6 Conclusion: Zealots or Herodians?
- 政治支持者：Herodians 並非一個政治黨派或宗教派別，而是一群支持希律王朝的猶太人。
- 希律王朝：這個王朝由希律大帝（約公元前55 年至公元前37 年）建立，後來被其兒子們劃分為希律四分王國。
- 支持希律·安提帕斯：他們很可能支持希律·安提帕斯的政策，他是加利利和伯利亞的四分王，積極在巴勒斯坦推動希臘化（希臘羅馬）文化。
- 共同的目標：在福音書中，Herodians 被描繪成耶穌的對頭，他們與法利賽人聯手，試圖讓耶穌說出反羅馬的話。
- 動機：他們可能認為耶律王朝有助於猶太地的穩定，並且不相信耶穌的彌賽亞希望，因此與法利賽人聯手對抗耶穌的世俗和宗教權威。
- 與世俗權力的衝突：Herodians 的存在表明，世俗權力與耶穌的傳教工作之間存在著對立。
😗😭😘😍🤩
以下是該章節〈Conclusion: Zealots or Herodians?〉的條列式章節概念、重點筆記與引導問題整理（含前置背景與主要論點脈絡）：
📘 章節概念概要
主題：
以Toynbee 對土耳其現代化的觀察為引言，提出「Zealots（狂熱者）」與「Herodians（希律黨人）」的二元比喻，作為非西方世界面對西方文明侵入時的兩難選擇。作者進一步將此二元困境轉化為對國際關係學（IR）中「非西方國家」的結構性批判與社會理論分析。
核心隱喻：
Zealots = 拒絕西方、抗拒現代化者
Herodians = 接受西方、追求同化者
但兩者皆處於「被迫選邊」的結構中——此即國際污名化與社會分層的再生產機制。
🧩 概念與理論重點
一、Toynbee 的起點：西方化作為全球性結構趨勢
- 西方文明在近幾世紀持續擴張，從經濟、政治到精神生活。
- 非西方世界被迫面對「接受或拒絕西方文明」的抉擇。
- 土耳其的西化是人類普遍現象的縮影，而非個別特例。
二、國際關係學（IR）的盲點
- IR 學界忽視非西方國家的「社會—文化負擔」與身份問題。
- 主流理論視非西方國家為「靜態、被動」的裝飾性存在（decorative plants）。
- 西方被視為「行動者（actors）」；非西方則是「被作用者（acted upon）」。
- IR 理論的假設：
- 若非西方國家有能動性（agency），其行為會模仿西方。
- 因此忽視了「社會分層」對國際行為的深層影響。
三、污名化理論的應用：社會分層與「正常性」的權力
- 「正常者（normals）」擁有將自身視為自然、客觀、理所當然的特權。
- 「外來者／污名者」的存在被定義為問題本身，而非結構的結果。
- 同化或抗拒皆強化既有的不平等結構：
- 同化 → 承認自身「不正常」；
- 抗拒 → 被標示為「異常」、「落後」。
- 「正常」即不需思考自己是否正常；這是權力的象徵。
四、結構性對立與理論偏見的再製
- 國際關係中的二元標籤：
civilized/barbaric, modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped, democratic/authoritarian
- 問題總被設定在「右邊」的詞上（即非西方）。
- 這種設定將存在性（existential）問題轉化為技術性（mechanistic）問題：
- 將非西方的「污名」視為自身的失敗，而非結構性的排除結果。
五、土耳其、日本、俄羅斯比較：被接納與被懷疑
| 國家 | 戰敗後狀況 | 西方態度 | 結構性差異 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 俄羅斯 | 未被佔領，繼承聯合國席次 | 快速被接納（G8、文明世界） | 親近歐洲文化、白人、基督教背景 |
| 土耳其 | 戰敗、重建、被拆解 | 長期懷疑、被視為「潛在偏離者」 | 穆斯林、東方身份 |
| 日本 | 戰敗、被佔領、美國主導重建 | 合作但永遠「不完全的成員」 | 非西方種族與文化背景 |
→ 說明「文化親緣性」與「污名階層」如何形塑國際接納度。
六、同化的陷阱（Bauman）
- 外來者為獲得接納，壓抑一切差異。
- 然而越努力模仿，「距離感」越明顯：
「The harder they try, the faster the finishing-line seems to be receding.」
- 結果：永遠的試用期（a friend on approval, permanently on trial）
- 這正是土耳其與日本的困境：
忠於西方，卻永遠不被視為真正的「內部人」。
🧠 總結性洞見
- 「Zealots 或 Herodians」不是策略選項，而是被迫的生存結構。
- 國際關係的「污名化結構」使非西方國家無法真正成為「正常國家」。
- 理論上應建立一種能揭示這種社會結構與權力再生產的分析框架，
而非只檢視非西方的「失敗」。
❓引導問題（討論或研究思考用）
- Toynbee 的「Zealots vs. Herodians」隱喻如何揭示非西方國家的困境？
- 為何 IR 理論將非西方國家視為「靜態存在」？其背後的學術權力結構是什麼？
- 同化（assimilation）為何無法帶來真正的平等？
- 土耳其、日本、俄羅斯三案的比較顯示「文化接近性」在國際體系中的何種作用？
- 如何在國際關係理論中納入「污名化」與「社會分層」的分析視角？
- 若拒絕成為 Zealot 或 Herodian，是否存在第三條路？
- 「正常性（normality）」如何在國際層面上被制度化並維持？
是否希望我幫你把這份整理轉成一份可列印的學術筆記（含雙語關鍵詞對照與頁碼索引）？
🥳😉😉🤣🤣🤩
以下是你標示段落的中文翻譯與語義說明：
---
一、二元對立詞組
> civilized / barbaric
→ 「文明的／野蠻的」
> modern / traditional
→ 「現代的／傳統的」
> developed / underdeveloped
→ 「已開發的／未開發的」（或「先進的／落後的」）
> democratic / authoritarian
→ 「民主的／威權的」
📘 說明：
作者指出，國際關係理論與西方社會科學常以這些二元框架分類世界，
並且總是假設右邊的詞是「問題」或「落後的狀態」，需要被改造、超越或矯正。
這種話語架構其實在再生產一種「西方中心」的優越感與結構性污名化。
---
二、關鍵句
> “The harder they try, the faster the finishing-line seems to be receding.”
→ 「他們越努力奔跑，終點線就越往後退。」
或譯為：
「他們越努力追趕，終點似乎就越遠。」
📘 說明：
這句引自社會學家 Zygmunt Bauman 的論述，用以形容被污名化的外來者（例如非西方國家）
在試圖模仿與融入「正常的西方秩序」時，反而使自己的異質性更加顯眼。
越努力同化，越顯得「不同」——因此永遠無法抵達「被完全接納」的終點。
---
三、IR 理論（International Relations Theory，國際關係理論）
📖 定義：
IR理論是研究國際政治行為、國家間關係與全球秩序的學術體系，
其中包括現實主義（Realism）、自由主義（Liberalism）、建構主義（Constructivism）等主要流派。
📘 本章批評：
主流IR理論以西方國家經驗為普遍模型。
將非西方國家的行為視為「模仿者」或「偏離者」。
忽略了非西方國家的歷史創造性與社會結構處境。
結果：IR理論本身成為「國際不平等的再製機制」。
---
是否希望我把這段內容整理成「中英對照＋學術解釋表格」？這樣可直接用於報告或課堂討論。
🤩🤣😉🥳
During the last few centuries, our Western society has been intruding upon the other civilizations of the world with greater insistence. First it has drawn them all into the meshes of its economic system; next it has enlarged the borders of its political ascendency almost as far as the borders of its trade; and latterly it has been invading the life of its neighbours on the most intimate plane – the plane of social institutions and of spiritual emotions and ideas. This revolutionary process of Westernization, which at this moment is overtaking the Turks and many of their co-religionists in other Islamic countries, has already proceeded further among the Oriental Christian ex-subjects of the Turks in South-Eastern Europe and among their Oriental Christian ex-enemies in Russia, and it is actively at work among the Hindus and the Far Easterners. Thus, in studying the Westernization process in Turkey, we are increasing our understanding of the human world in which we ourselves live and move and have our being; for the issues with which the Turks have been confronted by their contact with the West are confronting other non-Western peoples the world over. Everywhere these peoples stand at the parting of the ways, with the choice of entering the camp of the Zealots or the camp of the Herodians. They can no longer remain neutral; for the West, in its restless activity, will not let them alone. Shall they accept the civilization of the West and attempt to adjust their own lives to it, or shall they reject it and attempt to cast it out as a devil which is seeking to possess their souls?
Arnold Toynbee, Turkey
The title of this chapter comes from the above passage which con- cludes Toynbee’s excellent analysis of Turkey’s Westernization efforts in the interwar period. Great observer that he was, Toynbee realized that the changes Turkey was undergoing in the 1920s amounted to neither an aberration nor a historical curiosity, but rather were part of a great structural trend which sooner or later would engulf the majority of peoples around the globe. Unfortunately, the import of
240
this observation was never really acknowledged by the one disci- pline that should have been most concerned with such a structural trend: International Relations. For the most part, IR has relegated to the dustbin of history the choices the majority of the peoples in the world faced in the presence of the inevitable Westernization of global relations, and deems their dilemma as irrelevant to modern-day pol- itics. Not only is this problematic from a social scientific perspective, but it is also dangerous from a policy-making angle.
IR theorists have had the unfortunate habit of treating social dimen- sions of international interactions as negligible. This is especially problematic for analyzing the behavior of states outside the West, whose identities have been shaped by the additional social burdens they face in the modern international system. Most structural the- ories in IR ignore the effects of social stratification on state behavior and are therefore ill-equipped to explain the behavior of the majority of states in the international system.
Indeed, a cursory survey of IR theories might lead one to the conclusion that non-Western states are the decorative plants of modern international society. The treatment non-Western countries have received at the hands of IR scholars brings to mind Aristotle, who thought that men were like animals – they acted, they were doers – whereas women were like plants – they were acted upon, they stood still. This general theoretical indifference to the non- West is backed up by the belief that if any of these states attain any agency, they will act just like their Western counterparts. The overall thrust of the discipline has been to ignore the non-West in theory formulation because non-Western states are either assumed to be static and therefore indistinguishable from the environment, or assumed to be easily covered by theories extrapolated from the Western experience.
This state of affairs in the academic study of international rela- tions mirrors the social stratification in actual dynamics, and is predicted by the stigma theory offered in this book. The greatest priv- ilege that accrues to “normals” in any stratified society is the ability, the “smugness” to view their own condition as “natural,” “objec- tive,” and as “matter-of-fact”: “His is the state of ‘being situated’ or ‘tuned’ (Heidegger), which can feed nothing but the relativ-naturliche Weltanschauung (Max Scheler): that is a natural propensity to view the conditions otherwise circumscribed, confined to this place here
and this time now, as ‘natural’ and thus beyond discussion.”1 This is a position of great power because it makes the situations of the outsider, the stranger, the stigmatized their own problem, even though “all the essential determinants of the stranger’s plight lie beyond the reach of everything the stranger himself may do.”2 Almost every strategy to remedy this situation leads to reinforcing it: if the stigmatized/the stranger/the outsider attempts to become “normal” through assimi- lation, he confirms the definition of himself as not “normal”; if he argues with the “normal” view by pointing out that there are other experiences which that normal view does not account for, he draws attention to his “abnormality.”
In Toynbee’s words, the outsider’s choice is between becoming a Zealot or a Herodian, but it is actually the fact that one is faced with this choice, more than the actual choice itself, that reinforces the con- dition of stature inferiority. To be “normal” is to not have to worry constantly about which is the right choice to make, to not have to think about the world in terms of this choice. To be “normal,” to be “established,” is to have the luxury of seeing the world as natural, to take it for granted, and to not have to worry about the “construction” of one’s own identity, of society, or of international relations. Once those ontological matters are relegated to the realm of “given” facts, the illusion of fully realized agency, of sovereignty, of positive free- dom in what is inevitably always an ambivalent world becomes much easier to sustain. And for many, that illusion is enough.
The “normals” hold all the power – they do not, and in fact, they would much rather not, have to listen to the outsider whose efforts to belong and speak their language can be as equally strong a reminder of the arbitrariness of their “objective” worldview as her protestations about injustice.3 To the degree that mainstream, “normal,” “objective” social science theories take into account the plight of the outsiders in the international system, this very pattern is almost invariably reproduced. Recall the normative dichotomies invoked in the first chapters of this book: civilized/barbaric, mod- ern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped (or the politer version,
1 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 75.
2 Ibid., p. 77.
3 “The very awareness of such an outside view makes the natives feel insecure in their home ways and truths.” Ibid., p. 78.
“developing”), liberal/illiberal, democratic/authoritarian, etc. It is always the label on the right side that is presented as a problem that needs to be overcome. This casts the issue as a mechanistic dilemma about attaining desirable attributes, as opposed to what it really is: an existential one of delegitimation and stigmatization. What gets obscured in the process is the fact that the left side of the dichotomy cannot exist without the right side: “Despite the appearance to the contrary, it is not the failure to acquire native knowledge which constitutes the outsider as a stranger, but the incongruent existential constitution if the stranger, as being neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’, neither ‘friend’ nor ‘enemy’, neither included nor excluded, which makes the native knowledge unassimilable.”4 In other words, without an understanding of the deep structural properties of established-outsider relationships in the international system, any attempt to address the supposed endogenous “causes” of outsiderness will actually have the opposite effect of entrenching power disparities and affirming the “objectivity” of the hegemonic worldview.
This is precisely why this book attempts to offer a structural view of international stratification and demonstrate how international stigmatization circumscribes the behavior of non-Western actors. I underline the social, the structural, the exogenous nature of stig- matization, inferiority, laggardness, backwardness, barbarity not as an excuse on behalf of the non-West or an accusation against the West, but as a corrective against a literature that allows for the agency of non-Western actors only when they fail to live up to Western standards. In that perspective, what is wrong about the non-West actor is its own fault, and what is right about it is the West’s doing or an automatic response to Western stimuli. In this book, through a juxtaposition of the choices Turkey, Japan, and Russia have made in their interactions with the West, I have tried to show that the reality is more the other way around: outcomes taken to be functionally determined by Western observers are often the result of long considered and contested deliberations by local actors, and what are considered to be domestic failures (by both local and international observers) were often much more contingent on international social dynamics than is usually assumed.
4 Ibid., p. 76.
Let me now recap that discussion and say a few words about the choices facing Turkey, Japan, and Russia today – because what is happening with all three of these cases nowadays is pertinent to the concluding point I want to make about how we can improve the inter- national system.
Just as observers of the last two decades are baffled by the actions of Russia, the behaviors of Turkey and Japan after defeat also gave rise to many a misplaced prediction. However, while in the initial decades after defeat the observers of Russia tended to err on the side of optimism about Russia’s receptiveness to international norms and alliance potential, assessments in the cases of Turkey and Japan often displayed serious fears about future reversals. This in itself is very telling.
The Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I, dismantled, partially occupied. It took three years of military struggle, domestic chaos, and some stubborn diplomatic maneuvering at the Lausanne Conference for the new Kemalist regime to establish itself. The rein- carnated Turkish state was much smaller than the Ottoman Empire and had depleted most of its military and economic resources. Japan lost its empire in World War II, and was in perhaps an even worse material condition than Turkey at the end of the war due to the dev- astation wrought by the atomic bombs. The country was occupied by US forces and it was not until 1951 that Japan regained its full auton- omy. Russia, on the other hand, was not defeated in open military war, nor occupied, nor subject to any postwar treaty impositions. In other words, the material conditions of Russia’s defeat were quite unlike those in the other two cases.
The juxtaposition between how realism would read each of these situations and the actual comparative treatment Turkey, Japan, and Russia got after their respective defeats is jarring. Of these three coun- tries it was Russia’s ultimate integration to the “civilized” world that was hailed as a sure thing, bringing about declarations of the “End of History.” By contrast, both Japan and Turkey, even though each had very limited material room for maneuver, were eyed with consider- able suspicion and skepticism, and continued to be so regarded long after they had established a record of cooperation. The stigmatization framework offered in this book predicts this disparity. Bauman’s dis- cussion of what happens to the stranger who attempts to assimilate is directly applicable to our understanding of these three cases: “The
loyalty which is simply taken for granted in the case of the natives
… calls for suspicious and vigilant scrutiny in the case of yesterday’s stranger; and forever so, as his commitment has been compromised from the start and beyond the hope of redemption by the original sin of being freely chosen.”5 Of the three cases, Russia bears the most “familial” resemblance to the original rule-makers of the international society, and is the one that is most like the “natives” of the European/ Western order. This is partly because of the dominant religion of its population and the ethno-racial make-up of the titular nation, and partly because Russia had in fact managed to gain a formal seat in the European society of states in the nineteenth century. Hence, many observers in the 1990s jumped to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was merely a deviation from Russia’s natural destiny as a country that inherently approximates the original normative ideal of the states system. While realists may claim that Russia’s ultimate aggressive turn vindicates the materialist reading of the situation, the fact of the matter is, as explained in Chapter 5, Russia’s hostile turn cannot be thought of as independent from the (comparatively) forgiving social treatment it got from the West for a brief while in the 1990s.
Russia’s historical and cultural proximity to the core as well as its previous stature as a great power brought it identity assurances at a time it was probably least qualified to receive them. Russia’s (incon- sistent) turn to a more aggressive rhetoric in foreign policy does not precede but actually follows Russia’s admission to the elite power club of international relations. Russia’s admission to the G-8 at a time it arguably had not met most of the criteria for membership, coupled with the fact that the country had inherited the Soviet Union’s seat on the UN Security Council, momentarily created an illusion of stat- ure satisfying enough to the Russian domestic audience without solv- ing Russia’s otherness problem, and counterintuitively weakened the hand of the liberalizers. This development was not unlike the obstacle Russian Westernizers faced in the first half of the nineteenth century when Russia’s participation in the Concert of Europe had allowed Nicholas to keep reformers at bay.
I do not intend to downplay the challenges Russia has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it is important to draw attention to the fact that Russia was given the benefit of the doubt much longer
5 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 78.
post-defeat and rewarded much more easily than both Turkey and Japan for doing far less than either to be conciliatory. What is more, this dynamic is prominently at play again. These days, both Turkey and Japan are struggling to chart a more autonomous foreign policy course away from the influence of their traditional Western partners, and despite decades of loyalty to the West, hardly a week goes by without a proclamation from a Western observer that either country has been or is about to be “lost.”
It is true that the last decade has been an uncharacteristically high- profile one for Turkey’s foreign policy. Under the leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey has taken firmer pos- itions in its dealings with its Western allies, on the one hand, and has displayed an increasing interest in cultivating ties with its Eastern and Southern neighbors, on the other hand. For instance, after an initial strong push for Turkey’s accession to the European Union, the AKP government seems to have lost interest in pursuing this trajectory and, despite the “Obama effect,” Turkey’s relations with the United States remain cooler at present than historically has been the case.6 On the flip side, Turkey is actively pursuing stronger economic ties with the Muslim world and Africa, regions mostly ignored throughout the last century.7 In other words, after almost a century of commitment to a staunch Western alliance, Turkey may be modifying its course.8 Interestingly, Japan has also recently come under the control of a non- establishment party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Like the AKP, the DPJ seems uncomfortable with the foreign policy status quo and has expressed a willingness to take Japan out of the American orbit in favor of strengthened ties with neighbors in the Eastern hemi- sphere. Yet neither what Turkey has done thus far nor what the DPJ government has declared it plans to do comes even remotely close to cutting ties with the West – so what exactly is the source of all the hand-wringing by Western commentators?
Moreover, after decades of pursuing Western-friendly policies in order to gain recognition, neither Turkey nor Japan has been able to find itself a secure place in the international order. The course charted
6 Grigoriadis, “Friends No More?”; Rachman, “America is Losing the Free World.”
7 “Turkey: Trade Shifts away from Europe,” Oxford Analytica Brief Service, February 2009, 1.
8 Bengio, “Altercating Interests”; Abramowitz and Barkey, “Turkey’s Transformers.”
by both Turkey and Japan since their respective defeats has until recently been to seek equal acceptance as “normal” states by their Western counterparts. In order to achieve this outcome, they commit- ted themselves to grand strategies that entailed aggressively adopt- ing Western models at home on the one hand, and cooperating with Western powers in foreign policy matters on the other. Both in their own way can be thought of as having successfully pursued this strat- egy to its logical end (Japan perhaps more so than Turkey) – the prob- lem is, the arriviste strategy itself is fundamentally limited: “The best he can be is a former stranger, ‘a friend on approval’ and permanently on trial, a person vigilantly watched and constantly under pressure to be someone else than he is, told to be ashamed of his guilt of not being what he ought to be.”9 And this is precisely the position both Turkey and Japan have found themselves in. Despite the great lengths they have gone to in order to transform themselves, both countries remain torn between the East and the West.
Given an understanding of international stigmatization, none of this should come as a surprise. Bauman notes that the promise of assimilation is a hollow one. Stigmatized strangers may
go out of their way to get rid of and to suppress everything which makes them distinct from the rightful members of the native community – and hope that a devoted emulation of native ways will render them indistinguishable from the hosts, and by the same token guarantee their reclassification as insiders, entitled to the treatment the friends routinely receive. The harder they try, however, the faster the finishing-line seems to be receding.10
In fact, the effort put into socialization is the very thing that makes it impossible for outsider states to achieve the kind of insider recogni- tion they seek: “the very good will of the stranger turns against him; his effort to assimilate sets him further apart, bringing his strangeness into fuller than ever relief and supplying the proof of the threat it contains.”11 This is why despite decades of loyalty and commitment to Western norms, both Turkey and Japan have immediately become suspect, notwithstanding the fact that in both cases the shifts in for- eign policy thus far seem to be more rhetorical than actual.
9 Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 72.
10 Ibid., p. 71. 11 Ibid., p. 78.
The ugly truth is that what is the best outcome for the West is not necessarily the best for Turkey or Japan (or Russia). The best outcome for the West is for Turkey and Japan to continue playing along, to keep pursuing belonging, but never really getting the recognition they crave. Sticking with that strategy would continue to affirm the objec- tivity, the superiority, the desirability of Western-ness. Essentially this is why the goal-post, the bar one has to clear in order to belong, keeps moving, keeps being rearticulated in established-outsider rela- tionships.12 This pattern is most obvious in the relations between Turkey and the European Union, but Japan’s and Russia’s relations with the core of the international system are also subtly undermined by the same dynamic: “The rules of the game are changed with little warning. Or, rather, only now the earnestly ‘self-refining’ strangers discover that what they mistook for a game of emancipation was in fact the game of domination.”13 Given the fact that gaining belonging through assimilation is a fool’s errand, it is actually rather rational for Turkey and Japan (and Russia) to experiment with other coping strategies.
The reader may wonder what has taken Turkey (or Japan) so long to discover (assuming they have) that the recognition strategy they were pursuing would never deliver the optimal outcome they were seeking. Why does Charlie Brown keep trying to kick Lucy’s ball, even though she yanks it away every time he tries? Lucy’s joke draws on the two features of his identity Charlie Brown is most insecure about: friendship and sportsmanship. The fact of the matter is, the offer of recognition through assimilation is extremely seductive to outsiders because it offers an end to what bothers them most: ambiva- lence, ontological doubt, uncertainty.
The second (ugly) reason why countries like Turkey and Japan have kept at this strategy for so long is because it offered them a degree more recognition than those who were even worse off. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, in addition to directly seeking recognition from the West, both Turkey and Japan have pursued side strategies for status enhancement revolving around attempts to position the countries in a
12 “The stranger had been promised that full ‘domestication’ would follow cultural reform … The bluff of this promise is called the moment it has been taken seriously and matched with a behaviour it ostensibly required. The real obstacles guarding the entry are now revealed. They prove to be economic, political and above all social …” Ibid., p. 80. See also Bourdieu, Distinction.
13 Bauman, p. 71.
mediator or bridging role between the East and the West. It is claimed that Turkey and Japan are in unique positions to help their neighbors because they are the first among their “kind” to reconcile the various tensions between local culture and modern norms. Such a strategy is often framed as progressive and beneficent, but it in fact reinforces the status hierarchies in the international system, and ensures for Turkey and Japan a more privileged position vis-à-vis their Asian neighbors. In fact, despite the “bridging” rhetoric often employed by both coun- tries, any regional role has been for the most part a by-product or an afterthought to these countries’ quests to gain equal recognition from the West.
Instead of making an effort to regain a more powerful status by committing fully to regional causes (and becoming advocates for regional complaints), both Turkey and Japan have attempted to frame their Western orientation as the reason why they should matter in their regions. Implicit in this attitude was an endorsement and legitimation of the modern/Western ontology of ranking states. Modernization14 was the right thing to do – Turkey and Japan had something to teach states in their respective regions because they had traveled down that path first, just as they had themselves learned from the West. Or as Goffman put it: “The stigmatized 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 evi- dently stigmatized than himself the attitudes the normals take to him.”15 This kind of attitude was especially evident in Turkish actions in the 1920s. We see a similar dynamic at work with the Japanese actively pushing the Japanese model of development in Asia,16 and remaining rather aloof to regional and Third World efforts to ques- tion the international economic order. In both cases, problems in the “Third World” are severed from their international context and reduced to being responsibilities of various local governments – if Turkey and Japan could solve17 their modernity problem, so could
14 Of course, this term meant something other in the 1920s than it did in the 1950s.
15 Goffman, Stigma, p. 107.
16 Modernization and development with an Asian twist; just as the Turkish model is modernization and secularism within an Islamic context.
17 I am not claiming that Turkey solved this problem, but rather depicting how the Turks framed the issue.
other disadvantaged states, and if they couldn’t, the implication is that it was because they were not as deserving.18
It is possible to read the so-called sea-changes in recent Turkish and Japanese foreign policy simply as an extension and an amplifica- tion of this previous side strategy. In the post-Cold War international system, the limits of pursuing a strategy of assimilation are becoming harder to ignore. Ironically, this has much to do with the fact that the norms of the international system have become more homogenized due to the past successes of socialization pressures. This is also the second19 reason why post-Soviet Russia has been much less commit- ted to socialization as a strategy for coping with its stigmatization than either Turkey or Japan were after their defeats.
When the Ottoman Empire was defeated, the international sys- tem was not yet truly global. There were still territories without full sovereign recognition; most European powers still had colonies and mandates; and the Bolsheviks were an unknown and unpredictable factor. Western powers worried that any one of these variables could be manipulated by the new Turkish state. Similarly, during the Cold War, the existence of the Eastern Bloc and even the nonaligned move- ment created the illusion that Japan might defect. As documented in Chapter 4, despite the occupation, the presence of communist sympa- thies among the Japanese population, for instance, remained a serious concern for both Japanese policy-makers and their American allies. However, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the only viable20 norma- tive alternative to the Western model also collapsed: in this post-Cold War world, where else would Russia go, if not toward the West (and to the “End of History”)?
The fact that Turkey and Japan emerged from their defeats into tiered and divided international environments made them seem more likely to defect, but it is those environments which made the recon- struction efforts undertaken to gain respect from the West seem worthwhile to domestic constituencies. Strategies designed to obfus- cate or correct stigmatizing attributes are much more attractive in rigidly and openly stratified societies; the pay-off is much higher.
18 Such an attitude also justifies the imperial past.
19 In addition to the comparatively friendly treatment it received after defeat as discussed above.
20 Again, as discussed in Chapter 2, substantively, the Soviet model was never much of an alternative at all to the Western state ideal. But socially, it was.
Unlike Turkey or Japan, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia faced an international environment wherein the “ideal” state norm had come to be expressed in universalized language and there seemed to be no explicit standards for picking winners and losers. Emulation under those conditions has uncertain status yields. Furthermore, lack of alternative logics in the international system made the West less willing to feign interest in Russia’s overtures – an additional factor which also dampened whatever initial enthusiasm the Russian public felt about adopting Western models. As discussed in Chapter 5, all of these factors have thus far led Russia down a novel but somewhat impotent path: recently, Russia has been maintaining a stance of rhet- orical hostility but is unable to reject the normative order in actuality by offering an alternative worldview. This performance is directed to some degree at capturing recognition from the East and the South.
This is where the possible shift in Turkey’s and Japan’s trajec- tory points to a convergence with Russia. Turkey and Japan increas- ingly have to face the reality that in today’s international context, states such as Iran and China – states which are more secure in their “Asian”/“Eastern” identities – seem to have more cachet with non- Western populations increasingly disenfranchised with the hollow promises of international society than the “teacher’s pets”. Yet, Turkey and Japan are very much constrained by trajectories they followed in the twentieth century – and cannot put up the rhetorical performance Russia is offering without risking their hard-earned semi-Western position (especially considering the reaction even little protestations are getting). It is not surprising, therefore, that both countries have latched onto the discourse of the “Clash of Civilizations” as a way out of this conundrum – both Turkey and Japan see an opportunity in this “clash” to turn what used to be an afterthought, i.e. relations with the East, into an explicit strategy to redefine their importance for the West. To that end, both Turkey and Japan are actively spon- soring conferences and workshops21 devoted to exploring civiliza- tional issues. From a systemic perspective, there is not that much
21 Turkey hosted its most recent “Alliance of Civilizations” conference on April 6, 2009, with high-profile names such as US President Obama, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and many prime ministers from around the world in attendance. See Leheny, “The Samurai Ride to Huntington’s
Rescue,” for a discussion of Japan’s similar efforts to capitalize on “the clash of civilizations.”
difference between this strategy and that favored by Russia at the moment. Without a substantial ideology of rejection to back it up, the Eastward-looking Eurasianist policies differ from the “bridging” efforts primarily in their rhetorical tone.
Given that conclusion, this might strike the reader as an inop- portune moment to call for more attention to be paid to the social nature of the international system. It could be further argued that the international system, however socially stratified it had been in the past, has, over time, come to resemble more or less the world realists have described – one in which social constraints and stigmas play an increasingly diminished role. If that is true, perhaps mainstream IR theories are wrong about their projections into the past, but are not so problematic if we want to make sense of the present or predict the future.
I am willing to concede that the international system, very much like its liberal domestic cousin, has moved from patterns of overt stratification and stigmatization toward formal equality and dis- courses of cultural tolerance.22 Overall, this has been a positive devel- opment. I do not have a problem with the argument that the system of sovereign equality created after World War II is preferable to the nineteenth-century Standard of Civilization. It is also plausible that as a result of these trends, more states in the international system have come to resemble (or resemble to a greater degree than before) the ideal-typical agents they were always assumed to be by IR theory. However, neither of those arguments should lead us to conclude that social stratification is a thing of the past in international relations. There are still “established” and “outsiders,” “natives” and “stran- gers” in the international society. What is more, the make-up of those groups has changed very little in the intervening century between the Standard of Civilization and the present day. If anything, that fact should give us serious pause for thought.
For the majority of states in the international system, their place- ment along the historical established-outsider divide has been most formative and path-determinative. We know that social stratification persists in domestic systems even in the face of legal equality, and we
22 “Emancipated from modern hubris, the postmodern mind has less need for cruelty and humiliating the Other; it can afford Richard Rorty’s ‘kindness.’” Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 257.
also know how much of an obstacle social inequality may be for indi- viduals to fully exercise their autonomy – how is that lesson so eas- ily forgotten in international relations? In this book, I have analyzed the behavior of those most “fortunate” among the outsiders: states that had enough of an ontological coherence, bureaucratic tradition, material base, and institutional framework to cope with the stigma- tization that accompanies being on the wrong side of the social divide in a relatively autonomous manner. Even such states were traumatized by their manner of incorporation into the modern international order, and their state identities have evolved around that experience. Most states in the periphery were absorbed in a much more violent manner; and they face the international normative order with fewer resources, even fewer choices, and greater stigma burdens.
The theoretical neglect of the social divisions that dominated inter- national relations for the duration of the modern states system was and is a serious problem. My analysis above, as I am sure astute read- ers have recognized, leads to the rather twisted conclusion that with- holding equal recognition from defeated outsider states makes them more willing to emulate the dominant international norms domes- tically and play nice internationally. However, we should not forget that societal models that did not deliver on their upward mobility promise proved rather unstable in modernity. There may be a limit to how long the majority of the world’s population will tolerate living under an international system whose rules they have very little input in, and one in which even the most successful of outsiders (e.g. Japan) are never accorded the full respect that their material success entitles them to. There is a reason why the schadenfreude felt at the expense of Western powers over a wide-ranging scale of phenomena, from the 9/11 attacks to the verbal dressings-down delivered by Putin, is not confined to the immediate supporters of the perpetrators, but rather is widespread throughout what is now called “the Global South.”
As I pointed out in the Introduction, with reference to Orhan Pamuk’s remarks, what people want most of all is to matter, and what keeps their faith in any system is the hope that they may matter some day, even if they do not today. This is also why, for instance, people all around the world were enthusiastic about the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States – in his person, he sym- bolized the hope that “others” and “outsiders,” too, can be acknowl- edged one day. I do not want to overstate the importance of emotions
in foreign policy, but I do want to offer a humble correction to a vast literature that, for the last 50 years, has largely pretended that they cease to exist once one crosses the imaginary threshold of the “inter- national.” To deny the existence of an international society with its own logic of stratification is not a neutral act – it is an act of power which perpetuates those very dynamics.
Acknowledging that people need hope and a modicum of real recog- nition in order to keep trudging along is not romanticism. It is the height of rationality. As Hegel pointed out, mankind’s eternal quest for recog- nition is intimately connected with our drive toward rationality. The rational solution for long-term systemic stability is in striking the right balance between upward mobility and privilege distribution. Simply put, we need a more meritocratic international system, instead of one that is only described as such. In domestic societies, the social inequalities cre- ated by historical injustices make meritocracy a difficult ideal to achieve. However, in the IR discipline, we have barely even begun to accept that such social inequalities exist. It is about time we remembered.
There is also something that “outsiders” can do about their situ- ation. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, the choice between Herodianism and Zeolotry is really no choice at all because both choices reaffirm the privileged position of the West, of modernity, as the center to react to and to order one’s behavior around. Both the Zealots and the Herodians live under the imagined gaze of the West. Iran is no more free of the trappings of modernity, of the trauma of Westernization, than Turkey is. The only way out of the impasse is to truly make no choice at all, and resign oneself to living in a condi- tion of ambivalence. True manifestation of agency, of sovereignty, of positive freedom can only be attained by facing one’s own ontological insecurity, by realizing that self-construction is an inevitable part of existence. The master, the natives, the established do not ever address the tentativeness of their ontological condition – they side-step the issue by reveling in the simulated dynamics of mastery, agency, and domination. Furthermore, because of the seeming naturalness of their condition, they are most likely oblivious to the fact that their self- image is an illusion. This is why in Kojève’s reading of the Hegelian master–slave dynamic, the “slave” is the only party with real hope of attaining true freedom.23 Not having the protective cushion of
23 Kojève, Introduction, pp. 20–2.
normativity means being forced to face the world every day in its uncertainty, to be forced to be an agent every day, to not have the abil- ity to take anything for granted, to have to consider every action as a potentially constitutive performance – and that is very frightening (not to mention tiring). This is perhaps why in the world of outsid- ers, those who are best suited to grasp the full implications of such a condition have been the worst offenders in perpetuating the hier- archies of modernity. Both auto-Orientalism and its mirror image, the escape into strangerhood, have the same limited redeeming value of fixing one’s place in the world. If only outsiders could realize that they do not have to settle for that and accept that an ordered world with a fixed center is itself a sham, they may perhaps be able to liber- ate themselves.
I opened the book by talking about Orhan Pamuk, so let me close with him as well – he made the point I am trying to make here much more eloquently in his Nobel Lecture:
This means that my father was not the only one, that we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a centre. Whereas the thing that compels us to shut ourselves up to write in our rooms for years on end is a faith in the opposite; the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people all the world over resemble each other. But this, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled opti- mism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins, of being left outside. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt towards the West all his life – I have felt this too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love–hate relationship with the West, to behold the other world he has built on the other side.
It is my humble hope that this book will be one of the many stepping stones to that other side, the side without a center.
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