Daniela Russ, James Stafford (eds.) Competition in World Politics Global Studies Daniela Russ, born 1987, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph, Canada. Trained as a historical sociologist in Ber- lin, New York, and Bielefeld, she is currently working on her first book, Working Nature: Steam, Power, and the Making of the Energy Economy (1830-1980). Her research interests lie in historical epistemology, energy history and the critical theory of nature. James Stafford, born 1988, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Training Group “World Politics” at Bielefeld University. A historian of Ireland, Britain and Europe since 1750, his first book, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the Eu- ropean Order 1776-1848, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He com- pleted his Ph.D. in History at Cambridge University in 2016, and worked as a Lec- turer in Modern History at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, before coming to Bielefeld in 2017. Daniela Russ, James Stafford (eds.) Competition in World Politics Knowledge, Strategies and Institutions We would like to record our thanks to Professor Mathias Albert, Dr. Mustafa Ak- sakal, Catharina Wessing, Kim Keller and Gaby Trompetero for their advice and assistance with the workshops and with this volume. We are also grateful for the participation and ideas supplied by other workshop attendees not represented in the volume: Jens Bartelson, Aziz Elmuradov, Sandra Holtgreve, Jutta Joachim, Marc Kidson, Iver B. Neumann, Karlson Preuss, Yasin Sunca and Gladys Vsquez. This volume was made possible by funding from the German Federal Research Council (DFG) Research Training Group GRK 2225/1 'World Politics'. The Research Training Group hosted two workshops on 'Competition in World Politics’ at Biele- feld University in 2018 and 2019, which produced the majority of the contributions included in this volume. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National- bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (BY) license, which means that the text may be remixed, transformed and built upon and be copied and re- distributed in any medium or format even commercially, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. First published in 2021 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Daniela Russ, James Stafford (eds.) Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: James Gillray, ʻThe Plumb-pudding in danger, or, State epicures taking un petit souper’ (1805), public domain. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5747-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5747-4 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839457474 Buchreihen-ISSN: 2702-9298 Buchreihen-eISSN: 2703-0504 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper. Contents Introduction Daniela Russ & James Stafford...................................................... 7 Status and International Organizations Status in Early Modern and Modern World Politics Competition or Conflict? Ramy Youssef ...................................................................... 35 Network Power Europe and Competition at the UN Human Rights Council Anatoly Boyashov ................................................................... 61 Social Mobility in the Global Order Rising Powers and the Convertibility of Capitals Katja Freistein & Thomas Müller .................................................... 83 Knowledge, Ideology and Competition The Civilizing Force of National Competition U.S. Nationalist Reasoning in the Mid-to-Late Nineteenth Century Johannes Nagel & Tobias Werron .................................................. 107 ‘Free Trade’ and the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century State Competition James Stafford ................................................................... 133 The Development of Neoliberal Measures of Competitiveness Dieter Plehwe ..................................................................... 155 Competing Powers Engineers, Energetic Productivism, and the End of Empires Daniela Russ & Thomas Turnbull................................................... 183 Competition and Emergent Technologies Diplomacy and Artificial Intelligence in Global Political Competition Didzis Kļaviņš ..................................................................... 213 Small, Smart, Powerful? Small States and the Competition for Cybertech Superiority in the Digital Age Madeleine Myatt................................................................... 233 Between Strategic Autonomy and International Norm-setting The EU’s Emergent “Cyber-Sanctions” Regime Yuliya Miadzvetskaya .............................................................. 261 Afterword Competition During Covid-19 Heidi Tworek ...................................................................... 289 About the Authors............................................................ 301 Introduction Daniela Russ & James Stafford Competition is a central organizing principle of modern world politics. Rank- ings provided by international organizations are predicated on an idea of per- manent competition between states to achieve ‘excellence’ in a range of policy fields: from health and education to defense, inequality and business taxa- tion. Beyond these explicitly organized forms of competition, states are often observed to be competing for less clearly defined goods: power (of the ‘soft’ and the ‘hard’ variety), wealth, attention, influence, and status. They are fre- quently joined (and challenged) in this by a range of other prominent global actors, such as charities, major world religions, multinational corporations, and armed insurgencies. The relevance of competition to contemporary literatures on (among oth- ers) neoliberalism, US-China relations, trade, technological change, energy and security is largely taken for granted. Yet competition itself is rarely prob- lematized or explored in its own right. This volume interrogates competi- tion from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining history, sociology, legal studies and international relations. We believe that this interdisciplinary per- spective is necessary to understand the multiplicity of forms and contexts in which concepts and practices of competition structure modern world politics. In the mainstream IR literature, ‘competition’ or ‘competitive behavior’ is handled in one of three ways. Realist and neorealist scholars make competi- tion an explicit focus of their research, counterposing ‘competition’ to ‘coop- eration’ as one of two possible poles of state behavior under conditions of an- archy, insecurity and limited knowledge. Identifying the factors or situations that might lead states to emphasize ‘competition’ or ‘cooperation’ as part of their strategic posture is a primary concern for this scholarship (Glaser 2010). In Marxian and Bourdieusian approaches to IR, meanwhile, constant com- petition over economic, cultural, or symbolic ‘capitals’ is a prior assumption that is rarely interrogated in its own right (Wallerstein 2004; Bigo 2011). Lib- 8 DanielaRuss&JamesStafford eral scholars of ‘global governance’ emphasize the importance of international organizations as spaces for cooperation, as well as for normative ‘contestation’ over underlying values (Wiener 2014). In this volume, we seek to understand the complexes of knowledge, strate- gies and institutions that make it possible to conceive of world politics in terms of ‘competition’. The contributions gathered here attempt to identify the concrete conditions under which competition has become a globally rele- vant political category. They explore the relationships between different forms of competition in past and contemporary world politics. And they analyze the responses of a range of actors to the specific forms of world-political compe- tition generated by these shifting institutional and ideational contexts. In the rest of this introduction, we identify and explain the main con- tours of this perspective on the role of competition in world politics. The next section explains the need to interrogate the concept of the competition not simply from the perspective of individual state behavior, but from that of “world politics” (Albert 2016)—understood as a historically conditioned social system—as a whole. The third section offers a short conceptual history ofthe term competition in European social and political theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, culminating in the classic sociological accounts of Simmel and Weber. We find that these are particularly useful for constructing a distinction—at once analytical and normative—between ‘competition’ and ‘conflict’. The fourth section then elaborates on this distinction by outlining abrief outline of the structural features and normative justifications for a world pol- itics based on the idea of ‘competition’. The fifth section pivots to a consider- ation of the uses of ‘competition’ within and beyond the discipline of IR, be- ginning with realist, neo-realist, constructivist