Vol. 13 No. 4 (April 2003)

REFRAMING THE INTERNATIONAL: LAW CULTURE, POLITICS edited by Richard Falk, Lester Edwin J. Ruiz and R.B.J Welker, New York and London, Routledge 2002, ISBN 0-415-93176-2 (pb), 0-415-93175-4 (hb), pp 258, index, $ 24.95.

Reviewed by Marc Georges Pufong, mpufong@valdosta.edu .

Whether the turn of the century brought about changes or altered our perception of the world in real security terms or ratified a sense of advancement of humanity in sheer undertakings, is a proposition open for debate. However, the authors in REFRAMING THE INTERNATIONAL: TOWARD A NEW GLOBAL POLITICS argue that if we are to meet the challenges of the coming century, we should re-examine international politics and development through the prism of ethics and morality. Scholars and practitioners participating in this volume are well aware of these challenges and their contribution is a testament to such awareness. They face up, in view, with the “prism of ethics and morality” by exhibiting a sense of duty clarifying the nature of symbolism that was interwoven with apocalyptic predictions at the dawn of the new millennium. The collection of essays put forward in this volume also attempt, in part, to explain predictions away.

Central to the authors’ claim is the proposition that states today continue to retain much of their vitality and in some respect continue to increase their functional powers. They insist that states’ claim to authority—that is, their capacity to sustain respect from their citizens and to get things done—is being determined and supplemented by emerging claims and concepts about “the local and the global.”  This view is set up in the Preface, where the editors argue that the notion that we live in some kind “international,” a view that may be enshrined in popular imagination, is tacked uneasily between conventional wisdoms.  This perhaps unrealistic view about a world of sovereign jurisdiction coexisting with an increasingly responsible and cooperative international system, fosters a sense of profound disorientation about just where “the international” is going (p. ix). Unlike the previous century, it is argued, international relations must now contend with a widening circle of participants that reflect the diversity and unevenness of status, memory, gender, race, culture and class of the world community.

Although composed entirely of papers from a 1999 special symposium of the same title and by same authors, the breadth and depth of the essays in this book is breathtaking. Edited by Richard Falk, R.B.J. Walker, and Lester Edwin J Ruiz, the essays reflect similar but entrenched concerns established in several notable books by two of the editors, such as EDGE OF TIME: THE PROSPECTS FOR WORLD ORDER (Falk 1992), REVITALIZING INTERNATIONAL LAW (Falk 1989), ON HUMANE GOVERNANCE (Falk 1995), and INSIDE/OUTSIDE: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS POLITICAL THEORY (Walker 1993). In this book, and in spite of bold assertions made therein, the approach adopted is at its very best speculative and perhaps intentionally so. Addressing speculative initiatives and with specific regard to the pace and nature of change in the international system, the editors insist that, despite the appearance of such a pace, it is more important than ever to use the resources of mind and spirit to comprehend various challenges and opportunities and to delineate lines of action that appear constructive and helpful, while stressing an ethos of humility (pp. ix-x) (emphasis added).  Does this mean that what is offered, and/or can be gained from, such speculative enterprises amounts only to baseline knowledge and/or speculation and references as opposed to complete pictures?

To the authors, the collection of essays presented in REFRAMING THE INTERNATIONAL does more than reopen; it reshapes possibilities of broader conversations about collective futures. More specifically, it is insisted that such conversations grow out of concerns of the challenges now confronting theory and practices of international law as well as wide-ranging controversies over fundamental principles of legal and political order. Effectively, while the book advances the argument that contemporary developments in international law easily invite concerns on highly detailed and technical matters, it also does more. It presents and answers broad questions about history, ethics, cultures, and human sensitivity.  The collection of essays also attempts to explore directions that contemporary debates on the future of international law are likely to engage.

As detailed and presented below, some of the essays seek to draw the possibilities of “reframing the international” in relation to potentials embedded in its present circumstances dedicated to the promotion and extension of the rule of law and human rights, to include the advocacy of global democratic values, practices, and structures. Some of them evince skepticism about conventional and even reformist thinking. For example, some question how peace and justice can be generated in a world fraught with countervailing strengths embedded with injustices.  At the very least, taken together the essays suggest the need to engage a broader array of intellectual horizons of thinking, as well as talking about international law—a contribution to the ongoing debates of modern law, culture, and politics.

In the lead essay in Chapter 1, titled “After the Future: Enclosure, Connections, Politics” R.B.J. Walker offers an introduction that frames what might be at stake in “speculating about the future of sovereignty.” In its traditional conception, sovereignty is a principle or practice that is of crucial importance to law and international relations and in attempts to imagine possible futures in political terms. While dismissive of the Hobbesian conceptual account of sovereignty, Walker takes a position contrary to the conventional arguments relative to the role of sovereignty. In his view, the primary reason for the struggle with the paradoxical and contradictory legacies of modern principles of sovereignty is that it expresses the most fundamental sense of “what and where politics is.” Walker posits that in order to think with clarity how the future can be viewed in terms of sovereignty, it is important to distinguish between the five conceptions of sovereignty.  First, we have a problem associated with the very essence of sovereignty—how “legitimate authority” is constituted” (p. 14).  Second is “the modern framing of the principle of sovereignty.” By this we mean, those “practices that enable us to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate, the authoritative and non-authoritative.” Third is the application of sovereignty to territorial jurisdiction of modern states, especially in state systems. This view of sovereignty includes practices that reinforce the notion that lines can be drawn within and between spatially delineated jurisdictions.  The fourth view of sovereignty has to do with the embodiment of the claim in specific state institutions, the practices through which actual claims of sovereignty are reproduced.  Finally, the fifth view is connected to all those practices through which the principle of sovereignty is inscribed in the identities of the people.

Walker argues that contemporary challenges to the sovereignty principle must be understood in terms that challenge prevailing conceptions of politics. To Walker questions about the constitution of legitimate authority have been sidelined in favor of worries about many other things, especially about governance, policy, and ethics. Although he acknowledging their importance, he observes that neither governance nor policy nor ethics can be addressed in the absence of an engagement with the limits of our understanding of politics as a pattern of limits of spatial separations and temporal impossibilities. The very difficulty in thinking about alternative futures is that claims to sovereignty express not only one account of political reality but also establish the limits of modern political imagination.  More accurately it is understood as a normative or idealistic assertion about what a claim to legitimate authority should or must be. Even the modern notion of sovereignty, Walker admits, works not only as a claim about the legitimate authority of the state but also as a broader culture or set of codes that make any other way of thinking about future possibilities almost impossible.  In effect, without coming to terms with sovereignty, it is unclear how to frame our thinking of what constitutes claims to legitimate authority. Walker distinguishes between ways of thinking about the future that assumes the very spatial distinctions (i.e., friends and foe, community and anarchy, inside and outside), expressed by the modern sovereign state, as well as ways that are more sensitive to temporalities, multiple identities, and networks of relationships (pp. 3-26).

In Chapter 2, “Tainted by Contingency: Retelling the Story of International Law,” Nicholas Onuf conceptualizes the discipline in prose, locating international law assumptions within the story of international law itself (pp-26-45). He retells this story by arguing that most international legal scholars repeat a simple story about their field; namely how it came about and how it came to be what it is today. Onuf situates both the story and its narrative more broadly within the “republicanism tradition of political tradition of political theory”(p. 31). For example, he notes that naturalism originated with Hugo Grotious but ended with Emmerich de Vattel, and soon after came positivism which to date remains a dominant force within international legal scholarship. Drawing attention to the deficiency of this version of the story, Onuf proposes narratives that connect simple elements of that version of international law to republicanism that dominated European social and political thought at the time naturalism was rising (31-38). As it receded and was displaced by positivism, he argues, republicanism faded into liberalism and thus emerged the modern concept as we know it today. Onuf postulates three reasons for retelling this story—1) to offset the impression that the story of international law is a story unto itself; 2) to explain the dramatic shift from naturalism to positivism that the usual story merely stipulates; and 3) to help in assessing claims that modernity’s moment has passed and that all such stories can no longer validate international law promises and possibilities. In conclusion, he submits a pragmatic assessment of positivist’s modernity and the mitigating role of contingency in international life. By establishing an evolutionary account of the discipline of international law, Onuf’s essay provides a context that frames the essays by Falk, Kaldor, and Strauss that follow.

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5 Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, and Andrew Strauss, respectively, explore the prospects for reforming established institutions of international law relative to their potential as expressed in the struggle for a global civil society. Richard Falk’s essay offers a wide-ranging and synoptic overview of the potentials for innovation, consequential debates regarding “persisting doubts in contemporary international law” (pp-46-69).  Focusing on “persisting doubts” in the essay titled “Reframing the Legal Agenda of World Order in the Course of a Turbulent Century,” Falk demonstrates how deeply entrenched philosophical and theoretical perspectives work to divide and undermine rather than foster understanding of the role international law. He argues that at the turn of the new century two types of debilitating threshold challenges persist. The first, in his view, is jurisprudential, which arises when influential persons continue to raise questions whether international law is really law at all, or in its more mundane form, it is merely a species of traditional law that deserves only qualified respect. The second challenge, he submits, has to do with the more consequential policy question of how leading states (i.e., super powers) should, as all other states, conform their foreign policy preferences to requirements of international law. More specifically, how should powerful governments constrain their freedom of action and yet adhere to constraints of international law, where the apparent requirements of such laws run counter to their national interests or grand strategies? Continued doubts about the consequence of international, he argues, stem from two sources. The first is the acceptance by policy-makers of some variant of “realism” which rejects international law in analysis and prescription, as the proper mode for transacting international relations. The second, Falk contends, is that other leading states undoubtedly see the United States as the only dominant political actor in the world. This attitude, he contends, is exacerbated by the fact that the United States also holds the view that to protect its interests, the exercise of its authority is more important than to uphold treaties or other constraining obligations. For emphasis, Falk points to the equally confusing tendency of the US government to rationalize “legally dubious undertakings in a diplomatic language of justification that emphasizes selfishness and morally redeeming actions” (p. 48). The Gulf War and NATO Campaign over Kosovo are examples that in Falk’s view demonstrate the alluded “pattern of bypassing law and yet insisting on the moral high grounds” (pp. 48-49).

In her Chapter 4 essay, “The Ideas of 1989: The Origins of the Concept of Global Civil Society,”  Mary Kaldor links the struggle to forge civil society in Central and Eastern Europe with an ongoing civil society efforts on a world-wide scale. She argues that the contemporary attempt to create global peace and rule of law is tied to an active and alert transnational citizenry. Her presentation is divided into two descriptive parts. The first and most extensive part describes what happened in the 1980s from the perspective of what were then called new social movements and evolution of ideas in the West and Central Europe. She focuses here on “actions, behavior and thinking of the actors who actually carried out the revolutions in the period immediately preceding 1989” (pp. 71).  Furthermore, Kaldor also explores the effect of the economic and moral bankruptcy of the waning communist regimes, the influence of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power, and lastly, the consequences of the Reagan administration’s nuclear policies that precipitated the end of communism. While factors such as economics may not have been sufficient to unleash social movements in Eastern Europe, Kaldor concludes that it provided a context – not an explanation – for the revolution that occurred.

In the second part of the essay, Kaldor focuses on civil society in East and Central Europe, arguing that concepts such as peace and human rights can be associated with the rise of the nation state in that part of the world. She does so while recognizing that there may be conceptual differences associated with notion “civil society.” For example, Kaldor argues that prior to 1989 from the West’s perception of the East, the threat of nuclear war was justified by the absence of human rights, which also was tied to the view that totalitarianism could easily be spread.  From the East’s perspective, she notes, the absence of human rights was justified by a permanent perception of the threat of war. 

Drawing on themes developed by Falk and Kaldor, Andrew Strauss optimistically articulates in specific terms a case for the development of what he calls a global people’s assembly (GPA).  Considering the fact that the current state of the international community is dysfunctional, Strauss advances a radical proposal for change (pp. 83-106). As a particularly illuminating constitutive proposal, Strauss posits a functioning GPA could displace the current “bifurcated system” and states could become intermediaries between citizens and the international order. In the essay titled “Overcoming the Dysfunction of the Bifurcated Global System: The Promise of a People Assembly,” Strauss maintains that the tremendous growth of and commitment to democracy in domestic settings in conjunction with globalization’s large scale transfer of political decision making to international institutions today has made the lack of democracy at the international level an anomaly. Because states are unlikely to initiate democratization of international order, he believes the task of beginning the drive for the first GPA necessarily falls to civil society. To take up the task of instituting GPA, civil society can, in his view, deploy various strategies. Notably, he argues, it could establish an embryonic assembly composed of representatives of civil society organizations with the goal of evolving into a popularly elected assembly, or alternatively, to enlist a relatively small core of like-minded states to create a treaty-based electoral assembly.  Optimistic that other countries would be persuaded eventually to join, Strauss submits that civil society can organize elections and establish a Global People Assembly (GPA). Acknowledging GPA’s limitations, he points to the fact that some repressive governments would almost certainly resist and others would simply disagree with the notion of GPA as a potentially dangerous Leviathan that would pave way toward world domination (p. 95).

In Chapters 6 and 7 Jayan Nayar and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, respectively, work through a range of skeptical propositions about the claims that world order and democratization have emerged from hegemonic privilege.  With regards to “order” Nayar takes position that the potency of the term “world order” to mobilize human imagination lies in its appeal to something almost divine (i.e., the civilization project that is the natural path of human evolution, common destiny, and inherent goodness, bound by the cord of the heart). In this view, order is clearly preferred to a condition of disorder. In “Orders of Inhumanity,” Nayar is particularly worried that the prevailing abstractions from which progressive thinkers have imagined potential futures has little positive consequence to the faces and names of humanity on whose behalf they speak (pp.107-136). He believes that the challenge “is to come to grips with existing struggles for order-in-relationships within the many located worlds … and to work against totalizing world-order forces of disintegration and dehumanization” (p.107). Nayar’s essay focuses on reviewing rather than reframing world order as most of the essay in this volume does. For example, in the first three sections he directs his analysis to what he loosely terms “world (mis)order(ing).” Here Nayar confronts world narratives rather than narrate world order. World order narrative admittedly is a perpetuating ideology of colonization as well as a project that colonizes violence. A globalized world order, he notes, has come to fit snugly within the common parlance of the so-called globalized citizens – that include politicians, lawyers, corporate actors, professional NGOist, academics – and world order possibilities infused with imaginations. The trouble ahead, Nayar observes, lies in determining what the image of order might be and what the structure of global order might look like.

In the second section Nayar makes explicit the implications of an ordered world. Here he claims to relocate collective endeavors and ability to transform imaginations within the social realm of an ordered experience. In his view, the very locations from which we seek to project imaginations of transformed world orders are in themselves ordered sites.  In the third and final section of the essay Nayar offers an insightful assessment of “world ordering.” He brings previous discussions into the context of ordered but resisting subjects, constraints, and aspirations (p.125).  Rather than undertake the historic responsibility of renegotiating global socioeconomic space that may be a “reframed world order,” Nayar surmises that the challenge is to come to grips with the existing struggles for orders-in-relationships in the world and to work against totalizing world order forces of disintegration and dehumanization.

Balakrishnan Rajagopal’s essay employs a separate line of argument.  In “From Modernization to Democratization: The Political Economy of the New International Law,” Rajagopal argues that democratization has supplanted modernization as the driving ideology behind international law, as well as law governing relations between the West and the third World.  Rajagopal traces the transformation of international law and institutions and submits that democratization offers space for resistance (pp.136-162).  He argues that, while modernization theory was thought of as providing a framework for integration into the international economy of newly independent countries in the past, democratization theory today is charting the course for incorporation into the “global economy.”  Because of the importance of peace and security to economic relations, Rajagopal argues that the export of particular economic policies from the West must be seen through the prism of democratization. Thus, the discourse of democratization at some level provides means for intensification of the management of social reality in the third World by international institutions. For example, he argues that the arrival of democratization as a language of social transformation in under-developed areas is necessitated and propelled by an equally increased resistance to development by social movements. Furthermore, he notes, as social movement resistance to international law and institutions renews and grows, the combined resistance-renewal is said to become a central aspect of modern international law.  To Rajagopal, understanding the role of this new discourse provides a better grip on the explanations for growth of international law through institutions (pp. 139, 142, 149, 152 and 154).

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 present essays directing attention to a broad range of questions about violence, critique and vision of cultural conflicts, convergences of ethics, religion, and the Diasporas, and feminist challenges to established accounts of political events.   In his essay Lester Ruiz contends that the pursuit of the body politic today is situated within seemingly intractable dilemmas. First, he questions how one can begin to speak about, much less experience, the political body, when people have been disembodied – banished from, excluded from that very body and the vita activa and vita contemplativa – by modern politics. Secondly, how one can pursue this body when the conditions for its articulation require not only its dissolution but also its articulation as a body beyond space, time and place  (or at least, a transformed space, time and place)?  These dilemmas at their very core have profound limitations, which Ruiz argues, must both be celebrated and mourned for the sake of the future—namely, the recovery of the body politic (pp. 163-64). To Ruiz therefore, the diaspora is fundamentally about the body – all kinds of bodies – in what they are, who they are, and what is happening to them.  In essence, this essay explores the pursuit of the “body politic” in the concept of the assertion that such an exploration involves a rediscovery of “the body” under the conditions of diaspora. Ruiz situates and identifies that body in the instance and context of Filipino diaspora, where Filipino migration and immigration are recast in a remarkable and exceptional fashion. To that end, his effort in recovering “the body” is facilitated by example of feminist diaspora and in “pursuing the body politic.”  In other words, the return of the body from its forced exile by patriarchic ritual of modernity is facilitated by assessment of “the body” in all seeming categories – e.g., ethnically, spiritually, culturally, political, as well as through the process of transformation (pp. 163-86).

The next essay focuses on culture and world order. Culture has not typically been considered or analyzed as a factor that overtly shapes conceptions of world order and politics, and therefore it is not surprising that the main paradigms in politics are void of theoretical explorations and/or explanation of any significantly constitutive role of cultural identities within world politics. Jacinta O’Hagan, in “Conflict, Convergence, or Coexistence? The Relevance of Culture in Framing World Order,” examines culture epistemologically to establish its politically defining phenomenological role as well contributions in politics and specifically political conflicts.  Her analysis is framed by three questions: 1) why is culture largely neglected in the discipline of international relations? 2) What does an awareness of Culture add to analyses of world politics? 3) How do perceptions of cultural identity frame our understanding of world order?  She contends that assumptions about “culture” form an important aspect of a broader project of reframing world order. How we view the cultural world order, O’Hagan argues, is one of the perspectives that structures how we understand political interaction. For example, she invites us to consider the prevailing assumptions about the relevance and role of cultural identities in state and transnational politics. Furthermore, the recognition of a significant relationship between conceptions of “civilizational identities” (i.e., a concept applied to practices and norms of a group formed at many different levels in the society) and broader assumptions about the cultural world order is important for studies of world politics in the new millennium (pp.187-217).

Karena Shaw’s essay, “Feminist Futures: Contesting the Political,” makes the case that feminist theory should be important to thinking about things global. She does this through critical intervention into debates about the future of feminism—debates often criticized for focusing on abstract principles. Shaw argues that their significance nevertheless rests precisely in those very principles because they are firmly entrenched in legal principles, notwithstanding the fact that they developed from historical conditions in which the marginalization of women was taken more or less for granted (p. 219). Accordingly, feminist theory is most effective when it reveals the implications of this historical embeddedness, not only for women’s legal-political condition, but also for our broader understanding of political possibility.  As an example, Shaw maintains that it is especially important to challenge assumptions embedded in claims about sovereignty. 

As demonstrated above each of the essays in this collection provides information central to the core of the founding of international law as a political identity and an incarnation of human identity. More generally, all of the essays look back as much as they look toward the future. The modern framing of “the international” insists on the ultimate priority of citizenship claims within particular jurisdictions over claims to a universally conceived humanity however connected to effective governance.  A 1994 book by Richard Falk titled ON HUMAN GOVERNANCE has a similar focus but also observes the effect of global structures in producing new divisions, such as North/South and rich/poor. The essays in this book also consider the aspirations about international law, democracy, religion, culture, and gender.  What unites these pieces conceptually is best expressed by Nayar—“Ordered  Inhumanity.”

Among the editors’ intentions was to provoke reflection wider communication, and the book achieves its billing. The collection of essays in this book represent an attempt “to reconstruct the international system by reframing fundamental arguments and conceptualizations on political, cultural, and social practices that underpin the enterprise of law.”  As the editors contend in the preface, the metaphor of “reframing” is directed especially to those who are slow to depart from the well-trodden path of legal doctrine. Contributors in many ways, explicitly or implicitly, challenge America’s privileged position in world politics and suggest initiatives for improving the quality of human existence in tangible ways.  They also critique the conventional wisdom on how peace and justice can be formulated.  We are told, for example, that when we develop projects for the world, we must remember that the most basic prevailing assumptions of modern law, politics, and culture are not necessarily obvious, natural or progressive. 

The book is full of important insights, but the arguments are theoretical, and little empirical evidence is presented to support a range of propositions and speculations. The lack of such evidence is noticeable throughout the volume, even if each essay conveys unique views of issues on “reframing the international.” The chapters do not always complement one another in a continuous flow of thought. Finally, while some of the essays are nicely expressed, some are too winded and densely articulated thus obscuring important nuances of the argument. Nevertheless, faculty actively doing research and/or teaching graduate seminars in international law, world politics, international relations and globalization will find this book suitable as an additional reading for their course.

REFERENCES:

Benhabib, Seylay. 1999. “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The Global Constellation,” 24 SIGNS 335.

Falk, Richard. 1995. ON HUMANE GOVERNANCE: TOWARD A NEW GLOBAL POLITICS. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Falk, Richard.  1992. EDGE OF TIME: THE PROSPECTS FOR WORLD ORDER. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Falk, Richard. 1989.  REVITALIZING INTERNATIONAL LAW. Ames, IO: Iowa State University Press.

Walker, R.B.J. 1993. INSIDE/OUTSIDE: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS POLITICAL THEORY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Copyright 2003 by the author, Marc Georges Pufong.