21 April 2011The political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa region came in response to the oppression, corruption, and arrogance of the rulers of Arab states, according to Professor Nicholas Onuf.
Onuf, who is a professor at Florida International University, made the remarks in an e-mail interview with the Mehr News Agency conducted by Hossein Kaji and Javad Heiran-Nia.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: What are the reasons behind popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East?
A: Recent events in North Africa and the Middle East are readily explained as another chapter in the struggle for popular sovereignty that goes back to the American and French revolutions. They are popular responses to oppression, corruption and arrogance on the part of those who rule their societies to the advantage of themselves, their families and the so-called ‘ruling class.’ What is not so easily explained is where and when these struggles will break out. Local conditions always matter, including the availability of information and communication technologies. It is no wonder that oppressive regimes are so intent on controlling these technologies.
This is not the time or place to address the deeper issue of the relationship between bourgeois revolutions and struggles for popular sovereignty. Nevertheless, I would suggest that just such a relationship connects the two questions I am responding to here and constitutes one the great challenges for contemporary scholarship.
Q: What is your view about the “rise of China�? Is this rise a threat to U.S. hegemony in the international system?
A: The most obvious way to look at China’s rise is from a realist perspective, on the assumption that the size of any nation’s economy translates into militarily relevant capabilities, and that capabilities are significant determinants in the way nations behave on the world stage. Less obvious are two other perspectives on the implications of China’s rise. First, China is not alone. Also rising economically are Brazil, India and Russia (with China, the so-called BRIC countries). In my view, this is best described as a bourgeois revolution, due to the capitalist world economy’s shifting center of gravity, comparable in scale and consequence to the bourgeois revolution in 19th c. Europe and North America.
Liberal institutionalists typically argue that bourgeois prosperity disposes people, and peoples, toward peaceful relations. The liberal institutionalists may be right, if nothing else adversely affects these relations. But we can easily think of ways in which prosperity produce tension and conflict, not peace. One has to do with fluctuations in the rate of growth in the capitalist world economy. Periods of negative growth—depressions and recessions—can undermine confidence in bourgeois prosperity, provoke beggar-thy neighbor policies and reinforce the kind of behaviour that realists always expect. A second has to do with uneven development, which Lenin and other Marxists emphasized during the last great bourgeois revolution. If China grows faster than everyone else or, more especially, faster than those nations, like the US, that were primary beneficiaries of the last revolution, then these distributive consequences of capitalist growth can become a significant source of stress.
This leads to my third perspective. I would argue that status concerns matters at least as much as material well-being in human relations. Hegemony is one way to describe a system of status relations, or status order, in which the US leads (or fails to lead) by example. The US does so by virtue of its dominant position in the status order and the well-known tendency for lower-order status holders to defer to those whose status is higher. Culturally speaking, the Chinese are very sensitive to status arrangements and their behavioral implications, and if they feel that the status they deserve because of their economic success is being withheld, then they may behave accordingly. Arguably, this is what happened in the last decades of the last bourgeois revolution, when Germany and Japan, as latecomers, thought they were denied the status appropriate to their importance in the world economy.
Nicholas Onuf is one of the primary figures among Constructivists in international relations. His best known contribution to Constructivism is set out in World of Our Making (University of South Carolina Press, 1989). |
21 April 2011
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