Realism vs. Cosmopolitanism

飞雪寒冰

A debate between Barry Buzan and David Held, conducted by Anthony McGrew *


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A.Mc.: A common preoccupation of much contemporary writing about world politics concerns the dynamic interrelation between continuity and change. The end of the Cold War, the intensification of globalization and the ’postmodern turn’ have delivered powerful challenges to the orthodoxy of realism. Among the most significant of these challenges is the cosmopolitan approach advocated by David Held, Andrew Linklater and others. In contradistinction to realism, which assumes a strict analytical separation between politics within and amongst states, the cosmopolitan approach proffers a more unified conception of political life. In this discussion Barry Buzan, a prominent advocate of realism, and David Held debate the merits of their respective positions and assess the strengths and limits of both realism and cosmopolitanism as frameworks for understanding contemporary global politics and its potential for transformation. I began by asking Barry to explain the fundamentals of contemporary realism. What are its constituent elements?

B.B.: The key thing about realism is that it is a political theory and you need to understand that first and foremost. The titles of the two best known realist texts make this very clear: Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, and Waltz’s Theory of International Politics. Realism gives you a particular angle on the world system, but it is a limited angle, focused on power politics. Now there is, of course, a problem about how we define ’power’ and there are lots of different approaches to that, most of which can be comfortably contained within realism in one way or another. Power might be about the capabilities of units to do things, or about the relative strengths of different units compared to each other, or about, to some extent, the interests of these units and the way they define them; it might also be about structural power, the way in which the system itself - that is, the arrangement of the system - actually shapes the behaviour of units within it. Power can be located in the structure of the system. But realism for the most part is interested in the units; even when it thinks about system structure it does so in terms of the units. And it is very much fixated on the state because the state is, of course, the key political unit in the international system. Hence, realism is a political theory; it is a theory of the state.

Realism is a theory that divides the globe into two different domains. There is the domain inside the state which is often seen as progressive, where politics operates and where society can evolve; and there is a domain outside the state or between states - the international relations domain - which is not seen as progressive but as static. This is the domain in which power politics works, has always worked and, in the view of a very committed realist, will always work. So that as long as the international system is divided into states, the relations between states will have this characteristic of being about power politics.

A.Mc.: When you talk about power politics, what are you talking about exactly?

B.B.: I am emphasizing a conflictual view of the international system. Realism assumes that states are all locked into their own survival and into the pursuit of their own interests, that those interests will clash at various times and places and for various reasons, and that because there is no overarching government in the system, then the use of force is always a possibility in the conduct of states toward each other. Power in the realist view, therefore, does have a strong military component. I do not think realism is necessarily wedded to this, but traditionally power and the military have been closely associated in realism because the international system is unmediated by any kind of global authority. In pursuit of their own interests, or in defence of their own interests, states may resort to force in relation to each other, and force is a kind of ultimate test of power.

A.Mc.: Is this why sovereignty is so central to the realist view of the world?

B.B.: Sovereignty is central because it defines what the state is. The idea of sovereignty, as I understand it, is the claim to exclusive self-government, which means that the state is defined in terms of its ability to exert absolute political authority over a given territory and people. This is not the way in which the international system has always been organised; it is the modern European way of organising politically which was imposed on the rest of the world as a condition of decolonisation. The European powers left behind them a world remade in their own political image in terms of sovereign states. Thus, sovereignty is what makes a very hard and sharp political distinction between the domestic domain inside states, and the domain of relations between states.

A.Mc.: Let me come to you now David. In the cosmopolitan account the separation of the domestic and external spheres no longer seem sacrosanct, especially so in an age of intense globalization. Is this your view?

D.H.: I think ’the division’ is certainly called into question. But I am in agreement with a great deal of what Barry has said. The realist focus on political power has been extremely important in illuminating the dynamic relations between states, the nature of the growth in relations among states, and the centrality of war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After all, the twentieth century, despite all its claims to civilisation, has been one of the most violent of all centuries, if not the most violent. But the perspective I take, the ’cosmopolitan perspective’ for the purposes of the discussion, highlights a number of key things. One is that the single-minded focus on political power and the state, which is so much at the centre of realism, is insufficient to examine the complexity of the world in which we live. What the cosmopolitan perspective says is that if power is important, and it indeed is, it is to be found not just in relations within states and among states, but across other dimensions of social life as well. So I would say that an account of the structure of power must be a multi-dimensional account, looking at economic phenomena, political phenomena, social phenomena, technological phenomena, cultural phenomena, and so on. One finds power, power systems and power conflicts in all these realms. Contra realism, I would argue that state power is but one (albeit important) dimension of power; and that aspects of all of these dimensions need to be understood if the nature and prospects of state politics are themselves to be grasped satisfactorily.

A.Mc.: How does this multidimensional account of power relate to the importance cosmopolitans, like yourself, attach to globalization. Is globalization transforming the state and state power?

D.H.: The issue of globalization does raise particular questions about political power and nation-states. On the one hand, many people claim we live in a global world. I call these the ’hyperglobalizers’, who assert that the nation-state is no longer central to the modern world: it is displaced; it is locked into a variety of complex processes; it’s power is denuded by world markets, by the growth of regions, by changing structures of international law, by environmental processes and so on. I think this view exaggerates the nature of the global changes with which we live. We live at a moment that can indeed be characterized as ’a global age’, but the hyperglobalizers have misunderstood the nature of this age. On the other hand, there are those who think that nothing fundamentally has changed for the last hundred years, that the world is no more international than it was, for example, during the gold standard era, and that the relations between states are, in some senses, less complex than they were during the British Empire. After all, the British Empire was an extraordinary political system which stretched across many regions and territories of the world. I think this sceptical view is also wrong but in order to tell you why, I ought to say something briefly about what globalization is and about the view that I take of it.

For me globalization involves a shift in the spatial form of human organization and activity to transcontinental or interregional patterns of activity, interaction and the exercise of power. It is not a case of saying there was no globalization, there is now. Rather, it is a case of saying we can examine and distinguish different historical forms of globalization in terms of the extensity of networks of social relations and connections, the intensity of the flows and links within these networks, and the impact of these phenomena on particular communities. (In making these distinctions I am deploying concepts colleagues and I have been developing in research on globalization for some time (see David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge, Polity, 1999).) I believe if you trace out within this framework the changing structure of trade, finance and multinational corporations, to take just three phenomena, you can show how in the late twentieth century we live in a world in which states are more enmeshed in global processes and flows than they have ever been before. Political power, in other words, is being re-positioned, re-contextualized and, to a degree, transformed by the growing importance of other (less territorially based) power systems.

A.Mc.: Does this cosmopolitan account deliver a fundamental challenge to realist notions of political power and the centrality of the sovereign state in world politics?

B.B.: Well, it raises very interesting questions and I think it goes back to the initial caveat that I made when talking about realism: that it is a political theory. Being a purely political theory it is stuck inside a relatively narrow domain. Accordingly, much of what David has said I can agree with, because if you are thinking in realist terms the problem is that the boundary around the state - that which separates the inside from the outside - has been cut through by a whole load of things - by communication, by trade, and by finance in particular. These are things which realists are not all that well equipped to think about. So what you find is that the political/military sector, as I would call it, which realist theory largely focuses upon, has become a bit less important in relation to what is going on in the world, at least for some states. I’ll have more to say about that later. In relation to the emergence of a world economy, and to some extent the development of a world society, and even in terms of transportation and communication systems, it is clearly naive now to think of a world made up of sovereign states which ’contain’ everything.

In traditional realist thinking, and also historically, there was some validity to the view that the state did contain an economy and society. The idea of a nation-state presupposes that the state embraces a particular society and a particular culture. Mercantilism presupposed that a society contained more or less its own economy, although there may be some trade. Now, all of these assumptions are rather falling away because the economy is clearly becoming globalized. Very few, if any, states now have any pretence at all to autarky or a self-contained economy. And although many societies still wish to preserve their own identity and use the state to do this, there is more exchange, more migration, more ’multi-culturalism’ in some senses, and elements of an emergent world society. There are questions to be asked about all of these things, and the problem is they fall a little outside realist theory because realist theory focuses on the state, and all of these other things are happening, as it were, elsewhere. To put the point somewhat differently: it is not so much that I think that realism is wrong; it is a mistake to assume that the state is disappearing. The state is still there and to some extent, therefore, the realist logic still applies. But other things have become more important and one has to judge realism in relation to the importance of these other areas.

A.Mc.: Can realism accommodate this changing world?

B.B.: Yes and no. I think that in those parts of the world where the old model of the relatively closed, sealed state has faded away, a good part of realist theory no longer tells us very much. I mean if states have become as interconnected as, say, the members of the European Union, just what is the boundary between the ’domestic’ and ’international’? A lot of EU politics feels more like domestic than international politics, and in that sense, the whole realist model is hard put to deal with that kind of development. Where states have become very open and interdependent, then some of the realist theorising about the balance of power (and all that) is clearly less relevant. In such circumstances, thinking about states in terms of traditional power politics is unhelpful. But my sense is that the whole world is not going that way. There are plenty of parts of the world in which the realist rules of the game still apply. If you look at, say, relations in East Asia, if you think about the way in which China and Taiwan relate, or North and South Korea, or indeed Japan to both China and the Koreas, this has an awful lot still of the flavour of realism about it. Accordingly, I think it would be a mistake to assume that the whole world has reformed itself in the same way that the most advanced parts of the world have. My view is that the world is really divided into two or three spheres in which the rules of the game are quite different because the level of globalization is very differently distributed.

A.Mc.: Can I return to you David? In the light of Barry’s defence of realism, should not globalization be understood primarily as a Western phenomenon?

D.H.: Well, I think there is little doubt that the development of global relations and the growing enmeshment of states in economic, cultural and social flows, received an enormous impetus from the expansion of Europe from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And, indeed, if we think for a moment of the British Empire, it was a tremendous impetus to the extension of certain western ideas and practices. The idea of sovereignty itself, secular conceptions of law, the notion of individual rights and duties, the concept of the nation-state itself, as Barry has already indicated, were all ideas which followed in the wake of western power, as it expanded and pushed around the world. There is little doubt that one can think of elements of the processes of globalization as part of an essentially western development. However, having said this, one would want to qualify this remark. Globalization is essentially contested. It is contested in diverse regions of the world. I do not think the West has ever been in the position simply to ’run’ the world according to its own terms of reference - its ’rules of the game’. These rules have been contested in parts of Africa, they’ve been contested in Latin America and Asia; and they remain contested in many regions today. The issue has always been to some extent what form global relations should take and what forms of accountability and law might govern relations among states in this era. This is a fundamental matter, and I think it is a more pressing one perhaps than Barry does; I’d be interested in his reflections on this.

The urgency of the problem today can be highlighted if we return to something raised earlier - the whole question of what is a domestic affair and what is a foreign issue. This is, I believe, a more chronic problem than it used to be. In the era in which states were being forged, it was understandable for them to think that there was a clear division between the domestic and the international, the internal and the external. But now that we have relatively settled nation-states with dense and complex relations with each other, the issue of what is and what isn’t a domestic issue is problematic. Let me just give you a few examples. The BSE crisis today. Is that an English issue? A British issue? A European issue? An international issue? A global issue? It clearly has implications the world over. What is the proper realm of jurisdiction for resolving this problem? Another example at the heart of our future health as well is AIDS. Is AIDS something to be dealt with within states? Clearly, it can’t be dealt with within individual states alone, because AIDS has ramifications for populations around the world. Or, take the issue of energy usage. The use of energy in the heavily concentrated industrialised areas of the West has direct implications for the nature of the weather, agriculture, industrial development in, say, Zimbabwe. Is that a Zimbabwean issue? Take one last example: the question of British paedophiles meeting in Prague or Bangkok to abuse children. Is this a British, Czech or Thai problem? Or, is it a question with global implications? These types of questions involve complex ramifications with implications for the very notion of what is now a proper legitimate subject for sovereign states to deal with. And I think this is because there has been, as it were, a ’global shift’. States have become enmeshed in more complex relations, in denser patterns of interconnectedness. In this sense, I think Barry’s formulation - that the ’realist’ part of the world is now sandwiched in more complex power systems that have become more important relative to state power - is absolutely right.

A.Mc.: But would not a realist response be that the very issues David seeks to highlight are largely marginal to the central dilemmas of world politics: the critical issues of war and peace, life and death.

B.B.: Again, that is a difficult question for realism because in traditional realism there was a rather clear distinction between ’high’ and ’low’ politics, high politics being about diplomacy and war, and low politics being about economics and society and many issues like the weather and disease. And because of the change in the importance of the different sectors that I mentioned earlier, this becomes problematic for realism. But the realists have been fairly agile. The realist line of defence would be that in most areas of world politics - again the emphasis on politics - states are still the principle authorities. And there is nothing that stops them from co-operating with each other. Thus, realists, or at least a good proportion of realists, can live quite comfortably with the idea of international regimes in which states, as the basic holders of political authority in the system, get together sometimes with other actors, sometimes just with other states, to discuss issues of joint concern, and sometimes they can hammer out of a set of policies, a set of rules of the game, which enable them to co-ordinate their behaviour. Now, this certainly does not feel like traditional power politics realism. You can think of it to some extent in terms of power politics by looking at issue power; who are the big players in relation to any big issue? Who are the people who have any kind of control? Who loses out?, etc.. There is, therefore, an element of power politics in this whole notion of regimes, and it does retain a strong element of state centrism. I think the realist would say: if you discount the state, where is politics? Where is it located? You cannot eliminate politics, as some liberals sometimes seem to do. To wish the state away, to wish politics away, is not going to generate results. The good dyed-in-the-wool realist would argue that power politics is a permanent condition of human existence. It will come in one form or another, in one domain or another, in relation to one issue or another, but it will always be there. It will be politics and it will be about relative power. And at the moment the state is still an important player in the game.

A.Mc.: This brings us to one of the defining differences between realism and cosmopolitanism. Surely, for realists the centrality of state power and power politics implies that, normatively speaking, democratic politics and practices have no place in the management of world order whereas for cosmopolitans the democratization of world order is a central ideal? Does not realism assume that regimes and structures of global governance can never be effectively democratized precisely because they are dominated by states, state interests and power politics?

B.B.: Yes. But what do we mean by democratization in this context - the famous ’define your terms’ question! I can answer this in two ways. If you are thinking about democracy as something based on individual rights - the right to vote and to determine the shape of the political universe - then the whole realist approach is very problematic in this regard because, for realists, the proper political domain in which individuals sit is the state. There is a problem about how this notion gets translated upward, and there is also a problem, to the extent that David is right, that as the state loses control over aspects of its economy and of its society, then elements of democracy become irrelevant; the state is no longer controlling those aspects of life for which the people installed democratic control. In this context, there is a problem about the efficacy and relevance of democracy.

But, if you focus on the principle of democratic voting and think about the way in which the United Nations and most other international agencies are actually organised, then it becomes important to recognise that they were formed by democratic states and they do reflect democratic principles. Up to a point in most of these agencies, there are rules of voting which bear very close resemblance to democratic rules of procedure. There is, if you like, a kind of international democracy amongst states which is based on the notion of sovereignty which sees all states as legally equal, even if they are not equal powers. One might object to this as a fudge, but there is in some sense an element of democracy available within the realist vision of the international system, in the way that states relate to each other as legal equals.

A.Mc.: So, the world order is in some sense already partially democratized. Do you agree?

D.H.: Certainly the world order has significant elements of democracy in it. The late twentieth century has seen a phase of massive democratization around the world; more states are democratic than ever before. In the mid-1970s, over two-thirds of all states could reasonably be called authoritarian. This percentage has fallen dramatically; less than a third of all states are now authoritarian, and the number of democracies is growing rapidly. Further, the emergence of regional blocks, particularly the European Union, signals the beginnings of the development of democratic relations among states which is unprecedented in the history of state relations. The United Nations, in addition, is a remarkable organization insofar as it brings together, at least in principle, states on equal terms. These and related developments (such as human rights regimes) have in some respects altered the balance and the nature of relations among states and the way in which the representatives of peoples of the world negotiate and treat each other. To that extent they are very important. But I think, at the same time, they are partial achievements and have some strong drawbacks and clear limits. They are all, as it were, organizational systems based by and large on states, and they give priority to particular state interests. Moreover, they build the hierarchy of state relations and of existing geo-political interests into their very structures. Thus, the United Nations might in principle be a democratic forum, but in practice it is run on a wide range of issues by dominant US and British interests, with significant contributions, of course, from other powerful nation-states. Certainly, the procedures of the Security Council have built into them the veto power of the ’big five’ states.

But there is something more important to stress than this. In a world which has undergone a certain shift away from the sovereign nation-state - marked by the internationalisation of the economy, the development of global financial markets, new infrastructures of communication (the Internet, for example), the elaboration of human rights law, and the development of important transborder problems such as global warming - the plurality of democratic interests can be represented systematically only in a fundamentally different kind of world order. This can be built on some of the strengths of existing institutions: the democratization of the nation-state, the collaborative relations of some regions, and institutions like the UN. But the process of democratization has a long way to go. We should not be despondent about this!

Democracy is not simply one fixed notion. It was first elaborated in antiquity in relation to city-states. It was re-elaborated during the Renaissance in relation to some of the leading cities of Renaissance Italy. It was re-invented with the development of nation-states, as liberal representative democracy. And, today, we are on the edge of a new fundamental democratic transformation. Historians may look back in a hundred years time and say liberal representative democracy was that form of government that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries only to become somewhat of an anachronism in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries as, more and more, the world’s fundamental resources and activities were organised across nation-states boundaries. Some people think that democracy is fundamentally dysfunctional in a world dominated by regional and global processes and structures (for instance, the German social theorist, Niklas Luhmann). However, I believe the contemporary world is one in which we need to re-invent the idea of democracy - not surrender it. The project of cosmopolitan democracy - involving the deepening of democracy within nation-states and extending it across political borders - is neither optimistic nor pessimistic with respect to these developments. It is a position of advocacy.

A.Mc.: I would like to come back to the essence of the cosmopolitan ideal later. Barry, I just wondered how you would respond to the cosmopolitan notion of the deepening of democracy between and within states, or perhaps how a more orthodox realist might respond to this cosmopolitan argument?

B.B.: I am glad you make that distinction! In a variety of ways I think there is clearly a problem, and it is not just a problem for realists, about how the world is structured politically. As I would see it, globalization is primarily an economic phenomenon. It is also in part a logistical phenomenon to do with transportation and communication and the ability to move goods, peoples, ideas, etc. around the world much faster and much more easily than before. But it is not clear what the alternative political structure to the state is, or how indeed we would make the transition from the current order to another. So it may be that the state is in crisis because of globalization, but there is not yet a very clear alternative available. Even in the place where one might plausibly look for a model of the future, and I’m thinking here of the European Union, it is still very problematic as a political construct. We do not know what the political relationship is when you try and disaggregate sovereignty into different levels. It seems like a good idea, but quite how it’s going to be made to work is very problematic and, of course, one of the key themes of that is the so-called ’democratic deficit’.

How do you move ’representation’ upwards and downwards to different levels, while still keeping some notion of sovereignty which can remain the foundation of the legal and political order internationally? I think it is fair to say that the international system or the global system is certainly more pluralist than it has ever been. I do not have any problem with that. But whether it is more democratic, or can be so, I am not sure. I would agree that to the extent that more states become democratic, then there will be a spill-over effect and that will have some democratising consequences for the world system, but this is not necessarily or always a good thing. A realist would look at the foreign policy consequences of democracy and say, well, quite a bit of the time democracies do not behave very well in terms of their foreign policies. If you look at the United States there is a great problem with inconsistency and isolationism; democratic polities can take a rather inward looking self-centred view and may reject concerns with managing the rest of the international system. Realists see this as a problem at the moment. I am thinking here of North America, Europe and Japan. They are all rather inward looking. They do not like casualties, they do not like spending money on foreign issues. There is a sense in which in order to win an American election candidates now have to say: ’I’m not going to be a foreign policy president’, because if they indicate that kind of interest, they would probably lose the election. How you actually re-jig the global political structure away from the state, whether democratically or in any other form, is a problem that simply has not been solved. We may be stuck with states per se.

A.Mc.: So the essence, then, of a realist position might be that there is no alternative to use that phrase, TINA if you remember the Thatcher era!

D.H.: I think there are at least two things I would want to say about that. One is that, of course, democracies are not necessarily simply noble or wise. They are fallible sets of processes and institutions. But the counterfactual of what Barry was suggesting could be taken to imply that the non-democracies of the world would be more noble or wise under some circumstances and, accordingly, could be considered a legitimate alternative. The issue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that we do not have an alternative principle of legitimacy for political affairs other than that of the principle of democracy. It is the principle of legitimate authority and has rapidly become the only one that is generally, if not universally, accepted, although, of course, there are great debates about what exactly this means in theory and in practice.

But the second thing I would stress is this. At the moment in which the idea of the secular state was first elaborated, by Bodin, Hobbes and others, it was largely against the background of a very unpromising set of historical circumstances. And yet two hundred years later, it became the dominant element in the organization of nation-states. If we accept, by contrast and extension, that we live now in a world in which the state has become somewhat decentred and fragmented, locked into complex transnational processes of cultural, political, economic, legal and technological power and so on, then we must begin to consider the political meaning of this - of living at another fundamental point of transition. And the question it seems to me is this: How can the idea of the modern state, so fundamentally important to law, democracy, accountability and so on, be best nurtured and re-articulated in a more transnational world? In response, the argument I would want to make is that this can be achieved only through a cosmopolitan account of democracy, which seeks to develop the idea of the modern state into a conception of governance, shaped and circumscribed by ’democratic law’, and adapted to the diverse conditions and interconnections of different peoples and nations.

The notion of cosmopolitan democracy recognizes our complex, interconnected world. It recognizes, of course, certain problems and policies as appropriate for local governments and national states; but it also recognizes others as appropriate for specific regions, and still others - such as elements of the environment, global security concerns, world health questions and economic regulation - that need new institutions to address them. Deliberative and political decision-making centres beyond national territories are justified when cross-border or transnational groups are affected significantly by a public matter, when ’lower’ levels of decision-making cannot resolve the issues in question and when the issue of the accountability of a matter in hand can only itself be understood and redeemed in a transnational, cross-border context. New innovative political arrangements are not only a necessity but also, in my view, a possibility in the light of the changing organization of regional and global processes, evolving political decision-making centres such as the European Union, and growing political demands for new forms of political deliberation, conflict resolution and decision-making. In this emerging world, cities, national parliaments, regional assemblies and global authorities could all have distinctive but interlinked roles within a framework of democratic accountability and public decision-making.

If many contemporary forms of power are to become accountable and if many of the complex issues that affect us all - locally, nationally, regionally and globally - are to be democratically regulated, people must have access to, and membership in, diverse political communities. Put differently, democracy for the new millennium should describe a world where citizens enjoy multiple citizenships. They should be citizens of their own communities, of the wider regions in which they live, and of a cosmopolitan global community. We need to develop institutions that reflect the multiple issues, questions and problems that link people together regardless of the particular nation-states in which they were born or brought up.

Now, you could immediately object to this as utopian. But I would say to you that it is no more utopian than the idea of the modern state was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the latter was (and is) an idea with short-term and long-term implications. So is cosmopolitan democracy. It is not an issue of all or nothing. For example, at the global level there are certain small incremental things that would make a difference now - the reform of the Security Council, enhancing the capacity of human rights law to be enforced, the creation of a UN peace-keeping and peace-making force that would be less dependent on the concerns of existing geo-political interests. A commitment to a programme of cosmopolitan democracy is a commitment to the extension and adaption of the idea of the modern democratic state and of the idea of democratic accountability to the new global circumstances in which we live.

A.Mc.: Barry, I detected in your argument about globalization and the democratization of world order that it is not only a question of feasibility, but also there is a sense in which there are very important normative issues at stake. Cosmopolitan or global democracy, even if it was feasible, may not be the best way to proceed in terms of human political organization. Would that be an adequate representation of your position?

B.B.: That is a difficult question. I think that David is right that posing the counterfactual requires me to sharpen the implications of my argument. I am not advocating a world of fascists states or totalitarians or whatever - of course not! I am merely pointing out that democratization should not be seen as some kind of universal good; it also carries with it a set of problems. I do not claim to have the answers to these problems, but I would like to comment a little on the kind of picture that David is painting. It does seem to me (and I am taking my realist hat off here because at this point I am leaving behind the great bulk of realists) that there are two things to say. First, as the process of globalization unfolds, deepens and strengthens - and I don’t dispute that this is the world we are living in and therefore that this is a time of transformation - this is going to raise serious questions for political structure. I think these questions are going to be answered in different ways in different parts of the global system. My sense is that in the most developed and most democratic parts of the system, like western Europe and North America, there is probably going to be a layering of power so that there will be, if you like, an unpacking or disaggregation of sovereignty. Political authority will move upwards and downwards, and will exist simultaneously on several different levels. Hedley Bull once referred to this as neo-medievalism and that is not a bad metaphor in some ways. This, however, only accounts for those most developed parts of the system because what you are looking at here is the interplay between the political units of the system and the system itself. And what globalization is telling us is that the system is becoming stronger and stronger in relation to the old political units within it. Now, the strong political units within the system may survive by adapting and adopting some kind of neo-medieval framework, but what about the rest? There are a lot of weak states in the international system and these are going to have much more difficulty dealing with life in the strong system. Some of them are already falling to pieces and it would not surprise me, putting on a futurist hat, if a number of quite substantial unstable zones opened up and became semi-permanent features of the system - perhaps one centring on Afghanistan, one in West Africa, and one in Central Africa. One could imagine there being no effective state structures, indeed no effective political structures at all in such places except for some kind of reversion to warlordism, tribalism or gangsterism, or combinations thereof. In some places this is already the case, and it would not surprise me to see this phenomenon spread so that one had a part of the world which was very highly organised, post-modern perhaps, parts of the world which had politically collapsed and then bits in-between like China, India - the so-called modern developing world. It is not quite clear to me what is going to happen to these latter states. They have a really tough game to play.

Looking ahead a bit further and trying to wear David’s hat a bit more, I can imagine a world in which there might be no states at all in the sense that we now understand them. However, one could still wear a realist hat and say well, all right, we might be in the post-state world, but there will still be plenty of power politics around. It may be pluralist, it may be democratic, it may be structured in all kinds of odd ways, but the logic of power politics will go on and to that extent the realist tradition will remain intact.

A.Mc.: So the circumstances for cosmopolitan democracy are not terribly propitious.

D.H.: Well, I do not think that would be an entirely accurate summary of what has just been said! In any case, I think what has been said is reasonably cautious; and who could disagree with an element of caution. One might perhaps be even more cautious than has been suggested so far. It seems to me extremely important to bear in mind that the West itself nearly destroyed democracy just fifty years ago. Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism almost destroyed this ’democratising civilisation’. The contingency and unpredictability of politics is with us at all times; accordingly, one cannot be complacent either about the continued democratization of the West, or of other parts of the world. Against this background, one can anticipate other fundamental threats, not simply threats from nation-states that are fragile such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, but again from the West itself. One of the most fundamental challenges that might arise in the next century may well follow from the attempt by many parts of the world to emulate western systems of lifestyle, resource use, consumption patterns and so on. There will be fundamental environmental obstacles to their extension. There may come a point where the West’s interest in defending its conditions of life may bring it into sharp conflict with other parts of the world. The environmental costs of western life-styles may well make the pursuit of them elsewhere unsustainable. The West may well not think that the rising demand for raw materials and new energy sources, the extension of industrialization and environmental degradation, and the unmanaged growth of population in many parts of the world is necessarily in its own interests, and serious conflict could follow.

We live in a moment of transition. Many of the old political ideologies are fraught with difficulty. Liberalism has no conception of how one might regulate markets in order to build environmental concerns systematically into market forces. State socialist theories are worn thin if not dead. Many of our political ideologies are at the point of bankruptcy. The task of the political theorist, then, is to rethink our political concepts and to create new conceptual resources which can be reflexively applied in the contemporary world. The idea of state sovereignty, as it were, was elaborated by political theorists and reflexively applied to the new state structures of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think ideas such as cosmopolitan democracy - but there are many other parallel ideas as well - are contributions to new debates about what these structures will look like, and to the extent that these debates are open it becomes possible to lay down new normative resources, new normative conceptions, which might have some bite when people come to think about how a more multi-layered system of authority, in a multi-dimensional world, can begin to cohere in a way which is consistent with the principle of democratic legitimacy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* This discussion was first recorded in December 1996 by the BBC for the Open University course, D316, Democracy: From Classical Times to the Present. It has been adapted and extended for publication.

DONNA-0096

这么长的英文，都……都看完了吗？:lol