【(Preliminary)Perspective】The Gift and the Generative Relational Foundations of Diplomacy - A Preliminary Discussion Paper

Posted on 2026-07-14 In Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice Views: Disqus: Word count in article: 27k Reading time ≈ 1:37

ENGLISH

The Gift and the Generative Relational Foundations of Diplomacy

A Preliminary Discussion Paper

Wanhong Huang (huangwanhong@serendip.ngo)

Abstract

States perform acts the available accounts of cooperation cannot price: the apology, the state visit, the disaster relief dispatched to a rival. Realism reads these as interest in disguise, rationalist institutionalism as reputational investment, the theory of soft power as influence purchased cheaply. All three are accounts of exchange, and none explains the observation that such acts fail when performed transactionally, and that the parties can tell.

That the gift creates relation beyond exchange is inherited here from Mauss and not claimed. What is claimed is a mechanism. Mauss explains the bond by obligation, and obligation presupposes an order that binds; the received symbolic account explains it by transmission, and transmission presupposes a shared code. The society of states supplies neither, and both accounts fail in the case for which Mauss himself most conspicuously invoked his. The constitutive act lies where neither looks, in the reading of the recipient that precedes the giving and determines its form, so that the wrong gift demonstrates that the relation was never entered. A gift, on the account offered, provides a position at which the recipient’s excess can register, and a criterion of four conditions distinguishes the gift that opens a circulation from the gift that installs a hierarchy. Diplomacy is chosen because it is the case in which the gift must operate without a shared code and without a third position from which the parties could be characterized, which is the configuration this programme holds incapable of generating normative structure. Whether the gift generates that position or merely conceals force is left to the archive.

Keywords: gift; diplomacy; anarchy; recognition; generative justice; relational theory of international relations.

Part I. The Anomaly

§1 The Transactional Anomaly

Consider a class of diplomatic acts. A head of government kneels at a memorial in a country his own state destroyed. A state dispatches rescue teams to a rival struck by earthquake. Two states exchange collections of manuscripts, or orchestras, or football teams. A foreign minister travels a long distance to be present at a funeral. A state extends recognition to another that has just come into being and can offer nothing in return.

The available accounts have three ways of handling these. Realism treats them as cheap talk, costless signalling that conveys no information and constrains no future conduct, or as interest in disguise, the material return concealed and awaiting discovery. Rationalist institutionalism treats them as investment in reputation, an asset that will be drawn upon in future bargaining. The theory of soft power treats them as influence purchased at low cost, attraction substituting for coercion in the production of preferred outcomes (Nye 2004).

Each of these is an account of exchange. Each holds that the act is undertaken because a return is expected, and each differs from the others only in the currency of the return.

The anomaly is not that such acts occur, which any of the three accounts can accommodate. The anomaly is that the acts fail when they are performed transactionally, and that the parties can tell. An apology offered in order to secure a trade concession is not received as an apology; it is received as a bid, and it does not do the work an apology does. Relief dispatched with a press delegation attached is read as what it is. The gift that is visibly given for its return produces no relation, and the actors involved, who are not naive, know this and act on it. They conceal the interest where interest exists, and the concealment is not hypocrisy alone. It is a recognition that the mechanism requires the concealment in order to operate at all, which is a fact about the mechanism.

An account of exchange cannot register this. On an account of exchange, a transaction openly conducted is a transaction efficiently conducted, and the visibility of the return should improve the arrangement rather than destroy it.

§2 What This Paper Inherits

That the gift creates relation beyond exchange is not the claim of this paper. It is the settled result of a literature, and the paper builds on it.

Mauss established that the gift is a total social fact and not a transfer, that it is governed by three obligations, to give, to receive, and to reciprocate, and that these obligations are not contractual and are enforced by no court (Mauss 1925). Later work established that the gift must continue to circulate and that value which ceases to move ceases to be a gift (Hyde 1983), that reciprocity is a mode of integration distinct from market exchange (Polanyi 1944), and that the historical record of obligation without enforcement is far larger than the record of contract (Graeber 2011). The theory of generative justice established the condition on which the present paper’s criterion rests. Its definition has three clauses: the universal right to generate unalienated value and to participate directly in its benefits; the right of value generators to create their own conditions of production; and the right of communities of value generation to nurture self-sustaining paths for its circulation (Eglash 2016). Unalienated value is defined there recursively, as that which makes possible further just and sustainable generation, so that what circulates is not a quantity of value alone and includes the capacity by which value is generated. The recursion, and the requirement that generators be positioned to create their own conditions of production, are Eglash’s and are relied upon at several points below.

None of this is original here, and stating so costs the paper nothing. What follows takes these as given and asks a question they leave open.

§3 The Question

The question. The gift is not exchange, and the gift is a technology of hierarchy at least as often as it is a foundation of trust. Tribute is a gift. Reparations are a gift. Aid is a gift. What distinguishes the gift that opens a circulation from the gift that installs a hierarchy?

The question is asked in the diplomatic case, and the choice is defended in Part V. It is not asked in order to recommend a foreign policy, and §27 gives the structural reason why the criterion developed here could not serve as one.

Part II. What the Received Account Presupposes

§4 The Definition, Held Neutral

A definition is required before the criterion, and it must be neutral with respect to the criterion, on pain of settling by stipulation what the paper undertakes to argue.

Gift. An irrecoverable transfer, whose form is determined by a reading of the recipient, and which carries no enforceable claim to return.

The definition covers tribute and the Marshall Plan alike, and it is intended to. A definition that excluded tribute would place the extractive case outside the theory’s reach, and the extractive case is what the theory exists to distinguish. The definition names the structure. The criterion of Part IV, stated separately, does the normative work.

A qualification is required at once, and §25 develops it. The strongest diplomatic gifts transfer no object. The apology, the state visit, the extension of recognition to a new state: what is given in these is standing, the irrecoverable surrender of a position from which the giver could have continued to deny, and the definition is stretched by them. Whether standing is a transfer in the sense the definition requires is a question the paper poses and does not settle.

§5 The Anomalies of Delay and Inalienability

Two features of the gift are anomalous under any account of exchange, and they are the evidential core of the negative argument.

The first is delay. An immediate counter-gift is an insult, and it converts the gift into a transaction, and every party to the exchange knows this. An account of exchange cannot say why. On such an account the prompt settlement of an obligation is the efficient discharge of it, and the interval between the gift and the return is a cost that both parties would prefer to eliminate. In the practice, the interval is constitutive, and its elimination destroys the thing.

The second is inalienability. What is given carries the giver, and what returns is not fungible with what was given (Godelier 1999). An account of exchange requires that the good exist independently of the transaction, so that its value may be compared with the value of what is received. In the gift the object is a bearer of the relation, and its value is not separable from who gave it and how it was read.

The transactional objection presents itself here and must be met, since it will otherwise be made later and with more force. The objection runs: the gift has an expected counter-gift, therefore the gift is exchange with a lag, and the anomalies above are frictions in the mechanism of exchange rather than evidence against it.

Three replies. The first is that substitutability fails. If the gift were exchange, an equivalent return from another source would be a substitute, and it is not; the return that is wanted is the return from this party, which does not exist prior to the relation and cannot be sourced elsewhere. The second is that the sign is wrong on the key variable. If trust in the gift were the discounted expectation of a return, the gift that most securely guarantees its return should produce the most trust. The gift that most securely guarantees its return is a contract, and it produces none. The third is that guaranteeing the return destroys the thing, which is the same observation stated as an intervention: attach an enforceable counter-obligation to a gift and it becomes a contract, and every party knows the difference and behaves differently.

A formal statement of the same point is available and is stated for the record, since it bears on the standing of rationalist accounts more broadly. The construction of a payoff matrix requires that the parties’ objective functions be defined prior to the relation whose payoffs are to be entered. Where the objective is itself constituted in the relation, and altered by it, the matrix cannot be written, and the account is ill-posed rather than incomplete. Whether the national interest is antecedent to the relations a state stands in is a question rationalist international relations answers in the affirmative by assumption and does not argue.

§6 Obligation Presupposes an Order

Mauss explains the bond by obligation. The gift obliges, the obligation is not contractual, and the failure to reciprocate carries a sanction that is social and not legal.

Obligation of this kind presupposes an order in which the obligation holds. The sanction that enforces it, being social, is administered by a community that recognizes the obligation as one, and the recognition is what gives the sanction its force. Mauss drew his cases from societies in which such an order was intact, and within them the account is sound.

The society of states possesses no such order. This is what the discipline of international relations means by anarchy (Bull 1977), and it names the absence of a locus from which obligation could be characterized as obligation and its breach as breach, rather than a condition of disorder. Where such a locus is absent, the Maussian sanction has nowhere to issue from, and the account of the bond by obligation does not extend.

The point has a sharp historiographical edge, and the paper states it rather than leaving it to a reviewer. Mauss himself applied his theory to the international case, closing his essay with an argument about the League of Nations and about the gift as an alternative to war. The present paper’s objection is therefore an objection to Mauss’s own extension of his own theory, and not to an extension made by his followers.

The first presupposition. The Maussian mechanism of obligation presupposes a symbolic order that binds, and the society of states does not supply one. The account fails in the case for which its author most conspicuously invoked it.

Refutation. The claim fails if a durable locus of obligation can be exhibited in the society of states, from which the breach of a gift-obligation is characterized as breach and sanctioned as such. Candidates exist and are not dismissed: the diplomatic corps, the practice of protocol, the historical judgment of an imagined posterity. Whether any of these constitutes such a locus, or merely resembles one, is the question Part V leaves open.

§7 Transmission Presupposes a Code

The received account of the gift’s symbolic dimension fails in a second way, and the failure has the same structure as the first.

That the gift carries symbolic meaning is not a claim this paper makes, the point being settled and the literature crowded. What the received account supplies is a model of that carriage, and the model is one of transmission: the giver encodes a meaning in an object, the recipient decodes it, and the exchange succeeds where the code is shared and fails where it is not. The gaffe, on this model, is a decoding error.

The model presupposes a shared code. Where the parties inhabit a common symbolic order, the presupposition holds and the model is adequate. The society of states supplies no common symbolic order, and the difficulty of the diplomatic gift is precisely that the parties do not share a code. So the transmission model fails exactly where it is most needed.

The structure of the two presuppositions is identical, and the identity is worth stating, since it locates a single defect. The Maussian account presupposes the order that would bind. The transmission account presupposes the code that would carry. Both presuppose the symbolic order they were invoked to explain, and both are silent where it is absent.

Part III. The Mechanism

§8 The Gift Proposes a Grammar

What is proposed in place of transmission is the following. The gift does not carry a meaning within a shared grammar. It proposes a grammar and awaits ratification.

The giver, reading the recipient, hazards a judgment as to what will count as a gift in the recipient’s world. The giving is a bid that the judgment is correct. The recipient’s response is not the decoding of a message. It is the ratification or the refusal of the grammar the gift proposed. What is at stake in the exchange is neither the object nor even the relation, but the terms in which the two parties will thereafter be able to address one another at all.

This explains the delay, and it explains it as a structural requirement and not as a rule of etiquette. An immediate counter-gift ratifies nothing, since it forecloses the interval in which the recipient’s own reading is hazarded. The counter-gift must be a second bid, offered in the grammar the first proposed and not identical with it, or the grammar never becomes joint. Simultaneity destroys the gift because it collapses two bids into one transaction.

It also explains the wrong gift, and it explains it structurally rather than culturally. The wrong gift is not a misencoding. It is a proposal the recipient cannot ratify, because it was made in a grammar the recipient has no place in. Grain that the recipient’s agriculture cannot use, a hospital the recipient has no staff to run, an artefact whose significance is legible only in the giver’s own history: these are not translation errors. They are bids made unilaterally, in the giver’s grammar, and they therefore reveal that no grammar was proposed at all and only a transfer was made.

The relation to Bourdieu

Bourdieu also made the interval constitutive, and the point of contact must be stated before it is discovered. On his account the gift’s efficacy depends on the temporal gap, because the gap permits the misrecognition of an exchange as a gift, and the immediate return exposes the exchange for what it is (Bourdieu 1977). The gap is thus a device of concealment, and the gift is exchange that does not know itself.

The present account gives the same interval a different function. The interval is not the time in which the exchange is concealed. It is the time in which the recipient generates a bid of their own, and its function is productive rather than concealing. Two consequences separate the accounts and could be tested against one another. On Bourdieu’s account a gift whose interested character is fully visible to both parties should still operate, provided the social misrecognition is collectively maintained; on the present account it should fail, since nothing was proposed for the recipient to ratify. And on Bourdieu’s account the recipient’s contribution during the interval is nil, the interval being the giver’s device; on the present account it is the whole of the mechanism.

§9 Closure by Stake

The gift closes by stake. What is given is irrecoverable, no third thing stands beneath the transfer, and no enforceable claim to return attends it.

The structure is the one that makes an unenforceable instrument more informative than an enforceable one. Where performance is secured by a sanction, performance is overdetermined, and the party who performed cannot be distinguished from the party who feared. The information that would tell the parties what they need to know about one another is destroyed by the very provision that secures their position. The gift purchases that information at the price of security, and it is available only to a party prepared to be wrong.

The choice of the weaker instrument is therefore not a concession and not a want of legal imagination. It is the instrument’s purpose.

§10 The Gift Is Born in the Relation

The constitutive act of the gift lies where neither the Maussian account nor the transmission account looks.

A gift, unlike a transfer, cannot be chosen unilaterally. To give well the giver must read the recipient: what is needed there, what will be legible there as a gift rather than as an insult, what the recipient’s history has made of the object proposed. The gift is an act of translation before it is an act of transfer, and it cannot be produced from within the giver alone.

Mauss’s three obligations all sit on the receiving side of the act. To give, to receive, to reciprocate: each concerns what is owed once the gift is in motion. What precedes the giving, the reading of the other that determines what the gift will be, is unanalysed in the literature, and it is the constitutive part.

The wrong gift. The wrong gift is not a gift that failed. It is a demonstration that the relation was never entered. Its wrongness is evidence about the giver, and it is evidence of a determinate kind: that the giver composed the gift within his own grammar and did not read.

The archive of aid is largely an archive of this. The surplus commodity dispatched because the giver held a surplus, the infrastructure built to the giver’s specification, the technical assistance designed around the giver’s expertise: each is a transfer whose form was determined by the giver’s condition rather than by a reading of the recipient’s, and the failure to translate is not incidental to the extraction. It is the form the extraction takes.

§11 The Locus and the Residue

The mechanism may now be stated in the terms the framework requires, and the statement corrects a formulation the framework has elsewhere refused.

It is tempting to say that the gift is an object offered into the recipient’s lack. The framework does not permit this. The object-cause of desire, on the account developed in a companion paper, is the residue of an operation, hypostatized by a theory that had nowhere to put it, and the residue is what a participant exceeds their position by, rather than what they lack. The two have the same shape and the opposite sign, and to conflate them is to reinstate the very reification the framework dissolved.

The correct statement inverts the picture.

The gift opens a locus. A gift is an offering that provides a position at which the recipient’s excess can register. It does not give the recipient something they wanted. It gives them somewhere to act back from.

Extraction is the converse, and it has been derived elsewhere in this form: a configuration that provides no locus at which a participant’s excess can register has foreclosed the source of its own further generation, and persists by consuming what it would have needed in order to generate.

Tribute is now specifiable. Tribute provides no position from which the tributary can act back. The tributary may comply, and compliance is all the configuration will register. This is why tribute must be repeated without end and generates nothing: the arrangement has consumed the capacity by which it would have gone on generating, and the repetition is the consumption.

The gift is the converse operation. The recipient’s excess arrives, the configuration absorbs it, and positions are generated that neither party occupied before.

§12 Foreseeability

A criterion follows from the preceding section, and it is the least familiar of those the paper offers.

The residue differs in type from the inputs that produced it, and what a configuration composes from it is not derivable from what was given. It follows that a gift which opened a locus produces a return that could not have been forecast, and that a gift whose return was forecast opened no locus.

Foreseeability is the signature of a closed configuration. A gift whose return could have been predicted by the giver is a gift from which the recipient had nowhere to exceed. What returned was what the giver had already composed.

This is the condition that defeats the objection which the other conditions cannot defeat. The objection runs: attunement to the recipient, the reading that §10 makes constitutive, is also the technology of the most effective manipulation. The manipulator reads flawlessly. Advertising reads its subject with a precision no diplomat achieves.

The reply is that the manipulator’s reading is directed at finding where a want can be installed, and the installed want is one whose satisfaction closes it. That is what makes it repeatable and what makes it profitable. The manipulated party is satisfied and nothing is generated, because the return was composed in advance by the party who installed the want. It is not a defect of the manipulator’s attunement. It is the direction of it.

The formulation is compact and it is the paper’s own:

The formulation is compact and it is offered as a conjecture: extraction closes a lack it installed, and the gift answers a lack it did not make and leaves it open.

Refutation. The conjecture fails if arrangements can be exhibited which install a lack, close it, and nonetheless leave the participant with an enlarged capacity to originate arrangements of their own. It fails if the origin of a lack proves undecidable in the cases where the criterion would need to be applied, in which case the condition is unusable whatever its truth.

The structure of the operation may be stated without adjudicating any particular case. Where an arrangement produces the condition that it thereafter relieves, and where the relief is the arrangement’s own product, the cycle answers a lack of its own making. A criterion that inspects the path alone will not register this, since value moves, it returns to the participants, and the cycle is recurrent and self-sustaining. The corruption lies at the opening and is invisible from the path.

Whether particular instruments of international finance and assistance exhibit this structure is a contested empirical question, and the critical literature has argued that some do (Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995). The present paper does not adjudicate the dispute. It supplies a criterion by which the question could be posed, and observes that the criterion is not one the disputing parties have used.

§13 What Follows the Opening

The account to this point establishes that the gift opens a position and that a foreseeable return is the mark of its failure to do so. It says nothing of what occurs once the position is opened, and the omission is material, since an opening that led nowhere would be of no interest and the paper would have described a gesture.

The passage from the opening to a sustained circulation may be set out, and it is set out as a sequence of conditions rather than as a procedure, since the moments do not order themselves in time and the value of an early one may be disclosed only by a late one.

The gift is composed in the recipient’s terms, which requires that the giver have entered the recipient’s world sufficiently to render in it. This is the labour of translation and it precedes the giving. The recipient, receiving, is not decoding: the recipient is ratifying or refusing a grammar, and where the grammar is ratified the two parties hold, for the first time, a term in common that neither held alone. What the recipient then composes in response is composed in that common term, and it is composed from the recipient’s own world, so that what returns is of a kind the giver could not have specified. The two then observe together what has been produced, and the observation is itself a crossing, since neither party’s rendering of the new term is the other’s. What they observe is a value that was in neither world at the outset and that has come into being in the relation between them. That value, once observed, becomes the ground from which the next crossing is made.

The chain from the opening to the cycle runs through translation, ratification, composition in the common term, joint observation of what was produced, and the reinvestment of what was observed. Each moment is a condition of the next, and the failure of any one of them arrests the cycle at that point.

The characteristic arrests may be named, and each corresponds to a familiar diplomatic pathology. A gift composed without translation proposes a grammar the recipient has no place in, and the cycle does not begin. A gift the recipient cannot refuse is not ratified, and what follows is compliance rather than composition. A response the giver steers is a response the giver composed, and the common term remains the giver’s own. A value produced and not jointly observed is a value that enters no ledger and cannot be drawn upon, and the relation retains nothing. And a value observed and not reinvested is a value that has stopped moving, which is the condition the gift exists to prevent.

The Marshall Plan can be read through the chain, and the reading is offered to show what the chain would look like when instantiated, and not to establish that it was. On such a reading, what was given was composed with some regard to the recipients’ condition, was accepted under an arrangement in which refusal was exercised by at least one state, was answered by forms of European coordination the giver had not specified, and was reinvested in an institutional order that came in time to constrain the giver. Each of these propositions is contested in the historiography, and §24 records the principal contest. The chain is presented as a structure that a case could exhibit. Whether this case exhibits it is not settled here.

Part IV. The Criterion

§14 Four Conditions

The criterion has four conditions. They are stated together because each is necessary and none is derivable from the others, and because a cycle may satisfy any three and fail the fourth.

Condition	Question	Failure
The opening	Does the cycle answer a lack it did not create, and does it open the recipient’s capacity to open in turn?	manufactured demand
The path	Does value return to those who produce it?	extraction
The boundary	Who bears the cost and is not counted?	tribute, the closed order
Foreseeability	Could the return have been forecast?	the manipulative gift

The condition on the path is Eglash’s and is not the paper’s, and the recursive reading of the opening developed in the section that follows is likewise anticipated in his account. The condition on the opening is developed in the section that follows, where it is shown to be recursive and where the binary reading of it is abandoned. The condition on the boundary is developed thereafter. The condition on foreseeability is developed in §12 above.

§15 The Quality of the Opening

The condition on the opening has been stated as though the opening were a binary matter, so that a cycle either answers a lack it did not create or does not. This is inadequate, and the inadequacy is exposed by the case the condition was introduced to handle.

Manufactured demand opens something. The consumer responds, and composes, and participates, and the response is not compelled. There is a position from which the consumer acts, and the consumer occupies it. An account which held that the extractive cycle simply fails to open would be an account that could not see the case at all.

What distinguishes the two is therefore not the presence of an opening and is a property of what the opening opens.

An opening is generative when what it opens is the recipient’s capacity to open in turn.

The extractive opening produces a response and forecloses the recipient’s own generativity: the consumer composes a purchase and is thereby returned to the condition of wanting, from which the next purchase is composed. The cycle turns, and the capacity of the participant to originate a cycle of their own is what it consumes.

The generative opening reproduces the condition of its own possibility. What the recipient receives is the capacity to give, and the mark of it is that the recipient becomes a giver.

The criterion is thus recursive, and the recursion is not this paper’s invention. Generative justice defines unalienated value recursively, as that which makes possible further just and sustainable generation, and it requires of a generative arrangement that its participants be positioned to create their own conditions of production (Eglash 2016). What is offered here is the transposition of that requirement into the diplomatic register and the observation that it discriminates where the condition on the path alone does not.

The question is accordingly not whether the recipient could respond. It is whether the recipient, having responded, can now open a position for a third party who was no part of the original transaction.

The test the criterion yields is observable in principle, and it requires no access to intentions and no judgment of sincerity.

Where the recipients of an arrangement come in time to occupy the position of givers, the openings of that arrangement were generative in the sense defined, and the transition is a matter of record. Where recipients remain in the position of recipients across a long period, the criterion directs attention to whether the capacity to give was among the things given, and it does not by itself settle the matter, since a persistent asymmetry may have causes the arrangement neither created nor could have removed. What the criterion supplies is the question. The answer requires the case.

This restates the condition of return in the form Eglash’s own recursion gives it, and it shows that condition and the condition on the opening to be aspects of one requirement. What must return to the participants is not value alone. It is the capacity by which value is generated, since a participant to whom value returns and capacity does not is a participant who must return for more.

§16 The Boundary of the Counted

A difficulty attends the condition of return, and it concerns a matter the account does not address rather than one it addresses inadequately.

Every clause of the definition quantifies over value generators and over communities of value generation, and none of them settles who these are. The determination of the set is presupposed. A closed order operates in the presupposition: it satisfies every clause with respect to the parties it recognizes, and it is sustained by parties it does not.

Tributary arrangements returned value to their participants, permitted those participants to create their own conditions of production within the order, and sustained the circulation across generations. Every clause was satisfied with respect to the set the order recognized. What sustained the order was the position of those who bore its cost and were counted among its participants not at all.

Extraction, so understood, does not violate the return. It draws the boundary of those to whom return is owed so as to exclude those whose cost sustains it. The observation is offered as a supplement to the account, and it is available to a defender of generative justice as readily as to a critic, since the natural reply is that the uncounted party is a value generator on any reasonable reading of the definition, and the reply is correct. What it does not supply is a criterion by which the order’s own accounting could be shown mistaken, the accounting being conducted in a grammar from which the uncounted party is absent.

The boundary condition. The set of those to whom value must return is constituted by those who bear the cost of the cycle, and not by those whom the cycle recognizes as its participants.

No criterion internal to the cycle can detect the falsification, since the cycle’s own accounting is conducted in a grammar from which the uncounted are absent.

What determines whether the uncounted can be counted is whether the grammar of the arrangement admits their address. Those excluded are not exhausted by those who receive nothing. They are those for whom no position exists within the arrangement from which their cost could be stated. Translation is therefore not a precondition of the gift and it is the labour by which the boundary of the counted is enlarged, and its refusal is the mechanism by which extraction becomes invisible to those who benefit from it.

§17 The Refused Gift

A test follows from the criterion and it is the most operational the paper offers.

To refuse a gift is to refuse the grammar it proposed. Under the account of §8 this is not the gift’s failure. It is the recipient exercising precisely the capacity for which the gift opened a position, and a gift that could be refused and was not is a gift whose grammar was ratified rather than imposed.

A gift that cannot be refused is tribute. The impossibility of refusal is the hierarchy, and it is auditable from outside the arrangement by a party to neither side of it.

The archive supports the test in its negative form, and the paper claims no more. Aid whose refusal would carry consequences the recipient cannot bear is not refusable, and the fact that it is accepted is therefore no evidence of ratification. The conditionality attached to a loan is the removal of the refusal. What distinguishes the Marshall Plan from the reparations regime that preceded it, on this criterion, is not the magnitude of the transfer and is the availability of the refusal, and the historiography of the point is contested in a way §24 does not conceal.

Part V. Why Diplomacy

§18 Difference Is Available Elsewhere

Diplomacy is not chosen because it is the domain of radical difference. Difference is available elsewhere. The gift across a cultural boundary, the gift between religious communities, the gift in the ethnography from which the theory was originally drawn: each involves parties whose symbolic worlds do not coincide, and none of them is diplomacy.

What distinguishes the diplomatic case is the conjunction of two absences, and the conjunction is what makes the case a test rather than an illustration.

§19 Two Axes

The first axis is whether a shared code is available. Where the parties inhabit a common symbolic order, the giver need not read the recipient and need only conform: what counts as a gift is settled in advance, and the giver’s task is competence rather than translation. Where no such code exists, the reading of §10 is required and the gift may fail at the level of the proposal.

The second axis is whether a third position is available, meaning a locus, occupied by neither party, from which the acts of each may be characterized. This is a stronger requirement than it appears, and the framework’s argument for its necessity is stated in a companion paper: a configuration containing two parties and the relation between them contains nothing that could distinguish a sanction from an aggression, since each of the two loci is a party to the act. Whether an act is a wrong is settled from a position that the dyad does not supply.

	shared code	no shared code
third position available	the gift within a culture	the migrant gift; interfaith exchange
no third position	the closed association	diplomacy

Diplomacy is the cell in which both are absent, and it is the only such cell in which the parties nonetheless sustain relations over centuries.

§20 The Stake

Every other cell permits the gift to lean on something. The gift within a culture leans on the code, and the giver who does not read may still give correctly. The gift across cultures within a common jurisdiction leans on the third, and where the exchange sours there is a law, an institution, a norm from which the souring can be named.

The diplomatic gift leans on nothing.

The stake. Diplomacy is the configuration in which the gift must operate without a shared code and without a third position, which is the configuration the framework’s own argument holds to be incapable of generating normative structure.

Either the gift generates the third position rather than presupposing it, in which case the framework’s dyadic argument requires revision. Or it does not, in which case what appears in the archive as order produced by gift is order produced by force, and the realist reading is correct.

The paper does not settle this. The archive settles it, and the archive has not been read for the purpose.

The discipline has a name for the configuration and has not known what to do with it. That anarchy is what states make of it (Wendt 1992) is a claim about the mutability of the condition and supplies no mechanism by which the making occurs. The society of states sustains institutions without an enforcer (Bull 1977), and the observation is correct and is a description. What the present paper offers is a candidate mechanism, and what it asks of the discipline is a verdict on whether the mechanism is real.

§21 Strategy, Trusteeship, and Structure

An objection arises here which, left unanswered, would remove diplomacy from the paper’s reach altogether. The criterion appears to disqualify the gift that is composed for an end. Every diplomatic gift is composed for an end. A ministry does not give without a reason, and a gift given without one would not be given at all.

The objection is sound against a formulation the paper must therefore abandon, and the abandonment improves the account.

Strategy is obligatory

The giver in the diplomatic case gives what is not his. A minister disposes of what belongs to a population that did not choose the gift and will bear its consequences, and he disposes of it under an obligation to that population which he cannot discharge by consulting them.

It follows that the absence of strategic composition in a diplomatic gift is a breach of duty. A minister who gave without regard to the interests he holds in trust would be giving away what was not his to give, and the generosity would be theft. Strategy is not a contamination of the diplomatic gift. It is a fiduciary requirement of it.

This has a structural consequence the paper takes seriously. The giver in the intimate case stakes himself, and the removal of the exit path is the removal of his own. The giver in the diplomatic case stakes others, and the exit path removed belongs to a nation that did not consent to the removal. The mechanism therefore runs, at this scale, through a relation of representation that the intimate case does not contain.

And the boundary condition of §16 arrives inside the giver. The uncounted are not exhausted by those on the recipient’s side of the transaction. They include the citizens of the giving state, whose resources were given and whose grammar was not consulted.

	who is staked	who may go uncounted
the intimate gift	the giver himself	the weaker partner
the diplomatic gift, outward	the giving nation	the recipient’s excluded
the diplomatic gift, inward	the giving nation’s citizens	those who bore its cost unconsulted

Two failure modes are thereby distinguished, and they are independent. The strategy may leave the recipient nothing to compose in return. Or the trusteeship may fail in its own terms, which occurs where the interest invoked in the composition of the gift is not the interest of those who bear its cost. Whether any given act of state exhibits the second failure is a question of fact, and the paper’s contribution is to identify it as a distinct failure and not to allege it of any party.

Strategy is imposed by the structure

Strategy is permitted at this scale, and it is required by the medium through which the gift must pass.

Coordination at scale proceeds through structure, and structure is congealed prior relation: protocol, treaty, precedent, ministry, budget. The structure constrains the present act, since an act that the structure cannot execute is an act that cannot be performed at all. A ministry cannot give affectively even where it would wish to, there being no channel through which an affect could be transmitted. The relational intention must be rendered into a form the structure will carry, and the rendering is what is called strategy.

Strategy is not a translation the giver elects. It is the form a relational intention must take in order to be alignable with a structure the giver did not choose and cannot bypass.

The rendering has a cost, and the cost is where the danger lies. The structure cannot carry the full complexity of a relation, and it therefore compresses: friendship, partnership, strategic competition, adversary. These labels are what the structure can hold, and the compression is a coarse-graining performed on the relation in order that the relation may be acted upon at all.

The question is what the coarse-graining destroys. A relation compressed to a label produces returns that the label already anticipates, and §12 has established what an anticipated return signifies. The generativity of the gift survives the compression to the extent that the coarse-graining leaves something the structure cannot specify in advance.

Strategy is fatal only when it is complete

The gift is not destroyed by the entry of strategy. It is destroyed when the strategy is total, which is to say when the structure has specified the gift so completely that every consequence of the giving is already contained in the plan.

What disqualifies is therefore not that a gift was strategically composed. It is that the strategy left the recipient nothing to compose in return.

The two poles of the diplomatic archive are separated by this and by nothing else. A programme of conditional assistance specifies its outcomes as deliverables, and the specification is the point of the instrument. Nothing exceeds the coarse-graining, because the coarse-graining was made total, and the recipient’s compliance is all that the arrangement will register.

The Marshall Plan was maximally strategic. It was composed for containment, for the construction of markets, and for passage through a legislature, and its authors were explicit about all three. What followed it was a European integration that the plan did not specify, that its authors did not foresee, and that came in time to constrain the state that had given it. The strategy was necessary and the residue was what mattered.

The consequence for gift theory

A dichotomy in the theory of the gift is dissolved by this, and the dissolution runs from the diplomatic case back to the theory rather than the other way.

It has been asked whether a gift that knows itself remains a gift, on the ground that a gift recognized as such by its giver has already entered the economy of exchange (Derrida 1992). A state cannot fail to know itself. It must deliberate, minute, budget, and justify, and the record of its deliberation is public. On the terms of the dichotomy, no gift by a state is possible.

The dichotomy presupposes a giver who owns what he gives, and who may therefore give it freely or withhold it. A trustee owns nothing he gives, and his giving is neither free in the sense the dichotomy requires nor an exchange in the sense it opposes. The trustee’s gift is a third thing, and the dichotomy has no place for it.

§22 Four Further Specificities

Four further features distinguish the diplomatic gift, and each bears on the argument.

The parties are composite. A state has no subject, and the reading of §10 is performed by an apparatus: a ministry, an embassy, an intelligence service. Whether such an apparatus can be said to read, and whether a residue can be said to register in it, is the point at which the transposition from the intimate case might fail, and the paper does not conceal the difficulty. It notes only that the framework is specified structurally and withholds commitment as to what a participant is, so that the transposition is available to it where it would be unavailable to an account built on persons.

The gift is public. The diplomatic gift is performed before audiences: domestic publics, third states, the historical record. The intimate gift is not. The publicity is consequential, since the position opened may be occupied by the audience rather than by the recipient, and the gift is then a bid in a wider field that the recipient is made to witness. Whether the audience constitutes the third position whose absence §20 identified, or whether the audience is instead the party for whom the gift was really performed, is left open, and the two are not always distinguishable from outside.

Asymmetry is the normal case. In the intimate relation, radical inequality is pathological. In the society of states it is the baseline condition. The condition of return cannot therefore mean equal return, and the capacity to give back must be theorized under structural inequality, which the literature of the gift, drawn from small-scale societies and from the peasant economy, has never had to do.

The counterfeit is institutionalized. There exists a profession whose object is the production of the appearance of the gift for the sake of a strategic return, and it has a doctrine, a budget, and a literature. Public diplomacy, aid conditionality, and the theory of soft power are its instruments. Nowhere else is the manipulative gift a codified function of state.

§23 The Antagonist

The position this paper exists to deny may be stated exactly, and it is not realism.

The theory of soft power holds that attraction produces preferred outcomes at lower cost than coercion, and that a state’s culture, values, and policies are resources to be deployed to that end (Nye 2004). On this account the gift that opens a circulation and the gift that installs a hierarchy are the same instrument, and their difference is a difference in the skill of its deployment. The theory is not obliged to distinguish them, since its object is the production of preferred outcomes and both may produce them. The present paper’s disagreement is therefore a disagreement about what is to be explained, and it is not an objection to the theory on its own ground.

The four conditions of Part IV exist to deny this. On the account offered here, the gift performed for a foreseeable return is not a gift performed well. It is not a gift at all, and it will fail to do the work the theory of soft power supposes it does, in a manner the theory has no vocabulary for.

Part VI. Cases and Limits

§24 The Cases and Their Contestation

Three comparisons bear on the criterion, and each is stated with its historiographical difficulty rather than without.

The Marshall Plan against the reparations settlement. The comparison is the paper’s central case, and the reading the criterion invites is the following. The reparations settlement transferred value away from a party whose capacity to generate was thereby reduced, and it is a long-standing contention, contested in the historiography, that the reduction contributed to the conditions of the subsequent conflict. The Marshall Plan, on the reading offered here, returned capacity to its recipients and left them positioned to give in turn, which some of them subsequently did in forms the giver had not specified.

The reading is a reading. It is what the criterion of Part IV would say of the two arrangements, and it is offered as an illustration of the criterion’s operation rather than as a contribution to the historiography of either.

The reading is contested and the contestation is material. It has been argued that European recovery was underway before the Plan and would have proceeded without it, and that the Plan’s effect was political rather than economic (Milward 1984). If this is correct, the case does not show what the criterion requires it to show, and the paper’s central comparison is weaker than it appears. The point is conceded here rather than left for a reviewer, and the paper’s response is that the criterion concerns the opening of a relation rather than the magnitude of a transfer, so that a Plan whose economic effect was small and whose relational effect was large is not an embarrassment to the account. Whether that response is adequate is not for the author to determine.

Tributary orders. Historical tributary arrangements returned value to their participants, and a reading of them as unrelieved extraction is not well supported by the record. What the criterion directs attention to is the boundary: whether parties bore the cost of such an arrangement without being counted among its participants. The test of §17 is also available, since the availability of refusal varied across such arrangements and the variation is documented. The paper offers the criterion and does not offer a verdict on any particular order.

Conditional assistance. A literature critical of development practice has argued that certain arrangements produce the dependency they subsequently address, and that the conditions attached to assistance can remove from the recipient the capacity to decline it (Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995). The claims are contested and the present paper does not endorse them.

What the paper contributes is the location of the alleged defect. If the critical account is correct in a given case, the defect lies at the opening of the cycle rather than in its terms, since the terms of such arrangements are frequently defensible on their face and the criticism is not a criticism of the terms. This is a claim about where to look, and it is available to a defender of such arrangements as readily as to a critic.

§25 The Gift of Nothing

The definition of §4 requires an irrecoverable transfer, and the strongest diplomatic gifts transfer no object.

An apology surrenders, irrecoverably and before an audience, the position from which the giver could have continued to deny. A state visit surrenders the position from which the giver could have continued to treat the recipient as beneath notice. Recognition surrenders the position from which the giver could have continued to hold that the recipient does not exist. In each the stake is standing, and the surrender is not recoverable, and no enforceable claim to return attends it.

Whether standing is a transfer in the sense the definition requires is not settled here. What may be said is that the structure is the same in the relevant respect: something is given up that cannot be taken back, no third thing stands beneath the giving, and the recipient is given a position from which to respond that did not exist before. If the definition must be widened to admit these, they are the cases for which it should be widened, since they are the cases in which the mechanism is least contaminated by the value of the object.

§26 Time

The wager of the gift is under greater strain in the diplomatic case than anywhere the theory has previously considered.

The value of a gift may return only after a long interval, and the interval in an intimate relation is measured in years and is bounded by a life. The interval in the society of states is measured in generations. A gift may return after the giver is dead, to a state whose government did not give it, from a state whose population was not alive when it was given. Reparations are paid by parties who did not incur the debt to parties who did not suffer the injury.

This is not a footnote to the theory. It is the point at which the diplomatic case is harder than the intimate one, since the wager is made by a party who cannot receive the return and the return is received by a party who did not make the wager. That such gifts are nonetheless made, and that the returns nonetheless arrive, is a fact the paper records and does not explain.

§27 The Criterion Is Available to the Audit

No foreign policy is recommended here, and the reason is structural.

The criterion does not forbid intent. It forbids closure. A giver may give for reasons, and must, and may still open a position from which the recipient can exceed him. What he cannot do is specify in advance what will return, since a return specified in advance is one the recipient had no room to compose.

The criterion is accordingly usable by a third party assessing an arrangement, by the recipient, and by the historian. It is not usable as a specification of the gift to be given, since a gift whose form is determined by the requirements of the criterion is a gift determined by the giver’s requirements, and §10 holds a gift so determined to be a transfer.

The asymmetry parallels a result obtained elsewhere in this programme, that the condition of justice on a generative cycle is not computable from within the cycle. The parallel is exact and it is not a coincidence, the two being the same structural fact seen from the position of the agent and from the position of the audit.

§28 The Gift as a Governance Mechanism

A claim larger than the paper’s own is visible from the position the argument has reached, and it is stated here in order to be handed on rather than argued.

Coordination at scale proceeds through mechanisms that coordinate by specifying: hierarchy through the directive, price through the signal, norm through the expectation, network through the negotiated interdependence. Each is a coarse-graining, and each, in the ordinary course, ossifies. A position is installed which characterizes without being characterized, reinterpretation is foreclosed, and the configuration thereafter persists by reproduction where it once persisted by generation. This is the standing pathology of governed orders, and it has been documented in this programme elsewhere.

The question such an order cannot answer from within itself is where a new position is to come from. A structure that executes only its own specifications produces only what it has specified. It cannot generate, and it runs down.

The gift is the act that a structure permits and does not specify. Protocol requires that a gift be given and cannot say what will return. The gift is therefore the aperture in the coarse-graining: the one move within a governed order whose consequence the order did not compose.

On this reading a coordination structure requires an unspecified act in order to remain generative, and the gift is the institutional form that requirement takes.

The relation between the structure and the gift is thus one of dependency and not of compromise. It is inadequate to say that structure exacts a cost in generativity which the gift partially offsets. The structure cannot generate at all, and the gift is how a structure obtains what it is constitutively unable to produce.

This accounts for an observation the received theories leave unexplained. Diplomacy is the most protocol-bound field of state action, and it retains at its center a practice that is unenforceable, non-reciprocable on any schedule, and strategically opaque by design. Realism cannot say why the practice survives, and institutionalism cannot say why it is not replaced by an instrument with clearer terms. On the present reading the practice is no residue of courtly ritual. It is the structure’s generative organ, and its removal would leave the order able to execute and unable to grow.

The claim is a claim about governance and not about diplomacy, and it exceeds what the diplomatic case can establish. It is recorded here as the direction in which this argument, if it holds, would next be taken.

§29 What Remains Open

Whether the payoff matrix of rationalist international relations can be written at all, given that the objective it requires may be constituted in the relations whose payoffs it would enter.

Whether a state can be said to read another, or whether the reading is performed by persons within an apparatus and the transposition to the state is illicit. The framework’s structural specification makes the transposition available and does not make it correct.

Whether the audience before which the diplomatic gift is performed constitutes the third position whose absence makes the diplomatic case a test, in which case the framework’s dyadic argument is preserved and the test is dissolved, or whether the audience is the party for whom the gift was performed, in which case the gift was never given to the recipient at all.

Whether the criterion of §17, the availability of refusal, can be operationalized in the archive, and by what measure a refusal is judged to have been available to a party who did not exercise it.

Whether the claim of §28 survives its generalization, which is to say whether the four coordination mechanisms of a governed order each require an unspecified act of the kind the gift supplies, and whether the practices that supply it elsewhere can be identified.

The mechanism has been proposed and the criterion stated. Whether the gift generates a third position where none was given is the question on which the account stands, and the archive has not been read for the purpose.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Bull, H. (1977). The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. Macmillan, London.

Derrida, J. (1992). Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Eglash, R. (2016). An introduction to generative justice. Teknokultura, 13(2): 369–404.

Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Ferguson, J. (1994). The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Godelier, M. (1999). The Enigma of the Gift. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, New York.

Hyde, L. (1983). The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Vintage, New York.

Mauss, M. (1925). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Routledge, London.

Milward, A. S. (1984). The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51. Methuen, London.

Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. PublicAffairs, New York.

Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Farrar and Rinehart, New York.

Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics. International Organization, 46(2): 391–425.

中文

礼物与外交的生成性关系根基

一篇初步的讨论稿

黄万宏 (huangwanhong@serendip.ngo)

摘要

诸国家执行诸可得的合作说明所无法定价的行动：道歉、国事访问、被派往一个对手的救灾。现实主义把这些读作乔装的利益，理性主义制度主义读作声誉的投资，软实力的理论读作被廉价购得的影响。这三者都是关于交换的说明，而无一解释如下观察，即这样的行动在被交易性地执行时失败，而诸方能分辨。

礼物创造超出交换之关系，这在此从莫斯被承继、而非被主张。所被主张者是一个机制。莫斯以义务解释那纽带，而义务预设一个约束着的秩序；那被接受的符号说明以传递解释它，而传递预设一个被共享的代码。诸国家的社会两者都不供给，而这两个说明都在莫斯本人最显眼地援引他的说明的那个案例中失败。那构成性的行动躺在两者都不看之处，在那先于给予并决定它形式的、对接受者的阅读之中，因而那错误的礼物证明那关系从未被进入。一个礼物，依所提供的说明，提供一个接受者的余额可在其上登记的位置，而一个四条件的判准把那开启一个循环的礼物与那安装一个层级的礼物区分开来。外交被选择，因为它是那礼物必须在没有一个被共享的代码、并没有一个诸方可从之被刻画之第三位置的情况下运作的案例，而这是本纲领持有为无能生成规范性结构的配置。那礼物是否生成那位置、抑或只是隐藏力量，被留给那档案。

关键词： 礼物；外交；无政府；承认；生成性正义；国际关系的关系性理论。

第一部分. 那反常

§1 那交易性的反常

考虑一类外交行动。一个政府首脑在一个他自己的国家所摧毁之国家的一处纪念地下跪。一个国家把救援队派往一个被地震击中的对手。两个国家交换手稿的收藏、或管弦乐团、或足球队。一个外交部长长途旅行以出席一场葬礼。一个国家把承认给予另一个刚来到存在、并能提供不出任何回报者。

诸可得的说明有三种处理这些的方式。现实主义把它们当作廉价的空话，即传达不出任何信息、约束不了任何未来行为的无成本信号，或当作乔装的利益，那物质回报被隐藏并等待被发现。理性主义制度主义把它们当作对声誉的投资，一份将在未来讨价还价中被动用的资产。软实力的理论把它们当作被以低成本购得的影响，吸引在偏好结果的生产中替代强制（奈，2004）。

这些中每一个都是一个关于交换的说明。每一个都持有那行动被承担因为一个回报被期望，而每一个仅在那回报的货币上与其余者有别。

那反常不是这样的行动发生，而这三个说明中的任何一个都能容纳。那反常是那些行动在被交易性地执行时失败，而诸方能分辨。一个为确保一项贸易让步而提供的道歉不被接受为一个道歉；它被接受为一个出价，而它不做一个道歉所做的工作。带着一个新闻代表团被派出的救援被读作它之所是。那可见地为它的回报而被给出的礼物产生不出任何关系，而所涉及的行动者，他们不天真，知道这并依此行动。他们在利益存在之处隐藏那利益，而那隐藏不单是伪善。它是一个认识，即那机制要求那隐藏、以便根本运作，而这是一个关于那机制的事实。

一个关于交换的说明无法登录这。依一个关于交换的说明，一个被公开进行的交易是一个被高效进行的交易，而那回报的可见性应改善那安排、而非摧毁它。

§2 本文所承继者

礼物创造超出交换之关系，这不是本文的主张。它是一个文献的已安顿之结果，而本文建于它之上。

莫斯确立了礼物是一个总体的社会事实、而非一个转移，它被三个义务所统领，即去给予、去接受、去回礼，而这些义务不是契约性的、并被无一法庭所执行（莫斯，1925）。较晚的工作确立了那礼物必须继续循环，而停止移动的价值停止是一个礼物（海德，1983），互惠是一个区别于市场交换的整合模式（波兰尼，1944），以及无执行之义务的历史记录远大于契约的记录（格雷伯，2011）。生成性正义的理论确立了当下本文之判准所倚的条件。它的定义有三个条款：生成未被异化之价值并直接参与它惠益的普遍权利；价值生成者创造他们自己生产条件的权利；以及价值生成之诸社群培育它流通之自我维系路径的权利（埃格拉什，2016）。未被异化的价值在那里被递归地定义，作为那使进一步的正义而可持续的生成成为可能者，因而所流通者不是单一份价值之量，而包括那价值据以被生成的能力。那递归、以及那诸生成者被定位以创造他们自己生产条件的要求，是埃格拉什的、并在下文若干点上被倚赖。

这一切在此都不是原创的，而如此陈述使本文不费任何东西。随后者把这些取为既定、并追问一个它们所留敞的问题。

§3 那问题

那问题。 礼物不是交换，而礼物至少同样频繁地是一种层级的技术，如它是一个信任的根基。贡品是一个礼物。赔款是一个礼物。援助是一个礼物。什么把那开启一个循环的礼物与那安装一个层级的礼物区分开来？

那问题在外交的案例中被提出，而那选择在第五部分被辩护。它不是为了推荐一项外交政策而被提出，而§27给出为何此处所发展的判准无法充当一项外交政策的结构性理由。

第二部分. 那被接受的说明所预设者

§4 那定义，被持中立

一个定义在那判准之前被要求，而它必须就那判准是中立的，否则便以规定了结本文所着手论证者。

礼物。 一个不可收回的转移，它的形式被一个对接受者的阅读所决定，而它不携带任何可执行的对回报之主张。

那定义同样覆盖贡品与马歇尔计划，而它意图如此。一个排除贡品的定义会把那榨取性的案例置于那理论之触及之外，而那榨取性的案例正是那理论存在以区分者。那定义命名那结构。第四部分的判准，被单独陈述，做那规范的工作。

一个限定立即被要求，而§25发展它。那些最强的外交礼物转移不出任何对象。道歉、国事访问、把承认给予一个新国家：在这些中所给出者是地位，那给予者本可从之继续否认之位置的不可收回之交出，而那定义被它们所拉伸。地位是否是那定义所要求之意义上的一个转移，是一个本文提出而不了结的问题。

§5 延迟与不可让渡的诸反常

礼物的两个特征在任何关于交换的说明之下是反常的，而它们是那否定论证的证据核心。

第一个是延迟。一个立即的回礼是一个侮辱，而它把那礼物转换为一个交易，而那交换的每一方都知道这。一个关于交换的说明无法说为何。依这样一个说明，一个义务的迅速了结是它的高效清偿，而那礼物与那回报之间的间隔是一个两方都会偏好消除的成本。在那实践中，那间隔是构成性的，而它的消除摧毁那事物。

第二个是不可让渡。所给出者携带那给予者，而所返回者与所给出者不可互替（戈德利耶，1999）。一个关于交换的说明要求那善独立于那交易而存在，因而它的价值可与所接受者的价值相比较。在礼物中那对象是那关系的一个承担者，而它的价值不与谁给出它以及它如何被阅读相分离。

那交易性的反对在此呈现自己、而必须被应对，因为它否则会稍后并以更大的力量被作出。那反对这样说：那礼物有一个被期望的回礼，因此那礼物是带一个滞后的交换，而上面的诸反常是那交换之机制中的诸摩擦、而非反对它的证据。

三个回答。第一个是可替代性失败。若那礼物是交换，一个来自另一来源的等价回报会是一个替代品，而它不是；所被想要的回报是来自这一方的回报，它不先于那关系而存在、并无法从别处被采得。第二个是那符号在那关键变量上是错的。若在礼物中的信任是一个回报的贴现期望，那么那最牢固地保证它回报的礼物应产生最多的信任。那最牢固地保证它回报的礼物是一个合同，而它产生不出任何。第三个是保证那回报摧毁那事物，而这是同一个观察被陈述为一个干预：把一个可执行的对等义务附加于一个礼物，而它成为一个合同，而每一方都知道那差异并有别地行动。

同一要点的一个形式陈述可得、并被为记录而陈述，因为它更广泛地关乎理性主义诸说明的地位。一个收益矩阵的构造要求诸方的目标函数先于那其诸收益要被填入之关系而被定义。凡那目标本身在那关系中被构成、并被它所改变，那矩阵无法被写出，而那说明是病态提出的、而非不完整的。那国家利益是否先于一个国家所立于其中的诸关系，是一个理性主义国际关系由假定肯定地回答、而不论证的问题。

§6 义务预设一个秩序

莫斯以义务解释那纽带。那礼物使人有义务，那义务不是契约性的，而未能回礼携带一个是社会的、而非法律的制裁。

这一类的义务预设一个那义务在其中成立的秩序。那执行它的制裁，作为社会的，被一个把那义务认可为一个义务的社群所施行，而那认可是那给予那制裁其力量者。莫斯从这样一个秩序完好的诸社会中抽取他的诸案例，而在它们之内那说明是可靠的。

诸国家的社会不拥有任何这样的秩序。这是国际关系的学科以无政府所指者（布尔，1977），而它命名一个义务可从之被刻画为义务、它的违反被刻画为违反之处所的缺席，而非一个失序的条件。凡这样一个处所缺席，那莫斯式的制裁无处可从之发出，而那以义务对纽带的说明不延伸。

那要点有一个锐利的史学之缘，而本文陈述它、而非把它留给一个评审者。莫斯本人把他的理论应用于国际的案例，以一个关于国际联盟、以及关于礼物作为战争之替代的论证收束他的文章。因此，当下本文的反对是一个对莫斯本人对他自己理论之延伸的反对，而非对一个由他的追随者所作之延伸的反对。

那第一个预设。 那莫斯式的义务机制预设一个约束着的符号秩序，而诸国家的社会不供给一个。那说明在它作者最显眼地援引它的那个案例中失败。

证伪。 这一主张失败，若一个持久的义务处所能在诸国家的社会中被展示，一个礼物-义务的违反从之被刻画为违反并被如此制裁。诸候选者存在、并不被摒弃：外交使团、礼宾的实践、一个被想象之后世的历史判断。这些中的任何一个是否构成这样一个处所、抑或只是类似一个，是第五部分所留敞的问题。

§7 传递预设一个代码

那被接受的、关于礼物之符号维度的说明以第二种方式失败，而那失败与第一个有同一结构。

礼物携带符号意义，这不是本文所作的一个主张，那要点是已安顿的、而那文献是拥挤的。那被接受的说明所供给者是那携带的一个模型，而那模型是一个传递的模型：那给予者把一个意义编码于一个对象之中，那接受者解码它，而那交换在那代码被共享之处成功、并在它不被共享之处失败。那失礼，依这一模型，是一个解码错误。

那模型预设一个被共享的代码。凡诸方栖居一个共同的符号秩序，那预设成立而那模型是适足的。诸国家的社会不供给任何共同的符号秩序，而那外交礼物的困难恰恰是那诸方不共享一个代码。因此那传递模型恰恰在它最被需要之处失败。

那两个预设的结构是同一的，而那同一值得被陈述，因为它定位一个单一的缺陷。那莫斯式的说明预设那会约束的秩序。那传递说明预设那会携带的代码。两者都预设那它们被援引以解释的符号秩序，而两者都在它缺席之处沉默。

第三部分. 那机制

§8 那礼物提议一种语法

所提议以取代传递者如下。那礼物不在一个被共享的语法之内携带一个意义。它提议一种语法并等待批准。

那给予者，阅读那接受者，冒险作出一个关于什么将在那接受者的世界中算作一个礼物的判断。那给予是一个那判断正确的出价。那接受者的回应不是一则讯息的解码。它是对那礼物所提议之语法的批准或拒绝。那交换中所攸关者既非那对象、甚至亦非那关系，而是那两方此后将根本能以之相互致意的措辞。

这解释那延迟，而它把它解释为一个结构性的要求、而非一个礼仪的规则。一个立即的回礼批准不出任何东西，因为它预先关闭那接受者自己的阅读被冒险的间隔。那回礼必须是一个第二出价，以那第一个所提议之语法被提供、并不与它同一，否则那语法从不成为联合的。同时性摧毁那礼物，因为它把两个出价坍缩为一个交易。

它也解释那错误的礼物，而它结构地、而非文化地解释它。那错误的礼物不是一个误编码。它是一个那接受者无法批准的提议，因为它是以一个那接受者在其中没有位置的语法被作出的。那接受者的农业无法使用的谷物、那接受者没有员工去运营的一所医院、一件其意义只在那给予者自己历史中可读的人工制品：这些不是翻译错误。它们是单方地、以那给予者的语法被作出的出价，而它们因此揭示根本没有任何语法被提议、而只有一个转移被作出。

与布尔迪厄的关系

布尔迪厄也使那间隔构成性，而那接触之点必须在它被发现之前被陈述。依他的说明，那礼物的效力依赖于那时间的空隙，因为那空隙准许一个交换被误认为一个礼物，而那立即的回报暴露那交换之所是（布尔迪厄，1977）。那空隙因此是一个隐藏的装置，而那礼物是不认识它自己的交换。

当下的说明给那同一间隔一个不同的功能。那间隔不是那交换被隐藏于其中的时间。它是那接受者生成一个他们自己之出价的时间，而它的功能是有产出性的、而非隐藏性的。两个后果把这两个说明分开、并能被相互检验。依布尔迪厄的说明，一个其被感兴趣之品格对两方完全可见的礼物应仍运作，只要那社会的误认被集体地维持；依当下的说明它应失败，因为没有任何东西被提议供那接受者去批准。而依布尔迪厄的说明，那接受者在那间隔中的贡献是零，那间隔是那给予者的装置；依当下的说明它是那机制的全部。

§9 由押注的闭合

礼物由押注而闭合。所给出者是不可收回的，没有任何第三物立于那转移之下，而没有任何可执行的对回报之主张伴随它。

那结构是那使一个不可执行的工具比一个可执行的工具更有信息者。凡履行被一个制裁所确保，履行被过度决定，而那履行的一方无法与那畏惧的一方相区分。那会告诉诸方他们需要知道的关于彼此之物的信息，被那确保他们位置的条款本身所摧毁。那礼物以安全为代价购得那信息，而它只对一个准备好犯错的一方可得。

因此，那更弱之工具的选择不是一个让步、不是一个法律想象力的缺乏。它是那工具的目的。

§10 那礼物诞生于那关系之中

那礼物的构成性行动躺在莫斯式的说明与传递说明两者都不看之处。

一个礼物，不同于一个转移，无法被单方地选择。要给予得好，那给予者必须阅读那接受者：那里需要什么、什么将在那里作为一个礼物、而非作为一个侮辱可读、那接受者的历史已把那被提议的对象弄成什么。那礼物在它是一个转移的行动之前是一个翻译的行动，而它无法从那给予者单独之内被产生。

莫斯的三个义务全都坐在那行动的接受一侧。去给予、去接受、去回礼：每一个都关切那礼物一经运动便被欠者。那先于那给予者，即那决定那礼物将是什么之对他者的阅读，在那文献中未被分析，而它是那构成性的部分。

那错误的礼物。 那错误的礼物不是一个失败了的礼物。它是一个证明，即那关系从未被进入。它的错误是关于那给予者的证据，而它是一个确定种类的证据：即那给予者在他自己的语法之内组成那礼物、而不曾阅读。

那援助的档案在很大程度上是这个的一个档案。因那给予者持有一份剩余而被派出的剩余商品、按那给予者的规格被建造的基础设施、围绕那给予者的专长被设计的技术援助：每一个都是一个其形式被那给予者的状况、而非被一个对那接受者之状况的阅读所决定的转移，而那未能翻译不是那榨取的附带之事。它是那榨取所采取的形式。

§11 那处所与那余数

那机制现在可被以那框架所要求的措辞被陈述，而那陈述纠正一个那框架已在别处拒绝的表述。

有一个诱惑去说那礼物是一个被提供入那接受者之匮乏的对象。那框架不准许这。欲望的对象-成因，依一篇姊妹篇中所发展的说明，是一个运算的余数，被一个无处安置它的理论所实体化，而那余数是一个参与者超出他们位置所凭者、而非他们所缺乏者。这两者有同一形状与相反的符号，而把它们混同便是重新设立那框架所溶解的实体化本身。

那正确的陈述反转那图景。

那礼物开启一个处所。 一个礼物是一个提供一个接受者的余额可在其上登记之位置的馈赠。它不给那接受者某种他们所想要之物。它给他们一个可从之回作的地方。

榨取是那反面，而它已在别处以这一形式被推导：一个不提供任何参与者的余额可在其上登记之处所的配置已预先关闭它自己进一步生成之源，并靠消耗它本会为了生成而需要者而持存。

贡品现在可被指定。贡品不提供任何那纳贡者可从之回作的位置。那纳贡者可以遵从，而遵从是那配置将登录的一切。这是为何贡品必须被无尽地重复、并生成无物：那安排已消耗那它本会据以继续生成的能力，而那重复是那消耗。

那礼物是那反面的运算。那接受者的余额到来，那配置吸收它，而诸位置被生成、是任一方先前都不曾占据的。

§12 可预见性

一个判准从前一节随之而来，而它是本文所提供者中最不熟悉的。

那余数在类型上不同于产生它的诸输入，而一个配置从它所组成者不可从所给出者被导出。由此可得，一个开启了一个处所的礼物产生一个本无法被预报的回报，而一个其回报被预报的礼物开启了没有任何处所。

可预见性是一个封闭配置的签名。 一个其回报本可被那给予者预测的礼物是一个那接受者从之无处可超出的礼物。所返回者是那给予者已然组成者。

这是那击败那些其他条件无法击败之反对的条件。那反对这样说：对那接受者的调谐，即§10所使构成性的那阅读，也是那最有效之操纵的技术。那操纵者无瑕地阅读。广告以一个无一外交官达到的精度阅读它的对象。

那回答是那操纵者的阅读被导向找到一个想要可被安装之处，而那被安装的想要是一个其满足闭合它者。那是那使它可被重复者、并使它可赢利者。那被操纵的一方被满足而没有任何东西被生成，因为那回报被那安装那想要的一方预先组成。它不是那操纵者之调谐的一个缺陷。它是它的方向。

那表述是紧凑的、而它是本文自己的：

那表述是紧凑的、而它作为一个猜想被提供：榨取闭合一个它安装的匮乏，而礼物回答一个它不曾制造的匮乏并把它留敞。

证伪。 这一猜想失败，若诸安排能被展示，它们安装一个匮乏、闭合它、而仍留给那参与者一个被扩大的、发起他们自己诸安排的能力。它失败，若一个匮乏的起源在那些判准会需要被应用的案例中被证明是不可判定的，在那种情形中那条件无论它的真是不可用的。

那运算的结构可被陈述而不裁决任何特定的案例。凡一个安排产生那它此后缓解的条件，而凡那缓解是那安排自己的产物，那循环回答一个它自己制造的匮乏。一个仅检查那路径的判准将登录不出这，因为价值移动，它返回给诸参与者，而那循环是反复的与自我维系的。那腐败躺在那开启处、并从那路径不可见。

国际金融与援助的诸特定工具是否展现这一结构，是一个被争议的经验问题，而那批判文献已论证有些展现（弗格森，1994；埃斯科瓦尔，1995）。当下本文不裁决那争论。它供给一个那问题据以能被提出的判准，并观察到那判准不是那些争议之诸方所使用过的一个。

§13 那开启之后随之而来者

到此为止的说明确立了那礼物开启一个位置、而一个可预见的回报是它未能如此做的标记。它就那位置一经被开启便发生什么说不出任何东西，而那省略是实质的，因为一个通向无处的开启会无兴趣、而本文会描述了一个姿态。

从那开启到一个持续之循环的通道可被陈列，而它作为一个诸条件的序列、而非作为一道程序被陈列，因为那些时刻不在时间中为自己排序、而一个早的时刻的价值可能只被一个晚的时刻所披露。

那礼物以那接受者的措辞被组成，而这要求那给予者已足够地进入那接受者的世界以在它之中呈现。这是翻译的劳动、而它先于那给予。那接受者，在接受时，不是在解码：那接受者是在批准或拒绝一种语法，而在那语法被批准之处，那两方第一次持有一个共同的、任一方都不单独持有的项。那接受者随后作为回应所组成者以那共同的项被组成，而它从那接受者自己的世界被组成，因而所返回者是一个那给予者本无法指定的种类。那两者随后一同观察所被生产者，而那观察本身是一次跨越，因为任一方对那新项的呈现不是那另一者的。他们所观察者是一个在起初两个世界中都不存在、而已在他们之间的关系中来到存在的价值。那价值，一经被观察，成为那下一次跨越从之被作出的根据。

从那开启到那循环的链穿过翻译、批准、以那共同的项组成、对所被生产者的联合观察、以及对所被观察者的再投入。每一个时刻是那下一个的一个条件，而它们中任一者的失败在那一点上遏止那循环。

那些典型的遏止可被命名，而每一个对应于一个熟悉的外交病理。一个无翻译地被组成的礼物提议一种那接受者在其中没有位置的语法，而那循环不开始。一个那接受者无法拒绝的礼物不被批准，而随之而来者是遵从、而非组成。一个那给予者操控的回应是一个那给予者组成的回应，而那共同的项仍是那给予者自己的。一个被生产而不被联合观察的价值是一个进入无一账簿、并无法被动用的价值，而那关系保留无物。而一个被观察而不被再投入的价值是一个已停止移动的价值，而这是那礼物存在以防止的条件。

马歇尔计划可被通过那链被读，而那读法被提供以显示那链一经被实例化会看起来像什么，而非以确立它曾是。依这样一个读法，所给出者被以对诸接受者之状况的某种顾及被组成，被在一个拒绝被至少一个国家所行使的安排之下接受，被那给予者不曾指定之诸形式的欧洲协调所回答，并被再投入于一个来及时约束那给予者的制度秩序。这些命题中的每一个在史学中被争议，而§24记录那主要的争议。那链作为一个一个案例能展现的结构被呈现。这个案例是否展现它在此不被了结。

第四部分. 那判准

§14 四个条件

那判准有四个条件。它们被一同陈述，因为每一个是必要的而无一可从其余者被导出，并因为一个循环可以满足任何三个而在第四个上失败。

条件	问题	失败
那开启	那循环是否回答一个它不曾创造的匮乏，以及它是否开启那接受者转而开启的能力？	被制造的需求
那路径	价值是否返回给那些生产它者？	榨取
那边界	谁承担那成本而不被计数？	贡品、那封闭的秩序
可预见性	那回报本可被预报吗？	那操纵性的礼物

那关于那路径的条件是埃格拉什的、而不是本文的，而那在随后一节中被发展的、对那开启的递归读法同样在他的说明中被预示。那关于那开启的条件在随后一节中被发展，在那里它被显示为递归的、并在那里对它的二元读法被放弃。那关于那边界的条件在其后被发展。那关于可预见性的条件在上面的§12被发展。

§15 那开启的品质

那关于那开启的条件已被陈述得仿佛那开启是一个二元之事，因而一个循环要么回答一个它不曾创造的匮乏、要么不。这是不足的，而那不足被那条件被引入以处理的案例所暴露。

被制造的需求开启某物。那消费者回应、并组成、并参与，而那回应不被强迫。有一个那消费者从之行动的位置，而那消费者占据它。一个持有那榨取性的循环只是未能开启的说明会是一个根本无法看见那案例的说明。

因此，把这两者区分开来者不是一个开启的在场、而是一个关于那开启开启什么的性质。

一个开启是生成性的，当它所开启者是那接受者转而开启的能力。

那榨取性的开启产生一个回应并预先关闭那接受者自己的生成性：那消费者组成一个购买并由此被返回到想要的条件，那下一个购买从之被组成。那循环转动，而那参与者发起一个他们自己之循环的能力是它所消耗者。

那生成性的开启再生产它自己可能之条件。那接受者所接受者是那给予的能力，而它的标记是那接受者成为一个给予者。

因此那判准是递归的，而那递归不是本文的发明。生成性正义递归地定义未被异化的价值，作为那使进一步的正义而可持续的生成成为可能者，而它向一个生成性的安排要求它的参与者被定位以创造他们自己的生产条件（埃格拉什，2016）。此处所提供者是那一要求向外交层面的转置、以及那“它区分于单那关于那路径的条件所不区分之处”的观察。

因此，那问题不是那接受者能否回应。它是那接受者，既已回应，现在能否为一个不是那原初交易之一部分的第三方开启一个位置。

那判准所产出的检验在原则上是可观察的，而它要求不了任何对意图的通达、不要求任何对真诚的判断。

凡一个安排的诸接受者及时来占据给予者的位置，那安排的诸开启在所定义的意义上是生成性的，而那过渡是一个记录之事。凡诸接受者横跨一个长时期仍处于诸接受者的位置，那判准把注意引向那给予的能力是否在所给出的事物之中，而它本身不了结那事项，因为一个持续的不对称可能有那安排既不曾创造、也无法移除的诸成因。那判准所供给者是那问题。那答案要求那案例。

这以埃格拉什自己的递归给它的形式重述那返回的条件，而它显示那条件与那关于那开启的条件是一个要求的诸方面。所必须返回给诸参与者者不是单一份价值。它是那价值据以被生成的能力，因为一个价值返回给他而能力不返回给他的参与者，是一个必须返回以求更多的参与者。

§16 那被计数者的边界

一个困难伴随那返回的条件，而它关切一个那说明所不处理、而非一个它处理得不充分之事项。

那定义的每一个条款都在价值生成者、在价值生成之诸社群之上量化，而它们中无一了结这些是谁。那集合的确定被预设。一个封闭的秩序在那预设中运作：它就它所认可的诸方满足每一个条款，而它被它所不认可的诸方所维系。

纳贡的诸安排把价值返回给它们的诸参与者、准许那些参与者在那秩序之内创造他们自己的生产条件、并跨代维系那流通。每一个条款就那秩序所认可的集合被满足。维系那秩序者是那些承担它成本、并根本不被计入它诸参与者之列者的位置。

如此被理解的榨取并不违反那返回。它如此绘出那些返回被欠于其者的边界、以便排除那些其成本维系它者。那观察作为对那说明的一个补充被提供，而它对一个生成性正义的捍卫者如对一个批评者一般现成地可得，因为那自然的回答是那未被计数的一方在那定义的任何合理读法上是一个价值生成者，而那回答是正确的。它所不供给者是一个判准，那秩序自己的核算据以能被显示为错的，那核算是以一种那未被计数的一方从之缺席的语法被进行的。

那边界条件。 那些价值必须返回于其者的集合由那些承担那循环之成本者所构成，而不由那些那循环认可为它参与者者所构成。

没有任何内在于那循环的判准能察觉那证伪，因为那循环自己的核算是以一种那未被计数者从之缺席的语法被进行的。

什么决定那未被计数者能否被计数，是那安排的语法是否容许对他们的致意。那些被排除者不被那些接受无物者所穷尽。他们是那些在那安排之内不存在任何他们的成本可从之被陈述之位置者。因此翻译不是那礼物的一个前提条件、而它是那被计数者的边界据以被扩大的劳动，而它的拒绝是那榨取据以对那些从中获益者变得不可见的机制。

§17 那被拒绝的礼物

一个检验从那判准随之而来、而它是本文所提供的最可操作者。

拒绝一个礼物便是拒绝它所提议的语法。依§8的说明这不是那礼物的失败。它是那接受者恰恰行使那礼物为之开启一个位置的能力，而一个本可被拒绝而未被拒绝的礼物是一个其语法被批准、而非被强加的礼物。

一个无法被拒绝的礼物是贡品。 那拒绝的不可能是那层级，而它可被那安排之外、非它任一侧之一方从外部审计。

那档案以它的否定形式支持那检验，而本文别无更多主张。一个其拒绝会携带那接受者无法承担之后果的援助不是可被拒绝的，而它被接受这一事实因此不是批准的证据。附加于一笔贷款的条件性是那拒绝的移除。什么把马歇尔计划与先于它的赔款体制区分开来，依这一判准，不是那转移的量级、而是那拒绝的可得性，而那要点的史学被以一种§24不隐藏的方式争议。

第五部分. 为何外交

§18 差异在别处可得

外交不是因为它是激进差异的领域而被选择。差异在别处可得。跨一个文化边界的礼物、宗教社群之间的礼物、那理论最初从之被抽取之民族志中的礼物：每一个都涉及诸方，他们的符号世界不重合，而它们中无一是外交。

把那外交案例区分开来者是两个缺席的合取，而那合取是那使那案例成为一个检验、而非一个例示者。

§19 两条轴

第一条轴是一个被共享的代码是否可得。凡诸方栖居一个共同的符号秩序，那给予者无需阅读那接受者、而只需遵循：什么算作一个礼物在事前被安顿，而那给予者的任务是胜任、而非翻译。凡没有任何这样的代码存在，§10的阅读被要求、而那礼物可能在那提议的层级上失败。

第二条轴是一个第三位置是否可得，意即一个被任一方都不占据、诸行动之每一个可从之被刻画的处所。这是一个比它显得的更强的要求，而那框架对它必要性的论证在一篇姊妹篇中被陈述：一个含两方与它们之间之关系的配置含不出任何东西可区分一个制裁与一个侵犯，因为那两个处所中的每一个都是那行动的一方。一个行动是否是一桩错，从一个那二元组所不供给的位置被了结。

	被共享的代码	无被共享的代码
第三位置可得	一个文化之内的礼物	移民的礼物；跨信仰的交换
无第三位置	那封闭的结社	外交

外交是两者都缺席的那个格，而它是唯一的这样一个格，其中诸方却横跨数世纪维系诸关系。

§20 那攸关

每一个其他的格都准许那礼物倚靠某物。一个文化之内的礼物倚靠那代码，而那不阅读的给予者仍可正确地给予。一个共同辖区之内跨诸文化的礼物倚靠那第三，而在那交换变质之处有一条法、一个制度、一个规范，那变质可从之被命名。

那外交礼物倚靠没有任何东西。

那攸关。 外交是那礼物必须在没有一个被共享的代码、并没有一个第三位置的情况下运作的配置，而这是那框架自己的论证持有为无能生成规范性结构的配置。

要么那礼物生成那第三位置、而非预设它，在那种情形中那框架的二元论证要求修订。要么它不，在那种情形中那在档案中显现为由礼物所产生之秩序者是由力量所产生的秩序，而那现实主义的读法是正确的。

本文不了结这。那档案了结它，而那档案不曾为此目的被读。

那学科对那配置有一个名字、而不曾知道拿它怎么办。无政府是诸国家把它弄成的样子（温特，1992）是一个关于那条件之可变性的主张，而它供给不出任何那弄成据以发生的机制。诸国家的社会维系无一执行者的诸制度（布尔，1977），而那观察是正确的、并是一个描述。当下本文所提供者是一个候选的机制，而它对那学科所要求者是一个关于那机制是否真实的裁断。

§21 战略、受托与结构

一个反对在此升起，它若被留而不答，会把外交从本文的触及中整个移除。那判准看似取消那为一个目的而被组成之礼物的资格。每一个外交礼物都为一个目的而被组成。一个部不无理由地给予，而一个无理由地被给出的礼物根本不会被给出。

那反对对一个本文因此必须放弃的表述是可靠的，而那放弃改善那说明。

战略是义务性的

那给予者在外交案例中给出不是他的东西。一个部长处置属于一个不曾选择那礼物、并将承担它诸后果之人口者，而他在一个对那人口的义务之下处置它，而他无法通过咨询他们来清偿那义务。

由此可得，一个外交礼物中战略性组成的缺席是一个失职。一个不顾他所受托之诸利益而给予的部长会是在给出不是他所可给出者，而那慷慨会是盗窃。战略不是那外交礼物的一个污染。它是它的一个受托要求。

这有一个本文认真对待的结构性后果。那给予者在亲密案例中押上他自己，而那退出路径的移除是他自己的移除。那给予者在外交案例中押上他人，而那被移除的退出路径属于一个不曾同意那移除的民族。因此，那机制在这一尺度上穿过一个那亲密案例所不含的代表关系而运行。

而§16的边界条件到达那给予者内部。那未被计数者不被那些在那交易之接受一侧者所穷尽。他们包括那给予国家的公民，他们的资源被给出、而他们的语法不曾被咨询。

	谁被押上	谁可能去而不被计数
亲密的礼物	那给予者自己	那更弱的伴侣
外交的礼物，向外	那给予的民族	那接受者的被排除者
外交的礼物，向内	那给予民族的公民	那些未被咨询而承担它成本者

由此两个失败模式被区分，而它们是独立的。那战略可能留给那接受者没有任何东西可作为回报去组成。或那受托可能以它自己的措辞失败，而这发生于那在那礼物之组成中被援引的利益不是那些承担它成本者的利益之处。任何给定的国家行动是否展现那第二个失败是一个事实问题，而本文的贡献是把它辨认为一个独特的失败、而非把它指控于任何一方。

战略被那结构所强加

战略在这一尺度上被准许，而它被那礼物必须穿过的介质所要求。

在尺度上的协调穿过结构而进行，而结构是被凝结的在先关系：礼宾、条约、先例、部、预算。那结构约束那当下的行动，因为一个那结构无法执行的行动是一个根本无法被执行的行动。一个部无法情感地给予，即便在它会希望之处，因为没有任何一个情感可从之被传递的渠道。那关系性的意图必须被呈现为一个那结构将携带的形式，而那呈现是那被称为战略者。

战略不是一个那给予者选择的翻译。它是一个关系性的意图必须采取、以便能与一个那给予者不曾选择、并无法绕过的结构对齐的形式。

那呈现有一个成本，而那成本是那危险所躺之处。那结构无法携带一个关系的完整复杂性，而它因此压缩：友谊、伙伴关系、战略竞争、对手。这些标签是那结构所能持有者，而那压缩是一个在那关系上被执行的粗粒化、以便那关系竟能被作用。

那问题是那粗粒化摧毁什么。一个被压缩为一个标签的关系产生那标签已然预期的诸回报，而§12已确立一个被预期的回报意味着什么。那礼物的生成性熬过那压缩，到那粗粒化留下某种那结构无法预先指定之物的程度。

战略只在它完全时是致命的

那礼物不被战略的进入所摧毁。它在那战略是总体的时被摧毁，也就是说，当那结构已如此完全地指定那礼物、以致那给予的每一个后果都已然被含于那计划之中。

因此，取消资格者不是一个礼物曾被战略性地组成。它是那战略留给那接受者没有任何东西可作为回报去组成。

那外交档案的两极被这、而不被任何其他东西所分开。一个条件性援助的方案把它的诸结果指定为可交付物，而那指定是那工具的要点。没有任何东西超出那粗粒化，因为那粗粒化被弄成总体的，而那接受者的遵从是那安排将登录的一切。

马歇尔计划是最大限度战略性的。它为遏制、为诸市场的构建、并为通过一个立法机构而被组成，而它的作者们对这三者都是明确的。跟随它者是一个那计划不曾指定、它的作者们不曾预见、并来及时约束那曾给出它之国家的欧洲一体化。那战略是必要的、而那余数是那要紧者。

对礼物理论的后果

礼物理论中的一个二分法被这所溶解，而那溶解从那外交案例回向那理论、而非相反。

已有人追问一个认识它自己的礼物是否仍是一个礼物，其根据是一个被它给予者认作如此的礼物已然进入那交换的经济（德里达，1992）。一个国家无法不认识它自己。它必须审议、记录、编预算、并辩护，而它审议的记录是公开的。依那二分法的措辞，一个国家的礼物是不可能的。

那二分法预设一个拥有他所给出者、并因此可自由地给出它或扣留它的给予者。一个受托人拥有不了他所给出的任何东西，而他的给予既非那二分法所要求之意义上的自由、亦非它所对置之意义上的一个交换。那受托人的礼物是一个第三物，而那二分法对它没有任何位置。

§22 四个进一步的特殊性

四个进一步的特征把那外交礼物区分开来，而每一个关乎那论证。

诸方是复合的。 一个国家没有主体，而§10的阅读被一个装置所执行：一个部、一个使馆、一个情报机构。这样一个装置能否被说成阅读、以及一个余数能否被说成在它之中登记，是那从亲密案例的转置可能失败之点，而本文不隐藏那困难。它只指出那框架被结构地指定、并保留就一个参与者是什么的承诺，因而那转置对它可得，于它对一个建于人之上的说明会不可得之处。

那礼物是公开的。 那外交礼物在诸受众面前被执行：国内的诸公众、第三国、那历史记录。那亲密礼物不。那公开性是有后果的，因为那被开启的位置可能被那受众、而非被那接受者所占据，而那礼物于是是一个在一个更宽之场中的出价，那接受者被弄成去见证它。那受众是否构成§20所辨认之其缺席的第三位置、抑或那受众反而是那礼物真正为之被执行的一方，被留敞，而这两者不总能从外部被区分。

不对称是那正常的情形。 在亲密关系中，激进的不平等是病理性的。在诸国家的社会中它是那基线条件。因此那返回的条件无法意味着相等的返回，而那回赠的能力必须在结构性不平等之下被理论化，而那礼物的文献，从小规模社会与从农民经济被抽取，从未不得不如此做。

那赝品被制度化。 存在一个其对象是为一个战略回报之故而生产那礼物之表象的职业，而它有一套教义、一个预算、一个文献。公共外交、援助条件性、以及软实力的理论是它的诸工具。在别处无一处那操纵性的礼物是一个被编纂的国家功能。

§23 那对手

本文存在以否认的立场可被确切地陈述，而它不是现实主义。

软实力的理论持有：吸引以比强制更低的成本产生偏好结果，而一个国家的文化、价值与政策是要被部署向那目的的诸资源（奈，2004）。依这一说明，那开启一个循环的礼物与那安装一个层级的礼物是同一个工具，而它们的差异是一个在它部署之技巧上的差异。那理论没有义务区分它们，因为它的对象是偏好结果的生产、而两者都可能产生它们。因此，当下本文的分歧是一个关于什么要被解释的分歧，而它不是一个在那理论自己的地基上对它的反对。

第四部分的四个条件存在以否认这。依此处所提供的说明，那为一个可预见的回报而被执行的礼物不是一个被执行得好的礼物。它根本不是一个礼物，而它将未能做软实力的理论设想它做的工作，以一种那理论没有词汇的方式。

第六部分. 诸案例与诸界限

§24 诸案例及它们的争议

三个比较关乎那判准，而每一个连同它的史学困难、而非无它被陈述。

马歇尔计划对赔款和解。 那比较是本文的中心案例，而那判准所邀请的读法如下。那赔款和解把价值从一个其生成能力由此被减少的一方转移走，而那是一个长期的争辩，在史学中被争议，即那减少促成了随后冲突的诸条件。马歇尔计划，依此处所提供的读法，把能力返回给它的诸接受者、并留他们被定位以转而给予，而他们中的一些随后确实以那给予者不曾指定的诸形式如此做了。

那读法是一个读法。它是第四部分的判准会就那两个安排所说者，而它作为对那判准之运作的一个例示、而非作为对任一者之史学的一个贡献被提供。

那读法被争议、而那争议是实质的。已有人论证欧洲的复苏在那计划之前已在进行、并会在没有它的情况下推进，而那计划的效果是政治的、而非经济的（米尔沃德，1984）。若这是正确的，那案例不显示那判准要求它显示者，而本文的中心比较比它显得的更弱。那要点在此被让步、而非被留给一个评审者，而本文的回应是那判准关切一个关系的开启、而非一个转移的量级，因而一个其经济效果小而其关系效果大的计划对那说明不是一个窘境。那回应是否适足不由作者来确定。

纳贡的诸秩序。 历史的纳贡安排把价值返回给它们的诸参与者，而一个把它们读作未被缓解之榨取的读法不被那记录良好地支持。那判准所把注意引向者是那边界：诸方是否承担这样一个安排的成本而不被计入它诸参与者之列。§17的检验也可得，因为那拒绝的可得性横跨这样的诸安排而各有不同、而那不同被记录。本文提供那判准、而不提供对任何特定秩序的裁断。

条件性援助。 一个批判发展实践的文献已论证某些安排产生它们此后处置的依赖，而那附加于援助的诸条件能从那接受者移除拒绝它的能力（弗格森，1994；埃斯科瓦尔，1995）。那些主张被争议、而当下本文不背书它们。

本文所贡献者是那被指称之缺陷的定位。若那批判的说明在一个给定案例中是正确的，那缺陷躺在那循环的开启处、而非在它的措辞中，因为这样的诸安排的措辞往往在它们表面上是可辩护的、而那批评不是一个对那些措辞的批评。这是一个关于往何处看的主张，而它对这样诸安排的一个捍卫者如对一个批评者一般现成地可得。

§25 无物的礼物

§4的定义要求一个不可收回的转移，而那些最强的外交礼物转移不出任何对象。

一个道歉不可收回地、并在一个受众面前，交出那给予者本可从之继续否认之位置。一个国事访问交出那给予者本可从之继续把那接受者当作不值注意之位置。承认交出那给予者本可从之继续持有那接受者不存在之位置。在每一个中那攸关是地位，而那交出不可被收回，而没有任何可执行的对回报之主张伴随它。

地位是否是那定义所要求之意义上的一个转移，在此不被了结。可被说者是那结构在相关方面是同一的：某种无法被收回之物被放弃，没有任何第三物立于那给予之下，而那接受者被给予一个可从之回应的、先前不存在的位置。若那定义必须被拓宽以纳入这些，它们是它应为之被拓宽的诸案例，因为它们是那机制最少被那对象之价值污染的诸案例。

§26 时间

那礼物的投注在外交案例中处于比那理论先前考虑过的任何地方更大的张力之下。

一个礼物的价值可能只在一个长间隔之后返回，而一个亲密关系中的间隔以年被测量、并被一个生命所界限。诸国家的社会中的间隔以世代被测量。一个礼物可能在那给予者死后返回，返回给一个其政府不曾给出它的国家，来自一个其人口在它被给出时不曾在世的国家。赔款被那些不曾招致那债的诸方付给那些不曾遭受那损伤的诸方。

这不是那理论的一个脚注。它是那外交案例比那亲密案例更艰难之点，因为那投注被一个无法接受那回报的一方作出、而那回报被一个不曾作那投注的一方接受。这样的礼物却被作出，而那些回报却到来，是一个本文记录而不解释的事实。

§27 那判准对那审计可得

此处没有任何外交政策被推荐，而理由是结构性的。

那判准不禁止意图。它禁止闭合。 一个给予者可以为理由而给予，而必须，而仍可以开启一个那接受者可从之超出他的位置。他所无法做者是预先指定什么将返回，因为一个被预先指定的回报是一个那接受者没有余地去组成的。

因此，那判准可被一个评估一个安排的第三方、被那接受者、并被那历史学家使用。它不可被用作对要被给出之礼物的一个指定，因为一个其形式被那判准之诸要求所决定的礼物是一个被那给予者之诸要求所决定的礼物，而§10持有一个如此被决定的礼物为一个转移。

那不对称平行于一个在本纲领别处所获得的结果，即一个生成性循环上的正义条件不从那循环之内可被计算。那平行是确切的、而它不是一个巧合，这两者是从那能动者的位置与从那审计的位置被看见的同一个结构性事实。

§28 礼物作为一个治理机制

一个比本文自己的更大的主张，从那论证已抵达的位置可见，而它在此被陈述以便被传递、而非被论证。

在尺度上的协调穿过那些以指定来协调的机制而进行：层级通过指令，价格通过信号，规范通过期望，网络通过被协商的相互依赖。每一个是一个粗粒化，而每一个，在寻常的进程中，僵化。一个刻画而不被刻画的位置被安装，重新解释被预先关闭，而那配置此后靠再生产、于它曾靠生成而持存之处而持存。这是被治理之诸秩序的长存病理，而它已在本纲领别处被记录。

这样一个秩序无法从它自身之内回答的问题是一个新的位置要从何而来。一个只执行它自己诸指定的结构只产生它已指定者。它无法生成，而它耗尽。

那礼物是一个结构准许而不指定的行动。 礼宾要求一个礼物被给出、而无法说什么将返回。因此那礼物是那粗粒化中的那孔径：一个被治理之秩序之内的、其后果那秩序不曾组成的那一个举动。

依这一读法，一个协调结构要求一个未被指定的行动、以便保持生成性，而那礼物是那要求所采取的制度形式。

因此，那结构与那礼物之间的关系是一个依赖的关系、而非一个妥协的关系。说结构索取一个在生成性上的成本、而那礼物部分地抵消它，是不足的。那结构根本无法生成，而那礼物是一个结构据以获得它构成性地无能生产者的方式。

这说明一个那被接受的诸理论留而未解的观察。外交是国家行动最受礼宾约束的领域，而它在它的中心保留一个不可执行的、在任何时间表上不可回礼的、并因设计而战略上不透明的实践。现实主义无法说为何那实践存活，而制度主义无法说为何它不被一个有更清晰措辞的工具所取代。依当下的读法，那实践不是任何宫廷仪式的残余。它是那结构的生成性器官，而它的移除会留那秩序能够执行、而无能生长。

那主张是一个关于治理、而非关于外交的主张，而它超出那外交案例所能确立者。它在此作为那方向被记录，若这一论证成立，它会接下来被采取的方向。

§29 什么仍然敞开

理性主义国际关系的收益矩阵能否根本被写出，鉴于它所要求的目标可能在那其诸收益它会填入之关系中被构成。

一个国家能否被说成阅读另一个，抑或那阅读被一个装置之内的诸人所执行、而那向那国家的转置是不正当的。那框架的结构性指定使那转置可得、而不使它正确。

那外交礼物在其面前被执行的受众是否构成那使那外交案例成为一个检验之其缺席的第三位置，在那种情形中那框架的二元论证被保全而那检验被消解，抑或那受众是那礼物为之被执行的一方，在那种情形中那礼物从未根本被给予那接受者。

§17的判准，即那拒绝的可得性，能否在那档案中被操作化，以及以何种量度一个拒绝被判断为曾对一个不曾行使它的一方可得。

§28的主张是否熬过它的一般化，也就是说，一个被治理之秩序的四种协调机制是否每一个都要求一个那礼物所供给之类的未被指定的行动，以及那些在别处供给它的诸实践能否被辨认。

那机制已被提议，而那判准已被陈述。那礼物是否在无一被给出之处生成一个第三位置，是那说明所立于其上的问题，而那档案不曾为此目的被读。

参考文献