Introduction
Modernity refers to a condition of social existence that is radically different to all past forms of human experience. Modernization refers to the transitional process of moving from “traditional” or “primitive” communities to modern societies. IR is by and large a derivative discipline when it comes to debates over modernity and modernization. However, these debates have influenced IR in two main ways: firstly, via the exploration of continuity and change in the international system; secondly, and at a more subterranean level, via some of the “great debates” of the discipline and the development of contending theoretical approaches.
Debates over modernity have proceeded most influentially in the discipline of sociology. In fact, the category itself is largely a product of this discipline, and scholars created the discipline in the nineteenth century specifically to come to terms with “society” as a novel form of human existence. These debates have impacted upon IR primarily in the deployment of the contrast between traditional and modern forms of sociopolitical order in order to ascribe and explain the different constitutions of the domestic and international spheres. The sociology of modernity tends to approach different forms of human existence in temporal terms, specifically, the rupture between traditional community and modern society. Indeed, there has often been an implicit assumption in sociological literature that the historical experiences of Western Europe are the defining experiences of the ruptures that created modernity, hence universalizing a particular geocultural experience. Because of this, sociology has usually been reluctant to relate the chronological difference of tradition/modernity to the persistence of synchronous geocultural difference in the modern world order. It is this later form of difference that theories of modernization have directly addressed.
The investigation of modernization as a process has pluralistic intellectual roots: methodologically it utilized a comparative form of analysis in order to illuminate transitional processes between and within Western and non-Western (mainly ex-colonial) polities in broadly political-economic terms. In fact, the intellectual space available for comparative analysis of different socioeconomically organized polities was provided by social anthropology and its turn to ethnography as a way of exploring the continued existence of “primitive” communities in the modern world. While cognate investigations certainly precede World War II (for example, Veblen 1939), it is in the postwar period that modernization theory really developed as a form of comparative analysis that specifically targeted the political transitions of ex-colonial states towards modern societies. While such analyses experienced their heyday during the Cold War, the legacies of modernization theory – both its insights and its oversights – are still felt in both IR and IPE via the attempts to capture the geoculturally pluralistic character of modern world development.
Together, then, the sociological investigation of modernity and the anthropological/ comparative study of modernization have provided two articulations of sociopolitical difference, the former temporal, the latter geocultural. These two articulations of difference have impacted significantly upon approaches to and debates within IR; in many ways, the as yet unresolved relationship between temporal and geocultural difference provides one of the deepest challenges to the investigation of the form and content of international relations.
The first part of this essay investigates modernity by reference to historical and contemporary debates within sociology and illuminates, where appropriate, the influence of these debates upon IR. To begin with, the part sketches out the sociological investigation of the modern subject interpolated as an individual inhabiting an impersonalized society. Subsequently, a number of important debates over the constitution of this modern subject are discussed: how sociopolitical order is formed in the midst of anomie or alienation of the subject; what form of knowledge-production this subject partakes of, and what form of knowledge-production is appropriate to understand modern subjectivity; and finally the ethical orientation of the modern subject under conditions where human existence has been rationalized and disenchanted.
The second part of the essay starts by placing the emergence of modernization theory within the intellectual space provided by social anthropology for investigating continued geocultural plurality in an apparently “modern” world. Subsequently, the part documents the rise of modernization theory focusing on the Third World during the Cold War. The grounding in modernization theory of present-day debates in IR over the security/development nexus (especially the notion of “failed states”) is drawn out, as well as the interface between modernization theory and evolving notions of globality. Critiques of modernization theory are then documented, notably the rise of dependency theory and notions of underdevelopment. The second part finishes by drawing attention to current critiques of the way in which social anthropology has inherited the narrative of temporal rupture from sociology, in so doing conflating the traditional and primitive so that the persistence within modernity of supposedly premodern social relations of, for example, race and religion cannot be adequately accounted for.
Modernity
Sociology and the Modern Subject
Sociological inquiry starts with the assumption that modernity is temporally distinct from tradition (Shils 1961:1425; Habermas 1987b:8). Although chronological notions of the “modern” existed for centuries before, sociologists have usually placed the beginnings of modernity – and thus their own discipline – within the tumultuous effects of the “dual revolutions” that occurred within Europe at the end of the eighteenth century (Nisbet 1967). In fine, the rupture thesis of modernity states that the (French) democratic and (British) industrial revolutions radically undermined preexisting localized communities and their traditions by profaning sacred values and dismantling associated sociopolitical hierarchies.
The new science of sociology was charged with investigating the theoretical, practical, and ethical challenges deriving from the interpolation – through the above-mentioned revolutions – of the “individual” as the subject of an impersonalized organizational form of human coexistence, “society” (Elias 1978:34–7). Standing on the modern side of the chasm, sociologists have claimed that the condition of human being must be thought through without the comforting sureties of timeless tradition and spiritual faith. Rather than considered as part of an enchanted objective whole, the individual must be examined by prizing open its interior life. Subsequently, the development of the modern subject must be investigated in terms of an open-ended, constantly shifting process rather than embedded within an eschatological narrative; and meaning – if there is to be found any meaning – must be understood as immanent in this new human existence rather than transcendental (Lash and Friedman 1992).
With this in mind it is interesting to note that, similarly the sociology problematique, the core problematique of IR theory has always been the paradoxical search for order under conditions of anarchy. However, for this task, sociology has not relied upon a Realist canon of classical political thinkers, but upon Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber.
Order, Anomie, and Alienation
For Durkheim, traditional societies exhibited a mechanical form of solidarity because the individual was bound to the “collective conscience” directly instead of through a series of mediating institutional nodes. With no room to become authors of their own agency, individuals were effectively inorganic matter, hence Durkheim's mechanical metaphor (Durkheim 1964:130). Alternatively, industrialization prompted the specialization of tasks that, with a more complex division of labor, resulted in institutional differentiation (pp. 354–61). As the totalizing moral code of tradition was replaced with an instrumental approach to social interaction based on institutionalized specialization, individuals came to understand their social existence in terms of anomie (Durkheim 1964:128, 361; 1970:382) Durkheim claimed that the new form of solidarity, unlike the mechanical type of traditional communities, gained its strength by encouraging the development of individual personality, a requirement of the complex division of labor. Because both the parts and the whole were “living,” modern society exhibited an “organic” form of solidarity (Durkheim 1964:124, 131).
Durkheim's claim regarding the radically different constitution of sociopolitical order in modernity has been mobilized in IR as a way of mapping out the divided terrain of politics so that the “international” is effectively rendered as a premodern space in opposition to the modern space to be found within the state. In the pivotal chapter 6 of his hagiographic neorealist script, Theory of International Politics, Kenneth Waltz (1979) argues for the different structural qualities of domestic and international politics by referring to Durkheim's distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity (see for example Waltz 1979:115). Waltz claims that the international realm is characterized by the mechanical form of solidarity. Populated by an array of non-differentiated functionally like units, the international realm lacks a complex division of labor and can therefore only be composed of relations of thin interdependence, because the functional likeness of parts leads to systemic competition: anarchy is the condition of anomic relations between parts. Alternatively, the domestic realm for Waltz is