0序言：戰敗之後

 Introduction

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以下是〈序言：戰敗之後〉（Defeat: The Stigma of Being “Non-Western”）的章節概念重點與思考問題整理筆記：

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一、開篇與導引：模仿的限度

引用：William McNeill〈A Defence of World History〉

「最誠懇地模仿外國模式的努力，也無法完全消除本地傳統人際互動的痕跡。」

• 主旨： 每個國家在現代化過程中，都無法徹底抹除自身歷史文化的痕跡。

• 延伸例證： 日本、俄羅斯、土耳其皆是典型案例——既想「西化」，又無法擺脫東方傳統。

→ 問題思考：

1. 為何「模仿西方」成為現代國家建構的共同起點？

2. 當模仿無法成功時，會產生何種文化焦慮與集體心理？

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二、奧罕．帕慕克（Orhan Pamuk）事件與民族自我羞辱

事件背景：

• 2006年帕慕克獲諾貝爾文學獎，卻在土耳其國內被控「侮辱土耳其性（Turkishness）」。

• 起因：他提到亞美尼亞種族屠殺與庫德族問題，觸及歷史禁忌。

作者分析：

• 這種憤怒並非單純民族主義的「瘋狂」，而是國家自我認同的焦慮與被西方評價的恐懼。

• 土耳其想同時被視為「正常的西方國家」與「特別的文明樣本」，但這兩種需求互相矛盾。

→ 問題思考：

1. 為何「西方承認」對非西方國家具有如此強烈的心理重要性？

2. 土耳其的反應是否反映出「後帝國創傷」與「文明層級」的內化？

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三、核心概念：國家層級的「污名（Stigma）」

理論來源：Erving Goffman《Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity》

關鍵定義：

• 污名＝虛擬身份與實際身份的落差。

• Discreditable：擔心污名被揭露。

• Discredited：污名已被揭露。

延伸至國家層級：

• 「落後、非現代、非民主、非基督教」等標籤成為國家層級的污名。

• 非西方國家內化這些評價，進而形成「對西方凝視的自我監控」。

例子：

• 土耳其被視為「東方」、「落後」；

• 因此在對外行為中必須時時「表演現代性」。

→ 問題思考：

1. 如何區分「被歧視」與「被污名化」的差異？

2. 當國家內化了外部標準，是否就喪失了「自主的現代性」？

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四、現代性作為全球評價體系

論點：

• 現代化與進步被普遍視為理所當然的國家使命。

• 然而此體系源自西方，其「普遍性」其實帶有文化偏向。

• 大多數非西方社會都被迫「在西方標準下評價自己」。

帕慕克訪談觀察：

• 無論在中國、日本、台灣，都有人認為自己「介於東西之間」。

• 幾乎沒有國家自認「完全東方」。

→ 問題思考：

1. 「東／西」對立是否已成為全球普遍的心理地圖？

2. 若現代性本身帶有西方中心色彩，非西方國家還能真正「現代」嗎？

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五、現代性、羞辱與恐懼

帕慕克名言：

「今日文學最應探討的，是被排除的恐懼與無價值感。」

分析：

• 「被落下」的恐懼＝文明羞辱。

• 西方的傲慢與非西方的敏感形成互為鏡像。

• 民族主義的誇大往往是掩飾羞辱與恐懼的反應。

→ 問題思考：

1. 民族主義是否是一種對文明羞辱的「防衛性情緒」？

2. 當非西方社會同時崇拜與怨恨西方，會形成何種外交與文化矛盾？

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六、帝國崩潰與現代土耳其的創傷記憶

核心命題：

• 奧斯曼帝國的崩潰與「未能西化」的失敗感糾纏在一起。

• 「不夠現代」被視為滅亡原因，因此「現代化」成為民族救贖神話。

• 這使土耳其在國際體系中呈現出「過度渴求認可」與「過度防衛」的雙重心理。

→ 問題思考：

1. 為何「現代化＝救國」成為許多非西方國家的信條？

2. 這種信條是否會導致自我否定與文化分裂？

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七、對比案例：日本與俄羅斯

延伸預告：

• 日本、俄羅斯與土耳其皆在東西夾縫中形成「自我污名化」的現代性。

• 他們同樣具有「模仿—羞辱—反抗—再模仿」的循環模式。

→ 問題思考：

1. 這三國的歷史中，如何以不同方式回應「西方凝視」？

2. 哪些政策或文化表現可視為「去污名化」的嘗試？

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八、整體論旨摘要

主題	概念	說明
國家與污名	Stigma 污名	非西方國家在國際秩序中被貼上「落後」標籤，並內化此評價。
文明羞辱	Humiliation 羞辱	來自被比較、被評判的長期焦慮。
自我分裂	East/West Split 东西方分裂	現代化與真實自我之間的張力。
國族情緒	Nationalism as Defense 民族主义作为防御	民族主義往往是對文明羞辱的防禦反應。
理論意圖	Constructivist Approach 建构主义方法	國際關係不僅是權力，而是「社會意義與比較關係」的產物。

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好的！以下是您提供的社会学相关概念的中文翻译，并附上简要解释以帮助理解这些概念在社会学中的含义：

1. **Stigma（污名）**  

   - **翻译**：污名  

   - **解释**：污名是指社会对某些个体或群体施加的负面标签或刻板印象，导致他们在社会中被贬低、排斥或歧视。社会学家如欧文·戈夫曼（Erving Goffman）在其著作《污名：关于受损身份的管理》中深入探讨了污名如何影响个体身份和社会互动。

2. **Humiliation（羞辱）**  

   - **翻译**：羞辱  

   - **解释**：羞辱是一种社会过程，涉及贬低某人或某群体的尊严，通常通过言语、行为或制度化的方式进行。在社会学中，羞辱常被用来分析权力关系、阶层冲突或社会排斥现象。

3. **East/West Split（东西方分裂）**  

   - **翻译**：东西方分裂  

   - **解释**：这一概念指东方与西方在文化、意识形态、政治或经济上的差异与对立。社会学中常用此框架分析全球化、殖民主义、后殖民主义或文化冲突等议题，如爱德华·萨义德（Edward Said）的《东方学》探讨了东西方之间的权力动态。

4. **Nationalism as Defense（民族主义作为防御）**  

   - **翻译**：民族主义作为防御  

   - **解释**：这一概念描述民族主义作为一种社会和政治意识形态，用于保护或强化国家、民族身份或文化免受外部威胁（如全球化、殖民或文化侵蚀）。社会学家可能分析民族主义如何在社会动员或冲突中起到凝聚作用。

5. **Constructivist Approach（建构主义方法）**  

   - **翻译**：建构主义方法  

   - **解释**：建构主义是社会学中的一种理论视角，强调社会现实（如身份、规范、制度）是通过社会互动和集体意义建构而成的，而非自然或客观存在。彼得·伯格（Peter Berger）和托马斯·卢克曼（Thomas Luckmann）在《现实的社会建构》中阐述了这一理论。

如果您需要更详细的解释或更多社会学概念的翻译，请告诉我！

😀🤣😄😄😭😭

… And from the other side, it is also the case that the most earnest and heartfelt efforts to imitate some foreign model can never entirely succeed in eliminating tell-tale traces of older, traditional local patterns of human interaction. The modern history of Japan, Russia and Turkey should suf- fice to tell us that.

William McNeill, “A Defence of World History”

In 2006, while I was working on an earlier draft of this book, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What should have been a joyous occasion for the writer and for Turkey, how- ever, was instead marked by histrionic public accusations of treachery against Pamuk. He was vilified in the Turkish press. Several months before the announcement of the award, Pamuk had been interviewed by a Swiss newspaper, and in response to the reporter’s characteriza- tion of Turkey as a country having difficulty in facing its past, he had emphasized his own willingness to discuss the Armenian genocide and the plight of Turkey’s Kurdish minority. Even though Pamuk’s transparency had been partly motivated by a desire to defend Turkey (against the implied charge that Turkey cannot deal with its problems like an “adult” and therefore does not deserve to join the European Union), when this interview was later covered in the Turkish media, many Turks decided that Pamuk was either a traitor or, at best, a sleaze. Official charges were brought against him for denigrating “Turkishness” (the charges were later dropped). Some even argued that if Pamuk were an honorable man, he would return his prize, which was surely given to him for political reasons. It was suggested that by accepting the Nobel Prize he was playing into the hands of the Westerners, whose sole motivation in their dealings with Turks was to make Turkey look bad.

I suppose everything about this episode looks ridiculous to an out- sider. Here is a country that has bent itself out of shape for almost a

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century to join the Western world, while at the same time holding on to the worst kind of paranoid suspicions about Western intentions. Turks accuse Westerners of portraying Turks always in an unflatter- ing light (and rewarding those native sons, such as Pamuk, for playing along); yet their way of dealing with this perceived injury is to act in the most petulant way imaginable, giving credence to those who like to portray Turks as brutish. Even to sympathetic observers, Turks’ general tendency to fly off the handle when confronted by any ugly facet of their country, their strange laws protecting “Turkishness,” and their inability to break out of groupthink when it comes to narra- tives of Turkish history seems like nationalism run amok. And there is some truth to that assessment.

I hope I do not come across as an apologist, however, if I suggest that the exaggerated sense of pride and the persecution complex exhibited by Turkish nationalism today is not an inherent tendency of “Turks,” but rather the unfortunate consequence of Turkey’s place in the inter- national system. This is not to say that Turks are justified in acting in this manner or cannot help but act in this manner. Nonetheless, however responsible Turks may be for their conduct, the underlying causes of such behavior can be found only in the interactions between Turkey and international society throughout the last century.

Orhan Pamuk is a writer who personifies Turkey’s greatest aspir- ations and anxieties. He was able to achieve a level of international recognition that most Turks believed would never be accorded to a Turkish citizen; but he did this by writing (and speaking) evocatively about things that Turks find embarrassing while simultaneously ridi- culing things that Turks lionize. Many Turks believe that Pamuk was rewarded for confirming the West’s worst perceptions of Turkey, from the Armenian genocide to the fact that some Turkish women wear headscarves.1 And they are partly right.

The nationalists are obviously wrong about Pamuk being a traitor, but in all of the misdirected anger at him, there lies the justifiable (or at least understandable) frustration with the fact that Pamuk gets rec- ognition because he often writes about what is different about Turkey.

1 This is one of the subject matters of Pamuk’s Snow. “‘Isn’t it bad for us if American readers find out from this book that some Turkish women wear headscarves?’ asked a worried boy, who had told me he learned his excellent American English by chatting on the Megadeth fansite. ‘Won’t they think we’re … like Iran?’” From Gloria Fisk, “Orhan Pamuk and the Turks.”

 

Turks (or, at least, the secular, urban, establishment Turks) want what they cannot get: to be recognized simultaneously for what Turkey has in common with the West (i.e. as an ordinary, “normal” country) and for the super-human effort Turks have put into creating that common ground (i.e. as an extraordinary, “special” country). The realization that the West cares more about what lies beyond the Westernized Turkey Turks have worked so hard and sacrificed so much to create is an existential kick in the gut.

National identity and stigma

Are the nationalist Turks irrational? Perhaps. Their frustration is not that different, however, than that of a blind person who has spent a lifetime developing skills to function as well as a “normal”2 person, only to find time and time again that people cannot but see him as a blind person, that whatever he does, he cannot shed the label of blind- ness as the primary marker of his identity. Being rewarded for one’s handicap is in some ways worse than being shunned for it – a person is thus deprived also of the righteous indignation of the deliberately victimized and has difficulty justifying his anger.

In their reactions to Pamuk’s award as well as in their other seem- ingly irrational behavior, Turks, as a group, are acting very much like an individual who carries a “stigma” and who is trying to hide it. Erving Goffman describes “stigma” as “a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity.”3 If the stigmatized individual assumes that “his differentness is known about already” he is someone who is “discredited”; if he assumes that his stigma “is neither known

… nor immediately perceivable” he is someone who is “discreditable.” Modern Turks continuously live with the fear of becoming discredited; they worry about being forever stuck with their “stigma(s)”: Eastern, backward, Asian, Muslim, uncivilized, barbaric, etc.

One of the distinctive features of having to endure life with a stigma is feeling the need to be always “on,” “having to be self-conscious and calculating about the impression [one] is making, to a degree and in areas of conduct which [one] assumes others are not.”4 In stigmatized

2 “We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals.” Goffman, Stigma, p. 5.

3 Ibid., p. 3. 4 Ibid., p. 14.

 

collectives, the same need to be “on” seems to manifest as the emer- gence of an officially sanctioned group self-narrative that is quite stif- ling of individual members’ ability to express themselves honestly to the outside world. Actions such as Pamuk’s are perceived as a betrayal of the highest order, and in some ways they are: by undermining the sanctity of the group narrative, they spoil the identity of the group and therefore threaten its very existence.

One of the underlying arguments in this book is that stigma has the same effect on states that it has on individuals: it colors and therefore motivates every subsequent interaction. Not being of the “West,” being behind the “West,” not being “modern” enough, not being developed or industrialized or secular or civilized or Christian or democratic enough – these are examples of designations (and, later, self-evaluations) that have essentially functioned as stigmas for states. To treat such labels as if they were only objective assess- ments of the facts on the ground is to miss entirely the social dynam- ics of international relations. By drawing attention to the stigma-like properties of seemingly objective assessments in international rela- tions, I want to draw attention to the socially constructed nature of the international system – it is only in a social, comparative, rela- tive setting that various physical conditions become problems to be managed or overcome. After all, it is the norm of sightedness that makes blindness a stigma, something much more than an individual attribute.

Stigma is not at all the same thing as discrimination, although there is considerable overlap between the two in practice. Goffman said that in order to understand stigma we need “a language of relation- ships, not attributes.”5 Stigma, in essence, is a socially shared ground between the “normals” and those who are being discredited: “The stigmatized individual tends to hold the same beliefs about identity that we do” and “the standards he has incorporated from the wider society equip him to be intimately alive to what others see as his fail- ing, inevitably causing him, if only for moments, to agree that he does indeed fall short of what he ought to be.”6 Stigma, then, is as much the internalization of a particular normative standard that defines one’s own attributes as discreditable, as it is a label of difference imposed from outside.

5 Ibid., p. 3. 6 Ibid., p. 7.

 

Apart from a few states which have chosen total isolation (and even those may not be completely free), most in the world today still evaluate themselves according to the ideals and ideas of modernity.7 Many people all around the globe continue to equate modernization with progress, development with improvement, and they hardly ever question that these are the rightful missions of a state. Even if their own particular state does not embody those ideals, most feel that it should, and feel disappointed, and perhaps even humiliated, when it falls short.

This is why Orhan Pamuk’s books, which deal with the existential issues of being trapped between the East and the West, resonate with readers in the “East” as much as they fascinate Westerners. In an interview with The Believer magazine, Pamuk remarks:

I’ll tell you something. I have just come back from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taipei. And you know what they say? This is very peculiar … No one thinks his country is completely East. In China, they say, “Yes, Mr. Pamuk, we have the same East/West question here.” They think that they are also torn between the East and the West, the way we are here in Turkey. They don’t consider themselves in China or in Tokyo completely “East.” They think that they have some part of the “West” and “East,” you see?

… And they will tell you this, and then they will smile – knowing the strangeness of it. There is no place, perhaps, in humanity, where the subject considers himself completely Eastern.8

What sets Turkey apart from the West, much to the consternation of secular Turks who want to pass as ordinary Europeans, unites it in a common fate with the majority of states in the modern inter- national system. Most communities in the world exist in a constant state of identity struggle. While it is extremely difficult to live up to the standards of modernity – which, despite its universal language, has undeniable Western origins and therefore carries certain assump- tions about proper social and institutional configurations – without feeling inauthentic, it is also almost impossible to be authentically non-Western.

7 See Meyer and Jepperson, “‘Actors’ of Modern Society,” 105, for a further elaboration of this point.

8 Rockingham, “Interview with Orhan Pamuk.”

 

Modernity and the international system

The lack of attention given to the particular cultural and historical origins9 of the modern international system may just be the most glar- ing oversight in mainstream International Relations (IR). The emo- tional price that the majority of peoples around the world have had to pay as a result of joining a system of states with very specific cultural origins – the rules of which they did not create, the norms of which were unfamiliar at best, the major players of which judged and expli- citly labeled them as inferior, and the ontology of which convinced them that they indeed were lacking in some way – is swept under the rug as being irrelevant to international affairs.

People who have grown up in countries whose modernity has never been in question may not fully understand how all-consuming10 the stigma of comparative backwardness may become for a society; how tiring it is to conduct all affairs under the gaze of an imaginary and imagined West, which is simultaneously idealized and suspected of the worst kind of designs; or how scary it is to live continuously on the brink of being swallowed by a gaping chasm of “Easternness,” which is simultaneously denigrated and touted as the more authentic, the more realistic choice. No amount of hostile bravado disguised as nationalist rhetoric of pride can cover up the fear people around the world feel when they think about their place in the international sys- tem. Let me turn to Pamuk once again:

What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for noth- ing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the col- lective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin … We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations out- side the Western world – and I can identify with them easily – succumbing

9  See Salter, Barbarians and Civilization, pp. 114–20, as well as Blaney and

Inayatullah, Problem of Difference, Introduction, for an extended discussion of this critique.

10 “The awareness of inferiority means that one is unable to keep out of consciousness the formulation of some chronic feeling of the worst sort of insecurity, and this means that one suffers anxiety and perhaps even something worse, if jealousy is really worse than anxiety.” Sullivan, as quoted by Goffman, Stigma, p. 13.

 

to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West – a world with which I can identify with the same ease – nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.11

To be torn between the East and the West as a state, as a society, as a nation, is to exist in the international system with the dilemmas that are faced by stigmatized individuals in everyday interaction. The individual with stigma may accept that he has a stigmatized attribute and try to improve his life within the bounds of that awareness – but that choice implies resigning oneself to second-class status. Bringing oneself to that kind of resignation is extremely difficult, even in cases where it may unavoidable.12 Or the individual may try to act as if he does not have a stigma or convince himself that it may be overcome with the right measures, but that course of action relegates one to a lifetime of dissonance, and does not necessarily guarantee success.13

Just like individuals, some states have coped with potentially stig- matizing labels more calmly than others. Turkey is not one of those countries. The emotional trauma inflicted by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which came toward the tail end of the century in which Turks internalized modern standards and their own stigma- tization, has made Turkey, at least thus far, a state that is obsessed with international stature, recognition, and acceptance. Much like an individual who attains a stigma attribute later in life and blames it for everything that goes wrong after that point, modern Turkish identity was constructed around the notion that the only thing keeping Turkey

11 Pamuk, “My Father’s Suitcase.”

12 Goffman quotes the account of a newly blind girl visiting an institution for the blind:

Here was the safe, segregated world of the sightless – a completely different world, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left …

I was expected to join this world. To give up my profession and to earn my living making mops. I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation. (Stigma, p. 17)

13 More on this point later, but for now, see also Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, pp. 77–8, 80.

 

from regaining its former glory was its identity as a non-Western state. In the reconstructed nationalist narrative of the republic, the failure to modernize, to become Western, is seen as the primary reason for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In other words, for Turks, the pain of losing an empire is fused with the feeling of inferiority due to being not Western/modern enough.

Three cases of stigmatization: Turkey, Japan, and Russia

By now, it will probably come as no surprise to the reader if I confess that I started this project with the desire to understand the things I found so frustrating about my native country, Turkey – but also because I thought that there had to be something missing from a body of literature that had almost nothing to say about political actions I observed on an almost daily basis.

Now that I have put some emotional and physical distance between Turkish society and myself, I am able to observe a certain peculiar tendency in friends and family. “Only in Turkey,” they will fre- quently say, “such a thing could only happen in Turkey!” The com- plaints vary, but the formula remains the same: “if only we were living under a true democracy/in a modern country/among civilized people, then our fellow citizens would behave/dress appropriately/ talk politely/have manners/they would not be so religious/or wear headscarves/or try to cut corners/or elect a government like AKP/and so on.” Goffman points out that this kind of condescension is a way of putting a distance between oneself and one’s “own”: “The stigma- tized individual exhibits a tendency to stratify his ‘own’ to the degree to which their stigma is apparent and obtrusive. He can then take up in regard to those who are more evidently stigmatized than himself the attitudes the normals take to him.”14 There is also a parallel nar- rative about the uniqueness of Turkey. Only Turkey is supposed to be unfairly singled out for discrimination by the West; only Turkey can bridge the East and the West; only Turkey can be a model for Muslim countries; nobody understands Turkey; nobody appreciates Turkey; Turkish society is too complex for ordinary political institutions to work there, etc.

14 Goffman, Stigma, p. 107.

 

There was a time I would have agreed with them wholeheartedly – after all, I too am shaped by the Turkish national habitus.15 Growing up in Turkey, I was inclined to think that Tolstoy’s maxim about unhappy families applied equally well to nations, and that Turkey was a special bundle of contradictions and problems, the likes of which nobody else had to deal with. Thankfully, I was wrong (misery loves company). As much as Turks would like to believe that they face a unique set of challenges, there are in fact other countries with similar constellations of problems.

The domestic narratives in both Japan and Russia bear a striking resemblance to those in Turkey. All three countries are torn between the East and the West, and in each case this condition is sometimes seen as a weakness that needs to be overcome (by choosing one side over the other) and sometimes as a blessing that needs to be exploited (by acting as either a bridge or a protective gate between the two).16

This similarity may be surprising given the differences between these countries’ material conditions, but it is no accident. Certain characteristics set these states apart from both the “East” and the “West,” and it is no coincidence that William McNeill singled these three countries out as examples of states that were unable to eliminate “tell-tale traces” of older patterns despite their “heartfelt efforts.”

Turkey, Japan, and Russia all pre-date the Westphalian system as political entities.17 As empires, they18 long sustained social universes capable of producing comprehensive worldviews – in other words, before their incorporation into the Westphalian system these states had their own normative standards by which they defined them- selves as “normal” and others as different, abnormal, or inferior.

15 Habitus is “an active residue or sediment of [the actor’s] past that functions within his present, shaping his perception, thought, and action and thereby molding social practice in a regular way.” Crossley, “The Phenomenological Habitus,” 83.

16 E.g. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, p. 177; Klien, Rethinking Japan’s Identity, p. 6.

17 Obviously, these were not the only states around in the seventeenth century to have missed the beginning of system formation only to join it in some form later. Aspects of my argument apply to states such as Iran, India, China, and Thailand as well, but what distinguishes Turkey, Japan, and Russia is the relative autonomy they were able to retain vis-à-vis Europe.

18 For system-level arguments, the book follows the IR (and layman’s) convention of referring to states as if they are capable of expressing purposeful, unitary agency.

 

Therefore, incorporation into the Westphalian system in the case of these pre-modern empires necessitated giving up a self-affirming position of relative privilege and accepting a self-negating position of an outsider instead. This new position did not square well with self- understandings shaped by centuries of being the masters of their own domains.19 Furthermore, because they joined the original incarnation of the international system, the European society of states, as autono- mous entities, their position of inferiority was not overtly forced on them, as it was in the case of colonized peoples20 – they came to an awareness about their inferiority, i.e. in the sense of a lack or def- icit of modernity, through their own internal discussions.21 As such, people of these states did not reject outright the values of modernity as a hostile foreign imposition (as is perhaps the case with certain schools of Muslim thought) but, rather, looked upon those values as something to be emulated; believed Westernization to be a goal that a state could achieve by trying hard enough, and saw it as a solution that might allow them to recreate their past privileged position in the new normative universe. In the twentieth century, all three countries experimented with revisionist grand strategies with the intent of cap- turing what they thought was their rightful place in the new inter- national system. However, instead of earning them a seat among the “established” members of the international society, these revisionist policies ended in failure.

As I will demonstrate throughout this book, the aforementioned dynamics between the Western core of the international system and the Eastern latecomers closely resemble the established-outsider fig- uration delineated by the famous sociologist Norbert Elias. According

19 The importance of having a consistent self-understanding for state behavior is stressed in the literature on “ontological security.” Ontological security is first and foremost about having a consistent sense of “self.” See Zarakol, “Ontological Insecurity,” as well as Lebow, Cultural Theory, pp. 25–6, for an extended overview of the relevant literature.

20 Having escaped direct colonization is a significant element of both Turkish and Japanese identity narratives. The Japanese call this a “‘parting point in history’ (rekishi no wakare).” Klien, Rethinking Japan’s Identity, p. 11.

21 This is the case even with Russia. Despite its success in joining the Westphalian system as an equal member after Peter’s reforms, Russia maintained an outsider status within this in-group and its differences became more evident after the radical transformations in Western Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.

 

to Elias, one of the remarkable aspects of the established-outsider con- figuration is that through stigmatization “the ‘superior’ people may make the less powerful people themselves feel that they lack virtue – that they are inferior in human terms.”22 In the nineteenth century, the elites in these empires came to see themselves and their countries through European eyes, even if they did not necessarily agree on any specific course of action vis-à-vis Europe.

Not only did the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Japan in World War II, and the Soviet Union in the Cold War cost the titular nations their empires, it also reinforced the very stigmas these states were trying to escape. It is no accident that the interna- tional community holds the crimes23 committed by these empires in their pursuit for glory to be especially heinous.24 This is a reaction very much similar to what Goffman observed in attitudes against the stigmatized: “Further, we may perceive his defensiveness to his situa- tion as a direct expression of his defect, and then see both defect and response as just retribution for something he or his parents or his tribe did, and hence a justification of the way we treat him.”25 This is not to say that the actions of the Ottoman Empire, or Japan, or the Soviet Union were not beyond the pale, but rather to point out the fact that in the case of stigmatized – i.e. “backward,” “barbaric,” “uncivilized,” “authoritarian,” “childlike,” “warlike” – Eastern states, violence is

22  Elias, “A Theoretical Essay,” p. xvi.

23 E.g. the Armenian genocide, Japanese war crimes, Stalin’s actions.

24 Germany seems an exception here, but it is not. However, due to its more secure place in Europe, Germany is better understood as an “in-group deviant,” whose aberrant actions are tolerated much longer than would be the case with an outsider and for whom every door reopens after

rehabilitation. See Goffman, Stigma, chapter 5. Here is but one example of the differing attitudes against outsiders vs. in-group deviants:

… in February 1945, a few weeks after being posted to the Pacific after years of covering the war in Europe, Ernic Pyle, the most admired of American war correspondents, told his millions of readers that “in Europe we felt

that our enemies, horrible and deadly were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something, subhuman and repulsive, the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.” He went on to describe the Japanese prisoners of war: “They were wrestling and laughing and talking just like normal human beings, and yet they gave me the creeps, and I wanted a mental bath after looking at them.” (Matsuda, Soft Power, p. 84)

25 Goffman, Stigma, p. 6.

 

often assumed to be the default response stemming from inherent ten- dencies and not the aberration it is supposed to be in Europe.26

At some point in the twentieth century, then, each of these three countries found itself stigmatized, defeated, and stigmatized again because of having fought to overcome a stigma position. Having bet the farm (or the empire) in a quest to regain a privileged “normal” sta- tus in the new normative universe of the modern states system, these states emerged from their respective wars even further away from the “established” core. Therefore, even though this book is concerned with the larger questions of international stigmatization and estab- lished-outsider dynamics since the inception of the modern states sys- tem, the empirical inquiry is limited to post-defeat choices.

Research approach and chapter outline

After Defeat juxtaposes the post-defeat choices of Turkey (1919–39), Japan (1945–74), and Russia (1991–2007) to demonstrate that – for at least some states in the international system – international status, respect, and acceptance27 are primary motivators in decision-making. I will argue that post-defeat, each country chose a strategy designed explicitly to minimize the social status gap accrued during their out- sider pasts and in their unsuccessful military bids for recognition. Such identity-oriented policies were preferred even when there were other viable policies with potentially greater military or material yields.

Especially in the immediate aftermath of defeat, each country has preferred policies that were meant to signal an understanding and acceptance of international norms that stigmatized them – having been charged with a lack of “civilization,” Turkey directed all of its efforts to obliterating signs of “Easternness”; Japan swore off its mili- tarist past to embrace pacifism while putting great effort into eco- nomic “development”; “enigmatic” Russia set upon a course (albeit temporarily) of transparency and openness to foreign advice. These states dealt with their status deficit by choosing policies intended to

26 Which, of course, is met with defensive posturing from the guilty parties, and seen as further evidence of violent tendencies. For a more extended discussion of Turkish and Japanese attitudes to war crimes, see Zarakol, “Ontological Insecurity.”

27 For an overview of how these concepts have been (mis)handled in the IR literature, see Lebow, Cultural Theory, pp. 21–4.

 

yield social capital, given the norms of international society at the time of their defeat: a secular European model of modernization and nation-building in the case of Turkey, economic development within American parameters in the case of Japan, and a “triple-transition” in the case of the former Soviet Union.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter starts with a discussion of the evolution of the modern international system begin- ning with its seventeenth-century origins. The dating of the origins of the modern international system to the seventeenth century follows John G. Ruggie in that territorial sovereignty is taken to be the main demarcating principle separating the modern system from previous systems.28 However, the focus of this chapter is mostly on the nine- teenth century, developments during which were extremely critical in shaping countries like Turkey, Japan, and Russia both because nation- alist projects (and therefore state identities) have their origins in this period, and because it was the time29 when the modernist ontology underlying international stigmatization crystallized. Chapter 1 will demonstrate that in the nineteenth century the relationship between the European society of states and non-European states came to resem- ble the established-outsider figuration outlined by Norbert Elias.

The second chapter analyzes the international system as such an established-outsider figuration and utilizes Goffman’s aforemen- tioned stigma theory to enumerate the possible forms of interaction responses available to stigmatized outsider states. The two most real- istic choices are either to attempt normalcy (either by “passing” or fixing one’s discrediting characteristics) or to embrace one’s stigma (but that still leaves the choice between attempting to use it to one’s advantage in normal society and withdrawing to one’s stigma group). That choice will ultimately depend on both the structure of the inter- national society and domestic considerations. The chapter outlines which configurations of these factors are likely to lead to choosing the existence of a discreditable state over a discredited one. Underlying this discussion is not only an assumption that states care about their identity (or their “ontological security”), but an argument that such concerns shape international dynamics to a much greater extent than is usually allowed. The second chapter also provides an overview

28 E.g. Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” 148–51.

29 See also Reus-Smit, Moral Purpose, p. 122.

 

of the evolution of normative standards in the international system, starting with the nineteenth-century Standard of Civilization up to the present-day discourses about stability and danger.

By wedding Elias’s discussion of the established-outsider figuration in social relations with Goffman’s explanations of stigma, the the- oretical model presented here offers a new way to think about state interaction in the international system. Constructivist IR theories strongly emphasize “social” aspects of international politics, but gen- erally ignore manifestations of social stratification within the inter- national system. The constructivist research agenda on norms30 in the international system has produced many fine examples31 of scholar- ship in the last decades, but very few of these works make the power dynamics32 behind socializing relationships their explicit focus. This is not to say that constructivists (or others who study socialization33) deny that there is often a relationship of inequality driving the process of socialization.34 Yet, to the extent the power disparity behind norm internalization is studied, it is conceptualized as a relatively unprob- lematic “incentive” driving socialization, and not as something that

30 Defined in this literature often “as a standard of appropriate behavior for actors within a given identity.” Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics,” 891. Note that this definition does not diverge far from Goffman’s.

31 See e.g. Klotz, “Norms Reconstituting Interests”; Klotz, “Norms and Sanctions”; Florini, “Evolution of International Norms”; Finnemore, National Interests; Sikkink, “Transnational Politics”; Flockhart, “Complex Socialization”; Checkel, “Why Comply?”; Checkel, “Norms, Institutions and National Identity.”

32 One possible exception is Johnston in “Treating International Institutions,” 493.

33 For instance, neorealists tend to view socialization as a mostly automatic process whereby systemic constraints force the weak to emulate the successful states. See e.g. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 118,

128. The best-known neoliberal approach to the study of socialization, Ikenberry’s After Victory, puts most of the explanatory emphasis on the choices of hegemonic victors. The problem with such approaches is that the power dynamic is thought of as completely independent and a priori to the socializing process. Incidentally, constructivist disinterest in the power disparity in socializing relationships may stem from a desire to counter this earlier agenda and its over-emphasis on the role of hegemons in driving normative compliance.

34 Alderson argues that acknowledging the power dimension is one advantage the socialization literature has over the “learning” approach of neoliberal institutionalism. See “Making Sense,” 424.

 

is possibly constituted or reproduced by the socializing process itself. For instance, Finnemore and Sikkink argue that states may have three possible motivations for responding to “peer pressure” to social- ize: legitimation, conformity, and esteem.35 However, because in such studies the focus is on what drives compliance and not what happens to the state’s identity after internalization, the distinction between motivation and actual outcome is obscured.36 In other words, there is little to no consideration of how a relationship of unequals may survive intact even if socialization is successful, much less an acknow- ledgment that the process of socialization may itself be perpetuating that inequality.37

This neglect of the stratifying potential of international norms and socialization in constructivism38 is unfortunate because in domestic society we know that normative expectations always generate exclu- sionary figurations and status hierarchies. Even prima facie benign social norms generate complications that affect identity. Even if a par- ticular norm – defining, say, a citizen, a worker, or a sovereign state – is couched in universal, abstract, inclusive language, stratification is inevitable. There are pressures to conform, choices to be made, and questions about authenticity, and these constraints are not distrib- uted evenly throughout society. Furthermore, stratification often is a consequence of socialization; one becomes aware of the stigmatiz- ing potential of one’s attributes (and therefore, one’s inferiority) only after internalizing the standards of larger society. Even if stigmatizing attributes can be corrected, correction is not the same as never having had that attribute: “Where such repair is possible, what often results is not the acquisition of fully normal status, but a transformation of self from someone with a particular blemish into someone with a record of having corrected a particular blemish.”39 Norms are essen- tially tools of power: they reflect the power dynamics in the system

35 Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics,” 902–4.

36 Even Johnston, who approaches the constructivist norm literature with a relatively critical eye and offers a nuanced theory of socialization, reproduces this pattern. See “Treating International Institutions,” 499.

37 See Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence in its entirety for the most astute articulation of this point.

38 Obviously, this problem is even more prevalent in neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism, but those approaches are more internally consistent on this point; they do not emphasize the constitutive effects of norms.

39 Goffman, Stigma, p. 9; Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 77.

 

and are as likely to perpetuate them as they are to ameliorate them. The flipside of socialization is otherness. Otherness implies the pres- ence of an established-outsider dynamic.

There are several reasons why constructivist work on socializa- tion and norm internalization has failed to draw attention to the stratifying after-effects of these processes. To begin with, especially early on, constructivist work on norms centered around “‘hard’ cases of moral transformation in which ‘good’ global norms prevail over the ‘bad’ local beliefs and practices.”40 Because until recently much empirical work focused on the diffusion of norms that researchers agree with in principle, such as human rights, women’s equality, etc., it has been difficult to conceive of such positive “socialization” as having adverse effects on state identity.41 Furthermore, earlier con- structivist work on norm diffusion mechanisms focused almost exclusively on persuasion.42 Persuasion approaches assume a level of deliberate communication in socializing interactions that is not neces- sarily commensurate with the historical development of the modern states system. Additionally, such a focus leads to an emphasis on shallower single-issue norms about which one can be demonstrably “persuaded,” as opposed to broader shifts and deeper rifts in world- views. Hence, it is no accident that much of this earlier persuasion/ learning literature in constructivism was rather individualist in its methodology43 and retained the rationalist cost/benefit analysis of previous regime scholarship44 on norms, as well as its focus on highly institutionalized settings.

At the root of these shortcomings is the presentist bias inherent in the studies of socialization in constructivism. It is only relatively recently in the history of the international system that it has become conceivable to think of all states as actors which may be persuaded by norm entrepreneurs (or other states) to choose from a menu of international norms. That very conceptualization is made pos- sible by a much more structural, homogenizing (and homologizing)

40 Acharya, “How Ideas Spread,” 239.

41 E.g. Sikkink, “Transnational Politics,” 520.

42 Johnston, “Treating International Institutions,” 493.

43 Checkel, “Why Comply?” 557–8.

44 See e.g. Keohane, After Hegemony; Oye, Cooperation Under Anarchy; Martin, Coercive Cooperation.

 

normative convergence.45 This convergence around the norms of modernity46 is what made it possible to speak of norm diffusion and social learning as if they are processes that every state actor can partake in relatively autonomously as a rational agent; as if the diffusion of these processes has never been anchored in geography; as if international norms have no particular cultural content or an overwhelming ethnocentric bias. Such assumptions are plausible to some extent if we focus only on the present-day international sys- tem. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, the international normative order has become relatively more inclusive and less culturally anchored over the course of its history, and states are more similar than ever before.47 Nevertheless, the present dynamics of the international system continue to be underwritten by the status hierarchies of the past, and socialization into the deep structures of the international system has played a historically significant role in both establishing and perpetuating those hierarchies. The abstract and generalized language about norms and socialization we find in much of con- structivism obscures much of that history,48 and misleads us about the underlying causes of present-day insecurities.49

This indifference to the stratifying effects of international norms may be attributed to the divisions within constructivism itself. More “sociologically” oriented constructivists, especially Wendt,50 have positioned constructivism as a systemic theory in direct competition

45 See for instance Meyer, “World Polity”; Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation-State”; Meyer et al., “Expansion of Mass Education”; Boli, “World Polity”; see also Finnemore, “Norms, Culture, and World Politics.”

46 See especially Meyer and Jepperson, “‘Actors’ of Modern Society.”

47 In fact, one could argue that the reason why the international system seems more inclusive today is because there has been such a great degree of convergence around Westphalian norms.

48 Even Checkel, who urges more caution about causal processes involved in socialization and more attention to domestic agency, is partly guilty of this. For instance, he points out that norm diffusion is more likely when there is a “cultural match” between the systemic norm and the historically constructed domestic norms. See e.g. Checkel, “Norms, Institutions and National Identity.” This is an excellent insight, but what is missing from the picture is an acknowledgment that the likelihood of a cultural match is not distributed randomly throughout the international system.

49 See Zarakol, “Ontological Insecurity.”

50 In fact, Lebow considers Wendt to be “a structural liberal” rather than a constructivist. Cultural Theory, p. 3, fn7.

 

with neorealism.51 This was arguably a necessary and ultimately suc- cessful epistemological strategy, but the trade-off (at least thus far) has been the neglect of processes at a slightly lower level of abstrac- tion that may not apply to all states equally, as well as the particularly uneven history of the expansion of the international system. Wendt’s discussion of the self–other dynamic in Social Theory,52 for instance, is rather ahistorical;53 similarly, Wendt’s discussion of recognition in “Why a World State is Inevitable” assumes a degree of uniformity in the distribution of various processes throughout the social system. Constructivists who tend toward what may be called the “psychologi- cal” side of the literature, i.e. those scholars who are more sensitive to domestic processes and identity narratives that are generated endog- enously, have been traditionally more open to incorporating histori- cal accounts and geographical differences into causal explanations (and as a result, stand closer to new generations of English School scholarship).54 However, this vein of scholarship generally is less con- cerned with macro-theorizing.55

The theoretical model advanced in this book links these two flanks of constructivism in a novel way. While the theoretical chapters of this book build upon previous constructivist contributions on norms and socialization, my main goal is to advance a more nuanced under- standing of the unevenly experienced social constraints driving the socialization of states. As noted earlier, I do this first and foremost by borrowing from Elias and Goffman the sociological insights about established-outsider dynamics and stigmatization. The emergence of the established-outsider figuration is a system-level dynamic, but it is one which creates different levels of pressures on states depending on the particular social space they are occupying at a given time in history. Stigmatization is also a social process, the presence of which needs to be first explained from a systemic angle, but responses to stigmatization can only be understood by paying serious attention to endogenous dynamics within societies.

51 See e.g. Smith, “Wendt’s World.”

52 Wendt, Social Theory.

53  See Buzan and Little, “Why International Relations Has Failed.”

54 See e.g. Neumann, Uses of the Other.

55 Lebow’s recent A Cultural Theory of International Relations is an exception to this generalization. However, as excellent as that book is, it does not address the gap I am discussing here: i.e. the uneven distribution of systemic social constraints.

 

The application of these sociological frameworks to the international system advances several other literatures as well. The demonstration of the presence of the established-outsider figurations throughout the evolution of the international system builds upon the more his- torically oriented scholarship in IR and sociology such as the English School,56 the historical institutionalist variants of constructivism,57 the World Polity school,58 but also the more materialist approaches such as World-System theory and macro-realism.59 Each of these approaches has made invaluable contributions to our understand- ing of the evolution of the Westphalian state model and the modern states system. However, the account offered in Chapters 1 and 2 con- cerning the evolution of the modern states system is not an uncritical summary of the aforementioned literatures. What is critically absent from most of these approaches is a theory of society at the interna- tional level60 and an interest in agency in the face of socialization pressures.

While I do not claim to advance a proper theory of international society, there is an implicit argument about society underlying the discussions of stigmatization in this book. Contrary to what most of the IR literature would lead us to believe, emulation does not neces- sarily guarantee that the socialized actor comes automatically to resemble the “normals.” Socialization driven by a desire to escape stigmatization can actually perpetuate the established-outsider figur- ation. However, the presence of the desire to emulate is itself telling because it means that the actor has internalized the judgment of the larger society. In other words, stigmatization points to the presence of shared norms, and as I will argue in Chapter 2, this is a more realistic litmus test for deducing the presence of an “international

56 Especially the more recent generation of scholarship such as Keene, Beyond Anarchical Society; Suzuki, Civilization and Empire; Hobson and Sharman, “Enduring Place.”

57 What I have in mind here is works such as Reus-Smit’s Moral Purpose, or Bukovansky, “Altered State”; Blaney and Inayatullah, “Westphalian Deferral”; Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond.” Obviously, this variant of constructivism is intimately linked with the new generation of English Scholarship mentioned in the previous footnote and vice versa.

58 See footnotes 40 and 43.

59 Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn, Derluguian, Tilly, Collins, etc.

60 Lebow, Cultural Theory, pp. 2–4.

 

society” than the sense of “we-ness,” common purpose,61 or the legal- istic approaches62 used in the IR literature.

Realist arguments rejecting the existence of an international soci- ety of states (or deem an international society at best a negligible presence compared with thicker versions of society) have one thing in common with the English School approaches: too high a standard of what constitutes “society.” There are plenty of domestic societies where common purpose or a sense of explicit “we-ness” is at best a remote ideal or simply empty rhetoric, and it is actually the pres- ence of stratification that points to a shared normative ground. The Brahmin, for instance, does not feel he has anything in common with the Untouchable; the White Supremacist is antagonistic toward racial minorities; many Saudi men believe the testimony of four women equals that of one man. In fact, as Lebow points out, “given the inequalities of all social orders, and the exclusions, restrictions and compulsions they entail, it is nothing short of remarkable that most people in most societies adhere to stipulated practices and rules.”63 While the people in the examples above presumably live under a com- mon state, that is not the only thing that binds them together in a society: in all of the examples, the oppressor and the oppressed, the powerful and the powerless, the insider and the outsider share a com- mon framework, a common habitus, a common ontology (such as

61 E.g. “A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working

of common institutions.” Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 13. Also see Wight, “Western Values”; Bull and Watson, Expansion of International Society,

p. 1. Buzan, “From International System,” provides a review of how “society” has been conceptualized in the English School.

62 As Suzuki notes, the legal positivist perspective adopted by English School scholars “resulted in a belief that when European and non-European states entered into treaty relations based on normative concepts originating

from European international society, this implied an almost automatic and reciprocal commitment to the Society’s institutions and practices.” Civilization and Empire, p. 16. Earlier generations of the English School suffered from the same blind spot as to the perverse effects of socialization

that the constructivist scholarship on norms is permeated with; scholars such as Bull and Watson treated the expansion of European international society as an overwhelmingly positive development. See O’Hagan, Conceptualizing the West, p. 129; Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, p. 15.

63 Lebow, Cultural Theory, p. 4.

 

faith or ethnicity) of the world, and recognize each other as part of that framework.64 The international system is not that different: states rely on recognition65 from other states for their sovereign existence, which implies that there is a shared understanding about what a mod- ern “state” is. There are criteria for recognition as a state: territory, a constituency, a recognizable administrative structure, etc.66 There is a great deal of homology between domestic structures. Finally, that there is a “society” at the international level becomes obvious when we consider the implicit common ground shared by the states in the modern international system,67 which is even more remarkable given the absence of a world government. As Chapter 2 will demonstrate, the Standard of Civilization, the distinctions between modernity and barbarism, the obsession with development, etc., are all examples of shared normative ground between the established and the outsiders of the international system.

Chapter 2 will also address the link between modernity and the projection of the established-outsider dynamic to the international level. Drawing especially upon Hegel and Nietzsche, I will argue that it is no accident that the established-outsider figuration truly mani- fested on an international scale for the first time in the nineteenth cen- tury. While there are good reasons to argue that making distinctions between “us” and “others” is a feature of the human condition,68 there is no reason to suppose that “us” and “others” will always agree

64 This is also in line with Lebow’s argument that societies are bound together by one of four reasons: “fear, interest, honor and habit.” Ibid.

65 E.g. Wight, Systems of States, p. 153; Clark, “Legitimacy in a Global Order,” 84–5.

66 See for instance Meyer, “World Polity”; Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation-State”; Meyer et al., “Expansion of Mass Education”; Frank et al., “Rationalization and Organization”; Frank et al., “Nation-State”;

Ramirez, “Global Changes”; Schofer, “Science Associations”; Thomas et al., Institutional Structure; see also Finnemore, “Norms, Culture, and World Politics.”

67 Bull and Watson note in Expansion of International Society, p. 5, that the reciprocity of sovereign recognition is a unique feature of the modern international system. We may also recall Giddens’s observation that the

emergence of international relations is coeval with the origins of the nation state.

68 See e.g. Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories. For a more general overview of the literature theorizing the self–Other relationship, see also Neumann, Uses of the Other, chapter 1; Salter, Barbarians and Civilization; Abizadeh, “Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other?”

 

on how they are ranked in relation to each other.69 The distinction between “us” and “others” may not be an obstacle to social cohesion70 if that distinction is built into the self-understanding of both parties.71 This is essentially what distinguishes the “established-outsider” figur- ation from the more ubiquitous “us–others” dynamic. It is the former, not the latter, that characterizes relations in the modern international system, which “does not aim at the ‘elimination of enemies but at the destruction of strangers, or more generally strangehood’.”72 What sets modernity apart is not “the division into selves and others. Rather, it is the effect of seeming to exclude the other absolutely from the self, in a world divided into two.”73 As Bauman has argued, it is this type of dynamic which creates pressures to assimilate, because in such situ- ations, the burden to resolve the ambivalence created by strangeness, being on the wrong side of the dichotomy, falls on the stranger, the outsider.74

Finally, Chapter 2 will also explore the available options for modern international actors who find themselves on the losing end of the established-outsider dynamic. Being stigmatized as an outsider has serious costs, and leaves a permanent mark on the national habitus. I noted above that treatments of socialization in constructivism tend to focus too much on the present-day international system and sug- gested that a more historically grounded approach may be needed to draw attention to the uneven distribution of social constraints in the modern states system. However, it is possible to err too much on the opposite end of the spectrum and to seriously underestimate the agency of stigmatized, outsider, “Eastern” actors.

While the abstract, ahistorical models of socialization one encoun- ters in neorealism, neoliberalism, and certain variants of construc- tivism mistakenly impute equal maneuvering room to all actors in the international system, the historically conscious narratives of the English School literature have traditionally downplayed almost all

69 In other words, what distinguishes the stigmatized “outsider” from the more generic “other” is that he agrees with the “normal” society to some extent that his devaluation is deserved.

70 See Lebow, Cultural Theory, p. 8, for a discussion of why this may pose a threat to social cohesion.

71 See also Huysmans, “Security!” 242–3.

72 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 153.

73 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 167. 74 Ibid., p. 75.

 

agency at the receiving end. The problem of incorporation is posed from the point of view of the existing international society, in this case the European society states. As a result, there is not enough the- oretical conceptualization of the mechanisms driving socialization. Buzan, for instance, relies on the Waltzian logic of anarchy generating like units in order to explain the emergence of international society. His only remark about agency at the other end is his remark that “his- torical discussions of how non-European states came to terms with what Gong has termed the European Standard of Civilization are sug- gestive of how this process of convergence toward a shared identity works, the most striking case being Japan’s conscious reshaping of itself into a Western state during the nineteenth century,”75 which hardly goes further than acknowledging that some kind of socializa- tion occurs in a competitive system.76 The World Polity school suffers from a similar weakness. World Polity scholars correctly reject func- tional depictions of the modern state – as a natural, purposive, and rational actor – inherent in realism, as well as accounts of state forma- tion which are exclusively based in localized national cultural narra- tives, in favor of a view of the modern bureaucratic state as a cultural construct that is embedded and legitimated by a global culture.77 Yet they are silent on the mechanisms of socialization,78 a choice which inevitably downplays the agency of the emulative actors.

This book aims to underline the additional pressures faced by Eastern actors on the one hand and bring their agency in responding to stigmatization to the forefront on the other hand.79 In keeping with these goals, case studies are used to emphasize the often neglected agency of “Eastern” actors in the international system without los- ing sight of different systemic pressures such actors face. The theo- retical discussion of available stigma-coping strategies presented in Chapter 2 is later matched by detailed historical reconstructions of after-defeat choices in each case presented in the following Chapters 3 to 5. Chapter 3 focuses on the actions of Turkey between 1918 and 1938; Chapter 4 on Japan between 1945 and 1974; and Chapter 5

75 Buzan, “From International System,” 335.

76 A similar functionalism pervades the writings of Bull and Watson as well.

77 Meyer, “World Polity,” pp. 147, 158.

78 Finnemore, “Norms, Culture, and World Politics,” 339.

79 See also Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, pp. 6–15, 26–9, for similar critiques of the English School literature.

 

on Russia between 1990 and 2007. In each chapter, I demonstrate that the strategy chosen was deliberately picked because of status concerns, given the international normative standards of the time, and over other strategies that may have been more in line with the predictions of mainstream IR theories. These case studies advance an empirical argument about the significance of status and self-esteem concerns in the international system.

In terms of social scientific approach, this book is located within the historical institutionalist paradigm that is interested in histor- ical dynamics and the complex interaction among social processes. This body of work is most notable for taking into account all fields of human interaction, i.e. economic and social as well as political. Because of this comprehensive interest, this kind of work “require[s] a multiplicity of theoretical tools, [as well as] the painstaking ana- lytical reconstruction of environments in historical and comparative planes.”80 This approach is also in line with the Bhaskarian insight that “structural analysis explains the ‘possible’ while historical ana- lysis explains the ‘actual.’”81 The research approach undertaken here falls under comparative-historical methodology, primarily expressed through reconstructed historical event and strategy narratives intended to map causal structures suggested by applications of social stratifi- cation theories on to the international system.82 Agency is located within the constraints imposed by the structural space, and variation is explained by contingency of social action on time, space, and con- text as illustrated in the narrative. Causation is inferred by comparing narratives across cases, and grounded in a macro-historical frame- work. The approach is neither purely inductive nor purely deductive, but should rather be thought of as layered, moving back and forth between various levels of abstraction, inference, and observability. Social constraints do not lend themselves as easily to measurement

80 See Derluguian, “Terrorism,” 6.

81 Patomaki, “How to Tell Better Stories,” 126.

82 For other examples of the use of historical narrative for the analysis of causal processes, see Abbott, Time Matters; Griffin, “Causal Interpretation in Historical Sociology”; Sewell, “Three Temporalities”; Stryker, “Beyond History versus Theory”; see also Glass and Mackey, From Clocks to Chaos; Reisch, “Chaos, History, and Narrative”; Shermer, “Exorcising Laplace’s Demon.” For a discussion of causation in case studies, see Mahoney, “Comparative-Historical Methodology”; see also Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry; Paige, “Theory in Macrosocial Inquiry.”

 

as material constraints, but they can nevertheless be conceptualized and observed in their particular manifestations. As Goldstone noted, “the test of the worth of a work of comparative history is whether it identifies and illuminates relationships heretofore unrecognized or misunderstood.”83 Furthermore, as Jackson has argued, it is not necessary (or possible) “to find evidence for ‘real motives’ driving particular individuals to make particular choices”; rather, it is more sensible to follow Weber’s lead in focusing on “the production and reproduction of boundaries of action,”84 i.e. on the social context out of which policy outcomes arise.

Case studies are therefore a particularly suitable approach to study the actual manifestation of the structural conditions. “Given the necessity of reconstructing meaning and of studying the effects of mechanisms in overdetermined, open systems” that social relation- ships are governed by, explanatory and comparative small-N case studies of empirical events are the only way we can access the under- lying structures.85 The case-study approach benefits from empirical research without being epistemologically empiricist. Empiricism is problematic because it reduces social science to only what is observ- able, “expressed more often as a vague ‘actualism,’ that is a stance denying the existence, plausibility, or usefulness of conceiving of underlying structures which determine … events, and instead locates the succession of cause and effect at the level of events.”86 Critical realism, on the other hand, allows for a layered view of the world, wherein we can distinguish between underlying causal mechanisms and observable phenomena: it “encompasses a theory of emergence of ontological levels, and it sketches out the basic lineaments of a specifically social ontology, organized around the difference between human agents and social structures and the differences between social and natural mechanisms – specifically, the time, space, concept, and practice dependency of the former.”87 This is the broad approach underlining the analyses of case studies in this book.

83 Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 60.

84 Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, p. 22. The broader discussion on Weberian legitimation starts on p. 16.

85 See Steinmetz, “Odious Comparisons.”

86 Collier, Critical Realism, p. 7, as quoted in Steinmetz, “Odious Comparisons,” 375.

87 See ibid., 377; also see Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality.

 

The final chapter extends the discussion to present-day interna- tional dynamics, beginning with the question of why Russia seems to have changed course more quickly than Turkey and Japan. The answer lies both in the historical proximity of Russia to the “estab- lished” core of the international system (at least compared to Turkey and Japan), and also in the evolution of international normative order. However, both Turkey and Japan have started signaling a realization that their post-defeat strategies are no longer as viable in the inter- national system. I conclude by returning to the two themes I have introduced here: the impact of international stigmatization on inter- national relations, and the place of the established-outsider figuration in the present-day international system.

Of gates and keepers in the international system

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in sometime later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” … The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything” …

Franz Kafka From Before the Law (1925)