Table Of ContentINDIVIDUALISM AND WORLD POLITICS
Individualism and
World Politics
Edited by
Michel Girard
Departement de Science Politique de la Sorbonne
Universite Paris 1
Paris
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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Companies and representatives throughout the world
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ISBN 978-1-349-27034-7 ISBN 978-1-349-27032-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27032-3
First published in the United States of America 1999 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
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ISBN 978-0-312-21571-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Individualism and world politics I edited by Michel Girard.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21571-2(cloth)
1. Individualism. 2. International relations-Moral and ethical
aspects. I. Girard, Michel, 1946-
JC571.14875 1998
327.1'01-dc21 98-16553
CIP
Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 1 © Michel Girard 1999
Chapters 2-10 ©Macmillan Press Ltd 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-71559-8
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vi
1 Individuals, Individualism and World Politics 1
Michel Girard
2 Individuals and their Influence on the International
System 23
Michael Nicholson
3 The Skill Revolution and Restless Publics in
Globalized Space 44
James N. Rosenau
4 Praxiological Analysis of International Politics:
between Systemism and Methodological Individualism 69
Jacques J. Herman
5 Non-individualist Rediscoveries of the Individual:
Feminist Approaches to World Politics 89
Anna Leander
6 Disarmed Prophets 128
Marcel Merle
7 Corporate Managers in World Politics 145
Susan Strange
8 Atomic Scientists and Disarmament:
the Pugwash Movement 160
Jean Klein
9 The Individual in the New Clothes of War 186
Dominique David
10 Individuals and Humanitarian Law: the Geneva Paradox 203
Jean-Pie"e Colin
Index 224
v
Notes on Contributors
Jean-Pierre Colin is Professor of International Relations at the
University of Reims. His main research interest is in studying the
political function of law in international relations. He has published
many articles or contributions, notably on collective security, neu
trality and Francophonie.
Dominique David is Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Fran~ais
de Relations Intemationales. He has published extensively on strategic
thinking, French strategy, and European security. He is also Pro
fessor at the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr and teaches in the
Department of Political Science of the Sorbonne at the University
of Paris 1.
Michel Girard is Senior Lecturer in International Politics in the
Department of Political Science of the Sorbonne at the University
of Paris 1. His research interests are international relations theory
and methodology, foreign policy and European integration. He has
published many articles on these subjects. He is the editor of Les
individus dans Ia politique intemationale (1994) and co-editor of Theory
and Practice in Foreign Policy-Making (1994).
Jacques Herman is Professor in the Department of Political Sci
ence at the University of Louvain la Neuve. His teaching and re
search interests are in methodology, and he is working at the moment
on chaos theory and politics. His last book is Incertitudes societales
(forthcoming).
Jean Klein is Professor of International Relations in the Depart
ment of Political Science of the Sorbonne at the University of Paris
1. His interests are in disarmament and international security. He
has published extensively on these subjects. He is the author of
Securite et desarmement en Europe (1987) and of Maitrise des
armements et desarmement (1991).
Anna Leander is Assistant Professor at the Central European Uni
versity, Budapest College. Her recent research and publications are
in international political economy and international relations theory.
She has published many articles in these fields.
vi
Notes on Contributors vii
Marcel Merle is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in
the Department of Political Science of the Sorbonne at the Uni
versity of Paris 1. His numerous books include La politique etrangere
(1984), Les acteurs dans les relations internationales (1986), and
Sociologie des relations internationales (1988).
Michael Nicholson is Professor of International Relations at the
University of Sussex. Originally a graduate and Ph.D. in economics
from Cambridge University, he moved to peace research and inter
national relations. His main work has been on theoretical topics
and formal theory, and recently includes Rationality and the Analy
sis of International Conflict (1992) and Causes and Consequences in
International Relations: a Conceptual Study (1996).
James N. Rosenau is University Professor of International Affairs
at the George Washington University. His recent writings include
Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a
Turbulent World (1997) and Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory
of Change and Continuity (1990); as well as co-authorship of Thinking
Theory Thoroughly: Coherent Approaches to an Incoherent World
(1995).
Susan Strange is a pioneer in the field of international political
economy, and her States and Markets has been translated into Japa
nese and Chinese. She is currently Professor at the University of
Warwick. Before that she taught at the European University Insti
tute and at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Other books include The Retreat of the State (1996), Rival States,
Rival Firms (1991) with John Stopford, and Casino Capitalism (1986).
1 Individuals, Individualism
and World Politics
Michel Girard
INDIVIDUAL AND INDIVIDUALISM
Just like the notion of individualism to which it is related, that of
the individual is saturated with meanings, the idea as well as the
word being heavily weighted with history.1 As early as the seven
teenth century, the concept of the individual, heir to the individuum
of medieval scholasticism (the somewhat mediocre special case from
which it was thought no safe deductions could be made), started
to be applied particularly to the human person.2 At this time also
the individual was thought of as an abstract item, distinct in nature
from political society and its variable structure.3 The 'community
of individuals' and the 'social body' (or 'individual' and 'collective'
units) then formed an antinomic couple which a long philosophical
tradition was to work on by giving it multiple faces which left their
mark on thinking for a long time.4
Since then, this outline of the individual has been filled in in a
thousand ways, but most of the doctrines and political and social
analyses which gave it a specific usage ran counter to a logical
contradiction - there can only be a general thought of individu
ality at the paradoxical price of sacrificing any strictly individual
singularity. Therefore, most of the viewpoints with an idealist ori
entation show the individual (most of the time in the singular) as
a generalizing abstraction in which any singularity is easily negated
or abolished. For Hegel, for instance, the individual is a world,
that of the spirit, only in so far as it is to be found, in an objective
form, in the historical reality of the spirit of a people going way
beyond the simple individual.5 In just as abstract a way, in our
time, the anthropologist Louis Dumont proposes a purely theoreti
cal (ideel) individual, defined as a moral being totally independent
from society and a characteristic product of 'modern ideology' and
'egalitarianist individualism'.6 As far as more realist or positivist
conceptions of man and society are concerned, which should in
1
2 Individualism and World Politics
principle be more inclined to respect objective singularities, they
sometimes talk about individuals in the plural, but usually tend to
subordinate them closely to wider political and social entities. Need
less to say that, in this context where holism is dominant, theoreti
cal individualism often gets short shrift. For instance, in two very
different and, it is true, hardly individualistic registers, Marx and
Durkheim both sketch out an actual individual who is a kind of
anti-Robinson Crusoe because he is essentially determined by his
torical or social laws of a much larger scale than his own. Like
wise, less holist thoughts, which mingle individual determinations
and social causality in more balanced constructions, such as those
of the sociologists Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, often tend to
give the individual an abstract and refined form leaving out most
of his or her specific characteristics, in order to keep their dis
course sufficiently general.
If one wishes to take the analysis of the individual and individu
alism a step further, it is advisable at least to start distinguishing
between the different meanings that these words may receive. The
notion of individual is undoubtedly neither unequivocal nor uni
versal. As for the notion of individualism, it can conceal as many
meanings as the rainbow can reveal colours.
The word 'individual' does not always designate a person, but
can also be understood as meaning a unitary, if not always singu
lar, case of a general category or of a collection constituted of
various elements: states, international organizations, coalitions, etc.
In international political analysis, instead of the notion of the indi
vidual, 'normal science' rather refers to that of the 'actor' (meant,
in a vague way, as an autonomous authority endowed with a ca
pacity of decision and action).7 This 'actor', who for the most part
is only a pseudonym for the individual in the international rela
tions scholars' language, is not necessarily a person, and when it is
one, it is almost always a political leader. But officials such as heads
of states and governments and all their delegates or substitutes are
undoubtedly much more than, and very different from, pure and
simple persons, in spite of appearances to the contrary which al
low ordinary people to become identified with the living symbols
that they embody. On the too well-lit forestage where they have to
constantly parade their public image, their personal individuality
cannot really show itself other than in the alienating form of a
semblance. The remarkable attention brought to bear on them by
many scholars, joined with that of the media and the general pub-
Individuals, Individualism and World Politics 3
lie, contributes to a large extent to their transmutation into objects
of identification or points of reference for the ordinary people who
are the ones they govern.
Even when the individual referred to in the discourse is actually
a person, the degree of singularity or particularity which he is then
allowed is still, as we have already been able to see, very variable.
Between the abstract, ideal-typical individual, almost totally devoid
of singular characteristics, and the real individual who is socially
and historically located, is there more in common than there are
differences? Whatever the case, all the individuals examined in this
volume will be persons.
Likewise, all human beings in the world are not individuals to
the same extent and in the same way, because forms of political
and social individualization can vary greatly from one society to
another, from one social category to another, from one gender to
another. In this respect, the modern or post-modern male indi
vidual of developed western societies is a richly endowed heir. He
reaps the fruit of hard work which continued over a long period
through the intermediary of institutions, practices, ideas and sensi
tivities in order to valorize his person as such, by distinguishing it
clearly from the collective units he belongs to or to which he re
fers, without however always setting his person against them or
assuming that it can do without them.8 In more traditional societies,
where processes of individualization can be of a lesser intensity
and of a different nature, the notion of the individual still makes
sense, but designates very different realities. In spite of a fairly
universal movement of extension of liberal capitalist economic logic,
of a spreading of democratic structures and of a promotion of western
ideas and values generally associated with modernity, hierarchical,
collective and ritualized forms often continue to prevail over indi
vidualizing and egalitarian logics, or to coexist with them, produc
ing much less individualized human beings, apart from certain
privileged elites, generally perceived as 'westernized'.
The notion of individualism can therefore also be understood in
many different ways. In the spectrum of such possibilities, a dis
tinction should at least be made between three major meanings.9
The noun, and even more its adjectival form 'individualistic', can
first mean an existing state of affairs, relating to the field of em
pirical realities, in which institutions, ideas, behaviours, processes
or people are strongly individualized. Even if the two notions usually
share relations of complicity, this empirical or factual individualism
