2010

C. Bottici, Men and States. Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age, MacMillan, Palgrave 2009, pp. 174, ISBN 978-0-230-20681-6

The analogy between men and states is common in political thought since ancient Greece and the analogical reasoning based on it is still playing a central role in contemporary political thought. To mention only one example, in 2003 Alexander Wendt argued on the basis of the analogy between individuals and states that the creation of a world state is not only desirable, but also the inevitable fate of our world.

Notwithstanding this long tradition, the label "domestic analogy" is relatively recent, and the authors that explicitly tackled the question of its suitability to explain international phenomena are but a few. Among them Charles Manning, who in 1935 used for the first time the expression "domestic analogy", Hedley Bull, who made the expression famous, and Hidemi Suganami.

These authors, together with Martin Wight, are a central reference in Bottici's book, but at the same time Men and States diverges from their works in many respects.

Firstly, Bottici sees her work as a theoretical contribution to the debate on the domestic analogy, while the previous works are considered essentially polemical, like Bull's "Society and Anarchy in International Relations" (1966) and The Anarchical Society (1977), or historical, like Suganami's The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (1989). Bull's polemic against the domestic analogy is grounded on the persuasion that the international domain has its own institutions and rules, which effectively preserve order in the absence of a centralised coercive agency: it is therefore theoretically wrong to study the international domain through the lenses of the domestic analogy. Suganami's work traces the history of the domestic analogy in academic debates during the 19^th and 20^th century, with attention to both its critics, like Manning and Bull, and its advocates, like, to mention but a few, James Lorimer, Hersch Lauterpacht, Richard Falk, and Kenneth Waltz. He offers also an account of the role played by the domestic analogy in projects for creating or reforming international institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Bottici indeed is primarily interested in analysing the way in which the reasoning based on the domestic analogy works and then to appraise the role it played in different traditions of political thought.

Secondly, Bottici's contribution intends to challenge many of the assumptions of Bull's critique of the domestic analogy. Bull discards the use of the domestic analogy as a sign of the infancy of international relations theory, a sign that the discipline has not yet attained an autonomous scientific status. On the contrary, argues Bottici, analogical reasoning is a valid heuristic method, as its use in well-established disciplines like mathematics shows. If the use of the domestic analogy is problematic, Bottici contends, the reason is not that it relies on an analogy. The reason is rather that it transforms a historically situated model -the modern state- in a universal paradigm.

Moreover, Bottici questions Bull's appraisal of the role played by the domestic analogy in different theoretical traditions. Bottici relies on Wight's partition of international theory into three traditions: the realist, the idealist (in Wight's words "revolutionary") and the rationalist one. She analyses the role played by the domestic analogy both in modern political thought, referring to Hobbes, Kant and Grotius as representative of each tradition, and in contemporary theories such as neoidealism, neorealism and neoinstitutionalism. Her aim is to show that the use of the domestic analogy is more tradition-crossing than Bull's account suggests. Bottici contradicts Bull's pointing at Kant's project of perpetual peace as an example of the use of the domestic analogy, arguing that Kant's project is not based on the domestic analogy and that, on the contrary, it relies on a deduction from a normative proposition. On the other hand, she points at passages in Grotius's theory that make significant concessions to the domestic analogy, while according to Bull the rationalist tradition is most hostile towards the use of the domestic analogy. In analysing contemporary theories, Bottici stresses the explicit critique of the domestic analogy carried out by the neoidealist Charles Beitz, and the traces of domestic-analogy-style reasoning in Kenneth Waltz's structural neorealism.

Bottici eventually abandons Wight's classification to take into account theories like constructivism, postmodernism, feminism and Marxism, which do not fit into Wight's categories.

Drawing on the feminist critique of the distinction between the "domestic" (broadly meant as referring not only to the "national", but also to the family sphere) and the "international", Bottici argues that this distinction has definitively collapsed with the beginning of the global era. According to the author, globalisation questions the very foundation of the domestic analogy: the possibility to speak of the domestic and the international as two separate domains. The author concludes therefore by calling for a "global political theory" which overcomes the distinction between political theory and international relations and liberates itself from any reference to the domestic analogy in order to take up the challenges of the global era.

Bottici's theoretical analysis is an important contribution to the debate on the domestic analogy, a useful insight to clarify the presuppositions involved in the reasoning based on it. Bottici's conclusion, however, seems to dismiss too quickly the importance of criticising the domestic analogy in the global era. In my opinion Bottici's concluding remark that the domestic analogy in the global era has become theoretically groundless do not tackle the very core of the problem. The domestic analogy, as Bottici suggests but unfortunately do not elaborate on, is not a neutral heuristic tool. The domestic analogy has ever had not only a descriptive, but also a prescriptive import. It is based on the belief in the superiority of the western state-model upon every other form of political organisation and calls for its imposition all over the world. On the other hand, as argued by its critics, globalisation is not a politically neutral phenomenon. It is on the contrary a process directed by western countries, which mostly profit from it. For instance, the liberty of movement for individuals and circulation for goods, the most typical phenomenon of the global age, has only one direction, namely the most convenient for developed and powerful economies. At the same time, globalisation does not entail a reciprocal osmosis between different cultures of the world, but results also in this case in a one-way westernisation of the globe.

In this sense, the domestic analogy is very sympathetic with western-led globalisation processes. This can explain its revival in last years, in spite of its supposed inefficacy to grasp the structure of the contemporary world. And it is also the reason why to carry out a critique of it and its hegemonic potential is all the more important in the global era.

Elisa Orrù