What This Book Is Not About
With a concept as multi-facetted and widespread in common parlance and academic study as myth, it is useful to briefly outline what this book is not about. In International Relations literature, myths are strikingly absent—some very notable exceptions apart (e.g.
Loriaux 2008; Lynch 1999; Hobson 2012; Teschke 2003; Weber 2001). As a rhetorical device, however, the term ‘myth’ enjoys some popularity in academic book titles, where it is mainly used to denote the opposite of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, thus often entailing notions of hollowness, (self-)deception, or outright lie.1 What distinguishes those works from the contributions to this book is not necessarily the critical impetus that the myth-as-rhetoric connotation carries, because a large number of modern myth theories have to be understood as profound critiques of the ideological, naturalising, and depoliticising functions of myth making, but rather their lack of foundation in any myth theory. The contributions in this book are not about the ‘uncovering’ of objective ‘truths’ behind the myths of international politics, like this sort of positivist understanding of ‘myth’ would suggest. Rather, authors are interested in the productive side of powerful narratives and commonly held beliefs, which are neither true nor false but point to different, more complex relationships between mythos and logos, and how they crystallise in sociopolitical conditions. They also assume, to different degrees, that their own knowledge production about international politics is affected by, and contributes to, myth making.2The contributions in this book are akin to studies of national myth making, but the focus is decidedly not on national myths or their international dimensions. National myths have garnered much more attention than their international counterparts, most likely due to the shared origin of myth and nation in Romanticism.
National political myths are ubiquitous. They are often encountered as represented in legend-like, historically simplifying, or selective stories about the founding of the state or the homeland of the nation, told around specific historical figures and events that were crucial in these processes, and re-enacted in state rituals and ceremonies on a regular basis (Bouchard 2013; Hosking and Schopflin 1997; Migdal and Schlichte 2005, 22-4). In the United States, for instance, such foundational myths include the ‘discovery’ of America, the ‘Founding Fathers’, the USA as a ‘melting pot’, and ‘the American West’ (Paul 2014).National myths can have international dimensions or implications, especially when they are at the heart of international disputes over contested state borders, territories, or citizenship, usually competing against contestants’ counter-myths. In the long-standing political conflict between Ukraine and Russia, for instance, a ‘myth of ethnogenesis’ of the Ukrainian people competes with the myth of a common origin of Ukrainians and Russians in an ‘Old Rus nation’ (Smith et al. 1998). The ‘1389 Battle of Kosovo’ myth at the heart of Serb national identity is another example of a foundational myth with international implications, namely in the Kosovo war and intervention in 1998-1999 (Kolsto 2005; cf. also Mertus 1999). Despite their international ramifications, however, the competing myths about Crimea and the Battle of Kosovo are first and foremost nationally confined narratives, meaningful to Ukrainians and Russians, or Serbs, respectively. On these grounds, they can easily be rejected as a sign of ‘historical revisionism’ or ‘ethnically grounded backwardness’ by Western policymakers and scholars.
Mythology at the international level, however, where interactions between states and societies are usually thought of in more rational- utilitarian, rather than cultural-ideational terms, is much harder to pin down. The contributions in this book make an effort to readjust the focus to similarly powerful, but unrecognised myths at the international level. The political myths studied here are international in that the groups who share these myths are border-transgressing and/or in that the myths have effects on the political conditions of world society, understood as the totality of the international sociopolitical order with all its inherent contradictions and inequalities.
More on the topic What This Book Is Not About:
- Outline of the Book
- The Contributions in This Book
- What This Book Is About
- Structure of the book
- The purpose of this book is to return to Riker's fundamental concern about the relevance of federalism in the 21st century.
- This book has surveyed a great deal of work on the state and reflects the views of a variety of different authors.
- This is a book about history: the ‘historical turn' in international law on the one hand, and the ‘international turn' in the history of political thought on the other.
- Choosing books
- Buckland W.W.. The Roman Law of Slavery. Cambridge University Press 1908, repr.1970. — 754 p., 1970
- Atienza Manuel, Manero Juan Ruiz. A Theory of Legal Sentences. Springer Netherlands,1998. — 205 p., 1998
- Preface
- Foreword to the English Edition
- PREFACE
- The foregoing discussion in Part A of moral scepticism and several of its ramifications will form the backdrop of my consideration of aspects of legal theory.
- Fenwick Tracy B., Banfield Andrew C. (eds.). Beyond Autonomy: Practical and Theoretical Challenges to 21st Century Federalism. Brill | Nijhoff,2021. — 265 p., 2021