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Für eine NACHHALTIGE Ernährungssicherheitstragie! Bauern-Sternfahrt vom 29. Mai bis 9. Juni 2011 May 10, 2011
From Action to Re-action: The Cold War in its Global Dimension July 29, 2010
Critiquing the Grand Narrative
In their recent publications, the authors Odd Arne Westad and Akira Iriye each engage in a re-calibration of historical focal points of world history as we (used to) know it. In fact, their critical analysis of the grand narrative of the Cold War reveals and moderates the still widely prevalent Euro/North America-centrism in (world) historical storytelling.
Placing the Cold War in a global context of plural and coexisting agencies and structures, a historical narrative emerges from Westad and Iriye’s research that reveals multiple factors of interdependency at play: In particular, the reconstruction of the enduring coexistence of cooperation, coordination and confrontation during this period challenges prevailing narratives, according to which the Cold War era is characterized by the fact that there were mainly two primary ‘actors’ (alias antagonistic powers), with the ‘Rest of the World’ (RoW) being degraded to the analytical figure of secondary class “re-actors’ to actions of the “actors”.
Focus on Multi-level Ramnifications and Transnational Initiatives
Contrary to this conventional wisdom of bi-polar action and RoW re-action, Westad attempts to write a global history of the Cold War era that focuses on the multi-level ramnifications of governance from 1945-1991. During this time, he argues, it was less the superpowers (US and Sowjetunion) but rather the ideational and hence programmatic conflict between them that had an impact on or that necessitated a reaction to developments in the “Third World”..
This three-dimensional focus on historical events actually allows Westad to establish and describe the historical linkage that existed between ‘Third World revolutions’ and ‘superpower interventions’. Accordingly, the latter often revealed that the superpowers were largely re-acting (rather than acting) to developments in ‘Third World’ countries.
While Westad’s analysis of historical events opens the narrative towards a three-polar perspective of mutual interdependence and re-action, yet pertains a state-centric perspective, Iriye goes even further in his deconstruction of the grand Cold War narrative. He focuses on transnational initiatives that emerged during the Cold War era and that he interprets as phenomena and outcomes of an emerging global community.
In Global Community, he provides a historical account which links domestic and transnational agency issues, with the focus being on non-state actors. Accordingly, the so-called Cold War era was less an era of cold war, but more an era of globalisation with the characteristic emergence of a global community. Iriye critiques that most historical story telling about the Cold War era primarily focuses on the bipolar constellation and confrontation as an explanation of every event, thereby missing to account for developments that took place regardless of or outside of the Cold War paradigm. In fact, most historical accounts of the Cold War tend to completely ignore simultaneous developments such as the rise of international organizations.
Iriye’s focus on issues of mutual interdependence and shared interests rather than bipolar conflict and zero-sum-game of power politics shows that these phenomena developed parallel to Cold War politics, and sometimes even undermined bi-polar world politics by providing an alternative framework that emphasized cooperation over confrontation.
Outlook
Indeed, it seems very valuable to look at the Cold War era from a global perspective that goes beyond the bipolar interstate point of view and incorporates other events, sources of power and agency (in form of (non-)state actors, ideas as well as regional or global alliances) in the analysis.
From this standpoint, the era of Cold War politics then re-emerges as an intermediary period which had a historical ‘before and after’, and which comprised by far more centers of power and agency than the superpower narrative wants to make us believe. Providing an outline of continuities since the 1945, Westad’s and Iriye’s diversified historical account of the Cold War era offers a valuable basis for better understanding the question whether the challenges of world order politics today are new. They do so in revealing the underpinning “world view” of different narratives, i.e. in bringing to the open the particular and distinct historical focal points of existing historical analyses of the era. In this regard, Westad’s state-centric historical account and Iriye’s transnational focus seem to complement each other. Their critical analysis provides for a multitude of perspectives which together make up a multi-polar historical framework. Altogether, this provides not only for a rich reading experience but also encourages reader & research to rethink the traditional bias (alias ‘conventional wisdom’) underpinning most historical accounts of world history, which in the long run hopefully allows for a more comprehensive picture of world politics.
Literature:
- Westad “Global Cold War”
- Iriye “Global Community”
On Crafting an African Security Architecture (2010) July 16, 2010
Hany Besada (CIGI) (eds.),
“Crafting an African Security Architecture – Addressing Regional Peace and Conflict in the 21st Century”
Druckfrisch: Das Handbuch zur Lehre Interkultureller Handlungskompetenz ist da! (2010) July 16, 2010
Lost in Translation – “Feuchtgebiete” and Cultural Excuse March 2, 2009
The article in the Globe and Mail on the book “Feuchtgebiete” by Charlotte Roche is definitively too wonderful of a material for losses in translation to let it be.
One of my favorite passages of literary critic turning grotesk in its cultural determinism is as follows:
“I don’t think we should be too quick to blame the Germans for this particular bit of pseudo-porn; Charlotte Roche is British by birth. This is just typical overcompensating expatriate behaviour. Germans love this kind of scatological thing and she’s trying to out-German them, poor thing. If history has taught us anything, it’s that no good can come of a foreigner trying to out-German the Germans. Not that she’s Austrian or anything, but it’s a pretty bad book.”
This line of argumentation is, to say the least, unique…
[Full article "Porn, pseudo-porn or just bad smut?" by ELIZABETH RENZETTI , TABATHA SOUTHEY and MICHAEL VALPY, Globe and Mail (27 February 2009) available under http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090227.wbkwetlands28/BNStory/globebooks/]
Human Rights as Global Regime November 1, 2008
It seems that the institutionalization of Human Rights (HR) that we know today developed over time under the very impression of peculiar incidents of atrocity and war. It was not until the end of the Second World War and under the impression of previously unimagined acts of inhumanity in form of the holocaust, extended prosecution and German war cruelties in Eastern Europe that nation states consented that is was in their own interest to develop and agree on a comprehensive and extensive Human Rights regime. The London Conference in June 1946 – the outcome of negotiations that had begun as early as in 1942 – laid out the design for an international system of international justice and normative order as exists today. In fact, the establishment of International Military Courts, the concept of crimes against humanity as well as the notion of global procedural justice under the rule of law, all these phenomena can be understood as the first steps towards the current institutional and normative HR regime architecture that comprises such prominent features as the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) or the International Criminal Court (ICC) (1998).Yet, the ideational foundations of the UN Declaration were not new; rather, they reached back to the 17th century and the program of humanism and enlightenment that made human rights logically conclude the ethical cosmopolitanism that underpins the Declaration.
Definitively, as Paul Kennedy pointed out in his book “Parliament of Man”, the UN Declaration of Human Rights since then greatly contributed to promoting Human Rights as idea as well as social practice on the national and international level. However,the idea of Human Rights – while being highly accepted as a normative order (value) in many contexts and minds worldwide – seems at the same time to remain highly contested as a practice in the international and domestic context. In this regard, it is not clear whether this is so despite or because of the increasing degree of international institutionalization and interaction.
Human Rights and International Relations
In this context, B.R.Tomlinson’s analysis of the so-called ‘Third World’ can be seen as an interesting contribution concerning the question of ethical cosmopolitanism in international relations and international institutions, and the contribution of the latter to the cause. On the basis of a historical account of the “Third World” as the outcome and example of the continued domination of certain nations of the ‘West’ over international discourse and institutions, Tomlinson concludes that we need to move beyond established criteria of assessing international relations and developments to finally develop a perspective of one instead of several worlds. Accordingly, the ethical cosmopolitanism immanent in HR makes a one world perspective a necessary precondition for its realization. Along with Tomlinson one can argue that only this perspective will make it be possible to write global history that accounts for the diversity of developments of different countries; the prevailing historical narrative that extrapolates the Rest of the World by mainly accommodating the ‘West’s’ narrative will on the contrary sustain notions of ideational and practical supremacy by some countries and institutions in the context of HR, and thereby in practice counteract criteria of equality and Kantian deontological ethics that actually build the normative kernel of the idea of human rights themselves.
Complementary to Tomlinson, Kristin S. Tassin focuses on the impact of the UN Human Rights Declaration in former colonial countries. Accordingly, the declaration had opened a new policy space for ex-colonial countries to constitute an alternative third world in the aftermath of the Second World War and with regard to the geopolitical dichotomy of the Cold War era. This amounted to the emergence of the non-alignment movement that aimed at advancing independent foreign policy, the domestic policy space, and the processes of nation building and national integration. The non-alignment movement put to life a new notion of territorial sovereignty by going beyond a mere negative self-interpretation within world politics. However, Tassin points out that the increase in political independence of ex-colonial countries was not met by existing structures of international economic governance. Rather, the contrary was/is the case. In fact, both articles (Tassin, Tomlinson) show the unwillingness of dominant powers in the international system to accommodate the demands for new institutions of global (economic) governance by the G77 countries. At the same time, the role of the UN as forum for ‘developing countries’ to exert pressure for change diminished since the 1970’s, and the 1980’s brought about an increased role of international institutions such as the World Bank, IMF or WTO whose policies were best characterized by decreasing domestic policy space via deregulation, by forcing ‘mono-economics’ as well as ‘political conditionality’ on to the people of ‘developing countries’. Thus, while the idea of Human Rights was a widely acknowledged value and along with it concepts of dignity and identity, at the same time the structural conditions that were enforced by the great powers after the Second World War remained in place, constraining the policy space and HR expansion (self empowerment) of the Third World’s governments and populaces.
The Global and Local Dilemma of HR
Out of the above, one can conclude that over the last four decades the highly ideal Human Rights regime in the context of the international realm missed to account for the question of changes and differences in political and socio-economic development. This yielded a ‘destructive dilemma by design’ according to which the institutionalized HR regime established and continuously sustains the existence of ‘morally supreme’ states over others in practice; and it brought a prioritization of certain HR articles over others, instead of moving on towards a human centered focus on development. If we look for example at the R2P-justification narrative that is based on HR, it seems problematic as it misses issues of political and economic marginalization as HR violations. Yet, this holistic HR perspective would be needed for the prevention of conflict as well as analysis of conflict. In this regard the establishment of an institutionalized global norm to some extent counter runs local developments by (a) helping to mask interests of states that have the structural as well as productive (norm generating) power; (b) in turning HR into a Top-Down endeavor.
Literature
B. R. Tomlinson, “What was the Third World?,” Journal of Contemporary History, 38, 2, 2003, 307-321.
Nuremberg Trial Excerpts: http://web.pdx.edu/~kinsella/nuremberg.pdf
Kristin S. Tassin, “’Lift Up your Head, My Brother’: Nationalism and the Genesis of the Non-Aligned Movement,” Journal of Third World Studies, 23, 1, 2006, 147-168.
UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Power and Governance: The Issue of Genetically Modified Organisms and Food October 27, 2008
Since the 1970s, and up until today, there exist two highly contrastive and different narratives concerning the emergence and particularly the ‘utility’ of genetically modified organisms or food (GMO/GMF), and more important the implications of this technology in view of power and governance issues on the international level. The following is a summary of key ideas prevalent in the literature on this topic (literature list at the bottom).
Power and Governance
When looking at the issue of GMOs from the perspective of international relations and governance, the literature suggests that the contrastive positions (pro or con GMOs) on the issue find their country wise equivalence in two countries, namely the US and the EU. At the same time, other potential host countries, i.e. the developing world that might be greatly affected by the impact of introducing GMOs into their environments remain largely excluded from the debate and power struggle over this issue.
Accordingly, the power struggle over proliferation or prevention of GMOs is strongly driven by actors such as the EU consumers, the European Commission (environmental department), US corporations, US Government, as well as the EU’s and US’ converging interests as main exporters (e.g.TRIPS). The obvious misrepresentation of certain interests, or better: the underpinning North-South divide and Corporation-Farmer divide is perspective- and system- related. It is to be found with regard to actual R&D activities in the field of agricultural knowledge for development and stretches as far as concerning bargaining power domestically, within the WTO (on issues of IPR, UPOV and/or sui generis systems) or the establishment of alternative institutional governance systems.
It seems that the power struggle as well as the representational divide, all of these phenomena hint at the complex of problems that intrinsically accompany the governing structures of genetically modified seeds and agricultural biotechnology. – Which raises the question, at what point the interests of farmers are accounted for in this governance structure?
“Food fights” and “IPR battles”
After Borlaug and his colleagues, the proliferation of GMOs is a “moral obligation” towards poor farmers. According to this line of argumentation, GMOs in form of genetically modified cash crops do not only bring wealth to the farmers in poor countries but also are an adequate agricultural instrument to eliminate hunger and starvation in poor countries. Based on this assumption, Paarlberg describes a “global food fight” that takes place between the US (corporate power) and the EU (environmentalists, consumers), whereas the preventive attitude of the EU in view of GMOs clearly is interpreted as an act of ignorance that goes directly against the interests of poor farmers. While the exclusion of poor farmers’ interests in the power struggle over governing seeds and agricultural biotechnology might be a correct assessment of the situation, Paarlberg’s conclusion that the interest of the poor farmer per se is the introduction of GMOs is simply false and only founded on his own scientific belief system.
While Borlaug et al. tell the story that the EU is preventing wealth and poverty reduction of poor farmers by preventing the proliferations of GMOs, Falkner on the contrary interprets the “global food fight” as the attempt of the US to force its interests on to poor farmers that (would) have to suffer from it. For Falkner, the prevention of the proliferation of GMOs is a success story, being the result of international cooperation of the EU and developing countries directed against the hegemon in the international system, i.e. the US. He points at the fact that from the beginning, developing countries were sceptical of GMOs, demanding regulations and liabilities as regards risk and (social) costs related to the introduction of this technology into socio-economic environment of their countries.
Complementary to Falkner’s argumentation concerning the composition and implication of the “global food fight”, yet from a different perspective, does de la Pierrere detect an IPR battle underpinning the global food fight in the area of GMOs. This battle is fought between (poor) communities whose interests are institutionally represented by the biodiversity convention (CBD) versus corporate power whose interests are institutionally represented by WTO (TRIPS or UPOV regimes). De la Perriere’s focus on the regimes themselves and respective country preferences, allows for a detection of powerful actors as well as interest as this focus makes it possible to circumvent the normative dispute over solutions that prevails in the other readings. Moreover, his assessment shows losers and winners of each regime, generated by the specific regime’s different inherent implications regarding profit and power distribution & allocation. Accordingly, the convention (on biodiversity) focuses on sovereignty, the equitable sharing of profits, the contribution of communities to diversity, the immanent value of traditional knowledge as well as communal knowledge systems; TRIPS/UPOV, on the other hand, implies reduction of genetic variety, the empowerment of the breeder (corporation) over the farmer, the clear separation of farming and breeding that yields a complete commodification of agricultural activity, and the related loss of traditional knowledge and practices on the local level for the benefit of, the dependence on, and the usurpation (of this knowledge) by actors in the global realm.
Outlook
It seems that the power distribution within the international governance system (WTO over CBD) so far clearly favors pro-GMO countries , and especially the US who pushes towards tearing down any barriers to trade in GMO. By limiting the issue of GMO to an issue of trade liberalization, these countries have the systemic and defining advantage that the international system still works best in the economic realm (WTO). This clearly reveals the underpinning problem that existing international economic governance structures are so far not equally met by powerful political governance structures that validate normative discourse on an issue such as GMO on an equal footing and have far reaching regulatory consequences that would allow for diversity by either excluding an issue from the economic realm, or by creating alternative governance structures.
Literature
Norman Borlaug, “Biotech Can Feed 8 Billion”, in New Perspectives Quarterly, 24 (4), 2004, pp.97-102.
Robert Paarlberg, “The Global Food Fight”, Foreign Affairs, vol.79, no.3 (May-June 2000), pp.24-38.
Robert Ali Brac de la Perriere and Franck Seuret, “The Battle Over Intellectual Property Rights”, in R. A. Brac de la Perriere and F. Seuret, Brave New Seeds (Zed: London, 2000), pp.89-112.
Robert Falkner, “International Cooperation against the Hegemon: The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety”, in The International Politics of Genetically Modified Food: Diplomacy, Trade and Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.15-33.
Gegen Seehofers Plaene zu Genmais protestieren October 13, 2008
Es geht um die Sicherung von Ernaehrungssoveraenitaet sowie -sicherheit! Und ganz nebenbei auch darum, dass die momentane Landwirtschaftspolitik an den Interessen der Bevoelkerung vorbeisteuert, insbesondere in den Bereichen genetisch modifizierten Saatgutes und Konsumentenschutzes.
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