Prelude

In this book, I seek to resist the effects of a rich and diverse array of discourses expressing claims about a need for, and evidence of, an historical and structural transformation from forms of political life articulated through the presumed authority of the modern sovereign state and the system of such states to something more universal: claims, most specifically, about the need to move from a politics of “the international” to a politics of “the world.” I do so because I see scarcely any chance of thinking more imaginatively about our future political possibilities as long as these discourses continue to sustain desires for other ways of acting politically while simultaneously insisting that these other possibilities are entirely impossible, in principle as well as in practice. It is not that I am unimpressed by various empirical claims about historical

trends and structural transformations, or even by some of the visionary aspirations that are said to warrant such a move. I am nevertheless sceptical about widespread attempts to force evidence about and ambitions for historical and structural change into this particular account of what it must mean to make claims about a beginning, an ending and an intervening spatiotemporal trajectory. I am especially suspicious of the routines through which the terms “international politics” and “world politics” are assumed to be either interchangable or diametrically opposed – to be either synonyms or antonyms – in ways that mobilize both affirmations and denials of a specific philosophy of history, specific accounts of the necessary relation between spatiality and temporality, and specific accounts of where and what political life must be and who it must be for. The book is thus constructed as an exploration of what it means to distin-

guish between an international politics and a politics of the world and, once this distinction is enacted as an array of constitutive contradictions, to frame claims about political possibilities and impossibilities – about freedoms, necessities, equalities, securities and sovereign authorities – that work by mobilizing accounts of political temporality promising to take us from one form of politics to the other while insisting, for very good reasons, that the promise can never be kept; while insisting, that is, that modern political life must be sustained within very precise spatiotemporal limits that are never

only internal, never enacted only within the practices of modern subjectivity. In my view, it has become much too easy to assume that the distinction between a politics of the international and a presumed politics of the world (a distinction that I take to be a necessary, even if insufficient, condition of the possibility of specifically modern forms of political life articulated through relations and antagonisms between individualized subjects, sovereign states and a system of sovereign states) can be superseded, transcended or erased by imagining some sort of move from the one to the other. A move from one political condition to another is now very easily envi-

saged as a journey from one space to another, one time to another, or perhaps even one spatiotemporality to another. This way of thinking about political possibilities may seem entirely straightforward, so to speak, even scarcely worth thinking about. Nevertheless, it is only possible to imagine this particular journey if we systematically refuse to think about what is at stake in the initial distinction, as well as in the metaphors of travel this distinction has enabled. For there is no doubt that both the distinction and the metaphors are far more troublesome than they usually appear; and quite obviously so to anyone attuned to the multiple conflicts over basic principles attending the articulation of modern forms of political life grounded in claims about liberty, equality, security and the bounded authority of territorialized sovereign jurisdictions. At some point, literally, the envisaged journey from an international politics to a world politics must cut, or must fail to cut, across the distinction between one condition and the other. Boundaries must loom ominously. Sites, moments and practices of contradiction must be politicized and/or depoliticized. This is not to say anything that has not been known to many traditions of

critical political analysis for several centuries, not least because what we now think of as critical analysis was partly generated by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European reflections about various manifestations of this problem, usually in relation to distinctions between secular and sacred, immanence and transcendence, or the finitude of human existence and some infinite world beyond. Familiarity in some quarters, however, has done little to constrain the popularity of discourses promising to solve the problems of modern political life through a shift from an international politics to a world politics, nor to inhibit the conscription of various forms of critical analysis into the ranks of those recommending such a shift. In my judgement, and despite their influence on many impressive scholarly traditions, the effects of the point, or moment, of intersection between a seemingly benign conceptual distinction and a proposed temporal trajectory cutting across this distinction, along with the vast topological field of political possibilities and impossibilities that it both expresses and enables, demands intensive and urgent scrutiny. My overall argument, to put it briefly, is that anyone seeking to reimagine

the possibilities of political life under contemporary conditions would be wise to resist ambitions expressed as a move from a politics of the international to

a politics of the world, and to pay far greater attention to what goes on at the boundaries, borders and limits of a politics orchestrated within the international that simultaneously imagines the possibility and impossibility of a move across the boundaries, borders and limits distinguishing itself from some world beyond. The point, that is to say, is precisely the point, together with the lines which flow from it in order both to discriminate and to connect: to include, to exclude, to both include and exclude so as to constitute a complex array of inclusions and exclusions, and to affirm both the possibility and the impossibility of some world beyond this array of inclusions and exclusions. I cannot pretend that this will be an easy argument to make; on the con-

trary. It will require resistence not only to the currently popular but (as I will argue) conceptually fragile literatures that remain content to keep directing us down the road to some future politics of the world, but also to various literatures that may be fully aware that pervasive metaphors of travel from one spatiotemporality to another work to keep us where we are and what we are supposed to be, but nevertheless underestimate the importance of thinking about the ins and outs of a politics orchestrated within and beyond the spatiotemporal boundaries of an international order. In both contexts, I will insist that the boundaries of a politics of the international are at least as complex as the boundaries of a politics preoccupied with either individual subjects or sovereign states, and that it is to the boundaries of the politics of the international that we should look in order to understand the conditions under which modern claims to sovereignty and subjectivity have been sustained, and under which conditions these claims might be rearticulated. While the argument will run in many different directions so as to break

open patterns of analysis that have congealed into narratives about a move from an international politics to a politics of the world, it is one that I believe captures a broad consensus among many currents of critical scholarship concerned not only with claims about daunting transformations in political life, but also with the interplay between the limits of our capacity to understand these transformations and our understanding of what it means to be political within and between certain kinds of limits, borders and other sorts of boundary practices. With the partial but telling exception of some literatures about political economies, political ecologies, postcolonial situations, urbanizations, and so on, most of these traditions tend to frame their analyses in relation to practices of statehood or individual subjectivity rather than of the modern system of states. In my view, this is a profound mistake, even though I understand well enough why many scholars might be reluctant to engage with the literatures about the modern system of states that have emerged since the mid-twentieth century within the specific Anglo-American disciplines of political science and international relations. The boundaries, borders and limits expressed in the distinction between a politics of the international and a politics of the world – in the line transected by a line of temporal possibility and impossibility – suggests that we might want to be much less sanguine

about our capacity to understand the workings of the boundaries, borders and limits of contemporary political life anywhere, but especially in relation to what we call the international, to what we might want to call the world, and to the collective voices that presume to speak about a politics of the international, a politics of the world, or a politics of states and subjects that simply assumes, without ever thinking about, a constitutive antagonism between a modern system of states and some other world beyond. The broad array of discourses that concern me here rest, in part, on the

assumption that a politics of the international generates problems resulting from patterns of particularism, pluralism and fragmentation (usually expressed through references to state sovereignty, nationalism and systemic anarchy) that must be solved by substituting patterns of commonality and universality (usually expressed in claims about humanity, reason, the planet or even the cosmos). Ultimate causalities might be identified in relation to other (usually “economic” or “social”) forces, but unless politics is simply reduced to such forces, their crucial political expression is usually identified as a lack of unity and a consequent surfeit of conflict and violence; although it is difficult to avoid some residual sense that an order characterized by disunity somehow manages to hang together as a system, as a structure, as a process or even as just an ever-present possibility of war. These discourses also rest, and more profoundly, on the assumption that the kinds of commonalities and universalities that can be imagined as solutions to problems generated by the politics of the international must eventually add up to a politics of the world as such. For all their popularity, both assumptions are impossible to sustain. The

politics of the international already express an extensive and powerful account of the proper relationship between a particular form of particularism/ pluralism in the sovereign nation-state and a particular form of commonality/ universality in the international system of sovereign nation-states. Consequently, problems arising from a politics of the international cannot be attributed to particularism or to pluralism alone. Moreover, the historical construction of a relationship between sovereign nation-states and an international system of such states rests quite famously on the rift between the political world of modern “man” and any other world as such, so that any attempt to speak about a politics of the world necessarily confronts both the achievements and limits of specifically modern forms of subjectivity and all the ontological, epistemological and axiological difficulties they imply; and they certainly imply a very impressive range of difficulties. Thus in the first place, claims about a move away from the politics of the international tend to counterpose principles of particularism/pluralism and universality/commonality that are already expressed as a complementary and mutually productive but also antagonistic relationship; and in the second place they tend to presume that all the standard problems that have characterized the modern ambition for distanciation from an objective world beyond itself can be overcome through an idealization of the world that must be the principled objective of our political ambitions.