Politics of Secularism and International Relations

by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

 

It has been suggested that the rise of religion confronts international relations theory with a theoretical challenge comparable to that of the end of the Cold War or the emergence of globalization.  I agree.  To understand why we need to turn to the politics of secularism.  How might we think about secularisms, in the plural, as forms of political authority in contemporary international relations?  What does this mean for IR theory and the resurgence of religion?  What kinds of politics follow from different forms of secular commitments, traditions, habits, and beliefs?

My work brings debates from sociology of religion, philosophy, and political theory into international relations with the intention of refiguring a field that has virtually ignored questions involving how the categories of religion and politics shape international affairs.  The secularist division between religion and politics is not fixed but socially and historically constructed.  The failure to recognize that this is the case helps to explain why IR — both IR theory and in terms of the practices of international politics — has been unable to come to terms with secularism and religion (they go together) as forms of authority in world politics.  Overcoming this problem — opening up the black box of secularism, digging into the complex negotiations that take place inside this box — allows for a better understanding of empirical puzzles in international relations involving the politics of religion such as conflict between the United States and Iran, controversy over the enlargement of the European Union to include Turkey, the rise of political Islam, and global religious resurgence.

Secularism refers to a series of social and historical traditions.  These sets of practices have developed over time, and each has a history.  These traditions both rely upon and help to produce particular understandings of “religion,” of political Islam, of religious resurgence, of “normal” politics, and so forth.  Think about the fact that we don’t hear much about political Christianity, or political Judaism — this is subsumed for the most part under “normal politics,” but we do hear about political Islam.  To figure out why this is the case, and what the consequences are politically, was one of the motivating puzzles of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations.  The division between religion and politics embodied in various secular traditions is neither stable nor universal.  Take Craig Calhoun’s suggestion that we approach nationalism as a discourse within which political struggles are conducted.  Secularism, adapting his formulation, “is not the solution to the puzzle [of politics and religion] but the discourse within which struggles to settle the question are most commonly waged.”  Secularism is an authoritative discourse, a “tradition of argumentation.”  It is a resource for collective mobilization and legitimation, a language in which moral and political questions are settled, legitimated, and contested.  It is a form of political authority, a language of politics.

Two trajectories of secularism have been influential in international politics: laicism, and what I call Judeo-Christian secularism.  Laicism refers to a separationist narrative in which religion is expelled from politics, and Judeo-Christian secularism to an accommodationist narrative in which Judeo-Christian tradition is perceived as the fount and foundation of secular democracy.  These varieties of secularism don’t map cleanly onto one country or one individual — both appear in different modes in different times and places.  They are discursive traditions, collections of practices with a history.  Each defends some form of the separation of church and state, but in different ways, with different justifications and political consequences.

Review Essay: Ositivism And The Power Of International Law

By Anne Orford[*]

 

Custom, Power and the Power of Rules: International Relations and Customary International Law by Michael Byers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pages i–xxii, 1–250. Price A$34.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 521 63408 3.

Introduction

The break-up of the Soviet Union prefigured major transformations in international law and international relations. With the end of the Cold War, scholars in these disciplines began to make great claims about the potential for achieving a new world order. The end of the stand-off between two major powers, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, which supposedly represented opposing ideologies, was seen by some commentators to offer an opportunity for achieving a liberal alliance of democratic states committed to global free markets and the protection of individual rights.[1] For others, the post-Soviet era threatened abuses of power by international organisations and powerful states and a new freedom for those with the power to impose grandiose visions of a liberal, capitalist order in the absence of any effective opposition.[2]

The end of the Cold War has also led to a less celebrated rapprochement between the two disciplines of international relations and international law.[3] The Cold War fuelled a division between the two disciplines that had depended since the 1930s upon each discipline projecting a negative image of the other — international lawyers criticised realist international relations scholars as apologists for state power, while international relations scholars dismissed international law as hopelessly old-fashioned, dangerous and utopian.[4] In the changed conditions of the post-Cold War period, where liberalism has again been confidently heralded as the end of history,[5] international relations scholars can afford to embrace the normative, while international lawyers can afford to admit that law was the stuff of (liberal) politics all along.

The interdisciplinary project which Michael Byers seeks to develop in his ambitious book, Custom, Power and the Power of Rules: International Relations and Customary International Law,[6] can be located in this post-Cold War climate. The intellectual landscape that shapes Byers’ approach is the world of positivist international lawyers and the realists and regime theorists of Anglo-American international relations. He aims to engage international relations scholars in a conversation about the role of power in the process of creating and changing customary international law rules. Through that conversation, Byers seeks to reveal the way in which pre-existing rules of customary international law that govern the process of rule formation constrain the capacity of powerful states to shape the law in their own image.

International Relations and Migration in Southern Africa

by Audie Klotz

Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago

Published in African Security Review Vol 6 no 3, 1997

 

Introduction

Since South Africa’s democratic transition in April 1994, the new ANC-led Government has confronted challenges brought on by its new role in the international system. After decades of raising barriers to the outside world and being shunned in various official and informal ways, the country is now (re)joining multilateral organisations and (re)establishing diplomatic ties. Another consequence of South Africa’s burnished reputation is the ‘influx’ of foreigners. The media and certain vocal politicians are up-in-arms about ‘illegal immigrants’, who are blamed for a range of scourges, from crime to unemployment. While international relations theorists trumpet ‘new security issues’, South Africa experiences them on a daily basis. Migration is but one of these concerns.

The issue of (both legal and illegal) migration intersects various international ‘regimes’, that is, clusters of international norms and institutions that regulate state policies in particular issue areas. For example, some immigrants qualify under international norms as refugees, a crucial source of transborder population movement in Southern Africa. In 1993, South Africa finally entered into its first agreement with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). International human rights norms also play a critical role in the politics of migration. For example, a new culture of constitutionalism has created a flurry of popular demands for legal protections, also raising the issue of the extent to which foreigners qualify for human rights safeguards. In the 1994 elections, no less, certain temporary residents acquired the right to vote. Expectations for additional rights have escalated.

There are numerous reasons to expect the new democratic Government to be more responsive to international normative pressures than the apartheid regime. The ANC, for example, spent three decades in exile, working within international organisations and building diplomatic ties.1 Having seen the power of international norms (through global sanctions) in aiding their own rise to power,2 ANC leaders should be expected to be more sensitive to the state’s international reputation. Yet, democracy also means that domestic protest is stronger and broader, and hence more influential than before. Not all members of the new Government spent those years in exile, most notably unionists. Many divisions within the liberation movement are now played out on different grounds. Immigration policy has emerged as one of these contested terrains.

A New Vocabulary for Trade

By Jagdish Bhagwati

 

From Wall Street Journal – COMMENTARY, August 4, 2005; Page A12

 

Metaphors matter. They define how one sees reality, as when the phenomenon of skilled emigration turns into the problem of “brain drain,” evoking the image of a leaky faucet that few can regard with equanimity.

The phenomenon of globalization has prompted competing metaphors. The prolific Thomas Friedman talks everywhere, and writes in his latest best seller, of globalization being marked by a “flat world.” Writing almost a decade earlier in the New Republic, I advanced an alternative — and less demotic — metaphor, that globalization was characterized by “kaleidoscopic comparative advantage.” Let me explain why the two metaphors diverge dramatically and carry startlingly different policy implications — and why Mr. Friedman gets it wrong.

 

‘Geography Is History’

One cannot but be aware that countries face intensified competition in the world economy — a phenomenon that forced itself on our attention long before China and India began to loom large in fevered imaginations. Interest rates are less far apart than earlier: A continual opening and global integration of financial markets has occurred. Multinationals now consider many alternative locations for final assembly and to manufacture components, so their know-how becomes available, in effect, to several likely locations. Access to knowledge is more diffused than ever before: Student enrollments in foreign countries have grown, better educational institutions have opened in some developing countries, and the need for skilled professionals has led to shifts in immigration policies to draw them in to countries that have excess demand for their skills. Producers in distant places can now access markets thanks to the Internet, to the point where many talk melodramatically of the “death of distance,” and I say, with tongue partly in cheek, that “geography is history.”

Yet it is wrong to infer from this that the world has gone “flat,” and that there is no comparative advantage left. The notion of a flat world is as wrong metaphorically now as it was when Copernicus showed it to be literally wrong. To be more precise than his metaphor, Mr. Friedman has on his mind not the world but a large fraction of it — India and China. He believes that the gradient which the citizens of these countries had to climb to get to our shores and out-compete us has now disappeared, giving way to a level playing field that we ignore at our peril.