International Relations as a Neo-Kantian Project

Introduction
Why does the discipline of International Relations have so much difficulty ‘seeing’ and attaching importance to the practice of international relations? The field has always favoured top down, abstract, holistic conceptualizations over pluralism, complexity and change. As an undergraduate in IR one of the first books I was exposed to was Waltz’s, Man, the State and War and it just seemed that doing IR properly required systemic theory, even if the details of that theory changed. In this post I want to suggest that this style of thinking should be seen not as consequence of the nature of international relations but of the fields unacknowledged debts to the roots of a great deal of modern social theory in Neo-Kantian philosophy. From around 1880 to 1930 Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in German academia and its influence permeated debates on the nature of the natural and the human sciences (itself a Neo-Kantian formulation) and the training of multiple generations of scholars. The suggestion that I want to make here is that understanding the legacy of Neo-Kantianism casts light on IR’s style of thought, in fact IR has many Neo-Kantian habits without even having heard of the movement.

Let’s start with a description of the movement and its concerns, then I’ll take up what I take to be their characteristic philosophical approach and before turning to the multiple channels of influence on International Relations and its consequences.

The Movement
In sociological terms Neo-Kantianism carved out a position for philosophy within the scientific university by rejecting Hegelian speculative metaphysics and going ‘back to Kant’ or at least to a version of Kant that treated him a scientific philosopher of knowledge. It’s sometimes argued that the centrality of epistemology to modern philosophy is a consequence of the movement. The term itself is sometimes used specifically to refer two two schools centred on Marburg (Herman Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer) and Baden (sometimes referred to as South-Western Neo-Kantianism) (Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert) but this obscures the extent to which the Neo-Kantian problem space was shared by thinkers who distanced themselves from the two schools, for example Wilhelm Dilthey. What we would think of as Twentieth century philosophical movements for example, phenomenology, logical empiricism and critical theory were shaped as reactions to the perceived limitations of Neo-Kantianism by thinkers who were steeped in Neo-Kantianism. The main members of the schools wrote extensively on human and cultural sciences. Key social theorists – Weber, Durkheim, Simmel were all trained as Neo-Kantians. International legal thought bore a strong imprint. Distinctions like explanation vs understanding, facts and values, nomothetic and idiographic, natural science vs human science emerge in the context of Neo-Kantianism.

So what was the content of Neo-Kantianism? It’s easier to make sense of it if we start with a cartoon version of Kant’s problem. He wanted to reconcile the rationalist (we can figure things out by thinking) philosophy of Leibniz and his successors and the empiricism (it’s all down to sensory experience) that Hume adapted from Locke. Kant’s solution that are elements of human experience that are not just subjective but reflect a universal experience and give us certain (apodictic) knowledge about the world. Starting from space and time he argued that there were universal elements in human cognition and these provide categories through which we interpret the world. In my (simplistic) terms there is a cycle by which subjective experience contains universal elements that provide the categories through which we make sense of the world in the Critique of Pure Reason he tried to work out what those categories were. Kant emphasized that we are always dealing with ‘appearances’ and not ‘the thing in itself’. At the same time he assumed a fit between an orderly ‘Newtonian’ external world, ordered on the basis of a limited number of principles and human cognition. After he published the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 critics argued that ‘the thing in itself’ didn’t actually do anything for human knowledge of the world. Indeed, even after he attempted to rebut these criticisms in the second edition some philosophers continued to argue for the superiority of the first version – effectively knowledge is a matter of our concepts.

As a self-consciously scientific movement the Neo-Kantians discounted ‘the thing in itself’ as metaphysics that is the external world was reduced to our concepts and methods. They extended Kantian epistemological methods by trying to uncover the universal elements underpinning the academic disciplines in the new scientific universities. Extracting the underpinning universal from particular cases (the transcendental method) provided a basis for interpreting the world and other cases. Indeed, other cases can be evaluated by reference to the extent to which they conform to the universal concept. Hence, a key concern for the Neo-Kantians was establishing the ‘validity’ of applications of the ‘transcendental method’ to derive the universal. The results should not be understood as an abstraction from a specific set of cases and subject to scope conditions but a claim to a truth with a validity that goes beyond the empirical. Compared with Kant the Neo-Kantians had to give some ground on issues of change but compared with historicists their bias was towards the structural. It is the context of Neo-Kantianism that ‘relativism’ emerges as a concern. Neo-Kantianism also marked out variation across time and space as a matter of variation in concepts and / or values.
As a mode of thinking about the world Neo-Kantianism places enormous weight on concepts. Indeed an issue reaching back to Kant himself is the question of pre-conceptual experience – a possibility that Neo-Kantian philosophy tended to reject. Concepts shape how we experience the world at both an epistemological level and an evaluative one. The point to underline again is that concepts exist in both empirical and transcendental versions. A final point is that there is a difference between Neo-Kantianism as philosophy or methodology and its impact in use within the disciplines themselves. To take a very obvious example the movement from Weber’s methodological writings on ideal types, what he did with them and the use that others have made of them marks the loss of cautions and qualifications and awareness of what an ideal type was supposed to be.

Neo-Kantian Influences on International Relations
Once you recognize Neo-Kantianism as a movement constituted by a specific thinkers and networks of relationships a complex web of connections with International Relations comes into view. The starting point is with the German theories of the state and international law that, in their American version, produced Realism. Once Realism is understood as a Neo-Kantian project its simultaneous claim to transhistorical validity regardless of whether history conforms to the theory, or the claim that Realism has normative force even if countries keep acting in ways that aren’t consistent with it makes much more sense. The claims of Realism are transcendental rather than empirical. The Americanization of emigre scholars obscured these connections and excavating their debts to Rickerts or Windelband is less interesting to later scholarship than possible connections to Nietzsche or Carl Schmitt, the Neo-Kantian style just becomes an unidentifiable background influence.

If Realism is the most obvious vector for Neo-Kantianism the irony is that efforts to render Realism more scientific and to provide alternatives effectively turned to different strands of Neo-Kantian thought. All of the versions of systems thinking, from whether Uexküll’s environmentalism, Bertalanffy’s general systemology, Wiener’s cybernetics or Parsons’s structural-functionalism have connections to Neo-Kantianism whether explicit, via teachers and supervisors or through later influences in particular the work of Ernst Cassirer. These all efforts to work out the conditions of knowledge and action in the abstract. Constructivism whether in sociological or phenomenological versions has its own debts. Durkheim’s social holism should be seen as a Neo-Kantian construct. Husserl wanted to produce a version of Kant that was more systematic than than of the Neo-Kantians and who alienated his more empirically minded students with a turn to the transcendental. The characteristics of Frankfurt School critical theory come from the effort to update Hegel and Marx in an intellectual context strongly influenced by Neo-Kantianism and where the key members of the School were themselves taught by Neo-Kantians. Even after the revolution Neo-Kantianism survived in the Soviet Union and via Bakhtin exerted an influence on post-structuralism.

Neo-Kantianism dropped the elements of Kant – the thing in itself, intuition – that balanced out the tendency to reduce the world to a set of concepts. A century later these Neo-Kantian influences have contributed to an IR that struggles to see outside its concepts and generally appears to have no idea what the status of its concepts are. When you begin to pay attention to how concepts are employed in IR you quickly become aware of how many of the statements in the field replace actual events with their complexity and uniqueness with concepts of uncertain provenance or relevance. Abstract concepts of ‘state’, ‘sovereignty’, international system float in from the past without their status being interrogated. These legacy concepts were formulated in the context of a claim of universal validity that we might be less willing to accept today. We are more sceptical of such universalizing claims and/or because we can come up with better ways of conceptualizing the thing we are interested in. Implicit Neo-Kantianism undermines the distinction between scientific concepts and those that exist ‘out there’. The universality of concepts also fits with the assumption that the social world is defined and explained by meanings. In the best Neo-Kantian tradition the concept can also serve a normative function as well as descriptive or explanatory leading to endless IR arguments about why the world doesn’t conform to the concept. And at this point we are back in the realm of Plato’s forms where the everyday world of international relations is an less real imitation of the ideal. The conceptualism encourages IR to see the world in terms of an abstract holism: practice, history and the empirical become deviations from the reality of the concept. This isn’t necessarily a problem provided that you know that you’re doing it.

This leads to a final point. The radical response to IR’s Neo-Kantian problem is a reconsideration of the status of the concept in IR. Where do our concepts come from, how do we use them, when are we talking about concrete cases and when are we actually replacing them with statements about concepts. The attempts at a radical reconstructions of IR frequently end up replacing one abstract whole with another, here we can point to the way that the ‘relational turn’ simply means replacing ‘substantialist’ concepts with ‘relational’ ones, concepts like ‘racism’ or ‘coloniality’ function in the same way as ‘system’, ‘sovereignty’ or ‘national interest’

I will come back to what a post-Neo-Kantian approach to IR should look like in future posts.

Reading
I have zero intention of writing anything systematic about Neo-Kantianism and International Relations so this is a list of items that this post draws on.

Helpful places to start are the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pages on Neo-Kantianism

https://iep.utm.edu/neo-kant/ and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neo-kantianism/ pages.

Neo-Kantianism in the Development of Philosophy

de Warren, N., & Staiti, A. (2015). Introduction: Towards a reconsideration of Neo-Kantianism. In New Approaches to Neo-Kantianism (pp. 1–15). Cambridge University Press.

Friedman, M. (2002). Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger: The Davos Disputation and Twentieth Century Philosophy. European Journal of Philosophy, 10(3), 263–274.

Harrelson, K. J. (2015). The Priority of Epistemology in Early Neo-Kantianism. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 32(1), 57–77.

Hohendahl, P. U. (2010). The Crisis of Neo-Kantianism and the Reassessment of Kant after World War 1. The Philosophical Forum, 41(1–2), 17–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9191.2009.00346.x

Luft, S. (2018). Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology. In D. Zahavi (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology (pp. 45–67). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198755340.013.5

Naraniecki, A. (2010). Neo-Positivist or Neo-Kantian? Karl Popper and the Vienna Circle. Philosophy, 85(4), 511–530. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819110000458

Richardson, A. W. (2003). Conceiving, Experiencing, and Conceiving Experiencing: Neo-Kantianism and the History of the Concept of Experience. Topoi, 22(1), 55–67. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022132704044

Themes and Issues in Neo-Kantianism

Beiser, F. (2008). Historicism and neo-Kantianism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 39(4), 554–564. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.09.002

Beiser, F. C. (2009). Normativity in Neo‐Kantianism: Its Rise and Fall. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17(1), 9–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672550802610941

Kinzel, K. (2019). Relativism in German idealism, historicism and neo-Kantianism. In M. Kusch (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism (pp. 69–78). Routledge.

Kinzel, K. (2021). Historical thought in German neo-Kantianism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 29(4), 579–589. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1932411

Kinzel, K. (2023). Neo-Kantian conceptualism: Between scientific experience and everyday perception. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2023.2237070

Social Thought

Brandist, C. (2000). Neo-Kantianism in cultural theory: Bakhtin, Derrida and Foucault. Radical Philosophy, 102. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/neo-kantianism-in-cultural-theory

Eliaeson, S. (1990). Max Weber and His Critics: Critical Theory’s Reception of Neo-Kantian Methodology. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 3(4), 513–537.

Feest, U. (Ed.). (2010). Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen (Vol. 21). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3540-0

Herzog, M. (1995). William James and the development of phenomenological psychology in Europe. History of the Human Sciences, 8(1), 29–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519500800103

Paulson, S. L. (1992). The Neo-Kantian Dimension of Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 12(3), 311–332. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/12.3.311

Redding, P. (2005). Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory. Critical Horizons, 6(1), 183–204.

Turner, S. (2017). Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian Philosopher. In W. W. Gephart (Ed.), The Sacred and the Law: The Durkheimian Legacy (pp. 49–70). Klostermann. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783465142942-49

Vandenberghe, F. (2001). From Structuralism to Culturalism: Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. European Journal of Social Theory, 4(4), 479–497. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310122225271

Systems Theories

Brentani, C. (2009). Konrad Lorenz’s epistemological criticism towards Jakob von Uexküll. Sign Systems Studies, 37(3/4), 637–660. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2009.37.3-4.13

Nemenyi, D. (2019). What is an Internet? Norbert Wiener and the Society of Control [PhD Philosophy, Kingston University]. https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/44219/1/Nemenyi-D-44219.pdf

Pouvreau, D., & Drack, M. (2007). On the history of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “General Systemology”, and on its relationship to cybernetics: Part I: elements on the origins and genesis of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “General Systemology”. International Journal of General Systems, 36(3), 281–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/03081070601127961

 

From Public Diplomacy to Social Statecraft

One of the difficulties with the rise of academic studies of public diplomacy is that the term and the concept have an specifically US history. After the middle of the 1990s the term spread more widely across foreign ministries and into academia. The standard US understanding of PD incorporated international information, international broadcasting, educational and cultural affairs all of which existed before the term came into use in the 1960s. Lots of countries had been engaging in these activities (and continued to do so) without using the term ‘public diplomacy’.  American ‘public diplomacy’ and the various foreign public diplomacies that have appeared (and often disappeared) at points over the past couple of decades become cases within a larger universe of cases known by other names. 

The question is how to characterize that universe of cases? My enthusiasm for using ‘public diplomacies’ in the plural was intended to reflect that there were different national approaches to (use Nick Cull’s terminology) engaging foreign publics and that countries frequently had multiple engagement approaches at the same time. In working across a longer time frame (back to the early 19th century) and in a more global perspective I’ve become more concerned that diplomacy and diplomacies don’t adequately capture what is happening. In global perspective the US and US derived versions of public diplomacy seemed unusual in their insistence that they were part of the foreign policy machinery (of course something that not universally accepted in the US). It is more common for these activities to exist in a state of tension with the complex of foreign ministry, embassies and diplomats, indeed to be seen as preferable alternatives to this diplomatic assemblage and to conducted by other agencies.

This comes back to the question how do we characterize the universe of cases that public diplomacy sits within? Where I’ve arrived is that these are examples of social statecraft. Modern (ie post 1750) international relations is shaped by the emergence of the state-society complex and the multiplication of transnational and international relations. The developments did not just change war or ‘diplomacy’ but gave birth to a whole set of opportunities (and threats) by which transnational relations could be put to work on behalf of the new polities, essentially operating through national and transnational state-private networks. 

I use ‘statecraft’ with a couple of things in mind. Firstly, although in the IR literature the term is usually means a concern with the instruments of foreign policy by in the 16th and 17th century when the term appeared it had a broader sense of the methods necessary to sustain the polity – it was literally about politics. Secondly, David Baldwin makes the point that classical IR theory (Morgenthau, Aron, Bull) referred to all non-military statecraft as ‘diplomacy’. From my perspective this obscures the continuous innovations in the methods and forms of statecraft over the past two centuries. I take the diplomatic assemblage to be one mode of statecraft and that a large part of the development of social statecraft is about the tensions and conflicts between diplomats and diplomacy and other actors with their own priorities and modes of acting for example, amongst others ministries of information, culture, or economic affairs, development agencies, interior ministries, departments of religious affairs, intelligence services, political parties, heads of government etc and between these other agencies themselves. 

Sometimes social statecraft is only a matter of a marketing campaign but in a longer term perspective it has been embedded in the political struggles of modern international relations from the effort to accelerate or exploit the decline of the Ottoman Empire, to the post-Cold War efforts to produce liberal civil society or to exploit the divisions of Western societies in the 21st century.

I’ll spell out some more of the implications of social statecraft in future posts.

Parliamentary Committee Report on UK-China Relations

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee recently put out a report on the UK’s relations with China.  This was seen by some as indicating a turn to a more cautious or suspicious line towards China.

I tend to read these reports more for what it tells us about how people think about the issues.  As I’ve indicated before I think UK foreign policy thinking tends towards an undifferentiated global liberalism that doesn’t provide a basis for prioritizing one thing over another.

This report has quite a lot of this but also some signs of greater appreciation of real world constraints.

The reading of China seems quite plausible.  China likes order but has some reservations about current one.  A central driver of Chinese external behaviour is the security of the regime, which also translates (as Max Weber would expect) into a concern with questions of prestige.

The report spends quite a lot of time discussing a whole list of contentious issues in relations with China; the South China Sea, the treatment of the Uighurs and the state of democracy in Hong Kong, Huawei, Belt and Road Initiative, influence activities in the UK and gives some consideration to what should be done about them but the report seems to swing between a faith in an abstract legal order and a rather one on one confrontational stance.  One of the strangest things in the report is the demand that the FCO produce a report on situations where it has successfully changed China’s position.  By the time that a country like China has a well-defined position it is going to be extremely difficult to change it and even if it does change its mind it will be very careful to obscure what has happened.   Also a good diplomat will not boast about this.

In relation to British policy the report points to the apparent disconnect between the Ministry of Defence, which seems quite keen to send an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea, and the Treasury  which has its own emissary to China outside the normal diplomatic framework. The Committee wants a statement of strategy towards China that can guide the actions of all government bodies.  That doesn’t seem unreasonable but UK government is quite capable of producing a strategy that is simply a list of departmental preferences and doesn’t set priorities.

Because China is developing a global presence there should be a China strategy but this needs to be developed in the context of an Asian strategy and an overall international strategy.  The report keeps returning to the question of influence and treating China in isolation actually makes this question much more intractable.  Putting China in an Asian context may show ways of working with Asian (and other) countries to push things in a desirable connection.

There is also a need for a greater recognition of the differences in motivations on different issues – it’s probably much easier to influence issues around Huawei or even the Belt and Road than it is on those that are seen in Beijing as to do with national cohesion, which of these issues are going to have be treated things that are protested for forms sake and which are going to be subject of a political strategy that expects to get a result.  The rhetoric of rules based international order tries link everything together and make it all equally important.  Strategy pushes towards choice and discrimination in the real world.

Ecological Control and Foreign Influence

Updated 8 May 2019 to improve clarity.

If you’ve been exposed to any kind of training in ‘strategy’ thinking in political, business or communications contexts it’s easy to get into the habit of thinking in an extremely linear way; what’s my objective, resources, timeframe etc.  There are good reasons for this; the world tends to entropy and the clarity of a plan is a way to generate action in a resistant world.  As the saying goes a ‘a bad plan well executed is better than a good plan badly executed’.

But this isn’t the only way of getting things done. A very common way of acting is what’s called ecological control.  That is an actor influences others not by trying to dictate precisely what they do but by influencing their environment.  In a classic statement of this idea the White House announces all budgets of government agencies will be cut by 5% but leaves it up to the agencies to decide how they will meet the target.  Clearly there is an ‘effect’ but the initiator is not responsible for particular choices.  You can argue that nudging /choice architecture or reflexive control are more directive variants of this given that in that they operate by shaping the environment rather than by dictating an action.

One of the reasons that it is difficult to make sense of questions of foreign influence is that often influence activities are aimed at shaping the ecology rather than achieving a direct objective.  Public diplomacies can be about creating opportunities rather controlling end states.  The issue that tends to face countries with in dealing with a partner is that these indirect, non-political effects can begin to affect the overall political ecology of the country; groups with particular attachments begin to pull overall policy in favoured directions.  In dealing with the foreign influence question such pulls are harder to deal with that out and out ‘collusion’.  It is up to those that are concerned about the consequences of such activities to politicize them but in doing so they find that those involved can (often quite plausibly) deny any political intention let alone ‘collusion’, they have merely acted to improve relations between the two countries or pursue business or study interests.   Although, in the current situation one might read the two countries as Australia (or the EU) and China the logic is the same between any pair of countries and much foreign public engagement activity.

This opens up a set of questions about the circumstances where particular relations become politicised.  The acme of skill in public diplomacies is to modify ways of doing things in another country without them becoming objects of political controversy.  Any general consideration of the foreign influence questions needs to engage with the ecological dimension not just with direct effects.

 

Regulating Foreign Influence: Some Starting Points

Public diplomacies are things ‘we’ do that affect other people.  Almost all discussions whether in academic or policy contexts are understood in these terms; other people show up in terms of ‘audiences’, ‘publics’ and ‘effects’.  Even the idea that public diplomacies should be understood in terms of ‘relations’ or ‘dialogue’ start from ‘us’ as the actor.  This opens the question of what this looks like from the ‘other’ side.

One manifestation of the flip side is ‘foreign influence’.  Or more precisely illegitimate foreign influence. The interesting thing is that discussions about foreign influence are far more heated that debates about public diplomacy, cultural relations or the state of our soft power.  It’s worth underlining how much political energy gets poured into these issues – think about questions over Russian or Chinese influence, the Turkish diaspora in Germany, the Israeli lobby in the US, or the ongoing Qatar-UAE struggle.  In a world where the range of countries who can set out to build influence is expanding these questions are likely to become more significant.

One of the reasons why these issues become so contentious is that we lack a tradition of really thinking about these questions in an abstract way; we can’t just slot cases into well worked out frameworks.  Western political thought tends to separate the domestic and the international at both analytical and normative levels thinking about these transnational issues is quite fragmentary.  This also means that our discussions tend to mix up different normative frameworks and a starting point is to recognize that there are different set of ideas at work.

I was really stimulated to think about this by a report that came out last week from the ‘Venice Commission’ the European Commission for Democracy through Law of the Council of Europe.  Their report was concerned with the extent to which states can limit the extent to which NGOs can access foreign funding.  The fundamental human rights declarations give states fairly extensive powers to regulate organizations and in the context of restrictions on NGOs in Hungary or Egypt the Venice experts were concerned with how minimize the scope of restrictions.  In reading it though I was thinking what if we were talking about getting funding for diaspora organizations from authoritarian governments would they be quite as keen on restricting state powers?

I would argue that we can see four different ways of thinking about the legitimacy or otherwise of foreign influence

The starting point is a liberal perspective.  People have rights to freedom of speech, thought, association, travel, religion etc.  Therefore any restriction is bad.  Given that these are the sticks that liberal states use to batter other kinds of states with it’s not surprising that any of the other perspectives look suspect.  From a liberal position you can argue the foreign influence question doesn’t exist.  It only exists because people insist on sorting people into foreign and non-foreign.  I suspect very few people actually embrace this position but part of the difficulty is that they don’t really think through how they deviate from it.  I can see three positions.

Polity protection:  The polity is a distinct political community that regulates its own affairs.  Therefore it needs to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and to ensure that its institutions function in the interests of the community.  In practical terms this means restrictions on the funding of politics and on the ownership and operation of media companies.  This perspective does not require democracy but it seems that democracy requires some degree of protection.

Cultural/Identity: The second position is a set of ideas around identity and culture.  That is foreign actors threaten our culture and must be excluded/regulated.  In the current climate this is likely to be read in terms of Victor Orban or Steve Bannon but it is also has to be recognized that it is the same idea that underpins discourses of cultural imperialism, the UN Convention on Cultural Diversity and decades of European and Canadian cultural and media policy.  Foreign influence is what threatens ‘our’ culture.  Of course this leads to other arguments about what our culture is and who defines its.

Westphalian Reciprocity: This is less about any particular content but about the right to regulate through the exercise of sovereignty and treaties.  This starts from the presumption of equality and hence reciprocity.  In theory at least foreign influence activities can be managed by insisting on reciprocity.  This is may look unacceptably restrictive from a liberal perspective but normatively is quite straightforward.

These three positions tend to get mixed up in thinking about modern states but actually rest on different normative foundations and suggest different prescriptions.  Yet there is another complicating factor; in practice debates about ‘foreign influence’ happen when people are unhappy about it, positive influence isn’t framed in these terms, instead we get more “what we can learn from them”.  Any systematic development of a position based on protection of the polity, culture or on Westphalian reciprocity will be rather restrictive from a liberal perspective.  Judgements on ‘foreign influence’ tend to contain evaluations of who is a friend which will often rest on issues of cultural or ideological proximity.

Having said that liberal states have no alternative but to begin to think through these questions.  There are lessons to be learned from the practices of European neutrals in the era of the World Wars but I’ll take this up in a later post.

The Centrality of the National

I think that biggest error in contemporary Anglosphere understandings of world politics is our inability to recognize the implications of the principle of nationality.  I’d emphasize that I’m not talking about nationalism but about the importance of the idea that practically everything on the planet can be assigned a nationality and that the “nation-state” (or more accurately “nationalized state society complex) is the fundamental unit of government.  You may be an internationalist but you still carry a passport and are almost certainly marked by what Gieselinde Kuiper would call, following Norbert Elias, “national habitus”.

The typical Western liberal perspective falls into an opposition between two clusters of ideas

state/ politics / official / government

 vs

society / private / unofficial /people / non-governmental.  Specific social sectors: culture, education, science, sport can also be found here.

What’s missing is that all of the second cluster can also be understood in national terms.  The national provides a set of associations that can bridge the implied gap between the two clusters. It’s a national government and a national sports team. It’s much easier to make sense of discussions about influence, public diplomacy, diasporas, cultural relations, soft power if we recognize the importance of activating or minimizing the national association.

Here’s a couple of nice examples.  The Australian government has a new scheme to make ‘foreign influence’ more transparent and universities who host Confucius Institutes are reluctant to register.  “If Confucius Institutes have not been registered, despite being substantially funded from Beijing, it may be because they are thought to confine their activities to “culture and language”. No politics.” The writer of the article makes the point that Communist China sees culture as political.  This is true but the more fundamental point is that in China (or in any other country with cultural relations programmes) “cultural and language” is certainly part of the national.

There’s also an interesting piece on the Turkish diaspora in the Balkans that has some wonderful quotes.  A lot of it is about the popularity or lack of it Erdogan among the diaspora but I was struck by:

“Take the citizenships of the countries you are living in,” Erdogan said. “Don’t say no. Take it. If they give it, take it.”

He explained: “You are representatives in your countries. You should learn your countries’ language, integrate with your country, enter politics and improve our relations. But never forget Turkish language, culture and your Turkey.”

A the end of the 19th century this was the kind of idea that you found in Italy or Germany or China, each had diasporas that were coming to be seen as part of national influence and an economic resource, even if people had to give up their citizenship if they maintained their culture they were still part of the nation.  This is the reason why all three adopted citizenship laws based on biological descent so that people had the option of returning to the homeland.

The strength of national associations can be rhetorically emphasized or minimized, later in the piece we get this

“Turkish identity is not a national identity,” he said. “It spreads across nations. It weaves itself into other identities. It’s not tied to Turkey. It’s much older, and much vaster.”

Somewhat ironically the speaker has been reported thus

“Ibrahim from the alliance of NGOs that champions the interests of ethnic Turks in North Macedonia credited Erdogan for pioneering an expansive new vision of what it means to be Turkish in the region — underwritten by increased funding in hospitals, schools, agriculture, mosques and banks.”

The core point is that opposition between politics and culture misses the importance of the national as a set of associations.  The national is not necessarily political but it is vector through which the political can travel.  Cultural relations strategies have always turned on this gap between the national as cultural and the national as political.

The Everyday IRD: British Covert Information in the Early 1960s

The Information Research Department (IRD), the Foreign Office’s Cold War covert information agency, has been back in news this week as the latest release of material from the Public Records Office confirms the involvement of the IRD in the production and use of forgeries aimed at Soviet aligned fronts organizations.  This report provides some detail on an operation against the World Federation of Democratic Youth in 1963.

By coincidence I’ve been looking at a couple of pieces on the IRD in this era which really focus on the day to day to activities of the organization.  These are a top secret review of the IRD conducted by the former Permanent Under Secretary of the FO Lord Strang in 1963  that was been dug out of the archives and transcribed by pyswar.org.  The second is a PhD Thesis by Simon Collins on the IRD in the Middle East and Africa between 1956 and 1963.  Strang’s report is redacted and is very much a Whitehall focused document while Collin’s thesis actually gives a pretty strong sense of what IRD was doing.

The Strang report seems to have been motivated by concerns over whether an expansion of IRD was providing value for money. The agency had been authorized to appoint up to 24 field officers who  could be sent overseas.  Part of the background here is that the IRD was largely funded by the ‘secret vote’ that financed the intelligence services and wasn’t subject to the same level of financial stringency that affected the overt overseas information services of the FO, the British Council and the BBC.  Neither was it subject to the same staffing policies as the FO.*  There’s a similarity with situation in the US during the early Cold War where the Marshall Plan information activities and those of the CIA had more money and more freedom than those of the State Department.  Although Strang accepts the argument that the IRD should be maintained as a covert organization I also get a sense in that part of the importance of the IRD  in this era is because of the additional resource it brings to the overall information effort.

At this point the IRD is the largest department in the FO and is several times the size of the overt information departments.   Strang gives a figure of 288 whereas the total staff of the Information Policy Department, Information Executive Department and the Cultural Relations Department is 83.  The key to the difference is that IRD is producing its own content and has its own people in the field.  I would assume that information officers at overseas posts did not count as part of the IPD establishment somewhat reducing the discrepancy.

I think Collins gives a good sense of what is happening with the IRD at this point.  From 1955 the IRD is  tasked against Nasserite Arab Nationalism as well as Communism.  This continues to be a priority well after the Suez Crisis.  Egypt’s external communications are attacking the British position in Africa not just  conservative Arab regimes.  In the late 1950s Britain wants to rebuild diplomatic relations with Egypt while containing the Nasserite influence.  The result is Transmission X; a sort of asymmetrical rebuttal service to Egypt’s radio broadcasting.  Instead of a classic mid-20th century radio war with competing radio stations directly attacking each other – which might have undermined the goal of repairing diplomatic relations – Transmission X used near real-time reports on Cairo’s broadcasts from BBC Monitoring Service as a basis to produce materials: opinion pieces, scripts that could be rapidly circulated to posts and to their contacts in government and media in the Middle East and North Africa.  The initial concept was to undermine the credibility of the Egyptian broadcasts by pointing out flaws and inconsistencies. Collins sees some success with this activity.  But from an organizational point of view  the consequences are bigger.  IRD is no longer just producing background materials but is now also operating as a full time information service.  The content and scope of Transmission X expanded beyond the narrow agenda of countering Egyptian broadcasts to take in anti-Communist material and even non-political ‘projection of Britain’ fare.   Certainly one gets the impression from the two studies here that one of the consequences of the expanding IRD field presence was for it to be used to fill gaps in the official information services.

The idea that 1955-65 represents a ‘golden age’ for Western public diplomacies crops up  in discussions of the  France and the US as well as the UK.  In this era public diplomacies are expanding as colonial countries gain their independence, public diplomacies are also pressed into service to fill gaps in national media systems and commercial international news services.  From the mid-60s the costs of this start to become apparent, the Soviet and Chinese threats in Africa seem less immediate and gaps in media systems are being filled in so that the scope of these information activities can be scaled back.

The main point is that while the involvement of the IRD in black activities will always be of interest the bulk of what they were doing was much more mundane.  In making sense of British Cold War information activities the covert and the overt need to put into context.

*I’m wondering if the exemption from the normal staff regulations meant that there were more women in IRD. The field staff were carefully selected and included at least three women, at least two of whom had intelligence connections going back the Second World War.

References

Collins, Simon MW (2013). “Countering Communist and Nasserite Propaganda: The Foreign Office Information Research Department in the Middle East and Africa, 1954-1963.” PhD, University of Hertfordshire. https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/14327/04085529%20Collier%20Simon-%20Final%20PhD%20submission.pdf?sequence=1

Strang, Lord (1963). The Unavowable Information Services of Her Majesty’s Government Overseas. CAB 301/399. https://www.psywar.org/content/strangIRDreport.

Egypt’s Strategy of Teacher Secondment as International Influence under Nasser

I recently came across a couple of very interesting papers by Gerasimos Tsourapas (2016, 2018) of the University of Birmingham on Egypt’s use of seconded officials, particularly teachers, as an instrument of statecraft during the regime of  Colonel Nasser.

Before discussing the case there is a broader point about the nature of historical research on public diplomacies. The problem is that our understanding of the historical record is inevitably shaped by ‘big battalions’ of organizations like the Comintern, the USIA, the British Council, the Goethe Institute – relatively enduring specialist organizations with extensive programmes of activities which leave sizeable archival records.  At the same time it is clear that these organizations don’t capture the full extent of public diplomacies, there are many other activities that have been much less enduring, more narrowly focused and on a smaller scale and don’t leave well defined archival trails.  These activities are only likely to become visible as the offshoot of other research, take for instance Kristine Kjærsgaard’s (2015) contribution on the Danish diplomat Bodil Begtrup who launched a whole series of one woman projects across different countries in the course of her career.    Tsourapas’ research has been driven by an interest in migration questions.  His research shows doing the state of the archives doesn’t make things easy, despite using different archives in Egypt he’s had to use the British archives and contemporary media reports to reconstruct the programme.   From the point of view of understanding public diplomacies as a whole  absence of knowledge is not the same as absence of activities or absence of effect only absence of research.

Eight summary points

1. During the period under study Egypt dispatched thousands of teachers across the Middle East.  These teachers were vectors of the Egyptian version of Arab Nationalism, and they tended to indoctrinate their students into the greatness of Egypt and the importance of Colonel Nasser as the leader of the Arab World, including organizing protests and boycotts.
2. The root cause of this was the effort under Mohammed Ali (ruled 1805-49) to reform the Egyptian state, which included the creation of formal systems of education and teacher training, publication of school books etc.  As the rest of the Arab world achieved independence after the Second World War the relative development of the Egyptian education system created an opportunity by which other states welcomed the supply of trained, Arabic speaking teachers.
3. In this context, Egypt made a strategic choice to promote this system of secondment.  Some of the teachers were paid for by the Egyptian government while others were selected by Cairo and paid for the host government.  This process of secondment continued despite the fact that there were teacher shortages in Egypt.  This was part of the ‘Cold War’ (Kerr 1967) between the Arab Nationalists and the conservative Arab States.
4. Money Talks: This strategy was greeted with alarm by the British, not just because of the anti-imperial views propagated by the teachers, but because they supplanted British teachers who were much more expensive to employ.   The cost issue cushioned the whole programme against the opposition of host governments who tended to be unenthusiastic about the political views of the teachers.  Although there were numerous expulsions the fact of Egyptian subsidies to meant that the expelled teachers tended to be replaced by new  Egyptians.
5. The fact that the teachers were Egyptian and the books that they used were also Egyptian tended to raise the prestige of the country.  In addition they emphasized the role of Nasser in resisting the imperialists and the Israelis further underlining the country’s importance.  Cultural promotion and political campaigning were two sides of the same coin.
6. Context Matters:  The reception of the secondment policy varied depending on the supply of qualified personnel.   Tsourapas notes that the break-up of the United Arab Republic was partly driven by the feeling among Syrian officials that the Egyptians were taking their jobs.
7. Although the role of Egyptian radio broadcasting in Nasser’s foreign policy is relatively well known this other strand of foreign public engagement hasn’t attracted attention arguably would have had longer lasting effects.
8. At a theoretical level it’s more evidence for my usual argument that separating ‘attraction’ from material resources and from contexts as many formulations of ‘soft power’ really doesn’t fit with the historical record.

References

Kerr M (1967) The Arab Cold War, 1958-67: A Study of Ideology in Politics. Second Edition. London: Oxford University Press.

Kjærsgaard K (2015) A Public Diplomacy Entrepreneur: Danish Ambassador Bodil Begtrup in Iceland, Switzerland and Portugal, 1949–1973, in Jordan P, Glover N and Clerc L (eds) Histories of Public Diplomacy and Nation Branding in the Nordic and Baltic Countries, Leiden: Brill, pp. 102–122.

Tsourapas G (2016) Nasser’s Educators and Agitators across al-Watan al-‘Arabi: Tracing the Foreign Policy Importance of Egyptian Regional Migration, 1952-1967, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43: 324–41. Ungated version.

Tsourapas G (2018) Authoritarian emigration states: Soft power and cross-border mobility in the Middle East, International Political Science Review, 39: 400–416. Ungated version

 

 

 

Fuzzy Sets and Public Diplomacies

One way that sciences create difficulties for themselves is when their conceptual frameworks diverge too much from the reality of what they are studying.  Concepts are always abstractions but there is a trade-off; more abstraction means greater universality but also less discrimination.  Abstract thinking is much more prone to  distinctions that are much sharper than are found ‘out there’.*

I’ve always thought that one of the problems with research on public diplomacies is a tendency to emphasize categorical; what is or is not public diplomacy, diplomacy, cultural relations or horror of horror ‘propaganda’.  Have worked through so much of the history I think happens here is that we as scholars import arguments from what we are studying.  Countries have generally want to differentiate what they do from the other side’s ‘lies’ and ‘propaganda’.  At the same time at home organizations have protected their turf by constructing conceptual distinctions between what they do (cultural relations, international broadcasting) and what other organizations do (diplomacy, propaganda, development).  When you focus on organizations, practices and programmes ie what actually gets done such neat conceptual distinctions really lose a lot of their importance.

One idea that I’ve found useful is the opposition between ‘crisp’ and ‘fuzzy’ sets (Ragin 2008).  A crisp set is one with a dichotomous membership, ie state versus non-state a potential member is either out or in.  Fuzzy sets have degrees of membership so rather than starting with a cut-off point you start with criteria that would define 100% membership,  potential members can then be scored.  The essential point is that you define the core of the set rather than its limits.   Hence to go back to the state/non-state example you would define criteria for something to count as 100% state (eg finance, legal status, responsive to guidance) and score from there.

This is similar to network analysis where you can assess degrees of membership of cohesive subgroups even within a network where everything is connected.

The focus of my history project is overt civilian, peacetime public diplomacies but in coming up against the historical record, for some countries at least, the overt, civilian and peacetime stuff doesn’t make much sense if your rigidly exclude activities that don’t quite fit.

* This is a rather old problem, I can’t remember who said it  (probably Nietzsche) but the quip that ‘the Greeks invented the concept and thought they had discovered reality’ is a useful one to keep in mind.

Ragin CC (2008) Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Reframing the State/Non State Issue in Public Diplomacy Research

There’s a new article in International Studies Perspectives by by Kadir Jun Ayhan on delineating the boundaries of public diplomacy and a blog post summarizing his argument.  In  teaching students want definitions and so Ayhan draws on his teaching experience to distill a definition of public diplomacy from those offered by several well known discussions of the topic.  A particular issue that bothered Ayhan’s students is the extent to which non-state actors can be said to do public diplomacy  and in his definition he comes firmly (and I think correctly) down on the statist side of the issue.

In reading Ayhan’s post I was struck by the importance attached to the state/non-state issue in the literature.  From working on the history of public diplomacies I think that the importance attached to it is misplaced.  It comes from   the history of International Relations Theory.   All the varieties of state-centric International Relations Theory represent the translation of a legal concept of the state into social theory where states are the actors in international politics. Hence an actor that it is not a state or cannot be treated as an organization with states as members is a non-state actor.   In the development of IR theory this has tended to morph into an antagonism between state and non-state; that the growth of the non-state comes at the expense of the state.  This produces the permanent conflict between varieties of Liberal and Realist theory and arguments over the erosion or persistence of the state.

What this line of development misses is that the modern state as it emerged from the 19th century is a complex of ‘state’ and ‘society’.  In this state and social actors are ‘nationalized’ and drawn into a complex and variable web of relations.  This tends to more obvious from outside than inside a country.  Inside we discuss the legal status of different entities from outside we frequently classify a government, a company, a charity, a foundation by its nationality.  In historical terms this can mean that countries that began to think in terms of national influence fairly early (eg France or Germany) were able to detect the advance of British or American influence long before either country had any formal programme of public diplomacy.  But while the work of American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire or Rhodes Scholarships in the United States were not ‘public diplomacies’ they did have elements which were based on promotion of national influence (eg ‘Americanism’) and they did enjoy degrees of support from official actors, for instance consular support for missionaries.

The history of public diplomacies is full of actors that are associated with but not formally part of states; German mittlerorganizations,  cultural relations organizations, news agencies, charities, civil society groups, friendship societies, broadcasters, private companies and that partly on their own interests, partly on their conception of the national good, and partly on behalf of the state.  However, even acting with or on behalf of the state is frequently a more ambiguous thing, does it involve resources, guidance, approval, consultation?  The important point is that state/non-state is much more complex that it appears at first look and often any distinction loses of some of its importance because of shared nationality.   A ‘non-state’ actor may not be able to do public diplomacy on its own behalf but this doesn’t mean that it’s not a part of someone’s public diplomacy.