British Patrons and Puerile Greeks: The Dialogics of Self-Presentation

Abstract

Why does political patronage masquerade in a gendered language of family unity? Feminist theorists who have worked towards a normative theory of care and of non-contractual values such as trust and responsibility (Deacon, 2007; Kittay, 2001; White, 2003; Williams, 2004) may not be surprised to find that, historically, the language of care was employed to describe unequal political relations on many occasions. The paradox this hides is so striking, that it is easily missed: in replacing the discourse of political control with that of care and unmitigated parental duties, an ethical universalism only Kantians would support becomes auxiliary to a realist ‘Weberian power politics’, reproducing thus a conflict that stands at the core of Western European modernity (Guzzini, 1998, p. 228; Robinson, 1999, pp. 4–6). The chasm between lofty aspirations of ‘justice’ and the ‘good’ on the one hand, and the more immanent aspiration of international relations to the maintenance of ‘stability’ or ‘order’ (Haslam, 2002; Morgenthau and Thompson, 1984), turn out to be, on closer inspection, two sides of the same coin rather than an intractable opposition. This reminds us in the context of international relations that ‘the structures, norms, and practices which govern the global system served to exclude, and to marginalize, certain groups’ (Robinson, 1999, pp. 109–10).