konstruktivis.docx

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By a world society we understand not merely a degree of interactionlinking all parts of the human community to one another, but a sense ofcommon interest and common values on the basis of which commonrules and institutionsmay be built. The concept of world society, in thissense, stands to the totality of global social interaction as our concept ofinternational society stands to the concept of the international system.(Bull 1977a:279)

From international to world society:57

In substantive terms, pluralism describes thin international societies where the shared values are few, and the prime focus is on devisingrules for coexistence within a framework of sovereignty andnon- intervention. Solidarism is about thick internati onal societies inwhichawider range of values is shared, and where the rules will be notonly about coexistence, but also about the pursuit of joint gains and themanagement of collective problems in a range of issue-areas. Thinkingabout pluralismand solidarism in terms of thin and thick sets of sharedvalues runs usefully in parallel with Ruggies (1998: 33) constructivist understanding of international systems:the building blocks of international reality are ideational as well asmaterial . . . At the level of the international polity, the concept of structurein social constructivism is suffused with ideational factors. Therecan be no mutually comprehensible conduct of international relations,constructivists hold, without mutually recognised constitutive rules,resting on collective intentionality. These rules may be more or lessthick or thin . . . Similarly they may be constitutive of conflict or competition.If one takes this view, then pluralism and solidarism become endsof a spectrum. They represent degrees of difference rather than contradictorypositions. This position also allows one to keep solidarism as afeature of international society (i.e. a society of states) and therefore to59From International to World Society?keep distinct the idea of international society as being about states, andworld society as about non-state actors.World society encompasses theindividual and transnational domains, and it remains a question to beinvestigated as to whether and how these tie into the development ofsolidarism. Contrary to the Vincentians, world society becomes not thenecessary absorption of international society intoawider universe of individualand transnational rights, but a distinct domain of actorswhoserelationshipwith the statedomain needs tobeunderstood.Amongotherthings, this perspective requires closer attention to the question of whatthe shared norms, rules and institutions that define solidarismand pluralismare about, and what values they represent. Answers to that maywell condition the type of relationship between international and worldsociety that develops, and whether and how individuals and transnationalsbecome players in solidarism; more on this in chapter 5.

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generated economic goods and bads (hence this originalposition is corporatist ). These economic roles are defined by their interests. Producers have interests in income, employment opportunityand stability, decent working conditions, and control over hoursof labor. Consumers have interests in the variety, availability, andaffordability of goods and services but also in avoiding dangerous

products and pollution. Owners have interests in maximizing profitor shareholder value. The individuals inhabiting each of these threeroles also have generic interests simply as human beings: interests intheir continued health, and in developing and maintaining basicabilities rationally to direct their own activities. I will further assumethat there is a limited partial ranking among these interests: forexample, physical health is more important than the consumptionof luxuries. (Global Justice, 77)

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Given a recent wave of celebration of civil society as the potentialcure to all ills of democracy, it is important to recall that the dominantforces in transnational civil society remain businesses and organizationstied to business and capital. Businesses are important inways distinct from markets they operate as institutions that organizemuch of the lives of employees and coordinate production aswell as exchange on several continents. The business dimension ofglobal civil society is not limited to multinational corporations; itincludes nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that set accountancystandards and provide for arbitration and conflict resolution,a business press, lawyers, and a range of consultants. The point is notwhether this is good or bad, but that this is civil society on a globalscale but not totally unlike what Adam Smith and Adam Fergusonsaw on a local and national scale in the late eighteenth century. Civilsociety meant then and still means the extension of more or less selforganizingrelationships on a scale beyond the intentional control ofindividual actors and outside of the strict dictates of states. It offersmany freedoms but so do states. Neither is automatically liberal ordemocratic. (307)

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Once international norms are in place they empower and legitimate thetransnational networks and coalitions that promote them. Daniel Thomas arguesthat nonstate actors that are otherwise weak can exploit the legitimacy

inherent in international norms to construct transnational networks andtransform prevailing conceptions of state interests. In this way, he says, networks serve . . . as teachers of norms to reluctant states. A number of the chapters stress the constitutive aspects of the norms. Networks promotenorms that not only stress the appropriate behavior, but help define the verynotion of what a state is. Thus, Karen Brown Thompson stresses the ways inwhich the norm about womens human rights reconstitutes the boundaries between the public and the private spheres. Human rights norms also demarcatethe boundaries of the appropriate limits of international intervention and define


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practice they are both motivations for, and outcomes of, action. Socialagents and social structures are viewed as mutually constitutive, so asAlexander Wendt argues, while social structures influence the identitiesand actions of agents, social structures are only instantiated by the

practices of agents . 28 (37)

Wendt draws a helpful distinction between the corporate and socialaspects of state identities but he then goes on to argue that although corporateidentities do indeed have histor ies, a theory of the states system need no more explain the existence of states than one of society needexplain that of people . 29 He argues that the domestic aspect of stateidentity construction can be bracketed off, as it is the interaction of stateswith other already existing states which constructs the social identity ofstates. This view rests on an isomorphism which assumes that individualsin society and states in the states system can be treated as like units,

but the very fact that the corporate identity of the state is just that corporate and not an individual identity, means that we need to lookat how this identity is constructed, how the we to which Wendt refers is constituted and maintained. In this respect, Wendt s systemic construct ivismdiffers little from the way mainstream theories of internationalrelations bracket off identities and interests. 30 As a consequence, his conception of the relationship between agentsand structures is relatively narrow , and his model of world polit ics remains static in the absence ofany non -systemic sources of state identity such as domestic politicalculture . 31 This reliance on the systemic level alone undermines Wendt s constructivist approach so that he is only marginally better equipped toexplain the constitution of states or the states system than neorealists (37)

One crucial aspect of thisrelationship is investigated in the following four chapters, in which I tracethe construction of corporate state identities, and how the practices bywhich corporate identities are constructed also constitute the boundaries

between states as moral boundaries. In these practices, elites draw on the

cultural and symbolic resources of their time and place in order to recastand reinvent collective identities within the state. (38)

International norms do indeed arise out of the social interaction ofstates, but Wendt ignores the fact that it is through this interaction thatthe society of states evolves standards of legitimate corporate state behaviour.34 International society thus plays an active role in state-building,as international principles of legitimate state action define, in part, howcorporate state-building should occur. What is more, this is a two-way relationship.As the criteria of political legitimacy within states have changed,and with them the domestic principles which underpin corporate identityconstruction, so too have the international principles that structure thestate system. As chapter 6 explains, international norms that set the standard

of legitimate state behaviour can be understood as both a response tocorporate state-building and part of societal state-building.

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