International Humility: Rebooting an Age-old Virtue

By Yönet C. Tezel - 27 January 2025
International Humility: Rebooting an Age-old Virtue

Humility has been widely valued in philosophical and religious traditions for centuries, and more recently by psychologists. However, its application to international relations and foreign policy has evidently not been considered at length either by scholars or practitioners. Geopolitical thinking and great power politics of our time seem to leave no place for humility in international politics. But given the severity of international challenges and conflicts, it would be wise to re-consider our ways of thinking about the world and adopt attitudes that can help us better understand friends, rivals and adversaries, but also ourselves. Such an attitude resides within the age-old virtue of humility. Arguing for humility is not to make a case for relativism or to condone transgressions and bad governance around the world. If cultivated properly, humility at the international level could contribute to smart statecraft even in the realist sense. Lack of humility has been one of the consequential shortcomings of the liberal international order. With certitude widespread, humility can serve east and west, north and south, helping us to overcome the polarizing narrative of “the West and the Rest.”.

Policy Recommendations

  • At the most general level, consider the (re)introduction of humility in the curricula of national education as a way to improve one’s understanding of others and oneself. Humility can be valorised, as part of critical thinking, through education, much like creativity has been.
  • Cultivate humility as an epistemic virtue in professional training programs (and, where needed, in academic institutions) covering international relations, foreign policy and global governance.
  • Promote humility as a rule of thumb, a heuristic, in the working methodology of intergovernmental organisations (and preferably in INGOs), as well as in schools of journalism.
  • Avoid interpretations of humility which associate it with low self-esteem and submissiveness; on the contrary, cultivate humility to build a sense of being grounded through a realistic evaluation of the self and modesty in one’s capacity to understand others fully.

 

Photo by Mehmet Altıntaş