Jan Aart Scholte's International Relations and Social Change is a sweeping critique of a veriety of intellectual fashions. He attempts to carve a sort of "third way" through the various disciplinary discussions he addresses, while also recommending less division between these disciplines. His most important criticisms are reserved for realist international relations and its primary focus on the nation state and the endogenous development of social change within its boundaries. He is also encouraging a broader understnding of social change than the narrow politicist definitions that often prevail in that field. Later he turns to other debates within the social sciences--such as the question of determinism, the subject/structure problem and the issue of theory vs. practice. In all of these he proposes a "co-determination" or, what I would call, a dialectical notion of mutual constitution.
I find his broad range of intellectual others to be the most productive part of the book. In presenting the myriad of questions that (should) face social scientists attempting to look at the social whole, he provides a significant bibliography of theoretical legacies and does an excellent job of parsing the issue into a variety of manageable chunks. He is very methodical in his examination of each issue, which makes it easy to comprehend the field as a whole. As I am writing a field statement myself, I admire this clarity.
His most potent other, in this context, is International Relations as a discipline. Ch 1 outlines the misconcieved premises on which the field rests: it is "marked by statism; by politicism; by separation of the domestic and international; frequently, though not always, by reductionism; and by the assumption that there is an underlying continuity in international history." (14) In most cases in the chapter, and throughout the book, Scholte provides examples to illustrate these points and usually these are compelling. The problem tends to be that he is trying to discipline the disciplines rather than founding a new category of inquiry altogether (Global Studies, perhaps?). In the rest of this chapter, he then looks at Historical Sociology and other perspectives that, like IR, have taken the nation-state to be the primary space and engine of social change. Though he obviously recommends that these fields also revise their notion of social change, his main focus is on IR. Since it doesn't seem that IR was ever intended to look at social change per se, this seems odd.
The argument that he only implicitly makes a couple of times, is actually that international relations isn't actually international, muchless global, in its scope, but is mainly concerned with actions between states. International relations should have to look at, as Scholte does in Ch. 3-5, a variety of other processes, actors, and institutions which co determine a structure of regimes and norms that have a powerful effect on the national level, regardless of the lack of a global authority.
This argument is made succinctly and with some attention to evidence. He articulates a different position than, for instance, Susan Strange, who also looks at the diffusion of state power and the ways that IR and GPE are unfit to consider it with their current disciplinary reflexes. Strange points to something new and unique happening in the global environment. Although she wonders if the state was ever the primary mover, she argues that it is now in retreat. Scholte, on the other hand, while he recognizes some of the changes that are taking place (or that it was fashionable to consider) is explicitly arguing that this issue of world society is transhistorical, even making one of his 14(!) clarifications that it can be applied to the most ancient of social changes--giving the example of the cosmolpolitan nature of anceint Greek civilization, saying it "developed not as a distinctively 'western' product, but out of intermingling in the second millennium B.C. between preexisting local peoples of the Aegean, Indo-European infiltrators from the north, Egyptian colonizers from the south and Phoenician arrivlas from the Levant" (33). In this valuable insight, he is trying to create a more productive version of what Gunder Frank attempts in Re-Orient. Only instead of throwing out all of western social theory, he decides all it needs is a revision. Still, he thinks this revision isn't necessitated by historical circumstances but is, instead, a key to understanding any historical circumstances.
This is, I think, what makes his later arguments so weak and places most of the enterprise, despite his empirical evidence, in the realm of ideas. For though I will acknowledge that it would be just as wrong (in the style of Scholte) to say that one or another "dimension" or "factor" of society was transhistorically dominant or determinant, it is rediculous to say that they are always just lined up on the checklist of "things to look at" when examining the process of social change. It reminds me of the problematic themetization of cultural studies in its trip from the UK to the US. Suddenly, in lieu of any theory of determinism, it became a simple matter of looking at race, class, and gender--and basically just looking at them, in terms of representing them "authentically." What Scholte, obviously influenced by the "third way" theorist Giddens, ends up saying is that "every transaction between people in some way contains a combination of all five qualities:"
It follows, then, that a social transformation is a process with multifaceted causation and multifaceted effects. World-systemic dynamics of socail chanve involve a combination of ecological, psychological, cultural, economic and political forces which alters a combination of power relations, production patterns, value frame works, constitutions of the self, and biospheric condititions. Like the distinction of international, national, and local dimensions of social relations, the distinction of facets of social life involves analytical differentiation which should not be reified as an actual separation. (118)
This is the point that he must make in his transhistorical frame, but if he were actually going to apply this, it would be essential to say that, in every situation, some of these factors are more powerful than others. Likewise, when he discusses the structure/agent problem, his attempt to find a universal theory of society in Giddens, allows them both to seemingly ignore the problem of history as something other than a tool to prove your point. Sio that, when Scholte claims that "the structure is a product of the actions...that it has helped produce," (128) and Militarism is seen as one such structure, it is clear that the level of the subject has little to do with the production of that structure and more to do with the reproduction of that structure. Though there are possibilities for change in this theory, the history of the structure and the force of social norms is clearly far more powerful than the individual agent. Thus to ultimately place the engine of social change at the level of the agent--which is what Scholte ultimately does--gives little indication of how a large scale movement is created except to say that thats how change happens. This is largely a re-articulation of "rational choice" theory with the rider that collective movements are sometimes, somehow constituted around something.
Nevertheless, Scholte does much to undermine some of the predominant assumptions in IR and in several other theories about the character of social change, even if he isn't quite sure how it happens. And, since he pretty much even handedly critiques every kind of determinism, he probably doesn't ruffle too many feathers. I don't imagine that was his goal, but overall, that is ultimately the result of presenting a set of observations and recommendations rather than prescriptions and manifestos. This reminds me of a few recent examples of the former (here and here) and the fact that it is examples of the latter that seem to be most powerful in actually producing change.
........
a link:
No comments:
Post a Comment