International relations and the problem of difference

International Relations and the Problem of Difference has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. In this work, the authors reimagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and differenceand always the one in relation to the other

International Relations and the Problem of

Difference

Other titles in the Global Horizons series, edited by Richard Falk, Lester Ruiz, and R.B.J.Walker

Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject

International Relations and the Problem of Difference

Naeem Inayatullah and David L.Blaney

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

R.B.J.Walker Published in 2004 by Routledge

29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Inayatullah, Naeem.

International relations and the problem of difference/Naeem

Inayatullah and David L.Blaney.

p cm.—(Global horizons; v 1) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-94637-9 (alk paper)—ISBN 0-415-94638-7 (pbk.: alk paper)

1 Intercultural communication 2 Ethnicity 3 International relations 4 International economic relations I Blaney, David L.

II Title III Series.

GN345.6 I52 2003 303.48′2–dc21 ISBN 0-203-64409-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-68137-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

Part I: Difference in the Constitution of IR 17

3 IR and the Inner Life of Modernization Theory 84

Part II: Studies in Difference and Contemporary IR 115

6 Multiple and Overlapping Sovereignties 168

In the mid-1970s and early 1980s the discipline of international relations (IR)and its subfield international political economy (IPE) displayed a limitedengagement with a strong theoretical voice that had emerged from the thirdworld,1 namely dependency theory We were fortunate to be in graduate school

at a time when, along with dependency theory, world systems theory and varioustypes of Marxism were being taken rather seriously Such, at least, was the case

at the University of Denver, where, in the 1980s, the intellectual and socialagenda was dominated by the concerns of students from Africa, Asia, and SouthAmerica While some of these critical streams of thought retain an institutionalpresence, dependency theory, as one of our teachers, James Caporaso (1993:470)observes, “died out more from neglect than frontal criticism.” Our sense is that,

on the whole, voices from the third world seem to bore and irritate most IRtheorists For us, this weary dismissal seems curious and requires both anexplanation and a response

When we first met, in 1980, David was studying East African developmentand Naeem was continuing his work in development economics We soonrecognized that development studies frustrated us both We were unable to makesense of the jumble of assumptions and conceptions taken haphazardly fromneoclassical and Keynesian economic theory as well as from IR and comparativesociology and politics Betting that we could gain a more integrated sense ofdevelopment studies if we traced its origins, we turned to the history of economicand political thought Under the guidance of David Levine and James Caporaso,this work took us to classical political economy—the Physiocrats, Adam Smith,David Ricardo, Hegel, and Marx—but also to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau Westarted to recognize that development studies not only rested on economicassumptions but also could rightly be seen as embedded within, and as anextension of, IR For example, it is not accidental that the primary unit ofanalysis in development studies is the nation-state When we finally turned to IRproper, we followed our prior procedure with development studies, with the aim

of placing IR theory within the process of its production in time and space Ourgoal was to distinguish IR’s potentially insightful elements from its less usefulidiosyncrasies

By the time we entered the discipline in the late 1980s, critical theory,postmodernism, and feminism were pushing the field toward a greaterphilosophical and political self-consciousness Having belonged to variousstudy groups in graduate school, which we can now see were aiming to map thepossibilities of post-positivist methods, we began to imagine that our work might

be welcome in IR Our combined focus on political theory/political economy andthird-world studies did not strike us as a liability, because most students we knewsearched for just such tools to explain and understand the particularities of theirpersonal, national, and transnational biographies We soon discovered, however,that this combination did not quite fit into IR

Seeking to bolster their self-conception as the ultimate source of theircreativity, most IR theorists seem to imagine that they spin their theories in apristine and abstract space that excludes the messiness of the existent world Tothe degree that they concern themselves with the third world, it remains littlemore than a tangential site for theoretical applications What they expect frompeople who are acquainted with the third world is not a challenge or a critique oftheir theoretical models Rather, the scholar of the third world is required toprovide them with raw information or data, but only if and when they need it

We resisted taking our place in a division of labor where ethnographicknowledge becomes merely input for high theorists Instead, assuming that theview from outside the empire was important and perhaps decisive, we hoped totheorize IR/IPE from a third-world point of view

Serious obstacles delayed this aspiration Unfamiliarity with the ethnology ofpublishing in North America permitted us to believe that, presented with enoughrigor, we could make our arguments heard by what we were told were theleading journals in the field Or perhaps more accurately, we vastlyunderestimated the degree to which arguments from outside the imperium wouldhave to be properly clothed and then made to bow deferentially to editors andreferees busy in their fortified castles

After some head pounding at the gates, we did learn—with help from scholarslike Rob Walker and Nick Onuf—that others, standing somewhat outside thecenters of power, had different concerns and alternative standards The memory

of that pounding did not stay with us only as a personal experience, however Wesaw it eventually as part of a larger, much deeper pattern In light of ourargument in this book, we would now suggest that the stiffest opposition wefaced was Western culture’s experience with difference itself, a powerful stream

of which has treated difference as a kind of degeneration of God’s originalperfection At least since the Reformation and its wars of religious purification,this aspect of Western culture has been so traumatized by the problems ofdifference that its habitual mode of dealing with it has been to self-righteouslyignore it, or to defer confronting it indefinitely

Thus, we argue that the early modern intellectual origins of IR closely alignthe field with a legacy of colonialism and religious cleansing We claim that IRwill be unable to find its purpose as a study of differences—as a theory of

international and intercultural relations—until we confront this legacy.Fortunately, resources from which we might build alternatives are available.These resources can be located beyond the European imperium, and also asrecessive voices within “Western” social and political thought, suggesting thepossibility of a post-Western IR that involves not so much the rejection of the

“West” but its reimagination

Open/Close: Form and Content

A text’s messages may be offered in distinguishable (but not separable) ways:through the meaning of the words and through the manner of their formulation.The formulation—the tone, texture, and the relative presence or absence of open,interpretive space within the text—implicitly conveys the relationship writershope to establish with readers Just as an awareness of the importance of formallows writers to create potentially useful symmetries and tensions betweencontent and form, so also a relative lack of such awareness can create obstacles

to realizing a writer’s purposes

We came to such a realization relatively late in the process of writing thisbook Nevertheless, we hope that the tone and texture of the book mostly avoidsthe authoritative tone of lecturing, of presenting the book as a monologue Wehope that the text, instead of closing down options, leaves open space—betweenthe various authors we follow and the (sometimes) multiple ways we formulateour points; between paragraphs, chapters, and sections of the book—where weinvite readers to a kind of participant engagement within and around the rhythms

of our concerns We experience the text as containing such spaces for our ownfuture work and we hope that others, whether in the form of extension,correction, or refutation, will find the text similarly open At the same time, wehave not, we believe, left the reader without a sense of our voice or our positions

on various issues Thus, those who prefer a good tight lecture may find ourpresentation as leaning too heavily on impressions and suggestion, while thosewho favor minimalist guides may find ours a meddling voice

Class/Race/Gender

Kind critics have pointed out that our presentation would be richer had we madeexplicit gestures toward gender To round out this criticism, we might add thatthere is also little explicit development of themes surrounding class or race Inthis form, the charge is undeniable On reflection, we might present our book asworking in and with the theme of “indianization” (see Mason, 1990:62–63).During Europe’s internally purifying crusades of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, both Catholics and Protestants found it useful to compare the otherunfavorably with “Indians.” We might, then, describe the denigration,vilification, and/or demonization as a form of indianizing of the other.Indianizing grew to have such currency that it was effectively applied to

peasants, the working poor, and other cultural outcasts within Europe and to theculturally “backward” beyond Europe Though we have not come across muchexplicit reference to this practice in our foray into these centuries (see, however,Campbell, 1992: chapter 5), it is difficult not to speculate that the witch hunts ofthe era revealed “witches” as a gendered sibling of the “Indians.” Likewise, we payonly limited attention to the often-discussed ways Amerindians and other non-European peoples were feminized as part of understanding or justifying theirsubordination.2

We want to be clear that the notion of indianization does not subsume othercategories; it suggests overlap and intersection, not isomorphism It has been

pointed out to us—and this is discussed in Chowdhry and Nair’s Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations (2002: introduction)—that the truly difficult work is to sort out the similarities and differences among processes of

proletarianizing, feminizing, racializing, and, we would add, indianizing others.The hard but necessary work of locating and tracing out such intersectionality is

a challenge to which this book only partly rises.3 However, we hope that thethematic rhythms of our book resonate with those who are attempting theseprojects and that the absences in our text might be seen as silent spaces withinwhich others may accent their own beats, supplementing, complementing, and

especially playing against the ostinato or tumbao of our rhythms.

Acknowledgments

Many people have played a special role in the process of bringing this book tofruition Rob Walker has been a source of encouragement and gentle criticismfrom the beginnings of our journey into the domains of IR We were very pleasedthat he wanted to include our manuscript in the series he was helping to launch atRoutledge Zillah Eistenstein read a draft of each chapter Her precise criticismhelped us recognize our overall argument, and her enthusiastic support stretched

us toward the fuller potential of the work Nick Onuf embraced our work atmoments when we ourselves were reluctant to embrace it fully He has readalmost every chapter in this book at some point and has been a careful, thorough,and generous critic Peter Mandaville has taken on our book as a project,promoting it shamelessly For that and for organizing a session at the EuropeanConsortium of Political Research, in which the initial chapters were read, wewill always be grateful Patrick Jackson has also stood behind us steadfastly,pushing us to get the book done We also need to thank him for organizing apanel at the Northeast International Studies Association meeting dedicated to thebook manuscript And thanks to those—Rob, Beate Jahn, Iver Neumann, SibaGrovogui, Robin Riley, Yale Ferguson, Edward Weisband, and Stephen Rosow—who read large sections of the manuscript for those panels and commented soexpertly Kurt Burch has been a constant source of friendship and careful readingand editing at numerous moments in the process of writing this book The loss is

to the discipline Himadeep Muppidi has been a fellow traveler down the path of

postcolonial scholarship and finding a home at a liberal arts college We have toooften failed to respond to his most serious and incisive criticism Two of ourprofessors from graduate school also warrant special mention Jim Caporaso has

a lifelong influence on those who are lucky enough to meet him We try toemulate as best we can his dedication to teaching his students to meet the higheststandards of excellence in scholarship Though he has read little of the text ofthis book, David Levine’s influence on our work has been profound, including inways he might not fully approve of We want to thank them for helping to launchall of this

Many have shared comments and assistance We want to thank: John Agnew,Jonathan Bach, Asma Barlas, Tarak Barkawi, Mike Barkun, Don Beachler,Shampa Biswas, Terry Boychuk, Hannah Britton, John Burdick, Stephen Chan,Geeta Chowdhry, Matt Davies, Joel Dinnerstein, Kevin Dunn, Bud Duvall, TonyFavro, Gary Fountain, Chip Gagnon, Chuck Green, Xavier Guillaume, SandraHalperin, Gil Harris, Harry Hirsch, Hon Tze-ki, Aida Hosic, Dominique Jacquin-Berdal, Inayatullah, Sara Inayatullah, Shishir Jha, Edward Keene, Sung Ho Kim,Helen Kinsella, Fritz Kratochwil, Sankaran Krishna, Hannes Lacher, MarkLaffey, Yosef Lapid, Andrew Latham, Richard Little, Dan MacIntosh, KateManzo, Teresita Martinez-Vergne Jennifer Mitzen, Alexander Moon, CraigMurphy, the late John Nagle, Sheila Nair, Meghana Nayak, Daniel Nexon,Haider Nizamani, Andrew Oros, Mustapha Pasha, Mark Rupert, Ahmed Samatar,Stefan Senders, Michael Shapiro, Kara Shaw, Meili Steele, Jan Thomson, AnnTowns, Ruth Turner, Latha Varadarajan, Jeremy Varon, Marco Verweij, RituVij, Cindy Weber, Wendy Weber, Birgit Weis, Jutta Weldes, Alex Wendt, JohnWilliams, Juliet Williams, and others whose names we might have temporarilymisplaced We have been unable to fully exploit the richness of their commentsand concerns

David would like to thank the University of Chicago for providing ahospitable and challenging environment for work during the 1998–99 academicyear and the University of lowa for access to its facilities for the academic year2001–2 Both Naeem and David would like to thank their institutions—IthacaCollege and Macalester College, respectively—for funding that supported thiswork David would like to thank three student assistants—Lubos Bosak, KaraBovee, and Egle Tamosaityte—for assistance with the manuscript in the finalstages

Chapters 1 3, 4, 5 are new and expanded versions of previous articles:Blaney, David L., and Naeem Inayatullah (2002) “Neo-Modernization? IR

and the Inner Life of Modernization Theory,” European Journal of International Relations 8(1):103–37.

Blaney, David L, and Naeem Inayatullah (2000) “The Westphalian

Deferral,” International Studies Review 2(2):29–64.

Blaney, David L, and Naeem Inayatullah (1998) “International PoliticalEconomy as a Culture of Competition,” in Dominique Jacquin-Berdal,

Andrew Oros, and Marco Verweij, eds., Culture in World Politics, pp 61–

One of the oldest and most persistent questions in Westernphilosophy—and as far as I understand it, in Eastern thought too—has been the “problem” of the one and the many and/or identity anddifference

—Richard J.Bernstein, The New Constellation

[W]e have all been programmed to respond to human differencesbetween us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference inone of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if wethink it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate But wehave no patterns for relating across differences as equals

—Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, Sex”

The Colonial Legacy

The discipline of international relations (IR) is hamstrung by a relative capacity to speak about “the situation of the Third World—the injuries done to itthrough conquest and colonialism and the justice of its demands” (Inayatullahand Blaney, 1996:68; see also Neuman, 1998; and Puchala, 1998) Thisrecurrent, if unheeded, protest has informed intellectual responses to dominantperspectives in IR from dependency theory to various postcolonial approaches.Our own intellectual efforts grow from a sense that IR as a discipline does not(except very thinly) assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape and areshaped by the changing structures and processes of the international system.More specifically, while competitive self-help is taken for granted—as backdrop

in-to the entire project of understanding state behavior (including cooperativebehavior)—IR has few resources for addressing how the cultural impact ofpolitical and economic competition denigrates the varying forms of life of “non-Western” peoples.1 More important, because competition is taken for granted IRfails to untangle the cultural logic of competition itself It therefore is unable to giveanything but a crude and caricatured understanding of the complex motives anddesires involved in colonial/neocolonial subjugation or in the resistance to

domination And, in its conventional neorealist or neoliberal guises, IR missesthe way international society—as both a system of states and a world politicaleconomy—forms a competition of cultures in which the principles of sovereigntyand self-help work to sanctify inequality and subjugate those outside of thecenters of “the West.” We have investigated these themes in much of our earlierwork,2 some of which appears in new and expanded forms as part II of this book.However, the more fundamental and challenging task is to explain why IRfails to confront seriously the role of colonialism, neocolonialism, and variouspostcolonial responses to colonialism and its legacies One implication of part I

of this book is that we can more clearly see the current shape of IR as itself partly

a legacy of colonialism The attempt to understand this failure has driven us toexamine the late medieval-early modern context for the origins of the politicalimagination informing contemporary IR, including, in our view, theories ofmodernization of which IR is a crucial component In the process, we have come

to translate our task as explaining IR’s relative incapacity to acknowledge,confront, and explore difference

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe are often treated as a period

of transition to the modern world, for which the “discovery” of the Americas andthe Peace of Westphalia serve as key markers within the “creation myth” ofmodernity With Westphalia, as the story goes, the pretensions of a universalChristian order gave way to a pluralistic society of states In the wake of bloodyreligious warfare and the expansion of Europe beyond its provincial narrowness,political and social thought is said to have gradually rid itself of religiousfoundations, spurring the trend to secular rule and the beginnings of a moreliberal and tolerant sensibility Our reading of this period in the first two chapterssubstantially revises this conventional view We argue that this interpretationblinds much of IR to the various creative responses to difference that existedduring this period and the way the intellectual discourses of the time—inresponse to both the wound of the wars of “religious cleansing” and thechallenges of incorporating the peoples of the Americas into Europeanworldviews (and empires)—mostly reinforced, rather than challenged, theinterpretation of difference as a dangerous aberration from the norms of stability,safety, and order Theory and practice aimed to contain, domesticate, or destroydifference—to establish an “empire of uniformity,” in James Tully’s (1995b)felicitous phrase

Though this legacy weighs heavily on the present, most particularly in theform of theories of modernization that pervade our understandings ofinternational/global order, we also search for resources that offer alternativeresponses to difference We argue that these can be harvested even from therocky soils of European thought about the Amerindians and from contemporarytheories of modernization

We might say, then, that the purposes of this book are to explain the failure of

IR to confront the problem of cultural differences and, perhaps less modestly, tobegin to reimagine IR as a perhaps uniquely placed site for the exploration of the

relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference—and always the one inrelation to the other We also aim to provide some preliminary examples of whatsuch a reimagination involves for IR and for our understanding of a postcolonialworld.

The One and the Many

What might initially appear to be a thorough repudiation of the canons of IR isonly partially so As we have worked to place these concerns about culturaldifference at the center of our inquiries, we have found ourselves moved—in a way

we no longer experience as ironic—by certain features of canonical “realist”texts.3 For example, though there is much to criticize in E.H.Carr’s 1939 account

of the polarity of the realist and utopian moments of IR,4 we experience teaching

The Twenty Years’ Crisis (Carr, 1964 [1939]) as rewarding and, at times,

inspirational We find common cause with the task of exposing the “historically

conditioned” character of schemes that lay claim to “absolute and a priori

principles,” or “unmasking” a utopianism “which serves merely as a disguise forthe interests of the privileged” (Carr, 1964 [1939]:68, 93) Though HansMorgenthau is a less inspirational thinker, it is not so difficult to identify alsowith his strictures against a “crusading spirit” that attempts to impose political,moral, or religious consensus (Morgenthau, 1963:561–62) We share his viewthat such a spirit produced the devastation and brutality of the religious wars ofthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, we would add, is responsibleperhaps for much of the oppression and violence of our own times

What we need not allow, nonetheless, is for these canonical texts to be used totry to erase important questions of ethics and justice from the domain ofinternational theory.5 Despite such attempts, these questions cannot be erased.Because “moral and ethical self-characterizations” are central to humanexistence, human beings live “inescapably in a space of ethical questions”(Taylor, 1990:305) International social life can be seen, then, as “a world ofeveryday ethics” in which people live according to and with the “standards thatmake their worlds inescapably their own” (Onuf, 1998a:669–70) And, if thetheory and practice of international relations is intrinsically ethical, being

“already constituted through accounts of ethical possibility,” there is no reason toimport “an achieved body of principles, norms and rules”—codified by socialand political theorists—into the domain of IR (Walker, 1993:50–51) The point

is that we should not treat IR as an amoral realm—an absence or gap that must

be filled by ethicists When we construct the ethical problem this way—as acontest between realpolitik and ethics—we risk undermining important ethicalvalues and meanings in the name of ethics This conclusion sustains thesuspicion of crusaders and global visionaries that we share with Carr andMorgenthau But there is more

If, as we have suggested, international theory and practice are constitutedthrough accounts of ethical possibility and are lived as a world of (at least

implicit) ethical purpose, then ethical inquiry is in an important respect

“descriptive.” That is, international theory finds its content within the ongoingtheory and practice of IR, not in the construction of an external or absolutestandpoint against which international relations may be evaluated and reformed(adapted from Lamb, 1979:75–96) Indeed, the idea that the analyst isinescapably embedded in international theory and practice rules out thepossibility of an appeal to any such “decontextualized or archimedianstandpoint” (Postone, 1993:87; see also Calhoun, 1995:86–87) Rather,international theory involves “drawing…a moral map” of ourselves in the worldthat articulates what things mean to us, the import they carry for us (Taylor,1985:67) International theory is also, then, a “continuing conversation” withprior or alternative mappings of the ethical universe, including both scholarlyand everyday accounts of the meaning of these practices (see Lamb, 1979:79).Highlighting the “descriptive” moment in ethical inquiry need not obscure itscritical role Social life always contains some “play” in the tension betweenethical meanings and aspirations and the actual shape of social practice Thistension suggests the ability for change, for growth, and that an account of the limits

of the present and the alternatives for the future may be an important part ofrealizing such growth (Lamb, 1979:106–11) Put differently, the purpose ofcritical international theory is to uncover alternative possibilities hidden by ourunderstandings of international relations, to show that these understandingscontain within them the possibility of a critical stance toward current theory andpractice (adapted from Postone, 1993:88; and Iris Young, 1990:6) Ashis Nandy(1987b:3), somewhat more expansively, refers to this as the production of a

“creative tension”: by exposing the “gap between reality and hope,” weinvigorate “a source of cultural criticism and a standing condemnation ofeveryday life to which we otherwise tend to get reconciled.”

Thus, critical thought necessarily maintains an “antagonistic connection” tothe social world (Walzer, 1988:22) Partly this is an acknowledgment of the fact,noted earlier, that there is no transcendental position from which to evaluatesocial life As Iris Young (1990:5–6) suggests, “normative reflection” gainscritical purchase, not from “some previously discovered rational ideas of thegood and the just,” but from a “socially situated” capacity to hear “a cry ofsuffering or distress” or to feel distress If “the given is experienced in relation todesire,” then it is “the desire to be happy” that “creates the distance, thenegation, that opens the space for criticism of what is.” This moment ofconnection also partly involves recognition of the self-contradictory character oftwo other stances—resignation in the face of the intolerable and radical rejection

of all existing values, necessitating an entirely new form of social life Thecritic’s simultaneous connection to and distance from existing social life isdefined, therefore, by his or her capacity to employ the “symbolic resources” ofexisting traditions in order to radicalize those traditions (Mouffe, 1992:1–2;1993:9–11)

Though we aim to practice some form of immanent critique of global socialand political arrangements, we are left feeling a bit uneasy The task of critics, as

we have described it thus far, is to articulate our implicit and explicit values andaspirations, exposing our failures to live up to these values or realize theseaspirations, and to point to those features of our social theories and practices thatexplain, or are complicit with, our failures and the suffering we and othersexperience But whose values and aspirations form the common ethical world towhich the critic refers? Along which affective register are we to embrace desireand measure suffering? That is, the persuasiveness of the critic’s case rests on theassumption that there exists a substantial backdrop of agreed-upon values, arelatively shared ethical or cultural tradition, or a mostly common register ofdesire and feeling Thus, we hesitate Immanent critique appears to assume acommon social world—a “we” to which the critic refers—and it is those veryclaims of global unity and moral universality that we, like Carr and Morgenthau,view with suspicion

IR offers a typical response to our uneasiness with cosmopolitan pretensions,

in the form of a communitarian international political theory (see Brown, 1992:part I) The communitarian vision embraces a society of states Internationalsociety is imagined as a “practical association” that is committed principally tothe mutual coexistence of the varied and competing goals and values of the

“purposive” associations—the states—within which people live (Nardin, 1983)

As a “compact of coexistence” (Bull, 1977:91) or a kind of “tolerant society”(Walzer, 1997), a society of states is necessarily a “very weak regime,”embracing only a “thin” conception of the good (Walzer, 1997:19; 1994: chapter4), or a set of common institutions, norms, and values that supports mutualaccommodation but necessarily limits any attempt to pursue more encompassinggoals or establish the institutions of a cosmopolitan order (Bull, 1977: chapters

3, 4; 1966) In Walzer’s (1994: xi) terms, ethical inquiry in an internationalsociety divides into two kinds of “moral argument” that parallel the “inside/outside” construction constitutive of IR (see Walker, 1993): the juxtaposition ofthe domestic political community of order and justice and the less cooperativeand more dangerous relations among political communities With “peopleabroad” and “across different cultures,” Walzer (1994:xi) claims that we engage

in moral argument concerned with (and largely restricted to) the very thin life of

mutual accommodation that we share By contrast, “among ourselves, here athome,” we engage in moral argument that draws upon the “thickness of our ownhistory and culture.” In such a world, cosmopolitan social criticism is treatedvery nearly as a contradiction in terms The common backdrop of values andnorms of international society is too thin and too circumscribed by the imperative

of mutual coexistence to sustain much of a “we” to whom the social critiquemight appeal Social criticism is possible, but it is always “local” and “thick

“grounded in the local/national political community that provides the “richlyreferential, culturally resonant,” and “locally established symbolic system andnetwork of meanings” on which ethical argument depends Thus, Walzer (1988:

232) sees immanent critique as intrinsically a multiple or “pluralizing activity” inthat the critic necessarily engages a particular, localized ethical vision, distinctfrom others.

Such a negative utopia has appeal Ashis Nandy (1987b:13) has argued that

utopian visions of cosmopolitan order consistently raise the problem of

“conflicting values” and that we might be better off with relatively “unheroic”visions It is precisely this worry—that claims of universal values areaccompanied by a temptation to impose values on the recalcitrant, resulting inviolence and domination—that we share with Morgenthau and Carr Surely, asBull and Walzer argue, a world of live-and-let-live—a negative utopia oftolerance—is preferable to the bloodletting associated with moral crusadingacross political and cultural borders

However, as we have already hinted and as we discuss in more detail in

chapter 1, the negative utopia of a society of states achieves far less than isclaimed With the emergence of the states system, the differences constitutingand complicating each state as a particular political community are kept separateand managed within the territorial boundaries of the state This demarcation andpolicing of the boundary between the “inside” and “outside” of the political

community defines the problem of difference principally as between and among states; difference is marked and contained as international difference This

construction of difference allows us to claim to “solve” the problem bynegotiating a modus vivendi among political communities However, the problem

of difference remains pervasive The bounded political community constructs(and is constructed by) the other Beyond its boundaries, the other lurks as aperpetual threat in the form of other states, antagonistic groups, imported goods,and alien ideas The other also appears as difference within, vitiating thepresumed but rarely, if ever, achieved “sameness.” The other within theboundaries of the political community is “managed” by some combination ofhierarchy, eradication, assimilation or expulsion, and tolerance The externalother is left to suffer or prosper according to its own means (though its poverty

or prosperity may be experienced as a threat); it is interdicted at bordercrossings, balanced and deterred; it is defeated militarily and colonized if need

be Indeed, colonial relationships have long existed as a separable mode of, orperhaps as a supplement to, relations among sovereign states (Keene, 2002).Given the tragic consequences of a society of particularistic states, we cannot

be surprised at the strength of the cosmopolitan impulse to erase or transcendthat particularism Two options are made available, each defined as the antithesis

of the other: a world of independent states or a cosmopolitan order Thecompeting impulses to divide and separate or unify and homogenize seem to gohand in hand If the idea of international society serves as a “warning” about thedangers of political identity and community beyond the territorial state (forexample, some form of world empire), an international society of states also callsforth the very “longing for reconciliation and integration” expressed incosmopolitan conceptions and a “more universally conceived humanity”

(Walker, 1993:15, 17–19) There is a pervasive fear of both an imperialuniformity and the divisiveness of a particularized world.

We are drawn to a broadly different description of the world that suggests thelimits of both cosmopolitan and communitarian conceptions Whileacknowledging the power of the idea of an international society of states to capturekey features of international social and political life, we see such a picture asunderemphasizing the “horizontal forces and ties that cut across state frontiers”(Neumann and Welsh, 1991:327) These forces and ties make possible forms oflife and claims of identity that cannot be simply mapped onto the nationaldemarcations of the society of states (Shapiro and Alker, 1996; Appadurai,1996), though it is equally unreasonable to insist that we are arriving at a genuineglobal culture (Friedman, 1990; Hannerz, 1990; 1992; 1996) If it is “one world,”

it is also “many worlds” (to borrow a phrase from Walker, 1988) And, just as weare unwilling to give up the idea of the unity of humanity, what that means inpractice remains far from clear and is, perhaps, the site of a necessarycontestation (Cheah and Robbins, 1998) We would highlight, instead, the

“cultural complexity” of the world (Hannerz, 1992): that competing visions forconstructing global social and political space form and circulate within andacross complex cultural terrains (Nandy, 1987b:16, 18; Appadurai, 1996:23, 64);that these visions and the traditions and cultures that spawn them are overlappingand interacting, such that every identity owes a debt to alterity and every vision

is multiple, containing dominant and recessive voices that conjoin with othersnear and far (Kennan Ferguson, 1996:176; Nandy, 1987b:17; Verma, 1990:129;Appadurai, 1996:46); and, finally, that processes of cultural differentiation andinteraction have entailed relations of domination and subordination (Todorov,1984; Nandy, 1987b:12–15; Verma, 1990)

If these descriptions are reasonably accurate, critical inquiry occurs against acomplex backdrop of values, aspirations, and desires—a situation of ethicalcomplexity, exhibiting less a common sense of ethical valuation and more asubstantial incommensurability among alternative visions and traditions As JohnGray (1998:20) explains, incommensurability entails, first, the claim that the

“human good is irreducibly diverse”—that the “goods of human life are many”and “cannot be derived from or reduced to any one value.” Second,incommensurability requires that these human goods are “often incompatible andrivalrous,” such that goods and values “may crowd one another out, exclude oneanother altogether, or belong to ways of life that are by necessity uncombinable.”Finally, “there is no principle or set of principles which enable conflicts amongvalues to be resolved in ways acceptable to all reasonable people.” That is, “[d]iverse and conflicting goods and evils cannot be rationally compared or tradedoff” (see also Kekes, 1994:46; and Bernstein, 1991:59–67) Given this ethicalcomplexity and incommensurability, cultural values and ethical traditions,whether extended beyond their points of origin or not, always stand (implicitly

or explicitly) as a judgment on the ways of life and ethical standards of others(Bernstein, 1991:66; Nandy, 1987b:8, 11–12) And, to return to Carr’s fears

about those who speak on behalf of humanity, we are likely to find that suchclaims are sustained only via a process by which resistance is both repressed andconstructed as an uncivilized, inferior “other” (Said, 1978; Gong, 1984; 1998;Verma, 1990; Spurr, 1993).

We need to keep in mind that the claim of ethical incommensurability doesnot entail that alternative visions and traditions are fully incompatible, precludingany overlap or commonality in values and visions Nor does it rule out thepossibility of comparing or evaluating competing values or ways of life(Bernstein, 1991:65–66; Kekes, 1994:46, 59; Gray, 1998:21–24) However, weare still left wondering how it is possible, in a world of diverse and oftenincommensurable values and visions that cut across localities, states, andregions, to make the kinds of comparisons and evaluations necessary to sustain

an ethical argument that is generally compelling It remains unclear how it ispossible to move beyond claims that possess more than a parochial appeal orresonate for more than a narrow band of humanity Or, even where agreementappears to exist, we might be quite concerned about how such “agreement” wasforged and wish to resist the way such “universalism” can become a civilizingproject imposed on the recalcitrant Thus, despite the current popularity ofvarious critical, global political projects,6 the possibility of international theory

as a form of global social criticism—locating tensions between (shared)aspirations and (common) social practices—remains unresolved How might werespond to the somewhat or mostly incommensurable visions and traditions ofothers?

Co-suffering and the Other Within

The early voyages to the Americas were marked by “an inability to understand

or be understood”—a situation of “opacity” (Greenblatt, 1991:24; 1976:576; seealso Zamora, 1993:158–59) This “problem” of communication, Greenblatt(1991:24) remarks, no doubt contributed to the sense of wonder with which thestrangeness of the New World was generally greeted Yet this sense of awe wasdifficult to hold onto; wonder was overwhelmed all too easily by a desire tolinguistically and materially appropriate the Americas, abetted by the Europeansense of moral and cultural superiority (Greenblatt, 1991:9, 13) We readGreenblatt, then, as suggesting that the initial uncertainty and ambiguity of thesetypes of encounters are resolved all too often by an assertion of superiority andoutright conquest However, Greenblatt (1991:25) also holds open the possibility

of a different response to the wonderment produced by the experience of

“otherness.” Rather than appropriating the other, we might be able to locate thatsense of wonderment, of options beyond the banal and taken-for-granted that arehidden, or perhaps repressed, within ourselves and our own ways of life We willdiscuss this possibility—an “ethnological moment” in Todorov’s terms or a

“struggle for cultural self-discovery” in Nandy’s—more fully below It is this

potential (or hope) that inspires and animates our inquiries into both the originsand contemporary character of IR as theory and practice.7

Following Mary Louise Pratt (1992:6–7), we refer to this space of thediscovery of the other as the “contact zone” The contact zone invokes “thespatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographicand historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect.” However, thehistorical experience is that these intersecting trajectories have been infused withinequalities of power; that is, the contact zone has generally become a “space ofcolonial encounters.” Within this space of unequal encounters, colonizer andcolonized cannot be conceived as radically separable; rather, they are “subjects”only as “constituted in and by their relations to each other.”8 Though theserelations are certainly defined by “conditions of coercion, radical inequality, andintractable conflict,” this does not require “diffusionist accounts of conquest anddomination” that obscure the “interactive” and “improvisational dimensions ofcolonial encounters.” We second Pratt’s insistence on the interactive andimprovisational quality of the encounters with others, but emphasize also the role

of learning via trial and error Uncertain if they understand or are understood (todraw again on Greenblatt), actors plod along, often stumbling and attempting toright themselves And, yet, the outcome is not necessarily salutary Thesefrustrations may prompt humility in the face of difference or they may spur avoracious hunger for certainty and mastery or one followed by the other, or anynumber of responses in between Chapter 2 involves an investigation of thisrange of responses as they emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

In earlier work (Blaney and Inayatullah, 1994; Inayatullah and Blaney, 1996),

we have drawn on the writings of Tzvetan Todorov and Ashis Nandy to givesome sense of the varying responses of the self to the “discovery” of the other.9

Todorov (1984:42–43), based on his study of the conquest of America, arguesthat a common pattern of meanings and identities—a “double movement”—emerges in situations of initial contact However strong our egocentric need tomake sense of the world in our own terms, and against the backdrop ofcommonality that this presents, “discovery” nevertheless reveals difference, that

the world is not one and our view of it does not exhaust its possibilities Despite

this revelation and the initial sense of wonderment that Greenblatt highlights,otherness is not readily or consistently recognized Here Columbus is exemplary.10

Unable to sustain this sense of wonderment,11 Columbus tends to translate theinitial experience of difference into a conviction of the inferiority of the other.This status then justifies the various forms of ill treatment and exploitation metedout to the Indians But there is a second moment in Columbus’s response.Further contact with the Indians reveals or produces commonalities between theSpaniards and the other This emergent sense of commonality brings with it aninchoate recognition of the common humanity of the other However, this limitedmoment of equality comes only at the high price of negating differences betweenself and other Again quite typically, Columbus becomes blind to differences,projecting his own values onto the other Hence the demand, often backed by

force, for assimilation Wonderment is thus dissolved into the double movement:difference becomes inferiority, and the possibility of a common humanityrequires assimilation.

Consistent with Pratt, knowledge of and action toward the other in the contactzone mostly reflects and expresses this framing of possibilities, constructingarchetypal colonial relationships (Todorov, 1984: chapters 2, 3, especially pages127–29, 177) As Todorov’s portrayal of Hernando Cortés makes clear, growingknowledge of the other does not immediately produce sympathy and a fullerunderstanding Rather, knowledge of the other, inflected by the equation ofdifference and inferiority, becomes a means for the physical destruction,enslavement, or cruel exploitation of the other In the case of a young Bartolome

de Las Casas, “love” for the other—based on a sense of the Amerindians’common humanity; that is, their potential for Christian piety—works to obscuredifferences This presumption of commonality, joined with Las Casas’s (rathermeager) knowledge of the other, becomes the basis for colonial conversion—anassimilation of the other to the self that promises cultural, if not physical,destruction What is precluded within the reflexes of the double movement is thepossibility of recognizing the other as both different and equal (Todorov, 1984:249)

The responses, described here as a double movement, accomplish a form of

“splitting.” As Jessica Benjamin (1988:25–31, 62–63) tells us, “splitting” occurswhen there is a breakdown in the mutuality of interaction between self and other.Maintaining a sense of balance between two subjects, each demandingrecognition from the other, involves complex interactions and fragileinterrelationships in a zone of psychological and social contact.12 Parallel toPratt, Benjamin’s contact zone is characterized by ambiguities, frustrations, anduncertainties The temptation, then, is to try to replace the ambiguities of theongoing balancing act and the frustrations entailed by the essential tensionbetween two subjects with a relationship of mastery and servility Where theuncertainty of one’s position vis a vis the other is difficult, even impossible, tobear, the self may be driven by the desire to move from a relationship ofmutuality and interdependence to one of autonomy and dominance on one sideand dependence and servility on the other As Benjamin explains, this movementfrom mutuality to domination involves splitting—an attempt to purify the self ofthe need for the other In splitting, “the two sides are represented as opposite anddistinct tendencies,” where “one side is devalued, the other idealized, and each isprojected onto different objects,” “so that they are available to the subject only asalternatives” (Benjamin, 1988:63) Instead of recognizing the possibility of theoverlap of self and other, boundaries are rigidly drawn, carefully policed, andmapped onto the difference between good and evil This tendency to split apartand then freeze difference and commonality into mutually exclusive,axiologically polarized extremes, as in the double movement, is “the pattern forevery form of domination” (Benjamin, 1988:218)

Nevertheless, the contact zone admits of other possibilities For example,Todorov’s inquiries (1984:185–93, 225, 240–41) reveal learning and growth andthe emergence of responses that begin to move against the double movement andthe mechanism of splitting Some, like Las Casas and Bernardino de Sahagún,may come to adopt a kind of “perspectivism” in their understanding of the other.Rather than simply effacing the other by assimilation, the cultural practices andtraditions of others are placed beside one’s own, both differences andcommonalities (and strengths and weaknesses) are noted, and a certain overlap

of views, if not a personal hybridity, is constructed and revealed

More commonly, as Todorov (1984:240–41, 250) explains, the stance towardthe other remains that of the “comparativist,” where difference is expressed largely

in one’s own terms; by appropriating the other within one’s own culturalcategories, the values and visions of the other are thoroughly obscured Thoughacknowledged, the internal multiplicity of the hybrid is evaluated according tostandards that continue to split self and other, privileging the imperial, Spanishelements of the self while denigrating the Indian aspects Though multiple voicesmay be given play, they are juxtaposed, but not allowed to intermingle in aprocess of critical self-reflection In the latter, which Todorov labels an

“ethnological” stance, the other becomes a resource for a self-examination thatmight substantially alter not only how the self sees the other, but also how theself views its own culture and traditions If we are to interact as ethnologists, wewould need to learn how to treat the doubts and ambiguities generated in thecontact zone as resources Only then could we become parties to a conversationthat “contributes to the reciprocal illumination of one culture by another.”

It is Nandy who provides a particularly compelling vision of a potential

“dialogue” in the contact zone For Nandy, this means reshaping the “space inpublic discourse” so that the parties to the “civilizational encounters of our time”meet on grounds of equality (Nandy, 1987a:118), so that they “come together tomake culture-to-culture dialogue a reality [and] establish a new plural futurethrough cross-cultural dialogues” (Sardar et al., 1993: 90) However, as inTodorov’s account, if the interactions and improvizations shaping encounters inthe contact zone are to take on the form of dialogue, participants need tonegotiate the polarizing tendencies characteristic of the “psychology ofcolonialism” (Nandy, 1983:ix-xii) As Nandy (1983:4–18) argues, Britishcolonial domination was organized discursively along dimensions of both genderand age, invoking hierarchy—strength and weakness, dominance and submission

—via parallel polarizations of masculinity and femininity and maturity versuschildhood and old age By mapping these polarities onto the British and Indianselves, British dominance was constructed as manly rule over submissivelyfeminine India, and a vibrant European adulthood was counterpoised to an atonce infantile and decrepit, aged East The colonial project was the logicalextension of this act of splitting: India requires the British other as a strictheadmaster and physician to whose tutoring and prescription it must submit

But, for Nandy, the contact zone also contains critical potentials The culturalspaces revealed and constructed by these “intersecting trajectories” are complexand overlapping Cultures and traditions face each other not as homogenous andfixed entities Though “shared” in important respects, cultures are more like an

“open-ended text” than a “closed book” (Nandy, 1987b:2; 1987a:118); traditionsare layered, comprising “different levels or parts,” or perhaps dominant andrecessive moments (Nandy, 1987b:17) And no matter how different, the subjects

of cultural encounters can find connections and overlaps between their ownvalues and visions and the various “levels and parts” and dominant and recessivemoments of the cultural practices and traditions of the other (Nandy, 1987b:54–55)

In some cases, the responses to domination that grow from this overlappingcultural space may prove largely self-contradictory In an effort to establish orrestore a mutuality of relationships, the subordinated self may lose, or perhapsrepress, elements of itself Indeed, far too much of Indian resistance, Nandy(1983:19–24) explains, involved an effort to assimilate by recovering those

“British” aspects of the Indian self, unacknowledged or repressed by the British.Figures like Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Bankimchandra Chatterjee areexemplary in their search for the British self and British valuations of Indiawithin Indian cultures and traditions themselves Yet Nandy sees this as thesearch for a recessive voice that may be reclaimed and elevated only after it hasbeen purified of the residual elements of Indian backwardness andsubmissiveness Recovering the Indian self in this way involves a simultaneousloss of the self

Efforts to maintain the purity of the British self are similarly costly for Britishinterlocutors (Nandy, 1983:40, 65–70) Policing the boundary between colonizerand colonized denies the possibility that the colonizer will learn or be healed bythe insights or responses of the other And the British are forced, like Kipling andOrwell in Nandy’s account, to repress those parts of themselves that link them toIndia, that, more strongly, show them to be Indian

More creative responses also are enabled by the intersecting trajectories of thecontact zone Nandy (1983:36–48) describes how a small but important group—Sister Nivedita (born Margaret Noble), Anne Besant, Mira Behn (born MadelineSlade), and C.F.Andrews—evade the colonial imperative to police the boundarybetween self and other Not only do they distance themselves from dominantaspects of their own society, using Indian “versions of religiosity, knowledge andsocial interaction” as an internal mirror, they also build on this critical self-reflection to envision and fight for forms of society and political life beyond theoppressions of colonialism Gandhi, similarly but more profoundly in Nandy’s(1983:36–37, 48–51) account, creates alliances between recessive traditions in theWest and themes in India’s cultures that offer a vision of liberation fromcolonialism—for both the Indians and the British

These figures represent for Nandy the achievement of something likeTodorov’s ethnological moment, but with a distinctly critical and political cast

As with Todorov, the ability to acknowledge that the other is not simply externalbut also exists within the self is only the first step More powerful and creative isthe capacity to uncover the other within as a source of critical self-reflection andcultural transformation For Nandy, the key is that each figure uses his or herown experience of suffering not only to establish a connection to the suffering ofothers, but also to make overcoming of suffering central to thought and action InNandy’s (1983:54) evocative phrasing, “a cultural closeness” of otherwisediverse civilizational experiences is made possible by “this experience of co-suffering.” Thus, as Nandy (1987b:4) warns, we should not seek and are notlikely to uncover a full “integration of visions” in such civilizational encounters.Rather, establishing dialogue in a world of inequalities and oppressions dependscentrally on the capacity to draw connections between various traditions’ andcultures’ understandings of and responses to oppression.

Nandy (1987b:13) sees this as a “negatively defined” utopia, not one involving

an appeal to a thick, universal order As we noted earlier, cosmopolitan visionstend to produce conflict, and severe violence accompanies their attemptedimposition A dialogue of responses to oppression, by contrast, “promotes avague, implicit negative consensus on an unheroic vision of a ‘decent society.’”This may disappoint those who long for some ultimate reconciliation in a worldorder, but Nandy suggests that it is precisely this longing for a unified order thatneeds to be abandoned Abandoning this quest for a universal order makes itpossible to “establish communications among social criticisms.” Such a dialogueinvolves refusing to attempt “to summate the values of diverse civilizations.”Nandy calls us to articulate instead “the diverse concepts of a tolerable society”

at work in our world Perhaps we cannot avoid demarcating these alternativevisions of a “tolerable society” as either self or other However, as long as werecognize that the other is also within and that our common experience ofsuffering may show us the way to establish connections between self and other,the other may serve as a source of critical self-reflection Thus, the intersectingtrajectories of the contact zone admit of potentials for “cultural self-discovery”(Nandy, 1987b:55) and a joining of “social criticisms” that Pratt may notadequately highlight

This finding is important because, as our descriptions of world politics in theprevious section suggest, we continue to inhabit the colonial relationshipscharacteristic of the contact zone Beginning in chapter 3, this book demonstratesthat the contemporary terrain of culture remains “a space of colonial encounters”—

of the eradicatory or assimilative violence of the double movement and themethodological violence of distancing central to the practice of the

“comparativist.” But, as we have argued here, the contact zone containsalternative possibilities—of critical self-reflection and of an alliance of socialcriticisms For us, then, the political and ethical challenge is to locate for IR theresources for an ethnological stance even in a world where the reflexes framed

by the double movement and the logic of the comparativist hold sway

Our attempt to locate and cultivate such resources involves a mode of reading

or textual exegesis that draws on the insights of Nandy and Todorov First, thisrequires a respect for the subjectivity of the author We must pay heed to theauthor’s voice, uncovering the author’s dominant motivation and purpose as theauthor him-or herself might understand it.13 At the same time, texts (like culturesand traditions) are layered, possessing dominant and recessive themes andpolitical and ethical purposes that work beyond the author’s intentions Thus,reading also involves an attempt to locate these minor and sometimes submergedthemes and purposes as resources for interpreting the text and for contemporarypolitical and ethical purposes In the case of interpreting the text, we come to seehow both the dominant and recessive themes serve as the necessary effects of adeeper contextual/textual structure of historical conditions and intellectual andpopular debates We can then observe how various texts together form a

“constellation” of writings that, even if not reducible to a single “core,” are usefullyjuxtaposed because they express some key “truths” embraced in that era, withimplications for later eras (see Bernstein, 1991:5–8) For our own political andethical purposes, the recovery of recessive themes and voices at once underminesthe naturalness of the dominant conceptions or conclusions of political andethical traditions and reveals alternative conceptions and conclusions that may beturned against dominant understandings More important in our view, thisprocess of recovery is central to the ethnological moment that breaks the hold ofthe reflexes of the double movement Finding the other within is, as Nandy tells

us, essential not only to the process of critical self-reflection, but also to aconversation of cultures and traditions that responds to the oppressions of thecontact zone

We can now return more explicitly to the issue of our stance toward IR What

is implicit in this discussion but needs to be said openly is the way this method

of reading informs our efforts to reimagine IR If IR is implicated in the colonialcharacter of the contact zone, as we suggest, then our work is a gesture toward apost-Western IR However, this gesture is complicated by the fact that revealingthe particularity and parochialism of the West14 is simultaneously to recover the

values and visions of the West (in its numerous guises, both dominant andrecessive) as resources To put it differently, moving beyond the hegemony ofthe West requires the rediscovery and reimagination of the West

Heterology: Beyond and within Western IRReimagining the West is beyond us, but we can contribute to this process bytrying to rediscover and reimagine IR Key to this endeavor is the process of

“provincializing” IR—documenting the historical process by which the spatialand temporal demarcations of IR come to seem self-evident.15 As a first step, wereintroduce the idea of “culture” into IR.16 The question of what culture does for

us must be asked, since alarms may sound around IR when one hears the term

Culture is considered “soft,” not capable of adequate specification Its use

conjures up interesting but probably irrelevant ethnographies of distant,

“stateless” peoples The rich or thick description suggested by the term seems tofly in the face of the imperatives of a positive science (see Geertz, 1973) Bydominant standards, IR is deductive in approach, emphasizing the nomotheticover the ideographic, the analytic over the descriptive, parsimony over the messy

or complex, systematic imperatives over particularistic creations Though weshare some of the suspicion of “culture” as a category, we have been drawn to it,gradually at first, and then, all of a sudden, almost wholeheartedly

In our view, the language of culture is immediately useful for IR because itevokes two tensions or oppositions (Walker, 1990) On the one side, culture is

distinguished from nature and the cultural from the natural Culture refers us to

human activity and creativity; the capacity to construct, live, and aestheticallyexpress forms of life; and the coexistence of human action that embraces andpractices as well as resists and reforms inherited (or imposed) forms of life Thisphrasing highlights the weight of cultural representations in shaping humanexistence into forms of life, including their role in constituting a group’s specificidentity in relation to others and to the larger cosmos Thus, the language ofculture leads us to sustain a strong (but not absolute) contrast between humanartifice and the fixities and givens of nature We might say that the human is bothfreed and shaped as a cultural being

On the other side, and to draw on earlier discussion, culture points at once to universality and commonality and to partiality and diversity We are referred to

the universal—the meaningful and constructed character of human experience—and to the particular commonalities (and differences) used to construct identities

in relation to others And though these two references are brought together inclaims about the existence of a system of national cultures or, increasingly, itssupercession by the arrival of a global culture, the term still strongly signals thathuman artifice is multiple, that ongoing processes of cultural self-definition (inrelation to multiple internal and external others) continue to operate partly inopposition to much of what is implied by the ideas of a nation or a global

culture To summarize, the language of culture draws our attention to the

construction, maintenance, and transformation of meaningful and purposefulschemes of existence as a common human endeavor, yet also as multiple, diverse,and often competing human projects Thus, we might add, the human project itself

is coterminous with what we have called the “contact zone,” exhibiting thevaried possibilities admitted by cultural encounters As described above, thesepossibilities range (to emphasize polar cases) from opacity, repression, andknowledge sought for purposes of domination to a sense of wonder, a desire forunderstanding and mutual communication, and a joining of social criticisms.And, to complete the thought, IR can thus be reimagined as a theory of interculturalrelations or perhaps rediscovered as an important site of “heterology”—the study

of differences (Certeau, 1986; Giard, 1991)

At the risk of being overly bold, we can imagine that had such a study ofdifferences—or heterology—more fully infused the understandings of theorists

and practitioners of IR, the attacks of September 11, 2001, would not have come

as much of a surprise Anticipating that others, at home and elsewhere, havealternative narratives of what we call “modernization” or “civilization,” we mighthave predicted the humiliation, anger, and violent response to what are seen ascolonizing projects Perhaps, having anticipated such powerful and dangerousresponses by the targets of modernization, we might have done two things to try

to foster alternative responses First, we could have incorporated the peoples ofthe third world not just in the execution of the project of modernity, but morefully in the formulation of its very meaning and in serious debates about itsrelative value Second, by listening to others, far away and nearby, we mighthave come to understand the need to defend and demonstrate the vibrancy anddepth of Western culture(s), instead of simply taking those for granted In theprocess of doing these two things, we might have discovered depths in ourselvesthat we had forgotten (or repressed) and assisted others in discovering those inthemselves, so that we might have replaced relationships of violence anddomination with dialogue These options are still available, but they require that

we begin with a critique of IR theory so that we may locate those alternativeswithin ourselves

PART I Difference in the Constitution of IR

CHAPTER 1 The Westphalian Deferral

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled withone another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

War’s a deal It cuts both ways

Whoever takes also pays

Our age brings forth its new idea:

Total war—and total fear

—Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children

The solution, however, wasn’t really a solution, nor the beginning abeginning

—Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the

Partition of India

Only recently has sovereignty appeared again as a puzzle A review of academicand popular discourse suggests that the political and ethical certainties associatedwith the nation-state are under assault by, variously, the inexorable forces ofglobal capitalism, the transnational mobilization of environmental and humanrights activists, the progressive emergence of global governance, and thepervasive deconstruction of borders and identities.1 The sense that humankind isthereby facing an uncharted future has also generated historical and theoreticalinterest in Westphalia, with the expectation that critical reflection on the origins,principles, and purposes of the state system might help us identify strategies bywhich we can remake the world (see Walker, 1993; Spruyt, 1994; Ruggie, 1998;Onuf, 1998b; Van Creveld, 1999; and Keene, 2002)

We share the expectation that a return to the puzzle of sovereignty is importantfor political and ethical inquiry Cutting against the grain of much contemporaryacademic practice, however, we believe that sovereignty—as theory and practice

—remains a site of political and ethical possibilities Rather than an ethical deadend or a site of political closure, we suggest that the problems posed bysovereignty contain opportunities that extend, stretch, divide, and revisesovereignty more than they fully transcend it We elaborate this set of claims inthe latter stages of this book, where we explore the idea of multiple andoverlapping sovereignties.2 Here we focus on the way the formal sovereignty ofstates—conventionally attributed to the Westphalian settlement3—intensifies thedifficulties we face in responding to differences in culture, religion, and mode oflife How does this “problem of difference” emerge with Westphalia?

Perhaps ironically, differences in culture remain less of a problem in an age of(premodern) empire, when the principle of hierarchy reigns supreme AsMichael Walzer (1997:15) suggests, “[i]mperial rule is historically the mostsuccessful way of incorporating difference and facilitating (requiring is moreaccurate) peaceful coexistence.” Subjugated peoples, though excluded from theapex of the social order and marked as inferior, paradoxically can find a kind ofsufferance of their way of life, religious practices, and distinct customs Walzer(1997:14–16) argues that, while this form of tolerance is partly rooted in a sense

of “minimal fairness” that the imperial center extends to the conquered, it is alsolargely a practical matter: as long as imperial rule is respected—taxes are paidand imperial authority is acknowledged—further subordination is unnecessary.Preserving the peace of the empire entails merely enforcing peaceful coexistenceamong the “authority structures and customary practices” of the variousconquered groups And, though tolerance is extended primarily to groups ratherthan to individuals (this is not a liberal world), individuals may escape some ofthe pressures for communal conformity in the more cosmopolitan cities of theempire

These days we are less comfortable with hierarchy and we do not openlysanction imperial practice But neither have modern empires proved to beparticularly tolerant, as we shall see The rise of the principle of equality ininternational relations (in the centuries following Westphalia) has served,relatively speaking, to delegitimate and break the hold of the monopoly of socialand political power of a particular group But where groups of differingpersuasions are placed on more equal (legal, if not social) footing, the imperialsolution of sufferance of subservient others is mostly foreclosed When theequality of others is acknowledged, we require the affirmation of those othersinstead of divine ordination to secure our own status However, the presence ofdifferences in ways of life, values, and visions also challenges the seemingnaturalness of our social practices and threatens the certainty of our given sense

of self (Benjamin, 1988: chapter 2) Walzer (1983:249–54) also points in thisdirection, explaining that hierarchical orders resolve the problem of recognition

by giving everyone a fixed place in the social order Whenever such a rankingbreaks down, it presents a potential challenge to our sense of our own value andsimultaneously we become unsure of our relations to others In this way, theproblem of difference emerges and intensifies under modern conditions of

relative equality, often leading to the reassertion of (illicit or informal) forms ofsocial hierarchy—the marking of the others as inferior and thereby as less of athreat We comprehend and affirm our values as others recognize us And yet,perhaps because of this dependence on them, others seem also to threaten us.How then should we reconcile need and threat? How do we realize equality withdifference? These problems remain central to modernity.

These problems are also central to the very constitution of internationalrelations We read the geopolitical demarcations of a society of states as a spatialcontainment of cultural difference Difference is placed at a distance (managedwithin the boundaries of “other” states and deterred by the defense of one’s ownborders) and resolved into “sameness” within one’s own political community.That is, the state is the domain where difference is translated into uniformity,while IR remains eternally a site of potentially dangerous, but one would hopemanageable, confrontations with others This splitting of inside/outside (tocombine Benjamin, 1988, and Walker, 1993) signals in our minds less a solution

to the problem of difference and more a deferral of the need to face that problemfrontally The idea that international society represents a solution to the problem

of difference is often linked to a reading of the legacy of the Peace of Westphalia.Thus, we examine the Peace of Westphalia in its historical context—as aresponse to the “religious cleansing” and material and psychological devastation

of the Thirty Years’ War—in order to trace IR’s posture toward difference

An Internal Crusade

Most historians consider the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia thatbrought it to a close among the major events of the latter half of the millennium.Ronald Asch (1997:7) calls the Thirty Years’ War “the best example of apolitical event which profoundly changed political and social structures, andperhaps even collective mentalities.” The decisiveness of these events is sealed

by the predominant view of the Peace of Westphalia as signaling the move from

a religious to a modern, secular world and from the accepted, if somewhatvaporous, goal of a united Christendom to a system, or perhaps society, ofindependent states (Pages, 1970:17, 250; Thomson, 1963: 814) There is nothingforeign about this interpretation: the decisiveness of these events is asserted, ifnot taken for granted, by most scholars in the field of international relations.4

This period is indeed notable for the central role played by religiousconviction in instigating military conflict While legal and political motivations—such as the limits of the emperor’s authority and dynastic rivalry—were certainlypresent, such factors took on a distinctly religious hue Just as we today perceivethe ubiquity of the economic motive, whatever else may be involved, both theruling classes and the masses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are said

to have seen the events of their time through a distinctly religious gaze (Asch,1997:7; Langer, 1980:11; Thomson, 1963:800; Lockhart, 1995:1–2; Brightwell,1979:418) The religious conflict flaring up in the sixteenth century and all but

consuming the seventeenth century found its initial spark in the Reformation’schallenge to the ideological monopoly and material power of the CatholicChurch (Friedrich and Blitzer, 1957:10–11; Van Creveld, 1999:67–84) Thischallenge persisted and escalated with the spread of various forms ofProtestantism among the masses and the conversion of certain territorial princes

in Germany

The specific character of the religious conflict merits some discussion In his

War against the Idols, Carlos M.N.Eire evocatively frames the Reformation as a

transition from an immanent to a transcendent notion of religiosity In his account

of the events of 1509, the year of John Calvin’s birth, Eire (1986:1) describes aEurope in which Christianity was tangibly expressed in the events and objects ofdaily life:

Heaven was never too far from earth The sacred was diffused in theprofane, the spiritual in the material Divine power, embodied in theChurch and its sacraments, reached down through innumerable points ofcontact to make itself felt: to forgive or to punish, to protect against theravages of nature, to heal, to soothe, and to work all sorts of wonders.But within a period of only two decades, a radical and sweeping change wasinitiated The religious immanence of Catholicism came to be seen as acorruption of the Scripture; its form of piety branded as “idolatry.”

Condemnation of the papacy fell on prepared ground, as many lay personsshared a resentment of the privileges and abuses of the Church (Blickle, 1984;Jelsma, 1998) Thus, the beliefs of the reformers were soon translated intoaction, disrupting the sense of the role of the Church in society: “churches weresacked, images smashed and burned, relics overturned, and consecrated hosts fed

to dogs and goats.” As this displacement of the dominance of a “religion ofimmanence” by a “religion of transcendence” spread from Germany andSwitzerland to France, the Netherlands, and England, “the unity of the Europeanreligious vision was forever shattered” and “the image donors” rather suddenlybecame “image smashers.” The Reformation remade Europe (Eire, 1986:2; seealso Head, 1998:95–96)

Though reformers were fractured along numerous lines, Eire (1986:2)emphasizes the competition among three major “streams of piety.”5 Catholicsdefended their own centuries-long history, “suffused with the immanence of thedivine,” while reformers tended to divide between the relative moderation of theLutherans and a Calvinist rigor and intolerance for compromise Lutheran pietyobjected to the Catholic practice of “works-righteousness”—the belief that gracecould be conferred through works—but accepted the Catholic use of materialobjects in worship so long as those objects were seen as a means to the divineand not as divine themselves Calvinism, or the “Reformed stream,” flowed in adifferent direction, “surging with transcendence” and unleashing an

“uncompromising and disruptive…crusade against idolatry that manifested

itself in iconoclasm, civil unrest, and eventually even in armed resistance againstlegitimate rulers” (Eire, 1986:3; emphasis added).

For contemporary readers, the allusion to an “internal crusade” needsemphasis Nor can we afford to minimize the moral and epistemic charge of the

word idolatry, or the oft-repeated charge that “the Devil and his army of

demons” stood behind the practices of the established church (Jelsma, 1998:27).Catholics fully understood the accusation, for they themselves hurled it whenthey vituperatively degraded, for example, the religions of the Amerindians.Here, a remark that serves Eire (1986:5–6) as peripheral and expository strikes

us as prescient, given our focus on European assessments of Amerindians in thenext chapter:

It is good to keep in mind that at just about the same time that the soldiers

of Charles V replaced the “horrible idols” of the Aztecs with “beautiful”crosses and images of Mary and the saints in the New World, Protestanticonoclasts were wreaking havoc on these Catholic objects in landsnominally ruled by him in Europe The grisly cult of human sacrifices led

by bloodstained priests inside the Wall of Snakes in Tenochtitlan inspiredthe same kind of reaction among the Conquistadors as the celebration ofthe Mass in the richly decorated cathedral of Basel did among Protestants

As Eire (1986:5) so rightly points out, “one man’s devotion was another man’sidolatry.”

And so it is that he who casts the first stone finds it returning with a vengeancethat can only come from the deepest doubts of former believers The Calvinistsclaimed that the medieval Church had fallen into idolatry in two ways First, theChurch as a whole was seen as an idolatrous entity The Church, in other words,

“had set itself up as an idol, substituting its own decrees for those of God.”Second, it used idols as a part of its worship, thereby directing the worshiper’sattention not to God, but to material artifacts (Eire, 1986:55–56; see also Blickle,1984) Eire (1986:55–56) describes the Reformist judgment: “Like some vastAugean stable, the medieval Church was ankle-deep in the ‘filth’ of images,relics, altars, holy places, and miraculous hosts The Calvinist attack on medievalpiety sought to flood and cleanse the Church from the accumulated debris.” Suchfeeling was justified, it was thought, because what was at stake was not simplyhuman lives, but human souls and the truth of God’s plan for humanity(Gregory, 1999: 345–46)

Such intense feelings could not but have had momentous politicalconsequences Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt—Luther’s colleague at theUniversity of Wittenberg—argued that because Catholic worship transgressedthe word of God it was the duty of Christians to remove idols and idolatry even

if this required violence (Gregory, 1999:78–82; Head, 1998:96–97; Skinner,1978:27, 75; Eire, 1986:65) While Karlstadt’s revolutionary views were rejected

by both Luther and Calvin, they nevertheless provide a sense of how the Catholic

Church came to be seen by its critics as a “realm of darkness” and “the kingdom

of the Antichrist.” By the 1520s, for those in Germany and Switzerland therewere two opposing Churches and the question became which one to believe A

1521 pamphlet poses this problem starkly—“should I then consider the pope andhis cronies to be the Christian Church?” The Protestant answer to this question,

as Eire shows through a sermon preached by Heinrich von Kettenback in 1522,

is obvious: “Christ has his Church, and the Antichrist also has his Church, andthe Church of the Antichrist is nowadays often mistaken for Christ’s Church”(Eire, 1986:102)

In response, Catholic enmity against the reformers was both symmetrical andasymmetrical: symmetrical because, while accused of spiritual pollution, theythemselves saw the Protestants as polluting Christianity; asymmetrical in thatwhile the Protestants focused their rancor on “idols,” the Catholics aimed theiranimosity at the bodies of “heretics” themselves This meant that

while Protestants sought to overthrow Catholicism by attacking its culticobjects, the Catholics sought to defeat the Protestants by inflicting bodilyharm on them Protestants would feed consecrated hosts to a goat and say

“now he can die if he wants, he has received the sacrament,” or spit intothe holy water fonts; Catholics, however, regarded such acts as attacks onthe sacred, and consequently vented their anger on the persons of theProtestants themselves (Eire, 1986:161)

Thus, each faction regarded the other’s false worship as a threat of plaguelikepollution (Blickle, 1984; Gregory, 1999:85–87; Eire, 1986:228, 283–84) Andplagues must be stopped Put in terms we introduced above, the other’s demandfor recognition was experienced as a deathly threat and death for one’s cause anact of martyrdom (Gregory, 1999)

Demands to return to orthodoxy—for example, the Edict of Worms (1521),the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), and the Diet of Augsburg (1530)—wereresisted by reformers, especially where such resistance was buttressed by thesupport of Protestant princes At the same time, attempts to forge a compromisethat recognized the divisibility of Christianity (for example, the First Diet ofSpeyer of 1526) were repudiated by both sides (Lindberg, 1996: chapter 9) Inthe end, princes loyal to Catholicism leapt to or were drawn into a defense of theUniversal Church—a Counter Reformation led by the Habsburgs, the HolyRoman Emperor, and the papacy German Protestants responded in kind, andboth sides mobilized for war More than thirty years of indecisive hostility werebrought to a temporary halt in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg (Thomson, 1963:500–1, 791)

From our point of view, the Peace of Augsburg appears to have been an initialand relatively meager attempt to come to terms with the problem of difference Thetreaty confirmed, if not strengthened, the autonomy of the princes within the

empire, including recognizing the principle of ubi unis dominus, ibi una sit

religio (“where there is one ruler, there should be only one religion”).6 While thisestablished a minimal pluralism (Lindberg, 1996: 246–48; Thomson, 1963:791),the right of rulers to fix the religion of their own citizens worked ill in an

“extensive, long-unified territory,” where migration by those of other faiths to asafe haven of coreligionists was difficult It worked somewhat better in practicewhere jurisdictions were “fractured and fragmented,” such that “people of deepreligious commitments need not move far to find, either a ruler who shared theirconvictions, or a tolerant free city” (Toulmin, 1990:49–50; see also Head, 1998:98–100)

For us, however, it is the limits of Augsburg that stand out The right ofindividual conscience was not recognized, and tolerance was established onlybetween Catholic and Lutheran princes, excluding Calvinists, Zwinglians,Anabaptists, and other sects In addition, even the minimal tolerance established

by the treaty was seen by the signatories as an act of prudence in the face of abalance of forces, merely a pause in an ongoing struggle to eliminate thereligious others (see Lindberg, 1996:146–47; Head, 1998: 99–101) As Asch(1997:10) describes the situation, “[T]hose who signed the Peace of Augsburg…did not yet see this principle as the essence of the settlement as clearly as thelawyers interpreting the Peace later were to do; for they had not yet given up thehope of re-establishing some sort of religious unity.” As would also be the casewith the later Peace of Westphalia, the Catholic Church refused to accept theprinciple of tolerance among princes The emperors—Charles V (r 1519–1556)and Ferdinand I (r 1556–1564)— saw the settlement as undermining the specialrelationship of empire and Church (or empire and God) Protestant princes andstates also tended to accept the arrangements as provisional (Thomson, 1963:500–1; Pages, 1970: 37; Parker, 1997:16–17)

A Purifying Hatred

The outcome seems scripted, and we are tempted to read the Thirty Years’ War

as the inevitable culmination of a long period of religious zealotry in whichdifference is first translated into inferiority and subject to eradication and thenglossed as the reason and basis for the gradual movement to a more tolerantmodernity While the events of the seventeenth century are usually read in thisway, we would warn against accepting such a view too readily Cary Nederman(2000) suggests that conventional accounts ignore the vast intellectual resourcessupporting tolerance within the thinking of the Middle Ages—from John ofSalisbury and Marsiglio of Padua to Bartholomé de Las Casas (to whom we willreturn in the next chapter) Stephen Toulmin similarly argues that the sixteenthcentury offered an alternative, more tolerant theory and practice than issuggested by the usual retrospective reading of this period as the antithesis andprecursor of the modern For example, in late-medieval or Renaissance figureslike Erasmus, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, Toulmin finds “an urbane open-mindedness and skeptical tolerance,” reflecting mostly Renaissance impatience

with the quest for religious or philosophical certainty as well as relative “respectfor complexity and diversity” (Toulmin, 1990:25–30; quotations on 25 and 29).7

Similarly, in Henry IV of France he finds a political practice that turns graduallytoward greater tolerance of the Protestant Huguenots, despite domestic andexternal opposition However, when Henry’s assassination in 1610 brought hisexperiment to an end, the event was interpreted widely as a failure of the policy

of tolerance This event served as “confirmation of people’s worst fears” and

“dashed the last hope of escaping from irresoluble conflicts” (Toulmin, 1990:46–53; quotation on 48; see also Van Creveld, 1999:72) The equation of differencewith danger was seen as vindicated with savage results

The revolt of the Bohemian estates against Catholic domination triggered arenewed effort by the Habsburgs to root out heresy from their domains(Thomson, 1963:800) Emperor Ferdinand II’s defeat of the Bohemian rebels andhis intensification of religious persecution reverberated throughout Europe,irrevocably shattering the uneasy stalemate among religious forces This phase

of Counter Reformation was prosecuted as a “consuming passion” with the tools

of “fire and sword” (Parker, 1997:75–76; Wedel, 1991:51) Though not all rulerswelcomed these provocations or the eventual outbreak of open warfare, theprospect of losing a religious war and being subjected to the religious dictates ofthe victor generated an anxiety difficult to bear Protestants and Catholics alikemobilized to resist this possibility; neutrality became almost impossible(Brightwell, 1979:418–19; Trevor-Roper, 1962:39–40; Parker, 1997:75–76;Gutmann, 1988:767–68) In this context, piety was translated into a clear andcertain response to difference—an attempt to eliminate alternative modes ofChristian belief and practice by conquest, persecution, and purification

The resulting conflict is infamous for the material devastation, but also thesocial, moral, and psychic scars it left across Europe Trevor-Roper (1962:33)considers it the “greatest and most destructive war in preindustrial Europe.”Toulmin (1990:53) is more expansive in his characterization of its effects oncentral Europe: “For thirty years, in a series of brutal and destructive militarycampaigns, shifting alliances of outside powers used the territory of Germanyand Bohemia as a gladiatorial ring in which to fight out their political rivalriesand doctrinal disagreements, most often by proxy, and turned the Czech andGerman lands into a charnel house.” Perhaps a better sense is provided bycomparison with a more contemporary reference Geoffrey Parker (1997:192–93) notes: “Until 1939, the Thirty Years’ War remained by far the most traumaticperiod in the history of Germany The loss of people was proportionally greaterthan in World War II; the displacement of the people and the materialdevastation was almost as great; the cultural and economic dislocation persistedfor substantially longer.” And, following Charles Weeks (1991:213), we mightdescribe the events as a cataclysm foreshadowing those of our own time: theThirty Years’ War was a total ideological war, ushering in a “modernist” period

in which the “unfolding disasters of war”—runaway inflation, spiraling militaryengagement, and a “phalanx of disease, hunger, and chaos”—crashed down on

civilian populations John Theibault (1995:1–2) reports that the Thirty Years’War is selected (still today and by a wide margin) by Hessian villagers as “thegreatest calamity to befall their villages” in the period bounded by the Black Deathand World War II We would, then, along with Herbert Langer (1980: 10),emphasize the devastating psychic wounds left on populations, both the massesand ruling groups.

Surely an important reason for the extremes of destruction is that armies weremaintained in the field continuously for nearly the duration of the war Troopsbecame, in Herbert Langer’s (1980:97) phrase, “marauding baggage-trains,”draining the resources of the countryside and spreading terror and epidemics intheir wake (see also Theibault, 1995:141–42, 151– 60; Nichols, 1989:261–63).Conscription, fed by heavy battlefield losses and the unremitting toll of disease,depopulated villages across Germany, Sweden, Finland, and elsewhere Militaryservice became a veritable death sentence (Lynn, 1991:95; Parker, 1997:186–88)

If the length of the war helps explain the magnitude of the destruction, this begsthe question of what sustained the war It also leaves us unable to easily accountfor the savagery displayed by combatants

We are led again to religiously inflected motives John Laursen (1998) arguesthat numerous chances for compromise that might have substantially shortenedthe war were missed by intransigent leaders moved by a religious mission.Toulmin (1990:54) argues similarly that the doctrinaire character of thereligiosity fed the frenzy of killing:

The longer the bloodshed continued, the more paradoxical the state ofEurope became Whether for pay or from conviction, there were many whowould kill and burn in the name of theological doctrines that no one couldgive any conclusive reason for accepting The intellectual debate betweenProtestant Reformers and their Counter-Reformation opponents hadcollapsed, and there was no alternative to the sword and the torch Yet themore brutal the warfare became, the more firmly convinced the proponents

of each religious system were that their doctrines must be proved correct,

and that their opponents were stupid, malicious, or both

We should not be surprised, then, that the barbarities were unspeakable, of a kindsome trace to that time (Langer, 1980:101), yet clearly recognizable in events ofrecent decades The pillaging of the countryside was accompanied by torture andrape, often of children and pregnant women No religious grouping was spared;nor were the religious dissenters less cruel than their persecutors (Parker, 1997:186–88; Lynn, 1991:96; Wedel, 1991: 42–45) The savagery reached such ascale that the inhabitants of Styria, who had contributed generously to EmperorFerdinand’s coffers, claimed that his armies had caused more destruction andsuffering than the dreaded Turks (Nichols, 1989:261–63) And one of theHutterite brethren, a group subjected to perhaps the worst indignities, comparedthe infidels favorably to their fellow Christians: “Even Turks and Tartars…

would have said it was too much.” Thus, Wedel, echoing Toulmin’s analysis,with which we began, takes the treatment of the Hutterites as evidence of thepower of a “purifying hatred” (Wedel, 1991:46–47).

Purifying hatred, one might imagine, burns with great fury but can alsoexhaust itself, especially when joined by an equally furious fire Indeed, it isargued that exhaustion again led the combatants to a series of peace tables, andthe resulting treaties are usually labeled the Peace of Westphalia HistorianGeorges Pagès’s (1970:250) view is emblematic of the interpretation usuallyascribed to this set of events:

The peace of Westphalia substituted the idea of independent states, a sort ofinternational society, for the idea of a united Christendom The peace didnot openly express this idea but it did contain the idea of a society whichtook no account of the method of government of its component states….Similarly, no account was made of the dominant religious faiths On theinternational plane, Europe became a secular system of independent states

It was the dawn of the principle of nationalism

S.Harrison Thomson’s (1963:814) account of the events likewise portrays thePeace as a marked step forward for religious tolerance: “The achievements of thepeace congress in the controversial area of religious liberty, while notrevolutionary, were not insignificant… Complete toleration was not to be

expected The old principle of cuius regio eius religio was deeply ingrained in

the princely class Now, however, Calvinists were tolerated and the princes wereexpressly enjoined not to interfere in the religion of their subjects.” HansMorgenthau’s (1963:312) assertion that, by the end of the Thirty Years’ War,

“sovereignty as supreme power over a certain territory was a political fact,signifying the victory of the territorial princes over the universal authority ofemperor and pope,” is similarly exemplary of international relations orthodoxy.Others follow suit Leo Gross (1968:47) claims that the “Peace of Westphaliaconsecrated the principle of toleration by establishing the equality betweenProtestant and Catholic states and by providing safeguards for religiousminorities.” Terry Nardin (1983:50) describes the emergent international societysimilarly as a system of mutual tolerance and accommodation Stephen Krasner(1993:242–44; 1999:73– 82), though he doubts the claim that Westphalia

implemented the idea of sovereignty, stresses the attempt of the treaties to

contain religious conflict by fixing boundaries in a system of nation-states,disentangle religion from politics, and foster greater religious tolerance Ingeneral, then, and to repeat a point, Westphalia normally is seen as a key marker

of the eclipse of the medieval world by modernity There is purportedly amovement from the religious to the secular, from the idea of Europe as unified

by Christianity to a European system of independent states, and from a web ofoverlapping and competing authorities to a modern states system based on thedemarcation of exclusive territorial jurisdictions

What is crucial in these varied accounts is the intimation that Westphalia and anascent modernity represent initial but definitive steps toward a solution to theproblem of difference We wish to complicate this reading, because the receivedview of Westphalia tends to blind us to the creative responses to difference thatwere lost during this period; the persistent, if understandable, evasion of the task

of exploring the source of the wounds in the dominant response to difference;and the manner in which the intellectual discourse, originating in the shadow ofthe Thirty Years’ War, reinforced, rather than challenged, the interpretation ofdifference as a dangerous aberration from the norms of stability, safety, andorder Thus, a richer story necessarily qualifies any effort to establish Westphalia

as a clear marker of the transition to a tolerant modernity

Toward an “Empire of Uniformity”

Our argument nearly reverses the stress of the received view By contrast withthe vision of an emerging tolerance, we suggest that the practical and intellectualrepercussions of the Thirty Years’ War fostered a movement as much towarduniformity as toward recognizing and respecting diversity We will elaborate thispoint in two steps

First, the attempt to contain difference within the relatively autonomous unitsrecognized by Westphalia8 deferred a deeper exploration and engagement of theproblem of differences Ronald Asch (1997:193–94) notes that Westphalia wasnot a solution to the problem of religious difference, but, rather, it kept alive thereligious conflicts of the previous century, “confirming the existing status, rights,and privileges of the confessional churches,” and thereby “perpetuating religiousdivisions,” albeit in a more “muted form.” Combined with a recognition of theindependence of princes, the effect was to divide “‘Europe’ into Catholic andProtestant spaces” and spur “the interstate construction of the continent”(Campbell, 1992:51) Religious tolerance among sovereigns was made, in effect,

a function of the balance of power among them (Keene, 1998:21), but within thenascent states the situation was different Despite the treaties’ relative embrace ofreligious liberty, the moral constraints placed on rulers were, as Krasner (1993:244–45) observes, on a collision course with the sovereign’s right to dictate thefaith of the realm as originally acknowledged in the Treaty of Augsburg and assupported by the emerging reality and theory of sovereignty “[F]rom now on,”Toulmin (1990:91) concludes, “established religion was the general rule.” Thismove, by setting difference at a distance, may well have helped to minimize theprospects of religious war on the scale of the Thirty Years’ War, but it did so at aprice: the problem of difference was simply displaced into the “domestic realm.”However, the consequences for religious liberty were not uniform across thenewly sanctified political units Toulmin (1990:92) describes a situation in whicheach state or domain individually faced “the continuing problem of religiousconformity and toleration.” Despite the expectation of submission to a nationalfaith, nonconforming minorities remained a troubling issue; others, thought to