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Toward an Integrated Theory of Emotions/Passions, Values and Rights in International Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2014

JEAN-MARC COICAUD*
Affiliation:
Professor of Law and Global Affairs, and Director of the Division of Global Affairs, Rutgers [email protected]

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between emotions and passions, on the one hand, and values, needs and rights, on the other. This relationship is indeed central to the social dimension of international politics. In this perspective, the article examines how emotions and passions can be at the same time effects and causes of the extent to which actors feel that their needs and rights are fulfilled or not. In the process, the article also explores the negative and positive features of emotions and passions, and their impact on the nature and dynamics of change in international affairs. Beyond this general approach to emotions and passions in connection with the social dimension of international politics and the questions of values, needs, and rights of actors and change, it concludes with the idea that there is also a contextual dimension to the generic argument developed in the article. This will have to be factored in for future research on case studies.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Coicaud, Jean-Marc, ‘Emotions and Passions in the Discipline of International Relations’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, 15 (3)Google Scholar September 2014.

3 Refer for example to Aquilar, Francesco and Gallucio, Mauro, Psychological Processes in International Negotiations: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives (New York: NY: Springer, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tetlock, Philip E., Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can we Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; McDermott, Rose, Political Psychology in International Relations (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Monroe, Kristen Renwick (ed.), Political Psychology (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2002)Google Scholar.

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16 Refer for example to the work of Stein, Janice Gross, ‘Psychological Explanations of International Conflict’, in Carlsnaes, Walter, Risse, Thomas, and Simmons, Beth A. (eds.), Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage Publications, 2009)Google Scholar; ‘Foreign Policy Decision Making: Rational, Psychological, and Neurological Models’, in Smith, Steve, Hadfield, Amelia, and Dunne, Tim (eds.), Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors, Cases (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; or the work of Mercer, Jonathan: ‘Emotional Beliefs’, International Organization, 64 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Human Nature and the First Image: Emotion in International Politics’, International Organization, 9 (2006); ‘Rationality and Psychology in International Politics’, International Organization, 59 (2005); ‘Prospect Theory and Political Science’, Annual Review of Political Science, 8 (2005). There is also McDermott: Political Psychology in International Relations, supra note 3; McDermott, Rose, ‘Prospect Theory in Political Science’, Political Psychology, 25 (2) (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘The Psychological Ideas of Amos Tversky and Their Relevance for Political Science’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 13(1) (2001). See as well Hymans, Jacques E. C., The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In another genre, Hassner, Pierre, ‘La revanche des passions’, Commentaire, 110 (2005)Google Scholar, and La terreur et l’empire: La violence et la paix II (Paris: Seuil, 2003), for example, pp. 383–402.

17 On this issue, Starobinski, Jean, Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple, translated by Sophie Hawkes with Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2003), for instance p. 371Google Scholar.

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20 Although emotions are feelings, it should be noted that a distinction can also be established between emotion and feeling. Antonio Damasio presents the distinction in the following terms: ‘While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time’. See Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), p. 110Google Scholar.

21 Jon Elster argues that the influence of culture on emotions is shown in three main ways: ‘in the labeling of emotions, in the evaluation of emotions, and in the determination of the behaviors that tend to trigger specific emotions’, in Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 412.

22 Ibid., p. 117. For more on basic emotions theory, see for example Frijda, Nico, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google ScholarPubMed.

23 Ledoux, The Emotional Brain, supra note 19, p. 121. Refer also to Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 149–50Google Scholar.

24 Ledoux, The Emotional Brain, supra note 19, p. 114.

25 Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, supra note 21, pp. 141–5. Daniel M. Gross is critical of the distinction between emotions and passions that are socially constituted and those basic ones, which are not. In his view, emotions and passions are social all the way down. He also disagrees with a simple neurobiological explanation of the social component of emotions. Gross, Daniel M., The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), Chapter 1Google Scholar.

26 Not everybody agrees with this. Robert C. Solomon argues that emotions are one of the forms of passions: ‘There are three fundamental species of passions: (1) emotions, (2) moods, and (3) desires.’ See The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), p. 70.

27 ‘A Brief Case study of Germany and Japan: Emotions and Passions in the Making of World War II’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.

28 On life regulation and homeostasis, see Damasio, Antonio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2003), pp. 166–9Google Scholar.

29 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, translated by Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, 1996), Part III, Propositions 6, 7, and 8, p. 75.

30 This of course is not all there is to social change.

31 This does not imply that the path from needs to rights is simple and straightforward. For example, for actors to be seen as having rights, and for them to be the pillars around which the sense of right and wrong is built, they first have to be viewed as legitimate actors (i.e., rights-holders). This is not an easy task. Over the course of history, the question of which actors have rights has been as much, if not more, a matter of debates and struggles as the one of which rights the rights-holders have. For more on this in the international context, Coicaud, Jean-Marc, ‘Deconstructing International Legitimacy’, in Charlesworth, Hilary and Coicaud, Jean-Marc, Fault Lines of International Legitimacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3647Google Scholar. In addition, the less a need appears to be a basic universal need, for instance for reasons of cultural differences or disparity of levels of development among societies, the more there is an inclination to contest the possibility that it could become a right.

32 On envy in a social context, an interesting book is Schoeck, Helmut, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

33 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, translated by Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003), Part 2 (for instance Chapter 13)Google Scholar and Part 3. See also Elster, Jon, Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapters 3 and 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 For more on this, see Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Margalit, Avishai, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 78 and 36–47Google Scholar.

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39 Quoted by Jervis, Robert, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 74Google Scholar.

40 On primary and social emotions both negative and positive, see Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, supra note 28, pp. 44–5 and 156.

41 Think about, among other examples, the mass suicide, by drinking poisoned punch, of close to one thousand people led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana, on 18 November 1978. Think also about Hitler and the issuance of the ‘Scorched Earth’ Decree (Nero Decree), on 9 March 1945. It seems that Hitler did not think that Germany could and, perhaps more importantly, should survive defeat and his own demise, hence the fact that surrender was not an option and that he was willing to let the destruction of the country go to extremes. There was to be no future for the nation after National Socialism.

42 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, supra note 28, pp. 44–5 and 156.

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44 Refer for example to ‘The social character of international relations’, a subsection of Section 1.

45 On a previous analysis of the notion of the imagination of the possible by the author, see Coicaud, Jean-Marc, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Chapter 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 On this issue, in the context of liberal values and constitutionalism, Sajo, Andras, Constitutional Sentiments (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), for instance Chapters 2 and 4Google Scholar.

47 Of course, who is a legitimate actor and how this is defined is another key issue, which we cannot addressed at this point but which has crucial implications for the questions tackled here.

48 On humiliation and the characterization and contribution of negativity in the service of the good, see Margalit, Avishai, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), for instance Introduction and Chapter 1Google Scholar.

49 A victim for whom justice has not been rendered has much difficulty not only to reconcile with the world and others, including the justice system which is not taking its defense, but also with itself. On this see Coicaud, Jean-Marc, ‘Apology, a Small yet Important Part of Justice’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, 10 (1) (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Karstedt, Susanne, Loader, Ian, and Strang, Heather (eds.), Emotions, Crime and Justice (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011)Google Scholar.

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51 Coicaud, Jean-Marc, Beyond the National Interest: The Future of UN Peacekeeping and Multilateralism in an Era of US Primacy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

52 Refer for instance to Mayer, Arno J., The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

53 See the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [my emphasis]’. Quoted in Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 128.

54 Coicaud, Beyond the National Interest, supra note 51.

55 Refer for instance to Mayer, The Furies, supra note 52, for example Chapters 3, 4, and 5.

56 Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics, supra note 4, pp. 269–70.

57 Ibid., pp. 272–4.

58 For example, for an overview of the evolution of the culture of honor in the context of French history, Febvre, Lucien, Honneur et patrie (Paris: Perrin, 1996)Google Scholar.

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61 Coicaud, Beyond the National Interest, supra note 51, p. 191.

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63 On public and private rights, and public and private emotions and passions, Coicaud, Jean-Marc, ‘Quelques considérations introductives sur la psychologie et l’étude des relations internationales’, in de Senarclens, Pierre (ed.), Les frontières dans tous leurs états: les relations internationales au défi de la mondialisation (Brussels: Bruylant, 2009)Google Scholar.

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