Culture and IR Theory: Departure or Appropriation?

Such conflict is directly related to debate over the norms that instruct them on how they enact their pan-Arab identity. Peter Katzenstein distinguishes between-constitutive norms which ‘express actor identities’, and regulatory norms, which ‘defuse standards of appropriate behaviour. Taken together, ‘these norms establish expectations about who the actors will be in a particular environment and about how these particular actors will behave’. These norms generate a ‘we-ness’ which explains why the United States was quick to extend security guarantees to Israel even in the late 1940s despite the absence of strategic rationale and has continued such ‘special relationship’ even when it undermined US attempts to cultivate strategic alliances with Arabs during Cold War. Even today shared values and sentiments rather than shared threats are always given as factors explaining the rush of the US to protect Israel.

The cultural imagination of the global order need not be confined to the Huntingtonian thesis of civilizational conflicts, In fact, Huntington’s definition of civilization in cultural terms is extremely parochial and motivated, to say the least. More significantly, it attempts to map a certain kind of a world. In this world, the civilizations are sustained by a structure of power internally, and they co-exist in geo-political relationships with each other. Contrast this with the wall of Akira Iriye, who used the term “cultural internationalism” to refer to the motivation and achievements of “individuals and groups of people from different lands that sought to develop an alternative community of nations and peoples on the basis of their cultural interchanges and that … their efforts have significantly altered the world community …” [Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1997, p. 2]. Nevertheless, on closer reading, one finds the optimism of cultural internationalism emanating from an essentially liberal, cosmopolitan vision, the chief dimensions of which we saw in the second image of the global order.

The book argues that the present global politics is uniquely multipolar and multicivilizational. Many major states across. non-Western civilizations were fiercely modern and yet vehemently anti-Western in their cultural choice. At present, the West is declining in relative importance, both in its economic and strategic strength. The demographic explosion of Islamic states is posing challenges to all non-Islamic states. It chronicles the emergence of a civilization-based world order, where societies sharing cultural values were seen cooperating with each other. In this world of civilizational divides, cultural renegades are missing. It strongly urges upon the United States, the custodian of Western culture, to reaffirm their Western identity and lead the West against the numerous non-Western challenges. The West needed to recognize the distinctiveness of their civilization by surrendering the vision of cultural universalism (Westernization as modernization syndrome) across the world. Huntington prognosticates intense inter-civilization clash based on incommensurate cultural identities.

Huntington’s conclusion here is emphatic: “The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be … the conflict between “the West and the Rest” and “the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values”. (Huntington, 1993: 41). Commenting on the Confucian Tslamic anti-Western strategy, Huntington believes “A Confucian-Islamic military connection has … come into being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of the weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the military power of the West.” (Huntington, 1993: 47).

The shortcomings of Huntington are of various kinds. Robert Bartley, amongst others, argued that the greatest potential for conflict was within rather than between civilizations. Fouad Ajami expressed surprise over Huntington’s confusion of civilizations and states, with his manifest tendency to collapse the second into the first and saw Huntington’s work as a mischievous rallying point for the American right wing forces. In concrete terms the whole enterprise seems convoluted, bereft of either the depth of scholarship necessary to compare the cultural essence of civilizations, or the theoretical flexibility to capture the nuances of textured categories such as civilization and culture. (Bartley, Ajami, Weeks, etc. 1993).

The most prominent among them has been Norman Podoretz, a noted die-hard Jewish conservative, who, after specifying the long list of states and regimes that “richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced”, believed that this action was at bottom about “the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam.” (Quoted in William Rivers Pitt, Blood Money, truthout, Thursday 27 February 2003, http.//bloodmoney.htm, p. 3).

The problem over the articulation and deployment of culture is clearly revealed in the discussions relating culture and democracy. The problem of making democracy compatible with cultural diversity without being imperialistic is a more serious affair. There are limits to both severe universalism and rigid relativist positions on the relations between democracy and culture. While cultural essentialism turns democracy into purely contextual, the universalist excess decontextualizes democracy into a reified and lifeless category (Lawson, 2000). The first often becomes the cognitive cover for authoritarian regimes who advertise their respective cultural brands of democracy without any meaningful demonstration of democratic practices, while the second might turn imperialistic vis-à-vis non-western cultures. There is enormous sense in Lawson’s point that the best position on democracy is the one “underpinned by a pluralistic epistemological position … [that] supports a sufficiently flexible approach to understanding democracy which is neither dogmatically relativist nor universalist” (Lawson, 2000: 83). A good example of the complications involved is the Asian values model of democracy, one that is defended by relativists otherwise sympathetic to the democratic project on cultural grounds, but is often nothing more than a thin cover for hierarchical leadership principles and authoritarian state practices completely bereft of the fundamental democratic norm of empowering people and their rights. The role of culture in world politics is indeed formidable. But to defend or critique democracy in cultural terms would not contribute to democratization unless one anchors democracy in ah ethical minimalism that is independent of institutions and agency across the world.

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