The Pilgrim’s Policy Conclusions: Cooperation, Conflict, Change

Abstract

International Relations can offer a long narrative of crisis. The latest is called the Global Financial Crisis and lasts since 2007 or 2008. Certainly this crisis or these crises around American subprime lending, European sovereign-debt, bank run, and threatening bank panic have a major negative impact. Nevertheless, they might be part of the capitalist creative deconstruction as Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter called it. Or at least, to echo a famous sentence in International Relations theory, crises occur because there is nothing to prevent them. Crises are structurally a part of change. If we live in a liquid age of transformation, we have to live with crisis. The old has too many reasons for wanting to stay and the new is always full of risks. Change rarely comes smoothly. The pilgrim’s contribution to this is the establishment of a political concept of self, agency, and community that cannot only stand change, including crises, but which can also judge and act accordantly. The critical task of political science is to offer narratives and semantics to imagine possibilities to make a difference to these changes.1