TEHRAN – Professor Nicholas Onuf, a primary figure among constructivists in international relations, tells the Tehran Times that “No theory explains everything.”

Onuf says “Different issues and problems call for different theories; given the varieties of religious experience and complexities of international relations, we should hope for a variety of theories.”
Professor of the Florida International University, adds that “Some issues and problems are intractable in practice, even when we have formulated theories that plausibly explain what is going on.”
He adds that “I specifically distinguish between faith and ways of thinking.”
Following is the text of the interview:

Q: When did the religious issues has been a matter of great interest in Theorizing of International Relations?

A: To answer this question, it would help to distinguish the impact of institutionalized religion on the affairs of states from the challenge that faith—profound, inalterable belief—presents to modern social theory and therefore theorizing in International Relations as a field of study.  It would also help to distinguish international thought over several centuries from the field of International Relations, which came into being only after World War II.
As a theorist, I am not especially qualified to address the contentious issues that animate contemporary world politics, including issues that come to the fore when religion is integral to national or ethnic solidarity, contributes significantly to the definition of states’ interests, occupies an institutionalized place in the apparatus of state, or provides an ethical standard for public conduct.  As someone born in the great American melting pot with a (somewhat unconventional) religious background, a scholar with an Enlightenment sensibility, and a troubled beneficiary of modernity’s globalizatiom, I have opinions on most of these issues, but I would be hard pressed to provide an adequately theoretical justification for them. 
The large reason for this is the way scholars like me carve up the world of human experience—as philosophers say, at its joints.  Any such undertaking presupposes that the world consists of things.  Once we carve the world’s social relations into ostensibly autonomous things, they resist change:  society, culture, economy, religion, politics are the things that we study, and the study of these things become things in their own right.  Even if that world had no joints to start with, it ends of with the joints we have given it.  In my world, this process goes back to Aristotle and was codified by scholars in modern universities 150 years ago.

If I study the political relations of states, which was the first thing giving the field of International Relations its status as a thing, then I am not going to study those other things— society, culture, economy, religion—to which other scholars devote their attention.  At least not directly.  If I am persuaded that my thing gives too little attention to those things or indeed other things happening in the world, then I and like-minded scholar will go about making a new thing—for example, international political economy, or religion in international relations, or international environmental relations, or technology and international relations.  Only then will anyone begin to worry about the theoretical justification for any one of these new things.  
In my view, the formation of an autonomous domain of study devoted to the central place of religion in the relations of states is now well underway.  A number of scholars for whom I have great respect have turned their attention to this new, self-evidently important thing.  Of course, they are responding to what they see happening in the world—they see the ‘jointness’ of religion and politics in society, including international society, and so they also see that the old way of carving up the world effectively denies the importance of religion and politics as conjoined phenomena and thus a thing about which to theorize anew.  This latter undertaking is exceedingly challenging.  It will take time and much discussion, not least because of the many ‘varieties of religious experience’ (recall William James’ lectures under this title, delivered in 1901-2 and central to the formation of religion as a field of study in modern universities).   

Q: Some argue that if the theory of International Relations means a constitutive and critical theory, then bringing religion into International Relations is possible, but if the theory of International Relations is an explanatory-empirical theory, then theorizing religion in International Relations is not possible and, in fact, there is no theological positivist theory in International Relations. What is your opinion?

A: Exponents of conventional International Relations theory come in two varieties.  Those who are known as realists limit their studies to the political relations of states and define politics in a narrow sense; they work within a domain of inquiry they allege to have been carved out by Machiavelli and Hobbes, in which issues of security are paramount and conflict pervasive.  Many but not all realists are also convinced that within the field’s well-defined boundaries, theory is well-settled and the task at hand is empirical assessment of the way states actually relate to each other in the kinds of situations in which they are likely to find themselves.  These situations have typically been defined in geographical terms (again, through a process of carving things up), more recently further defined in technological terms, and most recently in ideological terms.  This last move by realists enables them to bring religion into the world as they see it.  

I have come to think that theorizing in the field of International Relations is unduly self-limiting, that the field itself is an artificial, historically contingent construct that has long since outlived its usefulness, and that the most appropriate frame of reference for the study of states and their relations is the unfolding of what we (in the modern world) call the modern world—a distinctive social experience originating in Europe five centuries ago and now affecting the entire globe.The second variety of conventional theorists in the field of International Relations are liberals.  They define politics in a wider sense than realists do, emphasizing well-being as an antidote to insecurity, draw on Locke, Kant and Mill for inspiration, and are less concerned with a single, powerful theory by which to limit their substantive concerns and investigative procedures.  They are less likely than realists to include all possible situations within a single frame of reference, and they are drawn to situate themselves at the conjunction of fields of study, such as international political economy, or in what they see as emergent ‘issue areas’ such as universal human rights.  Many of the scholars who have recently ‘discovered’ religion in international relations are liberals. 

Among unconventional theorists with constitutive and critical sensibilities, the situation is more complicated.  These scholars come in several widely divergent varieties, even if conventional theorists treat them as a whole and refuse to take them seriously.  Insofar as we can generalize, they tend to define politics broadly—so broadly as to suggest that everything social is political.  They tend to be normatively engaged and highly critical of the modern world as they see it to have become; Marx looms in the background.  They take philosophical premises seriously and draw on diverse, even irreconcilable intellectual resources—Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas and Bourdieu, among many others—to repudiate positivist social science and the way the social sciences have carved up the world.  They recognize that the range of religious experience throughout the world is itself an immanent critique of modernity’s premises, at least some of which reflect Christian attitudes about the way the world should be understood.   

In my own case, I have adopted a constitutive, critical stance, for which I garnered support, not just by selectively plundering social theory as it has developed in the last 150 years, but also by reaching back to antiquity and especially to Aristotle, for inspiration.  In doing so, I have come to think that theorizing in the field of International Relations is unduly self-limiting, that the field itself is an artificial, historically contingent construct that has long since outlived its usefulness, and that the most appropriate frame of reference for the study of states and their relations is the unfolding of what we (in the modern world) call the modern world—a distinctive social experience originating in Europe five centuries ago and now affecting the entire globe. 

I develop the last of these clams in my recent book called The Mightie Frame: Epochal Change and the Modern World.  In this book, I start where Michel Foucault did in his magnificent book, now fifty years old, called, in its English translation, The Order of Things, by asking, what is it possible to think?  Foucault held that shifting conditions of thought mark epochal change in the modern world, and I argue that the relation between conditions of possible thought and what I call conditions of rule constitute a ‘mightie frame’ (in the words of John Milton, a 17th century English poet) for modernity’s trajectory over several centuries. In my book, I specifically distinguish between faith and ways of thinking, and I devote myself only to the latter.  

On reflection, I might concede that this is a shortcoming of my book, not to mention Foucault’s book and most of the scholarly literature on the rise of the modern world.  If I were now to write a sequel or addendum to my book, I might ask:  What is it impossible not to think?  This question would enable me to formulate another, perhaps even mightier frame.  On the one hand, it would point to the necessary conditions of faith manifest in any society, including today’s international society of states.  On the other hand, it would link those conditions to the conditions of rule also operating in any given society.  

As I have already intimated, modernity’s might frame has been subject to massive, episodic changes in the way people think, and these epochal waves have had significant effects on conditions of rule (and the some extent, the other way around).  By contrast, the mighty frame linking faith and rule is subject to large, enduring differences in the way people have interpreted articles of faith.  Interpretive castes emerge, and so do procedures for dealing with deviants.  As rival interpretations consolidate, they show a strong tendency to reinforce rival centers of rule.

In today’s world, where an international society superintends and reproduces conditions of modern rule, these rival centers of authoritative interpretation dominate some states and divide others, prompt a good deal of posturing and some measure of violence, and provoke the contempt of states and peoples waving the banners of modernity.  The latter would be well-advised to remember the extent to which the same dynamics afflicted early modern societies and still operate not very far below the surface of these same societies.  

Q: Some scholars such as Michael Allen Gillespie in the book The Theological Origins of Modernity believe that modernity was not initially against religion, and in later years, as a result of social, cultural and political conditions, it has led to secularism. So based on this conception, religion is not conflict with modernity, so can it be said that religion is not conflict with the International Relations theory stemming from modernity?

A: Gillespie takes issue with what he calls ‘the conventional wisdom,’ ‘the self-congratulatory story,’ that modernity ‘is a secular realm in which man replaces God as the center of existence.’  This is indeed the impression most readers carry away from reading Foucault’s The Order of Things. Gillespie’s important book seeks to put religion back into the story.  In my opinion, however, scholars typically do acknowledge the importance of Christianity in the rise of the modern world.  They document the relentless effort to prevail over other faiths.  They emphasize recurring struggles over interpretation.  They consider the unplanned consequences of contested authority and the abuse of privilege.  Not least they show how rival centers for interpreting Christian faith effectively precipitated the emergence of a society of states.  The Thirty Years’ War, settled in Westphalia in 1648, is but one chapter in that story.

There is, however, another way to look at what makes the modern world so distinctive and perhaps so dynamic—one that brings faith back in the picture.  To the extent that modern thinkers separate knowledge (as broadly provisional) and beliefs (as deeply certain), they relegate the latter to tradition in their own world, or they assume that all other worlds are framed only and fully by tradition.  Although this is rarely said, tradition is modernity’s ‘other’:  to be celebrated on ritualized occasions, ignored, mocked, feared, stigmatized, or turned into kitsch and commercialized.  In short, faith nurtures tradition; modernity makes faith mildly embarrassing; we moderns are enjoined to keep faith private and tradition in check.  When we do, so we open our minds to new possibilities—new ways to think, new ways to make things and make them desirable, new ways to live, new and better ways to rule and be ruled.    

The flaw in this way of thinking is obvious.  What is celebrated as new soon becomes old news and then is either forgotten or turned into an ersatz tradition.  As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’  Nothing is certain. Resources are mobilized, dispensed, turned into trash.  No one seems to be in control, though some people are benefiting far more than others.  Anxiety reigns.  Lacking faith, all too reliant on machines, people are feckless in their personal relations.  No wonder they revert to the old ways, express discredited attitudes, look for something to believe in.  Religion for some, nostalgia for others.  Most of all, they seek a stable position in society such as tradition always offered—a status order denominated in the secular signs and symbols of modern life and indemnified by faith in a profane order somehow made sacred.  Their dignity assured, they do what they can.

Q: Some argue that the current International Relations theory cannot explain some of the current phenomena of international relations and we need a religious theory of International Relations, especially with regard to religious issues. What is your opinion? In general, is theorizing Religion in International Relations feasible?

A: As I have been saying, religion is not the issue.  At least it is not the most compelling issue if we make modern world, and not international relations, our frame of reference.  Then faith in its relation to rule is a more feasible way to theorize about the predicaments of our time.  Secular modernity does not scorn religion as such, but it scorns tradition, from which it can never escape.  Faith comes in many varieties and many of these are profane.  

Q: If theorizing Religion in International Relations is possible, can this religious theory in International Relations explain all the unresolved issues and problems?

A: No theory explains everything.  Different issues and problems call for different theories; given the varieties of religious experience and complexities of international relations, we should hope for a variety of theories.  Some issues and problems are intractable in practice, even when we have formulated theories that plausibly explain what is going on.