremption is the central characterization that Schick uses to develop her understanding of the ‘Broken Middle’. Diremption is produced from the inevitable gap ‘between promises of the Enlightenment project and the concrete realities of life under conditions of modernity’ (Schick 2012: 6). The second feature is, following Hegel and Adorno, ‘speculative dialectics’, which focuses on the relationality characterized as the ‘way in which supposed opposites constitute, and are constituted by, one another’ (Schick 2012: 7). This feature of Rose’s thought embeds a ‘triune Hegelian structure of recognition, whereby attention to the relation between terms is the third term’ (Schick 2012: 7). The speculative is creative and incorporates the possibility of surprise—opening up spaces ‘for political action … without providing a blueprint for what the future might look like’ (Schick 2012: 7).7 In both diremption and especially by utilizing Hegel as a ‘resource for thinking ethically and politically’, Schick, via Rose, intersects so far with Brown’s work. A third theme Schick develops from Rose is ‘comprehension’, which is not only a recognition of brokenness but also a learning from it in the sense that the middle is never fully mended. This sounds not only cautious but perhaps even cynical. However, such comprehension not only steels the spine of the theorist, but, in a move that is important for where the Broken Middle can be found, also sets expectations for what kinds of conflicts will likely always continue to pervade the micropolitical settings

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where ethical conflicts emerge and are reinforced. Further, it helps to chasten and restrain impulses for investing centralized forms of power (including that of nation-states) with the legitimacy to carry out actions that will once and for all resolve this brokenness. As Schick explains, liberalism is problematic not only because it favors the abstract but also because it ‘disguises the operation of power’ (2012, 2). Unlike the first two features, we see here a clean distinction with Brown’s IPT—namely, a clear skepticism regarding the interests of power versus the interests of the investigator. Finally, anxiety and risk are important for our actions in working through the Broken Middle (Schick 2012: 7–9). Anxiety pervades our knowing of the present, and risk involves action without guarantees. It is a focus on aporia over euporia, the latter being favored not only by Enlightenment thought but also by the very poststructural critics of that thought who instead withdraw to a ‘melancholy’ that avoids working through problems, thus also ‘refusing to engage with the contours of the present actuality’ (Schick 2012: 3). Note here the importance of emotions even for the investigator, or anyone who is working through the Broken Middle wherever that may be. Emotions are not a liability, they are a resource. What is gained when we add approaches like Schick’s to the discussions that Brown has guided us through on some of these paramount contemporary political issues of the past few decades? First, it calls attention to not only what, but where, sentimental education takes place. Thus, some of the opposition that Professor Brown intuits that is shaped by emotions is instead more grounded, and less abstract, than on first inspection. We all have emotions that sentimentally educate us, and we encode our political positions by not only the need to win an argument in a seminar, or a news show, or on a roundtable, but by and through and with the micropolitical experiences of our embedded (ethical) communities. These include, following from Connolly but also the many others doing work on micropolitics now in IR (see Solomon and Steele 2017), our places of worship, our neighborhoods, our families, and our classrooms (where many of those who carry the scars of violence are trying to readapt to a not-quite-­postwar world). It is also a recognition that even if we have access to the insights of a human rights culture, access denied in previous contexts, there may be other, more ancient, emotions or affects (revenge, hatred) that rip open into the surfaces of our liberal democratic communities (as the current shattered state of US politics suggests), and can lead to (and indeed only be satiated by) some ‘awful behaviour’ as well.

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Second, Schick’s approach is representative of a type of chastened international political theory that I think exemplifies the work produced within and about the previous couple decades, by a generation of IPT scholars who have a slightly more guarded take on centralized power. It is no coincidence that this work has been particularly sensitive to issues over the role of not only abstract thought but the reflexivity of scholars and scholarship in the application of thought to action. Whether it is Jack Amoureux’s (2016) approach to ‘Ethical Reflexivity’, Daniel Levine’s (2012) Adornian-­ inflected work on ‘sustainable critique’, or my own interest (via Rorty, but also Niebuhr) in ‘irony’ and its ability to provide us a critical distance from our subjects (Steele 2010), these works come out of the 2000s with a different understanding of the role of both emotions and violent power and what is possible within the limits of our political imaginations. Third, and related to these first two points, it is perhaps for this reason that Schick as well as Amoureux, Levine, myself, and others (see Solomon and Steele 2017) have turned (following Connolly himself in many instances) to ‘micropolitics’ as a way to approach international political theory. Micropolitics as a style can be harnessed not necessarily to ‘treat’ some of the most pressing problems of global politics but rather to ‘cope’ with them (Dyer 2009), in ways that can also generate resistance to the factors and influences that produce such problems to begin with, or at least for their justifications as being ‘necessary’. This is why Schick has, for instance, focused on the micropolitical possibilities that an attention to a ‘critical pedagogy’ in the classroom can bring forth (Schick 2016), or my own work on the ‘acupunctural formations’ possible via the work of NGOs like Heifer International (Steele 2014). And such a focus, as idiosyncratic as it may seem, overlaps with the precise kind of ‘critical problem solving’ work that Brown posited could resurrect IPT in an era when the promise of Grand Theory is waning. Thus, while reacting differently to the events of the 2000s than Brown, such micropolitical studies are indeed ‘problem-­ solving’ theory in so far as ‘[they are] directly engaged with the pressing social problems, but … also …‘critical theory’ in so far as [they do] not take the definitions of such problems for granted’ (Brown 2013: 494).

5   Conclusion By the mid-2000s, Brown discloses in his ‘Life in Theory’ essay, he is ‘much more sympathetic’ to liberal thought than in his ‘previous efforts’; indeed he has ‘moved increasingly in the direction of a kind of Blairite

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liberal internationalism’ post 9/11 (2010a: 15). This is a decade that has pushed many of my generation of international ethics (or IPT) scholars into a more skeptical and even opposite direction. What I’ve tried to state in this short essay is that our more skeptical sensibilities may exemplify the kind of knee-jerk reaction to events of the recent past that thus still situate us within one of those typical extremes Brown argues against. But in concluding this essay, I would instead like to think that despite access to knowing better, we are and always will be ‘limited by our world’ (as he states in his Hegel and International Ethics article). Thus, many of us after 9/11 remain skeptical based on consistently reinforced observations about the limits of political agency, and that no matter how much evil we see unfolding in the world, there are simply limits to the abilities of humans (including leaders who do not know what they are doing or simply do not care), and groups, states, and communities, to recognize, respond, execute, and/or produce beneficial outcomes, of and from plans put in place by our ethical communities to others. But, again, our limitations in this respect require us to chasten our policy prescriptions and positions, recognizing that another generation will come along and find these positions woefully outdated as well (someday, if that day is not already here). My point is that many of us are in the middle with Brown, following his persuasive lead most of the time, but also sometimes in political (and perhaps international political theoretical) opposition to some of his positions because of a set of grounded experiences we have had in our own ethical communities that we cannot escape. Yet it would have been a more difficult struggle indeed, a more ‘Broken’ middle to work within, if we didn’t have Brown’s decades of work, argument, and persuasion to draw on. Thank goodness, and thank Chris Brown, for that.

Notes 1. In typically meticulous fashion, Luke Ashworth has also pointed to this same period of time and commented on many of the same group of scholars, depicting the era in similar terms in his own reflective explorations of international thought (Ashworth 2014, Chapter 8). 2. I will say in my brief time working within the International Ethics section of the ISA, I have seen a swing back to something akin to an air of ‘missionary zeal’ with an emerging generation of junior scholars in the section. They have brought both a vitality and energy to the work being produced on

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international ethics as well as a more applied or even activist-oriented approach to the topic that evinces more of a political edge to it than I recall having a decade or more ago. 3. I have a sense that readers of Brown’s work would also appraise it, and him, for this same tendency. Ian Clark, in his work on The Vulnerable in International Society, marshals for his own purposes Brown’s similar call for international society to exhibit its own collective moral agency and then concludes with a telling remark about Brown’s position: ‘Although Brown’s is no ringing endorsement, neither is it any absolute rejection of the possibility’ (2013: 16). 4. This is a play on the title of my 2013 study on torture’s increasing popularity in the US. 5. See Pew Research Center (2007). See also Mueller (2005). 6. See Swan (2016). For those who think this is just a feature of the Trump aberration, consider that even the ‘establishment candidate’ of the Republican primaries, Marco Rubio, would (in his quite typically programmatic way) propose that ‘if we capture any of these ISIS killers alive, they are going to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and we’re going to find out everything they know’ (Chait 2016). 7. Even here with Hegel, Schick moves to an even more middle ground between the ‘right-Hegelian’ readings which emphasize how ‘the real is rational’ and the left-Hegelians who ‘maintain that ‘the rational is real’ (2012: 27).

References Amoureux, J. L. (2016). A Practice of Ethics for Global Politics: Ethical Reflexivity. London: Routledge. Ashworth, L. M. (2014). A History of International Thought. From the Origins of the Modern State to Academic International Relations. London: Routledge. Brown, C. (1991). Hegel and International Ethics. Ethics and International Affairs, 5(1), 73–86. Brown, C. (2000). Cosmopolitanism, World Citizenship and Global Civil Society. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 3(1), 7–26. Brown, C. (2009). Bob Dylan, Live Aid, and The Politics of Popular Cosmopolitanism. In D. Boucher & G. Browning (Eds.), The Political Art of Bob Dylan (2nd ed.). Exeter: Imprint. Brown, C. (2010). Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2010a). Introduction: A Life in Theory. In Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (pp. 1–16). London: Routledge.

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Brown, C. (2010b). Universal Human Rights: A Critique. In Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (pp.  53–71), London: Routledge. Originally in T. Dunne & N. J. Wheeler (Eds.), (1998). Human Rights and Global Politics (pp. 103–127). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, C. (2010c). Practical Judgement and the Ethics of Preemption. In Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays (pp. 236–249). London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2012). The ‘Practice Turn’, Phronesis and Classical Realism: Towards a Phronetic International Political Theory? Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(3), 439–456. Brown, C. (2013). The Poverty of Grand Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 483–497. Brown, C. (2015). International Society, Global Polity: An Introduction to International Political Theory. London: Sage. Chait, J.  (2016, February 12). Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the Torture Primary. New York Magazine. Online. Available from: http://nymag.com/ daily/intelligencer/2016/02/trump-rubio-and-the-torture-primary.html. Accessed 26 Oct 2017. Clark, I. (2013). The Vulnerable in International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dyer, H. C. (2009). Coping and Conformity in World Politics. London: Routledge. Gould, H. D. (2014). Prudence. The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Online. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0838. Accessed 19 Dec 2017. Lang, A.  F., Jr. (2014). International Political Theory: An Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Levine, D. (2012). Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mueller, J. (2005, November/December). The Iraq Syndrome. Foreign Affairs, pp. 44–54. O’Driscoll, C. (2007). Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Just War Against Terror: A Tale of Two Cities. International Relations, 21(4), 485–492. Pew Research Center. (2007). Along the Iraq-Vietnam Parallel. Online. Available from: http://www.pewresearch.org/2007/08/28/along-the-iraqvietnam-parallel/. Accessed 11 Oct 2017. Posner, S. (2014, December 16). Christians More Supportive of Torture than Non-Religious. http://religiondispatches.org/christians-more-supportive-oftorture-than-non-religious-americans/ Rorty, R. (1998). Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Vol. 3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Schick, K. (2012). Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schick, K. (2016). Unsettling Pedagogy: Recognition, Vulnerability and the International. In P. Hayden & K. Schick (Eds.), Recognition and Global Politics: Critical Encounters Between State and World (pp. 25–44). London: Bloomsbury. Solomon, T., & Steele, B.  J. (2017). Micro-moves in International Relations Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 23(2), 267–291. Steele, B. J. (2008). Ideals That Were Really Never in Our Possession: Torture, Honor and US Identity. International Relations, 22(2), 243–261. Steele, B. J. (2010). Irony, Emotions and Critical Distance. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39(1), 89–107. Steele, B. J. (2013). The Insecurity of America: The Curious Case of Torture’s Escalating Popularity. In E.  A. Heinze (Ed.), Justice, Sustainability, and Security: Global Ethics for the 21st Century (pp. 171–204). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Steele, B. J. (2014). Micropolitics, NGOs and Global Governance. In R. B. Hall (Ed.), Reducing Armed Conflict with NGO governance (pp.  165–182). Abingdon: Routledge. Steele, B.  J. (2017). Organizational Processes and Ontological (In) Security: Torture, the CIA and the United States. Cooperation and Conflict, 52(1), 69–89. Swan, J. (2016). Trump Calls for ‘Hell of a Lot Worse than Waterboarding’. The Hill. Online. Available from: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gopprimaries/268530-trump-calls-for-hell-of-a-lot-worse-than-waterboarding. Accessed 2 Nov 2017. United States Senate Intelligence Committee. (2015). The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. London: Melville House.

CHAPTER 9

The Politics of Human Rights David Owen

1   Introduction The phrase ‘the politics of human rights’ can refer, variously, to political debates about the foundation, grounding or project of human rights, the variable ranking, observation or implementation of human rights, the political uses of human rights by state and non-state actors in international and domestic politics, and no doubt others. In this chapter, I want to address this phrase in two of its senses by taking up two seemingly disparate dimensions of Chris Brown’s work on human rights. First, the question of the grounding of human rights in the light of Brown’s recent work on human rights and human nature. Second, the international politics of, and prospects for, the project of human rights in respect of Brown’s reflections on post-Cold War changes to the distribution of global power. In this chapter, I offer both an account of the relationship of these two foci and a critical examination of Brown’s arguments in the context of wider debates on human rights.

D. Owen (*) University of Southampton, Southampton, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_9

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2   Human Nature and Human Rights: A Dilemma Does the appeal to human rights require an account of human nature? If so, on what grounds? In recent work, Brown has answered the first of these questions affirmatively and indicated that the reason that we need such an account is to establish that human rights can be divorced from their Western origins and justifiably claim to address universal features of human beings. He further—and much more controversially—advances the claim that contemporary developments in evolutionary psychology (EP) are providing the materials needed for such an account. In this section, I focus on Brown’s motivation for the appeal to an account of human nature as serving the project of human rights. Let us begin by considering why Brown raises this question. An initial theoretical motivation is that ‘unlike the rights of the individual in a domestic legal system, which are clearly based in positive law, the international human rights regime appears to rest on an account of human universals, and yet is deeply reluctant to admit that this is the case’: Mindful of critics of the notion of human rights ranging from Jeremy Bentham to Alasdair McIntyre via Karl Marx, rights advocates commonly describe rights as ‘useful fictions’, dodging the question ‘useful to whom?’ Or they argue that human rights are actually part of positive law created by international treaties, in spite of the obvious fact that many states sign-up to obligations they have not the slightest intention to honour. What human rights advocates rarely say is that rights rest on human nature—that humans have such a set of rights because that is what human beings are like. (Brown 2013a: 436–437)

The phrase ‘humans have such a set of rights because that is what human beings are like’ should be read in the light of the preceding claim that ‘rights rest on human nature’, where Brown is making the claim that if we think that human beings are universally characterised by certain interests or needs or capabilities that are basic in the sense of marking out matters of fundamental normative concern for any individual such that they ought to be protected through rights, then we are committed to the view that these rights-claims are grounded on an account of what human beings are like. This provides a defeasible philosophical rationale for addressing the issue, but it does not exhaust Brown’s motivations and he offers, I think, a revealing additional reason for addressing the question.

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Reflecting on the difficult history of false universalisms in which appeals to thick and rigid conceptions of human nature played central roles in justifying, among other things, imperialist and colonialist projects. Brown concludes that the case against such thick and rigid conceptions made by advocates of difference such as postcolonialist theorists is broadly compelling. He then poses the following question: ‘[I]s it possible to tell a story about human nature that is less rigid, more plastic, less open to manipulation in the interests of the powerful, but still with serious content?’ (Brown 2013a: 440). I take the inclusion of the phrase ‘less open to manipulation in the interests of the powerful’ to be significant here—and we can, I propose, see Brown as attempting to formulate and address a dilemma for theorists of human rights. The dilemma can be stated thus: Human rights require the idea of a universal human nature to legitimate their standing as articulating universal moral claims but we have good historically grounded reasons to be distrustful of ways of filling in this idea, of making it determinate, that are thick and fixed, while if the content of this idea is left too indeterminate, then the discourse and practice of human rights is open to manipulation by powerful actors.

Construed thus, Brown’s goal is to find a way of giving an appropriate form of determinacy to the idea of human nature, one that both grounds the moral claim of human rights to be matters of serious global importance and offers some resistance to manipulation by the powerful, where such manipulation can take either the guise of using human rights as a means of advancing national interests (e.g., through false universalisms) or that of organised scepticism towards human rights. We can see this dilemma as bringing together (but not identifying) two issues as integral to a political theory of human rights: first, the moral justification of human rights, the question of the grounding of human rights claims, and, second, the social legitimacy of human rights, the issue of the articulation of the global practice of human rights. A key issue here is the notion of an ‘an appropriate form of determinacy’. With characteristic verve, Brown addresses this point by drawing on a story told by Herodotus who was committed to the view that all peoples will naturally hold their own customs to be the best. The story runs thus: During his reign, Darius summoned the Hellenes at his court and asked them how much money they would accept for eating the bodies of their

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dead fathers. They answered that they would not do that for any amount of money. Later, Darius summoned some Indians, called Kallatiai, who do eat their dead parents. In the presence of the Hellenes, with an interpreter to inform them of what was said, he asked the Indians how much money they would accept to burn the bodies of their dead fathers. They responded with an outcry, ordering him to shut his mouth lest he offend the gods. Well then, that is how people think, and so it seems to me that Pindar was right when he said in his poetry that custom is king of all. Book 3: 38 (Herodotus 2008: 224, cited in Brown 2013a: 440)

And, as Brown notes, on this view ‘Darius the Persian would have known that the correct way to honour the dead is to expose bodies on high towers to be eaten by vultures’ (2013a: 441). However, the salient point for our concerns is Brown’s use of this story: This is a popular story because it is open to many different interpretations. What I want to suggest is that which interpretation one favours, which moral one wishes to draw, is largely a function of the level of generality with which one approaches the problem. Exposing one’s parents to the elements, eating them and burning them are radically different ways of expressing respect, but they are actually all ways of expressing respect—the reason why neither the Hellenes nor the Indians will give up their customs is because to do so would be a form of sacrilege, horrifying to the gods and unacceptable to any dutiful offspring. In other words, the same story can be told to illustrate the power of ‘difference’ or to bring to light a basic similarity, depending on what we hope to get from it. (Brown 2013a: 441)

Brown’s proposal is thus that the mistake of thick and fixed conceptions of human nature is that they elide difference because they operate at the wrong level of generality and that the task of giving the appropriate determinacy to the idea of human nature is one of providing an account that works at the right level of generality—and it is this level of generality that he proposes EP to provide. But is the appeal to EP necessary at all?

3   Theories of Human Rights and Appropriate Determinacy About Human Nature There are two major approaches to theorising human rights. The first, which most directly descends from natural right theory (Jones 1994; Griffin 2008: 9–28), conceptualises human rights as human rights, that is,

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in terms of rights held by persons simply in virtue of their humanity, where this refers to some property or features shared by (normally functioning) human beings. Three prominent variants on the ‘humanity’-based approach are the ‘personhood’ account (Griffin 2008), the ‘capabilities’ account (Nussbaum 1997) and the ‘basic needs’ account (Miller 2007a: 168–200). The first appeals to ‘personhood’ as an expression of the idea of dignity and identifies autonomy, freedom and minimum provision as the necessary conditions of normative agency that comprise ‘personhood’ and the protection of which generates human rights. The second appeals to a (defeasible) list of basic capabilities that are taken to be integral to flourishing of humans. The third grounds human rights on those basic needs (generic human interests) that are held to be universal conditions of a minimally decent life. The second type of approach to theorising human rights considers human rights as a public political doctrine or practice designed to specify conditions of membership of global political society. Here, we can distinguish between accounts based on international or global public reason (Rawls 1999; Cohen 2010) and on discourse ethics (Habermas 1996, 2001; Benhabib 2011; Forst 2012). These different approaches to the justification of human rights have implications for the range of rights identified as human rights and what count as ‘primary’ or ‘derivative’ human rights. One way of expressing the distinction between them is to note that the first approach holds that ‘primary’ human rights can be conceived independently of the practice of human rights as public, international standards of global political life, whereas the second approach conceives of human rights precisely in terms of their role as such standards. The initial question that the distinction between these two types of theory of human rights raises is whether the dilemma that Brown proposes is a genuine dilemma for either type of theory in its first aspect; that is, concerning determinacy and the appeal to human nature. If we consider the first type of theory, it seems that appeals to an account of human nature are part of the theoretical picture. This is straightforwardly the case in respect of Nussbaum’s version of the capability account of human rights in which a range of core capabilities are taken to be integral to human flourishing and any basic needs account—Miller’s is a good example—that grounds human rights on generic human interests is similarly situated. But the same point can also be made in relation to personhood accounts such as that of Griffin which focuses on personhood and, in contrast to Kant, practicalities (such as limits to human motivation and

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human cognition) as determinants of moral imperatives. That being said, it is helpful to note a difference between the three kinds of account that fall under this first type of theory of human rights: the personhood account appeals to the idea of a worthwhile life, the capabilities approach to the idea of a flourishing life, and the basic needs approach to the idea of a minimally decent life. These distinct aims for an account of human rights speak not only to differences of theoretical orientation and practical ambition in these theories, but also make different justificatory demands on the theories in terms of an account of human nature. Consider in this context, a criticism advanced by Miller of Griffin’s personhood account of human rights in which he argues that a basic needs account of human rights promotes the universal character of the protections human rights aim to provide, since basic needs are universally recognised, whereas the kind of personhood account Griffin advocates as the moral foundation of human rights appears to express a specifically Western liberal view of the individual (Miller 2012). There are two points worth noting about this criticism. First, the claim that basic needs are universally recognised. Second, the acknowledgment that an account of human rights needs not only to appeal to universally recognised features of the human condition but also needs to be seen as appealing to such universally recognised features if it is to command widespread support. Miller’s criticism and his own contrasting proposal of a basic needs account of human rights is designed (in this respect) to highlight the point that the legitimate authority of an account of human rights is based on its ability to ground a rational consensus on the normative significance of the features that it picks out for protection. Similarly, if we consider Nussbaum’s more ambitious proposal, we can note that she stresses that the list of core capabilities that she proposes as integral to human flourishing is an attempt to summarize the empirical findings of a broad and ongoing cross-cultural inquiry. As such, it is open-ended and humble; it can always be contested and remade. It does not claim to read facts of ‘human nature’ off of biological observation, although it does of course take account of biology as a relatively constant element in human experience. Nor does it deny that the items on the list are to some extent differently constructed by different societies. Indeed, part of the idea of the list is that its members can be more concretely specified in accordance with local beliefs and circumstances. In that sense, the consensus it hopes to evoke has many of the

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f­eatures of the ‘overlapping consensus’ described by Rawls. (Nussbaum 1997: 286)

As she notes, her ‘list is continually being revised and adjusted, in accordance with my methodological commitment to cross-cultural deliberation and criticism’ (Nussbaum 1997: 277). Nussbaum’s account is more ambitious than Miller’s and the justificatory standards that it must meet are more demanding, but it is clear about its commitment to an account of human nature. Both Miller’s minimalist strategy and Nussbaum’s more expansive approach—as well as the intermediate position represented by Griffin which focuses on a ‘worthwhile’ life—appeal to ‘objective’ facts about human nature. Thus, for example, Miller insists that a basic needs account is one that tries to determine what is actually necessary for people to lead decent lives in different cultural contexts, as opposed to what people in those cultures may believe is necessary. And here we must appeal to the fact that there are activities that humans engage in that are reiterated across contexts – activities such as working, playing, learning, raising families, and so forth – so that although the form the activity takes may vary from community to community, the activity itself can be described as universal. Let us refer to these as core human activities. Then we can say that a person has a decent life tout court when over the course of her life she is able to engage in each of the core activities, given the conditions prevailing in the society she belongs to. … She may of course choose not to engage in one or more of the core activities, but her life is decent so long as she is able to avail herself of the opportunity if she wants. Basic needs, then, are to be understood by reference to this idea of a decent human life. They are the conditions that must be met for a person to have a decent life given the environmental conditions she faces. The list of such needs will include (but not be exhausted by): food and water, clothing and shelter, physical security, health care, education, work and leisure, freedoms of movement, conscience and expression. (2007b: 5)

This ties a normative ideal (a decent human life) to what strikes me as an appropriately determinate (in Brown’s sense) account of human nature, that is, one that appeals to universal human activities. While it is certainly the case that such a view must not be incompatible with our best scientific account of human nature, it would not seem to require, from the

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s­ tandpoint of justification, any more than this. The same point applies to the different accounts offered by Griffin and Nussbaum which also aim to provide the kind of appropriately determinate account of human nature to which Brown’s use of Herodotus’ story concerning Darius directs us. The disagreements between these three theories of human rights are fundamentally philosophical disagreements about what we want a theory of human rights to do, rather than empirical disagreements about human nature. Thus, for example, Miller and Nussbaum could each accept, in entirety, the claims that the other makes about human nature without this touching on their disagreement about the proper role of a theory of human rights. What role does Brown’s appeal to EP play in this context? Brown acknowledges that human rights cannot be read off EP: ‘Scientific knowledge of the human animal will not tell us what sort of society we ought to promote, or what kind of rights we ought to assign to individuals, or, indeed, what kind of human capabilities we ought to allow to develop’ (2013a: 445). However, he argues, ‘it may eventually provide us with a set of parameters within which a substantive account of human flourishing will have to be constructed’ (Brown 2013a: 445). Thus, if the account of human flourishing at stake in a basic needs or personhood or capability account is, in some respect or other, incompatible with such parameters, that would serve a reason to revise or reject such an account. But unless we already have reasons robustly based on such an account, as Brown acknowledges that for the most part we do not, then we currently have no reason to be sceptical of these accounts on scientific grounds. When we turn to the second type of theory, it is unclear that an account of human nature is required in the same way since the idea of human rights is not advancing the same type of pre-institutional perspective and the legitimacy of an account of human rights conceived as membership rights of global political society is directly tied to public justification of the rights in question. The relevant contrast between the first and second types of theories of human rights is, thus, that the former aim at public justification of the claims concerning transcultural features of human nature that they identify as underpinning human rights, whereas the latter focus on direct public justification for human rights claims. As I have noted, this certainly implies that, at the level of justification, the former must not be incompatible with our best scientific description of universal human nature, but it need not imply that this type of theory of human rights ‘rests’ on an account of human nature in any stronger sense than

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this. In the case of the second type of theory of human rights, justification seems to require no direct relationship to an account of universal human nature. Do these considerations imply that Brown’s dilemma is otiose? It might seem so, but I think that this conclusion would be too fast and skate too quickly over Brown’s concerns both about the salience of human nature for both types and about the openness of human rights discourse to manipulation by powerful actors. We might say that these two types of theory offer responses to Brown’s dilemma with respect to the grounding of human rights, that is, the moral justification of human rights claims but do not adequately address the significance of the social legitimacy of the practice of human rights for its political justification. To bring this point into focus, we can bring Brown’s argument into conversation with the approach adopted by Charles Beitz, most notably in his book The Idea of Human Rights (2009), in which he attempts to offer a political, rather than moral, justification of human rights in which considerations of social legitimacy are adequately integrated.

4   A Practice Theory of Human Rights Beitz’s argument is motivated by noting two facts. First, that the post-war period, particularly since the 1970s, has seen the creation of a dense web of international treaties, organisations and practices designed to regulate state conduct with regard to the urgent interests of their populations. Second, that despite this elaborate international practice of human rights, the idea of human rights can also engender a disabling scepticism directed at the scope, content and costs of human rights. Distinguishing between ‘naturalistic’ and ‘agreement’ types of theories of human rights, Beitz’s argues that neither is adequate—and proposes an alternative: a ‘practice’ theory of human rights. With respect to ‘naturalistic’ theories of human rights—and Beitz considers both ‘personhood’ and ‘basic capabilities’ approaches as exemplars of this type of theory—he argues that they don’t adequately incorporate ‘considerations about the discursive functions of human rights within existing practice’: ‘International human rights are potential triggers of transnational protective and remedial action and should be suitable to function as justification of it’ (2009: 65). This links to a second problem, namely, their weakness in illuminating the ‘problem of contribution’, that is, most notably, ‘the extent of failure or default at the domestic level required to trigger protective or remedial action by

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outside agents, the selection of agents from among those in a position to act which have responsibilities to do so, and most fundamentally, the nature and demandingness of the reasons that pertain to these agents’ (2009: 65). A third issue is that the list of protections is likely to fall short of those ‘actually found in international human rights doctrine’ (2009: 66) and a consequent fourth is that, given such a discrepancy must ground ‘at least prima facie reason to reform international doctrine’ (2009: 66), we can reasonably ask why we should ‘insist that international human rights conform to a received philosophical conception rather than interpret them, as they present themselves, as a distinct normative system designed to play a special role in global political life’ (2009: 67). Beitz’s scepticism concerning the adequacy of the first (naturalistic) type of theory would seem to align him with the second type of theory of human rights under which I have indeed categorised him. However, Beitz distinguishes his approach from what he calls ‘agreement’ theories of human rights (e.g., theories based on intercultural consensus) which, in any of common core or overlapping consensus or progressive convergence models, he finds either to rest on actual agreement in a way that constructs a choice between giving up on intercultural agreement or accepting a highly restricted account of human rights or to appeal to a notion of progressive convergence that cannot bear the justificatory weight that the work of human rights demands (2009: 73–95). Instead, Beitz proposes that we address human rights in terms of the role that they play in the discursive practice of global political life, that is, it takes the doctrine and practices of human rights as we currently find them as the basis for constructing a conception of human rights whereby the content of human rights is constrained by the public political role that human rights are expected to play. So Beitz remarks: An understanding of this public role constrains the content of the doctrine. Whatever else is true of human rights, they are supposed to be matters of international concern in the sense that a society’s failure to respect its people’s human rights on a sufficiently large scale may provide a reason for outside agents to do something. (2009: 105)

At this point, let us bring Beitz’s discussion into dialogue with Brown’s concerns both about theories of human rights and about the future of human rights.

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We can start by noting that advocates of a naturalistic theory of human rights such as Brown have resources for responding to Beitz’s criticisms. Thus, it is worth noting that the first two of Beitz’s criticisms can also be advanced against ‘personhood’ and ‘capability’ accounts from within the first (naturalistic) type of theory of human rights. Thus, for example, Miller’s argument for a ‘basic needs’ account takes the role that human rights are designed to play in global political life as a further reason to prefer a ‘basic needs’ account to a ‘personhood’ account (and would presumably make the same critical point about a ‘capability’ account) since a needs-based account identifies the political nature of human rights claims as invoked against states. This is a consequence of his employment of ‘a distinction between basic needs and societal needs, where the former are to be understood as the conditions for a decent human life in any society, and the latter as the more expansive set of requirements for a decent life in the particular society to which a person belongs’ (Miller 2007b: 4). Thus, as he remarks: Using this distinction, shelter from the elements would count as a basic need, whereas shelter in the form of having a fixed dwelling place would be a societal need in most societies in the contemporary world, but not in all. A person suffers harm if either her basic needs or her societal needs go unfulfilled, but it is basic needs that ground her human rights, whereas societal needs correspond to what we may call rights of citizenship – rights held by virtue of membership in a particular society, and held against the other members of that society rather than against humanity at large. (Miller 2007b: 4)

This point is salient because, in response to Beitz’s closely related third and fourth criticisms, the basic needs account advanced by Miller can charge that Beitz is posing a false dilemma and, on this account, there is no tension between ‘a received philosophical conception’ and a ‘normative system designed to play a special role in global political life’. That the basic needs account may recognise fewer human rights than international doctrine provides a prima facie rationale for reform of international doctrine precisely because it acknowledges the special role that human rights play in global political life. I do not mean to suggest with these remarks that only a basic needs account can respond to Beitz’s criticisms, although it is well suited to do so, but to draw attention to the point that naturalistic theories of human

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rights can come in several flavours and at least some are capable of accommodating the critical points raised by Beitz. This point becomes more salient when we reflect on the criticisms that Brown’s reflections on sovereignty, human rights and global power enable to be addressed at Beitz’ alternative approach.

5   Sovereignty, Human Rights and Global Power Reflecting on the implications of the contemporary architecture of global politics in terms of the proliferation of relevant non-state actors and the changing power configurations between state actors, Brown draws attention to both the increasingly prominent role of human rights discourse and practice, especially since the 1970s, and the development of both international criminal law (exemplified by the founding of the International Criminal Court) and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine in terms that demonstrate this role even as the major treaties and covenants that establish human rights are also standardly framed in terms that assume a world of plural states and make reference to the sovereignty of states. The question that he addresses concerns the relationship between sovereignty and human rights within the contemporary architecture of global politics and he does so by integrating historical and contemporary perspectives. His first point of integration highlights the fact that the endorsement of sovereignty as a normative status of states should be seen in the light of the contested meaning of this status. Drawing attention to the history of the practice of attributing sovereignty since its emergence within Europe from the Peace of Westphalia to its global confirmation in the 1945 UN Charter, Brown highlights the point that the strong notion of sovereignty as dominium around which the European state system coalesced in the seventeenth century is present in the Peace of Westphalia, strongly asserted in the positive international law of the nineteenth century and also ‘partially represented in UN Charter of 1945’ which aims to limit the right of states to wage war but ‘actually restates very firmly the doctrine that the state is sovereign in its own territory’ (Brown 2013b: 7). Running through this history is the thought that intervention in state’s domestic affairs can only be justified if these affairs pose a threat to the peace and security of other states or of the international system. However, alongside this limited (if widely used) justification of intervention, the history of the status of sovereignty also sees interventions justified by reference to ‘violations of

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decent standards of behaviour’ by the ruler intervened against. For example, as Brown notes: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this argument was generally deployed within the Holy Roman Empire, which Simms establishes continued to be a political reality in a way that conventional accounts of Westphalia sometimes denied, but in the nineteenth century explicitly humanitarian interventions took place in a number of geographic locations far beyond the confines of Empire. (Brown 2013b: 9)

To adopt the contemporary slogan, this practice of attributing the normative status of sovereignty can be seen in terms of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ rather than as dominium—and this conception of sovereignty was central to European imperialist projects. This notion can be seen clearly in the concept of ‘standards of civilization’ developed in the later part of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, projects of colonial rule were justified in terms of the establishment of civilization. On the other hand, it also facilitated non-colonial forms of imperialism whereby establishing particular institutions and standards of rule became a condition of being treated as equal members of international society. As Brown wryly notes, such standards ‘were applied only to non-Western civilizations’ and ‘existing members of the international community were not subjected to these standards, this was because of the (rather optimistic) assumption that they already abided by them’ (Brown 2013b: 9). The point of this historical nuancing of the history of the Janus-faced norm of sovereignty/non-intervention is to contextualise the relationship of ‘emergent powers’ such as China, Russia, India and Brazil to the contemporary development of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ expressed in the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and of the doctrine of R2P. Brown points out that to the extent that Samuel Moyn’s thesis that human rights in the 1970s can be characterised as ‘the last utopia’ is justified, it represented a specifically European vision of world politics – a European utopia’ which can be seen as an attempt to make the world look more like the kind of political order that has developed in Western Europe since the Second World War, and West Central Europe since 1989, that is, an order with significant pooling of sovereignty, a recognition of substantial areas of economic, political and social life as subject to supranational decision-making, and the abolition of the possibility of inter-state war. (Brown 2013b: 12)

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The scepticism of emergent powers towards the vision of world order expressed in the current forms of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and their endorsement of contemporary forms of ‘sovereignty as dominium’ is, it seems likely, in part motivated by the fact that they ‘are deeply suspicious of the power of the United States and its allies, and are inclined to see an active human rights policy and the redefinitions of sovereignty adopted by the latter as moves in a power-political game rather than as normatively driven actions’ (Brown 2013b: 15). However, Brown argues, the scepticism of states such as India and China is also rooted in their historical experience of the varied forms of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ over the past few centuries in which European states’ actions outside of Europe denied the legitimacy of non-European rulers and their relations were governed instead by considerations of relative power justified in terms of purported European standards of civilization. The route by which, in the mid-1970s, India and China established themselves as full members of international society, who, for the most part, abide by the post-war rules of this order, makes them highly reluctant to revisions to that order: perhaps largely because of the long and difficult road that they have had to take in order to have that status recognised by the major powers, their new peers – they are very resistant to the idea of revising that account, which was what the European members of that society were beginning to attempt to do at exactly the point when India and China finally achieved full membership under the old rules. Having only recently escaped from the experience of being dominated by European imperialism, these countries were now experiencing new attempts to circumscribe their freedom of action in the name of human rights and sovereignty as responsibility. (Brown 2013b: 19)

The increasing economic power of states such as China and India supports their ability to resist—and coordinate resistance to—the ‘new rules’ proposed by European states. How does this bear on Beitz’s argument? Human rights, on Beitz’s account, are ‘standards for domestic institutions whose satisfaction is a matter of international concern’ (2009: 128), and he proposes what he terms a ‘precautionary’ account of human rights in which, taking the structural features of a global society of states as fixed and recognising that this global order is capable of self-regulation, it is a condition of people being willing to accept and support this global order that it protects their most urgent

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interests against the standard predictable threat posed by this composition of this global order as a society of states through ‘an apparatus by which the domestic jurisdiction of states could be limited and its exercise regulated’ (2009: 131).

This is the precautionary role of the global practice of human rights. Beitz identifies two challenges to this view, and Brown’s argument speaks to both of these challenges. The first challenge emerges from the anti-imperial concerns that Brown identifies and rests on the point that, given inequalities of power, a global practice of human rights can be manipulated for the strategic reasons of powerful states. Beitz acknowledges this concern as a matter of significance for the scope and design of human rights as a precautionary apparatus (2009: 134–5). Thus, for example, he identifies the following criticisms: (a) human rights as a vehicle of moral/cultural imperialism, (b) the use of human rights to secure ends that are primarily motivated by strategic foreign policy objectives and (c) power-based inconsistencies in the application of human rights norms (2009: 201–8). Furthermore, Beitz acknowledges that these ‘pathologies’ of human rights practice are ‘genuine political possibilities’ and that this suggests stable development of the human rights project is best supported by building broad consensus between states concerning the scope and application of human rights norms (2009: 209). Yet establishing such a consensus against the background of BRIC scepticism concern ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and their defence of ‘sovereignty as dominion’ is itself likely to involve a non-­ trivial revision of existing human rights practice. The second challenge concerns the relationship between the practice of human rights and the right to collective self-determination of states. Here Beitz recognises that the nature and extent of possible conflict between these two dimensions of the global political order depends on how the details of the practice of human rights and of collective self-determination are filled in. Thus, he acknowledges that if we supposed as starting points ‘the combination of an extensive list of protections, a principle justifying coercive international action in any case of substantial violation and a conception of self-determination whose conditions could be satisfied by most any actually occurring type of regime’, then ‘the prospect of frequent, objectionable interferences would be hard to deny’ (2009: 135–6), but he immediately remarks that ‘of course we need not take any of the starting points as given’. This is true, but what he does not seem to do, however,

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is note that the first set of anti-imperial concerns have significant purchase in terms of how the practices of human rights and of collective self-­ determination are fleshed out nor that, as Brown indicates, states such as China and India have both historical reasons to distrust the post-1970s human rights agenda and the economic power to mobilise this distrust in ways salient for the global practice of human rights. Thus, while Beitz goes a considerable way to acknowledging the kinds of concerns that Brown identifies emergent powers as having with respect to the evolving human rights regime and the conception of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ that it supports and also to recognising that such concerns may support revisionary moves with respect to the existing practice of human rights in terms of scope and design, his focus on defending the idea of a global practice of human rights leads him to leave indeterminate what kinds of revisions would be justified to meet the two challenges that he recognises. It is here, I think, that Brown’s own focus on human rights and human nature comes into play as a way of reducing the gap between ‘naturalistic’ and ‘practice’ theories of human rights. Consider Beitz’s own schema for justifying the content of human rights: 1. That the interest that would be protected by the right is sufficiently important when reasonably regarded from the perspective of those protected that it would be reasonable to consider its protection a political priority. 2. That it would be advantageous to protect the underlying interest by means of legal or political instruments available to the state. 3. That in the central range of cases in which a state might fail to provide this protection, the failure would be a suitable object of international concern. If the global practice of human rights is to be acceptable and sustain support among both individuals and states, then it is important that we have epistemic confidence in the identification of the relevant set of interests, that we have practical confidence in the judgement that the relevant interests require legal or political protection in the state (i.e., that they are vulnerable to public or private forms of power unless protected), and that we have political confidence in the ability of external actors to secure any of such interests in the absence of state protection in ways that do not themselves seriously threaten the interest(s) at stake or other such important

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interests. In addition, following this discussion, we can add a fourth desideratum: 4. That the means through which (a) what counts as a suitable object of international concern are identified, (b) how international concern is practically articulated and (c) the consistency of its application are each protected against egregious manipulation by powerful actors. Thus, we also require social confidence in the articulation of the practice of human rights. It may seem that Brown’s focus on human nature is primarily concerned with addressing the issue of epistemic confidence. We can put the point like this: if we are to avoid the concern that the identification of such interests represents a distinct cultural outlook, then we need reason to think of the interests concerned as genuinely universal, that is, as grounded in features of human nature. This aspect of Brown’s argument is one that is acknowledged by both the basic needs and core capabilities approaches to human rights which propose defeasible accounts of human nature that are open to revision as our scientific knowledge of human nature develops (perhaps on the basis of the emerging discipline of EP). Brown’s appeal to EP is, I think, in the first instance simply intended to bolster our confidence in the idea of common human nature that can ground the identification of such interests and in the idea that we can identify the parameters within which accounts of human flourishing must be situated. However, it is not limited to this role, bearing also on the second and fourth desiderata. The second desideratum addresses the issue of whether the urgent interest in question requires legal or political protection and, hence, implicitly the contrasting question of whether the interest can be secured through social arrangements in absence of such protection. Thus, for example, Brown notes: It does seem to be the case that males, especially young men, have a ‘natural’ tendency (i.e., a genetic predisposition) towards violence, but it is clearly highly desirable that this tendency be controlled, and there is also plenty of evidence that it can be …. The message here is not that, simply because it is natural, male violence is somehow inevitable, but rather that it would be unwise to design human institutions on the basis that such violence is learned behaviour, with the concomitant that, with the right kind of educa-

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tion and social environment, restraints on violent behaviour would be unnecessary. (2013a: 445)

To the extent that this type of scientific claim is well supported, it has clear implications for identifying interests that require legal or political protection. If we turn to the fourth desideratum, we can note that Brown’s survey of EP literature draws attention to several posited features of human nature that are salient for our concerns. Thus, for example, he comments: In The Blank Slate, [Steven] Pinker (2002), who is more willing to generalise than most, summarised the evidence as it then stood in a series of generalisations, which clearly will be refined over time, but, as things stand, are very well supported: human beings, left to their own devices, tend to be selfish and somewhat violent animals. We are biased in favour of our kin and immediate circle of friends, and are potentially ethnocentric, violent and domineering. Cooperative behaviour is kin-based or based on reciprocity. (2013a: 447)

If these generalisations turn out to be well supported, they have potential significance for the articulation of human rights, in particular for the design of the institutions though which human rights are identified and applied. Thus, for example, they would point to the importance of participation of diverse social actors in the epistemic task of identifying urgent interests and matters of international concern, and of authorising and reviewing the application of human rights as well as the need to build reciprocity-based mechanisms for the consistent application and implementation of human rights. The more general significance of these points is twofold. First, they indicate that the ‘gap’ between ‘naturalistic’ and ‘practice’ theories of human rights can be reduced in either direction by showing both that a practice-based account of human rights cannot be independent of naturalistic considerations and that naturalistic theories of human rights need to acknowledge the practical role of human rights. Second, they point to the need to recognise that the ability of the idea of human rights to generate and sustain social legitimacy is importantly dependent on the articulation of the practice of human rights—and to acknowledge that the history of Western imperialism (formal and informal) provides principled reasons for

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non-Western states to be sceptical of the kind of expansive practices of human rights represented by the ICC and R2P. Addressing this issue as an issue for the political justification of human rights means being prepared to engage with revisions to the scope of human rights in existing global practice and to take more seriously the issue of consistency of application of human rights standards. In this context, the advantage of Brown’s naturalistic approach is that, given its focus on human flourishing, it is compatible with a range of more or less ambitious human rights regimes and can coherently adjust its focus by attuning its commitments to considerations of social legitimacy. Thus, for example, in the context of the considerations that arise for BRIC states, it can acknowledge these by adopting a basic needs account focused on the conditions of a minimally decent life that serves as a critical standard without taking this to represent that last word on human rights. In this way, it can give greater and more principled determinacy to the revisionary enterprise than Beitz’s approach seems able to provide.

6   Conclusion Recall the dilemma that at the beginning of this chapter I have taken Brown to propose: Human rights require the idea of a universal human nature to legitimate their standing as articulating universal moral claims but we have good historically grounded reasons to be distrustful of ways of filling in this idea, of making it determinate, that are thick and fixed, while if the content of this idea is left too indeterminate, then the discourse and practice of human rights is open to manipulation by powerful actors.

From a standpoint internal to the kind of naturalistic approach to human rights that Brown favours, it could be argued that this dilemma is otiose because there are well-developed naturalistic accounts that already appeal in an appropriately determinate way to the idea of a universal human nature. From the standpoint of the ‘agreement’ theories of human rights, the dilemma may be seen as otiose because the kind of grounding of human rights at stake needs no appeal to a universal human nature for justificatory purposes. I have argued that such responses would be too quick and misunderstand the force of the dilemma that Brown proposes because they focus on moral justification, that is on the grounding of

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human rights, and fail adequately to recognise the importance of the social legitimacy of human rights within the architecture of global politics for a political theory of human rights. Bringing Brown’s argument into dialogue with Beitz’s practice-based theory of human rights provided a way of developing this point. In developing this engagement, my aim was not to reject Beitz’s approach but rather to show that defenders of a naturalistic approach such as Brown have resources to respond to it and that these resources extend to showing that Beitz’s approach cannot sensibly avoid acknowledging the salience of naturalistic claims for a political theory of human rights if it is to respond to the challenges that it faces. Perhaps more importantly, the engagement with Beitz’s approach allows us to see how Brown’s reflection on human rights and human nature, on the one hand, and his considerations of human rights, sovereignty and global power, on the other hand, are linked by more than the person of their author as related elements of distinctively political mode of theorising human rights which attempts to integrate questions of moral justification and of social legitimacy in way that is sensitive to human beings as products of both evolution and history. Although I am considerably more sceptical than Brown about the status of the claims advanced by EP (Bell 2006), this does nothing to undermine the form of argument that he provides or the requirements that this form of argument poses for an adequate political theory of human rights.

References Beitz, C. (2009). The Idea of Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, D. (2006). Beware of False Prophets: Biology, Human Nature and the Future of International Relations Theory. International Affairs, 82(3), 493–510. Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, C. (2013a). Human Nature, Science and International Political Theory. Journal of International Relations and Development, 16(4), 435–454. Brown, C. (2013b). ‘Sovereignty Versus Human Rights in a Post-Western World?’ ESRC Seminar Series. ‘Normative Challenges to International Society—Rising Powers and Global Responses’, 2nd Seminar, 22 March, 2013. Cohen, J.  (2010). The Arc of the Moral Universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forst, R. (2012). The Right to Justification. New York: Columbia University Press. Griffin, J. (2008). On Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Habermas, J.  (2001). Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles? Political Theory, 29(6), 766–781. Jones, P. (1994). Rights. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, D. (2007a). National Responsibility and Global Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, D. (2007b). Human Rights, Basic Needs, & Scarcity. Centre for the Study of Social Justice Working Paper Series (SJ007). Miller, D. (2012). Grounding Human Rights. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 15, 407–427. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Capabilities and Human Rights. Fordham Law Review, 66(2), 273–300. Rawls, J. (1999). The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 10

The Ethics of Brexit Mervyn Frost

1   Introduction I am delighted to contribute to the Festschrift honouring the contribution of Chris Brown to international relations (IR). There are many who have made contributions to IR in one role or another but few who have starred in as many key academic roles as he has done. He has produced groundbreaking publications (books, articles, textbooks) and has taught courses that inspired generations of students (many of whom who have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and beyond). He has headed the great Department of IR at the London School of Economics (LSE), and was president of the British International Studies Association. He has never been a remote academic figure but was (and is) always ready for a bracing conversation. Underpinning these activities has been his extraordinarily wide-ranging scholarship in the fields of history, sociology, political economy, literature, film and music. In this article, I wish to build on a suggestion Brown made in ‘The Ethics of Political Restructuring’ which appeared 23 years ago in a book he edited and entitled Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives (Brown 1994). The restructuring under discussion then was precipitated

M. Frost (*) King’s College, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_10

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by the breakup of the Soviet Union and the knock-on effects of this for Europe widely construed. Although the issues being faced then were different to those facing Europe and the EU today, I believe that the ethical approach Brown advocated is as pertinent now as it was then. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was unravelling, the EU was expanding, and the restructuring of Europe was high on the political agenda. Fifteen new states were coming into existence. The restructuring in question concerned the constitutional forms these would embrace and the relations between them that would be established. A quarter of a century later Europe is facing a different set of problems that call for restructuring, both within and beyond the EU. These have been brought about by the knock-on effects of the financial crisis of 2008 (in particular as these affected Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal); the refugee drama playing itself out across the EU and causing internal conflict in most European states; and the referendum in the UK which committed the country to Brexit. Questions about restructuring are back on the agenda. In what follows, I shall consider one element of this restructuring, Brexit. More specifically I shall put forward a case that there are profound ethical dimensions to Brexit that have not properly been considered. The focus has been largely on the pragmatic and political reasons for and against Brexit. It is important to supplement this with a consideration of its ethical dimensions. In his article on the ethics of restructuring, Brown made a case for constitutive theory as a way of approaching the ethical issues involved. In what follows, I shall extend his analysis, illustrating how constitutive theory produces surprising, enlightening and important results that have so far been absent from the debate. The insights point to a set of political imperatives that ought not to be ignored.

2   The Ethics of Brexit As indicated, there has been a lack of sustained discussion about the ethics of Brexit, both during the referendum and subsequently. The pros and cons of Brexit have been discussed in instrumental terms—in terms of its ability to advance (or not) the UK’s national interests. For example, amongst other things, the pro Brexit camp highlighted the following: the money that could be saved for use by the National Health Service (NHS), the bureaucratic complexities that would be avoided by leaving the EU, the improved trade deals that could be made globally, the increased control the British government would have over affairs in all policy areas and so on.

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On the other side, arguments were put forward about the costs that would be incurred by leaving the EU, such as the problems that would be encountered in recruiting labour (in the hospitality industry, for old age care, in the health sector), the devaluation of the pound against other currencies that would inevitably follow Brexit and the likelihood that many companies would relocate their headquarters to mainland Europe. The background assumption to this argument for and against is that the EU is an organisation created by its member states for instrumental purposes. It is to be understood as analogous to a cooperative that farmers might create to advance their individual interests. In such associations, formed for instrumental reasons, there is nothing ethically problematic about newcomers joining and existing members resigning, as their calculations about interests change over time. The closest to a discussion of ethical issues that has emerged in the Brexit debate so far have been references to the goal of regaining sovereignty. But there has not been any detailed discussion about how the ethical value of sovereignty relates to other values such as justice, human rights, equality, liberty and democracy. Over and above these ‘rational actor’ type discussions about how best to advance UK national interests, there have been discussions about the political consequences of staying in the union or leaving it. The pro Brexit lobby stressed the political goal of ‘taking back control.’ Those in the ‘remain’ camp pointed to a loss of engagement in EU decision-making that would follow Brexit. This loss of political influence was portrayed as being of major significance for British national interests. There is one vantage point from which the absence of any consideration of ethical issues with regard to Brexit seems easy to explain. On this view, it is self-evident that the parties to the EU treaties which, taken together, constitute the EU, are all sovereign states. This is a status well understood in international law and is itself underpinned by a number of ethical principles, the most important of which is freedom understood as autonomy. On this view, in creating the EU, each state was simply exercising its freedom (i.e., its sovereignty) to enter into a complex of treaties with other states. In doing this, the states were forming an association of free states, freely entered into. This process may be seen as akin to the formation of a club by cyclists for the purpose of advancing their common interests in cycling. Clearly, when considering such associations, the participants must be understood as exercising their rights, that is, as making use of the ethical standing they enjoy as rights holders. If the goals of the association they

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are establishing are not ethically obnoxious, then, from their point of view there is nothing ethically problematic about them joining or leaving it. Of course, a participant deciding to leave the association would be ethically and legally responsible for any outstanding debts to it. This simple understanding of the EU as an association based on contract is the one that has framed the discussions about Brexit from the start. Brexit is understood as involving nothing more ethically complicated than that encountered by participants in any other kind of association when exercising their legal and ethical right to leave. There is, though, a second way of evaluating the ethics of Brexit that shows it to be altogether more ethically complicated than was suggested by the contractual account outlined earlier.1 It is holist. This approach does not start by taking for granted the UK’s status as an individual state entitled to make decisions about the ethics of exiting or remaining in the EU. Instead, when applying the holist point of view, the starting point is to ask, ‘What is the ethical structure of the social practice(s) within which the UK is constituted as a sovereign state (with the autonomy that this is understood to entail)?’ The answer to this framework question then provides a point of departure for considering the question: What would it be ethical to do in these circumstances? The holist question is prompted by the general insight that to be an actor of a certain kind (professor, priest, general, medical doctor, accountant, etc.) is to be constituted as such within a specific social practice. The insight applies to collective actors, too (schools, universities, corporations, churches, clubs and all the many different kinds of social formation including sovereign states). The practices in which the actors are thus constituted all have within them at least the following: systems of mutual recognition, constitutive rules which determine who is to count as a participant, rules which spell out what counts as appropriate conduct for participants and rules which specify what would count as inappropriate conduct which would justify expulsion of a participant from the practice. Crucially, all practices within which actors are constituted, encapsulate within them sets of ethical commitments which are binding upon the participants. Here is a simple example. To be an academic in the practice of university life (professor, research fellow and ­student) is to be one who is recognised by the other participants as one who understands how to follow the rules of academic life and who knows what values are established and maintained by doing so. An academic understands the rules of recognition which determine who is to count as a professor, research fellow or student; who understands the rules involved

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in participating in a seminar; the conventions governing examinations; and so on. But academics also understand the ethics of university life—the values that underpin its elaborate network of rules. These include values such as the pursuit of knowledge, the search for truth, the value of honesty in the production of experiments, the rejection of plagiarism, a commitment to free speech, the value of free access to publications and so on. In their daily round, academics might not be self-consciously aware of these ethical matters all the time, they simply assume them, as a matter of course. It is important to notice that these are not values that academics choose; rather it is the other way about, if one chooses to be an academic, adherence to these values is a prerequisite for becoming one. The same analysis can be applied to all games. Participants know the rules which specify how the game is to be played and they know the ethical requirements embedded in them. These typically involve a commitment to the values of competition, fun, and a rejection of cheating. In all the practices in which actors are constituted as participants, to flout the embedded values of the practice is to risk expulsion or excommunication from it.2 All this may be summed up by saying that in social practices the participants are constituted and constrained by the rules and ethics internal to them. On this analysis, ethical considerations are to be found in everything we do, in all the many practices within which we are constituted as participants entitled to do certain things within them. Ethics is not something that comes into play from time to time in exceptional circumstances; it is in play all the time. It is always possible to ask within any practice: What are the ethical values that are created and upheld in this practice? Also, we can always ask of any action or proposed set of actions: Does this action cohere with and uphold the values embedded in this practice or does it undermine them? At the heart of this kind of more profound ethical analysis is the insight that the social practices in which we are constituted as actors of a certain kind are, we may say, ethical achievements. They are arrangements which have been created or have emerged over time in which certain valued ethical statuses have come into being. So, when considering proposed changes to the ethical edifices in which we are constituted (such as the proposal to Brexit), we have to start by asking, what, from an ethical point of view, has been achieved in this set of practices and will what is proposed protect and advance its achievements or undermine them? In order to apply this holist view to the case of Brexit, we must first determine what practices constitute the actors involved in this course of

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action. Who are the participants in this process and within what social practice or practices are they constituted as participants of this kind? At first glance, it might seem that the primary participants are the 28 member states of the EU and their citizens. Crucially, though, this set of states and the union they formed, the EU, is not the relevant practice we are looking for here. For we are seeking the practice within which the state participants who formed the EU were constituted as that kind of actor entitled to form a union like the EU. The relevant constituting practice is much larger than the 28; it is the global society of 195 sovereign states. To create the EU, a treaty-based organisation, these states made use of the status they enjoyed as participants in this global practice. This is a practice in which everyone everywhere, through their state, is a participant.3 The key features of this practice are well understood by participants in the practice. They have to understand them otherwise they would not be able to participate.4 The participant states in the society of sovereign states understand sovereignty (a status that they all enjoy as equals), they understand the practice to be anarchical (that is, as one without a central government), they understand themselves to be bound by, among others things, international law, the rules of diplomacy, the mechanisms of the balance of power, the conventions of war, and the role of key international organisations. Day in and day out, the state participants act in accordance with these rules. It is in terms of these, the constitutive rules of this practice, that they understand their own actions and the actions of the other participating 195 states. Within the practice there are, as is well known, often disputes, some are settled in international courts, while others lead on to war, an activity which itself is governed by an elaborate system of conventions. Over and above understanding the ‘rules of the game,’ the participants in this society of sovereign states also understand the ethical values created and upheld within it. The primary ones are the freedom (sovereignty/autonomy) this practice accords to participant states and the diversity that this freedom encourages and makes possible between them. The society of sovereign states as a global practice did not always exist. Our system of sovereign states in which each state is considered to be equal in its sovereignty must be understood as an achievement (as progress) when compared to that which went before. It is an achievement created piecemeal over time. Before its creation, for centuries, macro social relations had been organised in any number of different ways. A common and prominent form was empire, characterised by hierarchical structures of rule in which an imperial centre ruled a colonial periphery.5

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The society of sovereign states is not the only global practice of ethical significance within which the participants in Brexit are constituted as actors entitled to do this. The people involved are concurrently constituted as participants in a second global practice, the global rights practice (which I shall also refer to as global civil society). This is the practice within which participants recognise one another as right holders. This practice can be conceived of as independent of the practice of sovereign states because, in it, participants claim rights for themselves (and recognise them in others) without reference to any bounded sovereign state. The rights recognised in this practice include first- and second-generation rights. In the first category are rights such as the right not to be killed, assaulted and tortured; the right to own property; the right to privacy; and the right to freedom of movement, conscience and assembly. In the second category are the so called welfare rights, like the right to life, to an education, to health, old age care, and so forth. Within the rights practice there are intense and ongoing debates about what constitutes a full list of human rights. These discussions are internal to the rights practice. To repeat the central point, the participants in the rights practice are people who claim rights for themselves. The class of people who do this includes just about everyone, everywhere and certainly includes all those participating in Brexit. Participants in this practice often use the global rights practice as a basis from which to criticise sovereign states and other collective actors that abuse human rights. A prominent component of the global rights practice is to be found in the global free market within which most people, in most places, are active participants. Since the market is a component of the rights practice, the participants in it must be understood as having individual rights to own property, make contracts, form companies, borrow and lend money, and so on. This is what a free market is. If one did not understand these rights-based concepts, one would not be able to participate in it. The global rights practice, like the society of sovereign states, did not always exist. Prior to its formation, people were participants in many social practices profoundly different from the human rights practice. For long periods of history, social forms predicated on slavery were common. So too were patriarchal practices in which women were accorded inferior ethical statuses to men. From the vantage point of participants in the contemporary rights practice, the ethical achievements of this practice compared to what went before are considerable. As things currently stand not everyone is equally embedded in the global rights practice; in many parts

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of the world, there are people who, while participating in the rights practice, are also still participating in practices antipathetic to it, like sub-state tribal forms which are patriarchal in form. This, not surprisingly, is a source of considerable internal conflict for the people involved. The full realisation of the rights practice is itself hindered by many states which allow the rights holders the freedom to move capital and goods, but do not permit the free movement of labour. To complete our analysis of the ethical architecture of the global practices in which the participants in the Brexit process are constituted, there are four more characteristics of these practices that need elucidation. First, unlike the examples of practices used to introduce practice theory above (universities, games), these two global practices are not static but dynamic. We regularly change them to cope with new circumstances. Pressures for change stem from, amongst other things, the interaction between the global practices; international events like world wars; major demographic changes; pressures for change brought about by many features of globalisation; and the emergence of many new technologies, including those associated with the Internet and the cyber sphere more generally. As participants in these practices consider ways of dealing with such pressures for change, they have to consider the ethical implications of any proposed changes. The enduring difficulty participants face is that of bringing about an ethically coherent architecture within and between these practices, one that avoids presenting them with ongoing and seemingly unsolvable ethical dilemmas produced in concurrent practices that set contradictory ethical imperatives. Closely linked to the changing character of our global practices is a second distinctive feature which is the severe ethical tensions that exist between them. The most dramatic of these is the tension between states’ rights in the practice of sovereign states and individual rights in the global rights practice. Recall that each one of us is concurrently a participant in both practices. The roles we occupy in them are a central component of who we are—we are constituted as participants in both, that is, as civilians in global civil society and as citizens in the society of sovereign states. We are not accorded the option of joining one or the other but find ourselves participants in both. It is easy to see how the ethical imperatives of the two practices pull us in different directions. As citizens of one or another sovereign state, we consider our state justified in pursuing its national interest. This line of thinking is clear in the aspirations of Brexiteers who understand the UK to be exercising a fundamental ethical right that

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Britain has in the society of sovereign states—the right of exit from a treaty-based agreement. It is a right that states have subject to the constraint that they recognise other states as having the same right. However, when we think of ourselves in our capacity as civilians, in the global rights practice, we may well be led to challenge narrow state-centric policies focused on the national interest of our state which can only be achieved at the cost of ignoring the human rights of others (e.g., refugees). This tension between states’ rights and individual rights is prominently displayed in the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe. As right holders in the global rights practice, we recognise an ethical obligation to respect the fundamental rights of refugees and migrants more generally, including their right to freedom of movement. Whereas, as citizens of specific European states, we consider that our state has a right to protect its own market, religion, culture, nation and politics. It has a right to protect these from waves of migrants. A similar tension reveals itself when considering humanitarian intervention. As right holders, we might consider that we have a duty to protect other rights holders wherever they happen to be, even if this imposes severe costs on our own state. Whereas, if we put the sovereign right of our state to pursue its own interests as primary, then we are likely to reject calls to make sacrifices in blood and treasure in order to help people cope with rights abuses taking place where they are. On the face of the matter, it would appear that we have to choose between states’ rights and individual rights. The third feature of our global practices to highlight is the dialectical processes at work within and between them. By ‘dialectical,’ I refer to a multistage process through which, in the first stage, the ethical actions of participants within them, through multiple iterations over time, lead to outcomes that undercut the core values of the practices in which they are active. It is easy to see the process at work in market economies. In the free market (a core component of the global rights practice), rights holders are entitled to use their freedoms to maximise their individual interests. When they do so, over time, what inevitably happens is that some right holders make better use of their freedoms than others and end up in control of a disproportionate amount of the total wealth in it. As a result, the majority of participants become relatively powerless in the face of such concentrations of wealth. This discrepancy of power leads to the freedoms of the worst-off participants becoming merely token freedoms, for in effect, they become subject to the power of the wealthy at every point. Such inequalities emerge, not through anyone’s deliberate unethical actions, but

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through participants in the practice, making legitimate use of their rights. The upshot is that a practice whose ethical architecture is designed to promote the freedom of its participants itself produces an outcome which threatens freedom. Similarly, in the practice of sovereign states, some states, through the use of their sovereign rights, manage to use their resources in the global marketplace in ways that secure for themselves predominant positions in terms of power and influence. Here again, this happens, not through malfeasance, but through the legitimate use by states of their sovereign rights. Some states end up in a position of dominance that undermines the value of the freedom enjoyed by those states left behind in this process. The growing inequality across the international market is evidence of this. There are other ethically negative consequences that emerge over time from the normal ethical conduct of participants in civil society. These include the emergence of profound alienation among civilians who, being in permanent competition with one another, come to experience themselves as isolated from others, as alienated from the products of their work and who feel themselves simply to be factors of production and at the mercy of what they see as the huge impersonal power of the market. The inequality and alienation they experience grows greater with time. In a second stage of the dialectic, we can see (with hindsight) how we have modified our global practices in ways that go some way towards resolving this tension between states’ rights and individual rights. I elaborate on this in the next section.

3   Resolving the Conflict Between States’ Rights and Individual Rights In spite of the tension between individual rights and states’ rights just outlined, the participants in these two global practices (i.e., all of us) now manage these practices in ways that have moved us towards resolving the contradiction. We have introduced changes to our global practices that have partially overcome this tension. As things currently stand, we are still in the midst of this second phase—this process of adjustment. This partial resolution has come about through developments in the system of sovereign states. First, through the evolution of the notion of citizenship in terms of which states and their governments have come to be understood as being required to serve their citizens and one of the ways in which this

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must be done is by protecting their human rights (their civilian rights). This relationship is most highly developed in democracies. The state understood as an institution is required to serve its citizens. This arrangement has replaced former social forms in which monarchs were entitled to use their subjects for their own purposes. Second, states in this practice are now required to protect the civilian rights of all people in their territory.6 One way of picturing this development is as follows. The responsibility for maintaining global civil society, which itself has no boundaries, has been given to states, with each state to be held responsible for the civilian rights of those within its territory. Where this requirement is met, the tension between individual rights and states’ rights is solved because states now have a duty to uphold individual civilian rights, not only those of its own citizens, but of all people within its jurisdiction. We can see this emerging practice among states in their adoption of the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle which was unanimously adopted by the UN at its 2005 World Summit. It specifies that states have a duty to protect human rights both within their own territories and to help defend them elsewhere when weak states fail to do so. The duty is not only owed to the citizens of that state but also to all civilians (rights holders) within it. Many states have also been able to make headway towards solving other ethically negative consequences brought about by the legitimate activities of participants in global civil society. As already indicated, the legitimate activities of rights holders bring about, over time, severe inequalities and alienation between them. Alienation comes about when civilians come to experience civil society as an overpowering force against which they understand themselves to be powerless. Neighbours are experienced as competitors. Civilians understand themselves to be mere units of labour in a vast machine. Indeed, they come to feel that they themselves are commodities in the global market. In some measure, civilians have been able to overcome these negative consequences by using their status as citizens in sovereign states. As such, particularly in democratic states, they enjoy a status vis-a-vis their governments which can be used to introduce measures to remedy the inequality and alienation suffered in civil society. Each individual citizen, no matter how poor or wealthy, has a right to equal concern and respect from their fellow citizens and from their government. These ethical entitlements require of states that they take appropriate measures to alleviate the most pressing inequalities and most hurtful forms of alienation. Most states now attempt this, but with different degrees of success. The way a state can overcome the ethical shortcomings experienced by its

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citizens in civil society is nicely illustrated in the UK. In its territory, there is a highly successful portion of the global market economy in operation, but as markets inevitably do, it has produced some ethically negative outcomes, severe inequality and alienation. Yet the alienated civilians have come together as fellow citizens and used their elected government to launch many government services designed to counteract ethically negative market outcomes. The counter measures include a whole range of policies including education, healthcare, old age provision, security, communication services, transport, and many others. The UK is not alone in having introduced such policies. All states aspire to achieve these things and attempt to do so (with more or less success). Many weak and underdeveloped states, while aspiring to achieve these goals, have been ­unsuccessful or only partially successful. Nevertheless, the citizens in all states (and the international society of states as a whole) understand that these are the ethical goals which states are called upon to pursue if injustice is to be prevented.7 Unfortunately, and as already indicated, the tension between individual rights and states’ rights has not been completely resolved. In spite of participating in the practices just outlined with their associated ethical requirements, many states persist in privileging the interests of their citizens and not upholding the ethical values required of them internationally. Informally we might say that some participants do not have the resources to fulfil their ethical commitments and other states simply cheat when they can. The most dramatic wrongs are carried out on the borders of states. Many states police their borders in ways that privilege their own citizens and radically discriminate against civilians and citizens elsewhere. They police their borders in ways that deny civilians their normal civil society rights, thus preventing them moving through civil society in search of friendship, employment, opportunities to worship with others, new cultural connections, games to play and so on. These states treat their territorial space as if it were the bounds of a private club where members have a right to decide whom to admit and whom to exclude. They pay scant attention to the fact that those whom they are excluding are rights holders in global civil society and that in policing their borders in these ways, they are, from an ethical point of view, denying their fellow participants their rights—in doing this, they are doing wrong. These wrongs are similar to those committed by the White South African government within South Africa during apartheid. It had

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e­ stablished a number of so-called Homelands (Bantustans) for the different Black tribes. These entities were given all the trappings of fully fledged democratic states, with parliaments, civil services, police forces, armies and so on. But White South Africa policed its border strictly to control the flow of labour into its domain. Those in the homelands were only admitted as and when judged necessary by the White government. In this manner, Black labour was managed by White South Africa. White labour was protected from competition by Blacks and the price of Black labour was kept low. Individual rights holders in the homelands could not use their civilian rights to seek out opportunities and life chances in the heartland of South Africa. The current state of affairs in the society of sovereign states is, in many ways, similar to these apartheid arrangements. Many states police their borders in ways that treat outsiders as forming a pool of reserve labour which can be admitted or not in terms of the national interest. The individual civilian rights of those beyond the border are not respected. These actions undermine the global rights practice, and in particular they undermine that part of it we know as the global free market. In doing this, they undermine the ethical relationships between the civilians within their borders and those outside them.

4   The EU as an Ethical Solution to a Fundamental Tension in Contemporary World Politics The only way in which we could coherently participate both as civilians in the global rights practice and as citizens in our states within the society of sovereign states would be to require of our states that they respect and protect (if they have the means) the human rights of all civilians wherever they happened to be (that is within their state territories and beyond). This would require that states respect the rights of civilians to use their right to freedom of movement, private property, to make contracts, form companies, and engage in exchanges, wherever they happen to be and from wherever they have just come. This solution to the ethical tensions that continue to beset our two global practices has been achieved within the territories covered by the 28 member states of the EU. What has to be highlighted here is that the EU is not fully understood as simply a practical arrangement for advancing the economic interests of the member states. It has to be understood as a very significant ethical achievement in which

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ethical contradictions and tensions inherent in the practices that preceded it have been resolved. Within the EU, individual men and women can make use of their full set of human rights to move about freely in search of all those relationships that make for a fully fledged ethical life. These include relationships of friendship, romantic love, material contracts, contracts of employment, the setting up of any number of different kinds of enterprise, the playing of games, easy participation in cultural exchanges and recreational activities of many different kinds. These activities within the context of civil society are then seamlessly conjoined with those ­associated with being citizens in the sovereign member states of the Union within which the citizens of each are able to participate in the democratic government of their societies. This achievement is then supplemented with a further level of citizenship at the EU level which allows for EU citizens to participate in government that overarches that of the individual member states, but without the formation of a super-state which would threaten the pluralism made possible through the existence of many separate states. In this arrangement, the sovereign states are not required to accept all those moving into their territories as citizens, but are required to protect and respect their civilian rights. The decision about granting citizenship (or not) is a decision to be made by individual states and their citizens alone. There is another significant positive ethical outcome that has been achieved within the EU which has to be considered. It will be recalled that within civil society, simply through the activity that takes place within it and without any wrongdoing by the participants, certain negative effects are inevitably produced. The most conspicuous of these are the emergence of major inequalities of power and severe alienation between individuals. In the EU, there are major socio-economic inequalities both within states and between them. Some states like France, Germany and Britain are economically powerful, whereas many other member states, especially in the south and the east are much poorer.8 With the ongoing operation of the common market, the inequalities and alienation are likely to grow. This is indeed what we have seen happen. The EU has coped with this set of ethical problems by instituting, from the centre, a set of elaborate redistributions directed towards helping the poorest states develop and improve their economic performances in ways that offset the negative outcomes just mentioned. The alienation is overcome through the institutions of the EU which enable all the workers throughout the union to have a sense that they are not at the mercy of an impersonal and brutal set of market

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structures, but that this market of theirs is in some measure controlled by their own European government. So here, once again, the achievement is to have individual rights protected and the ethical shortcomings produced by the activities of right holders, overcome by a higher-order institution in which all participate as fellow European citizens who are treated as equals. In the light of this analysis of the complex ethical architecture that has been achieved within the EU, it is now possible for us to consider the ethical consequences that would follow a member state seeking to leave the union. These ethical consequences may be well demonstrated by considering a hypothetical case of exit. For the sake of argument, let us suppose that Germany sought to leave the union. In doing so, it specified that in leaving, it wished to maintain strong trade links with the union. Suppose that it specified, furthermore, that one of its major goals in leaving was to save money through ceasing to contribute to the running costs of the organisation. It also indicated that another key goal was to end the free movement of EU citizens into Germany. It indicated that in future it would only admit those work seekers it specifically needed. In effect, it would thus be following the example set by South Africa in its control of labour from the Bantustans. The kind of relationship denied to those left in the rump of the EU would not be limited to worker/employer relationships, but would include many other kinds of relationships we all consider fundamentally important to our lives such as friendships, relationships with fellow believers in our chosen religions, educational links and all sorts of relationships in the field of recreation, including sport. Were Germany to exit the EU in the manner outlined, it is easy to see how the effect of it doing so would be fundamentally to discriminate against individual rights of men and women throughout what remained of the union, including the UK. As things existed prior to Germany’s exit, all these rights could freely be exercised by EU citizens. The people of the EU were in some fundamental sense truly autonomous both as civilians, citizens in their own states and citizens of the EU. By leaving Germany would be doing severe harm to these ethical relationships. Instead of having rights, those outside a Germany which had extricated itself from the EU would find themselves depending on privileges granted to them by Germany. What we can see in the light of the aforementioned hypothetical case is that a member state’s decision to leave the union is not at all like the decision of a member of the club to resign his/her membership. This latter kind of resignation, from an ethical point of view, is a perfectly simple exercise of freedom. No particular ethically significant harm is done to the

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remaining members of the club. The ethical significance of Germany leaving the EU would be of far greater ethical significance than the simple club analogy suggests. For what has been achieved in the EU is a successful adjustment of the tensions that exists between the global rights practice and the practice of sovereign states.9 These are the tensions between individual human rights and the rights of sovereign states that continue to plague the rest of the world. The solution realised within it has proved extraordinarily successful. It is to be hoped that in the fullness of time, other portions of global civil society in combination with other portions of the society of sovereign states might successfully create similar institutions. To withdraw from the EU is, on the analysis I have given here, an ethically retrograde step—it is ethically wrong. It damages the ethical standing of the state that is withdrawing, the ethical standing of the citizens in that state, it does ethical wrong to the citizens of the other member states that remain within the union, both in their capacity as citizens and as civilians. Seen from the perspective of the rest of the world it is also a retrograde step, for the exiting state may rightly be interpreted as having turned its back on a successful solution to an ongoing global ethical problem. In closing, it is important briefly to mention some further, more extreme, ethically negative consequences likely to flow from a wrongful withdrawal from the ethical structure of the EU. Within the withdrawing state, there is likely to be a watering down within its population of its commitment to human rights and to global civil society more generally. It will give support to some citizens in the withdrawing state who might choose to classify foreigners in negative, racist or religious terms. It will give support to those who misunderstand the global practice of sovereign states as a competitive arrangement in which the relationship between states is understood in zero sum terms—what one state gains, others lose. It will give support to nationalist and ultranationalist groups within the leaving state. This in turn is likely to increase the possibility of severe conflict within the state and with other states. In pursuit of their goals, ultranationalist groups, in defence of what they perceive to be their legitimate interests, might well be tempted to turn to militarism or proto-militaristic forms of protest involving militia. Leaving would give comfort to groups who deny a fundamental ethical achievement of the EU, which is the realisation of a cosmopolitan society within a society of sovereign states. The EU has made possible harmonious living together for people of many ­different cultural, national and religious persuasions and from many states

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with different institutions, national traditions and goals. This has been in sharp contrast to the outcomes of previous social and political arrangements in Europe which lead to hyper nationalist and fascist movements which lead to two world wars and caused immeasurable harm to European society. Withdrawal will make possible (and likely) the emergence of struggles against foreigners that will be portrayed as crusading fights against infidels. Furthermore, there is a strong likelihood that withdrawal would give succour to misogynist groups who feel their privileges have been threatened by the human rights practice which has taken root since World War II which has accorded equal rights to men and women both in the work place and more widely. This misogyny might be accompanied by the rise of homophobic groups. The negative ethical consequences mentioned earlier could in turn lead to even more ethically negative reactions from the groups targeted by anti-­ cosmopolitan nationalist groups. Within the leaving state, the target groups are likely to be minorities who would feel extremely threatened by such militancy. In reaction, it can be anticipated that some actors, mostly young men, in these groups might turn to the methods of asymmetrical warfare, to counter perceived persecution. This would be labelled terrorism.

5   Conclusion Through an analysis of the global practices within which all participants in the Brexit process are constituted, this chapter has sought to reveal the ethical values that underpin these practices. Using this as a point of departure, I have teased out the complex ethical achievements that have been realised in the EU. Setting these out enables us to see just what ethical harm the withdrawal of a member of the union would do both to itself and to those remaining in the union. The scale of the ethical harm done, of course, increases with the size and importance of the state seeking to exit the union. The overriding goal of this article is to demonstrate that the decision by Britain to leave the EU is not merely a political decision, but is one that has a very serious and complex ethical dimension.

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Notes 1. Holist approaches are to be found in the Hegelian tradition, hermeneutic approaches to the social sciences, and in interpretative approaches based on the insights of the language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein. More recently holist insights are to be found in the practice turn within IR. 2. Of course, in all practices, there are cheats, that is, those who flout the rules and seek to damage the ethical values embedded in the practice, but even those who cheat do so against a background in which most participants follow the rules and uphold the values created by them. 3. There are a few anomalous exceptions who are stateless persons. There are very few such people and their status is discussed as a special case by international lawyers. The general point stands, most people, wherever they happen to be, are citizens in one or more states within the global society of sovereign states. 4. Just as the participants in a game have to understand the rules of the game before they can play it. This is not optional but a requirement of participation. 5. See Chris Brown’s discussion of this in his Sovereignty Rights and Justice: International Political Theory Today (2002, Introduction). 6. The measures moving the practice in this direction are the adoption of bills of human rights by many states, the inclusion of human rights specifications in the constitutions of new states, the adoption by international organisations of human rights provisions, the acceptance of the R2P as an emerging norm in international affairs and the enriching of international law with a number of human rights measures. Another major impetus to the establishment of this practice has been the creation of the global free market. 7. There are of course many different routes that have been chosen by different states for their realisation. 8. These inequalities are even built into some of the key institutions of the EU.  For example, in the Commission, the wealthier states are accorded more votes than the less wealthy member states. 9. Note that the claim being made here is not that the EU was deliberately created in order to achieve these ethical outcomes, but that this outcome has been an unintended but ethically progressive result that flowed from what was initially merely a contractual arrangement for specified instrumental purposes.

References Brown, C. (Ed.). (1994). Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives. London/New York: Routledge. Brown, C. (2002). Sovereignty Rights and Justice: International Political Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

CHAPTER 11

Cultural Incomprehension and the Tragic Sense of Life David Boucher

1   Introduction Chris Brown describes himself as an international political theorist, and no one has done more to break down the artificial barrier that international relations erected between itself and the rest of political studies, but especially political theory and the history of political thought. He is equally at home talking about Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr as discussing Rawls, Singer, Walzer and Barry on distributive justice, or the Spanish conquest of the American Indians, and the infamous ‘Requirement’, or even Bob Dylan and Farm Aid. The connecting thread that holds his work together may be described as a healthy scepticism which makes him suspicious of grand narratives, universalist prescriptions, pursuits of ideals of international redistributive justice, human rights and cross cultural dialogue. In 2013, for example, Brown directly addressed the question of whether there is a poverty of Grand Theory in international relations, and if so does it really matter

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(Brown 2013: 483). Adopting the distinction between ‘world-revealing’ and ‘action guiding’ theory (Brown 2013: 284 and 493), proposed by Stephen White (1991), Brown implicitly adopts the Marxian position that the job of the theorist is not just to understand the world, but also to change it. The problem with international relations theorists is that there is far too much aspirant ‘world-revealing’ theory and not enough of the ‘action-guiding’ problem-solving type. Brown’s scepticism, which throughout his writings differs in degree, but not in kind, is the hallmark of the rich variety of his interests. He complains, for example, of the ‘habit in some, mainly Western, quarters of assuming that a generally agreed, cosmopolitan set of values exists or could be created, and that globally relevant normative theory can be erected on this base’ (Brown 2010: 19). Furthermore, he suggests: ‘No particular way of life can be taken as providing the criteria against which all others are measured’ (Brown 2010: 27). In this respect, Brown thinks it over-optimistic of Fred Dallmayr to champion the idea of a conversation between civilisations over the Huntington metaphor of a ‘clash’. Central to Dallmayr’s image is Oakeshott’s idea of the conversation of humankind in which no voice is privileged over the others, and each respectfully listens to the interjections of the interlocutors, without trying ‘to persuade, or refute one another, and therefore the contingency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing’ (Oakeshott 1991: 489). Dallmayr premises the idea of a conversation among civilisations on a common commitment to global civility, social justice, the rule of law, and the demands of ‘civic prudence’ or reflection, that is, phronesis (Dallmayr 2002: 30). Central to this engagement is the absence of a symposiarch acting as a master of ceremonies. However, the terms of reference in which the conversation is to take place assumes what Brown denies. It privileges the liberal view of the world and a universal set of values that many countries reject. Indeed, there is little in the practice of Western European states in their relations with eastern Europe, let alone with non-European polities, over the last 600 years of colonisation and decolonisation to establish the trust that conversation requires. Experience tells us, argues Amílcar Cabral, that the domination of the foreigner was accomplished and maintained by the permanent and organised repression of the culture of the colonised, and that in order to free themselves, they must reappropriate their upward cultural trajectory in the ‘living reality of its environment’. Liberation from imperialist domination is ‘necessarily an act of culture’ (Cabral 1974: 39, 43). Why, for example, should Afghanistan trust any recent overtures

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from the West when over the past 200 years it has been viewed during three Anglo Afghan wars, the Cold War, the Russian invasion, and finally American and NATO intervention, as a buffer zone occupied by barbarians, a means to strategic ends rather than of value in itself. Indeed, in contemporary debates on Africa, Frantz Fanon’s and Cabral’s voices have re-emerged dominant as Nelson Mandela’s star fades under accusations of complicity in the perpetuation of colonialism under a different guise. Both Fanon and Cabral warn of the propensity for corruption and social division by cultural assimilation. The urban and peasant petite bourgeoisie ‘assimilates the colonizer’s mentality, considers itself culturally superior to its own people and ignores and looks down upon their cultural values’ (Cabral 1974: 45). The current beneficiaries of past colonial exploitation, Fanon reminds us, have become complicit in deeply entrenched practices of domination and will not step aside willingly (Fanon 2001: 131). Such leaders ‘bandy about in irresponsible fashion phrases that come straight out of European treaties on morals and political philosophy’ (Fanon 2001: 131). The South African elite, both white and black, continued to emulate the world capitalist economy, pay tribute to it by maintaining the capitalist state, institutions and communities inspired by it. Fanon urges the oppressed to renounce ‘nauseating mimicry’, and turn their back on a world, ‘where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them…’ (Fanon 2001: 251). Cabral recommends the liquidation of the colonial culture, while at the same time eradicating negative aspects of the culture of the colonised in the creation of a new culture that emerges out of traditions but also the incorporation of what the world has attained today in the service of the people (Cabral 2016: 117). The assertion of African culture will not be achieved by reflecting back to Europeans their own expectations, but instead to ‘work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’ (Fanon 2001: 255). Dallmayr’s conditions for conversation require the non-European cultures to reflect European values back to those who initiate the conversation. Those radical thinkers who have not been corrupted by the trappings of their former colonial rulers think they know their oppressors very well, seeking to expose the disingenuousness and hypocrisy of the civilising mission. Take, for example, General J.  C. Smuts, twice president of South Africa and one of the principal drafters of the Preamble to both the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations. He promoted the ideas of a commonwealth of nations, freedom, equality and human rights, yet he had a very restricted view of who qualified for these benefits of civilisation. He was not unaware, however, that the ­theory

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and practice of his rhetoric was unravelling. Within South Africa, he saw no contradiction between his espousal of abstract moral principles of human rights while supporting racial segregation. He was the architect of policies that were the foundation of the National Party’s introduction of Apartheid in 1949, the year after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly (Steyn 2015). At the first session of the United Nations General Assembly, Mrs. Pandit, the Indian representative, launched a succession of attacks on the Government of Smuts, quoting against him the words he had drafted in the Preamble to the Charter (Cockram 1970: 9), for its treatment of the Indian minority in South Africa (Dubow 2008: 45 and 65). Nor did Smuts’ inner contradictions pass the notice of the Martinique born Fanon. At the same time Smuts was a delegate to the 1946 Peace Conference in Paris his government brutally supressed striking miners in the Witwatersrand, wounding 1,248 and killing 25 (Fanon 2008: 142). Given the apparent disingenuousness of the conciliatory overtures of Western civilisation to former colonial territories, whose leaders are frequently accused of complicity in prolonging imperialism under a different guise, it is hardly surprising that there is considerable distrust of attempts to facilitate greater cross-cultural comprehension (Wade 2005 and Galtung 1973). Indeed, Brown himself suggests that the conciliatory voices open to conversation may not be dominant in other cultures, and that the Hindu nationalism of Gandhi’s killers, for example, has been more influential than his notion of Hind Swaraj in the development of modern India (Brown 2003: 388). We may acknowledge that while growing concern for international distributive justice is laudatory, ‘modern theories of global justice which provide normative arguments for more cosmopolitan approaches to moral obligation and redistribution of wealth, stand in contrast to postcolonial political theories that cast the developed world as the exploiter rather than saviour’ (Kohn and McBride 2011: 7). I want in this chapter to connect this sceptical and anti-idealist (but not realist) tendency with two of Chris Brown’s interests in order to explore their implications further. These are the use of the Spanish ‘Requerimento’, or the ‘Requirement’, and International Distributive Justice, both of which illustrate, for him, the tragic sense of life which he detects in the hard choices that political actors are compelled to make in the real world of politics.

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2   The Requirement The defining feature of the delivery of the ‘Requirement’ drafted in 1513 and first read in 1514 to a bemused, incredulous Native American population is mutual incomprehension, but the relationship is one of a superior versus an inferior people. The conquest of America by Hernán Cortés and his army constituted probably the most historic and consequential of meetings ever experienced between cultures (Leon-Portilla 1992: xi). This is for Brown the beginning of the era of Vasco da Gama, ‘the domination of world politics by European institutions and values’ (Brown 2010: 78). The ethical issues raised by the Spanish encounters with American Indians had plagued enthusiasts and opponents of the Conquistadors since Spanish relations with the infidel began, and was the continuation of a debate within the Catholic Church that had perplexed theologians throughout the fifteenth century. The status of the infidel with regard to private property rights and public sovereignty was a matter of moral and legal importance to Europeans. Pope Innocent IV (ca 1195–1254) had pronounced the infidel capable of both private property ownership (dominion) and exercising public sovereignty. Neither, however, was deemed an absolute right. The right of the infidel to private property, for example, stood in a hierarchy of natural rights, and could be overridden by the mission of the Church to propagate the teachings of Christ. Consequent on the acknowledgement of the right to exercise public sovereignty, Innocent IV determined that infidels were entitled to constitute their own governments, and rule themselves, but their souls remained under the care of the pope in his capacity as Vicar of Christ. Sovereignty was shared, or divided, in that the pope reserved the right of political intervention should the infidel ruler violate, or allow his subjects to violate, the immutable and inviolable natural law. Christian missionaries had to be allowed free access to the lands of the infidel, and remain unimpeded in preaching the word of God to all nations (Peters 2004: 63). Although the teachings of Hostiensis (ca 1206–1271) before, and John Wyclif (1320–1384), after Innocent’s pronouncement, denied the legality of infidel dominion on the grounds that such unbelievers were not in a state of grace, the Council of Constance, when examining Wyclif’s views, affirmed and developed the position of Innocent IV. In practical terms, the followers of Hostiensis and of Innocent IV ultimately justify colonisation on grounds of just war (Muldoon 1979: 108 and 141). Addressing pressing moral questions within the Western Christian paradigm, or world of ideas,

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which tolerates a range of views, was necessarily exclusive of the worlds of ideas the American Indians inhabited. There could only be one-way traffic, what is right versus what is wrong, whatever the mitigating circumstances. The context of the Requirement incorporates an added dimension which came to the fore at the end of the fifteenth century, the responsibility of Christians to civilise primitive peoples and convert them (Bowden 2013: 151–169). These responsibilities together constituted a positive message: conquest conferred secular and spiritual benefits on the Infidel (Muldoon 1980: 311; Hanke 1935: 24). Spain’s title to the Indies was based exclusively upon the papal donation of 1493 dividing the Americas between Spain and Portugal (Hanke 1949: 29). At San Pablo, the Dominican monastery at Valadollid, the document, known as the ‘Requirement’ (requerimiento) was produced at the request of King Ferdinand in response to considerable soul searching on the part of the Spanish about the ethical and legal basis of conquering and enslaving the American Indians. Almost certainly composed by Palacious Rubios (1450–1524), the ‘Requirement’ detailed the history of the world from the earliest times, highlighting the establishment of the papacy and the donation by the descendent of St. Peter, Pope Alexander VI, of the Americas to King Don Fernando of Aragon, and ‘his daughter Doña Juana Queen of Castile and León, subduers of the barbarous nations’ (Requirement 1513). Central to the document was the requirement that the Indians, to whom it was proclaimed, acknowledge the superiority of the Church as Ruler over the whole world, and the delegates of the king and queen of Spain ‘in his stead’ as sovereign over their lands. In addition, they were to allow Christianity to be preached (Hanke 1949: 35). The remainder of the document warns of the catastrophic consequences for which the Indians themselves would be responsible if they refused to submit as subjects to the king of Spain. Because of the linguistic incomprehension between the New World and the Old, and the frequently cynical manner of its reading, the juridical act of ordering indigenous peoples to submit to the dominion of the king of Spain has often been ridiculed as ‘absurd’ (Cancellier 1993: 76; Hanke 1949: 35; Faudree 2013: 183). It was nevertheless a serious attempt by the Spanish government to conform to its legal obligations, demonstrable to other European monarchs, but particularly to the papacy on whose authority it acted, with respect to establishing the conditions of a ‘just war’ (Green and Dickason 1993: 190). In other words, without the p ­ erformative

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acts of informing and warning the American Indians, the subsequent conduct of the Spanish would have been both illegal and illegitimate. The document invoked the constellation of ideas to which both Pope Innocent IV and Hostiensis belonged (Vitoria 1991: 259; Muldoon 1980: 303, 312). The ‘Requirement’ acknowledged that the Indians had the right of dominion of which they could not lawfully be deprived until the document had been read to them demanding they subject themselves to the Spanish Crown. The justification underpinning acquisition was the responsibility of the Christian Church for the native peoples, and they in turn were obligated by natural law to permit missionaries to preach the Gospel to them (Muldoon 1980: 312). It was the fact that Indians had dominion, but not sovereignty, and that the papacy had an established legal lineage on the status of the infidel that necessitated establishing just cause by a witnessed reading of the ‘Requirement’. In other words, its reading was a performative utterance, in J.  L. Austin’s sense (Austin 1962) without which the subsequent actions of the Spanish were illegitimate. The context of conventions invoked for uptake of the utterances contained in the ‘Requirement’ was not that of the American Indians, for whom the point or intention of the performative utterance was incomprehensible, and would not therefore fulfil the condition of uptake, but instead the world of ideas, or context of conventions which alone authorised and legitimated Spanish action, in the eyes of the papacy and Europeans alike, namely the whole theological terms of reference. The point of reading the documentation aloud in the presence of notaries was to perform the act of legitimation, authorised not by the American Indians, but the Spanish monarchy and the papacy. The ‘Requirement’ was first declared at Darién in 1514, the year after it was written, and there is evidence of the procedure being followed, for example, by Hernnan Cortes. In his letters from Mexico, Cortes refers to his use of the ‘Requirement’ between 1519 and 1526. On the surrender of the vassals of Mutezuma to the king of Spain, Emperor Charles V, Cortes goes to some pains to demonstrate that he followed the proper procedures. Alluding to the ‘Requirement’, he says: ‘All of this was said before a notary public, who set it down in a formal document, which I asked for, attested by the presence of many Spaniards who served as witnesses’ (Cortes 1986: 99. Cf. 20, 21, 59, 71 and 415). Stricter requirements, such as the presence of two ecclesiastic witnesses, were added in 1526. A harsher version threatening a war of fire and blood (a fuego y a sangre) was used in Mexico in 1540s, and the practice fell into abeyance

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after 1550s, and was superseded in 1573 with the introduction of regulations that strengthened colonial governance (Green and Dickason 1993: 190). The veracity of the ‘Requirement’ for Europeans depended on the legitimacy of the claim that the papal donation to the Spanish and Portuguese kings to rule over the Americas carried the requisite authority. The claim was vigorously contested by Vitoria (1991: 260). Like Innocent IV, Vitoria conceded that the infidel possessed the capacity to exercise both public and private property rights, and were governed by recognisable structures of authority. Indians, like the Spanish, were subject to natural law (Vitoria 1991: 160, 237, 267–9). They were responsible for violations, which in certain circumstances constituted just cause of war (Vitoria 1991: 231–92). In essence, then, the Spanish Crown did not need to rely on the ‘Requirement’ for establishing just cause, because the Indians themselves in impeding the exercise of universal rights under the natural law provided the Spanish with sufficient grounds. Even though various elements of the justifications were contested, representatives of colonial Europe, such as Hostiensis, Innocent IV, John Wyclif, Matí de Paz, Juan López de Palacios Rubios and Vitoria, despite variations of emphasis in their arguments, all invoked the same ‘world of ideas’ and ultimately conceded ample grounds for colonisation in acknowledging that certain violations of the natural law constituted just cause for war. While the adjectives ‘Asian’ and ‘African’ never quite released themselves from considerations of geography, ‘European’ became an adjective which referred to something ‘found in any part of the world’ (Oakeshott 2004: 435–6). This European dominance, the repercussions of which reverberate even today, is widely acknowledged among advocates of international distributive justice, to be largely responsible for the vast inequalities between peoples on different continents. It is the fact that we can acknowledge this, yet be unable to do very much about it that for Brown constitutes a prime example of the tragic sense of life with which we are continually confronted.

3   Justice and Tragedy Tragedy is for Brown the acknowledgement that in many situations our obligations may radically conflict, and whichever choice we make will involve wrongdoing: ‘the only way to preserve integrity and honour is to accept the tragic nature of one’s choice…’ (Brown 2010: 186). It is the

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refusal to accept or acknowledge the tragic sense of life, and even to exhibit disdain for it, which diminishes the integrity of analytic political theory in its support for global distributive justice. ‘The missing dimension’ Brown argues, is the ‘sense of the tragic nature of the dilemmas we face—and perhaps of human existence itself’ (2010: 190). What is being alluded to here is a view that both Walzer and Rorty hold; that is, the tragic inevitability of economic triage. In Rorty’s view, it is a naive belief ‘that we can avoid economic triage’ (Rorty 1996: 15). It may be helpful to distinguish between two types of objection to moral universalism. The first is normative and consists in claiming that it entails morally unacceptable conclusions. The second is conceptual and objects to moral universalism on the grounds that it lacks a key feature or features of a moral theory (Caney 2005: 31). Brown objects on both grounds. With reference to Rorty, he argues: ‘It may be that talk of a sentimental education’ seems a woefully inadequate response to these human wrongs but it is difficult to see what other moral vocabulary is available to us once we reach the limits of an ethical society’ (2010: 68). From the premises with which we are presented, one may agree that tragic choices have to be made. The argument of Rorty against a strong version of international distributive justice is that the choices we have to make may be morally objectionable. He contends that it is unacceptable if helping the world’s poor is at the expense of damaging the prospects of one’s own children, or of undermining one’s own sense of identity. In other words, if redistribution makes it impossible to sustain the sort of person we are, the moral choices may be unacceptable. Rorty also has a conceptual objection in addition to the moral. For him, the requirements of moral universalism entails including the whole of humanity in our moral community, and this requires not only a willingness to help those in need, but also the ability to do so: ought implies can. Rorty’s argument, however, rests upon faulty premises. For him, if we are to consider the people of developing countries encompassed by our moral community resort to economic triage would be inconceivable and unacceptable. This feasibility criterion assumes an all or nothing criterion. Economic triage, however, is unavoidable within societies, let alone between them, in a world of scarce resources. Walzer recognises this point. He argues that any public system of healthcare, for example, has to make decisions of this kind on a daily basis. People are ranked in relation to their life chances, with the chronically ill or severely injured placed low on the priority list (Walzer 1994: 25). While people may have a right to equal

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consideration, limited resources require that the criteria against which they are judged are ultimately economic. There is a trade-off between people’s pain and lives measured against set priorities determined by available resources. The right to equal consideration does not entail equal outcomes. Let us accept that life requires tragic choices, and that this hint of realism may be offered in constraint of the more enthusiastic supporters of international social justice, such as Peter Singer, Brian Barry, Thomas Pogge and Charles Beitz. Indeed, Brown suggests that he has become increasing sympathetic to classical realism ‘because it recognises the tragic dimension to human existence’ (Brown 2010: 15). Modern political theorists, however, beginning with the extreme utilitarianism of Peter Singer privilege logic above practicality, and largely disregard the problem of agency (Brown 2010: 187–8). If we move the focus from the moral responsibilities of distributive justice, and focus instead on restorative justice, or reparations, the story may be equally as tragic, but if we begin with a very different set of assumptions constituting a different starting point, then the case may become more morally compelling, converting what are imperfect obligations, which we may or may not discharge, into perfect obligations where responsibility may be more precisely attributed for rectifying injustices. Instead of beginning with the moral arbitrariness of national borders and natural resources, we begin with the idea of palpable harm, not only when first perpetrated, but also with reference to its long-term inter-­generational consequences. Reparations and restorative justice are integral to just war theory, certainly for the whole of the period from the conquest of the Americas to the end of what Brown calls the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’ (Brown 2010: 21) in the late twentieth century, that is, from Francisco Vitoria to Michael Walzer. The ideas were consistently and persistently invoked by the Spanish in the cultural encounters that the ‘Requirement’ exemplifies. It served to establish a just cause of war, and legitimated reparations for the harm done. The ‘Requirement’, of course, was meant to absolve the consciences of the Spanish Conquistadors and the Spanish Crown, by establishing that the war about to be waged was just, and that the American Indians had given just cause, and it was they who were responsible for the ills about to befall them.

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This was not, for the Spanish, a matter of social justice, but of rectifying an injustice, that is, the injustice of denying the rights of the Christian Church and the Spanish Crown. If the principle from which we start is harm, however difficult it may be to determine the extent of that harm, then just compensation or reparations, provide different and added considerations for redistribution, and despite the continued tragedy of the choices that will have to be made, the pendulum swings towards responsibility for the harm perpetrated. The principle is reaffirmed at the end of the Vasco da Gama epoch by Michael Walzer. In Just and Unjust Wars, he argues a case for redistribution that is not based on principles of social justice. He asserts: ‘Reparations are surely due the victims of aggressive war’ (Walzer 1992: 297). The context, however, is that of the aggressor defeated in war, and required to pay reparations. The responsibility, he argues, is that of the whole nation: the costs are distributed through the tax system, and through the economic system generally, among the citizens, often over a period of time extending to generations that had nothing to do with the war at all. In this sense, citizenship is a common destiny, and no one, not even its opponents (unless they become political refugees, which has its costs, too) can escape the effects of a bad regime, an ambitious or fanatic leadership, or an overreaching nationalism. But if men and women must accept this destiny, they can sometimes do so with a good conscience, for the acceptance says nothing about their individual responsibility. The distribution of costs is not the distribution of guilt. (Walzer 1992: 297).

Elsewhere, Walzer extends these ideas to encompass the harm caused by an aggressor. In order to generate ‘thick’ perfect obligations, rather than thin imperfect obligations, the question of responsibility needs to be disaggregated. First, of course, there is direct responsibility for harm done, and in such cases, reparations may legitimately be claimed. But, we are being asked to accept indirect responsibility, ignorance of which constitutes no defence. There are, of course, degrees of responsibility and culpability, and the extent to which blame may be attributed diminishes if no clear intent can be established. It could be argued, of course, that a lack of awareness of the consequences of our participation in the current international economic regime constitutes negligence, which renders us equally culpable. It is apparent that two issues are at stake. The first is establishing responsibility. If it can

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be shown that someone is responsible for some evil or regrettable outcomes, that a person or persons have a duty to do something about it. The second issue is the degree of responsibility that one attaches to the perpetrator, and therefore the extent to which he or she has to make reparations. As beneficiaries of an economic system that spans the Vasco da Gama epoch, and which exploits the less well off in the world, we may all be responsible for exploitation, but we are not all equally responsible. This is a point at which Walzer’s argument, despite its emphasis upon the thickness of the morality required for distributive justice, comes much closer to that of those who advocate international economic redistributive justice. On the question of whether current resource distributions constitute international injustice Walzer wants to rely for the criterion upon culpable harm caused by past interventions, rather than upon a universal principle of redistributive justice. In other words, external responsibility for internal ills, arising from such actions as political control of trade, imperial wars, and the like, constitute international injustices that may require large scale redistribution of resources. Where serious suffering and inequality exist but which is not the consequence of some form of intervention, similar redistributions may be necessary, but they would not be a matter of justice. Justice does not, in Walzer’s view, exhaust morality, and ordinary principles of humane treatment and compassion may impel us to act out of charity rather than justice (Walzer 1995: 292–3). Pogge goes further and presents us with an argument that attempts to attach moral blame to the beneficiaries of the uneven distribution of world wealth. Its basis is not merely the recognition of suffering and getting us to admit that we ought to do something about it if we can, but the much stronger principle of accepting responsibility for the suffering of the world’s poor, and alleviating it by applying a threshold criterion of redistribution (Pogge 2002: 114–5; 214; 207). In other words, Pogge is arguing that we have to take responsibility for the plight of the poor, because we are at fault in causing their predicament and allowing it to persist. Most of us not only let people starve but actively ‘participate in starving them’ (Pogge 2002: 214). Pogge, and for that matter, Peter Singer, Charles Beitz, Brian Barry and Gordon Graham in part assume that the thin universalism of the principles of harm and responsibility are capable of generating significant redistributions of wealth, and what determines this redistribution is an answer to the empirical question of to what degree are the rich countries of the world responsible for the sufferings of the people of the impoverished countries.

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The universalist and cosmopolitan argument for the just redistribution of resources is based upon the assumption that the boundaries of our own communities or states are not morally relevant to questions of social justice. Some, such as Singer, believe that the same principles apply in both spheres, while others, such as Barry, think that whereas special ties may justify a difference in obligation to one’s neighbours, they do not negate, nor absolve us from our duties to other peoples. Where there seems to be a thin universal principle uniting the different points on the continuum from universalism to communitarianism is the notion of harm. Whatever the local manifestations, the principle itself is widely accepted as a ground to generate the motivation for instauration. Restoration or reparations are of course central principles in the idea of jus post bellum, and are extensively discussed by the classic and modern international jurists, but restorative justice is increasingly important in conceptualising and responding to the plight of refugees, one of the most pressing humanitarian crises of our times. Durable solutions to the unjust harms suffered by refugees are conceived in terms of reparations, or restorations for their displacement and loss, where voluntary repatriation, local integration and third-country resettlement are the principal responses (Souter 2013). Restorative justice cannot be conceived in isolation from social justice, and adds a dimension that is rarely to the fore in theories of social justice. Social justice focuses upon the present and the future, establishing principles by which unjustifiable inequalities may be identified, rectified and transformed for future good. Restorative justice focuses on the past, present and future. In principle, it determines how particular injustices have arisen, identifies their historic generation, and restores, or gives reparations for what has been lost. It has the propensity to conceive of justice in trans-generational and inter-generational terms, attributing responsibility for present inequalities and deprivations to past relations of power, subjection and subordination. Truth and reconciliation commissions are also closely allied to the idea of a comprehensive portrayal of restorative or reparative justice, and in this respect may identify past injustices and determine ongoing disadvantage and exploitation consequent upon those injustices in order to contribute to an understanding of what restorative justice requires, including the redistribution of the proceeds accrued through past unjust relations between the exploited and the exploiters. The complexities to such an approach are considerable, and we should not underestimate the enormity of the problems of establishing the ‘facts’

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about past injustices, even with respect to the relatively recent past. Establishing the ‘truth’, however, is different from establishing guilt, and where responsibility and injustices are concerned there need not be such high standards of evidence as required for a prosecution in an international criminal tribunal. Recent criminal tribunals, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Timor-Leste’s Special Panels for Serious Crimes, unlike Nuremberg which relied largely on documentary evidence, rely on witness testimony to establish the basic facts. Findlay and Henham, for example, suggest that ‘truth’ rather than guilt should be an objective of justice with respect the International Criminal Court (Findlay and Henham 2012). If guilt is to be dispensed with, responsibility should not. Indeed, even in relation to these International Tribunals, and the International Criminal Court, Nancy Coombs advocates a ‘close-enough’ approach to fact-finding (Combs 2010). Where neither documentary, nor testimonial evidence is in abundance for specific injustices, as is the case with historic societal injustice, establishing the relations in which groups stood to each other, and their social and economic consequences may be sufficient to determine the long-term harm. For example, in the case of Mauritius, a small island nation, in the south west of the Indian Ocean, 500 miles off the east coast of Madagascar, and uninhabited until 375 years ago, slavery was abolished almost 200 years ago, but the repercussions still reverberate and are intensely felt despite the fact it is a relatively thriving country which has been a functioning democracy since 1968. Successive colonisers—the Dutch, French and English—have occupied the island, and the ethnic and cultural complexity, makes it very difficult to deliver transitional and restorative justice without untangling those complexities. When France took possession of the island in 1721, renaming it Ile de France, Napoleon’s Code Noir was enforced to control the slave population. Slaves, as was usual, were defined as property, prohibited from marriage, forbade relocation, denied freedom of worship and outlawed from freedom of assembly. They suffered unspeakable brutality on the island’s plantations. In 2009, Mauritius established the first Truth and Justice Commission to investigate the long-­ term implications of slavery and indentured labour over a period of 370 years. The conclusions of its report released in 2011 indicate that the contemporary descendants of slaves and indentured labourers suffer discrimination, marginalisation and poverty as a result of continued racism which emanates from the condition of their ancestors (Boswell 2014: 146–161).

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Restorative justice, which necessarily includes a compensatory element, is not just about reparations for past wrongs. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, for example, was in the view of some commenters meant to heal psychological and emotional damage leading to national catharsis and forgiveness. This approach, while achieving a respite from the violent rejection of Apartheid, substituted truth for justice, and the political, social and economic settlement, while creating a new middle class, did little to address land redistribution, the reduction of very high unemployment rates and the eradication of obscene inequalities, exacerbated by conspicuous corruption, and the continuing disintegration of the African family begun by Apartheid (Johnson 2015: 122).1 The identification of the problem was recently reinforced by Slavoj Žižek who argued that once the initial wave of euphoria to change is over, the question becomes how the next steps may be taken without succumbing to the prevalent totalitarian tendency to move beyond Mandela while avoiding becoming Mugabe (2013: 12). Ironically, in speeches made in Harare on 27 August and 4 September 2017, Mugabe accused Mandela of making too many concessions to the white minority, and of preferring his personal freedom to the freedom of most South Africans. His successor, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, in the dramatic events of November 2017, has explicitly made overtures to the former colonial oppressors to return with capital investment. Indeed, the Rhodes Must Fall; Fees Must Fall; the decolonisation of the curriculum as well as land reform campaigns in South Africa are all responses to the continuing presence of neo-­imperialism on the African landscape. Restorative justice is more than rectifying economic and social inequalities, because in the process of creating those inequalities cultural genocide was perpetrated (Cabral 2016: 115–138, and Fanon 2001: 166–199). The restoration of identity and self-worth damaged or destroyed by colonial and imperialist attitudes to culture, and the psychological inferiority complexes instilled by the suppression and eradication of indigenous value systems requires more that the provision of equal opportunities. The psychological damage of colonisation and wars of liberation are recurrent themes in Fanon’s work. White civilisation and European culture, he argued, imposed an existential deviation on the Negro, an ‘absolute mutation’ in his phenotype: ‘The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority’ (Fanon 2008: 69, cf. Fanon 1965: 121–145). The man of colour, he argues, has to be liberated from himself (Fanon 2008: 2, 6, 10). Museums around the world are full

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of sacred and ceremonial artefacts which are not only of historical interest, but more importantly have contemporary value for cultural renewal among many indigenous peoples who were undoubtedly forcibly deprived of their heritage, and who now demand repatriation of the artefacts as part of the healing process of postcolonial trauma. The reintegration of cultural icons in the contemporary social practices of peoples is an imperative aspect of cultural renewal and of transmitting inter-generational knowledge, in contributing to the restoration of distinct identities and cultures that were repressed and discarded by colonisation (Simpson 2009: 122). In British Columbia, for example, recent research has shown that the loss of cultural continuity puts into jeopardy the wellbeing of whole cultural groups, and that collective endeavours to re-establish and preserve cultural continuities have contributed towards tangible improvements in health and self-esteem, resulting in lower suicide rates among First Nations communities (Chandler et al. 2003). Of equal importance, restorative justice is a homage to one’s ancestors whose stories have been repressed and replaced with those of the coloniser, the aggressor, the victor, dominant culture or class. Restorative justice, in taking the past as its focus in fact-finding, acknowledges the injustices committed against those who suffered from being party to unequal and exploitative relationships. Retelling their stories in contemporary contexts highlights the legacies and their implications, and hopes to influence the establishment of more satisfactory and different relations among peoples and groups, in order to achieve just outcomes. Restorative justice of this kind is necessarily anachronistic in that it does not attempt to understand past unequal relations in their own terms, but instead looks at the consequences of those relationships in terms of their outcomes; their inhumanity, brutality, depravity, economic exploitation and much more.

4   Conclusion Chris Brown was quite right to remind us that the era of Vasco da Gama casts a long shadow in the form of the domination of world politics by European institutions and values (Brown 2010: 78), and that cultural incomprehension still has dangerous implications for the way we view our relations with other peoples. The scars of colonialism, both East and West, while receding into the past, require a scale of values that does not merely recognise the injustices of the past but also takes seriously the idea of

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restorative justice, to which some of the most articulate anti-colonialists alluded in their analyses of the social and psychological, as well as economic, harm done to their peoples in the name of advancing civilisation. Tragic choices will still have to be made, and responsibility for the harm done will not always be accepted or acted upon, but in a world in which international distributive justice is more often than not considered an act of charity rather than a right, establishing responsibility for palpable harm, even though it may be difficult at times, creates a stronger moral imperative that has the propensity to convert imperfect into perfect obligations, with identifiable agents to discharge them.

Note 1. There have been significant increases in the overall quality of life since the end of Apartheid, but ‘various macroeconomic policies instituted over the last 20 years have, one after another, failed to change the distorted socioeconomic landscape inherited from apartheid South Africa’ (Hamilton 2014: 43).

References Austin, J.  L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boswell, R. (2014). Can Justice be Achieved for Slave Descendants in Mauritius? The International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 42(2), 146–161. Bowden, B. (2013). Poisons Disguised with Honey: European Expansionism and the Sacred Trust of Civilisation. The European Legacy, 18(2), 151–169. Brown, C. (2003). Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices. Contemporary Political Theory, 2, 387–388. Brown, C. (2010). Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2013). The Poverty of Grand Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 483–497. Cabral, A. (1974). National Liberation and Culture in African Information Service. In Return to the Sources: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral (pp. 39–56). London/New York: Monthly Review Press. Cabral, A. (2016). Resistance and Decolonisation (Trans. D. Wood and introduced by Reiland Rabaka). New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Cancellier, A. (1993). Conquistadors and Immigrants: Linguistic Conflicts in the Impact with the New World. In M. B. Mignone (Ed.), Columbus: Meeting of Cultures (pp. 76–82). New York: Forum Italicum.

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Caney, S. (2005). Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, M.  J., Lalonde, C.  E., Sokol, B., & Hallett, D. (2003). Personal Persistence, Identity Development, and Suicide: A Study of Native and NonNative North American Adolescents. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 68(2), Lalonde. Cockram, B. (1970, September 16). General Smuts and South African Diplomacy, South African Institute of International Affairs. Address to Commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Jan Christiaan Smuts. Online. Available from: https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/item/9690/thesis_hum_1997_getz_ tr.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed 13 Sept 2017. Combs, N.  A. (2010). Fact-Finding Without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiary Foundations of International Criminal Convictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cortes, H. (1986). Letters from Mexico (Revised ed. A.  Pagden, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Dallmayr, F. (2002). Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dubow, S. (2008). Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights. Journal of Contemporary History, 43(1), 43–72. Fanon, F. (1965). A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove. Fanon, F. (2001). The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. Faudree, P. (2013). How to Say Things with Wars: Performativity and Discursive Rupture in the Requerimiento of the Spanish Conquest. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22(3), 182–200. Findlay, M., & Henham, R. (2012). Transforming International Criminal Justice: Retributive and Restorative Justice in the Trial Process. London: Routledge. Galtung, J.  (1973). The European Community: A Superpower in the Making. London: Allen and Unwin. Green, L. C., & Dickason, O. P. (1993). The Law of Nations and the New World. Edmonton/Canada: Alberta. Hamilton, L. (2014). Are South Africans Free? London: Bloomsbury. Hanke, L. (1935). The First Social Experiments in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hanke, L. (1949). The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Johnson, R. W. (2015). How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis. London: Hurst. Kohn, M., & McBride, K. (2011). Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Leon-Portillo, M. (1992). The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon. Muldoon, J.  (1979). Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the NonChristian World, 1250–1550. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Muldoon, J. (1980). John Wyclif and the Rights of the Infidels: The Requeriminto Re-Examined. The Americas, 36(3), 301–316. Oakeshott, M. (1991). The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. In M. Oakeshott & T. Fuller (Ed.), Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New and expanded ed., pp. 488–541). Indianapolis: Liberty. Oakeshott, M. (2004). What Is History? And Other Essays. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Peters, F. E. (2004). The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (New ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pogge, T. (2002). World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge: Polity. Rorty, R. (1996). Who Are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage. Diogenes, 44(1), 5–15. Simpson, M. (2009). Museums and Restorative Justice: Heritage, Repatriation and Cultural Education. Museum International, 61(1–2), 121–129. Souter, J.  (2013). Durable Solutions as Reparation for Unjust Harms of Displacement: Who Owes What to Refugees. Journal of Refugee Studies, 27(2), 171–190. Steyn, R. (2015). Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness. Johannesburg/Capetown: Jonathan Ball. Vitoria, F. (1991). Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wade, R. (2005). Failing Stats and Cumulative Causation in the World System. International Political Science Review, 26(1), 17–36. Walzer, M. (1992). Just and Unjust Wars (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books. Walzer, M. (1994). Thick and Thin: Moral Arguments at Home and Abroad. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Walzer, M. (1995). Response. In D. Miller & M. Walzer (Eds.), Pluralism Justice and Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, S. K. (1991). Political Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Žižek, S. (2013, July 18). Trouble in Paradise: The Global Protest. London Review of Books, 35(14), 11–12.

CHAPTER 12

Chris Brown’s Liberal Conservatism, the Process of Moral Learning and Global Institutional Transformations Heikki Patomäki

1   Introduction When I spent a year at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1989–1990 as a PhD student and training fellow, I attended Chris Brown’s lectures on normative theory. These lectures were based on a manuscript that subsequently became International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (Brown 1992). The locally well-known debate between Brown and Mark Hoffman had taken place a year earlier, in a student-run journal called Paradigms1 (Brown 1987, 1988; Hoffman 1988). Post-structuralism was very much in vogue at the time and I had been reading a lot of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as well as international relations (IR) scholars such as Hayward Alker and Richard Ashley. It occurred to me that it would be relatively easy to deconstruct the Brown-Hoffman debate as a case of a wider debate between state moralism and cosmopolitanism. I tried to show that both are ultimately empty utopias (Patomäki 1992). Neither Brown nor Hoffman was able to show that his position is a well-­

H. Patomäki (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_12

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grounded one; the plausibility of each view depended on the weakness of the other. The substantial idea was to open up possibilities for a critical-normative discourse. Instead of restricting international or global moral discourse either to mere coexistence of nation-states or to universalising a few particular human rights, we should see the agenda of world politics as open-­ ended and our normative judgements dependent on the geo-historical context of their making. With a brief discussion of the international debt problem as an example, I indicated that the liberal position of free contracts and pacta sunt servanda is ideological, without accepting the Marxist position of structural determinism either. The basic thrust was that the politics of the Third World debt problem (as it was called then) lies in the ways in which global finance is constituted/regulated and organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are set up. Epistemologically, the point was to make a case for a practical, context-­ sensitive, engaged and political ethics, implying among other things a commitment to non-violence (i.e. maximal minimisation of violence in all circumstances, also in its metaphorical sense). If morality were seen in this way, it could become more practical in international relations, without losing its critical capacity. It appears that since the early 1990s, Brown has shifted his position into this direction.2 As Brown describes his own development in ‘Introduction: A Life in Theory’, the opening chapter of Practical Judgement in International Political Theory (Brown 2010), he has come to favour anti-foundationalist, practically minded, and action-­ guiding normative political theory that is, moreover, not opposed to the project of an explanatory social science. How the world is matters to our normative judgements. ‘I am more willing now than I was twenty years ago to acknowledge that exercising judgement depends on the existence of good explanatory theory’ (Brown 2010: 9). Although Brown seems to have adopted the basic tenets of what I back in 1992 considered to be an alternative account of morality, often our concrete judgements seem to be at loggerheads. For instance, Brown lashes the advocates of global civil society and citizenship, which has been precisely the context of many of my own political engagements. Brown frames his new approach in terms of ‘Blairite liberal internationalism’, explicitly approving or advocating several Western military interventions (Brown 2010: 15–16), which I consider a rather problematic move. I start this chapter by summarising Brown’s early argument for a pluralist and proceduralist state morality, followed by a concise outline of my

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(critical realist rather than post-structuralist) attempt at deconstructing the Brown-Hoffman debate. Second, I will have a closer look at Brown’s subsequent developments, including his move towards Neo-Aristotelian practical reason and his adoption of the human capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum. Brown has taken explicit steps to go beyond the state morality vs. cosmopolitanism divide. Third, I explain how I have come to see morality in terms of learning. It remains true that (i) the contingently shared stock of principles, criteria and interpretations is the ground for the plausibility of an argument, and this is what a substantiated judgement attempts to appeal to in a given community and (ii) that the relevant community is not bounded by any particular nation or state but can assume different spatial and substantial forms. However, I now realise that this account of normative arguments and judgements is only a part of the story. What I was tacitly presupposing is a process of universal ethico-political learning and its particular stage, discourse ethics, corrected by various post-structuralist and critical realist insights. In the final section, I examine whether the idea of universal learning and its cosmopolitan implications might explain the divergence in our practical judgements with Brown, anticipating his possible anti-­ foundationalist and communitarian objections.

2   Brown’s State Moralism In his early works on normative theory, Brown relied heavily on Terry Nardin and especially on his book Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (1983). Nardin, like Michael Walzer (2000/1977), had begun to develop his state moralist view as a response to the Vietnam War, in the wider Cold War context of nuclear weapons and global antagonism between the two superpowers (see Nardin 2013). Brown adopted this viewpoint in the late 1980s, at the time when Afghanistan had replaced Vietnam and the Cold War was coming to an end. State morality is about limiting ethics and politics to within the states in order to enable peaceful coexistence between them. In every argument, and especially in practical ones, there are typically both explicit and implicit elements. The implicit and explicit premises of Brown’s (1987) argument can be reconstructed as follows: (Premise 1)

To share a normatively binding morality is to share common moral values [explicit]

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(Premise 2)

The condition of mankind can be characterised as one of cultural divergence: in general, there are no shared values [explicit] (Assumption 1) Shared values exist within cultures, which are roughly coterminous with nations and nation states [implicit] (Premise 3) The state is a universal phenomenon [explicit] (Conclusion 1) Globally speaking, there are no shared values except within nation states [explicit] (Premise 4) A distinction can be made between common ‘purposes’ and ‘procedures, and only the former is related to common values [explicit] (Premise 5) Statehood can create moral values, rights, and duties [explicit] (Assumption 2) Besides shared morality, there can also be normatively binding procedural rules of coexistence [implicit] (Conclusion 2) The normative theory of international relations is concerned with the logic of the procedural norms of nation states’ coexistence [explicit] Hoffman begins his critique of Brown’s argument with an attack on Premise 4 (distinction between purposes and procedures), hoping thereby to undermine the plausibility of Premise 2 (no shared values) and Conclusion 2 (international ethics limited to nation states’ coexistence). After arguing against Brown’s distinction between ‘purposive’ and ‘practical’, he attacks Premise 2 directly. He concludes that ‘cosmopolitanism … exists within the international system … [although] it is thin and its reception uneven … it cannot be dismissed’ (Hoffman 1988: 71). Existing cosmopolitanism, in his opinion, can form the foundation for a theory of the basic security and subsistence rights of all human beings. Citing Henry Shue (1980), Hoffman argues that existing cosmopolitanism can form the foundation for a theory of the basic security and subsistence rights of all human beings. In his rejoinder, Brown argues that the state is the only institution able to protect cultures, whether it does so or not. Furthermore, he claims that Hoffman may have committed the sin of cultural imperialism: ‘most accounts of the universal values that might underlie a cosmopolitan ethic seem suspiciously like inadequately camouflaged versions of the first ten Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America’. While this anti-imperialist argument may look plausible, the problem is that

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Brown does not explain the normative force of any of his own claims. All his premises and assumptions seem descriptive, except premise 5 (‘statehood can create moral values, rights, and duties’), which seems arbitrary. For some reason, ‘the very act of claiming to be a state and to be treated as a state implies recognition that ‘statehood’ is a moral category entailing rights and duties’ (Brown 1988: 107, note 2), but why cannot we say the same thing about any collective political entity, such as a transnational movement, international organisation and world state? Moreover, do these duties include also the duty to respect universal human rights or principles of global justice or democracy? This is exactly Hoffman’s main point: The major difficulty with Brown’s argument is his characterisation of international society as a non-purposive, practical association. If this is merely an analytic claim, then the obvious problem is that Brown’s normative conclusions do not follow from his factual premises. If, however, it is meant to be taken as an endorsement of the desirability of conceiving of international society as a non-purposive, practical association, then we need to know why it should be accepted and why these reasons are superior to those favouring the acceptance of competing conceptions. (Hoffman 1988: 64)

There is also an apparent paradox inherent in Brown’s argument. On the one hand, he relies on the standard liberalist idea of neutrality of procedures (e.g. markets mediating between the desires of individuals or, in Brown’s case, international law of coexistence mediating between state-­ desires).3 On the other hand, he denies the liberalist idea that good life is a private matter by making the very ambitious claim that all or most individuals within a nation share a particular conception of good life. And yet, Hoffman’s position does not seem to be much stronger. He too fails to specify a transcendental source of morality (e.g. God, Providence, natural law and categorical imperative) and relies largely on immanent critique of Brown’s claims or international practices (e.g. in terms of commitments through existing human rights treaties). Moreover, Hoffman makes only the weak claim that there must be at least some fundamental human rights that are presupposed by state morality. Why would coexistence be good without it benefitting the people living in a state? So he seems to accept state morality, but qualifies it in terms of particular human rights, especially of rights to subsistence. Brown’s response is that this qualification amounts all too easily to Western imperialism. Regardless

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of how Hoffman chooses the substantial rights, they are certainly more in accordance with Western individualist cultures and practices than with many others. For Hoffman, individual human rights must be strictly universal moral principles, which we should apply in moral criticism and political action in any context. But Hoffman too begs the fundamental question: On what are his universal principles and rights of subsistence based?

3   Moving Beyond Groundless Utopianism—Or Staying in the Same Discourse? A key idea of the deconstruction of the Brown-Hoffman debate was that both state morality and cosmopolitanism are utopian theoretical constructs, in the sense that both claim to be able to find the general, ideal and exclusive normative principles for world politics. Literally, u-topia means a place nowhere. An abstract utopia is by definition unrealisable (unlike concrete utopias or eutopias in critical theory). This can be illustrated with a topical example. Although the process of British exit from the EU may look like a leap towards a world characterised by mere coexistence, what it has revealed is how deep and complex our inter- and intra-­ connections have become and how wide and comprehensive European and world-political agendas already are (see Morgan and Patomäki 2017). It is utopian to think that relevant ethico-political concerns could be ­limited to mere coexistence of states. Even if coupled with particular human rights, the picture remains totally unrealistic. It would be utopian even if we only considered, say, Iran’s relations with the EU or the US. On top of this comes the apparent lack of transcendental foundations. Given the basic contours of IR ethics discourse, both state moralists and cosmopolitans require some sort of grounding for their normative contentions, but in their argumentation, they tend to rely on criticising (negating) the position of the other. Moreover, in a typical IR ethics discourse, cosmopolitans are liberal individualists—and so are state moralists as far as the society of states is concerned. In other words, state moralists assume that states are persons and then apply the standard principles of liberalism to states (basically preservation of life and individual liberty, implying the principle of non-intervention). Moreover, if it is assumed that both markets and the procedures of coexistence can be neutral, then state moralism can easily be made compatible with market globalism (Steger 2005),

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involving for example extensive governance of a vast array of practices within the state through international trade law. In the real world, these assumptions and conditions result in contradictory rules and principles. In his later writings, Brown has been trying to take some distance from this problematic. In an essay entitled ‘Towards a Neo-Aristotelian Resolution’, Brown depicts the debate between cosmopolitans and communitarians as unresolvable, but proposes to change the question. Instead of asking ‘what should we do’, we could ask ‘how should we live’ (Brown 2010: 79). Brown argues that Martha Nussbaum’s (e.g. Nussbaum and Sen 1993) modern social-democratic reinterpretation of Aristotle’s virtue ethics is pluralistic in the communitarian sense while exhibiting also some universal standards of evaluation about what constitutes decent and good life. There will be a range of social arrangements that do provide thick accounts of the virtues and there is no suggestion that there is one such best account—but there are social arrangements that are not adequate, and even among the adequate accounts, comparisons and arguments are possible (Brown 2010: 83). ‘Towards a Neo-Aristotelian Resolution’ does not go far in elaborating the meaning and implications of this alternative. Brown (2010: 89) concludes by suggesting ‘that extending the research programme of normative International Relations in this direction would be a profitable step’. Readers looking for practical guidance in contemporary geo-historical contexts are likely to be disappointed. What kinds of actions, policies and institutional reforms would be conducive to furthering the possibilities for good life in international or global society? The only specific proposal that Brown (2010: 88) makes is that ‘the good life requires engagement in and with the collective life of the community’ (probably assuming that the ‘we’ in the question ‘how should we live?’ refers to academics, and that community = nation). Brown (2010: 117–19) gets closer to practical reasoning when he follows John Rawls’ (1999) The Law of Peoples distinctions between non-­ decent, decent and liberal societies,4 with normative implications especially with regard to military intervention: [I]f a society meets the criteria of being well-ordered, whether decent or liberal, it is entitled to be regarded as a member of good standing in a Society of well-ordered Peoples, and fully entitled to the protection of the

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norms of the Law of Peoples, in particular the norm of non-intervention. (Brown 2010: 118)

This suggests that non-decent societies are not entitled to the protection of the norms of the Law of Peoples and thus may be attacked militarily (by self-selected liberal states) if an attack seems morally appropriate for some humanitarian or other reason. Recalling that in the Brown-Hoffman debate Brown accused Hoffman of cultural imperialism, now he seems to verge on committing the sin of liberal US/British imperialism himself. This is a position Brown (2010: 221–35) makes explicit in his essay ‘Selective humanism. In defence of inconsistency’. This essay, written in the early 2000s, approves Tony Blair’s approach to military interventions, but tries to reframe it in terms of a new question. The starting point is that serious human rights violations are occurring across the world and that the US and the UK have the right to intervene militarily wherever and whenever they deem morally right and ethically, politically and strategically appropriate. The new question Brown poses in this paper is: As there are so many places in need of an intervention, which ones should ‘we’ select? Brown’s development can be seen as another indication that IR ethics discourse is contradictory in a way that is closely related to the deep ambiguities of international law—which in turn stem from the paradoxes and ambivalences of liberal theory of politics (Koskenniemi 2005).5 Brown seems to have concluded that the world community must comprise some minimal universal values, otherwise there would be no room for IR ethics but just an ongoing struggle for power and endless tragedy. These universal values include (1) the procedures of coexistence constituted by statehood and (2) core liberal human rights such as individual life and liberty defining what decent societies must observe (Brown 2010: 174). In effect Brown has now substituted negative liberal rights for Hoffman’s (and Shue’s) positive rights of subsistence and defends US/British liberal-­ imperial practices on that basis. The US and other Western countries should not formulate any general rule or principle ‘which will tell when to intervene and when not to intervene’ (Brown 2010: 231), but leave this decision at their discretion, which must be context-specific and involve considerations of national interest. Brown’s new position is thus open to his own earlier Hoffman-critique (perhaps even more so, because Hoffman in fact defended the rather ­un-­American right to food, shelter, and health care). This critique can be elaborated further. Brown clearly approves the fact that in the absence of

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consensus in the UN Security Council, the US and its NATO allies have resorted to unilateral wars of intervention. This raises the issue of just war. As Michael Walzer (2000: 22–32) has stressed, war is hell, and we also know that wars are often costly and very difficult to end.6 Moreover, as Hedley Bull (1997) has emphasised, the problem with just war is that just causes can clash, whether in the public sphere or on the battleground (1997: 30, 132–3, 157–8). If one great power can resort to war unilaterally, why not others? This question has been repeatedly posed for instance by Vladimir Putin and his regime, also to defend its own interpretations of just war. Bull’s point is that attempts at collective security may weaken or undermine ‘classical devices for the maintenance of order’ (1997: 231). In the 2000s and 2010s, just causes have been clashing for instance in the Middle East, Central Asia and Ukraine. Although the willingness to fight ‘just wars’ may not be the only cause of these regressive developments, since the early 2000s, we have seen a return to pre-First World War practices (about the disintegrative tendencies in global political economy, see Patomäki 2017b). A closely related but further problem has to do with generalisability of norms and our common institutions. It is precisely because our world is pluralistic that just war is not generalisable (this is a different point from the context-sensitivity of normative judgements). Because all sides of a conflict might well be fighting ‘just wars’, the idea of outlawing war by means of building adequate common institutions has arisen, the most recent and important example so far being the UN system. Brown tends to reduce the UN to what states want it to be (2010: 49) or to a mere bureaucratic chain of command (2010: 235). I would rather make a case for thinking that it is not possible to consistently (i) argue for the right to intervene on universalising moral grounds and (ii) refuse to take part in building common institutions that establish a global rule of law and exemplify the relevant universalising norms, holding all parties equally accountable.

4   Ethics and Politics as Immanent Critique and as Trans-Communal Judgements It is utopian to try to limit ethico-political concerns to mere ‘coexistence of states’ or even to just a few particular human rights. Another problem with IR ethics discourse is the assumption that normativity can only stem

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from general philosophical (and especially liberal) principles. In reality, the very texture of social life is evaluative and normative.7 Thus, in ‘From Normative Utopias to Political Dialectics’, I referred to the requirements and standards already embodied in social practices and to the contingently shared stock of principles, criteria and interpretations forming the ground for the plausibility of a judgement and argument. I distinguished between four types of potentially good reasons that can ground a potential agreement and a rational judgement in a dialogical context: (1) Factual social scientific explanations concerning the relevant area of reality, where truth is understood as a conduct-guiding metaphor of correspondence to the way things really are; explanations may also involve an account of the particular circumstances of applying a rule or a principle. (2) Arguments grounded on other actors’ publicly expressed or implicitly presupposed normative commitments, concerning for instance justice or democracy (but only if they are made public within the process of dialogue). (3) Arguments can be based on the teachings of history and other cultures; this is a way of bringing wider points of view into the discussion. However, in order to be plausible and persuasive, these kinds of reasons must be related to the existing commitments and concerns of actors. (4) New normative points of view, visions and metaphors can be created and brought into the debate, but, if they are to be plausible and persuasive, they must be closely related to (1), (2) and (3). Consider the case of global financial markets that re-emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming an increasingly dominant force in the world economy in the 1980s and 1990s. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 came close to bringing about a global economic meltdown; it caused the drastic impoverishment of at least tens of millions of people. The crisis led to critical ethico-political responses, in turn opposed by the powers that be, that is, the main banks and funds and other financial actors as well as states such as the US and the UK. What emerged was a transnational and, to a degree, a global debate about the right response to the crisis. These debates revolved around the question whether ‘the crony capitalism’ of the Asian tigers is to be blamed for the crisis or is global capitalism itself the problem? Is it possible to reform the world economy and its financial system to make it work better, according to some criteria?

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My book Democratising Globalisation: The Leverage of the Tobin Tax (Patomäki 2001) is a response to these questions. The efficient market hypothesis, widely conceived, provides normative grounding for the practices of global finance. Free markets are presumed to be stable, because they contain all the information required to anticipate the future. Standard free-market theories imply that all factors of production and all individuals get what they deserve, that is, in accordance with their contribution. However, empirical evidence and my causal explanation of the Asian crisis suggest that these claims are not true. Finance is unstable, generates crises and feeds inequalities. National economies and governments are not capable of adjusting to massive movements of funds across foreign exchanges, without real hardship and without significant sacrifice of the objectives of national economic policy. Arguments about what is true (1) have critical and normative implications. If the theories grounding current practices are in some important ways wrong, something has to be changed. But there are also arguments grounded on actors’ publicly expressed or implicitly presupposed ethico-­ political commitments (2). One is justice as fairness (as articulated by Rawls 1958), the minimum conditions of which are difficult for anyone in modern society to consistently deny. In the context of a worldwide financial crisis, the fairness concerns the problems of basic asymmetries between different positions in the world economy. Because of global interdependencies, financial fluctuations have far-reaching consequences to the lives of those who neither benefit from financial activities nor have any say on the decisions and developments suddenly hampering their lives. In other words, the millions bearing the consequences of recurring financial crises seem to get a punishment without committing a crime. Most of those few who are causally responsible are rescued or bailed out, that is, they do not get a punishment even when they fail. To the contrary, they can continue to enjoy their privileges. The principle of ‘individual profits, socialised risks’ is not fair in the sense of equal treatment. A more general argument for justice starts from the claim that global financial markets are co-responsible for widening global disparities. From this follows a prima facie commitment to transform the prevailing characters and powers of agents, and the structure of institutions, in order to reduce powerlessness and vulnerability (see O’Neill 1991). Alternatively, an argument for an institutional reform such as a global currency transaction tax may also begin from the shared ideal of democracy. This ideal presupposes that democratic decision-makers have a significant degree of

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autonomy. However, the shared ideal of democracy may also suggest new normative viewpoints (4), in this case global democracy as empowering the powerless in the world economy and establishing a new tax organisation in a democratic fashion. The latter may also evoke arguments based on the teachings of history and other cultures (3). For instance, it would be possible to use lottery to determine global civil society participation in the global currency transaction tax organisation (i.e. apply an ancient republican method). This is only an example. It is also possible to start, say, from a partly and contingently shared ideal such as democracy and specify its meaning and criteria in a widely appealing way. The world political economy involves relations of power. There are many proposals to transform the existing systems of global governance or to establish new ones such as global tax organisations. It is possible to evaluate systematically the degree to which the proposed transformations could democratise relations of power and dependence in our world political and economic system and accord with other norms such as justice or non-violence (see Patomäki and Teivainen 2004). It is also possible to begin from different metaphorically constituted models, theories and ideologies of justice and see to what extent they have a shared basis, on the one hand, and to what extent they may be contested within and across various divides globally, on the other hand, not infrequently also by violent means (the sense of injustice has constituted powerful negative emotions since ancient China, India and Greece/Rome). In Patomäki (2006), I developed the idea that while the abstract concept of justice is universal, its substance and direction are not. Like almost all ethical concepts, the notion of justice is constructed metaphorically. The core meaning of justice is that similar cases should be treated in the same way, and given what they truly deserve. I developed the idea that some substantial conceptions of justice may be more plausible than others, in part in a context-dependent manner. Given how prone justice has been to absolutist and also violent interpretations, it seems that the real ethical and practical-political problem is how to effect necessary and desirable institutional changes by means of peaceful change. The recognition of the relativist nature of models and sentiments of justice is a key reason for the quest to democratise systems of global governance.

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5   The Missing Part: Collective Learning and Human Cultural Evolution We can now see how and why Brown’s subsequent development since the early 1990s has not led to a convergence of our views on substantial matters. Brown does not consider issues such as global debt problem and financial crises, and he has never satisfactorily responded to the simple but persuasive argument made by Charles Beitz (1979) that if society is an interwoven whole based on division of labour and cooperation, then we should be talking about global justice (and other values and norms).8 Time and again Brown resorts to the metaphor of thinness/thickness, which is common in IR ethics discourse. ‘The web of global governance and private transactions [is] not yet thick enough to sustain the metaphor’ of global civil society (Brown 2010: 196). The assumption seems to be that when the global can be characterised as ‘thin’, then merely the apparently neutral norms of inter-national liberalism are applicable, moderated by some liberal human rights. The metaphor of thinness and thickness is loose. How do we know whether the ‘web’ of something—or the ‘moral life’ of X—is thin or thick? Being thin means having a small distance between the top and bottom or front and back surfaces. The thinness of something is relative even when we are talking about measurable things such as ice or boxes or human beings. Thinness presupposes evaluative standards or norms that are relevant for some practical purpose (e.g. driving across a lake in wintertime— how thin or thick is ice?). If neither the measure nor the practical purpose is well specified, there is no way of making a judgement whether something is thin or thick. It is also questionable whether the metaphor is rationally applicable to phenomena such as ‘web of global governance’ and ‘moral life’, or what it should mean in those contexts. ‘Someone leading a thin moral life’ might refer for instance to amoral or immoral behaviour. Moreover, the question whether we should characterise, say, Tony Blair’s moral life as ‘thin’ or ‘thick’ is likely to evoke controversies, because this question cannot be disentangled from substance. When studying phenomena such as a global debt problem or financial crisis, the critical question is whether the relevant practices, structures, and processes have causal effects that matter to people and whether there are ethical and political discussions and debates about those phenomena in the public sphere. If they have (or can have) causal effects that matter and those are being debated, then the very texture of social life in that particu-

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lar context is already enmeshed in evaluative and normative ideas and concerns, not least because practices are legitimised in terms of normative conceptions. Under these circumstances, there is room for making normative arguments that can ground a potential agreement and a rational judgement in a dialogical context, by appealing to potentially good reasons of the types (1)–(4). This perspective on normative argumentation is fine as far as it goes. However, a quarter a century later I find it historically myopic and philosophically wanting. By the time I wrote ‘Global Justice: A Democratic Perspective’ (Patomäki 2006), I had started to realise the recent historical emergence and rapid evolvement of morality, especially when compared to the prehistoric pace of changes. Geo-historically, the origin of money, mathematics and justice seem to be closely connected. Justice is based on the moral accounting metaphor and emerged in the early civilisations. The development of writing was especially important, creating the basis for metaphorical thinking that in turn emerged in the first millennium BCE and, through mutual enablement, gave rise to more complex and less hierarchical social organisations. The difference between the early ancient accounts of justice such the Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100–2050 BC) and the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750s BCE), and such late twentieth-century accounts as Rawls’s theory of justice and Habermas’s theory of discourse ethics, is profound. The ancient codes consider only retributive justice and contract law; have an inclination to resort to trials by ordeal; see robbery, adultery and rape as capital offences; and tend to be strictly physicalist (‘an eye for an eye’), although they sometimes also recognise monetary compensation for harm-doing. None of this is acceptable to a Rawls or Habermas, according to whom all humans have conscience and the capacity to choose universal ethical principles by appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality and consistency. Gradually, I started to accept the idea that there can be stages both in moral (Piaget, Kohlberg, Habermas) and political economy developments (Patomäki 2007c). History is contingent and open-ended, but there are different layers of time, in which counterfactual possibilities play out in different ways. At a deeper level of world-historical time, and at a higher level of abstraction, some developments and stages may be inevitable (although of course they are contingent upon the continuation of various background processes). Moreover, the higher stages in collective learning can be argued to be more adequate (Kohlberg 1981: Chaps. 4–5). Each

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higher stage answers questions or problems unsolved at the next lower stage. Empirically it can be established that higher stages are both cognitively more difficult and perceived by subjects as more adequate (moreover, with collective learning, relevant contexts change and earlier stages may become increasingly obsolete and inadequate). Normatively, a key consideration is the degree of generalizability—indicating plausibility and stability of judgements in differentiated and complex multi-actor contexts—and the related capacity for abstract role-taking. Higher stage reasoning is both more differentiated (implying a more nuanced understanding of social realities) and more integrated (implying symmetry and consistence) than prior stage. Stages represent successive modes of taking the role of others in one’s reflective consciousness developing through (i) practical conflicts, (ii) attempts to resolve them and (iii) subsequent conceptual-logical reorganisations. A more adequate conceptualisation and logic of reasoning does not, however, determine the substance of moral judgement. At each stage, actors can continue to have genuine disagreements about the right actions, rules and principles when they are dealing with complex moral problems. From this perspective, it is clear that the four types (1)–(4) of potentially good reasons that can ground a potential agreement and a rational judgement in a dialogical context presuppose the principles of stage 7 discourse ethics. At the post-conventional or critical-reflective level (from stage 5 onwards), there is an effort to define morality and ethico-political principles which have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups or persons holding these principles, and apart from the individuals own identification with these groups. From stage 6 (Kant–Rawls) onwards, and especially at stage 7 (discourse ethics), the de-centric post-­ conventional orientation implies critical cosmopolitanism (cf. Patomäki 2010, 2017a, b). In this social imaginary all human beings are seen hypothetically as equal world-citizens in a world society, giving a direction to emancipatory practices and institutional transformations (for a general outline of democratic global Keynesianism, see Patomäki 2013: Chap. 8). Habermas (1990: 197) formulates the basic principles of discourse ethics, including ‘only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse’. Post-structuralism and critical realism qualify these principles. Jacques Derrida (1988, 1992) emphasises the constructed and open character of identities and shows how easy it is to fix one’s identity, in ways with potentially (perhaps metaphorically) violent effects. He also

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points to difficulties of creating ethico-political spaces free from asymmetrical or biased power relations. Derrida’s interest lies in the conditions for a democracy to come, in which justice means thorough mutual respect for the other, all subjects reflexively understanding that their subjectivities are effects of language and world history. Bhaskar (1993, 1994) in turn wants to draw attention to the multi-layered non-discursive conditions of fulfilling the universal norms of free ethico-political discourse. Any possible approximation of the norms of free discourse is always contingent upon many politico-economic, educational, ecological and other real conditions, and these must be considered in terms of institutional design. In several passages, Brown (e.g. 2010: 87) mentions discourse ethics, but only to reject it. This rejection stems partly from a confusion between the ideal and the actual and between practical discourse and its outcomes. The idea is neither that there are determinate answers to all moral dilemmas nor that an actual or imagined consensus defines those answers. The stage 7 concerns only the dialogic of reasoning. Within it, actors can have genuine disagreements about the right course of action, or right rules and principles, when they are dealing with complex ethical and political problems. Habermas may be plausibly and perhaps rightly criticised for overstating human capabilities (Kuper 2004: 50–60), and for stressing too strongly the role of consensus (Rescher 1993), but the point of practical discourse is to bring in different interpretations and needs. The moral point of view arises out of the multiple perspectives of those affected by a norm or principle, or a policy or institutional transformation, under consideration. Practical discourse is always subject to various constraints such as asymmetries of habitus and social positioning, biases related to the media of communication and limitations of time. A potential or actual consensus is only one out of many criteria of validity of claims.9 Thus, a rational judgement in a dialogical context is necessarily also a matter of individual conscience and virtue.

6   Conclusions What makes Brown’s texts interesting is the way he can relate his ideas to a diverse mixture of literatures, from liberal communitarianism and social-­ democratic Aristotelianism to critical theories and post-structuralism. In this chapter, I have nonetheless argued that Brown’s own position can be best characterised as liberal conservatism. As a normative theorist, Brown started his career as a strong defender of state moralism, which is an

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e­ xtension of the principles of liberalism to international society (assuming that states are persons). Later he has accepted the universal validity of liberal (negative) human rights, which can be used to evaluate whether a state is non-decent or decent. The full rights of members of international society only apply to decent and especially to liberal states. The West led by the US and the UK can freely decide whether to intervene in the affairs of nondecent states. This aspect of Brown’s thinking comes close to US neo-conservatism. In this chapter, I have juxtaposed Brown’s development with the evolution of my own thinking since the ‘deconstruction’ of the Brown-Hoffman debate. Although epistemically Brown seems to have moved into a practical and context-sensitive direction, our ethical and political judgements have diverged rather than converged. I still consider both state moralism and many forms of say human rights cosmopolitanism as utopian, but I furthermore disagree about the legitimacy of unilateral Western interventionism on epistemological (relativism and its ethico-political implications such as strong predilection for non-violence) and consequentialist (war is hell and is difficult to end, and just wars may clash) grounds. Brown’s attempt to pose a new question—how should we live?—and explore possibilities opened up by Nussbaum’s version of virtue ethics is praiseworthy but remains an abstract opening (Brown 2012, discusses statesmanship from the same angle). I have argued in this chapter that any area of activities in international relations and world society, from property and contract to nuclear safety and global warming, can be subject to normative debates and potentially democratic politics. The critical question is whether the relevant practices, structures and processes have causal effects that matter to people and whether there are ethical and political discussions and debates about those phenomena in the public sphere. If the answer is yes, there is room for making normative arguments that can ground a potential agreement and rational judgement in a dialogical context, by appealing to potentially good reasons of the types (1)–(4). Good normative arguments often involve designs for better institutions, but they must be realisable by virtue of being connected to real causal processes (i.e. normative arguments embrace concrete utopias). Over time, it has become evident that my 1990s explication of normative argumentation—not tied to any nation, state or other limited community—presupposed the basic tenets and principles of discourse ethics, seen as a particular stage in human ethico-political development. Further stages can be envisioned, widening the scope of potential moral subjects

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and concerns, such as Karl-Otto Apel’s (1991) future-oriented planetary macroethics. It is increasingly realised that our planetary future depends on the actions taken, policies adopted and institutions built now. With this freedom comes also great responsibility.

Notes 1. The journal is now Global Society and is no longer edited by students. 2. I do not mean to suggest to have influenced Brown’s development in any way. To my knowledge, he has never cited any of my works—not even in his contribution to the debate about the promises of critical realism (Brown 2007). 3. John O’Neill (1998: 16) characterises liberalism as the view that public decisions and institutions are to be neutral between conceptions of the good. Individual liberalists maintain that the market economy and liberal state can be organised in such a way as to be neutral between different conceptions of the good, whereas communitarian liberalists argue that within a national state, conceptions of the good may converge, but among them pluralism must prevail. The assumption of neutrality is of course unfounded, because all institutional arrangements affect the conditions of good life (e.g. a subjectivist and competitive market society constitutes and constrains being like any institutional arrangement). 4. This distinction is basically the same as the historical distinction between civilised and non-civilised. In my review of the Finnish translation of The Law of Peoples, I noted that Rawls’ theory is based on the European medieval just war theory and international law of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His outmoded attempt to defend these as a universal truth via the procedure of ‘original position of states’ is condemned to remain a historical curiosity (Patomäki 2007b). Moreover, neither Rawls nor Brown really tackle the simple but persuasive argument made by Charles Beitz (1979) that if society is an interwoven whole based on division of labour and cooperation, then we should be talking about global justice. Although I think Beitz is basically right about worldwide social cooperation, division of labour and relations of interdependency, human interconnectedness does not solely rest on the empirical indicators of the volume of transactions that flow across national borders but is much deeper and concerns our very social beingness (my discussion with Roy Bhaskar on this point is unfortunately available only in Finnish; Bhaskar and Patomäki 2006). 5. Consider a legal dispute between two states. A criticises B by referring to a legal norm explicitly agreed by B (thus sticking to the hard evidence of state’s will and practice). B can contest not only the interpretation and applicability

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of this norm but maintain that this norm goes against its current will. A must then resort to a global-communitarian (cosmopolitan) line of argumentation and argue that B is objectively obliged to recognise the norm. The opposite is also true: if A starts from a cosmopolitan position, it necessarily ends up in citing state-will and state-practices. The preservation of the life and liberty of individual states contradicts the idea that the international (or global) community has its own moral or legal rules, norms and principles, and yet the latter is always necessarily presupposed. Thus, Koskenniemi (2005) claims that international law is indeterminate. As a consequence, the difference between, say, interventionist and non-interventionist position is illusory. You start with one position and end up arguing the opposite. Given the current institutional arrangements, Koskenniemi’s criticism of international law can be eye-opening, yet its adequacy is contingent, depending in particular on the prevailing transnational practices and global institutional arrangements. For a criticism of the Kennedy-Koskenniemi thesis, see Patomäki (2007a, b, c, especially 382–5). 6. Jus ex bello is about the rules surrounding the termination of war. The question is: What constitutes the legitimate boundaries of the use of force, in terms of both the decision to end a war and the rules upon which this decision is based? A satisfactory answer requires, moreover that one can reflexively anticipate possible and likely futures. See Colonomos (2015). 7. A powerful recent elucidation on this point is Sayer’s (2011) Why Things Matter to People. Social Science, Values and Ethical Life: ‘[W]e are sentient, evaluative beings: we don’t just think and interact but evaluate things, including the past and the future. We do so because, while we are capable and can flourish, we are also vulnerable and susceptible to various kinds of loss or harm; we can suffer.’ 8. See note 4. To my knowledge, the closest he gets to discuss these issues systematically is Chap. 7, ‘International Justice’, of his International Relations Theory. New Normative Approaches (Brown 1992, especially 174– 77). Brown argues that Beitz’s points may apply to the OECD world, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the poor may be dependent on the rich, but the rich do not need the poor. Thus, there is no cooperation for mutual advantage. This is a dismissive statement, not a sustained argument based on any explicit criteria, analysis or evidence. Dependencies or benefits do not have to be symmetrical for a system to be based on cooperation. For instance, in the classical Marxist depiction of capitalist labour markets, there is an army of reserve labour. Thus, capitalists seem totally independent of any particular worker; and yet, without the workers the system of production would at once cease to function. 9. Consider truth-claims first. The meaning of truth is correspondence to the way things really are in the world (veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus).

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Correspondence cannot, however, be used as a criterion of truth. Many centuries of attempts to explain what correspondence literally is have failed. Rather correspondence is a metaphor and truth should be seen as a normative and metaphorical principle, which guides conduct. In actual debates, we make truth-judgements on the basis of coherence, pragmatic and constructivist considerations and consensus. Coherence is important because beliefs form a system and coherence to evidence and other beliefs matters (thus, contradictions and aporias are so important for cognitive development). If an explanation or theory works in practice, we have pragmatic reasons to believe that it is in some important ways true (although our explanation of these reasons may be wrong). Constructivism (verum ipsum factum) applies to many things in society and we can create new social realities. As Habermas claims, also the norms of ideal speech situation and the actual beliefs held by the scientific community are relevant, although we also know that consensus can be wrong and in social sciences we rarely have a consensus. Mutatis mutandis, all these criteria are relevant in assessing moral validity-claims too. For instance, Rawls’s famous but also widely criticised ‘method of reflective equilibrium’ is a way of articulating the coherence-aspect of normative reasoning.

References Apel, K.-O. (1991). A Planetary Macroethics for Humankind: The Need, the Apparent Difficulty, and the Eventual Possibility. In E. Deutsch (Ed.), Culture and Modernity. East-West Philosophic Perspectives (pp.  261–278). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Beitz, C. (1979). Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1993). Dialectic. The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso. Bhaskar, R. (1994). Plato Etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution. London: Verso. Bhaskar, R., & Patomäki, H. (2006). Ihmiskunnan kohtalon yhteys: filosofisia ja yhteiskuntatieteellisiä vastauksia—Roy Bhaskarin ja Heikki Patomäen keskustelu, [The Common Fate of Humanity: Philosophical and Social Scientific Responses—A Conversation with Roy Bhaskar and Heikki Patomäki] (M. Jutila, Ed. and Trans.). Kosmopolis, 36, 6–25. Brown, C. (1987). Not My Department? Normative Theory and International Relations. Paradigms, 1(2), 104–113. Brown, C. (1988). Cosmopolitan Confusions: A Reply to Hoffman. Paradigms, 2(2), 102–111. Brown, C. (1992). International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Brown, C. (2007). Situating Critical Realism. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35(2), 409–416. Brown, C. (2010). Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2012). The ‘Practice Turn’, Phronesis and Classical Realism: Towards a Phronetic International Political Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(3), 439–456. Bull, H. (1997). The Anarchical Society. A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan. Colonomos, A. (2015). Is There a Future for ‘Jus ex Bello’? Global Policy, 6(4), 358–368. Derrida, J.  (1988). Limited Inc (A.  Bass & S.  Weber, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1992). The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (P-A. Brault & M. Naas, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Habermas, J. (1990). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (C. Lenhardt & S. Nicholsen, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hoffman, M. (1988). States, Cosmopolitanism and Normative International Theory. Paradigms, 2(1), 60–75. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on Moral Development, Volume One. The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Koskenniemi, M. (2005). From Apology to Utopia (A Reissue with New Elements). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuper, A. (2004). Democracy Beyond Borders. Justice and Representation in Global Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgan, J., & Patomäki, H. (2017). Introduction: Special Forum on Brexit Part 2. Globalizations, 14(6), 793–802. Nardin, T. (1983). Law, Morality, and the Relations of States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nardin, T. (2013, June 18). Interview—Terry Nardin. E-International Relations, Online. Available at http://www.e-ir.info/2013/06/18/interview-terrynardin/. Accessed 18 Dec 2017. Nussbaum, M., & Sen, A. (Eds.). (1993). The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Neill, O. (1991). Transnational Justice. In D. Held (Ed.), Political Theory Today (pp. 276–304). Cambridge: Polity Press. O’Neill, J. (1998). The Market. Ethics, Knowledge and Politics. London: Routledge. Patomäki, H. (1992). From Normative Utopias to Political Dialectics: Beyond a Deconstruction of the Brown-Hoffman Debate. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 21(1), 53–75. Patomäki, H. (2001). Democratising Globalisation. The Leverage of the Tobin Tax. London: Zed Books.

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Patomäki, H. (2006). Global Justice: A Democratic Perspective. Globalizations, 3(2), 99–120. Patomäki, H. (2007a). Rethinking Global Parliament: Beyond the Indeterminacy of International Law. Widener Law Review, 13(2), 375–393. Patomäki, H. (2007b, June). Historia ajoi Rawlsin ohi [Rawls: Overtaken by History], a Book Review of the Finnish Translation of J. Rawls ‘The Law of Peoples’. Yliopisto, pp. 58–59. Patomäki, H. (2007c). Back to the Kantian Idea of ‘Universal History’? Overcoming Eurocentric Accounts of the International Problematic. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(3), 575–595. Patomäki, H. (2010). Cosmological Sources of Critical Cosmopolitanism. Review of International Studies, 36(S1), 181–200. Patomäki, H. (2013). The Great Eurozone Disaster: From Crisis to Global New Deal. London: Zed Books. Patomäki, H. (2017a). On the Possibility of a Global Political Community: The Enigma of ‘Small Local Differences’ Within Humanity, Protosociology. An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 33, 93–127. Patomäki, H. (2017b). Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy: Exits and Conflicts. London: Routledge. Patomäki, H., & Teivainen, T. (2004). A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions. London: Zed Books. Rawls, J. (1958). Justice as Fairness. The Philosophical Review, 67(2), 164–194. Rawls, J. (1999). The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rescher, N. (1993). Pluralism. Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shue, H. (1980). Basic Right: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steger, M. (2005). Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism (2nd Revised ed.). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Walzer, M. (2000). Just and Unjust Wars (3rd ed.). New York: Basic Books.

PART III

Coda

CHAPTER 13

In Response Chris Brown

I am (almost) lost for words. I am, of course, enormously grateful to Mathias Albert and Tony Lang for the honour they have bestowed on me by putting together this collection of chapters, and to all the contributors for producing such stimulating work, but I have a feeling at the back of my mind that the exercise is based on false premises. My friends will testify that I am not given to false modesty, and so you can assume I am telling the truth when I say that I think the account that Tony and Mathias give of my influence in the 1990s, and since, is overdrawn. Certainly, I was one of several writers who identified a new field, international political theory, and helped to give it shape, but my talent for more-or-less accurate precis and for making connections shouldn’t be confused with genuine originality. The real founders of the field were scholars such as Andrew Linklater, Terry Nardin, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Friedrich Kratochwil and Charles Beitz who made substantial, original contributions. My contribution was to take what they were doing and pull out the ways in which it differed from the regular discourses of political theory and international relations theory, organising their work into categories such as ‘communitarian’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ which served a purpose at the time, though subsequently

C. Brown (*) London School of Economics, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_13

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they confused more than they clarified. I see myself as, on the one hand, an essayist whose thoughts come in 8000-word packages, and on the other, as a textbook writer with a certain facility for conveying complex material to smart students—what I am not and never have been is the sort of person who writes the kind of large-scale study that the authors named earlier have produced. What I would claim is that I am one of John Locke’s ‘under-labourers’; as he put it, ‘It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish which lies in the way to knowledge’ (1998 [1689]: 10). Critics would no doubt say that I added some of my own rubbish while removing other people’s, but that tends to be what under-labourers always do. Still, whether my role has been exaggerated or not, this initiative has produced a really interesting collection of chapters which offer a fine illustration of the depth and breadth of contemporary scholarship in international political theory. I am very pleased to have been given the opportunity to comment on them, although this is somewhat of the nature of a poisoned chalice. If I am critical, it will seem that I am looking a gift horse in the mouth, but to be uncritical would be worse, a betrayal at a deeper level. So I will risk the charge of ingratitude in one or two cases by responding quite critically, but without, I hope, failing to acknowledge the seriousness with which all the authors represented here have gone about their task. I’ll begin by making some general comments, proceeding thereafter to have something to say about each chapter—sometimes quite briefly where the writer and I are, as it were, on the same page, and in more depth when we differ. And I would like to apologise in advance to all of the authors for not having the space to respond in more detail to their chapters. One theme that runs through several chapters is the way my views have changed over time, which I might caricature as moving from a relativist and fellow-travelling crypto-postmodernist to a Blairite Liberal Internationalist or a Conservative Liberal (this trajectory is implicit in Brent Steele’s contribution, explicit in Heikki Patomäki’s and in the background of several of the other chapters, sometimes with partial approval, as from Colin Wight). There is some truth to the charge here, but I will still plead ‘not guilty’, or possibly ‘not proven’. There are two stories here, one international and one domestic. As to the first, the international, story, I’ll offer a partial mea culpa for some of the judgements I made over the Iraq War and over intervention more generally in the last 20 years. I still believe (i) that in the twenty-first century, the gap between

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pre-emptive (legitimate) and preventive (illegitimate) war is less clear cut than it once was given the nature of modern technology, which has changed what is meant by an imminent threat, and (ii) that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were justified to be concerned about Iraq’s weapons programme. But while I don’t think they lied about this concern, it’s now pretty clear that they didn’t dig deeply enough into the intelligence and ask the questions they should have asked. They believed they were right and didn’t look closely enough into the signs that pointed in another direction; this was certainly a failure of judgement. Similarly, I don’t row back from the general proposition that sometimes it may be necessary to use force to remove a regime which is a threat to its own people and to others, but if you do act, you have to have some reason to believe that you can actually make things better—planning for the aftermath of intervention is crucial. Clearly, in Iraq, Afghanistan and later in Libya, this was not done, or done so badly that it might as well not have been done. Here is the real indictment of Tony Blair, not that he lied, because I don’t think he did, nor that he helped to get rid of Saddam Hussein, on the whole a good thing, but that he simply assumed that doing so would solve Iraq’s problems, and didn’t listen to those who, correctly, predicted that it would not. This is one area where the prudential considerations of realists deserve to be taken very seriously indeed—though I would still hold that knowing when not to be prudent and when to take risks is as important as knowing when to stay one’s hand. If these positions make me a conservative liberal, then so be it. On the more domestic side, I don’t think I have changed very much—I still believe what I always have believed, but the new politics of identity and difference have made these beliefs seem conservative when once they would have seemed common to most varieties of socialism and social democracy. There is a whole range of positions where the world has changed but I have not. Many of these cycle around the rise of identity politics, and the notion that a general solidarity with the less advantaged should be replaced by support for particular claims to victimhood. I offer no mea culpa here. Among the changes that I think regrettable are the facts that in the course of the last 30 years, anti-Semitism has become a routine feature of the Left in Britain, that any kind of criticism of the Muslim religion is branded as the product of mental illness (Islamophobia) and criminalised, that feminists have been prevented from speaking on university campuses because they had the wrong opinion on transgender issues, and, most recently, that the expression of academic opinion

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favourable to or at least neutral about colonialism and empire has been met not with counterarguments but with a demand that the author be suppressed and the topic treated as closed for good. The last points are particular galling for someone such as myself who has spent a lifetime in academia—that universities are no longer committed to the free expression of ideas is, I believe, a disaster. The depressing fact is that the deplorable practice of ‘no platforming’ speakers is now being extended from the original targets, overt racists and apologists for fascism, to anyone who expresses a controversial opinion that might possibly offend someone in the audience. As a direct result, universities are increasingly losing their position as fora for the expression of dissent and argumentation—the action has moved off campus. The result of diversity politics is that universities certainly look less male and white than they used to and, other things being equal, that is a very good thing, but the fact that everyone nowadays is expected to think the same, that diversity of opinion is increasingly unacceptable, is bad. Nietzsche saw this coming: in his account of the Last Men in Also Sprach Zarathustra, he remarks, ‘One herd and no shepherd! Everyone thinks the same, those who do not go voluntarily to the madhouse.’ In some quarters, my opposition to these trends makes me rightwing; nothing I can do about that, but I’m certainly not going to shift my opinions. Colin Wight in his excellent chapter doesn’t want me to change my opinions, approving my dogmatic anti-dogmatism (nice formula, I’ll take that), but he does want me to admit that to defend these positions, I need to commit to ‘One World Realism’ and become a scientific realist. His position is, I think, that both the nonsense of ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ and the excessive toleration for all forms of ‘difference’ can be traced back to trends within the academy supportive of a relativism that undermines the capacity for judgement—that anti-foundationalism, postmodernism and post-structuralism have at worst contributed to these distortions, or, at best, weakened our defences against them. I have some sympathy for this position but would still want to defend the core position that to understand social life, we need qualitatively different tools from those required for understanding the natural world. Certainly, such a proposition can open the door to nonsense, but figures as diverse as Charles Taylor, Friedrich Kratochwil, Nicholas Onuf, and, I would argue, Michael Walzer and Richard Rorty demonstrate that one can hold the line against this nonsense without committing to scientific realism. Still, there is little substantive in Wight’s chapter with which I would disagree.

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Aristotle certainly held that there is a crucial difference between those areas where episteme or techne provide access to knowledge of the world and those areas where phronesis, practical judgement or prudence, is required, and obviously that is where I stand. Still, a key issue is what is actually involved in exercising practical judgement, and here Kim Hutchings and Nick Rengger, in two excellent contributions, gently take me to task. They examine different works from the last two decades but come to broadly similar conclusions, namely that my critique of rule-based ethical reasoning is basically sound, but that my positive alternative is thinly specified—I write of the importance of practical judgement without giving enough thought to what this actually involves. I’m inclined to agree with this criticism, but in my defence, I would argue that this lack of specificity partly reflects the nature of practical judgement. Such judgement is based always on the specific nature of the case, the empirics of the situation. The proposition is that we are always presented by a rich set of circumstances and our action has to reflect the complexity with which we are faced, and that while some rules of thumb (e.g., ‘don’t intervene if it would make things worse’ and ‘only act if you are sure of your case’) may be helpful, knowing which ones apply in this particular situation, here and now, can’t be specified in advance. Still, as to the detail of their arguments, I think Hutchings is very much to the point—I haven’t really worked through the contradiction between the elitist and democratic element in the way I employ the notion of political judgement, and on many of the specific issues, I have looked at I give more credit to the realist emphasis on specialist knowledge than I ought to. I would claim to be aware of the problem here, but agree I haven’t come close to solving it. Rengger would certainly agree that my position is incomplete, but I’d be interested in how he would complete it—Hutchings reaches out to Arendt, but I suspect Rengger would like me to be more rather than less elitist, following Oakeshott and McIntyre. In any event, these two chapters are important contributions to the project of making sense of an Aristotelian version of the practice turn, and I have learnt much from them. Henry Radice’s exploration of humanitarianism and defence of internationalism as a stance preferable to cosmopolitanism is very much to my taste, and, I think, one that is of increasing relevance in a so-called age of populism. To my mind, one of the reasons why populist political actors have done so well in the last few years has been because left-liberal thought has been at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile, to notions of the nation. Whereas once the left, broadly defined, claimed with some success

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to speak for the nation as a whole, in recent years, the trend has been to reject the nation in favour of, on the one hand, cosmopolitan commitments, and, on the other, various identity groups self-defining as victims, leaving the nation as an organising concept to be claimed by the populist right. I am one of the generation my fellow student at the London School of Economics (LSE) of 50 years ago, Peter Hennessey, has called ‘Atlee’s Children’, and a distinguishing feature of the great post-war Labour Government that Clement Atlee led was its patriotism and the claim that it represented all the people; as Herbert Morrison put it when abandoning a safe working-class seat to fight a Tory-held mixed-class constituency in 1945, it is ‘my conviction that the soundest socialist appeal is that which is most universal in its scope’. In the last British General Election, the Labour Party’s slogan ‘For the many, not the few’ caught that mood, and Jeremy Corbyn’s radical populism was surprisingly successful for just that reason, although Corbyn’s personal politics seem a long way away from the patriotism of Major Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, and the support for Labour among students and in university towns seems more like the product of a special interest than a commitment to ‘the many’. Returning to the issue of internationalism, I am sure that a commitment to the community, the nation, can be accompanied by an equally generous commitment to the world, and that a cosmopolitanism which denies the moral significance of the community will be politically impotent; Radice’s elaboration of this position is admirable. In his thoughtful, distinguished and substantial chapter, Lothar Brock picks up the issue of political judgement, rightly pointing to the indeterminacy of the notion, preferring to rely on Immanuel Kant in his analysis of the role of the notion of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in preventing atrocities, gently chiding me for my scepticism. I remain sceptical—I simply do not believe there is sufficient global consensus behind the notion of R2P to make it work in the way it is supposed to. Brock is a cosmopolitan thinker who believes that eventually a global constitution will emerge and we should work to bring this about, whereas I am an internationalist who believes that national communities will remain the essential building blocks of the world order for the foreseeable future. I also think that pushing ahead too fast may actually be counterproductive. Consider the case of the International Criminal Court (ICC), at one level, its establishment represents a great triumph for those who wish to see a more orderly world where great crimes can be punished, but this triumph could easily turn sour once it is realised that the great powers remain immune from its influ-

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ence—and already a degree of disillusionment is visible in Africa. The Court is now considering complaints from Afghanistan against US and other NATO forces—if, as I suspect, nothing comes of this, this negative outcome will be read as further confirmation that the ICC can do very little to respond to global hierarchies of power. But what struck me most reading this chapter is that although we reach slightly different conclusions, and get there by rather more different routes, still the degree of overlap in our positions is quite striking. When the chips are down, I would be a little more willing to see states employing force without the sanction of the UN than would Brock, and he is a little more committed to the legalism of the ICC and R2P than I am, but in the wider scheme of things we are very much on the same side. Part of Ken Booth’s entertaining diatribe takes the well-established form of reviewing a book by saying it isn’t the book one would write oneself, which is I’m sure true of Booth and International Society, Global Polity, but not particularly helpful. He obviously feels that the English School is moulding on the vine and that ‘global polity’ is too wishywashy—‘defensive realism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ would be a better binary opposition, if I insist on having a binary opposition. Actually, I do for heuristic and educational purposes and I prefer my binary to his, unsurprisingly. There is, however, another aspect of Booth’s chapter which is, for me, more interesting. To say that one does not understand an argument is a common rhetorical device, meaning that actually one does understand it but disagrees—however, I genuinely do not understand Booth’s criticism of just war thinking. To my mind, there are several logical possibilities when it comes to the ethics of using force in international (or any other) disputes. One can say that force is never justified whatever the circumstances (pacifism) or, at the other extreme, that the use of force is purely an instrumental matter with no moral issues involved (let’s call this Clausewitzian for the purpose of this discussion). Reject these two positions and one is involved in discrimination—sometimes force is justified, sometimes it isn’t—and that’s where just war thinking comes in. It seems to me these three positions, pacifist, Clausewitzian and discriminatory, cover all the possibilities, but Booth apparently disagrees. He wants to reject all three positions, which would be really interesting if he was prepared to specify the hypothetical fourth position that he wants to espouse, but he isn’t. I don’t understand this. I can understand those who argue that the classic just war criteria need to be revised, added to or subtracted from, and I can understand, though disagree with, those who

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think that totally different criteria for discrimination are appropriate— jihads, crusades or revolutionary wars offer such criteria. What I don’t understand is Booth’s position which is that one can somehow reject discrimination without being either a pacifist or a hard-line realist. What makes things worse is that I also don’t understand why he doesn’t understand why this is a sensible question. With Lothar Brock, I feel that we are actually in the same place, more or less, but with Booth, I suspect the deeper one went into our respective positions the further apart we would find ourselves— which didn’t stop us being an effective team when we were both engaged with British International Studies Association (BISA) in the 1990s. My earlier comments about conservative liberalism are obviously relevant to Brent Steel’s heartfelt chapter. I’m sorry he feels the sad story of liberal internationalism’s failures in the twenty-first century leads him away from what is valuable in a liberal approach to international politics— I certainly want to keep some of the values of liberty if not of liberalism; I think he is right that younger scholars turn away from this, but it is where they turn to that is truly worrying. I’m not convinced the middle is broken. Partly this is a matter of definition; to me, the ‘middle’ is not some kind of flabby centre but rather, in Aristotelian terms, the product of two antonyms. Thus, for example, courage is the opposite of cowardice, but it is also the opposite of rashness. The middle ground in this sense is worth fighting for and I am not going to be deflected from this because of some mistakes I might have made in particular circumstances. But, overall, I very much like the emphasis Steel puts on the emotions—it seems to me that this has been one of the most interesting areas in international political theory of the last two decades, and it’s one that I agree I haven’t really come to terms with, either in recognising my own emotional commitments, which are certainly there, or in a more general theoretical sense. In summary, this chapter was not always a comfortable read, but then it wasn’t supposed to be. David Owen’s closely reasoned chapter sets out a position with which I am very sympathetic, albeit with some caveats. I like the fact that he takes seriously the turn towards evolutionary psychology even while being cautious about actually endorsing this move—I can live with that, given the number of people who think that any move in this direction makes one a social Darwinist, eugenicist and generally bad guy. I also share the view that Charles Beitz’s ‘practice’ approach to human rights is a long step in the right direction. But one of the reasons why I don’t fully go along with Beitz’s position also applies to David’s approach, and that concerns the

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difference between an argument between political philosophers and an engagement with the operation of human rights outside of the academy. It is interesting to me that in Beitz’s world, the opponents of human rights whose arguments he needs to vanquish are for the most part communitarian political philosophers. The proverbial ‘man from Mars’ reading Beitz’s book would have no way of knowing that there are actually people out there in what I dogmatically (but in an anti-dogmatic way) think of the real world, who systematically, and from deeply held principle, reject altogether the idea that people have rights other than those gifted by a deity, reject the idea that men and women should have equal rights, or that sexual orientation and gender assignment are ultimately matters of choice. Beitz doesn’t really have any way of talking to these people—and I’m certainly not claiming that I do either, but it does seem to me that finding something genuinely universal upon which to rest human rights is an important task, and ultimately not one that can be performed by political philosophers. Mervyn Frost offers a characteristically vigorously argued chapter defending his long-held vision of a world of rights-holders, and critiquing Brexit on ethical grounds. His central proposition is that there is a tension between the practices that create states as rights-holders and those that create the individual as a rights-holder, that this tension is partly reduced by the existence of bodies such as the European Union (EU), and that it is therefore ethically wrong to leave the EU, thereby reducing the rights of EU citizens. I have much sympathy for the first part of this argument; in International Society, Global Polity, I set out a similar contrast between two overlapping conceptions of how the world should be organised— though it seems to me that characterising the global polity as composed of individual rights-holders is generally unhelpful, since that is clearly not how the vast majority of the world’s population see their situation. I have had this discussion many times with Frost, to no good effect, so better to focus on my real objection to the way Frost sets up his argument, which is to his characterisation of the EU. I would say that rather than reduce the tension between a state-centric and an individual-centric world, the EU relocates this tension in space—as much a system of inclusion and exclusion as the sovereign state, it simply shifts the relevant borders. As to the operation of the EU, it is interesting that Frost, implicitly in his thought experiment of Germany leaving the EU, sets up the Federal Republic as an ideal ethical actor, because a closer examination tells a rather different story, and one less harmful to the UK’s ethical standing.

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Germany certainly has a total belief in the importance of free movement within the Union—but it also has strong protection for the jobs of German workers, a system of identity cards which ensures that migrants are not left to their own devices, and a welfare system where nearly all benefits depend on contributions over time, which means that migrants cannot claim them. Such a commitment to free movement in principle combined with serious obstacles to it in practice is common in Western Europe, and this is why job-seekers from Eastern Europe come to the UK.  In 2015, Chancellor Merkel moved away from this stance to declare a universal welcome for refugees, but the result was a disaster for her and the Christoian Democratic Union (CDU), the rise of the populist right-wing AfD, and several years of rowing back on her unwise commitment. There is nothing here that is morally superior to the UK position which has been to support refugees in the region of origin. Interestingly, similar differences emerge with other EU countries over issues such as security and human rights; Brits agonise at length as to how long terror suspects can be held without being charged, and are routinely criticised for their practice here and for attempts to deport potential terrorists to parts of the world where human rights are routinely violated, but, for example, French Magistrates can hold suspects more or less indefinitely without charge, and North or West Africans who behave suspiciously in Paris will be on the next plane home before you can say ‘human rights violation’. In short, there is much euro-hypocrisy here. For the record, I voted Remain in the 2016 referendum, but I think that the result was a mistake but not a disaster, to paraphrase David Cameron. I certainly don’t think it can be characterised as the ethical mistake Frost claims to have identified. David Boucher’s meditation on cultural incomprehension, tragedy and restorative justice touches on many issues which have been and are important to me. I welcome his casting of Post-Colonial theory and of issues such as the decolonisation of syllabi in these terms, and certainly agree that thinkers such as Cabral and Fanon need to be re-established in our mental maps of the world—although Fanon at least has never really been absent. There is one issue where I am not sure whether Boucher and I are actually in agreement. We would both like to decolonise our thinking, but some at least of those who push for Rhodes to Fall remain fixated on the European experience of empire and racism, which may be understandable in context but still stands in the way of a full liberation from the prejudices which we have inherited. If we are to understand European imperialism, we need to understand the Empires of the Moguls, of the Ottomans, of

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the Central Kingdom of China, of Shaka Zulu and so on. In order to understand European racism, we need to understand the equally fierce racism of China and Japan, and we need to meditate on why virtually every name ‘tribal’ peoples give themselves (Lakota, Cheyenne, Maori, etc.) translates as ‘human being’ with the implication that non-members are in some sense at least, non-human. In the immediate aftermath of the colonial era, it was understandable that the de-colonised should focus on the evils of their previous masters—now, though, we need to take a wider view. The currently fashionable view that there is something uniquely evil about being a white male of European descent needs to be consigned to the same dustbin as the earlier view that white males of European descent represent the pinnacle of civilisation. What is regrettable is that the kind of initiative on the study of Empire currently being undertaken by Nigel Biggar’s research group in Oxford should be so vigorously attacked by the Post-Colonial theorists who in principle ought to welcome this attempt to decentre the European experience of Empire.1 I hope David would agree that such initiatives should be encouraged not condemned. Reading Heikki Patomäki’s chapter brought back good memories of debates with Mark Hoffman in the 1980s which Heikki recreates via a close examination of the exchanges Mark and I had in the journal Paradigms (now Global Society). Perhaps too close an examination—I’m not convinced these early exchanges can bear the weight he wants to put on them, though I am sure he is right that both of us were begging important questions. In his critique of my later work, he feels that having once rejected the imperialism of cosmopolitan universalism I am now accepting the liberal imperialism of the US and its allies. I have responded to this critique earlier, admitting that it is partly, but only partly justified. I’m less inclined to even partially accept the critique Patomäki offers of my various writings on global social justice. I have, I think, given plenty of consideration to the positions he claims I neglect, in book chapters, in papers in review articles and in book reviews, most recently in Ethics & International Affairs just last year2—he may not like what I have to say, but I think I have given plenty of reasons why my position does not constitute neo-conservatism or conservative liberalism (Brown 2017). Interestingly, Charles Beitz himself rejected the position that Patomäki describes as a ‘simple but persuasive argument’, namely that if society is an interwoven whole based on the division of labour and cooperation then we should be talking about global justice. In his chapter ‘Cosmopolitan ideals and national sovereignty’, he accepts that how the web was woven and currently operates matters and

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argues that a simple Kantian perspective provided a better basis for global social justice than the Rawlsian idea that the world could be seen as ‘a cooperative venture for mutual advantage’ (Beitz 1983). I have tried in these short comments to offer a few thoughts on these excellent chapters, but of course, it would take much more than the 5000 words I have been allotted to do justice to the depth of scholarship on display here. It has been an honour to read these chapter and if indeed it is the case that I might have helped to stimulate them—possibly by annoying the authors to the point where they have felt it imperative to respond— then I am well content that this should be so. Many thanks to all the contributors and, once again, to Mathias and Tony for putting this collection together. Postscript I haven’t been invited to comment on the Wagnerian conclusion to this volume, but can’t resist the suggestion that although, obviously, my work has always been shaped subconsciously by Der Ring des Nibelungen (along with the work of Bob Dylan), my true attitude to international political theory is better revealed by the greatest of Wagner’s operas, Parsifal, central features of which are compassion, the refusal to transcend, and an unwillingness to accept the closure represented by the Grail Knights. Nicht soll der mehr verschlossen sein: Enthüllet den Gral, öffnet den Schrein! [No more shall it be hidden; uncover the Grail, open the Shrine!]

Notes 1. The Ethics and Empire Project is described here: http://www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/ethics-and-empire. An open letter condemning the project is available at http://theconversation.com/ethics-and-empire-an-open-letterfrom-oxford-scholars-89333. Biggar replies here https://www.thetimes. co.uk/article/heres-my-reply-to-those-who-condemn-my-project-on-ethics-and-empire-cw5f2z80x. The response to Biggar’s initiative summarises so much that is wrong with modern universities. 2. In this review article, I set out exactly why I don’t buy into the global justice framework espoused by Barry and Overland and, it seems, Patomäki.

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References Beitz, C. (1983). Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment. Journal of Philosophy, 80(10), 591–600. Biggar, N. (2017, December 23). Here’s My Reply to Those Who Condemn My Project on Ethics and Empire. The Times. Online. Available from: https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/heres-my-reply-to-those-who-condemn-myproject-on-ethics-and-empire-cw5f2z80x. Accessed 12 March 2018. Brown, C. (2017). Poverty Alleviation, Global Justice and the Real World: A Review of Christian Barry & Gerhard Overland Responding to Global Poverty. Ethics & International Affairs, 31(3), 357–365. Locke, J. (1998 [1689]). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McDonald Centre. (2018). Ethics and Empire. Online. Available from: http:// www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/ethics-and-empire. Accessed 8 March 2018. McDougall, J., et al. (2017, December 17). Ethics and Empire: An Open Letter from Oxford Scholars. The Conversation. Online. Available from: http://theconversation.com/ethics-and-empire-an-open-letter-from-oxford-scholars-89333. Accessed 8 March 2018.

CHAPTER 14

Postscriptum: Chris Brown, and International Political Theory Anywhere Else but in Bayreuth Mathias Albert and Anthony F. Lang Jr.

1   The Challenges of ‘Festschrift’-writing The contributions to this volume have engaged with many aspects and themes in the field of International Political Theory (IPT) that were either directly contributed or to various degrees inspired by the works of Chris Brown. In the concluding chapter, Brown has added a range of comments on these contributions. Most of the chapters contain a mix of criticism and praise for Brown’s work. Taken together, they combine into what, for the lack of an established word in English, is a Festschrift. Still fairly common in the German-­ speaking world, Festschriften are more rarely assembled in the English-speaking world (with some exceptions in the field of legal studies). They usually follow two conventions, one more strictly applied, the

M. Albert (*) Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany A. F. Lang Jr. University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK © The Author(s) 2019 M. Albert, A. F. Lang Jr. (eds.), The Politics of International Political Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_14

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other more variably: The first convention is that they are put together on the occasion of either a specific birthday or the retirement of the honouree (admittedly few are actually—given many authors’ life-long and unsuccessful struggle with understanding the concept of a deadline—published on the dates of those occasions). The second convention is that within individual contributions, or in a separate contribution, the published work of the honouree is put into the context of some of her or his biographic details within, and sometimes beyond, academia. The present volume definitely does not follow the first convention. A first attempt to do so was leaked by someone in Scotland to the to-be-­ honouree, who threatened those involved in major ways, claiming no honouring was in order, leading to abandoning the project at an early stage. This already says something about the difficulties involved in somehow following the second convention, an exercise some might compare to the excellent idea of having a good game of football on a minefield. If anything, the conclusion we drew from all this is to write this chapter as a ‘postscriptum’ after the conclusion, not before it. In more practical terms, we chose to provide a more light-hearted, but certainly not non-serious, reflection on Chris Brown’s writings not in relation to biographical details, but in relation to the intersection of his writings and non-writings.

2   Chris Brown Writings and Non-writings Looking through Brown’s published work quickly reveals a wide array of interests and themes, as witnessed by many of the contributions to this book. Despite their variety and range, these contributions can mostly be grouped under the headings of ‘normative theory/ethics in IR’, ‘general IR and IR theory’ and shorter comments on contemporary political issues. Brown continues to write and publish in these areas, and certainly none of the contributors to this volume would argue that he should stop doing so. Nonetheless, his level of publishing activity on these themes is strongly at odds with his long-proclaimed and advertised aim that ‘after retirement’ (that is, the ‘official’ one), the top-priority project would be a ‘book on Wagner’. There is no mistaking the fact of Brown’s fascination with Richard Wagner’s music. In fact, this fascination is of such an intensity that it seems highly implausible that the Wagner book project could have been delayed by more earthly matters such as teaching and research. While in no way seeking to discourage further endeavours in this respect, what we would

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like to argue here is that a more plausible reason for the delay can be found in the entirety of Brown’s published writings that at least partly already contain and represent the book on Wagner. We do not wish to insinuate that Brown intended this in any sense. Nonetheless, it would be highly surprising if two passions, on Wagner and IPT, could have coexisted in isolation from each other in one and the same mind for such a long time. That being said, our argument here is a very modest one: that there is a formal similarity between Brown’s oeuvre in IPT on the one hand, and the structure of Wagner’s masterpiece, Der Ring des Nibelungen, on the other hand. A bold claim maybe, but still a modest one, as we do not wish to argue for substantive influences of Brown’s reading of Wagner and Wagner’s music on arguments made in the IPT context (or vice versa; we also do not wish to argue that there are no such influences, but leave the question to further, much more thorough exegesis). In making this claim, we also wish to connect Brown’s work to the emerging literature in IR sometimes known as Political Culture and World Politics (PCWP; Caso and Hamilton 2015). Much of this work draws on poststructuralist and post-positivist theoretical agendas. James Der Derian (2009), Jutta Weldes (2003), Cynthia Weber (2014), Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann (2006) along with many others have connected works in literature, film and video games to world politics. In so doing, these and other works have demonstrated the importance of thinking more broadly about how international relations is constituted by and helps to constitute the world(s) of popular culture. Brown has also contributed to this literature, though in a way that perhaps differs from some of the literature noted earlier. As noted, the PCWP derives in part from a poststructuralist theoretical agenda, an approach which Brown has engaged in some of his work. He has, as noted in the Introduction to this volume, turned away from this approach finding it to be too opaque in some of its discourse and problematic in its refusal to engage with pressing political agendas. Brown’s own work has turned to popular culture, though, ranging from the science fiction of Iain M Banks to the music of Bob Dylan. In fact, his essay on Dylan demonstrates the difference between his engagement with popular culture and that of some others. In his 2009 chapter, reprinted in his book of essays from 2010, Brown explores Dylan’s performance at Live Aid in 1985. At this performance, Dylan raised the question of whether or not some of the proceeds from the Live Aid concert might be spent supporting American farmers rather than just those in Africa. This generated a great deal of ­consternation,

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especially from Bob Geldof, the organizer of Live Aid, who called his comments ‘crass, stupid, and nationalistic’ (Brown 2010: 250). Brown uses this episode to critically assess the nature of what he calls ‘popular cosmopolitanism’, the support for global causes undertaken by wealthy and privileged elites in the US and UK. He argues that rather than being nationalistic, perhaps Dylan’s statement, along with his choice of music, refused to fall into this easy trap of supporting distant causes without considering the nature of one’s own political situation. Dylan is, of course, a wealthy individual (and a Nobel Prize winner as well), but Brown’s point is not that the wealthy can say nothing about politics. Rather, as we read him, his point is that rather than easy gestures which mirror the politics of youth in the West, which tends to focus on identity issues at the expense of socio-economic problems in their own back yard, engaging in normative political agendas requires more thought than perhaps Geldof demonstrated in his dismissal of Dylan. Brown differs here from some of the work undertaken by others in the PCWP approach in that he seeks to highlight the difficult political choices and judgements that must be made by those in the entertainment world and those who wish to turn to that world for insights. Instead of seeing popular culture as a way to reinforce existing liberal and cosmopolitan beliefs, Brown sees popular culture as a way to ask hard questions about our own assumptions about global politics. Certainly, those engaged in the PCWP literature may wish to do the same, but Brown’s efforts here suggest a rigorous and critical approach to these questions which is sometimes absent from other efforts. This leads us to the wider point we wish to make here. We’ve suggested that Brown’s engagement with popular culture is directly political and leads us to question certain assumptions and frameworks. It does not, though, lead to easy answers. Seeing his oeuvre through the lens of another form of culture, perhaps not as popular as Harry Potter, but no less rich in what it has to tell us about the world, opens up a deeper question, the search for truth in the practice of IPT.

3   Formal Structures: The ‘Ring’ and Brown’s ‘Werke’ Brown’s academic writings in normative theory/ethics in IR, general IR and IR theory, and political comments, do not idly sit next to each other in an unconnected way. In their diversity, they are connected, and have

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contributed to forming the admittedly still not clearly defined field of ‘IPT’. Brown himself provides what is probably the most lucid definition of that field—and a self-description of his own works—reflecting on its inherent tensions. IPT is ‘different from, although related to, political theory, but it is also different from, and related to, international relations theory’ (Brown 2002: 11), an approach we explore in more depth in the Introduction to this volume. It takes no deeper knowledge of music or opera history in order to detect the formal similarity: the Ring is certainly different from, although related to, other forms of opera, and it is different from, but related to, textual versions of the Nibelungenlied. The attraction as well as the problem of both, the Ring as well as the opus Brownum, seems to a large degree to rest on that closed yet inherently open structure. One might actually say that the constitutive double move of ‘related but different from’ implants what with Derrida could be called a différance at the bottom of both corpora. This situation also explains what arguably always has been a difficult relation between Brown’s work and those of IR ‘critical theorists’ and ‘postmodernists’ of various kinds—and the difficulties of comprehending that work on the part of the latter. Put in blatantly inelegant pictures: The whole point of the entire sage is that the precious treasure, the Rheingold, is found at the bottom of the river: realists of all kinds think that it can be found by digging ever deeper. Critical theorists go looking for alternative means to dig. And postmodernists argue there is no gold in the river, but only reflections of it on glittering waves, and thus look for ways of floating on, rather than drowning in, the river. Brown knows there is no gold there, but spends considerable effort on devising a good shovel and digging nonetheless—even though it is ‘turtles all the way down’ (Brown 1994). This makes it rather difficult to put him into a box. If that had to be done, the one most fitting (although he would probably resent that) might actually be neither critical theorist or postmodernist, but rather that of a ‘liberal ironist’ (in the Rortyan sense): The only thing that is certain is the loss of certainty as a (and maybe the only) defining feature of modernity—it does not really matter whether the Rheingold is there or not: what is certain is that there is no way of finding it! This loss necessarily results in scepticism and in resenting big excavation projects. The most succinct statement of this attitude is probably to be found in the essay entitled ‘The poverty of grand theory’ (Brown 2013)—yet it is exactly the attitude found in that essay that turns scepticism into irony: there is no scepticism against grand theory here at all—just against all those grand

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theories that happen to have been proposed thus far. The chances of ­remedying this situation are as slim as coming up with the ultimate performance of the Ring, and although most people would agree on this, they probably would not conclude from this to stop trying new performances and interpretations. This ironist attitude is, in a sense, deeply poststructuralist: it relies on a movement of différance at its bottom: always almost and often getting there, but never fully at the centre, as this would threaten (although arguably not guarantee) to collapse the ironic-critical distance. The point is, in a sense, to listen to and to attend performances—countless performances— of the Ring, yet also to make a point of claiming an aspiration to go and listen to it in Bayreuth on the one hand, but, on the other hand, not actually going for what is probably a resentment against a provincial Franconian claim to global authenticity (i.e., the collapse of différance and irony).1 Continuing this bold line of reasoning, the argument actually is that Brown’s work in both this attitude and structure reflects an ongoing interpretation of the Ring. Following a somewhat similar chronological order, earlier works on IPE obviously have a special status (they are not the first, second or third evening, but, like ‘Das Rheingold’, the pre-evening). What follows are two full evenings: the many and numerous writings on normative theory as well as on the vast subject of order and norms in international society—certainly both related as parts of the same Singspiel, but clearly distinct at the same time. It is however the completion of the Ring that is crucial in this respect: adding to the aforementioned, a third evening of, say, international political sociology, international history, or migration studies and so on would have certainly completed the circle. It would not have, however, done so in the ironic fashion alluded to above: it would not have woven together all the parts into one that could legitimately be called ‘IPT’. The Rheingold would have, in a sense, been returned to the wrong place. Brown chooses a different interpretation. The Rheingold does not belong to, as much as IPT must not remain at, lofty mythical places. It must be firmly located in concrete places. It is only this ‘homecoming’ that truly completes the circle, and constitutes Brownian IPT as Ring. It is against this reading that we propose to view Brown’s many commentaries not as miscellaneous parts of his oeuvre, but as necessary parts of it. Comments on Brexit, British politics, the wisdom or replacing Trident missiles, or on Bob Dylan are not scattered utterances prompted by dubious ‘public impact’ expectations of British research assessment exercises. Rather,

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Brexit, Trident, Bob and so on are in fact Brownian IPT’s Götterdämmerung. The Ring would be incomplete without it. But it is the particular form of completion that Chris Brown chooses that makes his Ring into one unlike any other—in sight of the possibility, even the lure, of a more pathetic completion, his solution is much different, it is distinctly modest, and it is, with a wink of the eye, refreshingly un-Bayreuthean.

Note 1. Indeed, as if to prove this point, the long and often proclaimed wish to go to Bayreuth has more recently been replaced by denial on that matter; listening to Wagner in Bayreuth allegedly is not worth it because ‘the Germans can’t do it properly’.

References Brown, C. (1994). ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ – Anti-foundationalism, Critical Theory and International Relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 23(2), 213–236. Brown, C. (2002). Sovereignty, Rights and Justice. International Political Theory Today. Oxford: Polity. Brown, C. (2010). Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays. London: Routledge. Brown, C. (2013). The Poverty of Grand Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 483–497. Caso, F., & Hamilton, C. (2015). Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies. Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing. Der Derian, J.  (2009). Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Media-­ Entertainment Industry (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Nexon, D., & Neumann, I.  B. (Eds.). (2006). Harry Potter and International Relations. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Weber, C. (2014). International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (4th ed.). New York: Routledge. Weldes, J.  (Ed.). (2003). To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index1

A Advocacy, 14, 120–122, 150 Afghanistan, 95, 200, 221, 245, 249 Alker, Hayward, 219 Anti-politics, 70, 72, 73, 96–100 Arendt, Hannah, 22, 49, 127, 247 Aristotle, 3, 14, 15, 41, 42, 60–64, 141, 225, 247 B Barry, Brian, 56, 199, 208, 210, 211 Begin, Menachem, 132 Beitz, Charles, 13, 167–170, 172–174, 177, 178, 208, 210, 231, 236n4, 237n8, 243, 250, 251, 253 Blair, Tony, 14, 59, 132, 149, 150, 226, 231, 245 Brexit, 119, 142, 181–197, 251, 262, 263

Brown-Hoffman debate, 219, 221, 224, 226, 235 Bull, Hedley, 89, 121, 122, 125–128, 132, 227 C Cabral, Amilcar, 200, 201, 213, 252 Carr, E. H., 123, 135, 136, 199 Chomsky, Noam, 58, 76 Clark, Ian, 107, 125, 127, 156n3 Clash of civilizations, 9 Clausewitz, Karl von, 103, 120, 125–127, 131, 132 Colonialism, 2, 201, 214, 246 Communitarianism, 2, 5, 7, 151, 211, 234 Connolly, William, 4, 5, 8, 12, 33, 144, 153, 154 Cosmopolitanism, 2, 5, 10, 70, 135, 219, 221, 222, 224, 233, 235, 247–249, 260

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Cox, Robert, 27, 65, 121, 122 Critical theory, 8, 12, 23, 27, 28, 32, 65, 154, 224 Cultural pluralism, 3, 25, 145

Global polity, 2, 10, 119, 124, 125, 249, 251 Graham, Gordon, 210 Gramsci, Antonio, 119

D Dallmayr, Fred, 200, 201 de Waal, Alex, 73, 80 De-politicization, 87, 100–102 Distributive justice, 6, 10, 199, 202, 206–208, 210, 215 Dylan, Bob, 141, 199, 254, 259, 260, 262

H Habermas, Jürgen, 90, 91, 94, 95, 106–108, 121, 163, 232–234, 238n9 Hegel, G.W.F., 7, 146, 147, 151, 152, 155, 156n7 Humanitarian intervention, 2, 10, 14, 44, 69, 74, 76, 96, 102–105, 171, 189 Humanitarianism humanitarian action, 70–76, 81, 90 humanitarians, 70–82, 94, 98, 103, 211, 226 Human rights, 2, 10, 13, 14, 16, 40, 72, 79, 87, 96, 97, 107, 109, 134, 146, 149, 151, 153, 159–178, 183, 187, 189, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198n6, 199, 201, 202, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227, 231, 235, 250–252 Huntington, Samuel, 9, 200

E Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 4, 94, 104, 105, 243 English school, 2, 10, 11, 24, 97, 120, 125, 127, 135, 137, 249 Enlightenment, 12, 23, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 62, 91, 152, 153 Ethics, 11, 13, 40, 44, 47, 57, 61, 62, 69, 74, 131, 146, 181–197, 220–222, 224, 226–235, 249, 258, 260 international ethics, 39, 40, 144–146, 155, 155–156n2 Evolutionary psychology (EP), 160, 162, 166, 175, 176, 178, 250 F Fanon, Frantz, 201, 202, 213, 214, 252 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 41, 42, 44, 46 G Gallie, W. B., 126 Geuss, Raymond, 65, 66, 81, 117, 129, 136

I Impartiality, 70, 75–79 International criminal law, 10, 170 International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches, 2, 56, 219, 237n8 International society, 2, 10, 11, 42, 104, 119–122, 124–127, 130, 134–137, 171, 172, 192, 223, 235, 262 International Society, Global Polity: An Introduction to international Political Theory (IGSP), 2, 118 Iraq war, 14, 95, 142, 150, 244

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J Judgment/judgement practical judgment/practical judgement, 14, 39, 55–67, 70, 75–79, 82, 118, 120, 125, 130, 134, 136, 143, 221, 247 political judgment/ political judgement, 3, 6, 14–16, 39, 41–43, 45, 47–52, 59, 88, 90, 105, 235, 247, 248 sovereign judgment, 87–110 Just war, 6, 10, 40, 46, 47, 88, 90, 96, 102–105, 120–122, 125, 130–134, 204, 208, 227, 235, 236n4, 249

N NATO, 90, 93, 94, 99, 100, 106, 201, 227, 249 Neo-Aristotelianism, 60, 61 Neutrality, 70–75, 79, 223, 236n3 Nibelungenlied, 261 Normative theory, 1, 2, 6, 8, 25, 42, 57, 64, 200, 219, 221, 222, 258, 260, 262 Nussbaum, Martha, 60, 67, 163–166, 221, 225, 235

K Kant, Immanuel, 64, 89, 108, 133, 163, 248 Kennan, George, 7, 41, 42 Keohane, Robert, 28 Kosovo, 45, 59, 90, 94–96, 133, 134 Kratochwil, Friedrich, 63, 107, 109, 243, 246

P Phronesis, 39, 41–43, 52, 200, 247 Pogge, Thomas, 13, 208, 210 Positivism, 29, 144 Postmodern IR theory, 8 postmodern theory, 7, 24 Post-truth, 21–23, 26, 34, 35, 246 Powell, Colin, 132 Practical Judgement in International Political Theory: Selected Essays, 3, 14, 39, 56, 220 Practices, 2, 12, 16, 16n7, 27, 41–43, 47–52, 66, 69–82, 89, 92, 98, 99, 103, 105–109, 118, 120, 127, 133, 150, 161, 163, 167–171, 173–177, 184–193, 196, 197, 198n1, 198n2, 198n6, 200–202, 205, 214, 224–229, 231–233, 235, 236–237n5, 238n9, 246, 247, 250–252, 260 international practices, 43, 167, 223 Pragmatism, 23, 27, 29, 31–34 Pre-emptive military action, 14, 44, 45 Preventive military action, 45

L Latour, Bruno, 34 League of Nations, 91, 201 Liberalism, 12–14, 32, 33, 153, 224, 231, 235, 236n3, 250, 253 Liberal theory, 226 Linklater, Andrew, 243 M Marxist theory, 12 Modernity, 23, 27, 32, 34, 152, 261 Morgenthau, Hans, 7, 41–43, 48, 51, 52, 123, 199

O O’Neill, Onora, 56, 229 One world realism, 24, 26–31, 246

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R Rawls, John, 13, 144, 163, 164, 199, 225, 229, 232, 236n4, 238n9 Responsibility to protect (R2P), 40, 70, 72, 73, 87, 88, 90, 96–100, 102–105, 109, 121, 170, 171, 177, 191, 198n6, 248, 249 Rorty, Richard, 29, 31–33, 78, 79, 146, 149, 151, 154, 207, 246 Rwandan genocide, 44, 71, 77, 79 S Schick, Kate, 142, 143, 152–154, 156n7 Schmitt, Carl, 29, 133 Scientific realism, 26, 246 Security Council, 90, 92–95, 98, 99, 102, 106, 227 Shklar, Judith, 76 Singer, Peter, 79, 199, 208, 210, 211 Sovereignty, 2, 8, 69, 94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 108, 170–178, 183, 186, 203, 205, 253 Sovereignty, Rights and Justice (SRJ), 2, 8, 9, 11, 87 Stampp, Kenneth, 128 Strange, Susan, 5 Sun Tzu, 132

T Toulmin, Stephen, 40, 46, 57, 58, 60–64, 67 Tragedy, 70, 79–82, 130–134, 206–214, 226, 252 Turtles All the Way Down, 27, 261 U UN Charter, 89, 92, 98, 105, 106, 170 Understanding International Relations, 3, 5 United Nations (UN), 87, 89–96, 98, 100, 107, 109, 136, 191, 201, 202, 227, 249 V Vincent, John, 56 Virtue ethics, 40, 225, 235 W Wagner, Richard, 254, 258, 259 Waltz, Kenneth, 7, 110n2, 122, 123, 130, 136 Walzer, Michael, 12, 16n7, 40, 80, 82, 104, 125, 131, 132, 199, 207–210, 221, 227, 246 War on terror, 142 Weinberger, Caspar, 132 White, Stephen, 57, 64, 65, 200, 213