The new universalism has a feminine face. I’m not talking about Greta Thunberg. Not about Ursula von der Leyen even more. Nor is it that today’s bold political activism has rested on the shoulders of women. Protests in Iran in 2022, protests against the junta in Myanmar in 2021, demonstrations in Belarus in 2020, Velvet Revolution in Armenia in 2018 were dominated by women. Today, it is women who have the courage and determination to stand up against the old order. So they are and will set the tone of the campaign for a new global order.
The feminine face of universalism, however, results from the deepest essence of the direction of reconstruction of the international order. The old order was based on the paradigm of the nation-state, and the nation-state was based on the paradigm of the nation. The nation was imagined and constructed by highly masculinized factors. Maria Janion once wrote: “The modern concept of the nation and the nationalism that arose with it were combined with the stereotype of masculinity, containing the properly specified characteristics of male identity.”
The national community was strengthened under the influence of the “mythology of the male community”, in the spirit of “ruthless struggle and war fervor”. Nationalist ideologies appealed to the ideal of masculinity, while nationalist movements were movements of “real men.” No wonder that today’s “stadium patriots” are at the forefront of homophobic mobs in Poland and elsewhere. Because male homosexuality is perceived by them as a denial of masculinity. As George L. Mosse noted: „Male eros was the haunting spirit of modern nationalism”. Nationalism idealized “true male friendship” as opposed to “erotic friendship.” Nationalism as a male movement dissociated itself from perversions, deviations, impurities and imperfections.
Femininity was identified with weakness, passivity, treachery, impurity, seduction. It had only one noble figure – the figure of the Mother. And this figure often personified the nation itself. Only the Mother mattered. And the rest of the female community was a subservient and despised tribe. So what if it was always the tribe of someone’s present or future Mothers. Every true nationalist believes in the immaculate conception of his own nation, just as he believes in the immaculateness of his own mother.
It is significant that when Ernest Renan gave his epoch-making lecture on March 11, 1882, “What is a nation”, only men listened to him in the Sorbonne hall.
Thus, the nation-state had to be built in the cult of strength and sacrifice. Because its first task was to ensure national survival, its status was determined by the accumulated resources of power. It had to compete with others. It had to defend its interests even by resorting to force. As a good male.
Imperialism was the flowering of hyper-masculinity. To authenticate its aggressive mission, the West feminized the conquered nations. The West conceived itself as a man, and the East was portrayed as a woman. As Edward Said argued, the masculine West had to conquer the feminine East. Colonization and the conquests carried out as part of it were creating relations of subordination, enslavement and taming, similar in essence to male-female relations in the contemporary society. The East was depicted as inferior, backward and at the same time impenetrable, evoking a feeling of desire. The woman of the Orient never spoke on her own, did not reveal emotions, obediently served the man who spoke on her behalf and represented her outside. And the Orient, like its women, attracted Western men with its sexual promise of hitherto unknown pleasure. Said wrote that Orientalism “viewed itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders”.
The conflicts between the imperial states became a clash of alpha males (for control of the global harem).
Today’s international politics and today’s international order are the legacy of this masculine world. It is a world of hierarchy, domination, rivalry, conflict, violence, political oculocentrism. Just look at Vladimir Putin and his actions. Today it is difficult to find a more convincing personification of masculinist stereotypes in politics, machismo as an apotheosis of effectiveness.
In 2014, Sweden proclaimed a doctrine of feminist foreign policy. It has become Sweden’s flagship global engagement project.
Feminist foreign policy was based on three pillars: the fight for women’s rights, increasing their representation at political and business leadership levels, and directing development aid to women’s emancipation goals.
It is a phenomenon that offends our high opinion of ourselves as a civilization that hundreds of millions of women live under conditions of legal discrimination, their rights are limited, they are deprived of the possibility of exercising their reproductive rights, they fall victim to domestic violence, they are paid less than men for their work. There is no doubt in my mind that the underprivileged status of women is evidence of our inability as a civilization to liberate ourselves from the legacy of the Dark Ages. We are still stuck in those centuries, although we talk about postmodernity.
The Swedes also put at the center of their policy the increase in the number of women holding managerial positions in diplomacy and international politics. No woman has ever had the honor of sitting in the chair of UN Secretary General and in other leadership positions (NATO Secretary General, Arab League Secretary General and others). Women constitute a negligible percentage of diplomatic negotiators (for example, in the three decades of the Minsk Group’s efforts on Nagorno-Karabakh, no woman has been a mediator or special representative of the OSCE Chairman).
Too little resources are still devoted to the emancipation of women. And emancipation costs money. A little digression here. When I asked a group of women in one of the Armenian provinces what we, as development donors, should do to increase the number of women involved in politics, I heard a clear and thoughtful answer: “Build nurseries and kindergartens.” Women’s access to education and healthcare remains a problem in many countries. Without this, equality cannot be guaranteed.
The Swedes dragged over a dozen countries with them, which became promoters of feminist foreign policy. This group includes Australia, Canada, Norway, France, Mexico and others. Poland doesn’t belong there yet.
Even the US has taken over some of its elements although has not yet joined the caucus. The term “Hillary Doctrine” (from the name of the US Secretary of State under Obama) has even appeared, which requires that women’s enslavement be treated as a threat to security. UN agencies, the OECD and other organizations have adopted documents supporting the goal of women’s empowerment (1995 Beijing Declaration, Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000 and other).
However, the intention of the new right-wing Swedish government, announced in December 2022, to abandon, at least in the PR dimension, the doctrine of feminist foreign policy, could be discouraging, because in its opinion “the label became more important than the content”, i.e. the form overshadowed the content.
But the group of supporters of feminist foreign policy consisting already of 18 states held a meeting at the ministerial level in autumn 2023 in New York and issued a political declaration.
The doctrine has been criticized from various sides. The accusation of inconsistency was raised quite early. Sweden preached the slogans of feminist peace, and at the same time was a leading arms exporter. In all fairness, it should be noted that it abandoned a lucrative arms supply contract to Saudi Arabia, arguing that the country still treats women as second-class citizens. But other Western countries do not apply similar criteria in the export of their own weapons systems. Systemic sanctions for the practice of female genital mutilation have not yet been introduced by the international community. Even more so for banning abortion.
Proponents of feminist foreign policy reply that it has been conducted in a responsible and pragmatic manner, i.e. taking into account the realities prevailing in the world. It is not a moral crusade. It is not a dogmatic policy.
Another objection pointed to the lack of practical effects of promoting women to high positions. It is difficult to fully agree with this allegation. The performance by Catherine Ashton and Federica Mogherini of the function of the head of EU diplomacy contributed to the consolidation of gender policy in the so-called mainstream of the Union’s external activities. It led to the appointment of a gender and diversity ambassador, the adoption of further strategies and ensuring a good proportion of women in the highest diplomatic posts. But Borrell is an equally good executor of this policy. Has the numerous presence of women in high diplomatic positions brought a tangible effect in specific actions of EU diplomacy? Has it changed its style? Have the ways of doing things changed? Have political goals changed? Critics say: not at all. And the sharpest voices claim that the existing system of conducting diplomacy, practiced for centuries, simply does not give such a possibility. Women fit into existing canons, canons created by the very masculine world of old international politics.
To illustrate this thesis, another digression. A person close to me once pointed out that theatergoers in Poland (and not only) can often observe the phenomenon of long queues to the women’s toilets in the intermissions, with no crowds in front of the men’s toilets. In the West, the problem is less acute. For various reasons. Our theater buildings were designed by men at a time when they could not have suspected that one day women would dominate the theater audience. And the design was based on the principle of symmetry and separation of toilets. Women become theater directors, but they are not always able to solve the problem of these humiliating queues (with some exceptions). Well, they don’t see the problem. If similarly long queues formed in front of men’s toilets, every male director with the help of a male architect would have solved the problem very quickly.
Nominations of women to managerial positions in diplomacy change its image, but they should also change its essence, one would like to say.
And critics of feminist foreign policy draw a heavy weight argument at the end. The policy’s methods perpetuate the stereotype of “woman in need of masculinized protection”, relying on administrative enforcement of change through quotas, zipper-like rules when composing electoral ballots and other artificial contortions. But it is the system which needs to be changed.
It is significant that the Swedish doctrine of feminist politics did not contain any postulates regarding the rearrangement of the world of international politics, which was formed by men and burdened with their inclinations stemming from their identity (competition, rivalry, struggle, domination, etc.).
It is undoubtedly thanks to the feminist doctrine that its practical application has given impetus to theoreticians and analysts who have wanted to transpose gender studies into the field of international relations theory for years. Recent years have brought an abundance of books, articles, conferences and seminars that refer to the feminist theory of international relations. Its undoubted merit is highlighting the moral factor in politics (women’s rights), the analysis of subjects of international relations as social constructs. It was, in its own way, part of the cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences that Ulrich Beck was so keen for.
The emancipation of women was one of the factors reducing violence in the world (and interstate violence as well), as Steven Pinker convincingly proved it.
I have also been convinced that a breakthrough in the governance of the globe will not be achieved with the help of old diplomacy, the old system of international institutions, everything that we associate with the paradigm of international relations based on the nation-state and national interest as the “guide principle of gravity” determining the behavior of states. I was also convinced that hierarchy should give way to networking, competition should give way to cooperation, national egoism to cosmopolitan empathy, interests to values, presentism to longtermism, diplomatic oculocentrism and information scopophilia to compassionate touch. I became a feminist.
But I do not see such strategic intentions in the operation of feminist foreign policy. I can’t even see the use of ideas that have been on the table for a long time, just related to building the institution of a networking world (Anne-Marie Slaughter).
A feminist international order would be ideal for a world of new universalism. But if sluggishly materialized it may never triumph. Before its proponents realize it, the world will embrace the technological order (Pax Technologica), based on the dictates of artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning. If it is a better option for the world, more on that another time.
But after all the new order should be freed from all the previuos stereotypes, including those relating to gender.
