The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010

by John M. Owen IV

Some blame the violence and unrest in the Muslim world on Islam itself, arguing that the religion and its history is inherently bloody. Others blame the United States, arguing that American attempts to spread democracy by force have destabilized the region, and that these efforts are somehow radical or unique. Challenging these views, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics reveals how the Muslim world is in the throes of an ideological struggle that extends far beyond the Middle East, and how struggles like it have been a recurring feature of international relations since the dawn of the modern European state.


John Owen examines more than two hundred cases of forcible regime promotion over the past five centuries, offering the first systematic study of this common state practice. He looks at conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism between 1520 and the 1680s; republicanism and monarchy between 1770 and 1850; and communism, fascism, and liberal democracy from 1917 until the late 1980s. He shows how regime promotion can follow regime unrest in the eventual target state or a war involving a great power, and how this can provoke elites across states to polarize according to ideology. Owen traces how conflicts arise and ultimately fade as one ideology wins favor with more elites in more countries, and he demonstrates how the struggle between secularism and Islamism in Muslim countries today reflects broader transnational trends in world history.

348 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2010

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb]

A dense but still interesting polisci book that argues that states incur significant costs to try to spread or preserve their regime type (Catholic, Protestant, monarchy, democracy, communist, etc) for reasons of external and internal security. They do so, however, not reflexively but in response to certain conditions, especially A. The polarization of transnational elites into 2 diametrically opposed camps B. The exhaustion of the credibility of one dominant regime type C. the ends of conflicts where, as you are trying to reset the geopolitical map, it makes sense to promote your regime type as much as possible. States do so for reasons of internal and external security. They tend to believe that states that share their regime will be less threatening, they want to earn credit among their own people for spreading the "right way" of organizing a society, and they want to disempower foreign sources of discord in their own societies.

Owen traces out three big waves of regime promotion in European/US history (this book is a bit West-centric, although he delves into the Middle East in the last section). First was Catholic v Protestant regimes, culminating in the Thirty Years War and ending with a loose agreement on religious tolerance and state sovereignty as the new defining rules of global politics. This broke down in the late 18th century, leading to another round of regime promotion that lasted to the mid-19th century, with republican/nationalist/liberal challengers taking on absolute monarchy, leading to mildly reformist, often constitutional monarchies as a new stasis. Finally, the 20th century saw regime struggles between liberal democracies, fascist states, and communist states, ending in a liberal democratic victory. Owen is a bit of a Hegelian in that he sees ideological conflict leading to synthesis as the main pattern of history, but he compiles enough evidence to suggest that this is really going on in many cases.

This argument is important in IR theory for a couple of reasons. It shows that states actually view regime promotion as important to their security (contra realism, which sees it as a luxury of super-powerful states,) but it also shows that states don't just follow a constructivist logic of appropriateness

Owen wraps up with a somewhat speculative history of regime promotion in the modern Middle East between secular nationalist regimes and Islamist ones. Both are trying to respond to the challenges and disruption of modern life, and both have a tendency to promote their regime type, although Owen admits that they haven't done so at a high clip. The US, he argues, intervened in part for hte purpose of regime promotion in IQ and AF, trying to insert liberal democracy in a region defined either by secular or religious autocracy. One of his most insightful points here is that liberalism historically isn't a referee in battles over regime promotion but a party to those battles, and we have to understand why so many people throughout history (and the modern Middle East, and the modern West too!) find it inadequate if we want it to succeed.

A few problems: First, this book is very dense and academic. Owen really beats the points into submission, which makes the book clear but not a breeze to read. Second, Owen has the polisci tendency to jam a lot of history into his framework. Usually he is transparent about evidence that doesn't fit, as this is a huge time span covering a massive amount of territory. At other times, though, he makes mistakes. For example, he argues that the US Civil War had basically no international ideological relevance, whereas the research of historians like Don Doyle have shown the opposite to be true. Reeling from defeat in 1848, republican and liberal activists in Europe sided heavily with the Union, especially after Lincoln started framing the war as against slavery and for the survival of republican government worldwide. Conservatives and monarchists in Europe, in contrast, tended to root for the traditionalist Confederacy although they ended up offering little real aid.

Finally, I think Owen could have theorized the question of non-democratic regime promotion more thoroughly. THe democratic peace I get, but is there such a thing as an autocratic peace? Autocracies today tend to have few real allies, but we are also seeing transnational elite networks of reactionaries and anti-liberals form today who are promoting nationalism and illiberalism against the liberal democracy of the US and others. Think about the growing links between populist, nationalist right-wingers in the US and the Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian governments. Is it autocratic gov't or authoritarian capitalism as the best political regime that unites these states? Or is it their commitment to winding back the clock on a variety of social changes? Hard to tell, but I'd love to see some research on how autocracies think about the global ideological landscape and whether they believe in some upside-down version of the democratic peace.

Good book, more fun to talk about than read, definitely for academics.

[Chasqui M.G.]

I bet you could teach a whole class about this.

[Diane]

This book looks at ideological clashes in international relations since the early modern period, including the Protestant Reformation, the clash between aristocracy and republicanism, capitalism vs. communism, and radical Islamist visions of the state. The author looks at what all of these clashes have in common, and designs a model of conflicting visions of world politics. The book makes interesting points in terms of putting contemporary ideological clashes in context, and the author does a good job of presenting his evidence. The main weakness of the book is that the vast majority of the time period that the author looks at has at last one ideological clash ongoing, but the author focuses on explaining why these clashes occurred rather than looking at the (relatively fewer) times when ideological clashes did not occur.

[Peter Henne]

This book will be a classic in the field of IR, and is recommended reading for anyone interested in the topic. Owen presents a grand historical theory for changes in IR, focusing on one specific aspect: forcible regime change. He also suggests broader theoretical directions for the field, focused on the interaction between transnational networks, state security, and ideological conflicts. The book is also incredibly accessible, and would be of interest to general readers as well as scholars.