Nomads, Empires, States Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy Volume I
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Prelims.qxd 31-8-07 04:34 PM Page iii Nomads, Empires, States Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy Volume I KEES VAN DER PIJL Prelims.qxd 31-8-07 04:34 PM Page iv First published 2007 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Kees van der Pijl 2007 The right of Kees van der Pijl to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2601 6 ISBN-10 0 7453 2601 3 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England Prelims.qxd 31-8-07 04:34 PM Page v Contents Preface vi Acknowledgements xiii 1 Foreign Relations and the Marxist Legacy 1 ‘An Absolute Humanism of History’ 1 Epistemology and Practical Method 12 The Analysis of Modes of Foreign Relations 16 2 Tribal Encounters 25 Difference, Communication, Foreign Relations 25 The Marxist Legacy in Ethnography 38 Space, Protection, and Exchange in the Tribal Mode 44 3 Imperial Universalism and the Nomad Counterpoint 61 Sedentary Civilisations and Semi-Barbarian Nomads 62 The Frontier as the Mainspring of Empire 76 The Inner Asian and Sea Frontiers of China 89 4 The Conquest of the Oceans – Ethnogenesis of the West 110 Frontier Wars of Western Christianity 110 Imperial and Nomad Aspects of the Atlantic Turn 123 Transoceanic Population Movement and the American Frontier 149 5 Worlds of Difference 164 The Other World of International Relations 165 Tribal Trails and Urban Jungles 183 Nomad Routes to Global Governance 198 References 215 Index 231 v Prelims.qxd 31-8-07 04:34 PM Page vi Preface My aim in the present study is to broaden the domain covered by the discipline of International Relations (IR) to relations between communities occupying separate spaces and dealing with each other as outsiders. This is an ambitious project vastly enlarging the field and raising a host of intellectual challenges. But there are simply too many contemporary world–political phenomena beyond the self- imposed horizon of the discipline to escape the conclusion that the very notion of the ‘international’ must be re-examined if we want to come to grips, theoretically and practically, with the world politics of today. This after all is the central terrain on which the survival of the human species and the preservation of the biosphere, under threat from an impending catastrophe, will be decided. All others are ‘dependent variables’. The current conjuncture of an unravelling world order in fact facilitates such a rethink. As in the ‘twenty years crisis’ between the two world wars, ‘global governance’ by the West (this time to impose neoliberal market discipline and competitively elected government) has turned out to be an illusion. In the 1930s and 1940s, the realism of Anglo-American theorists and practitioners of international relations, such as E.H. Carr, George Kennan, and others, articulated the insight that power politics cannot force the world into compliance with something materially out of reach. Unfortunately it also gave IR a state-centric and, by placing the ‘nation-state’ at the centre of analysis, Eurocentric and ahistoric imprint. Theories of imperialism (dominated by Marxism) and geopolitics (perverted by Nazi thinkers) were discarded; the study of historic civilisations and their relation to world order, exemplified by the work of Toynbee and others, was dismissed as woolly headed idealism, antithetical to science. True, aspects of all these traditions were later allowed back in to some extent. Global or international political economy (IPE) in this respect deserves a place of honour, especially once we accept, to quote Robert Cox (2002: 79), that ‘the real achievement of IPE was not to bring in economics, but to open up a critical investigation into change in historical structures.’ In this study I seek to push this investigation a step further in the area of relations among communities occupying separate spaces vi Prelims.qxd 31-8-07 04:34 PM Page vii Preface vii and considering each other as outsiders. The ‘international’ is a historically specific, but not the final form of such relations. People today are exposed to ‘foreigners’ to a degree and on a scale never before seen in history. With more than half of the world’s popu- lation now living in cities, each containing large non-native or otherwise different communities, due to unprecedented migratory pressures, global politics is present on every street corner – but not as a balance of power among states, although that too is part of the complex of historical forces which brought about the frontiers and boundaries cutting across the present world. Indeed the contemporary crisis of globalisation and the prolifer- ation of conflict it entails, points into the past as much as it reveals a possible future. It lays bare an underworld of foreign relations of earlier provenance which cannot be dealt with by a global governance for which the West writes the rules, nor by diplomacy backed up by military means. A crisis, Kaviraj writes (1992: 81), opens up the future dramatically by forcing us to abandon the lines of extrapo- lations from the present which we specially favour and to understand the range of possibilities, but in a significant sense it also opens up the past. It forces us to look into complexities of the past and reconsider lines of possible development which existed but might not have materialised, or towards which we may have been indifferent. Samuel Huntington deserves credit for having restored at least one line of extrapolation in the study of world politics, the analysis of ‘civilisations’. Clearly his thesis of a ‘clash of civilisations’ oper- ating on a level different from the relations among sovereign states, remains hostage to a naturalised view of eternal strife modelled on Cold War realism. Also his identification of Islam as an antagonist of the liberal Christian West (with a Chinese threat thrown in for good measure) comes suspiciously close to the agenda of a resource- hungry civilisation intent on mobilising all possible forces to confront the currently most ambitious contender to Western primacy. Yet the argument is a reminder that the conquest of the globe by capital, interacting with the expansion of the West, has all along involved ‘clashes of civilisation’; just as the resonance of Huntington’s thesis may be an indication that the global reach of the West is faltering and the substantive reality of different traditions and types of society is becoming evident once again. But clearly this cannot rely on the imagery of an ethno-religious plate tectonics. The method of investigating cultural difference in its relation to world politics must Prelims.qxd 31-8-07 04:34 PM Page viii viii Nomads, Empires, States radically break with the naturalisation of conflict, certainly now that the logic of a war without end, the ‘War on Terror’, threatens to engulf all political argument. The approach to foreign relations proposed in this study is inspired by Marx’s critique of liberal economics. Marx aimed to historicise and denaturalise the capitalist market economy coming of age in his lifetime by showing that there had been other forms of economy, which continued to play a role in the contemporary context; just as there was a possible new economy gestating inside the capitalist one, negating the capitalist form of economic life and mobilising the social forces to transcend it. Understanding the present as history goes to the heart of historical materialism, and I will take this method as my point of departure. This choice should not be mistaken for a sectarian commitment; on the contrary. The Marxist legacy as it exists has largely failed to develop its own method in the area of foreign relations, and politically it has run aground – for the time being. Still, its basic premise, that all existence is historical, the result of the exploitation of humanity’s relationship with nature, and that social life is therefore destined to change towards novel forms just as it emerged from different relations in the past, in my view constitutes the beginning of all wisdom. In this sense historical materialism is not a method of lifeless academic observa- tion, but a pedagogy of hope. There is no preordained goal to which history is moving; but humanity would do well to develop such goals in the light of present and future challenges and thus provide direction to what would otherwise be an aimless, vegetative exis- tence. Of course these goals will always be contested themselves, but that is the stuff of history too. That there did not emerge a Marxist analysis of foreign relations that is not derived from economics is due largely to the fact that the critique of liberal economics was Marx’s preoccupying aim. Even so, the methodology of his writings is not ‘economistic’ in the sense that would make the economy the deus ex machina that explains everything else.