Ole Wver : Autobibliography

There is more to life than books, you know. But not much more Morrissey In the train home after the meeting where the former editor of POLITIK, Ole Dahl Rasmussen, first mentioned the idea of 10x10, I could not help starting as I am sure, many readers of our 10x10 will do to scribble on the back of an envelope: what would be my ten works? It seemed hard to get the list down to ten there are many good books in the world. To discipline my selection process, I have asked in a genealogical mode, as a history of the present How I became what I am. The question is not what I was impressed by, found great when I read it, or would like to suggest to others. I have been looking from my present position for those books without which I am certain I would not be theorising, thinking and writing what I do. Still, even after having decided on a criteria for selecting the ten books, a few difficult cases that all ended up outside the list for different reasons deserves to be mentioned. This will both illustrate the consequences of the logic of selection and allow me to cheat and sneak in a brief mention of books no. 11, 12, etc. Some might expect to see Carl Schmitt on my list (either Politische Theologie on the concept of sovereignty or Der Begriff des Politischen on friend/enemy). With a growing secondary literature discussing the relationship between Schmitts decisionism and the speech act conception of security in the Copenhagen School of security studies, it could almost be interesting whether I actually formulated the concept of securitisation with Schmitt in mind. Unfortunately, I do not remember. I was somewhat familiar with the general argument, but as I recall, the original version of the speech act theory was formulated in 1988 without any direct inspiration. I only read Schmitt in detail later and found him very convincing, noticing naturally the similarities, as well as the points where hopefully we part ways. Such reflections helped to sharpen my understanding of what a performative view of politics implies, so Schmitt could have been included, but given the actual history and the

As volume 4:7 in 2004, the journal POLITIK published a special issue 10x10, where 10 leading contemporary social scientists present the 10 works that formed their own academic development the most. As then editor in chief, I wrote to market the issue- my own piece, only published virtually at http://www.tidsskriftetpolitik.dk/index.php?id=125

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criterion of selection adopted, he does not fully deserve it. Several others were under consideration, too. One was Hans J. Morgenthaus classic International Relations (IR) textbook Politics Among Nations. In a marxianised political science department in the early 1980s, where security affairs and realism were totally excluded, my first revolt was to seek up these works, and since bookstores in Copenhagen had few foreign books (and certainly not this one) this was my first order from a British bookstore. And the treasure fortunately turned out to be commensurate to its effect on the budget of a poor student: a hard cover book with gold lined pages. And of course the detail that impressed me most: the reprint of a world map on the inner cover, suggesting here is the world and the book about it. I struggled hard to get Cambridge University Press to do a similar thing with the recent Buzan/Wver book Regions and Powers, but they placed the world on pages xxv-xxvi not the same thing! Since this feat about the map really is what has kept the book on my mind all these years, it probably should not be among the chosen ten. I enjoyed reading it, but I cannot see any specific traces today, and I can thus blame my genealogical criterion for selection for not finding room for it. Elias Canettis Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) deserves to be listed and I am glad Chantal Mouffe did. In any case, I could not do it with honesty, because it really has not influenced me, although I wish it had. It is one of the most remarkable books written on a social science subject, but it is so systematically written up against all conventions for how to do social science it does not locate itself in relation to any disciplines, does not draw systematically on any specific body of literature but only a wide and highly idiosyncratic selection of readings, its method and line of argumentation is mysterious, and so forth. Accordingly, as it did not link up to any field, it was not received or integrated into any. Despite the Nobel prize in literature that Canetti was awarded, this masterwork never became very influential. It is a unique source of provocation to read now and then but what to do about it? Canetti can be an illustration of the trouble of digging out what influenced you I will not claim it as influence, because that would be to say I had been able to absorb it, and I have not. I have only been impressed, irritated, pushed, and at best vaguely inspired. Another borderline case could be Richard Ashleys Statecraft as Mancraft, which surely did influence me greatly around 1990, when I started to work out the possible ways to do IR inspired by post-structuralist philosophy. However, the book remains unpublished, so it would hardly be helpful for others to get this reference, and I try to get around this with my trick on book no. 8. That one also covers Waltz - another problematic non-selection. It is a bit unfair not to include either Man, the State and War (1959) or Theory of International Politics (1979), but Keohanes edited volume includes half of Waltzs 1979
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book. And Kalevi Holsti picked Theory, so again, I exploit my insider knowledge of books covered by others. Some ideas/influences came bit by bit, book by book, and therefore it is difficult to pin down which one was really influential. This goes especially for the so-called English School in IR. I read Hedley Bulls Anarchical Society first, and although it is a terrific book, I am personally more of a Wightian probably both in terms of style (the more paradoxical and un-stable, less the deductive, systematic) and in terms of interest (more history and more political theory, less measuring the state of contemporary institutions). But Martin Wight I got to gradually in the wrong sequence from Power Politics over the essays in Diplomatic Investigations and International Systems to International Theory. One important strand of the English School, the study of different historical international systems, culminated with Adam Watsons The Evolution of International Society. This work provided crucial inspiration for my thinking about contemporary Europe as an empire (in the positive sense). However, I have previously clearly marked my debt, and written as a Watsonian, and those writings will have to do on that account. Similarly for Pierre Hassner, who has been a bit of guru for me on European security, but for decades he published no book, and I have written on his main non-book recently in a Festschrift. So, if the 10 should actually be books, actually exist and their effects present in todays me, they are the ones below. 1. Marx, Das Kapital Karl Marx (1867-1894), Das Kapital English translation (1957) as Capital, Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow. The 1970s was still going strong at the Department of Political Studies as I enrolled in 1980 and throughout my five years as student, the main theoretical map in student circles consisted of the competing neo-marxist schools. Today, this period is much maligned and it surely had its absurdities. For instance, it is today much easier to see the parallels between the French structuralists (Althusserians) and the German (in Denmark also Jutlandic) school of capital logic, whereas then they made up the extreme ends of a polarised spectrum. One thing they agreed on was The Book. I think it is important that you early in your academic life take some theory or work very seriously, and struggle hard with it. Not every text will do, but more or less any of a certain complexity and reflexivity, preferably one that integrates meta-theory, theory and empirical work, and one that is self[3]

reflexive about its relationship to traditions and disciplines. In my case, the choice was not much of one Das Kapital was it. Nor was it an innocent one. Clearly, my mode of thinking has been shaped by this. I am inclined to think in terms of logics. Hayward Alker once commented that I have a strange way of using that term, and it struck me where it came from. It was a basic capital logic way of analysing, to assume that reality is shaped by patterns, logics, dynamics. Not that a totality like the actual society we live in today has one logic, but it is structured to a larger or smaller extent by various such, and Marxs claim was that the logic of capital increasingly came to dominate. Despite all the talk of Marxism dying with the fall of the Soviet Union, it is as striking as ever in our current period that the market logic is subsuming ever new areas of life - take the university world as but one example. Such logics are neither explicable by methodological individualism, nor through the most common conceptions of structure as typically located at one particular level of reality and somehow self-present; no, often the dynamics are morpho-genetic patterns that achieve a dynamism of their own, shape units and system in turn, and thus should be seen as ontologically prior, not derivative from these. A key element herein is the role of abstractions. Usually in discussions we blame the distance between neat categories and messy reality on the theory, but maybe we should rather blame reality. We talk as if we start from a reality which is pure mess, and then we abstract all abstraction is imposition on our behalf. We then get the familiar discussions about the need to simplify versus the need to respect complexity. As if abstractions come from us only, not from reality. Abstraction and realism are treated as opposites. However, abstractions are an important part of reality. Marx showed this compellingly in Grundrisse and Das Kapital exchange value, the value form, is a powerful abstraction which we practice all the time. Therefore, his theory was built by making this abstraction the starting point, and then adding complexity along the way. This Marxian procedure was explained well by Alfred Sohn Rethel through the term real abstraction. Similarly, if we today live in a world which contains (in Jim Rosenaus formulation) sovereignty bound as well as sovereignty free actors i.e. parts follow the logic of sovereignty, parts do not this is not an argument for declaring post-sovereignty and start from the resulting complexity only, but for grasping well the logic of sovereignty as well as the emerging logics of post-sovereign practices. It is still very important whether you are born and have citizens rights in Sudan or Sweden. Sovereignty will feel very real if you try to push up against its walls here. This is not easy to explain from a general theory of, say, politics and authority without somehow entering the concept of sovereignty, however modified and challenged. This is because sovereignty is a real abstraction.
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In terms of research strategy, the result is not too different from Karl Popper or Kenneth Waltz. Research has to have a creative element of first coming up with an abstract idea and then unfold this in order to show its relevance in relation to the empirical world, whereas it is not meaningful to work from generalisations about observables. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. (preface to Capital). 2. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral Friedrich Nietzsche 1887, English translation by Walter Kaufmann, On the Genealogy of Morals, in: Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Modern Library Classics, New York. Nietzsche wanted it like that. Nobody should be left unaffected by reading him. He thought of his own books as for instance in one case spooky and another a disaster, he wanted to philosophise with a hammer and declared I am no man, I am dynamite" (Ecce Homo). And indeed, it is hard to be unchanged after reading for instance The Genealogy of Morals. Not that each and every step is equally convincing, but the whole perspective is revolutionary. Concepts we take for granted, even build on and live by, are made contingent they are historicised and politicised when Nietzsche asks how and why they came about, got formed that way, and not least whether they are actually good for us. At one level, it does not seem provocative or implausible to state that concepts and values are produced historically, only we will tend to exempt concepts like good and evil from this, and assume that they are innocently there for us to use. Therefore, reading Nietzsche has the radical effect of transferring this mode of looking at concepts to whatever one it about to use as timeless subject or value. In the most radical passages, the historically produced includes the ideas of subjectivity and objectivity. The subject is an effect of language, of our belief in grammar. One of the main contributions of Foucault as Nietzscheinterpreter is to have worked out more systematically the implications of working with basis in neither subject, nor object, but seeing both as the product of discourse. However, Nietzsches main agenda is not methodological or actually historical, but the revaluation of all values as an attempt to cultivate the will to create new values. The original concepts of good and bad were with the noble people centred on good as the joy of great deeds, things done with a triumphant yes to itself, only creating bad as a marginal afterthought. The slave morality shifts the distinction to good/evil, where good
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becomes derivative, the starting point negative the negative judgment against nobility, strength and well-being. This points to the absolutely central role in the argument of ressentiment, a spirit of revenge, which drives a no to the different and paradoxically. Nietzsche argues that the weak have been historically successful and installed their values as generally accepted standards, whereby the powerful and creative are judged evil. We are probably inclined today to meet his cultural criticism with deep-seated ambivalence. The celebration of aristocratic values (including the more martial ones) will often even for those attracted to it give way to something closer to Fukuyamas tepid salutation of decadence, democracy and de-heroisation. On the other hand, even this element in Nietzsches work remains an important resource for those wanting to adopt a critical distance to modern life. For instance in relation to the concept of security, the most radical arguments about why we might not want security at all, but something more interesting, typically draw their power from Nietzsche. To aim for self-preservation displays too much modesty and relativism, not enough will and risk-taking. To choose one book for my list, I have deviated a bit from the principles and chosen the book that I think it makes most sense for others to start with. Nietzsche surely would have wanted Thus Spake Zarathustra on the list, the highest and the deepest book (is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness; Ecce Homo), and indeed it is a artistically unique and one of the most powerful philosophical experiences one can undergo, but it would be pretentious to list it, because few could read it in isolation and make sense out of it. Similarly, Ecce Homo as Nietzsches late summary of his works, is of course an ideal text to pick, but as a condensate and with extreme formulations, it would be off-putting, if one had not been hooked already through one of the more traditional works. The two connected books on morality, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, convey both method and substance very clearly. Personally, I actually read all of the texts in a messy process of jumping around sometimes in Werke, not even clear which book I was in, sometimes between the different books translated into Danish. Apart from the general impact of his arguments, Nietzsche has meant at least two things to me. The first is in relation to the question of what a poststructuralist politics entails. The dominant strand within IR builds on an ethics (mostly from Levinas) emphasising the indebtedness to alterity and tending to imply an ethics of not doing violence in any respect to the Other, and therefore questioning all strong projects. Strangely, this is often aligned with a Nietzschean inspiration (from left post-Nietzscheans such as primarily Bill
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Connolly). The general post-structuralist political ethic becomes one of opening up, freeing imagination and allowing new subjectivities to form. To act politically, however, must involve taking responsibility for leaving an impact, for forcing things in one direction rather than another. Since there is no way of guaranteeing in advance whether an act is good or bad, politics demand more will to power. It is not enough to have a meta-politics of a more democratic, open and inclusive society. In a specific situation, one must act and run the risk that the effects of ones effects turn out bad. This entails a courage to select - and say yes to oneself. Ironically, much of the ethics of post-structuralism wants too much guarantee, it is too security seeking in its attempt to stay at the (meta-)politics that can be ethically justified, and is thus not Nietzschean enough. The second is the fact that he provides a guide on How to survive in academe. It is a particularly brutal world. Famously Henry Kissinger, who knew both this world and the also pretty tough one of politics, remarked that in the academic world, The fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low". But obviously, it also has to do with the difficulty of separating product and person, wherefore criticism tends to be (taken) personally, and the relationship between careers and theories. To get anything done, it is important not to get absorbed into fights and petty rivalries. Often when I pulled a dagger from my back, Nietzsche was a direct source of inspiration in picking a positive retaliation. At one level, much of Nietzsches writings is a combination of a kind of paradoxical ethics plus psychology and life strategy (the only valid criticism of a philosophy is to try whether you can live by it). After being alerted to the destructive logic of ressentiment, it becomes wise as he puts it in Ecce Homo (p. 709 in The Basic Works) - to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, ones freedom and initiative and to become a mere reagent. So, almost at the level of American style how to and self-cultivation books, Nietzsche serves as a guide: do you want to honour the offender, by letting him rule your life and time and enter an unhealthy path of resentment or do you own stuff? Has the will become its own redeemer and bringer of joy? Has it unlearned the spirit of revenge and all teeth-gnashing? (Zarathustra). I have been less good at listening to another aspect of the same advice on not reacting, that is when formulated in relation to books: read less, write more. Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength - to read a book at such a time is simply depraved! (p.709 in The Basic Works).

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3. Karup Pedersen, Udenrigsminister P. Munchs opfattelse af Danmark stilling Ole Karup Pedersen 1970, Udenrigsminister P. Munchs opfattelse af Danmarks stilling i international politik [Foreign Minister P. Munchs Conception of Denmarks Position in International Politics], Gad, Copenhagen. Ole Karup Pedersen was my teacher, mentor (he probably didnt know) and my predecessor as professor of international relations at the department. His Dr.Phil. thesis (Habilitation) from 1970 was often mentioned in the department as a kind of reference point, a landmark, but it was not expected that students would ponder its 650 pages on Denmarks primary interwar foreign minister. Fortunately, I did, and found something much more radical than expected from the way it was usually referred to. The book explores the potential of organising a study around the conceptions of international relations that statesmen articulate as part of their political practice. Methodologically, this points to a study of statements made in official capacity and further of the processes involved when a conception is put forward and how it constrains and in other ways relate to specific political actions. The central analytical concept is the statesmens conceptions of the totality or action theories, the understanding of international relations implied in their political statements. Although inspired by role theory and decision-making analysis, Karup Pedersen was particularly conscious to steer free of individual psychology. He took the full consequence and did not even try to ask what P. Munch really thought deep inside, but what he found it opportune to state as his perception (p. 39, 615). The dissertation did not ask behind this to either what P. Munch really thought, nor to check it against reality. This led to an exchange at the defence that echoed in the journal Historie (History) afterwards. Sven Henningsen (Ole Karup Pedersens predecessor, the first professor of international relations in Copenhagen) found it hard to believe that Karup Pedersen really thinks that we cannot reconstruct the perception held by actors. Karup Pedersens project had to be to recreate P. Munchs perception (picture of reality) in order to confront this with reality and register an eventual difference. In my view, Karup Pedersens analysis can only be understood from this presupposition. How wrong he was. To use the texts as a source to P. Munchs private perceptions would demand a non-existent psychological theory there can be no valid analysis of individual psyche on the basis of the available sources. Therefore, Karup Pedersen elaborated a whole theoretical structure around the usefulness of understanding the presented conceptions as important in their own right.
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Similarly, he does not believe in the fruitfulness of, nor employs, a concept of objective reality. The researchers objective reality would just be another construction of reality, and instead of treating some as subjective and others as objective, we should see political reality as made up of many different conceptions of reality. It is in the confrontations between these different conceptions of reality that much politics takes place. What is exciting and decisive is therefore to investigate how such conceptions emerge and get explicitated, and how the confrontations take place. What Ole Karup Pedersen reconstructed was the conception as a system in its own right. It was not P. Munchs individual perception, and it was not just a summary of what he had said. It was the system in what was said. Ole Karup Pedersen performed discourse analysis ahead of his time. Quite a lot of his methodological reflections especially about the specific nature of political speech were more sophisticated than much of what has emerged in the recent booming discourse literature. Related to the way OKP operationally shifts from analysing an abstract state interest to the articulation of a proclaimed interest by a specific political actor, he also relativises the idea that the state as such has interests. This is neither a given fact, nor an impossible one. It is a political question, what (or who) is the ultimate reference point for policy. Foreshadowing much of the literature on referent objects of security state or individual and especially the securitisation version of this theme, Ole Karup Pedersen shows empirically how the right-wing parties saw Denmark, state and nation through the ages, as the referent object for security, whereas the centre-left government (of which P. Munch was foreign minister) assumed that their responsibility was to the living population of the country, not some eternal idea or identity (pp. 423ff, 583). Ole Karup found that this real life political debate paralleled that among international relations theorists, where he drew a distinction between realists like Morgenthau who operated with the national interest and had little specific thought about small states, and what he called the sociological school represented by Aron and Wolfers (pp. 591ff). Although Karup Pedersen seems here to underestimate the extent to which P. Munch actually made reference to the nation as a collective that could survive in relative separation from state and specific individuals, he points to a question still under-explored in relation to both politics and theory: to what extent state centric views assume that the state is the necessary road to individual security or it is an aim in its own right.

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4. Kissinger, A World Restored Henry A. Kissinger 1957, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace, 181222, Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Kissingers dissertation can be assigned importance in several ways - although in each case, one could surely get to the same insights by other channels, and the choice of this book will therefore seem idiosyncratic to many who have done well without it. For me it became one of the preferred instances of classical realism and of a conception of foreign policy, and since it is such an enjoyable read, it serves both purposes well, and I therefore continue to hold the somewhat unusual view that this is one of the best IR books ever written. The first kind of importance is as a key instance of classical realism. It is in the nature of classical realism that it is appropriate to have it represented not by a programmatic statement, but practiced. Classical realism is first of all a tradition of thought, a name for the accumulated wisdom of European statesmanship and philosophical reflections on it. Therefore, it gets a bit too sterile and static when presented as theory for instance by Morgenthau (in Politics Among Nations) or George Liska. It is better to watch how it is practiced in specific cases as by George Kennan or Kissinger (or Morgenthaus various collections of essays). A World Restored contains numerous quotable passages (often elegant bordering on the pathetic, but surely memorable). War is the impossibility of peace. Metternichs design was as simple as this proposition and as complicated (p. 67). The statesman is therefore like one of the heroes in classical drama who has had a vision of the future but cannot transmit it directly to his fellow-men and who cannot validate its truth. Nations learn only by experience; they know only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their intuition was already experience, as if their aspiration was truth (p. 329). With this kind of philosophical reflection it becomes easier to see clearly the contrast to the much more social science-like form that realism gets after Kenneth Waltz has neo-fied it. The other level of the books importance is to put it paradoxically in relation to the first point its theory. Officially, the theory is presented in the six page introduction, and here the main concept is legitimate order, an agreement among the great powers on the framework of international order. A legitimate order does not make conflicts impossible, but it limits their
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scope and notably Diplomacy in the classical sense, the adjustment of differences through negotiation, is possible only in legitimate international orders. It is often discussed in the literature to what extent this can be seen as an instance of reasoning from domestic to international, that is: the compatibility of the domestic orders as the key to international order, as in the democratic peace. In my view, this is a misreading of Kissinger, because the key issue is a truly international one: whether the main powers can accept the basic legitimizing principle on which the international order is built. The importance of this can be seen today, where the US and the lesser great powers disagree on this basic organising principle. This is not in a direct sense about the compatibility of their domestic orders. However, it is so indirectly, which is exactly what makes Kissingers theory interesting. It is not as in the democratic peace or Arons concept of homogeneity/heterogeneity a question about the domestic orders being or not being of a similar kind, but the relationship enters because each power faces the challenge to link international and domestic. The international principle can be perfect, or acceptable or disastrous for a specific national order as when a national organising principle would undermine the multi-national Austrian empire, while the conservative ordering principle propagated by Austria in turn was more or less acceptable to all great powers. The question is thus perspectival and relative, not logical and centralised. This has to do with the other important way that the book is about the domestic-international relationship: the nature of foreign policy and statesmanship. The statesman is not seen as a representative of the domestic order, as a kind of prolongation of the domestic into the international, but as a person mediating the two spheres. It is not possible to pursue an international policy that denies a nations vision of itself, but on the other hand, whether to modify a society or to change the international order is a purely pragmatic question, depending on which is most flexible. The hard challenge of the statesman is to make the two compatible: It may be asked why Metternich had to choose a procedure so indirect . Why not attempt to adapt the Austrian domestic structure to the national lan sweeping across Europe? But a statesman must work with the material at hand and the domestic structure of Austria was rigid, much more rigid, paradoxically, than the international one (p. 28) In addition to the direct impact on my thinking that this book had as an instance of classical realism and in offering central ideas for a foreign policy theory, it was the basis for one of the most enjoyable seminars I have taught, where it became clear how much students enjoyed reading just for once a text that was good history in the dual sense of actually containing historical information about early nineteenth century politics, and told a good story in a dramatic and engaging way.
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Kissingers later writings and commentary on current affairs often fail to live up to his own standards. Most strikingly, his harsh post-Cold War policies on Russia totally denied it any room for its vision of itself, and exactly this deficiency in Western diplomacy contributed greatly to Russias shift away from its originally more cooperative policy. A final reward of reading AWR is therefore to get a wonderful collection of quotes to use against not only Kissingers foreign policy advice, but contemporary US foreign policy in general. Such as this one: The most fundamental problem of politics () is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness (p. 206). 5. Arendt, Men in Dark Times Hannah Arendt 1968, Men in Dark Times, Hartcourt, New York. [Lessing] insisted that truth can exist only where () each man says not what just happens to occur to him at the moment, but what he deems truth. But such speech is virtually impossible in solitude; it belongs to an area in which there are many voices and where the announcement of what each deems truth both links and separates men, establishing in fact those distances between men which together comprise the world. Every truth outside this area, no matter whether it brings men good or ill, is inhuman in the literal sense of the word; but not because it might rouse men against one another and separate them. Quite the contrary, it is because it might have that result that all men would suddenly unite in a single opinion, so that out of many opinions one would emerge, as though not men in their infinite plurality but man in the singular, one species and its exemplars, were to inhabit the earth. Men in Dark Times is a collection of essays on persons how they lived their lives, how they moved in the world, and how they were affected by historical time (p. 7) concretely on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Rosa Luxemburg, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Waldemar Gurian and Randall Jarrell. Nobody would be well advised to read only Men in Dark Times from Arendts works. To make sense of it, you need the code or general theory found in The Human Condition (1958). Arendt in my view captures uniquely well an essential feature of politics. She starts from a distinction between labor, work and action. Labor corresponds to life itself, the biological processes of the human body, work to the production of artificial things (worldliness), and action goes on between men and correspond to the human condition of plurality. Plurality means that we are all the same, that is human, in such a
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way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who has ever lived, lives, or will live. Therefore, every birth is a new beginning. The distinction between production and politics is crucial and often ignored. Because politics takes place among people, in-between us, because power only emerges when people act together, it basically consists of action whereby the individual can do great deeds and speak great words, but always directed to and dependent on the reaction of others, not doing things directly. History is not made in the sense that one actor has a plan and then carries it out. Politics is always more uncontrolled action leads to other acting and so forth in chain reactions. However, I list Men in Dark Times here, first because it was the book that actually hit me so forcefully, and second, there is a happy correspondence between form and content here. The format of essays on persons brings out Arendts ability to inter-act. As Arendt explains about Lessing, he did not give priority to his own consistency the interaction with his readers was more important. The perspectival truth involved in the interaction of politics is different from abstract truth. Arendt practices this interaction herself in the essays. The Lessing essay further spells out an important element more clearly than in The Human Condition. Especially in dark times, there is a temptation to escape from it and move so closely together that the interspace disappears. This produces a warmth of human relationships, but this humanism often known by pariah people comes at the high cost of any responsibility towards the world. This essay develops the difference between fraternity and friendship and thus what it takes for a reaction during difficult times to still contribute to the world and to politics. The essay on Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) develops the relationship between story telling, life and politics, and in the essay on Broch she is not surprisingly given the challenging nature of Brochs own theory pushed in relation to her own thinking, especially in relation to ethical absolutes. The importance to me of Arendts work is first of all in relation to the concept of politics. It is a constant reminder, a check against that strange, everrecurring tendency of political science to erase politics. Theories should never explain away that irreducible, open element that is the in-betweenness of politics. Also, it is an argument in relation to academic-political self-reflection, cf. the comments above in relation to Nietzsche. It is not enough to work out safe, progressive meta-positions politics demands the wager of action with sometimes unpredictable effects, and whether ones action was good or not, will be established only later by the story-teller. Finally, she offers a critical light and holds up important standards for our political life.

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Her words from the preface, sounds even more relevant today: If it is function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by credibility gaps and invisible government, by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality. Let us hope that her continuation remains relevant as well, he conviction [t]hat even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect come illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost any circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth. 6. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Democratic Politics, Verso, London. Probably, post-structuralism would have found its way to the Department of Political Science in Copenhagen one way or the other, sooner or much later. In practice it happened around 1986 and clearly through Laclau and Mouffe. The student community was still predominantly Marxist, and I personally worked meta-theoretically from the scientific realism of Roy Bhaskar. Until then, I had been sceptical when a few fellow students made the first attempts to introduce a bit of Foucault or Derrida. My (now) wife picked up Laclau and Mouffe in the local bookstore (because of her interest in social movements and forms of democracy) and the book started to find its way into seminars at the department. When she was labouring over the infamous chapter 3 of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, she suggested that I read the book as well, so we could discuss it and I was considerable more convinced than her by the general argument. This is probably the one of my ten books where it is easiest to see an immediate and revolutionary effect. It seemed highly convincing to me that the key to understanding society and politics was competing meaning-assigning projects, that a single such project never achieves full dominance, and that their partial success is exactly how meaning is produced and politics fought out. This solved a number of problems, not only for Marxist theory, but more importantly for achieving an understanding of politics that kept in the power analysis, but neither reduced
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it to affairs of the state (or state theory), nor made it derivative of nonpolitical spheres like the economy. The theory was much more respectful of the nature of politics than anything from mainstream political science or standard Marxism with the important exception of Arendt (see above). The first part (two first chapters) of the book constitute a genealogy of the concept of hegemony, i.e. a critical re-reading of classical Marxism up to Gramsci, but with the remarkable preface that they could have read something else and reached similar political conclusions. Since they nevertheless despite the contingency regarding choice of text do start from a reading, they implicitly assume that one cannot just observe society and analyse it one has to engage with traditions of thought, theory works on theory (as Althusser had tought). In the reading, they show how the independent space for political action was continuously caught in contradictory conceptions of freedom/necessity. It is not enough to declare determinedly that there is no determination in the last instance by the economy, class or anything else, for how exactly should one understand the relationship between political practices and society? This leads into the dense chapter 3, which sets forth a general theory of politics. A crucial move is to give up the idea that society is positively given as a unity with inherent meaning. It is criss-crossed by competing practices of articulation, and there is therefore no essence of the social, it is not structured by one logic that gives meaning to its whole and elements, and there is no hidden, ultimate, literal sense. Competing articulations construct different symbolic universes. Not only is a fully structured totality impossible, the elements too are unstable and incomplete identities, present in each other and marked by more than one articulation. That each is not full, complete and closed means that there is always a surplus of meaning, it is always possible to re-articulate, and this is the condition of possibility of politics. Even when one discourse (say, neo-liberalism) is very strong, and seems to structure the social through key concepts like individual freedom, economic necessity and international competitiveness, there will remain aspects of each concept dimensions of freedom, for instance not fully integrated into this one project, and there is room for competing political projects to articulate another politics. This openness of the social is constitutive they even call it the negative essence of the existing. All social orders are precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of differences. The emphasis on partial fixations is a helpful formulation in contrast to other imports of post-structuralism into the study of politics, where there is a risk of either (some Foucauldians) creating a too monolithic dominant discourse or (some Derrideans) depicting everything as floating and multi-vocal. Partial fixations allow for a mixture of structuralism and post-structuralism, which is quite productive, but obviously also continues to raise difficult metatheoretical questions.
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The book continues with the workings of antagonism, of equivalence and difference, and of hegemony reconceptualised. Obviously much more should be said about the later parts of the book, possible criticisms of the book, and not least the further mostly separate work of Laclau and Mouffe. But sticking to the power of the book, it was transformative in terms of proving the power of post-structuralism and discourse analysis as political theory (and strategy), thus enabling the grand transformation of the left within political science from Marxism to post-structuralism. The importance of Laclau and Mouffe for quite a lot of us at the time was dual. One effect was its general opening to post-structuralism, where it led one naturally to read their main inspirations, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida of which the latter clearly clicked best with me. The second importance kept the book itself in play as the best proposal for how to analyse politics from a poststructuralist basis, i.e. as a post-structuralist theory of politics as well as the preliminary manual for discourse analysis. 7. Derrida, Writing and Difference Jacques Derrida, 1978 (French original 1967) Writing and Difference, Chicago University Press, Chicago. Reading Derrida followed naturally from the eye-opening experience of reading Laclau and Mouffe. Although not the ideal vacation literature on a beach in Greece, I was seized by ironically the consistency and consequence of Derridas philosophy. Despite his own insistences that he has no philosophy, no methodology, and no post-structuralism, and despite the common image of all post-structuralism and his in particular as playful, accidental and free-wheeling, I cannot help seeing in Derrida a strong philosophical system. Having read the early texts from the late 1960s, there is a surprising predictability to the various later moves. This does not mean that one could have made them without his later writings, which would imply that the theory is mechanical as a machine (or that one is as smart as him), but that the inner logic is quite clear and compelling, and the later writings (except for maybe the middle period around Glas) become forceful arguments (for instance about politics and ethics) that make so much sense out of important questions exactly because they draw from a set of basic moves that are highly convincing, not to say hard to justify ignoring. Already in On Grammatology, Derrida made the famous argument that the Western philosophical tradition has privileged speech over writing. At one level this is just one instance of many of the general pattern of deconstruction. One takes a crucial opposition, shows that really it is a hierarchy (because one side
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is privileged), and therefore one first reverses the opposition and then makes the whole set slide by upsetting the basic distinction it rests on. At another level, this is a very specific opposition, because the revalued concept of writing becomes the general system of differences as such, Derridas radicalised version of Saussures differential understanding of meaning. Speech in turn was privileged as an instance of the human longing for presence, for simultaneous self-presence and presence of the object being together in the moment of speech. The implications of that argument is unfolded in Writing and Differences chapter on structure, sign and play. From the system of generalised differences meaning as a continuous process of reference from signifier to signifier it becomes possible to observe the role in most discourses of some transcendental signified God, Progress, Reason, Truth, History, Reality. Usually, a text operates with some such instance that is kept out of the continuous play, the point where it ends something that simply is. But it is only in the system of differences. No centre exists outside the text, but a constant longing for one, and therefore typically texts produce one. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse provided we can agree on this word that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of significations infinitely (p. 280). Ironically, this argument by Jacques Derrida has become my own transcendental signified. It is the most stable point in my own work. I have found myself unable to counter Derridas argument at this point, so I take it as an obligation to be critical of my own practice in terms of installing such instances and I find it consistently revealing how texts are best understood in terms of the often strange and indirect effects on them that stem from the operations necessary to install a transcendental signified and repress its contingency. In my case, some of the most important areas where this general philosophy was worked out by Derrida was in relation to speech act theory and not least in relation to discourse analysis. It points to the centrality of studying in a text, how it produces its own meaning, rather than relating it to a context, which is a doubtful concept because it tends to imply the traditional senderreceiver view of communication where an original meaning can be retrieved if only put in the proper context. Therefore, it is better to draw on general semiotics and analyse the valorisations and operations in the text that generates meaning, and
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especially how it tries to anchor itself in something stable (a transcendental signified), although this very stability has to be produced in and by the text. In my view, this approach to reading texts is often more helpful than the more common route to discourse analysis through Foucault. 8. Keohane (ed.), Neoralism and its Critics Robert O. Keohane 1986, Neorealism and its Critics, Columbia University Press, USA.. This item on the list is a cheat and in many respects unfair first of all to Kenneth Waltz. Of course, his Theory of International Politics (1979) ought to have been on the list, but four of its central chapters are reprinted here, together with his important response to the critics. In addition, the book contains a number of key articles from debates on International Relations theory in the mid-1980s. This collection therefore conveys the importance of Waltzs text not only by way of the text itself, but simultaneously through the reactions that it engendered. Theory of International Politics is probably the most influential IR text of the last 50 years, and it is exactly its influentiality that makes it important for me, at least as much as the power of theory in its own right. One way to approach the theory is to take it, use it, and this is surely to be recommended. Even if one does not want to sign up as a neo-realist, it is a powerful theory that teaches its users something about working with theory. But another reception is to view it as a crucial moment in the history of the discipline. Waltzs strategic moves are among the most powerful speech acts performed in the discipline of International Relations. Waltzs 1979 book is a restatement of realism in new shape. By emphasising the demands of social science and especially of theory, and taking a systemic-structural approach, realism was reformulated in a systematic and minimalist way, where previous broad speculations were replaced by a precise argument. The resulting theory was theory to a previously unknown degree in IR, and this had impressive effects. Not only realism was thoroughly transformed, also its long-term rival, liberal IR, was transfigured. Robert Keohanes counter-moves that created neoliberal institutionalism are not comprehensible unless they are seen in relation to Waltz. Even the shape and direction of critical theories was to a large extent influenced by the Waltzian move, because the mainstream came to be defined by what I later termed the neo-neo synthesis (and the extremely narrow neo-neo debate). The main dynamic axis shifted to the metatheoretical one between rationalism and its critics (and because the hallmark of the mainstream was its conception of science, the debate happened at this level). This had decisive impact on the radical, critical corner in two ways: especially post-structuralism became much more central to the main map of the discipline (at least as the primary Other of the mainstream during a crucial
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period) and the terms of debate became the nature of science. This helped post-structuralism by elevating it to a centrality that it kept denying, and it burdened it by an excessive focus on metatheory and epistemology. Since Waltz, the discipline has been transformed in a number of ways, including the ubiquity of the demand to make a clear distinction between foreign policy theory (explaining the individual acts of specific states) and international relations theory (explaining the outcomes and patterns), to take realism serious as the continuing main tradition (and not only as past mistakes) and not least to think about ones theory as a deliberate construct to be optimised and evaluated as theory, and not by immediately jumping to assessments of the accuracy of this or that assumption judged by this or that empirical example. Neorealism and its Critics contains important articles by Keohane, Gilpin and Cox that are all much cited, but for me especially the chapters by Ashley and Ruggie belong in the top-ten collection (having written an article on the oeuvre of each .). In the first generation of post-structuralist IR, Richard Ashley and Rob Walker were key figures. Walkers main contributions from this first period culminated in a widely read 1993 book, but Ashleys work remains dispersed in a number of important articles, of which this is one of the first. Thus, to enlist Ashley within the ten volumes, his article on The Poverty of Neorealism is a reasonable choice (although his 1997 article in Alternatives is a more full-blown statement of his post-structuralist take on IR). Ruggies article (originally published in 1983) opened for a systematic discussion of continuity and transformation in the World Polity. With the radical changes that took place, especially in Europe with the end of the Cold War and the rejuvenation of European integration, and increasingly more generally in relation to globalisation, a discussion erupted over change in the international system. Was it possible to pin down a level at which organising principle was changing? Ruggie pointed to the importance of sovereignty (and private property) as a specific way of specifying and differentiating units, and thus within the general assumption of international relations as anarchic, we should watch the specifications following from the kind of anarchic system we lived in due to its organisation around the modern sovereign state. Ruggie compared this to the medieval system, but soon followed a discussion about post-modern possibilities, among which neo-medievalism was an obvious instance. Ruggies article (and a later 1993 follow-up) addressed the extremely tricky question of how to assess whether somehow one organising logic is giving way to or at least being paralleled by another. Change at this level happens not by a frontal confrontation on the terms of the old, but rather through lateral change, where a new logic emerges in the cracks of the old, the importance of which only becomes clear later. Thus, at the time of
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transition, it is possible to tell stories in the different languages, but not easy to measure them up against each other. Change can therefore not be measured in relation to sovereignty, the way it is often done, that is in terms of developments that transcend or violate sovereignty, because that is to assume that sovereignty is a descriptive term, where actually it is a generative principle. Also, it is a powerful abstraction which brings us back to the issues from Marx about what abstractions key actors actually live by, and from what abstraction we can generate coherent stories that match up with what we want to grasp. The importance of Waltz and the chain-effects on more or less the whole discipline of International Relations is of general validity and can be generally established as convincing disciplinary history. The strong emphasis on the whole constellation in the mid-1980s is more idiosyncratic (including the importance of Ruggie and the question of organising principles). They belong more distinctly to my own intellectual history. We each tend to lock in with particular periods. For me, it is clearly the early and mid 1980s, where the patterns of IR-fronts (and my taste in music) became the continuous reference point for interpreting later developments. 9. Buzan, People, States and Fear Barry Buzan 1983 (2nd ed. 1991), People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations, Longman, UK. Very few Europeans who had security studies as primary research field during the 1980s or 1990s would be able to come up with a top ten that did not include People, States and Fear. Buzans 1983 book raised the field to a whole new level. It showed that it was possible to take the concept of security serious and use it as analytical perspective on a large part of international relations subjects. He managed to organise general IR theory around it. The book contains a surprising amount of the ideas that became central for the coming decade: The different sectors military, political, economic, environmental and societal and the levels of individual, state and international; the security dilemma and the defense dilemma; the usefulness of viewing IR in terms of two main sub-fields, security studies and international political economy (which Buzan brought out by thinking the security problem in relation to the international political and international economic systems); and the relative values of a national and an international security strategy. Even the idea much better unfolded later of regional security complexes is found here, as is mature anarchy. The latter was probably the main reason
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why Buzan later realised he had in some respects reinvented the English School in new terms, which led him to return to work on the original version, and produce very important theoretical work in that context (notably the 2004 book From International to World Society?). Also, Buzans book became influential because of the question of how to think about concepts. He argued that security is an essentially contested concept (with a term coined by Gallie): it is so politicised that one cannot possibly agree on a definition and leave disagreements for later. An important part of politics is carried out through the struggle over how to understand key concepts like democracy, equality and security. Buzans book showed that this not a route to agnosticism and demobilisation, but the study of an essentially contested concept could become immensely influential, not only in critical circles, but certainly also in mainstream strategic studies and even policy circles. Also in other respects, Buzan demonstrated that it is possible to overcome a very polarised debate. For instance, he viewed the state as both protector of and threats to individuals, at a time when most mainstream realist IR and peace research would only insist on seeing only one side of this picture. For me personally, the book acquired special importance for several reasons. First, I used it as foil for formulating and focusing the previous years inchoate thoughts on the concept of security in the shape of a criticism of the book, primarily for an unsustainable idea(l) of striking the right balance between individual, global and national security. I insisted that much of the debate on individual and global security is about how to understand national security, and if it is argued that a policy that takes individual and global dynamics into account produces better national security, this is not a case of giving less priority to national security, only of achieving it a better way (I would today accept that security exists as such at all levels, but still the main task is not to chose or balance between the levels but to understand how they are connected, different ways for state security to produce individual security and insecurity, etc.). This critique led to a productive discussion with Barry Buzan that has continued since then, including a handful of co-authored books. This co-operation has been all-decisive for my own academic career, so the book would be obligatory on my list for purely circumstantial reasons, but rereading it, I am reminded that the book itself fully deserves this it is actually impressive how much of the discipline in manages to reflect through security as a crystal.

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10. Milosz, New and Collected Poems : 1931-2001 Czeslaw Milosz, 2003 New and Collected Poems : 1931-2001, Allen Lane, London. To exist on the earth is beyond any power to name. One important reason for listing Milosz is that one constantly underestimated factor in the way international politics is understood (by reference to the history of ideas and competing philosophies) is the power and complexities of romanticism. Much liberal, enlightenment-inspired theory thinks it has distanced itself from romanticism, but it neither sees its own dreams of unity, harmony and meaning, nor has a relevant vocabulary for more outright romantic phenomena, such as nationalism. Critical approaches can deconstruct all such theories as attempts to install meaning in still more mysterious and indirect ways; but what is the meaning hereof? One thing is to unmask the naivety of romantic dreams of harmony, identity and homecoming (or homelessness), equally important is to recognise the unrelenting power and necessity of these aspirations which we could hardly live meaningfully without. This is the kind of tension that makes it particularly rewarding to read Isaiah Berlins writings on nationalism, Pierre Hassners security analysis and Miloszs poetry. Probably it is an unavoidable heritage for someone writing in Polish to relate to romanticism even if in contradictory ways. In Miloszs case this often takes the form of praise of earthly, daily experiences and attempts to fit them into a universalism. Since my youth I have tried to capture in words a reality such as I contemplated walking the streets of a human city and I have never succeeded; that is why each of my poems seems to me the token of an unaccomplished oeuvre. I learned early that language does not adhere to what we really are, that we move in a big make-believe which is maintained by books and pages of newsprint. And every one of my efforts to say something real ended the same way, by my being driven back to the enclosure of form, as if I were a sheep straying from the flock. And is it not always the case that we tend to long for not only reason but meaning? That we assume that things come together in meaningful patterns? That we hope that reality can be contained - maybe not expressed, but almost grasped? Even those who attack one form of harmony, reason or scheme tend to dream of some other kind of unity with an inner meaning, which they try somehow to connect to. To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhytm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. (Unattainable Earth, p. 141). (See also the poem Meaning, p. 569, too long to quote here).
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To a Finnish newspaper, Milosz said in 1993 It feels like I have my whole life been striving after something, which it is impossible to reach. And he appropriately named his 1986 collection Unattainable Earth (probably my favourite collection in its unusual form. Here, Milosz breaks from the convention of a poet gathering poems from a few years to make up a volume, and instead includes poems by others, notes in prose, various quotations and fragments of letters from friends, because they are all part of the same striving and tone as he lived during a specific period, and they all serve one purpose: my attempt to approach the inexpressible sense of being; preface). Milosz believed strongly in the task of poetry, the responsibility of the poet, which made him sceptical of excessively avant-garde writing. His own style is often simultaneously plain-spoken and elevated and as it was said in the presentation speech in 1980 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, his style is both analytic, intellectual and sensous. One might add quite a bit of humour and self-irony. What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality, he said in his Nobel Lecture. This points us back to the role of ideals and aspirations in international affairs. In the discipline of IR, there is a tendency to assume that ideals count on the good side to be discussed as part of the solution, whereas the darker logics are driven by cynical, ideal-free actors of power politics. Often the opposite is the case. One of the few International Relationists to argue this, however, did it very forcefully; Morgenthau in Scientific Man vs Power Politics (1946). If all actors were driven only by a wish to handle relations and make reasonable, practical arrangements, maybe the more optimistic, rationalistic, liberal theories could work, but men rarely leave it at that politics is regularly infused by visions and ideals. Humans are moral beings. Their relations can therefore only be understood, if this transcendental dimension is included, which the rationalistic schemes do not allow for. For a planned doctoral (i.e. Habilitation) dissertation, which I almost completed around 1997, I wanted to use one of his poems as motto, and to get permission I tried to build up the courage to write Milosz, or maybe even visit him, when I lived in his new home town Berkeley. The poem was Preparation: Still one more year of preparation. Tomorrow at the latest, Ill start working on a great book I which my century will appear as it really was. The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
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Springs and autumns will unerringly return, In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay And foxes will learn their foxy natures. And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk. Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire. No, it wont happen tomorrow. In five or ten years. I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy. I havent learned yet to speak as I should, calmly. Unfortunately, I prepared for too long for this approach, and Milosz died in 2004. A final reason for listing Milosz here relates to the subject that interests me most at the moment: religion. Especially in his later poems, as he continued to wonder about his strange fate of becoming old enough to almost parallel the whole 20th Century, he returned not only to Poland, but also to the question of his relationship to religion. Take Helenes Religion: On Sunday, I go to church and pray with all the others. Who am I to think I am different? Enough that I dont listen to what the priests blabber in their sermons. Otherwise, I would have to concede that I reject common sense. I have tried to be a faithful daughter of my Roman Catholic Church. I recite the Our Father, the Credo and Hail Mary Against my abominable unbelief. Its not up to me to know anything about Heaven or Hell. But in this world there is too much ugliness and horror. So there must be, somewhere, goodness and truth. And that means somewhere God must be.

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