2. THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
2.4. Roots of Identity Studies in International Relations
concepts as the rival theoretical approaches but mostly focus on how these terms and concepts are evaluated and which meanings are attributed to them.
Just as selfishness and malignity (because a peaceful world was a fiction and universal moral principles were a matter of degree)115 others also would have been given. From this point of view, investigating ways not to eliminate but to manage wars/conflicts and to treat the other not as ideational but as factual116 would be more valuable and to the point117:
“[T]he existence of Other is certain, and the knowledge which we have of them is probable. We can see here the sophistry of realism. Actually we ought to reverse the terms of this proposition and recognize that if the Other is accessible to us only by means of the knowledge which we have of him, and if this knowledge is only conjectural, then the existence of the Other is only conjectural and it is the role of critical reflection to determine its exact degree of probability.
Thus by a curious reversal, the realist because he has posited the reality of the external world, is forced to return to idealism when he confronts the existence of others”.
Although the self and other were considered as given, it was not until Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that no conceptual relation was set forth between them. Hegel, in his way of dialectical118 approach to identity formation,119 raised the idea of mutually complementary character of the self-other pair that corresponds to each other,120 which are required forming and integrating the self with other121:
“Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another”.
115 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 8–9.
116 Yet, latest developments about re-writing national history textbooks –paying heed to eliminate insulting or humiliating attributions for Others– can be seen as an improvement within this field.
Although there are many projects to be listed one of them appreciates much more attention due to its host institution –World Bank– which is located in the motherland of Realism: “Wolfgang Höpken (Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig, Germany) History-Textbooks and Reconciliation – Preconditions and Experiences in a Comparative Perspective,
World-Bank meeting, November 11th, Washington, D.C.”,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1121703274255/1439264-1126807073059/World_Bank.pdf [22.01.2010]
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117 Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, 224.
118 A method of classical philosophy based upon dialogue of proponents and opponents of an argument, which dates back to Socrates and might be best exemplified by Plato’s “Republic”. And Hegelian dialectics is a threefold process wherein theses (be they ideologies or paradigms) and their counter-theses (read anticounter-theses) merge into a compromise called syncounter-theses, in virtue of the tension in between.
119 For Hegel the “self-Other relations are framed within the individual’s striving for unity and coherence. [And] [t]he unity of the self results from the dynamics of negation”. See, Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 41.
120 Neumann, “Self and Other in International Relations”, 141.
121 A. V. Miller, trans., Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 112.
Building on Hegel’s formulation of the other, Karl Marx excluded dialogical122 readings of identity constitution, in total, and advocated dialectical ones in his 1844 Paris Notebooks where he discussed self-alienation. Several but similar questions had been asked during this period of time, and such can be aligned as; ‘Who is other’,
‘What is it made up of’, ‘How to identify the otherness of the other’. Consequently, Hegel’s or Marx’s, in part, with his reformulation of Hegel’s, version of understanding and formulating identity became dominant and prevailed during 20th century123. In the field of social sciences, Michel Foucault is one of the eminent scholars referred to regarding discourse. In his view, discourse determines anything related to a speech, including attribution of a quality to a subject as well. As regards Europe or Europeanneass, for example, discourse “determines what can and cannot be said about Europe (e.g., a continent, an organization, an order, but not a company), [or] who is European and who is not”124. In this context, a final conclusion on the discourse on Europe could be reached through analyzing what has been said about it, regardless of who has said it. Contrary to what was proposed by the Foucauldian approach, John Langshaw Austin, who held the view that speech does not only passively describe a given reality, but it can also change and constitute a (social) reality through speech acts, considered discourse “as a product of individual discursive practices in the context of social norms and rules”125.
Lengthy studies addressing the self and the other concerns within the discipline of IR are undertaken by the so-called post scholars, and might arguably be dated back to James Der Derian, who has been influenced by Michelle Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, and to some extent by his mentor Hedley Bull of English School126. In his prominent book ‘On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement’ besides his ambition to combine international relations with political science and to develop the
122 It is an interpretative methodology originated in the studies of George Herbert Mead and Bakhtin, which is based upon analyzing human communication (that is spoken or written utterances or actions) as they are assumed to be embedded in a socio-historical context.
123 Neumann, “Self and Other in International Relations”, 141.
124 Senem Aydın-Düzgit, Bahar Rumelili, “Discourse Analysis: Strengths and Shortcomings”, All Azimuth, v. 8, no. 2 (2019): 286.
125 ibid, 287.
126 Martin Griffiths, Steven C. Roach, M. Scott Solomon, ibid, 270; Neumann, “Self and Other in International Relations”, 155.
types of diplomacy,127 Der Derian might definitely be the first to introduce the self/other nexus to IR and to reach a dialogical conclusion by dialectical readings of the state-selves and the state-others. He maintains that although diplomacy is not the only way to achieve a desired consequence for the self, yet it is the safest one “until we learn how to recognize ourselves as the other”128.
Michael J. Saphiro is another early IR theorist who scrutinizes identity formation in international relations by exploring textualism. Drawing heavily on Saussurean linguistics that “meaning emerges from the relational structure of signifiers”129 Saphiro underlines that language is not a set of symbols instead it is a set of values
“embedded in the process of signification which is responsible for producing the objects, acts, and events we entertain in our conscious awareness”130. Thus, for Saphiro, it is textualism that frees IR scholars to study discourse and enables them to take objects and subjects “as productions rather than as natural phenomena, lying outside of human productive activity”131.
According to Iver Neumann, Saphiro tackles the self/other issue as “aspects of historically contingent ideas of self, which again are rooted in historically contingent ideas about time and space” and reaches to the conclusion that “foreign policy generally is about making an other” in order to sustain the self against change132. Concomitantly, in his “Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity”133, David Campbell –an eminent scholar of reflectivist/post-structuralist camp– pursues the practice of US foreign policy soon after the Cold War and points out the importance of change in forming enmity and reformulating otherness. For Campbell, identities (whether personal or collective) are an ‘inescapable dimension’
of beings/entities and they are constructed through a two-way relationship between the self and its difference (the other). Since neither identities nor their differences are
127 Der Derian, in his genealogy of diplomacy, describes six types of diplomacy according to the situation wherein they are conducted: Mytho-diplomacy, proto-diplomacy, diplomacy, anti-diplomacy, neo-diplomacy, techno-diplomacy.
128 James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 209.
129 Michael J. Shapiro, “Literary Productions as a Politicizing Practice”, Language and Politics, ed.
Michael J. Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1984): 222.
130 ibid, 223.
131 ibid, 223.
132 Neumann, “Self and Other in International Relations”, 156.
133 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
‘fixed’, ‘given’, or ‘planned’, “[t]he problematic of identity/difference contains, therefore, no foundations which are prior to, or outside of, its operation”134. Self and other are performatively constituted, are not fixed and achieved through the
‘inscription of boundaries’ which mark the differentiation between the two concepts.
The discursive interaction between self and other is also important for the study of international relations since the approach of a state and state actors to international relations is based and influenced greatly by understandings of self and other which form the basis of identity.