History taught in schools throughout
much of the post-colonial world is a tale of colonisation, anti-colonial
resistance and finally self-determination. From this point on, history serves
the same purpose – of upholding States’ sovereign claims and preserving the
bureaucratic apparatus- as it did in the Western world a century before.
In 2014 the Scottish Referendum once
again brought to light questions surrounding the logic of devolution of power
and nature of federal relations; variations in voting behaviour across local,
national and supranational elections; lessons for other secessionist movements;
the nature of empire and anti-imperialist movements across space and time.
But above all, this democratic
exercise is an opportunity to re-examine certain long-standing assumptions
about the motivations that drive political behavior, chiefly nationalism and
its discontents.
Nation
as container category
Around the world, the writing of
history has served the cause of construction and consolidation of national
identities. This trend has been true across space as well as time as
post-colonial histories of the mid-late twentieth century demonstrate, inspiring
a body of literature that discusses the idea of nation itself as an imagined
community. But the main motivation
behind projection of a unified identity is to buttress allegiance to the
sovereign. Thus history has been widely mobilised to entrench the idea of
sovereignty which constitutes a key pillar of the Westphalian order of
nation-states.
The notion of competing nation states –
based on the understanding of external sovereignty – in an anarchic world
system is precisely what the Realist school of International Relations theory
is based on. Indeed, the dominance of Realism in the discipline is owed to the
analytical preponderance of the Westphalian schema. For much of the twentieth
century, the nation state has been firmly in the driver’s seat in peace as in
conflict and hence the seductive appeal of the Realist framework of
self-interested states operating in a setting akin to the Hobbesian state of
nature. Incidentally, the same nationalistic discourse turned inward also
mobilizes support around the realist policy prescription of accumulation of
hard power.
But it is this very dependence on state
as the sole significant actor and the international of “system” as the only
relevant level of analysis that has exposed the inadequacies of the existing
theoretical toolkit towards explaining a shifting transnational landscape of
conflict. Present-day conflict is marked
increasingly by sub-national hostilities, many of them a result of localised
issues but aggregated at the supranational level through trans-boundary movement
of information, weapons and people. One of the most transformative outcomes of
globalisation has indeed been the revival of the local and the contestation of
the national both, bottom-up and top-down.
Admittedly, the Liberal school of
international relations theory has long preached study of the sub-national
level, departing from the notion that only systemic factors are significant.
Focusing on the sub-national level has yielded two sets of results: one
theoretical, the other with real-world policy implications. Theoretically, the
liberal school has tasked itself with identifying how national characteristics
and regime features can be a predictor of external actions. The policy lesson propagated
by Liberal IR scholars has been that in an age of globalisation, the
interdependence fostered through trade raises the opportunity cost of
inter-state conflict and resets the normative paradigm at the systemic level in
favour of cooperation. But this outlook too is premised on absolute,
undiminished internal sovereignty, limiting its applicability in an era where
the greatest challenge to the sovereign stems from within the territorial
boundaries.
Eurocentric
Narratives
International Relations scholars have
wavered between the extremes of accepting templates of periodization evolved by
historians as given and identifying patterns and drivers that deeply
problematize them. It is on the issue of periodization that the Eurocentric
bias in the mainstream of both disciplinary traditions is most evident.
Textbooks in particular have long used milestone events in Europe as pegs for
localised narratives, however “independent” or nationalistic. History taught in
schools throughout much of the post-colonial world is a tale of colonisation,
anti-colonial resistance and finally self-determination. From this point on,
history serves the same purpose – of upholding States’ sovereign claims and
preserving the bureaucratic apparatus as it did in the Western world a century
prior. The impact of this method of teaching history should not be
underestimated since for most people it is the only contact with the
discipline. Extending the point to the academic realm it could be argued that
the very existence of the debate on whether certain Eastern communities (Hindus
for example) are people without history is a figment of the Orientalist
discourse and ultimately a European understanding of what legitimately
constitutes historical record.
The dominance of Eurocentrism and
Nationalism in both disciplines is in fact related. The Braudelian longue vue
on history has been a stark reminder that nation states have been just one way
of organising territory and social and political life and one of very recent
vintage at that. This insight has freed students of IR from a straitjacket of
sorts allowing them to consider the relationship between national and other
competing forms of identity and conflict, instead of treating nation states as
an endogenous variable. Add to that the contributions of global historians such
as Janet Abu Lughod and Kenneth Pomeranz which have recast periodization as a
factor to be debated and variously demarcated rather than a given.
Buzan and Little sum up this
development as follows:
“The idea of international systems is
historically robust. It is valid both as a way of looking at history and as a
way of connecting theoretical analysis of the present to the data base of the
past.”[i]
In addition to specifying features of
what could be termed an international system however, historians have driven
home the argument that international systems existed in the pre-Westphalian
order. Also, debates among global historians have yielded overlapping international
systems discernable across geography and time, depending on reading of archival
data. Thus we have the much needed shift in analytical paradigm away from
understanding sovereign units as the only relevant actor in the international
system – whether as the black-box of the realist or the bundle of regime
characteristics as in the liberal school.
The need to grapple intellectually with
the beast that is globalisation has required contending with forms of
territorial organisation other than the nation-state. The approach of setting
aside the nation as the disciplinary container category was embraced by
historians who gradually retrained their sights on pre-modern forms of
organising territory and constituting polities. Some of them arrived at the startling
result that globalisation is no recent phenomenon but closely resembles
patterns in medieval and early-modern history.
This finding is significant to the most
pressing present-day dilemmas: Why is the appeal of primordial/tribal
identities gaining ground in an increasingly interconnected world? Even as we
witness democratisation in many parts of the world, why do new democracies not
conform to the ideal type of “liberal democracy”? Why is the conventional
Weberian monopoly over the use of force wielded by the State proving woefully
inadequate in dealing with non-state actors who challenge the legitimacy of the
current order?
The likes of Mahmood Mamdani have
argued in favour of understanding fundamentalism as a reaction to the
pre-eminence of state and the Western liberal order that it symbiotically
functions within rather than as emanating from a stagnant, essentialist understating
of culture. Olivier Roy’s succinct formulation that “neofundamentalisms embody
the crisis of the nation state”[ii]
is a reminder that the Westphalian order, far from being the end of history, is
more likely a blip.
Appeal
of divergent identities
The Scottish referendum is a reminder
that members of the same political community can find divergent identities
appealing at any given time or the same identity variously relatable across
time. In many other parts of the world one observes that variations in the
reach of state institutions (e.g. weak rule of law)and efficacy of delivery of public
services across the territorial jurisdiction of a state creates room for
alternative forms of socio-economic organisation. Globalisation and the
attendant loss of control over their fortunes experienced by individuals and
communities has weakened allegiance to certain long-standing identities and
galvanised certain others. A wedge of sorts has been driven between nations and
the states that contain and encompass them and it is during periods of crisis
that the strength and viability of existing state structures is truly tested. A
study of International Relations that is global in outlook and grounded in the
evolving landscape of historiography will enable us to better adapt to the
effects of globalisation and constructively manage conflict.
(Kalyani Unkule is the
Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean for Research and International
Collaborations, at Jindal Global Law School, Jindal Global University)
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