The Challenge of Global Commons and Flows for Us Power: The Perils of Missing the Human Domain by Mika Aaltola & Juha Kapyla

Author:Mika Aaltola & Juha Kapyla [Aaltola, Mika & Kapyla, Juha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Peace, Political Science, Geopolitics
ISBN: 9781317039211
Google: dHDeCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29879144
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

1 The hegemonic position of the US has led to dominance and high visibility. Stanley Hoffmann remarked in the late 1970s that IR as a discipline is still an American social science (Hoffmann 1977). To a large extent, this is true even today. Continental Europe has played a minor role in the major publications where Anglo–American approaches and researchers dominate (see Jorgensen 2000, Jorgensen and Knudsen 2006).

2 David Easton’s 1969 APSA presidential speech famously called for an end to the behavioural revolution: ‘Substance must precede technique. If one must be sacrificed for the other – and this need not always be so – it is more important to be relevant and meaningful for contemporary urgent social problems than to be sophisticated in the tools of investigation. For the aphorism of science, that it is better to be wrong than vague, post-behavioualism would substitute a new dictum, that it is better to be vague than non-relevantly precise’ (Easton 1969: 1051).

3 Galston (1999: 769) lists the following as leading contributors to plural liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, John Gary, Stuart Hampshire, John Kekes, Charles Larmore, Steven Lukes, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, Joseph Raz, Michael Stocker, Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams.

4 Interestingly, though, there can be seen a kind of an ‘unholy’ – though at the same time also very pragmatic – intellectual alliance between (some) neoconservatives and progressive liberals, who both have advocated the promotion of freedom and democracy, even at gun point. For illustration, see for example Krauthammer (2004) and Ignatieff (2003).

5 Contrary to the secularization hypothesis, it can be argued that secularization failed to produce a definite separation between religion and politics (Gentile 1990: 229, Juergensmeyer 1995: 379). This failure has been qualitatively different in the US and Western Europe. Western Europe is perhaps the only place where the secularization hypothesis still holds some water. This is reflected in the functionalist, neo-functionalist and institutionalist stances underlying the construction of the European Union. One way of understanding the place of religion in the US is to appreciate the changes in the degree to which American society is still religious as opposed to secular.

6 Habermas (1979: 113) detects a trend in the West away ‘from the sacred foundations of legitimacy to foundation on a common will … communicatively shaped and discursively clarified … public sphere’. An important ingredient of the secularization hypothesis has been the normatively sanctioned privatization of religion (Hadden 1987).

7 For example, the act of prayer, which, until recently, was considered a private matter, has started to appear in public speeches by American presidents, thereby lending the sense of introspection, mystical experience, progress and peace associated with it (Schmidt 2002: 602).

8 While the global commons itself is not a new concept, nor is the production of free global commons as a ‘global public good’ (Nye 2002:143–4) a new political practice (the British empire, for example, sought to produce and secure a free maritime commons), what is new today is the increasing emphasis on the their strategic importance in an age of complex interdependence and global flows in official US strategic documentation.

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