Introduction
Possessing a curious mind, I could not resist reviewing a book with words like ‘violence’ and ‘civilization’ and the ‘Western states-system’ in its title. But as a postcolonial scholar – and a feminist one at that – I could not help but feel a certain amount of heat rising while progressing through the manuscript, despite the considerable light it sheds. Let me state up front: reviewing Andrew Linklater returns a familiar scenario to subalterns. Linklater may duly criticise imperialism and colonialism as a source of globalised violence in the Western states-system but he still disappears the Other. It remains unseen, unheard and unfelt, both analytically and empirically. This sleight of mind contributes to a larger history of epistemic violence in International Relations (IR): that is, Hypermasculine Eurocentric Whiteness (HEW). (More on this below.) And such erasure incurs predictable, political violence: that is, revenge terrorism from the outraged Other and fascist (alt-right) threats from the injured Self. Not coincidental is the fact that most terrorists against the West come from the West.Footnote 1 Linklater thus rehearses HEW’s fixation with itSelf at the expense of all Others even while claiming moral victory on behalf of all humankind.
Given the gravity of these concerns, I decide to write this review as a personal journey. It allows me to speak honestly and from the perspective of a caring friend. After all, the West lives in me just as I live in the West. But – and this is the point – my experiences as a subaltern woman necessarily lead to different interpretations and understandings of the West. And these deserve an open airing.Footnote 2 Too often, Westphalian IR marginalises, truncates, or dismisses difference under calls for ‘rigour’ or ‘parsimony’. Instead of abiding by these predetermined parameters of discourse that invariably shape its outcome,Footnote 3 I resort to the art of play.Footnote 4 I hope this journal-like review begins a much-needed conversation in IR.
A second technique shapes this review. Given the book’s 500+ pages, I draw on one, representative chapter – ‘Chapter 6: Cruelty and Compassion in the Age of Empire’ – to illustrate my argument while keeping it succinct.
Now, onto the review!
Commendations
Let me first commend the author. He has compiled an impressive array of knowledge in one tome, beginning with the Hellenic city states-system to the rise of Rome to the mercantilist European states and their overseas empires to Europe’s Enlightenment to contemporary, modern times. (And I’ve skipped over several centuries in between!) Linklater also advances a certain understanding of IR that combines a sociology of civilisational processes, pioneered by Norbert Elias, with the expansion of international society most articulated by and identified with the English School. Linklater asks: how did modern Europeans become more civilised than their medieval forbearers? And by more civilised, he means less violent and/or less tolerant of violence. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Responsibility to Protect (R2P) shine as two major exemplars.
Linklater thus gives new meaning and significance to the concept of ‘international society’. More than an agglomeration of individual states with a common regime of structures and functions (despite, the English School insists, an inherent anarchy in world politics), the notion of an ‘international society’ now takes on an ethical badge of honour. It compels us to attain greater heights of morality – that is, civilisation – as a way of being in the world.
So far, so good, I mutter to myself. Who could disagree? But an eyebrow begins to arch as I continue reading.
Westphalia-Europe-Empire
‘Civilized self-images’ emerge in the West, Linklater writes, from a triangulation of modernity: that is, Westphalia-Europe-Empire. He specifies it as ‘state formation’, a ‘European international society’, and the ‘rise of overseas empires’ for Europe. Four ‘major shifts’ followed. Changes in the ‘balances of power’ between ‘competing social dynamics’ produced:Footnote 5
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1. ‘moral sensitivities … as people became bound together in more complex societies’;
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2. ‘ethical restraints on the use of force [given] the capacity to cause greater harm to more and more people over ever larger distances’;
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3. ‘the fear of retaliation or …“conscience”’; and,
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4. a sense of ‘responsibilities for citizens … [that] uphold[s] the rights of individual persons to be spared unnecessary suffering’.Footnote 6
Hm, methinks.
Violence begets civilisation, Linklater argues, and it does so autonomously. Like Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, whereby society seeks to recuperate from abuses in the economy to maintain equilibrium in both,Footnote 7 so Linklater finds that systemic inequities, cruelties, enslavements, and killings induce ethical restraints within the same system. The West thus transforms itself by itself for itself. No one or nothing else is involved or needed.
Sounds familiar. Carol Cohn tells a similar tale regarding sex and death among defence intellectuals.Footnote 8 They, too, fancied themselves capable of asexual reproduction. They talked about killing on a massive scale while, at the same time, fathering new weapons, new strategies, new worlds. They had no need for any kind of a partner – or remorse.
Linklater adds:
European feelings of cultural superiority and repugnance towards various non-European social practices were not manifestations of a completed civilizing process: they were critical elements in the formation of ‘civilized’ self- images.Footnote 9
Now the heat begins to burn. Five questions immediately fire up: where, who, what, why, and how?
Five questions
I. Where? Only the West
Where, I ask, is the role and impact of Others outside Westphalia-Europe-Empire? How could they figure so intimately in this triangulation of modernity, through centuries of colonialism and imperialism, yet fail to have a presence, not to mention voice, in the outcome? Furthermore, evidence abounds of cross-civilisational world-making.Footnote 10 These demonstrate that dialogues between Self and Other, West and Rest co-produced ‘international society’. A hundred years before Westphalia, for example, a Jesuit priest named Matteo Ricci sought to Christianise Ming China by Confucianising Christianity.Footnote 11 Ricci often wrote about how his articulations of faith and compassion, knowledge and enlightenment came through discourses with local leading lights.Footnote 12 These include ‘a long and acerbic debate with Abbot Xuelang Hong’en (d. 1607), the leading Buddhist cleric in Nanjing, whose erudition and personality had earned him an excellent reputation among the literati’.Footnote 13
Where Others show up in Linklater’s account, they impede Western progress. The colonised, Linklater claims, did not put up enough of a fight against European invaders, thereby enabling a moral laziness:
The ‘civilizing process’ would have unfolded in very different ways if Europeans had constituted the whole of humanity and if they had not entered into relations with other societies where, because of huge inequalities of power, there was little incentive or compulsion to observe the basic principles of reciprocity. The absence of such constraints on European societies is one reason why condescending or derogatory representations of outsiders have had a wholly unprecedented impact in the modern period.Footnote 14
Somerset Maugham immediately comes to mind.Footnote 15 This British raconteur and novelist extraordinaire recounts European colonisers on the edges of empire who committed all sorts of moral misconduct – murder, incest, rape – because, essentially, they were bored out of their minds. It had nothing to do with their inability to see and treat Others as worthy of social interaction and, by extension, learning.
II. Who? White sovereigns
Who are we talking about, really? Clearly, Linklater focuses on the West given his inquiry about morality in the Western states-system. But he privileges the sovereign patriarchs – from kings to philosophers to ordinary burghers – that feature most prominently in it.Footnote 16 For example, Linklater commends Western kings for their remarkable ethical considerations despite the violence their national-royal households had perpetrated against Others in their name: ‘It has been said that the court of Charles V was the first in European history to suspend imperial conquest while theologians debated its ethical foundations’.
How white of them.Footnote 17 I cannot help this slip into a contemporary colloquial expression. It’s a person-of-color thing. Still, it’s indicative.Footnote 18
As usual, the Western Self remains immune to Others. Linklater attributes the West’s enlightened restraint to internal institutional and discursive struggles:
An alternative interpretation is that an unanticipated major advance of human interconnectedness led to new power struggles, to complex discussions about the appropriate powers of different authorities, and to related ethical debates about the rights of colonial subjects.Footnote 19
I sit back in my chair and take a calming sip of tea. I forge on.
III. What? ‘The horror, the horror!’
To be fair, Linklater recognises the role of Western imperialism and colonialism in globalising violence. He notes:
Direct parallels were drawn between conceptions of savages who were under the control of ‘immediate desire, without discipline, without constraint, without real morality’, and the insane that were similarly beyond the reach of ‘civilization’.Footnote 20
In a footnote, Linklater details one case:
Changing attitudes to the slave trade were heightened by public responses to the legal case involving the slave ship, the Zong, whose crew in 1783 threw more than one hundred and thirty sick slaves overboard allegedly to conserve water but, in reality, to prevent the spread of disease, and to protect the monetary value of the remaining human cargo. The cost of the lost slaves was to be recovered through an insurance claim. The legal representative maintained that the action was entirely legitimate because ‘the Blacks were property’, the case of slaves being no different from casting horses overboard.Footnote 21
Here, Linklater gives Others a rare nod – but that’s it. He notes how ‘slave testimonials by Cugoano and Equiano in Britain, and by Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner and others in the United States’Footnote 22 helped to turn the ethical tide against slavery. We know nothing, however, of what these testimonials entailed nor how they influenced white society’s thinking about ethics and morality at the time.
To amend the record, I insert a brief excerpt here:
if any man should buy another man without his own consent, and compel him to his service and slavery without any agreement of that man to serve him, the enslaver is a robber, and a defrauder of that man every day. Wherefore it is as much the duty of a man who is robbed in that manner to get out of the hands of his enslaver, as it is for any honest community of men to get out of the hands of rogues and villains. And however much is required of men to forgive one another their trespasses in one respect, it is also manifest, and what we are commanded, as noble, to resist evil in another, in order to prevent others doing evil, and to keep ourselves from harm. Therefore, if there was no way to deliver a man from slavery, but by enslaving his master, it would be lawful for him to do so if he was able, for this would be doing justice to himself, and be justice as the law requires, to chastise his master for enslaving of him wrongfully – Quobna Ottobah Cugoana (aka ‘John Stuart’, 1787).Footnote 23
In effect, Linklater victimises Others twice. Like those who suffer rape and/or domestic abuse, the formerly colonised become victims only: first, as recipients of violence; secondly, erasure.Footnote 24 Without any capacity for speech, thought or action, Others can only labour on as beasts of burden or objects of sex. And such non-personhood persists in the analytical imagination even when lived realities no longer apply. Righteous anger and revenge fantasies invariably flare and flame. Like countless women who couldn’t take it anymore and killed their abusive husbands in their sleep, Osama bin Ladin justified al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington as retribution.Footnote 25 Linklater would have done well to learn from both precedents.
Instead, Linklater deftly shifts attention from the barbarity of slavery to capitalism. He cites a Spanish conquistador: ‘Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortes’ companions, probably captured the dominant outlook when he stated that ‘we came here to serve God, and the king, and also to get rich’.Footnote 26 Inhumane and venal though they were, says Linklater, these acts prompted the West to attain greater heights of self-awareness, civilisation, and ‘conscience’, in due time.
My postcolonial-feminist soul is now fully ablaze. I must open a window for air.
Silenced voices, silenced histories
I think of the slaves of Haiti who emancipated themselves at a time (1791–1804) when white society thought them incapable of human thought or emotion. The revolutionaries demanded equality in economic, social, and cultural terms, seeing each as necessary to human dignity.Footnote 27 They also graciously forgave their former masters, recognising their right to live in this brave new world.Footnote 28 Eurocentric history, however, buries this extraordinary act of Self by an enslaved Other as a ‘rebellion’ while crediting the citiyons of France and the settler-colonists of America with ‘revolution’.
I think, also, of Sojourner Truth. In her speech, ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’, delivered at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, she reminds us of what it means to be not just a woman but also a human being:
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I could have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?Footnote 29
Listen to me and hear my story, she urges. In acknowledging my humanity, she suggests, you regain yours even if you had abused me in the past. And on this basis of interpersonal, intersubjective resonance, I add, we may arrive at a more just understanding of morality.Footnote 30
IV. Why? Unicornic West
Linklater, however, fashions morality and the West (the two become coterminous) into a fantastic unicorn:Footnote 31 tremblingly white, rare, and unique yet also strong, everlasting and self-generative. As noted with Cohn’s tale about defence intellectuals, the unicornic West self-produces; at the same time, it acts as a patriarchal god by reproducing mini-Wests through the cultural-civilisational womb of the non-Western Other.Footnote 32 In this scenario, Others cannot partner in the making of our world-of-worlds.Footnote 33 They do not – cannot – inspire or command. Others can only serve as dispensable pawns in this inevitable march towards European modernity.
So what?, a critical reader could retort. What does it matter if, ultimately, we have a more enlightened international society?
Enter the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It offers insight into what Linklater’s analysis means for you, me, and the world.
The ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer could serve as a poster child for Linklater’s West and its capacity for autonomous morality. As director of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer oversaw the design and execution of the world’s first atom bomb. Yet throughout his life, Oppenheimer renounced weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Oppenheimer personifies, accordingly, the ‘four shifts’ Linklater identified in the West’s ethical landscape: moral sensitivities in face of complex interconnectedness, ethical restraints against the use of unprecedented force, fear of retaliation or ‘conscience’, and a sense of global responsibilities. But Oppenheimer’s personal history also shows why self-rectification ultimately fails.
Oppenheimer and the bomb
‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’Footnote 34 Oppenheimer uttered these words upon seeing the atom bomb’s first detonation in the desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, in July 1945. These words come from Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. He reveals himself as a god of gods to Prince Arjuna, who suffers from a paralysing guilt: he cannot come to terms with going to war with members of his own family. ‘How can I kill my kin?’, Arjuna laments. Do not worry about whom you will kill, Krishna counsels, for that is my domain.Footnote 35 Nor expect rewards for your labour. Just be the best warrior you were born to be. That is your dharma (duty). Arjuna is convinced and takes up his bow and arrow (his archery resounds throughout the land). Arjuna wins the war but the victory rings hollow. After 18 days of bloody battle, hardly anyone from either side survives to rule. Such is the tragedy of the Mahabharata. Such is, also, the tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer.
Science, Oppenheimer believed, was his dharma. Massive destruction would result from the bomb but life and death were beyond Oppenheimer’s moral ken. These matters belonged to the realm of the gods. Oppenheimer understood faith to mean a kind of spiritual purity and humility that sanctions an absence of moral judgment. The atom bomb could bring either world peace or world destruction: only time would tell. Meanwhile, action superseded the agony of reflection. ‘I was more concerned then with doing what I should’, Oppenheimer commented in 1966, ‘than chattering about it’.Footnote 36 But perhaps Oppenheimer, not to mention the world, would have benefited had he ‘chatted’ more, especially with the politicians and the generals. Together, they might have come up with a less radical act than atom-bombing a city on ‘technical’ merits.Footnote 37
For the rest of his life, Oppenheimer wrestled with his conscience about the bomb. A pacifist and critic of the nuclear arms race, Oppenheimer referred to WMDs as ‘devil’s work’: they demonstrate ‘the inhumanity and evil of modern war’.Footnote 38 Oppenheimer maintained that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been ‘in error’, scientists who had worked on the bomb had ‘known sin’, and he himself had ‘blood on his hands’.Footnote 39 Oppenheimer refuted Truman’s contention that the bomb ended the war earlier than it would have, otherwise. Japan, Oppenheimer argued in 1959, was ‘already essentially defeated’.Footnote 40 He charged the US with unnecessary ‘aggression’, ‘surprise’, and ‘terror’ in dropping the bombs.Footnote 41 Yet to his death, Oppenheimer maintained he had nothing to apologise for: he was merely doing his duty as a scientist. ‘I never regretted, and do not regret now, having done my part of the job’, he stated in 1965.Footnote 42 Despite a powerful intellect, Oppenheimer could not – would not – progress beyond this singular, insular position. He resisted entry into a larger consciousness. Neither did he allow that consciousness to penetrate his rationale.
Put differently, Oppenheimer refused intimacy with the Other. Even though Oppenheimer had studied the Gita since his twenties, calling it the ‘most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue’,Footnote 43 he never lived by it. That is, he never studied with a local guru or practised yogaFootnote 44 on a daily basis or engaged in any way with the Gita on its own terms. This inability to accept the Other within the Self blocked Oppenheimer from relating to the Gita in its own philosophical context, thereby losing its dialogical import. In compartmentalising both himself and the Gita, Oppenheimer turned the notion of dharma into a technical expertise only. He never saw his dharma as a scientist in relation to all other possible dharmas: as a father, for instance, or even a philosopher. But, as Arti Dhand notes, ‘[d]harma enjoins care of all beings, irrespective of social standing or even species…. A person devoted to this dharma, therefore, is identified by his/her solicitude and kindness towards others.’Footnote 45
Michie Hattori attests to the consequences of Oppenheimer’s insularity. She was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Nagasaki on 9 August 1945:
What a terrible feeling! I could see nothing. My hands and face singed, intense pain gripped my body. I tried to walk a little and stumbled over a fallen tree. I lay there, not knowing for sure where I was or whether something else might happen to me.
Fires started all around us. Flames leaped from paper and wood scraps, some from collapsed structures. Thick smoke and dust filled the air. The fires gave the only real illumination. Even the noontime sunlight, filtering through the clouds, darkened. The word I kept hearing the girls say, jigoku, means hell. That’s the closest I ever want to come to jigoku.Footnote 46
Oppenheimer insisted that building the atom bomb was his destiny, his dharma. Such was his anguish. His greater sense of morality brought little peace of mind or heart.
Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?, I ponder. Why would anyone want Oppenheimer’s tortured soul for their own?
Another domestic analogy
At this point, another kind of domestic analogy may apply.Footnote 47 From Oppenheimer and the bomb, we move to marriage equality in the contemporary West. Both cases show a common reasoning at work, if we accept Linklater’s premise. His argument about increasing morality in ‘international society’ resembles this claim by some: that is, Western culture achieved enlightenment about marriage equality without any input from the women’s movement or the LGBTQA communities that demanded such changes in the first place.Footnote 48 Marriage as a legal, economic and social institution, the argument goes, reformed itself due to internal, systemic revulsions against the types of violence that had abused and incarcerated a marital partner: for example, rapes, beatings, impoverishment, lack of rights, and so on. And since hetero-patriarchal men sit at the top of society and all its institutions, they deserve credit for making these reforms. Feminist and queer struggles over decades, if not generations, had nothing to do with them.
No one – I suspect not even hetero-patriarchal men – believes this claim. Yet it sticks, as demonstrated by the tome under review. Understanding how gives us further insight into why. And it takes two parts: local social power reinforced by a global infrastructure of HEW.
V.i. How? Social power
Those in charge, Linklater’s analysis implies, should stay in charge. Whether it credits hetero-patriarchal men in ‘modernising’ marriage or sovereign whites in building an ‘international society’ of increasing morality, this way of thinking assures us that self-rectification will follow – eventually. Even where decolonisation may have induced Others to ‘reject’ the West for ‘indigenous’ practices, Linklater writes, ‘the “civilizing offensive” has continued in modified ways’ given its utility for public policy.Footnote 49 All that’s required is time. The world just has to wait it out. Be patient.
Right, I grimace. That’s what all hegemons say. After the Second World War, many former colonisers recast their former colonies into ‘protectorates’ or ‘territories’ in order to ‘prepare’ them for self-governance. Accordingly, former colonisers often said to their former colonial subjects: ‘just be patient, you’ll be ready for self-rule soon – when we say’. In the twenty-first century, the ‘liberal world order’ is resurrecting a new version of this old chestnut.Footnote 50 Feminists, too, critique this concept of the ‘duty to yield’ – that is, for women to wait in queue, to be true to their nature, to be patient.Footnote 51 Never mind the Other, I say to myself, what does this mean for the Self?
Such analysis violates the Self as much as Others. In erasing Others, the West also erases itself, perhaps more so, since the violence is Self-inflicted. The Western Self needs Others to be the West; otherwise, by Linklater’s own logic, how could the West morally develop without a target of violence? And such violence covers the spectrum from the physical to the cultural to the epistemic. ‘Epistemicide’ thus afflicts not only the Global South.Footnote 52 Five centuries of colonialism and imperialism have gravely damaged the Global North as well.Footnote 53 In this way, violence remains in IR, notwithstanding ceremonious declarations of rights, responsibilities, and so on. As a body of knowledge, Western IR crouches darkly inside, crippled and hurting, unable to play with Others outside.
No mere conjecture, this way of thinking reflects a venerable pedigree. In New Atlantis (1627), Sir Francis Bacon presents his ideal nation, Bensalem. It routinely scours the world for knowledge and skills, thereby keeping its people wealthy, healthy, and wise. Yet Bacon describes Bensalem in these terms:
You shall understand that there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem; nor so free from all pollution or foulness. It is the virgin of the world…For there is nothing amongst mortal men more fair and admirable, than the chaste minds of this people.Footnote 54
But how is this possible? How could Bensalem retain a ‘chastity’ in mind and body while absorbing knowledge and skills from Others? Bacon offers the only possible answer: utilitarianism.Footnote 55 Only a utilitarian could consume knowledge without being ‘polluted’ by that knowledge. Utility, Bacon suggests paradoxically, bears no norms, values or visions even though it does so precisely. Like the conquistadores of a century before, utilitarianism can combine God and King with Profits. For this reason, it can deliver expedience and a virginal morality.
As evidenced by Linklater’s take on ‘international society’, Westphalian IR accepts this rendition of knowledge and morality. Indeed, it passes as normal. To understand how this ruse could last, given the multiplicities that make world politics, we need to look at the larger context created by and productive of works like Violence and Civilization in the Western States-System: that is, HEW.
V.ii. How? Hypermasculine Eurocentric Whiteness (HEW)
Linklater’s analysis reflects and perpetuates a global infrastructure that I call Hypermasculine Eurocentric Whiteness (HEW).Footnote 56 Hypermasculinity refers to an ideology that denigrates anything smacking of the feminine: for example, welfare, intellection, compassion.Footnote 57 Accordingly, Hypermasculinity needs no partner to come into being. Like a masculinised Athena, Hypermasculinity springs fully-grown from Zeus’s Western head. At the same time, Hypermasculinity has a patriarchal persona. Not only can it impregnate Others, as evidenced by the multiple mini-Wests that populate the formerly colonised world, but Hypermasculinity’s patriarchal persona also treats all Others as either sexual subordinates (wives/mistresses/prostitutes) or infantilised inferiors (children/servants/slaves).Footnote 58 Both require ‘education’ from the Hypermasculine-Patriarch.Footnote 59 (Still, HEW winks, they can never catch up to us!)Footnote 60 Eurocentrism regards all things European – people, customs, languages, institutions, philosophies, even fashions and lifestyles – as definitive of ‘civilisation’.Footnote 61 Eurocentrism ensures that Hypermasculinity represents and promotes the West; otherwise, Other patriarchal traditions could take hold. Like James Bond, the West represents the Best. And whiteness constructs a racialised order of privilege and entitlement that permits a false sense of benevolence, graciously granted to Others but, really, serving the Western Self’s own interests.Footnote 62 For this reason, the term ‘how white of you’ bites even as it smiles.
HEW updates colonial management with seemingly inclusive slogans like a ‘liberal world order’. But HEW still preaches universalising singular ‘standards’ derived from one cultural context (Eurocentrism), one racial identity (whiteness), and one sexual posture (hypermasculinity). In other words, Linklater can make the kind of analysis he does, with the implications it has, and still receive public adulation (this forum as one example) because he conforms to and perpetuates HEW.
The house of IR
Like a good colonial administrator/patriarch, Linklater writes from the cushy study of HEW’s main residence, the House of IR.Footnote 63 Built by HEW’s worshipped ancestors, Global Capitalism and the White Imperialist State, the House of IR divides into an ‘upstairs’ for the FamilyFootnote 64 and a ‘downstairs’ for Servants and other ‘lesser’ characters.Footnote 65 Likewise, Linklater exploits the resources of Others outside the House of IR, trafficking in the currency of pain and victimisation, for the Western Self’s higher moral development. At the same time, he does not give Others any credit for their contributions nor does he invite them in for tea, not to mention a stay or, heaven forbid, build another house together. Linklater presumes that the status quo benefits everyone in the long run: that is, we keep inside vs outside, upstairs vs downstairs, family vs strangers.
Though tantalising, hegemony ultimately disappoints. In marriage, a partnership in name only quickly dissolves into anger, resentment, deception, and retribution. Similarly, the colonial household could never keep up ‘proper’ appearances with the parents having all sorts of affairs outside the House (for example, Pater Realism’s liaison with Vixen Economics,Footnote 66 Mater Liberalism’s with Sexy Critical Theory),Footnote 67 sons and daughters ‘going native’ (for example, Queer IR),Footnote 68 and métis progeny (for example, Asian capitalism)Footnote 69 knocking on the Family’s door. Similarly, Linklater omits the struggles as well as co-productions between the West and the Rest in making ‘international society’. Without addressing this fundamental relationship, Linklater inflicts the worst violence of all: non-learning.
We must, in short, transcend. If not, as in the Mahabharata, members of the same family will end up warring against one another. Or, as with Oppenheimer, a lack of substantive interactions with Others would leave us bereft, no matter how many times we read the Gita.
But how?, I beseech the universe. How do we transcend such violence?
Nothing happens. No bolt of lightning, clap of thunder or gust of godly wind. Only ‘breaking news’ pops up on my phone, now and then. Indeed, all signs today suggest we are heading toward the opposite of transcendence.
Alt-right in contemporary politics
The current rise of ultra-right wing movements in the US, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and elsewhere simply startles. We know too well what happened to fascism just three generations ago. Yet even core members of the ‘liberal world order’ now want to retrieve fascist policies, especially to keep out (certain) immigrants (‘Brexit’, US-Mexico wall, travel ban) but also to contain internal ‘troublemakers’ such as investigative journalists, dissident academics, and activist minorities. Some on the Left claim that these policies are nothing new. Governments in the industrialised West have always exploited Others. When their economies boomed, they welcomed immigrants as cheap labour. Once the boom ends, so does the national welcome.
What disturbs me more – and this is related to my critique of Linklater – is the lack of learning involved. We all know, for example, that the US started out by treating African slaves as three fifths of a human being. Would a return to that mean the US is simply resuming its historical trajectory? Ronald Reagan as President of the US apologised to Japanese Americans, for the first time in 1988, for interning their elders from 1942–5.Footnote 70 Why does this precedent not serve as a cautionary reminder for current hate crimes against Muslims in America? Why, I ask, is the present not held to account for the hard-won victories of the past?
Certainly, I do not hold Linklater responsible for any of these developments. But I do see how his line of inquiry – which, as this review has shown, hobbles systemic learning from, by, and with Others – links with the current political regression into nostalgic fascism. The former does not cause the latter. But Linklater’s analytical framework, as an instrument of HEW, reinforces a tendency towards fascism. Or, to put it differently, the House of IR cannot check xenophobia, Islamaphobia, or any Other-directed phobias because it, too, derives from HEW. We need to face this power context honestly if we seek justice, not just morality, in world politics.
The din of recess distracts me. An elementary school flourishes nearby but I never see it. The City, being what it is, has too many buildings blocking the view. Still, I can hear the children whenever they’re freed from class for half an hour each day. On this warm spring day, their voices ring especially strong and joyful, loud and boisterous – precisely how children should sound when playing … PLAY! That’s it, I snap my fingers.
The power of play
‘We are still here.’Footnote 71 With these four simple words, the Andean activist Humberto Cholango conveys a whole world to Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. In his letter, Cholango explains to the Pope: ‘Our religions NEVER DIED [because] we learned how to merge our beliefs and symbols with the ones of the invaders and oppressors.’Footnote 72 Put differently, the indigenous peoples of the Andes learned how to absorb and adapt, reframe and reformulate even that which seemed ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’. In effect, they applied the lesson of the Bhagavad Gita. Dharmic detachment does not mean a lack of regard for the purpose of detachment: that is, concern for the whole alongside the particular.Footnote 73 The peoples of the Andes put this principle into practice by learning how to play.Footnote 74
Nick Onuf theorises on the importance of play for world-making.Footnote 75 Playfulness, he observes, provides another way to create worlds: it constitutes a ‘third way of living’.Footnote 76 It may be the most important way to create worlds, I add, for playfulness gives us the freedom to engage with Others. All games involve rules but part of the creativity of play is to come up with the rules together. For this reason, play often involves lengthy negotiations, back and forth, and at different pitches of intensity, depending on who’s playing what with whom. Nonetheless, curiosity motivates us all and the fun of playfulness invariably leads to inclusion and respect. After all, who can resist the joy of play?Footnote 77
For this reason, I write this review as a personal journey. Rather than resort to the usual academic convention of couched phrases that say little but reveal much, I want to share my honest reactions to what I am reading. Not only is honesty the greatest form of respect, but it is also high time I voice myself to the discipline. But I speak on behalf of myself only, as one member of the Global South who is also deeply entwined with the Global North, as we all are, whether located in the North or the South, whether we care to admit it or not. In this review, I openly record my feelings in an artistic, playful way. My reactions range from outrage to disgust to sadness to ennui. But I also take to heart Sojourner’s truth: we redeem ourselves morally and spiritually by, at base, listening to and hearing Others.
Herein may lie our salvation and emancipation. Drawing on Cholango, I say to the beautiful but sad, lonely, confused, and ultimately self-deluded unicornic West:
Stop hiding in that big, old, scary house all by yourself. Come out and play!
I am here. We are here. We may have suffered much at your hands – and continue to feel the pain – but we have triumphed over tragedy. And we have done so joyously, mirthfully. Just look at how we eat!Footnote 78 But do not mistake our resilience for a child-like innocence. We know fully well what you have done and what you continue to do. For this reason, some may wish to do onto you what you have done onto them. But we don’t want to play that game. It’s not fun. Instead, we want to explore and experiment, create and conjure, imagine and colour,Footnote 79 hop-skip-and-jump!
Come, join us! Let’s play.Footnote 80
Acknowledgements
I thank Payal Banerjee, Sneha George, Juliana Mendes de sa Beckert, Nicholas G. Onuf, Shirin M. Rai, V. Spike Peterson, Patricia J. Robertson, and Sara Shroff for their comments on this article. Of course, the author retains any responsibility for errors or confusions within. Many thanks, also, to John M. Hobson for inviting me to participate in this review.
