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Chapter 3

Toward an International Political Theology Vendulka Kubálková

Enlightenment publicists and philosophers wielded none of the torture instruments of the Catholic inquisitions, nor did they burn dissenters under some Protestant dispensation. But when it came to religion in all its aspects, they strangled free inquiry just as effectively by the commanding force of the fashion they imposed.1

—Edward Luttwak

C an International Relations (IR) as a discipline contribute to the study of the worldwide resurgence of religion? This is not an idle question, because the international context

within which this resurgence is taking place is the primary domain of IR expertise.

I answer this question in the affirmative. In this paper I outline the foundation of what I call International Political Theology (IPT). Its acronym, IPT, quite consciously rhymes with IPE (International Po- litical Economy), the earlier subfield of IR, at first also difficult to imagine or conceive. IPE was intended at the time of its conception to respond to the neglect of economic factors in the IR discipline. IPT similarly seeks to correct another systematic omission in IR: the ne- glect of the role of religions, culture, ideas, or ideologies in “social sci- entific” accounts of world affairs.2

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The parallel with the earlier creation of IPE is very apposite. In the case of IPE it was the fact that suddenly, to paraphrase Robert Gilpin’s famous dictum, it was not possible to separate the pursuit of power (as studied in the discipline of IR) and the pursuit of wealth (left out of the IR discipline to the students of economics). Similarly now, as Mark Juergensmeyer put it,

What appeared to be an anomaly when the Islamic revolution in Iran challenged the supremacy of Western culture and its secular politics in 1979 has become a major theme in international politics in the 1990s. The new world order that is replacing the bipolar powers of the old Cold War is characterized not only by the rise of new economic forces, a crumbling of old empires, and the discrediting of communism, but also by the resurgence of parochial identities based on ethnic and reli- gious allegiances.3

I use the term “theology” in the name of the framework deliberately to shock and also to indicate the need to bring to an end what Luttwak has called

a learned repugnance to contend intellectually with all that is reli- gion . . . [based on the] mistaken Enlightenment prediction that the progress of knowledge and the influence of religion were mutually ex- clusive.4

My use of the term “theology” does not go as far as political theolo- gians’ claim that political theorizing should have its ultimate ground in religious revelations, although their position is compatible with my framework. Nonetheless I have no qualms about using the term. The- ology was once synonymous with philosophy and science. Following the understanding of sociologists of religion, I take theos not in its common secular meaning as erroneous beliefs in supernatural ex- traterrestrial existence, but I take “theology” and theos to refer to the systematic study of discourses and the relations among them concern- ing world affairs that search for—or claim to have found—a response, transcendental or secular, to the human need for meaning. My purpose is to find a way of bringing the study of religion and IR together—pos- sibly for the first time—in a manner that would minimize their distor- tion and facilitate their understanding. IPT can accommodate in one framework the pioneering but so far fragmented micro and macro at- tempts to come to grips with the significance of religion in IR.5

I vividly recall the late Susan Strange’s exhortation that IPE must be constructed from first principles rather than concepts fit together from

Toward an International Political Theology ? 81

its apparently constituent disciplines. I would like to take that exhorta- tion to heart. Within positivist frameworks, however, the “first princi- ples” approach simply cannot be applied without emasculating the essence of religion. Thus for IPT I have had to draw the blueprint using a nonpositivist ontology of the rule-oriented constructivist framework first introduced by Nicholas Onuf in 1989.6 The constructivism that I use in this paper, however, ought not to be confused with the positivist- friendly forms of constructivism, frequently referred to as soft con- structivism, co-opted by the US IR mainstream as one of its two or three main theoretical approaches.7 As Steve Smith puts it, “the radical possibilities promised by social constructivism” have been “hijacked by a mainstream,” and the dominant, now increasingly popular form of constructivism of Alexander Wendt, Peter Katzenstein, etc., have been assigned “an unthreatening role of an adjunct explanation for those things that the positivist mainstream finds difficult to explain.”8

The framework I use is different. It eschews the constraints placed on IR theorizing by positivism and “materialism” as well as by the treatment of the state as a unitary and the main actor in IR (of all these, the mainstream, or soft, constructivists reject only materialism but share positivism and state-centrism). To positivists, religion stands in sharp contrast to reason, and is not to be taken seriously. Religion is either a “private affair of individuals,” a domestic issue of states, or it is liminal; in any event, it eludes the territorial boundaries characteristic of state-centric IR studies. The mainstream or, soft, constructivists are prepared to consider ideas, including religious ideas, and changing identities and state interests but subordinate them to the rational choice theory.9 Within these positivist, materialist, and state-centric constraints, the mainstream by definition cannot theorize religion in IR. Conversely, rule-oriented constructivism is not positivist; it re- gards IR as a very important slice of social reality without being state- centric, or to the exclusion of all else. Rule-oriented constructivism corrects the materialist cast of IR without lapsing into the opposite extreme, “idealism,” as do some mainstream constructivists (e.g., Wendt, who claims to have substituted structural realism with struc- tural idealism).10

Table 3.1 indicates the different “levels” at which religions have become more visible. The levels refer to different segments into which sociopolitical reality has been carved out by Western (mod- ern) academia, to be stored and cultivated in different departments, situated on different floors, and in different buildings of the West- ern social science edifice. In the contemporary world, there is ap- parently an increasing visibility of religion on all of these levels, and

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their connectivity becomes ever more important: from the greater religiosity and spirituality of individuals (in the “private” domain, which is excluded by social scientists altogether) to a greater role in the “domestic” setting and to the international, indeed transna- tional/global context. Without the possibility of moving between the different levels for an account of their interrelated relevance, large pieces of the puzzle will be missing. Rule-oriented construc- tivism can easily move amongst these levels.

I divide this chapter into four sections. First, by way of introduc- tion, I discuss a rather unlikely topic, the “third debate” in IR and its repercussions for the study of religion. Second, I discuss the basic on- tological characteristics of religion. Third, I outline rule-oriented con- structivism and the place of religions and religion within this framework. Fourth, I conclude with a sketch of some issues that the framework enables us to address in developing IPT.

This paper is a pilot of a book of the same name. It is important to stress that I have written it with IR students in mind, not sociologists of religion, anthropologists, or historians of culture, although I will try to show how the framework that I propose makes their work accessi- ble to IR students. The limited space does not permit me to do more than lay out the IPT framework. The study of religion in IR, in my view, has to start by finding an analytical space for it, on equal footing with secular discourses, beliefs, ideologies, and positivist theories. The main purpose of this article is to identify this analytical space.

The “Third Debate” and Religion: The Postmodernist John the Baptist

History, it seems, has repeated itself once again. To paraphrase Her- bert Marcuse’s famous words: that which was supposed to be subse- quent has become coexistent. That which was supposed to transpire in orderly stages got somehow stuck coexisting together, as absurdly as night coexisting with day. Now it seems, we have another unlikely threesome stuck together: premodern, modern, and postmodern, or rather, their contemporary spokespersons confronting IR scholarship. Ironically, the “third debate” inadvertently primed the modern IR scholars for an encounter with world religions, the premodern. The postmodernist scholar stands in for John the Baptist, as a Christian theologian might say.

There has been, of course, nothing very religious about either of the main protagonists of the third debate. This involved, on one side, the positivist camp, and on the other, anyone to whom the “post” label

I

I I

I I

I I I

- >-

>- -

- -

Table 3.1 Religions in Social Relations

Transnational relations Relations involving only religious organizations, groups, NGOs2

States (religious or secular) and nonstate foreign religious groups, institutions (NGOs) pursuing activities in IR aimed at “foreign” state3

Interstate relations: relations amongst religious states4 and amongst religious and secular states5

State level (with or without religious affiliation vis- à-vis religious institutions)

Political society level: religious organizations seek to use or ally themselves with political parties/ movements

Civil society level: religious actors trying to change the status quo

In IR1 In domestic politics7

“Public” Domain “Private” Domain6

(religiousity or spirituality of individuals)

Notes: 1Recently began to be studied; for example, Rudolph and Piscatori, Transnational Religion. 2For example, Catholicism; Latin American Catholicism and Protestantism; liberation Catholics of the left and Evangelicals of the right in Latin America; Vatican Council II; Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM); Catholic World Youth Congresses; relations of religions and religious groups in, for instance, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan; cooperation or emulation. 3For example, West African Sufis as Muslim missionaries in Africa; Western involvement with post-Communist churches, European and American philanthropic organizations and German episcopate in East Central Europe. 4For example, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia; pan-Arabist powers versus their opponents in the Middle East and Western involvement. 5For example, U.S. versus Iran; the West in the Middle East. 6Enhanced, for example, by the Vatican II shift from libertas ecclasiae to libertas personae. 7Traditionally studied in sociology/political science.

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might stick. The protagonists in the third debate—the modern secu- lar IR scholars and their postmodernist critics—reject/ignore religion. As James Kurth has observed:

The post-modernist perspective can include “spiritual-experiences,” but only those without religious (in the original sense of “binding”) con- straints. The New-Age movement can be interpreted as the ideal-typi- cal-post-modernist spiritual expression. Post-modernists are also drawn to superficial, Americanized versions of certain Eastern religions, espe- cially “lite” Buddhism and Hinduism. They are also drawn to an Ameri- canized version of nature-worship, a sort of neo-paganism. For the most part, however, post-modernism is largely hyper-secularism, and it joins modernism in predicting, and eagerly anticipating, the disappearance of traditional religions.11

The “post” critics of the mainstream have succeeded in unsettling their mainstream colleagues by their seemingly strange and outlandish ways. We ought not to forget, however, the scientific rigor to which the IR discipline in the United Sstates is still committed and which from the vantage point of the UK and Europe may not be as obvious as to those of us working in the United Sstates. The IR mainstream in- sists on the strict “use of evidence to adjudicate between truth claims,”12 and assigns theories that are not “testable” to the “margin of the field” because it is “impossible to evaluate their research pro- gram.”13 The postmodernist discourse of course has never met the pos- itivist standard and certainly in this regard has been closer to some premodern ideas. We tend to forget just how brief the modern period in the history of ideas has been. Until only two hundred years ago or so, religions provided the dominant mode of thought, and thus many ideas even today have their roots in religion.

Be that as it may, IR scholars who followed the meandering path of the third debate have prepared for the emergence of religions as a sub- ject of study by familiarizing themselves with certain concepts that postmodernist and religious discourse share. This is largely unac- knowledged by postmodernist scholars. As far as I am aware, only some postmodernist feminists openly acknowledge the debt they owe to the religious traditions on which they draw.14 Let me mention some examples of what issues have been raised through the postmodernist discourse, not always realizing that it also plays an important part in the construction of religion.

The entire shift of attention to the “inside,” the “insider’s perspec- tive,” to feeling and “emotional identification” that we recognize in some postmodernist writings, has religious antecedents. Here we un-

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doubtedly trace the influences of romanticism: the movement origi- nating in the late eighteenth century as a revolt against modernity’s ra- tionalism and based on medieval emotionalism. In philosophy and in art, romanticism focuses on the irrational and the nonrational, and on feeling rather than thought. For example, originally intended to make believers feel the pain of Jesus, emotionalism charged the concept and command of love (agape) with emotional force. This has served in turn as a source of the emotional force used by many secular ideologies, for example, nationalism. The stress on identity, the insider’s perspective, and the inside/outside distinction, prominent in the work of many postmodernist writers, has always been central to religious thought and practice.

Phenomenology, another source of inspiration for postmodernist scholars, also owes much to religious influences, particularly in regard to the shift from the focus on outward appearances to the attention to consciousness, the experience of the body, intuition, perspective, and engagement requiring empathy, along with careful linguistic textual and historical studies. One might even say that phenomenologists lis- ten to the inner “voices” coming from deep within. This idea derives from the preoccupation of religions with inner meaning. Religion and art are prime examples of human attempts to find meaning and value in life. A concern for “emancipation,” drawing on the engagement of the Frankfurt School with the work of Sigmund Freud, also resides in large measure in the mind, in knowing and understanding the human predicament as a precondition for, if not the realization of, emancipa- tion itself.

Hermeneutics, named after the Greek god of communication, Her- mes, adds interpreting and reflecting as approaches to knowledge. Hermeneutics, not surprisingly, originated in schools of theology where its methods were developed for the interpretation of sacred texts. At the hands of scholars like Paul Ricoeur, hermeneutics were extended to the search for the sacred in “texts,” the sense of which was allegedly lost through the modernist notion of the human being as the center of the universe. Entering a plurality of “worlds,” Ricoeur ar- gued, helps people to become decentered. Ricoeur’s reliance on metaphor—the weaving together of fragments of identity stressed by some feminists—parallels religious practices.

Ricoeur’s student Jacques Derrida used his teacher’s concept of play to show that words interact so that meaning is never fixed. Like theologians, postmodernists “tell stories,” rejecting the modernist ob- session with “theory” and its endless strictly modernist pursuit. Der- rida aims at destroying and deconstructing modernist secularized

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texts, which he terms “logocentric,” thereby suggesting that the words and ideas of such texts always point to an external reality. It is often overlooked that the goal of Derrida’s deconstruction was to create a space for attention also to sacred texts. Derrida believed that after the deconstruction of the foundations of Western secular philosophy, other cultures and religions would be considered more relevant by Westerners.15

Finally, the third debate also addressed the problem of “incommen- surability,” the notion that theoretical approaches refer to different re- alities, an even more intractable problem of the antifoundationalist view that there is no reality, but only different interpretations of a text in the readers’ minds. The consequence of Francois Lyotard’s famous antifoundationalist “incredulity toward metanarratives” is the belief that there are no foundations, outside any individual theory, that could serve as a neutral arbiter between competing theoretical accounts.16 Postmodernism—like religion—questions the notion of reality pre- sented by positivist IR texts.

It is possible, of course, to be a romantic/phenomenologist/ hermeneuticist without being religious. One can live without medita- tion, prayer, or any of the disciplines designed for the research of the self and its sense of cosmic connection. To many, the limits that mod- ern rationalism imposes on our modes of knowledge are entirely ac- ceptable. The many attempts to compensate for these limits and to fill in this void are not. The religious concern for the soul, as the next sec- tion will argue, runs a lot deeper, and neither modernity nor the post- modernists have managed to supplant it.

The Ontology of Religions I start with the discussion of ontology for two reasons. First, the util- ity of rule-oriented constructivism as the basis of IPT rests on its on- tological nature. The constructivist framework is conceived so broadly that it can accommodate otherwise mutually exclusive ontological claims, as for example, those of religion and positivist social science. Second, I make a distinction between religion and religions. An inat- tention to the ontology of religion produced the confusion of religion as an alternative way of looking at the world on one hand, and religions as materially existing institutions organized for the pursuit of “reli- gion” on the other.

The meaning of “religion” has been, for analytical purposes, lost. Religions, reduced to institutions, have become as easy to deal with as any other nonstate sociopolitical institutions. In the international

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context, religions have either been treated as one amongst many epis- temic communities, or as nongovernmental or transnational organiza- tions.17 Religions have then been found to fall into one of two categories: either good or bad. They have been categorized either as el- ements of transnational civil society,18 as elements defining larger, in- ternational, or transnational entities such as civilizations,19 or, if their adherents engage in violence, as terrorist groups outside international law. Social scientists—certainly in American IR—have treated reli- gious organizations as acting in accordance with rational choice the- ory. This simplification has resulted in a profound misunderstanding of the strength of passion that may imbue religious organizations and the various ways in which this passion may compensate for a lack of material capability, the latter being another pillar of American IR thought. This has produced some surprises when on occasion the reli- gious organizations act “irrationally” or “nonrationally” and with a force at odds with their material strength, thus confounding positivist expectations. To correct this simplification, I make the distinction be- tween “religion” and “religions,” the former as a precondition for the understanding of the latter and the latter nonreducible to the former.

It is infeasible to discuss religion in IR without appreciating that the difference in religious and secular thought is ontological, that is, in what in each of them “counts for real.”20 All spiritual communities, all religions, Western and Eastern, share a distinction between ordinary and transcendental reality. This difference in ontology leads to episte- mological and methodological differences between religious and secu- lar ways of looking at the world. Attempting to fit religious experience into a positivist framework can only emasculate it, caricature it, dis- tort its meaning, and underestimate its strength. A serious considera- tion of the role of religion in IR must start with the exploration of the ontological foundation of religious discourse.

According to most religious thought, the structure of the ordinary world, with its assumptions of separate and distinct cause and effect, the spatial arrangement of objects, and the linearity of time, does not exhaust reality. Most religions share the idea that the world as revealed to the temporal senses is only one item in a hierarchy of being. Reli- gious thinkers argue that secular humanists see only a small part of the picture when they view nature as impersonal and as lacking a cosmic design capable of explaining and justifying human experience. Hu- mans, in this view, are a unique link between the material world and the larger cosmos with its powerful forces that shape and structure re- ality. Human experience is seen as only one dimension of a multidi- mensional reality that is ordered by design rather than chance. This

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larger reality is greater than the limited reality of human experience, but is impervious to ordinary sensory perception. This external world and the ordinary world of sense and thought, most religions insist, are intertwined.21

All major religions also share a strikingly similar view of transcen- dental reality; sociologists of religion argue that creating or construct- ing gods is one of the human universals, a practice going back at least 14,000 years to the ancient world of the Middle East.22 Theologians, of course, deny that God (or the gods) are human constructions. They might accept that the human being is homo sapiens but they would contend that he or she is also homo religiosus, a species in need of find- ing a system of beliefs essential to the self-definition of the believer, what we now call “identity.”23 All religions are organized on the basis of beliefs that are fundamental not only to reality, but even more impor- tantly, to human identity.

The Western “faith” in secularism and anthropocentrism is un- precedented in human existence. Liberal secularism, scholars agree, is not something that comes easily and naturally to us and has to be con- sciously taught and promoted. This tension is illustrated in the con- tinuous efforts to substitute nontheistic and secular beliefs for religion. Forms of paganism, nationalism, and other ideologies have played societal roles comparable to that of religions, at least in terms of their outward manifestations and the strength of their beliefs. Par- ticularly after its demise, Soviet Marxism-Leninism is recognized as a secular religion; humanism has been described as a religion without God, and liberalism as Christianity without God.

The reality named “God,” however, is different from other kinds of theos. Theologians agree that the reality of God surpasses human comprehension. God, philosophers have argued, is the uncaused cause, the “not effect of a cause.” As such, God is not “out there,” wait- ing to be discovered or observed by the processes of rational thought and scientific observation. Most religions, and certainly the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, agree that it is impossible to describe the tran- scendent reality of God in normal conceptual language. (There is, by the way, an ironic parallel with the postmodernist dislike of modern lo- gocentric meta-narratives.) For religions, of course, the transcendental meta-reality does exist, though it cannot be expressed in either ordi- nary or scholarly language, let alone subjected to social scientific “tests.” The meaning ascribed to the reality of God is fixed nonethe- less by social conventions and can be expressed in everyday language. This rendition is imperfect and requires reflection, interpretation, il- lumination, repetition, metaphor, and ritualization. Thus Christianity,

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Islam, and Judaism derive divine meaning from stories (sacred texts), which are constantly read and reread and subjected to exegesis.

The ongoing representation of what eludes representation is re- quired to provide the believer with a map of reality. The map orients the individual and fixes his or her identity in ontological terms. The identity of the believers can be lost only with the loss of faith. Many psychoanalysts and psychologists agree that modernity’s malaise and the loss of identity that attends it come from its secular nature and the absence of any substitute for religion. According to Erik Erikson, who popularized the term “identity crisis,” for most people “having iden- tity” is an important part of healthy life, and “losing identity” is a sig- nal of the onset of serious psychological, psychiatric, and general health problems.24 Religious belief and the identity it provides binds the believer to action, to the making of sacrifices, even to the willing- ness to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of belief. Believers who fail in this may well feel extreme remorse.

Postmodernist antifoundationalism cannot be reconciled with the foundationalist claims of the positivists. Similarly, there is no method of resolving the conflict between the transcendental and the secular, on ontological or epistemological grounds. There is much more at stake here than disputes among communities that have different and mutually exclusive visions of the good life. Both ontologies insist on using the term “rational,” but both define rationality by controlling the criteria of evidence and rules of inference assigned to its observa- tions and concepts. Postmodernist and modernist scholars reject the possibility that there might be evidence of divine intent and the sug- gestion that spiritual events or spiritual beings such as angels might be real. Religious believers view this prima facie rejection as secular irrationality.

In the believer’s view, the origins of religious experience are beyond the realm of human choice, let alone the “rational choice” around which most social science discourse revolves. The freedom of con- science that is given such prominence in liberal thought means in reli- gious discourse the exact opposite. At the most fundamental levels of a believer’s existence, it means following the dictates (not choices) of conscience, for conscience has no choice but to follow belief.25 Histor- ical narrative, myth, moral discourse, blessing, cursing, confessing, adoring, metaphor, symbol, analogy, parable loom large in religious dis- course, as it accommodates both a transcendent reality (not confined to sensory experience) and the secular, the “divine realm of positivist social science.” There is nothing in the positivist bag of tricks to match this achievement, not that positivists have ever tried or would ever

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consider it worth trying. The failure to negotiate the problems of in- commensurability successfully is not an affliction only of positivists. As Fred Frohock has argued:

Liberalism . . . is not a suitable political philosophy to resolve or even manage disagreements over the meaning of human experience at the levels sometimes found in the spiritual-secular disputes.26

Thus I now turn to rule-oriented constructivism in search of a frame- work that can resolve this incommensurability for social science and IR.

From the Social Science “Turn” to the Linguistic “Turn” to Constructivism

The incommensurability of the positivist and religious understandings of the world is indeed profound. In search of a way to conceptualize meaning, we have to reach beyond those modern ontologies and epis- temologies that have deprived us, in the name of the pursuit of social science, of intellectual access to a large part of human experience. To understand meaning, we have to understand human action and lan- guage and reason and rationality anew. We, scholars of social theory and IR, have to retrace the path we have taken. We have to go back at least to the point at which modern social science took a wrong turn.

Following the path of modern knowledge and particularly taking the turn of positivist epistemology, we reach a point where we are un- able to reveal some of the most fundamental features of human exis- tence. The understanding of speech, intersubjectivity, and action cannot be grasped through the mechanical separation of subject and object, agent and structure, free will and determinism. A U-turn is re- quired; we need to abandon the narrow semantic understanding of lan- guage as a mirror of reality, whose sole purpose is to reflect accurately and record not only things but also actions. Meaning cannot be found in mirror reflections alone.

The alternative path is a long one. It takes us through some distin- guished intellectual territory. There we find Aristotle and the recogni- tion of man as a political animal endowed with speech, rather than just the voice that animals possess. Speech enables people to share mean- ings and to discuss their judgments on what is good and bad, just or un- just. Along this other path we find we must revisit the concept of praxis as well, and the unity of theory and practice as Marx described it. Then we are on the way to an understanding of the world of human beings as not given or natural, but as “created” through their actions.

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We find that this path leads beside and arguably beyond empiricism, naturalism, and structuralism; beside and arguably beyond the utilitar- ian, motivational account of action; beside and arguably beyond the imputation-based model of antecedent causes and consequent effects. We find an equally distinguished scholarly heritage that appreciates the “passions,” and how they may, and often do, override self-interest and self-preservation. We discover that the explanation of an action depends on the context in which the action takes place, and that this long and distinguished alternative path culminates in the linguistic “turn.”

Rule-Oriented Constructivism and Religion There are obviously different ways to construct IPT. Different stops can be made along the alternative path I have just sketched. In my con- struction, I rely on the work of Nicholas Onuf. He is an American IR/social theorist who addresses the American IR/social theory schol- arship he knows most intimately. His constructivist framework has the kind and degree of rigor without which, in North America, nobody gets a hearing. Onuf ’s framework is secular but it inadvertently creates a large space for the appreciation of religious experience too. Although it is called “rule-oriented,” it is in fact an anthropology of society, showing how rules influence the nonlinguistic aspects of human exis- tence as well.

Rule-oriented constructivism claims the ability to provide a frame- work for all social theory because its ontology anatomizes the real so- cial world at its most basic level. It articulates human universals, like the ability to use language and—radically important for my present dis- cussion—the ability to reason. Rule-oriented constructivism’s ontology is the common thread in the ever-changing range of social activities in which people engage, shaping the world and in turn being shaped by it. Rule-oriented constructivism points to words, speech acts, and rules as the key ontological elements of human interaction and of the human view of the world. With words, people obliterate the divide between “is” statements and “ought” statements so dear to the positivists. With words, people move effortlessly back and forth across this divide. Rule- oriented constructivism is a “way of studying social relations,” a “system of concepts and propositions.” It states that a tripartite typology of rules permeates the life of society. As Onuf explains:

People make sense of their situation through conjecture and cere- mony (assertive rules), confront their adversaries by using techniques

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of destruction (directives), and provide for their needs by hunting and gathering (commissive rules).27

Not only do speech acts and rules take assertive, directive, and com- missive forms, but nonlinguistic aspects of society based on this or that type of rules display distinct characteristics.

This is where I come to the key thesis of my paper. As I will show, religions are a possible manifestation of assertive rules that we have tended to dismiss as nonmodern, primitive, and nonrational, if not ir- rational. The positivist preoccupation with analytic-deductive meth- ods has become the only way many of us, certainly the rational choice theorists in the United States, think about the way we think. Only the rational-instrumental pattern of thought, of speaking, can then be re- garded as “rational.”28 Most people on this planet, however, by these standards of Western culture, do not think at all if thinking means only the rational-instrumental pattern of thought.

In the following sections, I will try to show how much even in West- ern society we depend on linguistic and nonlinguistic forms derived from these prescientific assertive rules. I will also try to show that, given a choice amongst assertive rules, the ones with a strong emo- tional association might win even if “rational choice” would dictate otherwise. Here, there is ample space for appreciating the role of emo- tions generated by religion as a source of one of the most powerful human passions. It is within a social framework conceived along these lines that it is possible to theorize religion and IR side by side, the pas- sion alongside the rational-instrumental reasoning. I divide the rest of this section into two parts in order to locate, first, religions and then religion within this constructivist framework.

Constructivism and Religions as Social Constructions

It should not be too difficult to accept the argument that religions as institutions have been socially constructed, although to a design that believers would claim has been revealed. There is a growing body of lit- erature addressing the organization of churches and religions, their various relations to state and society and to each other. Often the dis- cussion of religion and IR does not advance beyond seeing religions as yet another form of organizations—national, if they coincide with the state boundaries; international, if several states are implicated; transnational, if their coincidence with states is difficult to find or ex- plicitly rejected.

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Constructivism clarifies these distinctions whilst going beyond this fairly narrowly cast concern for religion in IR. The social arrangement consistent with religion (based on assertive rules) has been that of in- formal networks and associations, stressing the status of priests and granting them significant prestige. It is this form that most religions take if developing spontaneously “from below.”29 The politicization of religion, however, has introduced “alien” elements of wealth and power compatible with directive or commissive rules. The intrusion of these factors usually meets with fierce opposition, from within the religion or from outside, as borne out by the entire historical experience of the Reformation or of Protestantism versus Catholicism since the time of the Reformation, in general or in specific parts of the world, notably in Latin America.30 There is also a considerable literature concentrating on the prestige of religious figures and their ability to facilitate or me- diate international conflict.31

Constructivism draws our attention to a danger of sliding into state-centrism, either by connecting religions and states too closely or by seeing civilizations as jigsaw puzzles composed of states of the same religious cast.32 Similarly, there is the opposite danger of seeing reli- gions and states as totally separate. For example, Juergensmeyer sim- plifies the issue when he argues that for understanding the world today it is necessary to see two interacting and competing frameworks of so- cial order: secular nationalism (allied with the nation-state) and reli- gion (allied with large ethnic communities).33 There is no way of a priori generalizing, and only a careful examination of rules and their interplay will reveal the nature of these relations.

Much of the contemporary writing on religion in IR falls some- where into this category. It is, however, the next topic that holds the key to overcoming the divide that separates faith and reason and that places religions into their IR context.

Constructivism, Human Mind, and Religion By “religion,” in constructivist terms, I understand:

1. a system of rules (mainly instruction rules) and related practices, which act to

2. explain the meaning of existence, including identity, ideas about self, and one’s position in the world,

3. thus motivating and guiding the behavior of those who accept the validity of these rules on faith and who internalize them fully.

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Unlike some interpretations of religion, my definition deliberately omits any direct reference to a divine being, although its existence can be postulated without contradicting the definition. Nor do I include such elements as a specific type of organization developed by religion, viz., its symbols and rituals, for all of these are subsumed in the “re- lated practices” and can be handled within the constructivist frame- work, as social institutions. I also omit a reference to a divine being so as not to exclude secular discourses and ideologies, which can display all the overt indicators of religion, including emotional efficacy. Reli- gion and its organizations have, after all, perfected a number of fea- tures that different ideologies or nationalisms have successfully copied.

I have already referred to consciousness as recognized rules and practices that have been acted upon in the past and have become in- ternalized. This definition is consistent with Adda Bozeman’s view of culture and civilization as encompassing those values, norms, institu- tions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations in a given society have attached primary importance.34 Religions are the key parts of cultures, and even modernity and its postmodernist crit- ics (as I tried to show) have firm roots in Christianity.

My definition of religion as a central component in most cultures and civilizations is based on two human universals identified by con- structivism: language and reason. Religion consists of specific types of rules and is accepted on faith, and this acceptance, I will argue, repre- sents a form of reasoning. The first aspect, that religions are systems of rules, is not difficult to accept. The argument that faith is a form of reasoning is more problematic. If it can be sustained, however, the jux- taposition of faith and reason introduced by modernity and leading to the rejection of religions in the social scientific enterprise does not hold.

Religions as Rules Let me first explore what types of rules can be found in religions. Re- ligions are made up mainly of assertive speech acts and instruction rules. While commandments might seem to be commands (directive rules), on closer inspection it is probably better to call them declara- tions (which Onuf takes to be a species of assertive speech acts). Nev- ertheless, it is usually possible to identify directive rules and commitment rules backing up the declarations and instruction rules, which give a religion its general character, although religious rules carry their own special “back up.” To a believer, religious sanctions are

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derived from the divine authority, and the essence of religion is gener- ally faith. Asserted truths, the codification in ordinary language of that which “passeth all understanding,” are accepted on faith and backed up often by powerful emotions.35 One’s identity, one’s understanding of the world, one’s main values, are typically received in assertive rules articulated by human agents, albeit based on revelation, and, as already mentioned, when internalized they constitute the core of conscious- ness and culture.

Rules provide guidance but by themselves do not determine human behavior. It is at this point, in regard to the relationship between rules and reason, that the relevance of this discussion to religion will be- come apparent.

People use reason or judgment to decide whether to accept or reject rules and what course of action to take. Religion is no exception. Judg- ment arises from knowledge about the context of the rules involved in a situation and about the consequences of following or violating them. Forms of judgment are closely linked to the process of reasoning, and speech acts can be seen as instances of applied reasoning, since using rules is equal to exercising judgment. Let me first explore assertive rules in relation to religion and to modernity before I proceed to the discussion of the form of reasoning associated with them.

As forms of applied reasoning, assertive rules give rise to the most basic of all rules in the immediate demand they make on the hearer. Assertive and instruction rules state a belief coupled to the speaker’s wish or intention that the hearer accept this belief. Children learn to appreciate this kind of rule first, before they are mature enough to re- spond to directives and then to take on the responsibilities of choice and mutuality offered in promises and commitment rules. Assertive rules require no more than a passive acceptance of certain informa- tion, including information about values. Education typically takes this form. Assertive rules assume that the hearer does not know, or could not know, and obviously ought to know. They elevate the agent, priest, or professor, by granting him or her a special status and stand- ing and an enormous aura of respect. Assertive rules may be addressed to one person at a time, but the way they are styled often suggests a collective for an audience, for entire categories of hearers are uni- formly in need of instruction. Religions take the form of assertive rules. Religions foster a concept of a collective amongst others by lim- iting our needs and wants.

In contrast, modernity’s main currency are commitment rules. The contract is the model form of such rules, which are built around the in- dividual. This is a characteristic feature of the West and of modernity.

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Commitment rules are the domain of liberalism, characteristically based on the specification of individual rights and responsibilities. Western culture, liberalism, capitalism, individualism, modernity, and international relations are of a mainly commissive nature. True enough, commitment rules exist in mixes with directive rules and in- struction rules to provide sanctions, enforcement, and so on, and the right balance within these mixes is of concern to the guardians of lib- eralism, individualism, democracy, or capitalism, or indeed of interna- tional relations.

Bozeman was not using constructivist terms but was clearly consis- tent with them when she argued that the unprecedented success of the universalization of the states-system invented in medieval Central Eu- rope, the readiness with which many empires voluntarily dismantled to become its parts, was due to the commissive, nondirective, and nonassertive nature of the rules of the international system, as promised in the famous formula cuius regio, eius religio, that is, leave each state’s central beliefs and values intact.36 With the rules and prac- tice of diplomacy that originated in the West came the vocabulary of political symbols, also composed in the West. Societies transforming into states adopted the idea of rules, institutions, and practices of gov- ernance of the “community of states.”37 With this acceptance, many states began to practice the standards of Western intellectual and ma- terial achievement and the values thereof, a process culminating not in the elimination of indigenous religions and cultures but, on the con- trary, in the resurgence of religious beliefs across the world.

The predominantly assertive nature of religions goes some way to explaining their neglect in social science. We have got accustomed to viewing the assertive-based religions as archaic and ancient, if not an extinct form of social activity. Political systems based on assertive rules and hegemony, their characteristic condition of rule, have been re- garded as premodern, impervious to change, and antagonistic to West- ern values.

In fact, Onuf describes religions as forms of hegemony (to which as- sertive rules give rise as a form of rule) in the language of Antonio Gramsci, who, however, used the term “hegemony” in a different con- text altogether. Hegemony in this understanding appears to be the rule of values rather than rule by people. Hegemony refers to the promul- gation and manipulation of principles and instructions by which su- perordinate actors monopolize meaning, which is then passively absorbed by subordinate actors. These activities constitute a stable arrangement of rule because the ruled are rendered incapable of com- prehending their subordinate role. They cannot formulate alternative

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programs of action because they are inculcated with the self-serving ideology of the rulers, who monopolize the production and dissemina- tion of statements through which meaning is constituted.38

The issue here is that assertive rules are by no means an exclusive domain of premodern and antiquated forms of social relations. Critics of the West used the term “hegemony” in reference not to religious practices but almost exclusively to the Western form of rule regardless of its stated nature (in liberal doctrine) as based on commissive rules. It is fair to say that the central values and beliefs of any society, of whatever nature, are packaged in the form of assertive statements that are not conducive to questioning. The reason I am stressing this point is that in our preoccupation with rationality—used by some authors as synonymous with modern or Western—we have played down the hegemonic function of our own central values and beliefs.39

“Acceptance on Faith” and Passions All of us engaged in social sciences use the term “hypothesis,” not al- ways appreciating its connection to assertive speech acts. Hypothesis is a dignified way of referring to intuition, conjecture, belief, guess, dogma, or speculation, which is, or is not, then subjected to further “real rational” treatment, based on the rules of “falsification” or “veri- fication.” Generally speaking, three sorts of consequences of abduc- tion are possible, all of them normative.

The first sort points to religion. Conjecture takes on tremendous normative force through incantation and ritualization. Believers are discouraged, indeed prohibited, from subjecting their faith to the ra- tional inquiry appropriate for “this world.” Faith, however, exhibits the distinct form of reasoning characteristic of religion. This is the non- linear form of reasoning I have previously described: It draws on con- sciousness and eludes the methods of deductive or inductive reasoning and their rules of inference and evidence. The religious experience is built on a noninferential mode of cognition analogous to sense or feel- ing. The unknown is crucial in interpreting the experience. Rhetorical devices, similes, metaphors, intuition (to all of which I have already re- ferred) need to be used. Belief here precedes reasoning and controls it, unlike secular discourse, where beliefs are introduced but allegedly re- main subordinated to reasoning.

The second sort of social consequences stemming from adductive reasoning has nothing to do with religion and points to science. All of us formulate hypotheses, guesses, or conjectures, which we then proceed to verify (or falsify) either by inductive or deductive reasoning according

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to positivist rules. Research based on induction takes the form of either “hunting and gathering” for clues—from the parts to wholes—or, more typically for positivists, attacking the problem based on a deductive form of reasoning, from wholes to the parts.

The social consequences of the third sort might lead to the estab- lishment of a secular religion. Marxism followed this path, and so does modernist culture more generally. Conjectures are lifted out of context, advertised as scientific truths, and disseminated through the mass media. No less than religious beliefs, secular notions of individualism, liberalism, consumerism, and all the rest are repeated ad nauseam, pre- sented in Hollywoodesque stories, public spectacles, and strict codes of behavior. In academia also, many social scientists firmly believe in their scientific objectivity, yet a great deal of what gets written and said is based on a set of shared myths. Books are written about books, articles about articles, and articles about books. Theorists write about writing, theorize about theories, and create heroes whom they honor in rituals.

The upshot of my argument is that constructivism is open to con- sideration of adductive reasoning and acceptance on faith alongside rational-instrumental reasoning. It can engage with discourses based on faith as with those based on narrowly defined reason without fac- ing problems of incommensurability. Thus it will not be taken by sur- prise when advances in cognitive science will one of these days challenge once and for all the dogma of the rational choice theory and turn its simplistic structure into a more complex edifice that repro- duces itself in social structures of every sort and at every level. Even before such a “paradigm shift” is forced upon us by discoveries some- where in the natural sciences, constructivism has no difficulty accom- modating individual emotions influencing choices as an integral part of the human process of reasoning.40 Constructivism, in other words, can show how the human level involving feelings and emotions relates to the state level in a complicated process of accommodating religious thinking and feeling as forms of reasoning and as important aspects of how we construct our world.

Conclusion: The Paths to IPT The framework that I have outlined in this paper is by no means the only way to develop an international political theology. IPT has been developing spontaneously from many angles and directions. Many spe- cialists on religions follow the path of religion into the international arena, and IR scholars realize the need for serious adjustments in their discipline to accommodate the “intrusions” of religious factors.

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Many writers, irrespective of their disciplinary denomination, have reached constructivist conclusions, albeit without adopting its termi- nology. Bozeman, the international cultural historian, as well as IR the- orists such as Herrit Gong, Martin Wight, and even Hedley Bull spoke constructivism before it became “codified.” Constructivism is often simply common sense. Constructivism is a way of thinking, just as much as positivism is, and as I have argued elsewhere, it takes some getting used to.41 Eventually, one need not go through all the techni- calities every time one uses constructivism, any more than one needs to discuss in detail Auguste Comte, the Vienna Circle, Robert Keo- hane, or other intellectual fathers of positivist belief as a preface to any positivist-based research.

Rule-oriented constructivism has many other advantages over positivism. The positivist goal of theoretical parsimony has elimi- nated far too much from the IR discipline and made our job much too easy. Constructivism is perhaps more realistic in revealing the multitude of social relations (whether we call them contexts, social arrangements, civilizations, cultures, or games) and their tremen- dous complexity. Constructivists insist that international relations should be conceptualized as a social construction on many interact- ing levels. None of these levels should be shut out a priori by a theo- retical framework. This challenges the exclusivity of the state-centric focus still prevalent in IR studies. Having stressed the enormous complexity that constructivism draws to our attention, in contrast to the more parsimonious IR frameworks, it is important to note that despite its complexity, constructivism can support de- tailed, empirical case studies.42

IPT emphasizes research from an insider’s perspective, such as comes natural to constructivism but that needs to be much greater than that afforded by Western and particularly U.S. parochialism (a view, as the term aptly conveys, through the perspective of one’s own parish). Once we dispense with the a priori imputation of rational choice to actors, it is mandatory to establish the social context within which they act. Religion is often at the core of the social arrangement or structure within which actors operate. It is within this framework that we find out what is, or is not, defined as “rational” in any given sit- uation. This makes it mandatory for students of IR to devise new cur- ricula that integrate the study of religion(s), rather than “color in” religions as “bad” or “good” based upon a priori, out of context evalua- tions. In other words, we should use the existing scholarship and inte- grate the discourses of religion and IR, analyzing both as rule based within a framework such as I have proposed.

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This method eliminates many simplifications, most notably in re- gard to the idea underpinning modernization theories, opposition to which is allegedly (found in many accounts) the root cause of the con- temporary resurgence of religion.

The modernization thesis indeed does not stand up under con- structivist scrutiny. Anticipating constructivism as well as IPT, Boze- man pointed out that ideas or rules do not travel well and are never received and accepted without modifications. Such ideas become ei- ther rejected or at best accepted in a syncretic form, but never in the pristine form of its place of origin. This refutes once and for all the typ- ically North American notion on which modernization theories have been based, which despite policy failures and periodic refutation seems always ready to resurface in new forms. It also casts doubt on the notion that opposition to modernization somehow drives the resurgence of religion. The opposite can in fact be argued, namely that religions can play a pivotal role in the modernization of their societies, idiosyncratic though these modernization processes might be.

Bozeman links the entire proclivity of the West to modernize oth- ers and universalize its values to religious influences. She ties this mod- ernization impulse to Christianity, to its missionary zeal and a feeling of shame and guilt not present in most other religions. This persistent Western tendency is manifest in the concern with other parts of the world and the drive to “modernize” and “develop” them. However, each corner of the planet, she argues, continues to maintain its own traditions of life and thought, which often predate by thousands of years the Western social arrangements. Cultures, comprised of rules and practices, are society’s primary structuring ideas; they undergird political society and symbolize its continuity in time. Political institu- tions, state or nonstate, are all grounded in culture.

To a constructivist, the processes variously described as globaliza- tion or modernization are changes of the identity of the agent, of his or her agency, and of the social structure, all of which are based on and accessible through the understanding of changes in rules. Rules have to be implemented or supported by other rules, and thus these changes create responses inside societies, affecting people as individu- als. The reconfiguration of authority in a world experiencing distinct material shifts seems to have been unsettling across the world.

The most noticeable response has come from those parts of the world where the influx of new rules has been simultaneous with mate- rial changes that seem to undermine/threaten the very existence of these communities. There are individuals in different parts of the world and across all social classes who respond to the new rules with

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disenchantment, disappointment, and fear, particularly if modernity’s promises are not upheld. A feeling of loss of identity often follows. Thus these individuals may respond readily to anybody defending the familiar certainties. Utilitarian, material gratification is not always the outcome, as promised by the rational choice theory. Nor do the fail- ures of the rational choice predictions spare any part of the world. For example, as recently noted in 2000, the “happiness index,” even in the United States, was at an all-time low, despite almost ten years of boom- ing economy and its widespread material benefits across the social spectrum.43

In the Third World, as Jeff Haynes has argued, it is mainly secular states that act as agents of modernization, and assume an increasingly broad role in the domestic arena.44 Often due to a lack of understand- ing, and not by design, they unnecessarily encroach, or appear to en- croach, on the “private domain.” The changes wrought by the implementation of directive rules tend to disturb individual certain- ties and identities. In other words, the noble ideas of democracy, cap- italism, and the “user friendly” commissive rules in the form of which all of this arrives require directive rules for their implementation that override the local assertive rules. Despite some material benefits that these processes may bring and particularly as modernity’s promise of far-reaching material improvements has not been fulfilled, the legiti- macy of the state—the agent making the new rules that implement, for example, IMF or World Bank guidelines—is weakened. The polit- ical legitimacy of the state, that is, the acceptance by the populace of its actions as good and morally right, is undermined, creating space for opposition forces to become new agents challenging the status quo and creating political instability.

Postmodernist writing correctly echoes the worldwide distrust for the Enlightenment systems of hegemonically disseminated assertive rules, secular ideologies, and worldviews that claim universal applica- bility and promise progress based on reason and man’s ability to con- trol his own destiny. These grand schemes have brought social and economic disruption, or disruption of such social institutions as the family. These processes coincide with the communication revolution and the influx of new ideas, that is, a range of choices of assertive rules, such as those referring to unrestricted rights, including the right to practice religion. This opens further the scope of action for opposition forces.

Religious forces are put into a position to pursue a public role— often performed with a vengeance—and become agents in social con- struction, both in the domestic as well as in the international sphere.

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The understanding of these religious forces ought to reveal that by virtue of their social role they are incompatible only with other reli- gions advocating competing claims. Based on assertive rules, they are eminently compatible with other assertive systems of rules, such as na- tionalism. They are in fact broadly compatible with directive rules of any political organization and thus eminently suitable for political ex- ploitation.

The IR discipline may tune in only at the point when a civil war im- plicates foreign states, when international conflict occurs, or when the involvement of an international organization is required. Mainstream constructivists as well tune in only at the point when the international level comes to the fore and they must acknowledge that, to paraphrase the soft constructivists, states might have accepted some ideas that led to a change of their identities and consequently of their interests, and hence also of their intersubjective (interstate) agreements.45 The main- stream constructivists, however, would subordinate these processes to the logic of instrumental rationality.46 That this change has its root in religion would be purely coincidental. Religion per se would remain outside scrutiny of the U.S. mainstream, or soft constructivist.

Whether we argue that the greater visibility of religion is a conse- quence of or a last-ditch defense against modernity, or indeed a po- tential ally of modernity, there is yet another dimension of religion that remains totally outside IR’s concerns because it does not fit into IR’s state-centric perspective.47 This is the historically documented, never-ending human search for meaning that reaches “beyond the re- stricted empirical existence of the here and now” and/or the often desperate and apparently irrational clinging to the means of such a search.48 This search may set aside utilitarian gratification and elect the path whose authority is based on the beliefs and practices of gen- erations of one’s ancestors. Within this context, surely a turning to re- ligion at a time of turmoil that appears to threaten one’s very existence is perfectly rational.

I conclude with my initial thought. If liberalism and capitalism and the early stages of what we now call globalization required that IR scholarship correct its course by incorporating economics into its con- cerns, then yet another corrective may now be in order. What econo- mists were to the first expansion of IR, sociologists, sociologists of religion, cultural historians, and anthropologists are to the present broadening. IR needs to draw on their expertise. Returning again to Gilpin’s famous dictum about IPE to the effect that IR is about power and wealth, I add that IR in the contemporary world with its ever-in- creasing global stakes is not only about power and wealth but perhaps

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even more so about values and the meaning of the very human exis- tence. Hence IPT.

Notes

A number of colleagues and friends helped me tremendously with this work-in-progress project. I would like to thank Ralph Pettman and Joe Potts for editing my English prose, to Nick Onuf for going over my rendition of his framework, to Henry Hamman for urging me to write on this subject in the first place, to Fred Frohock for the gift of his marvelous little book, which influenced me very much. However, I have written this essay for the Reverend Canon Henry N. F. Minich, to whom I would like to dedicate it.

1. Edward Luttwak, “The Missing Dimension,” in Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, eds. Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8.

2. This extension is by no means new. For example E. H. Carr made a dis- tinction among categories of political power in the international sphere: “military power, economic power, and power over opinion,” stressing the importance of not neglecting the latter. See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1962), 108. See also Ven- dulka Kubálková and A. A. Cruickshank, Marxism and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 262, and Vendulka Kubálková, Nicholas Onuf, and Paul Kowert, eds., International Rela- tions in a Constructed World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 37.

3. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 1–2.

4. Luttwak, “The Missing Dimension,” 9 –10. 5. See, for example, Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in Interna-

tional History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Ger- rit W. Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori, eds., Transnational Religion and Fading States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Johnston and Sampson, Religion, The Missing Dimension; Daniel Philpott, “The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations,” World Politics 52, no. 2 (2000): 206 –45; Jeff Haynes, Religion in the Third World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1994); Jeff Haynes, Religion in Global Politics (London: Longman, 1998); and Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer- sity of California Press, 2000).

6. Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989).

104 ? Vendulka Kubálková

7. Stephen Walt, “International Relations: One World, Many Theories,” Foreign Policy, no. 110 (1988): 29 –46, and Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, and Stephen Krasner, “International Organization and the Study of World Politics,” International Organization 52, no. 3 (1998): 645–85.

8. Steve Smith, “Foreign Policy Is What States Make of It: Social Con- struction and International Relations Theory,” in Foreign Policy in a Constructed World, ed. Vendulka Kubálková (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001),

9. Philpot, “The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations.” 10. Alexander Wendt, “Identity and Structural Change in International

Politics,” in The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, eds. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996), 47. See also Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 32.

11. James Kurth, “Religion and Globalization,” The 1998 Templeton Lec- ture on Religion and World Affairs, Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 1999.

12. Katzenstein et al., “International Organization,” 678. 13. Robert Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays

in International Relations Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 173–74.

14. Arvind Sharma and Katherine Young, eds., Feminism and World Reli- gions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).

15. Ibid., 11. 16. François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowl-

edge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986), xxiv. 17. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “Introduction: Religion, States and

Transnational Civil Society,” in Transnational Religion and Fading States, 2.

18. Ibid. 19. Samuel P. Huntington et al., The Clash of Civilizations: The Debate

(New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993). 20. Fred M. Frohock, Healing Powers: Alternative Medicine, Spiritual

Communities, and the State (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 47.

21. Ibid. 22. Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Ju-

daism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 4. 23. Ibid., xix. 24. Erik H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York:

Norton, 1975). 25. Frohock, Healing Powers, 163. 26. Ibid., ix. 27. Onuf, World of Our Making. 28. Ibid., 102.

Toward an International Political Theology ? 105

29. Rudolph and Piscatori, Transnational Religion and Fading States. 30. Daniel H. Levine and David Stoll, “Bridging the Gap Between Em-

powerment and Power in Latin America,” in Transnational Religion and Fading States, and Edward A. Lynch, “Reform and Religion in Latin America,” Orbis 42, no. 3 (1998): 263–81.

31. See, for instance, Johnston and Sampson, Religion, The Missing Di- mension.

32. Huntington et al., The Clash of Civilizations. 33. Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 30. 34. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History. 35. The Blessing in Rite I, The Book of Common Prayer, 339, used in the

Anglican masses every Sunday. It is a paraphrase of Philippians 4:7. See also Peter 1:2.

36. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History. 37. Gong, The Standard of Civilization. 38. Onuf, A World of Our Making, 209 –10. 39. Ralph Pettman, Commonsense Constructivism (Armonk, NY: M. E.

Sharpe, 2000). 40. The recent neuroscientist literature, the “neurobiology of human ra-

tionality,” includes Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994); Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam Books, 1994); and Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999).

41. Vendulka Kubálková, ed., Foreign Policy in a Constructed World (Ar- monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), esp. chap. 3.

42. Kubálková et al., International Relations in a Constructed World and Kubálková, Foreign Policy in a Constructed World.

43. Alexander Stille, “A Happiness Index with a Long Reach: Beyond G.N.P. to Subtler Measures,” New York Times, 20 May 2000, A17, A19.

44. Haynes, Religion in the Third World and Religion in Global Politics. 45. Peter J. Katzenstein, “Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on Na-

tional Security,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Iden- tity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

46. Ibid., 27. 47. Peter van der Veer, “Political Religion in the Twenty-First Century,” in

International Order and the Future of World Politics, eds. T. V. Paul and John A. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

48. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics, 214.

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