The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion

Kees Van Der Pijl

Description

How do we think about international relations? There is no question that society is based upon its cultural foundations, yet this mode of understanding the world is seemingly absent from IR.



The second volume of Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, a three-volume project changing the way we think about international relations, traces the key characteristics of 'foreign encounters' over time. It shows that myth, religion and ethical philosophies have always informed the way that societies have interacted with outsiders, from tribal relations to the imperial frontiers. Acceptance of this points us towards the future state of international relations.



A truly masterful work, The Foreign Encounter In Myth And Religion, is a must for upper-undergraduates and academics at the cutting edge of international relations theory.
Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Tribal Foreign Relations and Mythical Ancestry

2. Sedentary-Nomad Encounters in Semitic Myth and Religion

3. Warrior Heroes in the Indo-European Lineage

4. Imperial Cosmologies and the Nomadic Counterpoint

5. Rival Fundamentalisms on the Imperial Frontier

References

Index

Sujets

• Economic Policy
• Public Policy
• International Relations
• Political Science
• Political economy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715039
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion
Also available by Kees van der Pijl from Pluto Press
Nomads, Empires, States:
Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, Volume I
Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq
The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion
Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy
Volume II
KEES VAN DER PIJL
First published 2010 by Pluto Press
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Copyright © Kees van der Pijl 2010
The right of Kees van der Pijl to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1
Tribal Foreign Relations and Mythical Ancestry
 
Identity and Memory in Ethnogenetic Myth
 
Pseudo-Speciation and the Constitution of the Foreign
 
Mythical Exchanges
2
Sedentary–Nomad Encounters in Semitic Myth and Religion
 
Ethnogenesis and Foreign Relations in Mesopotamian Mythology
 
Imperial and Nomadic Antecedents of the Semitic Monotheisms
 
Foreign Relations in the Bible and the Koran
3
Warrior Heroes in the Indo-European Lineage
 
From Aryan–Dravidian Synthesis to Hindu Nationalism
 
Heroes of the Hellenic World in the Mirror of Western Imperialism
 
Warrior and Fertility Myths from the Scythians to Wagner
4
Imperial Cosmologies and the Nomad Counterpoint
 
Imperial Confucianism and Frontier Buddhism
 
Contending Buddhisms on China’s Frontier
 
Frontier Origins and Imperial Transformation of Roman Christianity
 
Crusaders and Muslims
5
Rival Fundamentalisms on the Imperial Frontier
 
Militant Calvinism and Western Hegemony
 
Zionism and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel
 
Islam as the New Nomad Creed?
References
Index
Preface
This is the second of a planned three-volume project entitled Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy . My intention in Volume I, Nomads, Empires, States , was to show that the world order of sovereign states is only one historically specific form of foreign relations. If we define these as the relations between communities occupying separate spaces and considering each other as outsiders, it is obvious that there are and have been other forms of foreign relations besides inter-state diplomacy, just as there will be in the future.
All human society, then, is historical. Society arises in the exploitation of nature; but nature continues to set limits to what we can achieve, so societies must reorganise themselves over time. Change in other words occurs in a contradictory setting from which it cannot escape – in the case of foreign relations, the inner tension between separate community and common humanity. Marx developed the notion of modes of production in this perspective, as a way of denaturalising given patterns of relations of production as historical, subject to change, with the aim of returning the ability to make history to subjects under their spell. I apply the idea of ‘modes’ to foreign relations, aiming to develop a ‘critique of international relations’ (IR) in the spirit of Marx’s critique of bourgeois economics. Reproducing itself on an ever larger scale as civilisation and other forms of transforming nature advance, any given pattern of foreign relations has a limited shelf life, as do types of economy and society. Crisis, war, and revolution then signal that the limits of the possible have been reached, or crossed already.
It is not just a temporal, historical sequence that is involved in modes of foreign relations. Obviously a spatial dimension is included, albeit one that is bound up with time, and anchored, like the relations of production, in the development of the productive forces. Relations of exploitation, both within and between societies, internalise and reproduce the general, exploitative relationship with nature; thus the Western state form and the sovereign equality mode, along with the capitalist mode of production, have also been imprinted on outlying areas as one aspect of European expansion. ‘Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess’, Nandy points out in this connection (1988: ix), ‘as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order.’ For those subjected to these structures as much as for those imposing them, they were usually seen as conducive to progress. As an integral part of modernity, independent statehood and territorially bounded nationality were seen as key markers of shaping one’s destiny in accordance with the most advanced insights. This was implanted across all societies which did not enjoy the first-mover advantage of north-west Europe and its settler outposts, the Atlantic ‘West’ or, as I call it, the Lockean heartland. It is my claim that the propagation of formal sovereign equality and the accompanying academic discipline, IR (as well as international law), have been an underrated aspect of the ways in which this central, liberal structure has continued to occupy the commanding heights of the global political economy (compared to, say, finance, or monopoly capitalism, or ‘white man’s burden’ chauvinism).
The present volume analyses the mythical and religious articulations of tribal and imperial foreign relations, which antedate relations of sovereign equality. Foreign relations take shape in ethnogenesis and ethno-transformation; they sum up how communities and societies, in dealing with others they consider as outsiders, occupy space, protect it, and exchange with each other. Who constitutes the community, and on what title, and also what sorts of space are actually occupied – single territories, oasis trails, neighbourhoods that are home to members of a diaspora, or inter-oceanic constellations as for the modern West – and how they are occupied; all these are matters of historical variation and evolution. In the tribal mode, sovereignty over living space is ancestral, protection a matter of ritual, and exchange typically involves exogamy and barter; the empire/nomad mode is about universal sovereignty, protection by frontier auxiliaries, and tribute. A crucial divide here, as Petrov has argued (2005: 3), is what societies do with their ‘redundant’ people: are they put to work to build the monuments of empire – pyramids, Chinese walls, or irrigation infrastructure – or do they swarm out, as the nomads throughout history have done, and implant themselves and their world onto the worlds of others?
Likewise, the form of protecting space, by a land army recruited from the nation or otherwise, and the legitimacy of different aspects of exchange (crucially including norms of endogamy and exogamy), all hang together in more or less systematic ways as modes of foreign relations. Myth, religion, and ethical philosophies like Confucianism have shaped the ways different communities and societies have historically engaged in these relations, long before they crystallised into inter-state relations of the European type. They continue to operate, under different conditions and with hugely varying effect, to the present day.
As I shall argue in Volume III, the Lockean heartland has not just historically constituted itself as a transnationally linked constellation. It has also theoretically defended such a form of occupying space. The conceptual schemes developed in the process prefigure the global-governance mode of foreign relations, albeit mortgaged to liberal interests and preconceptions. Paradoxically, the West has simultaneously prescribed the territorial national state form to the rest of the world, as if it had not itself gone beyond this early on by embedding it in a wider, transnational social space – thus transforming the very nature of the relation between state and society. The discipline of IR is at the heart of the prescription to organise society ‘nationally’. However, in laying down the rules of engagement, the Anglophone heartland placed before all other societies a task in most cases impossible to fulfil; a recipe for global ethnic cleansing, if not actual genocide. In the present work, I seek to demonstrate how the seeds of the Western, globalising vision, as well as a range of alternative frameworks, can be retraced in the legacy of tribal and imperial metaphysical thought. The international discipline, intellectual and practical, which the West has sought to impose on the world (granting an exception only to itself), has worked as a straitjacket undermining social stability and progress. It called into being phenomena like ‘minorities’, which only arise as a result of imposing a framework, the territorial nation-state, that was a misfit for most if not all other societies. Al-Barghouti describes (2008: 148) how the British consul general, the Earl of Cromer, in the early twentieth century designed such a structure for Egypt;