Chris Reus-Smit addresses the role of culture in political order in the domestic as well as international arenas and—through the entry of new actors and new agendas—in the emerging global order. Concerned with the normative understandings underlying our political practices (see his 1998 The Moral Purpose of the State ), he now considers this work—in “standard constructivist guise” (p. ix)—somewhat unsatisfactory, because it misunderstands how “culture” works.
His doubts were certainly reinforced by his familiarity with the British school and its “deeper questions,” such as why fundamental institutions of state-systems differed and whether their institutions have to be sustained by a “common culture.” The answers, provided by Martin Wight, Robert Jackson, and Herbert Butterfield, diverged significantly. Wight stressed the importance of a common culture, whereas Jackson surmised that a “thin” layer of common beliefs was sufficient. He viewed both the state and the international system as a “practical association,” united only by an agreement on common practices regulating interactions and conflict. Hedley Bull added later that these arrangements had, however, to satisfy the elementary requirements sustaining social reproduction (limitation of force, pacta sunt servanda and acceptance of the acquisition and transfer of titles).
Although these answers of the “greats” of the British school (Chapter 3) seem at first only to provide the “background” for Reus-Smit’s new project, their relevance to contemporary discussions in international relations (IR) “theory,” such as the debate among communitarians and cosmopolitans or between the old realists and some constructivists, is hardly accidental. For Reus-Smit the problem with these debates is the common mistaken notion of how culture constitutes political orders. Reus-Smit calls this the “default position” (p. 4), which postulates that cultures form “coherent entities, bounded, integrated and distinct wholes” (p. 5); in contrast, he maintains that cultures embrace heterogeneous and often contradictory notions and practices (Chapter 6).
Such an alternative cuts not only against the systems thinking in sociology a la Talcott Parsons, which pretends to “solve” the problem of order through cultural integration, but also has further implications for social reproduction. The problem of order arises in modernity with particular virulence, because individual actors, pursuing their self-chosen goals “rationally,” are no longer endowed with some “social instinct” counteracting the Hobbesian “war of all against all.” Only a “sovereign” can “make” actors choose the socially preferable collaborative solution. It is clear that the sovereign must not only rely on coercion but also that this power consists mainly in the ability to be the “fixer of signs.”
In contrast, functionalists and some “thin culturalists” argue that compliance with norms only marginally needs the shadow of “the (coercive) law.” Political problems are solvable by either technical know-how, a favorite argument of some nineteenth-century sociologists, or through the exclusion of defectors from benefits (the “liberal” version). Whereas functionalists are systematizers relying on systemic logic or design, thin culturalists stress the role of particular sets of norms, creating as “regimes” a patchwork of “orderly” issue areas.
Both versions are for Reus-Smit problematic. He subjects the first to the well-taken criticism that a good deal of allegedly “constructivist” norm research starts with a simple causal model of (pre)-existing norms influencing actors or even making the norms actants with their own “life cycles.” However, because even legal orders are not all of one cloth, as “legal pluralists” have shown, it is not clear how through proliferation and diffusion of norms we are all supposed to converge on the same “standard solutions.”
Reus-Smit opts, therefore for a “deep” generative (or constitutive) role of culture without, however, endorsing the old “harmony” version. For Reus-Smit the predominance of the “thin” version in IR is also the result of having accepted the “default” position in the first place, while failing to see that political order can only be created by organizing diversity. The political task of yoking together different elements of existing orders and their conflicting values and practices is not akin to what one could call an architectural problem. The fault lines of a society’s culture are not given, and they allow for various combinations and transformative changes. Thus contrary to Marxian “classes” or to the nineteenth-century fantasies of preordained “nations” wandering through history, the “facts” of social order are not things, but actions. They have a performative dimension that needs therefore to be reenacted, as the newer literature on nationalism suggests.
This realization alone should be a reminder that something is amiss when we use norms to explain the social world and think that they function analogously to the “logic” of subsumption (under nomic laws) or of inductive “inference.” Following norms differs even from implementing certain prescriptions to create “objects” by aligning our doings so that the “product,” as the “end” of our activities, can emerge.
It is here that Reus-Smit and I differ in our assessments. I fully agree with his emphasis on (1) the heterogeneity and the generative force of different norms and values and (2) on the need to understand the resources that this, at first blush, “disorderly” pluralism provides for contestation and social change, which is, however, our best insurance against the inability of “going on.” I also share his insistence that one of the main achievements of culture is the translation of existing differences into authorized diversity, which is of the greatest normative and heuristic importance.
Yet what remains unclear is how and why an engagement with certain traditional ways of managing diversity is supposed to deliver the clues for dealing with our present predicament. For example, the Western political project of steadily expanding human rights—not only safeguarding the preconditions for free agency but also providing an ever-expanding catalog of “welfare rights”—squarely runs up against the “diversity regime” of the Ottoman Empire’s millet system that Reus-Smit wants to study. This system relied on the co-optation of elites and on grants of exercising political power over “their own people” in exchange for taxes and loyalty to the Sublime Porte, a regime hardly compatible with subjective rights.
Institutionalizing viable “diversity regimes” may also be a bit more complicated, as the Austrian “federal” solution and the “nation state plus minority rights” after 1918 suggest. But if this is so, the charge that it was the “default” conception of culture underlying the Versailles settlement that “proved tragically misguided” (p. 224) seems difficult to sustain. While not directly disproving Reus-Smit’s arguments, such considerations do turn our attention from the “unity/diversity” cleavage to the loss of levers available for “making” politics when new hegemonic projects endorse or devalue established practices.
Are we now not at a similar point? Having dismantled all “traditional” modes of “doing” politics, flawed as they might have been, the making of policy increasingly submits to both a symbolic politics concerned mainly with media spectacles and the allure of futuristic “visions” in which we all become spectators or “followers” of trends—all while Foucauldian forms of governance administer us.
Let us now turn to Reus-Smit’s second case, the Qing Lifanyuan system in China. Although it certainly is illuminating in correcting some misconception about “empires,” I am not sure that we can find thereby a solution to our quandaries in dealing with China’s contemporary treatment of Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam or even Pakistan, which is sometimes sold to us as a revival of the old “Silk Road.” Is the building of a road across the Himalayas really similar to the old practice of “trading,” or is the analogy to the imperial practice of Rome more apt, where the building of roads was always the first step in “controlling” this area?
These reflections raise two issues. The first is one of assessment and judgment. I think Reus-Smit is too sanguine when he belittles the concerns about “the drift of things” voiced by leaders— ranging from globalization opponents to political leaders as different as Obama, Trump, or Kevin Rudd—by attributing to them the default position of culture. Is it not possible that while the default position is indeed faulty—and historical research can tell us something about it—much depends then on being careful about the periods one studies and on which turning point one focuses? Which history one consults and which criteria for vetting historically based claims one uses become then the real issue. Is it not possible then that quite different mental operations and modes of thinking become necessary, rather than believing that a “new and improved” theory is still the way to think about these matters?
The second issue goes to the question of how one still can “make” or engage in responsible politics by realizing political projects to which “we” are committed, instead of, at best, being asked to “show” every now and then how we “feel” about it in acclamations. The “we” is then simply an aggregative expression and not the authoritative “we” in which a common purpose and commitment are communicated. Strangely enough, in a world in which everyone seems to be reachable and can be made to be “present,” the idea of “re-presentation”—so crucial for politics—seems enfeebled. Increasingly one encounters only generic “humans” or “customers” but no “citizens.” But those are “further questions” that have to be taken up at another time.
