GLOBAL HUMAN DYNAMICS
(THE PHILOSOPHY OF “INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS”)
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
As I leaned back in my chair pondering where to begin
this essay on global human dynamics, I realized that the beef I had consumed
that day -- by then well integrated within my organism -- was a produce
of Argentina, the banana I had eaten was imported from Costa Rica and the
coffee I had drunk was grown in Nigeria. Global human dynamics nurtured
my body which, incidentally, was covered by a sweater produced in England
out of Australian wool and a pair of jeans made in U.S.A. by migrant workers
from Mexico.
I reached for my Sony radio, made in Japan, to fine
tune the Mozart concerto and realized that global human dynamics, while
reaching within me, span beyond my reach over continents. By the way, the
concerto was being transmitted from Salzburg by satellite. These and variations
on the theme are common occurrences. Yet, if we don't make a conscious
effort, we donut become aware of them. Consciousness about them,
however, has become a matter of survival. The emission from the satellite
may not have been pleasurable music, but lethal laser.
Of course, intercourse among peoples living in different
regions is not new. The inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro in the Punjab
valley used pots and pans produced by Sumerians in Mesopotamia before recorded
history. What is new is the magnitude of modern global human relations.
And what is ominous about it is the gap between the development of the
means of contact and communication and yet the relative lack of understanding
and concord among the peoples of the world. Man's technology has
left his understanding behind. [1]
Over a span of some 2,300 years, from Darius to Napoleon,
man travelled at about the same maximum speed: that of a horse on a well
paved road. Then, within some 200 years, man increased his speed
of travel by nearly a hundred times. It took William of Rubroeck,
the envoy of St. Louis of France to the court of the Great Khan of
China, almost a year (1253) to reach Beijing. As he travelled, each
day he came in contact with cultural variations understandable in their
similarity or juxtaposition to the ones he had encountered the day before.
Today, the traveller can get from any point on earth to any other in less
than a day. Yet, it is not only the vision of a planeload of American
Midwestern farmers let loose in Dacca that should strike us as a dramatic
illustration of the shrinking earth, but rather the round-the-clock, round-the-globe
computer linkups and transactions and at the same time the five minute
lapse between the triggering of a nuclear missile from a submarine and
its impact on the target.
Still, dramatic as these illustrations may be, they
seem more manageable and negotiable than the simmering and globally intertwined
problems which no longer neatly fit the classical patterns of power politics
among sovereign nation-states.
The world population is growing on target to pass
the six billion mark sometime around the turn of the century. And
that population is particularly growing in regions where problems of survival
whether of sustenance or social and political security are far from resolved.
In 1987 the richest 20% of the world population produced 74% of the world
GNP while the poorest 20% generated only 1.5% of it; and the poorest 60%
of the world population held just over 7% of the global wealth [2]
At the same time the poorer population of the world
owes the richer over one trillion dollars. A debt which has run up
because the developing countries want to catch up with the industrialized
countries. Much of that money has been mismanaged or taken out of the developing
countries by their leaders and put back in Western banks. The developing
countries’ handicap is further compounded by protectionist measures and
nationalist constraints in the affluent markets as well as the absence
of adequate international organizational frameworks.
But if by the turn of the century all the six billion
human beings developed economies like those of the West with comparable
per capita car ratios, used the same amounts of fuel and energy and produced
similar amounts of non-degradable pollutants, we will have much bigger
holes in the ozone layers of the earth, bigger oil spills, more dangerous
nuclear radiation, and probably long-lasting greenhouse effects and environmental
hazards putting the planet in jeopardy. Surely, human ingenuity must
be able to find ways of reaping the benefits of knowledge, science and
technology to bring comfort and happiness to the multitude and avoid the
noxious side effects. But all human ingenuity does not seem to be
going in that direction. Consider the annual 500 billion dollar drug
trafficking business where drug producers and traffickers run international
networks and launder their fortunes with impunity into the world economic
system; international terrorism where terrorists take hostages and force
governments to bargain for them; and belief patterns which promote superstition
and fanaticism gaining grounds over rational behaviour and secular human
and social structures.[3]
These developments do not squarely fit into the patterns
of the discipline we have come to know as international relations. Mainly
because what we refer to as international relations is in fact focused
on inter-nation-state power politics. As new phenomena have emerged
since World War II, the discipline has attempted to incorporate them into
the patchwork of its original quilt. But its original quilt,
borrowed from the diplomatic history and international legal structures
of modern Western cultures, has set the discipline into a mould in time
and space with limited flexibility to absorb the new phenomena. A quick
look at its roots will make the point.[4]
The outer confines of the discipline are traced in
post-Reformation Europe and the emergence of sovereign states at the conclusion
of the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The more recent antecedents of
the discipline are in the post-Napoleonic Europe. At the Congress of Vienna
in 1815 the states of Europe created an international order based on the
concept of sovereignty which corresponded well enough to the realities
of the time to even survive and absorb the revolutions of nationalities
in Europe of 1848. The revolutions of 1848 inserted into the international
order -- albeit with a twist -- another long strain of Western civilization:
that of the legacies of the British, American and French national Revolutions,
namely, the concept of “nationhood”. By the middle of the Nineteenth
century, the nation-state became the recognized actor on the international
scene. The twist was that nationalism, which as the fuel of revolutions
had upheld the dignity of man against the absolutism of the state, evolved
to become the source of its exaltation: from Locke, Rousseau and Patrick
Henry to Napoleon, Hegel and Mussolini.
Together with their firepower, administrative organization,
industrial backbone and civilized and Christian righteousness, Western
powers, while balancing each other's power, imposed their politico-legal
concept of sovereign nation-state on other cultures. It was in this
politico-legal context, for example, that the Berlin Conference on African
Affairs of 1884 laid down rules for the appropriation of Africa by European
powers.
As the European nation-states’ power potentials increased,
the balancing act became more and more precarious. Attempts at accommodation
among the sovereign nation-states to control themselves from encroaching
on each other, such as The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and international
arbitration courts, did not produce adequate international frameworks and
eventually the nation-states burst out of their seams into the First World
War.
At the end of that war some events such as the Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia and the drift of the “older” nation-states - the democracies
- towards internationalism seemed to have potentials to erode the notion
of nation-state. But Wilson's Fourteen Points and the principle of
self-determination - eventually adapted to the political interests of European
powers - gave new vigour to the concept of nation-state and cajoled the
nascent discipline of international relations in that direction. Nationalism
proved virulent in the “newer” nation-states of Europe such as Germany
and Italy. It also fuelled the aspirations of the non-western cultures,
many of which, paradoxically, became conscious of their “nationhood” through
the ideological bias of the Bolshevik Revolution.[5]
Nation-state power politics was already showing signs
of inadequacy as a focus for the discipline of international relations.
The development of ideological dimension across nation-state configurations
did not properly fit in, and indeed, disturbed the domains of the international
jurists, diplomats and strategists. Nevertheless, the concept of
nation-state survived and at the close of the Second World War inspired
the makers of the United Nations to conceive of a world order built on
a hierarchy of nation-states and a new concert of powers: the co-operation
and management of world affairs by the five Permanent Members of the United
Nations’ Security Council. Its provisions for self-government produced
such incongruous nation-states as Fiji, composed of opposing Hindu and
native populations, Burundi, where a Tutsi minority rules the Hutu population,
or the sovereign state of Nauru with 20 square miles of territory and 8,000
inhabitants, while 20 million Kurds and 6 million Tibetans with more or
less defined territories still fight to have their own nation-state with
no prospects in sight.
Different international developments since the end
of the Second World War have influenced both the structure and the methodology
of the international relations discipline. The collapse of the new
“concert of nations”, the cold war, the coalition of the non-aligned nations,
the emergence of People's Republic of China and the re-emergence of Europe
as a power beyond her particular nation-states have inspired international
relations theories such as bipolarity, multipolarity, core and periphery,
linkage, regimes and hegemony.[6]
The discipline has adopted the methods of other social
sciences using behavioural and quantitative approaches, simulation and
systems analysis, studying political cultures and psychology, political
economy and sociology of international relations. [7]
But the sovereign nation-state power politics has remained its albatross.
Many recognized the need for a broader approach for
the understanding of international phenomena and tried to move the focus
off nation-states and onto other actors. But they were eventually
impressed by the resilience and staying power of sovereign nation-states.[8]
The most serious recent attempts at extending the
study of international relations beyond the straight jacket of sovereignty
have been made in the context of “transnational” approaches, recognizing
the existence of other actors on the international scene, from the catholic
church and Ford Foundation to international migration.[9]
However, these actors, as they emerge from within
the guts of the body-politick and steal the limelight from the nation-states,
muddle the plot which is still assumed to be that of power play acting
among the sovereigns. The discipline thus has remained, as some had
suggested, a perspective on a “bundle of subjects” and a “basket” appearing
as a hodge-podge to the uninitiated. [10]
Yet, international relations need not remain a non-discipline. But,
in order to have a discipline, the student of international relations needs
to be able to analyse the contents of the bundle and the basket and bring
them into a coherent and comprehensive pattern rather than constantly changing
the contents of the basket.
* *
*
It is for that purpose that I propose a change of
focus from the Actors onto the Factors of global human dynamics - international
relations. I believe that by first taking apart the wefts and woofs of
what we called a quilt and then weaving them into a new colourful fabric,
we may come up with a pattern bearing the blueprint for a new foundation.
That foundation could serve not only as a base for the understanding of
power politics among nation-states but also for the analysis of the other
patterns of the global flux which influence the inter-nation-state power
politics and transcend them.
There will always be human entities which may be
called Irish and Welsh, Azerbaijani and Armenian, Hutu and Tutsi, or Lao
and Mong; there will be religious and ideological configurations and there
will be global financial networks laundering drug money, exploiting cheap
labour, producing goods, creating jobs and helping development. In the
course of history, these entities have clashed and co-operated with each
other. Have their "encounters" had common characteristics?
Have there been “factors” which have made encounters possible and then
turned them into conflict or co-operation? Are there common threads
for these factors within the different encountering entities? To
ponder these questions we need to look at the nature and evolution of these
entities in the context of their encounters.
Delving into pre-Reformation and post-United Nations
worlds as the two historic confines of "sovereign nation-state power -politics",
we find entities with differing identities whose dynamics of encounter,
when considered in a continuum with those of sovereign states, may help
us attempt a unified field theory for the discipline. After all,
within the Holy Roman Empire, the “sovereign” was God. That did not
prevent the actors on the international scene from playing power politics
which they did not formulate as exclusive jurisdiction and sovereignty.
It was only after the Reformation that legal sovereignty passed from God
to the Christian monarchs of Europe under natural law. To be sure,
sovereignty was a powerful component of European monarchs’ identity.
But it was not their invention. Earlier, Christianity and Islam had
held sway over vast territories for centuries under the power of God's
sovereignty. Sovereignty, crucial as it was, was not the only component
of a politically independent group's identity. The other cultures
the European powers came in contact with had identities of their own, and
were it not for the other factors in their dynamics of encounter such as
Europe's superior firepower and methods of production, organization and
communication, other cultures may have prevailed and international relations
may have been based not on the sovereignty of nation-states, but on the
gods of the Aztecs or the tribal traditions of the Cherokee.
As for the post-United Nations world, the notion
of nation-state sovereignty, defined as exclusive jurisdiction within a
recognized territory over a specific population -- identified as “nationals”,
whether of the same or diversified stocks -- appears even more debatable.
The Third World nation-states are scrambling to materialize “nationalism”
-- the two terms (nation-state and nationalism) not always coinciding:
Ethiopia challenged by Eritrea and Tigre, Morocco by Polisarios, India
by the Sikhs and others, Sri Lanka by the Tamils, Iran, Iraq and Turkey
by the Kurds, China by Tibetans, Burma by Karen, Afghanistan by the Mujahedin
etc.; and Lebanon tearing herself apart.
The “identity” map of Africa does not look like its
political map at all -- see map in Chapter 2. Nor does, for that
matter, that of Europe drawn along such identities as Basques, Tyrolians,
Jurasians, Catalans, Bohemians, Bretons or Bavarians. Indeed, “nations”
within politically well established “sovereign nation-states” are claiming
their independence. Scotland, for example, toys with the idea of membership
in the Europe of 1992 bypassing her association with the United Kingdom.
Surely some of the other European “nations” mentioned above entertain similar
ideas. In anticipation of the European Community's further economic
integration proposals are made for regional regroupings cutting across
national frontiers for areas with similar economic patterns to harmonies
their excise tax rates “Opening up the Tax Frontiers”, Brussels,
Institute for Fiscal Studies, Roundtable of European Industrialists, 1988.
In Eastern Europe “nations” within the Soviet Union
such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Georgia are challenging USSR's
sovereignty. Religion has re-emerged as a potent dimension of international
relations superseding national frontiers and imposing its laws on accepted
rules of international conduct: The Vatican playing an important role in
the internal affairs of Poland and catholic church reinstated in that country,
Islamic fundamentalism disregarding diplomatic conventions and inspiring
international terrorism.
Ideological conflicts, which divided the industrialized
capitalist and socialist camps and led to regional and supra-national arrangements
like EC, the NATO, the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, after their cruder forms
of cold war confrontations, are now manifesting themselves in subtler ideas
of trade-unionism, human rights, democracy, worker co-management and free
enterprise, cutting across earlier international ideological divides.
International finance has grown as an influential
dimension of international relations to the extent that sovereign states
constituting major economic powers, even in concert, cannot control global
exchange rate fluctuations. Multinational conglomerates have branched
out in international networks of capital, production, marketing, distribution
and communications in proportions no longer easily controllable or serviceable
by any one nation-state. For example, in the naval expedition to the Persian
Gulf in 1987-88 to protect the international shipping lanes in the Iran-Iraq
war, the U.S. Navy was in the embarrassing position of protecting Kuwaiti
tankers flying United States flag and reluctant to defend ships belonging
to American corporations which were registered offshore to evade U.S. taxes.
In Angola, in the Eighties, the Cuban troops protected American oil companies
against attacks by the rebel Unita forces that were supported by the U.S.
government. Risk-taking egos are no longer generals in battlefields
but take-over raiders in corporate boardrooms.
The framework of sovereign nation-state no longer
suffices to embrace the “Sovereign State of ITT,” the Medellin drug cartel
or the hostage holders of Beirut. Diplomats and soldiers do not seem
to be the simple answer.[11]
Rather than beginning international relations with them, we need to devise
a complex of which they are a part. Such a complex can be devised if we
begin our research at the beginning by searching for the factors which
affect and make encounter and intercourse of human entities with differing
and specific identities possible. Stanley Hoffmann judiciously opens his
Janus
and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Politics
by identifying the field as “patterns of conflict and cooperation among
mutually alien actors,” but a few lines later he reduces it to “a world
of sovereign states.” [12]
It is a beginning which could qualify international relations as a distinct
discipline within the social sciences.
Indeed, such an approach could provide valuable insights
for other disciplines. For example, while political science
assumes the existence of legal and governmental structures and sociology
and social psychology deal with interactions between human beings within
the social context, in international relations we look at man at the confines
of organized society. Within the group, social experiences accumulate
exponentially and frequent observations of actions and their consequences
among the multitude soon result in “do’s and don’ts”: moral, ethical and
legal norms passed on from one generation to another. Encounters
of the entity with aliens at its confines are not normally an integral
part of its members’ life experience -- unless, of course, an individual
is in the particular position of being directly involved in them.
The child, while being inculcated with the norms of behaviour within the
group, including “thou shall not kill”, may also observe the rejoicing
at the news of heavy casualties inflicted by the warriors of the group
on the aliens.
To the extent they retain their distinctiveness,
human entities --“nations,” cultures, ethnicities, tribes -- do not readily
submit to binding norms which would alleviate the causes and consequences
of conflict with other entities and do not easily internalize whatever
modi
vivendi may have developed in their encounters. The phenomenon
is more glaringly demonstrable at moments of break with the past, when
human entities revert to a more primitive mode of behaviour towards the
alien, be it, among the bigger pictures, Hitler's Nazism, the Thirty Years
War, the Spanish colonization of America, the Mongolian invasions or the
expansion of Islam, or, among the smaller pictures, the daily headlines
in the newspapers about the warring tribes around the world.
But the reader can probably best observe the phenomenon
by introspection. To paraphrase Santayana, “those who do not internalize
history are bound to repeat its mistakes!” The uniqueness of a study
of the essentials of global human dynamics resides in the paradox in our
paraphrase: one hardly "internalizes" history. That is probably why
in our memory history is most often recalled as a fabric wherein the relative
time-span is not properly perceived. What was the time-span between
Hamurabi and Augustus? Seventeen centuries. The pyramids of Egypt
had been built for two thousand years before the first stones of Persepolis
were laid. This common flatness of history in our perception reduces
its impact as an analytical tool. It has led some to assume that history
beyond modern times has become irrelevant to the understanding of international
affairs.[13]
A closer look at historical events, archaeological
sites and museum artefacts shows us the immutable characteristics of human
encounters and leads us to believe that plus ça change, plus
c’est la même chose. Except for the fact that because of
modern technology, the sequence of events in certain areas are accelerated
and people are more often in contact others who are not part of their tribe.
At the slower pace of communications, remoteness compensated for proximity
of events. As Racine put it: “L’éloignement des pays
répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps:
car le peuple ne met guère de différence entre ce qui est,
si j’ose ainsi parler, … mille ans de lui, et ce qui en est … mille lieues”.[14]
That makes the observation of human behaviour at the point of encounter
of alien entities when events took place at a slower pace even more imperative
and valuable for our study of global intercourse.
It may be argued that, the reason we do not internalize
history is because, compared to the frequency of social experiences within
human entities, there have not been enough: “time series” of encounter
and intercourse between them to permit the development and internalization
of inter-group norms of conduct. After all, over 99% of man's existence
is in prehistory and sparse bands of hunters and gatherers. The argument,
however, does not take into account the quantum leap between man's need
for affectional belonging and identification within his own culture and
the surge of his primeval instincts as part of a group at its confines.[15]
And that does not seem to have changed from the time of the encounter between
the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons to the warring factions in the Congo.
It is at the confines of his tribo-cultural entity where we have to meet
man in the next chapter and examine the factors which materialize and shape
his entity's encounter with other entities.
A. Khoshkish
London School of Economics
October 1989
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