Core Ethics Vol. 3（2007）

ArticlesInternational Relations After Unipolarity and Deconstruction
Hiroaki Ikeda＊(This is written mainly in the context of International Relations. It should be noted that International Relations
is not an entertainment industry and one is not supposed to come up with new fashions every time he or she
writes or presents something, certainly not in those parts concerning a theoretical study or structural analysis;
some of my views expressed in this writing have been presented previously in the last decade in several
occasions and I re-present them here in a revised form since I consider them to be still valid theoretically andas structural analyses. I express my thanks to all the people who commented on my previous presentations.)

In this brief article, I first point out the vital importance of ethical and political values in world politics atthe beginning of the twenty-first century and a need for at least a minimum degree of global normative
consensus. But I also argue that, since deconstruction has put into doubt the meaning of “human” that is
supposed to be the very agent of values and norms, IR (International Relations) researches about those values
and the possibility of a global minimum normative consensus cannot confine themselves within the discipline
but must face this deconstructive challenge by expanding into and integrating with philosophy. I draw an
initial sketch of a post-deconstructive IR theory and a cosmopolitan defence of human rights for both developing
and developed worlds as the global minimum normative consensus.

Post-unipolar world
The problems of world politics are usually dealt by the discipline of International Relations focused onstates, security and economy, and such focuses are not misguided. However, in the context of the current worldpolitical situation, where globalization gradually weakens the global unipolar hegemony of the United States(the “Pax Americana”) and instead other poles (= major powers) and non-state actors — such as private
enterprises, terrorist groups and NGOs — wield increasing influences, the studies of ethics and political theory
also have particular importance. It may be even possible to say that what ideas, values and ethics dominate
peoples is as crucial as military and economy, and not just in normative but also in strategic and security terms,
in an era when knowledge and power are being diffused among people and people can be less controllable bystates.
Thus, the US National Intelligence Council predicts, “Over the next 15 years the increasing centrality of
ethical issues, old and new, have the potential to divide worldwide publics and challenge US leadership” (theoriginal is in bold letters), and it also forecasts growing challenges to the global order coming from populist andidentity politics.１ The US secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, who argues that the main objective of the US
foreign policy must be to shape “a balance of power that favours freedom”, also recognizes: “Lasting peace andlong-term security are only possible through the advance of liberty and justice. Military power alone cannot
protect us from the defining threats of our time.”２ At the other end of the spectrum, Osama bin Laden also

Key words : International Relations，unipolarity，deconstruction，human rights＊立命館大学大学院先端総合学術研究科

2004年度入学

公共領域

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Core Ethics Vol. 3（2007）

makes an appeal to ethical values: “Reciprocal treatment is part of justice.... Why should fear, killing,
destruction, displacement, orphaning and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability andhappiness be your lot ? This is unfair. It is time we get even. You will be killed as you kill, and will be bombed
as you bomb”３ (although there is no chance for any act of indiscriminate violence to be condoned, an important
fact is that this type of discourse strikes a cord among many ordinary people around the world).
Although the world since the end of the Cold War has been unipolar,４ actual symptoms in world politics
indicate that unipolarity is starting to cede its place to a configuration in which power is more dispersed.
Obviously, multipolarization led by China and Europe is one such symptom; the existing unipolarity itself ischaracterized by Samuel Huntington as “uni-multipolarity”.５ However, since the progress of globalization will
also undermine the capacity of major powers to keep the world under their control,６ the post-unipolar world
will be neomedieval as well as uni-multipolar.
Neomedievalism７ is a structure of world political, economic and social relations, which has been brought
about by globalization, and is characterized by the fluidity, deterritorialization and dispersion of power andauthority, especially the dispersion toward transnational and non-state actors, and by the resultant difficulties
of global and local governance by states, even by major powers; in that sense, this structure to some extent
resembles non-polarity.
In the post-unipolar world where unipolarity, multipolarity and neomeievalism coexist and intermingle in arather messy manner, and thus neither states nor some institutional mechanism of global governance cannecessarily keep people around the world under effective control, what sort of ethical and political values are
subscribed to by people and drive their actions is a matter that can make an important difference in worldpolitics. For instance, the East European revolutions in 1989 have shown that even totalitarian regimes canunravel when people’s desire for more liberal politics and society is irrepressible. On the other hand, people arealso vulnerable to pernicious kinds of hypnosis and brainwashing; they can be instigated and mobilized by ademagogically communitarian or fanatically fundamentalist ideology to fight against or even exterminate theirneighbours, as in some other recent cases such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Thus, the problem of ethicaland political values must be in a sense almost as important as military and economic matters for world peaceand development in the post-unipolar world. And at least a minimum degree of global normative consensus isneeded for diverse actors of the world’s political, economic and social relations to coexist and cooperate despite
all their political, economic, cultural, ethnic, religious, and other differences; in a world devoid of effective
control by force by a hegemon and major powers, diverse actors roaming freely without any bottom-line
normative rule guiding and constraining their actions can make it a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature of mutual
hatred and violent chaos (an example can be found in Iraq where the US invasion against vigorous
international oppositions resulted in a de-facto civil war situation that serves as a magnet for the world’s
jihadists). Multitudinous post-unipolar world actors may play different games with different rules, but they atleast must abide by some common bottom-line rule for the world to be a secure enough place; and such bottomline rule must have a benign nature since most people in the world may prefer anarchy rather than a global
Nazi consensus.

IR theory and deconstruction
The awareness of the vital significance of values is hardly new in the study and practice of world politics. It
can be even asserted that the most prominent figures among International Relations theorists tended to hold arather hybrid view of world politics which paid a careful attention to the nexus between power and values. For
example, E.H. Carr, one of the classical authors of realism, noted that, while every utopia hides behind it28

IkedaInternational Relations After Unipolarity and Deconstruction

machinations of power and interest and therefore realism must be deployed against the harmful hypocrisies of
utopianism, sound political thought and practice must combine both utopianism and realism, i.e. ideals andcalculations; “it is an unreal kind of realism which ignores the element of morality in any world order ... a newinternational order and a new international harmony can be built up only on the basis of an ascendancy which is
generally accepted as tolerant and unoppressive or, at any rate, as preferable to any practicable alternative.”８
And Martin Wight, one of the originators of the so-called “English School”, on his part witnessed in the 1950s
that there is a third current in the tradition of the political theory of international relations, separate but
interwoven with realism and idealism/utopianism (“revolutionism”), which he called “rationalism” or“Grotianism” and is characterized by its belief that international actors should be reasonable enough to be able
to coexist and cooperate even in the anarchic absence of the governing sovereign, by seeking lesser evil, actingwith enlightened self-interest and relying on justified power.９
The emphasis on values in world politics may have gone too far in recent years. The so-called“constructivist” theorists such as Alexander Wendt have been quite extravagant in emphasizing the roles
played by ideas in international relations; according to Wendt, constructivism is holistic “structural idealism”:“social life is ‘ideas all the way down’ ... deep, unobservable [cultural] structures constitute agents and rules ofinteraction”.10 The “neo-conservatives” of the first-term George W. Bush administration thought that they could
reverse the realist commonsense as they sought to further consolidate unipolarity by gambling on theattractiveness of the American values, predicting that the Iraqi people would come out in their thousands on tostreets to welcome the invading US forces as liberators.11
Stephen Krasner cautions that, while norms can matter, in a fluid environment with power asymmetries,
multiple, often conflicting norms and no strong conflict-resolving authority, actors “can select among strategies
that deploy normative as well as material resources in different and sometimes original ways”.12 The actors
meant by Krasner are the rulers of states, who are the ones that matter for Krasner, but it should be applicableto other actors in world politics as well.
Still, at least, the types of views as represented by Carr and Wight seem to be better attuned to the postunipolar world than some other more dogmatic views that mostly emphasize only one of the two — the realityof power or the ideal of norms. In fact, a vulgar distinction between realism, which prescribes minimizations ofinescapable power conflicts among actors pursuing their own interests, and liberalism, which preaches thepracticality of norms and the possibility of cooperation (rather than of natural harmony), is no more thanarbitrary: 13 while rationality cannot disengage itself from norms, norms cannot be sustained without
rationality; ultimately, in philosophical terms, “Self, roles and reasons cannot be disentangled.”14
A big trouble here is that the meaning of “human”, which is supposed to be the very agent of values andnorms and after which each nation-state as a principal actor of world politics is modeled,15 can no longer beconsidered as a given after various philosophical developments in the last century, especially French
structuralism and post-structuralism, have deconstructed that untouchable entity.16 In the words of its
godfather, deconstruction is “undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting of structures” without “a regression
toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin”17and an anti-logocentric and “radically empiricist”
dismantling of “historical opposition between philosophy and empiricism”.18 According to Jean-Luc Nancy,

the critique or deconstruction of the subjectivity would be one of the grand motifs of thecontemporary philosophical works in France ... the inquiries of which are as many as various
forms and functions of the “subject”. Hence, we have been involved with the critique or
deconstruction of the interiority, of the self-presence, of the consciousness, of the re=presentation,of la maîtrise, the critique or deconstruction of the individual or collective uniqueness of essence;29

Core Ethics Vol. 3（2007）

the critique or deconstruction of the solidity of hypokeimenon, substantia, subjectnum, and of theguarantee of authority or value (individual, nation, state, history, work).19

Throughout the modern time since René Descartes, humans compensated for the loss of religious certainty by
establishing themselves as the foundations of epistemological, ontological and ethical truths. 20 But withdeconstruction, even this consolation prize has been taken away from them.
Deconstruction of “human” can create difficulties for the conceptualization of humans and of collective
entities constituted by them as actors of world politics possessing rationality and normative values and for theattempts to seek a normative consensus among those actors. Such difficulties are manifested by the challenges
posed by “postmodern” IR studies that, no matter what semblance of commitment to ethical and politicalprinciples they pretend to keep, in all actuality lean toward cultural and communitarian relativism (or rather,anarchism) supported by epistemological relativism.21 These are the challenges International Relations must
tackle rather than avoid, but it can do so only by taking the battle to philosophical turfs and by revealing that“postmodern” IR in fact relies on a misunderstanding of deconstruction and thus does not have sufficientphilosophical argument to back itself up.
In my view, deconstruction can be defined as a philosophical disposition that is uncompromisingly
iconoclasticist and non-foundationalist including toward itself (it even refuses to provide any foundation for any
anti-foundationalism). Those who can dare to defy literary or mysticist interpretations must be able to see thatthe consequences of deconstruction are sceptical empiricist epistemology and starkly externalist-materialist
ontology that together make meaningless a popular binary between positivism22 and “post-positivism”; in ethicalterms, deconstruction leads to meta-ethical nihilism that in its turn can (though somewhat paradoxically)
constitute the foundation for a cosmopolitan defence of universal human rights.
Epistemologically, deconstruction requires abandoning the illusion of absolute and universal certainty ofknowledge that is obtainable through human mind or agency. Humans can only have “knowledge” which arealways fallible and more precisely are mere contingent assumptions extracted from a limited number ofexperience, observation, evidence or data and interpreted from particular perspectives; we will never be able toacquire any knowledge of which the truthfulness is absolutely proven and guaranteed. All we can do is to try toapproximate our assumptions to what is supposed to be the material world which exists regardless of our
subjective wishes; but at the same time, it is totally fair and reasonable for humans — as fragile living creaturesthat have to survive in limited material conditions — to do so: drawing assumptions from the past experienceand observation and projecting them to the future even if there is no absolute guarantee that any of the pastpatterns can be repeated in the future as discussed by David Hume;23 albeit with a caveat that any human“knowledge”, which in fact only means “fallible but probable assumption”, together with human reason andrationality that propose and examine such “knowledge”, must always remain potential objects of re-examination
and re-confirmation or refutation. Such sceptical empiricist epistemology interprets science and the modernity
as fundamentally iconoclastic and non-foundationalist projects: it is neither modern nor scientific to supposethat scientific “truths” are absolutely objective. It has an obvious affinity with Karl Popper’s “critical” approachin terms of its fallibilism but it does not embrace his falsificationism since there cannot possibly be a definitive
falsification with a definitive proof of falsity for anything.24
One must note that there is no problem whatsoever in making an ontologically determinist assumption(thateverything in the world is always causally determined)simultaneously with an epistemologically indeterminist
one(that it is in reality impossible for humans as materially limited beings to know all the elements of theworld’s material causal chains) In fact, deconstruction of “human” must result in a stark and comprehensive
externalist ontological assumption known as “eliminative” materialism, which in fact combines reductive and30

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eliminative views and argues that what one sees as individual human subjects or agents and their attributes
such as “reason”, “belief”, “will” and other mental activities are either misconceptions or at best nothing morethan physiological activities of our brains and thus are no more than mere links in the external material
world’s causal chains, and therefore all the concepts in humanities and social sciences concerning human minds
and subjects can be ultimately, or at least in principle, replaceable by scientific findings.25 It is materialism all
the way into your heads, minds and ideas.26 Humans’ plasticity and culturally-defined nature are also a part of
the natural world and must be open to naturalistic explanations.27 It is fair to assume that human existence inits entirety is biologically constituted and physically conditioned and thus that humans are completely
determined materially, even though it is presumably impossible for humans to know all and precisely about thecausal chains of that material determination. What exists are not subjective “inside”, social “whole” orintersubjective “realities” but physiological brain activities that imagine such features.28 Even though “in pointof epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind”, “myths ofphysical objects” generally accord well with our experience in the world and are indispensable tools for oursurvival.29 Fallible but probable assumptions based on experiences of the “fallen” exteriority of the material
world most of the time provide better guides for our life than beliefs in some mystical or romantic entities
hidden beneath or beyond them do.
Post-deconstructive epistemology and ontology thus bring back the original anti-essentialist aspiration of
positivism and completely neutralize “post-positivist” critiques that have been popular in International
Relations and other social sciences in the last decades. Steve Smith observes that positivism in International
Relations supposes a unity of natural and social sciences by relying on four dubious pillars of beliefs:
empiricism, naturalism, value-neutrality and hypothetical regularities in the social world.30 But first of all,post-deconstructive epistemology as fallibilism aims at value-neutrality and objectivity as much as possible but
does not assume that those aims can ever be fully achieved. Secondly, it should be reasonable for humans, whoare by nature vulnerable due to their material limitations, to derive fallible assumptions of regularities fromtheir past experiences or observations and to test and revise those assumptions through the processes ofprojecting them onto the present and the future. Finally, the naturalist unity of science is justified not only by
the eliminative materialist ontology but also by the sceptical empiricist epistemology according to which
natural science itself is only a regime of fallible assumptions.
Lastly, post-deconstructive ontology necessitates International Relations to integrate international relationsof nation-states (in which nation-states have been treated as if they were “subjects”) into a larger context thatcan be called “world relations”, the complex and dynamic networks of political, economic and social relations
among various forces and entities of the world. In the traditional nation-state-centric view of IR, they were seen
either as purely internal affairs that belong to each of nation-states as absolute logos and essential origins or as
mere external relations, the written exteriority that is secondary and derivative to those nation-states. But inmy view, just like human “insides” or “subjects” are nothing but parts of the external material world, worldpolitics must be regarded as entirely consisted of external relations: nation-states as essential origins/original
essences are only parts or aspects of what have been seen as fallen exteriority of the world’s political, economic
and social relations and dynamics that are comprehensively materialist (and my materialist view comes
without any Marxist-type grand, pseudo-scientific historical and social schematizations andoversimplifications).31
My rendering of deconstruction may be unbearably dry for those who desire it to be a novel intellectual
fashion or toy. But International Relations is not an entertainment industry but an academic discipline that
may have direct impacts on the life-and-death matters of millions or even billions of people around the world.
For such a discipline, a prosaically “politically correct” and even killjoy theoretical view that nonetheless works

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and contributes to the rescue and betterment of people’s lives must be incomparably preferable to fashionable
and excitingly inscrutable but rather decadent “postmodern” interpretations of deconstruction that are
indifferent or ineffective toward the most serious and urgent problems the world is facing.

Cosmopolitan defence of human rights for the post-unipolar world
In ethical terms, the outcome of deconstruction is meta-ethical nihilism. What I mean by meta-ethicalnihilism is that no ethical value is endowed with any undeconstructible foundation because any attempt of
ethics and justice (its enactment and interpretation) is necessarily “performative and therefore interpretative
violence” and has no absolute justification.32 Deconstruction must mean radical iconoclasticism that no original,
authentic, revolutionary or messianic foundation escapes iterability and deconstructibility,33 and no conceptual
ideal of justice or even of deconstruction can be allowed to be an exception.34 As J.L. Mackie argued, morality is
not to be discovered but to be made.35 While “is” is a term for assumptions derived from the past, “ought” is forprescribing future acting and being;36 thus, the “subjects” and “actors” of the human world do not exist naturally
in any ontological sense (as I argued in the previous section) but are artificially created and sustained according
to ethical prescriptions.
Nonetheless, meta-ethical nihilism (that is, the deconstructibility of all ethical enterprises) does notnecessarily lead to unrestrained ethical relativism, and Derrida clarified his own position in this regard:“Nothing seems to be less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify ittoday, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too lightly and forming the worst
complicities”37; “Emancipation is once again a vast question today and I have no tolerance for those who —whether deconstructionist or not — are ironical with regard to the grand discourse of emancipation. This
attitude has always distressed me and irritated me. I do not want to renounce this discourse.”38 Derrida justifies
this strongly pro-Enlightenment stance in consequentialist and rather Hobbesian terms by appealing to theneed to calculate: if the idea of justice, if it is left to itself, “is always very close to the bad, even to the worst forit can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. It’s always possible. And so incalculable
justice requires us to calculate.”39
In fact, it must be noted that deconstruction of “human” does not contradict with pro-Enlightenment anduniversalistic defence of “human rights” since such rights cannot be “natural” but can only be artificial rights. It
is pointed out that the most serious potential theoretical deficiency concerning the concept of human rights isthat it is neither naturally existing nor self-evident and therefore one needs to make a philosophicallycompelling justification for those rights if they are to be respected in practice.40 And from the argument above
about the possibility of ethics starting from meta-ethical nihilism, it must be clear that the foundation forhuman rights — which I define as just claims that can be made universally by human beings in their political,
economic and social relationships in order to secure what can reasonably be regarded as minimum necessary
conditions for the survival and dignity of each individual, and which are philosophically justified universal
entitlements that can be claimed even in the absence of any legal recourse (hence the human rights principle isminimum and the most basic but still primarily philosophical and ethical rather than legal principle) — also
must be artificially constituted and derive from a consequentialist and Hobbesian calculation, based on thelessons learned from experience and history (especially about the worst excesses) and ultimately on thecommon wish and need of humans to survive in the face of vulnerabilities they share. If humans are to survive
together on the planet, it must make sense for them to seek mutual advantages by respecting the most basic
rights that guarantee the bottom-line condition for everyone and to impose common physiological conditionings
and controls on themselves to this end41 instead of falling into a condition in which they have to be killing each32

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other just to obtain that very bottom-line condition.
I contend in a somewhat Hobbesian manner that it is the principle of human rights as such basic rights thatis the most appropriate as the very minimum global normative consensus needed for the world peace andsecurity: the world’s diverse political, economic and social actors must impose such regime of rights and mutual
responsibilities on themselves as the bottom-line constitutional meta-rule in order to extricate themselves fromtheir state of nature.42 The principle of human rights must set a global normative bottom-line in a double sense:
it must be a meta- or bottom-line rule that reigns supreme over all the other rules of interminably various
games played by diverse world actors; and it makes it imperative among imperatives, priority among priorities
to secure at least bottom-line condition of survival for all the human beings of the world.
There is an important caution to be made. Postmodern radical pluralists display their championing ofcontingent plays of human identities and differences as their moral fig leaf.43 For Ken Booth, “human becomingis the only permanent form of being, and emancipation is the politics of that reality”,44 while Mackie, in his
proposition to found morality on right rather than goal (consequentialism) or duty (deontologism), argued that“the right of persons progressively to choose how they shall live” is the most fundamental.45 Nonetheless, it
must be reminded that human rights are needed precisely because human “freedom”, “play of identities anddifferences” and “becoming” cannot be romanticized and idealized as they are; because human freedom, play andbecoming always have possibilities of turning into “freedom of becoming and playing evil”, they must be guided
and constrained by the human rights principle.46
Another point to be reminded is about the inescapably contingent nature of the foundation of human rights.
No rationality can force humans to accept a compulsive foundation for any ethics,47 and the legitimacy of thehuman rights principle as the bottom-line constitutional meta-rule also must in the end depend on voluntarycommitments by human individuals based on consequentialist calculations. Moreover, to be effective as anormative consensus, the principle must not be only established by treaties and in the forms of institutions, but
most crucially, also must be practised and enforced through the years by most of the major actors so that theworld’s diverse actors can recognize its practicality.
Furthermore, it should be noted that even though the human rights principle is rational morality in thesense that it is justified by consequentialist calculations based on fallible but likely assumptions and aimed atachieving mutual advantages, it cannot expect to be anything more than a purely hypothetical, idealized “social
contract”. A contract must be voluntarily agreed and subscribed to by all parties involved and any forced
contract is illegitimate. But it is unlikely that every single human individual on earth voluntarily agrees to theideal and practice of human rights, and as a consequence the human rights principle as the global minimum
normative consensus in some instances must be imposed against the will of some people who have neversubscribed to it. One also must be aware of the historical facts that the human rights principle has its origin in
the modern West and was imposed to the world through the Western domination, although it certainly must be
the most benign legacy of the Western hegemony that has been stained with the bloods and tears of theconquered and exploited peoples of the world over.
Thus, even if the human rights principle is an ideal universal agreement from any reasonable ethical pointof view, there must be no mistake about the fact that it is not an actual “social contract” but only a rather
metaphorical one: both in its origin and in its current status, the human rights principle has neither been
voluntarily agreed nor subscribed to by all parties involved, and its universality and effectiveness as anormative consensus and constitutional meta-rule did and still does rely, at least partly (though it must be
hoped as little as possible; surely, the imposition by force alone will not be able to sustain any rule and thus agenuine concord and a long-term construction of viable environment are also crucial), on the imposition by somepowerful and enlightened leadership that is increasingly in need of becoming more multilateral.

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A stubborn obstacle that can stand on the way against the human rights principle becoming a global
normative consensus is a conflict of interests between the developing and developed worlds concerning thisprinciple, as manifested by the difference between two UN covenants on human rights.48 I propose to solve thisstalemate through a reconciliation of two versions of “liberalism”.49 While liberalism is commonly seen as an
advocacy of freedom, I suggest to reinterpret it instead as a defence of human rights: a classical type ofliberalism50 should be seen as an approach with its focus on political aspects of human rights to achieve freedom
from the abuses of political power and a more modern version51 as characterized by its concern with economic
human rights to be free from the abuses of economic power. In the world at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, one human being every 3.6 seconds on average is dying due to hunger, with another 1.2 billion people
living with less than a dollar a day,52 and dealing with the problem of global poverty must be a priority among
priorities from any human rights perspective. However, trying to improve the world’s human condition in termsof economic human rights at the expense of political human rights and even totally neglecting the latter canlead to totalitarianism and genocide as demonstrated by some socialist experiments of the last century.53 Whilethe cruelly unfair reality of current global capitalism cannot be condoned from a human rights perspective andthe rightfulness of the demands for a worldwide economic redistribution by the absolute numerical majority of
the world human population who are left out of the global market prosperity must be recognized, one must also
address the concerns of people in the developed world who are economically better-off but at the same time are
numerical minorities in global terms and thus seek to avoid the claims of global economic redistribution
metamorphosing into vengefully excessive demands and persecution against their political freedom and socialand cultural non-conformism. Thus, in my view, combining two opposing liberal traditions can contribute to
striking a balance between political and economic human rights and that will greatly increase the chance ofdiverse actors of both the developing and developed worlds agreeing to adopt the human rights principle as
their shared normative bottom-line.
The cosmopolitan human rights principle that requires at least some degree of worldwide economic
redistribution cannot be a simple apologia for negative freedoms within the current status quo, but it does notpropose any “positive freedom” as an ethical requirement. The principle of human rights is supposed to be aconstitutional meta-rule about the bottom-line freedom for the human survival and dignity that is the condition
and basis for all the other freedoms and must be focused first on securing the lives of individuals who make up
the humanity from the most undue forms of death caused by poverty and persecution, rather than on
enhancing humans’ capabilities for their “flourishing”; in this sense, since there is an order of priority among themost basic human needs and the human need of survival must be secured before all others, there must be a clear
ranking among human rights, with the rights concerning the human survival privileged above all else.54 Thus,
instead of Rawls’ “difference principle”,55 the first tenet of the human rights doctrine must be what can be called“survival principle”, according to which the security needs of those whose very survival is at risk must be
prioritized before all the other needs. While promoting political, economic, social and cultural rights for humanflourishing can also contribute to world peace and security by creating political, economic, social and cultural
conditions where the human conditions of survival are unlikely to be threatened in the first place, they can doso only if diverse world actors — who, by claiming those rights to self-fulfilment, seek to realize their diverse
political, economic, social and cultural forms of human flourishing — at least first recognize the supreme
importance of the right of human survival and abide by the survival principle as the common and paramountrule.
Accordingly, democracy must not be only balanced by the rule of law and the division of powers but clearly
subordinated to the human rights principle as normative bottom-line. By thinking as if democracy will
naturally solve all the problems of the world, one relies on an overly romantic and optimistic assumption about

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humans that they are good in nature and will produce a virtuous world if they are left to themselves, but one
can easily see that such assumption is wrong by taking a look at the history of the last century, the mosthorrifying example being the Nazis who came to power through democratic processes and then sent millions ofpeople to death camps. Democracy is likely to produce a benign regime only when people subscribe to and act
according to the human rights principle. What really matters here is that the violation of human rights (at least
the most vital ones but not the expansively conceptualized version) threatens the bottom-line of the humansurvival but the absence of democracy by itself does not. Thus, when democracy and human rights, especiallythe most vital ones concerning the human survival, come into conflict, the latter must be privileged over theformer.
Hence, it is a shared commitment to the most basic human rights concerning the human survival that must
be adopted before all the others as the global bottom-line normative consensus by diverse actors of the postunipolar world. Promoting freedom and democracy before those actors reach such a consensus and firmly
subscribe to it (at least enough many of the major actors so that recalcitrant or contravening actors can be
overwhelmed by force if necessary) can possibly lead the world into a bloody quagmire of hatred, violence andchaos. The ideal of universal human rights must be applicable regardless of time and world political situations,but it certainly is more relevant now than ever.

Concluding thoughts for a further research
Post-deconstructive philosophy sketched above must engage more comprehensively with major historicaland contemporary views in philosophy and political theory. Since the cosmopolitan defence of human rights
advocated here demands immediate global aids for the poorest of the world and permanent preparations forhumanitarian interventions against persecutions, those tasks must be also studied in detail. Regarding
International Relations, neomedievalism must contain rich potentials for an inter-disciplinary research.
Relations between the post-deconstructive ethics and the post-unipolar world must be fully elaborated.
(written in summer 2006, revised in autumn and winter 2006-2007)

Notes
１

National Intelligence Council (2004), “Executive Summary” and “New Challenges to Governance”.

２

Rice (2002) and (2004) (Dr Rice was US National Security Adviser at the time of these speeches).

３

Bin Laden (2002).

４

For a discussion of the concept of polarity, see Waltz (1979) and Buzan (2004).

５

Huntington (1999).

６

Nye (1993/2005), Ch. 9.

７Bull (1977/2002), pp. 254-266, Strange (1996) and (1997), Kobrin (1999). See also Tanaka (1996). James Rosenau similarly discussed

about “post-internationalism”. Rosenau (1990). See also Ferguson and Mansbach (2004).
８

Carr (1939/1946), pp. 10, 93-94, 100, 222-223, 235-236.

９

Wight (1991).

10

Wendt (1999), p. 1 and p. 90.

11

Milbank (2003). George Kennan, one of the mythical personalities of International Relations, expressed a more sober view about(at least some aspects of) the American “soft power”. Kennan (1999).

12

Krasner (1999), p. 72.

13 Keohane and Nye (1977/2001), Keohane (1984), Buzan (1993).
14 Hollis (1994/2002), p. 195.
15

Thomas Hobbes famously characterized state as “an artificial man”. Hobbes (1651/1998), p. 7.

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Core Ethics Vol. 3（2007）
16

Foucault (1966/1970), Derrida (1967/1976) and (1991).

17“Letter to a Japanese Friend” in Derrida (1991) (emphases by Derrida).

18

Derrida (1967/1976), p. 162.

19

Jean-Luc Nancy, “Teiki,” trans. by Takashi Minatomichi in Nancy (1989/1996), p. 11 (emphases by Nancy).

20

Descartes (1988), Kant (1785/2002). Among modern Western philosophers, David Hume was an exceptional proto-deconstructivist
figure who saw the human subject as “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. Hume (1739/2000): Book I, Pt. 4,
Sect. 6.
“Positivism” was originally defined by Auguste Comte, one of the creators of the concept who called it “positive philosophy”, as a

22stage of human progress that renounces essentialism of two precedent stages (theological and metaphysical) and that instead
accepts that all knowledge, obtained through combinations of reason and observation, is relative rather than absolute. Comte (18301842/1974), Book I, Ch. 1 and Book VI, Ch. XIII. Bryant (1985) provides a historical overview of positivist developments in France,
Germany/Austria and America.
23

Hume (1772/1999), Section 4, Pt 2. See also Ibid. Section 12.

24

Popper (1934/1972) and (1963/1972). Post-deconstructive epistemology in a sense means a return to Hume but also even moreanteriorly to Hobbes. Hobbes (1640/1994), Ch. IV. Hobbes’ passage also presages Hume’s argument about causation.

25

Churchland (1984/1988), (1989) and Churchland (2002).

26

Cf. Wendt (1999).

27

Churchland (1989), Ch. 7.

28

Cf. Hollis and Smith (1990), Hollis (1994/2002), Booth (2005). For Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the major proponents of hermeneutic
philosophy, the foundation of human knowledge can only be in “inner experience”: “ only in the facts of consciousness given in innerexperience do we possess reality as it is. The analysis of these facts is the central task of the human sciences ... knowledge of theprinciples of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.” Dilthey(1883/1989), p. 50. Each human being constitutes “a realm within a realm” in nature by virtue of his/her possession within selfconsciousness of “a sovereignty of the will, a responsibility for actions, a capacity for subjecting everything to thought and forresisting, from within the stronghold of his personal freedom, any and every encroachment” (Ibid., p. 58): “I only appear [emphasis
by Dilthey] to live among things that are independent of my consciousness ... My consciousness is the locus which encompasses thisseemingly immeasurable external world; it is the stuff from which the objects that press on one another in that world are woven.”
Dilthey (ca. 1880-1890/1989), p. 245. For Hans-Georg Gadamer, hermeneutic understanding is a dialogic experience of historicity andlinguisticity and “a genuine encounter ... with something that asserts itself as truth.” Gadamer (1960/1989), Pt. II, Ch. II, Section 3(B) and Pt. III, Section 3 (C).See also Ricoeur (1990/1992) and (2004).

29

Quine (1964), p. 44.

30

Smith (1996). Cf. Sokal and Bricmont (1997/1998). Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse “postmodernism” — an intellectual

fashion that is “characterized by the more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist traditions of the Enlightenment” and that
relies on unrestrained epistemic relativism while using obscurantism as its cover — especially for debilitating the “left” andpolitically conscientious criticisms in general.
This paragraph was a part of my original essey written in April, 2003. Steve Smith and John Baylis have been insisting on using

31

the term “world politics” instead of “international relations” or “international politics”. Smith and Baylis (1997/2005), pp. 2-3.
John Burton already proposed in the early 1970s a deeper analytical and conceptual study of “world society” that would replace
the discipline of “International Relations” concerned with surface phenomena. Burton (1972).
I recommend the term “world relations” for two reasons: (1) it is not only politics but also economy, society and culture that areconsequential in the world; (2) the term “world society” places a too heavy emphasis on intra-human interactions at the expense of
all the other aspects of the world’s relations.
33

Ibid., II, esp. pp. 38-44. See also pp. 55-57 and Derrida (1967/1976).

34

Some of Derrida’s remarks about this point seem rather inconsistent. Derrida (1992), pp. 14-15, p. 25.

35

Mackie (1977), Ch. 5.

36

Ibid., Ch. 3.

37

Derrida (1992), p. 28. See also pp. 61-63 and note 6 in pp. 63-66.

38

Derrida (1996), p. 82.

39

Derrida (1992), p. 28 (emphasis by Derrida). See also Derrida (1967/1976), esp. Pt. 2, Ch. 1. Derrida also mentions that humanism,36

IkedaInternational Relations After Unipolarity and Deconstruction

even though it is devoid of philosophical foundations, remains the only bulwark against some ideologies that justify persecution andwere glorified by Friedrich Nietzsche. Derrida (1987/1989), p. 56; cf. Nietzsche (1885-1888/2003), Notebooks 37[8], 9[153], 14[5].
40Freeman (2002), p. 60.

41

Although there is no such thing as “free” will in any strict sense, the imposition of the concept of individual “responsibility” byhumans upon themselves — in a fair manner by taking into account different circumstances of individuals as much as possible —should be considered as such physiological conditioning and control that allow humans to live together. Churchland (2002), pp. 234236.
John Gray also makes his argument for human rights in Hobbesian terms: he defends them as modus vivendi which frames and42

constrains the conditions of pluralistic coexistence and protects humans from the worst universal evils that deprive their most basic
needs as biological beings. Gray (2000), pp. 66-67 and Ch. 4.
Hutchings (1999), Ch. 5-6.

43

44 Booth (1999), p. 46.
Mackie (1978/1984), pp. 175-176. These assertive views about human contingency, choice and becoming seem reminiscent of the45

existentialist humanist ethics of Jean-Paul Sartre who argued that there is “a human universality of condition ... all the limitations
which a priori define [hu]man’s fundamental situation in the universe ... every human purpose presents itself as an attempt either
to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else to deny or to accommodate oneself to them. Consequently every purpose, is
not something given; it is being perpetually made. I make this universality in choosing myself.” Sartre (2001), p. 39-40.
Thus, I agree totally with Booth in his criticism of postmodern and communitarian relativists: “Celebrating anxiety, insecurity

46

and fear, from the comfort of Western academe, on behalf of those anxious about being beaten up or worse, insecure about having
any cash to feed their children, or fearing their total dependence on the next rainfall, strikes me as deeply patronizing, immoral andunthinking.” Booth (1999), p. 58.
47

Warnock (1971), Ch. 9.

48

United Nations (1966a) and (1966b).

49

Gray (1986/1995) and Kelly (2005) provide overviews of the concept from opposing perspectives.

50

Gray (2000), Berlin (2002).

51

Rawls (1971/1999), (2001).

52

United Nations (2003), p. 3.

53

Jackson (1989) provides an analysis of the case of Khmer Rouge.

54 Cf. Nussbaum (2006).
55

Rawls (1971/1999), (2001).

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IkedaInternational Relations After Unipolarity and Deconstruction

International Relations After Unipolarity and Deconstruction

Ikeda, Hiroaki
Abstract:
In this brief article, I first point out the vital importance of ethical and political values in world politics at the
beginning of the twenty-first century and a need for at least a minimum degree of global normative consensus.
But I also argue that, since deconstruction has put into doubt the meaning of "human" that is supposed to be
the very agent of values and norms, IR (International Relations) researches about those values and thepossibility of a global minimum normative consensus cannot confine themselves within the discipline but must
face this deconstructive challenge by expanding into and integrating with philosophy. I draw an initial sketchof a post-deconstructive IR theory and a cosmopolitan defence of human rights for both developing anddeveloped worlds as the global minimum normative consensus.

Key words : International Relations，unipolarity，deconstruction，human rights

41