Bulletin n. 2/2007
October 2007
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Patomäki Heikki
    Back to the Kantian 'Idea for a Universal History'? Overcoming Eurocentric Accounts of the International Problematic
    in Millennium: Journal of International Studies , n. 3, vol. 35, september ,  2007 ,  575-595
    ABSTRACT: International theory remains Eurocentric. The implicit assumption is that all relevant modern concepts, practices, technologies and capacities are essentially European. Modernity - including the Industrial Revolution - originates exclusively in Europe, and with it, the modern international problematic. In this paper I argue that it is possible to take steps towards correcting this far-reaching bias with the help of works in the new global history. I develop the idea that there are different layers of time, in which counterfactual possibilities play out in different ways. The Industrial Revolution could also have taken place elsewhere in the Eurasian continent, most plausibly in East Asia (China), with far-reaching world-historical consequences. However, at a deeper level of world-historical time, and at a higher level of abstraction, the modern international problematic would most likely have emerged anyway. Paradoxically, it thus seems that attempts to overcome the Eurocentrism of international theory will lead to a version of universal stages of history along the lines of classical political economy and a universal learning process along the lines of Kant. Finally, I argue that an adequately multi-sided understanding of global history is essential for a global security community and for global democratisation. It grounds an ethical mode of responsiveness that is both open to the accidental historical trajectories layered in one's self and, at the same time, universalisable.
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