Realisme, Anarki Yang Mengancam, dan Tantangan Akademis

Oleh Asrudin

Pernah dipublikasikan dalam Perspektif: Fisip Journal of Interdisiplinary Studies, Vol.5, No.2, April 2007, hlm.69-83

Pendahuluan

Dipenghujung abad 20, peta politik internasional mengalami perubahan dramatis. Upaya merebut status hegemonik dalam fora internasional (kita mengenalnya dengan istilah cold war) di antara dua kekuatan adidaya (Uni Soviet dan Amerika Serikat) akhirnya terjawab sudah. Amerika Serikat menang dan Uni Soviet runtuh pada 1989. Berbagai intelektual kelas dunia terkejut akan situasi tersebut, karena intelektual kala itu banyak yang menilai bahwa Perang Dingin antara Blok Barat yang kapitalistis di bawah pimpinan A.S. dan Blok Timur yang komunis di bawah pimpinan Uni Soviet akan berjalan secara seimbang karena masing-masing blok mampu mengembangkan kemampuan militer, termasuk senjata nuklir, untuk melakukan tindakan detterence. Dengan demikian politik internasional selama Perang Dingin berlangsung berjalan dalam suatu situasi yang anarkis. Inilah cara pandang yang kita kenal dalam literatur ilmu hubungan internasional sebagai realisme politik.

Namun, persoalan utama pada 1989 (pasca Perang Dingin) sangatlah berbeda. Teori realisme telah digantikan oleh teori endisme.[1] Unsur utama endisme adalah bahwa hal-hal yang buruk telah berakhir. Menurut Samuel Huntington, Endisme menyatakan dirinya paling tidak dalam tiga cara. Pertama, endisme mengelu-elukan akhir Perang Dingin; Kedua, endisme menyatakan dirinya dalam proposisi yang lebih akademik dan umum yaitu bahwa perang di antara negara-negara bangsa, atau setidaknya di antara negara-negara bangsa jenis tertentu, telah berakhir. Banyak akademisi menunjuk pada tidak adanya perang di antara negara-negara demokratis. Ketiga, adalah klaim endisme yang paling ekstrem yaitu sebuah frase yang diajukan oleh Francis Fukuyama tentang berakhirnya sejarah. Fukuyama merayakan bukan saja akhir Perang Dingin ataupun akhir perang di antara negara-negara demokratis, melainkan juga ‘akhir sejarah’.[2] Dengan pola pikir seperti ini, politik internasional akan berjalan relatif aman dan damai. Kita tidak akan lagi dikejutkan dengan tragedi-tragedi kemanusiaan yang diakibatkan oleh perang. Realisme akan menjadi teori usang dan bagi siapapun yang berpikir politik internasional di era pasca Perang Dingin berlangsung anarkis adalah sesat pikir.

Munculnya cara pandang yang optimistik tentang politik internasional dari teori endisme ini memunculkan beberapa pertanyaan penting yang mesti dijawab, terutama oleh teoretisi realisme, yaitu, “benarkah realisme akan menemui ajalnya sebagai sebuah teori? Benarkah, bahwa berakhir Perang Dingin maka berakhir pula persaingan di antara kekuatan-kekuatan besar dan apa yang dapat realisme katakan tentang hal ini dimasa yang akan datang? Artikel ini ditulis untuk menjawab seputar pertanyaan-pertanyaan tersebut.

Realisme Sebagai Paradigma Dominan?

Seperti kita ketahui bersama, realisme merupakan perspektif teori yang paling diakui dalam Hubungan Internasional. Realisme telah mendominasi Hubungan Internasional pada berbagai tingkatan, mulai dari para mahasiswa, sarjana, dan para ilmuwan-ilmuwan hubungan internasional. Selama 40 tahun, para sarjana dan praktisi hubungan internasional telah berpikir dan bertindak dalam istilah yang simplistic, tapi sangat bermanfaat dalam menjelaskan masalah-masalah internasional, yaitu paradigma Perang Dingin. Perang Dingin telah menjelaskan sejumlah fenomena yang lebih penting dibanding pesaingnya (baca: endisme); ia telah menjadi titik tolak (starting point) yang sangat dibutuhkan dalam membahas masalah-masalah internasional; ia hampir diterima secara universal; dan membentuk pikiran para penstudi HI tentang politik dunia selam dua generasi.

Writing (and) Independence: Gaytri Spivak and the Dark Continet of Ecriture Feminine

by Theresa M. Senft

This essay originally appeared in Women & Performance , Vol. 7, No. 2, Issue 14-15, Spring 1995. pp 275-286. Please feel free to reproduce this, with appropriate acknowledgements.

Let’s begin at the ending. Let’s begin at independence, the liberatory move by which oppressed peoples free themselves from their oppressors. Feminism aspires to a brand of independence. So do nationalist uprisings, especially when they are thought of as the fair fights of indigenous peoples for self-determination. For U.S. Queers, the Stonewall Riots serve as a historical mark in the struggle for independence from what Monique Wittig has termed, “The Straight Mind.”

Let’s talk about writing and independence, about writing for independence, and writing from a position of independence. The most famous project of the continental feminists (which include writers like Wittig, Helene Cixous, and Gayatri Spivak) is called, “l’ecriture feminine.” Roughly, l’ecriture feminine translates to “writing the feminine body.” Continental feminists argue that the only way to move women from a position of objectified servitude to a position of full subjectivity is for women to write the truth of their bodies. Thus, the cry to produce embodied, personal, deeply felt “feminine” writing, in one’s true voice, serves as a call for independence. You are enslaved now, the argument runs, but write your truth and you will be free. In the last twenty years, many disenfranchised peoples have employed similar calls to “write the body.” The queer “coming out ” story, and the genre of writing known as “exile narrative” are examples of how Writing (to) Independence is still a call to arms in many communities.

Let’s begin at the ending, at writing, revolution, and independence, and work backward. Sigmund Freud was the first writer to suggest that women suffering from hysteria were in truth trying to communicate in a “lost language” fundamental, psychic truths about themselves. To cure these women, Freud went against conventional medical wisdom at the time and offered instead what he called “the talking cure”Ñencouraging women to tell their stories to him. Freud himself, however, proceeded on his own path to intellectual independence somewhat differently. From the beginnings of the history of women in psychoanalysis, writing has been a key issue, but writing was only prescribed for the doctor, not the (female) patient. In retaliation, many feminist practitioners and critics of psychoanalysis have literally written over the chronicles of male doctors who pondered from a distance the hysterical female body. Indeed, one of the critical accomplishments of feminism has been women’s’ reclaiming of the ‘power of the pen’ from male doctors, in order to write new and more inclusive descriptions of women’s psychic lives. Lesbians, in particular, have produced a large body of writing, arguing that female homosexual desire, definitionally unavailable to the male imaginary, is in particular need of a written history. Lesbian theorists like Teresa deLauretis call the invisibility of same-sex female desire within psychoanalytic doctrine, “lesbian indifference.” de Lauretis often cites the case of Dora, an hysteric Freud claimed he had “failed to cure” specifically because he was unable to read her lesbian desire for another woman, as the example par excellence of lesbian indifference in the history of psychoanalytic thought.

The Discourse of ‘Progress’ and the Trusteeship Debate in International Relations

By AL Dunn

Abstract

‘Progress’. A comforting and familiar term. ‘Progress’, it seems, speaks to us all. Yet those who have endeavoured to offer a more precise definition have tended to find their quest frustrating. Does ‘progress’ represent a provisional outcome of human agency or the relentless work of structure? Is it essentially a matter of faith or fundamentally a matter of fact? Demonstrably rooted in classical antiquity or irredeemably modern? By adopting a discursive framework informed by post-structural understandings of power/knowledge, this dissertation will not even attempt to supply such answers; it will, however, somewhat alter the questions. Rather than enquiring into what ‘progress’, understood ideationally, actually is, it will undertake instead to ask what ‘progress’, understood as discursive practice, actually does. The specific site in which such discursive workings will be examined is furnished by colonial and contemporary texts on international trusteeship. In colonial and recent work which advocates (the revival) of trusteeship, it will be argued that deployment of such a discourse does not produce a consensus on the meaning of ‘progress’ but does instead produce the regular effect of a discursive space constitutive of subjectivities defined as anachronistic. The consequences of such a production are, it will be argued, profoundly depoliticising. Pluralist international society texts seeking to counter contemporary proposals for trusteeship affirm the enduring value of sovereignty and pluralist, anti-paternalist norms. Although such texts offer a counter-narrative which significantly differs from that proposed by trusteeship advocates, they nevertheless deploy a similar discourse on ‘progress’ which, whilst resulting in alternative policy recommendations, does not escape the depoliticising effects identified previously. By emphasising a view of ‘progress’ as discursive practice, this dissertation will conclude by arguing for a sensitivity to the (sometimes undesirable, always political) effects such a discourse produces.

Acknowledgements

To link particular names to a comparatively short piece of work on which the verdict is yet to be delivered may appear somewhat presumptuous; in this case, however, it seems to me more presumptuous still to omit to thank certain people whose encouragement has not made this dissertation what it is (that, I am afraid, is all my doing), but has, more importantly, given me the spirit to complete it in the first place.

I would therefore particularly like to thank: Richard Wyn Jones, for a much-appreciated second chance; Jenny Edkins, for kindness, time and intellectual inspiration; and Caroline Morris, a lady without whose open house, kind words and warm heart, the last six months would have been twice as hard and ten times as long.   

Introduction

‘Progress’. The term is a comforting and familiar one. It connotes the seductive allure of a better life; it conveys hope in humanity’s telluric destiny. ‘Progress’, it seems, speaks to us all. Yet when we seek to define it more precisely, it becomes elusive. The field of operations of those who accept the definitional challenge is itself defined by conflict and contradiction, perhaps best exemplified by two seminal accounts of the ‘idea’ written at a sixty-year interval: J. B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress (1920) and Robert Nisbet’s  History of the Idea of Progress (1980). Whilst Bury inaugurates his narrative with the bold claim that “the notion of progress, which now seems so easy to apprehend, is of comparatively recent origin” (Bury, 1920: 6; my italics), the opening lines of the Nisbetian text declare, conversely, that “no single idea has been as important in Western civilisation for nearly 3000 years” (Nisbet, 1980: 4; my italics). Further inspection of the literature on ‘progress’ only compounds our confusion: does ‘progress’ intimate the continuity of linear time or the rupture of revolutionary upheavals? Is ‘progress’ a materiality which looks one in the face or an idea one harbours in the mind? Do we work for ‘progress’, or does ‘Progress’ work for us? Such questions elicit no consistent responses in this literature; it appears we must either sign up to our preferred definition, or renounce our enquiries.

Negara Bangsa Sebagai Komunitas Politik Terbayang

Oleh Asrudin

Pernah dimuat dalam siklus: Jurnal Kajian Hubungan Internasional, Vol1, No.4, Desember 2005, hlm. 170-179

Anderson, Benedict (2002). Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar & Insist Press)

Benedict Anderson defined a nation as “an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. For example the nationhood you feel with other members of your nation when your “imagined community” participates in a larger event such as the Olympics. As Anderson puts it, a nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. 

Saat ini Konsep negara bangsa dalam Studi Hubungan Internasional telah menjadi fokus analisis. Bahkan bagi sebagian ilmuwan HI, negara bangsa merupakan aktor utama politik internasional. Dengan pola pemikiran seperti ini, pantas rasanya kita ajukan pertanyaan, mengapa konsep negara bangsa menjadi begitu penting bagi manusia?, Mengapa manusia dari berbagai individu yang berbeda, wilayah yang berbeda, mau menyatukan diri sebagai sebuah komunitas politik yang bernama bangsa? Tulisan ini akan mereview buku Ben Anderson (2002) yang berjudul Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Dengan melakukan telaah secara mendalam atas pandangan Anderson dalam bukunya tersebut, kita akan dapat mengetahui jawaban atas pertanyaan-pertanyaan tadi.

Pengertian Bangsa

Secara umum bangsa diartikan sebagai sebuah entitas, sebuah unit politik yang di dalamnya terdapat individu yang menaruh kesetiaan terhadapnya (nasionalisme). Nasionalisme adalah salah satu dari kekuatan yang menentukan dalam sejarah modern. Ia berasal dari Eropa Barat abad ke-18; selama abad ke-19 ia telah tersebar di seluruh Eropa dan dalam abad ke-20 ia telah menjadi suatu pergerakan dunia (Kohn, 1984: 5).  

Perkembangan pesat paham nasionalisme kebangsaan di Eropa dan berbagai belahan dunia tentu tidak datang begitu saja. Ada yang membuatnya menjadi demikian. Menurut Ben Anderson, penyebabnya adalah karena terdapat banyak individu manusia yang menyatukan diri dalam sebuah komunitas politik, dengan begitu dia membentuk apa yang dinamakan dengan negara bangsa. Bangsa atau nation, bagi Anderson,  merupakan sebuah komunitas politik terbayang–imagined political community. Ia dibayangkan sebagai sesuatu yang bersifat terbatas (limited) secara inheren, karena pasti ada batas-batas teritorial dengan bangsa-bangsa lain di sekitarnya; berdaulat (sovereign), karena para pembayangnya menganggap perlu ada perlindungan; dan akhirnya ia dibayangkan sebagai komunitas (community), karena para anggotanya memiliki rasa persaudaraan antar mereka (Wiratama, 2003: 86).