Paper WISC RodriguesVieira

Framing anarchy: a framework to analyse foreign policy based on interactions among state, market, and civil society actors
in domestic and transnational levels

Mr. Vincius Rodrigues Vieira (Doctoral Student in International Relations, Nuffield College, University of Oxford) (E-mail: vinicius.rodriguesvieira@nuffield.ox.ac.uk) Paper presented at the Third Global International Studies Conference (WISC) University of Porto, Porto, Portugal, 20th August, 2011 Section: Domestic constraints in foreign policy Word Count: 10,737 (without bibliography)
Rodrigues Vieira-Framing Anarchy: Foreign Policy and Market, Civil Society, and State Actors
1. Introduction The world has been witnessing since the 1980s three major phenomena in political terms: 1) an increasing interconnection and interdependence among states in a context in which non-state actors play an increasing role in politics; 2) the rise of identity as a relevant factor in public life as much as class is; and 3) the emergence of powers out of the West, such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the BRICs.1 Each phenomena posits a theoretical question: 1) how domestic structures change vis--vis foreign influences; 2) how noneconomic factors interplay with economic ones in shaping national preferences; and 3) what are the sources of empowerment of countries in world where many see states as losing importance in comparison to non-state actors located in the market and the civil society? Current theories of International Relations (IR) face limitations in explaining these complex interactions, insofar as the linkages between the state and the societal actors in both domestic and international realms are either ignored or not fully taken into account. These accounts remain state-centred or economic-centred. Power, however, is not only economic or political. Power is essentially symbolic, bounded by conceptions of societysets of constitutive norms related to existence, focused on identity, and survival, with aims to organise economic production. These conceptions, however, are not shaped and reshaped as states and societal actorseconomic and non-economicwant. Moreover, power also has a social component. Such a fact limits the explanations of the origins of policy-making in times of change, such as the post-Cold War period. During these periods of change, societal actors are not in constant, well-defined positions, forming stable interest groups. They may transit across diverse identities to which they are linked in order to either increase or preserve power in economic and social terms and, therefore, increase their chances to have political leverage to legitimize their views of the world through discourses and material capabilities.
1
BRICs is an acronym that refers to the fast-growing developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. It was coined by the bank Goldman Sachs in 2001. These countries now have regular meetings and, in the end of 2010, invited South Africa to join them, forming the BRICS.
In this paper, I intend to develop an analytical framework that can be generalizable to situations in which countries became more powerful and, therefore, due to their changing systemic position, changed or adapted their foreign policy. The framework is based on the sociological notion of fields/arenas2 and seeks to explain how systemic transformations affectin economic and associational termssocietal actors located within countries, and eventually impact policy-making and international regimes. In the development of the framework, I confront my theoretical concerns with major works of main schools of thought in IR that sought to integrate domestic and systemic independent (causal) variables. None of those schoolsRealism, Liberalism, Marxism, and Constructivismsuffice because they either ignore contexts in which societal actors are influenced by multiple identities or, in considering identity issues, does not frame them in clear analytical units and leaves out economic/productive factors, considering them only in the sphere of discourses. Therefore, in being a theoretical tool that allows the combination of production and identity issues, the notion of fields can contribute to bridge the divide rationalism-constructivism in IR. The paper is organised as follows: first, I discuss the ontological assumptions and epistemological implications of IR theories and the limitations they present in accounting for phenomena in periods of systemic transformation. Afterwards, I introduce the notion of fields to IR, defining the fields (arenas of production, association, and redistribution, as well as the state-as-government in the domestic arena only) that compose both domestic and international spaces and how societal actors located in both operate bounded by conceptions of existence and of survival, interacting between different fields. In this stage, to consolidate my argument, I bring elements of the theoretical accounts that I criticized earlier. The conclusion revaluates the arguments presented and discusses the trade-offs the framework implies in terms of empirical research. Whenever it is possible, I illustrate my theoretical
Bourdieu 1991, 185.
arguments with concrete cases, especially from Brazil and India, two of the BRICs whose foreign policy and systemic position changed after economic liberalisation in the 1990s. 2. Ontological assumptions, epistemological implications, and general limitations In epistemological terms, IR research has largely been framed by the agent-structure positivist opposition, which considers both choices and constraints actors face in a given environment. Although some constructivists (namely the non-post-modernist ones)3 buy into this assumption to develop their research, rational-choice scholars have been the most engaged in this dichotomy. Nonetheless, as Snidal says, the rational-choice approach might seem ineffective for studying change. The concept of equilibrium is inherently static since it is defined as the absence of any tendency to change.4 More flexible than rational-choice scholarship, constructivist approacheseven when they work in terms of agents and structuredo not consider the possibility of detaching actors from the environment where they are located. Such assumption, however, has not been used as an advantage over rationalism, including on this rational-choice, to provide better tools to understand continuity and change in the international system. This fault-linefrom both rationalist and constructivist approachesderives from a common ontological problem: the idea that anarchy is at the origin of the international system even when, as it is in the case of constructivism, processes of socialization takes place and bounds actors together. On the one hand, the anarchical assumption makes rationalists to overemphasizedue to different reasons according to the approachsystemic constraints (anarchy itself in the case of structural realists and international regimes as means to deal with anarchy in the case of Neoliberals). On the other, the same assumption leads
Smith (2000, 391) defines three variants of social-constructivism: neo-classical, based on intersubjective meaning; naturalistic, which derives from scientific realism, being, thus, closer to rationalist scholarship; and post-modernist, that proposes a break with scientific epistemology. 4 Snidal 2002, 82.
constructivists to deny the fact that constructions (norms and institutions) over anarchy are not random or only historically-contingent. To put it simply, nation-states were not created on a tabula rasa. Economic and social exchanges used to happen between political units prior to the Westphalia Treaty. So the statesystem was created upon a network of material and social-cultural exchanges, bounded by a given set of ideas. As Fearon and Wendt argue, material is not the same thing as objective... material factors matter at the limit, but how they matter depends on ideas.5 The latter can also be either causal mechanisms or constitutive parts of the social world.6 In fact, as Ruggie says, constitutive rules are the institutional foundation of international life. No consciously organized realm of human activity is imaginable without them, including international politics.7 Ideas, thus, have at least three roles in human life: firstly, they frame material capabilities, such as the value we attribute to goods. Secondly, they frame social capabilities, like group identities. Lastly, ideas are tools through which we interpret both capabilities. Thus, unlike Lake and Powell assume, the strategic setting in which choices are made depends not only on information asymmetries,8 but also on the cognition of the available information. In dealing with the opposition agency-structure, Realism, Liberalism, and Marxism miss the same point: identities play a role in production and, therefore, in economic foreign policy,9 and have more importance in preference formation in times of change since distribution of power among societal actors is likely to be in flux. To understand the dynamic of redistribution in critical junctures and, thus, of policy-making and shifts in conceptions of existence and survival, it is needed to go beyond traditional political economic approaches and to bring in identities and norms as explicit analytical elements.
5 6
Fearon and Wendt 2002, 58. Ibid., 60. 7 Ruggie 1998, 873. 8 Lake and Powell 1999, 30-31. 9 For a non-systematic account of this argument, please read Sterling-Folker 2009, 137.
If one takes for granted that economic factors, particularly changing prices, coped with political ones, such the access to state institutions, the Pluralist-Liberal literature would suffice for this analysis. In spite of the existence, prior to domestic pluralism, of a literature that tried to unfold the domestic-international links, mainly through Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA),10 the most substantial contribution to the field emerged in the end of the 1980s, with Putnams two set level game metaphor,11 which represented an advance within the Positivist school, dominated at that time by the Neorealism-Neoliberalism debate.12 However, its parsimonious design ignores complex interactions between the state-as-government, the market, and the civil societythe major units of analysis in contemporary politics.13 In the subsequent years, two major trends emerged within Pluralist Theory, one more focused on economic factors and other that attributed to institutional constrains more leverage. The first explains changes in domestic coalitions as related mainly to shifts in the international prices, an argument derived from Neoclassical Economics. 14 The second unites economic interest with constraints given by institutions15 and asymmetries of information within the state and market and between these two arenas.16 Eventually, however, what prevail are economic interests, as in Moravcsiks analysis of the process of European integration. He argues that this process reflected patterns of commercial advantage, the relative bargaining power of important governments, and the incentives to enhance the credibility of interstate commitments. Most fundamental of these was commercial interest.17 Integration advanced while and when there was convergence among the negotiating parts. In this case, however, preferences are take for granted, perhaps because most of his empirical
10
Among the foundational works in FPA, it is worth mentioning Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin 1954, which focuses on decision-making process rather than only on foreign policy outputs. 11 Putnam 1988. 12 Among other references, for a summary of this debate please read Nye 1988. 13 Hurrell 2007. 14 Frieden and Rogowski 1996, 29. For an earlier version of this argument, please see Milner 1988. 15 Keohane and Milner 1996, 244 and 251. 16 Ibid., 20. 17 Moravcsik 1998, 3.
case took place during a time of predominance of an economic paradigmKeynesianism and in a region of the world that is the part of the core of the system, being, thus, less vulnerable to critical junctures and, therefore, likely to face more stability. Nonetheless, in focusing on price variations, institutional constraints, and information asymmetries, Pluralism offers a comprehensive and relatively parsimonious account of the links between preference formation and decision-making in foreign policy. That said, such accomplishments do not eliminate the pitfalls of that approach. Firstly, there is still no consensus on how to define relevant domestic factors.18 Secondly, in accounting for domestic politics, pluralism that focuses on markets, institutions, and information does not have a clear theory of the international environment.19 Finally, the links between grassroots movements in non-economic issues and economic foreign policy still have to be better explored in analytical terms. Therefore, it is logic to hypothesize that identity issues play a role in the process of transfer of power among economic societal actors, such as firms and sectors. Such hypothesis reiterates the argument that those actors cannot be conceived only in economic terms, but also in what concerns identities. For analytical purposes, those actors could be equated to interest groups. Nonetheless, in order to conceive them in flux, I propose the division of societyin both domestic and international levelsinto two major fields: an arena of production and other of association. The former corresponds to the market, where commoditised flows and monetary accumulation talks place, whereas the latter is civil society, where identities are reproduced and discourses of appropriation of the social world are consolidated. Their overlap corresponds to the political arena, which in the domestic realm needs a fourth arena to coordinate redistribution and regulate the exchange domesticinternational: the state-as-government. Insofar as neither in market nor in civil society actors
18 19
Moravcsik 1993, 14. Ibid., 23.
always reach a consensus on how production should be appropriated and association should be organized, they turn to the state-as-government, which assumes a redistributive role in both material and identity terms. It means that sectors traditionally conceived only in economic terms, such as primary (raw materials), secondary (industry), and tertiary (services), are within civil society too and have access to the state-as-government. Other works already consider civil society as an analytical unit that interacts with the state and the market. For instance, Moravcsik uses the word civil society to describe the place where all interest groupseither economic or non-economicare located.20 Also, in his analysis of European integration, he establishes clear links among actors in domestic and international levels. In his own words, European integration can best be explained as series of rational choices made by national leaders. These choices responded to constraints and opportunities stemming from the economic interests of powerful domestic constituents, the relative power of each state in the international system, and the role of international institutions in bolstering the credibility of interstate commitments.21 However, as long as Moravcsik aims to explain policy outcomessomething that by now does not exist in the Doha Round, he considers preferences and actors as stable, leaving aside the possibility that the co-relation between economic and identity power might be in flux. Furthermore, despite the fact that Moravcsik and others had already explored the linkages domesticinternational under Pluralist lenses, there is no notice that the empirical cases were located in the periphery or semi-periphery of the world-system. Such a fact is enough to argue for the pursuit of analytical models that fit better in non-Western societies. In those societies, given the pattern of state-as-governments dominance over societal actors, state-centric approaches could suffice to explain national preferences in periods without significant transformations. Historical-Sociological works and Neo-Marxist ones, not
20 21
Moravcsik 1998, 22. Ibid., 18.
to mention the Realist tradition with a clear theory of the state, seem to provide a good account of this dynamic. In following State-Centric Realist premises,22 Brooks and Wohlforth consider that, under capitalist markets, economy became disentangled from the political arena, which, in turn, implies in distinct interests from political actors, such as political parties and those located within the state and economic ones23. Nonetheless, they do not mention if a relative detachment from the political arena happened with the arena of association. Neoclassical Realism, which tries to integrate both systemic and unit-level variables,24 also leaves aside civil society as an arena relatively autonomous from economic interests and where non-economic interests arise. Such a critique is further elaborated ahead. Marxist approaches, when they consider the domestic arena, also tend to focus on the state, which is considered an extension of the bourgeoisie power.25 Only class identity is taken into account, a factor that does not suffice to explain Brazils and Indias cases due to the same reasons domestic pluralism does not either. Arrighis account of successive worldhegemonies advances this question, insofar as it addresses how one hegemon establishes dominance not only through material capabilities, but also in entailing common values that holds the units of the international system together.26 This is a Neo-Marxist approach, which is based upon analytical categories defined by Gramsci to overcome the materialist excesses of original Marxism. Among these categories, there is civil society, which stands [b]etween the economic structure and the state with its legislation and its coercion,27 serving as the locus of resistance and legitimation of the system through informal norms and collective actors. That is, ideas and norms have a role in processes of change and continuity in both domestic and systemic terms. For Neo-Marxists, however, systemic trends ultimately prevail,
22 23
Among the major works of this tradition, there is Gilpin 1981, and Krasner 1978. Brooks and Wohlforth 2008, 98. 24 Lobell, Ripsman, and Taliaferro 2009, 13. 25 Krasner 1978, 25. 26 Arrighi 1993. 27 Gramsci 1971, 208.
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which complicates the detachment of those trends from local shifts. In the Brazilian and
Indian cases, systemic accounts would predict a further liberalisation than actually happened and, therefore, a foreign policy more cooperative with the West. International Political Economy, which combines the interplay between the power and wealth motive (microlevel) or between international capitalism and its political organization (macro-level)29, could attain analytical concerns with non-economic factors, but it leaves aside identity issues as domestic pluralism does. Constructivism and other approaches that emphasize processes of socialisation among which I include the Historical-Sociological literaturehave analytical elements to understand the interplay between economic and non-economic issues. Nonetheless, due to the lack of clear units of analysis, those approaches cannot explain how ideas interact with material factors. Those accounts only say why that interaction happens: material-identity exchange is a matter of fact because we live in a socially constructed world. However, Wendt recognizes that ideas are not alone in the social world. There is rump materialism, a residual category of elements that, in spite of being socially shared, are not based on culture, such as geographical and natural factors.30 The problem, though, lies in the fact that it is still unclear how rump materialism interacts with socially-built beliefs. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that Constructivism sets up processes of change, such as reflexivity (social learning), the mechanisms through which they operate remain under-theorized.31 Under this account, ideational structures have more than a regulative effect on actors behaviour, constituting them in a mutual relationship. Actors, thus, can, through acts of social will, change structures.32 What is still missing is how constraints to reframe the world operate even in nonstatic periods. This requires theorizing how the Wendtian conceptions of self that states have
28 29
Teschke 2008, 173. Guzzini 1998, 160. 30 Wendt 1999, 130-1 and 136. 31 Drulk 2006. 32 For a summary of this argument, please read Copeland 2006.
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are changed. Also, the lack of clear analytical units generates a contradiction within Constructivism. Structured as a critique of Neorealism and, to a less extent, to Neoliberalism, Constructivism preserves the rationalist state-centrism, in which the market and the civil society are missed as analytical units. Up to date, there is no notice of systematic account of Constructivism in economic factors. Moreover, the social genesis and maintenance of identity has not been systematized either. Manns and Tillys Historical-Sociology attempted to do so, but their analytical units remain fuzzy and with unclear distinctions between the domestic and international realms. Furthermore, while a broad conception of international identity explains preference-formation in the analysed cases (a why question), the how question remains unanswered. 3. Defining fields in International Relations The concept of fields was created by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In his own words, [t]he field as a whole is defined as a system of deviations on different levels and nothing, either in the institutions or in the agents, the acts or the discourses they produce, has meaning except relationally, by virtue of the interplay of oppositions and distinctions.33 Following other Constructivist works, this is a political-cultural approach, as long as it presupposes that each field composes a set of norms, which defines relations between actors within it. According to Fligstein, the first author who has applied Bourdieus concept to markets, fields contain collective actors who try to produce a system of domination in that space.34 This, however, does not mean pure power, but also rules, as long as a field is an autonomous universe, a kind of arena in which people play a game which has certain rules, rules which are different from those of the game that is played in the adjacent space.35 Mann also employs the term arena in his social theories, but specifically to refer to the international
33 34
Bourdieu 1991, 185. Fligstein 2001, 15. 35 Bourdieu 1991, 215.
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realm. However, as Hobden argues, Mann never defines it, although suggests that it is a place for competition and conflictsimilar to the Bourdieuan idea of fields.36 The mechanisms which Constructivism misses can be unpacked once the constitution of the fields I defined above and the patterns of relationships among them are clarified. Each field37 is a political-cultural construction, which, however, is influenced by relationships of power and norms in contiguous fields and subfields, as collective societal actors might be conceived. Conceptions of existence and of survival set limits to societal action, particularly in what concerns the process of reframing fields. Those definitions and dynamics will be explored ahead. For now, it suffices to say that, in conceiving the market, the civil society, the political arena, and the state-as-government as fields that are bounded by conceptions of existence and survival, the model considers how capital/capabilities (material and social conditions to exercise power) and the interpretation of those capabilities of a given country change vis--vis its own constraints and those of the world-system and how those both constraints changed. Unlike in the agent-structure dichotomy, in an analytical model based on fields the description of both domestic and international arenas is not static. In this model, there are grey zones, located at the periphery of these arenas. The peripheral areaswhich are not necessarily geographical, but, as the other arenas above described, abstract/theoretical representations of social domains of actionlack clear rules. More than nothing, power prevails there, as happens in illegal activities, not directly legitimized by the state-asgovernment (figure 1). In each arena, societal groups try less to maximise their interests than to survive materially and in terms of identity vis--vis each other. These identities, expressed in conceptions of existence and survival, in turn, shape national trajectories38 and might be influenced by conceptions that come from outside the domestic realm. In the international
36 37
Hobden 1998, 132. Bourdieu 1991, 185. 38 Zysman 1994.
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sphere, these conceptions hold together the system, which is better understood if conceived as a society,39 and are legitimised in the international political arena through acts of consent and power in which hegemons and international organisations play a central role. Figure 1 Fields and transversal subfields/sectors domestic and international arenas
Domestic arena International arena
Source: Own elaboration, based on Rodrigues Vieira 2010, 33.
3.1.
Conceptions of existence and conceptions of survival
Actors cannot reframe fields as they want. There are limitations, given not only by the rules and power distribution within each arena and the connections with societal actors in other fields. Long-term narrativeswhich emerge through multi-causal processes, ranging from state policies to the action of epistemic communities40frame fields, composing a dimension of norms that enables different degrees of collective action in productive, associational, and redistributive terms. These long-term narratives correspond to conceptions of existence and survival.
39 40
Bull 1995. Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, 402.
14
Conceptions of existence, however, last longer than conceptions of survival because they are less linked to practical issues, being more applicable to asynchronic links. Both, however, are what constructivists would call constitutive norms.41 Conceptions of existence tie together different eras based on foundational myths in order to attribute, across history, meaning to societal units of organisation. These conceptions are always historically structured, fictions with real effects, historical narratives. They are meta-paradigms that eventually structure power and rules (regulative norms)42, although might be incrementally changed through shifts in the distribution of productive and associational capabilities, or suddenly broken apart in revolutionary situations that create tabula rasa contexts. Among these conceptions, there are nationalist discourses, religions, philosophies of life. To use Manns definition, it is an ideological power, which eventually set norms of behaviour. 43 In studies within IR, conceptions of existence are relevant as long as they contribute to bind together societal actors in attributing them a collective identity that conforms and is conformed to micro-identities that emerge from subfields, such as ethnic groups. The most relevant conception of existence in an IR study is nationalism. An example is the discourses on racial democracy44 and on secularism45 which framed ideas about national identity and both social and state action during most of the 20th Century in Brazil and India, respectively. In both Brazilian and Indian cases, those nationalist discourses aimed to incorporateat least in symbolic termsinto the nation any person who were born in, respectively, Brazils and Indias territory, no matter their ethnic or religious background. Nonetheless, conceptions of existence may be replaced by new ones in times of social disruption, as it was the case of Nazism in Germany, in 1930s, which became its own national creed after the Weimar Republic.
41 42
Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 891. Ibid. 43 Hobden 1998, 120. 44 Rodrigues Vieira 2008. 45 Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta 2001.
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Also, those conceptions of existence providedand, to some extent, still provide most of the acceptable limits for institutional reforms. For instance, Racial Democracy in Brazil and Secularism in India implied in nationally-based projects of development, including in material/economic terms as the ISI experience shows. If, in the 1990s, reforms in Brazil and India sought to dismantle the inward-looking development strategy that had been in place since the 1930s, later in the decade and more clearer in the 2000s, interventionism became fashionable again.46 This is evidence that the change in the mainstream conception of survival in the world economy, from Keynesianism to Neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s, 47 faced limits in Brazil and India thanks for the conceptions of existence existent in each nation-state and which were more suitable for state interventionism than for economic laissez-faire. In spite of losing relative economic leverage, groups can resist or at least adapt themselves to process of change if they are more linked to mainstream conceptions of existence in the country. The hypothetical mechanisms through which it happens will be detailed ahead. For now, it suffices to keep on mind that conceptions of existence constrain changes in conceptions of survival even in times of critical junctures. Conceptions of survival structure immediate actions of societal actors through framing patterns of production and association with immediate focus in economic organisation. As conceptions of survival, Keynesianism and ISI supported stateinterventionism, generating expectations among entrepreneurs on state-relief, while Neoliberalism emphasises competition, stimulating less state-centric solutions, without meaning a smaller role for the state, which does play a role in creating markets and promoting de-regulation.48 They tend to last for a shorter time and are less stable than conceptions of existence because they are more susceptible to external junctures and have an
46 47
Bresser-Pereira 2009; Kohli 2009. Hall 1986. 48 Polanyi 2001.
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immediate character. Crises in production, for instance, may require new paradigms that will be converted into policies and, in turn, reframe societal action. An example is the collapse of Keynesianism in the 1970s as both a set of economic ideas and a set of policies for social organisation, which opened room for the development of deregulatory policies based on the Neoliberal economic paradigm that had been acquiring respectability among academics in the previous years.49 On the other hand conceptions of existence are much more dependent on arenas that in which the flows tend to be more national/endogenous-based, as it is the case of the field of association and the state as government. In fact, it is not a coincidence that states-as-territories where societal actors within the arena of association and the state as government lack internal cohesiveness and a coherent and legitimate discourse that binds them together are more vulnerable to foreign pressures, as it was the case of just-born African states that in the 1980s onwards were submitted by international organisations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to structural-adjustment programs which later revealed to be unfit to local realities.50 However, Brazil and India resisted to liberalisation until almost 20 years after the first challenges to Keynesianism. So it is inevitable to ask whether these empirical facts challenge the notion of critical juncture as a period of systemic transformation that affects all members of a given system, such as the international one. The literature on historicalinstitutionalism has devoted some attention to achieve a better definition and a better tool to define a critical juncture, although there is no consensus on that. That said, evidence suggests that one can talks about systemic juncturesimportant facts that cannot be defined a priori that impacts systemic units up to a point that they face a critical juncture51as it was the case
49 50
Hall 2010. For an example of how international organisations projects may be totally unfit for local realities and lack understanding of conceptions of existence and survival, please see Ferguson 1990. 51 Pierson 2004, 12.
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of Brazil and India in the beginning of the 1990s. Due to economic crisis, both countries embraced liberalisation amid confidence crisis from the international society and deficits in the balance of payments.52 Therefore, I contend that the resilience of conceptions of survival depends, on the one hand, on the coherence and legitimacy of conceptions of existence among the constituencies of a given country. This legitimacy, in turn, derives from the balance of economic and social power within countries. On the other hand, this balance impacts the process of continuous legitimation of the conceptions. Imbalances, such as inequality and sudden changes in a given status quo through critical junctures, undermine, first, the dominant conception of survival and, if this conception is not adapted to produce a new balance in productive and associational terms, the conception of existence is undermined. Another possible outcome is the corruption of the conception to the limit that the society that organises itself upon that same conception can still recognise itself as distinct from others. 3.2. Fields of societal action
To employ a Hegelian metaphor, conceptions of existence and survival are the superstructure/constitutive dimension that shapes/conforms the base, the practical realm, composed, in the presented model, by three major arenas: production, association, and redistribution, respectively correspondent, in current times, to the market, the civil society, and the political arena. These fields exist in both national and transnational levels. In the domestic arenaor state-as-territorythere is a fourth arena: the state-as-government. Societal actors organise themselves in subfields that are transversal to each arena. The ability to have powerhereby defined as the capacity of shaping a given field or fields according to ones interestsin any field is given by the leverage of each societal actor in terms of production and association. Power, thus, ultimately corresponds to symbolic
52
Bresser-Pereira 2009; Jenkins 1999.
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powerthe power to influence the frame and reframe conceptions of existence, of survival, and processes of redistribution in the political arena and within the state as government. It is not enough to have economic leverage without associational power53 and, thus, without linkages with the prevailing conceptions of existence and survival in a given country. Symbolic capital, thus, is equal to power under this equation, which comprises economic and social capital. This model resembles Gramscis ideas on civil society, the market and the state. In his framework, whereas the market corresponds to the economic sphere, which can be defined as the arena where individuals and firms exchange goods, services and assets, 54 the civil society serves as the locus of resistance and legitimation of the system55 through informal norms and collective actors (which I have been calling societal groups) that operate based on those norms. Nonetheless, in the proposed framework, civil society does not stand between the market and the state: it is a distinctive arena. It has an autonomous dynamic that eventually contributes to its legitimation and to the legitimation of the entire domestic arena: what happens in the market also contributes to the formation of conceptions of existence and survival and, therefore, to overall legitimation. Also, the need to conceptualise civil society in transnational terms demands its redefinition, insofar as there is no authority similar to states to conform it in the international arena. Firstly, I define the arena of production, followed by a discussion on the arena of association. As mentioned before, the overlapping between both corresponds to the arena of redistribution, where political disputes take place in both domestic and international arenas. Finally, I define the state-as-government in a Neo-Weberian fashion. In all steps, I frame the discussion on the literature on IR that seeks somehow to integrate the domestic and
53 54
As suggested by Bourdieu 1991, 170. See Fligstein 2001. 55 Gramsci 1971, 208.
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international realms, especially in what concerns the ultimate focus of this thesis formulation of economic foreign policy. Arena of production: The contemporaneous capitalist market corresponds to the arena of production in both domestic and international scales. Its rootswhich can be found on medieval trade networksprecede the formation of the state-system, with commercial exchanges among Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The creation of nation-states and their consolidation enhanced further the development of production as long as they established markets through institutions with the aim to reduce transaction costs56, such as a common currency, and conquered, in some cases, exclusive markets abroad through colonisation. The trend, however, was that economic actors were subordinated to state-based projects even when colonisation enterprises guaranteed significant freedom for private actors. With the development of capitalism and multiplication of economic actors, the field of production gained leverage vis--vis the state as government. In fact, as mentioned before, production precedes to the formation of the interstate system. In the cases of colonised countries, such as the case of Brazil and India, it is more evident than in the core of the system. Markets have already been conceptualised as fields, challenging the existence of universal rational behaviour in economics and the Neoclassical view that predicts convergence in market organisations as a result of the pursuit for efficiency. 57 In conceiving markets as fields, economic sociologists imply that 1) markets are political-cultural creations,58 2) they are embedded in other social relationships,59 such as the ones that seek redistribution (politics) and association (civil society), and 3) more than maximisation of
56 57
North 1981. Fligstein 2001, 68. 58 Ibid. 59 Granovetter 1985.
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profits, actors, particularly firms, seek stability in order to survive,60 and try to use the state to keep and develop rules and policies to attain such a goal. IR scholarship that seeks to integrate market actors and factors to explain transnational links has, in general, a more restricted view of the market and, therefore, of its relations with actors based within other fields, particularly those in the state-as-government. An example is the Realist tradition that recognizes the role of economic factors in IR. Gilpin considers that there is, at least in the modern world, a reciprocal relationship between economics and politics:61 economic factors influence state behaviour and changes in the political arena, whereas groups in the domestic arena attempt to organise economic relations to increase their relative share in the national surplus.62 Other Realists, however, does not defend the profit-maximising principle, emphasising the idea of stability that the market-asfields approach defends. For instance, Krasner, in his study of U.S. governments role in the supply of raw materials for the American economy, identifies that such supply is important not only for military purposes, but also in times of peace, when [u]nstable supplies and prices can upset the general functioning of the economy and strain on the political system.63 It could explain why Brazil, in spite of the prospective expansion of exports of primary goods with the openness of agricultural markets, resisted, during most of the negotiations at the Doha Round, to make further concessions in industrial tariffs.64 Domestic Pluralism sides more with the profit-maximizing rationale, although some authors within this tradition provide a clearer account of the interactions between actors in production and the state. Frieden and Rogowski demonstrate that, with liberalisation, there is a trend that sectors whose production and profits increase will support further openness in
60 61
Fligstein 2001, 70. Gilpin 1975, 21. 62 Gilpin 1981, 67-68. 63 Krasner 1978, 39. 64 Narlikar 2010.
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economy, whereas segments harmed by the process will seek protection from the state.65 This happens because, even when a government keeps the national economy relatively closed, a facilitation of trade thanks for technological changes (such as in transportation) impact domestic economies. In bringing politics into market, Rogowski takes a step towards an institutional approach. For him, beneficiaries of a process of change in economy will try to deepen it through political means, whereas the increase in economic leverage is likely to correspond to an increase of political power. Therefore, the shifts in income will be translated into disputes to influence the policy-making,66 a process that will be further discussed ahead, as state-as-government is conceptualised. An example can be the increasing influence of the agricultural sector over Brazilian government after the liberalisation. Marxism in IR considers that struggle of classes is at the centre in the dispute for power in the market. In this process, eventually the dominant class captures the state to make it work on its behalf. In transnational terms, systemic Structural-Marxist theories, such as Wallersteins world-systems, suffices in explaining overall patterns of integration of the periphery into the world economy.67 However, in considering the system as the unit of analysis, this approach misses the dynamics of change that may emerge within countries and empower them. Neo-Marxists face the same limitation,68 although at least they work with the concept of civil society, the departing point to overcome economic-centred accounts of the links between societal actors and the state. Arena of association: known in current times as civil society, it is the field where both individual and collective actors gather in groups to claim for participation in the outcomes of production and for a given pattern of redistribution. These claims may happen indirectly, through the structuration of new conceptions of existence and survival with the aim to replace
65 66
Frieden and Rogowski 1996, 29; Milner 1988, 15. Rogowski 1989. 67 Wallerstein 2007 68 Teschke 2008, 173.
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the dominant ones. Those groups are not necessarily derived from production relationships, arising from non-economic patterns of interaction, such as religions and ethnic groups. As in the arena of production, the basic constitutive elements of the arena of association precede the formation of the international system. Prior to the state system, there were transnational identities, such as the ones based on religion and ethnicity. In most cases, these patterns of association were linked to forms of political power, such as the Catholic Church in Western Europe during the Middle Age. However, the fact that these arenas that initially were polities does not exclude other: those patterns of association remained as historical legacies or were re-elaborated through conceptions of existence that compete with national identities, composing part of the arena of association. Also, even when countries followed primarily the logic of sovereignty and controlled its population strictly to extract resources for war, the arena of association already existed, although was not analytically relevant, given the low degree of freedom of its members. With the expansion of civil and political rights, societal actors within the arena gained more freedom to organise themselves. Within Social Sciences, civil societyas an analytical unitusually corresponds to the space of social life open and autonomous from the state and in which actors share a set of values that enable them to act collectively.69 Among those set of values, there are conceptions of existence. Nonetheless, the autonomy from the state is not constant. It is notorious that authoritarian regimes reframe, through the state apparatus, the organisation of civil society to back their policies. It happened in Latin American corporatist states, between 1930 and 1950, when labour unions could only operate as extensions of authoritarian regimes, such as Getlio Vargass presidency in Brazil (1930-1945).70 Likewise, co-optation of civil society may also happen due to its disintegration, with the atomisation of individuals, as it is argued
69 70
Diamond 1999, 221. Rodrigues Vieira 2008.
23
to have happened in the interwar period in Germany with social disruption and the rise of Nazism. Usually the degree of autonomy of civil society is co-related to the degree of democracy. The theoretical roots of this relationship lies in Toquevilles Democracy in America, which establishes a causal link between independent/autonomous association among people and the strength of democracy and government accountability. 71 Later, political theorists and social scientists enriched the idea of civil society with the concept of social capital. According to Coleman, this kind of capital corresponds to norms and expectations related to economic activities that do not arise from strict economic patterns.72 Putnam expanded this concept, including, as factors of high social capital, trust and the density of networks among societal actors in order to develop co-ordinated actions.73 Bourdieu, nonetheless, offers a different definition of social capital, more useful as a theoretical tool to understand interactions within the arena of association. According to him, [s]ocial capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively-owned capital, a credential which entitles them to credit.74 Considering this last definition, I assume that a societal actors social capital is high if the most important identities it is attached to are entrenched with the predominant conceptions of existence and survival in the country where the actor is based. Thus it is not possible to precisely talk about social capital of a society, but only of the social capital of each of its groups, as one defines the economic capital of a firm or an economic sector. Furthermore, Toquevilles notion of civil society can be left aside if on assumes that trust is
71 72
Tocqueville 1835. Coleman 1990, 302. 73 Putnam 1993, 173. 74 Bourdieu 1986.
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not the most important factor for social cohesiveness. It can be enhanced from the state-asgovernment or through redistributive arrangements. Now it is needed to mention a caveat about the separation of the social space of a country into three distinct arenas. Analytically, there is a gain to separate association from production rather than fusing both concepts in a wider definition of interest groups that includes social capital, therefore going beyond economic and organisational strength based on rational-choice assumptions.75 This separation makes evident the existence of noneconomic factors and its influence over public policiesincluding international economic negotiationswhose main target is the production becomes more evident. Thus, shifts in non-economic arrangements are better recognisable, as well as their impact in policy-making. Reification of production and association through the static notion of interest groups ignore these dynamics. Arena of redistribution: The combination of societal groups capabilities in production and association is directed correspondent to their potential strength (capital) in the arena of redistribution, that is, the political arena. I argue that the essence of politics is redistribution, although in social science this concept is often associated to left-wing parties. The fact, however, is that political disputes always impact power distribution, in spite of the fact that a power-holder hardly assumes that is working on the expansion of inequality. The key to persuade constituencies and hold powerin either democratic or non-democratic regimes lies in having some degree of symbolic capital, what enables a societal actor to defend its standpoint.76 In this context, it is worth to bring in Bourdieus expanded definition of this kind of capital. According to him, symbolic capital is nothing other than capital, of whatever kind, when it is perceived by an agent endowed with categories of perception arising from the
75 76
The classic statement on this conception of interest groups comes from Olson 1971. Bourdieu 1986.
25
incorporation of the structure of its distribution.77 The field of production of symbolic power was never well defined by Bourdieu. The obvious point one can derive from his theoretical framework, however, is that power is essentially symbolic, insofar as it creates the social world. The currency for power, under this logic, is capital, which has an economic (productive) and social (identity) dimension. This combined capital can be converted into political capital with aims to influence or control the state-as-government. Political capital, says Bourdieu, is a form of symbolic capital and the product of subjective acts of recognition and, in so far as its credit and credibility, exists only in and through representation, in and through trust, belief and obedience.78 With this capital, one can have access to the centralised regulation of social relations,79 which includes the legitimation of conceptions of existence and survival through the state. That is, actual symbolic power derives from the combination of strength in association, production, and redistribution. Symbolic power matters because redistribution gains legitimacy according to conceptions of existence and survival, on the one hand, and to the distribution of power/capabilities in association and productive terms. The more a societal group buys into dominant conceptions of existence and survival, the more likely it is to gain economic and associational leverage. Likewise, the more a group improves its position in productive and associational terms, the larger is its ability to influence patterns of redistribution, although not necessarily it will convert its economic-social capital into political power. Ideas, here, are essential, because they have the power to mobilise.80 In fact, Bourdieus concept of struggle over representation and identityparticularly in ethnic and
77 78
Bourdieu 1991, 238. Ibid., 192. 79 Hobden 1998, 121. 80 Bourdieu 1991,190.
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regional termsis twofold: involves mental images and social demonstrations that manipulate those images.81 These processes aim to bring societal actors into the state-as-government to either control or influence it, and, therefore, to impact public policies. As in any other field, the institutional design of the political arena varies from country to country. For instance, under representative democracy, there are political parties, state-society councils, and interest groups. This last case deserves a point of clarification: some actors usually conceived as interest groups, such as business associations, labour unions, or even large firms are not essentially located in the political arena. Nonetheless, these societal actors may move from the arena of productionas it is the case of firmsand from the arena of associationas it is the case of labour unions and business associationsto use their power and defend a given pattern of redistribution. Also, it is worth mentioning that, specifically in the case of Brazil and India, since the end of the 1970s at least there is a fourth relevant actor that transits constantly between civil society and the political arena: social movements. Before the advent of democracy, redistribution operated mainly through other means besides what is known as politics, such as war, rent-seeking, aristocracy, oligarchyall of which may have residual effects even up to nowadays. It is the case in Brazil and India, where political parties are now stable,82 although need to be complemented by other subfields, such as social movements83 or even family-controlled firms,84 to link societal actors in the arena of redistribution with the state-as-government. State-as-government: it is also a field, which establishes a symbolic and territorial domain over the parts of the arenas of production, appropriation and redistribution that compose the domestic arena. All states-as-territories have a state-as-government, although it varies in
81 82
Ibid., 221. For the Brazilian case, please read Power 2010. On India, please see Katzenstein, Kothari, and Mehta 2001. 83 Gowda and Sridharan 2007. 84 Ross-Schneider 2009.
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terms of institutional design and linkages between the sections of the other arenas that are part of either the domestic or international realm. Also, states-as-government are not necessarily unique entities, with complete internal coherence. They have multidimensional functions and tools.85 It may have specific bureaucracies (clusters) that are more effective in designing and implementing public policies than others thanks for specific institutional characteristics, such as the qualification of professionals as well as their commitment to work. In the literature on states in the developing world, Brazil and India are seen as inchoate states, which, despite their bureaucratisation, remain partially subjected to rentseeking.86 As far as this work is concerned, the most relevant section of the state-asgovernment is the one that is responsible for international trade negotiations. In the case of Brazil, it is the Ministry of Foreign Relations (known as Itamaraty), whereas in India the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MoC) designs the strategies at the WTO. Both are, according to the literature on the topic,87 bureaucracies with more autonomy and internal coherence than most of both Brazilian and Indian states. Itamaraty and MoC for instance, have no political appointees but the head of ministry, who is selected by the head of government. MoC, however, as mentioned in the introduction, has linkages with internal societal actors, from firms to business groups. That said, the fact is that the state, through the ministry, remains as a strong gatekeeper for societal demands. 88 In fact, especially in federal systems, such as the Brazilian and the Indian, stateness is a negotiated process with domestic actors.89 These notions on the Brazilian and Indian states are affiliated to the Neo-Weberian tradition;90 a reaction to the theoretical models that emphasised domestic pluralism and
85 86
King and Lieberman 2009, 54788. Evans 1995; Kohli 2004. 87 On India, please read Narlikar 2008. On Brazil, please see Vigevani and Cepaluni 2007. 88 Narlikar 2008, 277. 89 King and Lieberman 2009, 558. 90 The most famous work on this is Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985.
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interdependence based on non-state actors.91 Unlike in the Marxist models, under NeoWeberianism the state is not a product of class relations, but rather a unit with some degree of autonomy from other societal actors.92 Historical-Sociology has analytical tools to connect Neo-Weberianism with IR through Realism. Historical-Sociology disagrees with anarchical systemic assumptions, but overlaps with State-Centred Realist accounts on how the state-as-government interacts with societal actors in both domestic and international level.93 Insofar as the stateconceived as an autonomous actorformulates foreign policy, its structure defines what is national interest and power. Thus, what actually matters is state power.94 As Krasner summarises, a statist paradigm views the state as an autonomous actor. The goals sought by the state cannot be reduced to some summation of private desires. These objectives can be called appropriately the national interest.95 Neoclassical Realism tries to integrate these assumptions to systemic dynamics, as long as it builds upon the complex relationship between the state and society found in classical realism without sacrificing the central insight of Neorealism about the constraints of the international system.96 However, in doing so, it still faces at least five problems. First of all, it overemphasizes security issues over economic ones. Secondly, it still offers no account of the mechanics of the relationships within the state and the nation-state. Thirdly, as a consequence, the role of identities that emerge from civil society remains untheorised, as in domestic pluralism.97 Fourthly, insofar as it has no understanding of the market and the civil society, it cannot clearly explain challenges to the state from non-state actors. Lastly, it is restricted to FPA, rather than putting state decisions into a bigger picture in times of change.
91 92
An example of such approach is Risse-Kappen 1995. For this, please read Hobdens (1998, 93) analysis of Theda Skocpols States and Social Revolutions. 93 Hobden 1998, 139. 94 Zakaria 1998, 9 and 187. 95 Krasner 1978, 5-6. 96 Lobell, Ripsman, and Taliaferro 2009, 13. 97 The principles of this approach can be found at Moravcsik 1997.
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3.3.
Interactions among fields
The theoretical gain in conceiving social arenas as fields lies in the fact that they allow us to make macro and micro analysis of social processes depending on the research focus, while grasping causal mechanisms of change. For analytical purposes, I define three basic movements in the interaction between the arenas: A) international junctures to domestic changes in production and association; B) domestic changes in production and association to domestic changes in redistribution; and C) changes in redistribution to changes in public policies. All these movements impact conceptions of existence and survival. Before detailing each movement, a caveat is necessary. This model is potentially applicable to explain shifts in power in the international system unless the analysed state is a hegemon. A systemic factor (an international juncture) is always the contextual variable that, with historical legacies manifested through conceptions of existence, leads to changes in foreign policy (the dependent variable). However, the outcome depends on steps B and C, which encompass both the independent (distribution of economic and social capital among societal actors) and the intervening (access of societal actors to bureaucracy, as well as its internal organisation) variables of the model. Movement A: The international-domestic movement happens when new conceptions of existence and/or survival emerge and gain predominance in the international arena. Thanks for the more openness of economic than of non-commoditized flows, conceptions of survival are more likely to be challenged than conceptions of existence. However, the extent to which conceptions of survival in the domestic scale adapt themselves to the international one is given by the conceptions of existence and if they are linked to the strongest sectors in both production and associational arenas. Simmons and Elkins argue that choices for picking up liberalising economic foreign policy tools are influenced by the choices of other governments as much as they are by
30
exogenously given domestic institutions or preferences that can be traced back to domestic political or economic structures.98 As the proportion of countries that adopt a given policy in this case liberalisationincreases, the reputational costs of being attached to oldfashioned conceptions of survival increase as well. Also, there is a learning process based on other experiences, especially in those of countries that are culturally-similar.99 This ideational side of economic reform dovetails with Bourdieus account of how the social world is built. According to him, the structuring principles of the world view are rooted in the objective structures of the social world and because the relations of power are also present in peoples minds in the form of the categories of perception of those relations.100 If a country, however, has a civil society deeply linked to the conception of existence that is dominant, the harder it will be to accept international junctures without local adaptation. Otherwise, such an outcome is less likely to happen if the arena of association is pervaded by strong transnational links (e.g.: ethnicity and religion) correspondent to conceptions of existence that dispute primacy with national ideals. Figure 2 exemplifies this process in a critical juncture. Figure 2 Movement A: Interaction conception of survival and sovereignty/intl. embeddedness
Source: Own elaboration
A civil society committed to the predominant conceptions of existence and survival, as well as an economy that is not sensitive to exogenous shocks, compose the core of what I
98 99
Simmons and Elkins 2004, 172. Ibid., 176. 100 Bourdieu 1991, 236.
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call sovereignty, the ability of a domestic arena to control exogenous influences. Total sovereignty, however, would demand autarchy, what is impossible for any member of the international society.101 Therefore, a high degree of embeddedness in the international system enables a country to potentially benefit from the exchange with other systemic units. From these assumptions, I derive proposition 1: The higher the degree of sovereignty and international embeddedness of a state, the higher the possibility that it will adapt itself to emerging conceptions of survival in the international arena and keep credibility in the international society amid autonomy. Movement B: Changes in conceptions of survival originated in hegemonic polesat it was the case with Neoliberalismmatter because they impact prices through economic liberalisation, therefore, the world-wide distribution of power (capital) in the arena of production. This is linked to the aforementioned domestic pluralist arguments that seek to integrate domestic and international arenas. And, considering that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital102, distribution of associational power is likely to change as well in such a context. Production is not in opposition to association, as contemporaneous global civil society theorists argue in the nave claim that opposes social movements and non-governmental organisations to capitalists.103 All
sectors/subfields/societal groups have an economic and an identity dimension. The links between changing prices and politics were already explored by Rogowski. His conclusions imply that beneficiaries of a process of change in economy will try to deepen it through political means. Also, the increase in economic leverage is likely to correspond to an increase of political power. Therefore, shifts in income will be translated into disputes to influence policy-making. The means through which these disputes take place and their
101 102
Here I follow Bull 1995 definition of international society. Bourdieu 1986. 103 An example of this account is Smith 2008.
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consequences depends on the structure of state and society liberalisation finds and reshapes. Milner and Keohane consider that there are three major pathways through which international economic changes affect the domestic arena: 1) creation of policy preferences and coalition; 2) triggering domestic economic and political crises; and 3) undermining the control of government over macropolicy.104 In any of these contexts, political institutions, in turn, have three roles: 1) blocking price signals from the foreign markets that may produce realignments in the domestic arena; 2) freezing coalitions and policies; and 3) channelling political responses to changing prices.105 All these facts mean that different domestic institutions give rise to distinct patterns of liberalisation. Institutions, Milner argues, should not only be employed as an analytical category in state-society relations, but also within the state itself, as long as policy-formation depends on interest convergence within different branches of government. Information also matters in explaining outcomes in both negotiation and interest formation processes, as asymmetries creates inefficiencies and political advantages.106 Generally the executive power tends to have more information about relevant issues for negotiations than the legislative and the electorate. Such divide, however, cannot be taken for granted in states such as the Brazilian and the Indian ones, where foreign policy making is centralised in the hands of the head of government and a stable bureaucratic body. Furthermore, if economic capital has primacy over other manifestations of power, it is not the only factor that determines the leverage of a societal actor vis--vis others in the internal arena. The position of a given societal actor, says Bourdieu, depends on the position it occupies in different fields in terms of power that is reflected in different kinds of capital, such as economic and social.107 It means that groups that have production and associational
104 105
Keohane and Milner 1996, 244. Ibid., 251. 106 Ibid., 20. 107 Bourdieu 1991, 231.
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capabilities not strongly linked to the conceptions of existence and survival tend to face more difficulty in striving in a changing context. Sectors traditionally conceived as purely economic are in fact transversal: they hold positions in associational terms as well. For instance, Indias rice processing industry has workers of different non-economic groups, mainly lower-caste Hindus.108 In Brazil, export-led agriculture remains dominant in regions where values of complex urban societies have not arrived yet. These are relevant differences from the empirical cases from which liberal theorists derived their conclusions. Their models were based on homogeneous societies, such as the European ones, already shaped by the iron cage of capitalism, or heterogeneous societies where logrolling led to constrain differences in times of prosperity, as it is in the US.109 In fact, different combinations of productive and associational powers are the root of different varieties of capitalism:110 a given conception of survival fuses with the predominant domestic conception of existence, triggering a national trajectory.111 The degree of adaptability of a sector to changes in the conception of survival depends on its attachment to identities linked to the conception of existence (figure 3). Figure 3 Adaptation of a sector in terms of economic and social capital after a juncture
108 109
Kaur, Gosh, and Sudarshan 2007, 148. Snyder 1991. 110 Hall and Soskice 2001. 111 For trajectories of development, please read Zysman 1994.
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All this leads to proposition 2: an economic sector gains strength amid critical junctures when it is able to absorb innovations that arise from new conceptions of survival while keeping leverage in the arena of association and, therefore, strong linkages to the conception(s) of existence predominant in a given domestic arena. Movement C: the trade-off between a Weberian state and a strong civil society does not seem to be applicable either empirically or theoretically. A strong state is perfectly suitable to a strong civil society and a strong market. However, the best adjective here to describe a stateas-government that does not constrain the creative forces of societal actors is not strong. A pair of variables defines a state such as this: social embeddednessits connections with societal actorsand autonomyits ability to preserve independent interests, which, eventually, are not corporatist, but represent the national interest, even if defined by elites. Originally, embeddeness and autonomy were defined by Evans 112 and Hobson.113 They argue that state strength (at least within specific bureaucracies) results from autonomy from private interests and linkages with society. Embeddeness and autonomy also affect the level of legitimacy of the state. An imbalance between both variables can cause a rupture or mistrust between government and societies. Unlike authors such as Jacobs and King suggest, legitimacy does not arise mainly from redistribution to promote equality or at least to attenuate inequality. Legitimacy is conquered based on stability of the overall domestic arena, which implies in balancing winners and losers in terms of power. Also, state has to have a minimum of internal coherence. Contemporaneous times offer plenty of examples of how state crisis impact other domestic arenas, being the mostly recent the Great Recession in the US.114 Embeddeness may take place through different means, which include formal and informal institutions. When
112 113
Evans 1995. Hobson 1997, 235. 114 Jacobs and King 2009, 277.
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embeddeness fails in terms of representation, the state becomes more vulnerable to rentseeking activities and in failing to produce internal stabilityeven amid lack of redistribution to reduce inequalityloses legitimacy. For instance, in the US, the comparatively weak administrative capacity of the state has been susceptible to the demands and interests of the financial sector.115 This legitimacy, however, has to be kept into the boundaries set by conceptions of existence and survival. For instance, the clashes over health care reform in the US derives at least in part from the fact that it challenges principles that bounds the American national character (e.g.: a Locke an conception of liberty that implies in a reduced role of the state amid civil society) and the organisation of the economyunlike in Continental Europe, health has been commoditised in the US since its foundation as a nation and as a market. A similar process took place in Brazil and India in the 1990s, when liberal reforms in economy had a more ambitious scope in the beginning than in the outcome. In both cases, the governments that conducted the initial phase of institutional reformin Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardosos PSDB presidency (1995-2003), and, in India, Narashima Raos Congress-led coalition (1991-1995)were, first, led to constrain its ambitions to keep partially the nationalist legacy of the ISI years, and, after, were replaced in power by coalitions thatat least rhetoricallywere more aligned with state-centred practices, as it is the case of Lula da Silvas PT in Brazil and Congress- and even Janata-led governments that went into power after the second half of the 1990s. Socio-economic capital is not always converted into political power. As figure 4 shows, such conversion depends on the degrees of embeddeness and autonomy of the state-as-government. Originally, the empowerment of the state vis--vis society happens, as Tilly and Hobson among others argue, due to the extraction of resources, mainly through taxation to
115
Ibid.
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wage war.116 With the expansion of capitalism, the arena of production gained more autonomy, which, in turn, required the improvement of human capabilities.117 This led to diversification of interests and society, concurrent forms of association, based firstly on class. Rather than sovereignty, states start to employ governmentalitytechniques of indirect control of society, as defined by Foucault.118 The reverse side of this coin is the empowerment of civil society: its actors no longer need the state mediation to organise themselves and to establish linkages abroad, which have been facilitated thanks for the new technologies of information. Figure 4 Conversion of economic and symbolic capital into political power
All this brings to proposition 3: the ability of powerful actors in economic and associational terms to influence, after a juncture, public policies and discourses to legitimise new conceptions of existence and survival or to re-affirm old ones depends on the degree of embeddedness of the state-as-government in the internal arena. However, as the ultimate intervening variable that processes a critical juncture, actors within the state-as-government will have the final word in decision-taking. This fact leads to proposition 4: the more autonomous a given bureaucracy within the state-as-government, the less susceptible to societal demands it will be in taking a decision. Nonetheless, the state will always seek
116 117
Tilly 1975; Hobson 1997. For a discussion on human capabilities and empowerment, please read Drze and Sen 2002. 118 Foucault 2010.
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stability within the internal arena and coherence with the dominant domestic conception of existence and conception of survival unless the coalition in power has a reformist program. That said, in the elaboration of an issue in economic foreign policy, as it is the case in negotiation preferences in WTO, issues regarding the international context and related to sovereignty and international embeddeness at the time of policy elaboration play a role as well, constrainingthrough modified conceptions of existence and survivalthe final preferences chosen as national ones by the state-as-government. 4. Conclusion The theoretical gain in conceiving arenas of social action as fields lie in the fact that this analytical tool allows to measure different dimensions of power without reifying sectors that are traditionally conceived as purely economic. Social capital also matters, insofar as its leverage determines the strength to which a given set of societal actors is attached to the predominant conceptions of existence and, therefore, will be able to resist to changes in the conception of survival. However, adaptations to shifts in economic organisation also matters insofar as power, which is always symbolic, involves productive and associational leverage. With productive and associational power, societal actors can participate in a more decisive way in the arena of redistribution and influence the state-as-government, which, nonetheless, has the final decision on the elaboration of public policies and legitimation of new conceptions of society. Old conceptions of existence, however, are employed to constrain new conceptions of society if there is the perceived risk of disruption within the fields of the domestic arena. Thus, the limits to reframe them are not only the co-relation of forces in domestic and international arenas, but also the long-standing conceptions of existence that constrain societal action as a whole in the domestic arena, which filters the impact of critical junctures posed by new conceptions of survival in the international system. As the liberalising experience of Brazil and India suggest at a first glance, it is possible to
38
resist to junctures through the mechanisms outlined above up to some point in which liberalisation happens and a new conception of survival wins. However, such conception latter is constrained and reframed as long as, in the pursuit of internal stability by societal groups and the state, the prescriptions the new conception of survival produces winners and losers in economic and social capital, leading, in turn, to new indigenous values that arises from the combination with local cultures that translates conceptions of existence. This theoretical framework is clearly ambitious and not parsimonious, falling, as far as simplicity is concerned, behind more synthetic accounts, such as State-Centred Realism and Domestic Pluralism. However, it addresses process of systemic change and its impacts in the domestic level and foreign-policy with clear analytical units. That said, the operationalization of these concepts can hardly be done in large-N research designs, insofar as there are not cross-country data-sets with ready-hand data to measure production and association and embeddedness and autonomy, given the ad-hoc characteristics that these variables show in each country. Nonetheless, the idea of fields can be refined119 through small-N cases that mix quantitative (for transnational flows) and qualitative methods (for internal dynamics, in special for embeddedness and autonomy). After such refinement, one can consider the development of cross-national datasets to measure all these concepts. If this goal cannot be achieved, fields, as it already happens in economic sociology, can be a theory frame that allows the study of both macro and micro processes. Theory frames are analytical tools guide hypothesis formation, although does not contain a priori a group of hypothesis.120 In this case, which is less ambitious than the aim of building a general theory of continuity and change in systemic terms and in foreign-policy, fields still unpacks the black box of the international system and frames anarchy in units of analysis beyond the nation-state or the state-as-government in a sociological fashion. However, the doors to
119 120
Adcock and Collier 2001, 531. Rueschemeyer 2009, 17.
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investigate causal relationships within and between these units in an ad-hoc manner remain opened. In sum, the bounded causality that the notion of fields suggest can be one step further in bridging the sides of the debate rationalism vs. constructivism in the discipline. 5. Bibliography Adcock, Robert, and David Collier. 2001. Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research. American Political Science Review. 95 (3):529-546. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1993. The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism. In Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, edited by Stephen Gill. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. Available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-forms-capital.htm. Accessed 1 Mar. 2011. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos. 2009. Developing Brazil: Overcoming the Failure of the Washington Consensus. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Brooks, Stephen, and William Wohlforth. 2008. World out of balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press. Coleman, James. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copeland, Dale C. 2006. The constructivist challege to structural realism: a review essay. In Constructivism and International Relations, edited by Stefano Guzzini, and Anna Leander, 120. London; New York: Routledge. Diamond, Larry. 1999. Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Drze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 2002. India: Development and Participation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drulk, Petr. 2006. Reflexivity and Structural Change. In Constructivism and International Relations, edited by Stefano Guzzini, and Anna Leander, 140-159. London; New York: Routledge. Evans, Peter. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Evans, Peter, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Framing anarchy: a framework to analyse foreign policy based on interactions among state, market, and civil society actors

in domestic and transnational levels

Bourdieu 1991, 185.

Moravcsik 1993, 14. Ibid., 23.

Moravcsik 1998, 22. Ibid., 18.

Bourdieu 1991, 185. Fligstein 2001, 15. 35 Bourdieu 1991, 215.

Hobden 1998, 132. Bourdieu 1991, 185. 38 Zysman 1994.

Source: Own elaboration, based on Rodrigues Vieira 2010, 33.

Conceptions of existence and conceptions of survival

Bull 1995. Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, 402.

Bresser-Pereira 2009; Kohli 2009. Hall 1986. 48 Polanyi 2001.

Bresser-Pereira 2009; Jenkins 1999.

North 1981. Fligstein 2001, 68. 58 Ibid. 59 Granovetter 1985.

Diamond 1999, 221. Rodrigues Vieira 2008.

Interactions among fields

Source: Own elaboration

Source: Own elaboration

Source: Own elaboration

Adcock and Collier 2001, 531. Rueschemeyer 2009, 17.

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