System, Structure, and World Order by Regan Maynard Burles Master Of
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Analogies of the international: System, structure, and world order by Regan Maynard Burles Master of Arts, University of Victoria, 2014 Honours Bachelor of Arts, University of Ottawa, 2012 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of Political Science © Regan Maynard Burles, 2021 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. Supervisory Committee Analogies of the international: System, structure, and world order by Regan Maynard Burles Master of Arts, University of Victoria, 2014 Honours Bachelor of Arts, University of Ottawa, 2012 Supervisory Committee Dr. R. B. J. Walker, Department of Political Science Supervisor Dr. Scott D. Watson, Department of Political Science Departmental Member Dr. Gregory Blue, Department of History Outside Member ii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. R. B. J. Walker, Department of Political Science Supervisor Dr. Scott D. Watson, Department of Political Science Departmental Member Dr. Gregory Blue, Department of History Outside Member This dissertation examines the boundaries of world politics expressed in claims about the ‘global’ character of international order. The presence of a single political order that covers the surface of the globe—the international system—is often treated as axiomatic in international relations. Animated by the tension between this claim to global scope and critiques of world politics in international relations, this study investigates the way discourses of international politics sustain claims to global political unity. I do this through analyses of literatures that chart the past (the globalization of international society), present (theories of structure and the problem of world politics), and future (Kant’s Cosmopolitan Right) of world political order in international relations. I argue that discourses of international politics sustain claims to global political unity through a specific understanding of order: system, understood as an irreducible relation between parts and whole. While descriptions of the international system abound, prevailing theoretical oppositions in international relations (such as anarchy and society, and hierarchy and equality), presume a particular account of an already present order that they describe. As a result, I argue, these theories of international order provide an implicit answer to some of the most intensely contested questions in world politics, such as the relationship between unity and diversity, that sets boundaries on imagining possibilities for political order on a planetary scale. iii Table of Contents Supervisory Committee…………………………………………………………………………...ii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iv Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..v Global, international, order 1 Chapter 1: Order in the anarchical society: Bull’s metaphysics of system 33 Chapter 2: The domestic analogy and world politics 66 Chapter 3: Structural variations: Three analogies of order 95 Chapter 4: Kant’s domestic analogy: International and Cosmopolitan Right 131 Chapter 5: Globalizing the international: The genesis of world political order 168 Boundaries of world order 195 Bibliography 202 iv Acknowledgements This work is the product of intellectual and material support from a number of individuals, collectives, and institutions. None of it would be possible without the intellectual and institutional paths opened by Rob Walker. The intellectual challenges, patient conversations, and sharp interventions from Rob over the years have steered my work in ways that I continue to discover and appreciate. Rob has provided a model of intellectual conviction, integrity, and inspiration that I continue to learn from. Scott Watson has been an important source of support throughout my graduate career, as a teacher, co- author, committee member, and an excellent guide to my first ISA conference. Thanks to Gregory Blue for serving on my dissertation committee and providing detailed and thought-provoking feedback on the work, from which it benefitted substantially. I am also grateful to Professor Siba Grovogui, Department of Africana Studies at Cornell University, who served as external examiner. Thanks also to Joanne Denton, Rosemary Barlow, Joy Austin, and Rachel Richmond who steered me ably through the administrative shoals of graduate school. Gordon Black, Tyler Chartrand, Phil Cox and Olivia Burgess, Phil Henderson, Janice Feng, Guillaume Filion, Susan Kim, Sasha Kovalchuk, David Lark, Matthew Law and Elsome Tsui, Aaron Mills, Kate and Lenore Newman, Pablo Ouziel and Karen Yen, and Kim Smith were all sources of intellectual challenge, friendship, and fun. Along with the above, Marta Bashovski, Joanna de Vasconcelos Cordeiro, Janice Dowson, Will Kujala, David Miller, and Didier Zuniga read early versions of parts of this work and I thank them for their feedback and encouragement. Jacqueline Best and Tom Lundborg also provided advice and support during key moments of the project. I am grateful for the financial support of the University of Victoria Department of Political Science, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies. The Centre provided an enriching intellectual environment in which to complete the dissertation, and where Can Zhao was a friendly and encouraging officemate. Most of Chapters 1-3 were written at the Senate House Library in London, while I was a visiting student at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. I thank Alvina Hoffman, Madeleine Lindh, Jef Huysmans and Kimberly Hutchings for making me feel welcome there. Thanks also to Simon and Roxy, and especially Alan and Gilly, for their friendship and accommodation. Material from Chapters 1 and 5 were presented to audiences at the ISA in San Francisco, USA in April 2018; the BISA Postgraduate & Early Career Researcher Conference in Portsmouth, UK in April 2019; and at the Centre for Global Studies in November 2019. My family, especially Ryan, Charlene, and Jarryd; my parents, Kent and Carolyn, and my sister Kayla, all provided unfailing love and support over the last almost-decade of my graduate education. And finally, thanks to Jasmine Liu, my best friend and partner, whose love, strength, and encouragement are a daily inspiration. v Global, international, order Debates in world politics are characterized by simultaneous claims to both political unity and diversity. While these claims take many forms, they generally express an opposition between an international conceived as a collection of particular political communities in the form of states and an international conceived as the universal political community of humankind. The international is split along these lines by a number of familiar dualisms such as universal and particular, local and global, state and system of states, or, in the parlance of the currently ascendant international nationalist movements, nationalism and globalism. Not only do these options animate many of the most vigorous and influential debates that characterize the discipline of international relations, but they in large part determine the limits within which contemporary political struggle takes place. Furthermore, they are expressed in numerous problems and debates that shape research on international politics, including those related to positions expressed by categories such as realism and idealism; the distinction between citizenship and humanity; conflicts between the authority of state law and of international law; and to the relation between state sovereignty and the globalizing forces of capitalist economic activity, to name only some among many others. Amidst these often violently negotiated oppositions, however, there is one source of agreement: that there is a single political order that covers the surface of the globe—the international system. Most approaches in international relations consider world politics as a politics that is in some way beyond the system of states. Scholars identify world-scale political order with a variety of phenomena like the development of a capitalist world-economy;1 gendered, raced, and classed 1 Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Saskia Sassen, Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages, (Princeton university press, 2008). 1 identities linked to imperial and colonial hierarchies;2 global social movements;3 or a world society,4 that have fallen outside the conventional ambit of state-centred theories of international order.5 The various social, economic, and technological interconnections that span the globe are now familiar in discourses of globalization. Less familiar, however, is the discourse of political globalization linked to these others, and largely explored in international relations. This dissertation examines the way these approaches share an account of political unity—that of an international political order coextensive with the surface of the globe. Despite growing attention to various arrangements of international order, theories of international relations are rarely studied as theories of an already-existing planetary political unity. I thus investigate the conceptual resources through which discourses of international politics