Part I - Substantialism and Relationalism

2 Political Worldviews in International Relations The Importance of Ideologies and Foreign Policy Traditions

Mark L. Haas and Henry R. Nau

In this chapter we apply a Weberian analysis to selective foreign policy decisions made by US and European elites in the twentieth century concerning war and peace. We look at the behavior of individual actors and the groups they form because, following Max Weber, individuals “give meaning” to the world around them. They interpret the historical setting in which they find themselves and act to shape the world they seek in the future. Individual and group worldviews overlap and compete. They overlap to become the basis of relationships and structures that shape a particular historical period, and they compete to establish a range of options from which leaders may choose. They operate against an objective reality of power, institutions, and ideas. We can test their effectiveness and hold the individuals or groups that espouse them accountable. At times, as we will show, ideas trump power in determining an actor’s behavior; at other times, power trumps ideas. Causation is discrete and sequential.

Relationalist worldviews say this type of analysis is a mirage. Individuals and the groups they form are not free to interpret and choose the circumstances around them, let alone play a significant role in shaping their future. The past and future are baked in the cake. A quantum rather than Weberian worldview prevails in which individuals and groups do not exist except as they emerge upon investigation. They materialize from a quantum world of wave functions in which every possible action is already prescribed by multiple probabilities. What exists after investigation is not a substance such as an individual but an entangled relationship of the observer, observed, and environment. This entangled “subject” is ephemeral and cannot be tested against an objective world because there is no objective world beyond what is observed. From a relationalist perspective, the free individuals we emphasize in this chapter are not free at all. They are deeply embedded in historical processes and contemporary relationships. They don’t choose their political party, class status, national citizenship, interpretation of history, or alliance preferences. They are those relationships. Actors have little room in the present to reinterpret the cosmological and historical context they inherit. Causation is mutual and holistic.

This is a worthwhile debate.¹ We see worldviews as substantive and individualist ideas by which individuals define their identities and decide which groups or communities they wish to join or remain a part of. These ideas in turn prescribe their objectives and their use of power and diplomacy in international affairs. We recognize that individuals and the separate groups they form are never completely autonomous. There is always overlap (“smearing,” as relationalists say). Bundles of relationships, fuzzy boundaries, and even structures of relationships exist that may be hard to change. The Cold War, for example, was thought to be permanent. But the whole point of Weberian rationalist thinking, which we affirm, is that individuals can be educated liberally to become self-critical and eventually form and change their worldviews on rational and accountable grounds. Because worldviews are substantive, their differences and relative significance can be measured. What Haas calls “ideological distance” tells us whether worldviews are close or far apart and, over time, converging or diverging. It shows us where boundaries between worldviews lie and how far individuals or groups must move to cross over from one worldview to another. Now, we can compare ideological worldviews relatively against the influence of other variables, such as the distribution of power and the role of institutions (relationships). The “distribution of ideologies,” for example, may involve similar ideologies across states (all democracies), while the “distribution of power” is skewed – the democratic peace under American hegemony. An objective world remains against which worldviews can be tested.² Ultimately, individuals make choices; they are not simply prisoners of deep-seated cosmological and historical processes or ciphers for atoms and wave functions in a purely materialist world.

Our focus in this chapter is on distinct, individualist worldviews associated with political rather than religious or cosmological ideas.³ Having made clear our worldview as scholars, we now apply the worldview concept to specific political leaders acting in the foreign policy arena. We examine in particular two types of political worldviews: domestic political ideologies (e.g., liberalism, fascism, communism, and Islamism) and foreign policy orientations (nationalism, realism, institutionalism, and constructivism). We ask in each case how these worldviews interact and affect policy outcomes, especially at the international level. In both cases, distinctive ideas and how they converge and diverge and interact causally with one another in the international system play a central role in creating threats and opportunities for the advancement of actors’ international interests, and thus are critical to the likelihood of war and peace, confrontation and cooperation. In short, ideational orientations espoused by specific individuals or groups of individuals define the map of international contestation, much in the way that power disparities define conflict in materialist ontologies, or institutional rules and roles define conflict in liberal ontologies.

This chapter is divided into two main sections. Section 2.1 examines the role of distinctive political ideologies as causes of world affairs. It details the pathways that connect political ideologies to perceptions of threat and consequent foreign policy behavior. Section 2.2 explores the role of distinctive foreign policy worldviews and demonstrates how these worldviews compete with one another to shape foreign policy outcomes. It demonstrates how distinctive individualist worldviews (what we call type as opposed to role identity) sometimes override realist, institutionalist (relationalist), and social constructivist worldviews.

2.1 Ideological Worldviews

Ideological worldviews operate at all levels of analysis: individual leaders, political parties, national identities, foreign policy orientations, transnational groups, and international institutions. We are particularly interested in ideologies at the individual and domestic levels of analysis: the goals and self-image actors articulate that motivate, guide, and give meaning to their international pursuit of power and participation in international institutions.⁴ What core institutional, political, economic, and social goals do leaders advocate and try to realize in their group or country? This domestic worldview in turn conditions their view for ordering international society.⁵ Do individual politicians or political parties, for example, advocate for their country and for the world the creation or continuation of representative or authoritarian political institutions? Capitalist or socialist economies? Theocratic or secular values? Ethnic or civic citizenship? Prominent ideologies that meet this definition include communism, fascism, liberalism, monarchism, and Islamism. These ideologies do not map neatly on the more holistic worldviews examined in other chapters of this volume. Nevertheless, liberal ideologies tend to emphasize rational faculties (explicit knowledge, reason) and lower levels of analysis along Weberian worldview lines. Authoritarian ideologies tend to emphasize nonrational faculties (tacit knowledge, traditions) and higher holistic levels of analysis along quantum worldview lines.

Political ideologies motivate actors to champion particular institutions and values against rival ones. To the extent they overlap, they form political in-groups. To the extent they diverge, they define political out-groups. Ideologies, in other words, encapsulate the shared or conflicting ideas around which domestic and transnational political parties and movements coalesce or collide. Group leaders draw on these ideas as they mobilize supporters and advance their ideology against rival ideological groups. Politics is about ideas and morality (right and wrong), not just about power, processes, and accommodation. Worldviews, as we understand them, are always contested – sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. They do not suffuse individuals in relationalist processes that limit individual choice. They involve individual and human agency. Actors are free to imagine new or escape old group relationships.⁶ Above all, individuals are always responsible for the effect their ideologies have on the freedom of choice of other human beings.

Actors’ ideological beliefs have profound effects on foreign policy behavior. Most importantly, the degree of similarity and difference among ideological beliefs – “ideological distance,” as noted earlier – has major effects on threat perceptions, which in turn critically shape foreign policies. As Haas argues, “There exists a strong relationship between the ideological distance dividing states’ leaders and their understandings of the level of [international] threat … The greater the ideological differences dividing decision-makers across states, the higher the perceived level of threat; the greater the ideological similarities uniting leaders, the lower the perceived threat.” Nau addresses the same issue through the concept of national identity – that is, a country’s self-image which motivates the use of force: “If [national] identities … diverge, hostile nations create a dangerous balance of power. On the other hand, if identities converge, communities of nations may moderate the balance of power.” Alastair Iain Johnston also deploys the variable of “identity”:

The greater the perceived identity difference, the more the environment is viewed as conflictual, the more the out-group is viewed as threatening … Conversely, the smaller the perceived identity difference, the more the external environment is seen as cooperative, the less the out-group is perceived as fundamentally threatening … Most critically, variation in identity difference should be independent of anarchy.⁷

Johnson’s last point is very important, and it is one that we develop later in Section 2.2 on foreign policy orientations. The effects of ideological distributions are independent of the effects of other variables such as power disparities emphasized by realist arguments, institutional constraints emphasized by liberal arguments, and holistic ideas emphasized by social constructivist perspectives. Ideologies shape the real world of power, institutions, and social identities. They are separate, sequential causes of events not simply rationalizations of power (realism), mutually constituted variables (constructivism), or bundled entanglements (relationalism).

Ideological distances shape actors’ threat perceptions and consequent international security policies by three main pathways – conflict expectations, demonstration effects, and miscommunications.⁸

2.1.1 Conflict Expectations

First, domestic ideological differences play a key role in affecting how actors assess one another’s international intentions. As Michael Barnett observes, “states apparently attempt to predict a state’s external behavior based on its internal arrangements.”⁹ The greater the ideological differences dividing states’ decision-makers, the more likely they are to assume the worst about one another’s objectives. As Secretary of State James Byrnes told President Harry Truman in late 1945, “there is too much difference in the ideologies of the US and Russia to work out a long term program of cooperation.”¹⁰ Byrnes understood that the greater the ideological distance between actors, the more likely they believe that serious conflict between them is inevitable in the long run. This expectation, measured concretely at one point in time, drives perceptions at later times. Even if ideological counterparts exhibit no hostility toward one another in the present – or even cooperate with each other currently – leaders will often assume that such amicability is temporary and is bound to be replaced with overt animosity.¹¹ Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, for example, noted that Germany’s cooperation with the Soviet Union in the early 1920s did nothing to eliminate the two states’ underlying enmity due to ideological differences: “Germany wants revenge [against France and Britain], and we want revolution. For the moment our aims are the same, but when our ways part, they will be our most ferocious and greatest enemies.”¹² To Lenin, “international imperialism [i.e., capitalist states] … could not, under any circumstances, under any conditions, live side by side with the Soviet Republic … In this sphere a conflict is inevitable.”¹³ These views led Soviet leaders to try to export communist revolution to Germany in the early 1920s, despite major material incentives to maintain cooperative relations with that state.¹⁴ Former Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov similarly stated in an interview in 1946 that the “root cause” of the incipient Soviet–American confrontation, despite years of alliance during World War II, was “the ideological conception prevailing [in the Soviet Union] that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable.”¹⁵ Interestingly, when Gorbachev gave up that conception in the late 1980s, the Cold War moved toward its end (see Section 2.2.3).

Assuming enmity, politicians dedicated to opposing ideological beliefs frequently take actions that ensure such a hostile relationship. Adolf Hitler, for example, repeatedly told the Wehrmacht leaders that the origins, objectives, and means of fighting the unavoidable war with the Soviet Union were rooted in the ideological differences between the two powers. Three months before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, he told his generals that the “struggle [with the USSR] is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness …. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated.” In fact, the “main theme” of Hitler’s reasoning for attacking the Soviet Union, according to the Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, Wilhelm Keitel, was to engage “the decisive battle between two ideologies.”¹⁶

When leaders have similar ideological beliefs, they are less likely to make worst-case assumptions than leaders whose beliefs are dissimilar. Policymakers who share core ideological principles are likely to trust one another more and to assume that they share major interests – including containing ideological enemies – that will result in cooperative relations. These relationships help explain the significant cooperation that often exists among co-ideologues, including monarchists (Concert of Europe), fascists (Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II), religious fundamentalists (Taliban Afghanistan and al Qaeda), communists (Soviet Union and China in 1950s), and especially liberals (“the liberal peace”). They also demonstrate why ideological convergence, or increasing ideological similarities among states, is often an important source of resolving international conflict.¹⁷

Because ideological relationships determine the threat posed by power variables, fears of power shifts and intense security dilemmas will exist more frequently among states that are dedicated to disparate ideological beliefs. Ideologically similar regimes, in contrast, will often form a “security community.” Members of a security community rule out the use of force as a means of settling disputes and instead possess stable expectations of peaceful change.¹⁸ Among these states, power distributions are not an important source of war and peace. As Nau explains:

In a world where national orientations significantly converge, for example today in the EU or North Atlantic region, traditional balance of power forces recede in importance from interstate relations … In a world of sharply diverging sociocultural and political orientations, on the other hand, the balance of power assumes preeminence to mediate security and wider disparities (for example, in Arab-Israeli relations). Military and economic balances do not themselves guarantee stability; but states are unlikely to feel safe or comfortable in a world of widely differing state identities unless they have an independent capability to defend themselves. The security dilemma, in short, is primarily a function of diverging identities not decentralized power.¹⁹

Indeed, decentralized power exists, it might be argued, precisely because countries have diverging identities. When those identities converge – as, for example, among liberal democracies – decentralized power or anarchy raises fewer if any serious security concerns. Liberal nations exist separately without threatening one another militarily.

2.1.2 Demonstration Effects

A second prominent way in which ideological differences are likely to shape leaders’ threat perceptions is by endangering their most important domestic interests, namely the preservation of their political power and the ideological system (political institutions and values) they support. Leaders often worry that the success of ideological enemies abroad will be contagious, ultimately boosting the political fortunes of like-minded individuals at home, even to the point of revolution. This concern will be greater the more vulnerable the regime is to domestic opposition.²⁰ In short, leaders fear the demonstration effects of other ideologies succeeding abroad and weakening their control at home. The greater the ideological differences dividing decision-makers in different states and the greater their internal vulnerability, the greater their fears of domestic subversion are likely to be, by which we mean the likely undermining at home of one set of ideological principles and the spread of a rival one.

In the 2000s, for example, Russia’s illiberal leaders worried that the “color” liberal revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan would spread to Russia. Vladislav Surkov, the Deputy Director of the Presidential Administration and a top advisor to President Vladimir Putin, claimed that these revolutions had “made a very strong impression on many [Russian] politicians,” and he worried that the spread of these political changes to Russia was a “very real threat.”²¹ Putin expressed similar fears in justifying Russia’s annexation of Crimea after the revolution in Ukraine in 2014 that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally.²² Chinese leaders have articulated the same concerns. As Aaron Friedberg summarizes (writing in 2012):

China’s rulers … remain deeply fearful of encirclement and ideological subversion. And despite Washington’s attempts to reassure them of its benign intentions, Chinese leaders are convinced that the United States aims to block China’s rise and, ultimately, undermine its one-party system of government … Although limited cooperation on specific issues might be possible, the ideological gap between the two nations is simply too great, and the level of trust between them too low, to permit a stable modus vivendi.²³

The US–China trade war initiated by the Donald Trump administration offers further evidence of an ideological explanation of worsening relations. In January 2019, Li Ruogu, a former chairman of the Export-Import Bank of China and former deputy governor of China’s central bank, asserted that the trade war was primarily a product of ideological not economic fears. According to Li, “the conflict wasn’t about the United States being threatened by China’s growth … but by its vision of state-led capitalism. ‘This is the conflict of systems. It won’t end easily.’”²⁴

Whereas ideological enemies tend to view one another as subversive dangers to their core domestic objectives, the opposite threat relationship often holds for leaders who are dedicated to similar ideological beliefs. Elites will frequently view the success of ideologically similar regimes with approval since others’ victories are likely to benefit the former’s domestic interests. By demonstrating the advantages or staying power of particular ideological beliefs, a party’s success in one state is likely to aid the political fortunes of like-minded groups throughout the system, thereby increasing the incentives for cooperative relations. Russian leaders, for example, provided generous aid to Belarus for much of the 2000s largely due to a belief that the continuation of the two countries’ illiberal political systems was interconnected. As Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alyaksandar Lukashenka observed in 2005: “A revolution in Belarus is a revolution in Russia,” meaning that a revolution in Belarus threatened revolution in Russia. Key Russian politicians clearly sympathized with this position.²⁵ This perceived interconnectedness of domestic interests created powerful incentives for Russia’s illiberal leaders to aid Lukashenka’s regime lest its demise undermine Russia’s system of governance. The same thinking led Saudi Arabia to tighten its alliance with Bahrain (both countries are monarchies) in response to the spread of popular protests throughout much of the Arab world in 2011. Part of these efforts included sending Saudi troops, at the request of Bahrain’s king, into its neighbor to quell domestic unrest. Saudi leaders feared that a successful revolution in Bahrain would inspire and embolden similar pressures in their kingdom.²⁶

2.1.3 Miscommunications

A third important way in which different ideological worldviews shape politicians’ threat perceptions is by increasing the likelihood of misperceptions among them. The greater the ideological differences dividing states’ leaders, the more likely they are to attribute different meanings to the same symbols and events, and thus the greater the likelihood of misunderstandings developing. These barriers to effective communication among ideological rivals are not a product of a lack of effort or difficulties of translation, but of different identities that push people to interpret language and other signals in contrary ways. President John F. Kennedy expressed well precisely these points when he wrote to Nikita Khrushchev in November 1961:

I am conscious of the difficulties you and I face in establishing full communication between our two minds. This is not a question of translation but a question of the context in which we hear and respond to what each other has to say. You and I have already recognized that neither of us will convince the other about our respective social systems and general philosophies of life. These differences create a great gulf in communications because language cannot mean the same thing on both sides unless it is related to some underlying purpose.²⁷

Among ideological enemies, misperceptions are likely to result in the creation and exaggeration of conflicts of interest as well as missed opportunities for cooperation. In the 1930s, for example, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin tried to communicate to Britain and France that he was interested in forming an alliance against Germany by instructing Western communist parties to support rearmament and by greatly downplaying the role of the Comintern (which was an institution that had been openly dedicated to the fomentation of revolution against capitalism and colonialism). Western conservatives, however, misunderstood Stalin’s intent and instead thought Stalin’s policy changes were part of a new, more subtle attempt to facilitate ideological subversion.²⁸ Similarly, British attempts in 1941 to warn Stalin of Hitler’s plans to soon attack the Soviet Union were misunderstood by the Soviets, which resulted in the opposite effect to their intent. Stalin and his associates dismissed Britain’s warnings as desperate attempts to embroil the Soviet Union and Germany in conflict. The Soviet ambassador to Britain, Ivan Maisky, even told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that British warnings to the Soviet Union about Germany’s plans of attack “would not be understood in Moscow and would be resented there.”²⁹ The ironic result of this communications breakdown, according to Gabriel Gorodetsky, was that “Churchill’s warning to Stalin of the German deployment [of massive numbers of German troops near the Soviet border] in April [1941], rather than being a landmark in the formation of the Grand Alliance, in fact achieved the opposite. Stalin was diverted from the main danger, suspecting that Churchill was bent on drawing Russia into the hostilities.”³⁰

2.2 Foreign Policy Worldviews

As we have argued, ideological worldviews influence international events through the three causal pathways of conflict expectations, demonstration effects, and miscommunications. But how important are these ideological factors compared to other variables? In each pathway, ideological variables, or what we call type identities, confront and compete with other causal variables such as power, institutions, and role or social identities. In other worldviews, power interests (realist worldviews), institutional factors (liberal worldviews), and role or social identity factors (constructivist worldviews) may dominate. Relationalist worldviews would argue that none of these factors has any distinct influence on outcomes because all of them are bundled together in the quantum world. They exist only as probabilities, until an investigator asks a question, and then pose a fundamental dilemma for an analysis like this one because they cannot be tested against an objective world. So, let’s assume that the specific questions we are asking as investigators trigger the relationist quantum world to yield the Weberian world and specific variables which can be tested against an objective universe. That assumption is not inconsistent with the new relationalism and allows this Weberian analysis to proceed. After all, if Newtonian science is good enough for understanding tennis balls, but not quanta and galaxies (black holes), it may be good enough for the study of politics since the latter operates on the level of tennis balls not quanta or galaxies.

Historically, actors in international affairs have taken four distinct approaches to thinking about the interaction of “type” ideas with other variables. They reflect the four main foreign policy traditions or worldviews of any country: nationalist, realist, institutionalist, and ideological. Each tradition implies a different causal relationship between type identities on the one hand and power, institutions, and role or social identities on the other.³¹

The nationalist orientation comes closest to a pure Weberian worldview. Nations, like individuals, are separate and distinct. They have a unique type identity and act, rationally for the most part, to preserve that identity. This imperative to survive shapes in turn the realities of power, relationships/institutions, and social identities. Nations mostly take care of themselves. Independence and unilateralism prevail, not interdependence and multilateralism. Institutions such as alliances are unnecessary, except in extremis. Power balances emerge autonomically. Social or shared identities are thin; type identities matter most.³² The materialist universe consists of an equilibrium of multiple and roughly equal powers.

The realist worldview is mostly Weberian but adds some interdependent or institutional aspects. Not all type identities matter the same. Great power identities matter more because great powers have more agency (capability) and responsibility to balance power and preserve world order. The balance of power (power) then shapes military capabilities (e.g., arms races), institutional relationships (e.g., the United Nations), and social identities (e.g., great power solidarity). Great powers cooperate and compete regardless of type identity, and cooperation does not narrow ideological differences.³³ Social identities remain thin.

The institutionalist worldview operates between the Weberian and quantum worlds. Interdependent, rather than independent, relationships shape power (e.g., collective security, trade), institutions (e.g., multilateralism), and role or social identities (e.g., common rules, regulations, practices).³⁴ Actors strive to resolve their geopolitical (realist) and identity differences by negotiations and common rules. They build up international institutions and develop the habit of cooperation, which helps them narrow geopolitical and type identity differences. Over time, role and shared identities take on greater importance, and a world community or “community of nations” emerges.³⁵

The social constructivist worldview tacks toward the quantum end of the worldview spectrum. The world is no longer made up of separate Weberian entities or interdependent relationships between separate entities. It is now a holistic world of entanglement in which individual and separate identities disappear into discourses and language games. Communicative practices shape identities, and role or social identities matter more.³⁶ Social constructivists “bracket the corporate [i.e., domestic] sources of state identity and interests, and concentrate entirely on the constitutive role of international social interaction, exploring how structural contexts, systemic processes, and strategic practice produce and reproduce state identities.”³⁷ Over time, relationships replace identities, as actors merge at higher and higher levels of analysis. The world becomes a whole; actors are diffused rather than distinct.

Let’s look at several empirical examples of how “type” ideological variables interact with and at times override materialist, institutionalist, and social constructivist worldviews

2.2.1 When Type Identities Override Geopolitical Realities

Type identities are frequently more determinative of leaders’ threat perceptions and foreign policies than material variables, even when geopolitical realities are stark. After World War II, western European countries viewed the United States as less threatening than the Soviet Union even though US troops occupied western European countries and Soviet troops did not. Power balances were not the issue; ideological ones were. Today, US leaders view North Korea as much more threatening than Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, even though the latter are orders of magnitude more powerful (and all have nuclear weapons or the capability to acquire them relatively quickly). During the Concert of Europe from 1815 to 1848, leaders in the monarchical great powers saw weak liberalizing states (such as Naples and the United States) as much more threatening than fellow great powers. Because liberalism might spread (demonstration effect), they viewed liberal revolutions as major threats to their domestic interests.³⁸

No better example of how type identities can override profound geopolitical realities exists than the way British and French conservatives and socialists favored opposing alliance policies in the 1930s.³⁹ Conservatives refused to ally with the Soviet Union despite the massive power threat posed by Germany, whereas most socialists pushed hard for such an alliance to balance Germany. The root source of these clashing preferences was opposing ideological orientations toward Germany and the Soviet Union. Most conservatives viewed the Soviet Union as the greatest ideological danger in the system, Nazi Germany a lesser one.⁴⁰ This intense ideological hostility to the Soviet Union prevented an alliance with this state throughout the 1930s. Even after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 – when the power-based threat from Germany was reaching extremely high levels – key conservatives continued to emphasize their intense suspicions of the Soviets on ideological grounds. In April that year, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote his sister, Hilda: “Our chief trouble is with Russia [and thus not with Germany]. I confess to being deeply suspicious of her. I cannot believe that she has the same aims and objects as we have or any sympathy with democracy as such.”⁴¹

British and French socialists reacted ideologically to Germany and the Soviet Union in exactly the reverse way, resulting in opposite alliance preferences. Because socialists viewed Nazi Germany as the greatest ideological threat in the system, the Soviet Union a lesser one, the barriers to an alliance with the Soviet Union were much smaller than they were for conservatives. British Labour Party leaders, according to a summary by William Tucker, argued as early as 1934 that the Soviet Union lacked “aggressive designs toward other states,” thus making it “a natural ally of the forces of peace” against the fascist states.⁴² There “was no question upon which Labour opinion was more united than the necessity of an [alliance] agreement with the Soviet Union.”⁴³ French socialists concurred.⁴⁴ Power variables were identical for British and French conservatives and socialists. Their ideological worldviews, however, were not, and these differences resulted in opposing policies on the most important security issues of the era.

In addition to critically affecting the meaning that individual leaders give to power variables, ideologies can also at times be a direct cause of power shifts. Political scientists often treat ideas as a residual variable, exerting only marginal influence after international power and domestic institutional exigencies are accounted for.⁴⁵ Ideological leadership is relatively discounted. The historian H.W. Brands, Jr. argues, for example, that President Ronald Reagan’s success in the Cold War can be largely explained in terms of events not policy: Reagan “had no policy agenda beyond basic conservative principles. He expected events to furnish direction. They obliged from the start.”⁴⁶ Yet, it can be argued that events were not moving in Reagan’s direction in the late 1970s. The strategic rivalry was moving decisively in the Soviet direction, and the US and world economies were languishing in stagflation. As John Lewis Gaddis notes, “the Nixon-Ford years saw the most substantial reductions in American military capabilities relative to those of the Soviet Union in the entire postwar period.”⁴⁷ Meanwhile, worldwide inflation rates tripled, growth slowed by 25 percent, and unemployment jumped by 50 percent. Reagan was not favored by structural forces; he had to alter them. In a multivariant and constantly changing world, proving causality is impossible. Yet a plausible case can be made that Reagan’s ideas about both strategic relations and the world economy preceded his time in office, mobilized political support to put him into office, informed the policy initiatives he implemented once in office, and ultimately coincided (correlated) with a revitalization of the strategic balance and the world economy.⁴⁸ By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had disappeared, and from 1980 to 2010 the world economy enjoyed average annual real growth of 3 percent plus. In short, ideological factors mobilized a policy agreement (the so-called Washington consensus) that altered geopolitical circumstances.

2.2.2 When Type Identities Override Institutionalist Factors

When ideological identities diverge, leaders are more likely to focus on their competing than their common interests, thereby making it very difficult for institutions and routinized diplomacy to facilitate sustained cooperation.

The failure of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s illustrates these dynamics. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger adopted realist and institutionalist approaches to US–Soviet relations; they minimized ideological factors. As John Lewis Gaddis summarizes, they believed “that the geopolitical interests of ideologically disparate states could, in certain areas, be congruent. Once diplomacy was purged of its sentimental and emotional [i.e., ideological] components, it should be possible to identify and build upon these common interests held even by previously irreconcilable antagonists: survival, security, a congenial international environment.” Sustained “serious negotiations on substantive issues,” Nixon and Kissinger believed, was the key to convincing the Soviets to focus not on “the clash of competing interests” but on “the evolution of ‘habits of mutual restraint, coexistence, and, ultimately, cooperation.’ This, Kissinger insisted, was what was meant by détente.”⁴⁹ Its goal was the coexistence of great powers, not the eventual triumph or merger of one ideology with another.

The détente process resulted in a number of noteworthy agreements.⁵⁰ But institutionalized diplomacy did not succeed in ending the Cold War. The effects of ideological differences, despite Nixon’s and Kissinger’s beliefs to the contrary, were a major barrier to conflict resolution. As Raymond Garthoff explains, the “foremost” reasons for the collapse of superpower détente in the 1970s were the very different understandings of the meaning and purposes of détente possessed by US and Soviet leaders and their failure to understand these differences.⁵¹ And these differences in conceptions and failures in understanding were rooted in ideological differences. Whereas Nixon and Kissinger hoped that détente would end the Cold War by institutionalizing the pursuit of common interests, Soviet policymakers hoped to use détente to make the superpower rivalry less dangerous while they continued to pursue an intense ideological and military struggle at lower economic cost. As General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Leonard Brezhnev asserted in 1972:

The CPSU has always held, and now holds, that the class struggle between the two systems – the capitalist and the socialist … will continue. That is to be expected since the world outlook and the class aims of socialism and capitalism are opposite and irreconcilable. But we shall strive to shift this historically inevitable struggle onto a path free from the periods of war, of dangerous conflicts, and an uncontrolled arms race.⁵²

President Reagan took a different approach to détente than Nixon and Kissinger. Like the Soviets under Brezhnev, he emphasized the ideological differences that limited the potential for diplomatic cooperation. He sought not coexistence but an end to the Cold War. As he told Richard Allen, his national security advisor: “my theory about the Cold War is that we win and they lose.”⁵³ Reagan rejected the notion that all ideologies were morally equivalent. As he explained in 1988, “We spoke plainly and bluntly … We said freedom was better than totalitarianism. We said communism was bad [and] … made clear that the differences that separated us and the Soviets were deeper and wider than just missile counts and number of warheads.”⁵⁴ Rather than pursue détente, Reagan armed his diplomacy by reasserting American ideological exceptionalism (distinctiveness) and reviving American economic and military capabilities. He forced the Soviet Union to take negotiations seriously because it could not compete outside the negotiations. As Mikhail Gorbachev told his Politburo colleagues in October 1986, “our goal is to prevent the next round of the arms race. If we do not accomplish it, the threat to us will only grow … because we are already at the limits of our capabilities.”⁵⁵ Reagan’s approach saw ideological factors driving material realities and determining institutional outcomes.

2.2.3 When Type Identities Override Social Identities

If détente or US ideological superiority did not end the Cold War, did it end by changing social or role identities brought about by changing international practices? Social constructivists might think so. The United States and Soviet Union came together around the shared ideas of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking.” Social constructivists count on repetitive interactions to influence outcomes, as do institutionalists. The difference is that, for social constructivists, these interactions are communicative and substantive, not ameliorative and procedural. Did the diplomatic discourse in US–Soviet relations change as Gorbachev developed his ideas of glasnost and perestroika and a common European home? This is the social constructivist explanation. Or did type identities shift such that the Soviet Union moved toward liberalism and eventually abandoned communism, and US–Russian institutional and geopolitical relations shifted accordingly from enemies to friends? This is the type identity, agency-oriented explanation.

Efforts by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev to end the Cold War in the mid-to-late 1980s illustrate well these dynamics between type and social identities.⁵⁶ Alex Wendt crafts the social constructivist explanation. According to Wendt, Gorbachev’s policies are “an example of how states might transform a competitive security system into a cooperative one.” Because

competitive security systems are sustained by practices that create insecurity and distrust … transformational [international] practices should attempt to teach other states that one’s own state can be trusted and should not be viewed as a threat to their security. The fastest way to do this is to make unilateral initiatives and self-binding commitments of sufficient significance that another state is faced with “an offer it cannot refuse.” Gorbachev [did] this by withdrawing from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, implementing asymmetric cuts in nuclear and conventional forces, calling for “defensive defense,” and so on.⁵⁷

The problem with this analysis is that Gorbachev’s much more cooperative international policies from 1985 to 1988 did not convince US leaders that the Cold War was ending. Although US elites acknowledged that Gorbachev’s more cooperative international relations were helping to make US–Soviet relations less dangerous, their dominant sentiment was that Gorbachev’s initiatives did little to alter the overall adversarial character of the superpowers’ relationship. Before 1988, no key American official claimed to believe that the end of US–Soviet enmity was likely in the foreseeable future. For example, on the eve of the Washington Summit in December 1987 when the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed, Secretary of State George Shultz asserted that “there is nothing in the ‘new political thinking’ [the name of Gorbachev’s domestic and international reform agenda] to date which suggests that the end of the adversarial struggle [between the superpowers] is at hand.”⁵⁸ The following February, Shultz stated that he found it “difficult to believe that [America’s] relations with the Soviet Union will ever be ‘normal’ in the sense that we have normal relations with most other countries.” Thus “it seems unlikely that the US--Soviet relationship will ever lose what always had been and is today a strongly wary and at times adversarial element.”⁵⁹ A new edition of the National Security Strategy of the United States, issued by the President Reagan in January 1988, reached similarly pessimistic conclusions. According to the document, “despite some improvement in US–Soviet relations over the past year, the long-term threat [posed by the USSR] has not perceptibly diminished … There is as yet no evidence that the Soviets have abandoned their long-term [aggressive international] objectives … We must not delude ourselves into believing that the Soviet threat has yet been fundamentally altered.”⁶⁰

What pushed the most powerful decision-makers in the Reagan administration to believe the Cold War was ending were not changes in Soviet foreign policies, but proposed changes in Soviet domestic politics (type identity) that convinced key US leaders that the ideological distance dividing the superpowers was narrowing considerably. In April 1988, Gorbachev laid out major new institutional objectives for the Soviet Union that would be voted upon in the Nineteenth Party Conference, which was scheduled for June. These proposals included holding competitive elections involving nonparty members; establishing a new, popularly elected Congress of People’s Deputies that would select a standing legislature (a new “Supreme Soviet”) that possessed significant power; creating an independent judiciary; and providing protections for freedom of speech, assembly, and press.⁶¹ The conference approved all these initiatives, and the elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies was scheduled for March 1989.

Reagan and America’s most important policymakers immediately recognized the ideological significance of Gorbachev’s 1988 plans. Reagan asserted in a speech in London after the Moscow Summit in June that the Nineteenth Party Conference proposals, which included “such things as official accountability, limitations on length of service in office, [and] an independent judiciary,” were “cause for shaking the head in wonder.” These proposals convinced Reagan that Gorbachev “is a serious man seeking serious reform.” Because of Gorbachev’s domestic objectives and their institutionalization, the Soviet Union was very likely now entering a period of “lasting change.”⁶² Reagan’s advisors also took note. Ambassador Jack Matlock remarked: “as I read [Gorbachev’s proposals] and discovered one new element after another, my excitement grew. Never before had I seen in an official Communist Party document such an extensive section on protecting the rights of citizens or such principles as the separation of powers, judicial independence, and presumption of a defendant’s innocence until proven guilty.”⁶³ With these proposals, “what had passed for ‘socialism’ in Soviet parlance had dropped from sight. What the ‘theses’ described was something closer to European social democracy.”⁶⁴ To Matlock, the conference proposals indicated that “Gorbachev was finally prepared to cross the Rubicon and discard the Marxist ideology that had defined and justified the Communist Party dictatorship in the Soviet Union.”⁶⁵

It was shortly after the Americans became convinced that Gorbachev was trying to revolutionize the Soviet domestic system that they began to assert that the Cold War was at an end. When Reagan was asked at the Moscow Conference – which was held just weeks after Reagan learned of Gorbachev’s goals at the Nineteenth Party Conference – if he could declare the Cold War to be over, the president answered: “I think right now, of course.”⁶⁶ A few days later, he stated in a speech in London that Gorbachev’s revolutionary reforms were possibly ushering in “a new era in human history, and, hopefully, an era of peace and freedom for all.”⁶⁷ These statements came mere months after Reagan and other leaders had declared that the fundamental threat posed by the Soviet Union remained intact. The night after learning about Gorbachev’s new domestic objectives, National Security Advisor Colin Powell recounts that he “felt a conviction deep in [his] bones … I realized one phase of my life had ended … Up until now, as a soldier, my mission had been to confront, contain, and if necessary, combat communism. Now, I had to think about a world without a Cold War.”⁶⁸

Gorbachev’s domestic policies that indicated a substantial narrowing of the ideological differences dividing the superpowers thus accomplished what changes in geopolitical shifts and international diplomacy could not: they convinced US leaders that US–Soviet enmity was ending. As Nau concludes, “the decisive shifts that ended the Cold War were ideological not material or institutional. The United States and western countries revived confidence in democratic ideals (after the alleged malaise and governability crisis of western societies in the 1970s), while the Soviet Union lost further confidence in communist ideals.”⁶⁹

2.3 Conclusions

The point of this chapter is not to argue that worldviews understood as political ideologies and type identities override in all cases other influences on outcomes. There are times when materialist forces exert preeminent influence – for example, when nuclear weapons compel security interdependence;⁷⁰ or when institutional forces overcome historical geopolitical rivalries, as in the case of the European Union.⁷¹ Even social and relationalist identities matter increasingly in such issue areas as global warming. It is simply to suggest that our Weberian agency-oriented approach has important advantages that are eviscerated in more relationalist and holistic approaches. In our approach, perspectives are identified with specific actors and objectives. These actors perceive the world differently and contest their differences against an external world which they cannot completely know but which pushes back to tell them if their worldview is not false.⁷² They wrestle with moral dilemmas. As Michael Barnett points out (Chapter 5, this volume), Israeli Jews deliberate and decide between nationalist and cosmopolitan worldviews. Whatever they decide, whether they fail or succeed, they are responsible. In debates about the causes of the end of the Cold War, the reader can test different foreign policy worldviews against the evidence and decide which one makes more sense. In holistic worlds, there is no contestation of political or religious perspectives. There is no good and evil. Nothing can be questioned because boundaries are uncertain and everything is in the process of becoming. There are no certainties, no firm truths. Seen critically, the holistic vision is an appeal to disarm intellectually, to abandon the pivot of individual inquiry and insight, to blur any distinction between points of view, and to lose the element of choice which is the very essence of freedom.

3 Relationality, Post-Newtonian International Relations, and Worldviews

Milja Kurki

The challenges presented today by climate change and ecological collapses, including the ongoing sixth mass extinction,¹ are unprecedented in scale and politically complex. They are also challenging for how International Relations (IR) scholarship and other social sciences have oriented themselves to the world, human and nonhuman. As Audra Mitchell reminds us, in the face of these challenges IR scholars are only just starting to think through how we might orient to questions of survival “as such” rather than simply the survival of individual states or communities.² And, as Rafi Youatt suggests, in a rush to “manage” the oncoming crisis, we have failed to consider how interspecies and not just “human” politics is deeply embedded in our responses.³

In a way, in the face of the different scale, nature, and temporality of uncertainty implicated in ecological and climate changes, IR, alongside many political and social sciences, has struggled to break free from the conceptual bounds within which we have imagined the world: primarily Newtonian, substantialist, and also often anthropocentric in Katzenstein’s terms (see Introduction), and as such also rather narrow in terms of the political imaginations available to think through how we might negotiate the challenges ahead.

So how might we address climate change and ecological collapse differently? How are productive political conversations enabled when human and nonhuman communities adjust to changing ecological and climate conditions on the planet? And how are such questions implicated with the “relational revolution” – the rise of new forms of relational thinking and practice – in the natural and social sciences?

In this chapter I seek to tackle such questions by introducing a set of reflections arising out of “relational cosmology,” a reorientation to thought and practice around IR that I have been exploring in recent years.⁴ This perspective is aligned closely to the Post-Newtonian, relational, and hyperhumanist ends of the spectra that Katzenstein sets out in the introduction to this work. As a result, as we will see, the perspective here interrogates puzzles around “worldviews,” both in scholarly practices and in the “world” at large, in quite a distinct manner vis-à-vis classical paradigms of IR.

The relational perspective explored here suggests that the sciences – natural and social – are undergoing a “relational revolution,” moving from Cartesian, Newtonian, and empiricist ways of knowing toward more relational ontologies and epistemologies in line with not only quantum science and relativity theory but also with ecological thought and decolonization of the sciences. Relational cosmology, and Post-Newtonian perspectives more widely, argue that we can and should explore new or different ways of thinking and practicing science, politics, and also questions around agency. These perspectives encourage us to rethink the conceptual parameters and “affective” commitments that structure IR’s ways of putting the world together to manage its challenges.

The challenge of the relational perspectives, which are many, is that they do not come with easy answers or straightforward paradigmatic commitments, and they do not often even address the same questions of concern to classical paradigms of liberalism, socialism, or realism: they do not search for a rational individual to ground politics, there is no abstract ethics to justify actions on universal grounds, and there are no clear cut answers to the socialists’ favorite question: “What is to be done?”

As such, relational thinking may seem strange, frustrating, and even dangerous perhaps, to some scholars in the field (see, e.g., Nau, Chapter 6, this volume). For example, from this perspective, agents – human and nonhuman – are seen as porous, hybrid, and “distributed,” much to the displeasure of many classically Newtonian and humanist emancipatory ideologies, whether liberal or socialist. Relational perspectives – and partially related perspectives such as quantum perspectives⁵ – challenge many core conceptions of classical western humanism, its (Newtonian and secular) orientations to science, its habit of separating nature and society, and the tendency to seek to “manage” people and things. However, in answer, the relational perspectives as explored here also do not put forward a single, totalistic “worldview” or an “agent of salvation” (leader, class, rational individual, species), but rather provoke us to find new ways of thinking and feeling the world(s) around us and, through this, also representing the varied agents at stake in IR scholarship of a Post-Newtonian kind.

Relational perspectives, then, encourage a lot of new “theoretical” thinking on agency, politics, international relations, science and religion, and affect. Yet, it is important to note that they are not “theoretical” or “abstract” exercises even as it is tempting to treat them as such. They seek to be intensely practical and put forward new ways of practicing engagement, representation, and, thus, (planetary) politics (see also Duara, Chapter 7, this volume). Indeed, the most significant aspect of the relational perspectives is not (at least in my view) how they “theorize” the world as such, but rather the ways in which they ask us to view, experience, be, and “become” differently in our immediate experiences as well as through our “planetary entanglements.”

What this all means for IR scholarship or for climate change is not straightforward to work out – the implications for politics or action are contested (as rebuttals of relational work in this book show; see, for example, Nau, Chapter 6). Yet, the challenge is that, instead of turning back to political ideologies that we have turned to for centuries, political ideologies implicated in the creation of the problems we are faced with in our relationship with the “natural world”⁶ as well as in cross-cultural dialogue,⁷ we can and should explore the difficult questions emerging from the relational revolution – in the natural and social sciences – in order to develop ways of engaging the “trouble” in the current order and with our conceptions of it.

This relational “end of the spectrum” has in the context of this project been described as “the jungle,” and, as such, has been contrasted to the “gardens” or “parks” of more traditional ways of thinking and doing International Relations (Katzenstein, Chapter 10, this volume). There is something seemingly unruly, wild, and “unmanaged” about relational thinking and political practice. And, for others, this perspective appears “cuddly” and “naïve” in somehow assuming that we should love all others around us. Both conclusions, I hope to show, are too easy a response to the difficult questions raised by relational thinking. The relational perspectives are many and do not seek a uniform, singular truth. And they have multiple different challenges and questions to navigate themselves. They offer no panacea.

Yet, my belief, in line with Katzenstein’s intuition, is that these kinds of perspectives should be explored and debated more in our field precisely because the alternative – to turn back to realism, liberalism, or socialism unreconstructed – also comes with problems in the condition we inhabit. Our ways of conceiving the international and what the focus of IR should be are implicated in a particular ecological and cosmological ordering of the world.⁸ The relational perspectives then call on us instead to reimagine how we have historically come to constitute our conception of the world and to shift these imaginations to forms of politics which may seem “new,” “radical,” and “strange” to some western scholars. Yet, arguably relational qualities, practices, and thoughts, while more present in non-Western traditions, pervade the lives of “western” “individuals” too. As Grove puts it in Chapter 4, if we are all relationally processing in the world, relational thinking and negotiation is of relevance to all. Relational traditions pry open seemingly well-sealed liberal individuals or national communities, and reveal the “other aspects of ourselves,” the porosity and comaking, the overlaps, the complex constitution of individuals and communities and species.⁹

In this chapter, I start by reviewing the ways in which authors in and around IR often frame climate and ecological challenges, including the increasing number of critics of IR’s way of framing coexistence challenges on the planet. I then explicate what the so-called relational cosmology brings to the table, how it reorients our thinking and being, and, crucially, what introducing it does (in my view) to our orientation to the world (and, indeed, the idea of worldviews as an analytical category). In other words, I seek to explicate what operations of mind (and body!) are required to link relational cosmology to worldviews analysis. This (as Byrnes [Chapter 9] and Allan [Chapter 8] might also lead us to expect) includes reflection on big questions around secularism and religion, the nature of science, and the nature–society dichotomy, as well as the nature of politics and political community. Finally, I seek to show that moving to the conceptual register of relational cosmology entails a shift in how we do politics. While the political implications of relational thinking are not necessarily akin to the usual “policy implications” sought in the study of international politics, they are nevertheless of some import to how political praxis can be reoriented in and around IR and in relation to questions of climate and environment.

3.1 Climate Change, Ecological Destruction, and the Problem of International Relations

In the last twenty years, environmental challenges have arisen from the sidelines of the social and natural sciences to present some of the central challenges for theoretical and practical sciences today. This has been precipitated by the materialization of a changing climate and environmental patterns, the communication of a new scientific consensus around challenges presented for human and nonhuman life within the next decades and centuries, and also certain shifts in power relations between human communities and also arguably between key human and nonhuman communities (e.g. farmers and bees). What Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” – climatic regimes, planetary circulations, ecosystems (“massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”)¹⁰ – are appearing on our horizons, but we do not know what to “do with them”: while somehow implicated in our ability to act, and indeed our past actions, they are also not subject to human control but exceed them. They seem to challenge our very conceptions of how to “understand” and “control” the planet and processes on it. As Morton nicely reminds us, they are “hyper [in the sense of ‘over’, ‘beyond’, in excess] relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as humans.”¹¹

In this section I explore IR ways of attending to these challenges, first within traditional paradigms, and second amongst a series of critical scholars.

3.1.1 Responses to Climate and Environment

While the environment and its use has always stood at the heart of geopolitical origins of IR,¹² and while environmental concerns feature in realist as well as liberal frames in IR theory, the way in which these concerns are addressed reveals crucial aspects of the epistemic, ontological, and thus also political assumptions of these theories.

In realist theory, for example, the “environment” is treated primarily as a resource to be strategized about and utilized to ensure that a state meets its interests (or the interests of its human community). Classically, the realist school would focus on immediate security threats and thus dismiss climate and ecological change as secondary to the more immediate existential crises human communities face. Yet, this does not mean realists cannot take action on environmental and climate crises: as Sofer argues, “even a hard-nosed realist should support international cooperation on climate change. Due to climate change’s impact as a “threat multiplier,” the benefits of cooperation now outweigh the potential gap in relative gains between cooperating countries.”¹³ It is how this action is to be taken that is paramount: key actors on the environment are the state and the international (human communities) and politics involves their human interaction “on” the environment. The sphere of action is the “international.” In other words the environment is seen as external to “human” communities’ interests, strategies, and intentions. State survival, while dependent on resources, is an abstract problem of human decision-making. States, as human communities, are “lifted off” the planetary negotiations as they determine their own relations to each other and to the “environment.”

A classical liberal perspective on environmental change works with similar assumptions, while being more encouraging of “international” negotiation between states and other human communities. Liberal concerns revolve around interdependence and the ways in which environmental risks travel across states (as human communities) necessitating cooperation. To address climate and environmental concerns, then, we must assess how institutional structures could work in creating more sustainable outcomes. Some say liberal democracies can do the work, others call for cosmopolitan arrangements: either way, states have a key role in responding to the moment of crisis presented by climate change – “our political moment,” as Beardsworth calls it.¹⁴

At the heart of liberal approaches is an acceptance of not only states as a key institutional reference point, but also, fundamentally, the separation of human institutions from the “environment” as a background to be controlled and managed. To come through the climate challenge, “we” have to manage the environment correctly by redirecting human intentionality and incentive structures. This by and large means working with, but revising, current domestic and global institutional structures. Climate crisis is then ultimately a “human coordination problem,” and in dealing with it is essential that we learn from what we have achieved in terms of institutional (re)structuring of global life so far. Rather than challenging the international order, climate change emphasizes the importance of maintaining it and working through it.

But what about the constructivists and critical theorists? Do they not give us useful new ways of thinking on the environment?

For sure. Constructivists call for more detailed engagement with the way in which we construct environmental problems and the discursive parameters of how we can shift how states or communities relate to the problem; on the other hand, critical theorists of various persuasions point to the limits of the underlying assumptions of such perspectives.¹⁵ Governmentality scholars, for example, highlight the environment as a site of creation of liberal governmentality and state power,¹⁶ while feminist political ecologists would call for greater attention to be paid to the ways in which we relate to the environment, via specific conceptions of the human and of the environment.¹⁷ Environmental concerns are constructed, and “we” and our political communities (including their security interests) are constructed with them.

While interesting, here too arguably deeply humanist assumptions often play a key role: it is the discursive and normative construction by humans of the environment which concerns these thinkers. “Our” ideological and normative framings are key in how we come to and act toward the “environment,” and new ways of doing politics on it depend on new social constructions among human actors. This is why normative entrepreneurship around environmental sustainability for example matters – domestically and in the international sphere.

This range of perspectives is interesting. Yet, there is arguably an implicit set of “worldviews” – if not a singular, clearly bounded “worldview” – reflected in many of these perspectives. Core assumptions of such could be described as follows.

First, at the heart of this broad worldview stands the idea of the “human,” standing over the “environment.” A distinction between culture and nature is foundational to much of the social sciences, including IR. As Latour puts it, there is a House of Humans/Politics and a House of Nature that stands at the heart of the modern Western scientific endeavor and political thought.¹⁸ Even political ecologists have reproduced this division of human and nature: “if political ecology poses a problem it is not because it finally introduces nature into political preoccupations that had earlier been too exclusively oriented toward humans, it is because it continues, alas, to use nature to abort politics.”¹⁹ How we think the human and the natural or the social and the environmental present deep challenges.

These assumptions are underpinned by even deeper assumptions about there being distinct “things” in the world which work against “backgrounds.” Such Newtonian assumptions are fundamental to modern liberalism and realism, which perceive the world as constructed by “things” moving, self-willed and autonomous, but also arguably to many other schools of thought and our everyday language. Indeed, try and think about the world without things and language barriers soon force your mind back to habits of thought with a long legacy in western religious, cosmological, and scientific thought. Yet these assumptions too are particular: that is, framings of basic ontologies of the worlds of Buddhist, Andean, and South Pacific peoples²⁰ are not in line with these assumptions, but point to different, more relational, ways of framing the very basic orientations to the world and thus our “views on the world.” There are not just different worldviews; there are families of worldviews with quite different orientations to substances and relations, the human and the nonhuman, nature and society.

But this is not all: at the heart of how we think the environment also arise deep questions around whose experiences frame the “international” and “global” challenges of environmental or climate change. Indeed, the international is a curious ontological notion in its wedding onto the world of a very particular humanist frame: politics on the planet involves the politics between human communities (“states”).

Even the framing of the “global” reproduces this: when we address “global challenges,” such as climate change, we are in need of a “universal” human response across political communities. The challenge of how to think the climate, then, is not just how to think common responses but how to think critically about how the international and the global, how human division and commonality, have been imagined. These ways of thinking have not only worked to deprive some human communities of land, rights, and response-ability, but also have embedded into the world a very particular framing of humans and nonhumans. Many of the apocalyptic narratives which drive “global” policy discourses even now have embedded within them racialized and racist assumptions ignorant of experiences of indigenous populations, for example.²¹

It is worth noting the role of these foundational “cosmological” understandings of the world that is at the heart of how we orient to environmental and climate politics (see also Allan, Chapter 8 in this volume, for discussion of cosmology and worldviews). These are sometimes hard to discern but are increasingly unpacked not only in IR²² but also in the social and natural sciences more widely. They have also been pointed to by a series of important interventions around the Anthropocene, planet politics, and decolonial thought.

3.1.2 Anthropocene, Planet Politics, and Decoloniality

Although little has shifted in traditional IR vocabularies – or the worldview assumptions underpinning them – as a result of the rise of climate and ecological challenges, this is not the case in the social and natural sciences more widely. Indeed, the “paradoxes of the anthropocene” (arising from the increasing realization of human influence on hyperobjects while seemingly lacking direct control over them) have been discussed at length in both the natural and social sciences and also increasingly in critical IR in the last decades.²³ Indeed, in recent years there have been many calls in the field for a radical reorientation of the conceptual premises and empirical foci of “International Relations.”

Thus, for example, in 2016 a collective of IR scholars released a paper that called for a new turn in IR: a turn toward so-called “planet politics.”²⁴ This manifesto, first, reflected the wider calls in the humanities and social and natural sciences for scientific disciplines to “deal with” the Anthropocene: the increasing realization of humans” role in structuring planetary relations, which also has precipitated calls for overcoming classical notions of “humanhood” as well as the “environment.”

Second, this manifesto specifically challenged IR for its fundamental inability to deal with the “social nature” it is implicated in: the embeddedness of our patterns of international politics, our conceptions of the world and its key actors and all aspects of human life in what used to look to us like an external nonhuman “nature” must be reckoned with, both in policy and in “consciousness” of humans facing ecological disasters around them.

The planet politics manifesto has been critiqued from various angles: for being too conservative and liberal cosmopolitan,²⁵ for being unclear in meaning,²⁶ and for how debate around it has been conducted.²⁷ Yet, nevertheless it indicates an important challenge in IR: that we are coming to the limits of the classical political imaginations on which we have built our ways of dealing with “coexistence challenges” in IR.

Thus, whether it is attempts to build new kinds of democratic orders – a geopolitan democracy,²⁸ for example – or imaginations of posthuman politics in complex systems,²⁹ change is afoot in the study of IR to realign the discipline’s conceptual systems and political responses with “planetary realities,” as Burke et al would have it.³⁰ These critics argue that we must look “elsewhere” than the state and the international system to rethink the current order, potential politics, and communities that matter in negotiating the “planetary real.”

It follows that not only realism and liberalism but also classical (humanist) traditions of constructivism and critical theory have been left far behind as new types of relationalism have been suggested for IR. At the center of the concern of relational thinkers has been rethinking, as Fishel puts it, “the ways in which we create ourselves, both as individuals and as humans, beyond how the state predefines our identities as citizens.”³¹ Drawing on critical humanism and posthumanism, analysts have sought to develop ways to think about the human as a historical construction, thus also developing a concern for the way in which the nonhuman has been relegated to a background to “human action” conceived as the center-ground of politics and international relations.³² Rafi Youatt’s important book shows to us how interspecies politics functions in world politics as we know it: just because we have delimited our capacity to understand how politics works does not mean interspecies politics do not already shape our world order and states. We must take on the bias that “species should be a central barrier to who can be part of global politics.”³³

On the other hand, relatedly, building on alternative cosmologies, some relational thinkers have called for a simultaneous turn toward non-Western ideological and cultural sources of rethinking capitalism, communities, and the international.³⁴ They have argued for engagement with new and old forms of relationalism often not seen from within Western ideological and cultural assumptions wedded to rationalism and individualism.³⁵

These kinds of interventions have been termed a “relational turn” in the field.³⁶ The oncoming ecological changes, alongside attempts to decolonize the social and natural sciences, have brought about a need to think through, far more carefully, how IR scholars have related to the world through very specific conceptual categories. IR has inherited its conceptual bases from specific (often European) cosmologies and theological notions, notions later embedded in seemingly secular conceptual order and also disseminated around the world through colonialism. ³⁷

Relational approaches are of great significance as we tackle the current human and nonhuman predicaments. They challenge more classical ways of conceiving of ecological negotiations in the field of IR, but also crucially start to open up important questions around geopolitical power in knowledge constructions, the nature of science, the relationship between sciences and secularism, and also questions around who make up the “political communities” or “negotiations” that matter. I find them persuasive also because they tap into and question a whole range of underlying assumptions, cosmologies, and worldviews, reflected in the more classical paradigms of IR.

With this in mind, I explore one particular relational frame implicated in the wider relational turn to discern its impacts for reflections on worldviews in IR and ultimately (in Section 3.3) for reorientation of how we might engage questions around environmental and climate politics.

3.2 Relations in a Relational Universe

Instead of trying to reflect the full scope of relational thought in a short chapter, I focus on the implications of relational cosmology, a perspective which I have been working with for some five years now and which (to my mind) expresses relational principles and what is at stake in them rather clearly and also converses with other relational perspectives in interesting way.³⁸ My focus here is to bring out the core assumptions of relational cosmology and to relate them to the discussion of worldviews and IR theory.

3.2.1 Relational Cosmology

Relational cosmology is developed by Lee Smolin, in conjunction with other physicists such as Carlo Rovelli but also recently, interestingly, in cooperation with social theorists such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The core principles of relational cosmology as developed by Smolin come through in texts such as The Life of the Cosmos (1997), Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000), The Trouble with Physics (2008), Time Reborn (2013), and the coauthored The Singular Universe (2015).

Relational cosmology’s basic claim is that sciences are telling us to shift our background assumptions, if you like our foundational worldviews or conceptual bases, in some fundamental ways. We must give up on “God’s eye views” on the world and get to grips with the thoroughly relational nature of the universe and of us as “situated” knowers within its relationalities. Crucially, this shift is precipitated by experimental and empirical findings of the natural sciences. In the first instance, this arises from relational cosmologists’ interest in the theory of general relativity and their development of a specific theory of quantum gravity: Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG). These physical theories, which Smolin and Rovelli are both involved in developing, require, for them, certain shifts in our conceptual universes. The physical theories call on us to “think differently” about “what there is” in the universe.

Crucially, for them, scientific findings are “screaming” for us to realize, and to work through, the fact that there really are no such things as things or backgrounds in the universe. Indeed, space itself is not a background in which things move, but part of the network of relationships in the universe. The loops that make space are “linked to each other, forming a network of relations which weaves the texture of space, like rings of a finely woven immense chain mail.”³⁹ Crucially, these loops are not “anywhere” in space: “they are themselves the space … the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships.”⁴⁰

It follows that what we need to grapple with in the sciences is the need for a thoroughgoing relational, processual understanding of the universe. All “things” and “backgrounds,” as we would have it in our everyday discourse derived from Newtonian conceptions of space, are in fact relational processes in the process of relating.⁴¹ Relational cosmology is an extension of what it means to think relationally and has important implications also for the social sciences, for “one of the things that cannot exist outside the universe [and its relations] is ourselves.”⁴² As Smolin puts it:

relativity and quantum theory each tell us this is not how the world is. They tell us – no, scream at us – that our world is a history of processes. Motion and change are primary. Nothing is, except in a very approximate and temporary sense. How something is, or what its state is, is an illusion.⁴³

The challenge, then, is how do we think relationally, and how do we follow through with the implications of thoroughgoing relationality? How do we think without Newtonian configuration space populated by things moving against backgrounds?

With some difficulty. How do we know when the world around us can only be known in ways that are inevitably situated in relations? If nothing in the universe is outside of relational unfolding of the universe – not even the scientists or the laws of the universe, which are also made relationally – how do we think the sciences or the social sciences? This is a challenging situation. As Smolin puts it, “[i]t is not easy to find the right language to use to talk about the world if one really believes that the notion of reality depends on the context of the person who does the talking.”⁴⁴

The relational revolution in the sciences extends across the social and natural sciences, and all the sciences, for Smolin, are engaged in a shift of worldview, from a substantialist, Newtonian view toward a processual, relational relative view. A lot is implicated in such a shift. And such a shift has many important implications because a lot is implicated in the shift. Indeed, inhabiting this worldview takes on all kinds of other categories, divisions, and dichotomies that we often work with.

There are at least five key things implicated in such a shift. We need to consider issues with: 1) secularism and religion and their complex relationships in defining conceptual tools; 2) affect and (re)enchantment of the world and science; 3) the categories of human and nonhuman, natural and social; 4) science and democracy, and 5) our conceptions and practices of politics.

1 Science: Not Simply Secular

One of the key aspects of relational cosmology and the perspectives of the relational turn more widely is that they necessarily open up questions around religion, secularism, and, indeed, reason and affect in how we engage the world (see 2: Affect: Knowing and Becoming).

This is because at the heart of the critique is a realization of, and, at the same time, a certain discomfort with, (Christian) religious dogmas as they are played out in much of our conceptual systems. Relational cosmology both notices the role of religious thought in science and seeks to point to how this also limits how we can think. It follows that doing science also necessitates thinking on legacies of religion. The comfortable distinction of secularism and religion, then, is not possible within this frame (see also discussions in Byrnes, Chapter 9, this volume).

These concerns come out in different ways. For Smolin, for example, the key concern is the implicit Christian commitments in physical sciences: the ways in which assumptions about Laws of Physics or Nature replay certain unthinkingly religious commitments which prevent us from following through conceptually what empirical findings are telling us. For Carlo Rovelli, the concern is about the inability of man to see itself as part of nature due to a Christian legacy of seeing humans as “lifted” above nature.⁴⁵

Interestingly, these concerns are closely tied up with the interest in political theology in the field of IR.⁴⁶ Indeed, both relational cosmology and recent literatures in the field of political theology point to a concern with the hidden religiosity attached to secular humanism and its conceptual basis. Secularism itself is being unpacked for its religious commitments and its particular versions of humanism.⁴⁷ The implication is that IR and our own ways of conceiving the world must be probed for their religious undertones, whether in our conceptions of autonomous humans, cosmological origins of notions of anarchy, or improvement or the commitments to the ideas of “laws of nature.”

2 Affect: Knowing and Becoming

The foregoing discussion has important implications also for how we try to know, or indeed for the constitution of, “reason.” Reason is not disenchanted within this frame, and, strangely, at stake in how we know is not just how we know: it is also how we “are.” That is, to know is also to be, to become, in a particular way in and of the world. Indeed, knowing through reason is a particular way of materializing the world, not a universal manifestation of some abstract principles.

As such, to “know” is affective, as well as materially productive of the world’s unfolding. That is, we do not simply know through reason, but are materially embodied in the world, which also “cuts” on us.

We are in a very uncomfortable sense not just on the world, trying to know it, but also of it and cutting into it with our concepts and acts. This means that we are never engaged in just knowing about others or their worldviews “in abstract”; we are also ourselves implicated in the world(s) analyzed, and these worlds are dynamic and multiple, partially made up of how we “cut” the world, how we materialize it through our thoughts or actions.

This also pertains to the ways of being of scientists or IR scholars: they are also made of the world’s materializations and produce them; they are not “above” them. And scientific knowledges and practices also produce or “cut” the relationalities of the world in specific ways.⁴⁸

3 The Human and the Nonhuman Agency: Porosity

In the same sense that complexity theorists and posthumanists argue that the modern human is a kind of an invention or a production of relatively recent history with its origins in theological notions of man as well as particular colonial inventions of “humanity,” the relational cosmologists allow us to open up or keep looser the idea of the human and its conceptual counterpart, the nonhuman.⁴⁹ The idea of the human as “lifted” from its environment, as a manager of its ecology, is a very particular production of life, coincidental with certain religious traditions but also of the rise of agricultural and industrial societies.

From a relational point of view this is not the essence of “the” “human”: the human is a processual creation made in relations to and by creating “others,” human and nonhuman. When we realize this we come to see that the human is not autonomous but part of a rich set of voices and lifeforms. In the relational universe live, then, not only humans but also the nonhumans which they are entangled with.

Crucially, in this mesh we, “the humans” and others are “strange” in Morton’s sense⁵⁰ – that is, never fully capturable, partly because “we” are never fully “autonomous”; we are made relationally and know situatedly from relations. That is, the notions of sovereignty of the individual and the state, and indeed of any object, is in question in this perspective. There are no beings, there are only relational processes: symbionts relationally processing “across” each other.

In a relational universe, then, we must embrace the “strangeness” required to think and to be, and we see the limits of the Cartesian need to control (and discipline) the human and the nonhuman. And we see the many dialogues which shoot across the “levels of analysis” (natural and social sciences) and dichotomies (nature, society) that structure modern conceptions of the human, of agency, and of the political.

As such, agency, or even prioritization of questions of agency, is not a central concern of this perspective; rather, it is to think through distributed and shared agencies (if that is what one still wishes to call them).

4 Science as Community in Cosmos

The foregoing assumptions also have implications for how we think about science. For Smolin, much like for many posthumanists, science is not abstracted from the world. It is part of becoming, of affective being in the world. What this means is that we do not have clear-cut criteria for good or bad knowledge, much as postpositivists always suspected but now embrace as a key cornerstone of scientific approach itself.

In this view, knowledge itself is not just knowledge. Instead, curiously, science is more like democracy: it is about openness to and openness about what we assume, think, explore, and interact with. And it is about making relations, cutting the world.

Science is, as Smolin puts it, about a kind of “democratic” being and becoming in the cosmos. It is about probing and thus relating, and rethinking relations and communities that matter. Science is part of the making of a community of relational being becoming the relational cosmos. Science in this perspective, then, is not defined by a “method.” As Unger and Smolin put it, “There is no scientific method, science is fundamentally defined as a collection of ethical communities.”⁵¹

5 Conceptions of Politics

Crucially, what is shifted here too are views on politics and what and who count as political agents. There is no classical distinction here between human polities and those polities that do not matter. Communities cross boundaries of “human.” This means that in a very real sense we can also think about representing and coexisting in communities with nonhumans, animals, vegetables, and minerals. Or, as Youatt so powerfully puts it, we must start to call into question the “representation of nonhuman life through human speech as a sole point of entry for nonhuman species into the sphere of the political.”⁵²

How we gather these communities together, and how we process politics without abstracted special human communities, is an intense focus of theoretical and practical research. How do we compose the universe? How do we converse? How do we do democracy when we are more than human?

This is all very well, you might say, but what has this to do with the worldviews frame of this book?

3.2.2 Implications for “Worldviews”

There are (at least) three key implications for the discussion in this book of worldviews – both everyday worldviews and scientific worldviews:

1. 1. Non-Newtonian alternatives. There is a kind of (shifted, non-Cartesian, non-Newtonian) worldview reflected in this frame and it appears it challenges a different kind of orientation: a more substantialist orientation with things and agents. It is also a worldview that is seen as part of a much wider, and more varied, relational revolution in arts and the humanities, as well as the sciences. Indeed, Smolin explicitly sees his work as part of a wider relational revolution expressed across western culture and science and also beyond it. An interesting aspect of relational cosmology has been its ability to recognize the limits of “western” science and the legitimacy of varied ways of knowing from outside of the “rationalist” scientific frame. This is in part because of its much wider understanding of science as situated becoming in relations.

   It is then interesting, as Katzenstein suggests, to point to a kind of a continuum of worldviews from this perspective. Relational cosmology does also suggest that there is a difference between this perspective and atomist Newtonian ones. And it suggests a more systematic shift from certain more substantantialist orientations that still play a key role in the sciences and social sciences such as IR (as well as in everyday life) to more relational understandings of the world, with important consequences for our conceptual frames as well as our engagements with the world.

2. 2. However, there is a multiplicitous alternative. It follows that from this perspective we should be attuned to worldviews and the wide (and widening?) spectra of them. And we should trace them across communities and across time.

   Crucially, within this frame worldviews can never be understood in a singular frame. In this perspective no view, no view of the world, is ever singular or alone – because no view is lifted “above” the relations which make it. Even science is based on situated knowledge.

   This is not all. All worldviews are also relationally linked. There are no uniform, autonomous worldviews; there are always just many situated, relationally connected worldviews. Thus, the world, being, and becoming within it is always polyphonic in speaking, being, and cutting into the world, and worldviews from this perspective then also thus are always smeared across each other. That is, they are not pure, or separated, but cut into each other. In Ling’s terms, even oppositional worldviews are made of each other; they are off each other relationally.⁵³ It is recording this dance, being attentive to the relationalities, which is the challenge of engaging with worldviews in a relational frame. And this is in part why they are so interesting to study.

3. 3. Worlds and Worldviews. There is another sense in which worldviews” frames are challenged or pushed by this perspective. As is emphasized by the so-called ontological-turn authors,⁵⁴ worldviews here emerge less as “views on the world” and more like what we might call “lifeways” or “worlds.” That is, since the world does not exist “out there” to be viewed from the point of view of the special human, and since the nonhuman makes the human, worldviews too are more like relational paths in the world. They are not “of us” humans but made in relational assemblages with nonhumans. And nonhumans also make of us, our thoughts, frames, relations. Even when we narrate them as others they are in fact in and of relations with us.

   Thus, I think we also come to be critical of the “worldviews” frame, for possibly itself embodying certain humanist predilections which may deny some of the ways of thinking through and being “relationally.” In this context, exploring the arguments of pluriverse theorists is interesting. They ask us to get beyond thinking about the world as consisting of multiple viewpoints, or perspectives, and to start thinking in terms of multiple worlds, literally: multiple sometimes related worlds of being. As Viveiros de Castro emphasizes, we are not just concerned with multiple “imaginary ways of seeing the world, but real worlds that are being seen.”⁵⁵ This also implicates our affect, bodies, in knowing – for, literally, how we know is also implicated in our bodily ways of traversing and experiencing.

   The challenge, then, is how to deal with multiple worlds without erasing worlds – in thought and action. How do plural lifeways negotiate and collaborate on the planet? While I leave a full explication of this line of thought for another occasion, I think is interesting, potentially, in shifting questions around how we come to questions around worldviews, which may be productive for a project such as this to explore.

But what, the reader may ask (and some of the authors in this book have pointedly asked me throughout this project!), are the supposedly concrete, practical implications of this kind of an orientation for where we started: concern around climate and environmental politics?

3.3 Politically Practical, But in a “Strange Way”

How can we best use our research to stem the tide of ruination? … Our hope is that [paying better attention] to overlaid arrangements of human and non-human living spaces … will allow us to stand up to the constant barrage of messages asking us to forget – that is, to allow a few private owners and public officials with their eyes focused on short-term gains to pretend that environmental devastation does not exist … To survive we need to re-learn multiple forms of curiosity. Curiosity is an attunement to multispecies entanglement, complexity and the shimmer all around us.⁵⁶

First encounters in IR circles with the kind of relational perspectives explored herein often generate responses such as: What does this contribute to real resolution of interstate conflict around climate change contributions (requiring, ultimately, state cooperation internationally and human action domestically)? In ignoring basic building blocks of “how we do politics” (between individuals, in states, and on the international stage), does it not in fact undermine our ability to address climate catastrophe? How can we have practice “policy response” in a relational mesh?

The relational perspective examined here, and relational perspectives more widely,⁵⁷ do not come to IR or practical politics with disinterest. They come to it with a sense of deep disappointment and a certain level of anger and frustration about how our ways of doing and knowing international politics reproduce ways of “allowing” us to forget about how we must and could shift ways of doing politics. Relational perspectives, then, do not come to IR with a hope for an “invitation” into the IR parlor-game, but with a call for different kinds of dances altogether.

These new dances are not uninterested in the world, nor are they “theoretical,” “utopian,” or “impractical”; yet, they pull on our sensibilities, ways of being, and lifeways in some strange and uncomfortable ways. If you like, they pull us into the world differently; and encourage us to “commit” to world(s) around us differently. Crucially, within this (set of) worldview(s) who the communities are that matter are shifted, quite fundamentally, and, as a result, so are negotiating sites and modalities of politics. Instead of doing global governance of the humans and for the humans, engagement with politics might also entail immersion into marine communities or thinking with trees. And engagement with “humans” here too becomes less about modeling negotiations between abstract, autonomous humans and more about exploring various ways in which “humans” are made and cut the world around them, and not only as (abstract, universal) humans but also as “more-than-humans” (porously processing in mesh).

A couple of points, then, could be noted about “politics” in such a context.

• There is, for sure, interest in politics beyond states, the international, and the global, but for somewhat different reasons from classical liberal scholars, say. In this frame, all states, individuals, and communities are porous and worldviews are porous too. Because every “thing” is made in relational processes, they are to be understood as part of relational processes shaped far and wide. Crucially, then, to do “politics” in such a context is not to represent “oneself” or one’s “state” – these constructs are just one way to cut the world politically. Rather, the aim is to “loosen” actors (at the boundaries) to understand cobeing, entanglement, and conegotiation across “beings,” actors, and species. In terms of climate and environment politics this means, for example, that state politics and global responses are not the be-all and end-all of “political” negotiation. Rather, attempts to understand and conduct diplomacy with more-than-human humans and, crucially, plants, animals, and ecosystems becomes a central aspect of politics. Politics is not “only-human.” One way of describing this is as a form of planetary politics: a process of making kin and doing diplomacy in more-than-human worlds. Or we can understand it as Youatt calls it: as interspecies politics.⁵⁸ In this frame we recognize that we must and do negotiate with, on a daily basis, bacteria, fish, and trees as well as humans. They “think” and they “act”; and we represent them even at present, but often badly: we can learn to represent them and ourselves and our symbiotic relations better. As Dutch activists engaged in the Embassy of the North Sea point out, it is difficult but not impossible to learn to represent algae, water, and fish communities.

• Yet, this planetary or interspecies politics – also of interest in different ways for Duara and Grove (Chapters 7 and 4, this volume) – is not “one” and is engaged from different traditions of thought, culturally and in terms of experiences of natural world. Such politics, then, comes with critical sensibility about “crisis environmentalism”⁵⁹ or the “planet talking” for us – the environment “dictating” matters⁶⁰. This is in part because the politics of how the “environment” is created, and how the “human” (only) also emerges from this, are key to work through and become animated about in this view. There is an intense interest in the politics of the human and the nonhuman. How some migrant populations are made as “less than human,” and how mass slaughter of animals is facilitated by constructions of “lifted” humanity, are intense focal points of negotiation politically. These constructions work at the international level, but they are also at play in our daily negotiations.

• As such, there is also a wariness of “politics” of control, panic, and management. Relational perspectives point out that much of western political imaginations – including climate change politics – is tied up with forms of control and, simultaneously, many apocalyptic visions of “threats” to humanity (or some humans) and their preferred notions of autonomy and agency. From this perspective, the need to control and manage “the earth” as part of climate change politics is seen as part of the problem, rather than a solution. This does not mean we should not take political action on climate change, but it does mean that this action cannot be taken simply to reproduce, in a panic, the same politics of control which are in part to blame for where we have ended up (a deeply hierarchical order of [some humans’] control). These perspectives agree with decolonial and critical perspectives in recognizing that “modern politics” and “international politics” have been not just about representation or coordination only but also, deeply, about discipline, control, and order for some over others. We must therefore watch out for what forms of politics we encourage – politics of negotiation or politics of control – and pay attention to when the one starts to bleed into the other. Implicated in these questions are also questions of colonialism, racism, and species-solipsism.

These kinds of reorientations to politics, and there may be others, may mean different things to different communities in different relational perspectives. For me, “personally” they have provoked important changes in concrete political practice. For example, I have ceased to look to the international order for the “solutions” and have redirected my political action to alternative forms of local and global attempts to understand and represent humans and nonhumans. My academic politics too today revolves around teaching how we might think, “feel,” and act differently, thinking carefully with toads, spiders, and plants. Yes, we read “plant theory” in my MA class on the future of IR! And I am pleased my students going into the practice of “classical” politics have written their essays on political leadership of matriarch elephants or how to re-relate to nonhuman life through music. I think their engagement with the world, experientially and politically, has shifted, as has mine, through exposure to relational ways of “loosening” ourselves into the world – even if these political negotiations do not at once overturn the international order and all the cosmological baggage (of classical humanism) it comes with.

Will such politics “save us”? Perhaps not. Indeed, these kinds of perspectives also throw up many difficult questions on which much more reflection is needed. Thus, is relationalism necessarily a good thing, or does relationality mean that “machines,” “structures,” and “ecologies” can structure our fate to such an extent as to destroy any hope for emancipatory politics?⁶¹ Is there an ethics of relational thinking, and what does it consist of?⁶² And how do we assess political action if it is situated and context specific? What happens to structural or collective responses? Are we driven to some sort of weird individualism? What is it to represent beyond the human voice? Who are communities if there are no “I”s or “we”s?

These and many other important questions remain unanswered, or different responses to them are being developed. But they are being asked, seriously, and being explored, seriously. This, if nothing else, is evidence of the significant kind of shift in worldviews that is ongoing in the field of IR, along with many others in the context of the relational revolution.

3.4 Conclusion: Of Jungles, Parks, and Cities?

Those who exist in a Newtonian world of things and their patterns and look for order – in the gardens of IR – may not see this kind of intervention as productive. And yet, within the “ruins” of ecological and human chaos we are facing, it is probably best not to pretend that IR or global power management has succeeded in managing these issues. Perhaps we should, as Grove argues, call out the “old white men [who] still strut around the halls of America’s best institutions as if they saved us from the Cold War, even as the planet crumbles under the weight of their failed imperial dreams.”⁶³ In the real world there is trouble, much trouble, and we need to stay with the trouble, as Haraway would have it.⁶⁴ In a relational universe, perhaps more productive than anything that reproduces the failing orderly IR, with its American hegemony, its colonial impulses, its stubborn state-centrism, its inherent liberal individualism, its alliance with capitalism, is to learn to let go of the special discipline, of the failed paradigms for politics, of the insistent humanism of the social sciences and IR. And we should let go of the measures of success and relevance of those working to a providential plan for human redemption, eventually.

I’m persuaded by the call that we need to get more real. And getting real means also getting real about which kinds of worldviews, or orientations to being in the world, we work with. Relational revolution is here, global ecological collapse is here; “humanity” (as an imagined whole) was never saved and has not saved the world. How do we reckon with this?

The aim of relational thinking is to try to process in and coexist with the world and its rich, real participants, and figure out less brutal ways of living, for more actors. It does not aim to be policy relevant for the “killing machines”⁶⁵ of lifeways, cosmologies, and politics that many of our states, democracies, and economic orders are. What we need to “get with” in a relational perspective, then, is a sense of “letting go” of these orientation points. This letting go is not to give up on politics or community or diplomacy, but it is to give up on imagining political or social orders as a park, carefully managed, ordered, and eradicating of ecologies of relationalities.

The spatial metaphor Smolin prefers for a relational form of life in the universe is a “city.”⁶⁶ For him, a city is a perfect example of a relational unfolding of multiplicities of relations. It is not one “thing”; we don’t know where its “borders” are; it is smeared across humans, nonhumans, and technology and has roots in the rural and the global all at the same time. States are also smeared, and so are we. To think like this is to let go of ontological categories that are fixed – a notion of relations with definitions, but it is to gain a way of knowing and being in the world which is interesting and embedded in the world. In this world, you are made and you are cutting across others as we speak. And you explore, curiously, the relations which make you, but which you can never fully capture. Political being and intra-action is not between defined beings with interests, but “collaboration across difference”⁶⁷ in relations.

It follows that climate change is so many other things than a climate change problem to be solved by humans in the international politics of the humans. In a relational worldview it is a process of negotiation of many actors and relations. It is of the “mesh,” and not to be easily tamed or tackled in a “park” or a “garden.” It is a mess of diverse beings cohabiting, battling for space, transforming and taking over, never uniform, never singular, never nondynamic or nonlinear. Thus is also world politics. Relational IR then too is “doutblessly messy,” as Kavalski would have it.⁶⁸ That’s not a “problem” if the world is also a mess.

What is required in this mess/mesh is constant wariness of the habits of thought that simplify too much: simplify what it is to think and act politically, simplify what it is to think and act globally, simplify what it is to think and act scientifically. And from this perspective what is needed is fewer new total single global visions – a worldview; rather, what is needed is “multiplying viewpoints so as to complicate all “provincial” or “closed” views with new variants.”⁶⁹

Thinking carefully on worldviews, then, surely is key in this process. But we also perhaps need to think on limitations of how we perceive worldviews. Whose views? Whose worlds? How do worldviews collaborate, conflict, and cohabit? In a relational universe, the key challenge of the social sciences, and of IR, is to adjust to this inherent and constant difficulty and also to the limitations of our thought and practice. Engaging in politics in a relational universe does, then, involve a different way of engaging uncertainty, as Katzenstein proposes in the introduction. Paraphrasing Morton, engaging politics in a relational universe is “like knowing, but more like letting be known. It is something like coexisting. It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation.”⁷⁰

4 The President as Mascot Relations All the Way Down

Jairus Victor Grove

The occasion of this collection is the problem of worldviews for the field of international relations (IR). I want to invoke this problem in more than one sense. First, I am interested in how the kinds of worldviews we inhabit change the way we study international relations. In my case, I will try to present the reasoning behind my methodological decision to adopt a relational world view as opposed to a mechanistic world view made up of discrete objects with specific and stable essences. Second, I want to show the way that worldviews function in our relational world – that is, in practice.

In an attempt to create a conversation across the different chapters, I offer an account of what I think relationalism is and its origins within the tradition of international relations. As is often the case of adherents to a particular position, I want to show that we are all relationalists, just some better and more explicit than others. I also want to dispel a few presumptions about what I think relationalism can and cannot do, and give a sketch of what a relational approach could look like in addressing a seemingly straightforward legal or technical question about nuclear authority.

4.1 What is Relationalism, for Me?

First and foremost, relationalism is an is, not a should. I mean it as a claim to how I believe the world actually works. For me, it comes primarily from the radical empiricist tradition of William James, C.S. Pierce, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, and Gabriel Tarde. Second, the goal of a relational approach is to figure out how things – including people, states, and technological systems – actually work, rather than to make claims about how things should work or predictive claims about how things will continue to work. Therefore, it is in the philosophical sense a realist position not primarily interested in questions of representation or interpretation, but also not indifferent to them. Relationalism sees problems of human access to the world (representation) and problems of meaning-making and communication (hermeneutics) as being horizontal with other relations, such as those we think of as biological or technological. This has been described by Manuel Delanda as a “flat ontology.”¹ Human observation and interpretation is on the ground floor with everything else, rather than above it, apart from it, or looking down at the world.

Although it certainly has a strong claim to ontology – how things are – relationalism is an ontology of becoming. Process is privileged over structure or fixity in the traditional sense. Highly dynamic and transversal ecosystems are privileged over equilibrium systems such as those imagined by Talcott Parsons or other Hegelian inheritors who see the world as turgid and therefore only open to gradual and often purposive change.

The correlate to an emphasis on becoming or the dynamic evolutionary character of change within systems and of systems directs us to investigate processes – stories about distributed formations and deformations – rather than agents or variables which could be said to be the “effect” of a process. In part, the so-called “flat ontology” of relational worldviews renders distinctions between independent and dependent variables, and agents and structures, somewhat arbitrary. As an aside, arbitrary here does not mean meaningless. It simply means not essential – that is, not bearing an essence. What is causally significant, what is an agent, what is a system instead is most often an effect of investigation. At what scale one asks the question, and the scale of the investigator, radically alters what appears as a part and what appears as a whole. For instance, from this perspective, the methodological individualism of social theory and many other theories is not a natural unit of analysis. Instead, the focus on the individual as a causal principle comes from the unity we “feel” as an “I.”

We rarely experience ourselves as disaggregated (although drug-induced effects, bouts of madness, dreaming, etc., are exceptions most people experience over the course of their lives). However, we are disaggregated. From William James’ Principles of Psychology, in which we are a “bundle of affects and perceptions,”² through to contemporary neuroscience investigations of mood-altering gut bacteria, preconscious decision-making, and increasingly compelling philosophical accounts of a subjectless human by Galen Strawson and others, we have strong reason to believe that even this most basic unit quickly begins to come apart at the seams as we zoom in for closer investigation.³

As we zoom out, the litany of parts reveals more and more wholes. Consider group behavior in the form of riots and crowds, which exhibit flocking behavior even in humans. Extending the view just a little further, communities and then societies appear in which the lack of central planning (and even contrary to central planning) there is repetitive behavior, cooperation, and transactions of all kinds. An aerial view of a major highway system exhibits behavioral phenomena vastly beyond the conscious coordinating capability of individual humans or the technology they are interfacing with. Despite the high number of auto fatalities, that there are not more is astounding. The average daily commute is more than an hour a day of barely conscious muscle memory playing out amongst thousands of actors with little to no communication beyond turn signals and the occasional horn. And what about zooming out much further? If we occupy the space between the earthrise and Carl Sagan’s little blue dot, the entire planet becomes something like James Lovelock’s Gaia. The earth from this perspective is a kind of super-organism of feedback mechanisms, from the carbon cycle to the birth, death, and reabsorption of all of the necessary chemical and mineral components, as well as the creative drive to incorporate them into newly innovative forms of life. Scale as a spacetime, how close and for how long, drives the units of analysis and not the “natural” or “essential” unity of those units. Instead, there are relations at every scale crossing into every other scale. Which relations are most important, most operative, and most determinative of change or stability depends upon the region investigated.

Finally, we have the very strange and exotic wholes which make up much of international relations. So far, the descriptions of parts have been in some sense mechanical, or could be interpreted as such (i.e. brains or weapons, etc.). However, what about Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities? Collectivities can feel history and connection with those they have never met, and will show up to fight a war for the injury of those anonymous brethren. Even the strange magic of memory and consciousness scales very differently when considered at different scales. However, we should not separate consciousness or memory from the networks of neurons, perceptions, gut bacteria, print media, and social network platforms that make it possible for consciousness to travel, imitate, innovate, and reaffirm conceptual habits.

At all scales, relationalism describes a multitude of relay and feedbacks constitutive of the processes that give form to what we experience as part–whole relationships in time. Many endure at different scales (plate tectonics for eons, species differences for shorter durations, fashion trends or diplomatic crisis for durations of hours or days) but they only exist, in some sense, solely in their process. When the relations change, the process is over or altered, and the only thing that remains is the impression left on the new arrangement by the arrangements that preceded it. This is true, according to relationalism, from the intimacy of identity all the way to the formation of stars.

While I follow a relational and primarily historical and interpretive approach, I do depart from many other adherents of relationalism in two significant ways.⁴ The first involves the assumption of an ethical or normative content to what Milja Kurki calls the “relational cosmology” of the “relational revolution” (Chapter 3, this volume). Kurki believes an ethical impulse is “baked into” a relational worldview. There are a number of examples of this in contemporary theory inside and outside of IR. Two variants are those following Judith Butler and her debt to Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, who account for violence as an abrogation of relations and a possibility of nonviolence in relations themselves. Here, violence is in some sense the ignoring of a fundamental relationality among human beings that would, if recognized, create an understanding mutuality opposed to violence. From these accounts, consciousness-raising about the fact of relationality is a solution to global violence just as “realizing” and “experiencing” relationality makes us open or indebted to “the other,” to use Levinas’ terms. The second variant focuses more on the natural environment and violence against nonhuman others. From this perspective on relationality, environmental destruction and extreme cruelty toward nonhuman animals is, like the Levinasian/Arendtian account, the result of a loss of relationality often attributed to modernist accounts of mind/body and nature/culture dualisms, or, more generally, of anthropocentrism. Like normative relationalism, the environmental strand believes that an awareness of this fact, or a cultivation of an ethos of interdependence beyond the human species, will reduce violence and possibly may make planetary life more sustainable. It is not unusual to take as evidence of this position the confluence of environmental protections by indigenous peoples with relational cosmologies.

Both variants conflate the methodological insights of relationalism with a relational worldview. One is empirical while the other is aspirational. The risk, I believe, in this conflation is a confusion of expectations and a false sense that one has solved more philosophical questions than are possible to solve. It is enough to have an account of the world that integrates ideational and material forces into a single substance and ontology. We ought not expect that this, in addition, restores the world to some perfect order, or that striving for a more universal notion of the good escapes somehow the deep problems of competing interests, relativism, or incommensurable worldviews. Too often the appeal to relationalism’s debt to science or fundamental, ancient ontologies is used to depoliticize its normative commitments. However, the ambivalent relationship between relationalism’s cosmological and scientific origin stories ought to demand the inverse. Rather than seeing relationality as an ethical exit from particularity and the divisions in politics, it ought to insist upon both as the beginning of inquiry.

While an ethics can be built within a relational ontology, it does not necessarily follow from the ontological insights. After all, seals and great white sharks are deeply relational and aware of each other, and yet could not easily arrive at a common sense of the good. If any interspecies consensus could be reached between predator and prey, it would be minimal (maybe a consensus value on saving the ocean, for instance) and not as a mere result of their relationality, which is mostly characterized by teeth and blood. Could such a relationship be at least free of violence? Even that seems far-fetched given the findings of animal behaviorists that predators enjoy their hunt; killing for fun has been observed in orcas, dolphins, and cats.

In fact, rather than say that relationality and violence are opposed, I believe that the opposite claim can and should be made. If everything is relational – from our cells to our consciousness – then certainly violence is relational too. To go a step further, violence – a thoroughly human concept – only distinguishes itself from force or change because of the particular relationships of attention and intimacy which make cruelty possible. What makes an earthquake tragic – that is, unavoidable and indebted to no misanthropy or purposive end – is precisely what makes an act of war violent. Malice, sadism, cruelty, cultivated indifference – all of these extra characteristics are what change the ecological and political relations of actions such that they are violent as opposed to something else.

The second error of many relational approaches is to treat relations as a metaphor, or an independent substance. This is a common error of network theories and assemblage theories. In both cases relations are abstracted from the environment, resulting in an image of “nodes” which fall back into the original trap of agents – that is, unified, essential entities, independent of relations and surrounded by a “web” of connectors. This image is often borrowed from the internet existence we all live amidst. The vast series of “tubes” connecting things are either thought of as an independent substance, like the wires and fiberoptic cables of the network society, or as a kind of metaphor for communication across the ether between nodes.

Either way, treating relations as a “thing” misses the entire point of the ecological approach. We are not constituted by relations. We are relations. Or, more accurately, everything is an unfolding and refolding process of relations. There are no solid inputs or outputs. All of life is origami. The differences are in the folds, not the substance. A relational approach does not study relations instead of actors or instead of parts. A relational approach studies the folds and processes that make differences, hence the ability to differentiate the therapeutic cut of a scalpel to remove a gangrenous hand, the punitive surgical removal of a hand because someone has been convicted of theft, and the horror of having your hand blown off by an adversary trying to kill you. Mechanistically they are all similar at one level, in that they all involve pain, a missing hand, or another actor creating the condition of losing a hand, a weapon, or a tool. At another level – that of the psycho-social economy, the chances of survival, the character of the trauma, and the feelings of gratitude or revenge – it is the variability of the relations of the process which will be the basis for creating these differences. This is what I mean by an ecological approach. There are not entities with relations; it is relations all the way down.

For me, relationalism is an entry point into the complexities of global violence rather than an exit from or prophylactic against it. Similarly, the highly complex and dispersed systems which make violence possible, from breathable air to enmity to the technological systems of enacting violence on larger and larger scales, to the rich histories of national belonging as well as forms-of-life which form the basis of legible differences, suggest to me that a relational approach is incredibly productive for studying such the variable and unstable arrangement of the things that constitute global orders. In what follows, I will present one example of how a relational approach would alter our discussion and research. The example focuses on nuclear weapons, particularly the relationship between constitutional authority and command, and control capability, which are often treated as completely separate questions. My discussion of nuclear weapons command and control is not meant to offer comprehensive accounts of the vast literatures on this question. Instead, I want to show what kinds of questions or research might become visible with a shift to a relational ontology and an ecological research agenda.

4.2 A Relational Approach to Nuclear Authority, or the Insufficiency of Decisionism and Constitutionalism

Broadly speaking, there exist two very different literatures about nuclear weapons. Legal scholars and philosophers spend their time considering whether the American president has the right to use nuclear weapons either constitutionally or morally. A more technical literature on nuclear strategy and capability focuses on policy formulation and implementation. Little if any overlap exists between these two literatures and traditions of inquiry. I want to see what happens when we combine these questions, see how each is shaped by the other, rather than seeing either as primary. Furthermore, what comes of debates over sovereignty and decisionism when we take a more relational or ecological approach?

It is important to keep in mind that an ecological account of security is not simply about connecting technological change with legal and political development internally, but observing the change in the security environment’s material conditions – that is, all of the relations. For instance, it is difficult to imagine the present state of nuclear weapons development that tended so heavily toward a sovereign model of command and control without taking account, at the most basic level, of the geographic specificity of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even a distant competitor such as Japan would have altered the technological development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). A basic feature of the environment like the relatively small size of the Japanese nation-state would probably not have driven the development of MIRV-ed delivery vehicle or even megaton yields entering into the double-digits.⁵ The simple fact that Japanese soldiers could not have threatened Western Europe, thus requiring a nonconventional arsenal to even the odds, would have altered the course of nuclear weapons development. But size, geography, competitor – these are contingencies of history, contexts for which either the legal/moral or strategic approach could easily account for and does not change how we understand the actors or institutions at work. For an ecological account to be significant (and worth the effort), the nature of change and the actors of the situation ought to appear different (alien, even) to the conceptual tools of methodological individualism presumed by moral legal theory and leadership debates in strategic thought. Otherwise, contingencies such as place, infrastructure, and communication networks are merely details. What is at stake in this section is to consider that these things are constitutive, internal actants – that is, details that make a difference in what is and is not possible and what is and is not thinkable. The sovereign is not exterior to the nuclear assemblage nor its command head. Rather, what we understand to be nuclear sovereignty – the final right and capability of nuclear launch of which there is no higher power – is the assemblage itself, by which any particular president is incorporated, habituated, and therefore plugged into. This perspective is in sharp contrast to the individual accountability that is a central value of the humanist Newtonianism that Haas and Nau (Chapter 2) and Nau (Chapter 6) defend so vigorously. As Nau puts it, the discussion of IR and the events we study “would not be possible without individuals.”

There exists a fundamental problem in Nau’s analysis. His claim of the individual as a basic unit rests on Weber’s rich understanding of individual behavior that distinguishes between instrumental rationality, value rationality, emotions, and habits. Nau focuses exclusively on the first two and skips over emotions and habits when he writes “the individual remains primary over structure.” Nau thinks that this assertion allows him to move forward with a reading of Weber in which “choice is free, not determined by science or higher norms.” What little lip service Nau pays to Weber’s rich understanding of structure is subsumed by a deep and abiding faith in a unified and autonomous individual. However, dismissing “structure” does not get us back to a unified individual for one simple reason. The individual is a structure constituted by the deep relationality between the four distinctive Weberian categories on which Nau relies. They are categorically relational even if one were to believe that instrumental rationality is a kind of governing executive function freed from its origins and the processes of perpetual recreation. Values, habits, and feelings (and, I would argue, also instrumental rationality) come from relations that predate the individual even if we want to be humanists. These categories are contingent on early childhood development and learning that are both radically intersubjective before the “I” emerges (as Erikson, Lacan, Piaget, and many childhood developmental psychologists have shown) and radically inter-objective (as the formation of what we recognize as the self comes from the ability to separate from the mother and connect to other people and objects in the formation of independence, as Klein argues).⁶ Even if we argue that humans “congeal” at some point late in their teenage years (which is implausible for any teacher of university students and for anyone who thinks that experience induces learning), the four Weberian categories of individual action have to be coordinated by some means other than instrumental rationality, otherwise the others would no longer be categories for behavioral analysis; they would just be a bargain bin for rationality to sift through and choose self-consciously amongst. Of course, this is absurd. Instead, there is a plastic and oscillating intensity of relations between emotional, habitual, rational, and ideational formations of consciousness and sense. This is where structure, affect, intersubjectivity, pedagogy, aesthetics, metabolism, architecture, nonhuman animals, temporality, etc., all come back into play with a vengeance. Nau ignores all of this and moves forward with the rest of his critique of relationism and his defense of human freedom because he black boxes all of these relations in the emergence of consciousness. Put simply, Nau’s individualism is Cartesian not Weberian. He thus fundamentally violates the foundational relational assumptions that are embedded in the Weberian model he deploys.

Consider Weber’s attention to charisma in Economy and Society, applied here to the complex nuclear issue. Weber distinguishes between the power of bureaucracy and the charismatic leadership both in terms of their economy of power and the “rules” of legitimation (or lack thereof) that govern them. Economically, bureaucracy is dependent on a “continuous income” for its functioning.⁷ In contrast, Weber writes of charisma that it “lives in, not off this world.” Adding a further religious and almost magical tone, he continues: “Because of this mode of legitimation genuine charismatic domination knows no abstract laws and regulations and no formal adjudication.”⁸ Beyond laws and norms, Weber argues for charisma as a distinctive source of power that differs from the rationalized power of bureaucracy and the less-refined brute force that possess the capability to exercise domination and “transforms all values and breaks all traditional and rational norms.”⁹ Weber’s explanation of charisma deconstructs both the individualist explanation and the casual frame it might suggest – namely, that someone “possesses” charisma and uses it in some instrumental or individualistic way. For Weber, charisma cannot be something that is simply possessed by an individual, for it must move the people it inspires in unprecedented ways, often against their own interests. That is, charisma works by neither rational nor habitual means. It breaks rules and creates new values rather than relying on norms or laws. So how does one acquire such a power?

For Weber, for charisma to exist in the first place, charismatic leadership is relationally dependent upon those moved by its power. The self-determination of charisma is not that of the charismatic leader conceived of as a self-possessed individual. Instead, the self-determination of charisma is a co-emergent and semi-autonomous formation resulting from the relation between the leader and the people. In Weber’s language: “Charisma is self-determined and sets its own limits. Its bearer seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him by virtue of his missions. If those to whom he feels sent do not recognize him, his claim collapses; if they recognize it he is their master as long as he ‘proves’ himself.”¹⁰ There is no means by which either the “bearer” of charisma or the will of the followers can be a sufficient cause for charisma. Instead, there exists a deep and variable relationality at the heart of the production of subjects, whom Nau calls individuals. Intersubjectivity creates the condition of possibility for charisma and the catalytic transformation it can deliver. Weber does not offer an individualist account of charisma. And Weber insists that no rational account is on offer as charisma “disrupts all rational rule.”¹¹ It would be fine to ignore just how malleable and coconstitutive humans are if charisma were a rare force in political and geopolitical change. But I concur with Weber that in a “purely empirical and value-free sense charisma is the specifically creative revolutionary force of history.”¹² The vision we are given by Weber is one in which all of the agents of change are swept up in a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, much less any particular individualistic part.¹³ For me, Weber’s explanation is much closer to what I am trying to develop here in terms of a nuclear sovereign assemblage than is Nau’s defense of a substantive or methodological individualism.

What I argue is the precise opposite of Nau. It is only once circulating in the assemblage that the American president can become a significant relay-exchange in the functioning or nonfunctioning of the assemblage, but is never the final relay-exchange. While we would likely blame or credit the president in the case of a nuclear launch, much as we did blame or credit George W. Bush with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, such an anthropomorphic image would be a mistake. The command as much as the compliance with the command is not possible without the collaboration of millions of people and countless numbers of things. Nau’s image of individual responsibility may satisfy his moral appetite, but it does nothing to reveal how a decision takes place as an event which can unfold across systems and people seemingly as if their dispositions were already decided. How many decisions, infrastructures, years of training, or national identities had to come into formation for a presidential command to make sense, much less be effective in unleashing nuclear war. To put it another way: the decision comes after the potentiality of nuclear war, not before it.¹⁴

Such a claim, if demonstrated, changes how we understand constitutional constraints of nuclear war. The legal right is less significant, even potentially irrelevant, to the capability to set nuclear war in motion without, for instance, congressional approval. Similarly, in the context of strategic studies, the anthropomorphism that conflates the state and its nuclear arsenal into a single entity, a president, with a structured, individualized rationality driven by victory and survival, becomes self-evident. That is, the sovereign is shown to be a mere stand-in for something vastly more complex than a real, ontological entity. The president, in the most radical reading of this claim, is more like a mascot than a quarterback. In the informatic networks of early warning systems, targeting coordinates, satellite communication, silo commanders, rocket fuel, hangovers, weather balloons, and global ideological competitions, the American president doesn’t call the play, the play calls them.¹⁵

In what follows I will quickly identify the characteristics of the nuclear arsenal that lends itself to a relational or ecological analysis. As I argued in the introduction, relations are the real fabric of existence. They are ontologically real and not a metaphor. Does everything then lend itself to a relational approach? Not necessarily. Not all forms of reductionism – that is. the reliance on unitary actors or instrumental accounts of tools – are useless. Like the case of Newtonian physics, reductions and simplifications can be very powerful despite being in some sense simply inaccurate. However, there are scales of complexity and complexities of causality in which simplifications occlude more than they reveal. I want to argue that there are specific features of the nuclear arsenal that demonstrate the limits of legal-moral and strategic anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. Furthermore, to understand how war as an event, and nuclear war specifically, requires a relational account to describe the capacity to make wholes out of such disparate parts also goes a long way to discount Nau’s belief that relationalism somehow smuggles utopia and peace into its conceptual worldview. Quite the opposite: a relational approach is essential to understanding collective catastrophe as much as it is to any other form of change. What we lose in the shelter of provincial humanist thought is the degree to which global politics depends precisely on the nonindividualistic capacities of human beings. Ought we let political realism off the hook if a president did not “mean” to cause a nuclear war or end civilization, or would the habituation of strategic thinking, nuclear development and deployment, and thousands of hours of drilling officers sitting in bunkers somehow find its way back to the logics of deterrence and escalation dominance that were simultaneously inspired by the vast networks of nuclear capability and that enlivened the circulation and modernization of those nuclear networks? The nuclear world we live in goes well beyond the four-part Weberian schema of social action described by Nau in Chapter 6. Likewise, unfortunately the inhuman and often indifferently autogenocidal character of the nuclear sovereign assemblage calls into question whether becoming part of the connected nature of things leads anywhere in particular, much less to what Kurki calls a “not only human… planetary politics.”¹⁶ Instead, relationalism merely is. The fact of the relational world may be as necessary for the possibility of a more humane planetary ethos as it is for the techno-human death cult of the nuclear balance of terror. However, the insight that we live in such a world is not sufficient to explain the inevitability of either outcome.

4.2.1 Discovery, Defense, and Design

Unlike a spear, or even a rifle, nuclear weapons are technics of an entirely different order. For a fission or fusion detonation to take place, sufficient control must exist to alter the common conditions of the physical properties of reality. Fermi’s achievement at Chicago Pile-1 on December 2, 1942 is exotic to terrestrial life. The capacity to achieve that feat requires vast cooperation between large numbers of humans, apparatuses, and the rare elements which lend themselves to being pulled apart at the subatomic seam. To date, no one can build a nuclear weapon in their basement by themselves. Each and every nuclear artifact is the congealed efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, of human actors and countless technical, mathematical, and elemental entities. And this is all before we have considered how to target, deploy, or scenario-plan the use of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons have no earthbound correlate and are only possible because of a vast scientific-technical-socio-political order encountering the special properties of a relatively rare material rather than the genius of a few individuals. Methodological individualism fails entirely at understanding even one component of the nuclear arsenal: nuclear weapons. The novel or exotic properties of radioactive material and the near-accidental discovery of radiation by Marie Curie, the subsequent fits and starts on the pathway to develop a sustained chain reaction, and the hundreds of different mathematical, physical, chemical, and geographic discoveries that accumulated to make possible the now refined high-yield ICBM all challenge a simple, linear, explanation of the current state of affairs as being the result of planning or decision-making as we would understand it within the frame of the moral or strategic individual.

But that is just history. Can we not begin with the individual once a president has inherited the vast assemblage of the nuclear weapon? However, the basis on which that individual emerged as an American president for which a nuclear weapon makes sense, or is at one’s command, is no less complex. The security environment and the necessary interpretation of the environment that made nuclear weapons desirable is outside the decisional character of the president. In time, the security environment preceded the president. Practically speaking, the relevant nuclear knowledge is not present or directly under the jurisdiction of a president. Furthermore, the decision to launch or not launch is the result of hundreds of daily security briefings, which are each the result of the interpretation of thousands of analysts, which are the result of intelligence and data collected, sorted, coded, and processed by myriads of individuals. And what of the frame by which each of these analysts comes to understand the significance of what they see?

Therefore, the origin story, or what others have called an onto-story, of the nuclear president is neither a legal-moral history, a strategic history, nor a technical history – it is all of these at once. If the nuclear assemblage is all of these things, there is not one place, or a first place, to identify as an origin; instead, the preference for an onto-story is to think about how something emerges not for the first time but again. We start in the middle because there is no beginning of an assemblage, there is only the tangle of its relations.¹⁷ In short, despite the fact that they appear to be built more uniformly from human things such as perceptions, representations, ideas, and stories, the strategic environment and the legal-moral environment are no less assembled and distributed than the highly inhuman technics of nuclear weapons.

Because of its significance to both legal-moral history and strategic thinking, I will focus here on the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the missile crisis to take place, we need to track and understand the missile as another highly complex technical component of the nuclear assemblage.¹⁸ Before the missile, the American Strategic Air Command was rapid and destructive by prenuclear standards of warfare, but the increasing desire to centralize decision-making and the state’s destructive capacity at a distance follows the course of the missile not the airplane. To achieve the transformation from air-power to missile power, teams had to be assembled. Codenamed Operation Paper Clip, the United States employed Werner von Braun, the leading Nazi scientist, to develop rocket technology for production in the United States by extending the capability of the V2 rocket developed and deployed by the Third Reich during World War II. The first two designs, the Redstone IRBM and Jupiter IRBM, were relatively clumsy Intermediated Range Ballistic Missiles. The first actually Intercontinental Ballistic Missile was the Atlas, which was made operational in 1959. The Atlas was cumbersome, slow, and subject to attack because of its above-ground launch pad. The first SLBM went underwater in the USS George Washington, on November 15, 1960.¹⁹ The SLBM locked in Second Strike capability because of the inability to target and kill submarines in a decapitating first-strike. The first generation of ICBMs that fit the sovereign image of intercontinental exchange, the Minuteman, was deployed two years after the first SLBM was put on alert, on October 27, 1962.

These technological achievements gave contour to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The technological achievement of the Minuteman created the violence capability for a truly intercontinental conflict. Despite the name, the nuclear sovereign assemblage is not primarily radioactive. Its sensory and informatic character is equally important. If you cannot see anything or know anything, what then? Therefore, the reliability and clarity of U2 photographs were also essential to the crisis in Cuba and how the nuclear sovereign assemblage defined the model of executive leadership and sovereign control that emerged from those fourteen October days.

Kennedy’s minute-by-minute crisis-management decision-making was a highly complex system of institutional organization, technological capacity, ideology, and leadership, each constituted by and feeding back into the other. What emerged was a new conception of time and warfare that only escalated and consolidated sovereign power and technological development further, but neither sovereignty nor technological development, nor even geopolitical competition, would fit primacy or firstness, much less exogenous characteristics of what scientifically we would call a “cause.”

From the perspective of those witnessing the event in real time, at no other time did the American president seem as significantly in charge. From Arthur Schlesinger’s front row seat, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the very paradigm of a methodological individualism: “the management of the great foreign policy crisis of the Kennedy years – the Soviet attempt to install nuclear missiles in Cuba – came as if in proof of the proposition that the nuclear age left no alternative to unilateral presidential decision.”²⁰

And yet, immediately after this statement, Schlesinger points out that Kennedy did not make his decision alone: “Kennedy took the decision into his own hands, but it is to be noted that he did not make it in imperial solitude” Instead, he created and relied upon a special executive committee.²¹ While commendable and imperative to the situation, there is nothing democratic or republican about such a committee. Nor is there any means of review or accountability for the committee’s actions. As Schlesinger succinctly puts it, “Congress played no role at all.”²² While I take Schlesinger’s point that the procedures of the US constitutions were made obsolete, it was not the replacement of Congress – a collective body – by the president – a single individual – that took place. Instead, one collectivity – Congress – was replaced by another collectivity – the nuclear sovereign assemblage. One may be less democratic than the other, but not because of its unitary nature.

The question, then, is what enabled a president and a single room of advisors 1,200 miles from the potential battlefield to take command? President Kennedy may have been commander-in-chief in this situation, but he was not in any sense in control or even in charge in the way Schlesinger imagined it. The ability to implement extensive networks and organizational changes such that presidential authorization from one mobile source could predictably command the whole of the US strategic nuclear forces creates a new kind of executive authority resting with the network rather than with the messages in the network.

As compared to an actual command, where the charisma and respect of the leader may be at play, or legal authority relying on institutional legitimacy, in the nuclear arsenal the bully pulpit is replaced by the “football.” Presidential authority becomes more significantly a question of signal fidelity. By April 1967, less than five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1,000 Minuteman ICBMS were built and deployed.²³ Following the Cuban Missile Crisis and the new nuclear force structure and capability, “the football” – aka “the button” or “trigger” – was always with the president. Although technical more than political, the football is not a literal button, but contains a SIOP decision handbook and the codes so that the president can authenticate that he is indeed the president. The actual “go” codes are decentralized and housed at secure facilities throughout the country.²⁴ The incredible breadth of telephone coverage and its redundancy established by AT&T by the 1950s made it possible for the president to communicate from any location to virtually any other location. The result is what Paul Bracken calls a “self-healing network,” depriving the Soviet Union of central communication targets.²⁵ By the 1970s, Command, Control, Communications and early warning networks (intelligence) (C3I) accomplished the goal of bringing “the individual pieces of a defense system together into a coherent overall structure.”²⁶ From the perspective of a strong advocate of the system, Bruce Blair, this is meant to be total; “once deterrence fails, it fails completely.” Blair’s only concern is to maintain an “undeniable capacity to destroy the Soviet target base in a retaliatory strike.”²⁷

In terms of presidential consolidations of sovereignty, deterrence made it possible for one human being to be the head of the forces from almost any location, facilitating the already desirable centralization of nuclear-war-making authority in the president. Neither the sovereign nor sovereignty are simply present or absent in a decision or the ability to make decision. The sovereignty or authority of the president must be built out of wire, telephone poles, hardened targets, rapid transport, and early warning systems. Authority is coterminus with capability, and the possibility of a decision is coterminus with the sensory infrastructure that makes that authority possible, further routinized by the targeting which was determined by scenario planning and war gaming that both influenced the development of technical capability and were influenced by the limits and capacities of technical capability. In this relational account, individual accountability is submerged in a variety of assemblages and relationships.

4.2.2 From Presidential Powers to the Nuclear Sovereign Assemblage

The very effort to secure the survivability and centrality of the American president’s decision and the effort to build a sovereign that could command a nuclear arsenal created the very techno-strategic ecosystem in which the American president became a mascot rather than a quarterback. Here I will try to theorize how to understand the ambiguous role of the sovereign in the assemblage of nuclear sovereignty. Furthermore, I will argue that the anthropocentric image, or Schmittian ideal, of one human in charge is insufficient for understanding how the event of a nuclear war would take place.²⁸

In Schlesinger’s account of nuclear decision-making we have a stark image of nuclear weapons as the totalization of sovereignty rather than the end of the sovereign. The nuclear state of emergency sidesteps democracy because it is possible for a single individual to decide and to go to war and to finish that war in 30 minutes. At first glance, this apocalyptic diagnosis seems accurate. Nuclear weapons at current numbers could destroy the condition of human life as we know it. And, given the structure of the US nuclear command, any Congressional or popular attempts to stop the process of nuclear launch would likely be in vain. Politics and a democratic balance of power require time: time to react, time to respond, time to debate, time to strategize, time to implement. ICBMs nullify time. Nuclear decision-making is, as Deudney says, “dominated by the dogma of speed.”²⁹

While the nuclear state of affairs runs contrary to the possibility of democracy, it does not favor the autocrat – at least, not as we would understand it as an all-powerful individual. The threat of the extreme case has obscured the actual case that presents opportunities for intervention as well as a very different image of decision-making and the decider. Politics, whether micro or macro, does not begin and end with the sovereign decision; the sovereign decision emerges from a relay of forces, connections, and other previous decisions, resonances, and actants that are presupposed in each subsequent iteration of the sovereign decision, each layered into multiple streams of time, perception, and medium of relation. Even an increasingly automated nuclear arsenal requires the participation of millions of people and countless networks, objects, tectonic stability, stable solar flare activity, and on and on. Focusing on individual accountability, as does Nau (Chapter 6), does not help us explain how we got to such a vulnerable and contingent state of things any more than it tells us how to get out of it. The decision and the decider only appear singular when we truncate time and space to the moment the president “pushes the button.” Or, to put it another way, the president as nuclear sovereign only appears if we are primed by methodological individualism to look for an already constituted, single decider, in space and time, to explain a nuclear event. Here, I think we can see precisely what Kurki means when she writes “At the heart of liberal approaches is an acceptance of not only states as a key institutional reference point, but also, fundamentally, the separation of human institutions from the ‘environment’ as a background to be controlled and managed.”³⁰ While I am not sure there is the tight connection Kurki sees between the relational perspective and a particular political ethos, I am fully in agreement that analytically we cannot understand the complex arrangements of the world and the novelties that emerge from them if we hide in a Newtonian reductionism or narrowly Weberian humanism. What we do with that understanding is unfortunately also beyond the scope of humanism as much as it is the individual. What the knowledge will become, what processes it is folded into and intensifies exceeds the control of an individual or even collective of individuals. To put it another way, the capacity of the nuclear sovereign assemblage and its resilient cybernetic network was also indicative of a relational worldview that displaced unitary command structures and more ancient ideas about the unity of the executive.

So, while real danger exists, the destructive capacity of the system does not rest with the president. To illustrate this point, I want to keep the president as sovereign in torsion with the assemblage of sovereignty. In so doing, I want to consider how an alternative image of sovereignty – that is, the nuclear sovereign assemblage – accounts for the discrepancy between nuclear authority and capability. The goal is to provide a more-than-human account of the nuclear-predicament account that sees beyond the moment of nuclear decision to the broader landscape of atomic politics, and to take one further step down the relational rabbit hole.

The goal of an ecological approach is not to replace sovereignty with its assemblage. Certainly, the sovereign decision is a powerful, expressive, performative act of individuation, and is highly effective in mobilizing populations of things. A sovereign nuclear decision even more so, but such a decision is not self-constituted or self-causal. The processes of individuation and mobilization require a field of relations and resonances from which the sovereign decision emerges. The decision itself is also not decisive. The sovereign – in so far as they are constituted by the enunciation of decisions – is a condensation point for a national ethos, affect, and institutional individuation. Each decision is constitutive not of the “sovereign” alone, as is the case in Schlesinger’s observation, but of a sovereign point of identification or reified consistency which can become habitual but need not – and in fact cannot – remain static or immobile.

What I hope is becoming clear is that a focus on the ecology or assemblage of nuclear sovereignty need not supplant or ignore a degree of human involvement in the signification of actors and events. Rather, the point is that real networks or fundamental entanglements of things are further complicated by the way humans participate in meaning-making in those entanglements. The task here is to demonstrate the degree to which the emergence of a discourse of sovereignty ought not to be mistaken for the actual nuclear sovereign assemblage that amplifies and makes possible the event of nuclear war. We see only the effects which we correlate to the sovereign, often through secondhand accounts or the personality politics of media streams.

The impersonal character of the presidential position in the nuclear sovereign assemblage could in part explain why there is so little transition time between each sovereign and so little variation in the intensifying breadth of war powers. The sovereign is a reference point or index for a history of actions and events made more complex by the function it is believed to serve – a body, but not the body in the sense of an individual. It is a body that is built from the matter of decisions. It is the titular focal point of an assemblage, a mascot not a quarterback.³¹

By way of a crude time line one could say that sovereignty in the United States has been characterized by three periods. 1. The republican model, whereby the inherent advantage or tendency toward centralization through war plays out as a juridical struggle between the three branches of government. Prior to an intensely mediated society the role of the American public is limited but not nonexistent. 2. The autocratic model, whereby the development of nuclear weapons enables the president to ignore the other two branches because war can begin and end without a single soldier putting their boots on. 3. The assemblage model, whereby the means of war becomes dispersed such that the sovereign’s function becomes more like a refrain to give consistency to a dispersed, pluripotential network with each strand on the cusp of escaping or disrupting the state/military apparatus.

The transition from each stage is roughly cybernetic in so far as it is periodized by the evolution of “codes.” In the first model we have a code of conduct or an expectation of behavior: the gentleman sovereign. In the second there is the attempt to centralize the C3I of nuclear war through a centralization of codes vested in the president. Lastly, there is the dispersal of codes such that the system can maximize survivability but the result is a system that can no longer secure hierarchy or sovereignty in relation to war. Instead, the sovereign survives as an expressive point of identification. War then becomes more obviously emergent. Resonances and relations throughout the nuclear sovereign assemblage exist in a continuum between nonwar and war, depending on the necessity for testing, alert, or accidental machinic statements provoked by weather balloons, reactor meltdowns, or acute paranoia.

One danger of continuing to sustain the individualist fiction that the nuclear arsenal can be wielded by the president directly is that it undermines the capacity to resist and steer nuclear politics. A new constitution, more Congressional oversight, more or less automation, or electing a president who is more moral or strategic would not be sufficient to alter how highly distributed and deeply embedded the assemblage of the nuclear arsenal is. A nuclear crisis reduced to the personality or authority of a president tells us little about the nature or possibility of a nuclear conflict. Behind the curtain of the American presidency lies a vast machine-like vista well beyond the control of any one person, or even any one ideology or system of governmentality.

4.3 Conclusion

In the case of nuclear command and its ambivalent relationship to sovereignty as imagined in our habitual descriptions of presidential authority, I have tried to show how a relational approach to nuclear sovereignty as opposed to either a materialist or ideational approach is necessary to understand how embedded and at times perpetual the infrastructure of nuclear violence has become. What is presented here is not sufficient to make that case indisputably or lay out what new mode of political action would be equivalent to the complexity of each problem. That is beyond what can be done in one chapter. However, I hope that the slightly different account of the problem that more fully accounts for the relational complexity and inhuman character of nuclear command as ecological problems can open up practical questions about how purely individualist approaches or purely discursive approaches blunt our understanding of how these problems work. To craft from that a way forward would need to center in some sense on the very practical and material condition by which territories, spaces, and habits of each encounter are built and repeated, often below the radar of anything we would call a decision.

However, the deadlock of arms-reduction treaties and even contemporary efforts at threat reductions, are, from a relational point of view, much easier to understand. When the more concrete assemblage of nuclear power becomes part of the discussion the interests of the strategic actors seemingly wielding the weapons, as well as tired narratives about the failure of “political will” or “leadership,” can be displaced in favor of the nuclear infrastructures which are in some sense more durable than our political systems. The nuclear sovereign assemblage has a momentum and a trajectory well beyond the intentions or agency of those who thought themselves its maker. In a sense, then, Nau may be right that “individual freedom is at stake,” but not because relationalism somehow “dissolved it” – although wouldn’t it be a neat trick if the ontological framework of the universe could be altered by a compelling argument? Instead, individual freedom, in the way conceived by Nau’s reading of Weber, may be at risk precisely because it never existed in the first place, and that is precisely why the predicaments we find ourselves in, from a nuclear armed world to an imploding ecosystem, come to pass in the first place.

5 Jewish Questions and Jewish Worldviews

Michael Barnett

Why study worldviews? What does the concept add that is not covered by kindred concepts such as civilization, paradigm, ideology, and discourse? Each incorporates the values, knowledge, practices, and identities that bind the members of a community and organize social relations; shape meanings; craft narratives of the past, present, and future; define and justify ethical action; and establish the background conditions that form habit and the subconscious. You say civilization, I say worldview. Following the observations of Stephen Kalberg and others, my view is that worldviews do something these others do not: blend the worldly and the heavenly.¹ They are tantamount to an “ethical universe” that links the here-and-now to the transcendent, and the practical and metaphysical.² In line with Katzenstein’s discussion in Chapter 1, they consider how a community addresses the “ultimate” questions of meaning, purpose, suffering, and injustice.³ What is the place of the community in the cosmos and the relationship to the universal? What is the relationship to outsiders? What duties and obligations does it have to them? How do they cope with suffering and evil? How is suffering related to salvation and redemption? To the extent that worldviews address these fundamental questions that often can strike terror and panic in the hearts and minds of humans, they help create order out of the chaos.⁴ The world is a jungle, but worldviews provide a transcendental canopy.

This chapter considers the multiple and changing worldviews of western Jewry in search of ontological and physical security in a post-Enlightenment world of nation-states. Because the volume provides multiple worldviews on worldviews, and Chapter 1 situates worldviews in relationship to forms of relationalism and humanism, I should begin by briefly explaining why I occupy the cell of humanist relationalism. I adopt a sociological relationalism that does not venture into quantum-style relationalism or hyper-humanism. Although I have been informed by others in the project that quantum-style relationalism subsumes sociological relationalism because it is the mother of all relationalisms, which it might be, but I have not been persuaded that the former’s high level of abstraction is either necessary or can be sufficiently grounded to capture the changing meanings and practices of worldviews. Moreover, although there are communities, religious and otherwise, whose worldviews incorporate relationality with nonhuman forms, at best this is a minor feature of Judaism and the Jewish people.⁵

My sociological position also distances my argument from substantialism in ways that follow from constructivist international relations. Actors, whether they are individuals or groups, are social constructions. Said otherwise, they are not natural but rather are social kinds. This sociological position can and does incorporate the possibility that groups can be more than aggregates of individuals and can have a collective identity, and that these collectives can have enduring features, including identities, beliefs, interests, and practices. But this differs from substantialism’s tendency toward essentialism and reification. Instead, worldviews “do not have a life of their own, apart from their human carriers.”⁶ As Katzenstein writes in his discussion of Weber and Dilthey in Chapter 1, the interpretive tradition works at the individual and group levels of analysis to access the cultural meanings and significance that individuals and groups give to the world; however, these worldviews are not the byproduct of psychology, but rather of a culture with an integrity. Worldviews, in this way, provide a “causal impulse” akin to the conditions of possibility discussed by constructivists.⁷ As social constructions, worldviews can be settled or unsettled, and they can be unsettled by internal developments and contradictions or by external shocks and disturbances.

These dimensions of humanist relationalism inform my narrative of the changing worldviews of western Jewry in response to the Enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state. All groups are social kinds and thus are constructed. Most groups that make an impression have a history, and in the case of the Jews it is 5,782 years and counting. And, similar to all social kinds, Jews have debated what defines them as a people, what is their purpose, how to make sense of suffering, what are their core tenets, how to interpret and give meaning to their central texts, who is and can be a member, and what are the boundaries between themselves and others and what should be their relationship to them. Jews have managed to maintain a collective identity despite having lived most of their history in exile and, in the modern period, in pockets of isolated communities strewn across the Christian and Muslim worlds. Yet there is diversity within unity, which is always the case for any community or cultural grouping, and especially so for a people that are diasporic, dispersed, and, historically speaking, have lived in relative isolation from each other. Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews share a unity, but also a diversity. So, too, do many western Jewish communities. As the punchline to several Jewish jokes goes: two Jews, three synagogues.

Jews are both a certain and an uncertain people. They are a certain people to the extent that they have a strong collective and transnational identity with mutual obligations. They are an uncertain people with regard to their survival. As a barely tolerated and often hated minority, Jews have experienced all kinds of oppression, violence, forced migration, and genocide. Jewish history and important religious events are often narrated by moments of considerable suffering. Indeed, suffering is so central to the Jewish historical narrative that, according to the eminent historian of Jewish history Salo Baron, they possess a “lachrymose” view of their history.⁸ And, according to various other scholars, this reading of history shapes their worldviews and anxiety about their physical and ontological survival.⁹ The consequence is that suffering and survival enter worldviews in two ways. Suffering must be explained, and in a way that provides meaning. And the threat of destruction is part of their worldview.

The historical period I examine – a post-Enlightenment world of nation-states – posed threats to and presented opportunities for western Jews that, in turn, led to a change in worldviews. Although worldviews have various dimensions, I focus on what is called the “Jewish Question.” The theologically stylized formulation is: are the Jews are a people apart, or are they a light unto nations? Should they emphasize and preserve those laws, customs, traditions, and rituals that make them distinctive, or should they accentuate and cultivate what they share with humanity? How should they balance and navigate the relationship between particularism and universalism?¹⁰

These theological questions began to have practical importance with the rise of the Enlightenment and the nation-state in Europe in the eighteenth century. The urgent question became: how can the Jews, a diasporic, transnational community, find a secure place in a world with universalizing tendencies and that is carved up into different territories that are expected to circumscribe identities and loyalties?¹¹ The Enlightenment and nationalism compelled Jews to reconsider how they classify themselves as a people, their place and purpose in the world, and their relationship to non-Jews. The universal threatened to remove the boundaries that distinguish Jews as a separate people, and inclusive forms of nationalism expected the Jews to transfer their loyalties from their fellow brethren to their fellow citizens.¹² Under such conditions, the Jews might possibly cease to exist as a people, cut off from other Jews and their history. But if they refused the invitation, they would potentially signal that they were a separate and possibly threatening people. At least they had a choice. Other countries, shaped by counter-Enlightenment and chauvinistic nationalism, treated Jews as the quintessential “other,” an outsider worthy of exclusion, persecution, and violence. Different worldviews began to emerge in relationship to these different circumstances. There is a larger history lesson here: if you want to understand how different Jewish communities have answered the Jewish Question, start by looking at the gentiles. This piece of advice is attributed to Heinrich Heine, the great nineteenth-century poet and writer who was born a Jew and then converted to Christianity. A Yiddish proverb offers a similar, though more fatalistic, conclusion: Vy es kristit zikh, azoy yidlt zikh – “As the Christians go, so go the Jews.”¹³

The responses by Jewish communities to these challenges and opportunities provided by the Enlightenment also were mediated by political theology. Whether Jews are primarily a religious, national, or ethnic community is a post-Enlightenment debate that underscores how Judaism has become less important to Jewish identity for many western Jews. But even when it appears to have receded, it still figures prominently. An ongoing challenge for any religious community is the translation of theological concepts rooted in text into political choices shaped by context.¹⁴ In short, political theology is the process and result of connecting the transcendental to the imminent. The search for a “usable past” is central to this exercise. There is no one, true, original meaning or interpretation. Religious texts do not speak for themselves; there is an active human process of interpretation that occurs at the individual and collective levels. Consequently, all religious communities debate the meaning of texts and which elements are most urgent and salient. History and politics channel this search for a usable past, and mold this past into the ingredients that shape a worldview. The recognition that religion shaped how Jews understood the meanings, and responded to the challenges, of the Enlightenment and nationalism underscores that worldviews are never hermetically sealed but are constantly rubbing shoulders with, absorbing, and reacting to other worldviews, a point raised by other chapters in this volume.

These unsettled times underscored how worldviews are simultaneously background and foreground. Whereas Chapter 1 focuses on the background, I shift the angle to the foreground. Western Jews are engaged in backward- and forward-looking debates about how to respond to current circumstances and challenges in ways that connect the past to a possible future that addresses their ontological and physical security. There is no single answer to these debates. However, if a proposed solution is to find an audience, it must satisfy the need for both physical and ontological security. And while there have been multiple answers, they are Jewish responses. But the fact that responses are in the multiple, and that different responses can become hegemonic in different national and transnational contexts, highlights how a single community can have multiple worldviews and how any community’s worldview, just like its culture, has both unity and diversity.¹⁵

The rest of the chapter is divided into two sections organized around two periods, from the 1800s through 1948, and from 1948 to the present. Global structures and world-turning events provided the stimulus for the transformation of Jewish worldviews. The first section describes how variations in the Enlightenment and nationalism, and the perceived necessity of Jewish sovereignty and statehood for survival, led to the emergence of four Jewish worldviews: a diaspora nationalism, which mixed nonterritorialism and particularism; a rooted cosmopolitanism, which combined nonterritorialism and universalism; an ethnonational Zionism, which blended territorialism and particularism; and a prophetic Zionism that contained territorialism and universalism. The second section examines how the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel led the two largest Jewish communities in the world, the American and the Israeli, to develop two distinct worldviews: American Jews continued to orbit around a rooted cosmopolitanism; and Israeli Jews migrated from a prophetic Zionism to ethnonationalist Zionism. The conclusion draws out the lessons of this story for humanist relationalism.

5.1 Jewish Worldviews: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Except for the brief slice of history when they had political power in ancient Israel, Jews have been a minority people in exile that operated with a nearly singular worldview that pivoted around isolation in and exclusion from the world. Jewish life and religious practice varied regionally and historically, but this was diversity within unity. However, after centuries of relative isolation, two yoked transformations forced Jews to reconsider their worldview.

The first major transformation was the Enlightenment. By privileging reason over superstition, change over tradition, science over religion, and, most importantly, humanity over discrimination, Enlightenment thought held that people should be judged as individuals and on their achievements, not their religion or other discriminatory factors. Because the Enlightenment made it less defensible to treat some people as inherently inferior and undeserving of equal treatment and respect, it represented the beginning of the emancipation of the Jews and other minorities and the possibility of having rights and citizenship.¹⁶ This was a revolutionary moment in the history of the Jews. As Salo Baron, pronounced more than ninety years ago, “The history of the Jews in the last century and a half has turned on one central fact: that of Emancipation.”¹⁷ Two decades ago, David Vital similarly concluded that: “The principal engine of change in the modern history of the Jews of Europe was the revolutionary idea that it might be after all right and proper for them to enjoy full and equal civil and political rights with all other subjects of the several realms they inhabited.”¹⁸ In his monumental history of Jewish emancipation, David Sorkin reviews how the variable of the emancipation nearly determined differences in the conditions of European Jews since the eighteenth century.¹⁹ In any event, with the possibility of their emancipation, the debate about their relationship to the particular and the universal spilled out of the yeshivot and into politics. Yet not all states and polities embraced Enlightenment; indeed, most European Jews lived in places where counter-Enlightenment flourished and Jews were defined as less than human.²⁰

Similar issues emerged because of the second major transformation: the rise of nationalism. A nation, generically speaking, is a political community that is bound by a common history, language, religion, spirit, or sense of fate. What gives the nation something of a special status in modern politics is the project of nationalism and its goal of statehood. In short, nationalism consists of a nation with a collective identity and interests, and with the belief that its interests and self-determination are advanced by gaining or maintaining sovereignty or authority over a homeland. In many instances, the nation replaced God as the sacred.²¹

As self-defined nations went about their business of nation- and state-building, some had open clubs while others were restricted. The classic distinction is that between civic and ethnic nationalism, which, not coincidentally, was coined by a Zionist and Jewish scholar of nationalism, Hans Kohn.²² In ethnic nationalism, membership is determined by blood, lineage, kinship, and tribe. As Michael Ignatieff famously described, in this brand of nationalism “an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen.”²³ States that subscribe to this form of nationalism favor one group over another. In those countries where ethnic nationalism took root, Jews did not have to consider which features of their Jewishness they were prepared to surrender to become part of the nation because they were, for all intents and purposes, automatically disqualified from membership. An alternative form of nationalism is based not on blood or heritage, but on a shared civic character. “This nationalism,” Ignatieff argues, “is called civic because it envisages the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values.”²⁴ In the early days of nation- and state-building, this meant transforming regional, religious, and ethnic identities into a unifying national identity.

The rise of nationalism alongside the first wave of globalization helped to create the rise of cosmopolitanism. There are many kinds of cosmopolitanism, but most modern forms trace their origin to the Enlightenment and include several core tenants. There is a belief that each person is of equal worth an a subject of moral concerns. Relatedly, individuals and communities have duties and obligations to all other humans near and far and that transcend existing territorial, political, cultural, gender, racial, and religious boundaries. And, humans should strive to transcend “particularism in order to achieve a more complete understanding of that experience.”²⁵ These modern forms, moreover, became more desirable with the simultaneous rise of the nation-state and the internationalization of the world; whereas the former demanded that individuals circumscribe their identities and duties, the better encouraged individuals to transcend borders.

There has been a spirited philosophical and political debate regarding the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism ever since they emerged as projects and aspirations around the mid-nineteenth century.²⁶ As should be apparent by comparing how Duara in Chapter 7 and I approach the topic of cosmopolitanism, the relationship between it and nationalism is hard to pin down because neither has a fixed meaning, and the boundaries between them have evolved in relationship to each other and in response to the historical times. And, to further complicate matters, the boundaries between them are not only historically fluid but also community dependent. Different communities in historical and spatial proximity can have very different views of the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To go deeper down the rabbit’s hole, as I will soon do, the same community can have contending views about this relationship. That said, the debate tends to orbit around whether nationalism and cosmopolitanism are competing or complementary.

The zero-sum view is that they are rivals and that when one is up the other down, a view that derives from the belief that national and cosmopolitan identities, like oil and water, cannot mix. During the era of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalism was in and cosmopolitanism was out. This was an era of state-building, in which society was expected to not only defer to the state but also to identify with it and no others. Movements that imagined an alternative political project that directly challenged the authority and purpose of the state, such as socialism, and those peoples who were viewed as incapable of shifting their loyalties, such as the Jews, were viewed as enemies of the nation. This nineteenth-century perspective appears to be making a comeback, as current trends exhibit a retreat from forms of internationalism and cosmopolitanism and the return of a self-centered nationalism.

Alternatively, cosmopolitanism and nationalism might have a positive-sum and symbiotic relationship. Nations have common interests that can only be individually and collectively advanced with the presence of a cosmopolitan spirit. In this regard, forms of cosmopolitanism can stabilize, not undermine, a world organized around the nation-state. Many nations and nationalisms present themselves as serving not just the nation-state but also the international community, and such presentations and their associated practices can help legitimate the nation-state. Cosmopolitan beliefs and practices can deepen while maintaining the legitimacy of the state. For instance, Immanuel Kant imagined a historical unfolding whereby states developed a pacific relationship while maintaining their sovereignty.²⁷ There have been historical periods when such sentiments developed into dominant trends and practices in the world order. For instance, World Wars I and II discredited egoistic nationalism and created a space for the development of internationalism with islands of cosmopolitanism. Lions and lambs could not only coexist, but also enjoy a platonic consummation.

The rise of nationalism and the Enlightenment profoundly impacted how Jewish communities answered the Jewish Question and pursued their ontological and physical survival in an era of the rise of nation-states. After centuries of having little choice but to be a people apart, the emergence of nationalism and the nation-state meant that Jews were judged according to whether they were perceived to be capable of shifting their loyalties from each other to the state. Whether nationalism was, on balance, more positive than negative depended on which form prevailed. In the emerging folk nationalisms of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Jews were defined as outsiders because of their heritage, dress, religion, and Yiddish tongue. Under such circumstances Jews had very limited choices, including immigrate to the West, join movements such as socialism that aspired to remove all differences between peoples, or become Zionists.

In situations of civic nationalism Jews were welcome – on the condition that they shed any transnational identity in favor of their new state-bounded identity. For instance, in 1789, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre famously declared: “To the Jews as a nation – nothing; to the Jews as human beings, everything.”²⁸ If the Jews wanted to be a nation, then they could not be French, and if they wanted to be French then they had to forget any thoughts of being a nation. Jews decided to become French. A similar process occurred in other liberal-oriented nations, as Jews became Germans, Dutch, British, and Americans. But if the Jews were not a nation, then what were they? Either a religious community or an ethnic group, or some combination thereof, but in any case this was a private and not a public concern. Complicating their claims, though, were the eastern Jews, who had been excluded from membership and were now increasingly claiming that the Jews were a nation that deserved their own homeland or state. If the eastern Jews were right about the Jews being a nation, then western Jews were trying to con their Christian neighbors.

The Enlightenment and civic nationalism also placed new demands on Jewish communities. Jews had the opportunity to be granted equal rights and accepted as citizens of the nation-state – but only if they abandoned those features that gentiles found offensive and believed sustained their clannish tendencies. It was not enough to pledge loyalty to the nation – they had to fit in. Accordingly, Jews began to reconsider their way of life, traditions, and religious laws and customs, attempting to reform or remove those that Christians found contemptible and that Jews believed would hinder their bounded integration into a modern, civilized society.²⁹ They removed any claims to be a “chosen people” or that they were in exile, each of which communicated the view that Jews were both superior and just passing through. But how much of a makeover was too much? At what point did altering their practices to win acceptance turn into an assimilation that was a euphemism for cultural suicide? The Haskalah movement in the nineteenth century was one of the first important attempts to provide an answer.³⁰ Centered in Germany, it advanced the simultaneous solidarity of the Jews and their integration into Christian societies. In the United States, a Judaism that once had no need for adjectives now began to acquire them – reform, conservative, and Orthodox. Reform Judaism became the primary vehicle for allowing Jews to remain Jews while also fitting into a modernizing and liberalizing society. It was this prophetic theology that helped to nurture a cosmopolitanism and universalism among western, and especially reforming, Jews.³¹

Reform Judaism drew much of its inspiration from prophetic Judaism.³² Prophetic Judaism refers to the sayings of the prophets who lived between the seventh and eighth century BCE, a period in which the Jewish tribes were having difficulty sustaining themselves, religiously and politically. They had formed a monarchy, an unusual move for a people that believed that only God was a true king. The monarchy became corrupt and arguably blasphemous as it used faith to mask its many indiscretions. In response to these transgressions, dozens of prophets, including Amos, several Isaiahs, Hosea, and Micah, professed that God had spoken directly to them, commanding them to exhort the Jews to return to a path of righteousness, to reaffirm that there was only one, invisible, God, to choose good over evil, and to work for justice. God’s message was clear: to be righteous requires more than unthinkingly following commandments, reflexively holding ceremonies, and performing rituals to be righteous – it also demands an ethical life, treating others kindly, and working for justice. A house of worship that becomes a “den of thieves” is not pious. Reform Judaism drew from the prophetic tradition as it emphasized the importance of ethics and justice – themes that did not require Jews to spend hours in prayer and that made them appear more acceptable to non-Jews.

The combination of the kinds of emancipation and nationalism split the Jewish community into four stylized worldviews distinguished by the intersection of nonterritorial/territorial and particular/universal. Particularity regards whether Jews are a people apart and universality whether they are part of a common humanity. Deterritoriality captures whether Jews can (and should) exist without a home or state of their own. Judaism and the Jewish people are attached to the ancient land of Israel, reflected in and reinforced by religious texts, songs, prayers, and expressions. But this attachment does not necessarily demand either immigration to their ancient homeland or the belief that Jews require an exclusive homeland or state in order to survive and thrive.³³

Territoriality concerns whether Jews need a homeland or state of their own that allows them to control and defend their lives. Zionism is the chief example of territoriality.³⁴ It originated in the nineteenth century in Europe and as a response to Jewish ontological and physical insecurity; if Jews became part of other nations they might assimilate to the point of disappearance, and Jews needed a state of their own for self-determination and self-defense. In this respect it tracks with many other nationalisms at the time, but as a latecomer it drew from the various existing nationalisms. But in almost all versions Zionism was intended to do more than provide protection and self-determination; it was also intended to provide a break from and a return to history. Centuries of living in exile had led the Jews to acquire many unsavory characteristics: obsequious, weak, compliant, cowardly, passive, and willing to obey even the most suicidal of commands.³⁵ According to mainstream Zionist thought, diaspora Jews do not get respect from gentiles because they do not deserve it. By returning to Palestine and working the land, by building a state and defending it with courage, muscle, and power, Jews will recover their dignity and Christians will treat them with the respect they have earned. Zionism was a twelve-step program that would help Jews become “normal” and make an awe-inspiring return to history.

Figure 5.1 Worldviews of Western Jews

Three caveats before describing each worldview. Because subcommunities can have their distinct worldviews, there could be as many worldviews as there are subunits. I am including those Jewish worldviews that want to maintain the physical and ontological survival of Jewish people. There were Jews who were quite tired of the “disaster” of being Jewish, as Howard Kallen undiplomatically put it, wanting to shed any sign of their Jewishness, and who felt no love for or obligation to the Jewish people.³⁶ Some assimilated into society either by rejecting Judaism and/or converting to Christianity. Many Jews also joined socialist and communist movements, which held that anti-Semitism would end with the arrival of a socialism that would choke off the supply of opium that turned the masses into religious dopes.³⁷ Second, I am examining those Jewish worldviews that are political to the extent that they are attempting to address the social organization of the Jewish people in a world carved into nation-states. There are religiously oriented sects that, for all intents and purposes, have withdrawn from the secular world. Third, these stylized views are ideal-types.³⁸ In other words, their purpose is not to reflect a granular reality, but rather to help identify different kinds of, and measure change in, worldviews. There might be three synagogues for every two Jews, but it also might be theoretically and empirically advantageous to compare all three to two different ideal-types. In this regard, they are sociological categories because they identify distinctive attributes that distinguish between types, and historical categories because they can help trace change in and across Jewish communities.

Prophetic Zionism emerges from the interplay of territorialism and universalism. It is territorial because it demands a homeland or state for the Jews in the land of ancient Israel where they can enjoy self-determination and marshall their own defense. This form of Zionism also had a universal or cosmopolitan character, both in terms of how it imagined organizing state–society relations and the state’s place in the world. There were two major branches of prophetic Zionism. A liberal Zionism imagined the creation of a liberal state, in which all inhabitants would enjoy liberty and equality. It would become a light unto nations. This was the Zionism of Herzl, many leaders of the Zionist movement such as Chaim Weizmann, and the prevailing form in western countries such as the United States. There also was a Labor or Socialist Zionism. This Zionism emerged as a critique of capitalism and bourgeois nationalism, aspiring to create a socialist state that would provide the foundation for genuine equality and justice and become a role model for the world until a global socialism emerged that would remove the need for a world divided by sovereignty. This was the Zionism of Moses Hess, Ber Borochov, David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish leadership in Palestine, and the Mapai government that ruled Israel for three decades. Both liberal and labor Zionism, though, confronted the limits of egalitarianism when having to create a Jewish state with a significant Arab minority in a hostile environment: as a Jewish state, would Jews enjoy special privileges, and would the state provide room for non-Jews in its national identity? And as a Jewish state, how would it respond to the potential threat posed by the Palestinians and Arabs? Importantly, liberal Zionists tended to be highly secular and labor Zionists quite hostile to religious authority.

Ethnonational Zionism ascribes to the idea that a state for the Jews should be by and for the Jews. There are two major branches. One follows from revisionist Zionism.³⁹ Spearheaded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, it began less as a rejection of Zionism than as a critique of the Zionist leadership in Palestine and abroad. Although he never rejected liberal values, his nationalism had a strong ethnic and racial component. He also admired those European nationalisms that wanted to flex their muscle and militarize, even going so far as mimicking some of Italian nationalism’s fascist elements. Unlike the labor and liberal Zionists. who exhibited some flexibility in their territorial demands, he imagined a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan River. He passed away in exile in 1940, and his legacy continued with Menachem Begin and others, often venturing from a minimalist to a more maximalist revisionism.⁴⁰ Alongside revisionist Zionism is religious Zionism, which blends nationalism and Orthodox Judaism. Of the many important intellectual figures, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was among the most influential, interpreting the Jewish return in messianic terms and advocating for the establishment of a Jewish state that followed religious law on all of ancient Israel.⁴¹

Diaspora nationalism refers to a Jewish people dispersed across different lands that see themselves as a nation with a shared identity, history, and common fate.⁴² As responses to the emerging European nationalism, diaspora nationalism developed alongside, and in ways as a counterpoint to, Zionism.⁴³ The primary point of differentiation between it and forms of Zionism is the necessity and possible function of a Jewish state. The Jewish people would benefit from common, transnational institutions, and even be members of multilateral institutions and international organizations, but these features of political life could be accomplished without a sovereign state. Perhaps most critical in this regard was cultural, religious, and physical survival. Many diaspora nationalists advocated a two-front campaign – develop forms of autonomy at home and global norms and institutions to protect them from their domestic enemies. Also, while diaspora nationalists tended to reject the idea of a state, they nevertheless favored a Jewish homeland to provide a fertile ground for a Jewish renaissance and to anchor Jews in a universalizing world. Not only did they believe that a Jewish state was impractical, but many also thought that living in the diaspora was ethically superior to political sovereignty. Whereas Zionists saw exile as producing abnormalities and deformities in the Jewish character, some diaspora nationalists believed that it nurtured a cosmopolitanism and more easily merged the particular and the universal, developed a multiperspectival view, and integrated the best of different cultures. For some non-Jews, this diasporic character became a major explanation for the purported genius of the Jews. Living on the margins enabled Jews to create something world-turning from loose and disparate ends; Marx, Einstein, and Freud became the paradigmatic examples.⁴⁴

Rooted cosmopolitan sits at the intersection of nonterritoriality and universality.⁴⁵ It overlaps with diaspora nationalism in terms of its rejection of the necessity of Jewish sovereignty for a meaningful and secure Jewish life. But whereas diaspora nationalism often imagined forms of geographic, legal, and political autonomy in order to maintain the Jewish cultural identity, rooted cosmopolitans tended to root themselves in the individualism of liberal, democratic societies. Relatedly, while diaspora nationalism tended to hope for various forms of national and international protections to secure their cultural and physical existence, rooted cosmopolitans tended to rely on a strategy of acceptance and a liberalism of equality. Consequently, diaspora nationalism flourished in eastern Europe, and rooted cosmopolitanism in Western liberalizing democracies. Rooted cosmopolitanism’s liberal, democratic roots also account for its suspicion of Zionism because of its exclusionary nationalist character. Consequently, while Zionism might be necessary for securing the physical and cultural existence of some Jews, they are fine where they are.

Rooted cosmopolitanism’s universalism stems from a political theology and humanism that accentuates the liberal and pluralist character of modern (international) society. In this way, its domestic political culture shapes its international and cosmopolitan orientation. Accordingly, rooted cosmopolitans tend to have the sort of orientation associated with liberal internationalism, and for two major reasons. One is that their universalism crosses borders. Their values of liberalism, democracy, equality, and liberty are not tied to the nation-state but rather are part of global justice. As Jews they could play a role in bringing these values to the rest of the world, and many of them did, as evidenced by their role in the creation of international human rights. The other reason owed to Jewish survival and security. The same humanistic values that brought security and acceptance to them in Western liberal democracies could also help bring security to Jews in non-Western lands. As such, advocated internationalism and civilizing missions.⁴⁶ And, it just so happened that those western countries where Jews were becoming accepted and enjoying access to political power were also the West’s major powers, creating, at times, a relationship between Jewish interests and imperialism.

5.2 Profiles in Changing Worldviews

These four primary worldviews that crystallized in the early twentieth century had different answers to the Jewish Question and Jewish ontological and physical security in the context of changing kinds of Enlightenment processes and nationalism. As I argued in the opening pages, worldviews can change because of internal and external developments. In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish worldviews were shaken by a series of violent ruptures that culminated in the Holocaust. In the second half of the twentieth century the worldviews of the two largest Jewish communities, the American and the Israeli, followed their environments: among American Jews it remained part of rooted cosmopolitanism, with shades of particularism; in Israel, a prophetic Zionism became replaced by an ethnonational Zionism.⁴⁷ Once again, for the sake of simplicity and because of space constraints, nuance is an unaffordable luxury.

5.2.1 1900–1948

The first half century of the twentieth century constituted a downward spiral of the destruction of European Jewry. Pogroms cycled and recycled through Russia and Eastern Europe until the outbreak of World War I. The war had a disproportionate effect on the Jews, the end of the war continued the killing spree, and the new states of eastern Europe maintained their well-earned reputation for anti-Semitism. The combination of counter-Enlightenment forces and chauvinistic nationalism fed into a rabid anti-Semitism, beginning in Nazi Germany but then spreading to other parts of Europe; at times, the Germans and the local populations appeared to engage in one-upmanship regarding who could be cruelest to, and kill the most, Jews. Nazi Germany might have lost the war against the allies, but they almost won the war against the European Jews.

The Jews of Europe had few (if any) protections or exit options. Following in the footsteps of diaspora nationalism, following WWI many eastern Jewish leaders proposed the construction of semi-autonomous provinces and specialized rights for the Jews to provide security and preserve their cultural identity. Because these new states could not be trusted, they and various western Jewish leaders, including the relatively influential American Jewish delegation, proposed internationalizing these rights and creating protections lodged in the new League of Nations. Predictably, the new leaders of Eastern Europe opposed the idea of carving out a state within a state, Western states were hesitant about establishing robust enforcement mechanisms that would dispense with the principle of sovereignty, and so states created the unprecedented international minority rights treaties – but without enforcement mechanisms. Unsurprisingly, these rights had little protective value when they were most needed over the next two decades.

The only other option was immigration, and while Germany and other countries were prepared to see their Jews flee at the appropriate price, there were few countries prepared to accept them. The United States had been a principal destination point for European Jews before World War One but it all but closed its doors in 1924. Palestine was the other alternative. Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 pledged to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which was subsequently endorsed by the League of Nations, and Britain became its mandatory authority. From the very start the British had to try and accommodate two competing nationalisms, and became increasingly resistant to allowing substantial Jewish immigration for fear of triggering unrest and possibly civil war. But because Palestine was the only possible option, and because the violent anti-Semitism in Europe proved the fundamental point that Christians would never figure out how to protect or stop killing Jews, the Zionists’ demands became more urgent and forceful; Britain, though, refused to do anything that might distract from its focus on Nazi Germany or cause the Palestinians to rebel or become allied with Germany.

The destruction of European Jewry had an immediate impact on which worldviews were seen as either practical or utopian to the point of suicidal. Because diaspora nationalism could not address how to protect the Jews’ physical security, it retreated to the steam rooms, cafes, and other places where Jewish intellectuals debated utopian solutions. Rooted cosmopolitanism in many Western states, and especially in the United States, began to warm to Zionism for several reasons. Arguably most important in the United States was the emergence of an American culture that provided space for hyphenated identities.⁴⁸ Against this welcoming possibility, American Jewish leaders such as Louis Brandeis, who would become the first Jew appointed to the US Supreme Court, began reassuring American Jews that they could be part of the Jewish and the American nation, and that their Zionism did not diminish but rather strengthened their American identity. But all the while theirs was an American Zionism: Jews needed a homeland and not a state; and any homeland had to recognize the rights of the Arab population. In short, many early-twentieth-century American Zionists favored forms of binationalism in Palestine – not partitioning Palestine, but rather finding a formula for Jews’ and Palestinians’ coexistence.⁴⁹ Importantly, although anti-Semitism was also on the rise in the United States, American Jews doubled down on liberalism and universalism, emphasizing how America was their home and Zionism was a solution for other Jews. Not until 1942 did American Jewish organizations finally accept that Jews needed a “commonwealth” – that is, a state, of their own.

Labor and revisionist Zionism, which represented prophetic and ethnonational worldviews, battled each other for influence and power in the Yishuv and in world Zionist organizations; but, in the end, ideology mattered a lot less than whose strategy and tactics for creating an independent state seemed most compelling and practical. Labor Zionism, led by David Ben-Gurion, which was busily creating a proto-state and placing facts on the ground, controlled the major Jewish institutions in Palestine and, for all intents and purposes, represented the Jewish community in relations and negotiations with the British authorities. The Revisionists’ charismatic powerhouse Ze’ev Jabotinsky died in exile in 1940, and their other leaders, including future Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, lived underground as a consequence of their acts of terrorism against Palestinians, British mandatory authorities, and the occasional Jewish rival.

The Holocaust followed by the miraculous return of Jewish sovereignty after 2,000 years combined evils and dreams beyond imagination. Catastrophe then renewal. It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of their impact. The Holocaust and Israel became historically and metaphysically connected through death and rebirth. And their combination helped Jews, across these worldviews, make sense of the suffering and provided a way to cope. The Holocaust caused Jews to turn dark and to wonder how it was possible that God could have allowed such horrors to happen. What had they done to warrant such a punishment? What did this evil say about the world? Jews responded to these religious, spiritual, and existential challenges in various ways. Some turned their backs on religion, God, and the very idea that it was possible to explain the Holocaust. The Holocaust, like all events of such horror, destroyed the conceptual resources available to make sense of evil and suffering.⁵⁰ Indeed, to try to even make sense of the Holocaust represented an obscenity.⁵¹ As Theodore Adorno famously wrote, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.”⁵² Not the creation of the Jewish state, or anything else, could ever explain, justify, or give meaning to the destruction of the European Jews while the world stood by and let it happen.⁵³

Many others, however, invested Israel with a significance and a meaning that enabled them to cope with the horrors of the Holocaust and have reason to hope. This can be interpreted as a form of theodicy.⁵⁴ The eighteenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz introduced the concept to a modern audience, and then Max Weber illuminated the concept as it became central to his sociology of religion. Different religions and ethical communities have offered different responses to the existence of evil, sin, and disappointments in a transcendental and divinely ordered world, but the need to do so is powerfully felt in those religions that believe in a loving and all-powerful God.⁵⁵ As Max Weber wrote, “The more the development [of religious ideas] tends toward the conception of a transcendental unitary god who is universal, the more there arises the problem of how the extraordinary power of such a god can be reconciled with the imperfection of the world.”⁵⁶ Although many Jews, religious and secular alike, refused to try and find meaning in the Holocaust, Israel provided a blessed stand-in. It gave them a reason for belief. The Holocaust became part of the sacred, and, by extension, so too did Israel.

5.2.2 1948–2020

The destruction of European Jewry and the creation of Israel meant that the United States and Israel became the two largest Jewish communities in the world. Both began building their lives. In the United States, anti-Semitism became unacceptable (though it still occurred) and Jews became integrated into what was now referred to as a Judeo-Christian America. There was not the same need for Jewish country clubs, hospitals, community centers, and the like as Jews were increasingly allowed to join more inclusive institutions. Many Jews also became involved in various civil rights and empowerment movements, seeing their own struggles in those of others. In hindsight, the surprise is not that the Holocaust impacted the outlook of American Jews, but that its impact was so minimal at the outset and that American Jews continued onward with a cosmopolitan ethic.

Israel began with a prophetic streak, but this principle became compromised as a matter of politics; or, alternatively stated, Israel wanted to be both particular and universal, but the former ranked above the latter in terms of the hierarchy of needs.⁵⁷ In his speeches and writings at the time, Ben-Gurion often referenced the prophetic tradition and Israel’s rightful place as a light unto nations. But the prophets had never dealt with the harsh reality of gathering Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab lands in numbers that equaled the existing population in Israel, and developing an economy under dire circumstances and without natural resources. Nor could Israel beat swords into ploughshares surrounded by enemies that pledged its destruction; instead, necessity suggested just the opposite. In the document declaring Israel’s independence, Ben-Gurion reassured that all citizens, regardless of religion, race, gender, or creed, would be treated as equal.⁵⁸ Liberal democracy was not twaddle, but this was a Jewish state, and while Israeli Arabs were formally equal and had the right to vote, this potential fifth column did not enjoy the same rights or freedom of movement as Jews.

The 1967 and 1973 wars had a significant impact on the worldviews of American and Israeli Jews, though with slightly different effects. For many Jews, the major plot lines of the wars tracked each other. In both cases Arabs waged war and the world stood by. In 1967 the Arab states mobilized their armies and marched them to their border with Israel with speeches predicting Israel’s coming destruction. Israel went to the United Nations, France, and the United States for help, but found none. Instead of waiting to be attacked, it struck preemptively, and in six days demolished three Arab armies and captured the Sinai, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, flipping the standard narrative of Jewish weakness on its head. Six years later, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on the holiest day in Judaism, and once again the world stood by and did nothing. Even the United States hesitated to resupply an Israeli army that was on the ropes. Israel turned near-defeat into victory, but a pyrrhic one.

This is also a period that coincides with the construction of the “Holocaust.” The Holocaust was no stranger to American Jewish life, but it was relatively minor compared to what it would become. Beginning in the 1970s the Holocaust gained prominence in the United States and around the world, aided by the collective effort of well-placed individuals and organizations, and especially Jewish leaders and associations, who determined it must become more central to Jewish and global consciousness. The increased emphasis on the “Holocaust” resulted from accidental and intentional activity, sincere and strategic action, and the conjunction of forces beyond anyone’s control. The wars of the Middle East and the sanctification of the Holocaust bonded to form a single experience for American Jews.⁵⁹ By the mid-1970s it was near impossible to think about Israel without also conjuring up the Holocaust, and vice versa. The Holocaust was an immediate reminder that Jews are never safe and can never rely on others for their existence, and that a self-reliant, strong Jewish state is the only guarantor of the Jewish people. Israel is a Jewish state dedicated to ensuring the survival of the Jews, in the here and now, in the future, in Israel, and in the diaspora. The Holocaust reminded Jews that forces would rise, from time to time, to destroy the Jewish people, and Israel reminded them that Jews would persevere.

Because of the wars and the growing salience of the Holocaust, the balance between particularism and universalism among American and Israeli Jews shifted from the latter to the former. Israel became part of the American Jewish identity.⁶⁰ For many American Jews, Israel became a form of idolatry, and to be a Jew in good standing depended more on supporting Israel, right or wrong, than keeping Shabbat. There was an increase in American Jewish immigration to Israel, but American Zionism continued to mean American Jews providing financial and political support from the United States. Alongside Israel, the Holocaust also helped to reinforce the more particularlistic aspects of the American Jewish identity and create a greater attachment to Israel. But they remained rooted cosmopolitans with strong universalistic tendencies.

In Israel a new form of nationalism began to develop, much less prophetic and much more ethnonationalist and messianic in character. When Israel’s borders were limited to the 1949 armistice, there was little room for religious and revisionist Zionism to expand. But the capture of the territories, and especially those seen as part of biblical Israel, provided an outlet for their visions of a Greater Israel. And those Israeli Jews who might not see the ideological value of the territories could appreciate adding to Israel’s strategic depth. Israeli settlement activity began soon after 1967, and then accelerated with the 1977 election of Menachem Begin, whose Likud Party had strong roots in revisionist ideology. The Labor and Likud parties continued to vie for control, but the ground was shifting to the right. The Holocaust also became more fully intertwined in Israeli Jewish identity, though in a context of a growing ethnonationalism that amplified Israel’s particularism.⁶¹

Like what happened in the United States, the Holocaust also became central to Israeli identity beginning in the 1960s. In the first decades of the Israeli state, the Holocaust victims were treated as a living example of life in the galut; many Israeli leaders held to myths of Jews going to their deaths like sheep, and occasionally referred to survivors as “soaps.” The 1961 trial of Albert Eichmann was one of the first showcase events in Israel, and, beginning with the 1967 war, Israel began using Holocaust analogies to refer to the conflict with Arab states and the Palestinians.

Despite these shared experiences that swelled feelings of Jewish precarity, their preexisting worldviews offered different ways to respond to such feelings, creating a growing difference in worldviews between American and Israeli Jews. American Jews retained a strong attachment to Israel, but began to increasingly question their relationship to an Israel that appeared to contain a different set of values than them. American Jews remain both Americans and Jews. They retain a strong sense of their Jewish identity, but it is a Jewish identity that continues to be profoundly shaped by an American experience that retains strong connections to humanism and cosmopolitanism. The Israeli Jewish identity, on the other hand, is defined by its ethnic and religious character. There is little remaining of prophetic Zionism in Israeli politics as ethnonational Zionism has become hegemonic.⁶² The consequence is that Israeli and American Jews have become brothers from different planets. And while these brothers maintain relations, these relations are fraught with tension and opposition. The Jewish Question remains.

5.3 Conclusion

I want to conclude with two observations regarding the relationship between Jewish worldviews and relationalism. The first is the recognition that while worldviews presume a permanence, they also are susceptible to change. To distinguish between change in a worldview and change of a worldview requires some measure of distinction. In other words, what aspect of a worldview is being isolated and used to mark a transformation? There is no gold standard, in part because there are various elements of worldviews. My account of Jewish worldviews, though, has focused on the relationship between the community and their relationship to outsiders and their place in the world, otherwise known as the Jewish Question. But, as many of the major European intellectuals, who also happened to be Jewish, observed, you don’t have to be Jewish to experience the Jewish Question. The relationship between the particular and the universal, as Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Levi-Strauss, Berlin, and Arendt, and other eminent Jewish scholars noted, is a central feature and experience of modernity. And for a Jewish community defined by religion and ethnicity, the universalizing properties of the Enlightenment and modernity threatened extinction.

Accordingly, the central question for many Jewish communities became how to retain some semblance of their Jewish identity while integrating in an increasingly humanistic world. There were many factors that shaped how different Jewish communities answered this dilemma, including what their non-Jewish neighbors might think of them. And if their non-Jewish neighbors were not pleased, there was the chance that their toleration might wear thin. As such, this was a debate that was shaped by historical context and the search for security mediated by the desire to retain features of a religious and secularized Jewish identity. And the very fact that there was not one answer but multiple answers, all formed under the rubric of the Jewish Question, highlights how a single community can have distinguishable worldviews.

The second point is more directed at hyper-humanism. As I stated at the outset, my sociological relationalism incorporates not just a humanism but also a recognition that while all groups are socially constructed, they also can have enduring properties and see themselves as having a history and memory that links them from the past to the present to the future. When Jews began debating the Jewish Question in the late eighteenth century, they did so with a belief that they shared a common history and set of religious texts that provided the wellspring of memory and belonging. Being and becoming were part of a dialectic process, and neither could exist without the other. There must be a there there – a desire to maintain some semblance of belonging even as they choose different paths for becoming. Jews might not have agreed on the basis of their belonging, but they agreed on the necessity of keeping belonging alive. The particular required a permanence, even if at the level of metaphysics, with the danger that humanism might turn into a version of hyper-humanism. What would be the consequence? Jews, and all communities would become ever-changing things (or things that are not things) that have little basis of existence. Their sense of self would have no basis in history, culture, or belief. Individuals would experience alienation and anomie. They would cease to have hopes or ways of coping with disappointment and suffering. Do humans long for this deracinated existence? Communities are often criticized for the burdens and obligations they impose on their members, but a world defined by highly mutable and constantly disappearing things sounds like another form of imprisonment.

The questions posed in this volume are reminiscent of Martin Buber’s struggle to find a comfortable relationship between humanism and relationalism. Born in Vienna in 1878, he moved to Germany as a young man, rose to considerable prestige, and then fled Nazi Germany for Palestine in 1938 at the age of 60, where he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In a recent biography, Paul Mendes-Flohr underscores how Buber eventually committed to a relationalism to try and align the particular and the universal. As Mendes-Flohr tells it, there were three stages to Buber’s intellectual development.⁶³ In Stage One he worried that the Enlightenment would lead to the erasure of the supernatural Jew, who is deeply connected to thousands of years of tradition, history, and practice, and rooted in Torah and rabbinic tradition, and to the rise of the “natural” Jew, who aspires to become part of humanity. This shift owes partly to the attraction of Enlightenment thought and to the desire to mute anti-Semitism by doing everything to avoid offending Christians. But at what cost? Humanism, Bubor warned, would lead to the disappearance of the Jewish people and offer nothing but emptiness.

In his effort to recover the supernatural Jew, Buber turned to Hasidism, which he believed represented a sort of “pure” Judaism. However, Buber hoped not for a return, but rather a rebirth – a Jewish renaissance. In Stage Two Buber entered into Jewish politics, embraced Zionism, and worked for Herzl. What attracted Buber to Zionism, though, was not the idea of imitating European politics or establishing a Jewish state, but rather the possibility of promoting a Jewish cultural renewal in which Jewish rebirth and humanity were in dialectical relationship. Indeed, he feared that a Jewish nation that became a sovereign state would cease to have the ability to enjoy a real Jewish renewal; European nationalisms were hardly attractive role models. Buber championed binationalism, broke from organized Zionism, and concluded that renewal did not require living in Palestine but rather could occur in the diaspora.

Stage Three begins when he moves to Berlin, continuing his Judaic learning, and becomes mentored by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. He now adopts a relationalism that is steeped in both the imminent and the transcendent and the particular and the universal. Such commitments provide the metaphysical foundations for a fluidity between being and becoming and his magisterial I and Thou. He retains an abiding belief that the Jews are rooted in a primordial covenant whose life in faith is mediated through religious texts. But there is always the danger that a people might become cloistered and unable to engage in genuine dialogues with those outside the community. He wanted a Jewish people that were able to realize their “commitment to a larger family of humankind” and worried that Jewish nationalism in Palestine might develop in a way that disregarded the genuine needs and aspirations of non-Jews.⁶⁴ Such a nationalism would not only harm Palestinians, but would also lead to a damaged Jewish people in Israel. Jews, like all peoples, need to be able to establish relations that recognize others and allow the possibility of being changed through dialogue. Buber’s worldview was both Jewish and humanistic. In this regard, he wanted to avoid the dangers of substantialism and hyper-humanism and locate an ethical humanism and a form of politics that recognized the intrinsic relationship between being and becoming.