This is the approach taken by writers characteristically referred to as
poststructuralist or sometimes, usually inaccurately, postmodern, and if the
above account of Habermas and critical theory is dangerously thin, any
attempt to provide an equivalent background for these scholars within a
study of this scope presents even more difficulties – once again readers are
urged to follow up some of the references given below.
A few themes only
can be identified; first, following up the reference to Walker above is
‘inside/outside’; then, closely related, a new approach to ethics and to
pluralism; next, speed, simulation and virtual reality; and finally, the
contribution of feminist writing.
For the critical theorist Linklater, the community is necessarily to some
degree exclusionary, but the aim is to be as inclusive
as possible and to make
the costs of exclusion as low as possible – this is, of course, an explicitly
normative project, although Linklater insists that trends supportive of this
end are immanent in our current world order. Walker may share some of
these normative goals, but is more directly concerned with the way in which
the very system of sovereign states is constituted by and rests upon a sharp
inside/outside distinction (Walker 1993). It was the emergence of this sharp
distinction in the early modern era that created the Westphalia System and,
more
recently, has created the discourse of International Relations itself;
moreover, the emancipatory discourses of the Enlightenment rest upon a
structurally similar distinction; the privileging of a particular voice by the
Enlightenment – European, rationalist, male – is not something that is
incidental and can be eliminated by a better dialogue, any more than the
bounded community can be redesigned to
avoid the privileging of the
interests of its inhabitants.
It is not always clear where Walker wishes to take these points, but writers
such as William Connolly and David Campbell offer some suggestions.
Both focus on issues of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ and both propose strate-
gies for dealing with otherness that reject the universalism of conventional
emancipatory politics. Campbell, in studies of the Gulf War and the Bosnia
conflict, attempts to show the emptiness of rule-oriented approaches to
ethics, symbolized by such constructions as Just War theory in which the
actions of parties to a conflict are tested against an allegedly impartial and
objective ethical yardstick (Campbell 1993, 1998).
Instead he proposes an
ethics of encounter, a more personal, less general approach to the identities
and interests of groups and individuals, in which those identities and
interests are not taken as given but are seen to be constructed in the course
of conflicts – a classic illustration being the way in which the various parties
to the Bosnian conflict are created by that conflict rather than representing
pre-existent monolithic identities such as ‘Muslims’ or ‘Serbs’. Connolly’s
interests are less obviously international, his
contribution more closely
related to the ‘Culture Wars’ of the modern US, but his critique of American
56
Understanding International Relations
pluralism as a unifying and categorizing force as opposed to the kind of
‘pluralization’ that he would favour, in which no attempt is made to privi-
lege particular kinds of interest and where the self-definition of actors is
respected, draws on similar resources (Connolly 1995, 2002).
Campbell and Connolly are self-described ‘late-modern’ writers, who have
by no means lost contact with the notion of emancipation – their worry,
most
explicit in Connolly, is that conventional notions of emancipation are
likely to combine with contemporary technology to create a world in which
‘difference’ is abolished, in which human variety is ‘normalized’ and, as
Nietzsche put it over a century ago, everyone thinks alike and those who do
not voluntarily commit themselves to the madhouse (Connolly 1991).
The theme that the speed of modern life, the capacity for simulation and
the creation of ‘virtual reality’ will fundamentally shift the ways in which we
are able to think of ourselves as free and emancipated has been taken up in
the
discourses of IR, most prominently by James Der Derian. His early and
pioneering work on the genealogy of diplomacy pursued Foucauldian
themes, but his later work on spies, speed and ‘anti-diplomacy’ has rested in
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