Most of my public comments on Snowden have focused on how to evaluate his actions as a US citizen and someone entrusted with a high-level security clearance. Here I want to focus on an analytical concern–that of international hierarchy.
I don’t have a strong sense of the degree that other scholars associate me with the “new hierarchy studies,” but a major theme of my work is that we are better off understanding crticial aspects of international relations as structured by patterns of super- and subordination than as anarchical. Indeed, my sense is that two of the most prominent advocates of this view–Krasner and Lake—overestimate the importance of anarchical relations in world politics. Still, both correctly note that de jure state sovereignty serves to deflect attention from the prevalence of hierarchical control among and across states.
One important dimension of this intersects with Krasner’s appropriation of “organized hypocrisy.” The US-led hegemonic order has always had a problematic relationship with state sovereignty insofar as it usually embraces norms of sovereign equality while de facto violating them. Sovereignty is, among other things, a marker of status. A state that is sovereign is formally the equal of its sovereign peers. Political subordination involves a diminution of status with respect to a superordinate state. Most hegemonic orders require lower-tier states to accept this diminution of status; indeed, the dominant power maintains control, at least in part, by explicitly manipulating the disbursement of status such as to pit subordinate polities against one another for position in the overall hierarchy.
The US has, of course, played these games–think about “special relationships,” Presidential visits, and the like–but it has done so in a much more plastic and ambiguous way than that of, say, Ming China. Indeed, the sovereignty rubric imposes some pretty significant constraints on the ability to formally recognize status differentials. At the same time, it requires all kinds of mechanism that reaffirm the sovereignty of subordinated states–precisely because explicit recognition of hierarchy damages both the legitimacy of the hegemonic order and the regimes of those states that belong to it.
With respect to the most powerful states in this system–those that, in many respects, enjoy the greatest autonomy and claim to status within it–multilateralism has proved a particularly useful way of managing these contradictions. After all, multilateralism recognizes the voice and authority–the high status–of participating states. For liberal internationalists such as John Ikenberry, this is all as it should be. But we should not lose sight of the degree that the bargain involves the selective concession of sovereignty rights.
Thus, it should not be surprising that many recent brushfires in US-European relations have involved moments that puncture the illusion of sovereign equality.
- The Iraq War highlighted both the inability of leading European states to restrain their putative multilateral partner and the relative ease with which Washington could pivot to divide-and-control tactics in its relations with NATO members.
- Revelations about extraordinary rendition made clear the degree that the United States–often with the complicity of NATO partners–could use its military bases in ways unfettered by European domestic law (PDF; new version forthcoming).
- Something not altogether dissimilar is happening with respect to revelations about the extent of US data collection with respect to the citizens of its European partners.
Thus, while I find Luke’s phrasing imprecise, I can see why he writes “What is especially important about this information is how it provides real proof (not just hearsay) about the vast extent of U.S.-imperial surveillance operations…” I don’t see the form of hierarchy revealed here terribly imperial, but it certainly is not consistent with the general image we hold of relations between two sovereign states.
One of the interesting features of this whole episode for the hierarchy debate is this classification of second class (UK, Can, NZ, Aus) and third class partners (Germany, …). The logic of demarcation between these two group might be more complicated than what it looks like at first, but it nonetheless reminds us of this: https://www.amazon.com/The-Anglosphere-Racialized-International-ebook/dp/B00631I9N0
I had a similar thought, more specifically tied to intelligence and Snowden. In my intelligence studies classes in the 1990s, the inter-community cooperation among the US, the UK, Australia and NZ was taught pretty much as an uncomplicated fait accompli… the assumption was that there was a ‘special relationship’ in intelligence that was anglophone… or so as near as I can tell. (Vucetic does a nice job of showing what the ideational foundations/cultural hookups for that could be.) And of course it was ranked…
In addition to Krasner and Lake, I’d wager there is some overlap with Randy Stone’s concept of informal governance. This looks closer to Stone than to Lake.
The politics around extradition–the pressure the US is putting on Latin American and other states–also seems clearly linked to hierarchy. Especially since the US seems to refuse extradition to those countries in some circumstances. There may be a status hierarchy too, similar to Ann Townes work on gender, but reflecting extradition, rule of law, and judicial procedure.
I think this might be a more direct link than the US spying on European allies, especially since presumably other states spy on the US.
We should also include the confirmation (its hardly a revelation) that the US engages in systematic spying on its NATO allies. Secretary Kerry’s response, as well as General Hayden’s are instructive. They essentially note that everyone spies. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see what the American reaction would be to learning of extensive German spying operations in the US, versus the muted reaction of the German government to what has been confirmed as happening to them. Then again, we do accept probable SIGINT operations from at least some of our allies.
And yet, the fact that so far the US has been unable to snatch Snowden puts a dent in the notion of American hegemony and suggests that some countries are very happy making sovereign decisions on the issue of criminality and ‘unacceptability’. So to me this affair looks more like evidence that the ‘unipolar moment’ is over.
If there is or was a unipolar moment, Washington’s inability to “snatch” Snowden would tell us very little about its status. Consider that in 2002/2003, which would have been peak, the US couldn’t get German or French support for Iraq, nor a UNSC resolution. Unipolarity is a distribution of power in which there exists no realistic counterbalancing coalition, not a state of total world domination.
On the merits, Snowden’s lack of success so far is a pretty good indicator of the continued relevance of US influence.
Well, here the question arises how to define power and as we know there is more than one answer. So we could just dig into our different interpretations… That said, your point that some are more sovereign than others is well taken, but not news, really. Yet it would be good clarifying in what sense spying (or ‘collecting data on private conversations’) violates sovereignty. It does if we make privacy a core element of sovereignty…but that’s not really a standard IR reading, is it?
https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=OvkuePL7oDY
I dunno. How is electronic data collection across the borders of a sovereign state different from spies running around doing stuff…. more research needed.
Agree. But as far as your argument is concerned, the question is whether you follow the liberal globalization view that these communication flows occur in a transnational space, in which case surveillance does not breach sovereignty. Or you take the view that these spaces are part of a hegemonic structure, in that case the hegemon collecting data on it is just an affirmation of the condition (it cannot interfere in something it controls). In either case, the data never rested in a sovereign realm. Unless, again, you see privacy as essential to sovereignty – but then whose sovereignty are we speaking of? I think this is a very interesting question, not just conceptually but given the political stakes (i.e. on what basis do/can states like Germany protest the practice).