Refleksi Teori Hubungan Internasional: Dari Tradisional ke Kontemporer

Judul Buku    :  Refleksi Teori Hubungan Internasional: Dari Tradisional ke Kontemporer

 

Penulis           :  Asrudin; Mirza Jaka Suryana, dkk

Jml Hal          :  xii + 484

Penerbit         : Graha Ilmu (Yogyakarta)

Th. Terbit       :  2009

Format           :  21 x 26

ISBN               :  978-979-756-493-3

Harga             :  Rp. 98.800,-

 

Komentar Para Pakar:

Fenomena hubungan internasional semakin lama semakin mendekat ke persoalan sehari-hari penduduk di berbagai belahan dunia, termasuk Indonesia. Cara kita menjalani kehidupan sehari-hari sangat jelas dipengaruhi oleh kejadian-kejadian diarena internasional. Keberhasilan kita untuk memenuhi kebutuhan fisik, seperti pangan, sangat ditentukan oleh fenomena internasional. Upaya kita untuk menjadi pintar, juga sangat terkendala oleh banyak hal yang terjadi di luar wilayah kita. Itu berarti bahwa kita mesti belajar untuk memahami apa yang sebenarnya terjadi di luar sana. Kita mesti belajar mendeskripsikan apa yang terjadi. Mencoba mengerti mengapa itu terjadi dan bagaimana mengatasi dampaknya terhadap kehidupan kita. Karena itulah saya menyambut dengan gembira penerbitan karya-karya seperti yang terhimpun dalam buku ini. Buku yang tidak hanya menyajikan analisis ilmiah, tetapi juga menyajikan perspektif nilai mengenai apa yang mesti dilakukan sehingga kehidupan di arena internasional itu bisa relevan dan bermanfaat bagi upaya manusia menyelesaikan masalah keseharian mereka.

Prof. DR. Mohtar Mas’oed

Guru Besar FISIP Universitas Gajah Mada (UGM)

 

Studi Hubungan Internasional di Indonesia, meskipun termasuk bidang studi yang cukup banyak diminati, masih kekurangan berbagai literatur akademis mengenai bidang studi itu sendiri. Kekurangan itu akan semakin terasa apabila kita melihat ketersediaan berbagai buku-buku teks (text-books) dalam bahasa Indonesia. Kalaupun tersedia, buku-buku teks yang ada pada umumnya bersifat pengantar. Buku Refleksi Teori Hubungan Internasional: Dari Tradisional ke Kontemporer ini, patut disambut baik sebagai langkah awal dari dimulainya tradisi penulisan buku-buku teks mengenai perkembangan ’teori’ hubungan internasional dalam bahasa Indonesia, khususnya yang bersifat advanced. Para mahasiswa, akademisi, dan peminat Studi Hubungan Internasional pada umumya, akan mendapat manfaat besar dari buku ini.

(Dr. Rizal Sukma)

Deputy Executive Director Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

 

Dalam beberapa waktu belakangan ini, fenomena hubungan internasional telah dan akan terus menunjukkan komplekitas yang semakin tinggi. Hal ini ditunjukkan bukan saja pada  semakin beragamnya aktor hubungan internasional yang saling berinteraksi (the actors), tetapi juga ditunjukkan dengan semakin bervariasinya isu (the issues) yang diperbincangkan dalam hubungan internasional serta semakin rumitnya proses interaksi (the process) yang terjadi antar berbagai aktor hubungan internasional. Sementara itu di sisi lain, perkembangan teori hubungan internasional terkesan terseok-seok, bila tidak dikatakan mandeg sama sekali, dalam menerangkan berbagai fenomena hubungan internasional. Untuk itu, semua upaya yang dilakukan untuk terus meninjau perkembangan teori Hubungan Internasional bukan saja patut diapresiasi secara positif tetapi juga patut didorong tingkat kuantitas dan kualitasnya dalam komunitas hubungan internasional di Indonesia. Buku ini tentunya juga patut disambut gembira karena telah mendorong upaya petualangan ilmiah yang lebih kritis untuk meninjau kembali berbagai upaya teorisasi Hubungan Internasional. Terlepas dari beberapa kelemahan metodologis, buku ini dapat menjadi salah satu referensi utama dalam studi Hubungan Internasional di Indonesia, terlebih di tengah terbatasnya literatur Hubungan Internasional berbahasa Indonesia. Buku ini diharapkan dapat memperkaya studi Hubungan Internasional di Indonesia dan dapat pula membantu kita dalam memahami berbagai perkembangan hubungan internasional dewasa ini.

(Prof. Anak Agung Banyu Perwita, Ph.D)

Guru Besar Ilmu Hubungan Internasional, FISIP-Universitas Katolik Parahyangan, Bandung.

Gramsci’s Marxism and International Relations

By Adrian Budd

 

Introduction

Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are not an obvious starting point for the study of international relations. However, in the past few decades a group of radical scholars has drawn on his work to challenge the dominant ‘Realist’ perspective in this field. The Realist perspective is associated with key US strategists such as Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who provided the US state with its ‘intellectual compass’ during the Cold War.¹ Realism takes the bourgeois view of human nature as a struggle between atomised individuals and transposes it onto the international system—its essence is inter-state rivalry and conflict. It assumes that since the time of the ancient Greek city-states the world’s states have had coherent national interests that they project internationally, chiefly by military means.

Given this abstract, ahistorical approach, in which there is no place for the rise and fall of modes of production or the class dynamics underpinning them, it is not surprising that there was ‘mutual neglect’ between Marxism and international relations for much of the 20th century.² But recently, the ‘neo‑Gramscian’ perspective, initiated by the Canadian Robert Cox, has provided a convincing critique of Realism.³ Cox firmly rejects the label ‘Marxist’, and has merely applied to the study of international relations ideas derived from a selective reading of the Prison Notebooks—of which the most important is the concept of hegemony. The neo-Gramscians have helped enlarge the space for Marxist ideas in international analysis but their selective use of Gramsci and their idealist understanding of hegemony mean that they neither accurately represent Gramsci’s Marxism nor convincingly explain the dynamics of the international system.

Gramsci’s comments on international relations are fragmentary and under-developed. His use of the concept of passive revolution, however, illustrates a consistent appreciation of the interpenetration of the national and international. Passive revolution is central to Gramsci’s analysis of 19th century and early 20th century European history, including Italian unification (the Risorgimento) in the 1860s. It describes a top-down process in which a narrow, modernising elite brings about a transformation of traditional social relations by piecemeal reform. Unlike the Jacobins in the French Revolution, this elite failed to mobilise mass activity behind its revolutionary programme. The pressure behind this process arose not from domestic economic development, but was ‘instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery—currents born of the productive development of the more advanced countries’.⁴ Similarly, Gramsci argued that the Fordist development of early 20th century American industry, itself a passive revolution that transformed existing forms of capitalist relations, was reshaping European societies and forcing states to adopt structures and policies more supportive of free enterprise and economic individualism.⁵ Gramsci also suggested that Italian fascism represented a passive revolution designed to preserve the power of a decaying bourgeoisie faced with the revolutionary challenge from Russia.

Whatever their historical accuracy, these arguments illustrate Gramsci’s understanding of a national-international dialectic in which international forces both provide the context of change and penetrate and transform national political and social relations. There are hints of Leon Trotsky’s theory of the uneven and combined development of world capitalism here but Gramsci did not develop these ideas. Nor did he produce an analysis of imperialism like those of Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, who both saw imperialist rivalry as a consequence of capitalism’s economic dynamic, particularly the growth of capitalist monopolies and the tendency for economic processes to transcend national limits. Nor did Gramsci place competitive processes (including capitalist accumulation, imperialist expansion and war) at the centre of the national-international dialectic, focusing instead on mechanisms of ideological transmission.⁶ Nevertheless, against much academic Marxism, which even today analyses social relations and state power in their specifically national dimensions, he understood that internal and international relations ‘intertwine’ and that Marxism should study how ‘the international situation should be considered in its national aspect’.⁷

Saidism Without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History

By Andrew J. Rotter

 

American diplomatic historians may not be interested in Edward Said, but he is interested in them. While Orientalism was primarily a study of British and French representations of Middle Eastern Others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Said nevertheless devoted a good deal of space to the period after 1945, when American power supplanted that of Great Britain and France, and Americans, he argued, inherited the Western Orientalist apparatus. American Orientalism went well beyond vaguely populist stereotypes that Arabs or Muslims were prone to violence, incapable of rational thought, untrustworthy, devious, and unclean. Instead, “the Middle East experts who advise [U.S.] policymakers are imbued with Orientalism, almost to a person.” Since 1978, as Said has refined his thinking about imperialism and paid increasing attention to its American version, he has read broadly in the field of U.S. foreign relations. Footnotes in his Culture and Imperialism (1993) include works by William Appleman Williams, Richard Van Alstyne, Walter LaFeber, Michael Hunt, and Paul Kennedy, all of them scholars of American foreign relations.¹

Said’s interest in the history of U.S. foreign policy has apparently not been reciprocated. Articles published over the past twenty years in the journal Diplomatic History, house organ for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), contain only a few references to Orientalism, most of them charitable but cursory. Akira Iriye, who has studied the influence of culture on United States–Japan relations in the twentieth century, made a glancing reference to Orientalism in his 1979 SHAFR presidential address. Diplomatic History frequently publishes pleas by senior historians for greater conceptual scope in the field. In one of these essays, John Lewis Gaddis managed to invoke Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, and Douglas Adams—author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—but not Said. Michael Hunt called for “Internationalizing U.S. Diplomatic History” in 1991—without Said. In a 1994 essay, Emily S. Rosenberg used cultural analysis, in a manner reminiscent of Said, to connect two post–World War II films to international relations. Responding, Bruce Kuklick referred to a passage in Rosenberg’s article as “intellectual junk, the mental equivalent to eating at McDonald’s.” “Cultural studies,” he concluded, “needs to do serious research to be more than a trick.” In the spring of 1998, the published version of Rosenberg’s SHAFR presidential address included the single most useful footnote (n. 2) in the brief history of “culturalist” U.S. foreign relations. But it did not mention Said.²

Extend the boundaries a bit, and the story is much the same. Of roughly thirty recent books on U.S.–Middle East relations since 1945, only three refer to Orientalism, and two of these concern U.S. relations with Iran, hardly the centerpiece of Said’s analysis. Over the past six years, the Journal of American History has published several articles on diplomacy; only one referred to Orientalism. Nor are diplomatic historians alone in the profession in their apparent neglect of Said. Outside of professional journals, few historians reviewed Orientalism. Said has been highly influential on the Subaltern Studies group, and Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman have credited Orientalism with inaugurating “colonial discourse theory,” or postcolonial studies. While some practitioners in this field are trained in history, most mainstream historians would regard the definition of the postcolonial—”a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that the colonising power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occluded tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations”—with a bafflement they normally reserve for descriptions of highway engineering or haute couture. Said’s influence on cultural studies and anthropology has not seemingly been matched by any obvious comparable impact on history.³

Liberalism, Imperialism, And Empire1

By David Long

 

In a series of books and articles in newspapers and magazines, Michael Ignatieff has embraced the concept of empire as a way of understanding, contextualizing, and justifying Western intervention in less developed countries in terms of liberal ideas of democracy, human rights, and good governance. More precisely, empire is a means to end genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as removing the challenge of certain rogue states such as Iraq.

To some, Ignatieffs assertive, interventionist discourse seems like an outlier to liberal discourse on international relations. Liberalism is commonly accused of avoiding discussions, let alone justifications, of the use of force in international relations. Liberals generally focus on peace, interdependence, and the importance of commerce to international relations. Ignatieff has not only criticized the use of force in international relations as a means of repression, marginalization, or elimination of populations, but he has also supported its use in order to address international maladies through peace enforcement and humanitarian intervention. Is Ignatieff just an anomaly, to use social scientific terminology, or is his approach more representative of a tendency within liberal thinking on international relations? And if he is representative of a liberal tendency, what does this mean for our understanding of liberalism in international relations, especially liberal international theory today and its approach to global order and justice?

Ignatieffs liberal imperialism is intriguing for a variety of reasons. First of all, for many liberals, liberal imperialism is an oxymoron because liberalism and imperialism are opposed to one another. Liberalism as a political doctrine is thought by its advocates to be associated with freedom, peace, and democracy. Imperialism, by contrast, is generally considered by these same liberals to be associated with the very opposite: oppression, war, and tyranny. In this paper, I consider the roots of the phrase liberal imperialism and whether this opposition is really as axiomatic as liberals consider it today. I do so by comparing the relationship between liberalism and imperialism, especially the justification of liberal imperialism, in the writings of Ignatieff with those of another prominent liberal, J.A. Hobson. Hobson, an English liberal publicist, wrote a series of books and articles over a period of more than fifty years, from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

The purpose of comparing Hobson and Ignatieffs discussions of imperialism and empire is to look at the approach of two important liberal intellectuals and publicists, each of whom has had a significant influence on liberal discourse on international issues, and the theory and practice of international relations more generally. This paper does not purport to be a comprehensive overview of either authors political or economic thought, let alone a more general history of the development of liberal thinking on international affairs. It is more in the style of comparative statics than of a longitudinal study. The aim of the comparison is to highlight important features in these liberals approaches to imperialism and empire in order to indicate common themes and point out contrasts.