Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality (Book Review)

Michel Foucault’s language spreads like wildfire through international-relations theory. This particular celebration of the French master comes from Norway, where, as the authors tell it, a group of young scholars revolted in 1998 when their government resurrected the practice of paying scholars with research grants for participating in a national conversation about power in Scandinavian states, this was to be a conversation whose mandate, funding, and orchestration would be provided by the state. The Norwegian government was apparently hoping to promote the ‘governmentality’ among the populace that Foucault’s writings are all about. States grow stronger, he teaches, when their raw power no longer needs to be applied directly, as the populace internalises respect for authority and rules. The technique for achieving this discipline certainly includes influencing the public discourse to promote this self-imposed governmentality of obedient citizens. In effect the rebels refused to practise what Foucault preaches. Instead they produced their own independent series.This, they say, marginalised the government’s efforts to dominate the domestic debate. Emboldened by their success in eluding their government, the authors next hoped to escape their language: to join the international discussion of Foucault with a book in English applying his ideas to international-relations theory. Unfortunately translating Foucault’s ideas into any known language is a formidable task, and certainly no easier than translating Norwegian into English.

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