As the preceding discussion explains, realist and neoliberal approaches are hamstrung by their underlying conceptions of politics and law, con-ceptions that leave them ill-equipped to comprehend issues as funda-mental as the expanding corpus of international law, the obligatory force of that law, the way in which the weak can employ the law as a power resource, the historical uniqueness of the modern international legal or-der, the role that law plays as a locus for legitimation struggles, and the cosmopolitanisation of international law. Constructivism, I suggest, im-plies analytically more useful conceptions of international politics and law, but these remain underdeveloped. Rethinking these foundational conceptualisations, and grasping their expression in the modern, liberal international order, is thus essential if we are to reach a more complete understanding of the contemporary politics of international law. In what follows, I expand on the constructivist idea of politics as a socially con-stituted and constitutive form of deliberation and action, and explain the implications of this expanded understanding for thinking about the
‘demand for institutions’.
The nature of politics
The argument advanced here starts from the assumption – commonsen-sical to the international relations scholars of the clascommonsen-sical period – that politics is a variegated, multi-dimensional form of human deliberation and action, the lifeblood and challenge of which lie at the intersection of these dimensions.29To fully comprehend this domain of social life it
29 This argument has been rehearsed in Christian Reus-Smit, ‘The Strange Death of Liberal International Theory’, European Journal of International Law 12: 3 (2001); and elaborated in Reus-Smit, ‘Politics and International Legal Obligation’. It also complements arguments recently offered by other scholars who advocate a return to a more classical conception of
is necessary to begin with the nature of political reason or deliberation, as all but the most brute forms of action rest on some type of reason-ing and deliberation, however crude or disagreeable we might judge this to be. Political deliberation can be said to integrate four types of reason: idiographic, purposive, ethical, and instrumental. Idiographic de-liberation takes place when actors confront the question ‘who am I?’ or
‘who are we?’, and is thus identity-constitutive. Purposive deliberation occurs when they ask ‘what do I want?’ or ‘what do we want?’, engaging them in a process of interest or preference formation. Ethical delibera-tion happens when they address the quesdelibera-tion of ‘how I should act?’ or
‘how we should act?’, situating their purposive and instrumental deci-sions within the realm of socially sanctioned norms of rightful agency and conduct. Finally, instrumental deliberation – the favoured terrain of realists and rationalists – involves actors confronting two subsets of questions: one strategic-instrumental, the other resource-instrumental.
The former asks ‘how do I get what I want?’ or ‘how do we get what we want?’, while the latter asks ‘what do I need to get what I want?’ or
‘what do we need to get what we want?’.30
These four types of reason, I want to suggest, constitute the key cogni-tive reference points that frame political deliberation. My crucial point, however, is that political deliberation should ultimately be seen as lying at the difficult intersections between the idiographic, purposive, ethical, and instrumental. That is, politics is a distinctive form of reason because of its interstitial quality (see figure 1). Although he used different termi-nology, this idea of politics is captured in Carr’s critical but neglected observation that ‘Politics cannot be divorced from power. But the homo politicus who pursues nothing but power is as unreal a myth as the homo economicus who pursues nothing but gain. Political action must be based on a co-ordination of morality and power.’31
If political deliberation is multi-dimensional, so too is political action.
Because political action is the behavioural expression of political rea-son, each aspect of that reason affects the practical expression of politics.
Idiographic reason lies behind the practices actors engage in when they seek to articulate, justify, demonstrate, perform, and contest their self-identities through verbal and ritual processes of communicative action.
politics. See, in particular, Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
30 This is an elaboration of a schema advanced by Ronald Beiner in his Political Judgement (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 129–52.
31 Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 97.
POLITICS
Purposive Idiographic
Instrumental Ethical
Figure 1 The interstitial conception of politics
The Washington Summit Communiqu´e that NATO member states is-sued on the 50th anniversary of the alliance is a good example of this form of political action. They declared that ‘The North Atlantic Al-liance, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law, remains the basis of our collective defence; it embodies the transatlantic link that binds North America and Europe in a unique defence and security partnership.’32Purposive deliberation encourages a form of political action in which actors learn, articulate, justify, negoti-ate, and revise their individual and collective preferences in the context of other actors’ interests, expectations of legitimate conduct, and estab-lished societal norms. This type of action was apparent in the agonisingly slow rise to humanitarian consciousness and commitment of European states and the United States, in which their initial denials that they had any fundamental interests in the Balkans were eventually displaced by a stated humanitarian interest of such importance that it demanded mil-itary intervention. Ethical deliberation informs political action in which actors seek to license their interests and actions in terms of prevailing norms of legitimate agency and rightful conduct. NATO’s statement at the outset of the bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) is an example of such political action. ‘The crisis in Kosovo’, it reads, ‘represents a fundamental challenge to the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, for which NATO has stood
32 NATO Press Release NAC-S(99)64, ‘Washington Summit Communiqu´e’, 24 April 1999,
<www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-064e.htm>.
since its foundation. We are united in our determination to overcome this challenge.’33 Finally, instrumental deliberation informs a strategic type of political action, the essence of which is the application of avail-able means to achieve individual and collective interests within envi-ronmental constraints. When NATO declared that its ‘military action against FRY supports the political aims of the international community:
a peaceful, multi-ethnic and democratic Kosovo in which all its people can live in security and enjoy universal human rights and freedoms on an equal basis’,34it was engaging in instrumental political deliberation, and on launching its air campaign it was engaging in strategic political action.
NATO’s pronouncements suggest that types of political deliberation and their associated forms of political action stand in a distinctive con-stitutive relationship. To borrow a phrase from Alexander Wendt, idio-graphic reason and action ‘supervene’ upon other political modalities.
‘Supervenience’, Wendt argues, ‘is a nonreductive relationship of de-pendence, in which properties at one level are fixed or constituted by those at another.’35Here this means that deliberation and action around questions of identity pre-structure purposive and ethical deliberation and action, which in turn condition instrumental reasoning and be-haviour. In rationalising and justifying their actions, NATO member states explicitly tied their identity as a group ‘founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’ to their ‘interest’
in meeting ‘the challenge’ of the ‘Kosovo crisis’, and their military cam-paign was presented as an appropriate means to serve such an ‘interest’.
This is not to suggest, of course, that the process of constitution is uni-directional, even if the posited relationship of supervenience pertains.
Through ethical deliberation actors can redefine their interests and even their identities, and instrumental reason and action can reinforce or un-dermine identities, interests, and ethics depending on experiences of success and failure.
Thinking about politics in the manner outlined above helps us to appreciate more fully the ‘political charge’ that attends central issues in contemporary international relations, a charge that is occluded by
33 NATO Press Release M-NAC-1(99)51, ‘The Situation in and around Kosovo’, 12 April 1999, <www.nato.int/docu/1999/p99-051e.htm>.
34 NATO Press Release M-NAC-1(99)51, ‘The Situation in and around Kosovo’.
35 Alexander Wendt, ‘Identity and Structural Change in International Politics’, in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich V. Kratochwil (eds.), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), p. 49.
realist and rationalist perspectives. Returning to the Kosovo case, the strategic-instrumental question – how do I (we) get what I (we) want? – and the resource-instrumental question – what do I (we) need to get what I (we) want? – beg a series of deeper identity, purposive, and eth-ical questions which constitute the heart of the conflict. For NATO, the Serbs, and the Kosovars, the salient issues concerned ‘who are we?’,
‘what do we want?’, and ‘how should we act?’ How these questions were answered constituted Serb and Kosovar nationalisms, split NATO from the United Nations, and provided the discursive context in which secondary instrumental questions were answered. If there had been no debate about these deeper identity, purposive, and ethical issues, and if the parties to the conflict had reached mutually compatible conclu-sions, the political essence of the Balkans issue would have dissolved.
The same can be said of issues such as the ‘war against terrorism’, the in-tervention in East Timor, the treatment of refugees, the expansion of the European Union, and the creation of the International Criminal Court.
In each of these cases the political resides at the intersection of identity construction, interest formation, ethical debate, and strategic action, and it is the tension between these that marks politics out as a distinctive realm of social action, capable of generating intense passion to the point of violence.
Critics might argue that in concentrating on different modes of polit-ical deliberation this understanding of politics ignores other important ingredients of politics, particularly force. The use of physical or moral coercion to achieve political ends is a recurrent feature of both interna-tional and domestic social life, and as students of internainterna-tional relations we are conditioned to treat such coercion as the essence of politics. It is crucial to recognise, however, that most applications of coercion or force take place within a framework of political calculation, in which actors seek to reconcile, individually and collectively, issues of identity, purpose, ethics, and strategy. Force is part of the play of politics, but it is generally a secondary part; a calculated means to achieve a given set of political ends. The above perspective, therefore, does not deny the role that force plays in politics. Rather, it concentrates on the deeper political
‘rationality’ that conditions deployments of force. In this respect, our perspective differs little from that of rationalists, as they too concentrate on the deliberative (or strategic) bases of politics. Realists seem to treat force as more central to politics, defined as the struggle for power. On a closer reading, however, few realists would reduce the struggle for power to the exercise of force; the accumulation of power may permit
such exercise, and it may even depend upon it, but political reasons – from survival to aggrandisement – are always more primary.
The ‘demand for institutions’
In 1982 Robert Keohane published a key article in the rationalist tradition of institutional theory, titled ‘The Demand for International Regimes’.36 Setting out to show why states would want to create international insti-tutions, he advanced a ‘supply–demand’ approach that sees it as rational for states with common interests to create institutions to facilitate co-operation. Institutions aid co-operation by reducing cheating, lowering transaction costs, and increasing information, all of which are necessary if states are to overcome their co-ordination and collaboration prob-lems. We have already seen that when this approach is applied to the modern institution of international law several questions are left unan-swered, such as the obligatory force of legal rules, the uniqueness of the modern institution of international law, the role of law in legitima-tion struggles, and the progressive cosmopolitanisalegitima-tion of internalegitima-tional law. Having outlined above a broader conception of politics than that deployed by rationalists, I now wish to suggest how this conception can inform a broader, more holistic understanding of the demand for institutions,37an understanding that helps us to better comprehend this question.
Rationalists are correct that instrumental deliberation and action lead actors to pursue institutional arrangements that enable the resolution of specific conflicts and the solution of co-operation and collaboration problems – institutions do indeed lower transaction costs, increase infor-mation, and deter cheating, thus facilitating ordered interstate relations.
Yet this is not the only demand for institutions. Idiographic deliberation and action prompt the construction of institutions that permit the con-stitution, stabilisation, and demonstration of legitimate social identities.
This is clearly apparent in the institutional orders created after major systemic conflagrations, where the community of states has sought to enshrine notions of legitimate statehood that will ensure international
36 Reprinted as Robert O. Keohane, ‘The Demand for International Regimes’, in Stephen D. Krasner (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
37 I define institutions here as sets of rules, norms, principles, and decision-making proce-dures that ‘define the meaning and identity of the individual [and actors in general] and the patterns of appropriate economic, political and cultural activity engaged in by those individuals’. See George M. Thomas, John W. Meyer, Francesco Ramirez, and John Boli (eds.), Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (London: Sage, 1989), p. 12.
peace and stability, with the institutional projects of the Congress of Vienna, the Versailles Peace Conference, and the San Francisco Confer-ence being cases in point. It is also apparent in issue-specific regimes, where the norms and rules, of security, economic, environmental, and human rights institutions coalesce around particular, historically con-tingent, notions of legitimate statehood that prescribe certain relations between state, society, economy, and nature. Purposive deliberation and action call forth institutions that enable the negotiation and stabilisa-tion of legitimate collective purposes and strategies. In this respect, the norms, rules, and principles that comprise international institutions serve as encoding devices, locations in which the collectively negotiated, socially sanctioned legitimate interests of states – either in particular issue-areas or for the governance of international society in general – are publicly enshrined to serve as orientation points for acceptable political conduct, internationally and, increasingly, domestically. Fi-nally, ethical deliberation and action create reasons for institutions that enable the expression, stabilisation, and pursuit of collectively nego-tiated, historically contingent moral principles, ideas of justice, and conceptions of fairness. Questions of the right, the good, and the fair constitute a crucial, yet curiously overlooked, dimension of institutional rationality, affecting not only the substantive content of international in-stitutions – from the lofty principles of the United Nations Charter to the existence of foreign aid and human rights regimes – but also the procedural practices of such institutions.38
Just as politics ought to be understood as interstitial, institutional rationality should, ideally, be seen in holistic terms. This is for two rea-sons. First, the politics that generates institutional imperatives cannot be segmented easily into discrete idiographic, purposive, ethical, and instrumental components. When actors create institutions, they are al-most always engaged in the simultaneous construction of social iden-tities, definition and validation of individual and collective interests, deliberation on the good and the just, and the strategic pursuit of instru-mental objectives. The precise mixture of these political practices will vary from issue to issue, and from one level of institutions to another,
38 Cecilia Albin, Justice and Fairness in International Negotiation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Thomas M. Franck, Fairness in International Law and Institutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); David Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights; and Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
but the pristine pursuit of strategic interests, devoid of all considera-tions of legitimate agency and action, is as rare as disinterested codifi-cations of state identities. Second, there has been an overwhelming ten-dency in the study of international institutions to focus solely on regime rules, on their relationship to state interests, on the constraints they place on states, and on their contribution to order within a particular issue-area. Yet a comprehensive perspective on international institutions must move beyond consideration of the rule content of issue-specific insti-tutions to comprehend the varying form and practice of different in-stitutional arrangements. Only by considering the full spectrum of institutional impulses – from identity construction to instrumental action – can we grasp the totality of institutional formations, their dis-tinctive form, practice, and content.
John Ruggie has shown how the form of the contemporary insti-tution of multilateralism is deeply wedded to the social identity of the modern sovereign states, based as it is on the underlying lib-eral principle that rules should be equally and reciprocally binding on all legal subjects in all like circumstances.39 Similarly, the purpo-sive politics that surrounds the codification and institutional pursuit of state interests affects not only the rule content of institutions, but also their procedural practices. Institutional rules instantiate and sta-bilise the collective interests of states, yet often institutions, such as the Framework Convention on Global Climate Change, are designed procedurally to permit the regime’s gradual evolution as ongoing, in-stitutionally structured negotiations lead states to redefine their inter-ests. With regard to the politics of ethics, Cecilia Albin and Thomas Franck have shown how considerations of justice and fairness have con-ditioned the practices and content of issue-specific institutions.40Albin’s exhaustive study of the role such considerations play in international negotiations demonstrates their central importance in shaping the ne-gotiations that create new institutions, the procedural rules of those in-stitutions, and the content of their rules. Finally, rationalists have shown how instrumental politics plays an important role in conditioning the content of institutions, the specific rules, norms, and principles they enshrine.
39 John Gerard Ruggie (ed.), Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Also see Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State.
40 Albin, Justice and Fairness; Franck, Fairness in International Law.