Back to Basics: Power in the Contemporary World

Back to Basics: Power in the Contemporary World October 1 & 2, 2010 Princeton University Robertson Hall, Room 015

Friday, October 1

1:45pm Session 4: Power as Ur-Force? Domestic Traditions and Embedded Actors in World Politics Peter J. Katzenstein (Cornell University) 2

Word count: 8,225.

Power as Ur-Force? Domestic Traditions and Embedded Actors in World Politics1

Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University, [email protected]

Prepared for the Princeton Conference Back to Basics: Power in the Contemporary World

October 1-2, 2010

In his writings on power, Stephen Krasner has been as consistent as an orthodox rabbi who advocates praying on the Sabbath. Ours is a world of power. Power is grounded in material resources. The most powerful rule. They bend the rules as they see fit. And they can be blind. Krasner’s view is intellectually austere, rigorously causal, and experientially pessimistic. Without slaying any of his fathers – Machiavelli, Hobbes, Carr, Kennan, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, Waltz, and Gilpin – he found his own distinctive voice as one of the most important realists of our generation. More hedgehog than fox, Krasner held on to one basic insight rather than being distracted by many small ones. He deepened this insight by developing one intellectual skill to perfection: setting up any opposing argument in ways that left it vulnerable to intellectual subsumption. Interdependence, transnationalism, regimes, globalization, ideas, ideologies, beliefs, norms, identity, discourse and other analytical constructs that came, and went, over the decades affected the world “merely” by mediating the world’s Ur-force – power.

This, however, is a partial reading of Krasner’s work. It overlooks a second strand of radical experimentation that explains why Krasner’s ideas were taken so seriously and reverberated so strongly in the minds of other scholars – realists and non-realists alike. Krasner inquired into the fundamentals of realist thought. And when he found those fundamentals wanting, he did not shy away from breaking with them. Indeed, his contrarian intellectual instinct would have been bored stiff had it been condemned to repeat received wisdom for forty years.

In an important book on raw materials policy, Krasner made two novel arguments.2 First, the national interest is not a concept that can be stipulated deductively. It must be studied inductively. Krasner assembled compelling evidence, deploying the national interest as an inductive category. Furthermore, he was able to demonstrate the superiority of a statist account over Liberalism and instrumental Marxism. Second, Krasner inquired into the ideological roots of America’s liberal foreign policy. Based on the empirical cases of raw materials policy, it proved impossible for him to rank the explanatory strength of Realism – which for Krasner in this case meant statism and structural Marxism. He therefore 1 Parts 1 and 2 of this paper amplify and replicate, respectively, material from Katzenstein (2010a, 2010b). For earlier comments and suggestions I would like to thank Martha Finnemore and the participants who met at a workshop in Stanford in December 2009 to honor Stephen Krasner. The writing of this paper was supported generously by Louise and John Steffens Founders’ Circle Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton where I spent the academic year 2009-10. For editorial improvements I am, as always, deeply indebted to Sarah Tarrow.

2 Krasner 1978a. 3 went to another case, Vietnam, to settle the matter. Setting up the analysis in these terms took considerable intellectual courage. In the mid-1970s, junior faculty members in Harvard’s Government Department were neither encouraged nor eager to give Marxism a serious hearing in their scholarship. It was the irrationality of liberal ideology (which had driven the U.S. to disastrous defeat in Vietnam and serious division at home) that helped Krasner to establish the superiority of a structural statist over a structural Marxist explanation of American foreign policy. For Krasner, a liberal ideology crystallizes around core values that can impel profoundly irrational policies.

Two decades later, in another path-breaking book, Krasner – statist per excellence – came to the ineluctable conclusion that Realism is ontologically incoherent.3 Sovereign states are epiphenomenal. They are neither unitary actors nor the basic unit of analysis. States lack autonomy. Too often, their sovereignty is compromised. Sovereignty is thus not a deeply institutionalized norm in international politics. The Westphalian state system is grounded in hypocrisy, not sovereignty. After each breach of an exceedingly brittle sovereignty norm, actors return to sovereignty as the default option in both their rhetoric and their practice. Yet they are always prepared to break with the norm again when necessity or desire so dictate. Rulers, not sovereign states, are the basic unit in international politics. And Machiavelli, not Hobbes, is the preeminent Realist theorist.

In this paper I explore power from the vantage point of ideology and institutions. First, I inquire into the domestic foundations of power, the Hartzian view of liberalism that consistently informs Krasner’s writings on American foreign policy. Liberal values are, for Krasner, coherent and unitary. This is at odds with much of Louis Hartz’s writings, which historicized America’s liberal tradition in the examination of how it expressed itself differently in sub-national, international–comparative and global contexts. In sharp contrast, Krasner’s coherence view offers only a simplified snapshot of that tradition. Krasner argues in his first book that an anarchic international system normally pushes sovereign states toward coherence, political unity and rational policies aiming at survival. Lacking that external push, the U.S. as the most powerful of all states heeds the unifying power of its liberal ideology, which drives it toward the adoption of irrational policies aimed at remaking the world. Students of American political development disagree, denying the existence of a unifying liberal ideology as the foundation for America’s state. Instead, they point to a large ideological space accommodating America’s multiple political traditions.

Second, I follow up on the argument that rulers, not states, are the basic unit of international politics. Rulers are motivated by the logic of consequences rather than the logic of appropriateness. Actor preferences are uniform at all times and in all places, and rulers are intent on maximizing their individual power. The means to achieve that end may differ, but not the end itself. History becomes a storehouse of facts illustrating the recurrence of this constant theme. Krasner’s intellectual move opens the door to a room furnished in minimalist style, featuring only black and white. Other scholars, however, prefer warmer hues and more comfortable furniture. Rather than stipulating a world of rulers or institutions, we can also conceive of a world of rulers embedded in institutions. This enlarges the scope of the questions we pose by including the variability of the means to a given end as part of the inquiry. Max Weber rather than Gary Becker becomes our preferred interior designer. Weber focuses on history, not as the endless repetition of sameness, but as a story of change. In arguably the most personal part of his book, Krasner concedes this point to Weber. He dedicates this book to his two children, Daniel and Rachel, “who do change.”

3 Krasner 1999. 4

In its final section, this paper draws out the implications of these two arguments about multiple traditions and rulers embedded in institutions for the analysis of sovereignty. We are better served by capacious rather than sparse concepts. Intellectual capaciousness gives us the purchase to formulate interesting and novel questions that often sit between the visions of economics and actor perspectives on the one hand, and sociology and relational perspectives on the other. It allows us to escape the strong clutches of paradigmatic thinking and the comfortable cocoon of the like-minded. Working at the interstices of paradigms, with luck and hard work, we can re-imagine the world in novel ways. And we can fashion eclectic analyses that mix and match elements from different analytical traditions. Krasner’s work is testimony to the fact that brilliant hedgehogs, in the end, can act like foxes. Working from within paradigms, they scale or smash the walls that imprison them. We all reach Rome, travelling, as we must, on different roads.

1. Domestic Traditions

For several generations, Louis Hartz’s single-tradition theory of America has shaped profoundly the thinking of scholars.4 His consensus view of America’s liberal culture had an epigrammatic quality that no Cliff Note could rival. “No reactionary feudalism in the past means no revolutionary socialism in the future.” America’s consensual liberalism reigns unchallenged and forever, as Locke’s overweening presence has desiccated America’s political imagination. Liberal and pragmatic muddling through has become America’s homegrown, totalitarian ideology. Since America takes its own ethics for granted, it is free to turn all political problems into matters of technique. Because its reach is total, American liberalism needs no partisan advocates. Liberal unanimity easily tips over into tyrannical conformity. Because it is unopposed, liberalism’s main beneficiary, business, is overcome by a paranoid sense of political impotence. Finally, America’s unconstrained ideological fervor imposes on its foreign policy a messianic impulse to spread Lockean liberalism on a global scale.

Krasner agrees fully with Hartz.5 He argues that America has a weak state and a strong society, held together by a strong ideological glue. Compared to other countries, the American state lacks the political resources and institutional rules to concentrate power. State actors cannot easily resist private pressure, change private behavior or alter social structures. The U.S. has developed into a fine art the fragmentation of political power within and across the three branches of government. The causes of this fragmentation have deep historical roots. Born lucky, international pressures impinged much less on the United States than on other states. Hence power did not need to be concentrated in the hands of a strong state. With the minor exception of the War of 1812, the United States never confronted the credible threat of a foreign invasion. Political fragmentation was countered by ideological cohesion. “America has been unusually cohesive . . . dominant social values did not have to be changed to ensure social cohesion or economic development. America, born modern, did not have to be made modern.”6 Krasner refers to Hartz and to those who followed his lead, such as Samuel Huntington;7 like them, he discounts America’s race problem. For Krasner, both supporters and critics of the American political

4 Hartz 1955.

5 Krasner 1978a, 55-90.

6 Krasner 1978a, 66-67.

7 Huntington 1981, 2004. 5 system subscribe to the all-encompassing Hartzian view of shared liberal values as the most distinctive trait and unifying element of America’s weak state.8

This encompassing liberal ideology moves center stage in the toughest analytical task that Krasner faces in his book: differentiating between two structural explanations. In sharp contrast to both liberal and instrumental Marxist explanations, structural accounts see the state as relatively autonomous from societal interests and endowed with long-term political objectives. For structural statists, the interests of the state are not reducible to specific social interests. States have a political logic all of their own. For structural Marxists, the interests of the state in long-term social stability aim at the prolongation of a system of class exploitation. Although these two perspectives differ sharply, they are not easily tested empirically. To decide the case, Krasner draws on American foreign policy and the use of covert or overt violence during the Cold War. He argues that American leaders were adopting an illogical policy while pursuing their anti-Communist campaign during the Vietnam war. Lacking a rational means–ends calculus, American policy undermined the coherence and stability of both state and society. The irrationality of autonomous state action, Krasner argues, was due to the iron grip of Lockean liberal ideology over America’s collective imagination.9

Krasner did not adopt in his analysis the simple unitary actor conception of systemic Realism. For neorealists, the quest for survival in an anarchic world enforces a unity of purpose and eliminates political pluralism. This is not Krasner’s view. He argues that over time, the harsh systemic pressures of international anarchy or the more benign ones of a world with serious security dilemmas came to matter less and less for the United States. The rise of America to a position of unchallenged international primacy lifted the constraints of the international system. America was freed to act on its internal compulsions. This change led to a shift from the politics of interest (the defense of specific territorial or economic interests) to the politics of ideology (the projection of a totalistic Lockean vision upon the world). In full agreement with Hartz’s consensus view of American liberal ideology, once the United States had the requisite power, it wanted to remake the world in its own image. Graham Greene’s brilliant The Quiet American captures the result for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq: high-minded, simplistic naïveté gone astray in a dark and complex world.

Hartz’s lasting intellectual influence rests on his interpretation of America’s liberal tradition.10 But his earlier and later writings illustrate an acute awareness that there is more to America than one set of coherent liberal values. In his first book, Hartz addressed what we might call the developmental state of Pennsylvania in the pre-Civil War era, pointing to the complex historical roots of contemporary liberalism.11 His detailed inquiry into Pennsylvania’s economic ideas between the American Revolution 8 Krasner 1978a, 70; 1978b, 54-56. Robert Kagan (2006) unknowingly duplicates Krasner’s analysis of Vietnam in his argument about the Spanish-American and, indirectly, the Iraq war. In Kagan’s view, Left and Right in America are divided by small family quarrels, not major family feuds. All Americans share in one encompassing liberal vision and are united in a grand coalition of arrogance and ignorance. This unanimity is what made America a Dangerous Nation. Like Krasner’s, Kagan’s is an oddly incomplete and unsatisfactory view of American politics. It elides the deep and painful divisions, ideological, political and otherwise, that have marked America with its multiple traditions, not only during these two wars but at all other times as well.

9 Krasner 1978a, 332-35, 346-47.

10 Hulliung 2010.

11 Hartz 1948. 6 and the Civil War gives ample testimony to the active role of the state in the economy.12 Jacksonianism in particular became a populist force for equality, displacing a Whig party tainted by whiffs of aristocratic sentiments. The state acted as promoter, entrepreneur and regulator, thus playing a decisive and positive role in economic life. That role could be likened to that of East Asia’s developmental states during the last several decades, with one great difference. State objectives outstripped capacities by significant margins. The alignment of economic and political forces was thus more complex than allowed for by the canonical distinction between interventionism and laissez faire. “It was in the principle of public profit,” writes Hartz, “that the positive character of the democratic theory of state enterprise showed itself perhaps most clearly.”13 The lack of state capacity created disillusionment with those who were implementing ambitious public plans. Corporate development and anti-state ideology grew hand- in-hand and ushered in a very different political era after the civil war. On questions of economic policy, the statist roots of America’s liberal tradition remain visible today.14

In an ambitious, unapologetically Euro-centric work of comparative and international intellectual history published after his landmark study, Hartz located the specificity of America’s liberal tradition in the broader universe of the ideological beliefs of settler colonies in Latin America, Canada, Australia and South Africa.15 He argued that like the United States they were all European seeds, partial fragments of Europe’s infinitely rich culture and ideology. These fragments displayed an intellectual immobility that differed sharply from Europe’s capacity for intellectual self-renewal. Escaping from Europe’s past, these frozen fragments also hoped to sit out the future. Suspension from history has proven to be a temporary solution. The decolonization movement of the 1950s and 1960s began to break down the barriers these settler communities had erected, forcing their fundamentally conservative ideologies to confront the challenges of international and global intellectual developments. Isolationism, nationalism, xenophobia, hysteria and reactionary intellectual movements were evidence of a period of transition as the fragments came to terms with the experience of being reconnected to Europe’s intellectual imagination, now displayed on a global scale.16 America’s bourgeois liberalism stood out as both similar to Dutch South Africa and English Canada, and different from Europe’s feudal fragments in Latin America and French Canada as well as its radical fragments in Australia and English South Africa. Hartz’s comparative analysis leaves little room for American exceptionalism. However, it offers plenty of space for understanding America’s distinctiveness.

Finally, in his last, brilliant and flawed book on global history, Hartz shed his Euro-centrism and placed America in a multicivilizational world.17 His argument is inspired by Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud, and the book is filled with sweeping generalizations about the interchangeability of philosophical superstructures and convertible ideologies, all fundamentally similar in their psychological roots and their secret fusion of the “active” and “passive” moment of human existence. Not a conventional piece of scholarship and with an uncertain pedigree of publication, this book conveys debilitating self-doubt

12 Hartz 1948. Swedberg 2009

13 Hartz 1948, 299.

14 Eisinger 1988.

15 Hartz 1964.

16 Hartz 1964, 22-23, 44-48, 63-65.

17 Hartz 1984. 7 and limitless intellectual ambition. Patrick Riley, whose reading of the text I rely upon here, calls it a “strange and extreme but coherent and compelling book.”18 Hartz focused his attention on the dialectical tension between “action” and “quiescence” to account for cultural absolutes such as various strands of Western and non-Western political philosophy, the major Axial Age religions (such as Islam, Confucianism, Christianity, Buddhism) and modern secular religions (such as natural law and Marxism). That tension generates irrational fears that find their resolution in a religiously inspired compulsive certainty. Western liberalism is portrayed as a distinct part of a much larger ensemble, a respectable instrumentalist rather than principal conductor. The American experience and those of the other European fragments are theoretically too narrow and too averse to Europe’s ideological imagination to permit heroic thrusts and massive surrenders. Hartz’s fragment theory is not subordinate to his “activity-passivity” theory of the absolute.19 Instead, incoherently, the two coexist side by side.20

Hartz’s own writing on American liberalism is thus more variegated and complex than Krasner leads us to believe. Furthermore, students of American history have focused their attention on the concept of multiple traditions, which offers a direct challenge to the liberal thesis.21 Specifically, Rogers Smith has reworked an older scholarly tradition organized around the concept of dueling intellectual beliefs such as Jeffersonianism and Madisonianism, an approach that Hartz replaced when he articulated his unitary view of American liberalism. Smith argues that American political development is marked not only by the egalitarian values of liberal democracy but also by inegalitarian and illiberal ones. It is the clash between these different traditions that time and again has reoriented America’s reigning ideas and practices. The multiple tradition theory argues that America has been shaped not by any one tradition, but by a complex pattern of what often looks like inconsistent combinations.22

In Smith’s reasoning, what Hartz’s analysis overlooks are America’s republican and racial strands. Hartz argues that conflict in America, for example over democratic and economic rights or between majority rule and minority rights, occurs within the liberal tradition. This minimizes the influence of America’s republican tradition.23 Rejecting monarchism generated strong political support for a popular republicanism that was infused with ideals of civic virtue. This republican tradition reverberated with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian conceptions of American democracy and underlay a distinctive form of American communitarianism. In addition, Hartz is virtually silent on the issue of race. To be sure, Hartz acknowledged that liberal slavery was more vicious and cruel than feudal slavery; it denied slaves their very humanity by making them pieces of property rather than relegating them to the bottom of society. But Hartz argued also that the abolition of slavery and the restoration of the slaves’ humanity had revealed liberalism’s generosity. Unlike feudalism, the liberal tradition lacked arguments to halt demands for equality. In fact, contra Hartz, liberal hegemony did not eliminate the institution of racism in American politics. Like republicanism, racism is one of America’s vital political traditions. From the

18 Riley 1988, 377.

19 Hartz 1984, 79-81, 114-17, 273-77. Moreau 2003, 137-74.

20 Riley 1988. 394.

21 Smith 1988, 1993, 1997, 1999.

22 M. Katzenstein et al. 2010.

23 Kane 2008. 8 perspective of multiple traditions theory, Krasner’s insistence on the ideological glue of liberal ideology in support of a weak state is wrongheaded.

Unlike Krasner, other scholars of U.S. foreign policy have followed multiple- rather than single-tradition theories of American foreign policy, disagreeing with the Hartzian argument. They turn to America’s past and see not one but numerous traditions. Walter Russell Mead, for example, distills from American history distinct schools of thought that provide the intellectual and ideological foundation for American foreign policy.24 In his book, Jeffersonianism competes with Madisonianism, Wilsonianism and Jacksonianism. More recently, Henry Nau offers an ingenious reinterpretation of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy to add to our stock of foreign policy traditions or schools of thought.25 Reagan’s conservative internationalism complements traditional Realism and Liberalism. Realist nationalism dates back to Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt, liberal internationalism to Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and conservative internationalism to Jefferson, Polk and Truman. Like Reagan, these three presidents were assertive and deployed military force, when necessary, to expand freedom and self-government rather than international governance.

The multiple tradition thesis undercuts the coherence view of a sovereign American state and accommodates race as a central fact of American politics. Although it is the deepest of all divides, race does not factor into either Hartz’s or Krasner’s accounts. This is politically implausible and intellectually problematic, as Michael Hunt has pointed out.26 Throughout the nineteenth century, American foreign policy has been profoundly shaped by racial categories – in U.S. relations with American Indians, Mexicans, Cubans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese, and in an elaborate racial hierarchy in which the Anglo-Saxon race was deemed superior to successive waves of German, Slavic, Jewish, Latin and Irish immigrants. Woodrow Wilson, as Stephen Skowronek argues convincingly, was a man of the South, a liberal and a racist whose organic theory of history caused him to support tutelary empires over black Americans at home and Filipinos abroad, and to veto the racial equality clause at Versailles. 27 Furthermore, the internationalism of the New Deal was founded on a political bargain between the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and conservative Democrats in the South to continue their long- standing policies of racial discrimination. It is easier for multiple tradition theory to account for the coinciding and partial convergence of liberalism with racism than it is for single tradition theories to do so. And it opens up the interesting question of how, during the last half century in the American South, race has gradually been replaced by religion as the domestic foundation for another wave of American internationalism, this time under conservative auspices.

Contra Krasner, a weak American state is not sustained by a powerful and unifying liberal ideology. Domestic sovereignty is not supported by the crystallization of liberal values. The domestic bases of American foreign policy have been deeply contested well beyond the South. What from the lofty perch of international relations looks like a unity of liberal purpose in pursuit of a single-minded strategy is actually the result of domestic struggles by and over alternative traditions. Typically, Americans are divided and conflicted about what they want and how to go about getting it. Conventional coalitional, sectional, sectoral, institutional and other forms of analysis help us to translate the multiple-tradition

24 Mead 2002.

25 Nau 2008.

26 Hunt 1987.

27 Skowronek 2006. 9 perspective into an understanding of politics that matches well with observable data and connects readily to the weak state and fragmented power analysis that Krasner so rightly emphasizes in his writings.

2. Embedded Actors

In his far-ranging discussion, Krasner focuses primarily on Westphalian and legal sovereignty. He argues that different types of sovereignty do not correlate well with one another. Since the normative veneer of power and ideology is much thinner in international affairs than in domestic politics, the logic of consequences trumps the logic of appropriateness. The historical record, Krasner argues, is unambiguous. Throughout the ages, the domestic autonomy of states has regularly been compromised. At their core, Krasner argues, neo-realism and neo-liberalism are intellectually incoherent. States are not the basic unit of the international system.

Shedding a lifetime of intellectual commitment to the state, Krasner makes a sharp break by adopting Machiavelli rather than Hobbes as his central theorist. “The starting point for this study,” he writes, “the ontological givens, are rulers, specific policy makers, usually but not always the executive head of states. . . . Whether international legal sovereignty and Westphalian sovereignty are honored depends on the decisions of rulers.”28 Since rulers have habitually broken the principles associated with sovereignty, such principles are best thought of as organized hypocrisy.

In Krasner’s theory, actors rule the world. Actor preferences are applicable uniformly across time and space. If the preferences themselves are problematic, they need to be explained rather than doing the explaining. Stipulating simple preferences is thus central. For this task, Krasner chooses the logic of economics. Rulers want to stay in power. How they accomplish this will differ across time and space. Krasner then proceeds to make his empirical case like an economist, willing and able to disregard context and change. His historical episodes of the encroachment on sovereignty are universal stories. Timeless history is nothing but endless repetition.

Krasner’s bold move opens up intellectual space for social versions of actor-oriented theories, such as actor-centric institutionalism or network approaches to international politics.29 These approaches are better equipped to analyze not only the pursuit of power but also the choice of means to pursue and defend it. Rather than tracking only constancy in history, an actor-oriented institutionalism also opens our eyes to processes of historical change and differences in context. Organized hypocrisy marks many domains of politics besides sovereignty politics, including Swedish labor markets (from which Krasner derived his inspirations) and Japanese politics (with its distinction between two spheres of social life, the world of true feelings and the world of social appearances, honne and tatemae). Being able to differentiate what organized hypocrisy means in different contexts, and how it operates, advances our knowledge. World politics is not only inhabited by rulers, but rulers embedded in different institutional contexts. Three in particular concern me here: states, polities and empires.

States are centers of political authority with distinct identities and institutions, endowed with the capacity of collectively mobilizing resources in the achievement of political objectives. They are not the

28 Krasner 1999, 7.

29 Scharpf 1997. Kahler 2009. 10 only such centers of authority. Although centralized-territorial rule is their hallmark, states are not unitary. They take on very different forms. And they persist today in many parts of the world, not unchallenged, but as an integral part of overlapping and intersecting networks of rules. States are often nested in such broader structures of authority, both newer ones such as emerging polities or governance structures, and older ones like historical or universal empires.

The degree of “stateness” and its social context are variable. Compared to continental Europe, for example, the United States is marked by relative statelessness.30 Its elected government is comparatively limited in its power. Individual rights, a litigious culture, a constitutionally mandated separation of powers, and the institution of judicial review all constrain the power of the state. The Presidency, especially in times of national emergency, can acquire extraordinary powers, as illustrated by the policies adopted after 9/11. But the overreaching of one branch of government should not be confused with the creation of an institutionally strong state. Other states such as Japan can draw on broader and deeper sources of state power than can the United States. State power is somewhat smaller in India and perhaps also in China, especially if we refer to China as the combination of both the territorial state of China and the networks that connect a large Chinese diaspora. Historically, the triumph of the European state over alternative forms of political organization was based on its superior record of keeping peace at home, securing property rights in markets, collecting taxes, organizing a common defense, and waging war. Today, at the European level, stateness remains low in the case of Europe’s emerging multi-level polity. It does not exist at all in the case of global umma of Islam. The social embeddedness of the state also varies. State policies and practices may be constituted by domestic norms; they may be guided by domestic rules; or they may be merely permissible under domestic rules.31 The social context in which states operate is variable. It can privilege regime, group, national, or civilizational norms. Michael Mann sees contemporary world politics undergoing complex changes.32 Under the impact of globalization, these changes cause states in some parts of the world to lose control over some political domains, while gaining control over others as the need for increasing regulation of human affairs intensifies. In Mann’s view, states are thus becoming increasingly polymorphous and crystallizing in multiple forms; they do not exist as singular actors.

Polities are a second institutional context for rulers. Compared to states, they are broader centers of authority that are not exclusively territorially based. Ferguson and Mansbach rely on the concept of polity to cover the manifold and increasing changes that have affected the role of the state historically and in contemporary world affairs.33 For them, states and polities are both parts of multiple, overlapping and intersecting networks. John Meyer and his colleagues and students have developed systematically the idea of one global polity that provides cognitive and normative models to help constitute contemporary states.34 Such models provide contemporary states with universal rules in which to ground their claims to legitimacy. As was true of nineteenth century America, far from producing anarchy, political conformity is being generated by the reliance on common cultural material: law, science, civic associations, religious sects and nationalism. Thinking of American analogues for the

30Nettl 1968.

31 Andrews 1975

32 Mann 1986; 1993.

33Ferguson and Mansbach 1996; Ferguson et al. 2000.

34 Meyer 1994. Meyer et al. 1997. 11 international system in the nineteenth century, Daniel Deudney has referred to this as the “Philadelphia system.”35 What was true of nineteenth century America, John Meyer argues, is also true of today’s global polity.36 That polity acts as a consultant and for the most part produces talk that is addressed primarily to constituent states and influences the goals they set (social and economic development as well as welfare, justice, rights and equality). Indeed, “it becomes rational rather than treasonous to propose copying policies and structures that appear to be successful in a virtuous or dominant competitor.”37 The usefulness of the concept of polity thus depends on the empirical phenomena to which it is applied. Political analysis of the European Union (EU), for example, refers to a multi-tiered polity rather than an embryonic federal or confederal system of government. In the case of China, it may make sense to operate with the concept of polity if the inquiry extends beyond the territorial state of the PRC to incorporate the role of the overseas Chinese. And we can refer to Islam’s global umma as a stateless polity.

Besides states and polities, empire offers a third institutional context embedding rulers. European empires exported state institutions to other parts of the world where they provided an overlay to indigenous political forms of organization and loyalty, which eventually nested within the institutional import from Europe. In contemporary world politics, the American imperium is the closest analogue to traditional European empires. It conjoins the powers of a territorial empire with those of a nonterritorial Empire.38 Imperium combines traditional elements of old-fashioned European imperialism with elements of rule that are distinctively new. The system of far-flung military bases and the power of the American military illustrate the importance of the territorial-military aspects of America’s imperium. At the same time, the United States is also a central actor and part of a system that is creating new forms of non-territorial rule, for example in the evolution of governing mechanisms in financial markets or in the standards that help delineate the evolution of consumer society and definitions of individual happiness and contentment.

Historically, territorially-based empires or universal states differ from normal states and polities in terms of size, scope, salience, and sense of task. Interimperial relations are defined by the relationship of subordinate states to the dominant power.39 Empires remind us that an important part of international politics is defined by hierarchical rather than egalitarian relations among states.40 Empires are marked by direct or indirect rule and by differential bargains between the imperial center and subordinate political communities. When empires assert the unilateral right to define the criteria for membership in the community of civilized states – as was true of European states in the nineteenth century and the United States after 9/11 – they move beyond the bounds of realist international politics.41 They operate often indirectly through heterogeneous and asymmetric contracts with local elites who are recruited from

35 Deudney 2007, 161–89.

36 Meyer 1994.

37 Meyer 1994: 13.

38 Katzenstein 2005: 2–6.

39 Liska 1967: 9, 11.

40 Lake 2009.

41 Ferguson 2007; Nexon and Wright 2007; Motyl 2006; 2001; 1999. 12 core or periphery, or are operating as leaders in their own right. An imperial ideology often complements self-professed standards of civility and transcendental convictions. The balance of capabilities between empires thus is often a highly salient factor shaping the manifold types of encounters and engagements that ensue. With the disintegration of the land-based Habsburg and Ottoman empires after World War I, the overseas European empires after World War II, and the Soviet empire at the end of the Cold War, the era of territorial empire has largely ended, as the United States learned only incompletely in its unsuccessful wars in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001.

The non-territorial side to the American imperium has political and sociocultural features. The American imperium has considerable power to define the political norms and rules governing international politics. International regimes, a variety of global governance arrangements, soft law, and various methods of policy coordination are shaped to some extent by the norms and practices the United States has actively promoted during the last half century. In contrast to other empires, in the American imperium these norms cannot simply be broken with impunity by the strongest power, following the dictate of “might makes right.” Instead, significant international decisions are now taken by majority rule, and international arbitration procedures have grown in importance. Both developments have undermined the unanimity principle and the principle of the sanctity of state sovereignty. Furthermore, some norms, such as those prohibiting unprovoked aggression or the waging of genocidal wars, have become widely accepted and, if violated, can result in international sanctions and criminal prosecution of individuals. On issues such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, American policy since 2003 has clearly been affected by strong international condemnation. Indeed, American justification for the war against Iraq is based on both encompassing international norms and narrow American interests. The American imperium thus is not exempted from its own normative pressures.

The sociocultural side of the American imperium goes well beyond the explicitly political aspects of authority and legitimacy. Technological advances and the shrinking of time and space have made available to more people and over longer distances the model of “the American way of life” in all its manifestations, admirable to some and appalling to others. The open door policy that was a hallmark of U.S. expansion in the second half of the twentieth century has created the conditions for the informal penetration of foreign societies by America’s social and cultural practices. The existence of social ties with pre-colonial elites, which establishes the precondition for the successful exercise of informal imperial governance, is less important than the unmediated seductive fascination with the energizing impulses of a liberal brand of democratic capitalism and an entrepreneurial culture that promises self- advancement. As an idea and as a dream, America has always had a non-territorial aspect, spurring both political imagination and fear. Both have grown with the shrinking of time and space, and so has America’s political relevance in global politics.

Although they are important, these three contexts are only illustrative. There exist others, which specific research questions may suggest as being more salient for specific inquiries. Furthermore, actors often inhabit overlapping spaces. This is true of the United States, which is both a state and an imperium. It is true of European states, which are pooling some of their sovereignty into Europe’s emerging polity without relinquishing their stateness. It is arguably true of China which, following Lucian Pye, is not just another nation-state but “a civilization pretending to be a state.”42 And it is true of the stateless umma that provides a context, or weak polity, for all Islamic states. All of these provide different institutional contexts that embed rulers. Machiavelli’s Prince lives not a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and

42 Pye, 1990, 58. 13 short. Instead, he lives in a deeply social world that typically defies Hobbes’s characterization. No ruler is an island. Instead, rulers are part of an institutional world that they also shape.

3. Capacious Concepts

Broadening our analytical focus from encompassing liberal values to multiple political traditions, and from autonomous to institutionally embedded rulers, points the way to capacious rather than sparse concepts of sovereignty. One common way of thinking about international relations focuses on unitary states operating in the Westphalian state system. The multiple-tradition argument reminds us that states are not unitary actors but are moved by the impulses of different and competing traditions – traditions as reflected in the domestic coalitions and institutions that shape their politics. And the perspective focusing on an actor-centric institutionalism points us beyond self-contained and autonomous actors, such as states or rulers, to complementary and overlapping contexts of which sovereignty is only one part.

The choice of capacious over sparse conceptualizations of traditions and actors is in part a matter of individual taste. Some like Gothic more than Baroque. But individual taste is less important than the question we seek to answer and the intellectual ambition with which we pose our question in the first place. For some questions, sparseness will do. For others we need to think more broadly. This shift in perspective may help us to recognize new problems, develop new insights and sharpen our knowledge. It is aided by rich work that has appeared in recent years on the concepts of power and interest.

In their searching reexamination of the concept of power in international politics, Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall have provided us with the foundation for capacious thinking.43 They refer to power as the production of effects, in and through social relations, that shape the capacities of actors to determine the conditions of their existence. Power has two dimensions – type and specificity. It works, first, through two types of social relations, interaction and constitution; power is either an attribute of particular actors and their interactions, or of social processes of constitution that create actors as social beings. And it works, second, either directly and in socially specific ways, or indirectly and in socially diffuse ones. Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy generates four ideal types of power relations: compulsory power in social interactions characterized by direct control of one actor over another; institutional power in diffuse interactions marked by indirect control; structural power, which constitutes an actor’s power in direct structural relations; and productive power as the socially diffuse production of actorhood in systems of meaning. This taxonomy provides a powerful heuristic and organizing device for streamlining the two conceptual moves that I have suggested here. It helps us to focus on processes of constitution and socially diffuse and indirect effects, aspects of sovereign power that are often disregarded by analyses that theorize ideology as a system of coherent values and actors as operating autonomously and outside of institutions. And it theorizes a variety of contexts, of which sovereignty is only one.

Ian Hurd’s inquiry into legitimacy also helps develop a greater capaciousness in our conceptualization of sovereignty. Hurd makes a sharp distinction between self-interested and interested action.44 Based on coercion or legitimacy, various models of social action assume that actors are interested, in the sense of pursuing their interests. Self-interest adds to this generic description. Interested actors act rationally to

43 Barnett and Duvall 2005, 42-43.

44 Hurd 2007, 37-40. 14 pursue a given goal, but we know nothing about that goal. Self-interested action is egotistic toward others and social rules. Self-interested action excludes considerations of existing structures of social relations and institutional rules. Interested action does not. It looks to self-advancement within existing relations and rules. At each decision point, a self-interested actor calculates her situation de novo and seeks to create an arrangement that is maximally beneficial to the self without regard to existing institutions. In this account, self-interested action is revisionist; interested action is status quo oriented. In self-interested action, nothing is taken for granted or valued for its own sake; the focus is on the payoff that accrues to the self. Self-interested action assumes actors who are constantly recalculating their benefits. Loyalty to institutions and long-term relations are contingent on positive payoffs. When payoffs change, there are no sticky institutions or relations holding actors back from pursuing alternative courses of action to maximize their self-interests. Applied to the second part of this paper, this distinction between self-interested and interested action is useful to help us work with actor-centric institutional theories of social action.

Capacious concepts can help us capture analytically a political reality that is marked by multiple rather than single political traditions and by actors who exist as institutionally embedded rather than autonomously. Furthermore, such concepts are likely to analyze political arenas and policy processes more adequately if they rely on the rich analytical vocabulary of power and interest that Barnett, Duvall and Hurd have made available to us. Choosing this avenue toward the analysis of sovereignty may fall outside of the boundaries of paradigmatic research and lead instead to more eclecticism.45

Thinking about America as a civilizational empire, for example, offers a line of analysis that goes well beyond our conventional categories of American state power and hegemony in the Westphalian state system. Anatol Lieven likens America to ancient China, Rome, the early Islamic caliphates, and perhaps parts of the Soviet empire.46 They were neither military empires like the Mongols, nor European seaborne Herrenvolk empires. Civilizational empires unite many different ethnic groups under one language and culture and leave their legacy to shape the history and character of successor units long after they have vanished from the scene. The assimilatory capacity of America and the institutionalization of multiculturalism are impressively large. And so are its economic and military success as well the vitality and global salience of its culture. America became a civilizational empire only after it had eradicated legally sanctioned racism and substantially weakened racial prejudice. Language, creed and culture, not race or ethnic origin, are the operative criteria for American membership.

State sovereignty is only one among several important aspects in this conception of America’s engagement with the world. The terms of engagement are more complex than conventional views of sovereignty in the Westphalian state system can acknowledge. They include the processes by which multiple traditions are remade. And they include also relationships between the core of the empire and various peripheries living in different cultural distances such as Europe, China and the Islamic world. For those interested in sovereignty, much speaks for relying on more rather than fewer analytical categories to capture a complex world marked by multiple political traditions and actors who inhabit institutions they do not control.

45 Sil and Katzenstein 2010a, 2010b.

46 Lieven 2004, 41-47. 15

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