Myths, Post-Structuralism and Power Applied in International Relations Analysis

It is this focus on power that makes Bourdieu’s structuralist approach interesting for the analysis of international relations, as the most recent surge in Bourdieusan analyses attests.

Following Bourdieu, power has a material and a symbolic dimension. while the material dimension is expressed in objectively measurable categories, the symbolic dimension has to be inferred from behaviours, discourses, and, among others, myths. The analysis of myths initiated by Levi-Strauss therefore enters international relations analysis through the back door of its Bourdieusan critique, that is, for those who take the idea of a social construction of concepts, knowledge, and ideas in international relations seriously. This is because a Bourdieusan analysis of myths of international relations allows not only identifying myths as a ‘simple’ analysis a la Levi-Strauss but also carving out the social power relation between narrators, narrated, and audience.

The first important step is to identify myths. Bourdieu subsumes myths in the category of discourses of symbolic power. In order to be able to call a myth a myth, the observer needs to go back to the definition provided by Levi-Strauss of a narrative that provides a moral tale of the foundations of the society in question. Consequently, when talking about myths in international relations in the understanding of Levi-Strauss, one assumes that something like an international society exists and that this international society is not made up exclusively of highly institutionalised units like states, who act in terms of preference-guided rational choice. On the contrary, international society is well composed of individual subjects who are embedded in structured contexts, states being one of them, and who act and interact in complex webs of social relations. The lavish splashing out of the label ‘poststructuralist’ to thinkers like Bourdieu and Agamben alike has often brought the former into suspicion of negating the subject as much as the latter.

However, Bourdieu’s sociology is poststructuralist only in the sense that Bourdieu rejects the sole focus on symbolic structures that Levi-Strauss proposes in the tradition of Saussurian linguistics; it is not a post-subject sociology (Angermüller 2007).

Myths circulate in global society, which, in turn, is made up of actors, who can be institutions like states but who can also be individuals. They are narratives, which are foundational to this global society, which define its basic values and taboos, and which assign paradigmatic roles and places to its actors. The ‘Peace of Westphalia’, for instance, has been identified as such a myth. It is foundational, for it provides a creational tale of the origins of the international system; it defines basic values (sovereignty) and taboos (war for non-territorial motives), and it assigns paradigmatic roles (state) and places (the West) to its actors. Other myths are possible. To identify these, it is necessary to collect a corpus of narrations on the same topics and compare if their narrative structures follow the same sequential and paradigmatic structure (see my analysis of the ‘warlord myth’ in Chap. 7 for an example).

Once identified, the interpretation of myths requires identifying the context of the myth in order to carve out the power structures hidden in the myth. The question is not simply what kind of personalities populates the myth, but who and what these personalities represent. This is where Levi-Strauss’ structuralism comes in as useful method of deciphering the myth. By opposing the syntagmatic structure to the paradigmatic structure of the narration, it is possible to establish tables of opposing binaries. The contextualisation of the myth in a larger cultural setting allows pinpointing the tacit and subliminal ‘other’ that myth is talking about when telling the story of its personalities. In the 1648 myth (that is, the Peace of Westphalia myth), for instance, the ‘heroes’ are the state and the statesmen who came together in peace talks.

This narrative is repeated in other myths, which are foundational of the international state system, like the narrative of the Vienna Concert of Nations (1815), or the Versailles Peace Negotiations (1919), or the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences for the foundation of the United Nations, (1944) and (1945), respectively. The concrete others in these narratives vary in the syntagmatic structure; in 1648, it is the Church and in a wider sense religion; in 1815, it is a nebulous political entity like the Napoleonic empire; in 1919, too, it is the Empire, this time the German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian; and in 1945, it is the axis, the fascist ‘Lebensraum’ state. However, in the paradigmatic narrative, all these different political entities share the main characteristic that they are not states based on the principle of territorial sovereignty; they are all forms of political communities, which define allegiance in non-territorial and non-statist ways. A table of oppositional binaries allows carving out these syntagmatic others and the paradigmatic theme that mirrors the myth. The principle of allegiance called ‘sovereignty’ in the 1648 myth would, in this case, be contrasted with other forms such as religious, imperial, or racial belonging.

The contextualisation of the myth that allows making sense of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure is, in turn, the starting point for a more profound power analysis. The myth singles out the right and good things to do as well as the right, good, brave, virtuous personality and the villains, stupid, greedy, and unworthy. It is then only a small step to analysing who is telling this myth in the interest of whom. Myths reflect patterns of distinction and hierarchies of authority to author the story that is told about global politics and global society. Why would the teller be interested in representing this personality as virtuous and another as villain? Which type of audience recognises ‘naturally’ this division of roles and ‘intuitively’ agrees with it? Who is projected to be the hero or the anti-hero in the ‘real world’?

Conclusion

Myths rely on standardised narratives and use stereotypes. However, these are well concealed in the realm of global politics, most particularly as the discipline international relations itself still grapples with the Potemkin concepts ‘state’ or ‘national interests’.

The analytical categories of ‘hero’ or ‘anti-hero’ seem to make very little sense in an analytical framework that focuses on a narrow understanding of actors and interests. Yet in a much wider framework of cultural analysis, the identification and analysis of myth allows revealing structures of power and authority that structure profoundly global politics.

The structural method of Levi-Strauss, combined with a social analysis of ‘who speaks’, as Bourdieu proposed, not only allows identifying myths in their narrative structure but also permits seeking out the power expressed by these narratives. The combination of these two approaches, furthermore, allows for a thoroughly systematic methodology within a reflexivist epistemological framework. The deciphering of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure of a narrative, for example, on conflicts or international organisations, reveals the standardised narrative sequences as well as the stereotypes used. The contextual analysis of ‘Who speaks? And with which authority?’ furthermore embeds the structural analysis in a sociological framework, which allows retracing the social hierarchies that support certain myths.

Bibliography

Adler, E. (1997). Seizing the middle ground: Constructivism in world politics.

European Journal ofInternational Relations, 3(3), 319-363.

Adler, E. (2005). Communitarian international relations. The epistemic foundations of international relations. Abingdon: Routledge.

Adler, E., & Pouliot, V. (2011). International practices. International Theory, 3(1), 1-36.

Angermüller, J. (2007). Qu’est-ce que le poststructuralisme Francais? A propos de la notion de discours d’un pays a l’autre. Langage etsociete, 120, 17-34.

Barthes, R. (1966). Introduction a l’analyse structurale des recits. Communications, 8(8), 1-27.

Bigo, D. (2011). Pierre bourdieu and international relations: Power of practices, practices of power. International Political Sociology, 5(3), 225-258.

Bliesemann de Guevara, B., & Kühn, F.

P. (2015). On Afghan footbaths and sacred cows in Kosovo: Urban legends of intervention. Peacebuilding, 3(1), 17-35.

Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le Sens pratique. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire: l'economie des echanges lingiiistiqiies.

Paris: Fayard.

Bourdieu, P. (1994). Raisons pratiques. Sur la theorie de l'action. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Bourdieu, P. (2000 [1972]). Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique, precede de trois etudes d'ethnologie kabyle. Paris: Points Essais.

Bourdieu, P. (2004). Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. Paris: Editions Raisons d’agir.

Checkel, J. T. (2004). Social constructivisms in global and European politics: A review essay. Review of International Studies, 30(2), 229-244.

de Saussure, F. (2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Doniger, W. (2011). The implied spider: Polities and theology in myth (Updated ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Drumbl, M. A. (2012). Reimagining child soldiers in international law and policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dundes, A. (1997). Binary opposition in myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss debate in retrospect. Western Folklore, 56(1), 39-50.

Epstein, C. (2008). The power of words in international relations: Birth ofan antiwhaling discourse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eribon, D., & Collin, P. (1988). Claude Levi-Strauss. Reflexions faites. Video. Accessed June 7, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=0hStPQRsW7Y

Guzzini, S. (2000). A reconstruction of constructivism in international relations. European Journal ofInternational Relations, 6(2), 147-182.

Guzzini, S. (2013). Power. In R. Adler-Nissen (Ed.), Bourdieu in international relations. Rethinking key concepts in IR (pp. 78-92). London: Routledge.

Hansen, L. (2013). Security as practice: Discourse analysis and the Bosnian War. London: Routledge. Kindle edition.

Jackson, P. T. (2011). The conduct of inquiry in international relations: Philosophy of science and its implications for the study of world politics.

London: Routledge.

Katzenstein, P. J. (Ed.). (1996). The culture of national security: Norms and identity in world politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lapid, Y. (1989). The third debate: On the prospects of international theory in a post-posivist era. International Studies Quarterly, 33(3), 235-254.

Leander, A. (2006). The ‘realpolitik of reason': Thinking international relations through fields, habitus and practice (Working paper no. 83). Copenhagen Business School and University of Southern Denmark.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1955). The structural study of myth. The Journal of American Folklore, 68(270), 428-444.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1979). Myth and meaning. New York: Schocken Books.

Levy, J. (2007). Globalization as a political invention: Geographical lenses. Political Geography, 26(1), 13-19.

Neumann, I. B. (2012). A t home with the diplomats: Inside a European foreign ministry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Pupavac, V. (2012). Language rights: From free speech to linguistic governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rosenberg, J. (2006). Why is there no international historical sociology? European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 307-340.

Segal, R. A. (Ed.). (1996). Structuralism in myth: Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Dumezil, and Propp. New York: Garland Publishing.

Segal, R. A. (2004). Myth. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Swartz, D. L. (2013). Symbolic power, politics, and intellectuals: The political sociology of pierre bourdieu. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Wiener, A. (2008). The invisible constitution of politics: Contested norms and international encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Bliesemann de Guevara Berit. Myth and Narrative in International Politics. Palgrave Macmillan,2016. — 329 p.. 2016

Myths, Post-Structuralism and Power Applied in International Relations Analysis

More on the topic Myths, Post-Structuralism and Power Applied in International Relations Analysis: