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Abstract
The Islamic caliphate is a key competitor in the global ideological marketplace. Indeed, it has been called ‘one possible configuration for a post-industrial politics’ (Philip W. Sutton and Stephen Vertigans, ‘Islamic “New Social Movements”?: Radical Islam, Al-Qa'ida and Social Movement Theory’, Mobilization 11, no. 1(2006): 105). What is its nature? The answer illustrates the argument that the relationship between the informal conception of collective identity and its non-agentive interest in formal establishment is the ontological basis of international relations. This points the way toward resolution of the agent–structure problem with reference to evolutionary theory. Distinguishing between action and behaviour on the basis of subjecthood is useful, showing that actors' primary interest is self-identification through affirmation of an institutional ideal-state. Such ideational objects do not act, but those through which agents successfully constitute and affirm themselves are more likely to prosper strategically. The caliphate is one such. Thus, conceptions of collective identity behave, compete and evolve.
Acknowledgements
Early drafts of this article were prepared at the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University (ANU). This was made possible by a Keith and Dorothy Mackay Travelling Scholarship from the University of New England (UNE), Armidale, Australia. I am grateful to both universities for their support, and particularly to Dr Jacinta O'Hagan, of the ANU, for agreeing to supervise the writing of the paper, and for her guidance. Thanks also to Professors Christian Reus-Smit and Richard Ned Lebow, with whom I discussed the project, to the anonymous referees and the editor of Global Change, Peace & Security, and to my UNE supervisors, Dr Karin von Strokirch and Dr Graham Young, for their continued support.
Notes
1 Bernard Knox, ‘Introduction’, in Homer, The Iliad (London: Folio Society, 1998), lix.
2 Philip W. Sutton and Stephen Vertigans, ‘Islamic “New Social Movements”?: Radical Islam, Al-Qa'ida and Social Movement Theory’, Mobilization 11, no. 1(2006): 104.
3 Ibid., 105.
4 I am aware that these are loaded and constructed terms, but have not the space here to elaborate them.
5 John Gerard Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organisation 36, no. 2 (1982): 379–415.
6 Alexander Wendt, ‘Agency, Teleology and the World State: A Reply to Shannon’, European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 4 (2005): 589.
7 Fiona B Adamson, ‘Global Liberalism versus Political Islam: Competing Ideological Frameworks in International Politics’, International Studies Review 7 (2005): 1.
8 Bradley A. Thayer, ‘Bringing Darwin in: Evolutionary Theory, Realism and International Politics’, International Security 25, no. 2 (2000): 132.
9 The term is adapted from J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995), 20.
10 One might argue that I am assigning functionality, and even existence, to this entity. I freely accept this. For one thing, it is unavoidably a model I am describing, not the world itself, and, for another, it is the influence of this very mechanism of assignation and reification which underpins the model. Reification works.
11 Sidney Verba, ‘Assumptions of Rationality and Non-Rationality in Models of the International System’, in The International System: Theoretical Essays, ed. Klaus Knorr and Sydney Verba (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 93; Ulrich Franke and Ulrich Roos, ‘From “Collective Actor” to “Structure of Collective Acting”: The Meaning of “Human Beings” for the Study of International Relations’, in First World International Studies Conference (Istanbul: 2005), 1.
12 D. Dessler, ‘What's at Stake in the Agent–Structure Debate?’, International Organization 43, no. 3 (1989): 443.
13 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
14 Quotation marks are appropriate, since anarchy is a highly contentious issue. Nicholas Onuf has ‘grave doubts about the claim that anarchy is the central and defining feature of international relations’ and calls it ‘liberalism carried to its logical extreme’. He does, however, allow for ‘the incidence of anarchical events’. Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 14, 18–19. For my purposes here we can think of anarchy as an ideal type.
15 Waltz himself makes no apology for this: ‘I assume that states seek to ensure their survival. The assumption is a radical simplification made for the sake of constructing a theory.’ Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 91.
16 John Gerard Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity (London: Routledge, 1998), 9.
17 Most famously, Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics’, International Organisation 46, no. 2 (1992): 391–425.
18 Franke and Roos, ‘From “Collective Actor” to “Structure of Collective Acting”’, 13.
19 Talcott Parsons, quoted in Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, ‘What Is Agency?’, American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 965.
20 For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon see John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 61–76.
21 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 69–76.
22 Colin Wight, ‘They Shoot Dead Horses Don't They? Locating Agency in the Agent–Structure Debate’, European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 1 (1999): 136.
23 Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49. For more on ‘states-systems’, as he terms these institutionalized lower-level structures, see Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977).
24 Indeed Searle does not particularly like the term, because it seems to imply only intention and goal-seeking, whereas he considers it as describing a range of states of mind having ‘conditions of satisfaction’. I have not space to go into this issue here, and the ordinary meaning will suffice for my purposes.
25 Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity, 13.
26 Ibid., 20.
27 Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 38.
30 Ibid., 131.
28 Wight, ‘They Shoot Dead Horses Don't They?’, 110.
29 Ibid., 111.
31 And, more controversially, can this actor be the subject of beliefs, or attitudes, as Gilbert claims?
32 Wight, ‘They Shoot Dead Horses Don't They?’, 133.
33 Wendt argues that such a state is inevitable. A. Wendt, ‘Why a World State Is Inevitable: Teleology and the Logic of Anarchy’, European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 9 (2003): 491–542.
34 Wendt, ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It.’
35 See Wight, Systems of States, for a detailed explication of many such systems.
36 Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ/Chichester, UK: Princeton University Press, 1999), chapter 2.
37 Franke and Roos, ‘From “Collective Actor” to “Structure of Collective Acting”’, describe ‘structures of collective acting’, which correspond to institutional structures.
38 This is not so clear cut as I have presented it, since, as soon as different sources of legitimacy come into competition, it is necessary for their agents to settle on some system of interaction which involves legitimating their identities and actions. I do not pretend to describe the real world, only a model thereof.
39 Colin Wight, ‘They Shoot Dead Horses Don't They?’, 131.
40 The impossibility of subjecthood has been argued: ‘I can speak about myself in reference to individual facts, but when I try to go beyond their contents to ask about some indivisible core or permanent substratum of subjectivity unifying those data in an identical self, my questions become as meaningless as any other metaphysical question.’ Kolakowski, quoted in Wight, ‘They Shoot Dead Horses Don't They?’, 139, n. 17.
41 Brute facts are facts independent of human cognition. Social facts are those that are facts by virtue of agreement. Institutional facts are a subset, requiring institutions, and purpose. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 1–4.
42 Jan Aart Scholte, ‘Globalisation and Collective Identities’, in Identities in International Relations, ed. J. Krause and N. Renwick (Basingstoke, UK/New York: Macmillan Press, 1996), 39.
43 Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Power, Persuasion and Justice’, Millennium 33, no. 3 (2005): 551–81. He derives the idea of appetite from the ancient Greeks, who conceived it as encompassing ‘all physical desires, including security and wealth’, and as being in tension with self-esteem: 556.
44 There have been isolated examples of humans growing up in entire social isolation, but they are pathological, and so do not affect the argument.
45 Denise Dellarosa Cummins, quoted in Thayer, ‘Bringing Darwin in’.
46 Quoted in Alexander E. Wendt, ‘The Agent–Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organisation 41, no. 3 (1987): 348. Durkheim's observation that ‘the individual is dominated by a moral reality greater than himself: namely, collective reality’ can be taken as a foundation of strategic ontology. E. Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 38.
47 See M. Gilbert, On Social Facts (New York: Routledge, 1989), 185–203.
48 F. Kratochwil, ‘Rules, Norms, Values and the Limits of “Rationality”’, Archiv fur Rechts und Sozialphilosophie 73 (1987): 311.
49 Adamson, ‘Global Liberalism Versus Political Islam’, 558.
50 Al-Bahri, quoted in Sutton and Vertigans, ‘Islamic “New Social Movements”?’, 108. Al-Bahri is referring to al-Qa'ida.
51 Arnold Toynbee, ‘Abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate’, Survey of International Affairs 1 (1925): 81. This is a masterful but under-recognised work, whose significance for the present situation could not be overstated. It is also an example of how a relatively traditional realist approach involves more than a little of what I would call constructivist analysis.
52 The next step toward theoretical unification would be to problematize and challenge this statement. Are they really so different?
53 Toynbee, ‘Abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate’, 88.