Assessing Islamist constructions of world order
On the occasion of the Munich Security Conference 2016, John McCain (2016) framed the recent events in the Middle East as indicative of the decay of the “Western” world order:
The world order that we built, our dearest inheritance is coming apart. […] It is [our] vision of world order – our vision – that is under assault today. It is that balance of power that is eroding […], and nowhere more graphically than the Middle East. […] It is happening because we have adversaries and enemies that oppose us. It is happening because revisionist powers and terrorist movements like Daesh are testing us, and threatening us, and attacking us, and ultimately seeking to drive us back and displace us.
What this quote bears witness to is a very common and generalized suspicion: the “Western” world order is under attack, and it is, in particular, the events in the Middle East that threaten what McCain calls “our dearest inheritance.” But what does it mean to say that “our” world order is coming apart – what is the world order and who is the “we”? What exactly is it that those enemies oppose “us” in? And in what sense can it be meaningful to argue that certain actors threaten “the” world order?
Since 9/11, the top candidate for the personified threat to the “Western” world order has become the so-called Islamist or Islamist terrorist. This view gained momentum ever since the first euphoria about the “Arabellions” gave way to sobered assessments of the dramatic developments in some of the affected countries. As Tony Blair (2014) warned in 2014,
[w]hat is presently happening [in the Middle East] still represents the biggest threat to global security of the early 21st Century. […] At the root of the crisis lies a radicalised and politicised view of Islam, an ideology that distorts and warps Islam’s true message. […] It is de-stabilising communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence in an era of globalisation. We might call this […] perspective an “Islamist” view […].
The construction of the “Islamist” as the principal enemy of the “West” is the continuation of a polarization between the “West” and “Islam” on a more general level in an even more coarse way. Within this antagonism, the Muslim “Other” is often depicted as a threat to Western values such as democracy, freedom and secularism (Asad 2009: 21), thereby becoming constitutive of the “Western” self (Hurd 2008: 45). While this phenomenon itself is not new, a new dimension has been added to this mode of production ever since the attacks of 9/11. In the aftermath of this event, many have pointed to different phenomena of the securitization of Islam, which have reinforced the construction of “the Muslim other as a negation of an idealised Western secular self” (Mavelli 2013: 161–163).
This polarization finds both its climax and its distorted generalization in the figure of the “Islamist” who allegedly represents all the qualities opposed to and ambitions directed against the “Western” order, thus becoming the archetype of the Muslim “Other” to the “West”. As an allegory of violent opposition to the “Western” world order, he serves as a screen for projections of the fear of losing order and values, especially the democratic, modern nation-state, as well as liberalism, secularism and pluralism. The thesis underlying these diagnoses is that “Islamist” and “Western” constructions of and discourses on world order are radically antithetic and essentially irreconcilable.
This chapter wants to question this view and instead pursue the thesis that “Islamist” and “Western” discourses on world order may indeed bear more resemblances and connectivity than is commonly assumed. The main argument to support this thesis is the following: the observation that “Islamist” and “Western” discourses on world order are diametrically opposed is only valid if one assumes that both sides constitute unambiguous and closed structures of meaning. In contrast, I claim that such an essentialization of the “Western” and the “Islamist” construction of world order is undue:1 both discourses are marked by inner contestation, rivalling claims for what order should look like and changing hegemonies of interpreting analytic and normative claims about the world order. Moreover, the notion of world order itself often remains unspecific and should be understood as a concept that consists of several elements. If those two differentiations, the complex structure of the idea of world order and the plural character of both the “Western” and the “Islamist” discourse are accepted, then a much more nuanced picture of the “Islamist” opposition to the “Western” world order thesis will build: while, indeed, there are moments of rejection and opposition in “Islamist” discourse, there is also a high degree of connectivity to and mobilization of “Western” discursive threads.
This chapter proceeds in four steps. First, it briefly summarizes some of the most important interpretations of “Islamists” in the International Relations (IR) literature and points to what these conceptualizations potentially dismiss with regard to the question of world order. The second part suggests conceptualizing world order as plural discourses on sovereignties (things ordered), legitimacies (ordering principles) and teleologies (normative goals of order) in order to account for its complex structure and avoid generalizations about “the” world order. The third part then develops the concept of sovereignties further and show how within “Western” academic discourse this notion is contested, and thus, no single interpretation of a “Western” understanding of sovereignty is possible. The final part elaborates on how these theoretical considerations and differentiations can methodologically be used to assess connectivity and conflict with “Islamist” discourses on world order. I use the example of Hezbollah in order to illustrate some preliminary insights into empirical results such an approach might generate. In the concluding part, I give an outlook on what use the proposed perspective on the “Islamist” challenge to the “Western” world order can have with regard to the current conflicts in world politics.
The argument that political Islam should be studied within an interpretive framework that actually engages with the claims made by Islamic thinkers, activists and politicians is not new. As early as in the late 1990s, Roxanne L. Euben warned against the treatment of Islamic fundamentalists within a purely rationalist framework which cannot fully grasp the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism because it “involves the translation of all culture through the filter of Western categories of knowledge,” thus “implicitly bracket[ing] the substance of fundamentalist political thought as irrelevant to properly scientific explanations” (Euben 1999: 23). In rationalist accounts, fundamentalism appears “as a mechanical response to structural pressures” (Euben 1999: 154). To Euben, the construction of fundamentalism within rationalist categories is an attempt to create and discipline a subject that “serves as the irrational Other to our intelligible Self” (Euben 1999: 43) and replaces the communist threat in a post–Cold War era (see also Camilleri 2012: 1029; Mandaville 2013: 184). Fundamentalist movements “stand in relation to Western, secular power and international order as the chaos of the particularistic, irrational, and archaic stand in relation to the universalistic, rational, and modern” (Euben 1999: 7). From a perspective of comparative political theory, she rejects the notion of a strong opposition between fundamentalism and modernity, as well as the characterization of fundamentalism as pre-modern (Euben 1997).2 Rather, she argues, fundamentalism is a product of modernity: “fundamentalist world-views are defined in terms of and in opposition to modernity” (Euben 1999: 161, emphasis added). Thus, the question we should ask is, “[what] are Islamic understandings and experiences of modernity, and what, precisely, about modernity is pernicious, from an Islamic fundamentalist point of view in particular?” (Euben 1997: 431). Embracing such an interpretive perspective allows not only for deessentializing the “Islamist Other” but also for discovering commonalities between Islamic and Western thought regarding their critique of post-Enlightenment modernity (Euben 1999: 15) as well as overlaps in the history of thought, for example regarding the role of religion in the public sphere (Abdelkader 2016a).
Yet, Western public discourse and the discipline of IR tend to focus on the violent face of “Islamism” and reproduce the narratives of either the instrumental use of Islam for expressing grievances or the essentially irrational nature of “Islamism” (Abdelkader 2016b). IR still has a strong bias towards questions of security and stability as well as potential obstacles to (liberal) democratization according to the Western model.
One thread of the debate about “Islamism” in IR is shaped by a security studies perspective that focuses on the violent traits of “Islamists” as terrorists. In this strand of research, there are two main options of framing “Islamists”. They are either considered as functionally equivalent to other terrorist movements that deploy violence as a strategic means or as a particularly irrational actor with a behaviour that remains opaque for the outside observer (Volpi 2010: 149–174). In the first case, “Islamists” are understood as strategic actors that merely instrumentalize religion as a tool of seduction for mobilizing support and constructing legitimizing narratives for underlying social and economic grievances (Rittberger and Hasenclever 2005: 138–139). In the second case, a psychologization of “Islamists” takes place: they are considered somewhat deviant actors whose behaviour cannot rationally be accounted for. Such accounts often draw on a secularist tradition in IR that considers religion as a phenomenon that belongs to the sphere of the irrational (Snyder 2011). They also tend to essentialize Islam and its supposedly inherent violent-proneness, which has sometimes been called the “myth of religious violence” (Cavanaugh 2009: 4).
The second thread of IR deals with the alleged purpose of “Islamism” to take over state power through revolutions (Iran being the case in point) and the question to which extent a state’s “Islamic” quality influences its behaviour in the international sphere or international relations en gros. Two important strands can be identified here, too, and they reiterate the previously mentioned motives. One stands in the tradition of the civilizational approach of Samuel P. Huntington (1993) and follows neo-Orientalist plot: where “Islamists” take over and thus establish a non-secular political system guided by Islam, state behaviour becomes irrational, erratic and conflict-prone. Such accounts rely on an essentialist understanding of Islam “as a single cohesive entity” (Volpi 2010: 32) whose unalterable principles and values are culturally exceptional and can be studied as an independent variable causing certain kinds of (abnormal) behaviour (Volpi 2010: 50–56). The other trend is even more powerful in IR theory: the neo-realist as well as neo-liberal paradigms neglect that religion plays any role at all (Snyder 2011; for exceptions see Bech and Snyder 2011; Fox and Sandal 2010). States are treated as rational actors, either as like units or as utility maximizers, for whom (absolute or relative) power is the only relevant category. Religious arguments, here, are considered as mere rhetoric.3
The chasm in the conceptualization of “Islamist” actors either as irrational, violence-prone, exceptional or as rational, instrumentalist, strategist seems to work against recognizing the political quality of “Islamists.” Moreover, there is a strong narrative that constructs “Islamists” as actors who cannot make it to modernity. This assumption has three corollaries. First, it is assumed that “Islamists” cannot embrace the idea of modern statehood. For the discipline of IR, it is important that, according to the secularization narrative, the separation of the political from the religious realm and the privatization of religion were a main precondition for the emergence of the modern state in Europe after the peace of Westphalia (Cho and Katzenstein 2011: 168). In this perspective, the power shift from the church to and the consequent rise of the nation-state, as well as the establishment of the sovereign state system, are constructed as the solution to religiously motivated conflicts in Europe. One effect of this narrative is the creation of “a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence [as] one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state” (Cavanaugh 2009: 4). Religion is thus depicted as an anachronism and contradiction to modern statehood. Consequently, “Islamist” actors that allegedly cannot separate between religion and politics are incapable of establishing or being part of a modern sovereign (and therefore necessarily secular) state that is at the basis of the international system (Volpi 2010: 57).
The second corollary is intimately linked to the first one: it claims that “Islamists” are inherently anti-democratic because they cannot separate religion and politics. Liberal democratic theory assumes that any comprehensive doctrine (e.g. religions) should be banned from the public sphere insofar as its reasons and arguments are only valid if a person adheres to its encompassing system of beliefs. Arguments given in the public sphere should be accessible to every citizen, irrespectively of his or her adhesion to a specific encompassing doctrine (Rawls 1993, 1997), and any conception of the political should suffice the imperative of a neutral language or the idea of pure practical reason (Reder 2013: 65–66). Given that “Islamists” are assumed to be incapable of differentiating between the political and the religious realm, these actors are automatically anti-democratic from a liberal perspective. In the broadest sense, the “Islamists’” project is understood as “the establishment of an Islamic state and Islamic institutions” (Roy 2013: 16). Following the liberal conception of democracy, a party that tries to transform religious norms into positive state law undermines systematically the neutrality imperative of the democratic state.
This immediately leads to the third corollary, namely that “Islamists” are anti-pluralistic. Given that comprehensive doctrines as a normative state system must be forced upon a plural society in order to be kept alive. “Islamists” are suspicious of abandoning the pluralist democratic game as soon as they are in power. This has been referred to as the “Islamist dilemma”: “[if] allowed to run for elections, Islamists may win and cancel elections once in power, but preventing them from running undermines democracy” (Teti and Mura 2009: 102). Instead, “Islamist” discourse is assumed to be a monolith that enforces one closed set of norms on societies and, as an institutional realization of one comprehensive doctrine, precludes the possibility of pluralism and contestation. This is often associated with a “sharia’atization of law” (Tibi 2013: 64) and the society’s dispossession of the pluralist struggle over norms.
In this sharp formulation, these three assumptions about “Islamists” are extremely broad generalizations: they are premised both on the existence of a unified, homogenous and consistent “Islamist” discourse that is substantially characterized ex negativo, namely by its anti-secularist character, and the unambiguity of such concepts as modernity and democracy. If one instead assumes an inherent contestedness and the existence of modernities, political rationalities and democratic models in the plural, on one hand, and an understanding of “Islamism” as a pluralist, political and modern discourse, on the other hand, this opens up a perspective on “Islamist” constructions of world order that exceeds mere opposition to and violent threatening of the “West.”
This means two things. First, “Islamist” discourse should be understood as a space where political alternatives, polity and policy options are negotiated and where new ideas of order are developed (Hurd 2008: 118–128). Thus, “Islamist” actors have a political quality: they put forward political claims, create and mobilize legitimizing narratives and develop their own visions of order. Of course, this should not distract from the fact that some of them are also violent actors – but they are more than that. This is the understanding that I would like to pursue here: “Islamists” employ a modern language in which ideas of the political and order are negotiated, and this discourse is not simply irrational and opaque or a mere negation of “Western” discourse. Much rather, interdiscursivity makes ideas travel, they are picked up, reproduced, transformed, rejected or connected to new ideas.
Second, the inner contestedness of such concepts as sovereignty, democratic legitimacy and normative goals of world order should be made visible in order to de-essentialize the “Western” discourse, too.
Before turning to the “Western” discourse on world order, it should be clarified what is meant by “world order” in this article. In the existing literature on world order, two main trends can be identified. One strand of research deals with empirical transformations of the world order; the second with its normative contestation.
Within the first strand of research, many have argued that changes in international and global governance structures can be empirically observed, which might hint at a transformation that is already underway. An important turning point was the end of the Cold War that entailed a debate as to whether a unipolar world order with the triumph of liberalism would replace the bipolar order (Fukuyama 1989; Ikenberry 2004; Krauthammer 1991) or whether the age of a multipolar order was heralded and what its consequences were going to be, especially with regard to war and peace (Lebow 1994). Today, many observe a rising importance of regions as a complementary or conflicting level of governance to global and national arrangements, a debate that came to be known as “new regionalism” (Acharya 2014). Moreover, the academic debate has questioned its rigid concepts and pointed to the social constructedness and changeability of sovereignty (Bartelson 1995; Biersteker and Weber 1996; Zürn and Deitelhoff 2015) and authority structures (Hall and Biersteker 2002; Hurd 1999; Zürn, Binder and Ecker-Ehrhardt 2012).
With regard to the second trend, it has been stated that normative alternatives to known and established forms of order have emerged. This concerns, on the one hand, power shifts in the international system that strengthen, for instance the BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and question the hegemony of the “West” (Ba and Hoffmann 2005; Flemes, Nabers and Nolte 2012; Hurrell 2006; Stephen 2014). On the other hand, transnational and in particular religious movements are often depicted as fundamental opposition to the existing global order, which sometimes even goes so far as to question the organization within states per se (Haynes 2001; Shani 2009). More specifically, what is often considered to be at stake is the liberal world order that is either depicted as being threatened by global (mostly Islamist) terrorism (critically Sørensen 2011; Volpi 2010) or the re-rise of authoritarianism (Kagan 2008; Ott-away 2003). The latter approaches hold that a shift in power also entails an adaption of the values that guide and are realized by global institutions (Kagan 2012). Others have attributed the challenges to the liberal world order to its own inner tensions (Jahn 2013; Sørensen 2011) or stressed that there are many versions of what a liberal international order can look like, which means that observable changes and challenges can be framed within – and not without – a liberal paradigm (Ikenberry 2011).
What the normative and the empirical approaches have in common is that they stress the transformation of the world order (marked by Western hegemony): while the former tries to find real-world materializations of such developments, for example in institutional or structural change, the latter try to reflect on the normative implications of such transformations, for example a change in the values and normative structures underlying the world order. But can we really establish the empirical and normative state of the current world order in a definite way? This seems to be a very difficult enterprise – ambiguities remain, competing interpretations coexist, one becoming hegemonic at one time, the other guiding practices at another time, and a third being institutionalized and codified in international norms. This is my first claim with regard to world order: it can only be understood as an ever-contested discourse that informs practices and institutions in a non-coherent, ambivalent, sometimes contingent way.
If this claim is accepted, then the task to identify contestation of “the” world order is a very vague notion. For instance, what does it mean when McCain claims that its enemies threaten “our” world order? In what way can the world order be threatened as a whole if it is internally contested – and who can even be identified as an enemy? This needs very careful analysis which will not lead to generalizing conclusions, such as: “the ‘Islamists’ threaten the ‘Western’ world order”. What should be studied, in the most differentiated manner possible, are two things: First, how do actors engage with the discourse on world order? The analysis of discursive struggles and the utterances by an actor who tries to gain discursive power are of interest here. If social phenomena “exist only because people collectively believe they exist and act accordingly” (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001: 393); that is they come into being because of inter-subjectively held meanings and interpretations of the world that are expressed through language, then the “struggle over meaning” (Holzscheiter 2014: 144) should be the relevant object of analysis when assessing the contestation of world order. According to my reading of the literature, however, a perspective that can combine the normative and empirical transformation thesis of world order in a way that allows for a nuanced and differentiated assessment of actors’ discursive contestation of the world order is missing up to date.
Second, what are the elements of the world order that can be subject to such contestation? It is important to be specific here instead of claiming the contestation of “the current world order” as a reified, institutionalized whole. I suggest an understanding of world order that answers the following questions: What should be ordered, how should it be ordered and to what purpose? Or, as Hedley Bull put it,
[t]o say [that] of a number of things […] display order is […] to say that they are related to one another according to some pattern, that their relationship is not purely haphazard but contains some discernible principle. […] [Order] in social life is […] a pattern that leads to a particular result, an arrangement of social life such that it promotes certain goals or values.
(Bull 1995: 3–4, emphasis added)
With regard to the world order, I translate things, principles and goals into sovereignties, legitimacies and teleologies: sovereignties designate the units that are subjected to order and, at the same time, those entities whom final autonomy/agency is ascribed to, for example states, peoples, regions and so on. Legitimacies are the principles according to which a certain order is justified. Teleologies refer to normative visions of what the world order should look like its purpose, as well as historical-philosophical convictions of where it is heading.4 This concept of world order is not only based on a plausible notion of order but also covers most of the debates that circulate under the label “world order” in (International) Political Theory and IR. Using the example of sovereignties, the next section will display the wide range of interpretations that exist in Western discourses on world order.
It should be noted that what I refer to as the “Western” discourse on world order is a special sort of discourse, namely an academic one that, obviously, is not the same as the political discourse. However, the two are not entirely disconnected. On the contrary, academic accounts of world order deal with political developments and, conversely, inform political discourses and practices.5 This means that what I extract from the academic discourse are discursively available interpretations of sovereignty, legitimacy and teleologies. These academic interpretations pick up and feed back into interpretations used by political actors. On a methodological level, the four identified paradigms should be understood as a heuristic scheme that allows for empirically analysing and structuring utterances and dis-cursive contributions by political actors. This is not limited to the analysis of “Islamist” actors that I take as an example here but can be applied to any political actor, including “Western” actors.6 The goal of the following part is thus to identify the main paradigms of argumentation about sovereignty available in “Western” (academic) discourse that can be used as a heuristic for analysing political discourses on world order or, more specifically, actors’ utterances and verbal contributions to such discourses.
With the ongoing processes of globalization and transnationalization, the issue of sovereignty is debated anew and often takes place at the intersection of IR and Political Theory (Kuntz and Volk 2014: 9). In the so-called transnational constellation, state-centred approaches are now challenged by politics outside the state and the domestic sphere such that binaries as inside/outside and local/global are hard to maintain (Kuntz and Volk 2014: 9–12). The constructivist turn allowed for historicizing sovereignty as state sovereignty (Philpott 2001), which opened up the space for identifying different ways of constructing sovereignty (Biersteker and Weber 1996). In this section, four paradigms of sovereignty are identified as dominant in “Western” discourse: absolute, popular, shared and conditioned sovereignty.
Absolute sovereignty is the archetype of modern sovereignty and the condition for the anarchical international system (Philpott 2001: 19). It is thus also the underlying concept of neo-realist approaches to IR that rarely problematize the notion of sovereignty at all. Paradigmatically, Kenneth Waltz understood the concept of sovereignty as a state’s ability to decide “for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems” (Waltz 1979: 95–96), thus linking it with the “like unit” argument with regard to the international system: here, the understanding of structural equality of states as sovereigns is at the basis of the idea of the anarchic system where they co-act without functional differentiation given that “in any self-help system, units worry about their survival” (Waltz 1979: 105).
Absolute sovereignty is intimately connected to the idea of the state. It has an internal and an external side: internally, it designates the “supremacy over all other authorities within [a specific] territory and population;” the external side is the “independence of outside authorities” (Bull 1995: 8). The external side is often associated with the (1) formal equality of states, also in the legal sense and the (2) external recognition of authority that grants immunity from external interference, whereas the internal side of sovereignty refers to the (3) final or supreme authority in the domestic arena and the (4) effective control, that is independence or at least controlled interdependence in policies (Biersteker and Weber 1996: 2, Krasner 1999: 9–26, Philpott 2001: 18, Zürn and Deitelhoff 2015: 194–195).
These dimensions could be considered as the ideal of absolute sovereignty. However, almost all authors doubt that such an ideal form in the four dimensions sketched has ever been full-fledged empirical reality: while the Peace of Westphalia established the state as a holder of sovereignty that was absolute in terms of “the scope of affairs over which a sovereign body governs within a particular territory” (Philpott 2001: 19) and, arguably, the norm of non-intervention, the geographical boundaries were at first quite narrow, merely comprising Europe and potentially such political entities that could fall under label of Christian state (Philpott 2001: 30–33). Moreover, there is an increasing challenge to the absolute conception of sovereignty, in particular through changing state and non-state practice. In practice, the external side of sovereignty is not necessarily dependent on the internal one (Krasner 1999: 14–20): states are for instance recognized as equal part of the state system without effectively holding the ultimate authority within their territory.
And yet, absolute sovereignty not only serves as a “normative and conceptual aspiration in the minds of individuals” (Zürn and Deitelhoff 2015: 195) but also persists in the legal domain in the form of absolute sovereign rights (Donnelly 2014: 233–235). What is important here is that there is a paradigm of absolute sovereignty within which arguments can be made on an academic and more importantly on a normative and political level. In its four dimensions, it is intimately linked to the modern nation-state, which makes absolute sovereignty distinct from popular sovereignty that is discussed in the following section.
Essential for this paradigm are the waves of colonial independence and the rise of the idea of self-determination of peoples (Philpott 2001: 35–37; 151–251). While the participation in and recognition within the international system of sovereign states used to be a privilege of European states, with the colonies being mere extensions of them, a new norm emerged in the second half of the 20th century and held that “colonies were entitled to statehood however weak their government, however scant their control over their territory, however inchoate their people” (Philpott 2001: 35).
In contrast to the paradigm of absolute sovereignty, the different dimensions of internal sovereignty, especially the effective authority and control within a territory, were no longer linked to external sovereignty, that is the recognition of the international legal status and sovereign equality understood as the non-existence of formal hierarchy in the international system. Counter-intuitively, however, the rise of colonial independence, while motivated by the idea of self-determination, led to a further strengthening of the international system of state sovereignty – equality between states, independent jurisdictions, exclusive authority and so on (Donnelly 2014: 228;
Philpott 2001: 35–37). This is because the norm of self-determination merely changed the understanding of who or what was attributed the quality of being a state, not, however, the idea that states were the legitimate polities in the international society or their prerogatives (Philpott 2001: 28). Statehood was the award for those peoples who made their way to freedom.
A central question within the paradigm of popular sovereignty is whom the right to self-determination should be conferred to. Who is the we that asks for popular sovereignty – and who can do so legitimately? This is what has been referred to as the “paradox of popular sovereignty” (Espejo 2014: 467): it designates the infinite regress into which one enters when, on one hand, arguing that delimiting the people is such an important question that it should be answered by the people while, on the other hand, such a claim already presupposes that the boundaries be drawn around a demos. Historically, the most successful answer to this question was the nation, although there is no causal link between popular sovereignty and the nation (Yack 2001: 517–518). Obviously, not all the quests for statehood are recognized as legitimate even if founded on the idea of a nation. Such groups that try to draw a demos along different lines, for example “those based on solidarities overlapping territorial borders, such as class, ethnicity, and religion” (Jones 2013: 1151) or any kind of transnational affiliation are denied sovereignty. This dominance of the nation has altered the perception of what the units of the global order are: away from states towards peoples or, more precisely, to nations.
It has often been stated that the norm of national self-determination and the wave of events it inspired officially abolished all formal hierarchies in the international system (Lake 2003: 304) and added legitimacy to the recognized polities in international society (Hurrell 2007: 127). Following authors such as John Agnew (2005), however, the idea of a world of equal nation-states is a mere fiction given the obvious power inequalities and the non-availability of effective sovereignty for many states.
The last two decades have added a different kind of inequality to the sovereignty discourse: conditioned and gradated sovereignties. At the outset of these notions’ development was the shift of attention towards the individual and its rights as the unit that determines how sovereignty is discussed as well as the introduction of a “universal human rights-centred language of global or cosmopolitan law, rather than […] the state-based territorialized language of international relations” (Chandler 2012: 214). In the aftermath of this debate, the concepts of, first, humanitarian intervention and, later, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as sketched by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001 emerged. For this context, the most important change that the R2P brought about was that being sovereign now meant “both to be responsible to one’s own citizens and to the wider international community” (Evans 2006: 708–709). Some academics event went a step further, by introducing the notion of conditioned sovereignty, that is that states that do not fulfil their responsibility could be denied sovereignty (Slaughter 2005: 628). This conditioned or qualified sovereignty is thus premised on the idea that state sovereignty is something that needs to be earned and can, indeed, be lost again. In its more drastic versions, conditional sovereignty “legitimizes intervention to change a political regime” (Hurrell 2007: 280) if the latter has lost its privilege of sovereignty.
The consequences of this kind of thought become even more clear when combined with the so-called democratic peace thesis (DPT) as formulated by Michael Doyle (1983). During the following two decades, the thesis became ever more elaborated (see e.g. Russett and Oneal 2001) and gained significance in political discourse (Eberl 2008: 99–100). Notably, the DPT operated by establishing a sharp line between a “zone of peace” that, according to Doyle, would spread among democracies (Doyle 1983: 226) and a “zone of war” on its outside where an anarchic and violence-prone state of nature prevailed (Eberl 2008: 120).
Picking up the general intuition behind the democratic peace thesis, theorists of liberal international law began to promote a divided notion of sovereignty, one being the classical idea of state sovereignty coupled with the prohibition of intervention and territorial integrity, the other referring to a version of popular sovereignty that is founded on human rights and democratic governance. They advocated a transformation of international law towards a more normatively enriched understanding, where sovereign equality is only granted to those states that are democratically organized and respect human rights, thus rooted in an individualist approach of freedom. The more radical among those theorists even went so far as to demand that those states that do not have a liberal constitution be excluded from international law and deprived of the right to non-intervention (Eberl 2008: 121–124).
As Christian Reus-Smit (2005) observes, this new brand of liberal internationalism has four key features: first, its advocates take liberal democracies to be empirically more peaceful, protective of political and civil rights and morally reliable, which also makes them the “most advanced historical form of polity” (Reus-Smit 2005: 76). This also justifies that they “ought to have special rights in international society” (Reus-Smit 2005: 76), thereby, fourth, reintroducing a legal hierarchy to the international sphere. As Anna Geis pointed out, these lines of thought have been extended even further in proposals for different forms of liberal club governance within a “League [or] Concert of Democracies” (Geis 2013: 258), thus not only granting liberal democracies special rights but, indeed, also making them an exclusive governance body with the power to take decisions on a global level because of their inner qualities. This means that the idea of conditional sovereignty also entails the introduction of gradated sovereignties.
A last paradigm of sovereignty refers to what is called, here, shared or disaggregated sovereignty (see Agnew 2005: 441). It broadly captures those developments that involve a sovereignty transfer to levels above or beneath the state. The first thing that comes to mind are international institutions. Today, “sovereignty no longer consists in the freedom of states to act independently […], but in membership in [sic!] reasonably good standing in the regimes that make up the substance of international life” (Chayes and Chayes 1995: 27). While the oldest international institutions originate in mid-19th-century efforts to coordinate foreign policies, the most far-reaching restrictions imposed on absolute sovereignty on a global scale have certainly been the UN, its ever-evolving system and the development of international law. While these institutions could still be interpreted as being eventually subjected to the states’ consent and thus a mere tool of the exercise of state authority, both the EU and its predecessor institutions and the emergence of some forms of international authority (“delegated” and “pooled” authority, Zürn and Deitelhoff 2015: 2015) casted actual doubt on the persistence of absolute sovereignty.
The EU is the most pertinent example of sovereignty transfer. Indeed, the supranational bodies can take decisions in those policy fields that are communitarized within the EU without the nation-states’ consent (Philpott 2001: 39–40). The “sovereignty-eroding potential of […] [this type of] integrative regionalism” (Acharya 2002: 23) through functional spill-over effects (Haas 1961) was best explained by neo-functionalist approaches. In the 1970s, it still seemed that Europe and its integration in the EU stood in sharp contrast to the disintegration and advancing of the nation-state in the other regions of the world (Haas 1961: 366).
But then, the 1990s bore witness of the emergence of what came to be known as “new regionalism.” As opposed to the “old regionalism” that mainly focused on strategic and economic cooperation, new regionalism was marked by its “comprehensiveness and multidimensional nature” (Acharya 2014: 86). It was no longer dependent on a dominant hegemon but, rather, developed autonomously from within and below. A common trend is that in contrast to integrative regionalism, this new intrusive regionalism “is not always based on consent […] [and instead often marked] by a coercive element” (Acharya 2002: 28) either in a political or in a military sense. While in some countries, the reluctance to restrict state sovereignty and create supranational bodies at first prevailed, given that these nation-states have only gained their full sovereignty quite recently, most regions now know models of shared sovereignty, too. Today, regional institutions can be considered building blocks of a multilevel global governance architecture with shared sovereignties.
One should not forget that the sub-national level plays its role in shared sovereignty, too. The concept of federalism, for instance, is the prototype of “shared and negotiated sovereignty” (Rudolph and Hoeber Rudolph 2010: 556). It is an ambivalent part in state formation it is opposed to the ideal of absolute state sovereignty. Examples include not only the US and Germany but also the UK and India (Rudolph and Hoeber Rudolph 2010). More recently, cases such as Iraqi Kurdistan puzzle the conceptions hitherto discussed with regard to federalism (Mansour 2014). The model of autonomous regions that are neither sovereign states nor simple administrative units within a nation-state is also relevant with regard to other world regions, for instance the Basques in Spain and France, Kosovo and Kashmir.
As the previous section has shown, there are four different paradigms or argumentative schemes available in the “Western” discourse on sovereignty: (1) absolute, (2) popular, (3) conditional and (4) shared sovereignty. This section shows methodologically how this heuristic can be used for analysing political actors’ discursive contributions to this thread of the discourse on world order by drawing on the example of Lebanese Hezbollah. The overriding goal of using this heuristic is to make visible discursive connectivity and conflict between the “Western” and, in this case, one “Islamist” actor’s discourse on sovereignty.
Technically speaking, the four identified paradigms of argumentation serve as deductive sub-categories in a category scheme of world order. This scheme can be used for structuring inductive codes that are gained from a qualitative analysis of texts. Table 6.1 displays the sovereignty-related extract of this larger category frame.7
Table 6.1 Display of category “sovereignty” and its subcategones, including short descriptions and epistemological status
| Element/Paradigm: Sovereignties | Short Description: What the Order Consists of | Epistemological Status Logical Element/ Category | |
|
|
|||
| X1 | Absolute Sovereignty | Sovereign: States | “Western” Discourse/ Deductive Sub-category |
| X2 | Popular Sovereignty | Sovereign: Peoples | “Western” Discourse/ Deductive Sub-category |
| X3 | Conditional Sovereignty | Sovereign: (Peoples →) legitimate states | “Western” Discourse/ Deductive Sub-category |
| X4 | Shared Sovereignty | Sovereign: (Identities →) states, ROs, IOs, sub-state actors | “Western” Discourse/ Deductive Sub-category |
| X4+n | ______Sovereignty | "Other" Discourse/ Inductive Sub-category | |
Note: RO = Regional Organization; 10 = International Organization.
Obviously, there is no guarantee that the discursive contributions by actors such as Hezbollah fit this deductive category – on the contrary, as shown above, the general assumption is rather that “Islamists’” constructions of world order stand in sharp opposition to “Western” conceptions. This is why the suggested heuristic should be open for inductive additions, the space for which is represented by the last row in Table 6.1. If certain arguments reappear in the utterances of Hezbollah representatives and seem both quantitatively important and qualitatively coherent, a new inductive sub-category can be created. This then represents an additional paradigm that should be elaborated on in the way that it has been done for the “Western” paradigms earlier: what is the inner logic of this paradigm, what arguments support it, what variations on the themes exist and so on.
In what follows, I illustrate the extent to which Hezbollah’s discursive constructions of sovereignty can be connected to the “Western” paradigms of sovereignty – where can we find argumentative convergence, that is discursive reproduction; what are the fields of discursive struggle where a reinterpretation, rejection or re-association with new concepts take place? In this article, I will concentrate on a single example drawn from a comprehensive account of Hezbollah’s ideology that can be found in the book Hizbullah. The Story from Within by Naim Qassem (2010), Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general: the concept of wilayat al-faqih and how it is related to conceptions of sovereignty. The aim is to demonstrate the applicability of the suggested category scheme for empirical studies of how political actors discursively relate to the “Western” and develop their own constructions of world order and to what extent these processes are conflictual.
Hezbollah officially considers its commitment to the jurisprudence of al-wali al-faqih, the jurist-theologian, as one pillar of its programme (Qassem 2010: 112–122).8 In the absence of the last infallible Imam, Imam al-Mahdi, his task is to reveal “Sharia’s verdicts and judgments, becoming the spiritual authority of last resort” (Qassem 2010: 113). He has a high degree of authority, a variety of tasks and is considered the leader of the Islamic ummah. Given that al-wali al-faqih currently is Ali Khamenei and thus the supreme leader of Iran, an obvious question is to what extent this concept is compatible with the notion of absolute sovereignty.
Indeed, claiming that Hezbollah does not have a Lebanese but, rather, a trans-national identity has been part of a political discourse which tries to portray Lebanese Shiites as not being part of the Lebanese nation. As Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr (2008) has demonstrated, however, these claims have to be handled with care. She makes the case that the transnational dimension is part of the Shiite production of a national identity and thus a competing vision of what it means to be Lebanese (Shaery-Eisenlohr 2008: 210). Conversely, portraying Hezbollah as a non-Lebanese actor as both Sunni and Maronite Lebanese actors do should always be reflected with regard to its political motivation, against the backdrop of an instrumentalization of sectarian argumentation and in the historical context of a decades-lasting political and social marginalization of the Shiite community in Lebanon. The most important allegation against Hezbollah is that it acts as a mere puppet of Iranian interests in Lebanon and thus has an essentially anti-national attitude (Shaery-Eisenlohr 2008: 204; 208).
In Qassem’s interpretation, the relationship between Hezbollah and Iran has to be separated from the question of the commitment to wilayat al-faqih. The relationship with Iran is understood as part of a “common practice where countries of the world work towards forging alliances and building strength through collaboration all while maintaining their own convictions and serving their own interests” (Qassem 2010: 392). The main common interest and basis of loyalty with Iran as with Syria resides in the common commitment to muqawama against US hegemony and Israeli occupation.
This means that wilayat al-faqih concerns a sphere that is somewhat different from national politics; it is a transnationally effectual framework for politics:
Such commitment to the Jurist-Theologian and his jurisprudence does not limit the scope of internal work at the level of forging relations with the various powers and constituents of Lebanon. It further does not limit the sphere of regional and international cooperation with groups with whom the Party’s strategic direction or concerns meet.
(Qassem 2010: 121)
Hezbollah emphasizes that it is a Lebanese party that is concerned with Lebanese issues.
Given that working within a particular country is connected to a given set of circumstances and individuality, it is so that Hezbollah’s work concords the Islamic order with the Lebanese national background. It is a Lebanese faction by all means, from its framework to its members. […] Concern for the Islamic world’s issues and those of the oppressed does not conflict with interest and concern for national issues that fall within the realm of refuting occupation and oppression, struggling for justice and preserving interests and national priorities.
(Qassem 2010: 121–122)
To subordinate oneself to the jurisprudence of the Jurist-Theologian is considered to be a normal practice of committing oneself to certain values and institutions that may or may not be transnational:
There is no party or group in the world that does not have its internal and external delimitations, based on its vision of its own interests, and in harmony with the convictions it holds. Such points are not considered negative except where they are a source of subordination which hampers free choice, of a clear conspiracy with the enemy, or of an action which results in domination and annulment of others’ rights.
(Qassem 2010: 122)
In this sense, the belief in wilayat al-faqih does not imply anything for the relations between Hezbollah and Iran – it is not understood as being linked to national politics. Iran just happens to also commit to this jurisprudence and to have embraced an Islamic state in which al-wali al-faqih is part of the constitution. This is why the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state, in this regard, is not questioned at all – on the contrary:
The Party is not connected to events taking place inside Iran, for these are considered to be internal concerns linked to the choices and convictions of the Iranian people and their representatives. […] The Party’s scope of work and interest requires appropriate groundwork, not indulgence or interference with the affairs of others. […] The relationship between Hizbullah and Iran […] is a genuine collaboration on common convictions and in the requirements of the relationship, a candid, transparent and declared relation that has realized great practical benefits for Lebanon.
(Qassem 2010: 391)
Thus, the notion of absolute sovereignty is re-emphasized as irrevocable while at the same time it is connected to the concept of wilayat al-faqih. This connection, is interpreted as belonging to those kinds of transnational commitments to ideas and norms that are normal for any political actor. It could thus be interpreted as part of an argument that considers absolute sovereignty to give way to shared sovereignty.
As Shaery-Eisenlohr has argued, while Hezbollah and Iran’s ruling elite do share a common understanding of piety as instituted in the belief in the guardianship of al-wali al-faqih, this does not imply that there is no struggle over meaning and competing interpretations of Islam: “the boundary between Islam and non-Islam is constantly negotiated and is a source of disagreement and debate” (Shaery-Eisenlohr 2008: 207). This negotiation is not a one-way street in which Iranian elites dictate the correct interpretation. Rather, the
fatwas, although pronounced by a single authority, Khamenei in this case, are much more a product of dialogue than anyone involved would like to admit. While Hizbullah derives meaning from vilayat-i faqih, it also takes part in the shaping of rulings by the vali.
(Shaery-Eisenlohr 2008: 208–209)
Still, the Iranian revolution and the subsequent political system is presented as a model of modern, Islam-inspired governance. The commitment to wilayat al-faqih is not only seen as harmless to Lebanon’s sovereignty. It is also interpreted as the precondition for popular sovereignty. Given the successful revolution in Iran that, in Qassem’s interpretation, led to the self-determination of the Iranian people, one should take this as a role model for Islamic governance:
Iran represents a vivid manifestation of Islam’s applicability, one that every Muslim adherent should observe and contemplate. It altered the widespread, gloomy picture of Islam that was the result of ignorant errors and enemy conspiracy. It provided a case in point for popular elections, street opposition and steadfastness […]. It provided the example for instituting a system of free choice of representatives […]. Iran’s experience is also manifested success through its attentions to freedoms, for opinion divergence, women’s rights and the management of state institutions.
(Qassem 2010: 389)
In the category frame as sketched in the previous chapter, however, wilayat al-faqih would appear as a distinct inductive category because it constitutes an extension of and novelty to the “Western” discourse. It could perhaps be interpreted as a sort of divine sovereignty insofar as the task that al-wali al-faqih has to realize through his guardianship is
the preservation and implementation of Islam. […] There is a need for one clear path that practically brings the [Islamic] nation together. […] [His] authority thus represents a continuation of that of the Prophet and the infallible Imams (PBUT) insofar as his role is concerned. […] [He is the] one who carries out the Imam’s doctrinal and jurisprudence functions as required.
(Qassem 2010: 115–116)
He is granted authority in many fields, among which is the implementation of Islamic jurisprudence. Notably, he “may decide on issues of war and peace” (Qassem 2010: 117). This ascription makes it very clear that wilayat al-faqih represents a concept outside the known, “Western” ideas on sovereignty where the decision on war and peace is a matter of the state, of collective security mechanisms on a global level or, in the case of conditional sovereignty, of a club of liberal democracies.
While this rough interpretation of Naim Qassem’s explanations on Hezbollah’s view of wilayat al-faqih cannot replace an encompassing and in-depth empirical analysis, it may nonetheless indicate the type of result we can expect from such an analysis. In order to scrutinize “Islamist” constructions of world order in relation to the “West”, scholars need to overcome seemingly clear binaries and the assumption that ideas can be attributed to some actors – and not others – in an unambiguous way. Hezbollah does not simply reject ideas of sovereignty established in “Western” thought, political discourse and practice. Rather, it actively problematizes the relationship between its programme and different notions of sovereignty; it reaffirms the importance of absolute and popular sovereignty but, at the same time, innovates and creates new interpretations of these concepts by linking them to the idea of wilayat al-faqih. From this first insight into the thought of Hezbollah, one can expect that this ambivalent picture is rather representative of its perception and construction of the world order: it rejects and criticizes some parts but picks up others and alters their meaning.
Such a multifaceted picture of the relationship between “Western” and “Islamist” discourses on world order can only emerge if both the notion of world order is specified as consisting of different elements and the “West’s” interpretations of world order are uncovered in their inner plurality and contestedness.
The question remains: What can we learn from such results in the field of IR? In my reading, there are three potential fields for which this approach and its results could be of interest. The first is the theoretical debate on the question of religious actors in IR. As shown previously, they are often considered as either irrelevant or irrational and thus a threat to international security. These assessments are often based on a strong binary between the secular and the religious that has been questioned in recent debates (Casanova 2012; Hurd 2008, 2012; Taylor 2007). Showing that “Islamist” discourses on world order are neither opaque nor irrational but, on the contrary, partly move in the same fields of argumentation as “Western” discourses would confirm that any strong separation of the religious and the secular is untenable. Rather, “Islamist” actors participate in constructing and shifting the boundaries between the secular and the religious. They also develop their own notions of order by engaging with, transforming, adopting and challenging the concepts available in the liberal discourse on world order. Focusing on such interpretations of order by “Islamist” actors is important not least because they actively shape the building of orders, an example of which is the role of Tunisian Ennahdha party in the process of building a democratic order in post-revolutionary Tunisia.
If it is true that some of the alleged differences between “Western” and “Islamist” discourses on world order disappear when subjected to a detailed analysis, then this, second, raises questions with regard to the construction of strong differences between them in political discourse. Some have suggested that calling an actor religious is a political move that aims at banning it from the sphere of the political and de-legitimizing some of its acts (Asad 1993; Cavanaugh 2009). At the same time, it legitimizes state practices against such religious entities. These questions of legitimation and delegitimation concern in particular the sensitive area of the use of force and resort to violence. Such a perspective does not deny the problem of or speak in favour of the legitimacy of “Islamist” violent practices – on the contrary, it bears a potential of criticizing “Western” practices like military interventions9 that are often carried out under the pretext of fighting the “Islamist” threat. If one can uncover some parts of the “Western”–” Islamist” antagonism as resulting from a politics of difference rather than “actual” differences, then this might not only contribute to reducing the violent-proneness and fierceness of this antagonism. It might also point to the necessity of finding new interpretations for ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, especially with regard to the “Western” role.
Finally, such results open up a new interpretive scheme for “Islamist” practice. While the claim here is not that discursively created meaning translates into a consistent practice, I still hold, conversely, that every practice needs an interpretation in order to become meaningful. It is very common to interpret “Islamist” behaviour via ascriptions from the outside, for example by imputing social grievances or psychological deviance to them. It is rare that “Islamists” are taken seriously in what they offer as interpretations of their actions and behaviour, at least in “Western” IR. Given that hitherto explanations neither seem intellectually satisfying nor inform policies that would curtail violent conflicts in and with the Middle East, it is high time to investigate alternative interpretations. This chapter is meant as a contribution to such a debate.
1 This is why “Western” and “Islamist” are consequently put in quotation marks in this chapter.
2 She is also sceptical about assigning the label post-modern to fundamentalism given that “the Islamist insistence on absolute foundations is antithetical to the antifoundationalism characteristic of postmodernism” (Euben 1999: 436).
3 Constructivist approaches are far more promising in conceptualizing religion as a factor in international relations. Given that this capter takes a constructivist position itself, these positions are left aside. Seminal contributions in this field include Kubálková (2000), Laustsen and Wæver (2000), Philpott (2002) and Thomas (2005).
4 For purposes of giving an overview of the paradigms of legitimacy and teleologies, I name the four strands of discourse that I have identified, respectively: legitimacy: (1) individual-based, (2) community-based, (3) deliberative and (4) agonistic legitimacy; teleologies: (1) liberal convergence, (2) Western hegemony, (3) pluriverse and (4) clash of civilizations.
5 A very convincing example for the first is the R2P debate in IR that is intimately connected to the political developments and discussions of the concept. An example for how IR debates can influence political practices in the democratic peace thesis that politicians explicitly referred to for justifying their policies.
6 For instance, it is quite probable that the US and the German government have quite different interpretations of sovereignty. This could be brought to light by applying the suggested heuristic.
7 The full scheme can be made available by the author of this chapter.
8 Qassem describes the concept of the Jurist-Theologian as part of “a constitution based on commitment to clerical custodianship” (Qassem 2010: 119) that was for the first time practically implemented after the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 when Imam Khomeini, “the embodiment of this jurisdiction in our times” (Qassem 2010: 388) became the custodian of Islamic shari’a. Who becomes the Jurist-Theologian is a question of qualification and wisdom.
9 It is noteworthy that the clear majority of US-led military interventions from 2001 to today were carried out in Muslim-majority countries.
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