Destabilizing state sovereignty

The concept of hegemony has long had significance for the study of inter­national relations where it has been used to describe the way states dominate others in a ‘state system’.

For instance, in his critique of realist and neo-realist literature, Richard Ashley (1988) argues that the discourse of national sovereignty requires the concept of international anarchy. Sovereign states with authority over their domestic interiors are taken to be the foundational elements of theories of international politics. The world ‘outside’ states is imagined as an unregulated, anarchic, space within which a multiplicity of forces compete or co-operate. Anarchy, then, is the ‘other’ of sovereignty, against which it is defined. This lays the basis for a ‘rationality’ that constantly asks of the international arena ‘How is order possible?’; ‘How can order be maintained?’; ‘How can policy be co-ordinated’? Rational and self-interested ‘state-agents’ face an ambiguous, unco-ordinated environment against which they must range. Corresponding theories of the ‘balance of power’ and the need for its main­tenance become the basis for state policies. But the state itself is unquestioned since it is a ‘rational presence already there, a sovereign identity that is the self-sufficient source of international history’s meaning’ (1988: 231).

Poststructuralist critics, then, take a ‘constructivist’ approach to interna­tional relations. That is to say, they are interested in studying the way concepts and practices of sovereignty or inside/outside distinctions are socially created through, for example, the mutual recognition by other states of national identity, territorial integrity or assumptions concerning trade in capitalist markets (see Biersteker and Weber 1996). In attaching its claim to authority to notions such as national purity or economic success the state continually confronts resistance to its efforts (often as a consequence of its own intervention) which expose the partiality and contingency of its claims.

Defining the state and ‘its’ interests is not a matter of inventing ‘mere’ fictions. Typically it involves very material forms of violence against bodies and identities. Poststructuralist thinkers (among others) draw attention to the ‘securitisation’ of the international environment through which subjects and identities are constituted in relation to other identities, boundaries and ‘threats’. For example, David Campbell (1992) argues that foreign policy should not be understood as the more or less successful expression of a state’s given interests and identity but as part of the ongoing attempt to establish that identity and those interests, through the constitution of enemies and dangers against which state action can be ranged and, in the process, defined. This means that the state, as we have seen, requires the anarchy it seeks to eliminate, the enemies against whom it establishes an identity. As Campbell puts it: ‘the inability of the state project of security to succeed is the guarantor of the states continued success and impelling identity’ (1992: 11-12). In the live televisual spectacle of successful strikes against enemy targets, the state seems to be protecting us yet, simultaneously, we experience a visceral sense of personal insecurity that narrows our ability to see beyond these limits (see Dillon 1996; Edkins 1999).

This draws attention to the way in which rationalities constitute and define the very space of the international environment in which states are deemed to act. In the study of ‘geopolitics’, writers such as Gearoid o Tuathail (1996) and John Agnew (Agnew and Corbridge 1995; Agnew and o Tuathail 1992) examine the ways in which international space is rendered both meaningful and practically governable through discursive representa­tions. These are embodied in various forms such as maps, public ‘common sense’, varieties of intellectual reasoning, which contribute to a vision of the international order favourable to certain kinds of action rather than others. The Cold War, for example, involved efforts to envision a dichotomous division of space into broadly homogenous, antagonistic camps, thus obscuring the very real differences between states presumed to be on the same ‘side’. The spatial discourse of ‘East vs West’ validated certain forms of identity and a selective understanding of the purpose and function of other states. It made it possible to imagine the United States as the ‘defender’ of Western civilization and to interpret events anywhere in the world in terms of that overriding dichotomy (as if the Middle East or South East Asia were merely a theatre for the Cold War). Today, when many things are securitized - from climate and population movements to trade and criminal activities - we can see how each is drawn into the orbit of the overriding security threat of terrorism.

Poststructuralist analyses of state sovereignty expose the arbitrary, shifting boundaries that underscore the supposed stability of the state as a principle and guarantor of order. The rationality of sovereignty places complex deci­sions and judgements within a stable frame whose unity is presupposed and therefore not open to debate and contestation. In the very moment in which ‘it’ takes a political decision, the state itself is depoliticized.