EH Carr Memorial Lecture 2015

good evening and welcome to the EH car memorial lecture this is the third first year in the series of car lectures and somebody told me recently is that somebody in the United States told me recently that they had heard somebody say that this is now the most prestigious named lecture series in our discipline it wasn't somebody from the department who said this it was somebody outside in the United States Edward Halleck Carr was the fourth Woodrow Wilson professor in the department and he was here between 1936 and 1947 during these years he consolidated his reputation as being one of the leading intellectuals in British life he had a tempestuous relationship with the end hour of the world Wilson chair David Davis and the two of them came to embody the so called debate between so-called idealism and so-called realism and in this way came to add to the folklore of our discipline and in these 11 years Carr wrote an enormous amount an enormous number of articles and books in different formats newspapers and academic journals and much of this still meets the test of time most famously of course for students in this discipline and his book the 20 years crisis stands out it's never been out of print since it was first published in 1939 and every serious student of international politics and international relations has to engage with at some point house I would say to read it at least three times car died in 1982 at the age grundle age of 90 and these lectures were the inspired idea of a former colleague Brian Porter the first of the lectures was in 1984 in the early days the lectures were sponsored by the so called Aberystwyth papers fund the Aberystwyth papers some of you will know was the title of the book of the famous conference that again Brian Porter conceived which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the department's founding this was held as some of you will know in 1969 and I'm happy to say that served the Department of our speaker this evening is celebrating its 50th birthday in a couple of weeks time more recently when the a Bristol papers fund diminished to zero more recently the lecture series has been funded by the publishers sage who published the journal international relations in which the written version of this lecture will eventually appear and I must give my thanks to sage for their very generous support not only of this lecture but also of other activities in the department over the years the car lecture has been given by a veritable who's who of distinguished figures who have something to say about international relations founding figures in the discipline like Bill Fox who gave the first one in 1984 international historians as air Astana philosophers Raymond guys who gave the lecture last year political theorists Barrett Bryan berry sociologist Ernest Gellner international lawyers Matic Koskinen Amy you key us Giants of us IR theory like Robert Kahane and John Mearsheimer and giants of theorists in the United Kingdom like Fred Halliday and our own under Linklater before he became the president woodrow wilson professor joining this very distinguished list this evening I want to welcome professor Justin Rosenberg from the University of Sussex Justine has had a distinctive voice in the field for the last twenty plus years and its distinctiveness comes from the fact that he works at the intersections of a number of different traditions of thought international relations Theory social theory historical sociology and Marxist theorizing all mixed up and combined to use the favorite word of our speaker all combined with his own distinctive voice which comes in part from having a degree in English and having done a lot of sociology in his time there was a first phase Rosenberg which looked at IR theories criticized IR theories from the perspective of these intersections that I mentioned and then there is a second phase Rosenberg that has turned around a telescope in in a sense and looks at the significance of the International for thinking about social theorizing in other areas of the social sciences and humanities his books are widely cited the empire of civil society and the followers of globalization Theory Justin began his career at LSE moved to Sussex in 1998 and has been there since he recently gave up being head of department it's a real pleasure for me because I work I don't know just in very well but I've always been very sympathetic with with his work so it's a real pleasure to have him here to talk about I are in the prison of political science is there a way out can I ask you to give a big other vote of appreciation to Justin Thank You Ken for your kind words and thank you for inviting me to give this most prestigious lecture in the whole discipline I was also told that by colleagues who were not related to Aberystwyth so I feel very honored by the occasion thank you for that and thank you to all of you for coming this evening I have a rather grim image on the screen there which in a way is the complete opposite of how I want to begin my talk this evening because I what I really want to begin by saying is this congratulations the discipline of international relations is nearly a hundred years old given the unique role of Aberystwyth in this achievement I'm sure that preparations must soon be underway for a big centenary event in 2019 I'd love to be there because there's going to be so much to celebrate the field of international relations today is more exciting more diverse more creative and more politically engaged than ever before it attracts growing numbers of students and deep ongoing changes in the world order mean that the need for a discipline of ir has never been more obvious it's a great discipline to be in now I don't want to spoil the party before it's even happened but I'm sure I'm not alone in noticing that international relations today is also experiencing a kind of crisis of confidence in 2013 the European Journal of international relations published a special issue I'm sure many of you have seen it called the end of IR theory in which the editors suggested that IR seem to be exhausted and no longer producing big ideas by contrast around the same time our waiver has argued that in international relations today contains more theory than ever except that it's not ir theory but theory imported from other disciplines Christine Sylvester has analysed how all this theory is fragmented among numerous intellectual camps which no longer have a shared possession about their common subject matter everybody is sitting around their own campfires validating their sectarian position there no longer is a common conversation about IR and in this sense she claims it is indeed possible and I quote but IR Theory per se is at an end but here's the worst bit if so it's apparently not an end that is going to be particularly noticed elsewhere in the social sciences because as Chris Brown recently reminded us again the external impact of international Theory has been more or less negligible IR has imported numerous ideas but the traffic has been almost entirely one-way in fact IRS Disciplinary credentials are apparently so weak that in 2015 the annual review of political science actually published an article called should we leave the subfield of internet leave behind the subfield of international relations the nerve of it in this article the author considered whether and I quote the ir subfield should be abandoned and its pieces allocated to new subfields of conflict institutions political economy and political behavior well fellow students of IR I have to tell you we've had a narrow escape because he eventually concluded that international relations should be left for now but mainly because breaking it up would cause new boundary issues among the replacement subfields there was no suggestion at all in his argument that IR might actually have an important contribution of its own to make to the social sciences so why are we in this peculiar situation why has the great flowering of IR as a field been unable to shake off this sense of failure and vulnerability and what can be done about it in this lecture tonight I want to answer these questions in three main steps first I want to suggest that strangely IR has never quite been established as a field in its own right it emerged as an extension of political science and has remained more or less trapped within a borrowed ontology and I call this the prison of political science and I think it explains our failure to produce ideas that can travel to other disciplines but secondly I want to argue that this is not a necessary fate at all ir rests on a fundamental fact about the human world that is full of implications for the social sciences this is of course the fact that the human world comprises a multiplicity of coexisting societies and I think that knowing how to take intellectual possession of this fact and how to draw out its implications for other fields these really are the key to reversing our intellectual trade deficit and developing ideas that can travel creatively and so finally I want to give an example of one such idea which I think could become a successful export from IR because it carries the importance of the International directly into the subject matter of other disciplines and that's the idea of uneven uncombined development but let me start by going back to the thinker whose memory we're honoring tonight eh Karl because one of the glories of the 20 years crisis is that every time we reread this book car in effect invites us to go back with him to the very origins of IR as a discipline and to debate with him precisely this question of what are the intellectual foundations on which the infant discipline of IR should be built and not only does car provide his own answer to this question but this answer enables us to see Prison of political science while it is still under construction it happens about a third of the way through the book at the start of chapter seven and this is where car switches from negative critique and starts to make his own foundational moves and it looks at first as if he gets off to a flying start man he tells us in the opening sentence has always lived in groups let's remove the sexism by changing man to humanity and it then appears that car has gone straight for that Universal fact about the social world that must be the starting point for our discipline the coexistence of multiple social entities surely if he now reflects on this he will uncover both the distinctiveness of this object of study and its implications for social existence in general and the Disciplinary credentials of ir will be firmly established but alas this is not what happens next when Carr talked about humans living in groups his use of the plural word groups was almost incidental he wasn't referring to the coexistence of multiple societies what he actually meant was that humans are social animals who live together in groups of various kinds and even this was just a means of getting to the foundational statement that he really wants to make which is a statement about politics because individual humans always exist in a group he says one of the functions of such a group has been to regulate relations between its members and then he immediately adds politics deals with the behavior of men inside organized groups now from here car goes on to add three further points first he says in groups people behave in both egoistic and cooperative ways second although the political groups the state is unique in being a compulsory Association eat two exhibits this duality because it rests on both coercion and legitimacy and finally all this is no less true of international politics than it is of domestic politics the infancy of the science of international politics lies in the fact that it has not yet come to terms with this twofold character of its subject matter only says car when its initial utopian hopes have been balanced by a realist analysis only then will this new field pass out of its infancy and become a social science now in one sense it's hard to object to this chain of reasoning after all car calls this chapter the nature of politics and the basic point that he's making is our starttls point that because humans live in groups there is an irreducibly political dimension to their existence nonetheless I do think there's a real problem here cow is supposedly laying the foundations for a discipline of international relations but the way he does this is not to identify what premises of its own the International might uniquely contain it is rather to extend the premises of the political into the International and it's this that grounds I are in an ontology borrowed from political science and to see why this is a problem we need I think to reflect for a minute about academic disciplines as we know the study of the human world is distributed across a range of social sciences and humanities people often lament this fragmentation but the division of labor does bring benefits as well if you think about it each discipline of foregrounds a particular dimension of social reality and makes it the object of an organized inquiry it then analyzes both this dimension in itself and its wider significance for human affairs and as a result of this specialization the analysis surely goes much deeper than it would otherwise have done so for example geography specializes in the spatial dimension of human and natural existence both what space means for society and how space is itself socially constructed in different ways in different times and places it's about of a deep level it's about speciality similarly history ultimately subtends on our existence in time which explains its preoccupation with historical specificity causal sequencing and narrative forms of explanatory method temporality is to history what speciality is to geography sociology is grounded in the fact that human lives are always carried on within wider structures of social relations society is its special object it's no wonder that the agent structure debate is perennial to that discipline sociology is after all the original home of the very idea of social structure one last example comparative literature comparative literature is not just the study of different national traditions of creative writing at a deeper level it's also about the properties of language itself and about how by extension the social world at large which is also linguistically mediated and produced exhibits properties of texture ality that invite hermeneutic deconstruction and analysis now in each of these four cases an academic discipline rests upon a specific feature of social reality spatiality temporality social structure and texture allottee but here's the interesting thing this very specialization is at the same time the secret of their interdisciplinary potential it's precisely because each of these disciplines has taken possession of something that is in fact general to the social world it's because of that that their local investigations can produce concepts that can suddenly travel and be applied right across the human sciences and we see this happening again and again whether it's the spatial term coming out of geography the broad alien idea of temporal conjuncture from history Wallerstein's world Systems Theory which of course originated in sociology or indeed post structural and post-colonial theories today in which literary scholars like Edward Sayid homi Bhabha and so on have played such a prominent role in all these cases I would say that the reason that a given discipline can speak to other disciplines and has something to say to them is precisely because it has specialized in a particular feature of social reality that is nonetheless general to the social world so the question naturally arises what general feature is the special preserve of IR as an intellectual discipline enabling us to speak to other disciplines in our own language about their particular subject matter if we ask this question of the 20 years crisis the answer actually is nothing IR emerges from its infancy not by finding its own voice and but by accepting that it is simply an extension of another discipline the science of politics only when the same assumptions are accepted for international politics as have been since Aristotle recognized for politics only then will the science of IR exist and here I think we can see the foundations of the prison being laid because if IR is just a subfield of political science then the only identity available for it becomes a negative one it studies politics but in the absence of central authority and so the International itself becomes associated with the narrower version of it provided by political realism and once that has happened the possibility of IR producing ideas that can travel to other disciplines evaporates as a result of this to take a in a way an exception that proves the rule even the work of Kenneth waltz who certainly did assert the distinctiveness of the International has two characteristics deriving from this history of the foundation of the discipline which prevent it from having interdisciplinary significance and it's one of the things that Chris Brown says in his article but that what's amazing is that even someone like Ken walls who is such a giant and rightly so in our discipline is almost unknown outside it so what are these characteristics that prevent Waltz's work from having interdisciplinary significance well the first is that he himself defined international theory as international political theory it emphatically did not embrace the wider condition of internationality with implications beyond political science and Walt's repeatedly challenged his critics to show how such an extension could be made without just replacing theory with thick description and secondly Walt's conceptualized the International famously as separate from and counter posed to the domestic realm about that domestic social world neo-realism quite literally had nothing to say except to note how different it was from the world of international politics that existed alongside it so it played a huge comparative role in sharpening the definition of the International by contrast but at the same but it did so in such a way as to cut off our understanding of the international from the rest of the social world now of course realism has not had the field of ir-2 itself numerous other approaches have rejected both the narrow statist definition of the international and the whole idea of an autonomy of geopolitics and the sheer range of these alternatives from liberalism Marxism and feminism through to constructivism post colonialism queer theory and so on I think accounts for much of the tremendous vibrancy of IR today but here's the thing how many of these challenges have replaced realism with theories of their own that are actually based on the distinctive properties of the International how many of them have grounded the International that the field of I are in a concept of the International itself I think the answer is pretty much none and I think that's because all these other approaches regard the idea of the International as part of the toxic legacy of realism it's an understandable phobia but I think it leads them to conclude that International Affairs must therefore be shaped by other aspects of the social world and are therefore best interpreted by ideas imported from the disciplines that study those other aspects but of course if you declare that sociology or history or anthropology holds the key to understanding prior subject matter then you effectively turn IR into a subfield of sociology history for anthropology the downside to I ARS wonderful openness to other disciplines is that if we have no deep ontology of our own we become in effect everybody's subfield so I think we should hardly be surprised that no big ideas have traveled outwards from Iowa any such ideas would have to be about the unique importance of the International for the human world but the realists have defined it too narrowly for this role and the anti-realists myself included in the past have steered clear of the uniqueness of the International because they associated with realist claims about anarchy and power politics which they're determined to refute so I call this situation the prison of political science for three main reasons first I think its ultimate source still lies in the continuing failure of IR to emancipate itself from political science second this situation confines IR within the premises of an alien discipline preventing it from developing freely and realizing its own potential as a viewpoint on the social world and finally just like in a real prison IR can receive visits but it cannot repay them it can import ideas from outside but it cannot send anything back in return whatever the significance of the International may be for the wider social sciences they don't get to see it it's locked away inside the prison but now I want to argue that this is not a necessary predicament at all just like geography history sociology and so on ir has an ontology of its own one with enormous significance for all the human sciences this ontology is not the property of any one particular approach of any one of those campfires that Christie and Sylvester described so memorably it's our shared inheritance as a discipline and I think it's our way out of the prison of political science so let's return to that big question if geography subtends on our existence in space and if sociology analyzes the relational quality of human life what general feature of the social world provides IR with its deepest ontological premise well in my experience no matter how much we twist and turn this word international in our hands it always ends up presupposing the same basic thing namely that human existence is not unitary but multiple it is distributed across numerous interacting societies this is the basic fact about the human world that justifies the existence of ir as an academic discipline no other discipline not even political science subtends fundamentally on this fact of societal multiplicity it's uniquely our ontological premise and it has remarkable consequences for the social sciences some of these consequences are half known to us already but I think we half know them under the negative sign bequeathed to us by political science the sign of the absence of overarching government we do not yet know them fully under the positive sign of the International the co-presence of multiple interacting societies and when it comes to IR finding its own voice among the disciplines I think that switching signs makes all the difference in the world so what are these consequences the first and most profound one the one that opens the box for everything else is this at its highest level the human world does not culminate in a single Authority but nor that nor does it just tail off into empty space instead it opens out into a lateral field of coexisting societies this field of coexistence adds a whole new layer of social reality beyond the internal structures of any individual society and the result is not simply that the human world is bigger it also contains the whole extra kind of social phenomena into societal relations into societal behavior into societal ethical norms and into societal causality in other words multiplicity generates the International itself as a dimension of the social world and clearly it is the special remit of IR to bring this dimension into focus and construct it as an object of study is this just going to lead us back to realism well to find out let's unpack the other consequences of multiplicity I think the second consequence is difference and that's because the quantitative multiplicity of societies is also a qualitative one now we know this to be the case empirically we know that societies differ from each other in all kinds of ways size power culture history and so on but I want to suggest that difference is a necessary consequence of multiplicity itself the reason for this is partly that multiple societies must vary in their geographical location and are therefore differently influenced by the physical variety of the earth itself but difference also obtains because the distribution of social development across more than one society allows it to take different forms in different places at the same time as we know one of the most distinctive attributes of humans as a species is our ability to construct our social existence in radically different ways and then for those different ways themselves to undergo historical development and change multiplicity converts this attribute into a concrete variety of societies that actually coexist in space and time and that I think is really important because it means that the International inscribes difference and multi linearity into the nature of social development itself but multiplicity is not just about coexistence and difference it also compels societies into interaction and this is because it imposes a common condition on all societies they all confront the fact that the human world extends beyond themselves and that is a source as we know both of dangerous and of opportunities it's a danger because processes are occurring outside can become threats to a society's interests or even survival during the long 19th century dozens of Asian and African societies were completely overwhelmed and extinguished as independent political entities because the Industrial Revolution happening elsewhere had increased the power of European states whose very existence had barely been known to them before but it's also an opportunity because differences between societies can be the basis for trade and for importing knowledge and resources produced by differential development elsewhere so multiplicity leads to interaction because societies have to manage their external environment through diplomatic and military means in order to survive and if they want to benefit from the opportunities of difference they have to develop structures of interdependence too and in fact as we know all modern societies do both of these all the time this is international relations as mainstream IR Theory knows it geopolitics and interdependence but the implications of multiplicity don't stop there and that's because interaction brings with it a fourth consequence no society undergoes a history that is truly you know linear and self-enclosed all societies are therefore to a greater or lesser extent ongoing combinations of local patterns of development with external influences and pressures of all kinds and this can apply even to their most apparently indigenous elements what could appear more English than the English language and yet we know it only takes a minute to reflect and we know that it's actually a mixture of the Latin Saxon Norse and French languages among others and those different ingredients are not just linguistic influences they're the sedimentation in language of the influence of the Romans Saxons Vikings and Normans on Britain's social and political history as well and this I think has a really dramatic implication both for international relations and for all the other social sciences because it shows us that the international dimension is not simply a matter of external relations through interaction multiplicity reaches into the inner constitution of societies themselves but finally if human societies are multiple varied and interactive then it also follows that the process of world development overall cannot be unilineal or even just multilinear it must be a fully dialectical process let me give an example to illustrate what I mean in 1620 Francis Bacon wrote that the modern world was marked off from the past by the impact of three main inventions gunpowder the printing press and the magnetic compass between them he wrote these inventions had done more than any Empire or religion to lift Europe out of the darkness of the Middle Ages now bacon didn't know this but all three of these inventions had originated in China and had been transferred to Europe through processes of indirect trade and communication but this is not just a general point about interconnection because of course when they turned up in Europe these Chinese inventions were inserted into a completely different social setting and they were therefore developed in new directions and with results that they never had in China and were probably never going to have in China the same can be said of the transfer of classical Greek learning from the Arab world to Europe at the start of the Renaissance or indeed of the original translation of Greek philosophy into Arabic 300 years or so before in all these cases the dialogical transfer of something out of one society and into another sets in train a new and different process of development that inflicts the wider course of world history itself and conversely viewed in that wider frame even something like the rise of the West turns out to have been rooted in a dialectical causality generated by the interactions of multiple societies so what are these five points tell us about the subject matter of IR I think they tell us that the International is an even bigger deal than we normally take it to be it certainly is the field of geopolitics and interdependence that realist and liberal theories say it is but it is also the implications of societal multiplicity for all the so-called domestic aspects of social life as well for social structures economic systems intellectual production cultural phenomena and so on but to put it another way a discipline of IR should certainly try to understand what is happening in international politics but it should also elaborate the significance of societal multiplicity for the social world as a whole and this I think is our passport out of the prison of political science because it means that we finally have something to say to other disciplines about their subject matter instead of only talking about the significance of class gender language and so on for IR we can also explore the significance of the International for the construction of class gender language and so on as well what's more this is actually something that these other disciplines need and maybe even want to hear I say that because one of the naughtiest problems in the social sciences is the problem of methodological nationalism it's a problem that goes all the way back to the classical social theorists themselves including Marx Weber and Durkheim we see it in their tendency at a deep theoretical level to conceptualize society in the singular and in that failure therefore to theorize the consequences of multiplicity for social reality from this intellectual source in classical social theory the problem is carried forward into contemporary theory where's where as many writers from theta Scotch pole to zygmunt bauman to auric BEC have observed it continues to hamper social analysis in his book intimations of post modernity assigment bellman quails at the thought of what it would take to overcome this problem modeling the intercept into societal space he says at one point is a harder challenge than anything the sociologists tried to grasp intellectually in the past but I think that we and I are ought to have the solution to this and that's obviously not because we're any more intelligent than the sociologists it's simply because societal multiplicity happens to be the general feature of the social world that is specific to us as a discipline because it's been locked up inside political science it hasn't been available to other disciplines in a form that they could use as a result the International has been in effect the missing piece of the drug sort of the jigsaw of the social sciences but if we can reground ir in its own ontology of multiplicity that piece can finally be put back into place now of course for that to happen we now need ideas that operationalize all this ideas that make the International exportable to other disciplines by showing its importance for their subject matter I can think of at least one such idea that we already have and that's the theory of uneven and combined development as I'm sure you all know this theory was originally formulated completely outside ir by leon trotsky at the start of the 20th century but it works precisely by operationalizing the five consequences of multiplicity that i've been outlining and this enabled Trotsky to overcome a major instance of methodological nationalism at the time let me first explain what I mean by that and then go on to say how this theory reimagines the International in a way that carries its significance beyond the discipline of IR at the start of the 20th century Czarist Russia was undergoing rapid capitalist development but it was not retracing the experience of the Western countries as the Communist Manifesto apparently implied that it should Marx and Engels say there that capitalism was going to create a world in its own image wherever it's spread but state led industrialization in Russia was producing quite different social structures from those of Western Europe and since the Russian Marxists drew their world view from the manifesto this meant that they were increasingly left without a coherent political analysis or strategy and this is the problem that Trotsky solved by arguing that modern world development is not you know linear but rather uneven and combined so let's see how he did this he began in effect by invoking the first two consequences of multiplicity because what Trotsky meant by unevenness was that capitalism had emerged into a world of coexisting societies of different kinds and levels of development next he argued that this unevenness produced a mixture of dangers and opportunities that intensified international interactions on the one hand the growing power of capitalist states imposed a geopolitical whip of external necessity onto all other societies if they could not reproduce this new kind of power of industrial capitalist societies inside themselves they would be consumed by the European empires as indeed of course most of them were on the other hand this same historical unevenness gave them a paradoxical opportunity to which Trotsky called the privilege of historic backwardness and I always need to say at this point that when he uses the term backwardness he means it as a chronological category coming later to a process that has already begun he doesn't mean it as a kind of imputation of stupidity or primitive behavior so he's talking about late comers to a process of industrialization that has already become elsewhere and the the privilege that he sees them obtaining through their late coming is that they did not have to retrace the slow haphazard development of the pioneers they could export an import its latest technological and financial results from outside because they were coexisting with other societies who had already advanced further down that road and in this way coexistence and difference among societies created the possibility of accelerated development among late comers such as Russia but it also meant for these late comers would not become copies of the pioneer societies after all Russian czar ISM had no intention of transforming itself into a British style constitutional monarchy let alone a copy of Republican France on the contrary Tsar ISM was importing foreign inventions and resources in order to shore up its own survival the result therefore was not repetition but combination or as Trotsky called it combined development elements of modern capitalist society were being grafted on to a semi-feudal social structure to produce a unique hybrid of the old and the new in which the original sequence of developmental stages that was apparently being imitated was in fact being compressed and even reordered in various ways now what Trotsky was discovering here I sometimes think without fully realizing it was the difference that societal multiplicity was making to the history of capitalist world development but what he certainly did realize was that as a result of this difference the overall shape of that history was dialectically altering as well now Trotsky referred to this big picture as the social structure of humanity and he argued that it did not comprise a homogeneous world of capitalist states that were just at different stages of a uniform development it wasn't just a Multi multi linear world instead east-west interactions had prepared produced peculiar social structures in the catch-up societies making them paradoxically closer to anti-capitalist revolution than were the advanced Western societies where Marx had expected the first revolutions to occur in this way the International conceived here as uneven and combined development had dialectically transferred the trigger of world revolution away from the Western countries this was an outcome that Marx's largely you know linear theory could not have foreseen but trotsky's analysis now transformed it from a baffling contradiction into an enabling condition enabling condition of political action now I'm not actually a Trotskyist and I never have been a trotskyist but as an international theorist I can't let go of this idea of uneven and combined development and that's because it's inner logic is the exact inverse of eh cars in the 20 years crisis a car you remember argued from the nature of politics to the nature of the International Trotsky's idea by contrast is all about how deeply the fact of the International can reshape the dynamics of political development and change and by inverting the direction of the analysis in this way it looks to me like the kind of big idea that could be exported from our into the other social sciences after all the world today is full of striking instances of combined development the largest in every sense is surely China a country that endured a whip of external necessity so intense and prolonged that they call it the century of humiliations using the privilege of historic backwardness Chinese industrialization is now occurring on an even more accelerated compressed scale than other late developers before it and like others before it Chinese combined development is also producing a peculiar hybrid social formation capitalist industrialization organized by a semi-feudal Czarist monarchy was weird enough but capitalism presided over by a communist state is surely the weirdest most paradoxical combination so far but of course it's far from being the only one in Saudi Arabia a tribal system of politics has been grafted onto an industrializing society so that the state which owns the wealth of society is itself the property of a seven thousand strong extended family of princes the forcing together of different kinds of society doesn't come much more extreme than that and yet a significant chunk of the world's energy supply rests on this peculiar political hybrid and the events of 9/11 showed just how unstable this hybrid could be meanwhile in Iran a theocratic revolution that has no precedent in Shia Islam let alone in the textbooks of Western social theory has been locked in a confrontation with the great powers over its use of advanced nuclear technology Islamic Republic the very name announces the fusion of traditional and modern elements I think that because we live with these examples every day we forget how truly peculiar they are their existence could never be explained by internal development alone international pressures and opportunities have created these hybrids and woven them into the social structure of humanity they demonstrate the relevance of trotsky's idea in contemporary social analysis but they also do something else they help us to finally correct the balance between IR and political science for nearly a century now political realists have defined IR as a subfield of political science we already know that it's much more than that the consequences of societal multiplicity extend across all the different fields of human action of thought but among these different fields is of course political science itself if it now turns out that the real world political systems studied by political science have themselves been interactively produced and this is what explains their individual peculiarities then it must follow that in this respect political science is a subfield of IR the point is worth savoring but we shouldn't press it in an imperialistic way because of course the logic of my argument about academic disciplines is that all disciplines are subfields of all the others with regard to the particular aspects of social reality that those others have made their own all of them should be both importers and exporters of ideas the anomaly of IR was that it was only an importer and that was because it had not found an independent foundation of its own that was locked up inside political science let me end by pressing this argument one step further using an example from comparative literature Trotsky notes at one point that Russian thought like the Russian economy developed under the direct pressure of the higher thought and more developed economies of the West that sounds at first like an awfully mechanical formula but I think it doesn't have to be it could be the first step in an extension of uneven and combined development from the social sciences and into the humanities there it could provide a framework for uncovering the International history of ideas at a cultural production in particular and I think a brilliant example of what this might mean has been provided by a Brazilian writer called Roberto Schwarz Roberto Schwarz is a Brazilian literary critic and he analyzes the rise of the Brazilian Novel after national independence in 1822 and he argues that this literary trajectory was part of a wider cultural process in which a new Brazilian intelligentsia was scrambling to assemble what were then seen as the accoutrements of modern civilized society the European novel a literary form the gave expression to new kinds of private and public identity associated with bourgeois society this was among the most prominent of these accoutrements Brazil must therefore produce novels of its own but there was a problem unlike England and France 19th century Brazil was not a bourgeois society on the country it was based on aristocracy clientelism and outright slavery and this provided no basis for the plot form of the European novel which explored the fate of socially constructed individuals adrift in a depersonalized world of commercial relations the result of this mismatch was a first generation of Brazilian novels that were necessarily superficial and inauthentic not engaging with the reality of Brazilian society at all the real history of the Brazilian Novel says France began only later when both the plot form and the narrative voice of the novel were redesigned by the next generation of writers only then could the platform and the narrative voice of a novel begin to express both the different production of individuals in Brazil and the different inner meaning of european ideals like equality and liberty and so on when they were transferred or transplanted into brazilian society and the result of this assess france was not just that it produced some great novels though it clearly did that it was also a further development of the literary form of the novel itself which expanded its possibilities beyond the european originals that had been so slavishly copied at the start of the process what I find so striking here is that this example rediscovers in the sphere of cultural production exactly those consequences of multiplicity that lie at the heart of ir social ontology the coexistence and variation of multiple societies pressures and opportunities that this creates which lead to interaction the innovation of new forms which emerge from the process of hybridization and then finally the dialectical structure of the overall process itself which farts has reconstructed here is an episode in the uneven and combined development of the novel as a modern literary form but of course what goes for the novel will surely also go for music film architecture even clothing fashions and cookery in fact there's an International Relations of just about everything just like there's a speciality and a sociology and a politics of just about everything and that's because societal multiplicity like speciality social structure and politics is a general feature of the human world so its effects will be found in all these different aspects of human life applying uneven and combined development in these other fields will enable them to incorporate the International in a much more explicit and successful way but it will also enrich our conception of the international itself as we follow its causality into one area of life after another shraddha's analysis of the 19th century brazilian novel i think is as much a case study in international relations as is John Mearsheimer critic of Western policy in the Ukraine both of them explore the consequences of societal multiplicity for a particular aspect of the human world and so as the centenary of ir approaches I think it's time for us to leave behind the prison of political science when we reflect on the consequences of multiplicity we find that the foundations of an independent discipline already exist if we turn away from our campfires and look outwards we start to discover the enormous constitutive significance of the International for the social world in all its dimensions as we piece together the different elements of this IR surely can become a producer of big ideas for the social sciences and the humanities we may even stop talking about the end of IR theory and start talking about the beginning of IR theory because we will realize that in reality it's only the prehistory of this discipline that has been ending and if that is the case then we will indeed have every reason to celebrate so even though I know this is a bit premature let me be the first to say it happy hundredth birthday IR thank you very much

Channel: InterPolAber

Views: 7,439

Rating: 4.9080458 out of 5

Keywords: EH Carr Memorial Lecture

Id: VGKoYjXeE0Q

Length: 63min 36sec (3816 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2015