Scholarly Contributions | International Relations Theory

ROLE OF CULTURE AND ETHNICITY IN GLOBAL POLITICS

A common theme throughout Professor Said’s career was his foresight and willingness to talk about issues that had been marginalized, anticipating what would later become important trends in the field. One key example of this is his work on the role of culture and ethnicity in global politics. At a time when mainstream IR theories centered on a homogenized understanding of the nation state, Said called attention to the impacts of identity, culture, ethnicity, religion, and the experiences of postcolonialism. He started writing about these issues nearly 30 years before they would become more mainstream in the 1990s, now picked up by contemporary postmodern, postcolonial, critical feminist, and critical security studies scholars, among others.

For Said, “politics is a cultural activity and reflects tradition and environment.”¹ He called for cultural analysis in international relations from his earliest writings. His textbook with Charles Lerche, Jr., Concepts of International Politics, argued that a state’s pursuit of its interests and power must be understood as rooted within the cultural identity of its people, shaped by their values and moral considerations.² In The African Phenomenon Said recognized the ways African states were rejecting Western modes of development in the late 1960s “in favor of a form or forms which we ourselves will determine and which will reflect our own heritage and cultural patterns.”³ He called for nuance when mainstream approaches relied on generalizing models based on Western political paradigms.

Said was also interested in defining a cultural approach to development, as opposed to the purely political or economic approaches that struggled to explain the uneven experiences among newly independent states.⁴ Instead of fixating on such indicators as economic growth, Said, with his colleague Dr. Brady Tyson, defines development in more holistic terms as “a process whose goals are to realize the human potential.”⁵ He recognized the cultural community as the site in which “a major portion of human realization must take place,” and which can be developed to become more pluralist, humanistic, and open.⁶ While not discounting the role of modernization efforts focused on areas like economic productivity, he insists that development cannot be imposed. Rather, it must involve humanization, a process that includes “the enlarging and making more equal the dignity, freedom, opportunity for creativity and community, and welfare of persons in society, as well as the restructuring of the institutions and culture of that society to support these goals.”⁷ Similarly, for Said human rights are “concerned with the dignity of the individual – the level of self-esteem that secures personal identity and promotes human community.”⁸ He critiqued conceptualizations of human rights that reinforce the perception of the universality of Western values and that exclude the cultural realities of non-Western societies. While the pursuit of human dignity is universal, Said asserts, “its form is designed by the culture of the people.”⁹

Further, Said and his former student (and later Maryland House of Delegates member) Luiz Simmons drew attention to the resurgence of ethnic communities, ethnonationalist movements, and ethnic conflict in international relations. Writing in the 1970s, at a time when mainstream theorists continued to rely upon the nation state as their analytical tool, Said and Simmons proclaim, “we have entered the age of international politics of ethnicity.”¹¹ The state is “no longer the paradigm of human organization” and is no longer the central provider of physical security – having been undermined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons – nor of all social-psychological needs. Instead, aided by the technological revolution in communications and ultimately the human need for identity and community, Said argues that diverse subcultures increasingly find affinity within and across national boundaries.¹²

More specifically, not only is there a persistence of traditional ethnic identities but also the emergence of “neoethnicism,” which Said defines as “a transition from the national consciousness of the nation-state to more communal forms of identity and organization characterized by cultural patriotism, ethnic nationalism, and a revolt against anxiety.”¹³ These emerging groups will persist, they argue, and are in fact “indications that our [traditional] perceptions of international relations and the causes of war and peace lag behind the consciousness of the men [sic] and nations we study.”¹⁴ Said anticipated that “the new international system will be both more parochial and simultaneously ‘less geographic’ than before.”¹⁵

Said’s interests in culture and ethnicity also factored into his work on US foreign policy.¹⁶ Observing the rise of ethnic and sectarian conflicts across the Middle East in the 1990s, for instance, Said rightly predicted that they “promise to complicate the implementation of national security policy for the United States.”¹⁷ While in the past the US found itself supporting status quo forces, Said recommends that US policymakers consider the legitimate aspirations of the people, encouraging processes of change with minimal violence and the development of political, cultural, economic, and technological forms that “serve human needs and foster a social and cultural future.”¹⁸

As someone who straddled multiple identities and cultural influences – Arab and American, non-Western and Western – Said was particularly tuned into the importance of these issues within the field. He understood intimately the need to consider multiple perspectives, and the dangers of making assumptions and generalizations. His work on identities and culture continued to develop in his scholarship beyond the field of international relations, including on intercultural dialogue and religion in conflict resolution, as well as within his work on Islam, the Middle East, and Africa. In particular, Said continued to hold together the universality of the quest for human dignity and our shared human condition, with the importance of our cultural diversity (see Spirituality and Global Politics). As Said writes in one of his last publications, The Whole World Needs the Whole World, “through this growing awareness of our diversity lies our unmistakable unity: our humanity and our common values and needs.”¹⁹

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