The Indigenous Dimension of the Intersocietal: Dussel,Exteriority and the Sámi People

Abstract

Proponents of uneven and combined development (U&CD) as a theoretical approach to International Relations (IR) have presented it as providing the conceptual means for overcoming Eurocentrism. While the U&CD scholars have made valuable contributions to anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship, this article argues that U&CD has analytical limitations that impede its anti-Eurocentric potential. These limitations derive from U&CD’s reliance on the concepts of ‘development’ and the ‘whip of external necessity’, which require developmental ranking of societies and lock U&CD into a state-centric social ontology. To provide complementary conceptual resources to overcome U&CD’s analytical limitations, this article introduces Enrique Dussel’s liberation philosophy (LP), which can incorporate peoples other than states as agents and entities of global politics through its concept of ‘exteriority’. U&CD and LP are then jointly applied to analyse the relations between the Nordic states and the indigenous Sámi people to assess the approaches’ relative strengths and weaknesses and identify synergies between them. Based on this assessment, the article outlines the potential for synthesising a ‘thin’ version of U&CD with LP, by using the concept of ‘exteriority’ to reorient U&CD’s analytical focus towards people excluded by the states-system.

Introduction

The adaptation of Leon Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development (U&CD) as a theoretical approach to International Relations (IR) has stimulated debate on the discipline’s core purpose, by proposing the dimension of social reality that arises specifically from societal multiplicity as its proper role. The U&CD scholars have produced theoretical innovations for reconceptualising the international, or the ‘intersocietal’ as they prefer to call it, as a densely interconnected realm, which generates distinct causal determinants that U&CD’s concepts render discernible ¹ . Furthermore, the U&CD scholars argue that this reconceptualisation of the international/intersocietal enables overcoming Eurocentrism ² . This article provides a critical assessment of the latter claim by focusing on the works of Justin Rosenberg, Kamran Matin, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. Rosenberg pioneered adapting U&CD to IR, while Matin, Anievas and Nişancıoğlu broadly follow Rosenberg’s theoretical premises and have been most active in advocating U&CD as the solution to Eurocentrism.

The U&CD scholars perceive analytical neglect of intersocietal interactions as the foundation of Eurocentrism, as it has sustained the myth of Europe’s autonomously enacted transition to modernity, ostensibly demonstrating the superiority of Western practices and foreshadowing the developmental path all societies are destined to replicate ³ . They argue that U&CD provides the conceptual means for overcoming Eurocentrism, as it dispels myths of Europe’s endogenously enacted transition of modernity, by embedding interaction between societies into the concept of development. This in turn entails that all societies follow unique combined developmental paths, ruling out the possibility of humanity’s universal convergence around Westernised modernity, as advocated by Eurocentric ideologies ⁴ .

Although the U&CD scholars have made valuable contributions to contesting important expressions of Eurocentrism through their theoretical innovations and applied empirical studies, U&CD also has analytical limitations as currently formulated, leading it to reproduce Eurocentric assumptions that need contesting in the interests of furthering the anti-Eurocentric research agenda in IR. These assumptions are tied to its core concept of ‘development’ and its auxiliary concept of the ‘whip of external necessity’ ⁵ . The U&CD scholars are aware of the problematic teleological connotations of the concept of ‘development’ and have sought to address this by redefining it in a manner that rules out linear development ⁶ . However, they have not fully succeeded in purging ‘development’ of teleological residues, in part because the ‘whip of external necessity’ requires ranking societies by their relative levels of development to discern which societies are wielding and which are reacting to this ‘whip’. The ‘whip of external necessity’ also locks U&CD into state-centrism, by implying that only societies that successfully uphold their external sovereignty are entities of the intersocietal. Moreover, it will also be argued that the U&CD scholars operate on two levels of analysis, ruling out the possibility of linear succession of more advanced societies on one level, while still assuming it on a global macro-historical scale ⁷ . This limitation has clear normative implications by implying that societies ranked as less developed will eventually be superseded by more ‘advanced’ societies.

While appreciative of the U&CD scholars’ existing contributions to challenging Eurocentrism, this article is also constructively critical, and suggests Enrique Dussel’s liberation philosophy (LP) as a complementary analytical framework for conceptual resources to circumvent U&CD’s current limitations. LP’s core concept of ‘exteriority’ enables breaking with state-centrism, as it illuminates groups outside the dominant structures like the states-system ⁸ . It also rejects developmental ranking of societies, and instead operates with a notion of normative progress, premised on exterior groups using their agency to challenge and overcome injustices imposed by the dominant structures.

To assess the strengths and limitations of U&CD and LP in their abilities to generate anti-Eurocentric analyses of intersocietal politics, they will be applied to the case of relations between the Nordic states and the indigenous Sámi people. The Sámi people have been chosen because they are relevant for highlighting the normative implications of the analytical limitations identified in U&CD. They are an indigenous people that have never aspired to statehood, making them representative of peoples that typically fall outside the scope of state-centric IR theories. They also have a strong nomadic component that has survived alongside the long-established industrial societies of Nordic settler polities. This is relevant for demonstrating the long-term viability of nomadic forms of life after the emergence of industrial societies, contrary to the expectations of U&CD’s schema of macro-historical succession of more advanced types of societies. In addition to highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of U&CD and LP, the case study will also enable identifying potential synergies between the two approaches. Ultimately, this article aims to outline steps towards a productive synthesis between them to enable both to contribute jointly to a non-Eurocentric conception of the intersocietal.

The recent surge of anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship has seen several attempts at precise definitions of Eurocentrism, to differentiate between Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric scholarship, and to formulate the conceptual basis of non-Eurocentric approaches to the international ⁹ . While such endeavours are highly valuable for increasing our understanding of Eurocentrism, they have also drawn critiques for overlooking or reproducing important aspects of Eurocentrism. This shows that Eurocentrism is an extremely complex, multifaceted problem, that likely exceeds any particular definition. Rather than trying to adopt a definition that grasps the problem in its entirety, this article adopts a working definition derived from the critical analysis of the U&CD scholars’ anti-Eurocentric claims. I have chosen this approach because the U&CD scholars have made significant contributions to addressing the problem of Eurocentrism in IR, but still inadvertently ended up reproducing aspects of it, showing that these are persistent expressions of Eurocentrism that need addressing to maximise U&CD’s anti-Eurocentric potential and further the anti-Eurocentric research agenda. The working definition consists of the epistemic Eurocentrism of developmental ranking and uniform metrics of economic value and productivity embedded in U&CD’s concept of development, and the resulting state-centric conception of the intersocietal.

This article is structured in four sections. The first briefly introduces the problem of Eurocentrism in IR and critically assesses the U&CD scholars’ contributions to addressing it, considering existing critiques of their interventions. The second section introduces the alternative approach of Dussel’s LP, while the following section applies both approaches to the case of Nordic state-Sámi relations to assess their relative strengths and weaknesses. The final section provides an assessment of what aspects of the theories are most useful for generating a non-Eurocentric conception of the intersocietal, and how they could potentially be synthesised into an anti-Eurocentric theory of intersocietal multiplicity.

The Contributions and Limitations of Anti-Eurocentric U&CD Scholarship

To my understanding, the question of Eurocentrism in IR is normative at its core. Although much of the discussion has centred on the analytical Eurocentrism of IR theories, these questions are relevant because of their normative implications. This reflects the general interconnectedness of the analytical and normative dimensions of IR. As expressed by Robert W. Cox ¹⁰ , the feasibility of normative prescriptions hinge on the soundness of our analytical understanding of the world, while the scope of what can be considered feasible normative choices is likewise constrained by our analytical understanding.

John M. Hobson’s influential contributions to the anti-Eurocentric research agenda in IR, and responses they drew, serve well to demonstrate the interrelatedness of the analytical and normative dimensions of the Eurocentrism problematique. His interventions have focused on challenging and overcoming the analytical problem of systematic omissions of non-Western agency from IR theory ¹¹ and representations of world history ¹² . Hobson’s writings disclose the normative commitment motivating his contributions to anti-Eurocentric scholarship, as he argues that writing with empathy for ‘peoples marginalized as inferior’ ¹³ , by recovering their agency and rediscovering our global-collective past, enables envisioning a better shared future, where all peoples are recognised as active contributors ¹⁴ .

L.H.M. Ling’s ¹⁵ response to Hobson’s efforts to re-instate non-Western agency shows another side of the normative stakes surrounding questions of analytical Eurocentrism. She argued that Hobson’s emphasis on non-Western agency problematically implies non-Western peoples’ complicity in bringing about colonialism and the current Eurocentric state of academia.

Meera Sabaratnam ¹⁶ argued that Hobson’s international historical sociology merely inverts the master narrative of modernity’s emergence, making the ‘East’, rather than the ‘West’ the driver of this process, rather than challenging the centrality of modernity and its marginalisation of other cultures. This analytical critique has clear normative implications, as it implies that Hobson only treats cultures as significant and viable to the extent that they have contributed to the emergence and unfolding of modernity.

Hobson’s contributions to anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship, and the above referenced critiques demonstrate the interconnectedness of the analytical and normative dimensions of the Eurocentrism problematique. While the U&CD scholars have predominantly contributed to challenging and overcoming analytical forms of Eurocentrism, their interventions are also motivated by normative commitments, discernible from their writings, and they have likewise drawn critiques with clear normative implications.

The U&CD scholars’ contributions to anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship have a similar analytical focus on re-instating non-Western agency as Hobson’s. They build on Rosenberg’s pioneering work in adapting U&CD to IR. Rosenberg presented U&CD as providing the conceptual means for theorising the unique causal consequences of interactive societal multiplicity ¹⁷ , by departing from two core assumptions: (I) there are many societies; (II) they interact and are of relatively uneven political, socio-economic and cultural makeup ¹⁸ . These assumptions’ implications are captured through their effects on the process of ‘development’, which is dramatically altered by societies’ ability to appropriate practices from one another, that they could not have generated endogenously at the time. Such intersocietal transfers of practices are actively facilitated by the causal mechanism of the ‘whip of external necessity’ ¹⁹ , which compels societies to adopt cutting-edge innovations developed elsewhere to maintain military and economic competitiveness. This allows societies to utilise ‘the privilege of backwardness’ ²⁰ , accelerating their development by skipping and merging stages. The result is combined social formations, where organic practices and social structures intermesh with imported ones, setting all societies on unique, multilinear developmental paths ²¹ .

The anti-Eurocentric U&CD scholars argue that U&CD provides the conceptual means to ‘decisively defeat’ ²² Eurocentrism, by challenging its intellectual core of developmental internalism ²³ . ‘Developmental internalism’ means positing social change as internal to a society, or in this case, a subcontinent, by neglecting how other societies/continents influence the development of said society/(sub)continent. The analytical assumption that social change in Europe has been exclusively driven by internal factors has sustained the myth of Europe’s endogenously enacted transition to modernity due to its ostensibly unique virtues, which generates the further Eurocentric expectations that all societies will retrace Europe’s developmental path to converge around westernised modernity, which is seen as normatively desirable ²⁴ . Thus, U&CD scholars see the analytical Eurocentrism of developmental internalism as the foundation of normatively Eurocentric ideologies striving to universalise westernised modernity. U&CD overdetermines Eurocentrism thus defined theoretically. Developmental internalism is impossible, as development entails cross-appropriation of practices between societies, making all developmental trajectories combined and unique, which in turn rules out the possibility of other societies retracing Europe’s developmental path ²⁵ . This discredits normatively Eurocentric prescriptions that all societies ought to emulate Europe’s developmental trajectory. Anievas, Nişancıoğlu and Matin have ably demonstrated U&CD’s utility for informing anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship through their applied works.

Anievas and Nişancıoğlu’s How the West Came to Rule ²⁶ represents the most sustained effort by U&CD scholars to challenge internalist accounts of Europe’s transition to capitalist modernity, by theorising several inter-continental vectors’ contributions to this process. They include the Mongol Empire’s role in facilitating westward technology diffusion, the capital accumulated through colonial ventures and indentured labour in the Americas, the West and East Indies, and forcible colonial technology and capital transfers from India to Europe. While the normative significance of challenging Eurocentric internalist representations of history has been established above, the work also has an overtly normative component in extrapolating implications from U&CD’s understanding of capitalism for anti-capitalist resistance, particularly for non-Western peoples.

Matin challenged Eurocentric orientalist representations of the Iranian 1979 revolution and the emergence of ISIL in Iraq and Syria as untheorisable anomalies or expression of inherent Islamic theocratic tendencies by incorporating the intersocietal dimension through U&CD ²⁷ . Matin sees the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a ‘revolution of backwardness’, comparable to political revolutions in other precapitalist societies facing external pressure from capitalist societies ²⁸ . Similarly, ISIL emerged from intersocietal dynamics, as the Iraqi Sunni bureaucratic-military class was first shaped by the Ottomans and the British, and was eventually deposed through the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, driving them into the arms of Salafi militants with whom they formed ISIL ²⁹ . Matin’s normative motivation appears to be to discredit existing Eurocentric representations of these events, normalising and destigmatising these societies’ developmental paths through U&CD.

Despite these valuable contributions to contesting Eurocentrism and orientalism, current adaptations of U&CD have drawn critiques for unwittingly reproducing a form of epistemic Eurocentrism through their reliance on the concept of ‘development’, as expressed in the critiques of Meera Sabaratnam, David L. Blaney, Naeem Inayatullah and Arlene B. Tickner. They highlight that U&CD requires developmental ranking of societies as relatively ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’ to discern whether they are wielding or reacting to the ‘whip of external necessity’ or utilising the ‘privilege of backwardness’ ³⁰ . This analytical limitation can be termed ‘epistemic monism’, as U&CD’s developmental ranking of societies requires uniform metrics of economic value and productivity ³¹ . It has clear normative implications, as the uniform metrics of value and productivity must be derived from a particular culture (knowingly or unknowingly), privileging its standards over those of other cultures ³² .

A second analytical limitation, identified by Sabaratnam ³³ in Rosenberg’s work, is that he rules out linear development at one level of analysis, while assuming it at another. Though U&CD denies the possibility of any society replicating another society’s developmental path due to intersocietal cross-appropriation of practices, Rosenberg still insisted on retaining the notion of development as the chronological succession of more advanced types of societies on global macro-historical level. This enables positing humanity as a unified, yet internally differentiated ontological object, undergoing the process of (uneven and combined) development ³⁴ . Rosenberg tried to pre-empt critiques of lapsing into Eurocentric developmental teleology by arguing that such succession of more advanced types of societies is an indisputable historical fact ³⁵ . Sabaratnam responded that Rosenberg’s societal types are abstractions; to perceive these abstractions and their historical succession requires historiographical choices that are as disputable as the ‘facts’ they render discernible ³⁶ . This analytical critique has similar normative implications as Sabaratnam’s critique of Hobson’s international historical sociology. Rosenberg’s macro-historical schema, culminating with modern industrial societies, allows reinterpreting their formation under uneven and combined forms. However, it leaves the centrality and inevitability of modernity uncontested, imposing normative constraints on what courses of action appear feasible, as it is implied that all ‘backward’ societies are destined for eventual supersession by more ‘advanced’ ones.

Anievas and Nişancıoğlu ³⁷ attempted to distance themselves from problematic aspects of Rosenberg’s use of ‘development’ by maintaining that they use ‘advanced’ and ‘backwards’ to signify societies’ relative power relations rather than ranking them along a linear developmental scale ³⁸ . However, there is an inconsistency in their use of the concept of the ‘privilege of historic backwardness’ ³⁹ that enables backward societies to draw ‘together different stages of the journey ⁴⁰ , which is only meaningful with reference to a linear scale of development. Anievas has also stated that: ‘It is important to note that Trotsky’s argument retains the notion of a succession of more advanced modes of production on a global scale’ ⁴¹ . This is an admission of reliance on the same macro-historical analytical schema of sucesssion of more advanced types of societies/modes of production as Rosenberg, imposing the same constraints on what normative choices appear viable.

Matin ⁴² is less reliant on developmental ranking, as he sees societal typologies as obscuring more than they illuminate for premodern Asian societies. However, after the emergence of capitalism, a clear two-stage developmental ranking forms in his applied studies, as ‘precapitalist’ societies are reduced to a state of fundamentally uncompetitive ‘backwardness’ in relation to capitalist societies ⁴³ . Matin recognises the problem of using negative terms like ‘backward’ and ‘precapitalist’, stressing that these are not meant as normative verdicts, but as signifying power relations ⁴⁴ . Still, these analytical commitments impose constraints on what can be considered normatively viable, as the precapitalist societies in principle only can escape their ‘backwardness’ condition by transitioning fully to capitalism.

The U&CD scholars’ analytical commitments also render their approaches state-centric, despite their redefinition of the ‘international’ as the ‘intersocietal’. It must be recognised that U&CD scholars have gone to greater lengths than most IR scholars in incorporating social formations other than states. For example, Matin ⁴⁵ , Nişancıoğlu ⁴⁶ and Jamie Allison ⁴⁷ each respectively theorised the roles of pastoral nomads in Iranian, Ottoman and Jordanian state formation processes. However, the assumption that humanity is undergoing a succession of more advanced types of societies, where agrarian and industrial societies rank higher than nomadic societies, entails that nomadic social formations eventually are superseded by sedentary state-like entities.

U&CD’s state-centrism is further compounded by the analytical centrality of the ‘whip of external necessity’, which highlights how societies are compelled to adopt the latest innovations developed elsewhere to remain militarily and economically competitive to maintain their external sovereignty ⁴⁸ . This analytical constraint has normative implications by excluding all societies that are unable or unwilling to maintain their external sovereignty from the intersocietal. Moreover, this is a form of (unintentional) normative Eurocentrism, projecting the desire for statehood (the current standard of ‘external sovereignty’) on all contemporary societies, though this is a relatively recent norm that emerged through modern nationalism ⁴⁹ , and remains alien to many non-Western peoples. For example, Mohawk scholar Gerald Taiaiake Alfred ⁵⁰ has argued that sovereignty is a fundamentally alien concept to indigenous peoples, and that adopting it as a political aspiration comes at great normative peril, as the hierarchical, adversarial form of sovereign power risks alienating indigenous peoples from their intensely consultative flat governing practices. Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney ⁵¹ also highlighted how the norms of state-sovereignty impede genuine intercultural dialogue between westernised modernity and other cultures by demanding rigid mutually exclusive practices of territoriality, property and social belonging (citizenship), to the exclusion of flexible customary practices.

The debate on societal multiplicity sparked by Rosenberg’s intervention also raised questions of what kind of multiplicity, with several authors ⁵² questioning Rosenberg’s apparent equation of the intersocietal with the inter-state in a special issue dedicated to the topic. U&CD’s social ontology can accommodate stateless people and their agency by assuming unevenness within societies and internal resistance toward the state and its dominant classes. However, this still puts stateless peoples in a diminished position, as they are reduced to unevenness internal to other societies, rather than being treated as societies in their own right.

I have chosen to focus on the epistemic Eurocentrism of reliance on a monistic measurement scale of value and productivity, the macro-historical schema of the succession of more advanced types of societies/modes of production, and state-centrism, as they are persistent forms of Eurocentrism that appear in one of the most avowedly anti-Eurocentric research programmes of U&CD. This makes it necessary to draw out the normative implications of these forms of Eurocentrism, and find ways to work around them. I recognise that there remain many other important expressions of Eurocentrism that are outside the scope of this article. Next, I turn to Dussel’s liberation philosophy for conceptual resources to tackle these specific expressions of Eurocentrism.

Alternative Approach of Dussel’s Liberation Philosophy

Dussel’s liberation philosophy (LP) is an ethically driven approach, committed to illuminating the perspectives of marginalised parties, making it well-suited for breaking with U&CD’s limitations of epistemic monism and state-centrism. LP conceptualises the social world as a complex set of relations among totalities of publicly shared meaning. The dominant totalities are those with a strong capacity for violence to enforce acceptance of their preferred meanings. Other totalities suppressed by them are ‘exterior’, as their meanings are beyond the dominant totalities’ ontological horizons ⁵³ . What follows is an overview of the basic premises of Dussel’s LP and how it can be applied to intersocietal relations.

Dussel, following Levinas, sees ethics as the first foundational philosophy. This is because ontology and totalities of publicly shared meaning emerge as responses to originary ethical responsibilities, knowable through the pre-reflexive state of face-to-face proximity with the Other. Proximity triggers the realisation that the encountered human being radically exceeds our efforts to understand her/him through the confines of ontology, allowing access to the transontological realm of ethics, through intuitive understanding that the face of the Other makes unconditional demands not to be killed, but to be cared for ⁵⁴ . Reason and ontology originated as responses to this originary ethical duty, by compelling us to confront nature and organise sense impressions to obtain and fashion the goods to ensure the survival and wellbeing of the Other ⁵⁵ .

This unconditional ethical duty generates a set of universal ethical requirements that all societies must fulfil to an extent to self-reproduce, as losing sight of them would result in their destruction (for example, through uninhibited violence or mass starvation). They include the provision of food, dwelling, security and autonomy in organising collectively to provide these goods and pursue the higher cultural functions in life. These are universal transontological material-ethical requirements pertaining to human physical survival ⁵⁶ . However, fulfilling them entails entering the realms of ontology, culture and morality ⁵⁷ , by constituting instrumental totalities of shared meaning, enabling groups to coordinate complex labour tasks ⁵⁸ .

Paradoxically, organising into instrumental totalities to fulfil the ethical duty toward the Other opens the possibility for alienation — losing sight of the ethical responsibility towards the Other and negating it — through the assumption of standardised labour roles (the farmer, the herder, the builder, the nurse), risking glossing over individuals’ humanity by reducing them to production inputs ⁵⁹ . Dussel attributes under fulfilment of ethical-material requirements to the exclusion of individuals and groups from deliberations on the production and distribution of essential goods ⁶⁰ . Equal respect to all voices would result in minimal alienation and maximal material-ethical justice. However, this is a utopian ideal, impossible to realise fully in practice, as labour processes require organisation into standardised production roles with unequal participation in the decision-making process ⁶¹ .

Such alienation and exclusion is exacerbated by gulfs in meanings and moralities between totalities, presenting challenges for symmetrical communication between their constituents. Dussel terms that which is marginalised by dominant totalities as ‘exteriority’ ⁶² . Exterior communities are mistreated by dominant totalities, either because the dominant totalities’ constituents cannot perceive how they are impacting them, or because they misrecognise them through stigmatising ontological categories and regard their mistreatment as warranted or even necessary and benevolent ⁶³ .

Though seen with scorn from the dominant totalities, exterior communities can be the greatest sources of creativity and normative innovation, as they carry cultural and normative resources exceeding the dominant totalities’ ontological horizons ⁶⁴ . Dussel does not see relations between totalities as inherently conflictual, or their meanings as perpetually incommensurable. Rather, there is scope for dialogue, mutual learning and liberating transformation of dominant totalities, enabling them to expand their ontological horizons to appreciate exterior meanings and moralities ⁶⁵ .

The greatest potential for liberating transformation is when exterior communities are driven by desperation to unconceal themselves in a dominant totality’s public domain. Such eruptions of exterior marginalised peoples replicate the moment of proximity on collective level, as the dominant totality’s constituents are confronted by meanings that exceed the confines of their ontology, prompting them to reassess the dominant totality’s foundational assumptions ⁶⁶ . Acting ethically would require the dominant totality’s constituents’ acceptance of the exterior community’s contrary truth claims, which would entail expanding the totality’s ontological horizon and changing its social relations to accommodate the alterity of the exterior community, allowing it to flourish on its own terms with equitable relations to the up to then dominant totality, or as part of a reconstituted shared totality ⁶⁷ . Such ‘liberating’ transformations are always partial, with remaining and emerging injustices between and within totalities. Therefore, the liberation struggle is always a continuous process, as the utopia of completely overcoming all alienation is practically unachievable ⁶⁸ .

Dussel’s concept of exteriority enables addressing the analytical shortcomings of U&CD in relation to Eurocentrism identified above. It breaks with epistemic monism as exteriority draws attention to marginalised groups’ contestation of meaning and economic value as defined by the dominant totalities. As it always assumes that there is something exterior to, and suppressed by, the dominant totalities, LP is geared towards looking beyond the dominant totality of the states-system if applied to the intersocietal. However, LP was not formulated as an international theory, so it provides no clues for how to define exterior ‘societies’. For exterior groups to register in Dussel’s liberation philosophy, they would have to develop sufficient capacity for collective agency to, in some form, unsettle the status quo of the dominant totality. To be of relevance to intersocietal politics, exterior groups would have to make political claims as distinct peoples. This need not be for anything resembling statehood, but would require some level of collective self-identification and capacity to act as a group, or at least to claim to act on its behalf.

The following section will use the case of Nordic state-Sámi relations to ask questions of both U&CD and LP in terms of their abilities to provide analytical and normative insights on intersocietal relations between settler and indigenous polities. The Sámi people’s relations to the Nordic states is a good litmus test in relation to the residual Eurocentrism identified in U&CD above. Their lack of aspiration for statehood and prominent nomadic component makes them vulnerable to erasure resulting from U&CD’s analytical assumptions of state-centrism and ranking of nomadic people as less developed than sedentary societies. The case study will demonstrate some normative implications of U&CD’s analytical limitations and assess whether LP can provide more normatively beneficial interpretations, while remaining attentive to U&CD’s strengths and LP’s limitations to find complementary qualities and productive synergies between the two approaches.

Nordic State-Sámi Relations Seen through U&CD and LP

The Sámi are the indigenous people of the Northern Calotte, a geographical area covering mid-to-northernmost Norway, central-western-to-northernmost Sweden, northern Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula. They consider this area their homeland of Sápmi, where they are currently a minority with an estimated population of 80, 000 to 100, 000 ⁶⁹ . The Sámi have relied extensively on mobility for access to dispersed natural resources in the arctic and subarctic, with most Sámi having lived in nomadic or seminomadic forms, based on fishing, hunting, foraging, raring of reindeer and other ruminants and small-scale agriculture into the 20th century. Reindeer herding, and to a lesser extent fishing and hunting, remain significant Sámi livelihoods today ⁷⁰ . This analysis will focus on the reindeer herding Sámi, because their nomadic lifestyles made them most vulnerable to land confiscations as the Nordic states came to favour sedentary agriculture.

Sámi involvement with the broader intersocietal system began with Swedish, Russian and Danish states making competing sovereignty claims over Sápmi in the 12th century, which at first were limited to giving local strongmen (called Birkarls by the Swedish and Danish kingdoms) trade and taxation rights over the Sámi ⁷¹ .

The early stages of state-Sámi interactions were not characterised by systematic power-asymmetry making LP informed analysis less relevant. U&CD’s attentiveness to the constitutive role of intersocial interaction helps highlight mutually shaping Sámi-settler relations. However, Sámi societal existence and behaviour was inconsistent with the assumptions embedded in U&CD’s concept of the ‘whip of external necessity’. The Sámi never had anything resembling a sovereign authority. Rather, Sápmi was inhabited by Sámi groups organised through the siida band institution, which made interlocking territorial claims over the Northern Calotte through customary practices. While the Sámi were hunter/fisher gatherers, siida bands asserted exclusive hunting and fishing rights within their territories, which typically were rounded in shape and up to 400 square kilometres in size ⁷² . As the Sámi transitioned to large scale reindeer pastoralism, the siida territories became narrow strips, with wider summer and winter pastures at the ends, up to 600 kilometres apart ⁷³ .

The Sámi’s gradual transition from hunter/fisher gathering to large-scale reindeer herding was an outcome of combined development in the U&CD sense, catalysed by the encounter with non-Sámi settlers, beginning in Swedish Lapland during the late-16^th-to-early-17^th-centuries. The initial results of growing non-Sámi settlements were deepening Sámi-settler trade ties and more institutionalised state-Sámi relations through the introduction of the Lapp Land Tax regimes, which curbed the Birkarls’ arbitrary taxation and recognised Sámi titles to their hunting and fishing areas in exchange for regular taxes, paid mostly in furs ⁷⁴ . Contrary to the expectations of U&CD’s ‘whip of external necessity’, the Sámi did not attempt to preserve external sovereignty toward outsiders, but rather appeared to welcome the settler and state presence, as they offered lucrative opportunities through fur trade and commissions for the state, which depended on Sámi draft reindeer for wintertime transportation ⁷⁵ .

Access to external food through fur trade allowed the Sámi population to exceed the local environment’s carrying capacity. Increased hunting to meet the demand for furs along with hunting by the growing settler population eventually depleted game stocks, triggering acute food shortages amongst the Sámi of Swedish Lapland, compelling them to domesticate remaining wild reindeer, thus triggering a transition to reindeer pastoralism ⁷⁶ . Sámi reindeer pastoralism was also expressive of combined development, as its viability required sedentary populations for complimentary surplus exchange ⁷⁷ .

From the 17th century onward, Sámi also began organising into more settled communities along the Atlantic coasts, rivers and great lakes, though they still relied on mobility for transhumance with ruminants, access to seasonal fisheries, hunting and foraging areas ⁷⁸ . At this point, Sámi society was sparsely populated, but densely interconnected through the reindeer pastoral Sámi, whose seasonal migrations brought them into regular contact with the more settled coastal, lake and riverside Sámi villages, creating bonds across vast distances through trade, recruitment and intermarriage ⁷⁹ . Contrary to modernist nationalism studies scholars like Benedict Anderson’s ⁸⁰ and Ernest Gellner’s ⁸¹ characterisations of ‘premodern’ populations as lacking capacity for community imagination within a larger polity of co-ethnics, it was easy for the Sámi of the time to imagine having kin and other fellow Sámi in geographically distant places, as many would know first-hand. This sense of belonging to a wider Sámi community would subsequently serve as an important precedent.

Though the Nordic states claimed Sápmi as sovereign territories, they accommodated Sámi alterity through institutional provisions tailored to Sámi practices of mobile territoriality, resource management and societal organisation. These included the customised Lapp Land Tax regime, ⁸² and the Lapp Codicil of the 1751 Strömstad border treaty between Sweden (then including Finland) and Denmark (then including Norway), which affirmed the ‘Lappish nation’s right to survival’ ⁸³ by guaranteeing the Sámi’s rights to cross state boundaries on their seasonal migrations, recognising the jurisdiction of intra-Sámi courts and the Sámi’s right to stay neutral in a war ⁸⁴ . Both U&CD and LP offer insights on this aspect of Sámi-state relations. Incorporating Sámi customary practices into statutory law is another expression of combined development, whereas from an LP perspective, it expresses a mutually accommodating merger of ontological horizons between the settler and Sámi totalities.

The Sámi’s standing in relation to the states began deteriorating during the 19th century. It was in part due to geopolitical tensions. Sweden lost Finland to Russia in the Finish War of 1808-1809, and Norway shifted from Denmark to Sweden as part of the fallout of the Napoleonic Wars, with Both Finland and Norway retaining strong internal autonomy. Though the borders at first remained open to Sámi seasonal migrations, worsening relations between Sweden (then including Norway) and Russia (then including Finland) led to border closure between them in 1852 ⁸⁵ . When Norway achieved its longstanding aspiration for independence in 1905, it was keen to assert its sovereignty by closing the border with Sweden to Sámi migrations, which finally came to pass in 1923, with some exemptions ⁸⁶ . U&CD’s ‘whip of external necessity’ could illuminate how inter-state geopolitical tensions contributed to the dismemberment of Sápmi, but would also appear to preclude a U&CD informed analysis from treating the Sámi as a society in its own right after the border closures. The border closures meant the de-facto partitioning of the Sámi along the states’ territorial boundaries, reducing them to unevenness within the sovereign Nordic and Russian states. An LP informed analysis would interpret the border closures as the Sámi being reduced to an exterior society of intersocietal, that remained interconnected in the minds and memories of the Sámi, though this was denied by the intersocietal’s dominant totality of the states-system.

As the states/pre-independence autonomous administrations (Finland gained independence in 1917) became influenced by linear developmental thinking during the 19th century, they began systematically eroding existing Sámi rights. Previously, agrarian settlement into Lapland had been strictly regulated, as the states had assumed that the Sámi were using the lands to their full potential, generating more tax revenue than sedentary farmers could be expected to ⁸⁷ . This assumption was superseded by the dogma that sedentary agriculture is inherently more productive than pastoral nomadism, leading the states to embark on large-scale northward agri-colonisation programmes, parcelling out Lapp Tax Lands to pioneer settlers. Though this violated the states’ own legal frameworks, it was justified by the developmental ‘laws of history’ ⁸⁸ . In the words of a Norwegian government commission report from the 1880s:

Nomadic life has a hostile relation to the life of the advanced society. It is well known that the former will obstruct and damage the latter, when they collide, the progression of cultural life at the expense of the old natural forms of life is historically justified, this drives the legislator, guided by this awareness, to limit the rights of the nomad, that he be held responsible, should he inflict damage on the property of the sedentary population ⁸⁹ .

Reliance on U&CD to interpret this aspect of state-Sámi relations would impose normatively detrimental analytical constraints. The expansion of non-Sámi agrarian settlements into Sápmi would appear consistent with U&CD’s expectation of the long-term displacement of nomadic societies by more ‘advanced’ agrarian ones, given U&CD’s reliance on a macro-historical schema assuming a succession of more advanced types of societies. The foreseeable demise of Sámi reindeer pastoralism might be normatively lamentable, but inevitable given the historical reality of the succession of more advanced types of societies (a view shared by Nordic politicians sympathetic to the Sámi at the time ⁹⁰ ).

An LP informed interpretation of this phase of state-Sámi relations would highlight the diverging ontological horizons of the settler polities and the reindeer herding Sámi, resulting in the Sámi’s marginalisation to exteriority through the exercise of state-power. An early example of divergent ontological horizons between Sámi and settler societies, where state power became decisive in enforcing acceptance of the dominant totality’s preferred meaning, was the disputed status of ‘outfield hay meadows’. The pioneer settlers began regarding hay meadows within walking distance of their farms as their exclusive fodder resources, resulting in conflicts when reindeer grazed or trampled them ⁹¹ . In court proceedings, the Sámi pointed out that many of these meadows had been created by them as clearings for milking reindeer and were kept open by their grazing ⁹² . The states/autonomous administrations resolved these conflicts in favour of the settlers through legislation making Sámi reindeer herding bands collectively liable for any damages to farm ‘property’, including rather distant ‘outfield hey meadows’ ⁹³ .

The ontological exclusion of previously recognised Sámi customary practices from the states’ property rights regimes culminated with the Finnmark Bill in Norway and the Partition Acts of Sweden and Finland. Norway’s 1848 Finnmark Bill claimed all of Norway’s northernmost county of Finnmark (roughly the size of Denmark) as Crown lands, as its Sámi inhabitants’ nomadic lifestyles disqualified them from land ownership ⁹⁴ . The Land Partitioning Acts were implemented in different Swedish regions over a century from the 1820s to the 1920s, ⁹⁵ while in Finland it was accomplished through the Great Partition of 1925 ⁹⁶ . In these land re-distribution processes, Sámi territorial practices tied to reindeer herding, hunting and fishing were omitted from constituting a basis for land claims, turning all Sámi usufruct lands not claimed as sedentary farmland into state lands. Only the Sámi with sedentary farms could retain formal land titles, but this came at the expense of their official Sámi status and accompanying reindeer herding rights (except in Finland, where this is not an exclusive Sámi right) ⁹⁷ . Thus, from an LP perspective, the 19th-to-early-20th-centuries were a time of ontological subsumption of the Sámi under the dominant Nordic and Russian totalities’ ontologies of mutually exclusive territoriality and agrarian property rights regimes, where the Sámi could only claim territory by assimilating with the dominant totalities. Sámi reindeer herding continued existing at the mercy of the states, formally subordinated to the settler polities’ interests.

Both U&CD and LP offer insights into how the Sámi began organising politically to re-assert themselves as a society. Dussel’s concept of exteriority draws attention to efforts at self-assertion from the margins, while U&CD can offer insights on its combined indigenous-settler-influenced traits. Sámi political activism first emerged at the turn of the 20th century in mid-Sweden and mid-and-northernmost-Norway, areas undergoing acute Sámi-settler conflicts ⁹⁸ . The emerging Sámi political leaders were highly educated within the settler-societies formal systems and began publishing Sámi newspapers ⁹⁹ , while the Norwegian Sámi leader, Isak Saba, produced Sámi national romantic poetry ¹⁰⁰ . The early Sámi movement culminated with the first overtly political Sámi mass gatherings in Trondheim, Norway, in 1917 and Östersund, Sweden in 1918, organised by Swedish Sámi leader, Elsa Laula Renberg (subsequently remembered as Sámi national mother figure), which attracted delegates from both sides of the border, making them symbolic statements of pan-Sámi intent ¹⁰¹ .

No actionable programme emerged from the first wave of the Sámi movement, which faded after the Östersund rally, in part due to interwar economic hardship ¹⁰² . Sámi political activism only revived during the 1950-60s, in reaction to intensifying hydropower incursions into Swedish Lapland, which drove the reindeer herding Sámi of Sweden to unite under Svenska Samers Riksförbund (National Union of the Swedish Sami People, SSR). ¹⁰³ U&CD’s methodologically required uniform metrics of productivity and assumption of the macro-historical succession of more advanced types of societies would constrain its analysis of the hydropower expansion in Swedish Lapland. The ‘whip of external necessity’ would illuminate the capitalist geopolitical rivalries that compelled the Swedish state to exploit its watercourses, resulting in dramatic productivity increases in urban centres through abundant electricity. That is not how affected reindeer herding Sámi experienced it. To them, it was the destruction of life-essential resources through the flooding of homesteads and pastures (including rare, lush spring pastures along watercourses), the decimation of fish stocks and loss of migration routes, as regulated waters make river ices too brittle to traverse safely ¹⁰⁴ . If we see beyond the analytical constraints of UC&D’s ‘whip of external necessity’ and its requirement for developmental ranking, U&CD can highlight the combined form of Sámi resistance. The SSR was formed under the leadership of Sámi Vicar, Gustav Park, and gained its organisational strength from the underlying structure of the Lapp Villages, which were the combined outcome of traditional Sámi Siida band structures having adapted to the formal organisational requirements of the Swedish state ¹⁰⁵ .

While LP lacks the conceptual resources for highlighting the combined nature of Sámi resistance, it would focus on how the affected reindeer herding Sámi had ontologically constituted the rivers and tundra that were dammed and flooded as homesteads, spiritual sites, pastures, fishing waters and migration routes, and how these meanings and economic values were rendered exterior by the Swedish state, which gave them little consideration when the dams were planned. The reindeer-herding Sámi’s exterior status is evidenced by the omission of reindeer herding from livelihoods eligible for compensation from the Water Act that authorised the dams, although agriculture was included ¹⁰⁶ . LP’s concept of exteriority would also highlight the SSR’s efforts at communicating the plight of affected reindeer herding Sámi to the Swedish state through a sustained lobbying campaign, demanding compensation through equivalent lands and veto powers over further hydropower expansion ¹⁰⁷ . The SSR conformed to the dominant Swedish totality’s norms of acceptable political conduct, but the Swedish state did not reciprocate by expanding its ontological horizons to accommodate Sámi alterity. The hydropower expansion continued unabated, and the Swedish state began assessing damages to Sámi reindeer herding through the ontologies of capitalism and sedentary farming. It provided monetary compensation commensurate to percentages of nominal pasture lands lost, as if they were qualitatively undifferentiated like cattle fields, without considering the dams’ impact on the overall viability of the reindeer herding operations. ¹⁰⁸

Despite the meagre results of its activism, the SSR greatly increased Sámi capacity for exercising societal agency, becoming the organisational backbone of the Nordic Sámi Council (NSC), formed jointly with Sámi organisations from Norway and Finland in the mid-1950s ¹⁰⁹ . The NSC’s formation solidified a sense of shared nationhood among the Nordic Sámi political leaders, which reflected combination, with the Sámi leaders borrowing ideological concepts and organisation practices from the settlers. From an LP perspective, the NSC’s formation was expressive of the new emerging leadership claiming to speak on behalf of a society exterior to the dominant intersocietal totality of the states-system.

The NSC enabled the Sámi to join forces with other societies exterior to the states-system from across the Americas and the Arctic, by representing the Sámi at the World Council of Indigenous Peoples’ (WCIP) inaugural 1975 conference in Canada ¹¹⁰ . LP allows interpreting the formation of the WCIP as the ripple effect of exterior resistance to the dominant Canadian totality’s effort to ontologically dissolve Canada’s indigenous societies through the 1969 ‘White Paper’, which would have unilaterally terminated Canada’s treaties with indigenous peoples. This prompted all the indigenous peoples of Canada, party to a treaty, to unite under the Indian Brotherhood, which was formed in 1969 to resist implementation of the White Paper ¹¹¹ . Having successfully staved off implementation of the White Paper, the Indian Brotherhood subsequently led the effort in reaching out to indigenous peoples across the Americas and the Arctic, culminating with the establishment of the WCIP in 1975 ¹¹² . This marked the beginning of the first coordinated effort by indigenous peoples to jointly challenge the states-system’s claim to exclusive ownership of the world’s land mass. In language exterior to the states-systems’ ontology of sovereign statehood and rigid mutually exclusive territoriality, the WCIP demanded acceptance of a territorial system of inalienable belonging to the land, and for the right to be left outside the relentless pursuit of more ‘development’ ¹¹³ . The NSC assumed a central role in the WCIP, hosting its second conference in Giron/Kiruna, Sweden ¹¹⁴ . ‘The whip of external necessity’ would impede U&CD’s ability to perceive the non-sovereign entities that constituted the Indian Brotherhood and the WCIP as societies in their own right. However, U&CD’s concept of ‘combination’ would draw attention to how both organisations borrowed organisational practices from the settler societies’ civil society organisations to make political claims rooted in indigenous understandings of belonging, territoriality and justice.

From an LP perspective, the WCIP’s subsequent lobbying toward the UN appears as a sustained interpellation by exterior indigenous societies towards the dominant intersocietal totality of the states-system. It contributed to a chain of events that led to a limited, but still significant liberating transformation of the intersocietal system with increased acceptance of indigenous peoples as an aspect of it. This was expressed institutionally through the creation of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Issues in 1982, the passing of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (C169) in 1989, the formation of the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000 and the passing of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007 ¹¹⁵ . From a U&CD perspective, these developments express combination, as customary indigenous practices and indigenous leaders are incorporated into the formal framework of the UN.

By the late 1970s, the WCIP was already succeeding in normatively challenging the states-system’s exclusive claims to the world’s land mass by placing indigenous peoples’ rights on the agenda of global politics. Meanwhile, the Sámi earned tacit recognition of their indignity through their WCIP participation ¹¹⁶ . This would significantly increase the Sámi’s leverage towards the Nordic states, as became evident in the Alta conflict between theSámi and the Norwegian state over the Alta-Guovdageaidnu watercourse hydropower project.

The original plan for the Alta-Guovdageaidnu watercourse hydropower project was of unprecedented scale for the region. It would have flooded large parts of Finnmark County’s tundra, endangering the largest Sámi reindeer pastoral system, drowned the Sámi village Máze and destroyed the salmon river Deatnu/Tana/Teno, an important resource to Sámi villages in Norway and Finland ¹¹⁷ . Despite this expected destruction, it would, by U&CD’s uniform metrics still have generated an aggregate gain in productivity, and would have been consistent with the macro-historical expectation of the supersession of nomadic societies by industrial or capitalist societies, imposing constraints on the kinds of normative decisions that would appear viable from a U&CD informed perspective.

The project’s initial 1968 presentation drew mass protests from Máze residents, which succeeded in deferring and scaling back the project, sparing Máze and omitting the Deatnu/Tana/Teno watercourse, reducing its impact significantly ¹¹⁸ . When the scaled-back project resumed in 1978, it was widely seen as a front for a more extensive follow-up project, provoking strong resistance from Sámi and Norwegian locals and environmental activists, who jointly barricaded the planned access route ¹¹⁹ . Simultaneously, young Sámi activists, calling themselves the Sámi Action Group (SAG), erected a Sámi style tent outside the Norwegian parliament and went on hunger strike demanding authorisation for the project should be recinded ¹²⁰ . From an LP perspective, these Sámi civil disobedience campaigns reflected the eruption of an exterior group into the public realm of the dominant totality, opening space for liberating transformation by prompting the dominant totality’s constituents to reassess their assumptions of truth and justice. The Sámi activists’ appeals resonated with the constituents of Norwegian settler society, as the SAG attracted a massive crowd of supporters. The SAG’s hunger strike and the occupation of the access road site drew in the intersocietal dimension through international media attention, while the WCIP amplified the SAG’s message by issuing a public statement to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Odvar Nordli, urging him to recognise the Sámi’s land rights ¹²¹ . The Norwegian cabinet temporarily halted the project and appointed a Sámi Rights Committee to assess the Sámi claims, but reauthorised the project soon thereafter, mobilising 600 police officers to clear the protesters from the access road site, which became an international media spectacle ¹²² . The dam was completed, but the publicity generated by the conflict ensured it remained in scaled-back form, with a tolerable impact on affected Sámi ¹²³ .

LP helps us to understand how the emergence of the exterior indigenous peoples onto the stage of global politics through the WCIP, and Sámi participation in it, transformed the Alta conflict from a domestic Norwegian affair into an intersocietal conflict between a state and an indigenous people, of relevance to the outside world. The WCIP’s activities contributed to an expansion of the ontological horizon of the intersocietal system with indigenous peoples now occupying a space in it. The Alta conflict was also another watershed event in the reconstitution of Sápmi as a combined polity in U&CD terminology (if we see beyond the analytical constraints of the ‘whip of external necessity’). Media coverage of the conflict across the Nordic region stimulated mass Sámi ethno-political consciousness for the first time ¹²⁴ . Sámi political leaders capitalised on this by borrowing from modern nationalism, while infusing it with an indigenous understanding of what national self-determination entails. At its first post-Alta conference of 1986, the NSC issued a statement defining the Sámi as a single people, with their own territory, where they have the right to land, water, their own history, language, culture and societal organisations. The conference also fashioned a Sámi flag and adopted Isaak Saba’s poem Sámi Soga Lávlla (Song of the Sámi People) as a national anthem ¹²⁵ .

The Alta conflict set the scene for what from an LP perspective was a (partially) liberating transformation of Norwegian state-Sámi relations. The conflict made the status quo untenable, having catalysed unprecedented Sámi political assertiveness. It also led the constituents of the dominant Norwegian totality to question the state’s treatment of their indigenous population, and embarrassed the Norwegian state internationally, undermining its previously established reputation as a global champion of human rights. Consequently, the Sámi Rights Committee appointed at the height of the conflict was subsequently given a strong mandate ¹²⁶ . Its recommendations led to the passing of the Sámi Act of 1987, adoption of the constitutional Sámi rights article in 1988 and establishment of a Sámi representative assembly, the Norwegian Sámediggi, in 1989, with Norway also becoming the first country to ratify C169 in 1990 ¹²⁷ . This (partially) liberating transformation of the Norwegian totality to accommodate Sámi alterity is still unfolding. While much progress has been made in providing education and other public services in Sámi language, the question of Sámi land rights remains unresolved, with a process still underway assessing the question of landownership by Sámi and other locals in Finnmark County to make Norway compliant with its obligation to respect indigenous peoples’ ownership of their traditional usufruct lands under C169 ¹²⁸ .

The positive developments in Norwegian Sámi-state relations had limited influence in Finland and Sweden. They both now have representative Sámi assemblies, the Swedish and Finnish Sámediggis ¹²⁹ (Finland’s was established already in 1973). However, little progress has been made in safeguarding Sámi land and water rights ¹³⁰ . Institutional recognition of the Sámi on the states’ terms has pre-empted more extensive land rights demands, and subordinated Sámi politics to the nation-state structure. The Sámediggis counter-acted the latter by forming a pan-Nordic inter-Sámediggi council in 1996 ¹³¹ , and have been driving further unification of Sápmi across state boundaries and demanding greater acceptance of Sámi land and water rights by negotiating a Nordic Sámi Convention with the Nordic states’ parliaments since 2002. If ratified, it would guarantee Sámi customary rights to use lands and waters, allow cross-border reindeer herding arrangements and affirm the rights of all Sámi in relation to all Nordic states regardless of citizenship ¹³² .

From an LP perspective, these outcomes express the expansion of the ontological horizons within the dominant Nordic totalities to accommodate Sámi alterity, although this is still a very incomplete process, as much existing Sámi meaning and value remains exterior to these totalities. These partially liberating transformations have been enabled by the limited broadening of the ontological horizon of the intersocietal system through the establishment of global standards for indigenous peoples’ rights, a process driven by the coordinated efforts of exterior indigenous societies. U&CD’s concept of combination remains helpful for illuminating how the Sámi’s existence has been transformed through their close relations to the settler polities, and how their political claims appeal to the settler polities’ principles of national self-determination, while rejecting the ideal of sovereign nation-statehood. Combination also helps explain the hybrid form of Sámi institutional politics now operating under the settler polities’ practices of representative democracy.

Synergies between U&CD and LP

The above case study serves well to highlight the strengths and limitations of U&CD and LP, in terms of their abilities to contribute to non-Eurocentric theorisation of intersocietal interaction. If U&CD had been applied consistently, as it is currently formulated, the ‘whip of external necessity’ would have reduced the Sámi to unevenness internal to the states after Sápmi’s de-facto partitioning. Developmental ranking and reliance on the macro-historical schema of the succession of more advanced types of societies are required to apply U&CD’s concepts of the ‘whip of external necessity’ and ‘privilege of backwardness’. The requirement for developmental ranking confines U&CD to a uniform metric of economic value and productivity, privileging the culture this metric happens to be derived from over others, while the schema of macro-historical societal succession implies that ‘backward’ societies lack long-term viability in their existing forms. As neither the ‘whip’ or the ‘privilege’ proved particularly useful for analysing Nordic state-indigenous relations, discarding these concepts would allow abandoning developmental ranking of societies by relative productivity. This would allow retaining the concept of ‘combination’, which proved extremely valuable, at the core of U&CD’s social ontology, without implying any productivity hierarchies or unidirectional change. However, this would also render U&CD rather thin conceptually, essentially reducing it to the statement that all social development is combined and interactive. To provide analytical and normative direction to such a thin version of U&CD, it could be infused with LP’s core concept of ‘exteriority’, and its accompanying assumptions and ethics. Replacing the ‘whip of external necessity’ with ‘exteriority’ as the central epistemic pointer of U&CD would reorient its gaze from power asymmetries between states, to power asymmetries between the states-system as a whole and exterior peoples suppressed by it. This would put exterior peoples’ resistance toward the states-system and its subsidiary totalities at the centre of U&CD’s analysis, while retaining the concept of combination to illuminate the mutually shaping relations between dominant and exterior totalities. For directionality, U&CD’s notion of development as the succession of more productive types of societies can be replaced by LP’s notion of normative progress as the reconstitution of ontological horizons enabling acceptance of the meanings of exterior groups and redressal of the injustices they suffer at the hands of the dominant totalities.

Conclusion

Proponents of U&CD have argued that it makes a unique contribution to IR by providing the theoretical means for reconceptualising the intersocietal and for overcoming Eurocentrism. This opens the question: if the intersocietal is to be reconceptualised in non-Eurocentric form, why should it be equated with the inter-state? As the states-system is predominantly a legacy of European colonialism, leaving its centrality unchallenged appears to sidestep a central aspect of the Eurocentrism problematique. I have argued that analytical assumptions embedded in U&CD’s concept of the ‘whip of external necessity’ and in its macro-historical schema of the succession of more advanced types of societies locks it into state-centrism. I sought to demonstrate the normative implications of these analytical limitations through the case of Nordic state-Sámi relations. The Sámi are an example of the kinds of peoples that fall outside the scope of state-centric representations of the intersocietal. U&CD, as currently formulated can at best incorporate peoples submerged by the states-system as unevenness internal to states. If we truly aspire for non-Eurocentric conceptions of the intersocietal, there must be ways to incorporate such peoples as agents and entities of the intersocietal. LP’s concept of exteriority offers a way, by drawing attention to structural power asymmetries and resistance from below. However, it is also limited in the kinds of analyses of the intersocietal interaction it can generate, as its strengths are in analysing the outcomes resulting from confrontations between exterior groups and dominant totalities. It has little to offer in analysing the constitutive role intersocietal interaction has on all societies, which is where the strengths of U&CD reside. There is room for a productive synthesis between a minimalist version of U&CD, stripped of the concepts and assumptions that lock it into state-centrism, and LP’s concept of exteriority and its accompanying assumptions and ethical resources. This would reorient the gaze of U&CD from the intersocietal’s horizontal plane of inter-state interactions, to its vertical plane of relations between dominant totalities (the states-system and its subsidiary totalities) and exterior groups, and the potential for normative progress through the agency of exterior groups.