Introduction

Coming last in this collection of essays on one’s work is a privilege and a challenge. It is a privilege not only because one has now different texts articulating different facets of a common concern, but it is a privilege in that it shows that my attempts to rethink the issue of acting with all the conceptual baggage that comes with it has been useful for others, even if they (dis-)agree. Thus, the position alone could tempt one to provide just an overview and impose some weak order, familiar from the ‘contrast and compare’ genre. But one also could do worse, by creating the impression of a synthesis by opting for selective attention, in order to show how we all mean the same thing. Such an approach might be all the more tempting since we all seem to agree, due to the post-modern turn in social theory, that the world out there does not provide us with unadulterated and free-standing facts which serve as last appeals.

These observations point to the challenge part of the task, especially for someone who has warned of last words and grand theories. Similarly, in insisting that we filter our experiences through categories and concepts defining what is normal and making sense, or what is deviant or out of bounds, I can deny neither that these ‘bounds’ are not only logical distinctions – although they serve as criteria of intelligibility – nor that they are merely cognitive. Since they are norms, they not only state regularities but provide – through their counterfactual validity – for the enactments of ‘rules’ and the reproduction of social order, whereby alternatives are excluded and dominum is exercised as rule. Consequently, the notion of a ‘full view’ – attributed to theories when conceived from the point of the ‘view from nowhere’ – seems a doubly problematic metaphor for the social world where the observed order is based on rule-following and intersubjective understandings, some of which are clearly ‘fictions’ (such as corporations, or representations of a ‘people’, comprising also the dead and future generations), or they entail certain ‘truths’ that are held and declared, rather than found and available for inspection.

Introduction

The concepts of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ may not figure as centrally in everyday life as they figure in academic life. Yet, as the title of Kant’s essay from which the introductory quote has been taken indicates, ‘common sayings’ such as that something ‘may be true in theory, but is of no use in practice’ also reveal that the duality of theory versus practice shapes our most fundamental ways of sense-making in everyday life. It also goes without saying that the practice of theorizing is nothing that practitioners beyond the ‘sciences’ worry too much about because their praxis is usually defined in terms of some practical choices which do not, at least in the first instance, relate to thinking about thinking. Academics, however, have to come to terms with ‘theory’ one way or another – or risk being spurned as an ‘ignoramus’ if they don’t. This is especially true for International Relations (IR), which, ‘even in the West … did not become a predominantly academic, formally theoretical discipline until after 1945’ (Buzan, 2018: 393) and has defined itself in ‘theoretical’ terms ever since (Wæver, 2013).

Introduction

Praxis is a big book in every sense of the term (Kratochwil, 2018). It offers profundity on a wide range of topics over an equally wide range of disciplines – International Relations and Law are central but Political Philosophy and Social Theory are also addressed. But what, centrally, is Praxis about? Mathias Albert was faced with this question when writing his International Affairs review and, wisely, ducked it by describing the book as a collage, a judgement Friedrich Kratochwil invited by choosing Altdorfer’s ‘Die Alexanderschlacht’ as its cover illustration, a painting which is ostensibly about the Battle of Issus but actually offers a pictorial comment on more or less everything, up to and including the Day of Judgement (Albert, 2019). Such a collage makes for an exciting, challenging and often entertaining read, but it also means that any attempt to describe the main arguments of the book is in danger of falling into Borges’s trap of trying to create a map of the empire on a scale of 1:1 – in order really to do justice to this book of 500 pages it would be necessary to write another book of 500 pages (Borges, 1975).

To avoid falling into this trap I intend to focus on one set of arguments relating to sanctioning and punishment, chapters 6 and 7 of Praxis. The argument I want to develop is that Kratochwil’s answer to the issues raised by these topics is, in effect, a non-answer – he explains why current approaches to sanctioning and punishment are misconceived without providing an alternative. Perhaps of greater significance is the fact that he does not himself see this as problematic – he sees it as no part of his self-chosen brief to provide answers that are policy-relevant. Thereby hangs a more important tale: is the lack of interest in policy-relevant answers to the questions raised here indicative of a wider problem with the approach Kratochwil takes to politics and law?

Kratochwil on sanctions

As noted previously, Praxis is a book that defies summary, but it is at least clear that Kratochwil sees the practice of law as an important source of ideas and methods of reasoning for the study of international relations.

Introduction

This chapter is inspired by a simple observation. In the almost 500 pages of his recent work Praxis, Fritz Kratochwil pays little attention to the distributive role of rules (legal or otherwise), institutions and decisions (Kratochwil, 2018). This is not a criticism: it would be like criticizing Leo Messi for not playing basketball, or complaining that Lebron James does not play chess very often (assuming this to be the case). In all his work, Kratochwil has pioneered the constitutive role of rules, institutions and decisions, and he has more than made his mark on the study of international affairs. The fact remains, though, that while he has pioneered the constitutive effects of rules, institutions and decisions, he has rarely zoomed in on their distributive effects. That said, few others have done so beyond positing assumptions about the effectiveness of governments or markets. There are some exceptions: some scholars of (neo-)Marxist or (neo-)Gramscian persuasion (e.g. Cox, 1987), or the odd institutional economist (e.g. North, 1990), some revisionist historians and historiographers (e.g. Hobsbawm, 1975), and some international political economists (e.g. Strange, 1994); they all concentrate on issues of distribution in one way or another. But, by and large, in doing so they often neglect the specific role of rules, institutions or decisions. Put differently: for many, distributive results are results of political processes that are then cast in rules, institutions or decisions. Those rules and institutions are thought to reflect distributive outcomes rather than contribute to them: rules and institutions are often treated as the outcome of political processes, rather than key structures which help determine those very outcomes. For others, some branches of law address distribution as attaching to specific occurrences – tort law and insurance law may qualify as examples. But the role that rules, institutions and decisions play in achieving, channelling, promoting or facilitating particular distributive results remains under-illuminated; it is precisely here that my interest resides.

The ambition of this chapter is to start a conversation at precisely the point where others often sign off: on the distributive role of rules, institutions and decisions. My interest rests with the distributive effects of rules, institutions and decisions rather than with distribution per se – how is it that rules, institutions and decisions can best be conceptualized so as to take their distributive effects seriously?

The theory of International Relations (IR) is in a state of soul-searching, if not disorientation. The great ‘inter-paradigm debates’ that still marked the discipline in the 1990s and early 2000s have all but disappeared. Proliferation of ever new approaches and increasing fragmentation of debates dominate the disciplinary landscape today. IR theory discussions are now clustering within specific academic schools and subfields that revolve around their preferred ‘ism’ and hardly speak to each other, while much of the mainstream of the discipline is turning its attention to questions of methodology rather than theory. Practitioners of international politics, all the while, find it increasingly difficult to see the relevance of these academic debates for their own work and the pressing political (as well as theoretical) challenges posed by the rise of authoritarianism and populism, escalating climate change and the return of global pandemics.

There is, however, a family of theoretical approaches that hold the twin promise to alleviate the current state of parochialism and fragmentation and to reach out to those who practice international politics and not just study IR. These approaches ground their theorizing in the ‘praxis’, or practice, of international relations. Since much of this interaction is performed in the language of law, this turn to praxis and practice also facilitates much needed cooperation between IR and international legal scholarship.

Situating praxis theorizing

To speak of praxis theorizing instantly raises a few terminological questions, at least from an IR theory perspective, since major segments of IR usually figure under the label ‘practice theory’ in the aftermath of a ‘practice turn’ (Neumann, 2002; Bueger and Gadinger, 2018). Accordingly, the concepts of ‘practice’ and ‘practices’ are much more prevalent than ‘praxis’. The latter, however, played an important role already in an early phase of pragmatist and Wittgenstein-inspired social theory (Bernstein, 1971; Bloor, 1983), and a small segment of IR theory (Kratochwil, 1989: 210; 2018: 410– 40; Onuf, 1989: 35– 65), well before ‘constructivism’ assumed its prominent role as a new IR ‘ism’ in the 1990s.

Introduction

Kratochwil’s monograph Praxis: On Acting and Knowing is a healthy corrective to many current debates in general and about and within constructivism in particular (Kratochwil, 2018). In fact, it can be read as a fundamental critique of what constructivism has become as most contributors don’t even get the basic questions right. If we take textbook introductions as the ‘common sense’ of what constructivism is all about, then every single introduction I looked at highlighted ‘the study of norms’ as its key concern. Sometimes it was even – along with the agent-structure problem – the only issue deemed relevant (Burchhill et al, 2013; Jackson and Sørensen, 2015; Berenskoetter, 2018: 446).

Naturally, there are certainly good reasons for any constructivist to be interested in norms. When they started to develop this approach, both Kratochwil and Onuf drew heavily on international law (Kratochwil, 1989; Onuf, 2008). Its semantic field of norms, rules, sanctions and obligations provided (and still does) an avenue to challenge the then dominant positivism in International Relations (IR). Data and the identification of empirical ‘regularities’ are simply unable to deal with normativity and counterfactual validity. A dimension that was in subsequent debates moved somewhat to the background as ‘empirical’ analyses of ‘norms’ have dominated the discourse in recent years – a move that is awkwardly reproduced by those who now look for a ‘new constructivism’ through practice theories and thereby eclipse any interest in counterfactual validity (McCourt, 2016: 475).

So, while there are thus good reasons to be interested in norms, already the title highlights that it is simply wrong to equate constructivism with norms. Here, constructivism is associated not with the concept of norms per se, but the problem of action, a problem best circumscribed by a conjunction of Hume’s notion of common sense (Kratochwil, 2018: chapter 8) and the problem of knowledge (Kratochwil, 2018: chapter 9). Starting from here shows that those who took norms as the explanans simply barked up the wrong tree. If anything, future textbook introductions to constructivism need to start from ‘action’ and carefully lay out how its intersubjective quality is actually fundamentally different from both individual rational choice and the empiricism inscribed in the current search for ‘practices’ (see Kratochwil, 2018: 391).

Introduction

A central concern of Kratochwil's book Praxis regards our entanglement in institutionalized interactions and discourses, and the importance of a ‘thick’ constructivism for beginning to understand the nature of praxis as it relates to knowing, seeing, remembering, forgetting, showing, acting and so forth. The book represents a critique not only of thin constructivism, but of practices of science that seek to universalize knowledge, which rely on a questionable metaphysics of the world as existing ‘out there’ and capable of being understood from ‘everywhere at once’. Insofar as this conceptualization of science is a product of ‘our’ own conceptual structures and assumptions, originating with the Enlightenment and modernity, critical voices within are tasked with placing these structures in historical context, to begin to see the extent to which knowledge production, and its reliance on memory, is always undertaken from the perspective of present concerns and future projects.

While agreeing with Kratochwil's overall argument, this chapter reflects on the potential limits of history, conversation and critique that arise from the institutions and structures within which ‘we’ are embedded. To take history seriously, while crucial, does not entirely solve the problem Kratochwil identifies. History is remembering, and remembering is always part of someone's future project, by which past and future are linked through present concerns. From this point of departure, the ‘we’ that constitutes the common world of ‘commerce and conversation’ has to be problematized, in order to begin to see the unseen or those who have been written out of history.

The first section of the paper explores Kratochwil’s argument about Hume’s ‘commerce and conversation’, placing Hume in the historical context of Enlightenment Scotland and problematizing his silence on the transatlantic slave trade. Section two moves to questions of remembering, looking in particular at the ‘eerie and troubling silence’ surrounding Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the inability to ‘see’ the real victims of slavery. Section three explores the difference between ‘showing’ and ‘seeing’, and Kratochwil’s concern about the difficulties that stand in the way of a ‘global public forum’.

Introduction

Friedrich Kratochwil’s first professional article – published in 1971, the year before I was born – was a conceptual exploration of the relationship between politics and political science. After canvassing a number of different attempts to define politics, he settles on an account that emphasizes the centrality of unsolvable problems to politics, and he relates that unsolvability to the ‘incompatibility of value-orientations’ between various parties (Kratochwil, 1971: 121). As a result, he suggests, the challenge of both politics and political science is to find a language in which ‘specific critical problems’, such as the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR, can be defined and addressed (Kratochwil, 1971: 122). Assuming, or advocating, a complete homogenizing of values doesn’t get us as far as efforts to define a situation in ways that make possible at least minimal amounts of cooperation. Here the wissenschaftlich study of politics, particularly of international politics, can make a contribution to clarifying the areas of common concern even for otherwise diametrically opposed actors and communities.

In the conclusion of his latest and most synoptic work – the summa Kratochwilia, so to speak – we find much the same concern on display. We who are ‘not engaged in making practical politics, but who, as critical observers in the privileged position of academia, surely have something to say and to contribute to the understanding of praxis’, Kratochwil notes, but we won’t get far by imagining that we can exhaustively determine what political actors ought to be doing. Instead, we need a project of ‘seeking to that is a “conversation” ‘. This is

There is a remarkable continuity here, over almost 50 years of scholarship. The role of systematic scholarship is not, and for Kratochwil never has been, to develop ideal theory from which supposedly necessary consequences for political action could be derived.

Introduction

The present chapter discusses the account of historical change and the (seeming) rejection of theory in Friedrich Kratochwil’s Praxis (Kratochwil, 2018). It argues that Kratochwil’s sophisticated account both of historical change and of theory leads him to treat them as different sides of the same coin, resulting in the fact that when tossing that coin, usually only one side can be seen in the end, but not the other. The argument to be made in the following is that this conceptualization of historical change and theory as basically mutually exclusive is not necessary, although at first glance it might seem to follow from some of Kratochwil’s basic assumptions. Of course, making an argument in order to show that one would have arrived at different results if only one had started out on the basis of different assumptions would be fairly superfluous. However, the point to be made here is a different one: I argue that the conclusions drawn by Kratochwil would not be necessary were he to add a few ingredients to his account and become a little more relaxed regarding the use of others – a few tablespoons of theories of social differentiation and social evolution in order to describe modern society and its development, a little less baking time in the oven of law, and a consideration of how the dish should best be presented if it were to be sold where it rightfully belongs, that is, in a Michelin-starred restaurant rather than the eclectic mix of fast-food fare so often savoured around the International Relations (IR) campfires. This is another way of saying that probably one of the issues with Praxis is that when it comes to theory, its biggest problem might be that it mainly has in mind that special fare called ‘IR theory’ – but that this is exactly the fare not to Kratochwil’s liking, that is, the one that might have filled generations of IR students with academic carbohydrates, but which often doesn’t even pass muster for a decent home-cooked meal (Hausmannskost).

Introduction

What do we mean by theory and how is it related to practice? The question has been one of the recurrent themes for negotiating the identity of the discipline of International Relations (IR). Debates concern what kind of knowledge scholars should produce and value, what should count as ‘theory’ and ‘empirics’, but also what status is granted to those that ‘make’ theory and those that focus on ‘practice’. While these debates run through the history of the discipline, three recent developments have given them impetus.

A landmark debate in the European Journal of International Relations in 2013 explored whether the age of theory in IR had ended. Scholars asked whether they had witnessed a ‘retreat from theory’ (Dunne et al, 2013: 406), mourned the end of unifying grand theory that would order the discipline (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013), and were worried about the proliferation of theories and naive hypothesis testing (Guzzini, 2013; Jackson and Nexon, 2013). The discovery of non-Western IR and theory from the Global South brought another source of discomfort to the discipline. The potential of postcolonial forms of knowledge cast new doubt on the extent and limitations of Western epistemology and its concepts of theory (see Acharya and Buzan, 2010; Shilliam, 2010; Seth, 2011). Yet the emergence of a movement of scholars associated with ‘international practice theory’ also called for new thinking on theory and for grounding it in practice (Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Bueger and Gadinger, 2018). In declaring ‘practice’ as the foundational unit of theoretical thought, they re-raised the tension between theory and practice in new ways.

The triple uncertainty over theory opens a new moment to rethink the making of theory in IR. Taking insights from these three debates into account, this chapter asks whether and how practice theories lead to new, innovative thoughts on ‘theory’ and the relation to practice. The mere label of ‘practice theory’ is interesting: it brings together two terms which are often seen as dichotomous or at least are keenly kept apart. How does practice theory open the space for rethinking the relation?

Introduction

This chapter suggests that we should read Fritz Kratochwil’s praxis approach to the study of international relations (IR) and law as a humanist’s quest for wholeness in a world full of reductionism and fragmentation. The humanist desire for wholeness that is present in Kratochwil’s academic work remains largely disguised in the cloak of an epistemological stance. It underpins his concept of praxis and the related strategy of inquiry, an attempt to grasp human agency in all its facets. Kratochwil’s recent book Praxis (Kratochwil, 2018) emerges from his long wrestling with the question of how we can obtain useful knowledge of the social world, and how we can make competent judgements on matters of IR. I read the book as a largely philosophical exercise in which IR and law furnish most of the examples that illustrate more general problems of generating and applying knowledge. In that respect the book follows the plot of Rules, Norms, and Decisions (Kratochwil, 1989).

For decades, Kratochwil’s critical inquiries and polemics targeted mainly mainstream IR theory, although their implications were by no means limited to that field. He challenged the positivist American mainstream of the discipline on two grounds. Firstly, mainstream IR promotes reductionist conceptions of actors and situations of choice that paint a distorted picture of the social world. Secondly, due to their flawed ideal of parsimony, positivist theories and methods are unfit to explain (let alone understand) the social world adequately. Positivists just paper over the ambiguities and internal contradictions of human agency that are the real conundrums for us to address.

Praxis, then, suggests an alternative conceptualization of the social phenomena that international relations are made of, such as diplomacy, treaty-making, adjudication or warfare. This alternative approach does not have a name in the book. For convenience I call it the praxis approach. The praxis approach can be understood as a plea for strong contextualization. It requires us to consider the historical situatedness, contingencies and multiple constraints under which human beings act. It recommends a qualitative methodology that is sensitive to language use and the subjective world view of social actors.

Introduction

In his recently published book Praxis, Friedrich Kratochwil argues that action should be at the centre of our investigations in International Relations (IR). In making that claim, he positions himself against two theoretical starting points: (1) the agent is simply a vessel for structural factors, so ‘causes’ matter more than ‘reasons’; and (2) there is no real agency because of the instability of the subject. One might argue that he is locating a middle ground between positivism (position 1) and post-structuralism (position 2). He does this through an overview of a wide range of themes at the intersection of international politics and international law.

In any work that seeks to recover a praxis-based approach, Aristotle is an obvious figure; indeed, Kratochwil’s subtitle to the book (On Acting and Knowing) comes directly from Aristotle’s two categories of virtues, the practical and the theoretical (Aristotle, 1941: 952). Aristotle has long been in the background and sometimes foreground of Kratochwil’s work. In Praxis, Kratochwil invokes Aristotle a number of times. At the same time, he critiques Aristotle for what Kratochwil argues is the former’s overly theoretical focus at the expense of practical politics. Instead, in Praxis, Kratochwil finds more benefit in the work of David Hume, about whom he has written previously (Kratochwil, 2011a [1981]).

In this chapter, I argue that Aristotle is more beneficial than Kratochwil makes him out to be for understanding the practical dimensions of international law and politics. In particular, I argue that Aristotle provides an alternative understanding of the rule of law and how it relates to the wider international political order, one that differs both from Kratochwil and from contemporary international law. As Kratochwil notes, Aristotle became a reference point for many in the early modern and modern periods in support of a law-governed polity. In recent years, this invocation of the rule of law has become a mantra for advocates of global governance, one that has lost any connection to the political context within which the rule of law might function.