Queer/Trans K’s

Impacts

Diplomacy

The aff redeploys the rhetoric of the West as a savior to the ‘underdeveloped’ nations – that causes necropolitical violence and makes diplomatic engagement unattainable

Weber 16 – Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex [Cynthia Weber, 2016, Queer International Relations Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge, pgs 49-52, Oxford University Press] AMarb

The figure of the ‘underdeveloped’ is a relatively recent arrival to international relation theory and practice. The ‘underdeveloped’ was incited in post–World War II popular and institutional discourse as a potentially threatening figure emerging out of crumbling Western colonial empires. From a Western perspective, the ‘underdeveloped’ could threaten the ‘West’ if he were to denounce his ties to his former colonizers and align himself instead with the newly emerging Soviet bloc.2 This thinking placed the ‘underdeveloped’ at the crossroads of a choice between global capitalism and global communism, which—if made incorrectly—could imperil Western international order and throw international politics into dangerous anarchy. To woo the ‘underdeveloped’ away from communism was to maintain him within the Western capitalist bloc; the ‘underdeveloped’ was stabilized in international relation theory and practice as a specific problem that the Western bloc of sovereign states urgently had to address. This was done by figuring the ‘underdeveloped’ as socially, psychologically, economically, and politically primitive through modernization and development theory, ‘the latest manifestation of a Great Dichotomy between more primitive and more advanced societies’ (Huntington 1971, 285). Borrowing primarily from the structural-functionalist evolutionary sociology ofTalcott Parsons (1966) and the stages of growth evolutionary economic analysis of Walt Rostow (1960), comparative and international relation theorists created systems theories (Easton 1957; 1967) and development theories (Almond and Powell 1966) that stabilized the ‘underdeveloped’ as a primitive ignorant species-life whose political socialization and political development required Western guidance. This guidance invariably recommended implanting the ‘underdeveloped’ with a desire for the right kind of development and then placing him on a civilizing course from decadence to decency that mapped exactly to a political and economic progression from irrational, local tribalism toward modern Western capitalism and (usually) political liberalism (exceptionally, see Huntington 1969). In this way, ‘The bridge across the Great Dichotomy between modern and traditional societies [became] the Grand Process of Modernization’ (Huntington 1971, 288). At the same time, the modernization and development process identified the ‘undevelopable’ as those who would not or could not achieve Western-style development and who were accordingly cast as pure threats to Western global security. By adapting the Great Dichotomy to international political theorizing, comparative and international relation theorists stabilized all those understandings found in the Great Dichotomy and refined them for political analysis and public policy. Their ‘sovereign man’ and his opposite were precisely those of the Great Dichotomy—civilized, rational, modern, often imperial, presumptively Christian and always ‘developed man’ in his singular, ahistorical abstraction opposed to potentially dangerous, plural, uncivilized (or uncivilizable), irrational, traditional ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘undevelopable man’ mired in (while often excluded from modern) history. These theorists organized these figures into an order-versus-anarchy dichotomy that hierarchized ‘developed’ over ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘undevelopable’ populations and territories and designated ‘developed’ populations and states as a form of Western sovereign man who should be aspired to by ‘underdeveloped’ postcolonial populations as the foundation of their newly emerging sovereign nation-states. They located these figures within the linear, progressive logic of modernization, albeit at different moments (the beginning of the modernization process for the ‘underdeveloped’; not a part of the modernization process for the ‘undevelopable’) and in different geographic locations (the ‘non-West’ or the ‘South’ vs. the ‘West’ or the ‘North’). And they understood the process of modernization as a mechanism for implanting a desire for capitalist development in ‘underdeveloped’ populations and newly emerging sovereign nation-states, as a way to solve the Western bloc’s problem of the ‘underdeveloped’ as a global security issue. Finally, the ‘underdeveloped’ and the ‘undevelopable’ were regimented in a diverse array of foreign policies. US foreign policies offer some examples. President Harry Truman’s policies, which encouraged modernization as a function of nation building as a way of containing communism while avoiding direct wars (Merrill 2006), and President Kennedy’s establishment of the Peace Corps (Almond 1970a, 23) are but two illustrations. Such policies were often less focused on having the ‘underdeveloped’ much less the ‘undevelopable’ achieve the end goal of development than they were with maintaining the ‘underdeveloped’ and the ‘undevelopable’ in systems of biopolitical surveillance, administration, management, and constant correction and securitization, first in support of and supported by a globalized liberalism and later by a globalized neoliberalism (Doty 1996;Duffield 2007). For the ‘undevelopable’, the biopolitical management of life gave way to the necropolitical management of death (Mbembe 2003), since the ‘undevelopable’ not only could not be assimilated through the development process, but constituted a pure threat to the development process itself. Sometimes this occurred directly through violent wars (in Korea and Vietnam, for example); other times it occurred through the ‘defensive’ containment of dangerous difference. For example, before he became secretary of state, Henry Kissinger claimed, ‘We must construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity’ (1966, 529). This claim is rooted in Kissinger’s observation that ‘the instability of the contemporary world order may … have at its core a philosophical schism’ between the ‘West’ and the ‘new countries’, which ‘have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer’ (1966, 528), making Western-style development and its accompanying domestic political structures and international diplomacy unattainable (also see discussion in Said 1978, 46–47). As secretary of state, Kissinger acted on this claim to oppose ‘revolutionary states’ and their ‘prophetic’ leaders in Vietnam (1966). Through each of these sometimes very different foreign policies, modernization became a securitizing system of management and rule to be imposed by the ‘developed’ on the ‘underdeveloped’ and the ‘undevelopable’ to tame or to destroy their dangerous anarchy that—if left unmonitored, unmanaged, and unmodernized—threated Western capitalist states and Western civilizational order itself (Doty 1996).