The Future of Western Democracies

Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley

Ralf Fuecks, President, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

May 3, 2017

Interview with Islam Expert John Esposito

Al McKay, E-IR Website

September 8, 2014

John L. Esposito is University Professor, Professor of Religion & International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, and Founding Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Previously, he was Loyola Professor of Middle East Studies, at College of the Holy Cross.

Past President of the American Academy of Religion, Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, Esposito has served as consultant to the U.S. Department of State and other agencies, European and Asian governments, corporations, universities, and the media worldwide. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council of 100 Leaders and the E. C. European Network of Experts on De-Radicalisation and an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilization.

His more than 45 books include The Future of Islam, What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam,Islamophobia and the Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (with Dalia Mogahed), Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, Islam and Democracy(with J. Voll), The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, and Islam and Politics, Political Islam: Radicalism, Revolution or Reform?. He is Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Islamic Studies Online and Series Editor of the Oxford Library of Islamic Studies, and is Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Oxford History of Islam, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, The Islamic World: Past and Present, and Oxford Islamic Studies Online. His writings have been translated into more than 35 languages.

In this interview, Professor Esposito discusses his career, the current state of IR scholarship on Islam, the rise of ISIS, and Islamophobia.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I have often marvelled that “an Italian-American kid from Brooklyn,” the first generation to graduate from high school and then college, raised and formed in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic culture with minimal exposure to other religions and cultures, with the Capuchin Franciscans, training to be a priest, from the age of 14 until I left the monastery at 24 years of age, could become an academic, let alone have the life and experiences that I have had in my more than 40 year encounter with Islam and Muslims.

I received an MA in Theology from St. John’s University and taught at Rosemont College. It was here that I would suddenly find myself as a young theologian in a world that was torn by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and Vatican II reforms in Catholicism.

In 1955, Will Herberg’s captured the landscape of America in Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. But, by 1965, theologians were talking about the impact of secularization on religion and theology: Harvard’s Harvey Cox inReligion In the Secular City and “God is dead” theology. By the early 1970s, Harvey Cox authored Turning East, the response to the influx of Hindu gurus, Zen and Sufi masters, and immigrants from the East.

An unexpected and major turning point in my life occurred at Temple University, where I went to major in Catholicism studied for my PhD in the late 1960s, and finished in 1974. In contrast to other institutions, all grad students in the Department of Religion, regardless of their major, were required to major in one world religion and minor in two others. I took a required one-year introductory course in world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese religions, and Islam) with Bernard Philips, a charismatic teacher and the founder of the department, and never looked back, caught up in a new world of Hinduism and Zen Buddhism courses, intending to major in Hinduism. To my astonishment, Philips pressed me to take a course in Islam. Having acquired faculty in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese religions, Temple was now developing its Islamic studies component. I knew little about Islam and my images were from movies like The Exodus (1960) and its biased view of Arabs, and Lawrence of Arabia.

I had now made the astonishing discovery that there was another global Abrahamic faith, the second largest religion in the world. The children of Abraham included not only Jews and Christians, but also Muslims.

Like all great teachers, Ismail al-Faruqi combined scholarship with an energy and passion for his subject that was contagious. At Temple, I learned Islam from both texts and context, from books, and from Muslim professors and grad students who came from Nigeria and Egypt, Pakistan and Malaysia. This unique feature of the program provided immediate insight not only into the unity but also the diversity of Islam from North Africa to Southeast Asia. I learned not only from texts, but also from the perspectives of believers, seeing Islam as a living/lived faith. Much to my surprise and to the surprise of others, I changed plans and majored in Islam while minoring in Hinduism and Buddhism. The reaction of colleagues – theologians, family, and friends were quick to ask: “Why study Islam? You’ll never get a job.” And they were correct.

Religion, and particularly Islam, has enjoyed considerable attention from International Relations (IR) scholars since 9/11. Prior to this, however, both Islam and religion in general were generally under-explored intellectual terrains in IR scholarship. Do you think IR scholars are better placed to understand the role of religion in international politics now than they were before the 9/11 attacks?

In contrast to today, until only a few decades ago in the US and Europe, Islam and Muslim were invisible on our cognitive and demographic maps. Knowledge and coverage of Islam and Muslims were negligible in media, schools, and universities, the training for the military and Foreign Service Officers. Islamic studies was primarily focused on the past, emphasizing the study of texts and history, not the role of religion in modern politics and society. This trend was reinforced in the social sciences, informed by the reigning belief in modernization and development theory, which conflated development and modernization with the westernization and secularization of societies. Religion was a legacy from the past, irrelevant or an obstacle to modernization and the building of modern nation states. Some wrote of the passing of traditional societies and that Muslims would have to choose between Mecca or mechanization. Most professional associations – the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), American Historical Association, American Political Science Association, International Studies Association, even American Academy of Religion (AAR) – had little to no coverage of Islam and religion in the public square. Scholars of Islam were few and far between. In fact, Temple University was the first university, at least that I know of, to introduce the study of World Religions and Islam in 1968 and offer a degree in a Religion Department. Until that time, scholars of Islam were trained in departments of Arabic language and literature or history. Religion Departments were, in fact, predominantly staffed with experts on Christian scripture and theology with minimal or no coverage of Judaism. When, in the 1970s, departments began to respond and broaden their offerings, most introduced World Religions courses and emphasized an expertise in Hinduism and Buddhism, not Islam. The Iranian revolution would dramatically prove a “game changer.”

Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 transformed many lives, not only those in Iran and other parts of the Muslim world, but also US/European-Iran relations. Given Iran’s strategic location and the Shah’s long relationship with the US and threat to American national interests (the oil fields and our oil-producing allies in the Middle East) and the hostage-taking of American diplomats in our embassy, Iran’s Revolution and fears of an “Islamic fundamentalist threat” made careers. Reporters like Ted Koppel and Nightline, with its subtitle “America held hostage,” other journalists, and especially specialists in Middle East and Islamic studies, were catapulted out of the ivory tower and onto the lecture, consulting, and television circuits. For some scholars, if the 1970s were quiet private years, the 1980s and 90s were high-profile and fast-paced public years.

Political and demographic change during the 1980s and 1990s moved interest in Islam and Muslim politics from the periphery to centre stage. For those of us in the field, the famine became a feast: book contracts, speaking engagements all over the world, consulting jobs, and media appearances. A decade later, Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, and followed by Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and especially 9/11 and subsequent attacks from London and Madrid to Bali, precipitated a “global war on terrorism” whose impact reinforced fears of a clash of civilizations, changed the dynamics of global politics, and resulted in a quantum increase in government agencies and terrorism experts and in security, Middle East, and Islamic studies, as well as the exponential growth of Islamophobia.

The horrific attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, with subsequent terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, Bali, and elsewhere, and the rhetoric which called for a militant Jihad against the West, became the lens through which media and many in our societies came to view not only terrorist organizations, but also, for many, global Islam and Muslims. Fear of the religion of Islam and mainstream Muslims, not just fear and zero tolerance for Muslim extremists and terrorism, affected foreign and domestic policy.

International Relations (IR) was especially challenged by 9/11 and its aftermath. As I noted previously, the social sciences have ignored or dismissed the relevance and role in a modern nation state in which religion was, at best, a private matter antithetical to modern secular democracy and the public square. How was one to explain the resurgence of religion in politics and society, not only in Islam, but also in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism? How, in particular for those who saw modern education as producing a more secular-minded citizenry, was one to explain the role and involvement of modern educated leaders and followers (physicians, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and scientists who constituted an alternative elite to secular elites) as well as the less educated. The Social Science Research Council and others have attempted to address (to understand, analyze, and teach) these and other issues regarding the relationship of secularism and religion in modern states and societies, as well as form a committee to work on the development of curricula. When I first went to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (SFS), one of the oldest and leading schools of international affairs, to direct the newly created Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU), I was not only a professor of Islamic studies, but also the first professor of religion and international affairs, and there was no emphasis on politics and culture. Now, Culture and Politics (CULP) is a very popular major in SFS. There was only one (non-tenured) person in the entire university teaching Islam in the Theology Department. Now there are scholars of Islam (religion, politics, and society) in Theology, CMCU, and the Department of Arabic, renamed the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, as well as others. Today, in any good university or college, one expects to find faculty and courses in Islamic studies, not only in the humanities, but also in the social sciences.

ISIS is currently dominating international news headlines through its activity in Iraq and Syria, and there has been much discussion about effective ways to stop this militant Islamist group. What do you feel would be an effective response to ISIS?

As so often in the past (the Iranian Revolution, the rise and early successes of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s spread internationally, etc.), the rapid expansion of ISIS (or IS) in (and then out of) Syria and into Iraq stunned the international community and is currently dominating international news headlines.

Containing and ultimately defeating ISIS will require both short- and long-term response. ISIS expansion has been made possible by political conditions in Syria and Iraq, ethic-religious/sectarian divisions, and violence and terror in the region, and the failures of the US and international community.

Like Al-Qaeda and other militants, ISIS offers a militant, warped, and distorted Salafi ideology/religious rationale or rationalization to justify, recruit, legitimate, and motivate many of its fighters. Much of what they do violates Islamic law: its unabashed acts of terrorism, slaughter of civilians, savage use of beheadings, and killing of innocent Muslims, Yazidis, and Christians.

While religion/Islam, a particularly harsh and distorted version, does play a role to legitimate, recruit, and motivate, studies of most jihadist and movements, like ISIS, show that the primary drivers are to be found elsewhere. As in the recent past, so too today, this has remained true for Europeans and Americans who have joined ISIS.

Studies by the EC’s European Network of Experts on Violent Radicalization (of which I was a member) on radicalization in Europe, as well as those by terrorism experts like Marc Sageman and Robert Pape on global terrorism and suicide bombing, have found that, in most cases, religion is not the primary source of most extremist behaviour. Drivers of radicalization include moral outrage, disaffection, the search for a new identity, and for a sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging. For many, it is the experience or perception of living in a ‘hostile’ society, disenfranchisement, anti-imperialism, social injustice, and emancipation from occupation or corrupt authoritarian rulers.

At the end of the day, the peoples of the region (Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Gulf states) will have to deal with their problems. However, a substantial international commitment and involvement by the US, in consort with its European and Middle East allies (especially Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and the UAE), is also needed. Support for Syria’s weak and fractured moderate opposition, and for the new Iraqi president in strengthening Iraq’s military and security forces, and, in some cases, carefully targeted military operations and aid, are important considerations.

But, in the long run, if we wish to break the cycle of global terrorism and its movements that have existed in recent decades, as Graham Fuller notes in “Avenging James Foley“, the conditions and basic and enduring grievances in Muslim countries that jihadist terrorist movements have exploited in recent decades must also be addressed: “foreign boots on the ground, dictators supported by the US out of convenience, a failure to end a half century of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the treatment of Palestinians as a paradigm for treatment of other Muslims, the US employment of the region as an eternal cockpit for proxy wars—all of this is still ongoing.”

You’ve been extensively involved in the promotion of strong ties between Muslims and Christians. At present, how do you assess the global relationship between Muslims and Christians, and what more can be done to improve relations?

The global relationship between Muslims and Christians in the Arab and broader Muslim world has both prospered and deteriorated. Great advances have been made not only in Muslim-Christian relations, but also in interfaith or multi-faith relations that include all major faiths. Major Muslim-Christian initiatives have occurred between the Vatican as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in many countries at the national and local levels. The project and document “A Common Word between US and You” saw some 300 Muslim religious leaders reach out to the leaders of the Catholic, Anglican/Episcopal, and Protestant churches.

Sadly, at the same time, the rise of ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Christian and Muslim tendencies have reinforced a religious exclusivist worldview that is inimical to our increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies. We see it domestically with anti-Muslim tirades by Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Rod Parley, and Franklin Graham, and Islamophobia in America and Europe. Internationally significant anti-religious conflicts between Muslims and Christians: clashes have occurred from Nigeria and Egypt to Pakistan and the Philippines.

Statements that denounce violence and terrorism, and encourage mutual understanding and respect, are important, but they require implementation. Senior religious leaders have to be put into operation in training programs in churches and madrasas for the next generation of priests, ministers, and imams; so too, more outreach programs for high school teachers, and more courses and programs in universities and colleges are important, as well as faith-based summer youth projects. Political leaders and the media have an important role to play. They cannot pander to the hardline religious right bias and bigotry for votes, and media has to balance its at times obsessive coverage of extremism with more coverage of the mainstream majority, their lives and beliefs. Failure to do so reinforces the dangers of anti-Muslim attitudes and behaviour.

In 2012, you produced a book with Nathan Lean titled The Islamophobia Industry, which explored the rise of fear and hatred of Muslims sweeping through the United States and Europe. How wide a problem do you feel Islamophobia is, and do you see it as a phenomenon not simply confined to the far right?

Islamophobia has been a social cancer metastasizing in America and Europe since the 1990s. Islamophobia is prejudice or hostility towards Muslims on the basis of their religious or ethnic identity. Criticism of Islamic theology and culture is not intrinsically Islamophobic, just as criticism of the tenets or cultures of other world religions does not necessarily indicate a prejudicial position towards those who subscribe to them. Islamophobia refers to bias and discrimination that often lead to discrimination and hate speech, ascribing collective blame on the majority of mainstream Muslims for the actions of Muslim extremists and terrorists, violence, hate crimes, or denial of civil liberties.

In contrast to the UK, where the term Islamophobia was coined in the 1990s (and now is used in Europe), no term existed, or was used, in the US until fallout from the construction of Park 51 (the so-called mosque at Ground Zero), the Islamic center in downtown Manhattan. Time magazine was the first major publication to do a cover story that asked “Is America Islamophobic?” Unlike anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia, Islamophobia is still deemed culturally acceptable. It has yet to reach the threshold of being – at least publicly (broadcast, political establishment, etc.) – taboo.

Politicians, media commentators, hardline Christian Zionist preachers, and Islamophobic polemicists and websites – a dominant internet presence – have been enablers in its significant presence in popular culture.

Examples of the impact of Islamophobia in the US can be seen not only in incidents of hate speech and hate crimes, but also in the rhetoric and discourse in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, as well as the 2010 and 2012 congressional elections, and in the Park 51 protests and their aftermath.

In 2008, when Barack Obama visited Dearborn, some of his staff prevented his being photographed with young women wearing hijab, and many opponents labelled him a Muslim to discredit his candidacy. During the 2012 presidential election contest, every Republican candidate, either at that debate or in the two years before, had engaged in Islam and Muslim exceptionalism, questioning the loyalty of American Muslims, whether a Muslim could serve in the cabinet and under what conditions, the need to ban shariah law, etc.

You can see the impact during his presidency. President Obama has never visited a US mosque or sought a photo op at one. No Muslim has been appointed to a senior ambassadorship, and the number of visible senior members of the administration is negligible. Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim rhetoric became a topic in political contests in the 2010 congressional elections.

The building of an Islamic center in Manhattan near Ground Zero sparked a national debate and protest demonstrations. While there were diverse critics and reasons for opposition, prominent anti-Muslim activists played a major role in spearheading opposition, charging, among other things, that the Islamic center was a mosque that would be a monument to terrorism. Activists like Robert Spencer and Pam Gellar – who run websites including Freedom Defense Initiative, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) (which the Southern Poverty Law Center listed as an anti-Muslim hate group in 2010), and Jihad Watch – mobilized media, particularly social media, and public demonstrations. They coined terms like the “Mosque at Ground Zero” and “Mega Mosque at Ground Zero.”

In the aftermath of Park 51, a wave of anti-mosque activities swept from New York to California. This was also accompanied by some 29 states that have sought to pass anti-shariah laws to prevent its implementation, when in fact it’s impossible to do so under our Constitution.

Mainstream media, driven by the bottom line and market share, is captured by the media mantra “If it bleeds, it leads.” The effect of this approach can be seen in a Media Tenor report “A New Era of Arab Western Relations,” which reviewed 975,000 news stories in US and European media outlets, and reported astonishing imbalance.

• In 2001, 2% of all news stories in Western media presented images of Muslim militants, while just over 0.1% presented stories portraying ordinary Muslims.
• Jump to ten years later. In 2011, militant images went from 2% in 2001, to 25% in 2011. Yet, coverage of ordinary Muslims remained the same as 2001, at 0.1%.

Equally troubling and dangerous is the emergence of a cottage industry that has been meticulously cultivated by anti-Muslim polemicists and their resourceful funders, who master the domain of the internet with dozens of highly visible blogs and websites supported by hundreds of user blogs to which they link.

A 2011 study by the Center for American Progress found that, according to collected IRS tax returns, during a ten-year period, $42.6 million flowed from seven major foundations to these Islamophobic authors and websites.

The 2013 CAIR report “Legislating Fear: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States,” also with information taken from IRS returns, showed that, between 2008 and 2011, $119,662,000 dollars total revenue were given to US-based Islamophobia networks.

A lot of literature has been produced on Islam since 9/11. Yet, arguably, there are a lot of what could be described as misleading and agenda-driven texts out there. For people, particularly students, wanting to learn more about Islam, how should they distinguish between honest and dishonest writers?

In contrast to forty years ago, Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and especially 9/11, led to an explosion in publications in Islamic and Middle East studies and in major reference works. At the same time, the internet has become an access point for vast information and disinformation. Given the diversity of materials and diverse intellectual and political orientations – for example, from Tea Party and neocon to liberal or progressive – all tend to describe as misleading and agenda-driven texts out there. Just as years ago one could find PhDs or experts from the best universities supporting the tobacco industry, and scholars from similar universities giving a totally different assessment, so too today, in areas of global politics and religion we find a similar situation. Therefore, it is important to know publishers and authors of information: what is their orientation, track record, etc. This is made easier with the use of Google!

One of the reasons Oxford University Press launched an ambitious series of reference works that now cover most areas from culture and politics to science, gender, and the arts, was to meet the need for providing the best scholarship available. Similarly, with regard to the internet, Oxford Islamic Studies Online offers internet access to major texts (primary and secondary sources, biographies, etc.).

Many of E-International Relations’ readers are students. What key advice would you give those wanting to focus their research on the Islamic world?

The most important lesson I have learned from all of my years as an academic and as a student of Islam and Muslim societies is the most obvious and yet elusive. If you want to know what people believe, if you want to grasp the reality of everyday life, you have to combine, to use the current academic jargon, “text and context.” Understanding the faith and lives of others requires knowledge of religion, history, politics, and culture. You need knowledge of sacred sources, as well as what people actually believe and do!

Appreciation of the essentials of a religion cannot exclude awareness of the diversity of its forms and expressions. However important the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament, understanding Judaism and Christianity also requires that you observe what Jews and Christians believe and practice in specific historical, cultural, and social contexts. Judaism is Torah and Talmud. Judaism in Ethiopia, Israel, and New York may have an underlying similarity, but in fact its cultural expressions differ enormously. Similarly, beyond their shared identification with Jesus Christ, Western Christians and their Eastern counterparts (Coptic, Melkite, Orthodox, Presbyterian, and Anglican) have rich theologies and practices that are conditioned by their unique historical and cultural experiences. Although many tend to see Islam and Muslims too often through images drawn from Saudi Arabia or Iran, Muslim practice (dress, the roles of women and society, song and dance) varies widely from Africa and Asia to America and Europe.

This outlook has informed my work throughout the past 40 years. While I write about Islam (and other religions), the shared beliefs and practices of Islam, as well as its differing sects and schools of thought, I have always been drawn to seeing how the faith of Muslims plays out on the ground, in specific Muslim societies. At the same time, I have been acutely aware of the need to distinguish between the faith of the many and the twisted interpretations and actions of the few, the mainstream majority and a militant, extremist minority.

http://www.e-ir.info/2014/09/08/interview-john-esposito

Interview with IR Scholar Nicholas Onuf

E-IR Website

May 9, 2014

The interview was conducted by Rachel Denison. She is Deputy Features Editor at E-IR, and has a Masters degree in International Relations from the University of Sussex.

Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory, International History, and Social Theory. Onuf’s most famous work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which should be on every IR student’s must-read list. His recent publications include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida International University and is on the editorial boards of International Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.

In this interview, Professor Onuf discusses the professionalization of scholarship in IR and the effects this has had on the field in the US and globally; the influence that constructivism and World of Our Making has had on social theory; the transformations he has noticed in International Law Theory; and his top ten tips for flourishing in academia.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in contemporary IR?

I am not sure I see any exciting debates at this moment. I am not even sure we ever had a debate in the usual sense of the term. There have been moments better characterized as a parting of the ways. I like to think I participated in one in the late 1980s. Since then, well, these ‘ways’ have grown further and further apart. If such partings are generational (as I think they are), then we should now be seeing another such moment. If we do not (and I do not), then it is because IR has lost all coherence as a field—there is nothing left to render apart. Not that this distresses me. At the last parting, I suggested that we should think of international relations as a species of social relations and abandon IR theory for social theory.

What are the most important/interesting areas of IR Theory that are underdeveloped or understudied at the moment? Where is there most need and scope for new thinking?

As I just intimated, I do not believe IR theory can be made interesting. The question is, what area in social theory, broadly conceived, could help us—everyone interested in what we still call international relations—do our thing. Inasmuch as we in IR have rummaged around in social theory pretty superficially (and I count myself here), there is no area that could not be put to better use. That said, I am myself most interested in cognitive, evolutionary, and moral psychology these days. Mostly because I like to read around, and this stuff keeps me thinking.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I take this question—the way I understand the world—to concern the philosophical assumptions informing my scholarship. For the first 15 or 20 years of my scholarly career, I was a philosophical ignoramus. Still am, of course, though I can say that I have plunged into several philosophical seas and not drowned. I started off as an unthinking, and therefore utterly conventional, philosophical realist. Doubts came with exposure to postmodern and radical feminist theorizing, and theorists, in the early 1980s. Reading Wittgenstein pushed me into the linguistic turn and Oxford-style ordinary language philosophy helped me rethink the links between speech, rules, and rule, and thus the premises of much of social theory. I do not recall when I first dug into Kant’s First Critique, but I have never recovered from the experience—I still think of myself as a thoroughgoing philosophical idealist, not at all discomforted by the material appearance of the world. Around 1990, I took the better part of a sabbatical leave to read Aristotle from front to back, with cascading effects on my scholarship.

Having taught and spoken on IR theory all around the world, how would you say IR is studied and understood as a discipline in the US versus the UK/Europe, or indeed in South America or Asia?

I resist calling IR a discipline for reasons that should be obvious from my reply to the first two questions. Educated as I was in the US, I have always thought of it as a field of study in the discipline of political science, and I always took seriously the presumption that it was a field sufficiently at odds with the rest of political science to warrant excursions into other disciplines. In my case, this was history from the beginning (later reinforced by working with a brilliant historian who happens to be my brother). I also worked extensively in international law, but this was complicated by the vocational thrust of legal education in the US. Yet another complication is the vocational orientation of the so-called professional schools of international affairs, in which I taught for many years. Here again, disciplined scholarship and, especially, theory take a back seat to practical training and ‘real-world experience.’

Now, I think it is an open question as to whether IR is understood as a discipline in the rest of the world. There are, of course, the trappings of a discipline now almost everywhere: journals and professional associations specifically devoted to IR, not to mention clannish behavior. The big difference between the US and elsewhere is the lack of separate IR departments in the US and their proliferation in many other countries. This is a large result of the globalization of IR, while political science has always been and will always be country-specific for obvious reasons.

So let me shift the terms of discussion here just a little bit. What I saw happening in the US over the last five decades is the professionalization of scholarship (and more generally the professionalization of the professions). This was the deep issue in the so-called second debate: disciplined, highly trained US scholars, committed to rigorous positivist science, lording over English gentleman-scholars as dabblers. As a wealthy country, the US could afford the big science model of the scholarly profession, and reaps significant rewards in doing so—all this contributed to the imposition of set standards for scholarly performance, the normalization of scholarly practices, and the hegemonial presumption that everyone else in the world should and eventually would do things our way.

It is no surprise that some scholars in the US resented this development and there is less discipline than demanded, but professionalization won out domestically and has made great inroads in the rest of the world (just consider the RAE process in the UK and the English School today). Combined with so many other facets of US hegemony, the globalization/professionalization of IR in accordance with the big science model has also been a source of resistance, which I see (and sympathize with) whenever I am abroad. I also see a significant improvement in standards for scholarship. Even if higher standards are a consequence of US hegemonial discipline, as I think they are, they are nevertheless to be welcomed.

What did you feel was missing from IR theory, with Realism and Liberalism as the main schools of thought, that you felt a new school of thought—Constructivism—was needed? What blanks do you feel it fills in in our understanding of International Relations?

At the time I wrote World of Our Making, most of us in the US took realism to be the field’s frame of reference—indeed the umbrella theory that gave IR its coherence. Liberalism was on the outs, along with international law and institutions; realism had combined with a commitment to positivist science in deciding what counted as a contribution to knowledge. I did not feel a new approach was needed or, for that matter, that liberalism needed to be resuscitated. There are no ‘blanks’—the very term implies a philosophical/social theoretic stance contrary to the one that I have already sketched.

As I said in response to question 3, I had come increasingly to feel that a bottom-up revolution was needed. I also thought that a background in international legal theory gave me (and my friend Fritz Kratochwil) something distinctive and important to contribute to the cause. Constructivism’s subsequent erection as IR’s third pillar—in the US, no less—signaled the end of the uprising, the banishment of post-positivist, feminist, and critical renegades, and the normalization of IR as social science. As I suggested in my response to the last question, normalization and professionalization are hegemonial practices fueling the US vs. rest of the world dynamic. The question takes for granted that constructivism has been normalized. To the extent this is so, it is less by discipline than exclusion. That I, as a would-be revolutionary, should be among those who are effectively excluded is no great surprise.

What implications do you think that your book World of Our Making has had on the study of IR?

World of Our Making gives IR scholars an opportunity (incentive, excuse) to look beyond the world of states and their relations and ask how it, or any ‘world,’ has come to be what it is as a social arrangement, how people engage in world-making and to what effect, and how these two processes are, as we say perhaps too glibly, co-constitutive. The book also gives scholars good reasons to consider speaking as doing, rules as indispensable to social life, and rule, not anarchy, as the abiding condition of world politics.

I would say that constructivism thus conceived asks too much in a world where scholars have become ever more specialized in their interests and procedures. For that reason, it gets honorable mention when it gets any acknowledgment at all. Various people have gone ahead and worked on performative speech, rules in practice, and much else that I brought to attention, though often enough without realizing that I had already dealt with these matters. Few indeed have followed my initiatives with respect to rule and exploitation in world politics, even though there is much discussion of hegemony and hierarchy.

If identity and interests are a pre-given as constructivism argues, how would you argue that this framework can be used to help academics and students of IR understand and analyse current affairs, e.g. the crisis in Syria or in the Ukraine?

I would never say that identity and interests are pre-given. In my opinion, anyone who does say this does not have even the remotest idea what it means to talk about social construction. As a general proposition, ongoing processes of identity- and interest-formation give us little help in understanding crises in world politics. The converse proposition is, however, another matter:  What is the impact of crises on processes of identity- and interest-formation? When, for example, Stefano Guzzini talks about identity-triggers, I think he is on to something.

In International Legal Theory, you outline the key developments and problems in the field of International Law. What do you feel the most transformative have been and how have they affected the study and practice of International Law? Since its publication in 2008, are there any problems or developments that you wish you could address?

When I first started working in international legal theory, I saw three large issues needing further work. I used to think of them as the three S’s: the sources of international law, subjects of international law, and sanctions in international law. I wrote a great deal about the first, and some about the third, and very little about the second. I had my reasons at the time, but, looking back, I should probably have concentrated on the second, which has proven to be transformative. Instead I became increasingly interested in the properties of (legal) rules as instruments of social control, and this converged with a longstanding interest in world-order thinking and duly eventuated in my work on conditions of rule, to which I alluded earlier.

International Legal Theory marked my exit from active scholarship in/on international law. By happenstance, my departure coincided with a spirited revival of theoretical work among international lawyers, and something of a rapprochement between IL and IR. I have no regrets about bowing out when I did, because so many people today are working on the three S’s in blissful ignorance of what I and others had written about decades earlier. The one exception is the discussion of ‘the fragmentation of international law’ as a reaction to accelerating functional differentiation in global administrative practice. Unlike me, Kratochwil has continued to engage international legal theory; his forthcoming book, The Status of Law in World Society, has far more to say about this development and its implications than I could possibly hope to.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

As an old dog, I routinely dispense advice to young scholars whom I know well enough to think that my advice fits their circumstances. Rather than trying to guess what, in general, constitutes the most important advice I can give, let me list a few things. Ten, actually—ten rules for flourishing as a scholar in IR:

1) Preparing at length for classes does not make you a better teacher. Insofar as it dampens spontaneity, students will think you are boring; this will undercut the self-confidence you thought your lengthy preparations had purchased for you. And, of course, it steals valuable time from your scholarship.

2) Writing is a craft; writing well takes most of us a great deal of work. The usual practice is to think of a problem or issue, formulate a project, do ‘research,’ and then write it up. Bad idea. Keep writing at every stage, even if, in the end, you throw out most of what you have written. Writing makes the problem clearer, points up what more you need to do in the way of research, and, most of all, keeps your writing skills well-honed.

3) Don’t send sloppy, badly crafted papers out for review. As a frequent referee, I see them all too often. Many referees will punish you, not always consciously, for doing so, even if they think you are on to something. Once you think you have a well-crafted piece of work, do send it out, because most referees and editors take their duties seriously and will give you valuable feedback.

4) Be cautious about taking on collaborative projects. We all know that scholarship is a lonely occupation. Collaboration reduces the loneliness quotient and can result in better work than any of the collaborators could have produced on their own. It can also result in a piece of work that no one is entirely happy with. Sometimes collaboration causes damaging tension and bad feelings because of temperamental differences, greater or lesser commitment to the project, and perceived inequities in the distribution of work. All that said, collaborating with my brother on two book projects was hugely rewarding. That it might have been hugely risky never occurred to us.

5) Be even more cautious in participating in symposium projects. Their thematic foci may not match your interests very well; they tend to be superficially refereed and thus are not taken seriously; they also tend to disappear quickly from view. There are exceptions—symposia that mark major developments in the field—but you’ll have a pretty good idea if a particular symposium project has that potential. As a senior scholar, I contribute to symposia because it is fun to do projects with friends and I can afford the luxury. Most of all, avoid editing symposium volumes. This involves collaboration under the most difficult conditions. It is extraordinarily time consuming. Wrangling recalcitrant contributors is too often a thankless and disheartening responsibility.

6) Do not take on too many projects at one time. You will spread yourself too thin, miss deadlines, and make it all the more likely that you will succumb to the 90% rule—you run out of steam when any given project is 90% done and only needs some fine-tuning to be sent off. You will end up with a drawer full of nearly done projects that you have progressively lost interest in and will therefore never finish.

7) Dissertations are apprentice projects, immediately recognizable as such. Turning a dissertation into a book is probably the smart thing to do, but it will often take longer than writing the dissertation did. For most of us, it takes five years to write a good book; World of Our Making took me ten years. Whether you have that much time, institutionally speaking, is another matter.

8) Read every day. When I get up in the morning (early) and get my coffee, I read for 45 minutes. In my case, it has always been something that I do not have to read for whatever I am doing at the time. While this has broadened me immeasurably, for many scholars, a fixed time for reading is an opportunity—perhaps the only opportunity—to keep up on the literature in the field.

9) Whether to jump on a trend in the field’s scholarship, try anticipating a trend, come late to a trend but treat it critically, jump around from thing to thing, or plug away at something few others seem to be interested in is a tricky question, having much to do with temperament. It requires you to ask yourself how ambitious you are, how much you need validation from others, how long you can stayed focused on one thing, et cetera.

10) On the assumption that you are smarter than most people (or you would not be a scholar), seek out people whom you know to be smarter than you in various obvious ways. On the one hand, the more of these people you know, the less intimidating you will find them, and the more you will learn from them. On the other hand, knowing really smart people will remind you of your own limitations and help you be less arrogant. Arrogance is, of course, a constant hazard in our line of work. I like to think that hanging out with people who are smarter than I am has been the key to my own success as a scholar. Some of them have been my students. (I could name names, but it would not be appropriate here.) As for making me less arrogant as a human being, anything I might venture to say about that can only sound—what is the right word?—arrogant.

Interview with IR Professor James Fearon

e-International Relations on December 16, 2013 

James D. Fearon is Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow in Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies.  He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a program member of the Institutions, Organizations, and Growth group of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.  Fearon’s research has focused on the causes and correlates of interstate war, civil war, and ethnic conflict.  He has also published on positive theories of democracy, the problem of intervention in “failed” states, and on how states signal intentions in militarized interstate disputes.

In this interview, Professor Fearon discusses responses to the civil war in Syria and offers his thoughts on the passing of Ken Waltz and the academic study of civil wars.

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Kenneth Waltz sadly passed away recently. What impact did Prof. Waltz’s writings and teaching have on your intellectual development?

I hadn’t majored in Political Science as an undergraduate, and was pretty clueless about the field when I started as a grad student at Berkeley.  There were a couple of things I read in my first year that essentially decided my path of study, and Waltz’s Theory of International Politics was one of them.  I found his writing and style of thinking really compelling.

I’m not sure I have this exactly right, but I think Ken was on leave for my first year and didn’t teach the IR theory seminar my second year.  In any event I had essentially no interactions with him, except through reading his work, till my third year, when I TAed for his course on U.S. defense policy.  I asked him if he would chair my dissertation committee because what I wanted to do was somewhat closer to his interests and general analytical style than Ernst Haas’.  Haas was the other senior IR scholar at Berkeley at the time and I had had a lot more courses and other interactions with him to that point.  I thought Haas was tremendous, but he had his own thing and a dissertation using game theoretic methods to analyze how and when interstate disputes escalate or don’t escalate to war was not close enough.

At least in my case, Ken was a fairly hands-off dissertation adviser, which suited me fine.  He had certain things he was very insistent on, such as the distinction between deterrence and defense, or being very careful about how nuclear weapons change things in interstate crises.  Otherwise he let me develop the dissertation as I saw fit.  At that time he was pretty supportive of the attempt to apply game theoretic thinking to those problems — I recall him noting more than once that he had read Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in the 1950s and thought there were valuable insights in it that he drew on for his first book.  But there was ambivalence as well.  Certainly by his later years he seemed to have decided that all those quantitative and formal approaches weren’t really necessary.  He appreciated and encouraged the more historical parts of my dissertation, to be sure.

Ken had an unusual intellectual style, a style that has become even more unusual as time has passed.  He chose very big questions, and would go at them in a slow, careful, deliberate manner.  He didn’t spin off ideas left and right, or bounce between them, or publish lots of articles on one thing and then another.  Because his writing is often highly condensed, students and people in the IR field often underestimate the strength of his positions.  So interactions with him frequently would have the quality of Ken explaining why you needed to go back and think about his arguments again.  In my experience this is usually right.  If you think Waltz is just plain mistaken about this or that, you usually do need to go back and think about it some more.  Of course, there are lots of things I disagree with him about, or think he didn’t get quite right, but as a general rule of thumb, if you think he’s wrong about something it’s a good idea to go back and make sure you really understand what he is saying and the full set of arguments for the position.

The civil war in Syria has become a hotly debated topic, particularly the issue of whether a military intervention should be implemented. Do you feel that this would be an effective way to resolve the crisis?

At this point, a massive military intervention is probably the only effective way to end the war, but that doesn’t mean this would be the right thing to do.  First off, such an intervention would be over the strong objections of Russia, Iran, and other states, thus escalating interstate conflict, with a number of possible bad downstream consequences.  Second, such an intervention would be highly costly, since the interveners would surely face — and further stimulate — protracted violent opposition from Islamist insurgents even if intervention overcame the Assad regime and its international supporters.   Third, and probably most important, even if an intervention could depose the Assad regime and end the current war, the third parties would then be responsible for creating a stable political order that would allow them to depart without a return to war.  We appear to have no idea how to do this.  So, no, I don’t think a major military intervention (going to war against the Assad regime) would be a good approach to ending the war in Syria.

Throughout the nineties, politicians and the international media argued that many of the civil wars that emerged around the globe were caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. These explanations were falsified by scholars, yet this template of understanding is still highly popular with politicians and the media. Why do you think that this is the case and do you feel that adopting this ancient ethnic hatreds narrative can have negative political consequences?

Well, depending on what we count as “ancient,” I’m not sure I’d say this sort of explanation is always wrong, or wrong in all cases.  There is a lot of variation here.  There certainly are some conflicts where there is a long history of intense animosity between members of the ethnic groups in question, and where it is plausible that past episodes of violence created cultural memes that get recycled in new contexts, or that may increase the odds of violence by making it more mutually expected.  Or where intense dislike of the other group just disposes people to be more accepting or supportive of politicians who are advocating for ethnic cleansing.

But of course there are many other ethnic conflicts where there really isn’t much history of past violence between the groups, or it doesn’t go back very far.  David Laitin and I have recently been doing some research on long-run persistence of armed conflict in particular places around the world.  One of the “side” findings that I think is interesting is this:  There are remarkably few instances where members of two ethnic groups who fought on opposite sides of a Correlates-of-War-coded conflict post-1945 also fought on opposite sides of a COW-coded conflict before 1945.  (These include interstate, civil, colonial, and what COW calls “non-state” wars.)  Now, these are relatively high-level conflicts, due to the COW criteria, so I’m sure that if you considered lower-level conflicts you will find more cases of repeated fighting between members of different ethnic groups that go back 100 or 200 years (although it should be stressed that when you look at conflicts in the 19th century and earlier, “ethnic conflict” was often not how the leaders thought about what they were doing).  But still, I was struck by how few — like three or four — such cases appear at the COW-war level.

Why are “ancient hatreds” stories so popular in the media?  I don’t know, I could only speculate.  “History repeats itself” is a common explanatory trope for journalists in general.  And since it is typically assumed that ethnic groups are age-old things — indeed this is practically built into the concept, even though it is usually factually wrong — perhaps it seems natural to people that therefore ethnic conflicts must be ancient.  And of course labelling a conflict as “ethnic” can be a way of marking it as atavistic and thus not something we can do much about.

Can incorrectly explaining a conflict as a product of ancient hatreds have negative political consequences?  Perhaps your question was inspired by the famous example of President Clinton supposedly being strongly influenced against intervention in the Balkans by Robert Kaplan’s bookBalkan Ghosts.  This is usually exhibit A here.  It’s hard to gauge how important such thinking is case to case.  Usually there are other, probably more decisive political or military considerations against intervention, so the ancient-hatreds story may just be cover.  Probably in general the more dangerous negative political consequence is when some members of a group themselves come to subscribe to a factually inaccurate nationalist narrative that puts great stress on a history of conflict with other, presumed-to-be inferior groups.

A common criticism from constructivists of the rationalist approach to ethnic conflict is that it overlooks the significance of cultural factors, particularly the propagation of ethnic myths justifying hostility and dominance by political elites, in explaining the outbreak of violence. Do you feel that this criticism is fair?

I have no interest in defending or advocating for a “rationalist approach” to ethnic conflict, or international relations, or any broad domain of politics.  The field of IR seems almost absurdly prone to meta-level arguments over this or that approach, and I don’t want to contribute to that.

But so as not to seem like I’m completely avoiding the question:  I have a hard time making sense of an opposition between “rationality” and “culture.”  The opposition between “rational” and “irrational” can make more sense, where the former is a normative standard that defines what “irrational” action would be in some context.

As I mentioned in some responses above, I think that ethnic myths that justify hostility and dominance by political elites can certainly be an important factor in explaining ethnic violence in some cases.  When the argument is that elites are deliberately using these myths for their own political advantage, this often gets classed as a “rationalist” story, for whatever little that’s worth.

In some cases where civil wars have broken out they have been characterized by civilian targeting, atrocities and, in some instances, genocide. Do you think that rational actor models are sufficient in explaining occurrences like genocide in civil wars?

Again, I couldn’t care less whether rational actor models are sufficient for this purpose (I’m also not sure what “sufficient” can mean for explananda like this one).  I think that explaining civilian targeting in civil war is an important research objective, and am happy to get insights from whatever approaches produce them.

The study of ‘ethnic conflict’ has grown significantly in the past two decades. Which new studies on this subject have you found the most interesting?

I actually haven’t been working on ethnic conflict and ethnic violence much recently, so I don’t feel well qualified to answer.  I’ve been reading James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed, which is not exactly new and not exactly on “ethnic conflict,” but nonetheless extremely interesting on how to think about the formation of ethnicities and conflictual relationships among them in Asia.

There is a wave of interesting research in political economy going on, mainly by economists like Nathan Nunn, Hans-Joachim Voth, Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Melissa Dell, and others, including a lot of new PhDs.  This research agenda takes a long view and tends to find striking and sometimes surprising continuities of political and economic institutions, or long-lasting impacts of particular historical events.  Some of the work has looked at historical persistence of armed conflict (not typically “ethnic conflict” per se), but not much of it.  As I mentioned, this is an area where Laitin and I are doing some data collection.

What key advice would you give to scholars who are just starting their careers and want to focus their research on civil wars?

If a grad student were to come to my office and ask this question, in so many words, I would ask him or her what it is about civil wars that interests them, and if there is some particular conflict or set of conflicts that has inspired the interest.  Then we would have a conversation the point of which would be to draw out this interest and develop ideas about how to pursue it in light of the questions posed and answers found by the most relevant existing literatures.  So, basically, I don’t have a good generic answer to the question “how to focus in new research on civil war?”  It’s a big topic and there are a lot of interesting angles worth pursuing.

...

continues at:

www.e-ir.info/2013/12/16/interview-james-fearon/ 

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This interview was conducted by Al McKay. Al is an Editor-at-large of e-IR. 

Interview with Prof. Anthony D. Smith

Alex Stark, e-IR Website

September 3, 2013

Professor Anthony D. Smith is one of the founders and foremost scholars of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies. His best-known contributions to the field are the distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ types of nations and nationalism, and the idea that all nations have dominant ‘ethnic cores’. He is President of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of Economics, and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Nations and Nationalism. He is author of numerous works on nationalism, including The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of the National Identity, and The Antiquity of Nations. Professor Smith took his first degree in Classics and Philosophy in Oxford, and his master’s degree and doctorate in Sociology at the London School of Economics.

Professor Smith answers your questions about the origin of nations, changing conceptions of nationhood in the EU, and the links between nationalism and genocide.

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

At the moment the field is quite fragmented. There used to be key debates about the antiquity of nations and the nature of nationalism, but nowadays there are many different sub-fields; for example feminism, everyday nationhood, discursive analysis of nations, neo-evolutionary psychological approaches, as well as quantitative research on nationhood. In America in particular there are kinds of quantitative or rational choice-type approaches which are still much favored there. So it’s difficult to say which are the most important or seminal research areas. Different people jump in at different points in the debate and open up new lines, so that it is really quite difficult to say this is where the bulk of research or the most important areas of advance are.

I would even go so far as to say that in a field like nationalism, it’s doubtful whether we can speak of particular progress or lines of advance. In this respect it’s a bit more like humanistic or literary studies, which have a certain cyclic character, or have a stability that is quite different from what we find in the natural sciences. The study of nationalism has a strong cultural, literary element to it, which is not found in some of the other social sciences that deal with more economic matters, for example.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The world- that is a very big question! You are referring to the political world in particular. Some of the greatest and most important factors were first of all the Second World War and secondly the collapse of the Soviet Union; these were the two big world events which shaped my world view and which continue to resonate with me because they had personal consequences for me, and also they had consequences for my studies in the field of nationalism. Indeed, they were very influential in causing me to take up the study of nations and nationalism.

In the mid-1980s I began to adopt what was later called an ethno-symbolic approach to the study of nations and nationalism, and while I wouldn’t say I am a doctrinaire proponent of this point of view, I do find it useful in supplementing and perhaps correcting some of the overemphasis, particularly of the modernists in their study of nationalism. I continue to think that this is a valuable approach.

What was the impact of your PhD advisor Ernest Gellner’s scholarship and teaching on your own work?

He had a very considerable impact. He was a forthright exponent of that current of thinking about nations and nationalism that we call modernism, ie the belief that nations as well as nationalism are post-1789, and also that they are intimately connected to, if not dependent on, even derived from, the processes of modernization, an elastic concept which includes not only industrialization per se, but also political mobilization, secular education, urbanization, and so forth. He was a very radical exponent of this point of view, saying that nothing before 1800 really mattered for the study of nationalism.

At first I found myself very much influenced by this point of view. My early studies in nationalism concerned the role of the intellectual classes in that process. However in the early 1980s, I began to reconsider this method and this position, and I came to view the process of nation creation and nationalism as in part derived from, or generally located within, a much longer time process of ethnic revival and ethnic decline, which goes back to antiquity. It was this view that lead to my analysis of nations and nationalism in terms of myths, memories, symbols, values, and traditions, which is the core of the ethno-symbolic approach.

So yes, Professor Gellner’s work had a great impact, but it also influenced me to embrace a very different point of view as well. Certainly it is a major influence in the field, even today, but I feel that it needs to be supplemented and corrected by the considerations that I have just mentioned.

What is nationalism, according to you? And where do nations come from?

The term “nationalism” has very many meanings. For myself, I like to confine it to a movement and an ideology, and not let it encroach on the idea of sentiment, consciousness, the growth of nations, and all the other things that are sometimes all called “nationalism.” It seems to me that that is somewhat separate. The ideology and the movement hold that the world is divided into nations, as a matter of fact. In other words, nationalists believe that the primary division of the world is the national division. According to this view, each nation has its own character, its own history, its own destiny, and loyalty to the nation is the supreme loyalty that overrides all others. Belonging to a nation is what fulfills a person or put negatively, without belonging to a nation, one is “lost” or “alienated” in the world. There is also the belief that nations should have the right to express themselves most fully, and that they are cultural units which need to “find their identity”; that is to say, that people should seek to identify with nations, see how they are distinctive from other nations, and cultivate those distinctive characteristics. And finally, at a broader level, nationalists argue that a world of peace and justice can only be founded on a world of free nations; without free nations, you can’t have peace and justice, or indeed stability. So there is a complete worldview within the nationalist ideology. It doesn’t cover every sort of thing, it doesn’t cover issues of distributive justice, for example, but certainly it covers matters of world regulation, if that’s the right word.

Crucially, it links culture to politics. Political units are determined, in the nationalist view, by cultural groupings. These cultures can be of some antiquity, but they may be very modern, recently put together, and very often they are selectively drawn from the past by intellectuals, but usually they have some roots in the past (when I say “the past” I mean the pre-modern past). This was true of the initial modern nations- that’s to say England and France in particular, but also Scotland and Denmark and so on- and they became a model for nation creation elsewhere, first in Europe, and then outside.

Now we come to the question of what is a nation, and that’s much the most difficult question of all. For me, it’s a community; it’s a type of community that is based on the idea that people perceive a given territory as belonging to them, rightly or wrongly. So that’s the first characteristic: it’s a territorialized community. The second characteristic is that it’s a community of myth, memory, and symbol. This is what the members of a nation share in common, to a greater or lesser degree: myths, memories, symbols, traditions, which differ from those of other nations. Thirdly, the members of those nations have forged a distinctive public culture, which includes rituals and ceremonies and public codes of conduct; a political culture of symbols, flags, anthems, stamps, coins, and so on, that mark out this nation from another nation. And finally, the members tend to observe- and here I’m more careful, because not all members do- common customs and laws.

Now this leads on to the vexed question of whether every nation has a state or must have a state of its own. And it is clear when we look around that there are cases of nations which don’t have states– Catalonia and Scotland would be examples. Even if many of the inhabitants want a state of their own, some don’t. So I think that I would not write into the definition of nation the desire for, let along the actuality of having, a state. Of course a nation-state is actually a rarity; “nation-state” implying that there is a single culture with a state sitting on top of it. We don’t have that usually, we have a state which has a number of cultures in it, one of which is dominant, so it’s a polyethnic state, if you like. And there are many different varieties empirically. So it’s quite a complicated question as to the relationship between the nation and the state. I prefer to keep the definition of the nation separate from the state, while allowing for the fact that in historical practice, many nationalists have wanted a state of their own. Which is what Weber says, that “a nation is a community of prestige which would, if permitted, have aimed to possess a state of its own,” but the implication of course is that it may not.

This is a controversial question, but because of the cases that I have mentioned (and I’m sure there are others), we need to keep the questions quite separate. When I say that the members observe common laws, the laws may well be those of a community which is not yet an independent state of its own, but will just have some autonomy, as in Catalonia or Scotland. So that is how I would define a nation. It’s the most difficult concept in the field and one which has engaged the most debate. One is always looking to see whether one’s own definition fits the various empirical cases or whether it can be amended or supplemented. Here I differ from those who argue that there is no reality to the nation, that it is simply a discursive metaphor, and that nationalism is real but nation is simply a claim, a stance on the part of people. This is the position of some scholars in the field now. I don’t agree with this; I think that once created, nations have powerful impacts, the collectivity that is the nation has a sort of feedback onto the members themselves which is independent of their own predispositions, their thoughts, their emotions, and so on. Of course, if it’s allied to a state, that’s even more the case.

What is the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity?

Again, another very vexed topic! Originally when I studied nationalism I did not really think of it in terms of what’s called “the ethnic hinterland.” But as I proceeded, it struck me more and more that we cannot divorce the study of nationalism from the study of ethnicity. Ethnic groups are the primary communities from which nations are formed, and which nationalists seek to turn into nations, and then perhaps acquire a state of their own. “Ethnicity” has various grades. One can talk about ethnic categories; that is to say aggregates of population, who share a particular set of dialects, customs, and place, but who do not recognize any link among themselves, for example, dwellers of adjoining valleys which have a common dialect and so forth but they have no unity, neither a real cultural unity much less a political one. They may also be divided into city-states: the Phoenicians were divided into city-states in antiquity, they spoke the same language, they had the same cultural practices, but they had no unity; indeed, the fought among each other. The same could be said of the Greek city-states, although there we saw a greater sense of unity, because they had the Olympic Games, the common Gods, common Homeric poems, and so forth.

The next step up is an ethnic association. Here the members of the different groupings that constitute the ethnic category begin to have organizations in common, they deal with each other in some way, economically, politically, perhaps, but particularly in terms of culture, they might have a common religious center, for example the ancient Sumerians had a common religious center. And the next stage up again is anethnic community. Here, the aggregates of the population have come together and think of themselves as a single community, they may have a single ruler or they may have institutions which are common, but they share common myths, memories, and symbols, they have a sense of attachment to a common territory, and they feel themselves separate: there is a boundary between them and those outside.

Ethnicity in its various forms is very often the basis of nations. When it is desired by nationalists to create modern nations, it is to ethnic categories, ethnic associations, and particularly ethnic communities that they turn for the basis on which the nation can be created. And what are they doing? They’re forging a distinct public culture, they’re regularizing the laws and customs, they’re standardizing the myths and memories through poetry, music, and so forth, and they are securing the boundaries, in a more administrative or political sense of the term: the idea that arose during the French Revolution of France’s “natural frontiers,” which most ethnic groups would not have thought about originally. As I see it, and that was the argument in The Ethnic Origins of Nations, many- not all, but many- modern nations base themselves on antecedent ethnic ties, either in the weaker form of ethnic categories, which were selected from a number of other categories and turned into the ethnic basis for nations, or ethnic associations, or ethnic communities. If there had been no such units in the world, I don’t think we would have had nations or nationalism.

I think it is more a negative argument than a positive one, in a way. I am not saying that for every ethnic community there is a nation, by no means! Many ethnic communities have withered on the vine; the Frisians, for example– there is no Frisian nation. There are lots of ethnic groups that have not been the basis of a nation. Only some are selected. Why these are selected by nationalists, that’s a very interesting study. A lot of external factors play a part: external wars, migrations, religious movements; these are factors that lead to the disruption of traditional organization and traditional practices, and begin the process of creating an intelligentsia who are the normal- not the only, but the normal- vehicle for the creation of nations. In the West it was slightly different, it was kings and ministers and bureaucrats that created nations, from the top-down—although, even here, there had to be an ethnic basis on which to do it. The English and the northern French were the basis on which the kingdoms of England and France were based, and hence the English and the French nations.

This is a complex question, and it is extremely difficult to decide the point at which ethnicity or an ethnic community, as I would call it, becomes a nation. But it seems to me that when there is a definite movement- and this is where nationalism comes in -to create a distinct common culture, and laws and customs, and to standardize the cultural heritage and boundaries, then we have the moment of crossing over into nationhood.

You have taken degrees both in Nationalism and Art History. Where do you see the connections between these two disciplines?

In fact my most recent book, The Nation Made Real, tried to spell this out. The rise of modern nations in the West in particular- I want to stress this, because there is a debate about whether there are nations in antiquity, or in other parts of the world (the Far East, for example)- coincided with artistic movements of neo-Classicism and Romanticism, which sought in the past a legitimation for, and an understanding of, the communities which were to form the basis of the nations which the nationalists wanted to establish.

Modern nationalism arose in the 18th century. So did what we call “history painting” and “history sculpture” (around 1750), and the connection was not fortuitous. To my mind, one of the most important elements in the conjuncture was the new interest in the cult of authenticity. It stemmed from Rousseau’s idea that we should return to nature, we should lead the simple life, we should give up corrupt urban civilization, and this turned increasingly into the idea that what counts is sincerity and authenticity. Of course these things had been around before, we only have to remember what Polonius says to Laertes: “to thine own self be true.” But only in the 18th century did this become the object of scholarly, cultural, and ultimately political activity, trying to make not just a nation in the sense of any old group that could be put together with boundaries, but one that was authentic, that was “genuine” in some sense.

Now what this meant, of course, was the subject of debate both amongst the nationalists and between the nationalists and everyone else; and it is still subject to debate, since many people dismiss the idea of authenticity. But nevertheless it played a remarkably important part from the mid-18th century if not earlier through to the 20th century. The idea that we should seek in life that which is authentic has affected all types of activities; for example, we want to put on Shakespearean plays that are performed as they were in Shakespeare’s day, or Bach’s music as it was played in Bach’s time- in other words, authentic costumes, period instruments, and so on. We find this desire for authenticity in all sorts of ways, even down to eating “authentic food” rather than fast food.

So that became a link between painters and sculpture on the one hand, and on the other hand nationalist intellectuals forging nations. And very often the latter employed the former to construct the idea of the nation, to make it real for people. After all, if you want to get peasants to believe that they are members of a nation, you’re not going to go around saying that they have to believe in autonomy and authenticity and all the rest of it; it’s going to mean very little to them. But if you put it in the form of images, of pictures, and sculptures, or music, that will make much more sense; it will be accessible, it will be palpable. And that is where artists came in, they too were attracted by the idea of the nation: for one thing, they found a niche there that could employ their talents, particularly if the nation acquired a state, and the state gave commissions to the artists. So I think there are very many links between the arts and artists and the growth of modern nationalism. Now whether this is true in other lands, in the modern period or in antiquity, that is a subject for research.

What is the role of nationalism in genocide?

This has also been a very vexed topic. The majority of nationalisms in the world, and when I started doing my research I counted some 200 nationalist movements, did not lead to genocide. And I think we have to bear this in mind. Some did; or at any rate some provided the basis on which those who wished to exclude or ultimately murder others who they deemed not to be part of the “authentic” nation. That is where nationalism plays a part. In other words, it is probably a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition; lots of other factors have to intervene before the ultimate stage of genocide is reached.

It may also be true that the rise of nation-states and the filling up of the world, as it were, by exclusive nation-states- nation-states with sealed borders- made the possibilities of genocide that much more likely, since you couldn’t flee to other places easily. There were colonial genocides: the Germans in Namibia, and of course the British among the Aborigines in Australia, and the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. But one genocide has eclipsed them all, and lends the topic a huge importance: the Holocaust and the associated massacres by the Nazis of many others alongside the Jews, then imitated in Rwanda and of course the Cambodians, another type of genocide there of “inauthentic” Cambodians, that is to say people who were not working the fields, but were working in the cities.

So I would say that nationalism plays a part in the lead-up to genocide, and by its role in the construction of a system of national states makes it more likely, but it is not itself responsible. There was plenty of German nationalism before the Holocaust which did not lead to the murder of the Jews or anybody else, throughout the 19th century. The other factor of course is war, war itself which allows the perpetrators to hide their dastardly acts under the cloak of Nacht und Nebel, as the Nazis called it: night and fog.

How might the concept of nationalism be altered by changing conceptions of state sovereignty in the EU?

You’re talking about the idea that nationalism will be superseded or turned into a purely cultural phenomenon—“defanged,” as some people call it. It is interesting that one of the fathers of nationalism, Herder, did not envision a political nationalism. His was a cultural nationalism, and there have been plenty of cultural nationalists who have wanted to disassociate the community from the state itself, even if there was a state. There is theoretically that possibility, but it hasn’t in practice worked out very well. The tendency has been for cultural naturalists to turn themselves pretty quickly into political nationalists. That may not have been their volition, they may have been forced into that position by others, particularly those suppressing the cultural nationalists: we shouldn’t forget the role of the ancien regimes, of the colonial powers, of imperial powers even to this day in suppressing nationalism and forcing what might have been a cultural movement into more political channels.

The other route is to supersede nationalism by wider unities, of which the EU is the best known example. It’s also a problematic example, and it could by said by cynics that EU loyalty is itself a form of nationalism on a larger scale, that the fervor with which it is held, the desire to construct a single European space with borders, a common set of symbols, and shared myths and memories- the memories aren’t too good, I have to add- but also a common public discourse, ceremonies and rituals, an EU anthem, flag, etc, is certainly an attempt to supersede national loyalties, but with the risk that it itself creates a new large-scale nationalism.

It hasn’t caught on, I think it’s fair to say, for the very simple reason that one of the factors that made nationalism so popular, and allied to this idea of “authenticity” which it’s not clear that the EU possesses, is the idea that “the people” who are the “authentic” population- meaning the common people in particular- participate in the community. Now, their degree of participation in the European community is very low, I think everyone would admit this, the so-called “democratic deficit.” And there’s no doubt, however much it changed its shape, nationalism originally emerged in the modern world allied to a desire for greater democracy: overthrowing the ancien regime, representative government, parliamentary government perhaps, and an appeal to the common people, to their culture—admittedly selectively. This has not happened in postwar Europe. Even the European parliament, which aims to compensate for this, has not really struck a chord with most members of the European national states. “Europe” is perceived as an elite-driven project.

Whether it’s necessary that it should be like this, I don’t know. It sprang from the intentions of the founders, John Monnet and others, who insisted that the construction of Europe had to be top-down, that it had to be done in the manner of the kings and ministers of the separate European states like France or England—which worked, but it took a few hundred years to work. It didn’t work in the rest of Europe, where the national states that emerged, emerged in opposition to the state, to empires: to the Romanov empire, the Habsburg empire, the Ottoman empire. These were intelligentsia-led uprisings appealing to the culture of the people. I am not at all sure that in the time allotted to the European project by the elites any such democratic devolution will be possible.

As for the other route, namely a revolt of the people against the powers that be, that is not something that the EU elites want to consider. So I’m somewhat skeptical about the possibilities of transcending nationalism and the system of nation-states. There is of course a further possibility, namely the rise of a global culture of cosmopolitanism as such. Again, there has been very little take-up of such an idea. There is a great deal more tolerance in the West for other cultures. But even in the case of England and France, or in a different way the United States, the idea that somehow we should drown the nation-state in a sort of sea of cosmopolitanism which supersedes the particularistic notions of identity which have emerged over the centuries in each of these countries, doesn’t seem to have won many adherents. It seems to be confined to some intellectuals, who preach this with the best of intentions but without much sociological basis.

Your book Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity argues that sacred belief remains central to modern national identities. What light can this scholarship shed on the Arab-Israeli conflict and recent attempts to negotiate a peace deal?

I would have thought that it is relevant, in the sense that both peoples have a deep, underlying belief in the sacredness of their role in the moral economy of the world. The one because it is underpinned by Islam, a world religion, and the Arabs are the leaders of the Islamic world in terms of the historic nature of their role as the bearers of the creed of Islam to other countries and because the Qur’an is written in Arabic. This sense of “choseness” and of a covenant with God, with Allah, underpins the beliefs of the Arabs, including the Palestinians, in their claim to retake the land which is now Israel and make it part of the Arab-Islamic domain.

On the other side, the Jews, who after all pioneered the concept of “choseness,” have not given that up. Yes, of course, we meet secular Israelis, we will find them scoffing at the idea that they are in any sense chosen- except perhaps for suffering. But nevertheless whether they like it or not, whether it is their intention or not, this deep tradition of “chosenness,” of being set apart, of being elected to do God’s will, or at any rate to have a separate course in history, remains a powerful cement for modern Israel. It may not be stated in those terms, but a great deal of the public ceremony and ritual and of the underlying day-to-day assumptions about the place of the Jews in history, and the place of Israel in Jewish history and in the world, is based on this idea. And it is united, and of course this is the key factor- with a belief that it is only in a particular place in the world that this destiny can be worked out. The joke goes that Moses made a mistake, he should have marched further west to Switzerland! But he came to Palestine, and it is there that the Jews rallied: not to Uganda or Kenya, but to the land of Israel, or Palestine. And this has been, I regret to say, a focus of the conflict between two nationalisms, nationalisms fueled in the one case more obviously than the other, by sacred beliefs, beliefs in the sacred communion of the citizens, which I hold to be, even today, the definition of a nation, the underlying definition of a nation if you like.

I’m afraid this leads to a rather pessimistic outlook as to how this conflict could be resolved, because people are usually not ready, certainly not in a short space of time, to give up such long traditions which form the bedrock of their identity. The question then would have to be, since these are analogous identities, if I may put it like that, how they can be made to compromise and be dovetailed to fit each other, rather than trying to erode them, which I don’t think is going to work. You have a left-wing group in Israel that wants to do that, but it is relatively small and there is a very large and vociferous religious minority that won’t hear of it. And on the Arab side too, an even smaller minority of those that might consider such an idea, but a very much larger contingent of those that have no desire to give up their God-given identity. So I am very pessimistic about the chances. However, there are always external factors that come into play: American pressure, the world situation as such, economics and so on, which may force a modus vivendi between the two that is not a wholesale peace, which I think is very unlikely, certainly in my time.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of nationalism?

The first piece of advice is to read the basic theories and debates in the field, because without that background, to plunge into the particular sub-fields that are currently on offer would give a very distorted picture of what the overall field is, and lead to a shallowness in understanding. Second, in selecting a sub-field for research, it is important to relate that research to the wider debates, and to keep a broad view of the subject even when focusing on a narrower terrain. Third, in terms of the values that one brings to such scholarship, to my mind it is extremely important to have cognizance of, and to recognize, the importance of cultural diversity and of the other person’s nationalism. That is quite a difficult thing to do, to try to see yourself into the other’s nationalist shoes, particularly if the scholar is him or herself involved in a particular national group. I do not accept Hobsbawm’s advice that a nationalist cannot teach the subject. One cannot teach the subject if one can’t see and feel the other person’s identity and sense of nationalism. That is when a more balanced, a more nuanced, and a more insightful study will emerge.

So historically situated, connected to wider debates, and empathetic of the other person’s nationalism: these are the three things that I would urge on younger scholars entering the field. There are no doubt other things that would be important to consider, but these seem to be the sine qua non of a deeper, more profound study of the subject of nations and nationalism, which remains one of central features of the modern world.

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This interview was conducted by Alex Stark. Alex is Features Editor of the website and a director of e-IR’s editorial board. She is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Georgetown University.