Habermas meets role theory: communicative action as role playing?: Harald Müller

The question Many scholars look at role theory as a concept that emphasizes structural constraints upon actors. Role scripts tell actors how to behave, reducing their creativity and autonomy to a minimum. Communicative action (CA), in contrast, emphasizes the sovereign rational subject, i.e. agency engaging in intersubjective practice in order to produce norms and rules for achieving common objectives. Structural constraints are viewed (at least in the original conception of the theory) as attributes of the “system,” which, in turn, is the constellation in which strategic action is the dominant mode for the realization of preferences, while “lifeworld” is the environment in which CA blossoms. As an heir of Frankfurt School theory, Habermas invested unmistakably negative connotations in the system with its dehumanizing effects, and positive connotations in the “lifeworld” where freedom and authenticity have their home (Habermas 1981). The question, then, is whether the two conceptions can be sensibly reconciled and fruitfully applied to empirical issues in international relations (Deitelhoff 2006; Deitelhoff and Muller 2005; Muller 1994, 1995, 2001, 2004a, 2007; Risse 2000). An answer to this question requires an in-depth inquiry into the agencystructure conception of either approach with a view to determining their compatibility. This is what this chapter endeavors to do. I will first discuss the concept of “role” in a way that liberates it from a strictly structuralist understanding and puts it rather between structure and actor.1 I will then restate the case for applying communicative action analysis to international relations in the same way as to any other field of human action even though it was conceptualized as a theory for deducing valid universal norms in a post-transcendental environment – that is, for non-empirical purposes. Next, I shall try to explain why we can use the concept even in today’s world of cultural diversity, which seems to obviate the requirement of theory of communicative action (TCA) for a shared normative background embedded in the common lifeworld of actors. In the fifth section, I will differentiate between an institutional and an actor-related argument about how communicative action becomes possible in the seemingly hostile environment of international power politics and then enumerate a sample of non-state and state actors that could be particularlyinclined to use communicative action in their external operations. Coming back to the question of structuralist stasis (Sending 2002), I will then elaborate how communicative action works to make change possible in role scripts, and what other factors could initiate such a change. I conclude that globalization might, over time, be rather favorable to a growth of communicative action in international relations and that role theory and TCA go well together.