Politics on the line

The spatiotemporal rigidities of the Cold War eventually relaxed. Euphoria danced with nostalgia, at least until both were swept away by fresh worries about new wars, energy shortages, climatic transformations and economic failures. Claims about globalization seduced to the point of promiscuity, at least until new forms of exceptionalism disciplined all talk about apparently more hopeful possibilities into new accommodations with mass violence in the name of some ostensibly globalized, but in fact very localized but interconnected, forms of terror. Political practices and institutions nevertheless continued to exceed the expectations of individualized subjects, nation-states and the system of states. A bid for unipolarity ran into sand. Financial markets lost their magic. Other states made their presence felt. For some people, horizons brightened. Others saw very few reasons to be cheerful. Nothing stood still. Moreover, events seemed to evade any singular logic, whether structural or historical, although different readers will no doubt insist on the greater plausibility of some logics than of others, and may assign causal determinations far more readily than I think wise. In whatever ways the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall might come to be interpreted retrospectively, however, it has been difficult to ignore the degree to which grounds for political judgement have come to be regarded as worryingly insecure; though not so insecure as to preclude firm judgements that claims about security have been deployed more or less indiscriminately to justify scarcely credible acts of sovereign decision on the part of supposedly great, but utterly irresponsible, powers. That is to say, contemporary conditions offer many grounds for thinking

that sovereignty must be engaged as a problem, not a permanent or disappearing condition. Whether it has become any more of a problem than at any previous moment, or on what ground such comparisons might be made, remains unclear. It is nevertheless difficult to imagine any retrospective interpretation of recent events that does not pick up on widespread challenges to

established principles of political judgement and the claim to sovereign authority through which political judgements are enacted. In any case, and no matter whether these challenges are ultimately judged to be serious or trivial, I would also say that it is far better in both scholarly and political terms to engage with sovereignty precisely as a problem, rather than to keep reproducing narratives about what sovereignty must be or must not be that are themselves produced by specific forms of sovereign authorization of grounds for judgement. This is why I have pursued what might seem to be a fairly arcane quest

through literatures about discrimination, authorization and the spatiotemporal boundaries, expressed both horizontally and vertically and as both origins and limits, of a modern political order organized within a system of sovereign states. If sovereignty is in some trouble, not least because political life does not always seem to be where it is supposed to be within the bounded authorities of a modern system of states, then this trouble will be expressed in relation to the practices through which modern forms of sovereignty were constituted as attempts to respond to pervasive difficulties in defining what the world is, or must be, how this world must be carved up, how the carve-up might become authoritative, and what must happen at the boundaries (borders and limits, spatial and temporal) of any authority that is thereby established. In this way, I have tried to avoid reproducing standard narratives about sovereignty that work as practices of the modern state so as to draw attention to some of the conditions under which such practices attempt to solve various problems of discrimination, authorization and delimitation by affirming a capacity to draw the line in accordance with a specific understanding of topological form: a form that enables a familiar conjunction between spatial extension across sovereign territories and the unfolding of a temporal teleology within spatialized forms of subjectivity. As should be clear from what I have said, however, attempts to avoid the standard narratives are not exactly guaranteed to have much success. It is not that we have been suddenly thrown into some relativistic abyss, as

much superficial and debilitating commentary about contemporary political life has sought to insist. Rather, we may have become slightly more aware of the historical and cultural contingency of the grounds on which modern grounds for political judgement were once established, and have had to be constantly reaffirmed and/or reinvented. It might be possible to argue that this supposed emancipation from the authority of tradition, or theology, or nature, was a mistake, but not to complain that the foundations of modern political life have somehow gone missing. The absence of any foundations beyond those constructed by modern political life itself has been precisely the ground on which modern subjects have been able to celebrate their presumed liberties, equalities and securities. It may also be that this famously groundless ground, and the presumptions about liberty, equality and security it enables, is in some trouble, but it is trouble that is unlikely to respond to assertions about relativism or the essential virtues of modern/liberal reason. There is no

good scholarly reason to retreat to dogmatism in order to avoid critical interrogation of the conditions under which claims to reason and virtue, or claims about liberty, equality and security, might be sustained. It is certainly clear, more specifically, that no attempt to examine the conditions under which it might now be possible to speak about liberty, equality, security and other such principles in ways we (whoever this may be) might consider (through procedures that might be negotiated) appropriate (in some sense that might be agreed in the course of the negotiation) can avoid engaging with the limits of an internationalized order that can never sustain a claim to be a politics of the world. Similarly, it is not that the logic of the system of states that eventually

replaced, displaced or subordinated other logics of political/theological order has suddenly disappeared, as many contemporary literatures also claim; simply that we have become slightly more aware that the logic of a system of states is necessarily much more complex than it has been made to seem in the radically solipsistic nationalisms still informing many accounts of what it means to make claims to a theory of international relations, or indeed to a theory of politics. It is not necessary to invoke any especially fancy theorization to understand that dualistic accounts of the logic of friends and enemies is a profoundly misleading basis on which to examine the dynamics of modern political life, any more than it is to understand that practices of modern subjectivity cannot be captured through accounts of a radically solipsistic individualism of the kind that have become popular in some versions of modern liberal and economic ideology. No doubt some explanation for the popularity of radical solipsisms in the modern social sciences is called for. However, greater difficulties loom once the banality of dualistic readings of the logic of a system of states is understood and we try to come to terms with the practices through which apparently simple lines of discrimination between the internalities and externalities of modern subjectivities, whether individualistic, statist or systemic, work so as to produce very specific forms of subjectivity and objectivity. This has sometimes been a central theme of classic accounts of what it

means to speak about the sovereignty of the modern state, especially accounts in which apparently simple lines of discrimination work as sites of contradictory, mutually constitutive and self-constituting unity producing specific structures of norm and exception, in the sense expressed by Schmitt, or a present that produces a past that enables a present, as in the Hobbesian narrative about spatiotemporalities that must be at work in the assumption of a moment of social contract. As Hobbes already understood long before Schmitt, the sovereignty of the modern state – that mortal god – is located both within and outside the law it enacts. Similarly, the Schmittean exception affirms an externality in the very act of expressing limits to an internal norm. Such sources already suggest that there is no simple discrimination between internal and external, friend and enemy, national and international or before and after; rather, that the production of distinctions between internal and

external and before and after are, literally, crucial to the procedures through which a specific understanding of the spatiotemporal conditions of modern subjectivity has been shaped within what appears to be the already achieved, normalized and centred space of the sovereign state. Whatever else one may think of such figures (and they are, of course, not the only ones who might be identified, simply two of the most difficult to dismiss from any list of authorities on the authorization of state sovereignty as the beginning and end of modern political authority), both Hobbes and Schmitt challenge the dualistic accounts of a sovereignty distributed on either side of a line of discrimination: accounts that silence all questions about the authorization of what counts as authority and about what happens at the spatiotemporal limits of sovereign authority. The difference between the conventional dualism and the sort of duality,

dialectic, self-production and aporia sometimes expressed by Hobbes and Schmitt might seem very minor in some respects, merely a subtle shift in what some might still regard as just a boundary; as, for all practical purposes, just a simple line of authorized discrimination. Moreover, neither Hobbes nor Schmitt seemed especially keen to dwell on the difference, being quite happy to affirm the naturalized ground whose production they had articulated so succinctly. Nevertheless, the implications of this difference are quite extensive. It is in this context, for example, that we can understand many con-

temporary claims about universalism and enlightenment that ignore the very specific ways in which modern accounts of universality and enlightenment have been worked out in relation to the limits of modern subjectivity. Many commentators have played fast and loose with claims about the universality of modern subjectivity without acknowledging that modern subjectivity has been constructed as a claim about universality, and particularity, within very precise limits. What demands attention in this respect is neither the claim to universalism as such, nor the relativism often ascribed to anyone refusing to buy into such a claim, but the character of the limits within which such claims have been articulated. It might be possible to argue that, under specific historical conditions of modernization, the universality-within-particularity we call the modern subject (individual, statist or systemic) has become hegemonic as a cultural and political form, perhaps desirably so. Yet this is to make an argument not about universality as such, but about a specific political articulation of universality-within-particularity and particularity-withinuniversality that must necessarily generate huge problems at the point, or line or moment at which this articulation meets its external conditions of possibility – especially at which it claims to meet the world, and even more especially at which it claims to meet a world expressing possibilities for heterogeneity and differentiation as well as possibilities for some kind of planetary integrity. It is at this point, or line, or moment that we must eventually remember the

crucial difference between a modern politics orchestrated within a system of states and the logic of empire: the logic against which modernity is understood to have rebelled as the condition under which we now claim to be free,

equal and secure subjects. It may be possible to urge the need for greater universality as the condition under which we might now imagine some other form of political imagination, or under which we might urge the need to universalize the modern universal/particular subject, but to pursue both, or even to assume that they are the same thing, can only lead to huge and very familiar problems at the limits of the world of modern subjects. To assert the universality of any particular value (like life, or freedom, or right, or justice) is immediately to express some kind of conditionality (like mortality, or necessity, or obligation, or law), and thus to invite some sort of limitation. To insist on the universality of a particular relation between universality and particularity within modern subjectivities is immediately to provoke suspicions about the imperial pretensions of a hegemonic culture, and about expectations for the eventual entry of all other cultures, even the world as such, into this particular subjectivity of universality-within-particularity. To insist that a modern political life orchestrated as a structure of universalities within particularities extended in territorial space, but enabling a temporal process of teleological perfectability within each particular space, offers the best way of accommodating demands for liberty, equality, security and, indeed, perpetual peace, is to entertain enormous hopes that the sites of aporetic contradiction where subjectivity meets subjectivity, and especially where sovereign states meet the sovereign system of sovereign states, can be resolved without too many disasters. Considerable nonsense has undoubtedly been expressed in the name of

political realism in the theory of international relations, especially as a way of excusing authoritarian practices and dogmatic accounts of national security, but amidst the nonsense it is possible to appreciate the force of its core demand that we pay attention to the possibility, and sometimes necessity, of violence at the edges of modern sovereign states: not only at the territorial borders of such states but also at the limits of (legal, cultural, ethical) principle within which modern subjectivities seek to reconcile, and secure, their liberties and equalities. If doctrines of political realism are understood to be deeply problematic, then they have to be problematized not in terms of their appeal to simplistic stories about human nature, national interests and so on, but in terms of their idealization of specific (statist, nationalist) forms of modern subjectivity, and of their willingness to address the consequences of the limits of modern subjectivity. This is why I have long argued, against just about every attempt to develop

a theory of international relations since at least the beginning of the Cold War, that it is such a mistake to initiate any analysis of modern politics with claims about political realism without first coming to terms with the idealizations of a specific repertoire of claims about the liberty, equality, security and self-determining capacities of modern subjects, whether individual or collective. This is also why the classic texts that are usually invoked to justify claims to a tradition of political realism, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Weber perhaps most especially, are so much more provocative than the contemporary

literatures about international relations that remain content to examine only the presumed consequences of normative claims that go unexamined. Political realism is not the opposite of liberalism, to take a particularly influential recent conceit. It is, among other things, an expression of (diverse and contradictory) claims about what must happen when liberal universals, and liberal orchestrations of universals within particulars, reach their boundary conditions, the borders and limits at which exceptions must be declared in the name of a particular array of norms. It is in this context, I have argued here, that Kant’s troubled oscillation

from limits expressed horizontally to limits expressed vertically offers such a powerful purchase on what is at stake in claims about political realism in the theory of international relations. If political realisms have come to work most insistently as engagements with the boundaries of modern liberalism, it should be little surprise to find that the thinker who has probably had the most to say about the boundaries of modernity (the boundaries that Weber reaffirms in a machtpolitik of liberal nationalism and Schmitt reaffirms in a defence of a much less agonistic form of nationalism) is Kant, precisely the thinker who has been most persistently cast as the exemplary alternative to all forms of political realism. This is certainly not to equate Kant with either Weber or Schmitt, or even to deny that Kant might offer resources for resisting their versions of liberal or illiberal nationalism, not least because Kant offers an account of aporetic limits that can be read as both national and international. Both figures nevertheless work within a recognizably Kantian account of what it means to affirm a political universe of potentially autonomous subjectivities enabled within finite limits. Consequently, it is by organizing my commentary around themes that find expression in Kant’s multiple engagements with the limits of human finitude that I have tried to open out some of what is at stake in claims that modern forms of sovereignty are unsustainable, in many contexts and on many grounds. I have especially tried to work with themes that stand out when sovereignty

is understood not as the centralized form of political authority that is in its proper place once claims about state sovereignty are presumed to have been successful (the understanding expressed in Weber’s idealized (though paradigmatically “realist”) account of the nation state, the account that does much to enable Schmitt’s specific formulation of a sovereign exceptionalism), but as a problem that requires some account of the beginning and ending of things, of origins and limits between which a centred claim to authority can be made to work as a naturalized middle ground. My guiding assumption in this respect has been that it is not very helpful to engage with the flood of literatures seeking to find alternatives to modern forms of sovereignty without developing some sense of the problems to which the sovereignty of modern states, organized within a system of sovereign states that is in some sense also sovereign, has come to be seen as the only possible answer. So, in working towards a conclusion, let me first consider in a little more detail what would be at stake in treating sovereignty as a problem, rather than a condition that

can be either confirmed or denied, and then say something about what might be involved in treating the boundaries, borders and limits of a politics affirmed by modern forms of sovereignty as particularly troubling sites of contemporary political life. In the first instance, I want to insist that even if we remain committed to

something like a Kantian understanding of where and what modern political life ought to be within the triple array of subject, sovereign state and system of sovereign states, the politics of boundaries, as both borders and limits, must become a far more troublesome affair than might be gathered from the way the disciplines of political analysis have themselves been constructed as expressions of such boundaries. In the second instance, however, I want to canvass some of what might be at stake if we become persuaded that the conventional narratives about boundaries, and about the forms of sovereignty that boundaries both express and enable, have become too elusive for either scholarly or practical comfort. In either case, and as with sovereignty, the most pressing analytical difficulties arise less from a need to understand the novelty of contemporary boundary conditions, important as this is, than the need to appreciate what is at stake in the specific idealizations of what boundaries must be that already work to overdetermine expectations of what novel forms of boundary condition, and thus of political possibilities and impossibilities, must be like.