Global politics / Politique globale Y. Schemeil

How does Scientific knowledge turn global?

4 possible explanations (top of the head):

1. The inclusion of natural objects within the scope of international studies‘ scholars.
2. A less asymmetric assessement of international dangers by scholars from the North and the South altogether, who jointly contribute to the estimates.
3. The uniformization of the level and content of knowledge, which becomes everywhere similar.
4. The universalization of political thought, which is more and more dewesternized.

How does scientific knowledge turn global? First explanation

Theoretical Expansion: beyond cultural processes, we tend to target nature as a legitimate object of knowledge.
As viewed from a global politics perspective, the world is not shrinking (if one accepts the idea that globalization means a contraction of space and time).
To the opposite, the world as an object of study and discussion is expanding at a quick pace.
Nature plays a growing role in global politics, which in turn compels scholars to investigate scientific disciplines like geophysics, computer or brain sciences.
The whole Earth as an explanatory system of independent variables weighs on everything that happens within or outside domestic boundaries.

How does scientific knowledge turn global? A second possible explanation

A less asymmetric assessement of international dangers. The sense of emergency and the need for action are increasingly shared worldwide, they are no longer the concern of rich societies only.

Think tanks mushroom from Europe and the USA to India and China, their contributors travel extensively and meet frequently. Robust forecasting methodologies are now available: for instance, among the many schools of methods sponsored by the European Consortium for Political Research one directly addresses “Forecasting”.

Big data make prevision possible, despite social scientists’ lack of experience in forecasting.

Take a question such as this: where and when will the next conflict actually take place? The answer depends on statistics and probabilities, and this works in China as well as in Canada.

Forecasting: A worldwide but minoritarian exercice, as evidenced by its peripheral location within a rich methodological field (find it hidden in the South Western area!).

• 
  Forecasting

Facing New Challenges

Convergences on risk assessment: put under the same pressure everywhere, scientific and cosmopolitan scholars agree upon the level and degree of emergency of risks.
They work at distance: scholars exchange views about the sources of danger within virtual groups that the literature calls epistemic communauties.
These communities share knowledge across national boundaries, with no respect to the global North / South divide.
Their members believe in the same epistemic premises.
From time to time, they meet in world conferences with a large coverage, on earthquakes, the ozone layer, climate change, radioactivity, air, sea, coastal and water pollution.
According to Ernst Haas epistemic communities are “networks of the like-minded“.

How does scientific knowledge turn global? Third explanation

The Uniformization of the Level and Content of Knowledge.

Objective competence in political science increases: using the same tools, national schools of thought tend to reach the same conclusions about risks and threats – their emergence, and their degree of emergency.
Everywhere on this planet the knowledge-base society gains momentum, and with such a development ways of thinking converge.
Political science, international relations and geopolitics have a much better coverage nowadays than was the case in the past.
China builds two universities a week, each with strategic departments (conflict studies, geophysics, environmental studies).
Several departments of politics and international studies recently opened in Cameroun, with dozens of specialized lecturers.

• 
  HK U, of Science and Technology

How does scientific knowledge turn global? Fourth Explanation

The universalization of political thought
Extant theories seem earmarked by their very origins in the West, which are too “specific” to apply anywhere and in any situation.
In the Rest of the world, non-Western knowledge of foreign policy and domestic issues existed long before the encounter with Europe and the West, especially in Northeastern and Southwestern Asia.
Today they may be used to improve the relevance of Western theories rather than replace them – be it in their region of origin, or even globally.
A new vocabulary is invented, other worldviews about the study of international orders and disorders become accessible through translations and commentaries.
Post-Western international studies emerge.

Knowledge about globalization turns global

It does, provided that we find out the adequate concept, which points out the right content.
To address old and new issues globally, five alternative ways to name the content of this course should be compared.

• What comes to mind first is the word “international"- but it is too vague- and relations are not among nations but among states and peoples.
• “Interstate” sounds relevant, although limited to a particular set of relationships, which could be named “intergovernmental”, since Parliaments, Bureaucracies and the Judiciary are not prominent in such intercourse.
• Some of these relations are already «transnational», they bypass state frontiers and the perimeter of public decision making, compared to private activities.
• Scholars from rising states such as Brazil and China opt for “planetary” relations, a less imbalanced denomination, although far from being popular yet.

The Birth of Global Politics

How to take such changes into account?
We clearly have a denomination problem.
The title of the course could be classical (i.e. International studies – or International relations).
A more modern option would be to entitle it International politics, if not Geopolitics.
Our option must be explained in order to become legitimate.
See David Held‘s stance on this question before reaching the next slide (D. Held is professor of Global politics at Durham University).

The Birth of Global Politics

With mondialisation (in French) and globalization (in English) two impacts on the study of international relations may be observed.
First, the object of international studies changes:
its perimeter is enhanced and now includes the outer space and the deep blue sea.
Second, methods also evolve to adapt to this field enlargement:
they become interdisciplinary and combine economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, law, history, geography, and even... oceanography and brain science.
They become pluriversal, i.e. each local conception of what must be true everywhere is now considered as universal per se, and knowledge is jointly built by the Western world and the Rest of the planet, altogether.
They become syncretic (“best of” but no eclecticism, no relativism).

Old an New Paradigms

Is this the end of Western theory on interstate relations? This is what Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein claim.
According to them, the border between paradigmatic debates and a war of paradigms is thin!
Contrary to what they say however, we should avoid eclecticism (mixing incompatible statements in a single perspective).
Let’s try out syncretism and combine whatever is compatible.

• 
  Beyond Paradigms

Unit 2 - Positive and Normative Theories of Order

Positive and Normative Theories of International Relations: The problem

Before going further two questions should be raised about the nature of the world.

1. An analytical or positive question: why are states compelled by norms domestically but not internationally, which leaves room for undisciplined behavior such as greed and grabbing? (two Hobbesian concerns).
2. An ontological or normative one: what is the nature of the world, its “essence”? Are human beings good or bad? (a Kantian and Rousseaunian interrogation).

If the two realms were separate (the analytical and the ontological), solving external and global issues would become excessively difficult.

• 
  Political Theories of International Relations

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

Global Politics and Theories of International Relations: The First Alternative
If we go positive, we must disentangle various approaches to international politics in order to achieve a global view. Distinction must be made between…

• Rational analyses (about interests and institutions) versus constructivism (about identities and ideologies).
• Sociological views against strategic visions.
• Cognitive analysis rather than either economic or historical approaches.

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

Global Politics and Normative Theories of International Relations: The Second Alternative
If we go normative, then we want to know if the world is:

• “Hobbesian”: there is “a war of all against all”, with no global “Leviathan” to prevent it;
• “Kantian”: a violent Nature ends up in a “hegemonic” peace among Humans, which is itself conducive to self restraint and a “Republican” order;
• “Lockean”: the world is made of interests, not passions; trade prevails over war.

See Wendt Alexander article, «Anarchy is What States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics», International Organization, 46, 1992, p. 391-425.

Global Politics and Theories of International Relations: A summary

Let’s start with antiquity and the Classics when normative issues prevailed over positive ones. Then, once the West arised, Non-Westerners turned to a balanced mix of normative and positive analysis.
Finally, in modern times Western hegemony paved the way to the triumph of analytical views, sometimes under the guise of rational choice.

In Ancient times “International” Relations were very early studied by scholars, even though “nations“ did not yet exist, as in Ancient Greece, or Ancient Mesopotamia, and later on among Romans, Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas. Greeks and Mesopotamian as well as Amerindians and early Chinese all lived in city-states.

They were above all “citizens” opposed to other citizens who all belonged to another city – they were those who deliberated, owned weapons, and wore distinctive signs like togas, feathers or hats. They were also distinct from nomads erring from the periphery of one city to the next (as the Arabs, or Eribu and the Hebrew = “those who go back an forth” in every language of the time).

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

The Classics
Each city had its own territory, signaled by steles on which were written all sorts of warnings and curses that would happen if boundary stones were trespassed.
It also had a distinct history, with its own archives (as shown by the library of Ebla and the archives of Mari, two cities that were built along the Euphrates more than 40 centuries ago). Cities were protected by walls, circling their most important institutions:

• temples dedicated to local gods who were not shared with other towns,
• assemblies where citizens deliberated about domestic and external politics,
• markets and forums for local and long-distance exchanges,
• granaries where cereals were stocked, as if they were the ancient equivalent of our Central Banks.

This was close to autarky – to limit conflict, avoid contact!

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

The Classics
Therefore, fighting for the independence of the city meant fighting in the name of one’s gods against other gods and their followers.
Consequently, the defeat of an army of soldiers was also the defeat of a foreign god for whom their enemies fought.
Victory was the sign that the victors’ cause was just, that their values, beliefs and lifestyles were superior – i.e., more likely to preserve the harmony of the cosmos.
This was less egoistic and utilitarian – as is the case with modern nations pursuing national interests – and more committed to the survival of mankind.
In this quest for survival, the peoples of the world were led by the self-claimed bravest, strongest, richest and the most advanced among inhabitants of the planet.

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

Ancient peoples
However, from the most remote antiquity some peoples were consciously belonging to what was close to our idea of what a “nation” is.
Examples are Ancient Egypt (Kemit); Ancient Israel; Ancient Japan (Nihon); Ancient China (Chou, then Han).
At that time, members of a national group shared two characteristics:

• they lived at the origin or at the center of the world;
• they were the most civilized people since they won intractable civil wars and delivered centuries-long peaces (Pharaohs’ Egypt and Semitic Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium B.C; China circa 200 B.C; Japan circa 1600 A.D).

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

The Ancient and the Classics
Their neighbors were barbarians, because they were neither in charge of peace nor concerned with the quest for harmony as civilized peoples were.
Also, they did not oppose this world to the nether world.
They also linked politics to ethics, and moral philosophy to political philosophy.
Believing in the unity of mankind led by an elected people was conducive to pacification and centralization.
Cities that did not evolve into a centralized empire or a confederation were condemned to chaos (like those of the Mayas).
Provided each empire refrained from invading its neighbors, the global order would last for ever. This was the first appearance of mutual deterrence.

• 
  The Great Wall of China was built to stop the 'barbarians' from crossing the northern border of China

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

The Non-Westerners
Before colonization the Hobbesian order did not reach out to the Rest of the world. Most countries remained loosely centered on a major power’s capital city. Tributes circulated from “vassals” to “lords”, and from elementary segments of society to the most sophisticated ones.
This was a feudal and clanic hierarchical world from sky to earth and from center to peripheries. A great part of Africa, as well as the Ottoman Empire, which was not present at Munster and Osnabrück in 1648, plus peninsular Asia (China, Korea, Japan, India) or Muslim Asia (Indian and Malaysian peoples) as well as pre-Colombian America: all of them were ruled along these lines.

What did such regions have in common? Just a preference for loyalty over defection. Scholars were looking for guarantees that behavior would be ethical and consistent with religious or metaphysical beliefs. As stated by Timur Kuran this was conducive to face-to-face and short-lived networks of relations limiting risks of bankruptcy. Overall, most non-Western countries put limits to transactions with the West, in order to keep alive their ethical views of a harmonious non competitive world.

To find out more watch the video The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East.

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

The Moderns
What changed with the inception of “nations” in 1648 (and the Treatises of Westphalia) followed by the beginning of colonization?
On surface various sorts of polities coexisted peacefully and each was entitled to practice the religious cult of their choice, as in the ancient world.
In depth, sovereignty was now an intangible rule of interstate relations.
The Western world left the state of polyarchy, an organized disorder, to reach the state of anarchy, a dizorganized order.
From that moment on, Hobbesian theories predominated.
The West became egalitarian, at least among like-minded nations.

Positive and Normative Theories of Order

The Moderns
What changed with the beginning of colonization?
The world was now divided into the West and the Rest, conflicts tended to be limited within the West, they were now waged in the Rest.
There, interests either prevailed over beliefs or they were concealed behind “universal” values.
Private interests and the Public/national interest led the world.
Strategic calculus predominated.
The West now instrumentalized the Rest.
It also included the Rest into a Global Vision of what the world should eventually become.

The West and the Rest, a construct made by by scholars, along whom Niall Ferguson.

• 
  Civilization: The West and the Rest, Allen Lane, London, 2011

Positive and Normative Theories of Order - conclusions

Theoretical explanations of global issues should equilibrate analytical and ontological concerns.
However, these two aspects are not always properly combined in political thought.
Century after century, the normative concerns were dissociated from rational calculus.

In the end, the major division between the West and the Rest, which stemmed from different levels of attention given to ethics and cosmogony in Ego’s relations with the Other, may now be blurred.

Unit 3 - A legitimate world order?

Defining Order

Globalization may bring with it the building a new world order.
Order in this course is only an objective descriptor of the condition of the world, and not a desired outcome or, worse, the only desirable one.
More complex orders are not superior to simpler ones, they only have better chances to be both enduring and legitimate.
Since there are multiple sources of complexity, we do not know with certainty what sort of complex order would best fit our expectations.
Whereas in international studies “world order” may simply mean that the world is structured by mutual deterrence (East-West) or mutual dependency (North-South), in global studies the word points out a peaceful intertwining of every units, state and non-state.

Order and disorder

Order also includes disorders. The study of World orders is also a review of potential and actual disorders, as well as the review of the ways such disorders are addressed by scholars.
To the opposite, a complex world order differs from confusion or even worse, chaos.
It may be an unstable equilibrium, but it nevertheless tends towards becoming a sort of global equilibrium, at least in the long run.

From a confused War to a well-ordered Peace

The Global order may not reach the stage of a just peace by now, but it is estranging itself from wars, even “just wars”, and goes beyond “cold peace” (i.e. pacific coexistence between contesting systems).
It is a long way from the unfair and permanent use of force to a sustainable and legitimate peace (as shown in the figure).

• 
  Itinèraire

A complex, enduring and sustainable order

Enduring orders or what Wendt walls “stable end-states” (Wendt 2003) are preferable to short-lived ones (e.g. imperial orders).
Empires fall prematurely because they do not fill the prerequisites of acceptability.
Due to lack of legitimacy they are not sustainable in the long run.
Sustainability here means self-sustainability: complex orders mechanically engender more acceptable ones, and this is both spiraling off into a new cycle and spillovering towards neighboring realms.
It is a stately and societal process: governments and populations are both involved in bringing and maintaining a world order.
In short, such order simultaneously addresses peace and welfare issues.

An Ordered Network

Complexity emerges from networking and interdependence of the social and political units.

Note that complexity is one of the analytic characteristics of any network. Networks have ties and nodes, arranged in a complex framework. Complexity is not consubstantial to the units of which a network is composed, it lies in their relation, not in their substance. For instance, industrial and democratic societies are not more oriented towards a complex order than agrarian and paternalistic ones. For any unit a lack of complexity implies less ties with the outside world and other units, whatever the level of political and economic sophistication of each. Hence city-states may well be more acceptable than empires but they also are less effective.
Therefore sustainability and acceptability vary in reverse proportion.

Complex networks and networks of interdependence already exist in some sectors. Should it be possible to draw a graph of treaties and international agreements binding countries, it would resemble the map of airline route map.

• 
  Map of airline route map

Towards a Complex Methodology?

Assuming that order is a complex object of study per se, should methods used to explain it be themselves complex? On the one hand theories are thought out to reduce complexity and make sense of it. Why should they be excessively complex themselves?

On the other hand the multiplication of elegant and parsimonious theories brings additional complexity to the field, which may not stem from the nature of the world order as such: it may come from the mere refinement of intellectual tools on a competitive academic market.

Paradoxically, then, attempts at reaching robust explanations of a very complicated context may further complicate it.

International Politics is probably the realm of theoretical proliferation par excellence.

Conclusion

Order and disorders are dialectically linked to such an extent than logical reasoning may be negatively impacted, and its outcomes, counterproductive.
Moreover, sustainability does not always go with acceptability.
Legitimacy and longevity of any order result from a combination of factors.
Complex theories will simplify explanations; acceptable orders will survive in the long run.

Download references.