Taking Control
Foreign adventurism, as shown by Bush and Blair in rceent years, refl ects the lack of a domestic project
Today it appears that international politics is out of control. Our only relation to what is going on is as a bystander. The war in Iraq was fought through ‘shock and awe’ tactics that were geared more to American television audiences than to achieving military goals. This was war as spectacle. Even the opposition to the war was passive.
The leading slogan in Britain was “Not In Our Name” which suggests that anti-war campaigners were more concerned with having the Iraqi invasion on their consciences than with making a case against international intervention. Globalisation is also seen as beyond our control: either we should embrace it before China and India take over the world, or it is the work of a small band of corporate executives, who have the ear of the American president, and rule over us with impunity.
Ditto with the environment. Hurricane Katrina was another sign of our vulnerability, and that we should remain humble before the powers of nature. Contemplating international affairs today, our overwhelming emotions are fear, cynicism and despair. Yet, at the same time, we face the strange situation that as international politics is perceived as beyond our control, increasing numbers of students are enrolling on International Relations (IR) courses.
In Oxford, the most popular core paper for the PPE degree is IR. Over the last five years, an average of nearly three quarters of PPEists have taken IR as one of their core papers. As international politics increasingly appears to slide out of our control, students are flocking onto IR courses. Why is this? Part of the explanation could be to do with the emptiness of political debate at home.
Compared to the moribund squabbles of domestic politics, Abu Ghraib, skirmishes in Gaza and bombs in Bali are more likely to capture someone’s imagination. Political figures used to be charismatic and captivating, this is hardly true today. In the words of Tom Ogg, third year PPEist at Corpus Christi college, and founder of The Hive, a new Oxford society aimed at reshaping public debate, “The banality and lifelessness of domestic politics lead people to look elsewhere.
?? In Robert Guédiguian’s recent film about François Mitterand, we see Michel Bouquet, who plays the late French president, tell his young biographer that he is to be the last of the great presidents: “After me,” he says, “there will only be fi nanciers and accountants.” It is hard to imagine a similar fi lm being made of John Major or Lionel Jospin, or any of Europe’s current leaders. When national politicians fail to inspire, we look elsewhere.
Today’s politicians, of course, are aware of this problem, and have tried to resolve it by playing out their domestic problems on the international stage. James Panton, lecturer in politics at Lady Margaret Hall, and co-director of the forthcoming Battle of Ideas event to be held in London, points out that adventurism abroad refl ects the lack of a political project at home. As a result, he argues that, “Young people who are interested in politics see it as something which goes on overseas.
This takes politics out of the domestic sphere of democratic accountability, and leaves people feeling even more isolated from the forces which govern their lives.” We also live in a society that is increasingly atomised and fragmented. A white middle class student studying at Oxford is likely to feel as though they have much more in common with a similar student in New York than an unemployed British Asian living in Burnley.
Global civil society activism, which means fi ghting for anything placed beyond the pale of argument, like human rights or universal primary education, is the path of least resistance. The gratitude of Third World victims is far more edifying than taking on a room full of people who speak your language, know where you’re coming from, and don’t agree with you.
Sadly, this amounts to little more than a fl ight from real politics, where ideas, arguments and certainties are forged in the heat of debate, not from a priori moral absolutes. Being isolated from domestic politics leaves you in a position where you are always at war with your own society and ultimately with yourself. Rather than being engaged with people, you spend your time trying to convince them that they are selfi sh.
A good deal of misanthropy underlies campaigns such as Make Poverty History. In attacking the G8 leaders, such campaigns are really targeting the people that vote for them. The ‘turn to IR’ is the mirror image of a rejection of public and political life here and now, in contemporary Britain. For all of this, the ‘turn to IR’ is also an expression of something positive.
When asked why they studied IR as part of their PPE course, a number of Oxford students replied that it was precisely because of the fatalistic message they have been hearing. If the dominant trends affecting our lives today are globalisation, global warming, and international terrorism, then we should understand more about them. Kate Shea-Baird, 3rd year PPEist at Wadham, said, “The reason I wanted to study IR was precisely because it appeared so chaotic and out of my control.
As someone who was against the invasion of Iraq, I wanted to know why my marching the streets of London made no difference. Who wants to study something that they already understand, after all?” Georgina Thomson, another Wadhamite said, “I am aware that study of government or political economy, for example, does not tell us the whole picture and that as international issues, such as globalisation and global warming are increasingly important.
People are drawn to studying IR as a way of trying to understand these issues and hopefully gain some control over the very matters that make us feel we have lost control.” The turn to IR is as much a desire to understand the world today as it is a rejection of domestic politics. This makes it all the more important that we ask the right questions about the issues of today.
So instead of opposing the Iraq war by simply stepping outside of the political process, we should be asking bigger questions, such as can people be forced to be free? The Americans and British say that in invading Iraq, they were representing the will of the Iraqi people. Is that true? What kind of relationship of representation and accountability exists between an American solider in Iraq today and an Iraqi citizen? We also need to ask bigger questions about Europe.
Today, pro-Europeans spend most of their time attacking their domestic populations for being xenophobes, and not properly European. We are made to believe that the 80 per cent of Austrians who are opposed to Turkish membership of the EU are racists. Rather than fi ghting a war against their own populations, pro- Europeans should be looking for an idea of Europe that expresses people’s hopes and aspirations, rather than one which is pursued over their heads.
And finally, is Tony Blair right to invoke the Chinese ‘threat’ as a way of pushing through his own reform agenda? Can China not also serve as a counter-example to the fatalism that exists in the West about human achievement? These kinds of questions bring international politics back into the realm of human activity. As Tom Ogg argues, “We look to IR as a more promising sphere to have infl uence.
It is through debating these questions that we can meet the desire of those students who turn to IR precisely as a reaction against the fatalism of our national politicians, and against the culture of limits that pervades political debate and discussion today.
27th Oct 2005