“Walls” between “Those People”? Contrasting Perspectives on World Politics

This lecture inquires into two existential positions that concern Robert Frost in an excerpt from his poem “Mending Wall.”

Here is Frost:

“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.”

And here is Frost's neighbor as described in the same poem:

“He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”

I would like to explore in this lecture what these two positions entail for our understanding of world politics.

Introduction

During the beginning of this century, Americans voted for two very different visions of politics. Like Frost's neighbor, President Bush often spoke and acted like a man who mends walls. President Obama, like Robert Frost, speaks and acts like a man who tears them down.

I wish to explore here how political analyses capture these two visions and the contradictions they entail and create. My understanding of world politics bypasses conventional distinctions between international relations, comparative politics, American politics, and political theory. Whatever their benefits for organizing our profession, my teaching and research have taught me one thing: academic reifications can pose formidable barriers to our understanding of politics. In this talk I seek to bridge rather than build disciplinary walls. I shall argue in the first two parts of this talk that conceptions of civilizations that stress civilizational unity and uniform standards of conduct, and theories of American politics that emphasize single traditions, are succumbing to what Amartya Sen has called the “illusion of singularity.”² Unitary conceptions and single tradition theories make us overlook complexity in world politics, sidestep nuance in our analysis, silence questions we should ask about ourselves and others, divert our attention away from processes of change, and choose inappropriate political strategies. My argument has implications for the analysis of international relations and American foreign policy that I shall address in the lecture's third part, before ending with a brief conclusion.

Civilizations—Pluralist in a Global Ecumene or Unitary in an International System?

Civilizations are based on urban forms of life and a division of labor by which urban elites extract resources from peasants. There are two basic views on civilization. I argue here for a pluralist view of civilizations that are embedded in a global ecumene. This ecumene describes a universal system of knowledge and practices that differs from a competitive international state system reinforcing civilizational unity. At the center of civilizational complexes we typically find religious traditions, which at times intermingle with literary ones. People can escape the taxing and conscription powers of civilizing states, as James Scott has shown.³ The movement of peoples back and forth between hills and valleys and across continents and oceans, as well as the tensions within and between religious and literary traditions, account for the pluralism of civilizations.

An alternative view of civilizations holds that they are unitary cultural programs, organized hierarchically around uncontested core values that yield unambiguous criteria for judging good conduct. This view was a European invention of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century it was enshrined in one standard of civilization. That standard was grounded in race, ethnic affiliation, religion, and a firm belief in the superiority of European civilization over all others. The distinction between civilized and uncivilized peoples is not specific to the European past. It enjoys broad support today among many conservative supporters of Huntington's thesis of the clash of civilizations—a book that was translated into 39 languages.⁴ It is also held by many liberals who are committed to improving the rule of law and global standards of good governance. Furthermore, the unitary argument is widely used by non-Europeans in their analysis of civilizational politics. Everywhere and at all times barbarians have knocked on the doors of civilizations.⁵

Pluralist or Unitary

Civilizations, I argue here, are pluralist. Islam and China, for example, do not cohere around religious fundamentalism or Asian values. Instead, just like America, Islam and China experience conflicts over contested truths reflecting their internal pluralism and external context. Since this is a vast subject, let me offer here only a few illustrations from these two cases (leaving aside similar evidence easily adduced for Europe, India, Japan, Africa, and Russia). The two cases, China and Islam, are instructive because they illustrate territorially more and less compact civilizational complexes, and because they differ more than any other in their political organization: China is a vast state that looks exceptionally centralized compared to Islam's stateless polity. Furthermore, China and Islam are often thought to be most antagonistic to America. My illustrative examples are informed by my own reading and the work of several colleagues with whom I collaborated in a book project.⁶

Chinese civilization is pluralist. The different strands of Sinic civilization have emerged from numerous reinventions of Confucianism in China and the various forms through which they grafted themselves onto the socio-cultural systems of China's neighbors. Although they never fully abandoned their indigenous and Buddhist traditions, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan in different ways and for different reasons adopted or emulated characteristic Chinese state practices.⁷

The same is true of Islam. The first major scholar of civilizations was the fifteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, who sought to adjudicate among the claims of different strands of Islam, which existed then as they exist now. In the spirit of Khaldun, the founder of modern Islamic studies in the United States, Marshall Hodgson, has countered the opening line in Rudyard Kipling's famous “Ballad of East and West”—“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”⁸ According to Hodgson, Islam belongs to neither East nor West. A truly global civilization, Islam is a bridge between both. In the past, the Indian Ocean was for this global civilization the center for the blending of different Islamic traditions, including Persian, Southeast Asian, Arabian, Ottoman, and South Asian.⁹ Today this rich legacy continues undiminished. Hyphenated-Islam, as in the existence of a richly polyglot Afro-Islam, a vigorous debate over Euro-Islam, and a pragmatic Islam in Southeast and Central Asia, contrasts with an internally deeply divided Islam in the Middle East and North Africa.

Unitary conceptions assume that civilizations are culturally cohesive and that their collective identities are unchanging. Because of both the recent and the distant history of the “West,” this is implausible for both questions of security and political economy. Recently, after World War II, Germany—the most determined enemy of the West—was firmly integrated into a coalition of Western civilized democracies that were seeking to stem the tide of Eastern uncivilized autocracies.¹⁰ Furthermore, in the second half of the twentieth century, despite the importance of the Anglo-American model, varieties of capitalist democracies have remained a distinctive feature of the West. In the distant past, Medieval Europe, according to Karl Deutsch, featured six separate civilizational strands:¹¹ monastic Christianity around the Mediterranean; Latin Christendom in Western and Central Europe; and Byzantium in Southeastern Europe. These three major civilizations were connected by the Afro-Eurasian trade networks of Islam, which for centuries took hold on the Iberian peninsula, as well as elements of two other trading civilizations, Jews and Vikings. Like the Islamic and Sinic civilizations, the West is pluralist.

In contrast to this pluralist view, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations restates the old, unitary thesis for our times. His became arguably the most influential book published on international relations since the end of the Cold War. For Huntington, civilizations are coherent, consensual, invariant, and equipped with a state-like capacity to act. Huntington succeeded brilliantly in his objective of providing a new paradigm for looking at world politics after the end of the Cold War. His correct anticipation of 9/11 gave the book a claim to validity that helps account for its continued relevance. Less noticed in public than in academic discourse is the fact that Huntington greatly overstates his case. Numerous analyses have established beyond any reasonable doubt that clashes occur primarily within rather than between civilizations.¹² Furthermore, the book's appeal has not been undermined by the failure of the second of its two main claims. Since the end of the Cold War, the relations between Sinic and American civilizations are summarized best by terms such as encounter or engagement rather than clash.

In rethinking civilizational analysis, however, it would be a big mistake to focus only on Huntington's writings. Huntington insisted on a unitary conception of civilizations but accepted multiple standards of proper conduct in a world of numerous civilizations. Liberals follow an inverse logic. Unlike Huntington, they are often more willing to acknowledge the existence of diverse cultural programs in a given civilization. And unlike Huntington, they have a difficult time letting go of the notion of a single standard of good international and intercivilizational conduct. This is illustrated by vigorous and extended debates over failing states, standards of good governance, property rights, and transparent markets. On all of these issues, and many others, liberal arguments often proceed from the unquestioned assumption of the existence of a single standard of good conduct. In liberal American and European public discourse, the West thus is widely referred to in the singular: a universal, substantive form of perfectability that is integrating all parts of the world based on the growth of Western reason. A very similar, anti-Western counter-discourse, also steeped in Western reasoning, exists in Asia. The voices proclaiming the dawn of Asia's civilizational primacy may shift from yesterday's Japan to today's China and tomorrow's India. But these voices are growing louder. Like “Orientalism,” “Occidentalism” characterizes East and West in the singular.

Ecumene and Balance of Practice or Anarchy and Balance of Power

I argue here that the internal pluralism of civilizations is reinforced by a larger context in which they are embedded. That context is not the international system or global markets, frequently deployed concepts that suffer from excessive sparseness and abstraction. It is instead a global ecumene that expresses not a common standard but a loose sense of shared values entailing often contradictory notions of diversity in a common humanity. This loose sense of shared values centers on the material and psychological well-being of all humans. “Well-being” and the rights of all “humans” are no longer the prerogative or product of any one civilization or constellation of civilizations or political structures. Instead, technology serving human well-being and norms of human rights are deterritorialized processes that have taken on a life of their own and provide the script for all civilizations and polities. This ecumene does not specify the political route toward implementation. It does offer a script, often not adhered to, that provides everywhere today the basis for political authority and legitimacy. All polities claim to serve the well-being of individuals. And all individuals are acknowledged to have inherent rights. The existence of these processes enhances the pluralism that inheres in civilizations. It undercuts both the imperialism of imposing single standards and the relativism of accepting all political practices.

Recognition of the importance of this global ecumene is central to the trenchant self-critique that William McNeil wrote of his own brilliant book, The Rise of the West, more than a quarter of a century after he had completed it and six years before the publication of Huntington's book.¹³ For McNeill, civilizations are internally variegated, loosely coupled, elite-centered social systems that are integrated in a commonly shared global context. He argues that his earlier path-breaking book was wrongheaded. It was based on the faulty assumption of the existence of civilizations conceived as separate groupings whose interaction was the main engine of world history. Instead, McNeill insists now that an adequate account must give proper consideration to the broader context in which all civilizations are embedded. Since civilizations are internally differentiated, they transplant selectively. And since they are loosely integrated, they generate debates and contestations that tend to make them salient to others. What historically was true for South Asia and the Islamic world is even more true for all contemporary civilizations under the impact of modern communications technologies. A global ecumene pluralizes civilizations within a loose sense of shared values.

Such a pluralist conceptualization of civilization is attuned to the emergence of new forces, cultural and political, that reflects on the richness of the politically available repertoires of different civilizations. Analysis of pluralist civilizations stresses the balance of human practices. Shifting balances are producing and reproducing behavioral and symbolic boundaries within and between civilizations that are more or less closely tied to political power. Islamicization and Sincization offer two ready examples.

Viewed globally and historically, Islamicization centered on Indonesia, an important way station between Canton, South Asia, and the Arab peninsula. Indonesia's Islamicization was peaceful, the work of Sufi missionaries from Gujarat and Bengal whose outlook was quite compatible with Hinduism. This focus on Indonesia, furthermore, serves as a useful reminder that today Arabs make up only 15 percent of the world's total Muslim population, with South and Southeast Asia accounting for more than half of the world's total. Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, and Islam acts as a strong unifying force for a fragmented archipelago. Although almost 90 percent of Indonesians are Muslim, Indonesia is not an Islamic state, and Islam is not the national faith.

Contemporary media coverage suggests that Islamicization centers on the violence perpetrated by tiny sects of radicals of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. Many academics and members of the general public appreciate, however, that Islamicization encompasses also other practices such as the annual hajj and long-term migration, a fully developed consumption culture (including food, dress, and pop culture), and transnational communication channels—radio in the era of Pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s, Al-Jazeera satellite TV and websites such as Islam online today. Islamicization is dynamic and open-ended and defies easy summary under simplified labels.

Historically, writes Wang Gungwu, Sinicization “was not associated with coercion and the need to dominate.”¹⁴ Rather, it was a matter of China's neighbors emulating Chinese practices that they found to be effective in exercising domestic control and in managing their foreign affairs, especially with China.¹⁵ For example, the calendar, education systems, and civil service exams all required knowledge of Confucianism and Chinese culture. Although Korea was most directly exposed to China, it was not China but Korean Neo-Confucians who imposed Chinese standards and practices. Vietnam underwent a process of self-Confucianization to avoid Chinese occupation. And even though Japan was less exposed to Chinese influences than were these two countries, it, too, imported Tang dynasty norms and practices.

Today, Sinicization is a highly differentiated set of social processes.¹⁶ During the last two to three decades, East and Southeast Asia have developed a regional consumer society in which the Chinese diaspora plays an important role as both producer and consumer. The upper strata of the overseas Chinese are making different choices about their preferred use among the three major Chinese dialects and English. And they have to decide where to send their children for education—Hong Kong, Singapore, Britain, or the United States. Southeast Asia is being remade by the emergence of a new group of Anglo-Chinese who are fluent in English and comfortable with Anglo-American liberal norms.

This pluralist and ecumenical view differs starkly from Samuel Huntington's unitary conception of civilization. His civilizations are operating in an international system rather than a global ecumene. Hence, Huntington articulates as a policy maxim “the commonalities rule,” pointing as an urgent need to something that exists already in abundance: the search for values, institutions, and practices that are shared across civilizations.¹⁷ In his view, civilizations balance power rather than reflecting open-ended processes and a broad range of human practices. Neglecting all the evidence of a restless, pluralist and at times seething West, Huntington's analysis sees the West as a civilizationally reactive status quo power that reluctantly engages the upsurge of revisionist non-Western civilizations. Rather than focusing exclusively on actors such as states, polities, or empires that are embedded in civilizational complexes, in Huntington's analysis civilizations themselves become actors. And, implausibly, he measures civilizational power solely by material capabilities such as population, GNP, and military expenditures. His clash of civilizations thus looks remarkably similar to a clash of large states or empires.

Primoridality as a Political Construction

Though lacking in conceptual richness and empirical support, unitary conceptions of civilizations are very popular outside academia. How do we account for their broad appeal? Primordiality is a simplifying crystallization of social consciousness around nodes such as civilization, gender, and race. What matters is not so much the category in and of itself but the political act of reification, the public exposure it receives, and the fact that it is believed in. It is a testimony to Huntington's political acumen and ability to have framed our understanding of world politics in terms of binary and totalistic entities such as “the West” and “the Rest,” even though such entities have never existed in the past, do not exist in the present, and will never exist in the future. This mental map makes sense only if one adheres to a unified conception of civilizations, and is then willing to generalize boldly. Huntington understood perfectly well that primordiality is political, and he acknowledged candidly that his book was very much a political project.

Yet, primordiality is subject to empirical analysis. It has greater appeal in some situations than in others. Simplifications have intuitive appeal in moments of great uncertainty, when the world has lost its familiar structure and when we are groping to find new beginnings in old debris. The category of the West served that function both after the end of World War II, as Patrick Jackson has demonstrated, and after the end of the Cold War, as reflected in Huntington's civilizational thesis.¹⁸ Furthermore, simplifications are intuitively plausible and politically almost unavoidable in moments of extreme threat or war. Uncertainty, threat or war focuses the mind on what divides us from our enemies and what unites us with our friends.

I have argued here that we should think of civilizations in pluralist rather than unitary terms. Civilizations are embedded in a global context of knowledge and practice that influences them without robbing them of their distinctiveness. They represent what Shmuel Eisenstadt and others have called “multiple modernities,” which activate different cultural programs under new conditions.¹⁹ The emergence, for example, of Judaeo-Christian and Afro-Islamic patterns of identity and practice in world politics points to the combinatorial richness of civilizational politics. Civilizations normally appeal to and are salient for others when they display diversity and debates over different but related social visions and political purposes. But in exceptional periods, such as times of great uncertainty, threat or war, political and intellectual entrepreneurs everywhere can create primordial constructions that make us see the world in unitary terms.

America—Single or Multiple Traditions?

Let us then turn to thinking about America as an exemplar of an imperial civilization. I do not view the United States and America as a conventional nation-state. The conventional nomenclature is not wrong, but incomplete. Compared to others the United States is a state on steroids, inhabiting the border that separates state from empire.²⁰ And compared to others America is an assertive nation that is also a civilization, endowed with a syncretist amalgam of identities.²¹ Should we think about America in unitary or pluralist terms?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the title of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western from the 1960s—and an apt summary of single tradition arguments. In conventional accounts the United States is good, in revisionist ones it is bad, and in realist ones it is ugly.²² I argue that single tradition arguments (as developed, for example, by Louis Hartz and Samuel Huntington) yield a less comprehensive and compelling understanding of the United States than do multiple-tradition arguments (as developed, for example, by Rogers Smith and Stephen Skowronek).

Single-Tradition Arguments

More than half a century ago, Louis Hartz's Liberal Tradition in America developed an argument that has remained foundational for how we understand America today.²³ Hartz proposed a consensus view of American culture and identity. Without a reactionary, feudal past, America lacks a revolutionary socialist future. Lockean liberalism has snuffed out all alternative political traditions and imaginations. And American liberalism is a frozen fragment of bourgeois liberalism, transplanted from the Old World to the New. The American South, to be sure, resembled Europe in several ways. But after the Civil War it was relegated to a position of political marginality. America thus remained in the iron grip of a tyrannical liberal tradition.

This single-tradition theory yields many interesting insights. Hartz argues, for example, that American law is so important because America's political philosophy is so impoverished. Pragmatism as America's only genuine philosophical innovation is deeply shaped by Lockean liberalism. Only a country that takes its ethics for granted can convert all problems into matters of technique. Furthermore, because liberalism is hegemonic, it needs no party as its advocate. David Vogel has shown how the hegemony of Lockean liberalism has emasculated the self-confidence of American business.²⁴ As the main pillar and beneficiary of hegemonic liberalism, it has never been tested in serious political battle with other actors. Liberal unanimity can easily tip over from a lack of tolerance into tyrannical conformity. And foreign policy feeds a messianic impulse to impose Lockean liberalism on a global scale. Making America safe for the world, as Theodore Lowi famously argued, remains today as pressing a task as making the world safe for democracy.²⁵

Although his views have shifted over time, Samuel Huntington initially proposed a single-tradition theory of America.²⁶ In his book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Huntington followed Hartz in defining the American Creed first and foremost in terms of political ideals of rights, democracy, and the rule of law.²⁷ Twenty-five years later, in his last book, Who Are We?, Huntington rejects this view as too one-sided and insists that the American Creed has been rooted primarily in a culture shaped by dissenting Protestantism and English political traditions that are now at risk.²⁸ This more recent view of the American Creed is broader in the sense of incorporating both cultural and political components, and narrower in the sense of including fewer types of people. His original conception, inspired by Hartz, Huntington now argues is inadequate for building or rebuilding America's walls. The thrust of Huntington's civilizational argument is division and clash; the focus of his Creedal argument is assimilation or exclusion.

Huntington views the American Constitution as the source of liberal political ideals and a secular, constitutional patriotism that simply lacks sufficient Creedal power. Multiculturalism and multiracialism have become mainstream values. Business and the professions embrace economic globalization. And an unprecedented wave of legal and illegal immigration is threatening to make America Hispanic. The result is a surging of subgroup identities that are both eroding and fracturing the American Creed. Huntington's argument overlooks that the Constitution crystallized one of the civilizational identities of the New World.²⁹ The constitution has become an inexhaustible source of contestation over a civil religion that intertwines America's biblical and republican traditions.³⁰

For Huntington, the glue that holds America together is not the Constitution but a culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenting Anglo-Protestant sects expressing Christian religious commitments, adherence to a common language, and English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals. That culture empowers individualism, supports a strong work ethic, and creates a duty for individuals to create heaven on earth. The empirical evidence, both historical and contemporary, puts into question some of Huntington's most important claims.

Contra Huntington, Alan Wolfe argues that America was not shaped by dissenting Anglo-Protestant sects.³¹ In the seventeenth century two of the American churches were established rather than dissenting. Puritans, to be sure, were a dissenting sect in England. But once they arrived in America, they became an established church in Massachusetts. New York and New Jersey were settled largely by Dutch immigrants. Catholics came to play a prominent role in Maryland. Baptists founded Rhode Island. And in Pennsylvania, German and British Quakers played a prominent role. Historians point out that Protestants have disagreed vehemently about the content of their culture. Dissenting Protestants were at the forefront of the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s, a rebellion against the orthodoxies of the more established Calvinist Churches. To them, individuals had some influence over their own salvation rather than leaving matters to a distant God. Protestantism is too lumpy a category to engage the historical evidence. While it is true that congregationalism eventually conquered all American churches, an unending stream of immigrants continues to shape church culture while assimilating into it. The American Creed emerged thus not from dissenting Anglo-Protestant sects but from multiple religious traditions that date back to the very origins of the American Republic. Wolfe's critique offers a form of multiple tradition theory in the religious sphere.

Similarly, students of contemporary immigration take exception to Huntington's argument about Mexican immigration compared to prior waves of immigrants.³² In this view, discriminatory practices and power differences between those subscribing to the American Creed and those trying to join it—not the choices and plans of Mexican or Latino immigrants—are slowing the process of integration and assimilation. Worries about immigration predate the origin of the United States. Most specialists agree that there is precious little evidence suggesting that the adaptability of the most recent wave of immigrants is very different from that of earlier ones.

Multiple-Tradition Arguments

Rogers Smith has reworked an older scholarly perspective on dueling traditions, such as Jeffersonianism and Madisonianism, that preceded Hartz's book.³³ In so doing he has developed the multiple-tradition perspectives now closely associated with his name. Addressing, among others, both Hartz's and Huntington's single-tradition theories, Smith observes in his analysis that American political development was marked not only by egalitarian values of liberal democracy but also by inegalitarian and illiberal ideas that yielded substantial and serious clashes over America's reigning ideas and practices. “At its heart,” he argues, “the multiple-traditions thesis holds” that not any one tradition but a “more complex pattern of apparently inconsistent combinations of the traditions” has shaped American history.³⁴

Specifically, Hartz's liberal tradition argument overlooks America's republican and racial traditions.³⁵ For Hartz, conflict in America occurs within the liberal tradition—between majority rule and minority rights and between democratic and property rights. He thus overlooks America's strong republican tradition. The rejection of monarchism led to the support of popular republicanism informed by Rome and ideals of civic virtue.³⁶ This republican tradition had strong effects on Jeffersonian and Jacksonian conceptions of politics and a distinctive form of American communitarianism. Furthermore, Hartz's liberal tradition argument has very little to say about the issue of race. In semi-feudal Latin America, slaves were placed at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, but they were not robbed of their humanity. In America's non-feudal culture, slaves were denied their humanity and made pieces of property. Liberal slavery was thus more cruel and vicious than feudal slavery. But Hartz went on to argue that once humanity was granted, liberalism was more generous since it did not have within its own intellectual tradition arguments that could stop the demand for equality.³⁷ The elimination of slavery was necessary to establish the hegemony of liberalism in Hartz's argument; yet Hartz slighted the importance of race in American politics, a fact he reportedly regretted subsequently.³⁸

American political and legal history reflect fundamental disagreements, as American governors and judges frequently deviated from liberal doctrine by appealing to republicanism on the one hand and to an ethno-cultural Americanism on the other. Republicanism is strengthened by social homogeneity and small size, patriotism and community. Ethno-cultural Americanism is grounded in nativist and racial identities.³⁹ Lockean liberalism and Anglo-Protestant Creed were particular and exclusive, not general and inclusive.⁴⁰ Blacks and Native Americans, specifically, were explicitly excluded for many decades. Among Democrats in the nineteenth century, Jacksonianism elaborated racist ideas. Among Republicans, specific ethnic and religious attributes became constitutive of America as a redeemer nation. By the late nineteenth century, both parties favored immigration restrictions as social Darwinism replaced older racist theories. America's multiple political traditions—liberal, republican, and race-based—were reflected in the exclusion of women from the franchise and in anti-Chinese immigration legislation. Because of race, gender, and national origin, Smith argues, United States laws declared the majority of the world's population to be ineligible for full citizenship for over 80 percent of US history.⁴¹ For the same reason, at least half of the domestic adult population was ineligible for full citizenship for about two-thirds of American history. Instead of the primacy of any single tradition, America has evolved multiple political traditions.

Multiple-tradition theories of American politics are more compelling than single tradition theories. Specifically, they give us insights into the depth of sentiments among both winners and losers in the conflict among different traditions. Liberal diversity can take the form of a positive value we celebrate in a richly pluralist society, or a constitutional default option we grudgingly accept for keeping the peace. But liberal diversity always entails exclusive tendencies. It offers a political space for racial and ethnic majorities bent on the politics of exclusion, and for racial and ethnic minorities committed to enhancing group empowerment. Furthermore, multiple tradition theories give us purchase on why the New World with its polyvalent politics has remained so relevant to non-Americans—as dream or nightmare. America possesses a vitality that entices the political imagination everywhere to think anew the political realities of everyday life. George Bernard Shaw captures the American Dream famously when, in his play In the Beginning, he writes, “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” This is the politics of a World that forever holds forth the promise of being New.⁴²

“Walls”—Implications for the Analysis of World Politics and American Foreign Policy

What are the implications of these arguments in favor of pluralist civilizations embedded in a global ecumene, and of America's multiple traditions, for the analysis of theories of world politics and American foreign policy?

Kenneth Waltz's foundational Theory of International Politics focuses on the centrality of international anarchy, which also informs Huntington's civilizational argument.⁴³ Anarchy in a Hobbesian world makes states expect the worst and keep up their guard. The quest for survival enforces a unity of purpose and eliminates the pluralism that inheres in multiple traditions. A less-gloomy though related realist view sees all states as coping with a security dilemma that derives from anarchy.⁴⁴ States share in a common dilemma and must act defensively, expecting others to do the same. Both of these variants of realism are based on an abstraction of the European state system in the nineteenth century. That abstraction differs from the conception of a world of plural civilizations inhabiting a shared ecumene that has existed for millennia on a global scale. The range of political experiences this ecumene encompasses is richer than the experience of one civilization, however powerful, at a particular point in time. In this pluralist, civilizational perspective there is no need to privilege analytically clash and conflict over encounter and engagement. Rather, the conditions under which each of them occurs need to be studied empirically.

Other strands of realist theory have followed this broader trail and reformulated balance-of-power into balance-of-threat theory.⁴⁵ This is an important improvement. Moving beyond the material balance of power, it takes account also of good and ill intentions and distinguishes between friend and enemy. This intellectual move frees our inquiry from reifying the international system as a self-contained arena of politics and invites us to inquire into processes of threat construction and reduction. Robert Jervis has thus argued for the appearance of something really novel in modern world politics—peace among all of the leading powers.⁴⁶ This had much to do with the dynamics that ended the Cold War. To Ronald Reagan's stirring call in Berlin in 1987—“tear down this wall” —Georgi Arbatov, a long-time advisor to Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders, offered a laconic counter-challenge: “We're doing the worst thing to you: we're depriving you of an enemy.”⁴⁷ In brief, clash and conflict are surely important in world politics. But so are encounters and engagement.

The analysis of such processes is the special domain of scholars of American foreign policy. Some realist and neo-conservative scholars argue that in a Hobbesian world, the general constraints of international anarchy are lifted only from the most powerful of states.⁴⁸ For Stephen Krasner, the United States is free to indulge in the luxury of exporting its liberal ideology.⁴⁹ In a related vein, neo-conservative Robert Kagan argues that on questions of foreign policy the American Left and Right are united in a grand coalition of ignorance and arrogance.⁵⁰ Divided by small family quarrels rather than major family feuds, America shares in an encompassing liberal vision that made it a Dangerous Nation, “the advance guard of civilization leading the way against backward and barbaric nations and empires.”

Single-tradition theories encounter in the analysis of foreign policy problems similar to those besetting them in the analysis of domestic politics. Specifically, they have failed to deal with the implications of America's race issue. For example, Woodrow Wilson was a man of the South who held firmly to racist views and vetoed the racial-equality clause at Versailles. Yet, in the view of contemporary liberal theorists of foreign policy, race is an irrelevant dimension for understanding the legacy of Woodrow Wilson's statecraft and diplomacy. Realists and neo-conservatives are as forgetful of race as are liberals. For example, they tend to gloss over the fact that one of the main architects of American foreign policy after World War II, Dean Acheson, had strong conservative and realist views and freely shared, strong racial prejudices against Chinese and Japanese.⁵¹ Racial prejudice was one of the factors that inflected American foreign policy toward multilateral policies among relative equals in Europe and bilateral ones among unequals in Asia.⁵²

Multiple-tradition scholars of American foreign policy distill from the history of American foreign policy distinct schools of thought that provide the intellectual and ideological foundation for America's political engagement with the world. A recent formulation by Walter Russell Mead distinguishes between the subtle pacifism of slippery Jeffersonians, the commercial realism of hard-nosed Hamiltonians, the universal idealism of crusading Wilsonians, and the ferocious violence of tough Jacksonians.⁵³ In a similar vein Henry Nau has reinterpreted the foreign policy of President Reagan to add to our inventory of foreign policy traditions.⁵⁴ Conservative internationalism, he argues, complements traditional realism and liberalism. Realist nationalism dates back to Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt; liberal internationalism to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan's conservative internationalism draws on the foreign policies of Thomas Jefferson, James Polk, and Harry Truman, three presidents who were assertive and deployed military force, when necessary, to expand freedom and self-government rather than international governance. Mead's and Nau's suggestive arguments make us see the foreign policy of the first G.W. Bush administration not as a freak accident of history but as a return to several of America's multiple and deeply-rooted foreign policy traditions.

A perspective stressing multiple traditions is more compelling than one focused on single traditions. And it has the advantage of being readily grafted onto conventional political arguments about how different political, social, or regional coalitions win political battles at particular times; build institutions that express their values and interests; convince many others of the merits of their views, and translate such views into an unquestioned conventional wisdom until such time as a counter coalition or exogenous shock make winners into losers; shatter institutional arrangements; and overturn reigning views, typically slowly as in the evolution of different racial orders.⁵⁵ Multiple tradition theories are attuned to politics as the engine of historical change that moves America forward, sideways, or backward.

Despite their appeal, multiple-tradition theories of American foreign policy have failed to deal with the implications of America's race issue for American foreign policy. Whatever their other merits, on this score they have not done any better than liberal or realist single tradition theories. Yet in the nineteenth century, race rivaled Lockean liberalism as a powerful determinant of American foreign policy toward native Americans as well as toward the peoples of Latin America, Asia, and Europe.⁵⁶ During the last two centuries white Americans have all but eradicated, assimilated, or relegated to marginal existence on reservations the original inhabitants of North America. The defeat and dispossession of Native Americans set a powerful example as Americans turned to dominate other peoples. Mexicans who had abolished slavery, for example, occupied an inferior position in the thinking of the political coalition favoring annexation of Texas and the retention of slavery after the US–Mexican war of 1846–48. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Spanish-American war revealed the power of American racism once again in both Cuba and the Philippines. In the American West, a powerful movement of American nativism locked out Chinese and Japanese immigrants. In the American East, Anglo-Saxon racial superiority played itself out against a tide of European immigrants—Germans, Slavs, Jews, Latins, Irish—all of whom were deemed racially inferior. And during World War II, Japanese-Americans were interned in Californian camps. In sum, racism has historically pointed to the limits of America's polyvalence. “Americans,” writes Michael Hunt, “used race to build protective walls against the threatening strangeness of other people and to legitimize the boundaries and terms of intergroup contact.”⁵⁷

At the beginning of the twentieth century, race was very much a factor in Woodrow Wilson's design for a new world order. As Stephen Skowronek argues so convincingly, Wilson turned his southern voice into the voice of America.⁵⁸ His Fourteen Points were not radically new but evolved from a fully-developed view of politics that took its inspiration from Edmund Burke. Wilson's view of progress stressed organic evolution, illustrated by his support for tutelary empires over black Americans at home and Filipinos abroad. He was loath to fight Germany, and he did not support Ireland's quest for home rule. Wilson's primary aim was to stabilize great power relations at Versailles, not to bring democracy to all corners of the world. For Wilson, the League was not an entity fixed by legal terminology but an instrument of an evolving whole. In the language of this lecture, it was a flexible political arrangement for an evolving ecumene. In its search for political accommodation of competing national and international interests, Wilson's liberalism was not lofty but, in Skowronek's formulation, “latitudinarian.”⁵⁹

In the last decade of the twentieth century, race was still very noticeable in the conduct of American foreign policy. Set against the background of the loss of a couple of dozen American lives in an ill-fated UN peace-keeping intervention in Somalia in 1993, a year later the Clinton administration sat idly by during the Rwandan genocide. In a sharp reversal, a few years later in 1998–99, the United States intervened militarily to stop Serbia's vicious but much less violent ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo. Since then, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, Africa's political salience has risen sharply. During the George W. Bush presidency, the influence of the Religious Right helped bring about a renewed American commitment to more and more effective economic aid in Africa. And President Obama signaled simply by who he is and with a visit to Ghana, scheduled early in his presidency in July 2009, how important he considers Africa's promises and perils.

These policy shifts are due to the increasingly multi-racial politics of the global ecumene that embeds America as well as the domestic and specifically Southern sources of American foreign policy. During the twentieth century, the global ecumene was transformed by the movement favoring the protection of minority rights in the interwar period, the collapse of the racial prestige of whites in East Asia during World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the decolonization movement, the branding and isolation of South Africa's racist regime as a pariah state in the 1970s and 1980s, and the accelerating democratic and human rights revolutions in Eastern Europe and Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, multi-racialism and multi-culturalism had become ever more important, always contested aspects of the global ecumene.⁶⁰ Barack Obama's enormous global appeal is perhaps related to the broad recognition of America as a New World where unexpected things are still possible.⁶¹ It most assuredly is due to the charisma of a man with a compelling personal story and an exceptional rhetorical gift. His address to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo on June 4, 2009, shows him to both embody and articulate the pluralism of civilizations and the multiplicity of America's political traditions.⁶² Indeed, the global ecumene has magnified enormously the great changes in American politics that made the Obama presidency possible.

The domestic sources of American foreign policy rested throughout much of the twentieth century on a specific electoral coalition and political bargain pivoting around the South.⁶³ Following in Wilson's footsteps, the New Deal coalition that ruled America between the 1930s and the late 1960s gave the South great political latitude on racial questions, in exchange for Southern support for American internationalism. Legislative changes in civil rights and immigration adopted in the mid-1960s altered greatly America's racial order and subsequently its foreign policy. Nixon's Southern strategy and the seismic shift in American politics that subsequently ushered in the Reagan revolution again accorded the South a pivotal role. Religious fundamentalism replaced racial bigotry as the foundation for America's internationalism, this time under conservative auspices.⁶⁴ A once-racial doctrine of Anglo-Saxonism has been recast as a conservative ideology of the Anglosphere that crystallizes around the institutions and practices of America's liberal-capitalist democracy, with its characteristically intense commingling of religious and secular elements.⁶⁵ Most recently, President Obama's emerging, purple electoral coalition is beginning to bridge the sharp differences between blue and red states. It is too early to judge the effects this latest change in American domestic politics may entail for American foreign policy. But the rhetorical and political contrasts between the polarizing and bridging politics and rhetoric of George W. Bush and Barack Obama remind Americans, and an astonished world, of a stanza in Walt Whitman's poem “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).”⁶⁶

I have argued that important strands of realist thought rely on the foundational concept of international anarchy to highlight conflict or clash in a world of walls. Other strands of realist theory inquire into the conditions that can diminish threats, thus shifting our attention also to peaceful encounters and processes of engagements. In the field of American foreign policy studies, multiple-tradition theories are more compelling than single-tradition theories. But they have done no better in highlighting the effects of race on American foreign policy. That lack of attention puts foreign policy analysis at a disadvantage in tracking the long-standing effects that the South has had on America's involvement with the world, as well as the more recent change from racially-based to religiously-based coalitions and arguments. These coalitions and arguments differ greatly. But they are tethered to each other by pragmatism and prudence. As America's only homegrown philosophy, pragmatism counteracts its ideological fervor. And in a complex and rapidly changing world, prudence is a frequent, though not universal, characteristic of American diplomacy.

“Those People”

Let me conclude. The analysis of global and American politics offer different analytical perspectives to articulate, more or less explicitly, contrasting political visions about building up and tearing down walls. I have argued that pluralist conceptions of civilizations and multiple-tradition theories of American politics capture global and American politics more accurately than do unitary conceptions and single-tradition theories. They provide for our analysis of world politics and American foreign policy an analytically less confining and empirically better-grounded view than does the assumption of international anarchy. Furthermore, they capture better the core of American politics. The divisions over its multiple traditions, not its unity, show America as the deeply flawed political community it is, and the enormous promise it holds. Debates and disagreements make America more engaging to and engaged with other civilizations than single tradition theories and unitary conceptions can convey.

A few years ago I listened to a lecture by Gregory Ward, a linguist teaching at Northwestern. Ward spoke about generic demonstratives.⁶⁷ Genericity, he argued, is a widespread linguistic category that forms the basis of knowledge acquisition, distinctively realized in each language.⁶⁸ Demonstratives are noun phrases headed by a demonstrative article such as in “those Canadians,” “those Americans,” and “those people.”⁶⁹ Generic demonstratives tend to create distance between self and other, imposing uniformity on both rather than emphasizing plurality. They are based on shared beliefs or common knowledge as an essential precondition to, and integral part of, the collective identities we hold.

Unitary conceptions of civilizations and single-tradition theories of American politics are rich in the implicit and unacknowledged common knowledge about self and other that generic demonstratives activate. The success that Huntington's thesis of civilizational clash enjoyed with a broad reading public in the United States and abroad had much to do with the fact that his new paradigm did not differ very much from the old—in two senses of the word. It built on the nineteenth-century tradition of civilizational analysis. And it replaced the political and economic clash between Communist authoritarianism in the East and capitalist democracy in the West with the civilizational clash between a cultural West and an Islamic and Sinic East. Far from replacing our intellectual map of the world, Huntington's book offered no more than a modest updating, based on unacknowledged, common knowledge.

The argument I have developed here has implications for some of the central issues widely debated in political science. Common knowledge is often enormously important for understanding the success of our arguments. Success often hinges on implicitly-shared assumptions between author and audience. What is and what is not common knowledge? How does that knowledge emerge and change? Is it tacit or explicit? And what are its implications for politics? Besides the development of arguments based on strong evidence, inquiring into the common-knowledge assumptions of widely shared theories strikes me as an important task of contemporary political analysis. Beholden to a specific cultural context, common knowledge assumptions are too often taken for granted rather than questioned. Political science benefits from both analyses that simplify and analyses that problematize. Those rationalists or model builders must simplify and express themselves with numerical symbols requiring mathematical and statistical training. And those theorists—normative, critical, comparative, constructivist and otherwise—must problematize foundational philosophical issues and express themselves in prose requiring the mastery of foreign languages. “Those people,” it seems, dot our walled political science landscape. We encounter them at every occasion—in the lecture hall, in seminar, and at conferences.

Many of our most important theories of international relations and foreign policy share in unacknowledged common knowledge. The distinction between enemy and friend, for example, surely improves the analytical power of realist theory. But it risks entrapping us in what Susanne Hoeber Rudolph⁷⁰ has called the “imperialism of categories,” which forces a complicated reality into rigid preconceptions. The conceptual apparatus that such simplifications rely upon typically offers us a definition of political problems and solutions that makes us take for granted what should be questioned—the politics of primordiality. Our understanding is enhanced less by the labeling of self and other, and more by the analysis of the political processes by which real and fabricated enemies and threats are made and unmade—an explosive subject, as Americans have learned once again in recent years. In teaching our students, writing our books, speaking up as citizens, and advising our governments, it is one of our most urgent tasks as scholars to acknowledge, through the analytical lenses we deploy, the pluralism, multiplicity, and contradictions that define both American and world politics. If we fail to do so, we risk rebuilding a world of walls separating us unnecessarily from “those people.”

Champions of a parsimonious social science embrace the “imperialism of categories.” They seek to free us, mistakenly in my opinion, from context as they build a social science grounded in universal standards. In doing so, they overlook that universal assumptions and arguments are always deeply embedded in unacknowledged common knowledge and the unexamined parochialism it reflects. International and comparative perspectives can counteract what we tend to take for granted and thus protect us from a myopic view of American politics. A rigorous political science needs to be built on the foundation of contextual and comparative historical studies, which helps us to uncover tacit knowledge. Within particular parameters, we can arrive at historically bounded generalizations that identify material and ideational structures and the agents that move within and between them to create, over time, both choice and change. Such contextual knowledge is also indispensable for informed political judgments about the trade-offs between universalistic and particularistic standards by which we evaluate different political practices.

Let me then end this lecture with a reading of an excerpt from Constantine Cavafy's poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” written in 1898 and first published in 1904:

“Why all of a sudden this unrest and

confusion? (How solemn the faces have become).

Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,

and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.

And some people arrived from the borders,

and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.”