liberal lines, and those who believe that the failure of liberalism in this
respect is symptomatic of a problem with the goal of emancipation itself.
The former look back to, variously, Kant, Hegel and Marx to reinstate the
Enlightenment Project: the latter, variously, to Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Foucault to critique the underlying assumptions of emancipatory theory.
The former group – call them ‘critical theorists’ for the sake of conve-
nience – are clearly
related to the left-oriented, progressivist, international
thought of the last century and a half, including radical liberalism before it
became part of the official world-view of the dominant international
powers. The single most influential critical theorist was, and remains, Karl
Marx; it was Marx who set out most clearly the propositions that ‘emanci-
pation’ could not be simply a political process leaving economic inequalities
untouched (which has been the failing of liberalism), that capitalism,
though its subversion of traditional forms
of rule was to be welcomed, itself
created oppression, and, most important in this context, that capitalism
was, at least potentially in his day, a world-system, a force that had to be
understood in global rather than local terms – which means that ‘emanci-
pation’ must be a global project. Unfortunately these core insights, which
most critical theorists would endorse, were
embedded by Marx within a
framework which contained much that contemporary history has shown to
be decidedly un-emancipatory. The direct descendants of Marx – the
Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, and
various national communist regimes in Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea and
Vietnam – were, between them, responsible for more human misery in the
twentieth century than the adherents of any other world-view, Nazism
included. Moreover, the various directly-inspired Marxist theories of IR –
Lenin’s
theory of imperialism, and numerous variants of centre–periphery
and world-systems analysis – have proved equally unsatisfactory, although,
as will be seen in Chapter 8 below, highly influential in the non-Western
world. As a result of this record, contemporary critical theorists tend to
work with Marx via intermediaries, the most important of whom have
been, for international political economists, the Italian/Sardinian Marxist
and
victim of fascism, Antonio Gramsci, and for international political
theorists, the Frankfurt School and, in particular, its leading modern
theorist, Jürgen Habermas.
Setting aside the Gramscian heritage for later consideration, the contri-
bution of Habermas to critical theory has been to move Marx-influenced
thought away from economic determinism and the class struggle, and
towards an engagement with Kantian ethics and
Hegelian notions of politi-
cal community. Habermas shares Kant’s universalist account of ethical
obligation which he recasts for our age in terms of ‘discourse ethics’; moral
issues are to be understood as resolvable via dialogue under ideal condi-
tions; that is, with no voice excluded and without privileging any particular
54
Understanding International Relations
point of view or taking for granted that inequalities of wealth and power
are legitimate. Politics is an ethical activity which takes place within
communities – but communities must be understood to be as inclusive as
possible; some level of exclusion may be inevitable if citizenship is to be
meaningful, but the basis for inclusion and exclusion is subject to moral
scrutiny.
Habermas has written on the theory and practice
of international relations
in books and articles on such diverse subjects as Kant’s international theory,
the Gulf War of 1990–1 and the Kosovo Campaign of 1999, but his
standard bearers in English-language International Relations have been
scholars such as David Held and Andrew Linklater, with a rather more
Marx-oriented, wider, Frankfurt School perspective represented by Mark
Neufeld and Richard Wyn Jones (Habermas 1994, 1997, 1999, 2002; Held
1995; Linklater 1998; Neufeld 1995; Jones 1999, 2001). Linklater and
Held have developed different aspects of the notion of cosmopolitan democ-
racy. Held’s work is oriented towards an explicitly normative account of the
need to democratize contemporary
international relations; the central thesis
is that in an age of globalization (of which Held has been a major theorist)
the desire for democratic self-government can no longer be met at a national
level and so the project of democratizing the international order must be
prioritized, however difficult a task this may be. Linklater is less concerned
with institutional change, more with the transformation of notions of polit-
ical community, and the evolution of an ever-more inclusive dialogue. These
are themes that clearly relate to Habermas’s thought, but many writers in
critical international studies – especially in sub-fields such as ‘Critical
Security Studies’ – take a broader view of the critical theory project. Both
Neufeld and Jones remain closer to the Marxian roots of critical theory
than
Linklater and Held, and are rather more critical generally of the
powers that be in contemporary world politics.
These few comments can only give a flavour of the work of critical
theorists – readers are urged to follow up the suggested reading listed below –
but enough has been said to make it clear that the account of International
Relations they offer is radically different from that of mainstream IR. A
valuable illustration of the chasm in question can be found in the 1999
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