A First Discussion of Power and Value in International Relations from a Generative Relational Perspective

Theories of international politics measure power, aggregate it, and ask what follows from its distribution. They seldom ask why there is any. Power admits of derivation. A process that generates must differentiate, since a generation that leaves the world indistinguishable from what it was has generated nothing; what it differentiates includes the capacity to supply the terms on which coordination proceeds; and a relation whose terms are supplied by one of its parties is a relation with a direction. Asymmetry is therefore a condition of relations in which something is made, rather than a corruption of them, and it resists removal that leaves generation standing. The question of justice cannot then be how to eliminate asymmetry, and becomes instead what the asymmetry does to the relation in which it stands. Answering that question in international politics runs into an obstacle that the available frameworks do not meet. A state supplies technology and receives recognition, supplies a guarantee and receives basing rights. Between such goods there is no ratio, and for the account to close, something must be made to count as repayment for something of another kind. That operation requires a rate, and the rate is not given by the values it settles. It is posited, and there is no correct one. Three evasions are closed. Monetisation performs the conversion it claims to avoid; categorial separation forbids the question it claims to answer; subjective satisfaction consults the effect of the rate as the test of the rate. That the setting of a common metric among unlike things is a mode of power belongs to the sociology of commensuration and is inherited here rather than claimed. But that literature theorises the boundary: a metric advances upon a sphere held apart from it, and resistance takes the form of refusing the metric outright. Refusal presupposes a position from which one may withdraw and remain what one was. A state that cannot withdraw without ceasing to count as a party has no such position, and is settled against notwithstanding its objection. Where refusal is foreclosed, commensuration ceases to be a contested boundary and becomes a constitutive condition of the relation, so that the international case is not one further instance of the sociological phenomenon but its limit, at which the phenomenon changes character. Two consequences follow. The colony whose material ledger runs positive, a case on which generative justice, unequal exchange, and the sociology of commensuration are alike silent, is diagnosed: the injustice lies neither in the flow nor in the unfairness of the rate but in the foreclosure of any position from which the rate might be reopened. And the normative condition of a settlement is located in the contestability of its rate, which is not a proceduralist retreat but the residue of resistance once refusal has been foreclosed. The argument surrenders the classical vocabulary of exploitation, which requires a common measure that the goods of international politics do not admit. The paper closes on the question it does not answer, which is who reorganises a loop from which no party may withdraw.