Argumentation and Advocacy, Summer 2002 v39 i1 p57(15)

Public argument-driven security studies. (Review Essay). (book review) Gordon R. Mitchell.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 American Forensic Association

The topic of global security has recently received considerable attention in the field of argumentation studies, with public argument scholars engaging a host of vexing issues posed by the tumult in world affairs triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall (Broda-Bahm 1999; Dauber 2001a; Dauber 2001b; Leeper 2002; Mitchell 2000; Mitchell, Ayotte & Helwich 2001; Newman 2002; Winkler 2002). A trend in international relations (IR) mirrors this development, with a growing number of IR scholars drawing on the concept of argumentation to explain global events that resist snapping snugly into the tidy templates of Cold War power politics. This moment of intellectual convergence suggests that argumentation may be working as what rhetorical critic Leah Ceccarelli (2001, p. 5) calls a "conceptual chiasmus" -an interdisciplinary bridge connecting different scholarly communities working on overlapping subject matter.

The North Carolina-based Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) has facilitated academic interchange along these lines through its scholarly conferences and publications. (1) For example, a 1998 TISS conference on Bridging Gaps in the Study of Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy featured a roundtable discussion that put political scientist Ole Holsti in conversation with public argument scholars David Cheshier and Erik Doxtader (Cheshier, Doxtader & Holsti 1998). This dialogue, which centered on Holsti's (1996) groundbreaking book, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, hints at how the lens of argumentation can bring sharp focus to security studies that treat public opinion and deliberative practice as constitutive dimensions of global politics.

The overlap between public argument studies and IR scholarship becomes clearer when one compares Thomas Goodnight's (1998) call for study of "argument formation[s]" in world affairs with Thomas Risse's (2000) insight that by attending to "arguing in the international public sphere" (p. 21), IR scholars can effectively bridge rational choice theory and social constructivism. (2) Building on Goodnight's work and echoing Risse's suggestion, Cori Dauber & David Cheshier (1998) locate public argument-driven security studies in a conceptual middle space that foregrounds the iterative relationship between material conditions and discursive practices: "[T]he political scene in any polity will be shaped by complex interactions between public arguers, where the realities of geopolitics and culture will shape both arguer and audience and in turn be made the topoi and evidence of their claims" (p. 40).

It is notable that Dauber & Cheshier position their public argument approach to security studies as an alternative to Samuel Huntington's (1993) realpolitik "clash of civilizations" thesis, much the same way that IR scholar Marc Lynch (2000, pp. 309-16) uses public sphere theory to ground his critique of Huntington. This overlapping emphasis on argumentation challenges the deterministic underpinnings of Huntington's pessimistic worldview by illustrating how the global milieu is marked by moments of rhetorical exigence--opportunities to color with words and images what some paint as the inexorable march of history toward cataclysmic conflict. It also responds to two of IR realism's explanatory weaknesses--difficulty in accounting for the heightened efficacy of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as actors on the world stage (Keck & Sikkink 1998; Payne 2000; Payne & Samhat 2002; Samhat 1997, pp. 350-56), and descriptive myopia resulting from reductive formulations of communicative action in global affairs (Ri sse 1999, pp. 8-14; Risse-Kappen 1995). On a normative level, the public argument approach opens a critical aperture for commentators to articulate visions of world affairs where international disputes are resolved and complex problems solved through border-crossing dialogue oriented toward mutual understanding, rather than strategic deployment of force via power, money, or arms (Association of German Scientists 2000; Bohman 1999a, pp. 95-99; Bohman & Lutz-Bachmann 1998; Payne 1996, p. 376; Linklater 1998).

IR scholars who feature argumentation prominently in their theories face several challenges in explaining international events using theoretical terms usually reserved for analysis of deliberation rooted in domestic public spheres of democratic states. Most basically, transnational deliberations present unique logistical hurdles: "[S]evere time constraints and the sheer complexity of practical problems in international life are bound to prevent real discourses from achieving anything other than an approximation of the idealized presuppositions of argumentation" (Haacke 1996, p. 285). Even when such logistical obstacles are surmounted, common opinions forged in international public spheres often prove difficult to translate into policy change given the lack of decision-making authority currently invested in international institutions (Bohrnan 1999b, pp. 506-7). In addition, standard criticisms of deliberative democracy levied in domestic contexts tend to have even greater purchase when applied to internationa l public spheres. For example, the exclusionary effects of grounding discourse to the counterfactual assumption that domestic interlocutors share homogeneous background assumptions (see Zulick & Laffoon 1991) may be magnified on an international level, where the cultural, social, and religious heterogeneity of discussants is likely to be even more pronounced.

Just as powerful actors manipulate discussion in domestic public spheres, "norm entrepreneurs" can strategically engineer frames for international public dialogue that serve narrow special interests and frustrate unfettered collective will formation (Payne 2001). Finally, the same media filters that distort democratic deliberation in domestic public spheres are likely to corrupt argumentation even more insidiously in transnational public spheres, where interlocutors often separated by great physical distances must rely on technologically mediated communication to share ideas. All these factors make it unlikely that international public sphere dialogues will come to resemble so-called ideal speech situations. Whether there is still value in research that explores how communicative interaction enables and constrains will formation and policy-making in the international milieu remains an open question, one that is broached in the pages that follow.

The title of this review essay proposes a shorthand label for the interdisciplinary nexus linking security-based argumentation studies and argumentation-based security studies. I explore this nexus by reviewing four recent books that fit loosely under the rubric of public argument-driven security studies. Part one examines how the proposed globalization of public sphere theory plays out in a study on Cold War superpower relations. Part two pursues a similar vector of analysis in the context of Jordanian foreign policy from 1988 to 1998. Part three considers how recent technological developments and political trends complicate efforts to cultivate critical public discussion on security matters in entertainment-saturated spheres of public deliberation.

TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM AND THE COLD WAR ENDGAME

Stuart Croft and Terry Terriff's edited volume, Critical Reflections on Security and Change, is a collection of essays that are designed to revisit Cold War history, reflect on methods and approaches to studying security policy, and speculate on how future trends are likely to shape the practice and study of international relations. Some of the most useful chapters provide introductions to the IR subfield known as critical security studies. In one of these overview chapters, "'Change and Insecurity' Revisited," Barry Buzan traces the roughly 20-year history of this subfield and situates it vis-a-vis realism, IR's dominant paradigm. For Buzan, a defining feature of the critical security studies research program is that instead of accepting realism's theoretical categories (such as threat, security, and state interest) at face value, it shows how these categories are "socially constructed" through various security discourses (p. 3). Here, the way rhetors represent material conditions in the world becomes as im portant, if not more important, than material conditions themselves. As Buzan points out, this emphasis on discourse and representation simultaneously opens up security studies to diverse research methodologies and places a host of new normative questions on the table. These questions include "what should and shouldn't be constructed as threats" and "whose interests are served or damaged by particular processes of securitization and desecuritization" (p. 3). The title of Steve Smith's chapter in the same volume, "The Increasing Insecurity of Security Studies" signals that this is an academic field in a state of flux. Smith provides a panoramic survey of the various approaches to security studies that have taken root amidst the shakeup of IR's dominant paradigm: the Third World security school; the "Copenhagen School"; constructivist security studies; critical security studies; and poststructural security studies.

During the Cold War, talk of the "socially constructed" nature of security threats was often dismissed in the academy and beyond as little more than Pollyanish bluster. However, as Edward Kolodziej points out in his chapter, "Security Studies for the Next Millennium": "The sudden and unexpected implosion of the Soviet Union and the abrupt end of the Cold War prompted a probing, if not always fruitful, debate about what is--or what should be--security studies" (p. 18). Part of this debate played out in the context of discussion about what caused the Cold War to end. Commentators partial to the realist paradigm of power politics explained the Soviet Union's demise as an act of capitulation to overwhelming US military superiority (Brzezinski 1992; Kirkpatrick 1990).

Kolodziej, echoing many other voices in critical security studies, disputes this account: "[The military dimension of the East-West competition does not appear to have been determinative in explaining either the timing, speed and wholesale unraveling of the Soviet state and empire" (p. 24; see also Deudney & Ikenberry 1992, p. 124; Pike, Blair & Schwartz 1998, pp. 295-97; Powaski 1998, p. 260; Reiss 1992, pp. 192-93).

So if the mighty steel of US military strength did not tame the Russian bear, what did? Matthew Evangelista's answer to this question should pique the interest of argumentation scholars. In Unarmed Forces, Evangelista posits that the sharing of "information, arguments, [and] ideas" between networks of Soviet and American transnational activists constituted a major factor that influenced superpower policy and eventually brought about a peaceful end to the Cold War (p. 7). Turning to case studies of debates concerning nuclear testing, antiballistic missile defense, and conventional force deployments, Evangelista literally pries open what he calls the "black box" (p. 7) of Soviet policy, documenting previously obscured aspects of Cold War history through exhaustive study of Soviet-era archives, numerous interviews of key Soviet-era officials, review of recent memoir accounts, and inspection of newly declassified US and British archival documents.

Many of these resources chronicle cooperative efforts by Soviet and American scientists, doctors, and activists to create independent channels of communication that kept accurate and reliable information about military intentions and deployments flowing in both directions. Such lines of communication also galvanized an interlocking pattern of peace movement activism that steered Soviet and American leaders toward more moderate postures and policies. Evangelista cites the early "Pugwash" meetings between US and Soviet scientists as the "birth" of such transnational activism (pp. 31-35). During the 1950s, such meetings helped dramatize the danger of nuclear fallout in the respective public spheres, creating political momentum that eventually produced a nuclear test ban agreement.

Following a chronological pattern, Evangelista proceeds to track the entry of a new class of players to the stage of transnational activism in the 1970s-medical doctors. Taking advantage of the opportunity to treat aging Soviet leaders, American physicians such as Bernard Lown visited the Soviet Union and formed lasting relationships with Soviet counterparts such as Evgenii Chazov. The Lown-Chazov connection paved the way for the Boston-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) to evolve into a transnational network that eventually became the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Comprising some 200,000 members from 80 countries, the IPPNW won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

In 1981 Lown traveled to the USSR with Carl Sagan, under IPPNW auspices, to make a remarkable series of public appearances desigued to educate Soviet audiences about the nuclear arms race. At the time, Lown and Sagan were vilified in the US by Cold War hawks who felt that such discussion would compromise American military credibility and bolster Soviet resolve to win a nuclear war. Evangelista's research shows that such transnational activism had the reverse effect. Accurate reportage of IPPNW meetings appeared in Soviet newspapers such as Pravda (circulation 10 million); Izvestiia (over 8 million); Komsomol'skaia pravda (10 million); and Literaturnia gazeta (over 2.5 million). Soviet national television broadcast nine IPPNW congresses, reaching additional millions. According to Evangelista, these efforts "set a precedent for public discussion--'glasnost'--on nuclear issues, well before Mikhail Gorbachev came into office and began using the term" (p. 155). Evangelista documents how Gorbachev later acknowledged the significance of IPPNW activism by presenting to Lown a copy of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that bore the following inscription: "Dear Bernard! I want to thank you for your enormous contribution to preventing nuclear war. Without it and other powerful anti-nuclear initiatives, it is unlikely that this Treaty would have come about. I wish you all the best. Mikhail Gorbachev" (p. 876).

Evangelista's most convincing analysis shows how transnational linkages shaped the course of Gorbachev's presidency. He tracks the way that physicists and doctors, working alongside peace activists such as Randall Forsberg of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), were able to create "breathing room" necessary for Gorbachev and US president Ronald Reagan to engineer a peaceful Cold War endgame.

In addition to coordination of specific policy initiatives, the transnational network of US and Soviet disarmament supporters also worked together to create an overall atmosphere conducive to restraint on each side. In order for Gorbachev to succeed in cutting back Soviet military programs and military spending, he had to make a plausible case that the United States did not pose a serious threat to Soviet security ... As the Nuclear Freeze movement sought to persuade Ronald Reagan that he had to tone down his harsh rhetoric about the Soviet Union and careless comments about nuclear war, Soviet reformers pushed initiatives that would diminish the 'enemy image' of the USSR in Reagan's eyes.... The warming of US-Soviet relations would not have been possible had Reagan not been pushed by the US peace movement to address the threat of nuclear war.... American transnational activists, while trying to constrain US military programs, also considered it important to persuade the Soviet government that it did not pose a threat so grave that Soviet unilateral restraint or even negotiated settlements would be dangerous.... They managed to persuade Gorbachev, sometimes in direct discussion, that the Soviet Union should 'unlink' the signing of a strategic weapons reduction treaty from US pursuit of SDI. Star Wars, they argued, would eventually fade away, especially if the Soviet Union continued to pursue its reformist course in defense and disarmament, not to mention internal democratization (pp. 383-4, emphasis added).

Evangelista's findings raise serious questions about realpolitik models of international relations that explain US Cold War victory over the Soviet Union in terms of one mammoth billiard ball smashing into and destroying its more fragile counterpart. His impressive empirical research illustrates how threats, policies, and norms were constructed and deconstructed by argumentation conducted in transnational channels of communication. If the significance of this finding for students of argumentation is not already apparent, it becomes obvious in Evangelista's final case study, which examines the influence of transnational activism on post-Soviet policy.

In 1989, renowned poet Olzhas Suleimenov founded a movement to halt nuclear testing in the republic of Kazakhstan. As Evangelista explains, this movement was transnational from inception--by naming their group "Nevada," Suleimenou and his fellow activists attempted to "attract the attention of grassroots antinuclear activists ('downwiders') working to shut down the US test site in Nevada" (p. 352). These efforts succeeded in galvanizing quickly a transnational movement that brought some 50,000 protesters to a demonstration in Kazakhstan on August 6, 1989 (Hiroshima day). Evangelista was present at another important event in the Kazakh village of Karaul in May 1990, when Lown and Suleimenov dedicated a monument to victims of nuclear testing. According to Evangelista, "The impact was direct and powerful. An official in the Soviet foreign ministry admitted in early 1990 that the movement was responsible for forcing the Soviet military to cancel eleven of its eighteen scheduled nuclear tests for 1989... In December 1990, the Kazakhstan parliament banned nuclear weapons testing on the republic's territory" (p. 354). Evangelista notes that eventually, this decision worked as "a key prerequisite for the United States, Britain, France, and China to cease their tests" (p. 9).

Rhetorical scholars steeped in knowledge of how naming produces powerful bonds of identification will appreciate the way in which Suleimenov's decision to call the Kazakh anti-nuclear testing movement "Nevada" played an important role in fomenting the transnational activism chronicled by Evangelista. Future studies might explore how similar patterns of rhetorical invention shape efforts to forge transnational social movements in the security realm. This work would find theoretical support in a burgeoning corpus of literature focusing on the transnational dimensions of social movement activity (see e.g. Cohen & Shirin 2000; Khagram, Riker & Sikkink 2002; Smith, Chatfield & Pagnucco 1997). One challenge facing scholars pursuing this line of investigation is that the frequently episodic nature of transnational activism complicates its categorization as social movement activity. For example, Sidney Tarrow (1998, pp. 184-88) stipulates that sustained, rather than temporary or sporadic, contact is necessary for transnational activism to reach the status of a social movement.

Another aspect of Evangelista's work that hints at future lines of research in argumentation studies lies on a theoretical level. In developing his theory of transnational activism, Evangelista acknowledges a significant debt to Risse's "pathbreaking" work on transnational public spheres (p. 17; see also RisseKappen 1995). Recently, Risse (2000) refined his theory of "communicative action in world politics." Scholars of argumentation and rhetoric may be curious to note that in this explication, Risse relies heavily on a distinction between "arguing" and "rhetorical behavior" to explain precisely how his approach differs from neorealist IR perspectives that purport to account for communicative action in world affairs (see also Schimmelfennig 2001; Schimmelfennig 1999). According to Risse, neorealist approaches tend to rely on a "cheap talk" model of communication, where international actors engage in communication strategically to persuade interlocutors, but are not really willing to change their positions ba sed on outcomes of deliberation: "[A]ctors engaging in rhetoric are not prepared to change their own beliefs or to be persuaded themselves by the 'better argument'" (Risse 2000, p. 8). This form of international communication stands in sharp contrast to what Risse calls the "arguing mode," where parties attempt to approximate Habermasian dialogues geared toward mutual understanding: "[I]n contrast to rhetorical behavior, they are themselves prepared to be persuaded" (Risse 2000, p. 9).

Risse's distinction between rhetoric and argument does not find much support in rhetorical theory, where reductive approaches that treat rhetoric as strategic manipulation are criticized roundly for their conceptual thinness. Thicker descriptions position rhetoric as a practical art of using dialogue to coordinate action when interlocutors at loggerheads are forced to act in situations marked by uncertainty, or when collective decisions must be made before all the relevant facts are in (Doxtader 1991; Farrell 1993). Public argument-driven security studies might fruitfully explore how these insights could help differentiate bargaining (purely strategic communication undertaken for instrumental purposes); arguing (dialogue oriented toward mutual understanding); and rhetoric (the communicative search for joint agreement on necessary actions in light of imperfect conditions). Such differentiation could enhance the descriptive power of IR theories by adding texture to the argument/rhetoric binary some approaches use to explain communicative action in international politics.

SECURITY DEBATES IN ARAB PUBLIC SPHERES

In 1988, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan surprised the world by relinquishing its claim to the West Bank, effectively severing ties with thousands of Palestinians living on territory that was once part of Jordan. During the 1990 Gulf crisis, Jordan bucked world expectations again by refusing to join the US-led military coalition against Iraq. In signing a 1994 peace treaty with Israel, the Jordanian leadership made yet another unanticipated foreign policy move that was difficult to explain from within the realist IR framework. Realism holds that international relations can be described accurately and predicted reliably by examining how state interests and national identities animate foreign policy decisions. Yet in each of the instances listed above, Jordanian foreign policy appeared to diverge from, and even to contradict, longstanding interests of the Jordanian state and identities of the Jordanian people.

Marc Lynch takes this conundrum as a key point of departure for his book, State Interests and Public Spheres. This work advances a theory of international relations designed to sharpen accounts of Jordanian behavior from 1988-1998. At the center of Lynch's approach is the notion that shifts in state interests and national identity can occur when public spheres of deliberation enable the airing of competing viewpoints in episodes of argumentation: "[S]tate identity and interests ... become subject to change at those points when an open public sphere permits the appearance of public deliberation oriented toward questioning consensus norms" (p. 255). In a move that globalizes this theory, Lynch stipulates that public spheres of deliberation need not map cleanly onto the predetermined boundaries of state borders: "Instead of conceptualizing the public sphere as a single, unified arena in which a unified public debates the affairs of a single state, it is possible to think about public sphere structure as a netwo rk of overlapping and competing publics, which are not necessarily bounded by state borders" (p. 47).

Lynch draws upon field research conducted in Jordan, Egypt, and the West Bank, along with analysis of Arabic media publications and documents from official archives, to show how public spheres of deliberation developed in Jordanian society and the Arab world from 1988-1998. He documents how the Jordanian norm of hiwar (dialogue) was nurtured during this period through spikes in newspaper circulation, spread of radio transmitters, relaxation of state control over media outlets, and greater participation of editorial commentators from across the political spectrum.

Lynch's theory is not presented as a brand of full-blown constructivism designed to undermine completely the rationalist explanations yielded by IR's realist paradigm. Rather, Lynch argues, "a public sphere approach can bridge constructivist and rationalist arguments" (p. 11). A temporal distinction sets up this bridging maneuver. In periods of "normal politics," when "an effective public sphere does not exist," Lynch says that the rationalist tools of IR realism work well, because "actor identity and interests are likely to be relatively stable" (p. 11). Echoing Thomas Kuhn (1970), Lynch adds, "Identities and interests change primarily during moments of crisis, when they lose their 'taken for granted' quality and become the subject of explicit public debate" (p. 12). The key moments of change in Jordanian foreign policy described in State Interests and Public Spheres are all preceded by episodes of crisis when state identities and interests are thrown into flux and thematized as topics of public debate.

The case studies in State Interests and Public Spheres describe how these nascent public spheres influenced Jordanian security policy by enabling fundamental transformations in interests and identities. For example, Lynch suggests that Jordan's "severing of ties" with the West Bank was made possible by two-tiered process of public deliberation. On one level, Jordanian diplomats persuaded skeptical Arab colleagues that disengagement would fortify Palestinian identity and further the interests of an emergent Arab consensus by enhancing the collective security of all Arab nations. With such a tentative consensus secured, King Hussein announced the severing of ties with the West Bank in 1988, an act that inaugurated commencement of a second phase of deliberation in Jordan's domestic public sphere. In the ensuing debate, vigorous argumentation prompted calcified norms to shift in the key sites of Jordan's nascent public sphere: professional associations, political parties, the press, the Islamist movement, and pu blic opinion surveys. In Lynch's view, "Change in jordanian identity and interests--a change in preferences over outcomes--could only be produced by a domestic dialogue and the reconfiguration of domestic institutions. The emergence of the Jordanian public sphere in the 1990s provided a site for such deliberation" (p. 100). Similar patterns of public sphere activity are isolated as pertinent agents of change in Lynch's two other case studies: Jordan's boycott of the US Gulf War coalition and its signing of a 1994 peace treaty with Israel.

While Lynch is keen to highlight the constitutive role of public participation in influencing Jordan's security policy from 1988-1998, he is quick to distinguish his approach from realist accounts that fill explanatory gaps on an "ad hoc basis" by citing public opinion as a factor "constraining" policymaking: "It is important to distinguish between public opinion, as conventionally employed by foreign policy analysts, and the public sphere.... Rather than simply being a question of the extent to which public opinion constrains state policy, the issue is the extent to which public sphere discourse constitutes the state's articulation of interests" (p. 21). Lynch reveals his Habermasian affinities here, insisting that public sphere dialogue is more than just "cheap talk"--in his view, such dialogue has the power to reconstitute the fundamental building blocks upon which foreign policy rests.

If Lynch is correct about the strong function of public sphere deliberation in constituting state identities and interests, policymakers (especially those in the United States) would do well to heed his concluding remarks, which suggest that public sphere theory "has important implications for the debates over the appropriate response to 'rogue' regimes in the international society" (p. 269). In a world where state interests and identities have roots that go all the way down to civil society, cosmetic regime changes are unlikely, in the long run, to produce more moderate policies in so-called rogue states.

Near the end of State Interests and Public Spheres, Lynch hints at a more promising approach for dealing with Iran, one of the nations recently branded as part of the Bush administration's "axis of evil." A policy of engagement and dialogue, Lynch suggests, "can offer the potential for changing preferences and for identifying common identities and interests" (p. 269). Elsewhere, Lynch (2000) expounds on this idea, blending Iranian President Mohammed Khatami's prescription for a "dialogue of civilizations" with international public sphere theory to craft a vision of global affairs where the persuasive cachet of argumentation supplants coercion and manipulation as primary modes of communication (see also Association of German Scientists 2000).

Lynch is hopeful that his account of the "Arabist public sphere" will have enduring salience and "inform a generalizable international public sphere theory" (p. 34). Some readers may not share Lynch's sanguine outlook on this point, given that his approach draws heavily from Jurgen Habermas, whose work focuses primarily on the role of deliberation in highly developed capitalist societies. The question of whether Habermasian theory has sufficient flexibility and explanatory scope to elucidate the dynamics of a putative global public sphere (which includes many nations and peoples who do not openly embrace Western norms of political deliberation) has been the focus of recent debate in critical theory (Calhoun 2002; Dallmayr 2001; Habermas 2001; Habermas 1998; McCarthy 2002).

Public argument scholars are well-positioned to contribute to this debate, perhaps by using their expertise in argumentation to identify and address theoretical anomalies present in public sphere-based accounts of international relations. For example, Lynch's (p. 11) notion that "an effective public sphere does not exist" when identities and interests remain stable during periods of "normal politics" sounds much like Thomas Farrell and Thomas Goodnight's (1981) description of "accidental publics" that only come into being during catastrophic episodes. However, it seems untenable to maintain that public sphere structures disappear when crises subside and "normal politics" resume. In fact, many case studies in argumentation document precisely how public sphere activity plays a significant role in will formation during periods of "normal politics" (see Palczewski 2001; Rowland & Jones 2002; Zarefsky 1986).

Perhaps Lynch's international public sphere theory could be modified to account for this anomaly by including the concept of "controversy." In the parlance of argumentation studies, controversy is a phenomenon that occurs when underlying norms of communication are contested through "oppositional arguments" levied in public spheres of deliberation (see Goodnight 1993; Goodnight 1999; Mitchell 2000; Olson & Goodnight 1994; Phillips 1999). If Lynch described periods of international deliberation when state interests and identities are contested as episodes of international public controversy, he might position himself better to articulate how public sphere structures persist during periods of "normal politics" that follow the resolution of controversy.

THE MIME-NET AND SPECTATOR SPORT WARFARE

The US Marine Corp Modeling and Simulation Office recently acquired and modified the popular video game Doom for training exercises, altering the software to replace monsters with realistic simulations of enemy forces that young soldiers might encounter during actual combat. In Kosovo, NATO bombardiers wielded hand-held "wizzos," Nintendo-like devices that helped pilots guide precision weaponry to their targets from 40,000 feet. For U.N. coalition soldiers, the battlefield experience of the Gulf War similarly recalled childhood visits to the video arcade.

In Virtuous War, James Der Derian explores these phenomena as part what he calls the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-NET). Der Derian sees the MIME-NET as an extension of the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), a trend in arms procurement and military doctrine that favors development and deployment of sophisticated, high-tech weaponry (Freedman 1998; Laird & Mey 1999). As a latter day incarnation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex, the MIME-NET represents, an interlocking constellation of organizations and interests that controls the tenor of public debate on security policy (increasingly by exploiting interfaces between warfare and media entertainment networks): "[T]he new MIME-NET runs on video-game imagery, twenty-four hour news cycles, multiple nodes of military, corporate, university, and media power, and microchips, embedded in everything but human flesh (so far)" (Der Derian 2001, p. 126).

Those familiar with Der Derian's work may be surprised by Virtuous War, which reads more like a travelogue than the high postmodern theory for which he has become known in critical security studies circles. In the prologue, Der Derian shares that in order to "separate the hype from the hyperreality of virtuous war," he decided to "avoid the vices of academic abstraction... and to go where doctrine confronts reality" (p. xx). Thus, readers find themselves accompanying Der Derian on a whirlwind tour of the Pentagon's cutting-edge, high-tech infrastructure that includes visits to the Institute for Creative Technologies Convention (where the latest military simulation gadgetry is displayed), the US Army's Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command post (STRICOM, where high-ranking military officers plan the next steps in advanced virtual warfare), and the US Army Southem European Task Force headquarters in Vicenza, Italy (a central computer node for the NATO air campaign in Kosovo). Der Derian stops along the way for a series of conversations with military leaders such as Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, STRICOM technical director Mike Macedonia, and General Wesley Clark--verbatim transcripts of these interviews fill some 23 pages of Virtuous War.

While Der Derian seems genuinely impressed by the futuristic military technology he encounters, this sense of awe only redoubles the moral and political qualms he harbors about the MIME-NET. Specifically, he finds the virtualization of the warfare troubling because of its tendency to produce phenomenological detachment from battlefield violence: "Through the MIME-NET, the enemy can be reduced to an icon in a target-rich environment, perhaps even efficiently vilified and destroyed at a distance" (p. 147). The sense of alienation created by the conflation of entertainment technology and actual combat, Der Derian says, numbs soldiers and publics alike to the brutality of warfare: "In this high-tech rehearsal for war, one learns how to kill but not to take responsibility for it, one experiences 'death' but not the tragic consequences of it" (p. 10). On a political level, Der Derian asserts that this process results in a hollowing out of political discourse, with virtual pyrotechnics substituting for collective d eliberation about matters of war and peace: "[S]omething is lost in virtuality: not only the possibility but the very concept of political difference is hollowed out. It stops being a site of negotiation and becomes a screen for the display of dazzling virtual effects, from digital war games to national party conventions to video-camera bombing" (p. 202). The title of Virtuous War conveys Der Derian's warning about the political pliability of virtual warfare. He says that with the direct experience of battlefield carnage emptied from media representations of actual conflict, it becomes much easier for war hawks to take the moral high ground and justify the use of force by packaging risk-free humanitarian missions as virtuous campaigns.

A recent TISS report surveys how the values, opinions, and perspectives of military leaders differ from those of their civilian counterparts (Kohn & Feaver 1999). Part of this report features Cori Dauber's public argument analysis on how differing views of "casualty shyness" structures public deliberation and steers policy-making. This analysis caught Der Derian's attention--in Virtuous War (p. 171), he cites the casualty shyness portion of the TISS study (he calls it "casualty aversion") to help explain why organizations such as the Institute for Creative Technologies craft virtuous war narratives that resonate in the MIME-NET framework of public debate. Here is one instance of intellectual traffic crossing the Ceccarellian "conceptual chiasmus" that bridges argumentation studies and JR scholarship.

It is illuminating to read Virtuous War alongside two chapters from Croft and Terriff's Critical Reflections on Security and Change that touch on similar topics. In "Watersheds in Perception and Knowledge" Craig Demchak describes how rapid advances in military technology portend sea changes in war doctrine and political discourse. The military's traditional reliance on lethality, reach and resupply as force multipliers has shifted to an emphasis on tools that maximize accuracy, speed and legitimacy. In this "watershed" period of transition, Demchak argues that new military preferences are bound to emerge regarding technologies, doctrines and tactics.

Colin McInnes' chapter, "Spectator Sport Warfare," pursues the entertainment angle stressed by Der Derian, showing how high-tech weaponry blurs boundaries between sport and war. McInnes describes how the "major wars" of the early twentieth century have given way to more localized conflicts that unfold far from the capitols of Western democracies. With the sense of war's direct risk diluted by physical distance, McInnes says citizens come to experience warfare as spectators, "located out of harm's way but engaged courtesy of the media" (p. 160). McInnes suggests that in this condition, public discourse on security matters comes to resemble commentary on sporting events.

The suicide hijackings of September, 2001 cast fresh light on the analysis provided in Demchak and McInnes' chapters. At face value, McInnes' proposition that war has become a spectator sport for Western publics seems to have crumbled along with the World Trade Center. Yet closer inspection of his argument reveals a nuance--McInnes treats spectator sport warfare less as a naturalized condition and more of a calculated strategy pursued by military leaders to enhance the legitimacy of their actions. As such, he anticipates that technologically disadvantaged adversaries will resort increasingly to asymmetric strategies of attack that are designed to puncture the veneer of virtuality by drawing Western spectators directly into the field of violence:

[T]he West's lead in RMA technologies might lead enemies to adopt 'asymmetric strategies.' These strategies are generally aimed not at winning battles but at drawing Western societies more directly into a war, through attacks on infrastructure or populations. In other words the concern about asymmetric strategies is not related to their direct impact on the battlefield but to their ability to prevent war from being a spectator sport (p. 160).

Demchak's analysis also contains elements that deserve a second look in the post-9/l1 milieu. According to Demchak, as the RMA prepares Western military forces to fight futuristic conflicts that bear little resemblance to the "great wars" of the early twentieth century, the concept of war itself is likely to undergo transformation. Here, traditional views of wars as contests between state armies are likely to give way to models where Western militaries use technological wizardry to target specific organizations and even individual persons: "This 'repersonalization of war' harkens back to military conflicts of several centuries ago when the battle goal was to kill the king or the general. . . the battle ended as soon as someone made it up there [on the mountain] to kill the major lord" (p. 188). While the current US "war on terror" is unlikely to end with the capture or "liquidation" of Osama bin Laden, Demchak's observations about the protean nature of warfare certainly seem to have added salience in the mids t of a conflict where American forces have targeted a terrorist organization reputed to have havens in over 60 nations. One political complication Demchak sees in a world where military missions increasingly take on the character of police actions is that such actions become harder to track and control via political instruments: "Under these new definitions, preventive and highly personalized military actions which are only possible with information warfare technologies then become social corrections of possible unwanted severe behaviours, not war by other means. As such, such military operations will become more ubiquitous and more difficult to control by treaties" (p. 189).

CONCLUSION

As the interlocking trends of economic globalization and political interdependence gather momentum, stresses on the state-centric system of world politics are likely to mount. It is a safe bet that leaders of national governments will find options for effective unilateral action increasingly scarce in a twenty-first century milieu where policy challenges such as environmental protection, global security, and economic stability demand new forms of political cooperation. "With regard to the political means and ends of traditional grand strategy, the realist and neorealist days of state-monopolized 'high politics' (see Morgenthau 1948; Walta 1979) are likely numbered, as the rise of nonstate actors and the emergence of a global civil society bring the social dimension of world politics to the fore" (Arquilla & Ronfeldt 1999, p. 56). As defense analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt explain further, these new conditions warrant a shift away from the dominant realpolitik framework of international relations, t oward a noopolitik approach that locates the engine of world politics in globally linked communication networks where competing ideas shape the course of events.

Although Arquilla & Ronfeldt (2000) suggest that these trends portend a "revolution in diplomatic affairs," such a communicative approach to international relations is less revolutionary than might appear on first glance. Evangelista's Unarmed Forces shows how Soviet and US transnational activists forged communicative links outside established channels of interstate diplomacy to shape the Cold War endgame. More recent examples of such policy-relevant international public sphere activity are documented in Lynch's State Interests and Public Spheres, which details the role of popular dialogue in constituting Jordanian security policy.

These books exhibit the heuristic value of viewing public argument as a constitutive dimension of security policy. Such public argument-driven security studies might be enriched by interdisciplinary dialogue that turns overlapping concepts into productive points of theoretical synergy. For example, Risse and Schimmelfennig's strand of IR constructivism, which is notable for its emphasis on the role played by rhetoric in shaping foreign policy, draws upon Habermas' theory of communicative action for support. Yet in the field of argumentation studies, Habermas' view of rhetoric has been subjected to vigorous critique--the notion that rhetoric is little more than strategic manipulation of audience preferences has been widely discredited, displaced by thicker accounts that position rhetoric as the practical art of using dialogue to reach collective decisions in moments of uncertainty. Theoretical conversation about the dynamics of rhetorical action in international affairs might take this conceptual divergence a s a promising point of departure.

Another potential point of interfield synergy converges around the notion of the "public sphere." Evangelista and Lynch rely heavily on public sphere analysis in their respective projects, and their expansive international vision demonstrates the considerable potential of a public argument-driven IR approach. Perhaps cross-pollinating this critical strategy with public sphere concepts developed elsewhere could be useful. For instance, the idea of "counter-public spheres" has received significant attention recently in the field of communication (Asen & Brouwer 2001; see also Felski 1989; Fraser 1989). The notion of "international counter-public spheres" has not yet been thematized in IR circles. However, it is not difficult to imagine how this theoretical construct could augment public argument-driven accounts of international relations. Consider that much of the transnational political debate featured on the Internet not only challenges official state policies, but also calls into question the explicit and t acit norms of communication governing debate in formalized international public spheres of deliberation. To the extent that such communicative behavior bears a resemblance to domestic "counter-public sphere" activity designed to carve out independent spaces for discussion in polities where the official public sphere is insufficiently inclusive, such transnational dialogue might be perspicuously elucidated using counter-public sphere theory.

Ever since Immanuel Kant (1795/1957) proposed that a global association of republics linked by a common commitment to free speech and deliberation might bring "perpetual peace," leaders, citizens and scholars have wondered about the prospect of a world ordered more by words than weapons. Kant's universalist musings seem naively utopian in the present milieu, where the dangers of apparently intractable conflicts are heightened daily by the spread of advanced weapons geared toward mass destruction. But while Kant's vision of "perpetual peace" may remain an ever-elusive fiction, the growing salience of transnational deliberation in world politics is an inescapable fact. The erosion of nation-state sovereignty, spread of global communication technology, and rapid development of economic and political interdependence are factors that have combined to change the global landscape dramatically. The books reviewed in this essay show how public argumentation can have powerful political cachet in this new landscape, an d how technological trends give rise to new forms of argumentation with potential to shape events in ways that are only beginning to be understood.

(1.) The Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) is an interdisciplinary consortium of Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University. The object of TISS is to promote communication and cooperation among faculty, graduate students, and the public across disciplines and beyond the confines of each university in order to advance research and education concerning national and international security, broadly defined. Originally established in 1958, TISS has benefited from private foundation funding, most notably from the Ford Foundation, in addition to its university backing, and from help from such other agencies as the National Strategy Information Center and the Army War College (see the TISS website online at http://www.unc.edu/depts.tiss).

(2.) Rational choice theory, derived from the tenets of IR realism, explains world events by showing how foreign policy decisions are driven by state actors seeking to further national interests and protect national identities. Social constructivist IR approaches aim to dc-naturalize such descriptions by elucidating the social factors underlying realist accounts.

BOOKS REVIEWED

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON SECURITY AND CHANGE. Edited by Stuart Croft and Tery Teriff. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000; P. vii + 255. $53.55; paper $22.05.

STATE INTERESTS AND PUBLIC SPHERES: THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF JORDAN'S IDENTITY. By Marc Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999; p. ix + 327. $50.00; paper $19.50.

UNARMED FORCES: THE TRANSNATIONAL MOVEMENT TO END THE COLD WAR By Matthew Evangelista. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999; pp. v + 406. $49.95; paper $19.95.

VIRTUOUS WAR: MAPPING THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-MEDIA-ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK. By James Der Derian. Boulder, Colo.: West-view Press, 2001; pp. xi + 249. $26.00.

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Gordon R. Mitchell *

* Gordon R. Mitchell is an Associate Professor and Director of Debate in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Correspondence concerning this review essay should be addressed to Gordon R Mitchell, 1117 Cathedral of Learning, 4200 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; gordonm@pitt.edu.

Named Works: Critical Reflections on Security and Change (Book) - Reviews; State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan's Identity (Book) - Reviews; Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Book) - Reviews; Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Book) - Reviews