in the Social Sciences, according International Politics an architectonic role, and
reviving grand international theorisingfor history’s ‘Great Reckoning’.
- Recognising International Politics as the inconvenient truth in
the Social Sciences
The term ‘inconvenient truth’, used in the title of this chapter, is of course a
deliberate borrowing of the title of Al Gore’s popular book on climate change. The
former Vice-President of the United States, a missionary of environmentalism,
published An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What
We can Do about It^36 just at the time when recognition of global warming was
becoming almost everybody’s common sense. However, the inconvenient truth
about The Planetary Emergency– ignored in the book – is no longer ignorance about
the human impact on the climate, but rather the enormous obstacles to changing
collective human behaviour as a result of the structures and dynamics of actually
existing international politics and global capitalism. Here I want only to highlight
international politics.
The dynamics and structures of international politics are the inconvenient truth
of world politics because they confront political and social theorists and theory with
their hardest test. Perhaps this is why only a relatively small number of political and
social theorists have ventured into the ‘international’. Movement in a ‘resistant
medium’ was how Karl von Clausewitz described war; the phrase perfectly captures
the challenge of transferring ideas from the domestic to the international level. It is
difficult enough to develop ethical systems, social models, and theories for political
change in the context of domestic politics, settled communities, and national
cultures: it is radically more difficult to take such ideas to the next – international –
level and make headway. Similarly, basic notions in politics such as citizenship,
democracy and order can provoke controversy in relation to a specific polity: but
how much more difficult is it once one prefaces them with adjectives beyond
borders: world citizenship, cosmopolitandemocracy and universal order? When it comes
to spreading good ideas, international politics offers the level of maximum resistance:
here are focused the dynamics of a multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-religious,
multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-class, multi-racial, unevenly endowed, unevenly
developed world, all organised (or disorganised) in the form of multi-state
international anarchy.
‘International politics’ is the hardest test for political theory. This is the problem,
not any shortage of theories. Changing the realities of world politics by changing
the ideas that made us would be so much simpler without the games of nations that
have been learned through history. Any number of illustrations of the drag of the
resistant medium are possible. Most people declare their intention to be ‘green’ these
days, but the Copenhagen summit in 2009 ended in failure. Most people profess to
want to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation, but the five-yearly Review
Conferences of the Non-Proliferation Treaty have become sites where collective
interests hit the buffers of national priorities. All claim to want to reduce global
336 The inconvenient truth