Anantonese Journal of Economics and Theory

[Doc]

Contra a Sense of "World Order"
Imperialism and Interests-Based Foreign Policy

written by
Dr. Silvia David-Martinez
Kaliburg Imperial University
Kaliburg, Grand Duchy of Ananto
Empire of Ananto and Kalistan

Introduction

Currently, the predominant foreign policy mode in Terra follows what is described as "Rules-Based Foreign Policy." There are a series of rules, established by either some supernational institution, as was the case in the World Congress Days, or by what a lot of people simply fiat as seemingly what "everyone just does", and then Foreign Policy is determined to be good or bad based on its conformity to those "rules." These rules exist in the form of sayings like "We don't change national boundaries through war," or "Sovereign Nations still must follow what the international community wants," or "You don't abuse human rights in your state," or "Conflict instigated by non-state actors is always illegitimate." There is lengthy discussion about justice of war, justice in war, and justice after war. Etc.

The most important thing is that those who prefer Rules-Based Foreign Policy, which I will refer to hereafter as RBFP, assert that these rules are the same for everyone, and there is a set of legitimate responses that it is not only permissible for others to impose, but downright imperative, for violating the rules. All taken together, the result is a "world Order" established by these rules, that regulates state behavior within the world, as well as interactions between states.

RBFP is based on a liberal conception of internationalism. This notion that the fundamental principles of liberalism can and should be extended to the international realm. Things like multi-lateralism, collective security, free trade blocs, global capitalism, supernational institutions that have the mission, and the teeth, to constrain the sovereign state, to keep them in line, to force them to do as the world believes they should. Nations can be compelled, in this sense, even against their will, to be free. It's perfectly permissible under RBFP, that if the world deems some state aberrant, it can compel even regime change within that state to force it to comply with the "rules" that supposedly "everyone" agrees with.

In this paper, I set RBFP in opposition against a much more realist-oriented Interest-Based Foreign Policy or IBFP. This is a foreign policy which posits that states, as the expression of those who live there--granted, maybe not a perfect expression, and granted, maybe not of all the people, but certainly those who make decisions in the nation-- have interests that drive their foreign policy, and those interests both can and should always drive foreign policy.

I argue here that states always practice IBFP, even when they are hiding their own interests in international rules, and states only actually adhere to rules when they serve their own national interests. The talk of RBFP is in and of itself facetious at best, and downright crass in most cases. No state will voluntarily submit to international rules in its own case, when those rules run afoul of its national interest, and nothing but war can compel them to do so.

Anarchy is Everywhere

The fundamental tension within IR Theory circles surrounds anarchy in the international structure. Anarchy in this case does not mean chaos. Even the most realist among IR scholars will argue that there are regular patterns within international politics. Nations rise, nations fall, nations prosper, nations starve, some nations with good policies make friends, and then invariably some of those nations stab them in the throat. Wars happen, peace treaties get signed, some nations spend themselves into oblivion, some nations become crossroads for conquering armies. It happens, and the action of international politics is surprisingly regular, because men are rational and states which are made of men therefore also appear to act rationally, though a state cannot itself be rational, given that it is an inanimate object. The debate is in how best to mitigate the effects of this anarchy.

To define some terms here, when I say "regime" what I mean is the a structure which creates rules and normalized practices, such as a treaty or a peace accord. When I say "institution" what I mean is the functional body that makes that regime real for people: Such as an intergovernmental organization, a peace keeping force or a regulatory agency.

In Kalistan, we rely very heavily on our regime, which is the Imperial Structure between Ananto and Kalistan, and the relationship between the Empire of Ananto and Kalistan and the Kingdom of Gaduridos within the Anantonese Empire. Those are the rules that govern nearly every aspect of political life and political, economic and social relationships between our constituent nations. We also rely very heavily upon our institutions to make that regime quite real for people: The institution of the Monarchy, the Government and National Assembly, the Ducal Council, the Imperial Assembly, and the Viceroyalty and Government of Gaduridos who sets the laws for Gaduris. Within a nation, regimes and institutions are fundamental for proper order.

The issue occurs when you try to treat the international system, and notice, I do not say "order" here, because there is no order in the international system, like it is a state. Within a state, order is maintained by the monopoly of force possessed by the state. Sure, many people follow traffic laws or do not murder people because they voluntarily feel that violating the law is morally bad. That's an individual decision. But within a state if you don't have that same sort of moral compass, the police are there to check your bad behavior and compel you to follow the law.

But in the international system there cannot be that same sort of either voluntary compliance based on morality or irresistible force. States, as collective entities, cannot possibly be moral agents. That's simply not how morality works. A state can be no more moral nor immoral than a hammer can, because a state is merely a tool, an organizational tool designed to protect order within, and promote interest without, of the people who live there. Similarly, no one state has the right to tell another state what they can and cannot do, with any sort of authority. The prevailing characteristic of a state on the international stage is sovereignty. but if that is the case, then no one state has the authority over another to compel behavior by virtue of appeal to authority the way a police force can. So consequently, anarchy exists and continues to be the defining characteristic of the international system, where equals have to exist in the world with other equals.

Mitigation of War

The only way, therefore to get any other state to do what I want is war. That war can come in a number of forms, whether it be actually battlefield slaughter, or economic warfare which is designed to hurt the economy of a target to the point where the target relents and gives in, submits to force, and changes its offensive policies quite under duress. There are also gradations within those main categories as well and all manner of very nasty ways of accomplishing them.

But nobody wants war. War kills people, and unfortunately for the war makers, often includes blowback where the pain is revisited on the warmakers, often to unacceptable levels. It is destructive, it is destabilizing, and it takes eons to recover from. War is the failure of imagination on an international scale. War is the grand extrapolation of a frustrated parent hitting their child for not eating his brocolli at the dinner table, and is just as destructive on a much grander scale. So: How do we prevent war, given anarchy of the international system?

Here is where the liberals invent a mighty tale about these things called "International laws." According to the story, one which is perfect for nervous idiots at bedtime, these international laws, and the regimes and institutions created by them and aimed at enforcement of them, are derived from correct and reasonable apprehension of so called "universal norms" of behavior, which are common to us all, and represent the highest aspirations of all of humanity. These international laws are meant to govern us all as equals in a state of anarchy, and thus impose order on the anarchic world. And those who fail then to abide by the laws we ALL have to abide by are eligible for sanction by the rest of the world, in an effort to protect the apparent social contract we all agreed to as being a part of the world.

This is a well intended effort to mitigate anarchic tendencies toward war. The people who came up with the notion were trying, and the solution they came up with was quite idealistic. We have to give them credit: When it works and nations sign onto it, peace can be the result, for certain. My state, as a potential bad actor, will have pause to do things the the world will oppose if they are all united, and I know that I will suffer if I defect. It can be a free choice even. States can be bribed to change course with carrots, or cajoled to change course with sticks, if they are so inclined. After all, we said above that states are made of rational actors, and therefore states themselves could be said to proxy rationality.

But there is a huge flaw in the underlying assumptions here. It assumes that the norms that the international order is based upon are independent from the people who came up with them. And that's not at all true. I would think that a set of international norms that were developed by primarily Jelbek thinkers would look a bit differently than a set of international norms created by Kalistanis. After all, we have different national traditions. We don't automatically come to the same conclusions about when a good world or a Good Society looks like just by virtue of our shared humanity. But it is that flawed assumption that lies at the center of RBFP: that what is good for Jelbania is good for Luthori, is good for Utaristan is good for Kalistan. And it simply is not. That's not even reasonable, let alone some independent truth that the world stumbled upon in the modern era.

Instead, we look slightly below the surface and we find that these international norms reflect the preferences of the great powers who were among those who had the conversations about them. Nobody invited some backwater nothing state to the conference when they said "these are universal international norms, these are the laws we derive from them, and here are the institutions we will build to enforce them on the world." Why would they? Why would anyone ask Baltusia what their opinion on the matter is? Baltusia is just expected to fall inline with the rules-based global order that it had no hand in crafting, and if it sees itself in that anywhere, its purely accidental.

What we see instead is that the RBFP then seems to be just a bunch of sovereign nations deciding for the rest of us how foreign policy will be conducted: What is legitimate and what is illegitimate? What states get to do what, and what states are prevented from doing what? What actors get to participate in decision making and which actors are excluded from even attending the conference? What we all get to do to states that don't comply, and what we get out of it as reparations for their non-compliance? And what can we get away with ourselves that violate the rules for everyone else, but it is necessary for us, because we are the enforcers of the rules? At the end of the day, the "rules" are just codified interests of the rule makers, designed to insulate them from scrutiny by focusing it on nations that are not them.

RPFP shows itself to have been IBFP all along. And the interests of the big players are simply fiatted as universal norms and "International Law", and the world is supposed to work together to defend and protect those "norms", while those who created the international law occasionally have to violate it in order to enforce it on others, but at any rate enjoy complete immunity from sanction themselves, because they are supposedly doing all the rest of us a very vital service.

Can IBFP mitigate war?

Let's imagine a world where there is no international law that can actually compel compliance in and of itself, where there are no rules upon which to base a global sense of order and its all against all, where supposedly universal norms do not constrain states who are dead set on doing what they want anyway, and will happily accept the punishment for violating those norms if it means it gets what it wants. It shouldn't be too hard: That is the world we live in right now. That is the "realism" in the realist IR perspective. This is the real world, and the RBFP crowd live in the fantasy world where everyone can come together, hold hands and iron out serious disagreements by appealing to everyone's "better natures."

So, having demonstrated the complete fiction of RBFP, we are left with IBFP. But this fact also does not address the reality that RBFP was intended, and I will say, in good faith, at least as a theory of international politics, to address. IBFP leaves anarchy right where it is, it leaves war as the only method of inducing compliance from others, and it leave our future prospects nasty brutish and short.

Maybe not.

IBFP acknowledges that states as actors on the global stage, possess interests. We all do. As Anarchy is the defining feature of the international system, interests, or more correctly, the pursuit of those interests defines a state. Afterall, states proxy rationalism. As a state, its primary goal is to meet its interest. We also said that war is incredibly destructive: in fact, war is surprisingly not surprisingly avoided by states because war runs counter to the interest of states. It is not in the interest of Kalistan or Egelion to be at war with one another. It is, in fact, contrary to their interests.

This fact alone can form the basis of peace between these two states. If neither state is constrained by some international law which requires one of them to attack the other for failure to comply with some made up global rules-based order, they can realize that their overarching interest is in maintaining peace. The degree to which that is the case given other interests that run concurrent to this interest, is the degree to which they can and will work to pursue it. Even to the point of forestalling or abandoning lesser interests. If Kalistan is interested in avoiding war, it will not pursue its interests in Athosia, for example, though we know that this goal has been an obsession of countless Kalistani Emperors and Empresses for hundreds of years. Because Kalistan's interest is to "not destroy Kalistan to obtain Athosia."

IBFP can actually lead to more trust between states than RBFP, because it allows states to be perfectly honest about what they want, rather than obscuring interests behind moral outrage or cajolement. Kalistan and Egelion, for example, can both lay out interests on the table, and see where they overlap in a way they can't do when Egelion says their interest and Kalistan responds that they are moral degenerates for wanting to annex territory. The conversation which is based on interest allows states to reduce projection as well, because when you actually say what you want, it is much more difficult for the person you are talking to to impute completely false motivations to your actions. It reduces uncertainty, it reduces the security dilemma, and it reduces misperception in foreign policy decision making, while allowing for states who may seem completely at odds, where war seems inevitable, to instead find some common ground and start working toward peace.

IBFP is just foreign policy in the real world. That's all it is. We should just call it foreign policy, because interests always dominate any foreign policy decision making process, even among the most liberal nations. If a nation has to make a choice between sacrificing the nation or sacrificing international law, they will always protect the nation first. The interests of a state always override some half hearted half witted desire to promote an international, rules-based order.

Conclusion

Always, except one time. If I have a choice of sacrificing some OTHER state, or abandoning the rules based order, you better believe I will pick sacrificing that other sovereign state each and every time. In that mutually exclusive, either/or proposition, my interest is that the Global Order I happen to support, as my interest, because it protects me from others, is automatically superior to the sovereign demands of a state which threatens that order. Which, ironically adds to my claim that universal norms are completely made up by people who wish to use them to promote their own interests.

We are all sovereign, until your sovereignty conflicts with my national interest. And then we throw the norm of sovereignty right out the window.

It always was IBFP. But IBFP shows that interests, when they are aligned, can lead to peace and even cooperation. It can lead to long standing international arrangements like the Anantonese Empire, where Kalistan and Gaduridos have essentially declared perpetual peace between them. Gaduridos had to sacrifice just a little of its sovereignty to obtain that, and Kalistan had to put a lot of money, materiel, and time into the security of Gaduridos as a consequence, but perpetual peace and union between our two nations was seen as being within both Kalistani and Gaduri interests, and it would be far more disastrous for both nations now to break up than it is to just stay together and work together.

The trick is in getting those interests to align. Part of that comes through good old negotiations, and we must admit: liberal institutionalism, at least, does do a good job at creating trust among nations through regular and predictable interactions, at providing a ground for negotiations to work, to be believed, and for states to signal to one another that commitments are credible. Not always, but in general. A single solitary point for liberal internationalism--Institutions.

For those who promote RBFP, you know that this entire theoretical perspective is built upon an unsupportable a priori assumption which is more aspirational than grounded in anything empirical. But whatever you do: quit trying to force that on the world. You can't make it happen by sheer force of will and repetition. Nations will always put their own national interests first, even those who insist upon RBFP for everyone else. And they will always strive to be the ones who set the order that everyone else must live by.

At least let's be honest and call things what they are. Kalistan admits what it is: We are an irredentist, personalist, absolutist hereditary monarchy with territorial ambitions that we by all means intend to pursue and achieve at the first practical moment. Many other states have many of those features, but they claim to be some "morally superior" type of regime like a democracy or a republic, while looking down upon Kalistan. They try to hit Kalistan over the head with their Rule book as often as possible. This is fine. Its how those rulers sleep at night. Whatever. But we cannot ignore that RBFP is facetious in the best possible light, and straight up cynical, self serving fiction under any normal light. And saying otherwise repeatedly does not make it otherwise.