Liberalism and Transformation

Front matter

Liberalism and

Transformation

The Global Politics of Violence and Intervention

CHAPTER SEVEN Conclusion: Toward a Minimalist Liberalism 137

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11979108

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book benefited from enormous assistance by several institutions and individuals. I would like to acknowledge the help, feedback, and inspiration I have received over the years from various places, though I know I am likely forgetting many. Any faults in this book are my own.

This book started as a Ph.D. dissertation, though the book itself bears only a cursory resemblance to the final draft of that project. In terms of financial and institutional support for that work, I would like to thank the very generous funding and resources offered by both the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. This included several semesters of teaching-free research support in the form of graduate assistantships, the Rickey Fellowship, and tuition assistantships.

Henry Farrell, Marty Finnemore, and Charlie Glaser were among the first to give formative feedback on the project. The early process itself was unusually difficult, and I am grateful for the assistance provided by several people who took the time to read the entire draft and give solid comments. These include Robert Adcock, Ingrid Creppell, Amy Hsieh, Michelle Jurkovich, Diogo Lemos, Dan Nechita, Alex Reisenbichler, and Ken Vincent.

Pieces of this project have been presented at a variety of venues, including the International Studies Association conferences (2014—2018), as well as the International Studies Association-Northeast Conference (2015) in Providence. Among those in attendance, I am particularly thankful for the feedback offered by Alena Drieschova, Jamie Frueh, Cameron Hill, Tony Lang, Rodger Payne, and Andrew Ross. For their assistance at various points throughout the writing process, including commenting on drafts and bouncing around various ideas, I would like to thank Kerry Crawford, Ryan Krog, Henry Nau, Fabiana Perera, and Allison Quatrini. For their generous time, I would also like to thank Melani McAlister and Ingrid Creppell.

A version of the concluding chapter was presented at a workshop on John Dewey that was held in October 2017 at University College Dublin. I would like to thank the participants and organizers for a brilliant discussion.

xi xii Acknowledgements

Part of chapter 5 was previously published as “A Pessimistic Liberalism: Jacob Talmon’s Suspicion and the Birth of Contemporary Political Thought” in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Many thanks to the journal and SAGE Publishing for making that piece available for reprint.

A few colleagues are deserving of special mention. Alyx Mark, Brett Richards, and Scott Weiner volunteered more time than was reasonable to ask for. Alyx was a friendly ear for airing frustrations, Brett introduced me to literatures I likely would not have encountered, and Scott volunteered to read more drafts of various chapters than anyone else close to this project.

I would also like to extend thanks to my home institution, Francis Marion University, and the faculty in the Department of Political Science and Geography. Significant writing, rewriting, and research was made possible by a series of summer research grants, generous teaching schedules, engaged colleagues, and the most important things a writer needs: a computer and a printer. The university also contributed funding through professional development grants for conference travel to present early versions of the chapters and related research.

The University of Michigan Press, and particularly the fine work of Elizabeth Demers, Haley Winkle, the production staff at Longleaf and Michigan, and three anonymous reviewers made this project come to life—many thanks for their efforts. This book was made freely available in digital formats thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

My greatest intellectual debts are to some excellent professors at the George Washington University. Michael Barnett has been an amazing mentor, and has been incredibly generous with his time. I would not have been able to write this book without his support and mentorship. Alex Downes deserves special thanks for his kind encouragement throughout the project, and particularly for his assistance in pointing me in the right direction for data sources. Eric Grynaviski read numerous drafts of many of the chapters, and provided some of the sharpest critiques and suggestions that I have received. I can say, without hesitation, that I had the opportunity to study under three of the most innovative minds in the field, and for that Iam forever grateful.

It would be a tremendous oversight not to thank the brilliant, engaged, and critical students I have had at Francis Marion University. Students in my seminars “Political Violence and Terrorism” and “Politics of War and Security” deserve special mention. Teaching those courses helped clarify issues related to concepts and theory utilized in this work. Sometimes, caught up in the minutia of our own research, we often forget the debts we owe our students—our greatest (and certainly most frequent and curious) interlocutors.

Acknowledgements xiii

I would, lastly, like to thank my family. Kelly Gamble—an amazing scholar and writer in her own right—deserves special recognition for all of her love and support over the years. Epictetus once said: “Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.” She has always instilled the ethics of learning into me, and I am forever indebted. My brother and best friend, Theron Tatum, has never been anything but supportive, and has always been one of my greatest allies through thick and thin. Finally, my husband, Milam Chandler, has been by my side through some of this project’s highest highs and lowest lows. This finished project is as much his as it is mine. This project is dedicated to these three; everything I do, I do for you.

Introduction

Liberalism and Violence

Liberalism has changed all political conceptions in a peculiar and systematic fashion. Like any other significant human movement liberalism too, as a historical force, has failed to elude the political.

—Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

Y 1792, JACQUES-PIERRE BRISSOT had made a name for himself in

the First French Republic as a journalist, a particularly outspoken liberal

intellectual, and an Anglophobe. Early in the year, he called for an outright French imperial project on the continent, with the purpose of emancipating those republican brethren of Europe enslaved by despotic rule. For Brissot, “war was necessary against the enemies of humanity, who viewed the nation of many millions to be equivalent only to the person of a single king.”! This would not serve as idle propaganda for the republic. Brissot became an influential political actor and legislator in the new Assembly.

In November of 1792, he was a prominent voice in convincing the National Convention that France should establish a republican empire across Europe. The Convention decreed as much on November 15 of that year. By the end of the month, France annexed Nice and Savoy in the name of freedom. A month later, the French forcibly opened the Scheldt River to free trade.* France inaugurated the nineteenth century—the century of liberal democracy—with violence and intervention in the name of freedom. The great liberal revolution in an age of kings, one inspired by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, was characterized by war and conquest.

As the beginning of the nineteenth century represented a transformative and violent moment for international liberalism, so did the end of the twentieth. At the denouement of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama heralded, in a positively Hegelian way, the triumph of liberalism as the “absolute truth” toward which history had moved. Liberalism, for writers like Fukuyama, represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” Indeed, Western capitalism and market liberalism appeared to have triumphed over the Soviet Union in a protracted battle for ideological supremacy. Yet new forms of violence in the name of humanity characterized even this period of hope. In the 1990s, the world witnessed military interventions in the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia in configurations never before imagined, leading some to argue that these new forms of intervention were uniquely liberal ones.*

Liberalism has been a characteristic feature of international order since at least the nineteenth century, and its relationship to violence should prove puzzling to scholars of international politics. There are several instances in modern history where we find liberalism—as a set of political principles, institutions, cultures, and collective identities—mobilized to defend and shape state action and the use of force. These forms of violence, in the counterfactual, would not have been configured in the way that they were without international liberalism providing the context of social action for states. For example, governments often cast colonial wars in the nineteenth century as being part of a broader process of market expansion and “civilizing” progress. Andrew Jackson explicitly couched his “removal policy” of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in a language where tribes represented the antithesis to progress, civilization, and American destiny.’ John Stuart Mill’s writings on empire, as well, indicate a clear liberal logic for coercion and violence over Britain’s colonial possessions.°

Moreover, in contemporary international politics, actors carry out and justify violence with a universalist logic of emancipation and individualism, which would not be possible without such a language of liberalism. Even in wars that are widely acknowledged to have been waged for other reasons, a discourse of liberalism justified and brought meaning to episodes of force. One prominent illustration is the 2003 coalition intervention in Iraq, led by the United States. In attempting to sell the war, President George W. Bush branded the proposed intervention as an emancipatory one:

America believes that all people are entitled to hope and human rights, to the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery, prosperity to squalor, self-government to the rule of terror and torture. America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children. The oppression of Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomen,

Shia, Sunnis and others will be lifted, the long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin. Iraq is a land rich in culture and resources and talent. Freed from the weight of oppression, Iraq's people will be able to share in the progress and prosperity of our time.”

I argue that one strand of liberal ideology, what I have termed emancipatory liberalism, has a long, and diverse, historical connection with violence and intervention in world politics. This ideological program has been of broader importance to the constitution of international relations since the mid-nineteenth century. Emancipatory liberalism is a paternalist liberalism with the primary aim of freeing individuals from the chains that bind them. It includes an understanding of the liberal project as a universal one: a project that requires the fortunate and enlightened to “save” those who are in trouble. The aim of this book is to draw out the effects of emancipatory liberalism, its interaction with institutions of war, intervention, and force, and the interplay between practices of violence on the ground and the discourses of liberty that give rise to them. The intertwined history of violence and emancipatory liberalism shows the deep connections between ideology, culture, discourse, and intervention in international society.

In another vein, this book is about discourses and their power in international politics and world history.’ Discourses structure international politics, influence the way that states act, and allow actors to interpret their positions, practices, and beliefs about the world. Emancipatory liberalism does this in three specific ways. First, it allows for the justification of violence. It provides not just the rhetorical cover for physical fire, but constitutes the realm of justifiable action. Second, emancipatory discourses affect the way intervention is practiced, institutionalized, and operationalized. Third, emancipatory liberalism, and its historical specificity, has an impact on how the agents of violence and intervention confront resistance.

The reader of this book will encounter a variety of “authors” of this emancipatory discourse of world politics: a cast of characters as diverse as only a playwright could imagine. Scholars, intellectuals, policy makers, novelists, editorial writers—discourses of emancipatory liberalism are constituted by an array of cultural forms, a panoply of methods for thinking about global politics. As such, I approach this historical study from a discourse perspective.

Finally, this book invites readers to reflect on global ethics and transformation in world politics. It shows how ethical imaginings of the world have direct effects on actions of transformative importance. It suggests that discourses are fluid, changing, and complex. This has implications for the development and potential of alternative and dissident perspectives. Additionally, it opens the space for such an alternative perspective. In this critical history of the use of violence in international politics, a central theme is that world society need not be one structured around violence and intervention. Keep this in mind; my desire is to provide tools to emancipate ourselves from emancipation. “Minimalist” liberalism as the basis for international society—a topic further elaborated in the concluding chapter—finds a foothold in a variety of dissenting discourses that have existed, in one form or another, alongside emancipatory imaginings of violence and intervention.

This introductory chapter previews some of the major themes of the book. First, I place emancipatory liberalism in the broader context of thinking about violence and international order. How does emancipatory liberalism fit into contemporary conceptions of liberal world order? International relations theory has largely overlooked this historical narrative. Second, I propose a way of thinking about the history of global liberalism as a story of intervention and violence: a narrative that takes place within a written and spoken discourse, but also within the broader milieu of institutions, politics, and war. Throughout is a running theme about the purposes of such a critical history, alternative visions, and counterpolitics. Other conceptions of liberal world order exist—and have, perhaps, always existed—in opposition, conflict, and contradiction to emancipatory conceptions of world order.

Liberalism, Violence, and a New Narrative

International relations (IR) theory is concerned with the theory, history, and practice of liberalism, as well as the phenomenon of violence. Beate Jahn argues that liberalism, without question, still dominates international affairs.” Others have argued that, at least rhetorically, IR is about studying violence." The history of both liberalism and violence in international politics, and the way these histories intertwine, however, is underdeveloped and undertheorized. Arguments about liberalism tend to focus on texts in isolation from the material effects of liberalism. A focus on institutions and U.S. hegemony often neglects the role of violence in maintaining that order. And, finally, liberal IR theory itself has crafted a triumphalist narrative; liberalism is ending humankind’s confrontation with violence altogether. This book links and challenges these narratives. I argue that texts in the history of international liberalism are intimately related, and inseparable, from practices of violence in world politics. The liberal world order is as much about intervention, force, and war as it is about institutions, trade, and peace. A “liberal triumphalism” is itself an expression of a long-standing liberal sentiment. It is, indeed, part of—not an explanation for—the discursive history of liberal internationalism.

Defining Liberalism Despite being a “protean prey” conceptually," I define liberalism along two dimensions in this book. The first dimension is about the thematic similarities between thinkers and ideologies across time and space. Charles Mills sums up these themes succinctly, and deserves quoting at length:

“Liberalism” [. . .] refers broadly to the anti-feudal ideology of individualism, equal rights, and moral egalitarianism that arises in Western Europe in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries to challenge the ideas and values inherited from the old medieval order, and which is subsequently taken up and developed by others elsewhere.’

Liberalism, in this formulation, is based upon modern understandings of individualism—that ethics and politics should center on the welfare, liberty, and development of the individual. Furthermore, equality in terms of rights, privileges, and participation are cornerstones of liberal ideology. In world politics, this extends beyond the bounds of political communities into formulations that are often cosmopolitan in orientation. Liberalism, in short, is an ideology that expresses the desirability of a world that is fair and equal, with individual welfare as the primary thematic focus.

The second dimension of the concept of liberalism qualifies this ideology in relation to its contexts and histories. Liberalism does not always live up to its lofty promises, and, in fact, liberal thinkers often develop a logic of exclusion, racism, and violence within the historical, social, and political contexts it operates.” Thus, liberalism sometimes justifies “illiberal” action, and other times has exclusions and violence built in. Duncan Bell has pointed out that perhaps the most useful way to think about liberalism is through this contextual lens: “liberalism” is work written by people who have considered themselves “liberals.” This conception gives us leverage for understanding the content of “liberalism” as a political and ideological program.

One potential counterargument against this conceptualization of liberalism is that it is overly general and attempts to group together national-political and theoretical traditions that are diverse as well as historically specific. This book’s primary goal is to provide an inclusive definition, and to use the historical analysis in subsequent chapters to flesh out these contextual differences in each of the instances presented. My approach is to provide a broad definition of liberalism, and to demonstrate certain commonalities between “emancipatory liberalisms” and their relation to violence in world politics in specific historical instances.

Studying Liberalism in World Politics

Scholars of liberal empire have narrated well the intellectual history of early liberal internationalism. Enduring themes of this expansive research agenda focus on the way that liberal intellectuals attempted to justify empire while simultaneously developing theories of private property, liberty, and (sometimes) equality. Uday Mehta illustrates this point succinctly in suggesting that:

In its theoretical vision, liberalism, from the seventeenth century to the present, has prided itself on its universality and politically inclusionary character. And yet, when viewed as an historical phenomenon, the period of liberal history is unmistakably marked by the systematic and sustained political exclusion of various groups and “types” of people.'®

An overt focus on intellectual history often misses the material connection that liberalism has had on the deployment of violence. Bell makes a clear distinction between intellectual sources of liberal empire and material acts of imperialism; imperialism is not just theory or a set of texts.” While this broader point is certainly true, the framing of theoretical arguments, as opposed to material practices of violence and intervention, is historically problematic. Bell goes further along this line, implying that texts are fundamentally different from social practices: “[studying ideology] encompasses the interpretation of texts, the study of social practices, and the analysis of visual/material culture. [...]”!* Casting the dichotomy between liberalism as a set of texts and imperialism as a set of social practices associated with violence and domination obscures the historical relationship between the discursive and the material in a liberal politics of violence and intervention.

Two additional examples show that this connection is underdeveloped. First, in Jeanne Morefield’s important book Covenant without Swords, she traces the intellectual origins and tensions in the work of Alfred Zimmern and Gilbert Murray—two early twentieth-century “idealist liberals.” She is modest, however, about her claims to the effects their thinking had on the practice of intervention in the interwar liberal order. She writes: “This is not to say [. . .] that the power of Murray’s and Zimmern’s arguments alone convinced the British government and Conference participants to enact their particular approach to international organization in 1919.””? Second, even works that do connect liberal ideology to episodes and processes of violence, like John Owen's work, often focus more on the way that perceptions and interpretations of a state’s liberality can create the conditions for war. These studies often avoid digging into the substance of liberalism— discursive, ideological, ideational—which creates opportunities (and often moral imperatives in the minds of liberals) to intervene and deploy violence.”°

Furthermore, contemporary discussions of the development of liberal world order devote much of their attention to the way that liberalism’s history intersects with global institutions, while largely bracketing liberalism’s connection with violence. Some provocatively suggest that the existing liberal international order is in a crisis because hegemonic leadership of global institutions is declining (a “crisis of governance”), while others suggest that this crisis is what liberal world order looks like: a fight between liberals who value restraint and pluralism, and those who value universalism and imposition.” In this vision, world order is about the promises and pitfalls of supporting an “institutionalized rule-based order.”” These analyses all share a focus on institutions, broadly conceived, and leadership in the maintenance of liberal world order.” None of these approaches, however, seriously addresses violence, or questions the historical foundations of liberal world order.

One important exception in this vein is critical scholarship that examines the effects that a liberalized world politics has in constructing spaces of “disorder” in the Global South. But even this work pays less attention to theorizing the connection between this world order and direct deployment of violence. More notable in this regard is Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s influential argument about neoliberalism, and the way it has created a global structure that reduces enmity to conditions of lawlessness. Violence is committed in connection to new global criminals (e.g., terrorists) who threaten the institutional bases of liberal world order.” Others have examined the way that neoliberalism merges security and development discourses together in such a way that modern humanitarianism is contributing directly to crises in the developing world, marked by “new wars” along the borderlands of international society.” These approaches neglect, however, that liberalism more generally is complicit in traditional forms of violence (war, intervention, etc.): a history that is sacrificed for an argument solely about the contemporary condition.

Curiously, liberal IR itself constructs a narrative that not only ignores the connection between liberalism and violence, but also declares liberalism the “end of history” and associates it with the decline of violence.” This liberal triumphalism takes the form of not only liberal peace theory, but also broader accounts of liberalism’s pacifying effects. Liberal peace theory suggests that liberal-democratic states do not go to war with each other. Some liberal peace scholars have taken this argument even further, to argue that liberal states are inherently more peaceful.” Andrew Linklater’s study of cosmopolitan harm conventions makes the suggestion that “civilizing processes,” led by the liberalization of world politics, are leading to a decrease in harm. He writes:

Cosmopolitan harm conventions can be said to be immanent in the way in which all societies have been organized, in that all must protect members from superfluous pain and suffering, and all have at least the capacity to extend similar rights to all other persons. The universal human rights culture, augmented by recent developments in international criminal law, is the main contemporary expression of that shared potential.”

Linklater gives little attention to what Michael Doyle refers to as the “crusading” impulse of international liberalism.*° Some see in international liberalism a teleological movement toward the global diffusion of liberal democracy, or maybe even an inevitable world state. In these arguments, the struggle for recognition of universal rights is a key mechanism in the creation of a cosmopolitan, and universal, world order—one founded on liberal democratic principles.» In short, triumphalism has supposedly heralded a Kantian “perpetual peace”: a utopia where harm, violence, and war are outdated, or at least reduced significantly. This book challenges this narrative. As chapters 3-6 show, triumphalism like this is, ironically enough, a recurring theme in the discursive history of liberal violence.

Violence

The study of violence in IR would appear at first glance to be a vibrant research agenda, but, scholars rarely address the concept itself in a systematic and empirical way. Violence as a concept is conspicuously missing in most mainstream IR.** Most of the studies in IR that deal with violence are more interested in specific types of violence (e.g., war) and interrogating their causes, rather than thinking more clearly about the implications of violence in international politics. What is violence? How does violence relate to representational practices? How might violence be, in many ways, inseparable from our very visions of international order??? Violence is a central part of world politics, as well as the discipline of IR. The history of international violence, however, has often neglected the relationship between discourses, justificatory schemes, and the ethical bases of international violence. What is required to interrogate the idea of violence, and its grounding in discourses of liberalism, is a critical reading of international liberalism as an emancipatory project.

There are notable exceptions to this trend of ignoring violence, though these exceptions are few and far between. The study of humanitarian intervention has importantly focused on ideas; however, this attention has largely been on norms of intervention, rather than on discourse and ideology.** Studies focusing on the decline of violence have looked at the connection between liberalism and violence, but this relationship is one of opposition (i.e., liberalism causes the decline of violence) rather than one of co-constitution. And, studies of identity have examined discourse in relation to processes of conflict, though this literature tends to be oriented to concept development and deconstruction, rather than a more comprehensive account. There is much more to explore in relation to violence in international society, particularly in relation to discourses, institutions, and practices of intervention.

This book intertwines these narratives of a liberal international system and processes of violence and intervention. It challenges a liberal triumphalism by situating the evolution of international society within the context of justifying and employing violence. Furthermore, it contributes to a way of rethinking violence in international politics. Moving the focus away from simply the causes of war and peace to interrogating the history of an international ethics of violence—developed within, and operating through, narratives of progress, civilization and development—helps us recognize the complex interaction between the ideas, justifications, institutions, and practices of intervention.

Emancipatory Liberalism and a New Narrative

Emancipatory liberalism, the subject of this critical history, is one form of international liberalism, and refers to the trend in liberal thought of utilizing physical means for the sake of freeing individuals from obstacles to their own self realization.” This form of liberalism often takes on the character of paternalism: the intervention in others’ affairs for the purported sake of their own welfare.’ Emancipatory liberalism is not a liberalism of restraint; it is a liberalism focused on empowerment and active freedom. This broad focus has domestic-institutional implications.

First, emancipatory liberalism imagines effective, and appropriate, institutions as those that are distinctly beral—they are institutions created in the image ofa Western emancipatory ethic.” Second, the idea of frugal governance, in an emancipatory worldview, is replaced with that of radical governance*— constructed around a discourse of the “rights of man,” rather than of limited government. This is directly related to the way that emancipatory liberalism, as a culture, imagines governance: a means of ridding domestic institutions of tyranny, and institutional inefficiency, which would otherwise have illiberal affects in domestic politics. Third, emancipatory liberalism is not necessarily democratic. While democracy would become an important part of an emancipatory culture in the late part of the twentieth century, oftentimes actors saw direct hierarchy (as in the case of empire or spheres of influence) as an appropriate method of operationalizing the liberal project.

Isaiah Berlin’s influential discussion of positive liberty is most similar to the present conception of emancipatory liberalism and its focus on active freedom.” In international politics, emancipatory liberalism is oriented toward positive liberty, placing a value on bestowing the power and resources necessary to fulfill one’s potential. This can lead to the operation of violence through intervention, however, and confirms Berlin’s own concerns with the paradoxes of positive liberty. As he writes: “If this leads to despotism, albeit by the best or wisest wishes—to Sarastro’s temple in The Magic Flute—but still to despotism, which turns out to be identical to freedom, can it be that there is something amiss in the premises of the argument?” As this book demonstrates, this contradiction is one with which intellectuals and policy makers have been preoccupied.

A focus on emancipatory liberalism, as a type of liberal internationalism, allows for a rethinking of the narrative of the rise of global liberalism and its relationship to force. Charting the multiplicities of liberal discourses about intervention and violence, and demonstrating the deep connections between such discourses and actual practices of intervention, provide the resources to engage in a sustained critique of liberalism’s place in modern political considerations about war, security, and peace in international society.

Violence and Its Discourses: War and “War by Other Means”

Acentral theme of this study is the role that discourse plays in constituting practices of violence and intervention. By “discourse,” I mean the collection of texts that makes up a cultural system—providing the symbolic order in which social and political agents act.*! Discourse theory has seen a resurgence in IR scholarship. There is now a plethora of research in this regard, especially in the realm of genealogical analysis inspired by Michel Foucault.** Much of this literature is interested in the history of the development of norms, however, rather than a more open exploration of the role that discourse plays in constituting international politics.“ In the case of emancipatory liberalism, discourse has a multiplicitous,

Introduction Il and sometimes contentious, relationship with practices of violence and intervention. Nonetheless, any understanding of international liberalism must grapple with liberalism as a textual artifact—a set of symbols, cultural systems, and deep systems of meaning that are created by, and constitute, the writers who expound those ideas. These connections are not always clear and can sometimes be difficult to parse out historically.

There are two essential functions that discourse has in relation to practices of violence in world politics. First, discourse provides cultural resources that actors draw on in the practice of violence. Discourse works to constitute the lifeworld of actors; it forms cultural worlds that make lived experience meaningful. Sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann said it best: “language [. . .] typifies experiences, allowing me to subsume them under broad categories in terms of which they have meaning not only to myself but also to my fellow men.” Discourse creates these broad categories by giving substance to cultural systems. This is apparent in everyday life. Take the example of fashion. At any point in time, most of society shares at least broad understandings about what kinds of clothing are culturally acceptable. What belongs in the categories of “fashionable” (e.g., dark blue jeans) and what belongs in the categories of “unfashionable” (e.g, fanny packs) is part of a shared world created by the way we represent fashion discursively—in speech, in magazines, on television. Similarly, emancipatory liberalism as a discourse helped constitute broader international cultures shared by both elites and publics. In the Cold War, for instance, an ideological fear of totalitarianism was expressed in public discourses like editorial pages, intellectual production, and policy communities. Discourse has real, structural effects through its mediation of culture.