Myths fascinate—rightly so. This is what they are supposed to do.

They represent a particular and often particularly spectacular form of narration that is supposed to capture the imagination and feelings of their audi­ence. Yet in an age that wants to be secular, myths’ fascination has been relegated to the domain of belief and even superstition.

The analysis of myths can make a twofold contribution to the analysis of world politics: first, by deconstructing the belief in the coolly calculated interest-guided politics of the international system; and second, by provid­ing an original angle through which power in global politics can be analysed.

Reflections on how culture, norms, and ideas matter for international politics have become important in the discipline since several advances in theory development (Lapid 1989; Adler 1997; Guzzini 2000; Adler 2005). Empirical research has shown that cultural norms and values mat­ter not only for how decisions are taken (Checkel 2004) but also what is deemed appropriate to be politically regulated in the world (Epstein 2008), how norms evolve and change within policymaking contexts (Wiener 2008), and how power and domination in world politics are culturally framed (Hansen 2013; Katzenstein 1996; Neumann 2012). Constructivist research has also moved away from the essentialist and still statist assumptions of identity and social action that have character­ised early works of the Wendtian type and more into analysing practices and language of politics (see e.g.

Myths, however, as a particular type of cultural narrative, have not been theoretically integrated into these debates and have not yet been empiri­cally fully explored. Other social science and humanities disciplines readily accept that myths are foundational for societies; indeed, their foundational character is what turns a simple story into a myth in the first place. It is one basic definition of a myth that it is a story about very significant and arche­typical personalities, institutions, and norms. The dramatis personae of a myth live through a significant and archetypical adventure that can teach us, the audience, something about our lives, our society, our thoughts, feelings, and relations, in short, our place in the universe (Segal 2004).

One simple reason why myths have been neglected is the reluctance of large numbers of international relations scholars to accept a concept of global society that necessarily underlies the thought that ideas, norms, culture, and, in particular, myth shape politics. There are certainly institutional reasons for this resistance. But there are also theoretical debates to be had about just how much a society has to be ‘social’, that is, linking individuals through shared culture, to be called a society (e.g. Rosenberg 2006). A common argument against the view that we are living in an age of global society is exactly that not all individuals of this world share the same culture (e.g. Levy 2007).

Yet this argument has been well refuted by sociologists as mighty as Max Weber and Anthony Giddens, who argue that culture is not the most important characteristic of a society. Interaction and communication define a society: the simple fact that there are relations among individu­als and that these relations result in various configurations, which ‘order’ individuals into relational and, often, hierarchical patterns in the form of small groups like families or business organisations, and larger ones like nation-states or world society.

The statist paradigm of global politics has been considered for a long time sufficient to analyse hierarchy and anarchy. Yet the statist view fails to recognise and, consequently, to analyse a number of questions beyond the statist exercise of power. Prominent among these questions is the crucial one related to why the state has become the normatively and factually dominant form of political organisation in the world. The constitution of world politics as inter-statist politics is neither necessary nor natural in any way; it is the expression of a specific type of power relation between actors, some of which are states and some of which are not. These power relations bear a material form, for example, in the constitution of physi­cal borders and their territorial defence through physical means, and a symbolic form, for example, a discourse that naturalises states as the most important and legitimate actors in world politics. Scholarly debate that ignores the symbolic construction of states risks reproducing exactly such power structures which brought about the inter-statist world system in the first place. In order to avoid such a tautological approach and to better understand how global society is politically constituted, it is therefore nec­essary to transcend the statist paradigm through a critique of the symbols and discourses in which it is cladded.

Myths provide a particularly good case for the symbolic analysis. I understand myths as foundational stories which define authoritatively basic values and norms of a society (for overviews of different myth con­cepts see Bliesemann de Guevara, Chap. 2; Münch, Chap. 3). They are moral tales that depict not only what is good and right to do in this world but also—and commonly quite cruelly—the sanctions for misbehaviour. If world politics is to be understood as taking place in a global society where different actors and parts interact along relatively stable relational pat­terns, then there are certainly myths circulating about the origins of this society, its habits, norms, values, prohibitions, and taboos.

As an object of analysis, myths, however, do represent particular dif­ficulties. The most fundamental of these is their narrative form which, in global politics, does not appear in the same form as it does in the myths which are commonly analysed in other fields of social science and humani­ties. Folk tales, religious, or foreign myths are easily recognisable as myths. Myths in international relations, however, appear in secular and mundane forms such as news reporting or as urban legends (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2015). They need to be first identified as myths.

This chapter discusses how French structuralism and its successors can contribute to the analysis of myths in international relations by Levi- Strauss’ analysis of myths and a post-structuralist critique, namely that formulated by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This ‘debate’, which never really was one as the two never antagonistically confronted each other in public but rather replied very respectfully to each other’s work, clarifies two areas that are of interest for the analysis of myths in international relations. First, the analytical frame that Claude Levi-Strauss proposes is most useful to identify and decipher myths in international politics; sec­ond, Bourdieu’s critique of exactly this analytical frame allows tying in a discussion of power, which is still the central theme of international rela­tions (Leander 2006; Bigo 2011; Guzzini 2013).

The chapter will first present Levi-Strauss’ analysis of myths, which draws in turn on the works of the Russian linguist Vladimir Propp and on Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics. In a second section I will discuss Bourdieu’s critique of Levi-Strauss and its ‘poststructuralist’ aspects. It appears necessary to clarify the meaning of poststructuralism in this con­text, as this has often led to misunderstandings outside France about the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. While it is true that Bourdieu’s critique is vigorous, it nevertheless represents an important advancement of the way societies, which are foreign to the observer, are analysed and under­stood (Swartz 2013). Pierre Bourdieu wanted his critique to be under­stood in a Kantian sense, not as negation or denigration of Levi-Strauss’ work but as a test in its application to those research questions which he, Bourdieu, was preoccupied with at the time. One major research ques­tion of Bourdieu was the structure of domination that allowed French colonisers to subjugate the Algerian peasant and worker. In this context, Bourdieu referred to Levi-Strauss’ structuralism not only because it was the intellectual ‘doxa’ of the time. He was also inspired by the way Levi- Strauss had succeeded in destroying the most banal and deepest racism of social sciences through his methodology that extracted myths and rituals from the realm of the absurd, comic, childish, irrational, silly, and folkloric to which they had been confined (Eribon and Collin 1988). Rather than being a deprecation of Levi-Strauss’ monumental influence, Bourdieu’s critique is a tribute to it.