Carr Talk

Like Kyle I want to take a stab at assessing the applicability of the crisis of Carr's day to our own world today.

What was the crisis:

According to Carr, the world crisis of his day was a crisis of understanding. Thinkers had failed to provide the appropriate framework for policy makers to understanding world politics. Utopian Bureaucrats made too many decisions only to become disillusioned with the outcome of these decisions. This disillusionment returned them to a nature like state. This return to nature, According to Carr, caused the violence that had for decades been limited to civilized on uncivilized to become civilized on civilized.

"For more than a hundred years, the reality of conflict had been spirited out of site by the thinkers of western civilization. The men of the nineteen-thirties returned shocked and bewildered to the world of nature. The brutalities which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were confided to dealings between civilized and uncivilized peoples were turned by civilized peoples against each other." (207)

How does it apply today?

Well, if President Bush is honest, I don't see any reason not to believe that he generally is, then he is defiantly Utopian thinker when it comes to IR. Unlike the cynics, I see no reason not to believe that the Bush Administration thinks that they are really bringing democracy to the Middle East--starting with Iraq.

The problem with there Utopian vision is that it lacks any grounding in realism. The Utopian Bush administration constructed itself as a liberator. The problem with this construction is that it ignores the real way that Iraqi Identity has been constructed. Iraqi identity, like identity in most former colonies, has been constructed as post-colonial. In opposition to colonists. And this is totally obvious. It is evident in the rhetoric of the baath party. Iraqi school children learn to celebrate their Wilsonian liberation from the British Colons.

The problem with the Bush Administration's logic is that the administration was trying to use what seemed to the Iraqi's to be the old colonial modes of liberation. But the world has been done with that project for nearly fifty years now (this is also a memo that the Israelis need to get)

The colonial world is gone, and any attempt to apply its old tools, in Iraq or Palestine, will be met by opposition from newly formed nationalist identities.

Race in the US?

OK, this is a far cry from IR, but I think white-liberals in the US have a similar problem with race today that the liberals who constructed the international order in 1919 did. Mainly, white liberals pretend to live in the post-racial utopia--which from what I understand is a far cry from the realities of our world. This makes it hard for white liberals to understand actions like the 1992 uprisings in LA, or for French liberals to understand the recent uprisings in Paris. Simply by not having the tools to identify a problem seems to have led to violence.

How does the text make me feel:

I am frustrated because I feel like Carr's argument has a lot of Marx and Keynes and to some extent Heidegger(with his ideas about how science tries to understand things--am I off base with this?). I think it would help if more of these canonized works were required by our program--because I feel like I only know sketches of these other authors (except Marx who I ardour)