TY - JOUR
AU1 - J, Katzenstein, Peter
AB - Abstract This article makes its case against the reliance on binaries that is pervading our analytical and political conceptual universe under a variety of labels—Western vs Non-Western, West vs Rest, and Occident vs. Orient. These reductions are misleading as analytical short-cuts and pernicious as political projects. Theoretical complementarity provides us instead with an opportunity to divide our labor, extend our causal arguments, and show a measure of humility as we advance unavoidably limited theoretical claims. This argument is presented in two steps. In the first section, this article inquires into the distinction between Western and Non-Western International Relations Theory. In the second section, it discusses common knowledge and theories and tacit knowledge and world views. In both sections, the article argues for an approach to the two types of knowledge that is complementary, not binary. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, … And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? W.B. Yeats The Second Coming (1920) Yeats lived in confused and confusing times. And so do we. The chaos that confronted Yeats at the end of World War I was total. A world had been washed away in torrents of blood and tears. Physically and psychologically, the old order had collapsed. Something new was waiting to be born. Yeats’s fears turned out to be well-founded. Less than two decades later, the rough beast, moustache, and all had reached Bethlehem. To reduce confusion, we look for better and more knowledge. Two recent books draw on insights drawn from physics: Randall Schweller’s Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple draws on Newtonian physics1 and Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science on quantum physics.2 Both seek to enhance our knowledge of the theory and practice of international relations (IR). To the best of my limited understanding, although quantum physics has been proven superior by the canons of science, the two theories are complementary. The nature of that complementarity remains one of the great mysteries and interpretive challenges of modern physics. In Randall Schweller’s view, the modern Thirty Years War (1914–1945) occurred in the good old days. The bad ones are upon us now. He argues that hegemonic war clears away the underbrush and instills new energy and vitality.3 Creative destruction breaks old log-jams, makes new hegemons, and creates a new order.4 The nuclear revolution and economic globalization has robbed the world of the bracing effects of this kind of war. Furthermore, without the salutary effects of hegemonic war and absent the willingness of citizens to abdicate their rights to a strong state defending their physical survival, states are weak and lack the capacity to act.5 We are, thus, condemned to experience a different kind of chaos born from cycling between deadening paralysis and frenetic activity. For Schweller, we live in the age of entropy. Energy is no longer converted into useful activity. What is left is all-encompassing, disorienting chaos. Schweller’s book is marvelously imaginative and consistently ambiguous. Drawn from the world of Newtonian physics, its central metaphor is problematic in assuming that the international system is closed when in fact it is open.6 Its argument thus vacillates. Is this a finite territorial or an infinite informational world, or is it moving from finite territorial space to infinite informational space? Or is the world cycling, predictably or unpredictably, in and between different sites and situations?7 In contrast, beyond any given wave function, quantum physics insists on the existence of an infinite number of possible worlds that collapse into the one real world we inhabit only at the point of measurement.8 Nature is active and creative rather than passive and repetitive. It is not moving inexorably toward a fictitious point of equilibrium. Instead, it is marked by novelty and the unexpected, the precise opposite of entropy. The Greek word energeia does not mean only ‘activity’ and ‘working’;9 it can also be translated as a situationally specific potential capacity waiting to be actualized.10 Human beings are creative bundles of potential realities, not robots enacting fixed programs. Experience is not grounded in a world of separable, presocial individuals struggling to achieve sociability, without historical context. It is grounded instead in a world that is relational, imbued by historical context, and is social and political through and through. I wish to make my case against the reliance on binaries that is pervading our analytical and political conceptual universe under a variety of labels—Western vs Non-Western, West vs Rest, and Occident vs. Orient. This may strike the casual reader as banal. But, the fact of the matter is that these categories are pervasive in public and scholarly discourse. Advocates of a Chinese School of IR, for example, often rely on binary distinctions to establish the grounds that there is an inherent contradiction between American and Chinese theoretical approaches. Similarly, many Chinese and American scholars focus on common knowledge and theory without theorizing the relationship between them and tacit knowledge and worldviews. Both mistakes, this article argues, can be traced to a Newtonian view of the world that denies a central category of quantum physics, the entanglement of objects and processes. Reducing a complex reality to simple binaries often is a misleading analytical short-cut and a pernicious as political project. Theoretical complementarity provides us instead with an opportunity to divide our labor, extend our causal arguments, and show a measure of humility as we advance unavoidably limited theoretical claims. I develop this argument in two steps. In the first section, I inquire into the distinction between Western and Non-Western IR Theory. In the second section, I discuss common knowledge and theories and tacit knowledge and world views. In both cases, I argue for an approach to the two types of theories and knowledge that is complementary not binary. Western and Non-Western IR Theory—Really? Elaborating on Stanley Hoffmann’s view of IR ‘as an American social science’,11 Ole Wæver prognosticated correctly that American IR was moving from global hegemony to national professionalization.12 Stressing the peculiar context of American political science and politics and aware of different national schools in Europe, Wæver avoided categories such as ‘Western’ and ‘Non-Western’. For him, all schools of IR theory are unavoidably shaped by distinct intellectual milieus and traditions. The Scottish Enlightenment helped to create an empiricist and rationalist intellectual culture in the USA that differs from continental European philosophy. Wæver highlights differences in predilection and approach that mark different national schools of IR theory. Emigration Europeanized American IR scholarship during the 1930s and 1940s. Brought about by generational change and the behavioral revolution of the 1960s, the de-Europeanization of American IR theory made it increasingly insular. In short, Wæver’s dynamic analysis pointed to a more pluralistic pattern of IR theorizing emerging across the Atlantic. A decade later, Acharya and Buzan redirected our attention.13 They focused on Non-Western and Western rather than American and European IR theory. With the referents of ‘Western’ and ‘Non-western’ left undefined, Acharya and Buzan explored undefined ‘regional’ rather than national sites of IR theory construction. Like Wæver, Acharya and Buzan focus on a sociology of knowledge made of Gramscian hegemonies, ethnocentric Eurocentrism, and the politics of exclusion. The result, they argued, is a Western IR theory that is too narrow in its sources and too broad in its impact. Theirs is a strong case. European history is not the same as global history. Central categories of IR theory unavoidably reflect European experiences and sentiments. This is the central message of both materialist and ideational analyses of Eurocentrism. Since knowledge is power, willy-nilly, a European-inflected IR theory is disciplining the thinking about world politics and foreign affairs. For Van der Pijl’s Marxist sociology of knowledge argument, academic IR is simply a continuation of state-funded and state-supervised class discipline by other means.14 But, as John Hobson points out in the opening page of his book, here as elsewhere binary distinctions conceal more than they reveal.15 Preferring splitting to lumping, Hobson creates a four-fold schema that distinguishes between imperialist and anti-imperialist versions of scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism. And scientific racism is no longer a theoretical contender in contemporary IR scholarship in any part of the world.16 That leaves institutionalism. In their macro-historical inquiry into how institutional diversity in world politics has been compatible with international order, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman have focused their attention on Eurocentric institutionalism. What has been called ‘Oriental globalism’ in the Indian Ocean region between 1500 and 1750 was marked by institutional heterogeneity, illustrated by an Indian Ocean order produced by state-sponsored Portuguese crusaders, Mughal cavalry armies, and Dutch and English private-public corporations.17 All four fashioned a stable international order without the benefit of sharing norms or cultural understandings. Similarly, the European conquest of the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and Europe’s maritime expansion in Asia also reinforced preexisting diversities. Across many international systems in history, diversity helped to constitute international order. Eurocentric institutionalism mistakes a contingent historical outcome, Europe’s post-medieval convergence on the institution of sovereign statehood, as evidence for a universal law. Phillips and Sharman argue that conventional Western exceptionalism, although widespread, is wrong. Afro-Eurasian congruence trumps Western institutional innovation. Although it is understandable in light of the spread of formal state sovereignty after decolonization, ignoring persistent heterogeneity in polity forms throughout most of history is ‘hopelessly parochial’.18 William McNeill had made the same point 25 years earlier in a brilliant and dispassionate review of one of his masterpieces, The Rise of the West. In that path-breaking book, he equated the West with the human community at large.19 Profoundly influenced by the work of his University of Chicago colleague Marshall Hodgson, the founder of modern Islamic studies in America, McNeill subsequently critiqued his own work for neglecting the larger context and what he called ‘ecumenical’and ‘cosmopolitan’ processes in world affairs. Like Acharya and Buzan, McNeill sidesteps smartly endless controversies about the philosophy of knowledge. Like Waever, he stresses process. And like Hodgson, he emphasizes complementarity in diverse contexts. The context of contemporary IR theory construction is diverse. Take, for example, the Copenhagen and Chinese Schools of IR. Context is metropolitan in one case and national in the other.20 Neither the Copenhagen nor the Chinese School is spurred by problem solving theorizing. As a small, open, capitalist and democratic metropolis and state, Copenhagen and Denmark confront great challenges in navigating turbulent regional, international, and global waters. They do so with a distinctive set of routinized practices that have and continue to serve them well.21 This is of little concern to the Copenhagen School. Similarly, looking back at an unparalleled recent history of success, China is confronting daunting problems of environmental degradation, urban sprawl, sky-rocketing inequality, structural rigidities, wide-spread corruption, cult of personality, and dictatorial power. Like Copenhagen and Denmark, it brings to these challenges distinctive repertoires of practice. But, these are not the concerns of the Chinese School of IR. It is not interested in the unique problem created by the simultaneity of preindustrial, industrial, and post-industrial processes. Both schools focus instead on the intersection between history and theory. In the case of the Copenhagen School, this includes the incorporation of societal security and securitization processes that do not fit comfortably into classical, state-centric theory; the tensions between and pros and cons of methodological individualism and collectivism; the balance between statist and societal determinants of security and policy; and the combination of objectivist and processual analysis to issues of identity and societal security.22 None of these are tied to Copenhagen or Denmark. Michael Williams anchors them instead in the modern European state: ‘the construction of an ontological epistemological objectivism was at the heart of the political resolutions of the modern state’.23 That is, they are tied to a European history that is regional not global. The sovereign state model as the standard of legitimate international actorhood is universal in form more than in substance. It overlooks the relevance of empire and civilization as well as their legacies for the diverse institutional ecologies of contemporary world politics. ‘Empires did not fragment into nothing; nor did they fragment into a bare Waltzian system devoid of social structures, processes, and practices.’24 And state-building projects in Europe often involved processes of internal colonialism that were quite similar to the building of empires outside of Europe. Many of the most powerful nationalist movements in 19th-century Europe were less interested in creating nation-states than in recreating empires. Williams identifies an important but not a determinative moment. With legacies of the past reconfigured and rebranded, political units in contemporary world politics are not homogeneous. States are not ‘like units’. They do not express either a universally valid standard of modernity or one universally valid form of rationality.25 The concept of the state is intimately linked to Roman law. The distinction between public and private, however, is not equally relevant everywhere. It varies along a geographic West–East gradient, even in Europe. In the 1980s, Japanese scholars were entirely correct in criticizing attempts to export the concept of the strong state from France to Japan. Japan is a state-society complex or polity, not a European-style state. The non-European world is populated with polities and hybrid legal systems that embody many different substantive rationalities. Furthermore, international orders are patchworks of institutional arrangements and differing rationalities that often possess no more than minimal coherence. Dependency and post-colonial and subaltern theories provide ample documentation, as do the case studies that Halperin and Palan have assembled.26 World politics is defined by persistent heterogeneity and diversity rather than homogeneity and convergence on American, European, or Western institutions, traditions, and theories. And that heterogeneity and diversity cannot be captured by binary distinction between Western and Non-Western. It requires attention to context and process. The Chinese School of IR is similarly driven by China’s history and theory.27 Unsurprisingly, Chinese experience and categories provide conceptual raw material that differs from Europe: hierarchy and unity, tribute and Tianxia, realism, Marxism and culturalism, dictatorial and collective leadership, orthopractice, and orthodoxy. During the last two decades what might be called the hierarchical, Sinocentric, tributary trade, ‘Fairbank model’ has been debated, elaborated, rejected, or refined by senior scholars in the USA (such as Alistair Johnson and David Kang) and in China (such as Qin Yaqing and Yan Xuetong). The result is a rich and variegated set of disagreements in different knowledge communities that cannot be reduced to China. The next generation of scholars, by no means all of Chinese origin, has shown that East Asian relations have been more dynamic and complex than materialist or culturalist arguments of Chinese hierarchy imply.28 They do so by incorporating regional and transnational elements into national analysis. Feng Zhang and Ji-Young Lee have written wonderful books that use in-depth historical studies to advance our understanding of Chinese history under the Ming and Qing dynasties.29 They inform us about the nature of Chinese hegemony in the past without the pretense of being able to predict the future. Diplomacy by tribute was the defining practice in the relations among China, Korea, Japan, and the Mongols. Since power is always relational and often complex, the relationship between superior Ming and Qing China and inferior neighboring client states was not one of simple domination driven by instrumental calculations. The smaller states maneuvered and outflanked China, and in many ways, were critical to both the character of Chinese hegemony and East Asia’s regional order. For Zhang, relationalism that combines instrumental with affective motivations is at the core of the Confucian worldview that motivates his analysis. For Lee, it is the domestic politics in smaller states.30 In developing this argument, Zhang and Lee do not say anything that could be attributed specifically to a Chinese style of theorizing about IR. Imbued by a deep understanding of the importance of relationalism in East Asia, they build on the theoretical power literature. While American theorists remain beholden to the natural resource model that focuses on the attributes of agents, Zhang and Lee are properly attentive to power theorists, like Robert Dahl, who have argued that primary attention in the analysis of power should not be on the relatively more powerful actor A but on the relatively less powerful actor B.31 Their understanding of history and culture made them sensitive to a theoretical formulation that has been interpreted and deployed very differently by American IR scholars. This is less a case of rebalancing a Western misunderstanding of its own history as universal and more of bringing a distinctive historical and analytical sensibility to a universal concept. As was true at the outset of the 20th century,32 today rationalist and relational styles of analysis are subject of theoretical debate and empirical research everywhere. This is the point of departure for Qin’s China-inflected analysis of relational and rule-based governance.33 He argues that Europe and East Asia are empirical cases that exhibit, to different degrees and in different ways, the coexistence of both forms of governance.34 Confucianism’s articulation of a trust-based, moral relationalism, I would add, shares a close affinity with Aristotle’s relational ontology and argument for self-cultivation and self-restraint. Since both share a relational view of the world, binary categories of East and West give us no traction. What does vary, however, is the discursive dominance of relation- or rule-based styles of analysis in different sociocultural settings.35 Some prominent scholars like Qin are committed to building a Chinese school. Others like Yan regard this as an unnecessary, even harmful exercise. Such disagreements point to the existence of a vibrant community of scholars disagreeing on fundamental philosophical, theoretical, and methodological issues. As is true in many other communities of knowledge constituted by strong disagreements, their competing approaches are playing out in a finite space of attention and prominence where the stakes are reputation, resources, and power.36 Furthermore, in articulating their different positions, both Qin and Yan make contestable intellectual moves that are in no way specific to Chinese IR scholarship; two in particular. In their English-language writings, Qin Yaqing appears to subscribe to an essentializing view of what constitutes unique Chinese modes of thinking37 and Yan Xuetong to a unitary view of what constitutes the Chinese intellectual tradition that links ancient Chinese thought to modern Chinese power.38 These moves have been widely debated in and across other national schools of IR. And these disagreements are central to the world of politics and policy. In fact, they help constitute the field of IR specifically and the social sciences generally. Cunningham-Cross and Callahan are correct in pointing to the absence of a singular and stable Sinocentrism and the presence of an inescapable plurality of values and multiplicity of alternative analytical perspectives on world politics. ‘Chinese ideas enter into this IR theory discussion, then, not as the singular solution, but as one of many options.’39 The Copenhagen School is not really reflecting the historical experience and theoretical tradition of Copenhagen or Denmark but of the world of European states—which is one important part of global history not its determinative anchor. And the last decade of writing about the Chinese School of IR points to scholarly exchanges that are in no way specifically Chinese. Even as short-hands, ‘Western’ and ‘Non-Western’ IR theory remain unavoidably undefined. We, thus, can reject the naturalness of both the Westphalian and the Sinocentric order dressed in power politics or cultural garb. Instead, developing complementary styles of analysis, we should ‘critique theories that promote cultural destiny or power politics to the exclusion of other ways of understanding international relations’.40 IR theory will not rise, eventually, in a gigantic locale called the ‘Non-West’. Instead, it is unfolding now as a practice before our very eyes. We recognize it in our daily lives, as ‘Non-Western’ or ‘Western’colleagues become sources of inspiration and as ‘Western’or ‘Non-Western’ students begin to instruct their teachers.41 The era of religious and knowledge missionaries has long ended. We are in the midst of generating new knowledge and theories that all IR scholars will use to better understand a global world that resists understanding in terms of black and white distinctions. Common Knowledge and Theories—Tacit Knowledge and Worldviews Moving from IR theory to knowledge, more generally, both common knowledge and theories and tacit knowledge and worldviews are coevolving, complementary ways of understanding the world. Drawing black and white distinctions between these two types of knowledge is of less use than focusing on their interaction and coevolution. IR scholars prioritize theories that travel. ‘The Holy Grail for social theorists is the highest level of generalization about the largest number of events … Area Studies itself is generally dominated by disciplines that have a low interest in theorizing, effectively taking exceptionalism to be the reason not to theorize’.42 This view is not uncontested. In the fields of IR and comparative politics, for example, disciplinary generalists confront vigorous dissent from scholars committed to contextualized comparisons.43 A number of methodological and epistemological issues create this divide. Here, I would like to highlight only one. Universalizing theories operate in the domain of risk and with the assumption of the existence of a stock of explicit, common knowledge of how the world operates.44 Contextual comparison, in contrast, acknowledges the existence of uncertainty and highlights the existence of tacit knowledge, reflected in different worldviews. Our analysis is most effective when we combine both common and tacit knowledge. In The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber offers an analysis of the importance of uncertainty that goes well beyond the financial industry in which he made a successful career. Focusing on the dynamics of human interactions, he points to four phenomena in particular.45 First, slowdowns on interstate highways without accidents and stampeding crowds point to unexpected results that are not related to human intentions; human interactions can produce ‘emergent’phenomena. Second, in the social world of constant human interaction probabilities are forever changing; social processes are often not ‘ergodic’. Third, human interactions are so complex that they elude all attempts to anticipate unknown outcomes correctly; the world is filled with ‘computational irreducibility’. Finally, the belief that we live in a world of knowable, manageable risk is sheer fantasy; instead we live in a world often marked by ‘radical uncertainty’ for which the probability of outcomes is simply unknowable. This analysis points to the distance that separates a world of unknowns that is closed, linear, complicated and marked by common knowledge and a world of unknowables that is open, non-linear, complex and filled with tacit knowledge. IR scholars have grappled with the problem of uncertainty in three different ways.46 Two operate with rationalist concepts; the third one does not. First, strategic uncertainty is introduced into bargaining models that include the possibility of ignorance about player preferences and beliefs. Misperceptions yield suboptimal strategies. Uncertainty here refers to a lack of information about the payoff function and attributes of one of the players. Common knowledge or common prior beliefs about the rules of the game are still assumed. Second, analytic uncertainty stems from different underlying theories of how the world works yielding different probability calculations of outcomes. This approach focuses largely on differences in risk calculations and leaves little room for uncertainty and different worldviews. A third approach moves away from rationalist models and views the rules of the game themselves as contested and unstable. Absent common knowledge, information lacks intrinsic meaning. Here, the meaning of the rules of the game depend on actors’ larger views of the world and how these actors ‘intervene in it … debate it and … communicate about it’.47 Tacit knowledge is acknowledged as a separate dimension, and epistemic uncertainty is reflected in different worldviews.48 Common Knowledge In different fields of inquiry common knowledge is a productive idea that has been used in mathematical game theory, philosophy, economics, and other social sciences, including IR. Common knowledge concerns the functioning of interactive epistemologies in a deterministic or risky world. ‘An event is common knowledge among a group of agents if each one knows it, if each one knows that the others know it, if each one knows that each one knows that the others know it, and so on’.49 Public events, events that agents create themselves such as rules of a game and contracts, and specific beliefs about human nature constitute examples of common knowledge. The fundamental tool to explore the role of common knowledge is ‘the state of the world.’ It is extremely detailed. It encompasses the past, present, and future of the physical universe; describes what every agent knows or does or thinks, including what every agent knows or does or thinks what every other agent knows or does or thinks, ad infinitum; specifies the utility to every agent of every action, taken or not taken, and specifies what every agent thinks about every agent’s utility of every possible action and non-action; and specifies what probability each agent assigns to every event and what probability he assigns to every other agent assigning some probability to each event and so on.50 With mathematical proof and logical reasoning, the technical literature on common knowledge chips away at this unrealistic conceptualization to make the idea more serviceable as a working assumption. Depending on the kind and amount of chipping that is being done, common knowledge or opinions about expectations can converge. Importantly, common knowledge of actions negates the relevance of asymmetric information about events. Even when they have different information, agents must hold the same opinion if those opinions are common knowledge. The getting to common knowledge theorem shows that learning stops after a finite time; illustrated by your garden-variety faculty meeting, eventually, it becomes common knowledge what everyone is going to believe and say. Baysian updating of information is integrated into this common knowledge framework through another theorem. Common knowledge of rationality and of optimization eliminates speculation. Information processing errors have also been subject of work to make the common knowledge concept more serviceable. This interactive epistemology of common knowledge exists only in the world of risk. Uncertainty falls outside of its normal domain of application, inviting us to think about knowledge in a different way.51 Tacit Knowledge Michael Polanyi reignited a broad interest in ‘the art of knowing’ and the role of tacit knowledge.52 Information and explicit rules of codification are not the only kind of knowledge. There exists, for Polanyi, a tacit dimension that should not be thought of as the endpoint of one knowledge continuum stretching from explicit to tacit. The two kinds of knowledge are complements not substitutes. Explicit and codifiable knowledge is a superstructure that rests on an uncodifiable substrate.53 Friedrich Hayek, for example, was deeply critical of the neglect of the prescientific knowledge on which most of the theories of social scientists and political engineers rest. He was also keenly aware of the dispersal of different kinds of knowledge.54Knowing how cannot be reduced to knowing that. Explaining a joke is different from telling one. In the words of Michael Oakeshott, ‘the tacit or implicit component of knowledge … does not appear in the form of rules and … cannot be resolved into information or itemized in the manner characteristic of information’.55 The faith in explicit, codified knowledge is challenged by the notion of tacit, uncodifiable knowledge that provides an indispensable background for assessing what is codifiable. Bicycle-riding was Polanyi’s paradigmatic example to illustrate the importance of tacit knowledge. The Newtonian or quantum physics of bike-riding is complex and counter-intuitive. Few bike riders know it. And if they did, it would not help them learning how to ride a bike. We acquire practical knowledge by doing rather than by learning rules. Beyond learning bike-balancing which, at least in principle, is codifiable by the neural networks of the human brain, riding in traffic is irreducibly contextual and social and rests on tacit knowledge. Collins calls varying actions that are socially embedded ‘polimorphic’.56 They are marked by a ‘history of care’ and ‘shared involvements’ as is true of apprenticeships, including in scientific laboratories.57 Tacit knowledge characterizes worldviews. They offer foundational ideas that shape the questions we ask, provide us with explanatory and interpretive concepts, and suggest plausible answers. Their intellectual pedigree dates back to both the history of Christianity and 19th century German philosophy and social theory. A multitude of alternative worldviews is a characteristic marker of today’s multicultural and plural global culture. In Europe and the Americas it contrasts with the traditional, unitary outlook of the three major Christian traditions. Whatever their religious or secular sources, worldviews offer a narrative that affects ‘salient areas of daily, human practice’.58 They offer conceptions of possibilities that are grounded in historical understandings shot through with symbolic significance touching on questions of cosmology, ontology, and morality. They are ‘entwined with people’s conceptions of their identities, evoking deep emotions and loyalties. The world’s great religions provide world views; but so does the scientific rationality that is emblematic of modernity’.59 Worldviews offer a Gestalt. As tacit knowledge, they are embedded in a terminology that removes from scrutiny many things we simply take for granted. Tacit and Common Knowledge Tacit knowledge focuses on the flow of practices within communities marked by emergent properties. It differs from intersubjective, epistemic stocks of common knowledge.60 These two domains of knowledge are interrelated, for example, in Adler’s theory of cognitive evolution.61 For Adler, tacit knowledge is reflected in communities of practice that, in the form of expectations, dispositions, and preintentional capacities, incorporate an individual’s subjective appropriations. Individuals and groups act, interact, reason, plan, judge, and have expectations against a background that defines the terms of such activities. Background knowledge is, therefore, not only tacit and inert. Individuals’ reflexive, normative, and instrumental judgements can build a bridge both types of knowledge and are, therefore, central for its effective institutionalization. Jenco offers a related solution to the embeddedness of representational, common knowledge in historically grown tacit or background conditions. For her, cross-cultural encounters create epistemological dilemmas that generate an enhanced self-awareness of specific cultural positions and limitations.62 Since many cultural practices, such as knowledge production, are deliberately acquired rather than unthinkingly imparted, we should focus on knowledge not only as inert background but also as a collective and open-ended system of emerging practices, validated and sustained in and by diverse communities. This holds forth the possibility of learning from the culturally-other than just including, assimilating or tolerating her. The existence of shared, common knowledge under conditions of risk is a core assumption of IR theories that aim at universal truth. But as Acharya and Buzan and many others have argued persuasively, the shared knowledge is common only across specific sociopolitical domains and audiences.63 IR theories must, therefore, also be attentive to tacit knowledge that is linked to larger worldviews. Resisting the urge of choosing one or the other dimension of knowledge, we are better off avoiding black-or-white while considering both, as we seek a better understanding of world politics. Conclusion In his play, Copenhagen Michael Frayn interprets a fateful meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in terms of binaries that he bridges by drawing analogies between: social and natural, micro and macro, laws of men and laws of nature, internal states of consciousness and external states of being, intentionality and history, and discursive and material facts. Like atoms, furthermore, humans are in his view discrete individuals with inner characteristics. While the meaning of quantum physics remains a subject of intense debate, it points to a very different view of a deeply entangled world. Humans do not have preexisting, determinate mental states. Instead, they are part of an entangled state of agencies that are captured in a determinate state only through specific measurement procedures. It is the measurement procedure, here our conceptual apparatus, not the will of the experimenter or observer that creates determinate states. We are unavoidably part of the social and natural environment that we seek to comprehend. On this view, the binaries that pervade Frayn’s literary vision do not match the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. Distinct agencies do not precede the process of interaction. Rather, they emerge in the process of ‘intra-action.’ Agencies do not exist as individual elements but only in relation to their mutual entanglement.64 For students of world politics, specifically, power dynamics emerge from entangled relations operating under conditions of risk and uncertainty. They do not exist as the property of things or actors.65 In short, the diversity and heterogeneity of world politics requires us to shed our habitual preference for arguing in terms of binary distinctions. ‘Either/or’ is often less helpful in our analysis of world politics than ‘both/and’.66 In the end, it is not pure-breds but half-breeds that reflect the contaminated cosmopolitanism of world politics. As diverse voices gain in strength in world politics, we could do worse than to heeding Beckett’s celebration of the color gray.67 It will provide the context for and describe the process of IR theorizing in the 21st century. It is grey we need— Made of bright and black, Able to shed the former Or the latter, And be the latter Or the former – Alone. Footnotes 1 Randall Schweller, Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 2 Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 3 Schweller, Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple. 4 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Worth of War (Amherst: Prometheus, 2014). 5 Arjun Chowdhury, The Myth of International Order: Why States Persist and Alternatives to the State Fade Away (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 6 Schweller, Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple, pp. 31, 35–37, 40. 7 Ibid, pp. 44–45, 82, 86, 89, 91–92, 94–96, 117. 8 Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science. 9 Schweller, Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple, p. 30. 10 Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, ‘Power Complexities and Political Theory’, in Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, eds., Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 291. 11 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Am American Social Science: International Relations’, Dædalus, Vol. 106, No. 3 (1977), pp. 41–60. 12 Ole Wæver, ‘The Sociology of Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in International Relations’, in Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane and Stephen D. Krasner, eds., Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 47–87. 13 Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory? An Introduction’, International Relations of Asia-Pacific, Vol. 7, No. 3(2007), pp. 287–312. Their work is part of a larger literature that includes among others also Tickner and Tsyganov as well as Tickner and Waever. See J. Ann Tickner and Andre P. Tsyganov, ‘Responsible Scholarship in International Relations: A Symposium’, International Studies Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2008), pp. 661–66; Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver, eds., International Relations Scholarship around the World (New York: Routledge, 2009). 14 Kees Van der Pijl, The Discipline of Western Supremacy Volume 3, Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2014), pp. vi–vii. 15 John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.1–3. 16 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Will the Liberal International Order Survive? ‘, paper prepared for the international conference ‘From the Western-centric to Post-Western World: In Search of the Emerging Global Order’, Taipei, 2–3 June, 2018, pp. 4–7. 17 Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman, International Order in Diversity: War and Rule in the Indian Ocean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 18 Ibid, p. 1. 19 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); William H. McNeill, ‘The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years’, Journal of World History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1990), pp. 1–21. 20 Why Copenhagen rather than Denmark is a bit of a mystery. Jonathan Kirshner suggests, half jokingly, a linguistic reason: Copenhagen is a soft word connoting cosmopolitanism, while Denmark has a harsh terminal k. Perhaps, Aarhus and Aalborg are also excluded because a Danish in American English is what you eat. And the Chinese School, inexplicably, appears to exclude the diasporic community of overseas Chinese that has been such a vital part of China’s historical evolution. 21 Darius Ornston, Good Governance Gone Bad: How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); John L. Campbell and John A. Hall, The Paradox of Vulnerability: States, Nationalism and the Financial Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 22 Bill McSweeney, ‘Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1996), pp. 81–93; Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, ‘Slippery? Contradictory? Sociologically Untenable? The Copenhagen School Replies’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1985), pp. 241–50. 23 Michael W. Williams, ‘Modernity, Identity and Security: A Comment on the “Copenhagen Controversy”’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1998), p. 438. 24 Christian Reus-Smit and Tim Dunne, ‘The Globalization of International Society’, in Christian Reus-Smit and Tim Dunne, eds., The Globalization of International Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 21. 25 Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan, ‘Introduction: Legacies of Empire’, in Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan, eds., Legacies of Empire: Imperial Roots of the Contemporary Global Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 3; Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations’, Millennium, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2002), pp. 109–27. 26 Halperin and Palan, ‘Introduction’. 27 See Qin Yaqing, ‘Why Is There No Chinese International Relations Theory?’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2007), pp. 313–40; Qin Yaqing, ‘Relationality and Processual Construction: Bringing Chinese Ideas into International Relations Theory’, Social Sciences in China, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009), pp. 5–20; Qin Yaqing, ‘Development of International Relations Theory in China: Progress through Debates’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Vol. 11 (2011), pp. 231–57; Qin Yaqing, ‘Rule, Rules, and Relations: Toward a Synthetic Approach to Governance’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2011), pp. 117–45; Qin Yaqing, ‘Continuity through Change: Background Knowledge and China’s International Strategy’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2014), pp. 285–314; Qin Yaqing, A Relational Theory of World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Xiao Ren, ‘Toward a Chinese School of International Relations’, in Wang Gungwu and Zheng Yongnian, eds., China and the New International Order (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 293–309; Linsay Cunningham-Cross and William A. Callahan, ‘Ancient Chinese Power, Modern Chinese Thought’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2011), pp. 349–74; Yan Xuetong, Ancient Chinese Thought Modern Chinese Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Yan Xuetong, ‘From Keeping a Low Profile to Striving for Achievement’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2014), pp. 153–84; Yan Xuetong, ‘Political Leadership and Power Redistribution’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2016), pp. 1–26; William A. Callahan, ‘Sino-Speak: Chinese Exceptionalism and the Politics of History’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 (2012), pp. 33–55; William A. Callahan and Elena Barabantseva, eds., China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Relations (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Linsay Cunningham-Cross, ‘Using the Past to (Re)write the Future: Yan Xuetong, pre-Qin Thought and China’s Rise to Power’, China Information, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2012), pp. 219–233; He Kai, ‘A Realist’s Ideal Pursuit’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2012), pp. 183–197; Niv Horesh, ‘In Search of the “China Model”: Historic Continuity vs. Imagined History in Yan Xuetong’s Thought’, China Report, Vol. 49, No. 3 (2013), pp. 337–55; Peter M. Kristensen and Ras T. Nielsen, ‘Constructing a Chinese International Relations Theory: A Sociological Approach to Intellectual Innovation’, International Political Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2013), pp. 19–40; Wang Jiangli and Barry Buzan, ‘The English and Chinese Schools of International Relations: Comparisons and Lessons’, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2014), pp. 1–46; Astrid H. M. Nordin, China’s International Relations and Harmonious World: Time, Space and Multiplicity in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016); Zhang Chunman, ‘Review Essay: How to Merge Western Theories and Chinese Indigenous Theories to Study Chinese Politics’, Journal of Chinese Political Science, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2017), pp. 283–94. 28 David C. Kang, ‘International Order and Premodern East Asia’, Unpublished paper, University of Southern California, Department of Political Science (2018) unpublished paper. 29 Feng Zhang, Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Ji-Young Lee, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 30 Reid and Zheng’s and Park’s compelling books demonstrate that this style of analysis also illuminates 19th and 20th century East-Asian and trans-Pacific relationships. See Anthony Reid and Zheng Yangwen, eds., Negotiating Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Seo-Hym Park, Sovereignty and Status in East Asian International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 31 Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, eds., Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 7, 10. 32 Richard Swedberg, ‘The New “Battle of the Methods”’, Challenge, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1990), pp. 33–38. 33 Qin, ‘Rule, Rules, and Relations’; Qin, A Relational Theory of World Politics. 34 Qin’s conjecture is based on a contextual comparison. It is confirmed by Katzenstein’s analysis. Relying on the method of incorporated comparison, he adds to the horizontal, spatial comparison a vertical, global-national-subnational one. Different methods yielding convergent conclusions enhance the robustness of Qin’s claim. See on Qin, ‘Rule, Rules, and Relations’; Peter J. Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 35 Qin, ‘Rule, Rules, and Relations’, pp. 130, 143. 36 Kristensen and Nielsen, ‘Constructing a Chinese International Relations Theory’, pp. 22–30. 37 Qin, for example, argues that the dialectic of Zhongyong, or taking the middle course, constitutes a core component of Chinese background knowledge that embeds the ‘China’s Rise’ narrative. Unlike Hegel’s conflictual dialectic, this mode of thinking views interacting units such as yin and yang, as complementary and inclusive of each other. For Qin, most of the time most of the action is caused not by rational calculation but by histories, experiences, practices, and habits. Conflict is possible in processes of change, but it is embedded in harmonious meta-relationships. Below, I call this the tacit domain of knowledge. Qin, thus, argues that ‘the Chinese tend to think and act differently from other nations because they hold a different worldview, as reflected in the Zhongyong dialectic’. This conceptualization relies on an essentialized form of analysis that risks reifying, naturalizing, and depoliticizing the interactions of and relations within and between individuals, groups, nations, and civilizations. See Qin, ‘Continuity through Change’, pp. 287–288, 290, 292–293; Callahan, ‘Sino-Speak’. 38 In the terms of Bell’s methodological analysis of how to approach text, Yan relies on a combination of stipulative and canonical interpretive protocols in approaching classical Chinese texts that he views as inert and applicable across millennia. This approach conceals a crucial part of his creative work as an ideational entrepreneur who is attempting to reshape various Chinese intellectual traditions. Comprehensive contextualism would be better able to capture this part of Yan’s scholarship. It should be noted that the structural realism of Wang disagrees with Yan’s cultural realism, another instance of a generic disagreement among IR scholars that is in no way specific to the Chinese School. See on Duncan Bell, ‘“What Is Liberalism?”’, Political Theory, Vol. 42, No. 6 (2014), pp. 682–715; Yuan-Kang Wang, Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 39 Cunningham-Cross and Callahan, ‘Ancient Chinese Power, Modern Chinese Thought’, p. 362. 40 Callahan, ‘Sino-Speak’, p. 49. 41 Richard A. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why (New York: The Free Press, 2003). 42 Acharya and Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory?’, pp. 291–92. 43 Ariel I. Ahram, Patrick Köllner and Rudra Sil, eds., Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applications (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 44 See Katzenstein and Seybert for a discussion of contributions in the fields of national security and political economy that are based on this understanding of theory. See Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, ‘Uncertainty, Risk, Power and the Limits of International Relations Theory’, in Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, eds., Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 42–50. 45 Richard Bookstaber, The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics and the Sweep of Human Interaction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 46 Clara Weinhardt, ‘Playing Different Games: Uncertain Rules in EU-West Africa Trade Negotiations’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2 (2017), pp. 284–96. 47 Jacqueline Best, ‘Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Indeterminacy’, International Political Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2008), p. 362. 48 Spanning the second and the third options, Culpepper’s imaginative analysis of Irish and Italian collective bargaining, for example, looks at common knowledge creation in conditions of institutional crisis that mix risk and uncertainty. See Pepper D. Culpepper, ‘The Politics of Common Knowledge: Ideas and Institutional Change in Wage Bargaining’, International Organization, Vol. 62, No. 1 (2008), pp. 1–33. 49 John Geanakoplos, ‘Common Knowledge’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1992), p. 54. 50 Ibid, p. 57. 51 Once the assumption of a finite state of the world space is lifted, iterated knowledge may lead to very different behavior, thus requiring further theoretical adjustments. Elaborating on the notion of precedence and salience, the relation between common knowledge and social conventions, understood as a system of mutual expectations and common reason to believe, rather than strict common knowledge, is subject of a related literature. See on Christian W. Bach and Jérémie Cabessa, ‘Limit Knowledge and Common Knowledge’, Theory and Decision, Vol. 73, No. 3 (2012), pp. 423–40; Giacomo Sillari, ‘Common Knowledge and Convention’, Topoi, Vol. 27, No. 1–2 (2008), pp. 29–39. 52 Michael Polanyi, “The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). 53 Pau Duguid, ‘“The Art of Knowing”: Social and Tacit Dimensions of Knowledge and the Limits of the Community of Practice’, Information Society, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2005), p.111. 54 Friedrich Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1945), pp. 519–30. 55 Michael Oakeshott, ‘Learning and Teaching’, in R. S. Peters, ed., The Concept of Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p.167. 56 H. M. Collins, ‘What Is Tacit Knowledge?’, in Karin Knorr, ed., The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2000), p. 125. 57 David Bella and Jonathan King, ‘Common Knowledge of the Second Kind’, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 8, No. 6 (1989), p. 420. 58 David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2002), pp. xvi, 291–92, 297-303. 59 Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, ‘Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework’, in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 8. 60 Pau Duguid, ‘“The Art of Knowing”’, p. 115. 61 Emanuel Adler, ‘A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution: Change, Stability and International Social Order’, Preliminary draft, March 2017, pp. 136–37, 241. 62 Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 8–9, 11. 63 Acharya and Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory?’. 64 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 5, 19, 22–23, 33. 65 Katzenstein and Seybert, eds., Protean Power. 66 Qin, ‘Continuity through Change’, p. 287. In writing this article, I became aware of the depth of my commitment to the argument in favor of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. All of my major books always focused on analytical complementarities rather than binaries: state and society linked through policy networks rather than strong states or strong societies; international and domestic factors and the democratic intermediation between Christian and Social Democracy; regulatory and constitutive norms in general and in the case of Japan; Germany’s embeddedness in Europe; open regionalism analyzed with the method of incorporated comparison spanning different levels of analysis; civilizational entanglement beyond East and West; analytical eclecticism; and protean and control power. In my scholarship, I, thus, have been quite content to sit on the knife’s edge and to live on a bridge, never trying to reach either shore. See Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Anglo America and Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities beyond West and East (New York: Routledge, 2012); Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Many Wests and Polymorphic Globalism’, in Katzenstein, ed., Anglo America and Its Discontents, pp. 207–243; Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Sinicization and the Rise of China: Civilizational Processes beyond East and West (New York: Routledge, 2012); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–40; Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Mid-Atlantic: Sitting on the Knife′s Sharp Edge’, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2009), pp. 122–35; Peter J. Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Tamed Power: Germany in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Peter J. Katzenstein, Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semi-Sovereign State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Peter J. Katzenstein, Corporatism and Change: Austria, Switzerland and the Politics of Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Katzenstein and Seybert, eds., Protean Power; Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in World Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2010). 67 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1958). © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Institute of International Relations, Tsinghua University. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Second Coming? Reflections on a Global Theory of International Relations
JF - The Chinese Journal of International Politics
DO - 10.1093/cjip/poy012
DA - 2018-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-second-coming-reflections-on-a-global-theory-of-international-CzZXmAJgDW
SP - 373
VL - 11
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -