Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International RelationsJohn Gerard RuggieInternational Organization, Vol. 47, No. 1. (Winter, 1993), pp. 139-174.Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-8183%28199324%2947%3A1%3C139%3ATABPMI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-PInternational Organization is currently published by The MIT Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]://www.jstor.orgFri Nov 30 13:31:53 2007Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations John Gerard Ruggie We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to am've where we started And know the place for the first time. -T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding The year 1989 has already become a convenient historical marker: it has been invoked by commentators to indicate the end of the postwar era. An era is characterized by the passage not merely of time but also of the distinguishing attributes of a time, attributes that structure expectations and imbue daily events with meaning for the members of any given social collectivity. In that sense, what the journalist Theordore H. White observed in 1945 is true once again: the world, he wrote, is "fluid and about to be remade."' Arguments will continue for many years to come about the determinants of the collapse of the old postwar order and the contours of the new post-postwar order. But even among diverse theoretical traditions there exists a shared vocabulary describing "the world" that has become fluid and is being remade: in its simplest, irreducible terms, it is the world of strategic bipolarity. The same cannot be said of another "world" that also may be fluid and in the process of being remade: the modern system of states. This world exists on a deeper and more extended temporal plane, and its remaking involves a shift not in the play of power politics but of the stage on which that play is An earlier draft of this article was presented at the British Social Science Research Council Conference on Nation-States and the International Order, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 4-6 September 1991. I am grateful to Barry Buzan, Caroline Bynum, Ernst Haas, Andreas Huyssen, Stephen Krasner, Hendrik Spruyt, Tracy Strong, and Alexander Wendt for their comments and to David Auerswald for research assistance. 1. Theodore H. White, In Seach of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 224. International Organization 47, 1, Winter 1993 o1993 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology140 International Organization perf~rmed.~Here, no shared vocabulary exists in the literature to depict change and continuity. Indeed, little vocabulary for it exists at all. Take efforts to express the emerging architecture of the European Commu- nity (EC) as a case in point. "It is a negative characteristic which first imposes itself," the Marxist theorist Etienne Balibar concedes. "The state today in Europe is neither national nor supranational, and this ambiguity does not slacken but only grows deeper over time."3 From the other side of the political spectrum, The Economist agrees and gropes for metaphor: in place of older federative visions, it sees "a Europe of many spires," a European "Mont Saint Mi~hel."~For their part, Eurocrats speak of overlapping layers of European economic and political "spaces," tied together, in the words of EC Commission President Jacques Delors, by the community's "spiderlike strategy to organize the architecture of a Greater Eur~pe."~ These formulations are not terribly precise or definitive. Still, they are improvements over the treatment Europe typically receives in the standard academic literatures. In Kenneth Waltz's classic neorealist treatise, the EC earned only a few fleeting references, and then only to argue that it would never amount to much in the "international structure" unless it took on the form of a unified state.6 In the instrumental rationality of game theory and transactions cost analysis, macrostructures are either taken for granted or treated as relatively unproblematic consequences of the interplay of micromo- tives, and hence generate little interest as independent social facts.' And, regional integration theory long ago acknowledged its own obsolescence in the face of the new European reality.8 In none of these theoretical perspectives is there so much as a hint that the institutional, juridical, and spatial complexes associated with the community may constitute nothing less than the emergence of the first truly postmodern international political form. 2. For a specification of the ontological and epistemological differences among incremental, conjunctural, and secular or epochal time frames, see John Gerard Ruggie, "Social Time and International Policy," in Margaret P. Karns, ed., Persistent Patterns and Emergent Structures in a Waning Century (New York: Praeger, 1986), pp. 211-36. Within that typology, the "normal politics" studied by much of the international relations field falls into the incremental category, the cold war exemplifies the conjunctural, and the modern system of states the epochal time frames. 3. Etienne Balibar, "Es Gibt