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146 pages

English

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Concluding the Deutscher Memorial Prize winning trilogy on 'Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy', this is a magisterial historical sociology of International Relations theory.

In The Discipline of Western Supremacy Kees van der Pijl argues that, from the late European Middle Ages, Anglophone thinkers articulated an imperial world-view which was adopted by aspirant elites elsewhere. Nation-state formation under the auspices of the English-speaking West has henceforth informed thinking about international affairs. After decolonisation the study of comparative politics continued to develop under those same auspices as part of a comprehensive framework.

As the first major sociological analysis of the field of International Relations, this book advances a comprehensive overview of mainstream IR as a set of theories which translate Western supremacy into intellectual hegemony.
Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Empire and Nationality in the Pax Britannica

2. The Crusade for Democracy and World Politics

3. Cold War Discipline in International Relations

4. The Pax Americana and National Liberation

5. The Crisis of International Discipline

References

Index

Sujets

Economic Policy

Public Policy

International Relations

Political Science

Political economy

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Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	10 janvier 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849648899
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1650€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Discipline of Western Supremacy
Also available by Kees van der Pijl from Pluto Press
Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, Volume I
The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, Volume II
Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq

First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Kees van der Pijl 2014
The right of Kees van der Pijl to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 2318 3 Hardback ISBN 978 1 8496 4888 2 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4890 5 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4889 9 EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements

1 Empire and Nationality in the Pax Britannica

The Collective Mind of Anglophone Dominion
National State Formation and Informal Imperialism
Internationalism and National Self-Determination

2 The Crusade for Democracy and World Politics

The Making of Disciplinary Social Science
A World Made Safe for Democracy
Atlantic Synthesis in International Relations

3 Cold War Discipline in International Relations

Compromise and Confrontation in the Nuclear Age
The Ideology of Western Supremacy as Normal Science
A Marshall Plan for the Social Sciences

4 The Pax Americana and National Liberation

New States and Nation-Building
Intervention and Regime Change
Soviet and Third World Assimilation of the Nation-State Form

5 The Crisis of International Discipline

Global Ethics, IPE and the Postmodern Quandary
The Turn to Coercive Global Governance
Western Supremacy in Crisis
References
Index
Preface
This volume concludes the trilogy in which I redefine world politics as an evolving composite of modes of foreign relations. Foreign relations are about communities occupying separate social spaces and considering each other as outsiders. Occupation, its protection, and the regulation of exchange with others are universal attributes of human communities; they date back to the dawn of anthropogenesis and have evolved with the ongoing transformation of nature. Hence, as we have seen in Volume II, all human groups, communities and societies rely on mythologies and religious imaginaries to make sense of the foreign encounter. They originate in the tribal and empire/nomad modes and continue to run through contemporary foreign relations. Indeed in our contemporary epoch, such primordial imaginaries are resurgent on a grand scale.
International relations as we understand them today constitute a historical mode of foreign relations too. The grid of sovereign states under the guidance of a self-styled ‘international community’ headquartered in Washington and London not only remains imbricated with modes of older parentage; at some point it will make way for other patterns – if, that is, we live to see it. With the faltering ability of the liberal West and capitalism to develop the productive forces in ways conducive to the improvement of life chances, the very idea of a future is being eclipsed by proliferating violence and the spectre of ecological disaster.
Along with the need to dissect and discard economic theories of the self-regulating market which brought us to where we are today, Western supremacy in the global political economy must be challenged in the name of human survival too. In the present volume, I take the critique of foreign relations developed in Volumes I and II to its logical conclusion as a critique of the mainstream discipline of International Relations (IR). Along with adjacent fields dealing with foreign relations, such as comparative politics, area studies, and anthropology, IR serves to discipline thinking about foreign relations in terms of the pre-eminence of the Western way of life. It turns the alienated consciousness that underpins the idea of foreignness into a body of thought that denies validity to other ways of life and other political systems, whilst naturalising Western supremacy and obscuring the relations of dominance and exploitation that IR codifies.
Social science originally dealt with ‘domestic’ challenges. It crystallised in its present disciplinary form when the labour movement in the nineteenth century began to embrace socialist ideas. This triggered an epochal, across-the-board retreat from the most advanced social philosophy of the age – not just from historical materialism, but also from Hegel and others without whom Marx’s quantum leap would not have been possible. The first stage of the process saw the formulation of utilitarian economics in Britain, French sociology, and the German Staatswissenschaften. Their common inspiration was to create the conditions for authoritative class compromise – scientific advance was at best secondary to this task. Parcelling out knowledge across a number of different fields would allow adjustments in each whilst leaving the core structures of class society intact. For as the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian and writer Edmund Burke warned at the time of the French Revolution ( Works , iii: 259, emphasis added), ‘a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’.
The modern academic division of labour translates this insight into a series of teaching and research programmes in the service of the existing order (Wallerstein 2001: 20). It achieved its contemporary form in North America, where the aforementioned reformulations of social theory were further differentiated, with a common grounding in the agnostic, empirical theory of knowledge that John Locke developed in the seventeenth century. When control of the universities in the United States around the turn of the last century passed from the Protestant clergy to the business world, academic discipline mutated into a straightforward continuation of class discipline by different means, subject to methods of scientific management. The process was well advanced when the Russian empire collapsed in revolution in 1917, with the Bolsheviks emerging victorious from civil war and foreign intervention. The US president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, projected what would become the implicit programme of IR till the present day – the creation of a world of formally sovereign nation-states under liberal, Anglo-American supervision, arrayed against the spread of social revolution and open for business. Or as Ikenberry summarises the project (2011: 4), ‘The "problems of Hobbes," that is, anarchy and power insecurities ... had to be solved in order to take advantage of the "opportunities of Locke," that is, the construction of open and rule-based relations’.
Wilson’s entourage at Versailles created the framework for the one remaining specialisation needed to complete the academic infrastructure developed in the United States – international politics. Every branch of science, writes Bourdieu (1984: 90), at some point changes from obeying a scientific necessity that is socially arbitrary, to obeying a social necessity that is scientifically arbitrary. The Russian Revolution was that moment in the study of world affairs. Thus, in the decades following the First World War, discipline was imposed on a terrain captured by Marxist writers on imperialism and national self-determination. IR instead focuses on global governance and (subordinate) sovereign equality, two modes of foreign relations which owe their specific form to the rise of a transnational, Anglophone society and ruling class. Rival principles of world order, be they atavistic ones such as empire, or alternatives looking to equitable global governance such as socialist internationalism, are disregarded, as are tribal and other pre-modern foreign relations and their ideational forms. Hence it comes as no surprise that the academic discipline of IR, as Schmidt reminds us (1998: 13), is ‘marked by British, and especially, American parochialism’.
For Marx, historical change originates in class formation and struggle. We can analyse these in terms of a contradiction between an existing social order (including its ideational superstructures) and the vision of a different one arising from new possibilities. In the transformation of nature through the social labour process, this works out as a contradiction between forces and relations of production; in foreign relations, in which class relations are mediated by ethno-political difference, the contradiction is between human community and common humanity. Global governance, enabled by the development of the exploitation of nature and society on a world scale, would appear to be in contradiction with sovereign equality in this sense; but the contradiction is overcome in practice by making the states of the Lockean heartland ‘more equal’ than others. Since this cannot be the official introduction to a teaching programme, the discipline rests on a presumed foundational debate between Wilsonian ‘idealism’ and 1930s Realpolitik. Caught in a pre-Hegelian understanding of static antinomies conceived from the vantage point of the unconstrained ‘actor’, and confi