Rule in world politics: the social construction of consensus and legitimacy

Power analysis in *international political economy tries to overcome the difficulty of conceiving power along the resource-outcome-rule line by starting from the other end. These approaches run into two types of problems, however. First, they tend to overplay the causal strength of their analysis. Moving backwards from rule to outcomes faces similar problems as moving from resources to outcomes. ‘The US won for its structural power’ faces the same translation or conversion questions then classical resource based analysis. It often appears to offer an answer, when it begs the question: power cannot be just substituted to cause. The second risk is related to this. IPE approaches tend to understate the non-materialist aspects of rule or governance, indeed the extent to which structures affect events only though the meaning given to them.

It is here where *poststructuralist and *constructivist approaches have made their main contribution. They look at the intersubjective (ideational and/or discursive) origins of consensus and legitimacy. They conceive of and analyse power in its relationship to knowledge – in both directions: when taken-for-granted or ‘naturalised’ understandings inform and authorise action, and where social practices construct the very meaning of power and power politics.

Steven Lukes’ (1974) third dimension of power constitutes a good starting point for understanding these approaches. This dimension refers to those situations in which the behaviour of an actor was influenced without any visible persuasion, bargaining or conflict. It thereby takes issue with *behaviouralist analysis which would exclude these events from power analysis, because no link from intentional action to the outcome can be established. The one exception which can be included is the ‘law of anticipated reaction’ in which actors, anticipating reward or punishment, adapt their action accordingly. It thus includes consent in the sense of an obliged behaviour against the original intention of one actor. This exception is still permissible in this framework of analysis because it keeps the causal link between intentions, here imputed, and influenced behaviour. Lukes’ third dimension of power, however, focuses on consent which results not from any obligation or threat, but from the internalisation of values and ideas. Whereas in the law of anticipated reactions, consent follows an adaptation process, here nothing of that sort is necessary. It refers to situations where conflict is not even ‘thinkable’, where a consciousness of divergent interests has been preemptively ruled out.

Relying often on Foucault and Bourdieu’s analysis of power, post-structuralist and constructivist writings conceive of such a consensus as the reproduced outcomes of rituals and discourses. Instead of seeing consensus as the resultant of open coercion or a more or less voluntary social contract, they look at how discourses and practices dispose agents and how taken for granted (‘naturalised’) habits are enacted. Power moves from being a potential or disposition at the agent level to one at the level of practices. Hence, like the more holistic structural power concepts, poststructuralist and constructivist approaches break with individualist theories, but tend to see structures as less objectified and materialist. Their power analysis focuses more on the symbolic power inherent in the social construction of reality. They are much more outspoken in conceiving an intersubjective ontology where language often functions as the main analogy: albeit holistic, language is a practice and not reducible to a natural structure; albeit human, it is social and hence not reducible to mere subjectivity.

These approaches take double *hermeneutics seriously. Double hermeneutics refers to the idea that in the social world, observers have to interpret a reality through the interpretation given by the actor, i.e. they interpret an already interpreted world. This forces the theories to problematise the relationship between the level of action proper and the level of observation and how they can *reflexively affect each other. Indeed, symbolic power concepts are crucial for understanding those links. On the level of action, naturalised understandings evoke certain actions, empower certain agents. If an event is understood as analogous to ‘Munich’, a collective memory is mobilised that authorises some action and delegitimates others. On the level of observation, existing paradigms and ‘common wisdom’ dispose to understand the world in a certain way, to ask certain question and allow some puzzles at the expense of others. With the end of the *Cold War, the seemingly new paradigm of a *‘clash of civilisation’ mobilised pre-existing Cold War scripts in which fundamentalism basically took over the role of totalitarianism in the security discourse. Finally, symbolic power is perhaps most prominent when the observers’ interpretations have a feedback effect to the level of action, such as in possible self-fulfilling prophecies: how will the world look like if all believed in the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis? Via power, the theory of knowledge is intrinsically tied to social theory: the imposition of a certain view of reality is a crucial facet of rule.

This applies also to the other facet of constructivist and poststructuralist power analysis. Besides analysing power when naturalised understandings inform and authorise action, they look at social practices when they construct the very meaning of power and power politics. While discussing the lump-concept of power, the social construction of the meaning of power was already mentioned. In classical *diplomacy, with its balancing and band-wagoning, its arbitrations and compensations, diplomats must find a common understanding of over-all power. In other words, diplomats must first agree on what counts before they can start counting. How much worth is a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council? Similarly, Baldwin writes that barter trade, rather than monetary exchange is a better approximation for power relations. This points to the essential role of trust and, in particular, of social conventions in translating the value between different goods. In this regard, money is not basically different from power: its fungibility is an effect of social conventions and norms, not of some inherent or objective criteria.

Consequently, such a view of power puts further constraints on the scope of general theory. If power lies in the mobilisation of a pre-existing bias in collective memory, the analysis can rule out that certain actions will find easy legitimacy; but it cannot predict which part of the collective memory – e.g. the Munich analogy or the Vietnam syndrome – will be more successfully mobilised. Moreover, the advantage of understanding customary practices and discourses as part of the reproduction of power has the analytical drawback of making power ubiquitous. In a curious circle, the power debate had moved away from the realist manner of tying power so closely to politics towards a more pluralist and segmented understanding of international politics, only to end up in a similarly close if redefined tie proposed by constructivists and poststructuralists. As with the realist package, however, much of the significance of power derives then not from something inherent in power itself, but through its role in the political theory underlying it, on which constructivists/poststructuralists hardly agree among each other.

Guzzini, Power