IPE e a Cultura da Competicao na Economia Politica Internacional

PART II Studies in Difference and Contemporary IR CHAPTER 4 IPE as a Culture of Competition Competition is taken to be the central principle of international political economy as well as being endemic to the anarchic structure of international relations see Gilpin 1987 and Waltz 1959 1979 As members of an international society states are constituted as independent actors who must rely on their own resources and efforts to achieve their goals and purposes This requirement of selfhelp becomes competitive selfhelp when the goals and purposes of states become incompatible If as we are often told states under anarchy are compelled to define important goals in terms of gains relative to others then competition assumes a prominent and defining role in international life This characterization is only bolstered when we consider that states are embedded within a capitalist global division of labor Although the expansive and integrative logic of capitalism is incorporating the globe into a single economic space a genuinely world economy political boundaries continue to demarcate this singular space into national units in part because these boundaries operate as distributive devices States compete for market shares for their firms and regions in the world market and they promote and attract the development of technologically advanced and highprofit firms and industries within their boundaries Strange 1992 Reich 1991 Prestowitz 1994 Pellegrin 2000 Whether we see the state as guarantor of the economic welfare and security of its citizenry or as concerned primarily with enhancing its own capacities competition retains its force as a prominent feature of international society This does not mean that competition among states exhausts the character of international social life While alternative practices involving multilateral cooperation transnational movements local resistance and regional and global governance are increasingly widespread nevertheless there is a tendency among the dominant strains of IR to understand these only against the backdrop of competitive relations Keohane and Nye 1977 Haas 1990 Buzan 1991 Goldstein and Keohane 1993 Katzenstein 1996 Waltz 1999 Keohane 20011 Very few within the mainstream of IPE would question that competition remains a core concept in the social theory of IR The field treats competition as a given thereby indicating the hold that a culture of competition has on our imagination In this chapter we begin to redress this absence of theory by arguing that competition should be seen as part of a meaningful schemeas a social practice that juxtaposes certain values and principles while centering a certain type of self and framing its relations with others More specifically we propose that IPE is a particular cultural form characterized by an ongoing attempt to mediate the opposition between the principles of equality and social hierarchy and between identity and difference through the staging of competitions On the one hand the modern practice of competition constructs actors as formally equal and independent competitors in contradistinction to a model of a premodern world with relatively fixed and ascribed status hierarchies On the other hand such competitive practices still incorporate social hierarchy They continue to join this formal status of equality to a hierarchy that instead of being ascribed is now revealed within a social process of staging competitions Thus the hierarchies uncovered in modern competitive practices betray an uneasy tension expressing both the equality of actors and as the substantive denial of that equality Given the long and hallowed history of economism within IR Ashley 1983 Inayatullah and Blaney 1997 we are aware that embedding the structures and processes of international political economy in the cultural remains controversial despite the increasing concern with cultural questions within IR Walker 1990 Rengger 1992b Huntington 1993 Katzenstein 1996 Lapid and Kratochwil 1996 Jahn 2000 Although culture has arrived as a topic of conversation its status as a relevant category within IRIPE theory remains unclear Though establishing culture as indispensable to IRIPE is a task beyond the ambitions of this chapter if not this book2 we hope that the plausibility of our account of the logic of IPE as a culture of competition and a competitive hierarchy of cultures moves theory in the direction of a cultural IRIPE a topic we pursue more fully in our discussion of Karl Polanyis work in the following chapter Our purpose in this chapter is to redescribe IPE as a culture of competition in order to make a set of theoretical political and ethical claims about the antinomies of competition and the possibilities beyond a culture of competition We organize our discussion into three parts The first section sketches out the structure of meanings and purposes that define the cultural logic of competition In a first subsection we emphasize the way a peculiar juxtaposition of the principles of formal equality and competitively revealed social hierarchy is central to the social practice and purposes of competition We note that a culture of competition appears to be an attempt to wed the two polarities of Todorovs double movementjoining equality and sameness with difference and hierarchy We draw on numerous theorists and analysts especially the work of Friedrich Hayek in developing an account of this cultural logic Although we challenge Hayeks political conclusions as can be seen in the second half of this section and in the conclusion we find him invaluable as an informant about a IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 117 culture of competition In a second subsection we show how Adam Smith and Hayek formulate difference in largely parallel formulations Both treat difference in labor and knowledge respectivelyas an opportunity as well as a problem to be resolved by a modern society However the possibility that difference might offer alternatives to a culture of competition is foreclosed by limiting modern society to an order of ontologically separate and individualized persons The processes of exchange and competition thereby become the only possible and appropriate resolution of the problems created by difference In the second section we demonstrate that the interweaving of the logics of sovereignty and the capitalist global division of labor within the theory and practice of an international society likewise counterpoises principles of formal equality and revealed hierarchy International social life is constituted as a culture of competition and simultaneously as a competition and hierarchy of cultures that works to foreclose any alternative visions of social life Finally we conclude that the sense of natural inferiority and superiority attached to formally equal individuals is the central social contradiction of a culture of competition Highlighting this contradiction focuses our attention on the failure of modern society to come to grips with the transition from traditional hierarchy to modern equalitya confusion that drives the modern social actor to construct the other as ripe for subordination and exploitation We close by reinterpreting competition as a spur to the pursuit of excellence internal to the self but catalyzed through contact with others The Meaningful Structure of Competition In the introduction to this book we argue that bringing the language of culture into IR draws our attention to the construction and maintenance of meaningful and purposive schemesforms of lifeas a common yet always multiple human project We can thereby begin to think about what it would mean to construct IPE as a culture of competition First and foremost it becomes clear that competition is not a fact of nature3 Rather social practices involve a particular structuring of meaning and purpose that give competition its central role within the cultural logic of modern society The idea that the social world is a world of meaning and purpose does not entail that agents acting on the basis of a particular set of meanings and purposes will necessarily achieve their intended results Therefore in our account of competition we do not focus so much on possible agents of competitionstates multinational corporations producers of knowledge and so on If we point to a source that is shaping and perpetuating our current practice of competition it is the deep confusion about the meanings and purposes that lies at the heart of a modern culture of competition More precisely we point to our4 willingness andor compulsion to act out a powerful confusion where the very pursuit of equality generates social hierarchy Further we point out that the identity of modern individuals as competitors treats their socially constructed difference as logically prior to society so that social 118 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE inequality is seen as normal and natural The confusions of meaning and purpose intrinsic to the practice of competition appear in our reading then as analogous to a structural constraint We wish to stress though that we conceive such a structure as constitutiveas both constraining and enabling of a certain kind of agency and individuality5 Our point of departure then is that competition is not a fact of nature but a social practice6 In the two parts of this section we will sketch out the meaningful and purposeful structure of competition in modern social life Although our desire to expose the antinomies of this cultural logic is quite foreign to Friedrich Hayeks or Adam Smiths aims their voices loom large in our account because they individually and read in tandem stand as insightful explorations and defenses of the meaning and purpose of competition Indeed their account of the cultural logic of competition is mostly supported by others who have been compelled to lay out that logic as a prelude to apology or critique Hierarchy Naturalized In our age competition presumes and expresses the formal equality of the individuals brought into competition At the same time competitive situations assume and establish a ranking or hierarchy of achievement and value winners and losers gold silver and bronze topten lists and so on Can these opposing principles be reconciled They can However as we shall see the reconciliation reproduces the impulses of the double movement Todorov 1984 Within the cultural logic of competition hierarchy is thought not to violate the formal equality of individuals when that inequality is seen to be revealed instead of being created by or within a social process How a culture of competition tries to join formal equality and revealed hierarchy requires examination Friedrich Hayek 19796768 helps us understand this logic where he describes competition as a kind of experiment as a discovery procedure The staging of competitions both assumes and is a means of discovering individual differences that is competitions require that individuals adopt competitive strategies to mobilize and display their particular quality and quantity of ability skill and effort Where a ranking is established in relation to individual efforts and achievements the individuals position in the hierarchy is taken as a sign of the selfs merit and value relative to others7 although we cannot assume as we shall see a perfect correspondence between merit and rewards due to the contingencies of human interaction Hayek 19767278 115 Knight 193656 In a modern society the individual establishes his or her value by comparison with othersa comparison made possible by the staging of competitions Lane 1991221 However competition is not to be seen as the ultimate source of social hierarchies The true origins of modern inequality are preexisting differences among individuals As Hayek explains the rankings produced by competition merely reflect one of the most distinctive facts about the human speciesthe IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 119 boundless variety of human nature and the wide range of differences in individual capacities and potentialities Indeed these differences are treated as logically prior to the competition itself A competition appears then as a set of rules designed to reveal what is given by nature but remains latent8 There is ambiguity here The idea of the presocial character of differences seems to undermine the earlier claim that the social status produced by staging competitions is socially determined While the presociality of individual differences certainly exists in some tension with the idea of the social character of competition such a tension is partially diminished due to what occurs within the competitive process Within this process individuals may be spurred to enhance their combination of skills and effort perhaps adopting the methods of successful competitors as modelsthe demonstration effect In addition because competitions are ongoing throughout life the possibility of social mobility across successive competitions becomes real Competition partially retains its character as a social process because the competitive process works to uncover and stimulate the development or display of intrinsic differences among individuals Hayek 1960 chapter 6 the quoted phrases are from 86 We will return to this ambiguity shortly Hayek also embraces competition because it promotes individual liberty The market as a discovery procedure embodies and expresses the status of competitors as equally individual and independent albeit needy9 selves Competitors come to the market with a right to property as property owners and freely contracting individuals Knight 193649 For Hayek 1976107 then the market is both an expression of and the unintended outcome of the particular independent and voluntary actions of free and equal individuals10 Hayek further values the discovery procedure employed by the market because it produces important social goods The system of rewards organized by the market not only unleashes human productive efforts as we have noted but also directs those efforts to producing the things needed by others fostering a situation of economic interdependence The market exposes less productive efforts while validating more productive ones thereby providing models of effective competitive strategies and generating greater wealth at the cost of fewer resources and efforts As Hayek explains the competitions staged in the market are valuable because they generate wealth and improve the chances that each individual will have his or her separate and incommensurable ends met11 In this way the market realizes certain values and produces a particular version of the good society In sum the culture of competition generates a wealthy society via competitive mechanisms that endorse support and produce selves that are independent formally equal and free Given these advantages the fact that this regime also produces unequal rewards seems an acceptable cost The drawback of accepting such a formulation of the benefits and costs is that it hides a deeper problem namely that Hayeks combining of equality and inequality rests upon opposing ontological foundations Within a culture of competition formal equality is socially constituted and explicitly endorsed as an 120 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE intrinsically necessary social value of market society Inequality however is social only to the degree that competitions express reveal and realize differences The origins of these differences are left unconnected to any social processes and are produced ultimately by nature These naturegiven differences are then translated by the market into inequality and hierarchy Two consequences result from employing this mixed ontology Because Hayek establishes that in a culture of competition hierarchy has both natural and social components critics can find difficulty in challenging the injustice of hierarchies when those hierarchies can be shown to result from social rules of competition At most we can question specific rankings based on either the inadequacy of particular sets of rules to perform the task of ranking a poorly designed experiment or on violations of adequate rules cheating or because the rules fail to recognize the formal equality of the competitors discrimination Hayek 197671 12324 see also Nozick 197515082 In a culture of competition we are led to consider hierarchy and hierarchies as beyond ethical concern since they are treated as given and thereby not amenable to human determination Social inequality is thereby naturalized and depoliticized The second result of this mixed ontology is that winners and losers can claim different parts of the mixture While reveling in what they deem as their justly deserved results winners can point to what in principle are fair processes of social competition Meanwhile losers rather than accepting the result can instead intuit that competitive processes even when fair manage only to translate presocial naturegiven characteristics of individuals This powerful political clash will persist because the deeper source of its tension remains unexplored depriving the disputing parties of impetus to transform the social order Kramnick 1981 We can connect this formulation to the double movement Equality is translated as a formal legal status that submerges the differences between actors Though submerged differences cannot be ignored they surface as an unaccounted for prior substance which the market reveals as the basis for inequality The two sides of the double movementequalitysameness and differenceinferiorityare thus weakly stitched together in a culture of competition The idea that difference might not be translated into rankings of higher and lower but might instead be seen to offer an alternative vision of social life is precluded by treating difference as an individualized and presocial trait in relation to market society This naturalization of inequality assures that differences can have little political and ethical relevance in the present except as examples of unproductive and outmoded ways of being and doing That is the status of formal equalitysameness underpins the creation of the future out of the present differences are seen as an underlying reality revealed in the future as inequality or as residues of past failures to compete IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 121 Differences in the Competitive Process Though this formulation of the antinomy of formal equality and substantive social hierarchy captures something central to the logic of a culture of competition it does not fully explore the role of differences in a market society To do so requires a closer look at the ideas of a division of labor and a division of knowledge We turn to Hayek and Adam Smith in order to tease out their understandings of the problem of difference They construct difference as a modern problema problem resolved only by market competition In the initial chapter of his 1776 Wealth of Nations Smith 1976 book I chapter 1 imagines the Amerindian savage as a jackofalltrades In body and mind the savage bears the skills and knowledge of a hunter cook carpenter clothier and so on The distinction between individual savages therefore is merely formalthey differ only in that each occupies a different body and a different space In a civilized societyone in which as Smith emphasizes the division of labor has thoroughly taken placeeach individual carries different and specialized skills he12 is a carpenter but not a smith or a clothier but not a potter or a gunsmith but not a baker The civilized individual has specific skills and bears only particular knowledge This specialized difference in skill is a source of wealth Note the change in tone we mentioned at the end of chapter 2 namely that difference might be treated as a resource instead of an unconvertible problem However these differences in labor while the source of wealth also come to be the problem a civilized society must resolve The question for Smith is how can the different specialties of labor come to be productive for the society as a whole That is given that each individual specializes only in a particular skill how does each individual provision all of his or her needs His solution is to assert that market exchange operates so that commodities circulate to all laborers and so that everyones needs are adequately provisioned How Smith arrives at this conclusion requires some elaboration Smith begins the Wealth of Nations by comparing two abstract nations The project is to explain why one is poor and the other affluent He focuses on the character and quality of labor in the two nations If labor is dividedthat is if there is a functional differentiation of tasks and specialization within the communitywealth will be produced If no such differentiation occurs and each person must carry out all tasks individually this unity or sameness of labor results in poverty To illustrate the wealthproducing power of the division of labor Smith 197689 uses the famous pinfactory example at the beginning of book I chapter 1 Where each workman performs all the operations involved in the manufacture of pins Smith observes that he could scarce perhaps with his utmost industry make one pin in a day and certainly could not make twenty But where the process of pin making is divided into a number of branches perhaps as many as about eighteen distinct operations in Smiths account the individual can produce anywhere from two hundred to eight hundred times as 122 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE many pins13 The lesson is clear the division of labor associated with industrial production is the route to affluence and a civilized society Within civilized society we find a similarly salutary lesson about market exchange Where the market operates the wealth of society finds its way into the hands of all workers In this way the differences of labor are brought together to create a wealthy society and meet the needs of all the different and specialized laborers As Smith explains It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts in consequence of the division of labor which occasions in a wellgoverned society that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for and every other workman being exactly in the same situation he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity or what comes to the same thing for the price of a great quantity of theirs He supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for and they accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of society Smith 197615 emphasis added However there is something quite peculiar about this account of the diffusion of universal opulence Smith seems to regard the workers as independent producers who owning their own means of production have surplus to exchange Indeed it is not until book II of Wealth of Nations that Smith reveals the social relations involved in this example There we find that laborers work at the pin factory because they have no other property but their laborpower to sell they earn their wages performing specialized tasks within a functionally differentiated structure that is controlled by an owner of stock or a capitalist Wages are set in a contract between those whose only property is their laborpower and those who also own capital usually to the advantage of the latter The neglect of social relations in the first chapter allows Smith to think of workers within the factory as independent producers and not as wage earners selling their laborpower to capitalists he then presents the distributional consequences of the division of labor as a process of bartering among independent producers rather than consumption by wage laborers Contrary to the long passage above the barter of the surplus production of independent individuals and the spending of wages for subsistence by wagelaborers do not come to the same thing14 A general plenty of wealth naturally diffuses itself to all members of society only because Smith ignores the actual social conditions of the individuals in the factory in the first chapter of the Wealth of Nations The parts that were functionally different and dependent on the contract with the capitalist suddenly become equal and independentnot only do they own their own means of production but they also exchange surpluses IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 123 To summarize by grafting the requirements of a technical division of labor that is the pin factory with those of a social division of labor composed of independent actors Smith is able to arrive at the trickledown principle of wealth acquisition He is able to solve the problem of how different skills in individuals come to serve the general good in society by making two distinct moves First the creation of wealth is the result of differences between laborers as shown in the pin factory example and second the distribution of that wealth to the different ranks of society is the result of exchanges between independent producers The numerous exchanges involved while appearing to be capricious processes are actually governed by the salutary laws of political economy These exchanges bridge the difference between individuals allowing each to be a resource for others Others differences serve then as the source of each individuals wealth and the basis of a wealthy society If Smiths response to difference moves in a laudable direction by understanding difference as an opportunity for a modern society instead of simply a danger that must be erased this recognition is limited and has a darker side Like Hayek Smith tenuously weds the formal equality of actors with substantive inequality Sustaining this juxtaposition of equalitysameness and differenceinequality depends on an act of splitting see Benjamin 1988 though Smiths account is relatively ambiguous casting doubt on the very polarity he introduces More precisely Smith opposes the independent individual of civilized society to the social being of primitive society but simultaneously muddles the status of laborers in a market society Independent individuals are translated into independent producers at certain points but revealed as immersed in a system of social relations or social structures at other points We need to examine this problem more closely On the one hand for Smith the modern man is individualized and separated by the achievement of the division of labor In direct opposition to the savage who is completely subsumed by the group the modern man stands independently of the group and differentiated from every other individual by his specific set of skills This polaritythe splitting into the purely groupbeing of the savage and the purely independent and individualized actor of modern civilized societyis crucial for Smith15 By purifying modern individuals of their social being Smith obscures the social relationships and social structures involved in production Once the social relations of production are obscured the modern individual appears as an independent producer And only by seeing the distribution of gains as the result of a bargaining process among independent producers can he derive the salutary conclusion that the general opulence will trickle down Thus it is the purification of the opposition between the social savage and the civilized individual that leads Smith to translate the separation and individualization of labor into the independence of producers making possible his resolution of the problem of divided and different labors as beneficial to all 124 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE On the other hand though this polarity between the savage and the civilized and the associated developmental schema are central to the presentation of the Wealth of Nations see our discussion in chapter 2 Smith does not consistently sustain this distinction in its purest form With the introduction of the social relations of the factory in book II we find laborers occupying a position that contains some of each side of the polarity The free laborer is not bound to land or master yet in actual social condition he is compelled by lack of other means to contract to sell his laborpower to the capitalist That is this status shares something of the modern ideal of the free and independent individual rewarded for individual effort and like the savage dependence and subordination to a larger social system16 More than a simple confusion this splitting and grafting at once promises the relative equality of a diffusion of the general plenty and sanctifies the inequality of society divided by a marketproduced status hierarchy Hayeks formulation is similar to Smiths but he shifts the emphasis from labor to knowledge If for Smith what constitutes the wealth of nations is the division of labor then for Hayek that wealth is constituted by the division of knowledge We have already seen in Smith that a primitive or premodern society is characterized not by a division but by a unity or sameness of labor Accordingly Hayek characterizes primitive society as similarly suffering from a uniformity of knowledge only in small groups of primitive society can collaboration between the members rest largely on the circumstance that at any one moment they will know more or less the same particular circumstances Some wise men may be better at interpreting the immediately perceived circumstance or at remembering things in remote places unknown to the others But the concrete events which the individuals encounter in their daily pursuits will be very much the same for all and they will act together because the events they know and the objectives at which they aim are more or less the same Hayek 19731314 emphasis added By contrast knowledge in civilized societywhat Hayek calls the Great or Open Societyis specialized The situation is wholly different in the Great or Open Society where millions of men interact and where civilization as we know it has developed Economics has long stressed the division of labor which such a situation involves But it has had much less stress on the fragmentation of knowledge on the fact that each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all and that each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests Yet it is the utilization of much more knowledge than anyone can possess and therefore the fact that each moves within a coherent structure most of IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 125 whose determinants are unknown to him that constitutes the distinctive feature of advanced civilizations Hayek 197314 As with Smith and as should be familiar from earlier chapters a sharp distinction is drawn between the modern and the primitive We discuss Hayeks use of this distinction more fully below Though Hayeks preferences for advanced civilization are clear he like Smith recognizes that this division or difference of knowledge constitutes the central problem to be resolved by modern societies It is only when knowledge can be brought together that it is useful knowledge is unprofitable when it exists only dispersed as the separate partial and sometimes conflicting beliefs of all men Hayek 196025 As Hayek 196026 see also 197316 and 1979 68 puts it The more civilized we become the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends The very division of knowledge increases the necessary ignorance of the individual of most of this knowledge However in contrast to Smith Hayek is less concerned with defending a trickledown idea as part of the solution to the problem posed by differences of knowledge If Smith overcomes the division of labors with the salutary laws of polititical economy Hayek overcomes the problem of the division of knowledge with competition To build on the previous section the role of competition as a discovery procedure is crucial because we have no other acceptable means to identify which knowledge possessed by individuals is valuable It is because every individual knows so little and in particular because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it Hayek 196029 emphasis added The key word in this quotation is besta term through which Hayek introduces an explicit social hierarchy within modern society Hayek is arguing that while it is true that each difference contains some part of knowledge it is not the case that we need the knowledge of each equally Some carry knowledge that is better than what others hold Indeed those who know what is best for society as a whole should lead a progressive society while it relies on a process of learning and imitation recognizes the desires it creates only as a spur to further effort It does not guarantee the results to everyone It disregards the pain of unfulfilled desire aroused by the example of others It appears cruel because it increases the desire of all in proportion as it increases its gifts to some Yet so long as it remains a progressive society some must lead and the rest must follow Hayek 1960 4445 The problem is to understand how we can come to know this difference between leaders and followers The solution comes of course through competitions staged in the market Competition reveals the relative worth of different 126 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE individualized knowledge and thereby Hayek hopes and believes produces progress17 It must be the progress itself that justifies competition because as we noted above Hayek does not pretend that the market produces rewards that accurately reflect individual merit Smith and Hayek seem joined in their view that the problem of difference in a modern societybe it difference of labor or knowledgeis best and readily resolved by the operation of the market They also share the impulse to purify the distinction between the primitive and modern For Hayek his very statement of the problem of difference depends on the assumption that all knowledge is individual and separate The problem would be less stark or of a much different character if knowledge within modern society was also partly communally sharedeither as something tacit bequeathed by language tradition and lore or as a kind of collective subconscious Hayek 19604545 rejects this possibility Knowledge exists only as the knowledge of individuals It is not much better than a metaphor to speak of the knowledge of society as a whole The sum of the knowledge of all the individuals exists nowhere as an integrated whole In this assertion Hayek makes his commitment to ontological individualism abundantly clear Any dialectical or mutually constitutive relationship between parts and wholes is ruled out The parts exist only as separate independent entities the whole is not allowed to be the context within which the part emerges and is sustained Almost silently Hayek inserts an exclusion of any middle ground that might recognize the role of both parts and wholes A crucial purpose is achieved with this exclusionary move Though mostly implicit this exclusion of the middle operates to enforce the purity of the distinction between the modern and the primitive This duality of modern and primitive constructs two options either knowledge is a whole that subsumes the individual as in primitive society or knowledge is divided among individuals with no residue of the social With this act of splitting Hayek creates the logical form onto which he attaches another polaritybetween an unfree and a free society In this way the historically external other of the primitive and the historically internal others of modern civilizationvisions or practices that assume strong solidarity or the overlapping of selves for example socialism and mysticismare fused analytically as enemies of the unique features of the Great or Open Society Hayek argues then that any action to bridge the problem of difference that involves political authority in the name of society is utterly destructive of the project of individual liberty Hayek 1944 Only ontologically separate individuals through their own volition must build bridges toward the knowledge of others As we have seen certain processes alone facilitate this bridging exchange among freely contracting parties and the staging of competitions Hayek thus limits us to two polar options as resolutions of the problem of the division of knowledge Either the dispersion of knowledge is reintegrated by the submission of the individual to the social wholethe road to serfdomor the process of overcoming division and separateness is achieved via the free and voluntary actions of individuals in the IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 127 market18 To find space in the middle would be to cast doubt on Hayeks claim that the market provides a uniquely appropriate and desirable solution Part of our task here is to begin to undo this exclusion19 Hayek seems to imply that giving any ground to the notion of the social in a modern society is to commit a category mistake Hayek cannot or will not acknowledge the weight of social structure as Smith is led to do in book II of Wealth of Nations Where the social relations of production shape the status and actions of economic actors so that specialized laborers confront owners of stock the idea of an ontologically separate individual verges on myth if not deception Our point is not to dismiss completely the equality and freedom possible in modern society Rather we wish to highlight that refusing the polarity that Hayek enforces and thereby recognizing the weight of the social it is no longer possible to innocently see social hierarchy as an ontological prior revealed through the staging of competitions Nor is it possible to view inequality simply as a natural result of the independent and voluntary actions of individuals Inequality instead could be seen as one of the social conditions of modern individuality and the social basis for the staging of competitions in a market The equality and freedom of the individual in modern society appear to be circumscribed and constitutively interwoven with social inequality The competitions staged in the market lose their sacrosanct characteras beyond political questionand we can begin a process of weighing their strengths and weaknesses and the proper extent of their use This stricture on the social also works to rid our political imagination of any alternative to a market society The individualization of knowledge is used overtly as a weapon against the pretensions of philosophers or political theorists who claim to imagine a better society Hayek 196030 writes All political theories assume of course that most individuals are very ignorant Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization the difference between the wisest and that which the most ignorant can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant But Hayeks wielding of this weapon produces much collateral damage leaving us with no resources for imagining different forms of life Where knowledge is strictly individual groups cannot share identities and traditions providing cultural values and visions that inform distinctive social practices except as organized competitions It also becomes less than clear how individuals can know how to go on in social life without having acquired at least tacit social knowledge Wittgenstein 1958151 179 Giddens 19795 If as we argued in the introduction our capacity to respond critically to social life depends on a backdrop of at least some common values and meanings the social critic is left mute as an isolated individual The possibility of a dialogue among social 128 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE criticisms is equally disabled for how can our knowledge of and response to suffering be anything but an individual trait Cosuffering and the overlap of self and other are ruled out by definition And finally by treating all knowledge as the possession of relatively ignorant individuals Hayek eliminates any other both external and within that might serve as a critical mirror for a market society Since the end result of human progress is to transform all primitive societies into civilization and all savages into modern men Hayeks treatment of such differences as a significant starting point works to exclude the alternatives these others pose as continuous resources for critical reflection Having thereby cleansed the modern of contamination by the primitive the other is nothing but a collection of independent individuals who being uniformly ignorant of the design of any society can offer us only a reflection of our own ignorance All wisdom is placed in the workings of the market For its decisions there is no recourse but an appeal to heaven Both Smith and Hayek take stances that contain a strong commitment to the progressive achievements attained by the exploitation of difference Unlike the sixteenthand seventeenthcentury interpreters of the Bible faced with the discovery of the New World and unfamiliar peoples Smith and Hayek make a significant bow to the importance and power of difference Nevertheless each theorists stance toward difference also contains the powerful tension we identified earlier the tension between equality and hierarchy is mediated only by grafting the opposing poles of the double movement Equality as legal sameness operates to produce and justify a translation of difference into relations of inferiority and superiority Sustaining this tension requires a kind of deception that we have discussed at some length Social hierarchy must be latently present in the individuals revealed by the staging of competitions Inequality cannot be allowed to be seen as primarily a social factthe consequence of the creation of market society itself The voluntary actions of individuals must be made the cause of social inequality erasing from view the notion that inequality is a condition of the status of free and formally equal individuality And all this is justified by reference to the production of the social good of a wealthy society Quite strikingly and interestingly both Smith and Hayek admit that something like this deception operates at the heart of a capitalist society In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith 1979183 acknowledges that the power and wealth created by the division of labor should be considered quite contemptible and trifling Power and riches appear then to be what they are enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling convenienciesthat keep off the summer shower not the winter storm but leave him always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety to fear and to sorrow to diseases to danger and to death Adam Smith 197918283 Yet few are able to perceive this deception created by wealth because such a vision requires a facility with abstraction and philosophy Adam Smith 197918384 regards this IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 129 failure of popular vision with a bitter irony for without it civilization could neither be created nor advanced It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground to build houses to found cities and commonwealths and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human life which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe have turned rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains and made the track less and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth This deception combined with the invisible hand leads the rich to create civilization not just on behalf of themselves but to the benefit of society as a whole Hayeks proviso about a market society involves a similar functional deception If Smith pessimistically notes a lack of connection between wealth and welfare Hayek locates a similar break between individual effort and reward It certainly is important in the market order or free enterprise society misleadingly called capitalism that the individuals believe that their well being depends primarily on their own efforts and decisions Indeed few circumstances will do more to make a person energetic and efficient than the belief that it depends chiefly on him whether he will reach the goals he has set himself But it leads no doubt also to an exaggerated confidence in the truth of this generalization which to those who regard themselves and perhaps are equally able but have failed must appear as a bitter and severe provocation It is therefore a real dilemma to what extent we ought to encourage in the young the belief that when they really try they will succeed or should rather emphasize that inevitably some unworthy will succeed and some worthy will failwhether we ought to allow the view of those groups to prevail with whom the overconfidence in the appropriate reward of the able and the industrious is strong and who in consequence will do much that benefits the rest and whether without such partly erroneous beliefs the large numbers will tolerate actual differences in rewards which will be based only partly on achievement and partly on mere chance Hayek 1976 74 emphasis added see also 1960 4447 One is left to wonder about mere chancethe circumstances that while beyond individual control bear quite a weight in shaping social outcomes It may be that one is simply in the wrong place at the wrong timerandom factors that bear no explanation Or it may be that being in the wrong place at the wrong time says much about individuals relative command of information and geographical 130 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE mobility And these are less a matter of luck than of social position and prior command of wealth Perhaps the real dilemma is to decide if we should discourage those who have little prospect for chance smiling upon them by disabusing them of their illusions20 As argued throughout this book for much of European cosmological inquiry into the one and the many supports the conclusion that the problem is difference and the solution is unity Smith and Hayek by contrast highlight the productive power of difference understanding that difference can act as a resource for others Though they tend to obscure the tensions between equality and social hierarchy that their vision entails they stress that a division of laborknowledge produced by differences is instrumental in promoting civilization They do recognize however that the productivity power and wealth of this civilization come at some cost There is no guarantee that wealth will satisfy deeper yearnings Nor does ones laborknowledge directly translate into individual reward Maintaining such fictive linkages however are necessary deceptions in the folktales and lore of a culture of competition IPE as a Culture of Competition The logic of competition seems also to be a central feature of the culture of international life Pursuing this description of IPE allows us to highlight the way the interweaving of the logics of sovereignty and global capitalism reproduce the antinomies of a culture of competition Sovereignty promises the realization of the equality and independence of political communities in a society of states but this is juxtaposed with the hierarchical orderings of a capitalist global division of labor revealed in the competitions staged in a world market Together these interwoven practices form the constitutive horizon Walker 19939 of international social life as a culture of competition The idea of sovereigntythe independence of states and the absence of a supreme political authority21conjures up for most international relations theorists the image of a warfilled state of nature billiardball states and the anarchy problematic Ashley 1988 But ironically and despite protests of the eternal problem of anarchy this state of nature was founded We share Cornelia Navaris 1978119 concern is not there something odd about the state of nature which constitutes international relationsnamely the fact that it did not always exist The fact that it was an established state of nature which emerged out of something that went before And indeed the state of nature did have to be founded It was scarcely natural to the men of the time that social organization be cut off from external authority formed into billiard balls and the space between emptied The notion of the state as a billiard ball is a convention it was instituted That condition of affairs is maintained by other conventions IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 131 such as nonintervention and recognition which were also instituted To say simply that the space between is empty is not true It is empty in the sense that for certain purposes the state is a billiard ball But the space is full of conventions which maintain that image It is also full of the convention that societies must become states for certain purposes As this makes clear and as is crucial to Hedley Bulls distinction between system and society a society of states is more than merely a pattern of interaction among otherwise isolated political communities Bull 1966 1977 chapter 1 Watson 1987 1992 Rather a society of states is a set of historically constructed social practices stabilized by and made meaningful in terms of a more or less common form of international social life In terms closer to Bulls a society of states requires that there be a set of recognized norms and principles of common values and purposes which give shape and meaning to the interactions among states and give the society its value and meaning to the participants Thus a society of states is a culture in that it stands as a specific way of assigning meaning and value a specific way of organizing international social life such that states are constituted and valued as billiard balls22 To be more precise the principle of sovereignty is understood as the culmination of resistance to the hierarchical social order of Christendom the idea that outside forces God pope emperor determine the life of each community weaving them into a single Christian Commonwealth Gross 196854 The establishment of a society of sovereign states gave force to the idea that final authority should rest within each independent community that each community is in this sense selfdetermining The idea is that each political community should be governed by rules norms goals and purposes that belong to it in some strong sense that express the values and visions implicit in the communitys conception of the good life Walzer 1980 see also Jackson 1990a Ideas of national popular or territorial selfdetermination are all versions of this idea implicit in sovereignty Tamir 1991 Buchanan 199223 The principles of the equality of states and the obligation of tolerance appear as corollaries of sovereignty and community selfdetermination Leo Gross 1968 54 5960 explains that the principles of equality and the coexistence of separate political communities were made central to the society of states In the political field the Peace of Westphalia marked mans abandonment of the idea of a hierarchical structure of society and his option for a new system characterized by the coexistence of a multiplicity of states each sovereign within its territory equal to one another and free from any external earthly authority And it is this conception of an international society embracing on a footing of equality the entire human race irrespective of religion and form of government which is usually said to have triumphed in the seventeenth century over the medieval conception of a more restricted Christian society organized hierarchically that is on the basis of inequality 132 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE In principle at leastand we have suggested the limits of such tolerance and equality in chapters 1 and 2in international society each political community is recognized as a sovereign equal possessing the same rights and duties This equality of status implies a duty of each political community to respect the sovereignty of others Hinsley 1986258 Wight 1977135 to allow different versions of the good life to be played outmostly free from unwanted interferencebehind the protection of sovereign boundaries Of course various forms and degrees of unwanted intrusions continue to occur but the principle of sovereignty allows us to identify these as interventions see Weber 1992 and to the extent that sovereignty directs state action the principle allows a relatively safe place in which a communitys vision of itself can be implemented It is in this sense that the principles of equality and tolerance of difference are constitutive of and made manifest in a society of states We must stress again that in an international society states are treated as formally equal and independent sovereigns because of their presumed value as sites or receptacles for the realization of the particular values and traditions of peoples That values and traditions or to put it crudely cultures neatly map onto states or that states can adequately represent or contain cultures remain very problematic ideas and are sources of some dissatisfaction with sovereignty We took note of this initially where we suggested the cultural and ethical complexity of global social life Yet in international society nationness remains the most universally legitimate value In fact the force of the logic of sovereignty compels that forms of life be imagined primarily as political communities bounded in relation to others and equally sovereign as states as nascent states or as relatively autonomous actors within multination states Anderson 1983 see also Anthony Smith 1979 and Walzer 1980 and 1994 Thus whatever the limits of the state as a container of the values and visions of a political community within international society it is principally as or inside a state acting within a society of states that a form of life seeks to realize the traditions and practices that express and construct its identity It is in this sense that each state or political community is thought of as an independent and equal self with a sense of itself and a series of projects or goals and values associated with expressing that identity Any such identity has implications for economic policy The identity of a political community might incorporate or exclude capital accumulation and economic growth for its own sake represented for example by developmentalists and ecological movements respectively Nevertheless it is important to recognize that even simple reproduction or zero growth requires the creation of wealth that is realizing the projects values and visions of any political community depends on some degree of wealthiness compelling wealth creation as a necessary element of social life The idea of sovereignty accounts for this compulsion by reserving and protecting the states rights to its own resources and efforts as means to realizing its purposes Charles Tilly 199329 notes that this idea is central to the principle of selfdetermination Ifa people controls a state of its own it has the collective IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 133 right to exclude or subordinate members of other populations with respect to the territory and benefits under control of that state It is not unfair then to see sovereignty as the attribution of a collective property right within IPE The requirement of respect for a states domestic jurisdiction functions as a kind of collective property right for the citizens of that stateit entitles the state to exclude foreigners from the use or benefit of its wealth and resources except on terms that it voluntarily accepts Beitz 1991243 Sovereign boundaries thereby demarcate a space for the pursuit of a communitys identity as well as bounding and protecting the resources and efforts to be drawn upon as means to realizing that form of life In addition the claim of this right by a state establishes by implication an equal right of other communities to reserve their resources and wealth for their own purposes In this way sovereignty constitutes and demarcates forms of life as discrete political and economic units24 The rule that each state must rely on its own resources and efforts is often labeled as the requirement of selfhelp This requirement although sometimes a hardship is also defended as a virtue practiced by the truly independent and as supportive of the selfrealization of the community In other words the independence of political communities is thought to be more secure and more fully realized where the community is largely selfsupporting However the requirement of selfhelp also places political communities into competition IPE often thinks of competitions among states as being staged in two separate spheres the world economy and the strategic sphere of military competition We need to examine in some detail the structuring of meaning and purpose that links and differentiates these two spheres of competition We can then identify the place competition occupies in defining the nature of political communities and the relations between them in an international society Economic competition takes place within the world market a system of mutual dependence in which each political community must produce for the needs of others in order to secure its own livelihood Thus each political community is established as both producer and consumer as both needy and provider of the needs of others within a global division of labor Inayatullah and Blaney 1995 Vernon and Kapstein 1991 Moore 1989 Reich 1991 It might be thought that the world economy is more appropriately seen as an economic interaction of individuals and firms While this characterization is not inaccurate and is useful for many purposes our point is to highlight that the practice of sovereignty within an international society authorizes states as collective economic actors The consequences of such an authorization are outlined and bemoaned by Hayek 1944220 It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living that membership of a national group should entitle us to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes if 134 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE international economic relations instead of relations between individuals become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies they inevitably become the source of friction and envy Indeed the idea of the trading state is seen as a crucial concept in understanding the history particularly the contemporary history of international relations Rosecrance 1986 States as sovereigns and thereby as trading bodies within a competitive world market are assigned a complicated role in both maintainingpolicing the competitions staged by the world market and in participating as producers and consumers in those competitions As the guardians of a competitive international economic order states must establish the group of enabling conditions the social structure of accumulation that sets the rules of the competitions and gives the world market its purpose as a generator of wealth on a global scale This includes a role as guarantor of the property rights of individuals and firms including the establishment and maintenance of a set of international economic institutions that ensure the stability and enforce the rules of a competitive world economy25 Once secured by the actions of independent states the market is thought to operate as a discovery procedure on a global scale rewarding the uses of resources and efforts that best serve the needs of others As an independent producer each political community acquires its share of global wealth according to the market value of its contribution that is the contribution of its individuals firms and regions to global production in the meeting of needs within the world economy As an independent consumer each state is able to draw on global wealth to support its cultural selfexpression only to the point allowed by that market valuation of its contribution Because each state must provide and develop its own capacity to realize its purposes state is pit against state in an effort to acquire shares in global production It is not surprising then that states engage in an intense global competition to create conditions within their boundaries and for their firms globally to secure world market shares and promote the development of technologically advanced and highprofit production capacities by their firms and within their boundaries Strange 1992 Reich 1991 Prestowitz 1994 Krugman 1996 chapter 6 Cerny 1995 2000 Although not properly described as a zerosum game Krugman 1996 chapter 1 these processes of competitive selfimprovement Bright and Geyer 1987 secure gains for some states at the expense of others in the near and far term relatively and absolutely in varying combinations In this way the competitions staged within the world economy appear to uncover not only a hierarchy of individuals and firms but also a hierarchy of political communities As in a single society competition is applied in a world market in order to realize important purposes and express basic values First staging economic interactions as competitions is seen to spur global production and enhance the possibility of meeting the needs of political communities and their members The IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 135 reasoning is that because the market reveals and rewards even if imperfectly a hierarchy of resources and efforts devoted to meeting needs each state the individuals firms and regions within it will direct their resources and efforts to producing those things to which both the rewards are greatest and their given capabilities are best suited And as Adam Smith teaches because wealth is limited by the extent of the market securing the operation of a world market promotes the expansion of wealth and increased chances of meeting needs on a global scale In this context the ongoing economic competitions staged within the world market are valued because they are seen to increase global wealth and the chances for each political community to acquire the wealth it requires to express and realize its form of life Smith 1976 book IV chapter 4 Murphy 1994 Second a competitively revealed hierarchy of states is valued because it is seen as providing models for the proper and successful organization of political communities as economic actors Where the success of cultural selfexpression depends on competitive selfimprovement the resultant hierarchy of state and group capacities appears also to be a valuation of cultures Esteva 1992 Lummis 1992 This feature of international political economy is captured in a vocabulary of gradations of economic success and potential Advanced economies are contrasted with backward economies Modern societies are contrasted with the traditional where modernization represents a strategy for future economic success Likewise countries are developed and less developed or somewhat optimistically characterized as developing On one side this conceptual vocabulary suggests that the hierarchy revealed by competition is a hierarchy of cultural forms abilities and efforts On the other side this hierarchy suggests a model or some set of models for organizing cultural forms as relatively successful economic competitors see Hayek 19604647 A political communitys chances of realizing its form of life within the world economy comes to depend on adapting its own values and traditions to accommodate competitive development strategies or industrial policies The revealed hierarchy of cultural forms provides information to political communities about what works and what doesnt in a culture of competition thereby contributing to the process of wealth generation around the globe Third this hierarchy of political communities is also validated because it expresses and is a realization of the sovereignty of political communities The independence and formal equality of communities is expressed in their status as economic units possessing a sovereign property right The sovereign property right recognizes and constructs the individuality of political communities demarcating the space within which the distinctive traits of each separate community are contained or realized Relevant individual differences in productive resources capacities and efforts are treated thereby as logically prior to or separate from the global competition itself perhaps even as facts of nature26 Thus the competitions staged by the world market retain their legitimacy because competition can be seen as uncovering the hierarchy latent in the individual differences of multiple forms of life 136 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE We might say then that the economic competition proper to an international society largely reproduces the peculiar juxtaposition of the principles of equality and hierarchy that animates a culture of competition Competitions staged by the world market among formally equal bearers of property rights produce a ranking of forms of life as the revelation of a hierarchy latent in the individual differences of independent communities Thus in international society as in Smiths and Hayeks accounts of national society competition reproduces the impulse to mediate equality and hierarchy by trying to hold together both sides of the double movement At the same time and in parallel to Smith and Hayek alternatives to a culture of competition are largely erased The revealed hierarchy of cultures as we have hinted is constructed as a relationship between teachers and students Though weaker competitors might have some economic strengths relative to stronger competitors these advantages in primary products and laborintensive products largely mark them as less developed27 For these countries their forms of governance financial regulations systems of property rights and modes of individuality and family life all become subjected to scrutiny and proposed reform based on models offered by experts who peddle an orthodoxy rooted in the selfunderstandings and policy pronouncements if not necessarily the actual practices of the advanced economies Silbey 1997 Young 1995 Williams 1994 1999 Nieuwenhuys 1998 Hopgood 2000 Pupavac 2001 Snared within this framing of teachers and students models and sites to which they must be transferred aid givers and aid recipients the differences offered by those low on the competitive ladder are precluded from serving as a critical resource for those more advanced A culture of competition is thereby treated as the natural and normal order of things Difference is at once confined to that relevant to economic competition or targeted for eradication via development Sachs 1992 Escobar 1995 Rist 1997 Competition in the military sphere is entangled with economic competition in an international society but also stands as an analytically separable expression of the cultural logic of competition In a society of states each state must be concerned with protecting the identity of its members to secure through self help the wellbeing and safety of its community Interactions between communities may be experienced as threatening to the identity of each because the other community represents an alternative set of values and traditions that may spill over boundaries A culturally defensive attitude is sharpened where some communities attempt to impose their way of life on others an unfortunate but all too common occurrence in a society of states Such impositions may be motivated and legitimated by the claim of a hierarchy of forms of life presumably uncovered by the successful conquest itself or as revealed in some other sphere thought of as competitively discovering a latent superiority and inferiority Such threats and violations are made increasingly severe because the principle of selfhelp while limiting the states ability to realize and defend the identity of the political community to its own resources and efforts provides the IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 137 means by which some states may effectively lay claim to the resources and efforts of others More specifically as David Levine 199139 warns us inequalities in wealthacquiring capacities between communities may generate conflict when the boundaries between the communities limitaccess to wealth Those with less access to wealth given current boundaries might channel their resources so that they could attempt to forcibly alter their borders and their access to wealth Those with greater capacities might use their advantage in resources and wealth as a tool for pillaging those less favored and less capable of resisting such intrusions In Hayeks 194422021 terms this demarcation of states as political and economic units creates a contest of force and clashes of power Such a context of threats and resort to force prompts states to organize themselves in part as units of protection erecting fortifications and fortresses in order to deflect these threats Herz 19591440 Some have referred to this mutual vulnerability as a security dilemma Ashley 1988 Jervis 1978 Herz 1950 In a security dilemma each states effort to defend the integrity of its political community appears to be a potential threat to other states efforts to do the same prompting augmentation of each states fortress and a greater threat to all others In such a situation though the security of the political community is a crucial aim of each state it is fully achieved by none Strategic competition is destructive then not only physically but also of important social purposes of IPE At the same time for apologists of a culture of competition such an assessment stands as only a partial analysis of a society of states Though potentially creating varying degrees of mutual insecurity strategic competition is seen to give order to the system and thereby promote perhaps paradoxically the survival or security of its individual units We need to examine these two sides of the social practice of strategic competition more closely because this purported purpose of competition in IPE has no direct parallel in a market society in which government is taken for granted On one side strategic competitions establish a hierarchy of states a ranking of powers Inequalities among powers become de facto bases for the exercise of threats or the deployment of force by the stronger in order to coerce the weaker Where such coercion operates the stronger are able to dictate to the weaker including dictating in part the rules and principles ordering international relations States appear to be divided between those that can dictate the laws and those that must obey them violating the idea of states as sovereign equals and leaving the relatively weak subject to the threats of the stronger In this sense processes of strategic competition do less to realize and express the values of sovereignty independence equality and tolerance and more to transgress them Clark 198921819 Bull 1977205 On the other side the hierarchy uncovered by strategic competition is understood to fulfill an important social purpose it is said to support order and the norms and principles of a society of states by identifying those states capable of playing a key role in maintaining that order The staging of strategic competitions allows distinctions to be drawn between great middle and small 138 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE powers28 The necessity of strategic competition is claimed because where such distinctions are blurred strategic competitions are required to clarify the relative position of states adapted from Blainey 1988 chapter 8 Such clarification is crucial because in a global culture of competition powerful states are recognized as having a special responsibility to bear in maintaining international order In Bulls 1977202 terms great powers are recognized by others to have and conceived by their own leaders and peoples to have certain special rights and duties Great powers for example assert the right and are accorded the right to play a part in determining issues that affect the peace and security of the international system as a whole They accept the duty and are thought by others to have the duty of modifying their policies in the lights of the managerial responsibilities they bear The role of the great powers then is to contribute to international orderby managing their relations with one anotherand by exploiting their preponderance in such a way as to impart a degree of general direction to the affairs of international society as a whole Bull 1977207 This special managerial role is possible only where states are joined in a society of common norms values and goals so that the special contribution of these powers in maintaining that society is recognized and accepted by other states although force also plays a substantial role in maintaining this situation29 That there is widespread acceptance of this role at least by those states giving direction to international order but also by many that value that order is suggested by the continuing incorporation of this diplomatic norm into the organizational structures of international societythe Concert of Europe the League of Nations the United Nations Bull 1977202 Clark 1989113 chapters 6 8 9 and continuing calls for todays great powers to assume their role as guarantors of international peace and security even perhaps at the cost of recolonization Jackson 1990b This analysis exposes the central role of force in strategic competitions and simultaneously in maintaining for the most part the independence if not the equality of states We should not conclude that force is unbridled in this situation Rather force is at once recognized and utilized as well as constrained Clark 198921 The legitimacy of the special role of the great powers depends on their ability to constrain themselves and moderate the destructive consequences of strategic competition across the globe30 That competition is indeed moderated is suggested in that the collapse of the fortress in the event of attack does not ordinarily presage the destruction of the state as such or of the way of life of its inhabitants Rather the preservation of each political community has been given increasing weight not only as norm but in the practice of states including that of the great powers Herz 195961 7175 What is normally at stake in strategic competitions is the status of states as IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 139 powers and the role each state will playmarginal or substantialin the management of the affairs of international society or some regional context Thus far we have treated strategic competition as if it were primarily a matter of military strength However for IPE economic capacities are crucial to long term strategic competitiveness31 It is also the case that economic competitiveness alone as well as the need to secure the conditions for the world market has received increasing weight in the postwar era as a component of the states responsibility to protect its political community Because economic competitiveness is also treated as a strategic concern the logic of great powership is applied in the economic sphere as well The great powers including economic powers without substantial military clout have come to act as guardians of the rules governing the world market The predominant role that the advanced industrial societies their corporations and citizens play formally in the management of the international financial and trading institutions and informally via the various mechanisms for consultation and economic regulation is an illustration of the implementation of this principle Clark 198917578 Watson 1992 chapter 25 Patel 1995 Scholte 1997 Roberts 1998 The debates about the relative status of Japan Germany and China as great powers and the relative role of Russia the United States and the Europe in defining the military and economic security of Europe and the world stand as attempts although contentious to apply this thinking Agnew and Corbridge 1995 chapter 6 Pauly 1999 Xia 2001 Yan 2001 Bergsten 2001 Kurth 2001 Wallace 2001 Consistent with the logic of a culture of competition competition and the competitive processes we take either as given in themselves or as the causal effect of the structure of anarchy reveal themselves as a certain structuring of meaning and purpose IPE can be understood then as a peculiar intertwining of the principles of equality and hierarchy mediated by the staging of competitions The internal logic of an international society mingles together the two polar responses to difference The formal equality and independence of actors in their role as sovereign competitors expresses the essential sameness of states However the differences among states are translated into a hierarchy of cultures revealed by the competitions staged in the world market And as with Smith and Hayek the other of the advanced competitors is reduced to a status of backwardness that shields a culture of competition from criticism rooted in alternative values and traditions In an international society uncompetitive actors reduced to mendicancy neither set the terms of assistance nor serve as partners in critical reflection on the existing order and the building of a new one Beyond Competition or Sustaining Competitive Tension What then is the significance of seeing competition as cultural and IPE as a culture of competition Our analysis is that the cultural logic of competition involves a very precarious balancing First a culture of competition is formed by 140 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE holding together an understanding of important purposes and values as social while treating individuals as ontologically primitive as in some sense natural The essential traits of the individualindependence equality and freedomare similarly treated as logically prior Social institutions are charged with realizing this preexisting individuality to the extent that it fails to respect these traits society is judged to have overstepped its bounds to be oppressive of the individual A society based on market exchange and competition is said to express and realize the freedom equality and independence of individual actors as competitors At the same time the competitions staged in the market uncover rankings of achievement and effortdiffering quantities and qualities of labor and knowledgeas spurs to the creation of wealth Thus the discovery function of competitions is harnessed by society to serve important purposes to guard and promote the ethics of freedom equality and individuality and to promote the creation of wealth necessary to the achievement of a great or civilized society Whatever its origins or its status in relation to some idea of human nature competition is given a social character it is seen to embody social meanings and is harnessed to serve important social values In this formulation the individual is treated as the receptacle and source of differences that are mostly prior and external to competition Indeed the power and value of competition is that it reveals these preexisting differences within a process that in principle is open to all Because the process of competition is seen as independent of and therefore not responsible for the inequalities in character or traits of individual actors social inequality is treated as a given and the ontologically primitive individual is largely separated from the social process To put it in other terms the self is constructed as logically prior to and separable from the social and social inequality is naturalized IPE expresses this tension in the opposition between the construction of the social meaning and purpose of the outcomes structures institutions and regimes produced by the interactions of individual actors and the presocial quality of these actors and their motivations and needs32 Thus a culture of competition is understood paradoxically and problematically as requiring the construction of the social world by ontologically separate individuals Second and building on this paradox a culture of competition rests on an uneasy juxtaposition of the principles of equality and hierarchy Individual actors are socially constituted as equals in form each is formally equal as a property owner interacting competitively within the market or as a sovereign political community within a competitive society of states The social hierarchies constructed within a culture of competition are not thought to violate this initial social condition because hierarchies are treated as prior and external to the social condition of equality Thus hierarchy is not really deemed a social condition Rather hierarchies of wealth and power are constructed as natural and treated as givens of IPE33 However this solution to the problem of inequality in a culture of competition succeeds only to the extent that we allow the construction of social IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 141 life by logically prior individuals As we have seen the idea that hierarchy is socially constructed is disallowed by treating the needs motivations and capabilities of individual actors as presocial If instead we come to see both the self the individual the sovereign political community and the hierarchy of selves whether domestic or global as constituted within social life as we have suggested the project defined by a culture of competition begins to totter if not collapse The sense of innate inferiority and natural superiority attaching itself to socially equal individuals or political communities is revealed as the central social contradiction of a culture of competition If this account of the structuring of meaning and purpose in competition and competitive selfother relations is correct then it appears that we have yet to come to grips with the meaning of the claim that we have replaced traditional hierarchy with modern equality that simultaneously constitutes the individual as self and the political community as sovereign It is this continuing inability to make sense within our modern idea of equality that enables and compels the modern social actor to construct itself as a competitor in relation to others and to construct others simultaneously as dangerous and threatening and as ripe for subordination and exploitation We might see this as a consequence of the failure to move beyond the possibilities suggested by the double movement In a culture of competition the other is treated as an at least formal equal whose difference is effaced except for that knowledge or labor relevant to the market When those differences are marked as inferior by the results of market competition difference is subjected to management or eradication via correction And as we have suggested at a number of points in earlier chapters what one imposes on the other tends to redound to the self the other within also must be erased degraded or subjected to reform Indeed Smith and Hayek seem to recognize the possible degradation of both self and other Smith suggests that the necessarily widespread if not universal pursuit of wealth and its accouterments in a modern society fixates the individual on the trifling Hayek suggests that we embrace a market society in the name of selfseeking that fails to sustain a systematic relationship between skilleffort and reward except as a necessary social myth In either formulation the very fictions of a market society we impose on others we already and continue to impose on ourselves Even if a culture of competition is progressive for society in some respects it may be in the view of two of its most notable proponents a sustained act of selfdeception and a denial of the alternative and perhaps better selves we might be and become see also Lane 199131819 In sum within the structure of competition the individual is compelled to use and exploit others as well as to use and exploit him or herself as a means to promote human progress as or through the pursuit of wealth Thus and to highlight the central concerns of this book though differences serve as both opportunity and problem in Hayek and Smith both narrowly circumscribe that opportunity The differences among individualsin labor or knowledgecontain inequalities waiting to be revealed and utilized in the 142 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE market as rankings of valuable and lesser knowledge and labor As we have seen the losers in the competitive process are not just banished to oblivion they become parts of a pedagogical and emulative project in which the winners become teachers and models for the losers This pedagogy of competition however works to partly erase the very difference that it claims to value Difference is flattened into the division of labor or knowledge providing a useful resource for society from which any may learn Differences in forms of life that might offer alternative understandings of the meaning and purposes of human existence are treated less as opportunities and more as signs of backwardness underdevelopment irrationality or a dangerous delusion that is duly both punished by the market and subjected to reform Hayeks fear of coercion and homogenization is thereby realized by the very institutions meant to avoid it Hayek and Smith might protest still that the freedom and equality of the market though partly illusion are preferable to any effort to impose a utopian ideal Hayek 19767374 Such realism of course is the mainstay of IR where theorists often argue that an international hierarchy of states is an acceptable and necessary cost of constraining the imperial ambitions of wouldbe conquerors crusaders and others with missionary designs We wonder though if it is possible to have the gains of such open or anarchical societies without the violence and exploitation What Hayek cannot allow is Todorovs Nandys and Benjamins insight that self and other are mutually dependent and overlapping for Hayek the principle of the excluded middle is absolute An individualist ontology precludes the possibilities of competing visions of social life that divide individuals and groups but also reveal points of overlap and connection between self and other The self is treated as an internally homogenous billiard ball interacting with but not interpenetrating other selves Access to the experience of others and to selfknowledge through introspection perhaps catalyzed by dialogue with others both within and beyond is foreclosed Learning is limited to the results of competition Put differently there is no expressive totality of which each person is a differing but contributing part no communally shared experience no collective subconscious and no internal and external traveling from one form of experience to another The only way to learn is via experimentation drawing lessons from the failures and victories of ones own and others market projects For Hayek there are social experiments but there is no social experience In an alternative ontology one we offer for consideration in this book the other is both external and within Coming to know may involve two modes experimenting or learning by doing including competition as Hayek expresses it and dialogue with others whose differing experiences and visions of the world can catalyze selfreflectionan introspective process that provokes traveling simultaneously away from and toward the self where movement toward the other beyond the self leads one back to the other within Though the competitive practices advocated by Smith and Hayek may spur excellence in some respects particularly in terms of material progress they leave other aspects IPE AS A CULTURE OF COMPETITION 143 of ourselves impoverished We may be able to minimize the circumstance under which we come to treat others as means to trifling ends and engage in social comparisons that place ourselves and our others into hierarchies of value but only if we can reimagine competition as a process of comparison internal to our selves see Dallmayr 1996 chapter 10 especially page 248 Nandy 1987b35 Lane 199122122 By bringing forth different parts of ourselves we can foster a creative tension Quoting Henry David Thoreau but also echoing Schumpeters idea of creative destruction we might say that this internal competition is essentially revolutionarya change for the better like birth and death which convulses the body in Love 199837677 But unlike Schumpeters notion this is not simply spurring a circumscribed notion of progress within a given form of life nor need it degrade or purge competitors Rather this revolutionary process of internal competition holds onto the ultimate otherdoubteven as it opens new vistas and charts new directions Pursuing other paths can sustain rather than weaken the tension between various parts and dimensions of the self This tension can be a nonexploitative source of creativity In addition by rejecting an ontology that assumes an absolute ontological separation of self from other we can restore a dialectical vision in which separation necessarily coexists with overlap and connection and treat the various disjunctions and overlaps among selves as resources for an internal competition Without this overlapsocial connection we might feel compelled to accept Hayeks view that learning occurs only through processes of experimentation where our own and others individual successes and losses within the market provide hard lessons If this overlapsocial connection exists then we may learn not only through competitive experiments but also through sharable experiences The experiences of others can become as we argue more fully in the next chapter a lesson for usa lesson that need not result in the creation of a competitively revealed hierarchy Where this sort of learning predominates perhaps we can resist translating difference into rankas inferiority or superiority Perhaps we can redeploy our competitive skills as a search for excellence within such that the rich difference of the other becomes a catalyst for appreciating the potential richness of the other within the self and vice versa Difference and its deepest manifestation namely doubt will always pose a challenge for humans Yet when we can learn to engage instead of eradicate doubt we may come to see differences as renewable sources of infinite creativity 144 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE CHAPTER 5 Toward an Ethnological IPE In recent years the salience of Karl Polanyis work appears to have increased for both international political economy and critical development studies Much of his reputation among scholars of IPE rests on his 1944 book The Great Transformation Polanyi 1957 where he explores the rise of the free market project in lateeighteenthand earlynineteenthcentury Europe Polanyi saw this set of historical events as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of liberal thought and practice His critique is now well known implementing the liberal vision of a free market disembeds the economy from so ciety this threatens human livelihood and the natural environment and calls forth a societal self defence or what Polanyi calls the countermovement or double movement and the countermovement provides the seeds for a more encompassing democratic project of reembedding the economy in social life and human purposes IPE theorists establish the contemporary relevance of Polanyi by drawing a parallel between the nineteenthcentury great transformation and the latetwentiethcentury neoliberal globalizing project that has provoked equally myriad forms of resistance and efforts to restrict the scope of unconstrained market relations see for example Ruggie 1994 Gill 1996 Hettne 1997 Bernard 1997 Latham 1997 Birchfield 1999 Helleiner 2000 and Soederberg 20011 Others more focused on the discourse of development read Polanyis work a bit differently They emphasize his discussions of nonmarket and non European cultures and his distinction between substantivist and formal understandings of the economy2 They draw on Polanyi in this way to support a defense of culture or difference in the face of a normalizing if not in fact homogenizing project of modern development see for example Escobar 1995 chapters 3 5 and Sachs 1992 Though overlapping the IPE and critical development analyses tend to be treated as distinct or disparate readings We suggest instead that both readings should be seen as central to Polanyis thinking as intricately intertwined aspects of his in our terms double critique of capitalism see also Berthoud 1990171 and Topik 200182 On one side we read Polanyi as engaged in part in a project of immanent critique finding the sources of critique inside the European cultural project of development political economy itself Development is seen to undermine the social life and natural environment of the very society it constitutes and is seeking to develop Or put differently the modern project of realizing the freedom and equality of the individuala culture of competition in our termsbecomes destructive as soon as freedom and equality are so tightly linked with the effort to disembed the economy from society However as we argued in the introduction the idea of immanent critique obscures the multiplicity of visions and traditions that form the backdrop of ethical argument Likewise while the characterization of Polanyi as an immanent critic captures an important aspect of his project it does not fully appreciate the way he locates his critique in the contact zone of cultural encounters Pratt 1992partly outside or beyond the project of development political economy Polanyi understood that his critique of capitalism aimed to retrieve lessons from social forms prior to and outside of the modern West including drawing connections between resistance to unregulated markets in Europe and resistance to the imposition of colonial economic structures in Africa and elsewhere And more significant he finds in others critiques of his own traditions the possibility of greater selfunderstanding and potential alliances against oppression that engage both self and other Thus we should not treat Polanyi merely as a political economist or relegate his work to economic anthropology alone Indeed only by being both does Polanyis work stand as a whole and establish an intellectual legacy for both fields We read that legacy as suggesting that it is in the space of the overlap of political economy and economic anthropologyin an ethnological IPEthat we can find resources for a contemporary double or dialogical critique of capitalism A Dialogue of Traditions We highlight the dialogical element central to Polanyis form of double critique by returning to the work of Tzvetan Todorov and Ashis Nandy Though neither political economists nor anthropologists their understandings of cultural difference and the perils and possibilities of cultural comparison help us illuminate Polanyis own efforts to uncover qualitatively diverse forms of social life and to treat these diverse forms not simply as a source of intellectual comparison but as a source of a critical politics Todorov 1984 and Nandy 1983 1987b in a strikingly parallel fashion locate a space for dialogue in the contact zone through resisting the effort to construct a Manichean universe of pure forces of oppression and counteroppression In the introduction we drew somewhat briefly on their portraits of historical figuresColumbus and Cortés for Todorov Kipling and Orwell for Nandyto illustrate the polarizing reflexes of the double movement and its relation to colonial oppression Colonial discourse slides between two polar responses difference is translated as inferiority or a kind of equality is recognized but at the expense of assimilation of the other to the self These responses perform an act of splitting Benjamin 198863 where self and other appear to be mutually exclusive options The boundary between self and other is rigidly drawn the possibility of overlap denied carefully policed 146 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE and mapped onto the difference between civilized and barbarian masculine and feminine advanced and backward teacher and student The other appears then to be suitable for exploitation and colonial tutelage if not in more civilized times enslavement At best we find ourselves in a dialogue of unequals If Todorovs and Nandys assessments of the possibilities of cultural interaction exemplify splitting Polanyi challenges this practice in a specifically political economic form On the one hand he targets an economism that attempts to purify the economy of opposed elements because this form of splitting justifies both the predominance of market economics theoretically and the homogenization of social space as market society in practice On the other hand he resists envisioning an alternative to market society as a simple inversion a purely nonmarket form of life To further prefigure our discussion of Polanyi below we might say that Todorov and Nandy allow us to see the deepest source of oppression generated by this interconnected opposition of economism and romanticism as the failure of dialogue Thus for Todorov Nandy and Polanyi as we shall see restoring dialogue itself becomes an ethical imperative Todorov and Nandy construct the possibility of dialogue against the antidialogism of colonialism and its various contemporary resonances Todorov 1984247 imagines a dialogue based on knowing and treating the otheras subject equal to the I but different from it transforming the polarized framing of the other within the double movement This dialogue entails a search for truths not as a point of departure that subordinates one participant to the view of another but as a regulative ideal of establishing an understanding a common horizon that transcends ones partiality and ones parochialism without eliminating the particularity of the participants Todorov 1984160 Nandy 1987a118 like Todorov calls for reshaping the space in public discourse so that the parties to the civilizational encounters of our times meet on grounds of equality Indeed the fact that the powerful seldom contemplate sharing the world with the powerless is countered with a plea that self and other must come together to make culturetoculture dialogue a reality to establish a new plural future through crosscultural dialogues Sardar et al 199390 Given the weight of the past and the inequalities of the present how is such dialogue possible In contrast to the polarity of self and other within the double movement Todorov and Nandy present a series of historical figures who representing spaces of overlap of sameness and difference indicate a range of alternative possibilities that move us toward the pole of dialogue and the practice of critical and reciprocal cultural illumination that we following Todorov associate with ethnology At the beginning of The Conquest of America Todorov 19843 suggests the ubiquity of the discovery self makes of the other including the other in ourselves as well as exterior others both distant and near For Todorov 199512 46 recognizing the other as other is crucial not only for knowing the other but also for knowing the self As a first step beyond the double movement TOWARD AN ETHNOLOGICAL IPE 147 the self aware of its own identity seeks to know the other without assimilating it to itself Todorov 199515 But this recognition of the other as different does not exhaust the opportunities attendant on our experience of self and other as Todorov illustrates in reference to figures from the conquest The transformation that Bartolome de Las Casas the Dominican bishop of Chiapas experiences in his life moves his understanding away from the strict oppositions of the double movement Todorov 198418593 240 Though earlier an assimilationist in his love for the Indians later in life he injects what Todorov calls a sense of perspectivism into his religious views He appeals to principles of for him and his fellows apparent universalityhuman religiosity and a desire to worship Godagainst which he constructs a defense of the Indian variants of these practices Las Casass reasoning reveals in Todorovs words the religious rather than religion relativizing culture by placing the religious experience of the Spanish and the Indians side by side but without assimilating the Indian to the Spanish or suggesting the inferiority of the Indian In this Las Casas remains in Todorovs terms a comparatist Though he finds room in his understanding to express the difference of the Indians Las Casas does not use or allow the religious experience and categories of the Indians to inform an interpretation and critique of his own Christian conceptions Las Casass recognition of difference thus falls short of a dialogue that transforms not only how he sees the other but also how he sees himself For Todorov 198421941 250 the Franciscan teacher Benardino de Sahagún advances beyond Las Casas and points us to a higher ethnological phase of knowledge of self and other Sahagún enters into a pedagogical dialogue with his Nahuatlspeaking students of Latin through which he learns Nahuatl His assessment of the Indians as equal but different in that they possess a distinct set of strengths and weakness leads him unlike so many others to condemn the Spanish conquest Though never giving up his commitment to conversion he engages in a project of representing as well as preserving the culture of the Indians In his History Sahagún draws on various witnesses and reports in presenting three parallel but also divergent accounts of the events of the conquest written narratives in both Nahuatl and Spanish and visually through drawings Todorov writes that the book allows us to hear a voice whose multiplicity is internal to it Sahagúns viewpoint is complex incorporating elements of the values and visions of the Indians However this internal multiplicity is not fully employed for critical selfexamination Voices are juxtaposed but not made to interpenetrate in a critical process of self reflection Thus Sahagún heraldswithout quite achievingthe ethnological stance there is too little evidence of an attempt to establish the kind of conversation that contributes to the reciprocal illumination of one culture by another that makes us look into the others face Todorov 198424041 Todorov 199515 calls us to precisely this ethnological task as a regulative ideal 148 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE I no longer desire nor am I able to identify with the other nor can I however identify with myself The process can be described in these terms knowledge of others depends on my own identity But this knowledge of the other in turn determines my knowledge of myself Since knowledge of oneself transforms the identity of this self the entire process begins anew new knowledge of the other new knowledge of the self and so on to infinity Engaging the other in this way destabilizes our perspective without eliminating perspective Our sense of identity in relation to the other shifts as well I read myself in quotation marks The very opposition between inside and outside is no longer relevant nor does the simulacrum of the other that my description produces remain unchanged it has become a space of possible understanding between the other and myself Todorov 199515 Though there is no endpoint to this process this ideal motivates it and gives it a specific direction so that the universality that is lost in various moments of the process is recovered elsewhere not in the object but in the project Todorov 199515 Nandys discussion is remarkably similar though as we shall see he translates a dialogue of culturesTodorovs ethnological momentinto an explicitly critical political practice Nandys stories about historical figures unfold against the backdrop of British colonialism in India and the dialogue of unequals that it constructs For example Girindrasekhar Bose was a pioneer of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in India Nandy calls him the first non Western psychoanalyst However the introduction of psychoanalysis which might be seen as simply a cultural imposition via a transfer of technology becomes much more complicated in Nandys view Boses embrace of psychoanalysis responded in part to the needs of a rising Indian middle class uprooted from traditional modes of sociality and healing But somewhat ironically his dramatic therapeutic success with this class has been attributed to his capacity to reinvoke the gurusisya relationship in his analytical encounters Nandy 1996359 In this way Boses development of psychoanalysis also involved a serious revaluation of Indian traditions in the face of colonial degradation However unsuccessful finally he attempted in his writings and practice to resist the British effort to devalue things Indian by rediscovering an older version of the psychological man in a traditionally psychologically minded society Nandy 1996380 Thus Nandys 1996342 assessment is that Boses psychoanalysis had to serve as a new instrument of social criticism as a means of demystifying aspects of Indian culture that looked anachronistic or pathological to the articulate middle classes and as a dissenting Western school of thought that could be turned against the West itself Yet according to Nandy 199636163 36972 the story reveals an even greater irony The special power of Freud in European culture is explained by the fundamental challenge it posed to Victorian sensibilitiesthe effort to legitimize the previously disowned underside of the self By contrast the TOWARD AN ETHNOLOGICAL IPE 149 less dramatic reaction to and the lesser influence of Freuds teachings in India are explained both by their easier resonance with some Indian traditions and their acceptance as merely a part of the technological toolkit of the European world By means of such stories Nandy means to illustrate the critical potentials of such overlapping cultural spaces of both self and other Culture even if shared in some important sense is more like an openended text than a closed book A cultural vision is a layered phenomenon comprising different levels or parts or dominant and recessive moments Nandy 1987b2 17 1987a 118 This layering makes possible or rather calls forth a dialogue internal to the cultureamong competing orthodoxies and heterodoxies dominant and suppressed voicesproviding a source of creative tension and critique within the cultural vision As he puts it The gap between reality and hope which such a vision creates becomes a source of cultural criticism and a standing condemnation of the oppression of everyday life to which we otherwise tend to get reconciled Nandy 1987b3 Thus Boses confrontation with psychoanalysis is in part a dialogue within Indian cultural visionsa conversation of self and the other within Leaving it at this ignores the role of the external other and its layered and multiplex cultural vision Boses establishment of psychoanalysis in India and his interpretations of that traditions meaning for India posed at least an implicit challenge to the European ownership of psychoanalysis and its theoretical and practical evolutiona challenge mostly brushed aside by Freud himself Nandy 199636465 But others have responded differently finding support for a conversation within ones own traditions in a dialogue across traditions and vice versa That is a dialogical process within the self is made coeval with and can be sustained ultimately only in conjunction through a dialogue between self and other the search for authenticity of a civilization is always a search for the other face of the civilization either as a hope or a warning The search for a civilizations utopia too is part of this larger quest It needs not merely the ability to interpret ones own traditions but also the ability to involve the oftenrecessive aspects of other civilizations as allies in ones struggle for cultural selfdiscovery the willingness to become allies to other civilizations trying to discover their other faces and the skills to give more centrality to these new readings of civilizations and civilizational concerns Nandy 1987b55 Exemplary of this capacity for dialogue in the face of cultural domination are CFAndrews and Mohandas KGandhi Nandy sees Andrews as among the very few of the British in India who were able to gain distance from the colonial project They utilized Indian versions of religiosity knowledge and social interaction to assist in a critique of their own society and to envision social and political possibilities beyond the present Nandy 1983 55 Andrews was 150 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE especially adept in that he found in India a critical mirror for himself his own culture and for India In establishing a connection between his own Christianity and the anticolonial struggle he not only uncovered a continuity between Europe and India in general and between his British and Indian selves in particular but also strengthened his Christian devotion The paradox in these relationships is captured well by Nandy 198337 48 When Gandhi described him as an Indian at heart and a true Englishman it remained unstated that it was by being a true Englishman that Andrews became an Indian But it is Gandhi who comes closest to exemplifying Nandys ideal of a critical conversation of cultures Gandhis capacity to create alliances between recessive traditions in the West and themes in Indian culture allowed him to offer a vision simultaneously of the liberation of India and of salvation for Britain Gandhi saw that some of the recessive elements of Christianity were perfectly congruent with elements of Hindu and Buddhist world views and that the battle he was fighting for the minds of men was actually a universal battle to rediscover the softer side of human nature the socalled nonmasculine self of man relegated to the forgotten zones of the Western selfconcept Nandy 198349 Thus Gandhi fought on two fronts He appealed to the West in terms it could understand turn the other cheek thus summoning an Indian and also British resistance to colonialism that avoided as much as possible colonial understandings and methods rooted in domination and force Though his resistance was often put in very British terms it was also a reinterpretation of Indian traditionsso framed in order to establish his version of nonviolence as true Hinduism Nandy 1983 51 Gandhi was able largely to succeed in this task The figures of Andrews and Gandhi represent for Nandy the achievement of something like Todorovs ethnological moment but also give that stance an explicitly critical and political cast Nandy argues that both were able to uncover the other within the self as a source of critical selfreflection and cultural transformation Their sensitivity to their own suffering allowed them not only to discern the suffering of the other but also to make overcoming of suffering of both victim and victimizer central to their thought and action Andrews was able to fight for India while enriching the heritage of Britain Gandhi was able to think about and fight for Indias liberation as coterminous with the liberation of Britain Thus knowledge of the other is not merely a source of selfknowledge it is also a prelude to the hope of a future conversation of self and other Or put differently all three elementsselfknowledge knowledge of other and the hope of dialogueare equally necessary parts of a political and ethical process that is informed by common suffering but aims at establishing a relative commonality of horizons around which a struggle against oppressions may be organized To return to a theme developed in the introduction dialogue may flourish in the cultural closeness made possible by the experience of cosuffering For Nandy 1987b13 22 54 this recognition of the other calls forth a form of cultural communication that draws on each cultures more or less articulated TOWARD AN ETHNOLOGICAL IPE 151 view of and response to oppression and exploitationto join a dialogue among social criticisms and civilizational utopias Even more strongly he argues that the realization of a civilizations authentic vision of the future and its own authenticity in future depends on a recognition of this unfortunately ubiquitous experience of human suffering exploitation and oppression whether as victimizer or victim Todorov and Nandy share a commitment to dialogue as an ethical imperative Both see that dialogue requires placing self and other on an equal footing within the conversation This is the capacity to simultaneously find the other within and engage the other outside in a process of selfreflection andor cultural transformation Though Todorov emphasizes the former and Nandy the latter both knowledge and cultural transformation are central to a critical IPE of the kind that Polanyis work points us toward We find in his challenge to economism and his double critique of capitalism a heralding of the kind of dialogue of cultures that Todorov and Nandy recommend Polanyis Double Critique of Capitalism We divide our discussion of Polanyis double critique into three moments though our point is the importance of reading his work more holistically We argue first that Polanyis questioning of economism leads him to an ethnological stance that resists a specifically politicaleconomic form of splitting between real and ideal human motivations and the polarity of freemarket society and romanticized alternatives The second subsection examines the defense of difference central to Polanyis critique of the great transformation his analysis of the countermovement and his vision of a reembedded economy The free market is condemned precisely because it threatens to homogenize social life destroying the multiplex institutions that secure human existence Finally we reject the charge that this defense of difference is a lapse into romanticism Rather Polanyis deployment of a double critiqueboth internal to and from beyond industrial societyembraces the coexistence of mixed and overlapping modes of social life and points to a possible dialogue among them For Polanyi the coexistence of difference and dialogue is not about a return to the past but the basis of a new civilization Denaturalizing the Economistic Fallacy In The Livelihood of Man Polanyi 1977 a posthumously published synthesis of his thinking from the 1950s and 1960s Polanyi centers his complaint about our age on a conceptual error what he calls the economistic fallacy This logical error involves in principle the common practice of confusing a broad generic phenomenon with a species with which we happen to be familiar and specifically of equating the human economy in general with its market form Polanyi 197745 Challenging the tendency to assimilate the 152 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE other to the self is at the heart of Polanyis double critique both as an internal assessment of market economics as theory and practice and as a move that allows us to engage the political and ethical resources of other forms of social life in our response to capitalism As if echoing both Todorov and Nandy Polanyi 197711 argues that this confusion has fatefully warped Western mans understanding of himself and his society Most basically the economistic fallacy obscures our capacity to recognize and validate the richness and variability of human motivations This possibility is foreclosed because economistic thinking is predicated on the splitting of human motivations The real material motives of economic life are set in opposition to and purified of the distant and shadowy motives characterized as ideal that cannot be relied upon to operate in the vital business of production Polanyi 197711 see also Polanyi 1968c Any space between is emptied and without recourse to a more variegated understanding of human motivations we are driven to choose the real over the illusory ideal Modern market society likewise becomes generalized as human society per se economic desiderata form the central locus of meaning permeating all social activity Stanfield 198693 State and government marriage and the rearing of children the organization of science and education or religion and the arts the choice of profession the form of habitation the shape of settlements the very esthetics of private lifeeverything had to comply with the utilitarian pattern or at least not interfere with the working of the market mechanism Polanyi 1977 12 This contributesaccording to Polanyi 197714 to the triumph of economic rationalism and inevitably an eclipse of political thought such that our institutional creativeness and our social imagination are imperiled Polanyi 1968c71 For what else could such a society be other than an agglomeration of human atoms behaving according to the rules of a definite kind of rationality Rational action as such is the relating of ends to means economic rationality specifically assumes means to be scarce But human society involves more than that What should be the end of man and how should he choose his means Economic rationalism in the strict sense has no answer to these questions for they imply motivations and valuations of a moral and practical order that go beyond the logically irresistible but otherwise empty exhortation to be economical Polanyi 197713 In Polanyis 195757 phrasing society is seen and run as an adjunct of the market3 We would interpret this imperiling of imagination following Todorovs analysis of the connected oppositions of the double movement as a tendency to swing between polarized options either to assimilate all forms of life to an economistic logic as perhaps in Smith and Hayek or as we shall examine more fully below a complete repudiation of market logic and a recourse to romanticized pre anti or noncapitalist economic forms TOWARD AN ETHNOLOGICAL IPE 153 How should we as scholars respond to the economistic fallacy Polanyi 1968b see also Polanyi 1977 chapter 2 suggests that we begin with what has become a wellknown distinction between substantive and formal meanings of economy The substantive conception highlights the process of providing the livelihood of the human beingthe interchange with his natural and social environment insofar as this results in supplying him with the means of material wantsatisfaction Polanyi 1968b139 By contrast the formal meaning of economic derives from the logical character of the meansends relationship as apparent in such words as economical or economizing Polanyi 1968b140 Modern economic theorizing tends to collapse this distinction as noted above but Polanyi means to pry it apart Rather than taken as a given of human experience the place given to the motives processes and institutions of economizing in modern society appears to be a particular historical form as the seeds of a whole culture Polanyi 1977810 Thus not unlike Las Casass use of the distinction between the religious and his own religion Polanyi distinguishes between substantive and formal meanings in order to relativize our understanding of the economy adopting a perspectivism in Todorovs terms that opens up the social sciences to a study of the varied empirical economies of the past and present Polanyi 1968b140 Polanyis perspectivism is not a simple embrace of the pole of difference or some form of exoticism Rather the study of a multiplicity of economic forms is joined to a claim about the universality of the pursuit of human livelihood as a social process Polanyi expresses this idea variously that mans economy as a rule is submerged in his social relationships Polanyi 195746 1968c65 that the economy is an instituted process possessing a definite function in society that vests that process with unity and stability Polanyi 1968b146 148 that the human economy then is embedded and enmeshed in institutions economic and noneconomic Polanyi 1968b148 As a commentator summarizes Polanyis point The economy is always instituted by a socialization process which moulds individual character toward the ethical aesthetical and instrumental norms standards and practices which are needed to participate in the economy Stanfield 1986107 In this way Polanyi situates the effort to understand economy in a substantive sense within the larger study of human existence But we should not see this as a slide back to the pole of commonality and assimilation Rather Polanyi uses this language as a way of highlighting the variability and plurality of human society and culture What varies for Polanyis purposes is the place occupied by the economy in society or in similar language the manner in which the economic process is instituted at different times and places Polanyi 1968b148 That is these forms of economy are different not simply earlier stages of our contemporary market society4 Rather than temporally distancing himself from the other these forms are seen as alternatives throwing our image of market society into relief and raising doubts about its necessity5 For Polanyi then an investigation of diversityjoining economic history and social anthropology 154 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE constitutes a critical project of universal economic history Polanyi 1977xxxix note 46 or as we would prefer an ethnological IPE This theoretical move shifts our understanding of both self and other in a way that opens us to critical selfreflection Polanyi 197710 1968c refuses any attempt to take the ideology of market societyour market mentality or marketing mindas the basis or standard by which we understand other societies or even our own past Nor does he find that dominant contemporary understandings adequately illuminate our own situation Rather conflating the economizing market with economy per se leads us to reify current social arrangements as natural as the inevitable outcome of a species imperative7 Polanyi exposes us to the diversity of human experience dereifying and denaturalizing market society The perspectivism made possible produces not a mere comparatism where we take account of difference only in our own terms but a genuinely ethnological stance where our own categories and our very selves are profoundly changed by confrontation with difference Defending Difference The Great Transformation and the CounterMovement Polanyi builds on this perspectivism to develop a critical political response to capitalism most notably in The Great Transformation Though the bulk of his own research on economic history postdates that book it seems clear that this later project was an attempt to validate the earlier work Pearson 1977 xviixx PolanyiLevitt 19954 Stanfield 198617 Indeed our contention is that Polanyis ethnological sensitivities so essential to his response to the economistic fallacy profoundly shaped his critique of laissezfaire capitalism in The Great Transformation and elsewhere Because the main outlines may not be familiar to all we will provide a sketch as the backdrop for an examination of Polanyis critical method see also Inayatullah and Blaney 19977274 Polanyi recognizes that his intellectual and political project recalls Aristotles defense of the good life integral to the household and polity against the idea of the generality of the motive of material gain Inspired to a comparable effort Polanyi 1968a defends the rich texture of any form of social life against the consequences of implementing an unconstrained market In other words the free market ideology must be set in opposition to the findings of an ethnological IPE that as above the provision of human livelihood is always enmeshed in a particular set of social meanings and practicesfor example household and polity village and clan or modern industrial society and state Thus the idea that the provision of human livelihood might be governed by the pure logic of economy in the formal sense is not just misleading it is also dangerous As Polanyi 1957 3 puts it separating the economy as a distinct and selfregulating sphere creates a stark utopia Nonetheless the modern period has been peculiar in that it has witnessed periodic and partly successful efforts to disembed the economy Just as the polarization of self and other becomes an TOWARD AN ETHNOLOGICAL IPE 155 Conforme o mundo se globaliza a definição de IPE tende que é entendido negligenciar o poder político e o poder econômico O núcleo do IPE é o dinheiro internacional ou finanças internacionais ou seja quais foram as causas da crise financeira em 2008 e as consequências dessa Outra área seria o comércio internacional e investimento o que impulsiona a globalização dos mercados que forma o fluxo de comércio e investimentos Também são áreas como ambientes de economia política internacional do meio ambiente que impende a conclusão de um acordo genuíno sobre mudanças climáticas Estes não são fatores econômicos ou políticos direto mas uma mistura de ambos Se apenas olhar para a política muitas coisas que se sabe sobre estruturas políticas e os resultados que elas produzem são todas baseadas no poder As Abordagens tradicionais excluíram a economia elas apenas olham para o poder militar ou outras formas convencionais de medir quem é o dominador e se eles conseguem o que querem Em contraste se olhar para economia é perceptível que é algo que explica muito sobre como o mercado funciona mas não se leva em conta a dinâmica de poder que não considera as instituições políticas e instituições internacionais então o IPE é um meio que reúne todas essas coisas Os Internacionalistas gostam substancialmente de alguma sobreposição que muitos estão fazendo então isso fica mais claro na relação entre segurança e economia política e podendo ver todos os tipos de instâncias onde economia política e política econômica externa é usada para tentar atingir objetivos de segurança por exemplo o uso de sanções econômicas para tentar mudar o comportamento de segurança de outros estados ou para a agressão militar Este tipo de coisa também é visto por outros sentidos como a criação de alianças por vez com parceiros que podem fazer as oportunidades de investimento muito boas ou se tornarem bons parceiros comerciais e claro isso pode ser colaborativo e cooperativo mas também pode ser dominado e assumir a forma de imperialismo Em um geral sobre algumas dessas questões tende a haver uma simplificação ou um viés particular colocado por governos ou por grupo de interesses e o que o IPE pode fazer é fornecer uma análise e uma avaliação objetiva como os benefícios de custo mais amplos para a economia mas também para a sociedade como um todo Após o fim da guerra fria no início dos anos de 1990 quando as pessoas pensavam que havia acabado havia estudiosos como Francis Fukuyama falando sobre o fim da história e Alan Greenspan falando sobre uma grande normalização que a sociedade descobriu como executar a política macroeconômica tendo uma série de repetidas crises financeiras e crises de dívida saindo e entrando Desde então há uma visão muito ampla agora sobre o IPE de que muito o que pensam saber não é o caso muitas das ferramentas e técnicas antigas simplesmente não estão funcionando da maneira que esperavam Por outro lado pode ser muito desanimador e desafiador para os internacionalistas mas se torna empolgante pois há muito espaço para encontrar uma nova maneira de sintetizar todas essas novas anomalias que o mundo está experimentando