Culture, Identity and International

Relations
RAJEN HARSHE

This article explores the interrelationship between culture, identity and international
relations. After critiquing some significant writings on this theme in the post-cold war
context, it analyses liberal and Marxian modes of analysing hegemony in contemporary
international relations. It sheds light on the impact of macro-social identities such as race
and the nation state in shaping the landscapes of international relations. The area of culture
and international relations still appears nascent in scholarly writings. This critical gap in the
literature can be eventually overcome if scholars of international relations studies creatively
interact with scholars from other social sciences where more sustained and systematic efforts
have already been made to understand culture and the role of social identities.

International relations are primarily studied and interpreted with reference to politico-
diplomatic, economic and commercial as also security-oriented realities that consistently
shape them. Plausibly, the treaties and agreements that states sign, bilaterally as well as
multilaterally, the networks of trade and commerce that they weave through the private and
public sectors among themselves, and the overall strategic goals they carve out, render
obvious tools to pursue epistemic constructs under the umbrella of the diverse schools of
thought prevalent in international relations studies (IRS).However, factors involving culture
that inevitably shape international relations have yet to find their due space within the body
of scholarly writings in IRS. Cultural factors, invariably, have had their impact in evolving
the trajectories of international relations [Mazarr 1996]. Such an impact appears obvious
while the relationships between macrosocial identities formed around nation, race and ethnic
groups are examined. Although cultural streams under different circumstances are vibrant in
influencing the nature of social identities, the very
emotive impetus that stimulates their formation is unquantifiable. And yet, cultural traditions
involving identities, at times even multiple identities, appear to have dominated and shaped
the ethos of the major world civilisations across the centuries.
As we shall note subsequently, the popular as well as scholarly writings in the IRS, especially
in its post-cold war phase, concerning culture and international relations have begun to
acquire a fresh space of debate in the IRS. In view of this, I would venture to reflect on the
theme of culture, identity and international relations. To begin with, I will try and untangle
the intertwined association between culture, civilisations and international relations.
Subsequently, I will critique some of the dominant writings in the post-cold war world
dealing with culture and international relations and proceed to reflect on the liberal and
Marxian ways of analysing hegemony in the current context of international relations.
Subsequently, I shall proceed to explore the impact of social identities formed on the basis of
race and the nation to further underscore the interrelationship between culture, identity and
international relations.

Culture, Civilisations and East-West Encounters

Culture as an aspect or cultural theories, in general, seldom assumed prominence in analysing

and interpreting international relations because the term culture itself has escaped precise
definitional categories. More often culture is a product of man-made parts of the environment
that subsumes an ensemble of knowledge systems, beliefs, traditions, languages, arts,
literatures coalescing into a collective world view. More often, terms such as civilisation and
culture are also deployed interchangeably [Majie 2002]. However, civilisation subsumes
cultures though all cultural traditions may not necessarily lead to the formation of a
civilisation. The civilisations in the past came into being around rivers, seas and mountains.
For instance, civilisations have flourished in the ancient period around rivers like the Nile,
Ganges, and Yellow, regions along the Aegean Sea and Mesopotamian civilisation in west
Asia registered their conspicuous presence around the sea while a resilient civilisation of
Tibet grew around the mountain ranges of the Himalayas. Actually, civilisations in Asia such
as that of India and China have had long traditions due to the continuity in sustaining
intellectual, spiritual, philosophical, cultural and artistic traditions.
The processes of the formation of civilisations underwent a revolutionary transformation with
the onset of industrialisation in the west. Modern industrial civilisations of the west and their
continuous encounters with the oriental world in the context of colonialism and imperialism
nurtured an asymmetrical relationship of interdependence between the western world and
countries from the orient. For instance, the trends unleashed by modernity such as
Enlightenment rationality, cultivation of scientific temper and promotion of industrial
civilisations touched the oriental world. Most of the countries, ever since, have grappled to
maintain their own balance between traditions or indigenous ways of organising societies
while adapting themselves to the phenomena of modernisation. Countries including China,
Japan, Iran or India have struggled to absorb western modes of thinking and live with their
age-old civilisations.
Indeed, the core of industrial civilisation, like any other civilisation, has been shaped by a
distinctly discernible cultural and value orientation. On the one hand, apart from building a
public space for freedom and democracy, industrial civilisations of the west that have rested
essentially on materialism also generated scientific and well-structured knowledge systems
that laid claims to universality. And on the other hand, such knowledge systems have come
under severe scrutiny from the body of literature that has proliferated in the form of post-
structural and post-colonial writings. In view of this, several questions beg answers. Can so-
called modernity then be perceived and adapted in multiple ways and forms? Is the process of
knowledge building time and culture specific? These fundamental epistemic questions that
stem from such encounters will continue to beg for more satisfactory answers in the times
ahead. However, it needs to be underscored that east-west encounters have had their indelible
impact on human history.
One extraordinarily visible global impact of the east-west encounters has been the
organisation of people under nation states. The Westphalia Treaty that ushered in the nation
state as a form of social organisation in 1648 has by now spread across the globe. In addition
to the developed industrialised countries of the west, post-colonial states in the east have also
consciously promoted the state and nation building processes. As a result, most of the
transactions in international relations are conducted through the agency of sovereign nation
states. Obviously, practically all international as also regional organisations, in effect, operate
through sovereign nation states. Thus, if international relations are an ocean, sovereign nation
states are the vessels that steer the course. Moreover, several complex patterns of the
relationships between states are governed by the actual as well as potential power that states
possess, in a given time and place, when the relations are set on the rails. Although nation
states operate on the basis of their juridical power, cultural factors invisibly operate in the
policymaking processes of all countries.
Cultural Factors in the Cold War

In fact, culture of any epoch does set the tone of international relations. For instance, in the
context of the cold war, the ideological rivalries between the socialist camp, led by the former
Soviet Union, and the capitalist camp, led by the US, had almost set in motion a cultural
paradigm of the so-called bipolar world that governed international relations. The rival
ideologies of capitalism and socialism, respectively, aimed at organising their economic,
political and social organisations on diametrically opposite footings. While the socialist camp
valued the notion of equality and an exploitation-free society, the capitalist camp valued
liberty and free enterprise. Thus the terms deployed by the capitalist countries of the west and
socialist countries of the east to bolster their credentials and undermine the credibility of their
adversaries were pregnant with cultural meanings.
During the context of the cold war there was a tendency among both the ideological camps to
visualise international relations and hence world politics through simplistic binary opposites.
The rival camps accused each other of being anti-democratic, imperialist, and hegemonic on
the basis of socio-cultural values. Evidently, the political culture that enveloped the cold war
politics forced all countries in the world to respond to the ideological terms of reference that
had dominated the cold war. The group of non-aligned countries through mediation between
ideologically adverse camps mitigated the intensity of the then ideological rivalry. In spite of
the implicit clashes of cultures and civilisations that were wedded to two opposite ideological
standpoints, the politics of the cold war was inevitably interpreted in conventional ways of
understanding and analysing power. This meant measuring the power of any country on the
basis of tangible industrial, financial, military, geopolitical and several other resources related
assets. That the ideological dimension of the cold war had cultural underpinnings escaped
sufficient scholarly attention. However, the dimension of culture is finding some space in
scholarly studies after the end of the cold war.
Ascent of Capitalism in the Post-Cold War World

The end of the cold war has brought an end to the acute ideological rivalries between the two
contesting camps. At least for the time being, capitalism as a mode of production and a world
system does not have a formidable developmental alternative [Harshe 2004]. All the
countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CAS) that emerged after the
disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991, have chosen to develop themselves on
capitalist lines. Also, even if China defines its development strategy as market socialism it
has been broadly evolving a variant of capitalism in its development model. Certain features
of capitalist forms of development such as private/corporate ownership of the means of
production, the growth of wage labour, socialisation of the production process accompanied
by private appropriation of profits and liberalisation in trade, investments and finance have
become common to most countries. Hence, capitalism, with its regional and national
variations, is setting the cultural pace of international relations by navigating them.
Capitalism also is an agent of globalisation or it could as well be argued that the ongoing
phase of globalisation is yet another phase in the history of the development of world
capitalism. To put it simply, the world is getting even greater exposure to a global
consumerist culture with the advent of market civilisation under capitalism. Moreover,
culture has the capacity to design social and economic structures and shape attitudes and
world views. With the end of the cold war, it is also in the domain of culture that the
triangular relationship between the state, market and civil society is being constantly shaped.
Cultural Dimensions of International Relations
In fact, the realm of culture has acquired unprecedented importance in interpreting the nature
of international relations in scholarly as well as popular writings. Indeed, scholars of
eminence such as Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P Huntington have blazed a new trail in IRS
by drawing portraits of the possible trajectories of international relations by analysing the
impact of cultural aspects. Both the authors have an uncanny capacity to carry the essence of
their writings at the popular level. A few pertinent comments on their writings, at this stage,
are in order.
Fukuyama’s writings propounded his famous thesis of the end of history when the former
Soviet Union was undergoing existential strains and eventually disintegrated in 1991
[Fukuyama 1989, 1992]. Fukuyama’s central argument was that there was no viable
alternative to liberal democracy and capitalism. Further, a substantial number of western
countries are liberal democracies and the rest of the world, with variations, would be obliged
to follow the same path in the years ahead. To put it simply, the ideological clashes that
divided the world into two camps, in the cold war phase, had lost their erstwhile significance.
This verdict on the future course of the development of mankind appeared attractive in the
immediate aftermath of the so-called ascendancy of the west and the disastrous debacle of the
socialist camp as well as ideology.
In contrast to Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington came out initially with much more catchy
arguments built around the clash of civilisations in Foreign Affairs in 1993 [Huntington
1993]. Huntington further elaborated and developed his argument on the clash civilisations in
the form of a controversial book [Huntington 1996]. In his view, it is not ideological conflict
but the conflict among diverse civilisations that will shape the destiny of mankind. He
perceived that the dominating source of conflict was going to be cultural. While building a
rather over simplistic but powerful argument Huntington endeavoured to demonstrate how
the conflict dominated by cultural/ civilisational clashes could effortlessly slide into the
political space vacated by the politics of the cold war. He was particularly concerned about
the inevitable clash between the Islamic and western/Christian civilisations.
In this context, a few arguments in Edward Said’s critique of Huntington deserve critical
attention [Said 2003]. Said argued that with the end of the cold war, the defence industry
executives in the US and the Pentagon were in search of a new enemy to pursue their
vocation and the countries that were using political Islam to attack US imperialism became
natural candidates in this search. Indeed, the lack of democratic culture and systems, coupled
with gross violation of human rights in these countries facilitated the distinction between the
so-called “us and “them”. Moreover, Said asserted that the sources of Huntington are
journalistic and he has interpreted history with reckless distortions built round lazy
generalisations [Said 2003:71]. In fact, the civilisations that spread across several parts of the
world absorbing within their mould multiple cultures, languages and states are seldom static.
They are neither monolithic nor homogenous. Islamic civilisation is no exception to this rule.
Having got used to the idea of communicating with ease with a wider and nonprofessional
readership, Huntington came out with another popular work, namely, Who Are We?
[Huntington 2004], that essentially deals with diverse streams of migration and the winds of
change they brought about in the process of constituting America as a nation. The book is
insightful in several ways. However, one insight about the transforming notion of America as
a nation deserves critical attention. Huntington argues that technological revolution of the
19th century promoted nationalisation of the American elite while the rise of transnationalism
of the late 20th century is promoting the process of denationalisation of the American elite.
To put it simply, the American elite is in tune with the era of globalisation while the other
sections of the population have to hark back to nationalism to make their lives meaningful
and materially comfortable. Thus even the most powerful state such as the US at the moment
is torn between the forces of transnationalisation and nationalism [Huntington: 265]
Liberal and Marxian Ways of Analysing Hegemony

Apart from these dominant, controversial and widely read writings of Fukuyama and
Huntington, the notions of culture and power have been quite effectively interconnected in
the scholarly writings of the liberals as well as Marxists of the Gramscian persuasion. Among
the liberal scholars, Joseph Nye has tried to evolve the concept of soft power in the global
information age [Nye 2004] The central elements that go into the makings of soft power are
long drawn out historical developments of a country leading to evolution of a particular mode
of thinking backed by distinct cultural traditions, scientific and technological progress, and
adaptability to changing circumstances. In this context, a democratic culture, scientific
progress and political and social institutions in the US have built the soft power of the US,
which has an enormous attracting and imitating force. Diverse information communication
technologies (ICT) that are stimulating the phase of globalisation in an information age do
contribute substantially in the making of soft power. Soft power is not tangible but it certainly
is not a mirage. It is dynamic, pervasive and interdependent on hard power [Majie 2002].
Obviously, while building soft power no country can ignore hard power.
Unlike the liberal school, scholars including Robert Cox (1993), Stephen Gill (1991) and
Henk Overbeek (1993) have ventured to analyse the rise of US power by deploying the
concept of hegemony as enunciated by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist. Before dealing
with their analysis of US power it would be essential to explain, briefly, the Gramscian
notion of hegemony. In effect, Gramsci had used the notion of hegemony as an instrument to
compare and understand state-civil society ties in different countries including western liberal
democracies and czarist Russia. Gramsci underscored the consensual nature of the rapport
between states and civil societies that strengthened liberal democracies in the west. However,
Russia, under the czarist regimes, was a typical example of a country where the state
functioned with brute force without seeking any consent. In a word, hegemony inevitably
involves complex mechanisms that incorporate a potent blend of consent and coercion. When
such a blend is harmonious, hegemony operates smoothly. When the ruling classes merely
rely on coercion they, perhaps, establish a hegemonic order and not hegemony. Hegemony as
a notion evolves through a continuous reciprocity of interactions between the dominant and
the dominated states in international relations.
Inspired by Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony, the school of Italian Marxism widened
the scope of hegemony by applying it to the context of international relations. Basing his
analysis on certain stable and durable elements of the US power, Gill (1991) shed a different
light on the way US hegemony operated in the early 1990s. According to him, the structural
ingredients of American power such as security related complexes, technology, finance and
knowledge producing apparatuses have been sound and durable, adding to US strength in
world politics and endowing it to conceive a hegemonic role for itself. The US intervention to
topple the Taliban led regime in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001 and its invasion of
Iraq in 2003 merely display outward symptoms of hegemonic goals. Any worthwhile study of
the operational part of US hegemony would appear incomplete without reference to the
gradual rise of neoliberalism and the neoconservative groups that have advised US foreign
policy establishments, especially under the Republican regimes.
Neoconservatives: Genesis and Growth
With Reagan’s advent to power in the 1980s the neoliberal ideas related to governance and
economy acquired pre-eminence in the US polity. To put it simply, neoliberalism rested on
rolling back the role of the state from the public sphere by promoting market forces. Reagan
rose to power in the aftermath of the US defeat in Vietnam as well as the events such as
ouster of US allies like the Shah of Iran and the military intervention of the former Soviet
Union in Afghanistan, in the 1970s. These events started the “new cold war” and Reagan
conceived the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and chose to oppose it by turning the world
bipolar. In the process, the neoliberals began cutting welfare expenditure and enhanced the
share of the budget going to military and security related areas. Thus, on one hand, the US
began to reassert its hegemony by regrouping its European allies and Japan, and on the other,
it began to cultivate allies in the third world. Ostensibly, the US has formally promoted
democratic regimes that are wedded to capitalism. However, expedient and strategic
considerations also governed the choices of allies when the US began to rally countries from
the third world in its bid to contain the Soviet Union. Hence such networks of allies involved
diverse kinds of regimes, including dictatorial ones such as those as represented by Pinochet
in Chile, Mobutu in Zaire, Ziaul Haq in Pakistan as well as racist regimes in apartheid South
Africa and Zionist Israel.
It would be worthwhile to reflect briefly on the antecedents of the neoconservatives that have
been enjoying a powerful presence in the current US administration. Ironically, most of the
prominent neoconservatives of today came as migrants to the US and studied in the City
University of New York. Most of them were anti-Stalinist and followers of Trotsky [Frachon
and Vernet 2004]. They had a pathological dislike for totalitarian regimes. As students and
later as professionals they perceived and visualised the US role as the champion and promoter
of democracies across the world. For them, fighting any form of totalitarian domination and
promoting democratic regimes that respect human rights ought to become a major mission of
US domestic and foreign policy.
In their university life in New York, a number of them came under the intellectual influence
of the then towering social scientists like Leo Strauss although Strauss himself was not a
neoconservative [Frachon and Vernet 2004:64]. Due to the general intellectual ambience they
provided for the City University of New York, it came to be known as the Harvard of the
poor. Some of the prominent neoconservatives include Irving Kristol, William Kristol,
Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, James Woolsey, Patrick Monyhan, Richard Perle,
Richard Armitage, Douglas Feith, Allan Bloom, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney. In the
Bush administration the neoconservatives have been enjoying paramount importance. They
have been influential ideologues in shaping and controlling international regimes such as the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
(CTBT).
It could as well be argued that both the Democratic as well as Republican administrations
have projected US power quite conspicuously either by dominating the United Nations or
through military alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The
prominent role that the US played in the UN military intervention in Somalia and the NATO
intervention in Yugoslavia, in the 1990s, offer evidence of the same. The US administration,
in general, has opted to intervene in the internal affairs of different states through the socalled
“human rights diplomacy” [Majie 2002]. In its pursuit of promoting so-called democratic
norms of governance, the US has ventured to critique those regimes that are allegedly
violating human rights. The US led attack of NATO countries in Yugoslavia against the
Milosevic regime to stall ethnic cleansing in 1999 and the US invasion of Iraq against the
Saadam Hussein regime in 2003 fall in this category. What is more, the US has not spared
countries like China and India for their policies in Tibet and Kashmir, respectively. Keeping
this broad sketch of the role of culture and notions of organising hegemony at the backdrop, I
will now turn to the question of identity and international relations.
Identities and international Relations

At the outset, it can be observed that research related to identity has, indeed, flourished in
contemporary literature in sociology or psychology. However, scholars in IRS have yet not
drawn from the insights, concepts and theories pertaining to social identity from other social
sciences. This has been well demonstrated by Horowitz (2002) through a critical analysis of
most of the major research journals in the field during the past decade. Thus, studies
concerning social identities and their impact on international relations still appear to be a
barren field. Generally, social identities are built round sameness and continuity. Identities
get crystallised when the distinction between the “self” and “other” gets consciously
aggravated. Macro social identities invariably get socially constructed around religion,
ethnicity, language, region, race and nationality. To analyse the impact of identity in shaping
international relations I will briefly reflect on identities built around race and the nation state.
Race as International Identity

Racial identities have consistently influenced international relations since the onset of
imperialism due to the dominant and dependent ties they entailed among the white races of
the west and the rest of the world. Imperialism did cause injustice and promoted all forms of
racial inequalities. Practically all non-white races were victims of racial discrimination.
However, no other race was insulted like the black races. The black races were victims of the
institutionalised system of slavery. Since they were subjected to severe forms of injustice and
domination, blacks all over the world evolved a distinct psyche. In the African context, the
writings of Frantz Fanon, Leopold Sedar Senghor and George Padmore offer ample evidence
of this proposition. Fanon had already discussed how the colonial world constructs the
“white” and “black” races by building binary opposites through a Manichean world. The
Manichean world often rests on synonymy of the cause and effect. Thus, if one is uncivilised
then he/she has to be black and if someone is black that person has to be uncivilised. Such
rudimentary and simplistic constructs that define attributes of the ruling and ruled races
invariably lead to obvious as well as mute forms of violence. Violence built around racial
identity has been well explored by Fanon in his celebrated writings like The Wretched of the
Earth [Fanon 2001].
In contrast, Senghor reacted to imperioracist powers by unleashing the concept of negritude
and launching the negritude movement in the inter-war period. The notion of negritude was a
device to rebuild the pre-colonial identity of the blacks, on the one hand, and highlight the
qualities of the black races, on the other. The movement ventured to demonstrate that the
black races and people had a glorious past with flourishing civilisations.1 It also underscored
the spiritual and humane aspects of the black races as against the materialist and individualist
modes of existence of the industrialised western societies. Furthermore, George Padmore in
his famous work Pan-Africanism or Communism vehemently pleaded with all the black races
to promote pan-African movements because he suspected that the communist movement that
was supposed to be international was also dominated, primarily, by the white races [Padmore
1972].
In addition to the above set of writings, Kate Manzo’s (1992) insights on racial identity, built
through a Foucouldian perspective, offer a fairly imaginative interpretation of race as an
international identity and its impact on the diverse regions of the world. Manzo has
constructed the interrelationship between black and white races through the example of the
Republic of South Africa as it functioned under racism and the apartheid system (1948-94).
Manzo ventures to unveil the nature of global power relations. He treats different networks of
power as subjects whose struggles and even conflicts evolve around identities. The capacity
of aggravating the distinctions between the “self” and “other” in any form of identity politics
contributes to the strengthening and consolidation of identities. Thus, over the long-term
historical span of a 100 years, the racial identities of blacks and whites have been socially
constructed. The constitution of such identities has been characterised by their changing
meanings, which sprang up from changing social practices.
In the context of colonialism, whites were viewed as civilised Christians while blacks were
dubbed as barbaric. The two identities clashed profoundly within the context of the Republic
of South Africa under successive apartheid regimes. The white minority rule had
disenfranchised the entire black population that constituted an overwhelming majority in
South Africa. They had also cornered 87 per cent of the land, higher echelons of bureaucracy
and the military and maintained a continuous surveillance of the agitating black populations.
The apartheid system, with sanction from the Dutch Reformed Church, had produced
knowledge systems that underlined the genetic inferiority of the black races vis-a-vis the
whites. As the white minority found it hard to contain the emancipatory struggles, launched
through the movements like the African National Congress (ANC), of the black and other
deprived races, the state in South Africa became more repressive. It not merely enhanced
military expenditure but associated the military with the decision-making processes in
different bodies. The state also sought and obtained military support from western powers
like France, Germany, Italy and even the US [Harshe 1991]. As against this, anti-apartheid
agitations were being supported by the left and liberal groupings in the west, the former
Soviet Union and east European countries as well as wide range of third world countries.
Since the militarised state under the apartheid regime functioned without any form of consent
of the majority, it was inherently weak. In the realm of society, the networks of power shaped
by racial identities had permeated deep enough to build a viable agitation with proper
international support against the apartheid system. In 1994, the apartheid system was
formally replaced in South Africa by a non-racial rainbow coalition formed under the ANC.
However, the case study of apartheid South Africa incontestably demonstrated the
significance of race as an international identity and its role in shaping global power relations.
Like race, the nation state too has been shaping the contours of international relations in its
diverse phases.

Nuances in the Changing Identity of the Nation State

It is certainly not easy to come to grips with complex nuances that the term nation state
reflects in diverse parts of the world. In practice, it is easier to define and identify than the
state. The state involves legitimate or illegitimate physical force, a well defined territory with
a population residing within its bounds, sovereignty and government. The state is a juridical
concept and comes into existence when other states offer de jure recognition to it. However,
the nation is a psycho-cultural reality. Various combinations of ethnicnational and civic-
territorial elements are interwoven into the collective memory of the people to construct a
nation, socially. If the ethnic-national realities portray biographies of the nation, the
civicterritorial elements go into making the notions of citizenship. The notion of citizenship,
in its turn, allows for the categorising of populations into citizens, refugees, migrants,
immigrants or tourists within the defined borders of the state. In the history of nation states,
there have been times where the establishment of the state preceded the nation and, at times,
the nation too has preceded the establishment of the state. While several states in sub-Saharan
Africa exemplify the former, a number of west European states exemplify the latter.
Paradoxically, Pakistan and its evolution have posed a unique problem in the history of the
formation of nation states in the contemporary world. Leaders like Jinnah conceived it as a
separate nation of Muslims under the two-nation theory and hence the subcontinent was
divided and Pakistan came into being in 1947. This theory virtually cracked up with the birth
of Bangladesh in 1971. Currently, Pakistan is construed as a state in the process of building a
nation. If an attempt is made to go further into the set of complexities of the formation of
nation states, it could as well be argued that the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union had
functioned as multinational states. Indeed, even India may fall in this category.
If the notion of the nation state is analysed against the backdrop of the post-cold war
developments in Europe, several complexities could be perceived in the very being of the
nation state. While analysing such developments Pierre Hassner (1997), in one of his seminal
essays, had posed a question whether the nation state is obsolete or obstinate? Such questions
sprang up against two self-contradictory developments that are affecting the status of the
nation states within contemporary Europe.
On the one hand, transnational and nonterritorial forces related to trade, finance, migration
and terrorist/mafia activities that are operating under globalisation have been stimulating the
broadening and deepening of the processes of European integration through organisations
like the European Union (EU). The process of integration visualised by leaders like Monnet
and theorised by scholars such as Haas in the 1960s is well under way. It is also democratic
in terms of the domestic political systems of the member countries as well as in the decision-
making process of the EU as a regional organisation. In fact, it is the cosmopolitan character
of the EU that is inspiring transnational debates about the future of a common European
currency such as the euro as well as common European citizenship and defence and security
policy. The unprecedented developments in ICT, coupled with an attempt to integrate the
European elite through diverse forms of economic, financial, educational, technological and
cultural cooperation have certainly transformed the mindset of the young generation in EU
countries. At the same time, countries like France are still keen on guarding French
citizenship within the EU. Is western Europe then witnessing a tussle between the democrats,
who aspire to build a borderless Europe, and republicans who are protecting citizenship
within a single country as Hassner (1997) has pointed out? In a word, the developments in
western Europe offer evidence of the existential strain the nation state have been undergoing.
In contrast to the developments in western Europe, in eastern Europe ethno-national forces
are on the rise. The link that was being established during the phase of modernity between the
territory, state and nation is being reworked out in east Europe. Moreover, after the Treaty of
Westphalia of 1648, the countries of western Europe proceeded to initiate, consolidate and
justify the modern nation state. However, the nation state was not embraced and nurtured
with similar passions in eastern Europe. Most of the states and nationalities of these regions
were located on the tri-junction of three major empires: the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman
and the Russian/Soviet empire. Their territories were also absorbed by such empires which,
in their turn, provided them with common currency, security and political stability. Since the
early 1990s, however, developments including the break up of former Yugoslavia and the fall
of the Soviet Union, have unleashed forces of ethno-nationalism in the entire region that are
determined to carve out sovereign territorial space for their independent existence. If the
history of the formation of the nation state is sketched onto the landscapes of Europe, it
would reveal that different peoples and spaces are living in different time zones. Furthermore,
if any attempt is made to grapple with the formation of nation states in the so-called third
world, the interrelationship between the state and nation would surely display kaleidoscopic
complexities that keep defying acceptable definitions of the concept of the state as well as the
nation and, hence, the nation state itself.

Conclusion

It may not be easy to figure out the invisible impact of non-quantifiable cultural factors that,
in effect, affect and constantly shape the very landscapes of international relations. In certain
ways, cold war politics revolved around two forms of political culture, stimulated by two
diverse ideologies. Also, culture manifested in its pervasive sense can be a major cementing
force in the process of organising and building the hegemony of any powerful state such as
the US. Even though scholars in IRS have adopted a slightly complacent attitude towards
realities like the formation of social identities that essentially stem from a cultural
background, a beginning has already been made to assess the impact of social identities as
well as diverse cultural factors in shaping international relations. Since the area of culture and
international relations appears nascent in the scholarly writings of IRS, it will take some time
before scholars are able to place it in the overall scholarly literature within the discipline by
giving it a critical attention. Evidently, the analysis of identities built around race and the
nation state, in this paper, has merely illustrated a tip of the iceberg. Eventually, this critical
gap in the literature can be overcome if scholars of IRS creatively interact with scholars from
other social science disciplines, where more sustained and systematic efforts have already
been made to understand culture and the role of social identities.