ABSTRACT
The core, and arguably constitutive, problem confronted by an international political theory is that of the status and justification of borders. Most obviously, there are the borders of states, which distribute dramatically different life chances, constrain the movement of people, and demarcate the terrain of ‘sovereignty’ with all the conceptual, ethical, political, diplomatic, economic and military questions raised by that notion. More broadly, theorists of the international have been concerned with boundaries as markers of cultural, national or other important forms of social difference, to which, some have argued, sensitivity should be exhibited independently of the normative weight attached to political boundaries (e.g. Hutchings 2001; Linklater 1998). Of course, both these sets of issues have also been discussed by political theorists with a more purely ‘domestic’ focus, for example in discussions of the rights of cultural minorities or the status of minority nations within a state (Kymlicka 1995, 2001; Carens 2000; Gilbert 2000; Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Parekh 2000; Gagnon and Tully 2001; Shachar 2001). Yet, as Chris Brown (2000: 190) suggests, the very idea of a boundary between political theory and International Relations (IR) theory is itself both constitutive of and dependent on a political world of bounded entities: without boundaries there is nothing distinctive about an international political theory, while to take the view that there is something distinctive in the latter’s subject or methods reinforces the thought that the bounded character of the social and political world is fundamental, and must be taken for granted in thinking about it (also Williams 2002: 737). Within normative IR theory, cosmopolitans divide from communitarians
over the nature and significance of boundaries (Brown 1992; Thompson 1992; Cochran 1999). The former characteristically argue that boundaries of either sort should make no difference to the treatment of individuals, while the latter suggest (sometimes ambiguously) that differing political structures or the particular texture of custom or tradition should make a significant difference. In more specific debates, boundaries appear as the crucial issue around which arguments about global distributive justice, the character and reach of claims of human rights, and rights and obligations of humanitarian intervention revolve. On a different theoretical plane, the debates around globalization,
regionalism and separatist territorial politics are preoccupied with boundary questions. The purpose of this article is to offer a critical reconstruction of the dif-
ferent conceptions of boundaries that appear in pragmatism. In what follows, I will set out an account of the basic commitments of pragmatism, at least in its Deweyan incarnation. I then consider four ways of giving these basic commitments some determinate political substance, at least with respect to the question of the character and significance of boundaries. The first way eschews any explicit evaluative statement, concentrating instead on deconstructing the pretensions of reaching beyond the tissue of particular practices toward some more firmly grounded basis for critical reflection on those practices. The second allows for the possibility of internal criticism of a particular society or form of life, but attempts to draw a bright line between this activity, which is coherent and permissible, and imposition of one’s own standards on alien cultural forms. As well as offering problematic accounts of boundaries, I suggest, both these understandings are flawed as interpretations of the basic pragmatist commitments. I then turn to the two dominant versions of pragmatism for contemporary political theory. Richard Rorty’s iconoclastic challenge to the enterprise of epistemology, and thence to a range of philosophical presumptions about justification and value, is the more notorious and has met with a wide range of reactions, many predictably negative. Interestingly for our purposes here, boundaries play several sorts of roles in his ‘ethnocentric’ reflections on political philosophy, and I distinguish three sets of boundary problems in his work. I argue that his view of boundaries and their significance is importantly ambiguous, and routes us back to the problems with which we began. The final interpretation of pragmatism I consider is more Deweyan. This sets out a conception of democracy as an embodiment of the virtues of the pragmatist conception of inquiry, and the appropriate political form for modern societies. To rest an account of the pragmatist conception of boundaries on the idea of democracy may seem a particularly hopeless strategy, since democracy is usually supposed to require a prior account of the borders of the demos, the so-called ‘problem of the unit’. In contrast to this, I try to outline some ways in which pragmatism points to an ‘endogenous’ mode of dealing with the problem of the unit. The claims here are modest, and a long train of unanswered questions follows. But I think this tells us what pragmatism can hope to contribute to political theory, international or not: not a set of substantive solutions to particular problems, but a way of understanding the possible ways of addressing those problems.
