The Strange Death of Liberal International Theory 2. Recovering the Political For members of a subfield of political science, international relations scholars spend surprisingly little time discussing the concept of the politics. While canonical figures such as Carr and Hans Morgenthau saw defining politics as a necessary prelude to theorizing about international relations, more recently scholars have been content to treat the nature of politics as an undefined given. Political relations between states or other actors are frequently cast as fundamentally different from other social, economic, legal or moral relations, but what makes these relations so distinctive is seldom explained. Central yet amorphous, politics most often appears as a struggle for material power, rational utility maximization, formal relations between duly constituted `political' actors, or all three mixed into an inconsistent and frequently contradictory conceptual cocktail. Politics, it seems, is a classical example of the inverse relationship that commonly exists between a concept's disciplinary centrality and its theoretical clarity. In an effort to recover the concept of politics for international theory, it is useful to revisit one of the canonical works in the field - Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. The History is punctuated by a series of debates, speeches and dialogues, each of which highlights the essence of political deliberation and, in turn, the basis of political action. In the Mytilenian Debate, for example, the Athenians argued about how to punish the Mytilenians, who had revolted against Athenian rule and aligned with Sparta. Calling for the harshest of retributions, Cleon told the Athenians: What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will never make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favour... To feel pity, to be carried away by the pleasure of a clever argument, to listen to claims of decency are three things that are entirely against the interests of an imperial power.1 In contrast, Diodotus encouraged his fellow citizens to be lenient: [W]e should recognize that the proper basis of our security is in good administration rather than the fear of legal penalties... [T]he right way to deal with free people is this - not to inflict tremendous punishments on them after they have revolted, but to take tremendous care of them before this point is reached, to prevent them even contemplating the idea of revolt.2 Fortunately, Diodotus prevails and the Mytilenians are spared. But what is it that makes this debate recognizably `political'? The key is that it is neither wholly instrumental - concerned solely with how the Athenians can realize a set of predefined interests - nor wholly moral - focused only on which good is to be achieved. As Ronald Beiner so cogently argues, politics is distinctive `because it combines moral and instrumental considerations in a form of deliberation that is neither strictly instrumental nor strictly moral'.3 The nature of politics can be further clarified by considering four questions. Who am I? (who are we?); what do I want? (what do we want?); how do I get what I want? (how do we get what we want?); and what resources do I need to get what I want? (what resources do we need to get what we want?).4 I term the first of these questions, the identity question; the second, the purposive question; the third, the strategic-instrumental question; and the fourth, the material-instrumental question. Purely instrumental deliberation is concerned solely with the last two questions, and takes the first two as fixed and given. Purely moral deliberation concentrates on the second question (assuming answers to the first question, and largely ignoring the third and fourth). Political deliberation confronts all four questions simultaneously, bringing considerations of identity, morality and pragmatics into an often uncomfortable dialogue.5 This is precisely what makes Thucydides' History such a classic work of international political theory. It is not just that it is an attempt to identify the `real reason' for a major war, it is that its most important moments - the Debate at Sparta, Pericles' Funeral Oration, the Mytilenian Debate and the Melian Dialogue - so skilfully illuminate the way in which the political resides at the interstices of the instrumental and the moral.6 Thinking about politics in this way explains the `political charge' that attends central issues in contemporary international relations. Take the recent crisis in Kosovo, for example. The strategic-instrumental question - how do I (we) get what I (we) want? - and the material-instrumental question - what resources do I (we) need to get what I (we) want? - beg a series of deeper identity and purposive questions which constitute the political heart of the conflict. For the `international community', the Serbs and the Kosovars, the salient issues concerned `who we are?' and `what do we want?' The debates surrounding these questions, and the resulting answers, split NATO from the UN, constituted Serb and Kosovar nationalisms, and provided the discursive structure in which secondary instrumental questions were addressed. If the answers to these deeper identity and purposive questions had been settled, and if the answers relevant groups arrived at had been mutually compatible, the political essence of this particular Balkans issue would have dissolved. The same can be said of issues ranging from the intervention in East Timor and debates about the treatment of refugees in Australia to the expansion of the European Union and the development of the World Trade Organization - in all of these cases the political resides at the juncture of the normative and the instrumental, where identities and purposes, goals and strategies, and techniques and resources are intermingled and contested. As we shall see in the following sections, there has been a shift away from the orientation of classical international theories, which confronted the political in all of its above complexities, towards `neo-theories' of both realist and liberal varieties, which have reduced international relations to instrumental rationality, effectively abandoning political inquiry, and forgone normative argument, abrogating political engagement. If we return to the four questions posed above, the abandonment of political inquiry is evident in the tendency of neorealism, neoliberalism and Moravcsik's new liberalism to view the political only in terms of strategic-instrumental and material-instrumental deliberation and action. This is compounded by the retreat from political engagement, a consequence of the neglect of identity and purposive questions that attends the quest for non-ideological and non-utopian social scientific theory. 1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin ed., 1972), Book III.37, 213. 2 Ibid, Book III.46, 221. 3 Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (1983) 151. 4 This is an elaboration of three questions identified by Beiner, in which I have divided his third question into strategic and material variants. See ibid, at 146. 5 Ibid, at 144-152. 6 For a more detailed discussion, see Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (1999) 41-62.
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