Campbell: Writing Security

Campbell, D., 1998. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, University of Minnesota Press.

Ch 1: Provocations of Our Time

“The demise of the cold war has been much heralded. But the causzes, meaning, and implications of this political rupture (assuming its veracity) are much debated” (15).

“To proclaim the end of the cold war assumes that we know what the cold war was” (15).

“The interpretive approach…sees theory as practice: the theory of international relations is one instance of the pervasive cultural practices that serve to discipline ambiguity” (17).

He defines the “late modern period” as one of “the globalization of contingency, the, “increasing tendencies toward ambiguity, indeterminacy, and uncertainty on our horizon” (17). These are not just from the outside in, but they also come from within (or most importantly come from within?). “This globalization of contingency…renders problematic the discursive practices that have made those spatializations of power possible…The irruption of contingency opens up the possibility of observing that foundational discourses…work to constitute the identities in whose name they operate” (18).

The key to understanding “what was at stake” in the cold war is through the analysis of discourse. Other attempts to flesh out the subject-object continuum are less than helpful. “…if we accept that there is nothing possible outside of discourse…the way is open to reconsider what was at stake in the cold war” (22).

Examines some of the important national security documents that have been declassified and speeches given by leaders. There is a constant reiteration of the themes of the state, the moral justification for action, and the desire to fill an international void with order. There is a constant reminder of the dangers of global communism and their intention for global expansion. However, this threat is not the full reason that the US undertook certain aggressive policies; the desire to become a great power, an international leader, was a crucial aspect of foreign policy. The author argues that the “cold war” is much more than what it is traditionally thought to be, and the same mentality continues to prevail.

Ch 2: Rethinking Foreign Policy

The chapter begins by exploring questions of identity and difference. Firstly, it explores questions posed to immigrants to the US that are concerned with, “…the elimination of that which is alien, foreign, and perceived as a threat to a secure state” (36). “Does the inside of a state exist in marked contrast to the outside? What is at stake in the attempt to screen the strange, the unfamiliar, and the threatening associated with the outside from the familiar and safe, which are linked to the inside?” (36).

The etymology of foreign is explored. “How is it that we…came to understand foreign policy as the external deployment of instrumental reason on behalf of an unproblematic internal identity situated in an anarchic realm of necessity?” (37). “Thus, if one were operating in terms of the ‘levels-of-analysis’ metaphor found in traditional international relations literature, the argument here would need to be regarded at a level beyond that associated with either the state or the international system. The argument here is concerned with the representation of history that allows us to talk in terms of ‘the state’ and ‘the international system,’ and the impact that problematization has had on our understanding of foreign policy” (37). “[I]t is about how the conventional understanding of foreign policy was made possible via a discursive economy that gave value to representational practices associated with a particular problematization” (37-8).

He then explores the traditional IR definition and approach to thinking about the state and the international system. The traditional rupture between the early authority of the church that was said to transition to the state after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is used as a foundation for conceptualizing foreign policy today. Campbell claims that a (re)writing of history would provide space for possibly a new interpretation of foreign policy can emerge.

On Westphalia: “For international relations, this rendering of the We4stphalian moment constitutes the conditions of possibility for the discipline. IT establishes the point of origin necessary to suggest that, in contrast to the religious and political structures of the preceding millennia, the history of modern Europe since the Peace of Westphalia has been a history of sovereign states acting in a multistate system” (41).

Extensive discussion of Christianity as it relates to the traditional narrative of IR.

“To talk of the endangered nature of the modern world and the enemies and threats that about in it is thus not to offer a simple ethnographic description of our condition; it is to invoke a discourse of danger through which the incipient ambiguity of our world can be grounded in accordance with the insistence of identity. Danger might therefore be thought of as the new god for the modern world of states, not because it is peculiar to our time, but because it replaces the logic of Christendom’s evangelism of fear” (50). Foreign policy disciplines the state. The state acts out of fear of violent death.

Campbell: National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia

Campbell, David. (1998). National deconstruction : violence, identity, and justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press.

Though this book is not without its problems, it is an interesting and helpful application of deconstructivist reasoning and methodology in the field of international relations. The thesis is basically this: a positivist project of maps, census and history created a situation whereby the possibilities of responding to the tensions in the former Yugoslavia were constructed in such a way that they caused great harm and death. Campbell posits the ways in which the story could have been told differently, and how this may have gone a great distance to solving the problem with relatively less loss of life.

He begins by telling a couple of different stories from people after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The most striking is that of a Bosnian Muslim who says, “I am a Muslim…but I didn’t know that before the war. Before the war, of course, we were all atheists!” (1). This initially highlights the possible accounts that one could give regarding this conflict that were not part of the hegemonic discourse.

Campbell then goes on to discuss an Ethos of Political Criticism, the heart of the methodology. This ethos involves, “an effort to disturb those practices that are settled, untie what appears to be sewn up, and render as produced that which claims to be naturally emergent” (4). This is explicitly an effort to deconstruct.

We are then taken through some of the criticism that has been piled onto the “post-structural” school of though by other IR theorists. This criticism tends to be silly at best, and clearly indicates the critic’s lack of familiarity with the text(s). Deconstructivism is seen as leading directly to nihilism, in that it makes the ability to take action impossible.

In contrast to instrumental rationality, which is seen as not being a sufficient barrier to guarantee against totalitarianism, Campbell’s method, “aims to demonstrate that the settled norms of international society—in particular, the idea that the national community requires the nexus of demarcated territory and fixed identity—were not only insufficient to enable a response to the Bosnian war, they ere complicit in and necessary for the conduct of the war itself” (13).

One important move that Campbell makes is to identify identities with performance, and thus to take the ideational realm and make it apply to the material. “First and foremost among the onto-political assumptions of deconstructive thought is the concept of the performative constitution of identity” (24). “The performative constitution of identity is central to rethinking the relationship between violence and the political, especially in the context of the state” (25).

Then, the concept of ontopology is deployed. This is used as a method for mapping out the narratives, the “enplotment”, according to Hayden White, vis-à-vis the history of the Balkans. He then outlines the history of the conflict in terms of conflicting narratives that all still highlight the entrenched nature of historical assumptions of sovereignty, ethnicity and conflict. This is where the “bad” occurred that leads to more death in the Bosnian war.

There is a discussion of ethics and Lévinas. “’responsibility [is] the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics…does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very note of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.’ Of these concepts, responsibility is perhaps the most important because, for Lévinas, being is a radically interdependent condition, a condition made possible only because of my responsibility to the other” (173).

He then goes over Derrida and moves towards a pursuit of democracy. This is where the methodology and the text run into themselves. If we are fighting against power structures, and critique the modern project of rationality because it can not guarantee against fascism, why would we want to throw up such an empty topic as democracy? How do we make this practical? If anything, democracy has lead to horrible crimes being committed as well as other systems of government.

The final chapter outlines ways in which the conflict in Bosnia could have occurred differently, assuming that the deconstructive methodology were followed from the beginning. All in all, a compelling read that does a nice job of melding method and practice, though there are some gaps.