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Keith Hart on the Informal Economy, the Great Transformation, and the Humanity of Corporations
International Relations has long focused on the formal relations between states; in the same way, economists have long focused exclusively on formal economic activities. If by now that sounds outdated, it is only because of the work of Keith Hart. Famous for coining the distinction between the formal and the informal economy in the 1970s, Hart is a critical scholar who engages head-on with some of the world's central political-economic challenges. In this Talk, he, amongst others, discusses the value of the distinction 40 years after; how we need to rethink The Great Transformation nearly a century later; and how we need to undo the legal equivalence of corporations to humans, instituted nearly 150 years back.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?
I think it is the lack of fit between politics, which is principally national, and the world economy, which is global. In particular, the system of money has escaped from its national controls, but politics, public rhetoric aside, has not evolved to the point where adequate responses to our common economic problems can be posed. At this point, the greatest challenge is to extend our grasp of the problems we face beyond the existing national discussions and debates. Most of the problems we see today in the world—and the economic crisis is only one example—are not confined to a single country.
For me, the question is how we can extend our research from the local to the global. Let the conservatives restrict themselves to their national borders. This is not to say I believe that political solutions to the economic problems the world faces are readily available. Indeed, it is possible that we are entering another period of war and revolution, similar to 1776-1815 or 1914-1945. Only after prolonged conflict and much loss might the world reach something like the settlement that followed 1945. This was not only a settlement of wartime politics, but also a framework for the economic politics of the peace, responding to problems that arose most acutely between the wars. It sounds tragic, but my point in raising the possibility now is to remind people that there may be even more catastrophic consequences at stake that they realize already. We need to confront these and mobilize against them. When I go back in history, I am pessimistic about resolving the world's economic problems soon, since the people who got us into this situation are still in power and are still pursuing broadly the same policies without any sign of them being changed. I believe that they will bring us all into a much more drastic situation than we are currently facing. Yet in some way we will be accountable if we ignore the obvious signs all around us.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
My original work in West Africa arose out of a view that the post-colonial regimes offered political recipes that could have more general relevance for the world. I actually believed that the new states were in a position to provide solutions, if you like, to the corrupt and decadent political structures that we had in the West. That's why, when we were demonstrating outside the American embassies in the '60s, we chanted the names of the great Third World emancipation leaders—Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, and so on.
So for me, the question has always been whether Africans, in seeking emancipation from a long history of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and postcolonial failure, might be able to change the world. I still think it could be and I'm quite a bit more optimistic about the outcome now than I have been for most of the last fifty years. We live in a racialized world order where Africa acts as the most striking symbol of inequality. The drive for a more equal world society will necessarily entail a shift in the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world. I have been pursuing this question for the last thirty years or more. What interests me at the moment is the politics of African development in the coming decades.
Africa began the twentieth century as the least populated and urbanized continent. It's gone through a demographic and urban explosion since then, doubling its share of world population in a century. In 2050, the UN predicts that 24% of the world population will be in Africa, and in 2100, 35% (read the report here, pdf)! This is because Africa is growing at 2.5% a year while the rest of the world is ageing fast. Additionally, 7 out of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are now African—Asian manufacturers already know that Africa holds the key to the future of the world economy.
But, besides Africa as a place, if you will, a number of anti-colonial intellectuals have played a big role in influencing me. The most important event in the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution. Peoples forced into world society by Western Imperialism fought to establish their own independent relationship to it. The leading figures of that struggle are, to my mind, still the most generative thinkers when we come to consider our own plight and direction. My mentor was the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, with whom I spent a number of years toward the end of his life. I am by temperament a classicist; I like to read the individuals who made a big difference to the way we think now. The anti-colonial intellectuals were the most important thinkers of the 20th century, by which I mean Gandhi, Fanon and James.
But I've also pursued a very classical, Western trajectory in seeking to form my own thinking. When I was an undergraduate, I liked Durkheim and as a graduate student Weber. When I was a young lecturer, I became a Marxist; later, when I went to the Carribbean, I discovered Hegel, Kant and Rousseau; and by the time I wrote my book on money, The Memory Bank, the person I cited more than anyone else was John Locke. By then I realized I had been moving backwards through the greats of Western philosophy and social theory, starting with the Durkheim school of sociology. Now I see them as a set of possible references that I can draw on eclectically. Marx is still probably the most important influence, although Keynes, Simmel and Polanyi have also shaped my recent work. I suppose my absolute favorite of all those people is Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his Discourse on Inequality and his inventive approach to writing about how to get from actual to possible worlds.
What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
In your 20s and 30s, your greatest commitment should be to experience the world in the broadest way possible, which means learning languages, traveling, and being open to new experiences. I think the kind of vision that I had developed over the years was not one that I had originally and the greatest influence on it was the time I spent in Ghana doing my doctoral fieldwork; indeed, I have not had an experience that so genuinely transformed me since!
Even so, I found it very difficult to write a book based on that fieldwork. I moved from my ethnographic investigations into a literature review of the political economy of West African agriculture, and it turns out that I am actually not an ethnographer, and am more interested in surveying literature concerning the questions that interest me. I am still an acute observer of everyday life; but I don't base my 'research' on it. Young people should both extend their comparative reach in a practical way and dig very deeply into circumstances that they encounter, wherever that may be. Above all, they should retain a sense of the uniqueness of their own life trajectory as the only basis for doing something new. This matters more than any professional training.
Now we see spectacular growth rates in African countries, as you mentioned, one of which is the DRC. How can we make sense of these formal growth rates: are they representative of the whole economies of these countries, or do they only refer to certain economic tendencies?
The whole question of measuring economic growth is a technical one, and it's flawed, and I only use it in the vaguest sense as a general indicator. For example, I think it's more important that Kenya, for example, is the world leader in mobile phone banking, and also a leader in recycling old computers for sale cheaply to poor people.
The political dispensation in Africa—the combination of fragmented states and powerful foreign interests and the predatory actions of the leaders of these states on their people -- especially the restrictions they impose on the movements of people and goods and money and so on – is still a tremendous problem. I think that the political fragmentation of Africa is the main obstacle to achieving economic growth.
But at the same time, as someone who has lived in Africa for many years, it's very clear that in some countries, certainly not all, the economies are very significantly on the move. It's not--in principle—that this will lead to durable economic growth, but it is the case that the cities are expanding fast, Africans are increasing their disposable income and it's the only part of the world where the people are growing so significantly. Africa is about to enter what's called the demographic dividend that comes when the active labor force exceeds the number of dependents. India has just gone through a similar phase.
The Chinese and others are heavily committed to taking part in this, obviously hoping to direct Africa's economic growth in their own interest. This is partly because the global economy is over the period of growth generated by the Chinese manufacturing exports and the entailed infrastructure and construction boom, which was itself an effect of the greatest shift from the countryside to the city in history. Now, the Chinese realize, the next such boom will be—can only take place—in Africa.
I'm actually not really interested in technical questions of how to measure economic growth. In my own writing about African development, I prefer anecdotes. Like for example, Nollywood—the Nigerian film industry—which has just past Bollywood as the second largest in the world! You mention the Congo which I believe holds the key to Africa's future. The region was full of economic dynamism before King Leopold took it over and its people have shown great resilience since Mobutu was overthrown and Rwandan and Ugandan generals took over the minerals-rich Eastern Congo. Understanding this history is much more important than measuring GDP, but statistics of this kind have their uses if approached with care.
Is it possible to understand the contemporary economic predicament that we are seeing, which in the Western world is referred to as the "crisis", without attributing it to vague agencies or mechanisms such as neoliberalism?
I have written at great length about the world economic crisis paying special attention to the problems of the Eurozone. My belief is that it is not simply a financial crisis or a debt crisis. We are actually witnessing the collapse of the dominant economic form of the last century and a half, which I call national capitalism—the attempt to control markets, money and accumulation through central bureaucracies in the interests of a presumed cultural community of national citizens.
The term neoliberalism is not particularly useful, but I try to lay out the history of modern money and why and how national currencies are in fact being replaced. That, to my mind, is a more precise way of describing the crisis than calling it neoliberal. On the other hand, neoliberalism does refer to the systematic privatization of public interests which has become normal over the last three or four hundred years. The bourgeois revolution claimed to have separated public and private interests, but I don't think it ever did so. For example, the Bank of England, the Banque de France, and the Federal Reserve are all private institutions that function behind a smokescreen of being public agencies.
It's always been the case that private interests corrupted public institutions and worked to deprive citizens of the ability to act purposefully under an ideological veil of liberty. But in the past, they tried to hide it. The public wasn't supposed to know what actually went on behind the scenes and indeed modern social science was invented to ensure that they never knew. What makes neoliberalism new is that they now boast about it and even claim that it's in everyone's interest to diminish public goods and use whatever is left for private ends—that's what neoliberalism is.
It's a naked grab for public resources and it's also a shift in the fundamental dynamic of capitalism from production for profit through sales tow varieties of rent-seeking. In fact, Western capitalism is now a system for extracting rents, rather than producing profits. Rents are income secured by political privilege such as the dividends of patents granted to Big Pharma or the right to control distribution of recycled movies. This has got nothing to do with competitive or free markets and much opposition to where we are now is confused as a result. Sometimes I think western capitalism has reverted to the Old Regime that it once replaced—from King George and the East India Company to George W and Halliburton. If so, we need another liberal revolution, but it won't take place in the North Atlantic societies.
In your recent work, you refer to The Great Transformation, which invokes Karl Polanyi's famous analysis of the growth of 19th century capitalism and industrialization. How can Polanyi help us to make sense of contemporary global economy, and where does this inspiring work need to be complemented? In other words, what is today's Great Transformation in light of Polanyi?
First of all, the Great Transformation is a brilliant book. I have never known anyone who didn't love it from the first reading. The great message of Polanyi's work is the spirit in which he wrote that book, regardless of the components of his theory. He had a passionate desire to explain the mess that world society had reached by the middle of the 20th century, and he provided an explanation. It's always been a source of inspiration for me.
A central idea of Polanyi's is that the economy was always embedded in society and Victorian capitalism disembedded it. One problem is that it is not clear whether the economy ever was actually disembedded (for example capitalism is embedded in state institutions and the private social networks mentioned just now) or whether the separation occurs at the level of ideology, as in free market economics. Polanyi was not against markets as such, but rather against market fundamentalism of the kind that swept Victorian England and has us in its grip today. The political question is whether politics can serve to protect society from the excesses produced by this disembedding; or whether it lends itself to further separation of the economy from society.
And I would say that Polanyi's biggest failure was to claim that what happened in the 19th century was the rise of "market society". This concept misses entirely the bureaucratic revolution that was introduced from the 1860s onwards based on a new alliance between capitalists and landlords which led to a new synthesis of states and corporations aiming to develop mass production and consumption. Polanyi could not anticipate what actually happened after he wrote his book in 1944. An American empire of free trade was built on a tremendous bureaucratic revolution. This drew on techniques and theories of control developed while fighting a war on all fronts. The same war was the source of the technologies that culminated late in the digital revolution. Karl Polanyi's interpretation of capitalism as a market economy doesn't help us much to understand that. In fact, he seems to have thought that bureaucracy and planning were an antidote to capitalist market economy.
If you ask me what is today's great transformation, I would prefer to treat the last 200 years as a single event, that is, a period in which the world population increased from one billion to seven billion, when the proportion of people living in cities grew from under 3% to around half, and where energy production increased on average 3% a year. The Great Transformation is this leap of mankind from reliance on the land into living in cities. It has been organized by a variety of institutions, including cities, capitalist markets, nation-states, empires, regional federations, machine industry, telecommunications networks, financial structures, and so on. I'm prepared to say that in the twentieth century national capitalism was the dominant economic form, but by no means all you need to know about if you want to make a better world.
I prefer to look at the economy as being organized by a plural set of institutions, including various political forms. The Great Transformation in Polanyi's sense was not really the same Great Transformation that Marx and Engels observed in Victorian England—the idea that a new economic system was growing up there that would transform the world. And it did! Polanyi and Marx had different views (as well as some common ideas), but both missed what actually happened, which is the kind of capitalism whose collapse is constitutes the Great Transformation for us today. The last thirty years of financial imperialism are similar to the three decades before the First World War. After that phase collapsed, thirty years of world war and economic depression were the result. I believe the same will happen to us! Maybe we can do something about it, but only if our awareness is historically informed in a contemporarily relevant way.
The distinction between states and markets really underpins much of what we understand about the workings of world economy and politics. Even when we just say "oh, that's not economic" or "that's not rational", we invoke a separation. How can we deal with this separation?
This state-market division comes back to the bourgeois revolution, which was an attempt to win freedom from political interference for private economic actors. I've been arguing that states and markets were always in bed together right from the beginning thousands of years ago, and they still are! The revolution of the mid 19th century involved a shift from capitalists representing workers against the landed aristocracy to a new alliance between them and the traditional enforcers to control the industrial and criminal classes flocking into the cities. A series of linked revolutions in all the main industrial countries during the 1860s and early 70s—from the American civil war to the French Third Republic via the Meiji Restoration and German unification—brought this alliance to power.
Modernity was thus a compromise between traditional enforcers and industrial capitalists and this dualism is reflected in the principal social form, the nation-state. This uneasy partnership has marked the relationship between governments and corporations ever since. I think that we are now witnessing a bid of the corporations for independence, for home rule, if you like. Perhaps, having won control of the political process, they feel than can go ahead to the next stage without relying on governments. The whole discourse of 'corporate social responsibility' implies that they could take on legal and administrative functions that had been previously 'insourced' to states. It is part of a trend whereby the corporations seek to make a world society in which they are the only citizens and they no longer depend on national governments except for local police functions. I think that it is a big deal—and this is happening under our noses!
Both politicians and economic theorists (OliverWilliamson got a Nobel prize for developing Coase's theory of the form along these lines) are proposing that we need to think again about what functions should be internal to the firm and what should be outside. Perhaps it was a mistake to outsource political control to states and war could be carried out by private security firms. The ground for all of this was laid in the late 19th century when the distinction in law between real and artificial persons was collapsed for business enterprises so that the US Supreme Court can protect corporate political spending in the name of preserving their human rights! Corporations have greater wealth, power and longevity than individual citizens. Until we can restore their legal separateness from the rest of humanity and find the political means of restricting their inexorable rise, resistance will be futile. There is a lot of intellectual and political work still to be done and, as I have said, a lot of pain to come before more people confront the reality of their situation.
What role do technological innovations play in your understanding and promoting of shifts in the way that we organize societies? Is it a passive thing or a driver of change?
I wrote a book, the Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (read it here, with the introduction here), which centered on a very basic question: what would future generations consider is interesting about us? In the late '90s, the dot com boom was the main game in town. It seemed obvious that the rise of the internet was the most important thing and that our responses to it would have significant consequences for future generations.
When I started writing it, I was interested in the democratic potential of the new media; but most of my friends saw them as a new source of inequality – digital exclusion, dominance of the big players and so on. I was accused of being optimistic, but I had absorbed from CLR James a response to such claims. It is not a question of being optimistic or pessimistic, but of identifying what the sides are in the struggle to define society's trajectory. In this case the sides are bureaucracy and the people. Of course the former wish to confine our lives within narrow limits that they control in a process that culminates as totalitarianism. But the rest of us want to increase the scope for self-expression in our daily lives; we want democracy and the force of the peoples of world is growing, not least in Africa which for so long has been excluded from the benefits of modern civilization. Of course there are those who wish to control the potential of the internet from the top; but everywhere people are making space for themselves in this revolution. When I see how Africans have moved in the mobile phone phase of this revolution, I am convinced that there is much to play for in this struggle. What matters is to do your best for your side, not to predict which side will win. Speaking personally, Web 2.0 has been an unmitigated boon for me in networking and dissemination, although I am aware that some think that corporate capital is killing off the internet. A lot depends on your perspective. I grew up learning Latin and Greek grammar. The developments of the last 2-3 decades seem like a miracle to me. I guess that gives me some buoyancy if not optimism as such.
It's obvious enough to me that any democratic response to the dilemmas we face must harness the potential of the new universal media. That's the biggest challenge. But equally, it's not clear which side is going to win. I'm not saying that our side, the democratic side, is going to beat the bureaucratic side. I just know which side I'm on! And I'm going to do my best for our side. Our side is the side that would harness the democratic potential of the new media. In the decade or more since I wrote my book on money and the internet, I have become more focused on the threat posed by the corporations and more accepting of the role of governments. But that could change too. And I am mindful of the role the positive role that some capitalists played in the classical liberal revolutions of the United States, France and Italy.
Final Question. I would like to ask you about the distinction between formal and informal economy which you are famous for having coined. How did you arrive at the distinction? Does the term, the dichotomy, still with have the same analytical value for you today?
Around 1970, there was a universal consensus that only states could organize economies for development. You were either a Marxist or a Keynesian, but there were no liberal economists with any influence at that time. In my first publication on the topic (Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana, read it here, pdf)—which got picked up by academics and the International Labor Organization—I was reacting against that; the idea promoted by a highly formal economics and bureaucratic practice that the state as an idea as the only actor. In fact, people in Third World cities engaged in all kinds of economic activities, which just weren't recognized as such. So my impulse was really empiricist—to use my ethnographic observations to show that people were doing a lot more than they were supposed to be doing, as recorded in official statistics or discussed by politicians and economists.
Essentially, I made a distinction between those things which were defined by formal regulation and those that lay outside it. I posed the question how does it affect our understanding in the development process to know more what people are doing outside the formal framework of the economy. And remember, this came up in West Africa, which did not have as strong a colonial tradition as in many other parts of Africa. African cities there were built and provisioned by Africans. There were not enough white people there to build these cities or to provide food and transport, housing, clothing and the rest of it.
In my book on African agriculture, I went further and argued that the cities were not the kind of engines of change that many people imagined that they were, but were in fact an extension of rural civilizations that had effectively not been displaced by colonialism, at least in that region. Now if you ask me how useful I think it is today, what happened since then of course is neoliberal globalization, for want of a better term, which of course hinges on deregulation. So, as a result of neoliberal deregulation, vast areas of the economy are no longer shaped by law, and these include many of the activities of finance, including offshore banking, hedge funds, shadow banking, tax havens, and so on. It also includes the criminal activities of the corporations themselves. I've written a paper on my blog called "How the informal economy took over the world" which argues that we are witnessing the collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus that sought to manage the economy in the public interest through law and in other ways that have been dismantled; so, it's a free-for-all. In some sense, the whole world is now an informal economy, which means, of course, that the term is not as valuable analytically as it once was. If it's everything, then we need some new words.
The mistake I made with other people who followed me was to identify the informal economy with poor slum dwellers. I argued that even for them, they were not only in the informal economy, which was not a separate place, but that all of them combined the formal and informal in some way. But what I didn't pay much attention to was the fact that the so-called formal economy was also the commanding heights of the informal economy—that the politicians and the civil servants were in fact the largest informal operators. I realize that any economy must be informal to some degree, but it is also impossible for an economy to be entirely informal. There always have to be rules, even if they take a form that we don't acknowledge as being bureaucratically normal like, for example, kinship or religion or criminal gangs. So that's another reason why it seems to me that the distinction has lost its power.
At the time, it was a valuable service to point to the fact that many people were doing things that were escaping notice. But once what they were doing had been noticed, then the usefulness of the distinction really came into question. I suppose in retrospect that the idea of an informal economy was a gesture towards realism, to respect what people really do in the spirit of ethnography. I have taken that idea to another level recently in mywork on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Here, in addition to privileging the actors' point of view and their everyday lives, we wish to address the human predicament at more inclusive levels than the local or even the national. Accordingly, our interdisciplinary research program (involving a dozen postdocs from around the world, including Africa, and 8 African doctoral students) seeks ways of extending our conceptual and empirical reach to take in world society and humanity as a whole. This is easier said than done, of course.
Keith Hart is Extraordinary Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship and Co-Director of the Human Economy Program at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is also centennial professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE.
Related links
Faculty Profile at U-London
Personal webpage
Read Hart's Notes towards an Anthropology of the Internet (2004, Horizontes Antropológicos) here (pdf)
Read Hart's Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of a Whole (2007, Comparative Studies in Society and History) here (pdf)
Read Hart's Between Democracy and the People: A Political History of Informality (2008 DIIS working paper) here (pdf)
Read Hart's Why the Eurocrisis Matters to Us All (Scapegoat Journal) here (pdf)
Forschungskonzept Das Nachhaltigkeitsleitbild der Agenda 21 und die damit verknüpften Rollenerwartungen an die Privatwirtschaft sind ein Bezugsrahmen der vorliegenden Doktorarbeit. Die Agenda 21, ein zentrales Dokument der UN-Konferenz für Umwelt und Entwicklung (UNCED 1992), und Dokumente der Folgekonferenzen weisen der Privatwirtschaft eine zentrale Rolle bei der Verwirklichung nachhaltiger Entwicklung zu: Wirtschaftsunternehmen sollen Wertschöpfung auf der Grundlage umweltverträglichen Umgangs mit natürlichen Res-sourcen erreichen. Als verantwortungsvolle Unternehmen sollen sie die Interessen ihrer Anspruchsgruppen berücksichtigen, und diese Gruppen sollen ihrerseits die Privatwirt-schaft bei der Realisierung nachhaltiger Entwicklung unterstützen. Regierungsunabhängige Umweltorganisationen erwarten von der Privatwirtschaft umwelt-verträglichen Umgang mit natürlichen Ressourcen und üben entsprechend Druck auf Unternehmen aus. Die Literatur dokumentiert jedoch Konflikte zwischen dem Rollenver-ständnis der Privatwirtschaft und den Erwartungen internationaler Organisationen und zivilgesellschaftlicher Anspruchsgruppen. Seitens der Unternehmen bestehen Zweifel, ob die Anforderungen dieser Akteure angemessen sind und inwieweit sie die ihnen zuge-wiesene Verantwortung übernehmen sollen. Auf diese Problematik bezieht sich die vor-liegende, 2006 bis 2008 durchgeführte qualitative empirische Untersuchung. Das Ziel der Forschungsarbeit war, den Wissensstand zum Umgang kleiner bis mittelgro-ßer Produktionsunternehmen mit ihren Rohstoff liefernden natürlichen Ressourcen zu erweitern - ihrer Rolle in Marktketten, ihrer Beziehungen zu Stakeholdern und die Berück-sichtigung natürlicher Ressourcen durch ihr Management. Als Beispiel ausgewählt wur-den Holzmöbel erzeugende Unternehmen (Möbelhersteller), eine mittelständische Bran-che der holzverarbeitenden Industrie. Da Möbelproduktion hohe Wertschöpfung aus Roh-holz ermöglicht, erschien dieses Beispiel aufschlussreich im Hinblick auf die allgemeine Annahme der Agenda 21, hohe ökonomische Wertschöpfung aus Holz lasse Impulse für nachhaltige Waldwirtschaft erwarten. Die Untersuchung wurde in Regionen mit unter-schiedlichen gesellschaftlichen, volkswirtschaftlichen und insbesondere forst- und holz-wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen durchgeführt. Forschungsfragen waren: Wie stellt sich "Forst" aus der Sicht von Möbelherstellern dar? In welcher Beziehung stehen Möbelhersteller zu ihren Anspruchsgruppen und wie kom-munizieren sie "Forst" gegenüber diesen Gruppen? Wie berücksichtigen Möbelhersteller "Forst" in ihren Entscheidungen? Der Verfasser stellt diese Forschungsfragen unter den Oberbegriff "Forstrationalität". Das Konstrukt "Forstrationalität" umreißt, wie Entscheidungsträger in der Holzindustrie Wald-bewirtschaftung als ihre Rohstoffbasis wahrnehmen und in Entscheidungen einbeziehen. Es umfasst alle Aspekte der Wahrnehmung und Interpretation sowie des Verhaltens holz-verarbeitender Industrieunternehmen bezüglich ihrer Rohstoffquelle "Forst". Grundlagen hierfür sind Theorien der Ressourcenabhängigkeit (Pfeffer und Salancik 1978/2003; Steimle, 2008) und des Sensemaking (Weick 1995, 2001). Informationen zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfragen wurden in drei Zentren der Möbel-industrie mit unterschiedlichen gesellschaftlichen und forstlichen Rahmenbedingungen in Brasilien und in Deutschland gewonnen: in Rio Branco do Acre (RBA) im brasilianischen Amazonasgebiet; in São Bento do Sul (SBS) in Südbrasilien und in Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) in Deutschland. Die drei Regionen in zwei Ländern vergleichende Feldforschung stellte besondere Anforderungen an die Forschungsmethodik. Vorgehen und Aufbau der Erhebungsinstrumente waren in den drei Regionen identisch: Grundlegendes empirisches Wissen vermittelten Inhaltsanalysen von Fachzeitschriften der Möbelwirtschaft (1) sowie die Auswertung von Sekundärinformationen (2). Telefonische Leitfadeninterviews mit Ex-perten (3) beleuchteten die Unternehmensumfelder und gaben allgemeine Hinweise zum Verhalten von Entscheidungsträgern der Möbelindustrie. Das Spektrum der "Forstrationa-litäten" der Entscheidungsträger erschloss sich im persönlichen Kontakt bei Betriebsbesu-chen; in jeder Region wurden zwei Hersteller von Massivholzmöbeln und ein Hersteller von Möbeln aus Holzwerkstoffen ausgewählt (4). Ergebnisse der Fachzeitschriftenanalyse Die quantitative Inhaltsanalyse von Fachzeitschriften diente dazu, das Gesamtspektrum der für den Wirtschaftszweig Möbelindustrie relevanten Fachthemen kennen zu lernen und die relative Bedeutung der Themenfelder "Umweltschutz" sowie "Waldressour-cen/Forstwirtschaft" einzuschätzen. Zusammenfassend konnten folgende Schlüsse gezo-gen werden: 1. Die Themenfelder "Umwelt" und "Forst" interessieren in der Möbelindustrie, erhalten aber in der Fachpresse weniger Raum als Themenfelder wie Wirtschaft, Technologie und Wettbewerb. 2. Im Themenfeld "Umwelt" sind in Deutschland wie in Brasilien Aspekte des eigenen Produktionsstandortes (innerbetrieblicher Umweltschutz) die bedeutendsten Themen der Möbelindustrie. 3. In der brasilianischen Möbelindustrie stehen "forst"-bezogene Aspekte stärker im Fo-kus als in Deutschland. Ergebnisse der regionalen Fallstudien Ergebnisse der Untersuchungsphasen (2) bis (4) stellt die Dissertation in Form von drei regionalen Fallstudien mit identischer Gliederung vor: a) Rahmenbedingungen der Möbel-hersteller b) Nicht-marktliche Anspruchsgruppen c) Lieferanten von Holzprodukten d) Mö-belabnehmer e) Interaktion der Möbelhersteller untereinander f) Forst- und Umweltmana-gement. Die regionalen Fallstudien bestätigen die Einsicht aus der Fachzeitschriftenanalyse, dass die spezifische Situation des gesamten regionalen Sektors "Forst- und Holzwirtschaft" die brasilianischen Möbelhersteller stärker prägt als die in NRW. So fanden in RBA in jünge-rer Zeit einschneidende forst- und umweltpolitische sowie institutionelle Veränderungen statt, die neue Rahmenbedingungen für alle holzbe- und -verarbeitenden Unternehmen gesetzt haben. In der Region SBS beschäftigt "Forst" die Möbelhersteller ebenso wie an-dere Zweige der Holzwirtschaft wegen eingetretener oder in der Zukunft erwarteter Holz-knappheiten sowie angesichts staatlicher Kontrolle der Verwendung von Holz aus legaler Waldnutzung. In NRW werden hingegen die einheimische Waldbewirtschaftung ebenso wie die Verarbeitung von Vorprodukten aus nichttropischen Holzarten als unproblematisch wahrgenommen, forstliche Themen erscheinen nicht als kritisch im Makroumfeld der Mö-belindustrie. In NRW wie in SBS dominiert die Auseinandersetzung mit gesamt- und bran-chenwirtschaftlichen Kerndaten, mit nationalen und internationalen Markttrends sowie mit technologischen Entwicklungen die Agenda der Möbelhersteller. Die Möbelhersteller unterliegen der Aufsicht von Umweltbehörden. Die Kontrolle des in-nerbetrieblichen Umweltschutzes, zum Teil verknüpft mit Arbeitsschutz, zeigte sich in al-len drei Regionen als Schwerpunkt der Aktivität dieser Behörden. Anders als in Deutsch-land unterliegt in Brasilien die Holzbeschaffung durch holzbe- und -verarbeitende Betriebe behördlicher Kontrolle. Die Fachverbände der Möbelindustrie in allen drei Fallstudienregionen definieren als ihre zentrale Aufgabe die Vertretung der Interessen ihrer Mitgliedsunternehmen gegenüber Politik und Gesellschaft. In beiden brasilianischen Fallstudienregionen, in denen forstbe-zogene Probleme die Möbelindustrie intensiv beschäftigen, sehen die Möbelindustriever-bände forstbezogene Angelegenheiten auch als ihre Aufgabe. In RBA agiert der Verband mit dem Ziel, die behördliche Registrierung von Möbelproduzenten des informellen Sek-tors voranzubringen und diese zur Verarbeitung von Holz aus legaler Waldnutzung zu verpflichten. In SBS haben die Möbelfachverbände in Perioden der Holzknappheit der Entwicklung der regionalen Forstwirtschaft und der Holzversorgung der Möbelindustrie große Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet; zur Zeit der Untersuchung drängten andere wirtschaftli-che Probleme die Waldthematik in den Hintergrund. Die durch die Forschungsarbeit erfassten Möbelhersteller stehen selten in direktem Kon-takt mit privaten Umweltorganisationen. Sie nehmen jedoch wahr, dass diese Organisa-tionen die Rahmenbedingungen der Möbelindustrie durch Verbraucherkampagnen, An-forderungen an die ersten Stufen der Forst-Holz-Wertschöpfungsketten und durch politi-sches Lobbying indirekt beeinflussen. Die Abhängigkeit der Möbelhersteller von Holzproduktlieferanten variiert in den drei Un-tersuchungsregionen. In NRW ist diese Abhängigkeit schwach ausgeprägt, weil die Mö-belhersteller Vorprodukte regional wie überregional problemlos einkaufen können und weil auch große Holzlieferanten Ansprüche der Möbelindustrie etwa bezüglich der Qualität, Abmessungen und Vorfertigung von Schnittholz und Holzwerkstoffen berücksichtigen. In Brasilien stellt sich die Situation anders dar. In SBS haben große bis mittelgroße Möbel-hersteller wegen der Unsicherheit der Holzversorgung und der Qualität von Vorprodukten aus Holz Schritte zur Rückwärtsintegration unternommen (eigene Sägewerke, vereinzelt eigene Bewirtschaftung von Kiefern-Plantagen) oder alternative Vorproduktquellen ge-sucht. In RBA stellt die behördlich kontrollierte Forderung, nur Holz aus "ordentlicher Waldwirtschaft" zu verarbeiten, die zu einem großen Teil staatlich geförderten Möbelher-steller des formellen Sektors vor Probleme. Denn ein hoher Anteil des entsprechenden regional verfügbaren Tropenholzes wird in Form von Holzhalbwaren in andere Regionen Brasiliens verkauft oder exportiert. Für die Möbelhersteller in RBA sind die Einkaufspreise hochwertiger Holzvorprodukte, insbesondere wenn diese aus zertifiziertem Holz erzeugt werden, deshalb in den letzten Jahren stark gestiegen, während die Möbelpreise aufgrund der Konkurrenz zahlreicher kleiner informeller Produzenten, aber auch durch das Angebot kostengünstig produzierter Serienmöbel aus Südbrasilien unter Druck stehen. Nur wenige gut organisierte Möbelhersteller in RBA scheinen bislang tragfähige Strategien zu verfol-gen, um diesem Dilemma zu begegnen. Die Beziehung von Möbelherstellern zu ihren Abnehmern ist in allen drei Fallstudienregio-nen durch Abhängigkeiten der Möbelhersteller geprägt. In RBA hängen formell registrierte Möbelhersteller stark von öffentlichen Aufträgen ab. In SBS sind Möbelhersteller von der Serienproduktion für den Exportmarkt abhängig; vielfach geben Auslandskunden die Mo-delle vor und haben großen Einfluss auf die Möbelpreisbestimmung. Beim Möbelabsatz im Inland stehen die Hersteller in NRW wie in SBS großen Einkaufsverbänden oder Kon-zernunternehmen des Möbeleinzelhandels gegenüber. In allen drei Regionen erhält die Möbelindustrie von ihren unmittelbaren Möbelabnehmern wie von Endverbrauchern nur schwache "Forst"-Signale - die Herkunft des für die angebo-tenen Möbel verarbeiteten Holzes aus "legaler" oder "nachhaltiger" Waldbewirtschaftung ist allenfalls ein nachrangiges Einkaufskriterium bzw. ist sie nur in Marktnischen relevant. Eine Ausnahme bilden die öffentlichen Auftraggeber in RBA, deren Möbelbeschaffung explizit den Aufbau nachhaltiger regionaler Forst-Holz-Wertschöpfungsketten in Acre stüt-zen soll. Experten der drei Untersuchungsregionen bezeichneten die Interaktion von Möbelherstel-lern untereinander als wenig kollegial, sondern wettbewerbsgeprägt. Unternehmen koope-rierten primär in für den Wettbewerb wenig relevanten Bereichen (z.B. gemeinsame Mes-sebesuche im Ausland). Die Initiative zu intensiverer Kooperation gehe häufig von Ver-bänden oder staatlichen Organisationen aus. Die Unternehmensbesichtigungen und Gespräche mit Experten zeigten, dass die in die Untersuchung einbezogenen Möbelhersteller nicht über ein systematisch aufgebautes Umweltmanagement verfügen. Die Beschäftigung mit Umweltproblemen orientiere sich vorwiegend an den für sie relevanten umweltrechtlichen Vorschriften. In NRW befolgen die Möbelhersteller nach Experteneinschätzung durchweg die Umweltauflagen; ihre Pro-duktionsbetriebe unterliegen strengen Kontrollen der Umweltbehörden. In Brasilien um-fassen behördliche Umweltschutzanforderungen für Möbelhersteller zusätzlich zum inner-betrieblichen Umweltschutz auch die Auflage, die Holzherkunft aus legaler Waldnutzung nachzuweisen. Bezüglich der Umsetzung der Umweltschutzanforderungen auf betriebli-cher Ebene ergab sich in beiden brasilianischen Regionen ein differenziertes Bild. Theoriebezogene Ergebnisinterpretation Der Verfasser versuchte zu verstehen, wie Unternehmer und Manager in der holzverar-beitenden Industrie das eigene Umfeld wahrnehmen und deuten, wie sie Entscheidungen treffen und begründen. Im Fokus stand die Forstrationalität von Entscheidungsträgern in möbelerzeugenden Unternehmen. Von ihm verfolgte Interpretationsansätze waren: 1. die Unterscheidung von Anlässen forstbezogenen Verhaltens der Möbelhersteller; 2. die Unterscheidung von Verhaltensbezugsebenen und Zeithorizonten; 3. die Prüfung, inwieweit das spezifische Verhalten bezüglich der für die Möbelher-stellung beanspruchten natürlichen Ressource Wald generellen Verhaltensmu-stern von Entscheidungsträgern in Produktionsunternehmen entspricht. Zu (1) Anlässe forstbezogenen Verhaltens Gefragt werden kann nach der wahrgenommenen Dringlichkeit forstbezogener Signale, die ein Möbelhersteller aus seinem Umfeld erhält: Können Anspruchsgruppen aus seiner Sicht ein bestimmtes forstbezogenes Verhalten verlangen bzw. erzwingen? Die Fallstudi-en legen den Schluss nahe, dass Möbelhersteller Einflüsse von Produktketten-externen Anspruchsgruppen wahrnehmen und reflektieren. Die Intensität wahrgenommener An-sprüche ist jedoch offenbar nur selten so hoch, dass sie Reaktionen der Möbelhersteller auslöst. In der Untersuchung erkennbar waren aber Verhaltensänderungen brasilianischer Möbelhersteller nach Einführung der DOF-Dokumentation zum Nachweis der Beschaffung von Holz aus legalen Quellen. Im Umkehrschluss lässt sich vermuten, dass Möbelherstel-ler forstbezogene Themen aus ihren Umfeldern vorwiegend als Signale wahrnehmen, die sie ihrem Selbstverständnis entsprechend individuell bewertet mit ihren Strategien ver-knüpfen, die sie aber auch ignorieren können. Die Art der für die Herstellung eines Möbelstücks verwendeten Holzvorprodukte bzw. die Materialkombination lenkt die Aufmerksamkeit von Möbelkäufern mehr oder minder stark auf den Bezug zum "Forst", wodurch auch die Forstrationalität der Möbelhersteller beein-flusst wird. In der Untersuchung ergaben sich diesbezüglich Unterschiede des Selbstver-ständnisses und der Marketingkommunikation zwischen Herstellern von Möbeln aus Holzwerkstoffen und aus Massivholz, bei den letzteren wiederum bezüglich der Möbelher-stellung aus Tropenholz oder nicht-tropischen Holzarten. Hersteller von Massivholzmö-beln stellten häufig einen Bezug ihrer Möbel zur Natur oder zum Wald her. Dabei betonten Hersteller von Tropenholzmöbeln die Individualität einzigartiger Holzarten aus artenrei-chen Naturwäldern; Hersteller von Möbeln aus nicht-tropischen Holzarten hingegen hoben die Herkunft der Möbelhölzer aus nachhaltig bewirtschafteten "nicht-tropischen" Wäldern hervor. Hersteller von Holzwerkstoffmöbeln argumentierten "ökologisch" mit den Vorteilen hoher Holzausbeute bei der Herstellung und Verarbeitung von Holzwerkstoffen, wodurch Waldressourcen geschont würden. Die brasilianischen Möbelhersteller sehen sich mit Ungewissheiten der Holzversorgung konfrontiert; sie interpretieren diese unterschiedlich, auch innerhalb der beiden Fallstudi-enregionen. In allen drei Untersuchungsregionen bekannten sich die in die Untersuchung einbezogenen Möbelhersteller zur Verarbeitung von Holz aus unbedenklichen Quellen. Sie erwarten Absatzrisiken für den Fall diesbezüglicher Zweifel ihrer Abnehmer. Gegen-wärtig sei kritisches Hinterfragen der Herkunft von Möbelhölzern seitens der Möbelab-nehmer jedoch selten und beziehe sich vorwiegend auf Tropenholz. Zu (2) Verhaltensbezugsebenen und Zeithorizonte Waldbewirtschaftung ist nur in wenigen Fällen ein eigenes Tätigkeitsfeld von Möbelher-stellern. Mit ihrem forstbezogenen Verhalten ergreifen Möbelhersteller folglich in der Re-gel nicht unmittelbar forstwirtschaftliche Maßnahmen, sondern beeinflussen diese indirekt oder reagieren auf die von anderen Akteuren gesetzten Forstthemen. Dies erfolgt zum einen durch Auswahl der für die Möbelproduktion eingesetzten Materialien und deren Be-schaffung, also durch ein direkt an die Möbelproduktion gebundenes Verhalten. Zum an-deren geschieht dies durch den Umgang und die Kommunikation mit Anspruchsgruppen im unmittelbaren Umfeld und im Makroumfeld. Materialorientiertes Verhalten und die Be-ziehungen zu Anspruchsgruppen stehen jedoch nicht isoliert nebeneinander, sondern können miteinander verknüpft sein, etwa weil bei Materialwahl-Entscheidungen das Ver-trauen zu Lieferanten und Abnehmerpräferenzen berücksichtigt werden. Mit Blick auf die Zeithorizonte der Entscheidungen von Möbelherstellern machte die Ana-lyse deutlich, dass in deren Kurzfristperspektive Forstrationalität von untergeordneter Be-deutung ist und andere Aspekte der Unternehmensumfelder im Vordergrund stehen (z.B. Holzversorgung für das aktuelle Produktionsprogramm und Wettbewerb). In der mittel- und langfristigen Zeitperspektive hingegen erhalten forstbezogene Überlegungen und Maßnahmen (wie Einsatz alternativer Holzvorprodukte oder Verwendung von Holz aus zertifizierter Waldbewirtschaftung) größeres Gewicht. Zu (3) Spiegelt Forstrationalität generelle Verhaltensmuster? Etliche der in der Forschungsarbeit registrierten Ausprägungen von Forstrationalität der Möbelhersteller lassen sich allgemeinen Verhaltensmustern von Entscheidungsträgern in Wirtschaftsunternehmen zuordnen: Legitimation: Die in die Untersuchung einbezogenen Möbelhersteller in allen drei Unter-suchungsregionen hoben hervor, ihr eigenes forstbezogenes Verhalten, insbesondere die Wahl der verarbeiteten Holzvorprodukte, sei gesetzeskonform und ökologisch unbedenk-lich. Diesen Standpunkt vertraten sie unabhängig von ihren jeweiligen Möglichkeiten, die Rohstoffquellen der beschafften Materialien zu beurteilen und zu beeinflussen. Anpassung: Die Möbelhersteller reagieren auf Anforderungen aus ihren Umfeldern, etwa auf behördliche Vorschriften und Kontrollen, Kritik von Umweltschutzverbänden, Nachfra-ge von Verbrauchern oder veränderte Wettbewerbsbedingungen. Solche Reaktionen schließen auch das forstbezogene Verhalten ein, wobei Vermeidung (zum Beispiel Ver-zicht auf die Verarbeitung von Tropenholz) ein alternatives oder komplementäres Verhal-ten sein kann. Antizipation: Unternehmen entwickeln Antizipationsstrategien, um sich auf erwartete zu-künftige Herausforderungen, Risiken und Chancen frühzeitig einzustellen. Dieses Verhal-ten zeigten Möbelhersteller in allen drei Untersuchungsregionen, etwa in ihrem Umgang mit der Forst-Holz-Produktketten-Zertifizierung oder der Erprobung neuer Holzarten und Holzwerkstoffe. Innovation: Sie ist eine Form der Umsetzung von Anpassung und Antizipation, ist aber für die Massivholz-Möbelhersteller auch eine eigenständige Verhaltensform. Zum Teil haben sie dabei Aspekte der Waldbewirtschaftung (besonders deutlich bei den Möbelherstellern in SBS, die Plantagenbewirtschaftung als neues Geschäftsfeld integriert haben) und der Weiterentwicklung ihrer Rohstoffbasis von vornherein im Blick, zum Teil ergeben sich se-kundäre Effekte für die Forstwirtschaft. Die vorliegende Untersuchung zur "Forstrationalität" holzverarbeitender Unternehmen hat gezeigt, dass Möbelhersteller Stärken und Schwächen der Waldnutzung in ihrer Standort-region wahrnehmen und forstbezogene Entscheidungen reflektiert treffen. Wie sie ent-scheiden, hängt von den Rahmenbedingungen der Industrie, dem Verhalten ihrer An-spruchsgruppen, von den spezifischen Unternehmensstrategien, auch von Wertvorstel-lungen der Eigentümer und Manager ab. Ihnen stehen bestimmte staatliche und private Anspruchsgruppen mit Erwartungen gegenüber, die dem Konzept nachhaltiger Entwick-lung der Agenda 21 entsprechen. Die Unternehmensbeispiele der Fallstudien zeigen ein-zelne Ansatzpunkte für die Verwirklichung nachhaltiger Entwicklung in waldreichen Re-gionen durch die Herstellung von Möbeln. Jedoch erscheint das gegenwärtige forstbezo-gene Verhalten der Möbelhersteller nicht umfassend nachhaltigkeitsorientiert, sondern pragmatisch selektiv abgestimmt auf die Erfordernisse, Interessen und Handlungsmög-lichkeiten der Unternehmen. Potenzial der Möbelindustrie, höhere Wertschöpfung durch immaterielle Phasen der Produktion (ihr Marketing, speziell die Produktgestaltung) zu erreichen, ist vorhanden. Auf der Grundlage neutraler Nachhaltigkeitsüberprüfung in der Holzwertschöpfungskette durch anerkannte Forstzertifizierungs-Systeme könnten von Holzmöbelherstellern durchaus stärkere Impulse für die Entwicklung und Aufrechterhal-tung nachhaltiger Forstwirtschaft ausgehen. Abschließend seien die theoretischen Erklärungsansätze Ressourcenabhängigkeit und Sensemaking angesprochen, denen in dieser Forschungsarbeit gefolgt wurde. Der Zu-sammenhang zwischen beiden ist bereits aus Pfeffer (1978) ableitbar. Steimle (2008) stellt diesen Zusammenhang explizit her, um das Nachhaltigkeitsverhalten von Unter-nehmen theoretisch zu erklären. Auch der Verfasser kombinierte beide Ansätze: Das Konzept der Ressourcenabhängigkeit war hilfreich bei der Analyse der Umfeldeinbettung der Möbelhersteller und bei der Interpretation ihrer Beziehungen zu bestimmten An-spruchsgruppen; der Sensemaking-Ansatz erleichterte es, die Umfeldwahrnehmung aus Sicht der Entscheidungsträger in der Möbelindustrie und ihr forstbezogenes Verhalten zu verstehen. ; Research concept The guideline to sustainability provided by Agenda 21, and the associated expectations of private enterprise with respect to their role in sustainability, represent a frame of reference for the study presented in this Ph.D. thesis. Agenda 21, a central document of the United Nations Conference on Climate and Development (UNCED 1992), and documents pro-duced by the following conferences attribute a central role to private enterprise in the real-isation of sustainable development. Commercial enterprises are expected to create value on the basis of an environmentally acceptable use of natural resources. Responsible en-terprises should accommodate the interests of the respective stakeholder groups, and these groups should in turn support private enterprise in the achievement of sustainable development. Non-governmental environmental organisations' expectations of private enterprise revolve around the environmentally appropriate use of natural resources and, accordingly, they exert pressure on businesses to do so. Nevertheless, the literature documents conflicts between commercial enterprise's understanding of its role and the expectations of interna-tional organisations and civil stakeholder groups. From the perspective of enterprise, doubts exist over whether the demands of these actors are reasonable and over the ex-tent to which commercial enterprise should assume the responsibility attributed to it. The objective of this study was to deepen the knowledge of the use by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) of the natural resources providing the raw materials necessary for their production activities – their role in market chains, their relationships with stake-holders and the consideration given to the management of natural resources. Enterprises manufacturing wood furniture were chosen for the study, as a representative example of an SME branch within the wood processing industry. As furniture production facilitates high value creation from raw wood, this example was deemed to be revealing with respect to the general assumption of Agenda 21 that high economic value creation from wood generates impulses for sustainable forestry. The investigation was carried out in regions with contrasting social, economic and especially forest and wood industry framework con-ditions. The research questions were: How do furniture manufacturers perceive 'forestry'? What is the relationship between furniture producers and the corresponding stakeholder groups, and how do they communicate 'forestry' to these groups? How do furniture producers ac-count for 'forestry' in their decisions? The author posed these questions under the overarching concept 'forest rationality.' The 'forest rationality' construct outlines how decision makers in the wood industry perceive forest management as the basis of their raw material supply, and how they account for it within decision making. It incorporates all aspects of the perception and interpretation, as well as the behaviour of wood processing enterprises with respect to the source of their raw material, 'forestry.' The basis for this is theories relating to resource dependence (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978, 2003; Steimle, 2008) and 'sensemaking' (Weick 1995, 2001). The information used to answer the research questions was obtained from three centres of the furniture industry in Brazil and in Germany, each with different social and forestry framework conditions. The three centres were in Rio Branco do Acre (RBA) in the Bra-zilian Amazon, in São Bento do Sul (SBS) in southern Brazil and in Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) in Germany. The comparative data collection carried out in the three regions posed particular demands in terms of the research methods. The approach chosen and the design of the data collection instruments were identical in the three regions. Funda-mental empirical knowledge was provided by means of a content analysis of furniture in-dustry journals (1) and the evaluation of secondary information (2). Guided telephone interviews with experts (3) illuminated the environments in which the enterprises operate and provided general insights into the behaviour of decision makers in the furniture in-dustry. The spectrum of forestry reasoning of the decision makers was further developed through personal contact made during visits to companies. In each region two producers of solid wood furniture and a producer of furniture from derived timber products were se-lected (4). Results of the journal analysis The quantitative content analysis of industry journals served to provide information about the overall spectrum of issues relevant for the furniture industry, and allowed for an as-sessment of the relative significance of the issues 'environmental protection' and 'forest resources/forestry.' The conclusions may be summarised as follows: 1. The issues 'environment' and 'forestry' are of interest within the furniture sector, but receive less attention in the industry press than topics such as economics, technology and competition. 2. In the furniture industry in both Germany and Brazil, the most important themes under the heading 'environment' are aspects concerning the local production site (enterprise-internal environmental protection). 3. 'Forestry'-related aspects are the focus of greater attention within the Brazilian fur-niture industry than the German. Results of the regional case studies The results of the research phases (2) to (4) are presented in the dissertation in the form of three regional case studies with an identical structure, namely a) the framework condi-tions affecting furniture manufacturers, b) non-market stakeholder groups, c) suppliers of wood products, d) furniture consumers, e) interaction between furniture manufacturers, f) forest and environmental management. The regional case studies confirmed the view provided by the analysis of the industry press that the specific situation of the entire regional 'forestry and wood industry' affects the Brazilian furniture manufacturers more so than those in NRW. In RBA there have re-cently been drastic changes in forestry and environmental policy, as well as institutional changes, which have generated new framework conditions for all wood producing and processing enterprises. In the SBS region 'forestry' occupies furniture manufacturers as much as other branches of the wood sector due to existing or expected future shortages of wood, and as a consequence of state control over the use of wood from legitimate forestry. In NRW, on the other hand, native forest management and the processing of materials derived from non-tropical tree species are considered to be unproblematic, and forestry-related themes do not appear to be critical in the macro-environment of the furni-ture industry. In NRW and in SBS the issue of core economic data for the sector as a whole, and branches within the sector, of national and international market trends and of technological developments dominate the agenda of the furniture manufacturers. The furniture manufacturers are subject to restrictions imposed by environmental authori-ties. The control of enterprise-internal environmental protection, linked in part with work safety, was identified as a focus of the activities of these authorities in all three regions. Unlike in Germany, in Brazil the sourcing of wood by wood processing enterprises is sub-ject to official control. The representative associations within the furniture industry in all three case study regions define as their central task the representation of the interests of their member organisa-tions to policy makers and society. In both Brazilian case study regions, in which forestry-related problems greatly occupy the furniture industry, the furniture industry associations also view forestry-related matters as being within their remit. In RBA the responsible as-sociation is seeking to advance the official registration of furniture manufacturers within the informal sector and to oblige them to process only wood obtained from legal sources. In SBS the furniture associations have focused considerable attention on the development of regional forestry and the supply of wood to the furniture industry in periods of wood shortage. At the time of this study, however, other economic problems had pushed the issue of forestry into the background. It was observed that the furniture producers studied as part of the research are rarely in direct contact with private environmental organisations. However, they are aware that these organisations indirectly influence the framework conditions affecting the furniture industry through consumer campaigns, by placing demands on the first links of the forest-wood value chain and through political lobbying. The dependence of the furniture producers on the suppliers of wood products varies be-tween the three study regions. This dependency is weak in NRW because the furniture manufacturers can source materials regionally and beyond without any difficulties, and because large wood suppliers take into consideration the demands of the furniture in-dustry with respect to quality, dimensions and the preparation of sawn wood and derived timber materials. This contrasts with the situation in Brazil. In SBS large to moderately large furniture manufacturers have taken a number of steps towards backward vertical integration (establishment of own sawmills, in some cases resorting to the management of pine plantations) or have sought alternative sources of pre-finished materials. The rea-sons for this are the uncertainty of the wood supply and the quality of the pre-finished wood products. In RBA the statutory requirement that only wood derived from 'legitimate sources' be used in manufacturing poses problems for the largely state-sponsored furni-ture manufacturers in the formal sector. A large proportion of the regionally available tropical wood is sold in or exported to other regions of Brazil in the form of part-wood goods. The prices paid by furniture manufacturers for high quality pre-finished wood pro-ducts, particularly those made of certified wood, have increased considerably in recent years, whereas furniture prices are under great pressure due to competition from numer-ous small, informal manufacturers and as a result of the supply of cheaply manufactured, mass produced furniture from southern Brazil. As yet, only a few well-organised furniture manufacturers in RBA appear to have adopted a strategy capable of countering this di-lemma. In all three regions the relationship between furniture manufacturers and their customers is characterised by dependencies of the furniture manufacturers. In RBA formally regis-tered furniture manufacturers are greatly dependent upon public contracts. In SBS furni-ture manufacturers are dependent upon mass production for the export market, with inter-national customers often specifying the models and exerting a considerable influence on price setting. In terms of national sales, the manufacturers in NRW and in SBS are pitted against the large purchasing associations and groups within the furniture retail industry. In all three regions the furniture industry receives only weak 'forestry' signals from its di-rect costumers and end users – that the wood used in the furniture provided is sourced from 'legal' or 'sustainable' forest management is, at best, a subordinate purchase cri-terion, or is only relevant in niches within the market. The public clients in RBA are an exception as their furniture acquisitions are explicitly intended to support the development of sustainable regional forest-wood value chains in Acre. Experts from the three research regions characterised the interaction between furniture manufacturers as competitive, with little cooperation evident. Any cooperation between the enterprises occurs primarily in those areas that are of little relevance for competition (e.g., visits to exhibitions abroad). Initiatives prompting intensive cooperation often stem from associations or governmental organisations. The visits to the enterprises in the three regions and discussions with the experts revealed that the furniture manufacturers involved in the study do not possess a systematically de-veloped system of environmental management. Consideration of environmental problems is oriented primarily towards the relevant environmental regulations. According to the ex-perts, in NRW the furniture manufacturers adhere to the rules. Their production facilities are subject to strict controls by the environmental authorities. In Brazil the statutory envi-ronmental regulations for furniture manufacturers include not only the enterprise-internal environmental protection stipulations but also the means to demonstrate that the wood used stems from legal sources. The implementation of the environmental protection re-quirements at operational level was found to be variable in the two Brazilian regions. Interpretation of the results in a theoretical context The author sought to understand how entrepreneurs and managers in the wood process-ing industry perceive and interpret their own environment; how they make and justify deci-sions. The focus was on the forestry reasoning exhibited by decision makers in furniture manufacturing enterprises. The interpretative approaches followed were: 1. The differentiation of motives for forestry-relevant behaviour displayed by furniture manufacturers; 2. The differentiation of behavioural planes of reference and time horizons; 3. The examination of the extent to which the specific behaviour with respect to the forest resource, as the principal source of the raw material used in the manufac-ture of furniture, corresponds to the general behavioural patterns of decision mak-ers in manufacturing enterprises. On (1) motives for forestry-related behaviour One might enquire as to the perceived urgency of the forestry-related signals that a furni-ture manufacturer receives from his environment: can, as far as the manufacturer is con-cerned, stakeholder groups demand or even force a certain forestry-related behaviour? The case studies suggest that furniture manufacturers perceive and take into consider-ation influences exerted by stakeholder groups external to the product chain. It would ap-pear, however, that the intensity of the perceived demands is rarely so high as to cause a reaction on the part of the manufacturers. Changes in the behaviour of Brazilian manufac-turers did become evident in the study after the introduction of the DOF documentation requiring that they be able to prove the wood they use is sourced legally. Conversely, it can be assumed that furniture manufacturers predominantly perceive forestry-related themes within their environment as signals, which they assess individually on the basis of their own beliefs and either integrate within their strategies or ignore. The type of pre-finished wood product – or combination of materials – used in the manu-facture of a piece of furniture serves to focus the attention of furniture buyers onto the relationship with 'forestry' to a greater or lesser extent, through which the forestry reason-ing of the manufacturers is also influenced. The investigation revealed differences in understanding and in marketing approaches between the manufacturers of furniture made of derived timber products and those of furniture made from solid wood; and in the latter case there was a further distinction between users of tropical and non-tropical tree spe-cies. The manufacturers of solid wood furniture often draw a link between their furniture and nature or the forest. Manufacturers of furniture made with tropical wood emphasise the individuality of unique types of wood stemming from natural forests rich in species. The manufacturers of furniture using non-tropical species, alternatively, accentuate the fact that their wood stems from sustainably managed 'non-tropical' forests. Manufacturers using derived timber products base their 'ecological' arguments on the advantages of the low levels of waste in the production and processing of derived timber products, as a re-sult of which forest resources are used more efficiently. The Brazilian furniture manufacturers are concerned by the uncertainties surrounding the supply of wood. The associated problems are perceived differently by different manufac-turers, even within the two case study regions. In all three study regions the furniture manufacturers involved in the study avowed the use of wood from legitimate sources, and expect risks to their sales if their customers were to have doubts in this regard. At present there is little critical scrutiny of the origins of the wood used in furniture by the consumer, however, and that which exists focuses predominantly on the use of tropical wood. On (2) behavioural planes of reference and time horizons In only very few cases is forest management an activity undertaken by furniture manufac-turers. The forestry-related behaviour of the furniture manufacturers does not involve di-rect participation in forest management operations, but rather in influencing these indi-rectly, or in reacting to the forest issues taken up by other actors. This is expressed in the choice of the materials used in furniture manufacture, and in their procurement; that is, through behaviour linked directly to furniture manufacture. It is also expressed in the communication with stakeholder groups situated in the enterprises' immediate surround-ings and in their macro-environment. Material-oriented behaviour and the relationship with stakeholder groups are not independent issues but may be linked; for example, because in decisions concerning material selection the manufacturer's trust in the supplier and the preferences of the consumers are taken into consideration. In terms of the time horizons of the decisions made by furniture manufacturers, the analy-sis made clear that forestry reasoning plays a subordinate role in their short term perspec-tive, and that other aspects are of greater importance for the enterprises in question (e.g., wood supply for the current production programme and competition). Forestry-related considerations and measures (e.g., the use of alternative pre-finished wood products or the use of certified wood) are afforded greater weighting in the medium to long term. On (3) whether forest rationality reflects general patterns of behaviour Many of the forms of forest rationality of the furniture manufacturers identified in the re-search can be matched to general behavioural patterns of decision makers in commercial enterprises: Legitimacy: The furniture manufacturers from all three regions involved in the study em-phasised that their own forestry-related behaviour complies with the law and is ecologi-cally sound, particularly the choice of pre-finished wood products. They adopted this posi-tion irrespective of their abilities to judge or influence the sources of the raw materials pro-cured. Adaptation: The furniture manufactures react to demands from their environment, such as statutory regulations and controls, criticism from environmental protection associations, requests from customers and altered competition conditions. Such reactions also incorpo-rate their forestry-related behaviour, with avoidance (e.g., avoiding the use of tropical wood) a possible alternative or complementary behaviour. Anticipation: Enterprises develop anticipation strategies in order to prepare in advance for expected future challenges, risks and opportunities. This behaviour was exhibited by furni-ture manufacturers in all three study areas; for example, in their manner of dealing with forest-wood product chain certification and in the testing of new wood types and derived timber products. Innovation: Innovation is a form of manifestation of adaptation and anticipation, but is also a distinct form of behaviour in the case of the manufacturers of solid wood furniture. They have, to a certain extent, aspects of forest management (particularly evident in the case of the furniture manufacturers in SBS that have integrated plantation management as a new area of operations) and the further development of their raw material base firmly in focus from the outset. There are also secondary effects for forestry. This study of the 'forest rationality' of wood processing enterprises shows that furniture manufacturers perceive the strengths and weaknesses associated with forest utilisation in their regions, and that they reflect carefully on forestry-related decisions. The decisions they make depend on the framework conditions within the industry, the behaviour of the associated stakeholder groups, the strategy of the specific enterprise and on the ideals of the owners and managers. They are confronted by the expectations of certain state and private stakeholder groups; expectations that correspond with the concept of sustainable development espoused by Agenda 21. The enterprises included in the case studies re-vealed individual starting points for the achievement of sustainable development in forest-rich regions through the production of furniture. However, the current forestry-related be-haviour of the manufacturers is not comprehensively geared towards sustainability. Rather it is pragmatically selective, tailored to the needs, interests and possible courses of action available to the respective enterprise. The potential for furniture manufacturers to achieve greater value creation in the non-material phases of the production process (marketing, and especially product design) exists. On the basis of neutral sustainability assessments in the wood value creation chain, carried out by recognised forestry certification systems, it is certainly possible for manufacturers of wood furniture to create greater impulses for the development and maintenance of sustainable forestry. Finally, to the theoretical approaches offering a potential explanation considered in the study, namely resource dependence and 'sensemaking.' The connection between the two could already be inferred from Pfeffer (1978). Steimle (2008) revealed the link between the two explicitly, in order to explain theoretically the sustainability behaviour of enter-prises. The author of this study also combined both approaches. The concept of resource dependence was helpful in the analysis of how embedded manufacturers are in their envi-ronment, and in the interpretation of their relationship with certain stakeholder groups. The 'sensemaking' approach rendered it easier to understand the perception by decision mak-ers in the industry of their business environment and their forestry-related behaviour.
1. Introduction Biodiesel (BD) is a liquid biofuel that is defined as a fatty acid methyl ester fulfilling standards such as the ones set by European (EN 14214) and the American (ASTM 6751) regulations. BD is obtained by the transesterification (Scheme 1.1) or alcoholysis of natural triglycerides contained in vegetable oils, animal fats, waste fats and greases, waste cooking oils (WCO) or side-stream products of refined edible oil production with short-chain alcohols, usually methanol or ethanol and using an alkaline homogeneous catalyst (Perego and Ricci, 2012). Scheme 1.1. Transesterification reaction. BD presents several advantages over petroleum-based diesel such as: biodegradability, lower particulate and common air pollutants (CO, SOx emissions, unburned hydrocarbons) emissions, absence of aromatics and a closed CO2 cycle. Refined, low acidity oilseeds (e.g. those derived from sunflower, soy, rapeseed, etc.) may be easily converted into BD, but their exploitation significantly raises the production costs, resulting in a biofuel that is uncompetitive with the petroleum-based diesel (Santori et al., 2012; Lotero et al., 2005). Moreover, the use of the aforementioned oils generated a hot debate about a possible food vs. fuel conflict, i.e. about the risk of diverting farmland or crops at the expense of food supply. It is so highly desirable to produce BD from crops specifically selected for their high productivity and low water requirements (Bianchi et al., 2011; Pirola et al., 2011), or from low-cost feedstock such as used frying oils (Boffito et al., 2012a) and animal fats (Bianchi et al., 2010). The value of these second generation biofuels, i.e. produced from crop and forest residues and from non-food energy crops, is acknowledged by the European Community, which states in its RED directive (European Union, RED Directive 2009/28/EC): ''For the purposes of demonstrating compliance with national renewable energy obligations […], the contribution made by biofuels produced from wastes, residues, non-food cellulosic material, and ligno-cellulosic material shall be considered to be twice that made by other biofuels''. However, the presence of free fatty acids in the feedstock, occurring in particular in the case of not refined oils, causes the formation of soaps as a consequence of the reaction with the alkaline catalyst. This hinders the contact between reagents and the catalyst and makes difficult the products separation. Many methods have been proposed to eliminate FFA during or prior to transesterification (Pirola et al., 2011; Santori et al., 2012). Among these the FFA pre-esterification method is a very interesting approach to lower the acidity since it allows to lower the acid value as well as to obtain methyl esters already in this preliminary step (Boffito et al., 2012a, 2012b; 2012c Bianchi et al., 2010, 2011; Pirola et al., 2010, 2011). Aims of the work The aims of this work are framed in the context of the entire biodiesel production chain, ranging from the choice of the raw material, through its standardization to the actual biodiesel production. The objectives can be therefore summarized as follows: Assessing the potential of some vegetable or waste oils for biodiesel production by their characterization, deacidification and final transformation into biodiesel; To test different ion exchange resins and sulphated inorganic systems as catalysts in the FFA esterification; To assess the use of ultrasound to assist the sol-gel synthesis of inorganic sulphated oxides to be used as catalysts in the FFA esterification reaction; To assess the use of sonochemical techniques such as ultrasound and microwave to promote both the FFA esterification and transesterification reaction. 2. Experimental details 2.1 Catalysts In this work, three kinds of acid ion exchange resins were used as catalysts for the FFA esterification: Amberlyst®15 (A15), Amberlyst®46 (A46) (Dow Chemical) and Purolite®D5081 (D5081). Their characteristic features are given in Tab. 2.1. Various sulphated inorganic catalysts, namely sulphated zirconia, sulphated zirconia+titania and sulphated tin oxide were synthesized using different techniques. Further details will be given as the results inherent to these catalysts will be presented. Catalyst A15 A46 D5081 Physical form opaque beads Type Macroreticular Matrix Styrene-DVB Cross-linking degree medium medium high Functional group -SO3H Functionalization internal external external external Form dry wet wet Surface area (m2 g-1) 53 75 514a Ave. Dp (Ǻ) 300 235 37a Total Vp (ccg-1) 0.40 0.15 0.47 Declared Acidity (meq H+g-1) 4.7 0.43 0.90-1.1 Measured acidity (meq H+g-1) 4.2 0.60 1.0 Moisture content (%wt) 1.6 26-36 55-59 Shipping weight (g l-1) 610 600 1310a Max. operating temp (K) 393 393 403 Tab. 2.1. Features of the ion exchange resins used as catalysts. The acidity of all the catalysts was determined by ion exchange followed by pH determination as described elsewhere (López et al., 2007; Boffito et al., 2012a; 2012b). Specific surface areas were determined by BET (Brunauer, Emmett and Teller, 1938) and pores sizes distribution with BJH method (Barrett, Joyner and Halenda, 1951). XRD, XPS SEM-EDX and HR-TEM analyses were performed in the case of catalysts obtained with the use of ultrasound (Boffito et al. 2012a). Qualitative analyses of Lewis and Brønsted acid sites by absorption of a basic probe followed by FTIR analyses was also carried out for this class of catalysts (Boffito et al, 2012a). 2.2 Characterization of the oils Oils were characterized for what concerns acidity (by acid-base titrations) as reported by Boffito et al. (2012a, 2012b; 2012c), iodine value (Hannus method (EN 14111:2003)), saponification value (ASTM D5558), peroxide value and composition by GC analyses of the methyl ester yielded by the esterification and transesterification. Cetane number and theoretical values of the same properties were determined using equations already reported elsewhere (Winayanuwattikun et al., 2008). 2.3 Esterification and transesterification reactions In Tab. 2.2, the conditions adopted in both the conventional and sonochemically-assisted esterification are reported. For all these experiments a temperature of 336 K was adopted. Vials were used to test the sulphated inorganic oxides, while Carberry reactor (confined catalyst) (Boffito et al., 201c) was used just for the FFA esterification of cooking oil. Rector oil (+ FFA) (g) MeOH (g) catalyst amount vial 21 3.4 5%wt/gFFA sulphated inorganic catalysts slurry 100 16 - 10 g ion exchange resins - 5%wt/gF FA sulphated inorganic catalysts Carberry 300 48 10 g (5 g in each basket) Tab. 2.2. Free fatty acids esterification reaction conditions for conventional and sonochemically-assisted experiments. All the sonochemically-assisted experiments were performed in a slurry reactor. FFA conversions were determined by acid-base titrations of oil samples withdrawn from the reactors at pre-established times and calculated as follows: "FFA conversion (%)=" (〖"FFA" 〗_"t=0" "-" 〖"FFA" 〗_"t" )/〖"FFA" 〗_"t=0" " x 100" In Tab. 2.3, the conditions of both the conventional and ultrasound (US)-assisted transesterification are reported. KOH and CH3ONa were used for conventional experiments, while just KOH for the US-assisted experiments. The BD yield was determined by GC (FID) analysis of the methyl esters. Method Reactor Step gMeOH/100 goil gKOH/100 goil Temp. (K) Time (min) traditional batch step 1 20 1.0 333 90 step 2 5.0 0.50 60 US-assisted batch step 1 20 1.0 313, 333 30 US-assisted continuos step 1 20 1.0 338 30 Tab. 2.3. Transesterification reaction conditions. 3. Results and Discussion 3.1 Characterization and deacidification of different oils by ion exchange resins: assessment of the potential for biodiesel production In Tab. 3.1 the results of the characterization of the oils utilized in this work are displayed. The value in parentheses indicate the theoretical value of the properties, calculated basing on the acidic composition. The acidity of all the oils exceeds 0.5%wt (~0.5 mgKOH/g), i.e. the acidity limit recommended by both the European normative (EN 14214) and American standard ASTM 6751 on biodiesel (BD). The iodine value (IV) is regulated by the EN 14214, which poses an upper limit of 120 gI2/100 g. The number of saturated fatty chains in the fuel determines its behaviour at low temperatures, influencing parameters such as the cloud point, the CFPP (cold filter plugging point) and the freezing point (Winayanuwattikun et al., 2008). The IV are in most of the cases similar to the ones calculated theoretically. When the experimental IV differs from the theoretical one, it is in most of the cases underestimated. This can be explained considering the peroxide numbers (PN), which indicates the concentration of O2 bound to the fatty alkyl chains and is therefore an index of the conservation state of oil. Oils with high IV usually have a high concentration of peroxides, whereas fats with low IV have a relatively low concentration of peroxides at the start of rancidity (King et al., 1933). Moreover, although PN is not specified in the current BD fuel standards, it may affect cetane number (CN), a parameter that is regulated by the standards concerning BD fuel. Increasing PN increases CN, altering the ignition delay time. Saponification number (SN) is an index of the number of the fatty alkyl chains that can be saponified. The long chain fatty acids have a low SN because they have a relatively fewer number of carboxylic functional groups per mass unit of fat compared to short chain fatty acids. In most of the cases the experimental SN are lower than the ones calculated theoretically. This can be explained always considering the PN, indicating a high concentration of oxygen bound to the fatty alkyl chains. Oil Acidity (%wt) IV1 (gI2/ 100 g) PN2 (meqO2 /kg) SN3 (mg KOH/g) CN4 Fatty acids composition (%wt) animal fat (lard)* 5.87 51 2.3 199 62.3 n.d. soybean* 5.24 138 3.8 201 42.4 n.d. tobacco1 1.68 143 (149) 21.9 199 (202) 41.6 (39.8) C14:0 (2.0) C16:0 (8.3) C18:0 (1.5) C18:1 (12.0) C18:2 (75.3) C18:3 (0.6) C20:0 (0.1) C22:0 (0.2) sunflower* 3.79 126 3.7 199 45.4 n.d. WSO5 0.50 118 (129) 71.3 187 (200) 48.9 (44.6) C16:0 (6.9) C18:0 (0.9) C18:1 (40.1) C18:2 (50.9) C18:3 (0,3) C20:0 (0.1) C20:1 (0.4) C22:0 (0.4) palm 2.71 54.0 (53.0) 12.3 201 (208) 61.3 (60.6) 16:0 (43.9) 18:0 (5.6) 18:1 (40.5) 18:2 (8.6) WCO6 2.10 53.9 (50.7) 11.0 212 (196) 59.9 (62.7) C16:0 (38.8) C18:0 (4.1) C18:1 (47.9) C18:2 (4.2) WCO:CRO =3:1 2.12 69.0 (75.5) 30.1 200 (212) 58.1 (55.1) C16:0 (30.1) C18:0 (3.1) C18:1 (51.9) C18:2 (12.0) C18:3 (2.%) C20:0 (0.2) C22:0 (0.1) WCO:CRO =1:1 2.19 76.8 (90.7) 51.3 188 (203) 58.1 (52.8) C16:0 (21.5) C18:0 (2.1) C18:1 (55.8) C18:2 (14.7) C18:3 (5.1) C20:0 (0.8) C22:0 (0.1) WCO:CRO =1:3 2.24 84.5 (104) 62.4 177 (202) 58.1 (49.9) 14:0 (0.1) 16:0 (14.7) 16:1 (0.7) 18:0 (6.85) 18:1 (40.0) 18:2 (37.0) 18:3 (0.25) 20:0 (0.25) 22:0 (0.15) rapeseed (CRO7) 2.20 118 (123) 71.6 165 (200) 52.8 (45.9) C16:0 (4.1) C18:0 (0.1) C18:1 (63.7) C18:2 (20.2) C18:3 (10.2) C20:0 (1.5) C22:0 (0.2) rapeseed* 4.17-5.12 108 (107) 3.5 203 (200) 48.9 (49.5) C16:0 (7.6) C18:0 (1.3) C18:1 (64.5) C18:2 (23.7) C18:3 (2.4) C20:0 (0.5) Brassica juncea 0.74 109 (110) 178 (185) 52.4 (51.1) C16:0 (2.4) C18:0 (1.1) C18:1 (19.9) C18:2 (19.2) C18:3 (10.9) C20:0 (7.2) C20:1 (1.7) C22:0 (0.9) C22:1 (34.8) 24:0 (1.9) safflower 1.75 139 48.9 170 47.1 n.d. WCO: tobacco2 =1:1 4.34 119 (112) 56.0 191 (203) 48.1 (48.0) C16:0 (22.5) C18:0 (3.2) C18:1 (32.0) C18:2 (42.1) C18:3 (0.2) tobacco2 6.17 141 (151) 33.4 183 (201) 44.4 (39.5) C16:0 (8.7) C18:0 (1.6) C18:1 (12.8) C18:2 (76.0) C18:3 (0.7) C20:0 (0.1) C22:0 (0.1) 1Iodine value; 2Peroxide number; 3Saponification number; 4Cetane number; 5Winterized sunflower oil, 6Waste cooking oil; 7Crude rapeseed oil; * refined, commercial oils acidified with pure oleic acid up to the indicated value. Tab. 3.1. Results of the characterization of the oils. The results of the FFA esterification performed on the different oils are given in Fig. 3.1. Fig. 3.1. Results of the FFA esterification reaction on different oils. The dotted line represents a FFA concentration equal to 0.5%wt, i.e. the limit required by both the European and American directives on BD fuel and to perform the transesterification reaction avoiding excessive soaps formation. The FFA esterification method is able to lower the acidity of most of the oils using the ion exchange resins A46 and D5081 as catalysts in the adopted reaction conditions. High conversion was obtained with A15 at the first use of the catalyst, but then its catalytic activity drastically drops after each cycle. The total loss of activity was estimated to be around 30% within the 5 cycles (results not shown for the sake of brevity). A possible explanation concerning this loss of activity may be related to the adsorption of the H2O yielded by the esterification on the internal active sites, which makes them unavailable for catalysis. When H2O molecules are formed inside the pores, they are unable to give internal retro-diffusion due to their strong interaction with H+ sites and form an aqueous phase inside the pores. The formation of this phase prevents FFA from reaching internal active sites due to repulsive effects. What appears to influence the FFA conversion is the refinement degree of the oil. WCO is in fact harder to process in comparison to refined oils (Bianchi et al., 2010; Boffito et al., 2012c), probably due to its higher viscosity which results in limitations to the mass transfer of the reagents towards the catalyst. Indeed, the required acidity limit is not achieved within 6 hours of reaction. A FFA concentration lower than 0.5%wt is not achieved also in the case of WCO mixture 3:1 with CRO and 1:1 with tobacco oil and in the case of the second stock of tobacco oil (tobacco2). This is attributable to the very low quality of these feedstocks due to the waste nature of the oil itself, in the case of WCO, or to the poor conservation conditions in the case of tobacco oilseed. In this latter case, the low FFA conversion was also ascribed to the presence of phospholipids, responsible for the deactivation of the catalyst. BD yields ranging from 90.0 to 95.0 and from 95.0 to 99.9% were obtained from deacidified raw oils using KOH and NaOCH3 as a catalyst, respectively. In Fig. 3.2, the comparison between A46 and D5081 at different temperatures and in absence of drying pretreatment (wet catalyst) is displayed. As expected, D5081 performs better than A46 in all the adopted conditions. Nevertheless, the maximum conversion within a reaction time of 6 hours is not achieved by any of the catalysts both operating at 318 K and in the absence of drying pretreatment. A more detailed study on the FFA esterification of WCO and its blends with rapeseed oil and gasoline was carried out. In Tab. 3.2 a list of all the experiments performed with WCO is reported together with the FFA conversion achieved in each case, while in Fig. 3.3 the influence of the viscosity of the blends of WCO is shown. Fig. 3.2. Comparison between the catalysts. D5081 and A46 at a) different catalysts amounts and b) temperatures and treatments. The results show that Carberry reactor is unsuitable for FFA esterification since a good contact between reagents and catalyst is not achieved due to its confinement. A15 deactivated very rapidly, while A46 and D5081 maintained their excellent performance during all the cycles of use due to the reasons already highlighted previously. The blends of WCO and CRO show an increase of the reaction rate proportional to the content of the CRO, that is attributable to the decreases viscosity (Fig. 3.3), being all the blend characterized by the same initial acidity. Also the use of diesel as a solvent resulted in a beneficial effect for the FFA esterification reaction, contributing to the higher reaction rate. Feedstock %wtFFAt=0 Reactor Cat. gcat/100 goil gcat/100 g feedstock Number of cat. re-uses FFA conv. (%), 1st use, 6 hr 1 WCO 2.10 Carberry A15 3.3 3.3 6 15.4 2 WCO 2.10 slurry A15 10 10 6 71.7 3 WCO 2.10 Carberry A46 3.3 3.3 6 7.7 4 WCO 2.10 slurry A46 10 10 6 62.0 5 WCO 2.10 slurry D5081 10 10 6 63.7 6 CRO 2.20 slurry A46 10 10 10 95.9 7 CRO 2.20 slurry D5081 10 10 10 93.7 8 WCO 2.10 slurry A46 10 10 0 62.0 9 WCO 75 CRO 25 2.12 7.5 71.3 10 WCO 50 CRO 50 2.19 5.0 79.9 11 WCO 25 CRO 75 2.24 2.5 86.1 12 CRO 2.20 10 95.9 13 WCO 75 DIESEL 25 1.74 7.5 76.8 14 WCO 50 DIESEL 50 1.17 5.0 58.7 15 WCO 25 DIESEL 75 0.65 2.5 40.4 16 WCO 25 DIESEL 75 (higher FFA input) 2.44 2.5 63.5 Tab. 3.2. Experiments performed with waste cooking oil. . Fig. 3.3. FFA conversions and viscosities of the blend of WCO with rapeseed oil. 3.2. Sulphated inorganic oxides as catalysts for the free fatty acid esterification: conventional and ultrasound assisted synthesis Conventional syntheses In Tab. 3.3, the list of all the catalyst synthesized with conventional techniques is reported together with the results of the characterization. Catalyst Composition Prep. method precursors T calc. SSA (m2g-1) Vp (cm3g-1) meq H+g-1 1 SZ1 SO42-/ZrO2 one-pot sol-gel ZTNP1, (NH4)2SO4 893 K O2 107 0.09 0.90 2a SZ2a SO42-/ZrO2 two-pots sol-gel ZTNP, H2SO4 893 K 102 0.10 0.11 2b SZ2b SO42-/ZrO2 two-pots sol-gel ZTNP, H2SO4 653 K 110 0.10 0.12 3 SZ3 SO42-/ZrO2 Physical mixing ZrOCl2.8H2O (NH4)2SO4 873 K 81 0.11 1.3 4 SZ4 Zr(SO4)2/SiO2 Impregnation Zr(SO4)2.4H2O SiO2 873 K 331 0.08 1.4 5 SZ5 Zr(SO4)2/Al2O3 Impregnation Zr(SO4)2.4H2O Al2O3 873 K 151 0.09 0.67 6 ZS Zr(SO4)2.4H2O (commercial) - - - 13 0.12 9.6 7 STTO_0 SO42-/SnO2 Physical mixing + impregnation SnO2 TiO2 P25 H2SO4 773 K 16.8 0.10 3.15 8 STTO_5 SO42-/95%SnO2-5%TiO2 773 K 15.9 0.11 3.43 9 STTO_10 SO42-/ 90%SnO2-10%TiO2 773 K 16.5 0.09 5.07 10 STTO_15 SO42-/ 85%SnO2-15%TiO2 773 K 14.9 0.11 7.13 11 STTO_20 SO42-/ 80%SnO2-20%TiO2 773 K 16.9 0.09 7.33 Tab. 3.3. Sulphated inorganic catalysts synthesized with conventional techniques. The FFA conversions of the sulphated Zr-based systems are provided in Fig. 3.4a and show that Zr-based sulphated systems do not provide a satisfactory performance in the FFA esterification, probably due to their low acid sites concentration related to their high SSA. Even if catalysts such as SZ3 and SZ4 exhibit higher acidity compared to other catalysts, it is essential that this acidity is located mainly on the catalyst surface to be effectively reached by the FFA molecules, as in the case of ZS. In Figure 3.4b, the results of the FFA esterification tests of the sulphated Sn-Ti systems are shown. Other conditions being equal, these catalysts perform better than the sulphated Zr-based systems just described. This is more likely due to the higher acidity along with a lower surface area. With increasing the TiO2 content, the acidity increases as well. This might be ascribable to the charge imbalance resulting from the heteroatoms linkage for the generation of acid centres, (Kataota and Dumesic, 1988). As a consequence, the activity increases with the TiO2 content along with the acidity of the samples. For the sake of clarity, in Fig. 3.4c the FFA esterification conversion is represented as a function of the number of active sites per unit of surface area of the samples. Ultrasound- assisted synthesis In Tab. 3.4, the list of all the catalyst synthesized with conventional techniques is reported together with the results of the characterization. Samples SZ and SZT refer to catalysts obtained with traditional sol-gel method, while samples termed USZT refer to US-obtained sulphated 80%ZrO2-20%TiO2. The name is followed by the US power, by the length of US pulses and by the molar ratio of water over precursors. For example, USZT_40_0.1_30 indicates a sample obtained with 40% of the maximum US power, on for 0.1 seconds (pulse length) and off for 0.9 seconds, using a water/ZTNP+TTIP molar ratio equal to 30. SZT was also calcined at 773 K for 6 hours, employing the same heating rate. This sample is reported as SZT_773_6h in entry 2a. Further details about the preparation can be found in a recent study (Boffito et al., 2012b). Entry Catalyst Acid capacity (meq H+/g) SSA (m2g-1) Vp (cm3g-1) Ave. BJH Dp (nm) Zr:Ti weight ratio S/(Zr+Ti) atomic ratio 1 SZ 0.30 107 0.20 6.0 100 0.090 2 SZT 0.79 152 0.19 5.0 79:21 0.085 2a SZT_773_6h 0.21 131 0.20 5.0 n.d.1 n.d 3 USZT_20_1_30 0.92 41.7 0.12 12.5 80:20 0.095 4 USZT_40_0.1_30 1.03 47.9 0.11 9.5 81:19 0.067 5 USZT_40_0.3_30 1.99 232 0.27 4.5 81:19 0.11 6 USZT_40_0.5_7.5 1.70 210 0.20 5.0 78:22 0.086 7 USZT_40_0.5_15 2.02 220 0.20 5.0 80:20 0.13 8 USZT_40_0.5_30 2.17 153 0.20 5.0 78:22 0.12 9 USZT_40_0.5_60 0.36 28.1 0.10 10 79:21 0.092 10 USZT_40_0.7_30 1.86 151 0.16 5.0 78:22 0.11 11 USZT_40_1_15 3.06 211 0.09 7.0 80:20 0.15 12 USZT_40_1_30 1.56 44.1 0.09 7.0 80:20 0.17 Tab. 3.4. Sulphated inorganic Zr-Ti systems synthesized with ultrasound-assisted sol-gel technique. Some of the results of the characterizations are displayed in Tab. 3.4. The results of the catalytic tests are shown in Fig. 3.5 a, b and c. In Fig. 3.5a and 3.5b the FFA conversions are reported for the samples synthesized using the same or different H2O/precursors ratio, respectively. Fig. 3.5. FFA conversions of sulphated inorganic Zr-Ti systems synthesized with ultrasound-assisted sol-gel for a) the same amount of H2O, b) different amount of H2O used in the sol-gel synthesis, c) in function of the meq of H+/g of catalyst Both the addition of TiO2 and the use of US during the synthesis are able to improve the properties of the catalysts and therefore the catalytic performance in the FFA esterification. The addition of TiO2 is able to increase the Brønsted acidity and, as a consequence, the catalytic activity (compare entries 1 and 2 in Tab. 3.4). The improvement in the properties of the catalysts due the use of US is probably caused by the effects generated by acoustic cavitation. Acoustic cavitation is the growth of bubble nuclei followed by the implosive collapse of bubbles in solution as a consequence of the applied sound field. This collapse generates transient hot-spots with local temperatures and pressures of several thousand K and hundreds of atmospheres, respectively (Sehgal et al., 1979). Very high speed jets (up to 100 m/s) are also formed. As documented by Suslick and Doktycz (Suslick and Doktycz, 1990), in the presence of an extended surface, such as the surface of a catalyst, the formation of the bubbles occurs at the liquid-solid interface and, as a consequence of their implosion, the high speed jets are directed towards the surface. The use of sonication in the synthesis of catalysts can therefore improve the nucleation production rate (i.e. sol-gel reaction production rate) and the production of surface defects and deformations with the formation of brittle powders (Suslick and Doktycz, 1990). For the samples obtained with the US pulses with on/off ratio from 0.3/0.7 on, the conversion does not increase much more compared to the one achieved with the sample obtained via traditional sol-gel synthesis. Their conversion is in fact comparable (see samples USZ_40_0.3_30, USZ_40_0.5_30, USZ_40_0.7_30 and SZT in Fig. 3.5a. The similarity in the catalytic performance of these catalysts may be ascribable to the fact that they are characterized by comparable values of SSA (entries 2, 5, 8, 10 in Tab. 3.4) and, in the case of the catalysts obtained with pulses, also by comparable acidities (entries 5, 8, 10 in Tab. 3.4). A high SSA may in fact be disadvantageous for the catalysis of the reaction here studied for the reasons already highlighted in the previous sections. The best catalytic performance is reached by the sample USZT_40_1_30, i.e. the one obtained using continuous US at higher power. This catalyst results in fact in a doubled catalytic activity with respect to the samples prepared either with the traditional synthesis or with the use of pulsed US. In spite the acidity of this catalyst is lower than that of the samples obtained with the US pulses, it is characterized by a rather low surface area (entry 12 in Tab. 3.4) that can be associated with a localization of the active sites mainly on its outer surface. As evidenced by the FTIR measurements (not reported for the sake of brevity), it is also important to highlight, that only in the case of the USZT_40_1_30 sample, a not negligible number of medium-strong Lewis acid sites is present at the surface, together with a high number of strong Brønsted acid centres. The XRD patterns of the samples were typical of amorphous systems, due to the low calcination temperatures. Samples calcined for a long time (SZT_773_6h) exhibit almost no catalytic activity (results not reported for the sake of brevity). This catalytic behaviour might be ascribable to the loss of part of the sulphates occurred during the calcinations step that result also in a very low acid capacity (see Tab. 3.4). For the sake of clarity, in Fig. 3.5c the FFA conversions as a function of the concentration of the acid sites normalized to the surface area are reported for the most significant samples. For what concerns how the water/precursors ratio affects the catalysts acidity, some general observations can be made: increasing it up to a certain amount increases the H+ concentration (compare entries from 6 to 9 and 11 to 12 in Tab. 3.4) because the rate of the hydrolysis and the number of H2O molecules that can be chemically bounded increases. Nevertheless, increasing the water/precursor ratio over a certain amount (30 for pulsed and 15 for continuous US, entries 8 and 11 in Tab. 3.4, respectively), seems to have a negative effect on the acidity concentration. In fact, the risk of the extraction of acid groups by the excess of water increases as well and the US power density decreases. 3.3 Sonochemically-assisted esterification and transesterification Esterification In Tab. 3.5 a list of the sonochemically-assisted esterification experiments is displayed together with the final acidities achieved after 4 hours of reaction. The reactor used for these experiments, provided with both an US horn (20 kHz) and a MW emitter (2450 MHz) is described elsewhere in detail (Ragaini et al., 2012). Standard calorimetric measurements were carried out to measure the actual emitted power (Suslick and Lorimer, 1989). Considering entries from 1 to 6 (rapeseed oil with high acidity), a final acidity lower than 0.5%wt is achieved within 4 hours operating at the conventional temperature of 336 K with all the methods, while this does not happen operating at lower temperatures. In particular, the lowest acidity is achieved at 336 K with MW. Considering entries from 7 to 12, inherent to the raw tobacco oilseed, final acidities lower than 0.5%wt are achieved only with the use of US. It is remarkable that at the temperature of 293 K the FFA esterification reaction rate results 6X faster than the conventional process at the same temperature. In the case of the rapeseed oil with low acidity (entries from 13 to 20), the use of MW increases the FFA conversion at 293 K and 313 K but not at 336 K. Moreover, the higher the applied power, the higher the FFA conversion. Oil Initial acidity (%wt) Cat. Technique Temp. (K) Emitted power (W) Tthermostat (K) Final acidity (%wt), 4 hr 1 Rapeseed oil (5)* 4.2-5.0 A46 conventional 313 - 315 1.18 2 336 338 0.50 3 ultrasound 313 38.5 293 0.55 4 336 313 0.48 5 microwaves 313 61.4 293 0.69 6 336 313 0.32 7 Tobacco 1.17 A46 conventional 293 - 293 0.97 8 313 315 0.55 9 336 338 0.45 10 ultrasound 293 38.5 277 0.48 11 313 293 0.46 12 336 313 0.30 13 Rapeseed oil (2)* 2.0-2.3 D5081 conventional 293 - 277 0.82 14 313 315 0.44 15 336 338 0.25 16 microwaves 293 31.7 277 0.73 17 313 31.7 293 0.34 18 61.4 293 0.37 19 336 31.7 313 0.29 20 61.4 313 0.25 Tab. 3.5. Sonochemically-assisted esterification experiments. The positive effects of acoustic-cavitation in liquid-solid systems are ascribable to the asymmetric collapse of the bubbles in the vicinity of the solid surface. When a cavitation bubble collapses violently near a solid surface, liquid jets are produced and high-speed jets of liquid are driven into the surface of a particle. These jets and shock waves improve both the liquid–solid and liquid-liquid mass transfer (Mason and Lorimer, 1988). MW is considered as a non-conventional heating system: when MW pass through a material with a dipole moment, the molecules composing the material try to align with the electric field (Mingos et al., 1997). Polar molecules have stronger interactions with the electric field. Polar ends of the molecules tend in fact to align themselves and oscillate in step with the oscillating electric field. Collisions and friction between the moving molecules results in heating (Toukoniitty et al., 2005). The increase of the FFA conversion as the power increases may be attributed to the fact that more power is delivered to the system and, therefore, the enhanced temperature effects caused by electromagnetic irradiation are increased with respect to lower powers. Differently the reason why a too high power was detrimental at the temperature of 336 K could be accounted for by two factors: i) the acoustic cavitation is enhanced at lower temperatures due to the higher amount of gas dissolved; ii) possible generation of too high temperatures inside the reaction medium that could have caused the removal of methanol from the system through constant evaporation or pyrolysis. Transesterification Transesterification experiments were performed on rapeseed oil both in batch and continuous mode. For the batch experiments two kinds of reactors were used: a traditional reaction vessel and a Rosett cell reactor, both with two ultrasound horns with different tip diameters (13 and 20 mm), and operating powers. A Rosett cell is a reactor designed to promote hydrodynamic cavitation through its typical loops placed at the bottom of vessel. Sonicators used in this work were provided by Synetude Company (Chambery, France). In Fig. 3.6, results from the conventional and the US-assisted batch experiments are compared. The US methods allows to attain very high yields in much shorter times than the traditional method and using less reagents (see Tab. 2.3) in just one step. The beneficial effects given by the US are attributable to the generation of acoustic cavitation inside the reaction medium leading to the phenomena already described in the case of esterification reaction. In particular, with the use of the Rosett cell reactor, BD yields of 96.5% (dotted lined) are achieved after 10 minutes of reaction. This is likely due to the combined approach exploiting acoustic cavitation along with hydrodynamic cavitation, which is able to provide a very efficient mixing inside the system. The use of the Rosett cell reactor provided transesterification reaction rates up to 15X faster than the conventional process. Continuous experiments were performed using two tubular reactors with different volumes (0.070 L at 35 KHz and 0.700 L at 20 kHz) and different US powers (19.3 and 68.3 W, respectively). The volume of the treated reagents was varied to obtain the same power density in both the reactors. Results are presented in Fig. 3.7. BD yields higher than 96.5% were obtained in the case of the small reactor within a reaction time of ~5 minutes. It is remarkable that BD yields higher than 90% were obtained using pulsed US (2 seconds on, 2 seconds off) after only 18 seconds, corresponding to just one passage in the reactor. In this case the transesterification reaction rate was 300X faster than the conventional process. The beneficial effects of pulses for the reactivity of the transesterification have been extensively reported (Chand et al., 2010; Kumar et al., 2010). In particular, as reported by Chand, when pulses are adopted, excessive heating of the reaction medium is not promoted, so preventing the loss of the gases dissolved in the system that are necessary for the acoustic cavitation to occur. Moreover, excessive heating during the transesterification reaction might lead to evaporation followed by pyrolysis of methanol and its subsequent removal from the reaction environment. 4. Conclusions As a conclusion to this work, some final remarks can be claimed: Feedstocks with a high potential for biodiesel (BD) production are Brassica juncea oilseed, which can be used as feedstock for BD100, Carthamus tinctorus, tobacco, animal fat and waste cooking oil to be used in BD blends with other oils or in diesel blends. However, blending different oils among them or with diesel already during the free fatty acids (FFA) esterification reaction may increase the reaction rate due to the lowered viscosity. Free fatty acids esterification over acid ion exchange resins in slurry reactors remains the preferred method of oils deacidification due to the optimal contact between the reagents and the catalyst and the good durability over time. The final high BD yields obtained for the oils de-acidified with the pre-esterification method over sulphonic ion exchange resins demonstrate its effectiveness in lowering the acidity and the possibility of obtaining high quality biodiesel from the selected feedstocks. Surface acidity and specific surface area of sulphated inorganic systems can be increased by both adding TiO2 and using ultrasound (US) in precise experimental conditions to assist the sol-gel synthesis of the catalysts. Changing the experimental conditions of US during the sol-gel synthesis makes also possible to tune the properties of the catalysts. In spite of not satisfying FFA conversions were obtained, US-assisted sol-gel synthesis turns out to be an extremely interesting method to obtain catalysts with high acidity and surface area. Both US and microwaves (MW) enhanced the FFA esterification reaction rate at temperatures lower than the one used conventionally (336 K). The positive effects of US are attributable to the phenomena generated inside the reaction medium by the acoustic cavitation, while MW are able to generate temperature effects localized in the proximity of the catalyst surface and to increase MeOH-oil solubility. US-assisted transesterification reaction is much faster than conventional transesterification: BD yields higher than 96.5% were achieved in most of the cases within 10 minutes of reaction, whereas the conventional method requires 150 minutes, besides higher reagents amount and higher temperatures. In particular, BD yields higher than 90% were obtained using a continuous reactor and pulsed US within 18 seconds, corresponding to just one passage in the reactor. In this case the transesterification reaction rate resulted to be 300X faster than the conventional process. Suggestions for the continuations of the work concern the further study of the synthesis of sulphated inorganic systems such as SO42-/ZrO2 or SnO2 or TiO2 with US and MW. Future work should also be devoted to the optimization of the experimental variables related to the use of MW and US to promote both FFA esterification and transesterification reactions. References Barrett E.P., Joyner L.G., Halenda P.P., "The determination of pore volume and area distributions in porous substances. I. Computations from nitrogen isotherms", J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1951, 73, 373. Bianchi C.L., Boffito D.C., Pirola C., Ragaini V., "Low temperature de-acidification process of animal fat as a pre-step to biodiesel production", Catal. Lett., 2010, 134, 179. Bianchi C.L., Pirola C., Boffito D.C., Di Fronzo A., Carvoli G., Barnabè D., A. Rispoli, R. Bucchi, "Non edible oils: raw materials for sustainable biodiesel", in Stoytcheva M., Montero G. (Eds.): Biodiesel Feedstocks and Processing Technologies, Intech, 2011, pp. 3-22. Boffito D.C., Pirola C., Galli F., Di Michele A., Bianchi C.L., "Free Fatty Acids Esterification of Waste Cooking Oil and its mixtures with Rapeseed Oil and Diesel", Fuel, 2012a, accepted on 19th October 2012, DOI:10.1016/j.fuel.2012.10.069. Boffito D.C., Crocellà V., Pirola C., Neppolian B., Cerrato G., Ashokkumar M., Bianchi C.L., "Ultrasonic enhancement of the acidity, surface area and free fatty acids esterification catalytic activity of sulphated ZrO2-TiO2 systems", J. Catal., 2012b, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcat.2012.09.013 Boffito D.C., Pirola C., Bianchi C.L., "Heterogeneous catalysis for free fatty acids esterification rea.ction as a first step towards biodiesel production", Chem, Today, 2012c, 30, 14. Brunauer S., Hemmett P., Teller E., "Adsorption of Gases in Multimolecular Layers", J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1938, 60, 309. López D. E., Suwannakarn K., Bruce D. A., Goodwin JG. "Esterification and transesterification on tungstated zirconia: Effect of calcination temperature", J Catal 2007, 247, 43. Mason T.J., Lorimer J.P., "Sonochemistry, Theory, Applications and Uses of Ultrasound in Chemistry", Efford, J. Wiley, New York, 1988. Mingos D.M.P.,Baghurst D.R., "Applications of Microwave Dielectric Heating Effects to Synthetic Problems in Chemistry", Microwave-Enhanced Chemistry, American Chemical Society,Washington, DC, USA, 1997. Perego C., Ricci, M., "Diesel fuel from biomass", Catal. Sci. Technol., 2012, 1, 1776. Pirola C., Boffito D.C., Carvoli G., Di Fronzo A., Ragaini V., Bianchi C.L., "Soybean oil deacidification as a first step towards biodiesel production", in D. Krezhova (Ed.): Recent Trends for Enhancing the Diversity and Quality of Soybean Products, Intech, 2011, pp. 321-44. Pirola C., Bianchi C.L., Boffito D.C., Carvoli G., Ragaini V., "Vegetable oil deacidification by Amberlyst : study of catalyst lifetime and a suitable reactor configuration", Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 2010, 49, 4601. Ragaini V., Pirola C., Borrelli S., Ferrari C., Longo I., "Simultaneous ultrasound and microwave new reactor: Detailed description and energetic considerations", Ultrasonics Sonochemistry 2012, 19, 872 Sehgal C., Steer R.P., Sutherland R.G., Verrall R.E., "Sonoluminescence of argon saturated alkali metal salt solutions as a probe of acoustic cavitation", J. Chem. Phys., 1979, 70, 2242. Suslick K. S., Doktycz, S. J., "The Effects of Ultrasound on Solids" in Mason, T.J.: Advances in Sonochemistry, JAI Press: New York, 1990, vol.1, pp. 197-230. Toukoniitty B., Mikkola J.P., Murzin D.Yu., Salmi T., "Utilization of electromagnetic and acoustic irradiation in enhancing heterogeneous catalytic reactions", Appl. Catal. A 2005, 279, 1 Winayanuwattikun P., Kaewpiboon C., Piriyakananon K., Tantong S., Thakernkarnkit W., Chulalaksananukul W. et al. "Potential plant oil feedstock for lipase-catalyzed biodiesel production in Thailand", Biomass. and Bioen. 2008, 32, 1279.
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Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace
This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.
A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')
My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.
In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.
Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.
The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.
Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.
My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.
Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.
Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.
My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.
Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.
In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.
As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.
Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.
I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.
When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.
I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.
One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.
I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.
This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.
Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.
The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.
Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?
Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.
The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.
This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.
The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.
Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?
Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).
This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.
But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.
Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).
For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.
What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.
You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?
The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.
While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.
By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort. There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.
Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.
You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?
When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.
Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.
Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.
When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.
Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.
An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.
Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.
Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?
Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.
In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.
Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.
A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.
My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.
But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.
Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.
Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?
The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.
Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.
Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.
My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?
American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.
The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.
Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.
The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.
It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.
Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'
Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.
Related links
Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf)
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John M. Hobson on Eurocentrism, Historical Sociology and the Curious Case of Postcolonialism
International Relations, it is widely recognized, is a Western discipline, albeit one that claims to speak for global conditions. What does that mean are these regional origins in and by themselves a stake in power politics? This Eurocentrism is often taken as a point of departure for denouncing mainstream approaches by self-proclaimed critical and postcolonialist approaches to IR. John Hobson stages a more radical attack on Eurocentrism, in which western critical theories, too, are complicit in the perpetuation of a dominantly western outlook. In this extensive Talk, Hobson, among others, expounds his understanding of Eurocentrism, discusses the imperative to historicize IR, and sketches the outline of possible venues of emancipation from our provincial predicament.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
In my view, there are two principal inter-related challenges that face IR. The first is the need to deal with the critique that the discipline is constructed on Eurocentric foundations. This matters both for critical and conventional IR. The latter insists that it works according to value-free positivistic/scientifistic principles. But if it is skewed by an underlying Western-centric bias, as I have contended in my work, then the positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which lies the dark Eurocentric face of conventional IR. And of course, if Eurocentrism in various forms infects much of critical IR, then it jeopardizes its critical credentials and risks falling back into problem-solving theory. For these reasons, then, I feel that the critique of Eurocentric IR and international political economy (IPE) poses nothing short of an intellectually existential challenge to these disciplines.
The second inter-related challenge is that if we accept that the discipline is essentially Eurocentric then we need to reconstruct IR's foundations on a non-Eurocentric basis and then advance an alternative non-Eurocentric research agenda and empirical analysis of the international system and the global political economy. This is a straightforward challenge vis-à-vis conventional IR/IPE theory but it is more problematic so far as critical IR/IPE is concerned (which is why my answer is somewhat extended). The more postmodern wing of the discipline would view with inherent skepticism any attempt to reconstruct some kind of (albeit alternative) grand narrative. And the postmodern postcolonialists would likely concur. It is at this point that the thorniest issue emerges in the context of postcolonial IR theory. For however hard this is to say, I feel that simply proclaiming the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline does not hole its constituent theories deep beneath the waterline; a claim that abrades with the view of most postcolonialists who view Eurocentrism as inherently illegitimate either because it renders it imperialist (which I view as problematic since there are significant strands of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism and scientific racism) or because they conflate Eurocentrism with the unacceptable politics of (scientific) racism (which I also find problematic notwithstanding the point that there are all manner of overlaps and synergies between these two generic Western-centric discourses, all of which is explained in my 2012 book, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics). The key point—one which will undoubtedly get me into a lot of trouble with postcolonialists—is that I feel we need to recognize that in the end Eurocentric IR (and IPE) theory constitutes a stand-point approach, just like any other, and its merits or de-merits can ultimately only be evaluated against the empirical record, past and present (notwithstanding the points that I find Eurocentrism to be deeply biased and that what I find so deeply galling about it is its dismissive 'put-down' modus operandi of all things non-Western, wherein all non-Western achievements are dismissed outright, alongside the simultaneous (re)presentation of everything that the West does as progressive and/or pioneering).
So the second principal challenge facing the discipline—one which will no less get me into trouble with many postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers—is the need to reconstruct an alternative non-Eurocentric set of disciplinary foundations, which can then generate fresh empirical narratives of the international system and the global political economy. For my view is that only by offering an alternative research agenda and empirical analysis of the world economy can IR and IPE be set free from their extant Eurocentric straitjackets and the Sisyphean prison within which they remain confined, wherein IR and IPE scholars simply re-present or recycle tired old Eurocentric mantras and tropes in new clothing ad infinitum. For if nothing else, the absence of an alternative reconstruction and empirical analysis means that IR and IPE scholars are most likely simply to default to, or retreat back into, their Eurocentric comfort zone. Accordingly, then, the battle between Eurocentrism and non-Eurocentrism needs to be taken to the empirical field and away from the high and rarified intellectually mountainous terrain of metanarratival sparring contests.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
Another way of asking this question would be: what influenced you to become a non-Eurocentric thinker? I get asked this question a lot, especially by non-white people. A good deal of this is related to my life-experience, much of which is sub-conscious of course and both too personal and too detailed to openly reflect upon here (sorry!) More objectively, the initial impetus came around 1999 when I came across a book on Max Weber by the well-respected Weberian scholar, Bryan Turner, in which he argued inter alia that Weber's sociology had Orientalist properties; none of which had occurred to me before. Following this up further I became convinced that Weber was indeed Eurocentric, as was Marx. More importantly, I came to see this as a huge problem that infected not just Marx and Weber but pretty much all of historical sociology (which was reinforced in my mind when I came to read James Blaut's books, The Colonizer's Model of the World (find it here), and Eight Eurocentric Historians). So I set out to develop an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history and historical sociology as a counter (which resulted in my 2004 book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation).
Two further key IR texts that I became aware of were L.H.M. Ling's seminal 2002 book, Postcolonial International Relations and Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's equally brilliant 2004 book International Relations and the Problem of Difference, both of which led me to explore further the Eurocentric nature of IR and later IPE. But it would be remiss of me not to mention the influence of Albert Paolini; a wonderful colleague whom I had the pleasure to know at La Trobe University in Melbourne back in the early 1990s before his exceedingly unfortunate and premature death (and who, I must say, was way ahead of the game compared to me in terms of developing the critique of Eurocentrism in IR (see his book, Navigating Modernity (1997)). However, it would be unfair to the many others who have influenced me in countless ways to single out only these books and writers, though I hope you'll forgive me for not mentioning them so as to avoid providing yet another overly extended answer!
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
This is an excellent but very challenging question and I want to try and make a succinct answer (though I shall build on it in some of the answers I will provide later on). The essential argument I make about 'thinking inter-culturally' is that while the more liberal side of the discipline thinks that its cosmopolitanism does just this, its Eurocentrism actually prevents it from fulfilling this. Because ultimately, cosmopolitanism wants to impose a Western standard of civilization upon the world, thereby advancing cultural monism rather than cultural pluralism. And this is merely the loudest expression of a spectre that haunts much of the discipline. But I guess that in the end, to achieve genuine cultural pluralism and to think inter-culturally requires us to take seriously how other non-Western peoples think of what their cultures comprise and what it means to them, and how their societies and states work along such lines. Dismissing them, as Eurocentrism always does, as inferior, backward and regressive denies this requirement outright. Interestingly, my great grandfather, J.A. Hobson flirted with this idea in his book, Imperialism: A Study (though this has largely escaped the notice of most people since few have read the more important second part of that book where all this is considered). But this is merely a first step, for as I will explain later on in the interview, ultimately thinking inter-culturally requires an analysis of the dialogical inter-connections and mutual co-constitutive relations between West and non-West which, in turn, presupposes not merely the presence of Western agency but also that of non-Western agency in the making of world politics and the global political economy.
All of which is clearly a massive challenge and I am certainly not advocating that the discipline of IR engage in deep ethnographical study and that it should morph into anthropology. And in any case I think that there are things we can do more generally to transcend Eurocentrism while learning more about the other side of the Eurocentric frontier without going to this extreme. I shall talk about such conceptual moves later on in this interview. One such theoretical move that I talk about later is the need to engage historical sociology (albeit from a non-Eurocentric perspective) or, more precisely global historical sociology. Again, though, I'm not advocating that the discipline should morph into historical sociology. And I'm aware that one of the biggest obstacles to IR making inroads into historical sociology is the sheer size of the task that this requires. It has always come naturally to me because that is where I came from before I joined the IR academic community. But there is quite a bit of historical sociology of IR out there now so I do think it possible for new PhD students to enter this fold. All of this said, though, I'm unsure if I have answered your question adequately.
The west is often seen as the source of globalization and innovation, which have historically radiated outwards in a process without seeming endpoint. What is wrong with this picture, and, perhaps more interestingly, why does it remain so pervasive?
In essence I believe this familiar picture—one which is embraced by conventional and many critical IR/IPE and globalization theorists—is wrong because this linear Western narrative brackets out all the many inputs that the non-West has made (which returns me to the point made a moment ago concerning the dialogical relations that have long existed between West and non-West). In my aforementioned 2004 book I argued that the West did not rise to modernity as a result of its own exceptional rational institutions and culture but was significantly enabled by many non-Western achievements and inventions which were borrowed and sometimes appropriated by the West. In short, without the Rest there might be no modern West. Moreover, while the West has been the principal actor in globalization since 1945, the globalization that preceded it (i.e., between 1492 and c.1830) was non-Western-led (as was the process of Afro-Eurasian regionalization that occurred between c.600 and 1492 out of which post-1492 globalization emerged). And even after 1945 I believe that non-Western actors have played various roles in shaping both globalization and the West, all of which are elided in the standard Eurocentric linear Western narrative of globalization.
But why has this image remained so persistent? This is potentially a massive question though it is a very important one for sure. Conventional theorists are most likely to disagree outright with my alternative picture in part because they are entirely comfortable with the notion that the 'West is best' and that the West single-handedly created capitalism, the sovereign inter-state system and the global economy. Critical theorists are rather more problematic to summarize here. But one that springs to mind is the type of argument that Immanuel Wallerstein (Theory Talk #13) made in a1997 article, in which he insisted that it be an imperative to hold the West accountable for everything that goes on in the world economy so that we can prosecute its crimes against the world. Arguments that bring non-Western agency in, as I seek to do, he dismisses as deflecting focus away from the West and thereby diluting the nature of the crimes that the West has imparted and therefore serves merely to weaken the case for the critical prosecution. I fundamentally disagree with him for reasons that I shan't go into here (but will touch upon below). But in my view it is (or should be) a key debate-in-the-making not least because I suspect that many other critical theorists might agree with him and, more importantly, because it brings fundamentally into question of what Eurocentrism is and of what the antidote to it comprises. Either way, though, critical theorists, at least in my view, often buy into the Western linear narrative, albeit not by celebrating the West but by critiquing it. All of which means that both conventional and many critical IR scholars effectively maintain the hegemony of Eurocentrism in the discipline though for diametrically opposed reasons; and which, at the risk of sounding paranoid, suggests a deeply subliminal conspiracy against the introduction of non-Eurocentrism.
Nevertheless one final but rather obvious point remains. For the biggest reason why Eurocentrism persists is because it makes Westerners feel good about themselves. And at the risk of sounding like sour grapes (notwithstanding very decent sales for my non-Eurocentric books), I have been struck by the fact that there seems to be an insatiable appetite—particularly among the Western public readership—for high profile Eurocentric books that celebrate and glorify Western civilization; though, to be brutally frank, many of these rarely add anything new to that which has been said countless times in the last 50 years, if not 200—notwithstanding Ricardo Duchesne's recent avowedly Eurocentric book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as constituting a rare exception in this regard. All of which means that writing non-Eurocentric books is unlikely to get your name onto the bestseller list (though granted, the same is true for many of the Eurocentric books that have been written!)
International theory and political theory originates mainly from Europe, but makes universal claims about the nature of politics. How does international theory betray its situated roots and how do these roots matter for how we should think about theory?
I'm not sure that I can answer this question in the space allowed but I'll try and get to the broad-brush take-home point. I guess that when thinking about modern IR theory we can find those theorists who in effect advocate a normative Western imperialist posture even if they claim to be doing otherwise. Robert Gilpin's work on hegemonic stability theory is perhaps the clearest example in this respect. Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he claims, is non-imperialist because it always seeks to help the rest of the world, not exploit it. But the exercise of hegemony, it turns out, returns us to the old 19th century trope of the civilizing mission where Western practices and principles are transferred and imposed on non-Western societies in order to culturally convert them along Western lines. And this in turn issues from the assumption that the British and American interests are not selfish but are universal. This mantra is there too in Robert Keohane's (Theory Talk #9) book, After Hegemony, where cultural conversion of non-Western societies to a neoliberal standard of civilization by the international financial institutions through structural adjustment is approved of; an argument that is developed much more expansively in his later work on humanitarian intervention. And this trope forms the basis of cosmopolitan humanitarian interventionist theory more generally, where state reconstruction, which is imposed once military intervention has finished, is all about re-creating Western political and economic institutions across the world. I don't doubt for a moment the sincerity of the arguments that these authors make. But they can make them only because they believe that the Western interest is truly the universal. In such ways, then, IR betrays its roots.
Ultimately, Western IR theory constructs a hierarchical conception of the world with the West standing atop and from there we receive an image of a procession or sliding scale of gradated sovereignties in the non-Western world. For much of IR theory that has neo-imperialist normative underpinnings, it is this construction which legitimizes Western intervention in the non-Western world, thereby reproducing the legal conception of the (imperialist) standard of civilization that underpinned late 19th century positive law. Nevertheless, there has been a significant strand of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism within international theory (and before it a strand of anti-imperialist scientific racism, as in the likes of Charles HenryPearson and LothropStoddard). But once again, as we find in Samuel Huntington's famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations—which comprises a modern equivalent of Lothrop Stoddard's Eugenicist texts, The Rising Tideof Color (1920) and Clashing Tides of Color (1935)—the West is held up as the highest expression of civilization, with non-Western societies viewed as socially inferior such that the West's mandate is not to imperially intervene across the world but to renew its uniquely Western civilized culture in the face of regressive and rampant non-Western regions and countries (particularly Middle Eastern Islam and Confucian China). Hedley Bull's anti-imperialist English School argument provides a complementary variant here because, he argues, it is the refusal of non-Western states to become Western wherein the source of the (unacceptable) instability of the global international society ultimately stems. All of which, as you allude to in your question, rests on the conflation of the Western interest with the universal. It is for this reason, then, that the cardinal principle of critical non-Eurocentrism comprises the need to undertake deep (self) reflexivity and to remain constantly vigilant to Eurocentric slippages.
In turn, this returns me to the point I made before: that IR theory does not think inter-culturally because it denies the validity of non-Western cultures. Because it does so, then it ultimately denies the full sovereignty of non-Western states. For one of the trappings of sovereignty is what Gerry Simpson usefully refers to as 'existential equality', or 'cultural self-determination'. It seems clear to me that the majority of IR theory effectively denies the sovereignty of non-Western states because it rejects cultural pluralism and hence cultural self-determination as a function of its intolerant Eurocentric monism. The biggest ironies that emerge here, however, are two-fold; or what I call the twin self-delusions of IR. First, while conventional IR theory proclaims its positivist, value free credentials that sit comfortably with cultural pluralist tolerance, nevertheless as I argued in my answer to your first question, this positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which lies the face of intolerant Eurocentric cultural monism. And second, it means that while IR proclaims that its subject matter comprises the objective analysis of the international system which focuses on anarchy and the sovereign state, nevertheless it turns out that what it is really all about is narrating an analysis of Western hierarchy and the 'hyper-sovereignty' of Western states versus the 'conditional sovereignty/gradated sovereignty' of non-Western states.
Linking your work to Lizée's as a critique of extrapolating 'universals' on the basis of narrow (Western) experiences, Patrick Jackson (Theory Talk #44) wrote as follows: 'Perhaps the cure for the disease that Hobson and Lizée diagnose is a rethinking of what "theory" means beyond empirical generalizations, so that future international theorists can avoid the sins of the past.' What is your conception of what theory is or should be?
As noted already, I am all in favor of developing non-Eurocentric theory. To sketch this out in the most generic terms I begin with the proposition that Eurocentric IR/IPE theory is monological, producing a reductive narrative in which only the West talks and acts. It is essentially a 'winner/loser' paradigm that proclaims the non-West as the loser or is always on the receiving end of that which the West does, thereby ensuring that central analytical focus is accorded to the hyper-agency of the Western winner. And its conception of agency is based on having predominant power. We find this problem particularly within much of critical IR theory, where because the West is dominant so it qualifies as having (hyper) agency while the subordinate position of the non-West means that it has little or no agency. In turn, particularly within conventional IR and IPE we encounter a substantialist ontology, where the West is thought to occupy a distinct and autonomous domain. From there everything else follows. And even in parts of critical IR and IPE where relationalism holds greater sway we often find that the West still occupies the center of intellectual gravity in the world.
My preference is for a fully relationalist approach which replaces the monologism of Eurocentrism and its reification of the West with the aforementioned conception of dialogism that brings the non-West into the discussion while simultaneously focusing on the mutually constitutive relations between Western and non-Western actors. It also allows for the agency of the non-West alongside the West's agency (even though clearly after c.1830 the West has been the dominant actor). This in effect replaces Eurocentrism's either/or problematique with a both/and logic, enabling us to reveal a space in which non-Western agency plays important roles without losing focus of Western agency, even when it takes a dominant form as it did after c.1830. In this way then, to reply to Wallerstein's argument discussed earlier, one does not have to dilute the critique of the West when bringing non-Western agency in for both can be situated alongside each other. While I could of course say much more here, these conceptual moves are paramount to me and inform the basis of my empirical work on the international system and the global political economy.
All in all, IR theory needs to take a fully global conception of agency much more seriously; structuralist theory in its many guises is necessary but is ultimately insufficient since it diminishes or dismisses outright the prospect or existence of non-Western agency. Moreover, I seek to blend materialism and non-materialism, which means that neither constructivism nor poststructuralism can quite get us over the line. Even so, blending materialism and non-materialism is not an especially hard task to achieve though IR's preferred ontologically reductionist stance certainly makes this a counter-intuitive proposition.
You combine historical sociology with international relations. What promises does this interdisciplinary approach hold? Why do we need historical sociologies of IR?
Following on from my previous answer I argue that a relationalist non-Eurocentric historical sociology of IR is able to problematize the entities that IR takes for granted—states, anarchy (as well as societies and civilizations)—in order to reveal them, to quote from the marvelous introduction that Julian Go and George Lawson have written for their forthcoming edited volume Global Historical Sociology, as 'entities in motion'. Indeed such entities are never quite complete but change through time. Here it is worth quoting Go and Lawson further, where they argue that
'social forms are "entities-in-motion": they are produced, reproduced, and breakdown through the agency of historically situated actors. Such entities-in-motion, whether they are states, empires, or civilizations often appear to be static entities with certain pre-determined identities and interests. But the relational premise, and perhaps promise, of GHS is its attempt to denaturalize such entities by holding them up to historical scrutiny'.
It is precisely this global historical sociological problematique that underpins the approach that I develop in a forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Reorient International Political Economy where inter alia, I show how many of the major processes of the global economy are never complete but are constantly mutating as they are shaped by the multiple interactions of Western and non-Western actors. To take the origins of capitalism or globalization as an example, I show how these have taken not a Western linear trajectory but a highly discontinuous path as West and non-West have interacted in complex ways.
A good number of IR historical sociologists have focused specifically on particular historical issues—especially that of the rise of the sovereign state in Europe. Such analyses have in my view proven to be extremely valuable because they allow us to puncture some of the myths that surround 'Westphalia' that populate standard or conventional IR reportage (particularly that found in undergraduate text-books). But ultimately I feel that the greatest worth of the historical sociology of IR project lies in using history (understood in historical-sociological terms rather than according to traditional historians' precepts) as a means of problematizing our understanding of the present international system and global political economy. Thus, for me, historical sociology is ultimately important because it can disrupt our understanding and explanations of the present. And I believe that this kind of inter-disciplinarity can bear considerable fruit (notwithstanding the difficulty that this task poses for IR scholars).
You famously criticized IR's Eurocentrism and argued for the need for inter-cultural thinking. What is inter-cultural thinking and how can it benefit IR?
As I already discussed what inter-cultural thinking is a bit before, I shall consider how it might benefit IR and indeed the world in various ways. First, if the rise of the West into modernity owes much of this achievement to the help provided by non-Western ideas, institutions and technologies, then acknowledging this debt could go a long way to healing the wounds that the West has inflicted upon the non-West's sense of self-esteem. Moreover, the hubristic claim ushered in by Eurocentrism, that the West made it to the top all by itself and that the very societies which helped it get there are then immediately denounced as inferior and uncivilized, significantly furnishes the West with the imperialist mandate to intervene and remake non-Western societies in the image of the West. So in essence, the help that the once-more advanced non-Western societies that the West benefited from is rewarded by 150 years of imperial punishment! Of course, IR scholars do not really study the rise of the West, but it is implicit in so much of what they write about. So acknowledging this debt could challenge the West's self-appointed mandate to remake the world in its own image as well as problematize many of the historical assumptions that lie either explicitly or implicitly within IR.
Second, and flowing on from the previous point, thinking inter-culturally means recognizing the manifold roles that the non-West has played in shaping the rise of Western capitalism and the sovereign state system as well as the global economy, as I have just argued, but also appreciating their societies and cultures on their own terms rather than simply dismissing them as unfit for purpose in the modern world. Less Western Messianism and Western hubris, more global understanding and empathy, is ultimately what I'm calling for. But none of this is possible while Eurocentrism remains the go-to modus operandi of IR and IPE. And this is important for IR not least because significant parts of it have informed Western policy, most especially US foreign policy.
Third, a key benefit that inter-cultural thinking could bring to IR is that while the discipline presumes that it furnishes objective analyses of the international system, the upshot of my claim that the discipline is founded on Eurocentrism is that all the discipline is really doing is finding ways to reaffirm the importance of Western civilization in world politics, defending it and often celebrating it, rather than learning or discovering new things about the world and world politics. I believe that only a non-Eurocentric approach can deliver that which IR thinks it's doing already but isn't.
You've said that 'what makes an argument [institutionally] Eurocentric…lies with the nature of the categories that are deployed to understand development. And these ultimately comprise the perceived degree of 'rationality' that is embodied within the political, economic, ideological, and social institutions of a given society.' In order to think inter-culturally, does IR needs new conceptions of rationality, or standards other than rationality altogether?
What an extremely interesting and perceptive question which has really got me thinking! Again, it's something that I've been aware of in the recesses of my mind but have never really thought through. Certainly the essence of Eurocentrism lies in the reification of Western rationality (or what Max Weber called Zweckrationalität) and its simultaneous denial to non-Western societies. But what with all the revelations that have happened in Britain in the last decade, where a seemingly never ending series of fraudulent practices have been uncovered within British public life—whether it be MPs' expenses scandals, banking scandals, newspaper scandals and the like—then one really wonders about the extent to which the West operates according to the properties of Zweck-rationality that Weber proclaimed it to have. Corruption and fraud happen in the West but clearly they are much more hidden than in those instances where it occurs in non-Western countries (notwithstanding the revelations mentioned a moment ago). But if one were to open the lid of many large Western companies, for example, and delve inside one might well find all sorts of 'rationality-compromising' or 'rationality-denial' practices going on. To mention just two obvious examples: first, promotions are often tainted by personal linkages rather than always founded on merit; and second, managers often mark out and protect their own personal position/territory even when it (frequently) goes against the 'rational' interests of the said organization.
To return to your question, then, one could conclude that many Western institutions are far less rational than Eurocentrism proclaims, which in turn would challenge the foundations of Eurocentrism. Of course, corruption and fraud are not unique to the West, but it is the West that proclaims its unique 'rational standard of civilization'. Whether, therefore, we need to abandon the term (Zweck) rationality on the grounds that it is an impossibly conceived ideal type remains the question. Right now I don't have an answer though I'll be happy to mull over this in the coming years.
You've written that engaging with the East 'creates a genuinely global history' and articulate a 'dream wherein the peoples of the Earth can finally sit down at the table of global humanity and communicate as equal partners'. Do you consciously operate with an 'ontology' of 'peoples' and 'civilizations' as opposed to 'individuals'? How do you conceive of the relationship between global humanity and plural peoplehood? Is there an underlying philosophical or anthropological view that you are drawing on in these and similar passages?
Certainly I prefer to think of peoples and even of civilizations rather than individuals and states, though I'll confess right now that dealing theoretically with civilizations and articulating them as units of analysis is extraordinarily challenging. At the moment I leave this side of things to better people than me, such as Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15) and his recentpioneering work on civilizations. The term 'global humanity' concerns me insofar as it is often a politically-loaded term, particularly within cosmopolitanism, where its underbelly comprises the desire to define a single civilizational identity (i.e., a Western one) for 'global humanity'. In essence, cosmopolitanism effectively advances the conception of a 'provincial (i.e., Western) humanity' that masquerades as the global. So I prefer the notion of plural peoplehood, so as to allow for difference. I wouldn't say that I am operating according to a particular philosophical view although it strikes me that such a notion is embodied in Johann Gottfried Herder's work which, on that dimension at least, I am attracted to. But to be honest, this is generally something that I have not explored though it is something that I've thought that I'd like to research for a future book (notwithstanding the point that I'll need to finish the book that I have started first!).
In your reply toErik Ringmar, you draw on psychoanalytic metaphors to discuss the benefits of overcoming Eurocentrism, writing that, 'Eurocentrism leads to the repression and sublimation of the Other in the Self. Thus, doing away with Eurocentrism can end the socio-psychological angst and alienation that necessarily occurs through such sublimation.' How do you envision what we now call the West (or Europe) after its socio-psychological transformation? What does a world after angst and alienation look like? Is it possible, and is that the goal you think IR theory should aim at?
Another massively challenging and fascinating question, let me have a go. Since you raised the issue of socio-psychological/psycho-analytical theory (though it is something that I am no expert on), it has always struck me that Eurocentrism itself is not simply a construct designed to advance Western power and Western capitalist interests in the world. This seems too mechanistic. For recall that it was a series of largely independent sojourners, travel-writers, novelists, journalists and others rather than capitalists who played such an important role in constructing Eurocentrism. Something more seems to be at play. One can think of the battles between 'Mods and Rockers' or Skinheads and heavy metal fans in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, who detested each other simply because they held different identities and prized different cultural values. Most importantly, I feel, the constant need to denounce, put down and dismiss the Other as inferior seems reminiscent of those kinds of people we sometimes meet who, in constantly putting down others to falsely elevate themselves to a position of superiority, ultimately reveals merely their own insecurities. The same issues, of course, underpin racism and Eurocentrism. The West rose to prominence in my view as a late-developer and having got to the top it very quickly came to view its duty as one of punishing all others for being different – all done, of course, in the name of helping or civilizing the very 'global humanity' that had done so much to help the West rise to the top in the first place! And to want to culturally convert everyone in the world according to the Western standard of civilization seems to be symptomatic of a deeply insecure mindset. A secure person or society for that matter does not feel threatened by, but openly embraces, difference.
Can we move beyond this stand-off given that such a mentality has been hard-wired within Western culture for at least three centuries? And ten if you count the sometimes terse relations between Europe and Middle Eastern Islam that emerged after 1095! We need to move beyond an identity that is based only on putting others down. It's 'bad karma' and, like all bad karma, damages the Western self, not just the non-Western other. But to transcend this identity-formation process requires us to do away with logocentrism; clearly a very big task. Nevertheless, that is exactly what my writings are all about. And it is something that I think IR theory needs to strive to achieve. Because IR theory is to an extent performative then I live in the hope, at least, that such a mentality might, just might somehow seep into international public life, though if it were to happen I strongly suspect that I would not be around to see it. Still, your question—what would a world beyond Eurocentrism look like?—though very important is nevertheless perhaps too difficult to answer without seeming like a hopeless idealist… other than to say that it could be rather better than the current one.
You write that 'IPE should aim to be an über-discipline, drawing on a wide range of disciplines in order to craft a knowledge base that refuses to become lost in disciplinary over-specialization and the depressing academic narcissism of disciplinary methodological differentiation and exclusion.' Why do you prefer that IPE should be the überdiscipline, instead of IR (or something else altogether), with IPE as a subset?
My degree was in Political Economy, my Masters in Political Sociology and my PhD in Historical Sociology and (International) Political Economy. Despite the fact that the majority of my academic career to date has been in IR research, I have always returned at various points to my old haunting ground, IPE (as I have most recently). I have always found IR a little alienating for its reification of politics, divorced from political economy. I'm not a Marxist, but I share in the view that political economy, if not always directly underpinning developments and events in the international system is, however, never far away.
The quote that you took for this question came from the end of my 2-part article that came out in the 20th anniversary edition of Review of International Political Economy. This was partly responding to Benjamin Cohen's (Theory Talk #17) 2008 seminal book, International Political Economy: A Intellectual History. One of the challenges that I issued to my IPE readership, echoing Cohen, is the need for IPE to return to 'thinking big' (in large part as a reaction to the massive contraction of the discipline's boundaries that has been effected by third wave American IPE, which labors under the intellectual hegemony of Open Economy Politics). In that context, then, I argued that IPE needs to expand its boundaries outwards not only to allow big or macro-scale issues to return to the discipline's research agenda but also to incorporate insight from other disciplines. For in my view IPE has the potential to blend the insights of many other disciplines that can in turn transcend the sometimes myopic or tunnel-vision-based nature of their particular constituent specialisms.
One of the implications of 'thinking big' is that IPE should be able to cover much of that which IR does… and more. Like Susan Strange, who expressed her exasperation with IR for its exclusion of politico-economic matters, so I feel that the solution lies not with IR colonizing IPE (which is not likely for the foreseeable future!) but with IPE expanding its currently narrow remit. If it could achieve this it could become the 'über-discipline', or the 'master discipline', of the Social Sciences, notwithstanding the point that my postcolonial and feminist friends will no doubt upbraid me for using such terrible terms!
Final question. Beyond the East outside the West, Greece is now being remade as the 'East' within the West, with a range of measures applied to it that had hitherto been the preserve for the 'East' or Global South. How can your work help to make sense of the stakes?
Your question reminds me of a similar one that I was asked in an interview for Cumhurieyet Strateji Magazine concerning Turkey's ongoing efforts to join the EU, the essence of my answer comprising: 'be careful what you wish for'. One of the things that I have felt uneasy about is the way, as I see it (and I might not be quite right in saying this), that European Studies (as a sub-discipline) sometimes appears as rather self-affirming, thereby reflecting the core self-congratulatory modus operandi of the EU. I am not anti-European or in any way ashamed to be Western (as some of my critics might think). But I'm deeply uneasy about the EU project, specifically in terms of its desire to expand outwards, not to mention inwards as we are seeing in the case of Greece today. For this has the whiff of the old civilizing mission that had supposedly been put to rest back at the time of the origins of the European Economic Community. Although Greece is a member of the EU (notwithstanding its non-European roots), it seems clear that what is going on today is a process of intensified internal colonization under the hegemony of Germany, wherein Greece is subjected to the German standard of civilization. All of which brings into question the self-glorification of the self-proclaimed 'socially progressive' EU project. And to return to my discussion of Turkey I recognize that candidate countries have their reasons for wanting to join the EU. But I guess that what my work is ultimately about is restoring a sense of dignity to non-Western peoples, in the absence of which they will continue to self-deprecate and live in angst in the long cold shadow of the West. All of which brings me back to the answers I made to quite a few of the earlier questions. So I would like to close by saying how much I have enjoyed answering your extremely well-informed questions and to thank you most sincerely for inviting me to address them.
Professor Hobson gained his PhD from the LSE (1991), joined the University of Sheffield as Reader and is currently Professor of Politics and International Relations. Previously he taught at La Trobe University, Melbourne (1991–97) and the University of Sydney (1997–2004). His main research interest concerns the area of inter-civilizational relations and everyday political economy in the context of globalization, past and present. His work is principally involved in carrying forward the critique of Eurocentrism in World History/Historical Sociology, and International Relations.
Related links
Faculty Profile at the University of Sheffield Read Hobson's The Postcolonial Paradox of Eastern Agency (Perceptions 2014) here (pdf) Read Hobson's Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? (Review of International Studies 2007) here (pdf)
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Issue 50.4 of the Review for Religious, July/August 1991. ; Review fOl~ Religious Volume 50 Number 4 July/August 1991 P()STMAS'I'I'.'ll: Send mhh'c.~.~ chang~'s Io Rl.:Vll.:W 1.~ nt ll,.:i.i~ ;i, ~i,s; P.(). Box 6071); l)llhli h, M N 55806. .~lll~scriplioll raics: .~illglc c.py $3.51) plus lll~lililig 1991 RI.:VIEW I)avid L. Fleming, ~.l. Philip C. Fischen S.I. Michad G. I-hzrter, ~.l. Elizabeth Mcl)omm~h, 0.1: Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Edilor Asxocial~" Cammical Co.nsc/Edilor Assistant Editors David J. Hassel, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Wendy Wright, Ph.D. Advisory Board Mary Margaret Johanning, S.S.N.D. Sean Sammon, F.M.S. Suzanne Zuercher, O.S.B. July/August 1991 Volume 50 Number 4 Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor should be sent to R~vl~w rot R~lous; 3601 Lindell Boulevard; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Elizabeth McDonougb, O.P.; 5001 Eastern Avenue; P.O. 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This order is for [] a new subscription [] a renewal [] a restart of a lapsed subscription MAIL TO: REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ¯ 3601 LINDELL BOULEVARD ° ST.LOu1S, MO 63108 1-91" PRISMS. The word ordinary seems to imply the bland, the unexciting, the run-of-the- mill, the everyday. In fact, for many of us even the liturgical year of the Church suffers from being divided into two parts: the Seasons and Ordinary Time. Although liturgy properly speaks of our celebrations, we tend to find it hard to celebrate what is called ordinary. Perhaps the very distinction which the Church highlights in so dividing the liturgical year calls us to a deeper reflection upon our understanding of the ordinary. God creates the ordinary., and calls it good. It is true: the ordinary is the very substance of our world. While being itself God's cre-ation, the ordinary is also the substance with which God works. We, by being ordinary, can be touched and molded and transfigured by God. Often we try to escape from being ordinary, and in the process we shut ourselves off from being available to God's action in our lives. In the bibli-cal accounts of creation, we find the lure of an escape from the ordinary the root crisis of properly using our God-given freedom. The story of Lucifer and the fallen angels is a story of beings discontent with being ordinary. As they try to move beyond the ordinary by shutting out God, this becomes their hell. So, too, the story of Adam and Eve is a story of two people, in the freshness of human life, already desirous of escaping the ordinary--to be like gods. Sacramentally we are reminded that God continues to take the ordi-nary- water, bread and wine, oil--to make extraordinary contact with us. Even when our prayer or the spirituality we live is--try as we may---ordi-nary, we thus have the very quality which allows it to become the vehicle of God's action. The difficulty for us in accepting the ordinary is not just from an inherent human tendency to want to be noticed and praised, but also from the graced impetus to strive, to struggle, to desire to grow beyond where we are. How are we to distinguish these spirits within us, distinguish move-ments that would lead us to close ourselves off to God by our self-focus from movements whereby God is drawing us ever closer in our surrender? Our writers in this issue provide us with various approaches to a lived answer. John Wickham goes right to the heart of our reflections in the lead article by focusing on our choice of being "just ordinary." McMurray and Conroy and Kroeger turn our gaze to the whole complexus of activities 481 482 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 which make up our spirituality--how do we work at making a spirituality our "ordinary" life-source? A different question is posed by Samy and Fichtner when they ask whether the ordinary practices which we find in a spirituality which is not Christian can be an aid in our openness to God. Vest and Schwarz and Gottemoeller draw our attention to various aspects of the ordinary Christian lay life as influenced by a spirituality which is described as monastic, by a new kind of membership relation to a traditional religious congregation, or by a new responsibility within the institutions formerly identified with a particular religious order. In the midst of some of the liturgical renewal stimulated by Vatican II, the practice of a daily Eucharistic celebration has sometimes been a point of dispute, especially among those priests and religious whose congregational rule or custom clearly called for such observance. The confusion often turned on what was celebratory and what was ordinary or daily. John Huels weaves his way through various schools of thought in order to provide a group with a whole cloth of ordinary spiritual practice. Although contemplative life in its dedicated form is recognized as truly a special calling in the Church, Clifford Stevens would have us all draw some nourishment today from its age-old sources. And finally, four different writers--Navone, Monteleone, Seethaler, and Billy--lead us further along in the most common activity of human interaction with God, our attempt at praying. As portrayed in the gospels, Jesus had to spend a lot of his efforts both in his ordinary apostolic life and then again in his resurrected life to prove his ordinariness. He gets tired, he eats and drinks, he needs friends, and he takes time to pray--all ordinary activities for us humans. And yet it was in these very ordinary dealings that God is fully present to us in Jesus Christ. Perhaps the part of the Church year we call "ordinary time" is a necessary reminder to us of how God wants to work with us. David L. Fleming, S.J. Choosing to be "Just Ordinary" John Wickham, S.J Father John Wickham, S.J., is a member of the Upper Canada Province of the Society of Jesus. He is the author of The Common Faith and The Communal Exercises (Ignatian Centre in Montreal): His address is Ignatian Centre; 4567 West Broadway; Montreal, Quebec; Canada H4B 2A7. There is something new, I believe, about the feeling often experienced today of being "just an ordinary person." Many recurrently feel that way despite their natural gifts, highly developed skills, or honored positions. Nor do they need to deny those advantages. In contrast to what others may tend to think, or what the world expects of them, their subjective experience of themselves--what it feels like from within their own skins--is that of a worthwhile even if unfinished, rather unique and yet uncertainly striving, interesting enough but still "just ordinary" life. It is midway between what is heroic and what is base. It is not very glamorous, but neither is it paltry. Its special taste, which is quite different from these alternatives, makes it a rather new kind of experience. If at times we do recognize that experience in ourselves, then we may face a range of questions. Should I accept the feeling as a true and good one? Or would I be better off without it? Should I choose it so often and persis-tently that it becomes habitual for me? Or would that turn into an inauthentic pose? Should I try to find some part of my real identity there? And what exactly would that imply? For example, would it mean I am choosing to be mediocre? The fact that a feeling arises, St. Ignatius tells us, does not prove it to be from God. The latter point needs to be discerned. And kinds of feeling that become widespread in a given society need to be discerned just as much as do feelings that arise only in a particular individual. In fact, our faith com-munities must often set themselves against cultural trends in the world around them. 483 484 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 In order to get at underlying issues, I wish to consider this topic in two stages. The first will be restricted to the phenomenon itself of a "just ordi-nary" feeling as a secular event in our world. Only then will I turn to the sec-ond stage, namely, to take up the kinds of faith response which we might wish to give it today. The first part, then, attempts an analysis of the "feel-ing." The second considers when, or in what circumstances, we might "choose" in faith to make it our own. Our New Cultural Situation To rephrase my opening statement, I believe that a "just ordinary" feel-ing about oneself is somewhat new as a more widespread and recurrent experience in Western culture. In recent years nearly everyone I have spoken to about this has nodded at once and said, "Yes, that's exactly how I often feel." While I possess no statistical data on its prevalence, my impression is that quite a few people have come to recognize its presence in themselves. Let me try to locate this experience more precisely. I am referring to something secular in origin and not necessarily Christian or religious in itself. Like God's rain and sunshine, it may affect everyone, just :and unjust, believer and unbeliever alike. Perhaps it was triggered off by the countercultural movement of the nineteen-sixties, since during the seventies commentators often pointed out the exaggerated attention then being given to inner feel-ings- to the personal self of each one apart from their external involvements. At that time many were being thrown back upon their subjective states of awareness to a degree that had rarely happened before. The seventies were called the "Me Decade," one that belonged to the "Me Generation" whose subjective responses (often referred to then as "getting in touch with your feelings") were given unprecedented emphasis and publicity. What had previously been mostly private now became blatantly public. But perhaps during the eighties not only the novelty but some of the disturbing quality, too, of that rather messy explosion of "subjectivity" in our midst has worn off and subsided to a degree--enough to allow "just ordinary" feelings to rise to the surface and gain attention today. What had occurred, then, was an intensification of self-awareness, a heightening of subjective consciousness among much larger segments of our population than before, and even a thematization of this event in our culture. "Souls" had been transformed into "subjects." Individuals became persons. This had happened much earlier, of course, for some exceptional people and even for smallish groups here and there, but it had never before become such a widespread phenomenon. And it involves matters of considerable importance, not easily dis- Choosing to be "Just Ordinary" / 41~5 missed. Bernard Lonergan has written of "the shift to interiority" in the twentieth century as the emergence of a new "realm" of human reality, i At the opposite end of the scale, the usual wild and foolish misuse of a new gift by the more excitable members of society should not blind us to its underly-ing significance. That is the larger context. More in particular I wish to stress, first of all, the quieter reverberations which those noisy events have left with many per-sons today. The gift itself of interiority is multifaceted, of course, but a first approach would notice that in part it may belong with the newly "expressive self' which has emerged alongside, and often independently of, the older "utilitarian self.''2 While the latter continues to exert a dominant influence in our midst, it must now share the public table with a more mystical parmer. From a slightly different viewpoint the "just ordinary" feeling should be seen mainly as a response to the puritan "strong self' of modern culture. After the nineteenth century in the West we gained the capacity-- appropri-ate to a technocratic society---of developing our ego-strengths. That is, a cer-tain knack, at least for special purposes, of withholding or excluding deeper levels of feeling can free an individual to concentrate on impersonal obser-vations, accurate calculations, and carefully directed efforts of the will. Further development of this inner self-control is required for any kind of efficiency and productivity in the working world. It is clear that the requisite skills are not given by nature but must be culturally developed. Not only our workplaces but our schools and colleges, too, call insistently for the formation of habits (especially of technical reason and will) which enable entry into the competitive society with all the bureau-cratic ladders and graduated salary scales of a successful career---or not-so-successful, as the case may (more often) be. In contrast to this still urgent public arena of "strong selves," individual members also return to private worlds of rest, relaxation, and entertainment, to times of weakness when they may face their own ignorance about the questions posed to them in life and recogn!ze their lack of energy for the continual efforts required. Human beings, it should be stressed, when separated from their social roles and active commitments and thrown back upon their private resources, usually do not find a great deal of their own to sustain them. Modern urban ways have cut people off from the deeply penetrating and densely inter-twined supports of rural societies. As a result, the rootless city dweller becomes conscious of boredom, of empty times to be filled up, of personal neediness and spiritual hungers not easily satisfied. An individual person, after all, is usually endangered by too much isolation from others, and mod- 4~16 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 em technologies often weaken or destroy traditional communities (families, neighborhoods, parishes). Besides, whenever institutions let us down or defeat our aims, or when hurtful clashes disturb our feelings for others, we are left alone to deal with a diminishing present and a more uncertain future. That is when a loving spouse and intimate friends (if available)become essential to our very sur-vival; without them, depressed feelings all too easily turn to thoughts of nonexistence. It was the countercultural movement which reacted against the giant bureaucratic institutions of our world and forced into the broader stream of public life the previously underground resource of subjective feelings. It transformed leisure moments of the kind just mentioned into recurrent times of self-expression which are portrayed and celebrated in our electronic media. This revealed to large numbers of fairly well-off persons in Western societies that their interior selves need to be cultivated in ways that differ enormously from the older patterns of successful selfhood modeled for them in corporate institutions. The counterculture managed to give sustained pub-licity to a host of "alternative lifestyles"---that is, a diverse range of subjec-tive modes in self-identity and interpersonal relating. This vastly expanded "realm of interiority" provides a cultural context for, and is itself fostered by, many recent movements: affirmations of per-sonal rights, the reawakening of charismata, the turn to the East, the renewal of contemplative prayer traditions, and the broadly secular interest in spiritu-alities of all kinds. It is surpi'ising to notice how the word "spiritual" and its cognates have gained such widespread use not only in the arts but in sports, politics, business enterprises, salesmanship, the military--almost every-where today. In our faith tradition, on the other hand, the interior life had a much more restricted meaning. Medieval interiority was exclusively religious--the very opposite of anything secular or worldly. In order to develop one's union with God, according to the late-medieval Imitation of Christ, believers were expected to withdraw from external involvements--at least, from all the habits and attitudes belonging to them--and to cultivate an inner commu-nion with the Lord deep within their hearts. The Imitation, we should remember, is the most popular spiritual classic of all time.3 A crucial aspect of its teaching has to do with the personal self so poignantly revealed by means of a prolonged withdrawal of the kind rec-ommended. But when thrown back upon oneself in this way, what does one find? The oft-repeated answer to this question shows how bare the cup-boards of subjectivity can be: Choosing to be "Just Ordinary" / 487 This is the greatest and most useful lesson we can learn: to know our-selves for what we truly are, to admit freely our own weaknesses and failings.4 I am nothing, and I did not even know it. If left to myself, I am noth-ing; I am all weakness. But if you turn your face to me, [Lord,] I am at once made strong and am filled with new happiness.5 Oh, how humbly and lowly I ought to feel about myself, and even if I seem to have goodness, I ought to think nothing of it . I find myself to be nothing but nothing, absolutely nothing . I peer deep within myself and I find nothing but total nothingness.6 No doubt, older Christians today will recall teachings of this kind as familiar features of their early training. And some of its emphases tend to give us pause. What about the inherent goodness of each human self?. This was occasionally noticed in the Imitation, but should it not have received much more attention? On this question two historical points should perhaps be made. First, the Imitation itself arose from the Devotio Moderna's care for many ordinary members of society who desired to cultivate a devout life amid late-medieval disruptions of Christian Europe (the Black Death and subsequent plagues, persistent warfare, economic hardship, the Great Western Schism).7 Out of their prolonged experience of public calamities came this first popular expression of the personal subject in the West--at least, among the little seg-ments of the population influenced by the "new devotion." The point for us here is that a faith response to those troubled times made possible an interior life for many more persons than before (including lay members living in the world). An inner self could then be cultivated by means of the careful religious teachings extended to them by The Imitation of Christ and similar writings of the movement. Thus, interiority was initial-ly a sacred realm, not a secular one. In order to develop at all, it had to define itself against the secular world. This meant, of course, that the self had precisely "nothing" of its own to fall back upon--no widely accepted norms of individual worth had as yet been formulated. The themes of individualism which we take for granted today as "natural" were simply not available in the Middle Ages. The Devotio Moderna may, in fact, have contributed notably to the first social expression of our individual sense of self. It follows that to blame it for not supplying what it was in the very process of begetting seems misguided. That would be reading history backward--a frequent modern failing. Secondly, it seems that the difference between selfhood (a good sense of self) and selfishness (a bad sense) had not as yet been separately felt. In that 488 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 sacred milieu the differentiation of a secular goodness of creation apart from the fallen condition so frequently stressed in spiritual teachings remained for the future to bring about. In other words, the self-in-its-own-being could not possibly then have been "tasted" distinctly from the self-as-sinful or the self-as- saved-by-grace (or both together). True enough, humility was sometimes considered apart from habits of sinfulness--namely in Mary and in the saints--but even there what received emphasis was the divine grace of their redemption (in Mary's case extending to her prior preservation) from sin's more normal dominion. These excep-tions only proved the rule that humility--as we hear its accents in the Imitation--arises from the sharpened interior taste of one's sinful self that usually follows upon forgiveness. In view of this cultural moment of The Imitation of Christ in the early fifteenth century, its lack of any emphasis on natural goodness for the indi-vidual self is understandabl~. It is true that, by the later sixteenth century, Montaigne's Essays and Shakespeare's Hamlet and Richard II had begun to anticipate modem feelings of individual selfhood, but this was still an excep-tional happening within the sacred medieval precincts, it may be said. So many developments have taken place in the centuries since that time--the Cartesian ego, theKantian turn to the subject, the Romantic movement, nineteenth-century liberalism, as well as the already mentioned "shift to interiority" ~ind countercultural movement in our own century, that we cannot have recourse solely to a retrieval of medieval gifts. In short, the new interiority of our day differs a great deal from the "interior life" handed down to us in our spiritual tradition. The old interiority was (a) fully sacred in meaning, (b) defined in opposition to the "world," (c) low in self-esteem while high in reliance on God alone, and (d) rarely to be shared with others socially. By contrast, the new interiority is (a) mainly sec-ular in meaning, (b) defined against the mainline institutions of society (including those of the Church), (c) self-affirming and self-accepting, even if admitting one's need of friends and of the divine Other, and (d) eagerly shared with others in public lifestyles. Like many others, in my Jesuit formation I was often counseled to ignore, set aside, or "offer up" my individual feelings as distracting or, more likely, harmful to my fuller appropriation of the uniform spiritual teachings provided. These latter consisted in learning the general answers true for everyone alike and in keeping the rules set down for all without exception. That way of forming members, as we know, has been in great part aban-doned in recent decades. In any case, it had introduced painful distortions into our medieval heritage. Choosing to be 'Just Ordinary" / 489 The main "warp" in question was directly related, I believe, to the nine-teent~ h-century rise of the "strong self" already mentioned. Let me briefly review that development. As I have noted, humility had traditionally been ~'ocused on the sinful condition of those converted to the Lord. It did not dwell merely on mortal sins committed prior to their deeper conversion, but much more on the venial sins which they came to recognize in present self-awareness. This medieval tradition may be gathered in detail from Alphonsus Rodriguez's Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues.8 Against that backdrop the modem ideal of a "strong sell" to be fash-ioned in youth by anyone hoping to succeed in the secular world, or even to survive in it, presented a considerable contrast. Prior to 1965, our Catholic parishes and schools managed to combine this modem requirement (a strong selfhood formed in the conscious mind through repression of deeper feel-ings) With traditional teachings on humility (reliance on God alone because of personal sinfulness and the "nothingness" of self). This was made easier by means of the invisible wall erected around the distinctly Catholic world. By the later nineteenth century, of course, Christian faith had already become to a large extent privatized, separated from public life and domesticated in family and parish activities. For Catholics in North America, the immigrant Church had developed its own "garrison" mentality so effective!y that one could cultivate a traditionally humble self in the narrowly religious realm and at the same time a secularly aggressive self in the business, professional, political, or broadly social realm. That was the religious situation in which I was raised, and I did not then advert to its inconsistencies. Perhaps many others today can recall this com-bination of strivings. However opposite they were in character, we tried to attain them both and to some extent we succeeded--by the grace of God. In recent decades that whole effort has disappeared and as a result (among many other quandaries) a whole spectrum of possible selves has become available today. It is a somewhat unsettling set of choices. But amidst all our struggles to find or fashion personal identities (or perhaps to fortify older ways in the very teeth of these developments), the curious new event has made its presence felt--the "just ordinary" feeling. Contemporary Faith Responses At this point I wish to bring into our discussion a distinction rather dif-ferent from any mentioned so far. In a recent book, Hopkins, the Self and God, Walter Ong, S.J., has emphasized the "taste of self" which figured so prominently in Gerard Hopkins's poetry, letters, and notebooks.9 As a chap- 490 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 ter on the Victorian context makes clear, the theme was not unusual even then. But Hopkins, because of his unique attention to it and extraordinary gifts of language and feeling, managed to anticipate many of our present concerns. The distinction employed by Fr. Ong in his discussion is between the self as "I" or "me" in the densely concrete, subjective stance underlying all one's experiences and, on the other hand, the self as objectified in various characteristics, habitual attitudes, and acquired abilities. Ong names the first of these "the subject-self' and the second "the self-concept"--a terminology already in use. More is meant than merely a difference between subjective and objec-tive qualities of the self. The so-called "objective" side points to an individu-al's attempts to gain a sense of developing identity--at first through the reactions :of other people, and then through one's own continued striving. Often a variety of contrasting possibilities are "tried on for size" and lived out for a time, but later modified or rejected. But underneath every such effort lurks a richer source of seifhood that unifies the ongoing and often interrupted sequence. Moreover, the subject-self also feels--at least indirectly--the inadequa-cy of whatever aspects of self-conception are presently entertained. The lat-ter are never quite right. There is always a certain sense of"more to come": Why do I doubt my capacity to keep this up any longer? Maybe I should change my mind about the whole business? Or am I trapped in a "fate" of being the way I am?l° And as soon as some new aspect of the self gains initial clarity, there is often a tendency to react in a different direction. Even if I should rejoice in a rather flattering or at least affirmative symbol of myself, my subconscious feelings may tend to exert a counterinfluence. Or if snubbed by others or blamed in any way, I might resent it at several levels at once (despite a ten-dency to self-doubt), but I will also search for memories of my better qualities. A great variety of varying patterns of such "identity searches" may be noted in spiritual direction. But what I wish to stress here is the unifying "I" in every pattern or in every sequence of changing patterns over years of per-sonal growth. "I" am the enduring (somehow even unchanging?) recipient, resource, and agent of all such reflexive feelings, perceptions, visions, and (as Eliot has taught us) endless revisions. For I am always the one who is unfinished. I exist amid processes that are ever moving me into uncertain futures. This mysterious "I" may be used, of course, in a way that includes the self-concept of my current identity. Most often the two blend together in my Choosing to be "Just Ordinary" / 49'1 experience of them. Wider, more inclusive self-affirmations are normal and even important. For the self-concept can never really be independent of the subject-self--the two functions are inherently connected and interactive. My various self-conceptions (especially at their least vague, most fully articulat-ed stages) need to be tested repeatedly in the subject-self. Do I feel at home in them? In fact, their authenticity becomes known only insofar as they truly actualize my subjectively felt potentials. On the other side, the subject-self cannot long endure without some kind of self-concept. Even when denied previous realizations in the social world, the subject-self may have recourse to fantasy roles in the theatre of imagina-tion. For I cannot avoid notions of selfhood altogether--my neediness finds relief only in the movement to some form of self-realization, however indi-rect, implied, or even self-sacrificial it may become for a time. But what is new today for many persons is that 'T' may recurrently refer quite exclusively to the subject-self alone. In such cases the needful relation to identities is not denied but somehow "bracketed out" or "put on hold." This distinction appears to be called for by what I have named the "just ordi- ¯nary" feeling. More precisely, the "just ordinary" feeling belongs especially to the subject-self. Now, this distinction may unlock several, of the puzzling questions which arise .from our cultural situation today. It might resolve the problem for all who try to decide whether or not--even precisely as a Christian-- they should choose to be "just ordinary." Not Mediocrity, but Limitation A first question to be faced concerns mediocrity. If one settles into a "just ordinary" feeling of oneself, would this not bring an end to growth, to any serious striving for improvement? Would it not ring the death knell of idealism (in a good sense)? Would it banish from the competitive society believers who chose to accept it--as though our economic system as such is inherently alien? Even more traditional spiritualities sought to refute the accusation that Christian faith necessarily inclined believers to accept the established pow-ers and to resign themselves to exploitation by cle4er elites (Marx's "opium of the people" view about the role of religion in society). But that false use of Christian faith is not in question here. If a devout life means acceptance of manipulation and coercion by others, then it has simply lost its roots in the prophetic teachings of Christ. Instead, what is relevant here is the insight that only the subject-self can feel "just ordinary." Such a feeling cannot rightly belong to the self-concept. 499 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 My position is that only insofar as one becomes aware of one's "purely" sub-jective selfhood in contrast to current or possible fulfillments of one's poten-tials (the self-concept always means that) does the "just ordinary" feeling arise in the first place. It would follow, then, that for persons who do not experience this newish feeling (and no one is required to do so!) a decision to be "just ordinary" might mean choosing to be mediocre. That is not the case, however, for those who do recognize the new feel-ing in themselves; what they experience, I would say, is a new sense of per-sonal limits. No doubt, our knowledge of limitations is pluriform. Each person would tend to stress different aspects of the overall human "contin-gency" (its more technical name) as this comes home to individual lives. Limits are reached in our work, our relationships, our different life-stages, our suffering of reverses, rejections, sickness, injuries, or close encounters with death and dying: Our knowledge and abilities have a great variety of limitations, but so do our energies and our capacity for making creative responses. There are traditional ways of coming to know and accept our littleness, but what I have in mind here gives a different resonance to these more familiar events. In Western cultures it may seem natural to invest one's whole identity in a career role, with its achievements, or with honors already received (here the "strong self" makes its presence felt). But against this tendency I find it possible, like Hopkins, to identify mainly with my subject-self--even though my developed talents, skills, and other acquisitions (whatever their true worth) may be kept in view. I do not deny the crucial importance of these factors in my life as a whole. But I know I could lose all use of them if I suffered a grave stroke or a debilitating heart attack, for example. And throughout that illness, whose effects could be long-lasting, I would contin-ue to experience myself as "me"--a limited person, unique in my special taste of self, the same as I was as a child and teenager, and surely to remain so until death. If I am unable to make this sort of self-identification, but insist on claiming my developed self-concept as the only true "me," the danger is that a debilitating illness may tend to destroy me altogether. And those who live into old age, even if they never suffer a health crisis of the dramatic sort mentioned, may eventually experience their subject-self as "just ordinary"-- stripped of any actual use of their various gifts. In traditional Christian teaching our need for reliance on God will nor-mally be heightened and dramatized by major experiences of suffering (',limit" situations). This will surely continue to exert a central influence on personal realizations of Christ's paschal mystery. The unusual note to be Choosing to be "Just Ordinary '" / 493 sounded here, however, concerns the dimension of selfhood which our cul-tural moment may be bringing alive. The 'T' whom Jesus calls and unites to himself, the "I" who undergoes spiritual deaths and who may then receive new life in the risen Lord--this 'T' may now choose to identify with "just ordinary" feelings rather than either "nothing" or "something good denied." It is a form of limited selfhood available today to a much larger number of persons than ever before. Humility in a New Key As cultural events bring forward different ways of experiencing not only the humanized world but also the human subject in and by whom the world is humanized, individuals growing aware of their own gifts are always exposed to new dangers from pride. In his "Two Standards," we remember, St. Ignatius highlights the time-honored medieval teaching that pride is the source and origin of every other vice, and that humility, as St. Bernard puts it, is "the foundation and safeguard of all virtues." It follows that the emer-gence of a "just ordinary" feeling raises another question: precisely what effect might this have on our traditional sense of what the virtue of humility requires? No doubt, the rise of modern democracies brought a stronger emphasis on equality into social relations in the West (in contrast to earlier ideals of "subordination," of submission to those in higher orders). Every member, rich or poor, is supposed to stand on the same ground, in a civil sense as well as "before God," as every other member. But this opened the way to compe-tition in the public "free marketplace," where the many levels of social clas-sification become even more clearly marked than in the premodern world. Personal evaluations and interpersonal judgments are so much more intense than previously that the "neurotic" society of our day has become familiar to US.11 In this context modern teachings on humility tended to stress the differ-ence between the office and the office holder. And this traditional distinction was often combined with a focus on teamwork or group contributions. In sports, the heroes who score the highest number of points, even the winning goals, humbly acknowledge the help of their teammates and the glory of the whole team, rather than their individual merits. In short, modern humility consists mainly in putting oneself down. Self-abasement, especially after some signs of achievement appear in the struggle for success over others, is felt to be essential. This means that humility and humiliation are closely approximated in modern competitive societies. But in the postmodern world (if that is where we are today) many are 494 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 beginning to sense their subjective distance from the very structures of suc-cess and achievement themselves. Perhaps this is why human vulnerability and powerlessness have received so much attention in recent years. If I am right in this--to some extent and for some members only, of course--then the "just ordinary" feeling would denote an ability to experience self-worth independently of competition for successful contributions in the established institutions of the world. When the feeling does mean that, I would argue in favor of seeking to realize it in one's life. This would not necessarily signify nonparticipation in the large struc-tures of society--whether in business, politics, sports, communications, or whatever. But it could qualify the style of our participation because our main sense of self would no longer consist in whatever we might be able to achieve. To gain this rather sophisticated balance, of course, might not always be easy. It would mean learning how to give one's whole energies to highly skilled performances without pinning one's sense of self to success in performing well. Whatever the-degree of success or failure realized over time, those who contribute would continue to experience themselves to be "just ordinary" members of a community which regularly affirms their worth on a basis other than that of competition, success, or failure. This would bring a newish tone, a new chord, I think, to the age-old music of humility. Sacred and Secular Community The "just ordinary" feeling may also raise a question because of its very secularity. Normally the Church lives in a certa{n state of tension with the secular society in which its witness to Christ's message is to be given. But the quality of that "creative tension" can vary a great deal. In our day the tension may disappear whenever a new secular discovery affecting human growth is announced in a book or magazine, or its virtues are proclaimed in the media. It may then be taken up by skilled practitioners and made available in local programs. In recent decades we have received many such gifts. An example might be the interpretation of dreams by means of Jung's psychological theories. This can become quite an interesting activity, valu-able in itself. But there is a danger that believers who are attracted to it may then transfer most of their religious energies to essentially secular programs of this kind (think, too, of the many self-help groups claiming attehtion today) and thereafter give little attention to more central Christian practices. In particular, our own question concerns the "just ordinary" feeling. Is it another "brand-new discovery" of the type just mentioned? Does it not sug-gest a secular facet of human life which may all too easily replace more Choosing to be 'Just Ordinary" / 495 authentic 'teachings? Are we simply "shaking holy water" on secular objects and calling them Christian? I would reply that, while its potential misuses are undeniable, its right use may also be safeguarded if the underlying issue is kept clearly in sight-- the issue of the human call to transcendence. I will conclude this essay by exploring that deeper concem. At one level we remember that any new discovery may be claimed by Christian faith because all that is human belongs to God the Creator. Thus, we may recognize and welcome every fresh gift of human expertise, inte-grate it within the larger faith (making it subordinate, not dominant), and in this manner sanctify all things in Christ. No doubt this should be so. But at a deeper level of analysis the question arises in a new form because secularity (secular realities taken in a good sense, as differing from secularism) is always related to the sacred as its opposite. In this way Judaism and Christianity themselves initiated a radical process of secularization. For us the world is no longer "full of gods" since we believe in the one Creator who is beyond all created things (transcen-dent). Our faith has secularized the cosmos. Later on in history the civilized world, too, took further giant steps on the same journey. In great part today our political, economic, social, and cultural institutions are experienced not as immediately God-given but as humanly devised. In this more radical sense, then, whenever ongoing secularization enables a new gift of human life to be realized, the sacred powers of tradi-tional faith need to be adapted to the new situation. What had formerly been handled indirectly by religious beliefs has now come directly (even if incom-pletely) under human management. In faith we may welcome such events as fulfillments of God's intentions in creating humans "in his own image and likeness" (that is, cocreative with him). But we also note an important clue: there should be no change in secularity without a corresponding change in sacrality. The frequent failure here is a simple transfer of energies from the sacred into the secular realm while reducing religious operations to empty words alone. More specifically, if the emergence of "just ordinary" feelings can bring new aspects of human existence within the range of human competency, then we may rejoice in this prospect on condition that a corresponding, positive change occurs in our sense of specifically sacred gifts. But if the change should be merely negative, a loss of religious energies, then something has gone wrong. For example, the work of Carl Rogers and others on self-actualization and self-realization has an obvious bearing on our topic, but even here the 496 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 "just ordinary" feeling takes the process a step further, I think. All of these factors, we should remember, are secularizations of human powers which previously had been contained or implied within sacred gifts. 12 In Gerard Hopkins's poetry the sacred envelope remained untorn: Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is-- Christ--for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his . 13 Even more to the point are his famous closing lines in another poem: In a flash, at a trumpet clash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. 14 The eternal worth to be realized at last in Christ is anticipated by a believer who knows his subject-self as "poor potsherd" and "matchwood." Surely this comes close to our "just ordinary" feeling even if its validation depends on faith in the resurrection. If we look back to Hopkins, we can per-ceive its secular potentials lurking within his very religious lines. In any case, now that it has emerged to stand on its own feet in our midst, we are challenged to respond afresh in faith to a new aspect of human self-realization. We may rejoice inthis event, but without a positive religious response of some kind the 16ss of transcendence becomes palpable. We may happily accept the growth of a human value, but its simultaneous excision from religious meanings calls for new initiatives, for real adaptations which do not downgrade the relevance of our transcendent faith but rather give it fresh impetus, redirecting its energies in new ways. Two principles may be l~ormulated in this regard. I have already been exploring the first of these, which might be put as follows: The Principle of Adaptation: Every new growth of secular competence should stimulate a corresponding renewal of sacred powers. The second may'be named: The Principle of Intensity: In our creative response to a given process of secularization, one important criterion would be a specific heighten-ing, rather than any lessening, in the experience of transcendence. Choosing to be "Just Ordinary" / 497 Whenever the Christian component is subtly reduced to a comfortable repetition of now irrelevant phrases, this second principle has been ignored. The urgency of transcendent faith for human affairs can easily be diminished without any advertence to its loss. Our "just ordinary" feeling, for example, simply cries out for creative faith responses. But what are these to be? That is the real issue. Will our sense of Christian humility be intensifie~l instead of being replaced? What fresh meaning can we now give to the crucial "poverty of spirit" which indicates membership in the Lord's kingdom? The heightened subjectivity that often seems to afflict us may also serve to awaken creative potentials previously unknown. Even though it makes us experience our human limits as never before, our acceptance of "just ordi-nary" feelings could, in fact, lead to new dimensions of liberation. But this will not be automatic. Our spiritual behavior will need to adjust itself cre-atively to the new gift. Possible responses are always at hand. Whenever in faith the members of our new communities reflect upon the significance of feeling "just ordinary" togetherl I believe the Real Presence of the risen Christ may receive a fresh emphasis. This heightened communal awareness may correspond in a unique way to our traditional poverty of spir-it. Precisely here a new intensity of faith may be gathering force. During the nineteen-twenties T.S. Eliot insistently employed the symbol of the Angelus bell, a traditional reminder of the moment of Incarnation. In that extraordinary instant, and whenever it is made present to us today, tran-scendent powers cut through the secular time dimension to disturb our mod-em preoccupations. In similar fashion a few decades earlier, wher~ striving to resist new inroads of modernity Pope Pius X led Catholic parishes to give renewed attention to the Real Presence in the Eucharist (mainly as reserved in the tabernacle or received during Holy Communion). Whatever judgments we may wish to pass upon those earlier modes of resis-tance, it seems clear that a creative response for today will need to focus on the Eucharist as an action performed by the whole community. We may be able to enter the eucharistic action as full participants because we surrender in faith to the Lord who makes his Real Presence felt in our ways of relating to one another. The "just ordinary" feeling may be chosen as a means to that effective recognition. When in a small faith community the members have learned how to act and speak out of their newfound sense of ordinary selfhood, all their gifts may be appreciated warmly and without exaggeration. They can be put into action zestfully since the members are set free from the anxieties of personal competition. Each one's acceptance by all the others may become intensified through the distinctly felt presence of the risen Lord in their community today--not merely by anticipat.ing the Second Coming. 498 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 In short, we are being graced, membered in a new life, invigorated, and turned in hope to the future by this much more active presence of Christ. That intensification of God's "reigning" in us may correspond accurately and be found to dovetail beautifully with the newly released "just ordinary" feelings of the members about themselves. NOTES l Method in Theology, New York: Herder & Herder, 1972, pp. 257-262. 2 On this distinction see Robert Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1985, pp. 32-35 and passim. 3 SeeThomas ~ Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Wm. Creasy, Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1989; "Introduction," pp. 11-13. Also Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, trans. J. van Engen, New York: Paulist Press, 1988; "Introduction," p. 8: "The Imitation of Christ has undoubtedly proved the most influential devotional book in Western Christian history." It has also been translated into all the great lan-guages of the world. 4 Book I, chap. 28; trans. Creasy, p. 32. 5 Book III, chap. 8; trans. Creasy, p. 95. 6 Book III, chap. 14; trans. Creasy, p. 102. 7 Details are given in J. Leclercq, E Vandenbrouke, L. Bouyer, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages (vol. 11 of The History of Christian Spirituality), London: Bums & Oates, 1968, pp. 481-486 (text by F. Vandenbrouke). 8 Trans. Joseph Rickaby, S.J., Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1929; vol. II, pp. 165- 352: "The Eleventh Treatise: On Humility." See chap. IIl: "Of Another Main Motive for a Man to. gain Humility, which is the Consideration of His Sins." (The first main motive, given in chap. II, is "To know oneself to be full of miseries and weak-nesses.") 9 Walter J. Ong, S.J., Hopkins, the Self, and God, Toronto, Buffalo, London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1986; see especially pp. 22-28. For a recent philosophical discus-sion see Frederick Copleston, S.J., The Tablet, 11 Nov. 1989 (vol. 243, no. 7791), pp. 1302-1303. l0 Cited by Alphonsus Rodriguez, Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues, p. 168, see n. 8, above. Chap. II, "That Humility is the Foundation of All Virtues," pp. 168-170; chap. III, "In Which It Is Shown More in Detail How Humility Is the Foundation of All Virtues, by Going Through the Chief of Them." ~l On this, see Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart (n. 2, above), pp. 117-121, for its development in the U.S.A. But similar versions of "modem nervousness" and "therapeutic culture" could be gathered from the other Western traditions (Continental, English, Canadian.). ~2 Confer Paul C. Vitz, Psychology As Religion, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1977, pp. 20-27, for a discussion of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Rollo May as moving from religious into secular concerns. Choosing to be "Just Ordinary" / 499 ~3 The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Gardiner and N.H. MacKenzie, 4th ed., London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967; poem no. 57, p. 90. 14 Ibid, poem no. 72, p. 106. The Hunter Yahweh's manifest love has all the proud and fierce majesty of a turkey buzzard flying with outstretched wings upon hot afternoon breezes, which are thrust upward unconstrained from ocher grabens below. This carnivorous bird is the other side of the symbolic dove. It is the Master of the Universe when he is not content waiting for hesitant or indifferent souls who fail to seek him. Rather, he becomes the strident hunter pursuing those who choose hiding in dark shadows caused by lichen-covered trees, or along cow-trodden riverbanks, where brown mud oozes into slowly flowing, opaque waters. Yahweh spreads his wings, searches for the goats and lambs, such as you and me, when we forget how to look for him circling over us in the translucent sky. Brother Richard Heatley, F. S. C. De La Salle, "Oaklands" 131 Farnham Avenue Toronto, Ontario Canada M4A 1H7 At the Threshold of a Christian Spirituality: Ira Progoff's Intensive Journal Method John McMurry, S. S Father John McMurry, S.S., cun'ently serves at the St. Mary's Spiritual Center and as a spiritual director for St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland. He has taken part in thirty workshops led by Dr. Ira Progoff since 1976, and he has led some sixty Intensive Journal workshops since 1978. His address is All Saints Church; 4408 Liberty Heights Avenue; Baltimore, Maryland 21207. Since 1978 1 have been teaching Ira Progoff's Intensive Journal method occasionally at weekend workshops. Dialogue House, the umbrella organiza-tion covering all of Progoff's works, describes his method as a program of "professional and personal growth with a spiritual point of view." It is a non-analytic means for individuals to attain two goals. First, it enables individu-als to recognize and accept the wholeness of their life without denying the reality of any of its contents, no matter how unpleasant or embarrassing. Secondly, it enables individuals to get a feel for the consistency in the direc-tion that their life is taking as they discover potentials for the future hidden within their personal past. The goals of the program are attained by means of a variety of written exercises which are done in a group setting under the direction of an experi-enced leader who is committed to follow authorized guidelines. Individuals in the group work in private with the contents of their own life. The only prereq-uisites are an atmosphere of quiet and mutual respect, and an attitude of open-ness and acceptance on the part of each exercitant toward his or her own life. The program is not only nonanalytic; it is also nonjudgmental and is structured to help people experientially discover answers to questions such as the following: Where am I in the course of my life right now? How did I get to the place where I am in the course of life? Where is my life trying to go from here? What is the next step? 500 Progoffs Intensive Journal Method / 501 The Intensive Journal method itself has no content. The method is a dynamic structure to which each person supplies the content from one's own life. The structure aims at enabling individuals to establish deeper contact with the flow of creative energy in their own life. It is especially useful for people engaged in decision-making, for people who feel confused about the next step in life, for those who have lost contact with the direction their life wants to take, for those who feel alienated, isolated, or meaningless, and for those who simply want to expand their personal horizons of creativity. In creating the Intensive Journal program, Progoff had in mind people in a secular culture who are unfamiliar with or alienated by traditional religious language. However, the awarenesses stimulated by the exercises of his method serve to help Christians experience meaning in traditional doctrines which might otherwise remain merely propositional. In the case of people who approach it from the perspective of faith, the Intensive Journal program is a form of prayer. The Intensive Journal Method as Prayer In a chapter entitled "Prayer as Dialogue," Karl Rahner discusses prayer in terms apropos of the Intensive Journal method. He is addressing a com-mon problem of people who are earnest in their efforts to enter into dialogue with God. They often state the problem something like this: "When I pray, I cannot tell whether I am talking to myself or to God." Rahner challenges the presupposition that God says "something" to us in prayer. He raises some "what-ifs": What if we were to say that in prayer we experience ourselves as the utterance of God, ourselves as arising from and decreed by God's freedom in the concreteness of our existence? What if what God primarily says to us is ourselves in the facticity of our past and present and in the freedom of our future? Rahner concludes that when, by grace, we experience ourselves as the utterance of God to himself and understand this as our true essence, which includes the free grace of God's self-communication, and when in prayer we freely accept our existence as the word of God in which God promises him-self to us with his word, then our prayer is already dialogic, an exchange with God. Then we hear ourself as God's address. We do not hear "some-thing" in addition to ourself as the one already presupposed in our dead fac-ticity, but we hear ourself as the self-promised word in which God sets up a listener and to which God speaks himself as an answer. 1 Rahner is suggesting that God's word to me in prayer is not an idea; rather, God's word to me in prayer'is myself, that is, my personal, individual life story--past, present, and future. The implication is that my life story is 502 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 important in my relationship with God because it is the way God speaks to me and I to God. A further implication of Rahner's proposal is that I enter into dialogue with God ipsofacto under three conditions: 1) when I experience my life story as God's word addressed to himself; 2) when at the same time I understand that God is really present in my actual life story--past, present, and future-- as a free and undeserved gift of himself to me; 3) and when I freely accept my life story as the word of God in which God promises his Word to me. The Intensive Journal program is an instrument which lends itself to the discovery of the real presence of God in one's own personal life story. The content of the program is the content of the life of the Journal-writer; hence it is through the life of the Journal-writer that Christian faith may enter into the individual's use of the Intensive Journal exercises. Progoff has described the prayer dimension of his method as follows: The Intensive Journal work is indeed a species of prayer and meditation, but not in isolation from life and not in contrast to active life involve-ment. Rather, it is meditation in the midst of the actuality of our life experiences. It draws upon the actualities of life for new awarenesses, and it feeds these back into the movement of each life as a whole.2 The Intensive Journal Method and Spirituality In his "handbook of contemporary spirituality," Rahner raises the ques-tion whether the term "spirituality" is good, understandable, useful, or even has any meaning. Then he makes the observation that the crucial point for personal and pastoral life today is not so much a matter of getting the "spiri-tual" dimension of existence into our heads or other people's by means of abstract and conceptual indoctrination (which he says is ineffective anyway) as it is a matter of discovering the Spirit as that which we really experience in ourselves.3 Perhaps Rahner slightly understates the case. It may be that the crucial point for us personally and in our pastoral work today is simply to discover "the Spirit" as a fact of our own personal experience and to help others do the same. Furthermore, in order to be able to use the word "spirituality," we might let it refer simply to the individual's .relationship with God or, in other words, to what goes on in the creative process between God and each of us. This article presents Ira Progoff's Intensive Journal program as an aid to the process which is going on between an individual and God. The program adds no content to the life of the individual; it mirrors the movement which is already going on and stimulates that movement by feeding new aware- Progoffs Intensive Journal Method / 503 nesses back into the movement of life. ("Journal feedback" is one of the main features which distinguish this method from an ordinary diary.) This program, then, is a dynamic structure for evoking self-transcendence from the factual contents of a life story. For a person of faith it is a way of discov-ering the Spirit "as what we really experience in ourselves." Genesis of the Intensive Journal Method Following Progoff's discharge from the U.S. Army, he earned a doctor-ate in the area of'the history of ideas from the New School of Social Research in New York City. On the basis of his dissertation, Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning, published in 1953 and still in print, Progoff was awarded grants for postdoctoral studies with Carl Jung for two years. By virtue of those studies Progoff was licensed as a therapist by the state of New York, where he went into private practice after returning from Switzerland. In 1959 Progoff founded the Institute for Research in Depth Psychology at Drew University in New Jersey and served as its director until 1971. During those twelve years-he and his graduate students searched out the dynamics of creativity in published biographies of creative people whose life stories had ended. From his research Progoff concluded that creativity occurs through the interplay among various dimensions of life which may at first seem disparate. On the surface it may appear that the process in one dimension is unrelated to the process in another dimension, whereas in fact something new comes into being when the individual makes correlations among the dimensions of life. It is as though the individual is a complexus of certain processes which occur throughout life on different planes. Progoff has developed, the Intensive Journal method over more than a quarter-century of helping his clients apply the fruits of his research by dis-covering hidden sources of creativity within their own lives. He began teach-ing his method to groups in the late 1950s. In 1975 he published At a Journal Workshop, a thorough description of his haethod up to that time. In 1980 he published a companion volume, The Practice of Process Meditation, which added another dimension to the program. Dimensions of Human Existence In Progoff's view, the artist is paradigmatic. Each individual is both the artist and the ultimate artwork of life, and yet individuals execute the art-work which is themselves by engaging in outer activity which has inner meaning for the one doing it and beneficial consequences for society. In other words, in order for each of us to be fulfilled as an individual, we must 504 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 do some work (opus as distinguished from labor) which is both personally and socially meaningful. At the same time as we are creating our lifework, the doing of the work is creative of us. The basic dialogue of life is the dynamic actual (as distinguished from logical) dialogue between human cre-ators and their works. In Progoff's words, "Outward activity propelled from within is the essence of creative existence.''4 From his research on the lives of creative people Progoff learned to dis-tinguish certain dimensions of life as loci of the components of creativity. The Intensive Journal method recognizes those dimensions as sources of the raw material of creativity in anybody's life, They are the dimensions of time, ¯ of relationships, and of personal symbols. The Intensive Journal workbook uses color-coded dividers to mark off various sections in each of which the Journal-writer deals with the move-ment in one particular dimension of life. Within each of the main sections are tabbed subdividers of the same color as the main divider. Each tab bears the name of the specific exercise to be entered there. For example, the "Life/Time Dimension" is indicated by a red divider and contains four tabbed red subdividers; each of the four tabs bears the title of the written exercise to be entered there by the Journal writer. Similarly, the dimension of personal relationships in life, called the "Dialogue Dimension," is indicated by an orange divider and comprises five tabbed subdividers for each of the five "dialogue exercises." The part of the Intensive Journal workbook for making entries which deal with dreams and personal imagery is called the "Depth Dimension." It is indicated by a blue divider and five tabbed blue subdividers. In summary, the workbook comprises sections which reflect and stimu-late the movement of an individual life in each of its dimensions. Each of the main sections of the workbook represents a dimension of life and comprises several subsections for various written exercises which deal with the con- "tents of that life in styles appropriate to that particular dimension. The Dimension of Life/Time We do not get the chance to start life over, but the Intensive Journal pro-gram does offer us a tested means of restructuring our life from the perspec-tive of the present. At the same time it provides a means of discovering unactualized potentials which we may have overlooked the first time around, or which were not ripe then and may at some point in time be able to take a form they could not have taken originally. In studying the biography of a deceased person generally recognized as creative, the end or goal of that career may be clear and unmistakable, even Progof['s Intensive Journal Method / 505 though the lif'e story includes setbacks, stalls, reversals, and obstacles. It may be easy to see how everything in that life was leading up to some great scientific or philosophical work because we are viewing it from the perspec-tive of the end. But what if I am the life story I am working with? In that case the life process is still in progress. I am not looking at a still photograph but a mov-ing picture, and I am looking at it from the inside. In that case I start with the present epoch of my personal life and get a feel for this period of life from the inside. That is, I allow myself to feel the quality or tone of my life during this present period and record it objectively. The record I make of the pre-sent period will be an objective statement of my subjective experience of life at present. Then I am in a position to allow the course of my life to present itself to me from the perspective of the present in the form of about a dozen significant events. Each of those significant events serves to characterize a whole period of life. Of course, many other things also happened during that period. There are other exercises for dealing with them. The idea in this exercise is to get a feel for the wholeness and continuity of my life as I allow it to present itself to me in an articulated form so that I can use other Journal exercises to deal with it one period at a time. All the Intensive Journal exercises presuppose the attitude of openness and receptivity mentioned above, a nonjudgmental attitude toward life. It is not so much the objective contents of a life that affect its degree of creativi-ty, as the subjective attitude toward that life. In the creative restructuring of a life, a relaxed, friendly approach which allows surprises is important. Dimension of Relationships In the life/time dimension treated above, there is a principle of whole-ness, continuity, and direction,toward-a-goal at work. In the dimension of relationships, the dynamic is that of dialogue, that is, the give-and-take of equals listening and responding to each other in a spirit of mutual trust and acceptance. The principle of "dialogue relationship" applies first of all to significant people during various epochs of life. The. same dynamic applies analogously to meaningful work-projects (opera), which, like persons, seem to have a life of their own. In his research on creative lives, Progoff discovered that creativity occurs when people approach several kinds of meaningful contents of their life not as inert matter to be manipulated but as personal entities. That is, he discovered that creativity occurs when people acknowledge that each of sev-eral meaningful contents of their life has a life story of its own analogous to 506 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 that of a person. Each of these contents of life has a life story with blockages to growth toward a goal, with hopes, disappointments, successes, and so forth. He found that for the sake of movement toward acceptance of life and all it holds, it is of paramount importance to establish a "dialogue rel~ition-ship" not only with persons and works but witl~ the physical and societal dimensions of life, and with events, situations, and circumstances of life which "just happen." Progoff's research into de facto creative lives yielded two important corollaries. First, the movement which the dialogue relationship fosters is intrinsic to the "creative spirit. Secondly, in the dimension of relationships as well as in other dimensions of life, the factual contents of life are less impor-tant in the creative process than the way people relate to whatever the con-tents of their life are. The "Dialogue Dimension" of the Intensive Journal workbook offers a format for a variety of exercises which enable the Journal writer to engage in written dialogue with people who have played meaningful roles in their life, with work projects, their own body, sources of values in their life (v.g., fami-ly, ethnicity, religious commitment), and things over which they had no con-trol. The purpose of these dialogue scripts is to give a voice to the meaningful contents of life, that is, to provide them a forum in which mutu-ality can flourish in the form of a "dialogue relationship" rather than a mere-ly utilitarian relationship. This leaves the Journal writer open to the possibility of something new emerging from an old relationship from the past. That new something may contribute an insight or an awareness which is of benefit to another relationship or which creatively affects the movement in another dimension of life. The Dimension of Inner Symbols This dimension of life refers to dreams, "twilight imagery" and personal wisdom-figures as the vehicles which come forward spontaneously to carry the movement of life further. The aim of the exercises in this part of the Journal, called the "Depth Dimension," is to facilitate spontaneous correla-tions between inner imagery and outer life so that new insights, awarenesses, and possibilities for action and decision-making might come to the surface of consciousness. Then, by means of appropriate Journal exercises, they can be fed back into the ongoing movement of life and thus stimulate growth by creating new configurations in the way things fit together in life. Progoff tends to shy away from the use of dreams in his method because many people seem unable to deal with them except analytically. The Intensive Journal method of working with dreams is basically to allow the movement Progoffs Intensive Journal Method / 507 in a recurring dream or in a cluster of dreams to suggest some correlation with movement in one of the other dimensions of life. Then the exercitant may use appropriate Journal exercises to work in that dimension of life. The Fourth Dimension: The Spiritual As mentioned above, Progoff sees the Intensive Journal work in geoeral as "a species of prayer and meditation., in the midst of the actuality of our life experiences." However, he came to appreciate the role of the spiritual dimension in creativity only after he had developed Journal exercises in the three dimensions of life treated briefly above. The specifically spiritual dimension is reflected in his program as the dimension of meaning. The procedures for working in that dimension are called "Process Meditation." In the Intensive Journal program, formal work in this dimension is reserved for those who have already taken part in the "Life Context Workshop," which deals with the three dimensions of life treated above. As Rahner has said, "A basic and original transcendental experience is really rooted [in] a finite spirit's subjective and free experience of itself.''5 The "process" of "Process Meditation" refers to "the principle of conti-nuity in the universe" which is found on three levels: the cosmic, the s6ci-etal, and the personally interior.6 The Intensive Journal method helps the individual relate to "process" on the interior level. The movement of life in the three dimensions treated above is character-istically movement toward personal wholeness and the integration of the individual with oneself. Progoff calls that movement "core creativity." "In terms of individual lives," he writes, "the essence of process in human expe-rience lies in the continuity of its movement toward new integrations, the formation of new holistic units [of life/time].''7 In the spiritual dimension of life the movement is characterized by rela-tionships which transcend the core creativity of the individual. The roots of such relationships--even the personal relationship of the individual to God--are to be found in the stuff of everyday life, but at a deeper than ordi-nary level. Rahner speaks of the knowledge of God as "concrete, original, histori-cally constituted, and transcendental." He further says that such knowledge of God "is inevitably present in the depths of existence in the most ordinary human life.''8 Progoff interprets "meditation" broadly. In his usage it refers to whatev-er methods or practices one uses in the effort to reach out toward meaning. "The essence of meditation," he says, "lies in its intention, in its commit- 508 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 ment to work inwardly to reach into the depths beyond the doctrines of our beliefs.''9 Hence, "Process Meditation" refers to a set of exercises which draw on the individual exercitant's intimations or experiences of connected-ness to the principle of continuity in the universe. Progoff describes his method of Process Meditation as follows: Our basic procedure is to reenter the process by which our individual spiritual history has been moving toward meaning . We reenter that pro-cess so as to reconnect ourselves with the inner principle of its move-ment, and especially so that we can take a further step toward the artwork that is our personal sense of meaning,l° Conclusion In a review of The Practice of Process Meditation, William V. Dych, S.J., translator of Rahner into English, compares what Rahner calls "the uni-versal presence of grace and the Spirit" with Progoff's thesis that "there is in every human being an inner source of new light and life that expresses itself whenever the circumstances are right." Dych views Progoff's thesis as so supportive of Rahner's position that it would be hard to imagine a more pos-itive affirmation of it. ~ NOTES i Karl Rahner, The Practice of Faith: A Handbook of Contemporary Spirituality, ed. Karl Lehmann'and Albert Raffelt (New York: Crossroad, 1984), pp. 94-95. 1 Ira Progoff, The Practice of Process Meditation: The Intensive Journal Way to Spiritual Experience (New York: Dialogue House Library, 1980), p. 18. 3 Rahner, op cit, p. ! 86. 4 Ira Progoff, At a Journal Workshop: The Basic Text and Guide for Using the Intensive Journal (New York: Dialogue House Library, 1975), p. 35. 5 Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), p. 75. 6 Progoff, The Practice of Process Meditation, p. 40. 7 Ibid, p. 58. 8 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 57. 9 Progoff, The Practice of Process Meditation, p. 34. l0 Ibid, p. 82. II William V. Dych, "The Stream that Feeds the Well Within," Commonweal, 25 September 1981 Our Journey Inward: A Spirituality of Addiction and Recovery Maureen Conroy, R.S.M. Sister Maureen Conroy is co-director of the Upper Room Spiritual Center; EO. Box 1104; Neptune, New Jersey 07753. [~qany of us travel a great deal throughout our lives. With advanced means of transportation, traveling around the state, country, or world has become second nature to us. However, no matter how much or how far we travel, as we journey through life we discover that there is no journey more challeng-ing and scary than the journey inward, the journey to find true happiness and our most authentic self. We search for what is fulfilling and life-giving, but at times our searching takes us down the dark road of addictive behavior. We search for happiness in compulsive ways that deaden us rather than give us life--until we experience a desperate need for help. In this article I reflect on the darkness pervading the addictive process and some ways to journey through the darkness to our truer self. I discuss three aspects of our journey from addiction to recovery--woundedness and wholeness, powerlessness and surrender, and pain and compassion--and describe some dimensions of a spirituality of addiction and recovery related to these three aspects. A Spirituality of Woundedness and Wholeness As human beings God has given us the gifts of strength and freedom; we are called to live in the light. It is also true, however, that we are wounded, weak, vulnerable, broken people. We come from an environment of dark-ness. The brokenness in our ancestry and the dysfunction in our families has influenced our growth as free human beings. We are broken and we are in deep need of healing and redemption. We cannot save ourselves. In our addictive stance we want to avoid our woundedness, ignore our 509 510 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 weakness, and run from our vulnerability. We seek fulfillment through an object, a substance, or a process; that is, we form a pathological relationship with a mood-altering reality in order to find wholeness and happiness. We find it difficult to be honest about the dysfunction in our families and the brokenness in ourselves, so we look for something outside ourselves to keep us from facing our darkness. Spiritual growth and recovery, however, are just the opposite of this avoidance. To grow humanly and spiritually we must journey in and through our woundedness; we must face it head on. We need to feel the messiness of our brokenness and to discover God there. As Psalm 50 says, "a broken and humbled heart, O God, you will not spurn." We must discover that God's heart of love encompasses and holds as precious our wounded hearts, bodies, and spirits. It is through dwelling in our woundedness and vulnerability that we experience our authentic self and that we enable our addictive self to grow less powerful. We come to experience the child within and integrate our dark side with our light side. How do we make this journey in and through our woundedness? We do it by uncovering our addiction layer by layer. By this I mean we allow the walls of denial and layers of dishonesty to reveal themselves; we honestly appraise our unhealthy behaviorL Denial blocks our inner journey. It is a buffer against any reality thatis not acceptable to us, a way to protect our-selves from awareness of realities that are too difficult to face. Spiritual growth happens when we remove layer upon layer of denial that covers over our woundedness and our truer selves. Rather than avoiding our wounds, we need to expose them to the fresh air, to expose our broken hearts to the heal-ing .heart of God, to bring our darkness out into the light of day, to bring hid-den realities out to the light of God's love and the care of others. As Meister Eckhart says, "God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a pro-cess of subtraction." So it is through peeling off layer upon layer of denial and dishonesty that we discover God in our brokenness. We discover the original blessing that we are, our deeper and truer selves. We see and feel the aspects of ourselves--minds, hearts, and bodies--that mirror God's pres-ence. We experience the truth of the Genesis story where God says, "Let us make people in our image and likeness." We discover the authentic self that God desires to be fully human and fully alive. Growth in wholeness, therefore, takes place through integrating our dark side with our light side, through accepting our brokenness as we journey through it, by seeing the original blessing that we are. We discover that "darkness and light are the same" (Ps 139:12), that God is present in every dimension of our being. Thus, our woundedness becomes a gift, so rather Our Journey Inward / S'l'l than covering it over with layers of denial, we come to feel at home there because God is there. We discover our truer self underneath the layers of an addictive self. We integrate our wounded and blessed self, our darkness and our light, and we become more and more a whole person. We experience the truth proclaimed by St. Irenaeus: "God's greatest glory is a person fully alive." A Spirituality of Powerlessness and Surrender The journey through addiction to recovery is also one of powerlessness and surrender. God sent Jesus in the flesh to free us from our enslavement to sin and to show us the way t6 live in freedom. It was through Jesus' total surrender to his death on the cross that he experienced new life and showed us the way to true freedom, the freedom of letting go and surrender. In our addictive stance, we are trying to control everyone and everything around us. We grow hardheaded and hardhearted, and we attempt to control the sub-stance or process that we are abusing--alcohol, food, money, sex, work, or an obsessive relationship. We are out of control, and the more we try to con-trol everyone and everything around us, even the substance we are abusing, the more out of control we become. Our addiction is enslaving us to our own self-centered needs and desires. We are "number one" when we are addicted; our addictive needs come bei'ore everyone else. Our addiction enslaves us to an object or process that we think is going to bring us lasting happiness when it is really bringing us misery and isolation. It enslaves us emotionally, spiritually, physically, and socially. The more we try to control the use of our addictive reality, the more we lose con-trol. We deny the basic reality that Paul~ expresses: "The desire to do right is within me, but not the power. What happens is that I do, not the good I will, but the evil I do not intend. But if I do what is against my will, it is not I who do it but sin which dwells in me" (Rm 7~18-20). In our denial we keep think-ing we can choose to keep this substance in right order; however, the rbality is that our will is not working, it is diseased. We are powerless. So how does spiritual growth and recovery happen in relation to our being out of control? It begins when we admit our powerlessness, realize the insanity of thinking that we can control all aspects of our lives and our des-tiny. Spiritual growth happens through the journey of surrender, not control; it begins at the moment of surrender. We need to admit that our ability to choose has become greatly impaired through the disease of our addiction. Our trying to choose not to drink, not to overeat, not to overwork, not to engage in compulsive sexual activity, is just not working. Our willpower simply does not work. As we begin to admit our powerlessness and surrender to God, we find 512 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 new life. When we surrender rather than control, we are choosing life: "I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse. Choose life, then, that you may live, by loving the Lord your God, heeding God's voice and holding fast to God. For that will mean life for you" (Dt 30:19-20). As we admit our powerlessness and surrender to God, true power grows within us--the power to love others, the power to experience God's love, and the power to love ourselves. Through our surrender we come more deeply in touch with our authentic self--the self that is alive and not dead, free and not enslaved, joyful and not depressed. True freedom grows--a freedom that heals rather than hurts, that brings about growth rather than destruction, that results in life rather than death. In our surrender we begin to make positive choices for recovery, attend-ing twelve-step meetings and living the twelve-step program. We choose to take responsibility for our lives and our recovery, like the paralyzed man who had lain at the pool of Bethsaida for thirty-eight years until Jesus asked: "Do you want to be healed?" We need to respond to that same question in our addiction because recovery is hard work; it involves a gre.at deal of sacri-fice and responsibility. Also, through our daily admission of powerlessness and constant atti-tude of surrender, we discover God in a new way--a God who supports us in our weakness and strengthens us in time of need, a God who will not leave us even in our most out-of-control moments. We discover in Jesus a God " who has experienced weakness and powerlessness, a God who has stood totally stripped and poor, a God who invites us to have the attitude of a vul-nerable child rather than a controlling adult: "Unless you become like a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom of God." We experience a God whose power takes over in our weakness, as St. Paul discovered through his strug-gle: "Three times [which means numerous times] I begged the Lord that this might leave me. God said to me, 'My grace is enough for you, for in weak-ness power reaches perfection.' " It was through constantly admitting his powerlessness that Paul's spiritual growth and recovery took place. So he says: "I willingly boast of my weaknesses instead, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I am content with weakness., for when I am powerless it is then that I am strong" (2 Co 12:8-10). Thus, through admit-ting our powerlessness over an object of addiction and surrend.ering to God our weakness, we experience the power of God, the love of God, new life, renewed freedom. We move forward on the journey ,of recovery. A Spirituality of Pain and Compassion Finally, the journey through addiction to recovery is one of pain and Our Journey Inward / ~313 compassion. One of the hard facts of life is that suffering is an integral part of it. Jesus himself had to suffer great pain in order to bring new life. Our God is not a distant God but a compassionate God who experienced great pain, the pain of loving us. In our addictive stance, we deal with pain in an unhealthy way. We want to run from it, cover it over, deny it. We are caught in a "Catch 22" situation because, in using a substance to avoid our pain, we are really in great pain-- the pain of loneliness, isolation, and alienation from our true self and from healthy relationships with others. As our addiction progresses, it becomes increasingly painful to maintain our denial. We are overcome by the pain of shame and self-disgust. Spiritual growth and recovery take place when we face that pain, feeling it, looking at it square in the face, rather than avoiding it by abusing a sub-stance. As our walls of denial break down, we begin to feel the pain we have been covering up--the pain of living, the pain of loss, the pain of being human, the pain of developing intimate relationships, the pain of childhood neglect and abuse. We find out that healing involves pain, as in the case of lepers. Leprosy causes numbness. When Jesus healed the leper, he invited him to feel pain in the areas of previous nrmbness. The same is true of the leprosy of our addiction: as we begin to let down the walls of denial, we begin to feel pain. We realize that recovery and healing are not easy. As we journey through deeper levels of pain in our recovery, we discover a God who knows what it is to suffer. As Meister Eckhart says: "Jesus becam~ a human being because God, the Compassionate One, lacked a back to be beaten. God needed a back like our backs on which to receive blows and therefore to perform compassion as well as to preach it." Our compassionate God became a suffering God. Our God feels with us, suffers with us. Again, Eckhart says, "However great one's suffering is, if it comes through God, God suffers from it first." What a gift we have in a God who suffers with us! As we experience this tremendous love of a compassionate God, we become people of compassion, persons who can feel with others in their bro-kenness. We become more vulnerable and grow toward greater wholeness because love is the greatest healer. As our walls of denial are penetrated with God's compassionate love and we become more vulnerable, we can be with people in their brokenness. That is one of the beautiful realities of the twelve-step program: it is a group of people who are in touch with their bro-kenness and therefore have great compassion for those who are struggling. They live out these words of McNeill, Morrison, and Nouwen: "Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in broken-ness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with 514 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human" (Compassion, p. 4). As we feel the pain that our addiction has tried to cover, we become wounded healers--people who minister out of our woundedness as well as our strength. "What you have received as a gift. give as a gift" (Mt 10:8). Our pain becomes a gift that we can give to other addicted people as we compas-sionately help them to face the devastation of their addictive behaviors. In sum, our inward journey involves walking down the dark paths of our brokenness into the light of God's presence and our authentic self. A spiritu-ality of addiction and recovery must include two sides of reality: awareness of our woundedness, powerlessness, and pain as well as growth in wholeness, surrender, and compassion. Without a vivid sense of the depths of our bro-kenness in our addicted self, we cannot move toward the wholeness of our authentic self. Without a keen awareness of our darkness, we are blind to the light of God's healing presence. Without an acute sense of our vulnerability, we cannot become compassionate healers who stand with others in their pain. Though scary and challenging, our journey through our own darkness will lead us to the light of true happiness, deeper fulfillment, and new life. Awareness Examen for Recovering People In God's presence, take ten to fifteen minutes to prayerfully reflect on your day. Contemplate your day together--you and God. Prayer of Thanksgiving I thank God for the gift of this day, the gift of my sobriety, the gift of my recovery. I thank God for specific git~s of life that come to mind, such as my health, my family, my community, my friends, my job, my twelve-step program. I thank God for gifts of my inner life, such as the ability to feel and think, energizing feelings I had during the day (name them), specific values and beliefs that guided my actions, ways I used my thinking and imagination for growth, positive choices for recovery which I made today, God's life within me. I thank God for two or three concrete life gifts and inner gifts that I am particularly aware of and grateful for today. Prayer for Light I humbly ask God to help me see myself and my life today as God sees Our Journey Inward them. I ask God to remove blindness and denial from my mind and heart. I ask God for the gift of honesty with myself and God. I ask God for a dis-ceming heart and a truthful mind. Prayer of Awareness God and I contemplate my life, my heart, and my thinking this day from the moment I woke up until now. What specific feelings did I feel today? When did I feel most alive today? most my true self?, most joyful? most peaceful? most in tune with my deeper self?. How did I feel God's presence today? What was that feeling like? What was God like? At what moment did I feel God's presence the strongest? When did I feel powerless today? out of control? enslaved? unfree? What was I powerless over? Did I surrender that reality to God? When did I feel vulnerable today? When did I feel pain today? What was the pain about? Did I share that painful feeling with God or another? With whom have I been most honest today? myself?, another? God? What was I honest about? How did I struggle with honesty today? With what issue or feeling? ' What were my feelings underneath the struggle? fear? anger? guilt? Which of the twelve steps was my strength today? How did I live it, carry it out, in a practical way? In what concrete ways did I strive to improve my conscious contact with God? What choices did I make for my recovery today? How do I feel about those choices? When did I feel compassion for another person today? How did I reach out to others today? show concem and care? make amends? Prayer of Amends I ask God to forgive any specific wrongdoings of today. I ask God to have mercy on any negative attitudes or feelings that I got stuck in today. Prayer of Surrender I surrender all to God: my life, my will, my brokenness, my addictions, my imagination, my thoughts, my feelings. I surrender to God specific attitudes, feelings, thoughts, actions over which I felt powerless today. I ask God's strength to take over in my specific weaknesses. I ask God's power to be present in the specific areas in which I feel helpless and powerless. 516 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 O God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Take, O Lord, and receive my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will, all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, O God, I return it. All is yours, dispose of it wholly according to your will. Give me your love and your grace, for this is sufficient for me. (Prayer from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius) RECOMMENDED READING Larsen, Eamie. Stage H Recovery: Life Beyond Addiction. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. May, Gerald. Addiction and Grace. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. McNeill, Donald; Morrison, Douglas; and Nouwen, Henri. Compassion. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966. Nakken, Craig. The Addictive Personality: Roots, Rituals, Recovery. Center City, Minn.: Hazelden, 1988. Whitfield, Charles L. Healing the Child Within. Pompano Beach, Florida: Health Communications, 1987. A Gift to Share The Jesuit Heritage Today "Ignatian prayer puts the history of salvation into the present tense." --Walter Burghardt, S.J. A Spirituality for Contemporary Life ¯ presents six stimulating reflections on the Jesuit heritage today. Theologians Walter IBurghardt, David Fleming, Monika Hellwig, Jon Sobrino, ElizabethJohnson, andJohn Padberg speak about living with God in ordinary life. ISBN 0-924768-02-9 112 pages List Price $5.95 A Resource to Keep See Order Form Inside Back Cover for Special Offer for Readers of Review for Religious Apostolic Spirituality: Aware We Are Sent James H. Kroeger, M.M. Father James Kroeger last appeared in our pages in May/June 1988. He has a doctor-ate in missiology from the Gregorian University and has published five books. His address: Maryknoll Fathers; EO. Box 285; Greenhills Post Office; 1502 Metro Manila; Philippines. Adequately capturing realities in the spiritual life always demands the use of dynamic, expansive language. For this reason, spirituality is frequently described in relational categories--between a Christian and a personal God, between the servant-herald and the crucified and risen Lord. Such a relation-ship of intimacy is at the heart of biblical spirituality: "I will be your God and you shall be my people"; Christians are Jesus' friends and call their heavenly Father "Abba." Spirituality may also variously be described as growth, an evolution toward maturity, a pilgrimage. Each category presents an authentic, albeit partial, grasp of the human-divine dynamic operative in our lives. In this article, "consciousness" or "awareness" is the category for our insight into spirituality, and it naturally overflows with an apostolic or missionary dynamism. Consciousness: A Window into Spirituality Consciousness may seem to be an elusive concept, yet no one would deny the reality. An individual is in a conscious state when perceptual and cognitive faculties function normally. One continuously synthesizes various stimuli from within and from without; ideally, the result is a healthy personal integration. Notice that many constitutive elements are included in consciousness: seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, desiring, experiencing. Consciousness incorporates perceptions, emotions, observations, thoughts, aspirations, 517 5"11~ / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 choices. It also includes an introspective awareness of the personal impact of all events and experience. In light of this brief and rudimentary description of the phenomenon of human consciousness, one may begin to elaborate the relationship between consciousness and a spirituality of the apostolate. Our service--all focused on raising our God-consciousness and expanding the horizons of our spiritu-al awareness. We want to use our eyes to see perceptively and our ears to hear attentively; we hope to gain deepened insight into our lives through faith's mirror (Jm 1:22-25). In another vein, a look at the venerable Eastern traditions of many Asian nations reveals that the man of God or the God-conscious, God-focused per-son is essentially a seer, sage, or mystic. Such a person "sees" and experi-ences God; God is not an object of knowledge, but a subject of experience. To grow in holistic spirituality is concomitant with an experiential awareness and consciousness of God's presence and activity in all dimensions of one's life (Arguelles, 50-51). The beautiful prayer in the Upanishads, one of the Hindu sacred books, expresses the aspiration and spiritual desire to come to this deeper conscious union with the divine. In Sanskrit and English it is: Asato ma satgamaya Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya Mrutyu ma amrutam gamaya. God, lead me from untruth to truth Lead me from darkness to light Lead me from death to immortality. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and spiritual writer (1915-1968), has enabled countless people to gain insights into their spirituality. Merton inti-mately links spirituality and prayer with the transformation of conscious-ness. He sees that a renewed conscious awareness underlies all spiritual growth; Christians must cease to assert themselves as the center of con-sciousness and discover God's presence as the deepest center of conscious-ness within them. Thus, as their self-consciousness changes, they are transformed; their self is no longer its own center, it is now centered on God. It is important to note that for Merton no one will ever be capable of communion with God and others without ttiis deep awakening, this transfor-mation of consciousness. Such transformative growth "consists in a double movement, man's entering into the deepest center of himself, and then, after passing through that center, going out of himself to God" (Higgins, 49). Merton asserts that, unless our spirituality or prayer "does something to awaken in us a consciousness of our union with God, of our complete depen- Apostolic Spirituality / 5'19 dence upon him for all our vital acts in the spiritual life, and of his constant loving presence in the depths of our soul, it has not achieved the full effect for which it is intended" (Merton-A, 67). In today's world, "What is required of Christians is that they develop a completely modern and contemporary consciousness in which their experience as men of our century is integrated with their experiences as children of God redeemed by Christ" (Merton-B, 279). The renowned Indian theologian D.S. Amalorpavadass has written elo-quently on the role of consciousness or awareness in attaining spiritual inte-gration and interiorization: "If wholeness is a state of being at which one should finally arrive in stages, awareness is the running thread and unifying force. Awareness needs to flow like a river, like a blood-stream . Awareness is also the core of spirituality and God-experience." He repeats: "Awareness or consciousness should flow through the various actions of our life. One should maintain awareness in all that one does. It should serve as a running thread and connecting bond., through the various activities of our day, and the different periods and stages of our life, in an uninterrupted and continuous flow. This flow will make our whole life a continuous prayer and a state of contemplation" (Amalorpavadass, 4, 24). Brief glimpses of Scripture, Eastern traditions, a Trappist monk, and a contemporary theologian have shown that "consciousness" helps one grasp the human-divine dynamic operative in the Christian life. Within this catego-ry- which is foundational--a vibrant spirituality and a concomitant mis-sionary dynamism can flourish. And, in a Marian spirit, Christians who are missionary will grow ever more conscious of the marvelous deeds that God is accomplishing in us, our neighbors, our society, our Church, and the entire world. The Consciousness of Paul the Missionary The New Testament describes Paul's radical awareness of God's active presence in his life. Though not naturally prone to humility, Paul admits that he was knocked to the/~round; in Damascus "something like scales fell from his eyes," By grace h~ perceived that he was the chosen instrument to bring Good News to the Gentiles and that he would accomplish his mission only with hardship and suffering (Ac 9). Paul's consciousness of his apostolic calling was certainly at the basis of his extraordinary missionary journeys. Without a vivid perception and faith commitment, no one would willingly endure the challenges Paul faced. Such endurance would be foolishness. Yet Paul is never willing, even momentari-ly, to minimize his authority and commitment as an apostle; the introductory 520 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 verses of many of his letters are clear evidence of this. Paul's conversion was no superficial or passing phenomenon. It penetrated the core of his person and totally transformed his way of thinking and acting--his consciousness. Further investigation into Pauline theology and spirituality reveals the depth of his convictions. Paul is absolutely certain that God has a wonderful, marvelous, loving plan of salvation for the entire world (note his frequent use of the words mysterion and oikonomia). His letter to the Ephesians con-vincingly, almost mystically, explains how "God has given us the wisdom to understand fully the mystery,'~ "the mysterious design which for ages was hidden in God." Pauline reflection on God's loving plan of salvation (mysterion) synthe-sizes his belief that this design has been fully revealed in Christ and will be recapitulated in Christ at the end of time. This manifestation is focused on salvation, not condemnation or judgment, and is open to all peoples. It unfolds in stages: God, Jesus, Spirit, Church, world. Humanity's response is faith or personal appropriation of the mysterion (Fitzmyer, 807-808). A recent scholarly investigation (Plevnik, 477-478) has concluded that "Any center of Pauline theology must therefore include all these components of the apostle's gospel, his understanding of Christ, involving the Easter event and its implications, the present lordship, the future coming of Christ, and the appropriation of salvation. The center is thus not any single aspect of Christ, or of God's action through Christ, but rather the whole and undivided richness and mystery of Christ and of the Father's saving purpose through his Son" (mysterion). Mystery, in one word, captures the Christian message. Paul is the missionary par excellence because he believed, lived, prayed, served, reflected, witnessed, preached, and suffered so that God's mysterion would be known, extended, loved, and freely received. Obviously, Paul's missionary consciousness had the "mysterion encounter" as its central focus and driving force. Paul's self-awareness as an apostle was rooted in being chosen as a ser-vant and minister of God's loving plan of salvation. It might be asserted that the mysterion engulfed and consumed Paul; his consciousness was so trans-formed that he could assert that Christ lived in him, that fellow Christians could imitate him, that life or death no longer mattered, and that he gloried in giving his life for Christ. In a word, the mysterion is foundational to Paul's missionary identity and consciousness. Mission and Mysterion Consciousness The Second Vatican Council in its decree on the missionary activity of the Church places mission and evangelization at the center of the Church-- Apostolic Spirituality / 52'1 not allowing this task to float somewhere on the periphery: "The pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature" (AG, 2). Pope Paul VI continues in the same vein: "We wish to confirm once more that the task of evangelizing all peoples constitutes the essential mission of the Church . Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize." (EN, 14). To evangelize--what meaning does this imperative have for the Church? It is to be no less than the living proclamation of the mysterion, God's loving design of universal salvation. As the community of Jesus' disciples, the Church realizes her "deepest identity" and "her very nature" when she ful-fills her mission of evangelization. She is to be always and everywhere "the universal sacrament of salvation" (LG, 48; AG, 1). For her, to live is to evangelize. In contemporary terms, the Church accomplishes her "self-realization" or "self-actualization" through mission and evangelization. She is only authentic and true to herself when she is announcing and witnessing the mys-terion. A nonmissionary Church is impossible; it is self-contradictory. The great missionary pope Paul VI writes that the Church "is linked to evange-lization in her most intimate being" (EN, 15); mission is not "an optional contribution for the Church" (EN, 5). In addition, the Church's missionary identity is not a late afterthought of the risen Jesus--though this outlook may seem true today of some Christians and local churches. Animation and rededication are necessary because Christians "are faithful to the nature of the Church to the degree that we love and sincerely promote her missionary activity" (EE, 2). These few paragraphs may invite the comment "I have heard it all before." True, yet all of us often hear without hearing, see without seeing, and listen without comprehending. It is precisely at this juncture that conscious-ness is poignantly relevant. Many Christians do not deny the missionary nature of the Church, but their level of conscious awareness is weak or mini-mal. This fact is unfortunately true even of many full-time Church personnel. The intention here is not to berate or castigate individuals. Rather, it is a stark statement of the need for "consciousness-raising"; it is a call for Christians to expand and deepen their awareness; all urgently need "conscientization-into-mission." In short, the entire Church herself must experience a profound reevangelization in order to become a truly evangelizing community. Recall the themes presented earlier on the centrality of consciousness in Christian life and spirituality. They seem particularly relevant as the Church struggles with her fundamental missionary identity. Is not this a central burn-ing question in the Church today: What has happened to her mission con- 522 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 sciousness--where is its urgency and dynamism--where are the contempo-rary St. Pauls? A rephrasing in mission terms of earlier quotes on consciousness from Amalorpavadass may prove enlightening. Church-as-mission is "the running thread and unifying force"; it "needs to flow like a river, like a blood-stream"; it is at "the core of spirituality and God-experience"; ira"will make our whole life a continuous prayer and state of contemplation." Trinitarian Basis of Mission Consciousness and Spirituality In the same breath that the Vatican Council spoke of the Church's mis-sionary identity, it presented the foundational rationale of mission. In a word, the why of Church-as-mission is Trinitarian, "for it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she takes her origin, in accordance with the decree of God the Father" (AG, 2). This mission vision, expressed in Trinitarian language, must not frighten or intimidate readers. Do not say, "I do not understand Trinitarian theology, so I cannot grasp this." While a bit difficult and challenging, this insight is also beautiful and rewarding. It transports us to the heart of mission; it flows from the core of our faith in the Trinity; it greatly enhances our mission con-sciousness and spirituality. The most inviting manner to appreciate mission--via the Trinity--is to remember that it is an eminently personal approach. The Father is a person, his son Jesus is a person, their girl of the Spirit is also a person. This is only a statement of a basic dogma of the faith. Grasping the immanence and closeness of the three Persons appears far more fruitful than grappling with the incomprehensibility of the transcendent Trinity (Billy, 602-611). Growth in conscious awareness, experience, and encounter with each of the three Persons richly broadens our vision of mission. It also manifests that mission theology and spirituality draw from the same wellspring. An appre-ciation of the roles of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in mission produces an integrated missiology, incorporating "Abba" theology, Christology, and pneumatology. The result will certainly be a more holistic theology and spir-ituality of mission. Finally, it is the conviction of this author that such an approach relieves some current tensions and answers some questions in mission. For example, debates centered on interreligious dialogue with the living faith traditions of the world can probably be better resolved more from a pneumatological approach than from only a Christological one. Therefore, if mission theology and spirituality are an integrated endeavor, the deepened consciousness will provide insights for both theoretical and practical questions. Apostolic Spirituality / 523 Our attention now tums to the roles of Father, Son, and Spirit in mis-sion. How does each person of the Trinity send and accompany us into mis-sion? Recall the title of this presentation, which links mission and spirituality with a consciousness of being sent. The Role of the Father The Father is presented in Scripture as the harvest master and vineyard owner. Mission, therefore, originates with the Father; mission is God's pro-ject. The Father determines its parameters. Already this awareness places the Church and her evangelizers in an auxiliary, servant role. Vatican II clearly set aside triumphalistic ecclesiology as well as any simplistic identification of the Church and the Kingdom of God. As servant of the kingdom or laborer in the vineyard, the Church is to be "the kingdom of Christ now present in mystery" and the "the initial budding forth of that kingdom" (LG, 3, 5). In addition, the Council, situating the Church within the larger framework of God's design of salvation (mysterion), entitled its first chapter of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church "The Mystery of the Church." The Church and all missioners must radically see themselves serving the mysterion "according to the will of God the Father" (AG, 2). The Father desires generous cooperators and humble workers for the harvest. He freely chooses them and they are to belong to him (Lk 6:13; Mk 3:13-16; Jn 15:15-16). These passages remind evangelizers that all mission is a sending (missio/mittere), originating in the Father; their vocation is God's gratuitous gift. Missioners do not send themselves; mission cannot be defined in legal terms; all must be according to the Father's gracious design. Affirming mission, therefore, as a gratuitous gift in the Father's gracious vision, emphasizes the centrality of grace. Thus, missioners understand, as the country priest in Bernanos' novel says on his deathbed, in all vocations "Grace is everywhere" (Bernanos, 233). Trinitarian mission is always soteriological; its purpose is liberation and salvation. The Father has no other goal, as Paul clearly reminded Timothy: He "wants all to be saved and come to know the truth." Condemnation or rejection are inconsistent with the Father's design (Jn 3:16-17; Mt 18:14). The Father, overwhelmingly "rich in mercy" (Ep 2:4), extends his great love to everyone, as the universalism of both Luke and Paul make clear. All evangelizers have experienced "the kindness and love of God" (Tt 3:4); it is out of their deep consciousness of the Father's personal graciousness that they journey to all places, peoples, and cultures. They are aware that they have received all as girl, and they desire to give all with the same generosity (Mt 10:8). Any missioner would relish being described as "rich in mercy." 594 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 The Father cannot be surpassed in his kindness and generosity (Jm 1:5, 17); his mercy is made concrete and visible when he sends Jesus, his Son. This is definitely a new mode of God's presence with his people; it is love in personal form. This unfolding of the mysterion far surpasses previous mani-festations of Yahweh's presence to his people Israel (Heb 1:1-2). Missioners strive to be continuations of the love of God manifested personally in Jesus, and this approach brings transformation and deepened consciousness. Our discussion of the Father's role in mission carries us back to the heart of the Trinity: God is love (1 Jn 4:8), and all manifestations flow from this identity. No less than the inner life of the Trinity is founded on the dynamism of divine love. Thus, the mysterion necessarily is a loving design since it arises "from that 'fountain of love' or charity (fontalis amor) within God the Father" (AG, 2). It is imperative that missioners and evangelizers become mystics like John the Evangelist (see 1 Jn 4:7-21); nothing less can explain the love of God for a fallen world and rebellious humanity. No other motivation is ade-quate to the missionary calling--of the entire Church. Mother Teresa of Calcutta has named her congregation the Missionaries of Charity, and she never tires, of reminding her audiences that this is the fundamental vocation of all Christians. It sounds fantastic, but it is true: The love of the Trinity is personally poured into our hearts and it transforms all evangelizers into mis-sionary messengers of God's limitless love. Knowing our personal God as the font of love is the highest level of consciousness possible. Mission spiri-tuality becomes a conscious centering on Trinitarian love. This is the solid missiology-become-spirituality promoted by Vatican II. The Mission of the Son Jesus declares openly that he has been sent by his loving Father; the phrase "the Father who sent me" occurs forty-six times in the Gospel of John. And a salvific thrust is evident in the missioning of Jesus by his Father. Vatican II expresses Jesus' missioning as a reconciling presence "to establish peace or communion between sinful human beings and himself . Jesus Christ was sent into the world as a real mediator between God and men" (AG, 3). In Paul's theology, mediation and reconciliation are vital ele-ments of the mysterion (2 Co 5:19; Col 1:13; Rm 5:1)~ Jesus' continuing "Abba experience" (Kavunkal, 9-15), enabling him to faithfully accomplish his mission, has several dimensions: his coming or proceeding from the Father (noted above), his remaining with the Father (Jn 10:38; 16:32), and his eventual return to the Father (Jn 16:5; 7:33; 13:36). This means that Jesus fulfills his mission in light of a particular conscious- Apostolic Spirituality / 525 ness: continual intimacy with his Father. Luke tells us that, before making such a decisive move in his ministry as the choice of the Twelve, Jesus "went out to the mountains to pray, spending the night in communion with God" (Lk 6:12). Mission in the Jesus mode has its source, continuation, and fulfill-ment in the Abba experience. This dimension of Jesus' living of his mission provides evangelizers an inviting model for their own mission consciousness. In its holistic vision of God's design for salvation, the Council sees the Church as continuing, developing, and unfolding "the mission of Christ him-self" (AG, 5). The apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (13-16, 59-60) and the pastoral statement on world mission of the United States Bishops To the Ends of the Earth (25-27) also confirm mission as an ecclesial act in fidelity to Jesus. Contemporary evangelizers, cognizant of the Jesus-Church continuity, seek to live and witness as the community of Jesus' followers. They recall his promises (Mt 16:18; 28:20), but readily admit they are fragile "earthen vessels." They faithfully accept that "Christ in his mission from the Father is the fountain and source of the whole apostolate of the Church" (AA, 4). A missioner's model is "sentire cum ecclesia'" (feel and think with the Church), frankly admitting that one is "simuljustus et peccator" (concomi-tantly both upright and sinful). Who among Jesus' followers does not need a deeper consciousness of these realities? Central to the mission of Jesus is the mystery of the Incarnation: "The Son of God walked the ways of a true incarnation that he might make men sharers in the divine nature" (AG, 3). This radical identification of our broth-er Jesus with us mortals (Heb 4:15) makes us rich out of his poverty (2 Co 8:9). He became a servant (Mk 10:45) and gave his life "as a ransom for the many--that is, for all" (AG, 3). Consistently, Church Fathers .of both East and West have held that "what was not taken up [assumed] by Christ was not healed" (Abbott, 587, note 9). Thus, when Jesus took to himself our entire humanity, he healed, renewed, and saved us. In brief, incarnation is the fundamental pattern of all mission. Today evangelizers are deeply conscious of the ramifications of mission as incarnation. No missioner worthy of the name underestimates the impor-tance of indigenization and inculturation; they develop a spirituality of "depth identification," becoming as vulnerable as Jesus was in his humanity. This same pattern is the model of growth and development of all local churches (AG, 22). While it is certain that the mission of Jesus is initiated at the Incarnation, his baptism by John in the Jordan is an act of public commitment and conse-cration to mission. Jesus pursues his ministry; though it will encounter grow- 526 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 ing opposition and lead to the human disaster of Calvary, he will not betray his commitment. Note that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all juxtapose Jesus' baptism and the triple temptation in the wilderness. The tactic of Satan is to subvert Jesus with possessions, pride, and power; at the core, all Satan's promises tempt Jesus to renege on his dedication to mission. The more conscious an evange-lizer becomes of the struggle involved in mission faithfulness, the closer he will be drawn to Jesus. "who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin." The missioner will constantly and with confidence "approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and favor and to find help in time of need" (Heb 4:15-16). Instructive for the Church and her evangelizers is an appreciation of the continual action of the Spirit in the life of Jesus. The creed affirms that he was conceived "by the power of the Holy Spirit." The same Spirit descends on Jesus at the moment of his baptism (Mt 3:17); he is led by the Spirit to the desert (Mt 4:1); he returns to Galilee in the power of the Spirit (Lk 4:14); he begins his preaching mission at Nazareth asserting that "the Spirit of the Lord is upon me" (Lk 4:18). As Jesus was empowered by the Spirit, he sends forth his own disciples saying: "Receive the Holy Spirit" (Jn 20:22). Peter (Ac 4:8), Paul (Ac 9:17), Stephen (Ac 6:5; 7:55), and those who listened to their preaching (Ac 10:44) were all filled with the Spirit. In fact, the entire nascent Church brims with the Spirit's presence (Ac 2:4), and thus the community increases while it enjoys the consolation of the befriending Spirit (Ac 9:31). Jesus, his disci-ples, and likew.ise today's evangelizers all are in mission through the mar-velous action of the Spirit (Kroeger-A, 3- 12). Concretely in the practical order, Jesus carries out his mission through evangelization--proclaimiog the GoodNews of the Kingdom. The first words that Mark places on Jesus' lips are centered on this very theme (Mk 1"15). Luke also portrays Jesus' mission as focused on glad tidings to the "little ones of this world" (Lk 4:18-19). As Paul VI has noted, this theme "sums up the whole mission of Jesus" (EN, 6). Jesus could not be impeded in his ministry: "I must announce the good news of the reign of God, because that is why I was sent" (Lk 4:43). Contemporary evangelizers, reflecting on the urgency and scope of Jesus' kingdom proclamation, will find themselves imitating Jesus' ministry as he lived it in silence, in action, in dialogue, in teaching, and in prayer. Yes, the Good News of the Kingdom for Jesus means an integral, holistic approach to evangelization--because all dimensions of the total gospel are expressions of his enduring love (Jn 13:1). Apostolic Spirituality / 527 Jesus' entire life, from the Incarnation to the Ascension, was a procla-mation. All he said and did were a testimony to the Father's loving design (Jn 3:31-35; 7:16; 8:38; 14:24). Jesus existed on nothing else; his "suste-nance/ food/meat" was to do the will and work of the one who sent him (Jn 4:34). In everything Jesus was faithful to the Father. Reflective, insightful evangelizers interiorize the fidelity mind-set of Jesus (Ph 2:5); they also imitate St. Paul in his concern for faithful transmis-sion of the message of Jesus preserved by the Church (1 Co 15:3, 11). In prayer and meditation missioners refocus themselves on Jesus and his king-dom, and often this demands setting aside personal opinions and ambitions. Mother Teresa of Calcutta notes that Jesus does not always call us to be suc-cessful, but he always invites us to be faithful. This fidelity to Jesus and his message should not be interpreted in too narrow a sense. As announcers of Good News, we consciously interiorize Jesus' gospel values; however, we seek to transmit them to humanity in all its cultural, social, religious, and politico-economic diversity. Certainly, this is a fantastic challenge; it is central to contemporary evangelization. Paul VI expressed it wisely and poignantly: "This fidelity both to a message whose servants we are and to the people to whom we must transmit it living and intact is central axis of evangelization" (EN, 4). Lifestyle is key in any vision of evangelization. For our contemporaries, who willingly listen only to witnesses (not theoreticians), the missioner's authenticity and transparency are generally the first elements in evangeliza-tion; wordless witness is already a silent, powerful, and effective proclama-tion. It is an initial act of evangelization (EN, 21, 41). Jesus himself adopted a particular, concrete lifestyle. His mind-set was fidelity and obedience to his Father; his outward manner manifested the lived values of poverty, total dedication, persecution, apparent failure. The Church and her evangelizers "must walk the same road which Christ walked, a road of poverty and obedience, of service and self-sacrifice to the death" (AG, 5). Bluntly, there is no authentic Christian mission without the cross and all its surprises, foolishness, and scandal (1 Co 1:18-25). True mission is always signed by the cross, and without it we cannot be Jesus' disciples. The evan-gelizer is always generous in bearing a personal share of the hardships which the gospel entails (2 Tm 1:8). Constantly the Christian disciple is measuring his life and apostolate against the lifestyle of Jesus and the patterns of the gospel. Sustained prayerful reflection and an ever deepening consciousness of one's personal relationship with the Trinity are the unique way of interior-izing the paradox of the cross and the power of the resurrection. 528 / Review for Religious, July-August 1991 An anonymous poet, speaking of the centrality of the Incarnation and Redemption in Christianity, noted that there are no definitions in God's dic-tionary for these terms. One must search for the meaning of Bethlehem and Calvary under another category. Their significance is to be found only when one reads how God defines love. Indeed, God's loving plan of salvation is a message of hope for all peo-ples. It is universal and should be preached and witnessed "to the ends of the earth." To spread this universal message demands great dedication and faith, as seen in the practical advice that Paul gave to Timothy (2 Tm 4:1-5). The evangelizer, conscious of his role in the actualization of the mysteri-on, will surrender enthusiastically to the invitation of Jesus: Come and fol-low me in my mission. This conscious surrender will open his eyes to perceive, not so much what his efforts are accomplishing, but how Father, Son, and Spirit are working fruitfully in and through his life. With this vision, contemplation and actibn harmoniously blend and sustain one anoth-er; the evangelizer experiences living the mysterion. Eventually, all will be recapitulated in Christ and God will be
