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Promoting democratic norms? Social constructivism and the ‘subjective’ limits to liberalism

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13510347.2011.650081

1743-890X

David Chandler,

Foucault, Power, and Ethics

Abstract This article argues that, since the end of the Cold War, the understanding of democratic norm promotion has shifted through three conceptually distinct and chronologically distinguishable stages: the early 1990s view that democratic norms would be universalized with the Cold War victory of liberal ideals and the spread of new global norms of good governance; the mid- to late-1990s view that barriers to the promotion of democratic norms could be understood as the product of state or elite self-interests; and the perspective dominant since the 2000s, that the promotion of democratic norms necessarily involves much deeper and more extensive external intervention in order to transform social institutions and societal practices. Through charting the shifts in the understanding of democratic norm promotion, this article seeks to highlight the problems inherent in norm promotion discourses that emphasize the importance of subjective agency, normative choices, and cultural and ideational frameworks of understanding. A key problem being that, in the downplaying of social and economic context, agency-based understandings tend to degrade the rational capacities of – and to exoticize and problematize – the non-Western subject. The social constructivist approach, which presupposes a closed or endogenous framework of societal reproduction, has thereby been a crucial paradigm through which Western democracy promotion discourses have shifted to emphasizing the subjective policy barrier posed by the allegedly 'non-liberal' mindset of the non-Western subject. Keywords: norm diffusionsocial constructivismnew institutionalismstatebuildingbehaviour modification Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the two reviewers and the editors of Democratization for their critical comments on the original draft of this article. Notes See, for example, McFaul, 'Democracy Promotion as a World Value'; Carothers, Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion; Youngs, The European Union and the Promotion of Democracy; Thomas, Making EU Foreign Policy. A common definition of norms in the international relations (IR) literature is that forwarded by Peter J. Katzenstein, as a description of 'collective expectations for the proper behaviour of actors with a given identity'. Katzenstein, 'Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security', 5. Finnemore, 'Norms, Culture and World Politics'. The understanding of classical liberal theory as being blind to social and associative connections has been authoritatively challenged by authors as diverse as C.B. Macpherson, see The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, and Amartya Sen, see, for example, On Ethics and Economics; The Idea of Justice. Wendt, 'Anarchy is what States Make of it'. For a good overview see Cortell and Davis, 'Understanding the Domestic Impact of International Norms'. I follow Wesley Widmaier, although, for heuristic purposes, the analytical framing of these stages differs. See Widmaier, 'Taking Stock of Norms Research – From Structural, Cognitive and Psychological Constructivisms to Intellectual Irony and Populist Paradox'. Checkel, 'The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory'. See also, Hay, 'Constructivist Institutionalism'; Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science, 107–22; Scott, Institutions and Organizations. See, for example, Richmond, 'Resistance and the Post-liberal Peace'. For more on the problematic of universalism and the overcoming of difference in the Enlightenment conception of 'free' and autonomous subjects, see the treatment by Michel Foucault, The Government of the Self and Others, 6–39. See also the insightful work of Laura Zanotti, for example 'International Security, Normalization and Croatia's Euro-Atlantic Integration'; and Governing Disorder. See, for example, Barnett, 'Social Constructivism'; Jackson and Sorensen, Introduction to International Relations, 159–80; Reus-Smit, 'Constructivism'. See Wendt, 'Anarchy is what States Make of it'; and Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics. Katzenstein, 'Conclusion: National Security in a Changing World', 528. See, for example, Keohane, International Institutions and State Power; Krasner, International Regimes. Neo-liberalism in IR theory, refers to theorists who worked in the same methodological tradition as realist theories but who argued that the pursuit of rational self-interest could lead to cooperation rather than conflict. Kowert and Legro, 'Norms, Identity, and Their Limits', 458–9; see also Katzenstein, 'Introduction', 11–17. Katzenstein, 'Introduction', 4. Ibid., 5. See also the influential work of Anthony Giddens in developing the endogenous approach of 'structuration theory' in Giddens, The Constitution of Society; and the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein, 'Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security', 66. Finnemore, 'Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention', 157. Katzenstein, 'Introduction', 26. See for example, Harrison, 'State Socialization, International Norm Dynamics and the Liberal Peace'; Thomas, The Helsinki Effect; Black, 'The Long and Winding Road'. See, for a good overview of the problematic, Bull, The Anarchical Society. See, for example, Hollis and Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations. For example, Sen, 'Human Rights and Asian Values'; Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism; Donnelly, International Human Rights, 131–5. Finnemore and Sikkink, 'International Norm Dynamics and Political Change', 902–4. See Chris Brown for a useful discussion of Habermas in this context: Brown, '"Turtles All the Way Down"'. For example, for the sociologically informed authors of the United Nations instigated 'Responsibility to Protect' Report, the domestic socio-political context or preconceived geo-political interests were no excuse for not choosing to behave according to global liberal norms: 'The behaviour of states is not predetermined by systemic or structural factors, and moral justifications are not merely after-the-fact justifications or simply irrelevant'. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, 129. Finnemore and Sikkink, 'International Norm Dynamics and Political Change', 909. Ibid., 900. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. For the relevance of this framework to international institutional understandings see, for example, the 2011 World Bank publication, authored by Johanna Martinsson, Global Norms: Creation, Diffusion, and Limits. This was reminiscent of the 'universalist' reasoning of Vitoria, regarding the Spanish conquest of the New World, where refusal to open up to liberum commercium and the communicative engagement of Papal missionaries was held to be a violation of Spanish rights justifying suppression. See Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 108–13. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, 12–13. See, for example, Habermas, The Divided West for his critique of US foreign policy resistance to global liberal norms. See, for example, Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, 12–13. Ibid., x. See, for example, Burg, 'Bosnia Herzegovina'; Kaldor, New and Old Wars; Fine, 'Fragile Stability and Change'. For this reason the international administrative mandate was initially intended to last only until the first elections, held in September 1996. For more information, see Chandler, Bosnia. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, 4. See, for example, Acharya, 'How Ideas Spread'; Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community; Kaldor, Global Civil Society; Keane, Global Civil Society? Hopgood, 'Reading the Small Print in Global Civil Society'; Palan, 'A World of their Making'; Chandler, 'Universal Ethics and Elite Politics'; Chandler, Constructing Global Civil Society. See, for example, Newman, Paris, and Richmond, New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding; Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions; Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the Liberal Peace; Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam, A Liberal Peace? In shifting policy concerns to the societal rather than the state level, democratic norms discourse followed similar international discourses concerned with security and development, where the emphasis on 'human' individual and social capacities and capabilities was intellectually cohered through the work of Amartya Sen and others, see particularly, Sen's Development as Freedom; and the UN Development Reports, annually from 2004. For a critique, see, for example, Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War. A good example is Acharya, 'How Ideas Spread'. Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights. Risse and Sikkink, 'The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction', 3. Previously, Thomas Risse-Kappen had argued that domestic institutional structures had blocking affects, in terms of preventing communicative engagement with international norm entrepreneurs or transnational non-state actors from accessing domestic political systems and domestic actors. See, for example, Risse-Kappen, 'Ideas Do Not Float Freely'; Risse-Kappen, Bringing Transnational Relations Back In. Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights. Risse and Sikkink, 'The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction', 4. Ibid. Ibid. Risse and Ropp, 'International Human Rights Norms and Domestic Change: Conclusions', 271. Ibid., 273. It is in this context that concerns are often expressed in terms of the limits of the European Union's 'normative power' beyond the periphery of states involved in the accession process, see for example, Laïdi, 'European Preferences and their Reception', 15. Ibid. There is no methodological necessity for social constructivists to argue for the globalization of liberal norms rather than focus on the barriers to their acceptance – the only difference is the level of focus for the endogenous understanding of the operation of societal inter-subjective framings. Whereas earlier norms-based approaches focused on global social interaction, overtly challenging rationalist approaches at the international level, later norms-based approaches have focused on the domestic level of failing or post-conflict states and have tended to present endogenous frameworks of understanding in terms of institutionalist frameworks of reasoning, which equally challenge traditional rationalist frameworks of understanding in economic and political social science. Risse and Sikkink, 'The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction', 34. As Lord Paddy Ashdown, the former international High Representative with administrative ruling responsibilities for Bosnia, explained informally to me in January 2011, external rule was only necessary until the Bosnian people were judged to be capable of freely making their own rational governmental decisions. See also Ashdown, 'The European Union and Statebuilding in the Western Balkans'. Paris, At War's End. See, for example, Zaum, The Sovereignty Paradox; Paris and Sisk, The Dilemmas of Statebuilding; Hawksley, Democracy Kills. Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes. See, for example, Fukuyama, 'The Primacy of Culture'; Weldes et al., Cultures of Insecurity; Richmond, The Transformation of Peace. Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner argue that: 'Constructivists seek to understand how preferences are formed and knowledge generated, prior to the exercise of instrumental rationality.' See, Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 'International Organization and the Study of World Politics', 681. See, for example Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty; North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Commons, generally seen to be the father of new institutionalism, argued against the classical rationalist assumptions of the universal interest-seeking individual, insisting that no individual's understanding or behaviour could be understood outside a sociological institutional context: 'Even the individual of economic theory is not the natural individual of biology and psychology: he is that artificial bundle of institutes known as a legal person, or citizen. He is made such by sovereignty which grants to him the rights and liberties to buy and sell, borrow and lend, hire and hire out, work and not work, on his own free will. Merely as an individual of classical and hedonistic theory he is a factor of production and consumption like a cow or slave. Economic theory should make him a citizen, or member of the institution under whose rule he acts (Commons, 'Institutional Economics', 247–8). Foucault traces the institutionalist turn in social theorizing back to Husserl's critique of phenomenology, which influenced the Freiburg School of neo-liberal economic thinking as much as it did the critical sociologists of the Frankfurt School; see Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 101–6; see also Chandler, International Statebuilding, 66–84. Chandler, International Statebuilding. Belloni, 'Civil Society in War-to-Democracy Transitions'; Chandler, 'Democratization in Bosnia'; Paffenholz, Civil Society and Peacebuilding. See, for example, Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Roberts, 'Hybrid Polities and Indigenous Pluralities'; Barnett and Zürcher, 'The Peacebuilder's Contract'. See, for example, Acharya, 'How Ideas Spread'; Tadjbakhsh, Rethinking the Liberal Peace; Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam, A Liberal Peace? See, for example, Richmond, 'Resistance and the Post-Liberal Peace'. North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, 1. See for example, the best-selling neo-liberal institutionalist critique of classical liberal framings of homo economicus, Taler and Sunstein, Nudge. North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, 3. Davis and North, Institutional Change and American Economic Growth; North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, 140. Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science, 139. Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States. See, for example, the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States; Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes. For example, Fukuyama, 'The Primacy of Culture'; Schmitter and Karl, 'What Democracy is…and is Not'; O'Donnell, 'Illusions about Consolidation'; Gunther et al., 'Debate: Democratic Consolidation: O'Donnell's "Illusions": a Rejoinder'. See, for example, North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders. Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes; Snyder, From Voting to Violence; Zakharia, The Future of Freedom. In particular upon Hayek's seminal work on the phenomenological social construction of meaning, Hayek, The Sensory Order. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, viii. See Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science, 1–24. Kowert and Legro, 'Norms, Identity, and their Limits', 483. Macdonald, 'Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War'; Jervis and Snyder, Dominoes and Bandwagons. This danger was articulated well by Keohane, in a defence of rationalist understandings that encouraged researchers 'to look beneath the surface' rather than merely focus on 'post hoc observation of values or ideology', Keohane, 'International Institutions: Two Approaches'. Or, as Karl Marx put it: 'all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided', Marx, 'The Trinity Formula'. Kowert and Legro, 'Norms, Identity, and Their Limits', 485. Kratochwil, 'Constructing a New Orthodoxy?', 97. Wendt, 'Anarchy is what States Make of it'.