Description
This paper is about the rhetoric of Russia’s president, Vladmir Putin, and his justified inconsistency on ‘world order’s foundations’. Its aim is to explain this paradox in rhetoric for the theory on world states in international relations, addressing Alexander Wendt’s constructivist theory in particular. With reference to Michael Oakeshott’s account of the ‘ideal character’ of the modern state and Eric Voegelin’s account of the ‘restoration’ of order, I argue that Putin’s rhetoric from June 2021 to the present is constitutive of the narrative of a world state. And the ‘teleology’ to this narrative is best explained, not in terms of ‘inevitability’, as Wendt supposes, but ‘intentionality’. In this case, the intentionality for political association that looks beyond Russia’s borders, but not beyond a political faith in the restoration of ‘stable world order’. This paper’s case study discloses: i) the reactionary ‘foundations’ of this political faith in commitments to ‘the international community’ for world ‘peace’ and ‘our people’; and ii) the narratology of this political faith in international practice for theorising the unintended geopolitical revolution to the construction of an ‘ideal world state’.
