September 11 in International Relations Theory

September 11 in International Relations Theory

An event as epochal as September 11 is bound to provoke theorists of international relations. Over the past year or so, there has been a race in academia to claim the first prize for the best theory to explain the events before and after September 11. The consensus is that the dominant discourse of realism has won, because it conceives of conflict and destruction as natural in an anarchical world (from Thomas Hobbes' "anarchical state of nature"). It also justifies America's threatening military actions after the terror strikes as a natural form of behavior of strong states, which always bully the weak into compliance to serve the former's selfish interests.

The more interesting contest is among the alternative theories to realism. It is a race for second prize, and the main competitors are feminism, globalism/neo-Marxism and pluralism.

Feminism

The fundamental premise of feminism is that international politics is a "man's world" and a "gendered activity". Gender is a social construction based on ideas of "autonomy", "objectivity", "sovereignty" and "virtu" (Niccolo Machiavelli), of which only men and masculine states are allegedly capable. Writing after September 11, feminist novelist Arundhati Roy encapsulated this critique, saying, "Women of the world stand between two extremes, both represented by androcentrism, Rambo culture and patriarchy - Osama bin Laden and George Bush." Bin Laden reportedly has 42 wives and is a defender and instigator of Taliban-style hardline Islamic "structural violence" against women. Bush heads the most conservative American administration since Ronald Reagan, pursuing vested interests of the military-industrial complex and giant oil multinationals that extort women in the Third World (a line favored by Marxist feminism).

Realist dogmas and metaphors of "war of every man against every man" and "stag hunt" (Jean Jacques Rousseau) have been pursued vigorously by the US government since September 11, accompanied by a culture of "manliness" and glorification of soldiers and ultra-patriotic themes in the media. "Imperial brotherhoods" (Robert Dean) among mujahideen and the Bush cabinet are waging destructive wars to quench their fanaticism and male egotism. Some feminists see the World Trade Center itself as a symbol of male capitalist egotism which ran into another kind of Arabic male chauvinism on September 11.

Feminists also like to point out that the majority of women in the world, including Palestinians, mourned the deaths of innocents in the terror attacks, and called for a foreign policy of reconciliation instead of revenge. But state-centric "military security" orthodoxy dominates the discourse and active voicing of peace by women has been relegated to peripheral activity and condescendingly dismissed as "human interest stuff" (Ann Tickner). The outcome is that human security and "common security", an all-encompassing concept including domestic non-violence, is sorely lacking as the US prepares for more wars. Feminist scholars have particularly lamented how the US has compromised with chauvinist male warlords in Afghanistan, who are only a shade better than the Taliban, and which is still claiming for propaganda value that American military action "emancipated" Afghan women.

Feminist interventions since September 11 have labelled the event and its aftermath as an instance of patriarchal "technology of destruction and domination". They urge a dire need to transform the realist paradigm and to include one half of the world's population in deciding on foreign policy so that a more harmonious world and a "just peace" can be arrived at. However, feminism has no unified tenor. Despite using phrases like "sexual terrorism" (Dorothy Roberts) as a much bigger threat to human security than Islamic terrorism, feminists are a highly divided lot, with competing visions of "radical feminism", "white Western feminism", "ecological feminism", "post-modern feminism", et al. Feminist international relations deconstruct realist policies with gusto, but offer no alternative model for transforming practice of world affairs. Can a superpower be realistically expected to simply "forgive" and "heal" terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 people in one single day? Feminists seem to be putting forth a chimerical ideal.

Globalism/Neo-Marxism

Globalism/Neo-Marxism is a structural theory that rates economics, not security, as the driving force of international relations. Under-development of Third World states leads to "dependency" on rich industrialized states, which exploit the peripheral states through an integrated capitalist system. Saudi Arabia, which produced the majority of the hijackers on September 11, is a classic case of exploitation by gas-guzzling and oil-hungry America. Globalists believe that domestic bourgeois forces reinforce foreign domination. In the Saudi example, collusion between transnational American corporations and the Saudi royal family oppresses common people and forcibly imposes foreign values on Arabic society.

The ill-effects of US-led globalization deepens crises in the Muslim world and creates angry young suicide bombers and hijackers willing to lay down their lives to hit the Mecca of capitalism - the World Trade Center. Peaceful reordering and change of economic inequities between have and have-not nations is not feasible. Hence, poverty and frustration in the Third World feeds into terrorism. Another insight globalists give is that since foreign policy depends on economic and geo-economic resource strategies, the US government is using its war on terrorism as a pretext to open Iraq for oil exploration.

Division between the European Union and the US on war against Iraq can also be seen as a symptom of intra-capitalist struggle and "differential growth rates" of the northern states (Lenin). Europe and America are headed for a titanic "struggle among imperialists" to colonize the world, and this cleft is widening day by day, as was proved when the last German presidential poll was fought primarily on whether or not Berlin should support Washington in war. Alignment of "part-capitalist" states like Russia, China and India with the US in the post-September 11 phase is an indication of core and "semi-periphery" (Immanuel Wallerstein) joining hands not just against