On cultural diversity: international theory in a world of difference

Abstract

This book is the first in a three-volume project, and therefore necessarily leaves many big questions hanging. It has two principal purposes. The first is to show to the discipline of International Relations (IR) how its engagement with the concept of culture remains wedded to what Christian Reus-Smit labels ‘the default conception’ of culture. This conception sees cultures as largely homogenous, self-generating, bounded social structures interacting with each other in a billiard ball-like way. Reus-Smit argues that this conception was the one prevalent in anthropology and sociology before the Second World War. He shows in considerable depth and detail not only how this old-fashioned default view of culture evolved, but how it still anchors the societal dimension of thinking in four quite different areas of mainstream IR theory: realism, the English School, constructivism and rationalism. The second purpose of the book is to convince mainstream IR that it needs to abandon this old-fashioned view of culture and adopt the more post-modern conception now dominant in anthropology, cultural studies and sociology. In this view, culture is more fluid, variegated, cross-cutting, unbounded and internally contradictory. Reus-Smit thinks that some of the more radical approaches to IR theory such as post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and practice theory have already made this move. Mainstream IR now needs to abandon the default conception of culture not only because it is wrong, but also because it leads to serious misunderstandings about the nature and dynamics of international society. Specifically, the default conception makes cultural difference a zero-sum problem when changes in the distribution of power behind different cultures shift the balance among them. The dominant culture is threatened with losing its position, and the pluralist institutional structures of its order regime are challenged both by a new distribution of power and by new cultural claims. This is precisely the current problem, where western power and culture are in decline, and non-western cultures are gaining in wealth, power and confidence. The issue of how culture is understood is thus central to understanding, and dealing with, contemporary world politics.