RELATIONAL PARADIGM
Politics is a cumulative, multilevel, open-ended process of continuous interaction over time engaging significant clusters of citizens in and out of government and the relationships they form to solve public problems in whole bodies politic across permeable borders, either within or between communities or countries.
This contrasts to the paradigm that has prevailed in U.S. political science for the past two or more generations. The mantra has been: “Politics is about power” with power defined as the ability to control or coerce. In international affairs, the “realist paradigm” has essentially said: “Leaders of nation states amass economic and military power to pursue objectively defined interests against other nation states in zero-sum contests of material power.”
The relational paradigm’s focus on a multilevel process of continuous interaction among citizens contrasts to the traditional focus on a linear sequence of actions and reactions among institutions as in a chess game. Continuing interactions are the essence of that process. What is important are the interplay and interpenetration between entities—not just the action of one on the other.
To capture this dynamic process of continuous interaction, we have used the human word relationship, which has been carefully defined above.
The focus widens beyond the structures and institutions of state and government to include whole bodies politic—citizens outside as well as inside government.
Picture citizens interacting around common concerns. Each values a number of personal, professional, identity, religious, cultural, and other interests. Each brings those interests into different interactions with others sharing those interests. Each citizen’s life involves a complex of clustered interactions—some overlapping, some not. These clusters interact with other clusters in numberless ways. Picture clusters, groups, associations of citizens in and out of government thinking, talking, acting together because they are concerned about a particular problem. Suspend your inclination to define these clusters in terms of their structures and instead see the permeable boundaries of each group defined only by the pattern created by their interactions—not by constitutions and bylaws. Think of the body politic as the kaleidoscope in which these continuously changing groups interact.
This perspective does not minimize government. There are some things that only governments can do. But there are some things that only citizens outside government can do—such as transforming conflictual human relationships, modifying human behavior, and changing political culture. The energies and capacities of these citizens are the greatest untapped resources for meeting the challenges of the 21
st century. A paradigm that does not include them is ineffective because it ignores those resources and immoral because it leaves out most of the world’s citizens.
