Abstract
This article offers a prolegomenon to a relational theory of international relations (IR). The contention is that recent attempts to bring the Western and the Chinese strands of the “relational turn” in IR into conversation have so far failed to transcend the bifurcating metanarrative of the mainstream, let alone account for the multiple intersections permeating the strategic search for relations with others. To rectify this trend, the following analysis suggests that a genuinely relational IR is also necessarily post-Western—i.e., it is neither Sinocentric, nor Eurocentric, but cultivated from the convivial, yet dissonant cross pollination of values, narratives, and practices in the study of world affairs. The attention of this article is to the ways in which the affordances of relationality are foreshadowed by the engagement with the Chinese concept of guanxi. While one of the terms that make the Chinese phrase for International Relations (guoji guanxi), it has remained occluded from the disclosure of an ontologically and epistemically relational IR. Guanxi is used thereby to amplify—not merely analyze—the intrinsic relationality both of global life and the realms of IR.
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Notes
While acknowledging their diverse histories and context, the current analysis uses the terms mainstream, Western, and Eurocentric as stylistic variations denoting the dominance of the values, narratives, and practices of the “Anglosphere” over what passes for IR. This point is illustrated further throughout the paper.
The intention here is to make an analytical contribution to the understanding and explanation of the post-Western flavours of relationality in IR rather than illustrate how China has been able to gain a tremendous amount of goodwill and political capital in the Global South.
Janice Bially-Mattern (2005: 5) explains “uncovery” as a process that brings together the discovery of previously untouched perspectives and the excavation of insights from underneath layers of ossified or never-problematized knowledge.
Such frustration has urged many to advocate for a creative implosion of the disciplinary mainstream: “To decolonize IR is to deschool oneself from the discipline in its current dominant manifestations: to remember international relations, one needs to forget IR” (Krishna 2001: 407; Kavalski and Zolkos 2016: 5–10).
Jeanne Morefield (2014) suggests that mainstream IR scholarship is premised on the ongoing “deflection” of attention from its illiberal outlook and racialized paradigms as well as its systematic “deflection” of responsibility for the imperial violence that it still backstops. The discussion of the concept of guanxi independent of the foreign policies and practices of the current Chinese government should not be misunderstood as an exercise of deflection. As it will be explained shortly, guanxi is a characteristic of the “Sinophonic world” as a whole, not just mainland China.
The other important take on relationality comes from the important study of coexistence by Louiza Odysseos (2007), which, however, seems to have been completely ignored by the Chinese scholarship on relationality; likewise, Odysseos disregards the work by Jackson and Nexon.
Since this point is not central to the current investigation, the point here merely is that while singular, the logic of relationality implicit in Qin’s approach does not departs from the metanarrative of relationality espoused by Jackson and Nexon. In particular, despite his emphasis on roles and role-play to the background knowledge of “Confucian cultural communities” (Qin 2016: 35), Qin reverts back into the preoccupation with self-other relations that defines the Western IR model he critiques. As he insists, in the emergent complexly-related universe of global interrelatedness “actors tend to make decisions according to the degrees of intimacy and/or importance of her relationships to specific others, with the totality of her relational circles as the background” (Qin 2016: 37). Thus, rather than a contingent web of ongoing interactions, he presents relationality as a (distinct, although not that dissimilar from its non-Chinese variants) mode of encounter and engagement with otherness. Thus, what is potentially the most transformative Confucian contribution of Qin’s relational theory of IR (its prioritisation of roles over identities/subjectivities), becomes subsumed into what Odysseos calls the singularity of coexistence: “‘singularity never has the nature of individuality. Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable, if not identical identities’; rather, singularity has to do with the inclination or disposition to otherness” (Odysseos 2007: xxxii).
Yet, many have hinted that such practices reflect a far richer meaning of the term guanxi in Chinese than in its English counterpart “relationship” (Bell 2000: 133)—hence, the translation of the term as “relations,” “connections,” “friendship,” “networks of reciprocal bonds,” “social capital,” “nepotism,” and “corruption” reflects the polymorphous nature of the term. While such multiplicity of meanings should not necessarily be surprising (after all, any translation can offer only a partial impression of the ideational context within which the term originates), it still suggests the layered and fluid framing in the Chinese original as well.
While in circulation a century ago, the term was not deemed to be significant enough to warrant inclusion in the two classic Chinese dictionaries—the 1915 ci yuan (“sources of words”) and the 1936 ci hai (“word sea”) (Luo 1997: 44). This has urged some scholars to speculate whether there is anything distinctly “Chinese” about guanxi or whether it is merely the Chinese stand-in for the general social phenomenon of reliance on favours to accomplish tasks (Gold et al. 2002: 13–14).
In fact, some have suggested a certain paradox of power in guanxi, where owing to the structure of reciprocal obligation “the weaker party is effectively and paradoxically more powerful than the stronger” (Barbalet and Qi 2013: 412). Shih (2016: 9) makes a similar point by emphasizing the “higher level of anxiety” that the presumed or aspiring great powers have in a relational context because of the constant need to receive affirmation for their reputational profile.
A significant number of Chinese commentators have suggested that the emphasis on relationality is premised on a holistic worldview distinct from the Western dualistic opposition between self and other/self and the world (Qin 2007: 330). Such claims are premised on the contrast between relational and autonomous self. Associated with Western intellectual traditions, the latter insists on discrete subjectivities, praises individualism, and values and normalizes the lack of dependence on others. The relational self, on the other hand, insists that individuals do not and cannot exist unless they are enmeshed in relations with others. As Confucius, himself, is alleged to have stated “unless there are at least two human beings there are no human beings.” The relational self, thereby, is “one which is intensely aware of the social presence of other human beings” and occupies divergent social roles contingent on the interactions (Ho 1995: 117).
This challenge to the centrality of hegemonic monologues in the mainstream seems to resonate the inferences of the literature on communitarian IR.
This should not, however, be misunderstood as an assertion that the process is not affective. The point here is that guanxi is not about the subjective qualities of the participants, but about the process of interactions that they enact.
At the same time, the value of the personal favour rendered in the context of guanxi (called renqing in Chinese) “can never be calculated objectively”—instead, its assessment is subject to an ongoing and complex “blend of cost and quality and relationship in which one or two elements may be interpreted, by some people at certain times, as being more valuable than the other element(s)” (Hwang 1987: 963).
While post-Western IR is singled out in the present discussion largely for the purposes of brevity, the discussion of guanxi has important bearing on a number of other current conversations in IR: (i) the explanation and understanding of Chinese foreign policy thinking and practices; (ii) the grasping of the role of emotions in IR; as well as (iii) the nascent literature on non-Anthropocentric/post-human IR. While this list is far from exhaustive, its aim is to demonstrate the potential for rethinking IR theory and practice by bringing divergent concepts and ideas (and their histories, cultures, and geographical exigencies) into conversation.
The following distinction between first-order and second-order issues and atomistic vs. molecular outlooks draws heavily from Barbalet (2015) and Kavalski (2015, 2016).
The paper can thereby be read as a prolegomenon to a genuinely relational IR thinking and practice—one whose attention is not on reifying the bulwarks of national sovereignty and quantifying the national interest, but rather draws attention to the porousness and unpredictability of global life—Western and non-Western (and the messy and contingent intersections that permeate and constitute both). For more on this issue see Kavalski (2018b: 87–100).
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Kavalski, E. The Guanxi of Relational International Affairs. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 3, 233–251 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-018-0096-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-018-0096-0