Fifteen Eighty Four

In the current moment we are experiencing a profound shift in the international order. Russia militarily attacked Ukraine, a sovereign state, and the emerging attempts at peace negotiations most loudly promote the argument that territories should be distributed between the two states based on effective military control at the moment when the fighting stops. The president of the United States has proclaimed his intent to take control of Canada, the Gaza strip, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, because he perceives the United States to be militarily powerful enough to do so. Trump intends to make America great again on the basis of its military strength, thus suggesting it has not been great for some time, not the sole superpower that many in international relations thought it was.

We can see in Trump’s and Putin’s efforts an attempt to re-write the international order, by changing the order’s dominant representants. Representants are such practices, artefacts and language that stand in for the units of the international system, and thus make those units legible. Entities like the state, the papacy, multinational corporations, or international organizations are too complex to be comprehended in their entirety. People therefore rely on representants to understand what these entities look like. Representants highlight certain features from the units and omit others. They legitimise specific actors, define who is powerful in relation to whom, and they serve as tools for governing. Political agents, like Putin and Trump, can seek to change the existing representants, if they expect that new representants will portray them in a better light, and thus provide them with more power. Other actors, to mind come for example many of the prominent figures in the European Union, will resist these efforts. These struggles over representants are open-ended. Ultimately it depends upon which representants the public and the international community at large find the most convincing. Such factors as the functional efficacy, aesthetic appeal and the fit of representants into preexisting structures of meaning all play a role. The fact that many in the EU see a need for increased spending into the military indicates a shift in priorities, and that the order might indeed be changing. New representants might be carrying the day.

Representants and International Orders: The Staging of Political Authority traces the struggles over changes in representants in Europe from the Middle Ages up to contemporary dynamics in the European Union. In the Middle Ages the dominant representant was the coronation ceremonial. Through the coronation ceremonial the king obtained his power from God, which positioned the king above feudal lords. Simultaneously the king required papal benediction to be able to perform the ceremonial. Kings’ efforts to rid themselves of papal supremacy entailed primarily a tinkering with the coronation ceremonial. The Reformation permitted kings to vest the authority over the coronation in national churches, who proclaimed that the king was king by divine right, and did not require the unction to establish his supranatural authority. Kings adapted the representants, which the pope and the emperor had used to establish a Universal Monarchy, to represent kingly rule over a more delimited territory. The international order became one of divine right absolutism.     

The order of divine right absolutism was still hierarchically structured, courtly ceremonial and diplomatic precedence established the ranking among political elites. Yet, three actors, namely the British king, the Prussian king, and the Russian tsar were dissatisfied with the position they held in the established hierarchy, and despite their sustained efforts, they were unable to improve their standing with the existing dominant representants. They changed their strategy and openly challenged those dominant representants, primarily by mocking them. They rather focused on rationalizing their military apparatus. Instead of having the military infiltrated with courtly ceremonial, a rationalised and militarised aesthetics shaped the new court culture. The ancient regime powers were forced to adapt to the new style under the pressure of military defeats, or they were subjected to domestic revolutions, as was the case in France. The abolishment of the significance of courtly ceremonial and diplomatic precedence meant that the international hierarchy flattened. A two-tier system emerged between the great powers, who were able to lead sustained warfare, and the rest who was not.

In-between these dynamics a simultaneous unnoticed shift in representants occurred. From the late Middle Ages the Church had gone on a search to find ways to express the ubiquitous power and presence of God, until it found linear perspective. Linear perspective is based on the vanishing point, which orders space uniformly. The vanishing point is the point at which parallels intersect, which is in the infinite. It thus expresses universal, singularly ordered space. Linear perspectival painting and cartesian mapping practices developed in tandem; the first cartographers were renaissance painters. Projective geometry was the technique that linked the two together. Projective geometry and linear perspectival aesthetics were also crucial for the development of new fortification designs once gunpowder and the cannon had destroyed the feudal castle. And all of these dynamics shaped palace and garden architecture, the key sites of kingly rule and diplomatic interaction. The combined effect of these unintentional shifts in representants was the generation of the image of the territorial state, where power is spread evenly over a given territory and ends exactly at the border. These shifts in representants combined with the previously described dynamics, namely the rejection of Universal Monarchy, the disappearance of diplomatic precedence and courtly ceremonial, and increasing militarization, to establish the territorial balance of power as the new international order.

The monograph’s last chapter directs attention to the European Union. The European Communities were initially conceived as an economic space of flows established with specific representants, such as balance sheets, price lists, road maps, and an assembly line production of texts. The European Assembly initially played a purely consultative role. Things started to change once the members of the European Assembly, now the European Parliament, were directly elected in Europe-wide elections. Members of the European Parliament were dissatisfied with their lack of power, and started to organize to change the dynamics of representants. They drew inspiration from the toolbox national parliaments have at their disposal in the individual member states. Along these lines they staged votes in plenary, such as to confirm the European Commission, or later to question individual Commissioners, although such practices had not been established in the treaties. Gradually the European Parliament succeeded to enhance its standing to the point that it now has co-decision-making power together with the Council of the EU composed of member state representatives. Simultaneously the apolitical economic space of flows had increasingly profound political implications on member states, such as during the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, calls for more political legitimation increased. The European Council gained in prominence promoting the representative logic of summitry and traditional multilateral diplomacy. Different actors in the EU are promoting different versions of the EU by championing different types of representants. These are ongoing struggles over representants, which are also struggles about the future shape of the EU.

The conclusion hints at different avenues for further research, and also sketches out how we might understand the contemporary moment from a perspective that directs attention to representants. One of the prevalent dynamics is that a number of different actors are aspiring for more recognition, which they can at times express in efforts to change the existing representants. A second dynamic is that with increasing digitalisation and the hybridization of lived experiences between an online and an offline world, gradual shifts in representants are occurring. These gradual shifts can have unintentional, but nonetheless profound effects on representants, and therefore international order, just as the invention of linear perspective and the development of projective geometry had in the early modern period.