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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
This article focuses on the relationship between emotions and passions, on the one hand, and values, needs and rights, on the other. This relationship is indeed central to the social dimension of international politics. In this perspective, the article examines how emotions and passions can be at the same time effects and causes of the extent to which actors feel that their needs and rights are fulfilled or not. In the process, the article also explores the negative and positive features of emotions and passions, and their impact on the nature and dynamics of change in international affairs. Beyond this general approach to emotions and passions in connection with the social dimension of international politics and the questions of values, needs, and rights of actors and change, it concludes with the idea that there is also a contextual dimension to the generic argument developed in the article. This will have to be factored in for future research on case studies.
1 Coicaud, Jean-Marc, ‘Emotions and Passions in the Discipline of International Relations’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, 15 (3)Google Scholar September 2014.
2 Ibid.
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17 On this issue, Starobinski, Jean, Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple, translated by Sophie Hawkes with Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2003), for instance p. 371Google Scholar.
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21 Jon Elster argues that the influence of culture on emotions is shown in three main ways: ‘in the labeling of emotions, in the evaluation of emotions, and in the determination of the behaviors that tend to trigger specific emotions’, in Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 412.
22 Ibid., p. 117. For more on basic emotions theory, see for example Frijda, Nico, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google ScholarPubMed.
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26 Not everybody agrees with this. Robert C. Solomon argues that emotions are one of the forms of passions: ‘There are three fundamental species of passions: (1) emotions, (2) moods, and (3) desires.’ See The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), p. 70.
27 ‘A Brief Case study of Germany and Japan: Emotions and Passions in the Making of World War II’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.
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29 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, translated by Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, 1996), Part III, Propositions 6, 7, and 8, p. 75.
30 This of course is not all there is to social change.
31 This does not imply that the path from needs to rights is simple and straightforward. For example, for actors to be seen as having rights, and for them to be the pillars around which the sense of right and wrong is built, they first have to be viewed as legitimate actors (i.e., rights-holders). This is not an easy task. Over the course of history, the question of which actors have rights has been as much, if not more, a matter of debates and struggles as the one of which rights the rights-holders have. For more on this in the international context, Coicaud, Jean-Marc, ‘Deconstructing International Legitimacy’, in Charlesworth, Hilary and Coicaud, Jean-Marc, Fault Lines of International Legitimacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 36–47Google Scholar. In addition, the less a need appears to be a basic universal need, for instance for reasons of cultural differences or disparity of levels of development among societies, the more there is an inclination to contest the possibility that it could become a right.
32 On envy in a social context, an interesting book is Schoeck, Helmut, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1969)Google Scholar.
33 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, translated by Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003), Part 2 (for instance Chapter 13)Google Scholar and Part 3. See also Elster, Jon, Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapters 3 and 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 For more on this, see Walzer, Michael, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Margalit, Avishai, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 7–8 and 36–47Google Scholar.
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41 Think about, among other examples, the mass suicide, by drinking poisoned punch, of close to one thousand people led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana, on 18 November 1978. Think also about Hitler and the issuance of the ‘Scorched Earth’ Decree (Nero Decree), on 9 March 1945. It seems that Hitler did not think that Germany could and, perhaps more importantly, should survive defeat and his own demise, hence the fact that surrender was not an option and that he was willing to let the destruction of the country go to extremes. There was to be no future for the nation after National Socialism.
42 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, supra note 28, pp. 44–5 and 156.
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55 Refer for instance to Mayer, The Furies, supra note 52, for example Chapters 3, 4, and 5.
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