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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
China’s growing power and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have thrust geopolitics back to the centre of the global stage, but the old frameworks of international relations, with their positivist methods and their emphasis on structural determinants, will not enable us to understand the increasingly dangerous world in which we are living today.
Bertrand Badie argues that states and the many other actors now operating in the international arena are products of their cultural contexts and political traditions. Their perspectives and motivations are profoundly subjective in character and are shaped by the narratives, memories and emotions that constitute people’s everyday realities. In Badie’s view, international disputes in the twenty-first century are best understood through the concept of the ‘battle for meaning’, confrontations between different modes of understanding the world. His judgement is that peace and stability depend on greater sensitivity to the worldviews of other actors in the international arena. A willingness to try to see the world from the perspective of one’s friends, rivals and even one’s enemies is vital.
This timely and engaging book by one of the world’s leading scholars of international relations will be of great interest to students and scholars in politics and IR and to anyone concerned about the growing tensions in the world today.
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Seitenzahl: 123
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Note
Introduction
Notes
1 The Return of Geopolitics: A Nostalgic Illusion or a Recurrent Error?
The foundational times of geopolitics
Is geopolitics outdated?
Geographic renewal
Notes
2 The Two International Scenes and Their Multiple Meanings
A short subjective history of the international arena
The semantic ambiguity of the international system: the perpetual conflict of meaning
The two systems: the system in theory and the system in practice
Notes
3 Four Questions That Have Become Fundamental
The identity of the actor is no longer a simple question
Thinking about the ‘Other’
The construction of the context
What fusion of horizons?
Notes
4 Rethinking the International Agenda
The unavoidable battle for recognition
The confusion of contexts
Diplomacy has many meanings
The semantic clash of powers
Notes
A Tentative Conclusion: The Looming Battles for Meaning
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
A Tentative Conclusion: The Looming Battles for Meaning
End User License Agreement
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A Subjective Approach to International Relations
The Battle for Meaning
Bertrand Badie
Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
Originally published in French as Pour une approche subjective des relations internationelles. La bataille du sens © Odile Jacob, 2023
This English edition © Polity Press, 2025
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6710-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024945535
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
Last year, with my publisher’s encouragement, I published a work that did not conform to academic routine. For the first time, I wrote a first-person narrative, an ‘ego-history’ that retraced the trajectory of my family and the way in which it had gradually settled into biculturality.1 Alternately depicting the sufferings and the happy times, the joys and sorrows, the benefits and drawbacks of this condition – one that is becoming more commonplace with globalization – I explained how my personal history had very early on led me to fall into the seething cauldron of international relations. Indeed, by telling the story of this adventure, I realized that the line between the international and the national, the social and the individual, often faded away and lost its traditional impermeability.
By swapping notes with my readers, who had sometimes had similar experiences, I saw that this ego-history led directly to essential epistemological questions, questions that were often considered to be settled once and for all, but now, due to several significant contemporary events, have moved back centre stage. One example is the part played by personal experience in the discovery of the transformations affecting the world: it is far from certain that submitting solely to the supposedly objective laws of a pre-constructed geopolitics makes it any easier to solve the riddles of the present. And it is doubtful whether we gain any lucidity by looking at this world as external to ourselves, as made up of some mysterious substance quite inaccessible to our own personal judgement. Subjective knowledge at least has the virtue of transparency and honesty, but it also helps to lay bare and then overcome the postulates heedlessly constructed by other people, postulates that hold us captive.
This is only the beginning of a journey, because grasping my own subjectivity inevitably involves me taking into account and analysing carefully the subjectivity of the other people, both prominent and more modest, whom I observe. The illuminations of biculturalism encourage us, inter alia, to reconsider a number of apparent certainties about otherness, to access the diversity of the perceptions and constructions of reality that fundamentally characterizes our globalized world – often disconcertingly so. This is the focus of my new book. It certainly investigates the subjectivity of the analyst; but also, and even more, it investigates the subjectivity of the actors who make up the world as it is, the formidable interweaving of the understandings and – especially – the inevitably inimical misunderstandings of which the world is made, the recurrent failure to know and recognize the Other: in a word, the absence of any reference to humanity as a whole, since we unfortunately prefer ready-made geometries learned from geopolitical textbooks. If we can achieve objectivity, it is only by fully mastering this diversity of understandings that comprises the international sphere. This, it seems to me, is the main research project for international relations, a project that this book aims to present – in a concise manner, as it is more of a road map than the story of a completed journey.
The human dimension has been relegated to the domain of utopia or morality, even though it is the only essential and truly concrete part of the international sphere. That dimension is what gives it meaning, what makes it evolve, at a speed greater than that of the strategist. Marginalizing the human element has always been the best way to yield imperceptibly to the now absolute rules of power relations as reflected in fragile statistics or quite simply by the prejudices we harbour. At a time when these prejudices are being challenged, in Ukraine, in Africa and elsewhere, humanism is regaining its share of empirical truth – even though the limited freedom that effectively challenges structures is far from angelic and can serve the best and the worst causes. Behind every instrument of power, there is always a human being – wise or crazy – who decides. This is also what my ego-history has taught me: the ‘care bears’ and the ‘cuddle bears’ are not necessarily where we think they are.
Note
1.
Bertrand Badie,
Vivre deux cultures: Comment peut-on naître franco-persan?
(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2022).
Introduction
There is common talk, in these times troubled by the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, of an ‘alliance’ between Beijing and Moscow, with its banal rationality luring them into a self-evident strategic rapprochement consistent with centuries of European history. The historical moment that we are currently experiencing is undoubtedly complex and difficult to describe, but it is unwise to depend on the simple words of everyday language: we forget that the Middle Kingdom, throughout its millennia of history, has never really gone in for alliances, and that Xi Jinping probably did not learn anything from Montesquieu or Carl Schmitt, and certainly relies on completely different reference points that need to be deciphered carefully. Our grammar is not his; and, faced with this globalized conflict – perhaps the first to register so clearly in the mysterious process of globalization – everyone, in Beijing, in Riyadh, in Dakar, in Brasilia, in Warsaw and in London, has their own reading of this Eastern European tragedy that is revealing sometimes enormous gulfs. In it, we find contrasts attributable to the psychological orientations of each individual decision-maker (Putin is not Gorbachev) but also to the weight of cultures, histories, and recent or past social experiences, as well as to the humiliations suffered in a more or less distant past. In another part of the world, the Sahel conflict certainly does not have the same meaning in French political and diplomatic circles as it does in the villages of Mali and Burkina Faso.
In short, the international sphere is first and foremost human, only subsequently fitting into a pre-established universal model: it is even sometimes ‘too human’ – subject, for better or for worse, to arbitrary and often random choices, to unexpected individual decisions as well as to the twists and turns of collective consciousness, to interpretation, to the meaning that everyone endeavours to ascribe to it. Hobbes’s overly mechanical analysis is being undermined, in a way that discomfits the thinkers he has influenced for so many generations; and it is being especially challenged today by the extreme plurality on which globalization draws.
It must be said, however, that international relations during the times of European hegemony and the marginalization of other peoples were dominated by the significant – but simple – importance of the shared world of ‘others of their own kind’ (entre-soi), that strange ambience where, within an almost homogeneous space, the associate and the close rival, today’s friend and tomorrow’s intimate enemy, have always rubbed shoulders. Alone in the world in their mentality and their practices, European actors at that time shared the same culture, the same God, and even the same religion: when they quarrelled over this last, it was only to discuss reforms to it or the modes of its political use. They often spoke the same language, even though French was the universal language of diplomats: Richard von Metternich, the son of the illustrious Austrian chancellor and ambassador to Paris, made only three mistakes in Mérimée’s famous dictation, while Napoleon III, the monarch to whom he was accredited, made seventy-five!1 Princes2 were cousins and often enjoyed time together: their opposition, their tensions and their wars resembled truly consensual tournaments in terms of the meaning they conveyed, perhaps akin to ‘international board games’. They did not always like each other, but they respected each other and did not seek to humiliate each other; after all, they were similar, they sought to be ‘part of the same world’, and they thought in a substantially identical way.
Under these conditions, any understanding between them was limited to grasping the strategic intentions and measuring the determination of their counterparts rather than the deep meaning that the latter gave to the things of the world, since this remained homogeneous. In this period, cunning and force did all the work and shaped foreign policies on a daily basis. To take up the famous distinction drawn by the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, one might say that knowledge of the Other could be limited to mobilizing the benefits of an almost routine, fully self-conscious intuition.3 It was a golden age for strategy and therefore for ‘strategists’: and yet, the element of subjectivity was already there, however discrete, limited to the interpretation of the strategy carefully developed by one’s rivals, who observed the same rules of the game.
During this ‘Westphalian’ period, from the eponymous peace (1648) to the Cold War and the dawn of decolonization, only Russia had a somewhat ambiguous status, as Pyotr Chaadayev had already pointed out at the beginning of the nineteenth century.4 This ambiguity triggered an endless quarrel in the empire of the tsars, driven more by the first stirrings of social unrest and ideological polemics than by geography and mute maps: Russia was neither really inside nor really outside a Europe that only grudgingly offered it the privilege of being ‘one of us’ (entre soi). The ‘Third Rome’, as it was proclaimed in the reign of Ivan III – who had married the last heiress of the Eastern Roman Empire – paid Europe back in its own coin. Unfortunately, we know how tragically permanent this ambiguity was to be.
Today, the international ‘game’ is no longer the same: it is becoming a much more subtle process, aiming at a much more complex mutual understanding, an uncertain faculty of deciphering the attitude of actors who face us in a world that now has no limits, where so many lines are blurred. In these new times, the subjective realm is triumphing more than ever, asserting its ascendancy over ready-made data, in particular supposedly geopolitical determinants and commonplaces of every kind that set up ‘imperial vocations’ or ‘dictatorial DNA’ as the fateful subjects of history. This kind of fatalistic view gets bogged down when the world becomes more complex and when national groups and social dynamics of all kinds freely start to assert themselves. Yesterday’s objective laws are artificially revived or definitively extinguished depending on choices and contexts, as are the policies that result from them.
We thus enter, as a direct result, into the unprecedented and scabrous mazes of ‘international understanding’, with the inevitable recourse to a demanding and reinvigorated hermeneutics – a science of interpretation that took root precisely in the nineteenth century, when the world began to expand, and when the effort to understand the Other, now more distant, became an urgent but not always fully recognized necessity. This acute need to decipher actors external to us and their behaviour is now a necessary step, not only to attain a grasp of international relations but also and above all to practise them. Acting on the international scene now requires understanding in depth
