Winston Churchill, who was the conservative Prime Minister from 1940- 1945, had played a major part in helping the Allies to win the war. “for the world to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer—ONE stabilizer.”
The rules-based international order is founded on relationships between states and through international institutions, with shared rules and agreements on behaviour. It has enabled economic integration and security cooperation to expand, to the benefit of people around the world. It has done much to encourage predictable behaviour by states and the non-violent management of disputes, and has led states to develop political and economic arrangements at home which favour open markets, the rule of law, participation and accountability.
However, this virtual world is invariably divided into a number of hard entities (“states”) of different levels of material capabilities whose relationships peace or war or something in-between are governed by the “balance of power”, which has its own inherent rules of practice. This basic approach is devised to explain what happens among the state entities as levels of military and economic capability among them change. It could be extended to the organization of a full range of nonmilitary as well as military resources for the purposes of the state – a notion wrapped up in the idea of “grand strategy” and “Grand Alliance,”.
This inclusion of liberty, economic, psychological, moral, political, and technological factors of the modern state., which was especially relevant to the all-encompassing conflict of the Second World War, intensified the relationship between strategy and international politics in times of both war and peace.
Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s The Honourable Louis Susman, in his first formal address after his appointment, told the Pilgrims Society in London: “In war and peace, in prosperity and in time of economic hardship, America has no better friend and no more dependable ally than the United Kingdom.”
Issues of war and peace were central in the arrival of international relations as a fully-fledged academic discipline, symbolized after the First World War by the establishment of the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at University College of Wales in Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom (at that time called University College, Wales).
But, the modern understanding of political origins of war, conflict and politics can be linked above all to the early nineteenth century thinking of the Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz, whose commentary on the enduringly political nature of war helps us understand also the strategy as the connecting ligament between war and politics. On the whole, war is inherently political, it has the capacity both to reflect and to intensify the often messy and fiery relationships of power.
These features became supremely important in the Second World War. Clausewitz’s analysis could not have been more relevant:
…”The more powerful and inspiring the motives for war,… the more closely will the military aims and the political objects of war coincide, and the more military and less political will war appear to be. On the other hand, the less intense the motives, the less will the military element’s natural tendency to violence coincide with political directives. As a result, war will be driven further from its natural course, the political object will be more and more at variance with the aim of ideal war, and the conflict will seem increasingly political in character”.
Historian Paul Schroeder argued that the old formulas for “balance of power” were in fact highly destabilizing and predatory. The Congress of Vienna set up rules that produced a stable and benign equilibrium.
The goal was not simply to restore old boundaries, but to resize the main powers so they could balance each other off and remain at peace. The leaders were conservatives with little use for republicanism or revolution.
The establishment of the League of Nations and these war aims were central to a ‘liberal’ approach to International Relations. While Wilson can be seen as a hero to liberals in his views on International Relations, in other respects his ideas have not worn so well. As President, his time in the White House (1913-21) was dominated by the First World War. Wilson’s desire to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ has resonated in American foreign policy ever since. After the war, Wilson’s energies were devoted to the establishment of a League of Nations. His peace-making efforts won him the Nobel Prize in 1919.
Today, Modern liberty rests upon three pillars. They are representative democracy to solve the difficult problem of combining the liberties of the subject with the necessary authority of the modern state. Ultimately, the representative political institutions cannot alone guarantee our liberties. It is economic liberty that nourishes the enterprise of those whose hard work and imagination ultimately determine the conditions in which we live. It is economic liberty that makes possible a free press. It is economic liberty that has enabled the modern democratic state to provide a decent minimum of welfare for the citizen, while leaving him free to choose when, where, and how he will make his own contribution to the economic life of the country.
The third guarantee of liberty is the Rule of Law. Rule of law and institutionalization is a broad, overarching term. They affect how political actors are enabled or constrained and the governing capacities of a political system. For good reason it has become a popular recommendation in the arena of development. The thought that no-one in the state can escape the law is, after all, a daring one. Governors and governed, groups and individuals, soldiers, policemen, and civilians, each must bow to a higher principle.
Effective rule of law is foundational to successful development, and any political economy with the potential to become a Liberal has to overcome barriers to development.
Successful growth policies nearly always create institutions that develop around powerful vested interests, and just as these vested interests oppose and substantial change in the growth model, the institutional structure that develops around the growth model, including the financial system, the distribution of power between the central government and other important agents, the allocation of the benefits of growth, and so on – constrains the ability of the system to adjust.
Throughout history, liberalizing reforms almost by definition are aimed at undermining institutional constraints that benefit the elite at the expense of overall productivity, such reforms have always generated political opposition form powerful groups.
The few countries that have been able successfully to implement such major economic reforms have always been either politically competitive liberal democracies, or highly centralized autocracies. Countries that are not on one end of the political spectrum or the other, form the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s and 1850s to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, have never been able to successfully implement liberalizing reforms to any significant degree, except after unleashing tremendous political instability.
Countries that have been economically successful over the long term tend to be countries that have most successfully managed the adjustment process and countries that have reversed the economic imbalances associated with rapid growth relatively quickly and with a manageable amount of political and social disruption.
It is also a belief that continues to permeate the thinking of states or their defense throughout the world. Yet careful research makes it clear that the distribution of power, whether balanced or not, by itself bears neither a logically nor an empirically compelling relationship to the likelihood of international instability or conflicts.
Successful political leaders overcome such dilemmas when they develop adjudication mechanisms that settle disputes with perceived consistency and fairness.
The rule of law is found in all countries whose populations enjoy a high standard of living. No country that did not endorse the rule of law has ever developed a high standard of living. Freedom under the law and successful economic development occur together.
Rule of law, in its essence, is a concept as least as old as the Magna Carta, According to this principle, the government and the people are governed by a knowable and predictable set of written principles that apply equally to everyone within the jurisdiction of the government. Only if those principles are knowable and predictable can people optimally organize their affairs to pursue happiness.
The bishops and barons who had brought King John to the negotiating table understood that rights required an enforcement mechanism.
Magna Carta has also been a bigger deal in the U.S. In whay Americans, like Britons, have inherited their freedoms from past generations and should not look to any external agent for their perpetuation. The rights we now take for granted—freedom of speech, religion, assembly and so on—are not the natural condition of an advanced society. They were developed overwhelmingly in the language in which you are reading these words. When we call them universal rights, we are being polite. Suppose World War II or the Cold War had ended differently: There would have been nothing universal about them then. If they are universal rights today, it is because of a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples.
In this tradition, institutions are imagined to organize and to have an ordering effect on how authority and power is constituted, exercised, legitimated, controlled, and redistributed. Rules and practices specify what is normal, what must be expected, what can be relied upon, and what makes sense in the community; that is, what a normal, reasonable, and responsible, yet fallible citizen, elected representative, administrator, or judge, can be expected to do in various situations.
Charles Kindleberger, an economic historian, views a successful leader, in the international community, as one that can unilaterally establish and support rules of the game that stabilize expectations, manage risk, and promote cooperation and mutually beneficial exchange across national borders in good and in bad times.
Preferring the term “responsibility” he argues that during uncertain times, when the system hits significant shocks, “for the world economy to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer—ONE stabilizer.”
By the early nineteenth century Britain had become the richest nation in the world and remained so for most of the century. What drove these processes and how were they interrelated? The origins of British economic supremacy stem from a series of institutional changes which took place from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards.
These changes emerged out of the Civil War of 1642-51 and Glorious Revolution of 1688 and led to a dramatic change in the political institutions. At the same time, after 1832 a series of Reform Acts were passed which eventually culminated in democracy. The UK has a proud tradition of promoting civil liberties, upholding the rule of law, and building diverse, integrated communities tolerant of different faiths and beliefs
Although it is argued that much of the established wisdom about the effects of political institutions is very fragile (Rothstein 1996), scholars who deal with political institutions are generally less concerned with whether institutions matter, than to what extent, in what respects, through what processes and system, under what conditions, and why institutions make a difference (Weaver and Rockman 1993; Egeberg 2003; Orren and Skowronek 2004).
During Pax Britannica the British used their wealth, markets, and capabilities to provide key collective goods that endowed the United Kingdom with leverage to exercise global leadership,set the rules of the game, and promote a stable liberal international economic order. Charles Kindleberger, blames the collapse in hegemonic leadership following World War I for a breakdown in cooperation, reversals in globalization, and the traumatic interwar years.
Under Pax Americana, the ability of the United States to establish the rules of the game and provide collective goods (militarily and economically) to its bloc during the Cold War reduced uncertainty, encouraged exchange and cooperation, and advanced a liberal international economic order that enhanced stability and growth in the postwar era. Americans have a big stake in the role diplomats play in opening markets abroad, strengthening the economic rules of the road, ensuring a level playing field for U.S. companies, attracting foreign investment, and advocating on behalf of U.S. businesses.
Students of world politics and international affairs have made theoretical progress in recent decades on issues of war, cooperation, and the role of multilateral institutions and conceptual progress on issues of sovereignty. International relations is a deeply interdisciplinary enterprise. Impressive empirical work, guided by improved technical and methodological sophistication, has been carried out on a variety of problems, including warfare. Although we are living in a period of unprecedented change, our understanding of change is very inferior to our understanding of fundamental long-term regularities.
Whether discussing grand strategy in peacetime or that of war or political economy, change in material capabilities takes place within a “system”, but the nature or basic structure of the system never changes. Yet, the explanation of change lies within the process in the system itself. An older perspective sees the world as a realm of continuous and chaotic change with no ultimate final state “no end of history”. With a team of leading historians (see here), Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich examine how, and to what effect states, individuals and military organizations have found a solution to complex and seemingly insoluble strategic problems to reach success.
Lessons of the past can inform how we understand and confront the future.
The effects of changes in the ideas in which people believe are by no means necessarily benign, as illustrated by nuclear weapons and the recent militancy of fundamentalism. We should expect no simple answer to questions about progress, often asked urgently in the wake of disasters, but they are nevertheless important questions to ask. I think we can rise to the challenge. But improving life chances only gets you part of the way there. You can have a great start in life and work hard, but still be held back — often invisibly power — because of your background or the colour of your skin. These problems go deep elsewhere too. World wars and the Holocaust generated great disillusionment, but in the 80s hopes for progress, through learning or changes in principled ideas, were revived.
Regardless of how successful one becomes, we can all benefit from the mechanisms to achieve peak mental performance and the fortitude to persevere through difficult circumstances. Life will always have unique challenges. Recurring failures lead us to try to understand the conditions under which states and other diplomat actors can achieve their collective purposes rather than engage in destructive and often self-destructive, behavior. Behind all these issues lurks the concept of power.
Material resources are significant not just for war and threat, but also for the politics of economic relationships.
Oxford handbook of Political Economy by Weingast and Wittman (2006) debate regarding international affairs and the ways about studying conflict and peace. “The West’s approach to the realities of the post–Cold War world has made a great deal of sense, and it is hard to see how world peace can ever be achieved without replacing geopolitical competition with the construction of a liberal world order”.
Since world politics is not beautiful, a productive line of work has stressed the role of reciprocity in creating incentives for cooperative behavior. These theoretical contributions are beginning to be linked to the literature on the democratic peace, and institutional design, which I do not have space to discuss here. To be worthwhile for a democrat, institutions have to be accountable as well as effective.
The International relations scholarship can loosely be divided into these who focus on such structural aspects of the international system as the global distribution of power, or the alignment of nations into two blocs, the bipolar world of the cold war- or many blocs and those who attend to the ways in which domestic political dynamics shape international relations.
For much of the post-second World war years, structural perspectives including neorealism, liberalism and power transition theory have contended for domination as explanations of variance in cooperative and conflict-prone behavior. By structural perspectives (Weingast and Wittman, 2006) mean theories, such as which the central concern is how aggregate characteristics of the international system such as the distributions of power or distribution of wealth among states (as rational unitary actors) determines interactions leading to international conflict or cooperation.
- The study of “world politics” begins with the study of war.
In March 1915, during World War I (1914-18), British and French forces launched an ill-fated naval attack on Turkish forces in the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey, hoping to take control of the strategically vital strait separating Europe from Asia. The failure of the campaign at the Dardanelles, along with the campaign that followed later that year in Gallipoli, resulted in heavy casualties and was a serious blow to the reputation of the Allied war command, including that of Winston Churchill, the British First Lord of the Admiralty, in early 1915.
As we continue: Going to War offers reflections from political, academic and military practitioners in an attempt to discover the search for peace and the goodness hidden in the madness of war.
Why is war a perennial institution of international society and what variable factors affect its incidence? A growing body of work in experimental psychology has revealed, that people are often willing to make substantial sacrifices to punish those who violate shared foundational values and those who fail to punish cheaters. From this standpoint, the logic of international institutions built on shared values of distributive and procedural justice should be able to perpetuate themselves in the absence of strong central authority as long as members perceive the specific norms and normenforcement to be anchored in these shared values. This is true if there is a security gap in the sense of inability of protection.
Hugo Grotius, the 17th century jurist and father of public international law, stated in his 1625 magnum opus The Law of War and Peace that “Most Men assign three Just Causes of War, Defense, the Recovery of what’s our own, and Punishment.”
International law recognizes a right of self-defence. The right of self‑defence as recognised in Article 51 of the UN Charter may be exercised individually where it is necessary to defence.
The Caroline incident, beginning in 1837 that strained relations between the United States and Britain, has been used to establish the principle of “anticipatory self-defense” in international politics, which holds that it may be justified only in cases in which the “necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”.
This formulation is part of the Caroline test. The Caroline affair is also now invoked frequently in the course of the dispute around preemptive strike (or preemption doctrine).
In the last decade, two models have been offered that are easier to work with in this context of world policy spaces. It is useful to distinguish: The two formalizations of theory, power transition and balance-of-power theory. There is support for the central tenets of the power transition theory or for balance of power theory. When we focus on individuals rather than states the number of rationalist explanations for war proliferates still further.
In understanding this problem, as well as other issues in world politics. Political Theory, the oldest subdivision of the discipline, tackles the eternal questions of politics. Students become acquainted with the basic ideas of Western political thought through great thinkers (such as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and J.S. Mill) and through inspirational speeches of great leaders, in particular moment in time and a particular way of thinking.
As Britain prepared for battle, the emphasis on resolve and solidarity continued to pervade Churchill’s speeches. A few days after his first broadcast, Churchill again addressed the people, this time emphasizing the impending attacks on their homes. His realistic yet determined manner served as a model for all the people tuned in on their radios.
The theme of the British homeland became increasingly important, because it gave the people a cause worth fighting for.
4 June 1940: “I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”
Winston Churchill’s speech ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ is one of the defining speeches during the second world war. It uses the technique of repetition to very good effect.
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
Churchill took advantage of British nationalism in his speech: “there will come the battle for our Island – for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means. That will be the struggle.” He continued on by encouraging the people to devote all their resolve and effort into the war and asking them to “perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation.” He was requesting total devotion to the country.
Winston Churchill, who was the conservative Prime Minister from 1940- 1945, had played a major part in helping the Allies to win the war.
After the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war in 1941, he worked to build what he called a “Grand Alliance,” traveling tens of thousands of miles to meet with allies and coordinate military strategy. With them he redrew the map of Europe as Germany collapsed in 1945. Almost immediately, he saw the threat that had arisen in Hitler’s place, and warned the West of the Soviet “Iron Curtain” in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Churchill could claim to be its principal architect.
The question of war, freedom and the relationship of the individual to humanity has been central to the discourses of political theory in Western history. Critical theory has sought to provide a further elaboration on the nature and possibilities of freedom understood as moral universalism in the international realm.
Critical theory is first and foremost distinguished from traditional or problem solving theories. Traditional theory is modeled on the physical sciences and is concerned with explaining social processes form a disinterested or value free position in order better to predict human behavior and therefore control it. As a result, traditional the theory exhibits a system-maintenance bias. At best it compares to what the Greeks called “techne” (the classical understanding of reason).
During the past decade there has been a shift away from structural perspectives toward ones that look at how domestic political institutions constrain and create incentives that shape cooperation and conflict. According to the power transition theory, which was first developed by A.F.K Organski in 1958, Tammen (2000) and other view international politics as hierarchic rather than anarchic.
The theory assumes that all state´s are interested in imposing international organizations, institutions, rule, and regulations that govern international intercourse on the international system.
States are assumed to maximize their control over “the rules of the game” or the status quo norms and policies in the international system. Power or relative material resources is taken as exogenously given and is assumed to be the determinant of who controls international affairs. The most powerful state sits at the apex of a power pyramid in which those below the apex aspire to rise to challenge the dominant state for control of “the rules of the game”.
States are assumed to be divided into two broad coalitions.
Those in the satisfied coalition find the dominant state´s rules and norms acceptable while those in the dissatisfied coalition do not. The opportunity to challenge for control arises when a dissatisfied state´s internal growth rate is fast enough relative to the dominant state´s that the challenger can be expected to pull equal in power to and then overtake the dominant state.
In the temporal window during which this power transition occurs, war is predicted to be likely if the challenger is dissatisfied, as in the Franco-German War, also called Franco-Prussian War of 1870. France’s determination to regain Alsace-Lorraine would subsequently be a major factor in France’s involvement in World War I.
A peaceful transition is anticipated if the challenger is part of the satisfied coalition as the UK and the USA in the twentieth century.
Who will move first and whether the contenders will fight or resolve their transition peaceful depend on their respective willingness to take risks as it is the degree of asymmetry in the shape of their utility functions, and not growth rates per se, that determines the trade off between fighting now , fighting later, or never fighting.
The biggest contribution of critical international relations theory is that it keeps the question of individual and its relationship to political community from disappearing from the language of the study of international politics.
Following the First World War, and with the creation of the League of Nations and the emergence of international law, the field necessarily focused on international organizations. And it is perhaps from that point that we can start to orient us through this discussion on politics, International politics along institutional World of Liberty.
Following the Second World War, there was even more of a brad-scale effort to construct international organization. The UN was created, as were the World Bank (initially called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the IMF, among others. The UN is the one truly multilateral organization of great note that is prominent in international democracy promotion.
The one-100 anniversary of 1914. The original multilateral moment—
The 44 nations gathering at Bretton Woods were determined to set a new course—based on mutual trust and cooperation, on the principle that peace and prosperity flow from the font of cooperation, on the belief that the broad global interest trumps narrow self-interest. Their plan was nothing less than the reconstruction of the global economic order. This was the original multilateral moment—70 years ago. It gave, then birth to the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF—institution.
The world we inherited was forged by these visionary gentlemen—Lord Keynes and his generation. They raised the phoenix of peace and prosperity from the ashes of anguish and antagonism. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
Moreover, the steps taken toward European integration, especially the creation of the European Economic Community, also constituted important institutional development. Scholars took note and international organizations and regional integration became established subfield of international politics.
Until the 1960 the study of regions in social science was dominated by modernizations paradigm and development theory. The emergence of the nation-state had generated a focus on functionalism and national integration as the hallmarks of modern societies. These concepts were theorized and applied by a long line of social scientists, such as Weber and modernization theorists as Shils.
Regions and regionalism were seen as remnants of pre-industrial, pre-modern societies, fated to be eclipsed by the inexorable march of pro-organized, nationally integrated nation-state (Caramani, 2004). That regions and regionalism exist politically is an irrefutable fact of political life, in most if not all states. Therefore their study is an important part of the collective effort to understand politics in all its complexity at the local, national, an supra-national levels.
A second source, relevant to foreign policy is the pattern of transnational market incentives a liberal tradition dating back Smith and Rchard Corden. A third source of relevant to international politics is the institutional structure of domestic political representation and interests related to globalization. For exempal Republican liberal theory emphasizes the ways in which domestic institutions and practices aggregate such pressures, transforming them into state policy.
Institutions exist typically in low politics domains or lesser importance such as transportation, communication, health, and in the high politics domains of national security and defense.
During the more than half-century since the end of the Second World War, the field of international organizations has undergone significant change, captured by the changing terms used to characterize it. In general, and consistent with broader changes i political science, the subfield became less normative and increasingly theoretical.
The original post-1945 focus was on international organization, concrete entities with a physical presence names, addresses, and so on. Atypical definition was that of a formal arrangement transcending national boundaries that provides for the establishment of institutional machinery to facilitate cooperation among members in the security, economic, social, or related fields.
International politics today is as much institutional as intergovernmental. International institutions can be found in every functional domain and in every region in the world. And the study of international relations has grown alongside international institutions and impacts a broad range of thoughts and ideologies.
Political theory of international relations is much more complex then it appears on the surface, so I want to explore whether it is likely that Liberal theory, as an independent tradition of thought, can offer serous points of departure for international relations. Liberal, because I believe that elites should not only serve the public good but should be accountable to deliberative public views through institutions that give publics power over leaders. Liberty as a crucial value for a good society.
- This is because “preferences” shape the nature and intensity of world politics that states are playing.
Accountability, human rights and the rule of law, transparency, tolerance, free trade, and open societies –they are the themes that will prove to be the most in tune with the trends of the 21st century, and the best basis for the fulfilment of human ambitions and dreams.
Liberal theory is a paradigmatic alternative theoretically distinct from, existing paradigms such as realism (focusing on coercive power resources), institutionalism (focusing on information), and most nonrational approaches (focusing on patterns of beliefs about appropriate means-ends relationships). Science has a great responsibility in this respect to provide a better understanding of multiple challenges facing the international community.
A “science” without a theory may still be a science with a paradigm;Stanley Hoffman (1977).
The field of international relations responds to real-world events and historically has shifted the substantive focus of investigation to reflect changing reality.
An important contributor to the shaping of political reality are the decision making processes that characterize political elites as well as ordinary citizens. The most popular descriptive theory of decision under risk is prospect theory (Kahineman & Tversky, 1979).
Prospect theory, developed by Kahneman and Tversky and their collaborators, shows that individuals make decisions under risk differently depending on whether they confront prospective gains or losses, and that individuals are much more risk acceptant when faced with losses and risk averse in the domain of gains.
Problems that are logically equivalent but framed differently, for example, number of lives saved versus numbers lost, are treated sharply differently by respondents.
Prospect theory deviates from expected-utility theory by positing that the way people frame a problem around a reference point has a critical influence on their choices, and that people tend to overweight losses with respect to comparable gains, engage in risk-averse behavior with respect to gains and risk-acceptant behavior with respect to losses, and respond to probabilities in a non-linear manner.
Theories and methodological approaches of political influences do not arise out of a blue sky. Methods of comparative politics proved some scientific approaches influenced by political events.
The counter-movement emphasized the comparison of dynamics of politics and political behaviour. A shift towards interest groups and political movements.
Prospect theory has been particularly influential in the field of international relations, but scholars in other fields of political science have also begun to apply some of the theory’s key concepts.
Behavioral economists have embraced prospect theory´s findings to reshape their field. The theory is based not on personality predispositions but on situationally activated response tendencies, which should appeal to structural theorists in international relations.
Neurological work has shown that people think about cost and benefits with different parts of their brain, rather than making a single calculation as utility theorist would assume.
Prospect theory and associated work also explains a major difference between deterrence and compellence.
A recent attempt to marry explicit psychological theorizing with realist theory explain why great powers often initiate risk ventures in peripheral areas and persist even a prospects for victory dim and costs escalate (Taliaferro, 2004).
Certain difficulties from the point of view of psychological theorizing arise from the application of prospect theory to the analysis of political events.
The theory applies directly to a central debate within realism that between the defensive realists (e.g, Waltz) and the offensive realists (e.g,.Mearsheimer). Waltz and his followers have argued that states seek to maximize their security in an anarchic state system that requires them to practice balance-of-power politics.
Their main goal is to assure their survival, which requires accruing power by either building military might or finding allies, but states can become satisfied with the states quo if they feel sufficiently powerful vis-a-vis other states.
In Mersheimer´world, states are never satisfied short of hegemony. Prospect theory would suggest that Waltz is more corrects when states are faced with prospective gains. In either case, states have to form accurate representations of the world (Reus-Smit and Snidal, 2010) and respond to the actions of other powers in a timely manner, which makes them deeply suspicious and receptive to worse-case assumptions about the motives of other states in the system.
The study of the international system provides one with a fine framework, but no more precisely because the system may well put constraints on and provide opportunities for the actors, but does not “dictate” their behavior; and the study of the actors tells you, inevitably, more about the actors than about the interactions.
- International relations scholar and sometime diplomat Adam Watson defines diplomacy as “negotiation between political entities which acknowledge each other’s independence.”
- The dialogue may turn on compatible demands or on incompatible ones, in which case its function is “either the search for a compromise, or else is designed to transcend the dispute and to bring in a new element that makes a wider agreement palatable to both sides.” To him, it is in preparation to define roles and in the performance of this dialogue that diplomats formulate the national interest.
Roles, in my opinion, refer to patterns of expected or appropriate behaviour. Roles are determined by both an actor´s own conceptions about appropriate behaviour and by the expectations, or role prescriptions influenced by external perceptions.
Once a role is defined and has become institutionalized, it will act as a constraint, but also as an instrumment of empowerment, for the role player. In the nineteenth century we begin to see statesmen like Talleyrand consciously serving what they conceived to be the long-term interests of the state.
Roles ordinarily allow for certain freedom of manoeuvre and interpretation (sets of meaning that actors attribute to themselves while taking the perspective of others), albeit within limits. In this view, roles are often associated with certain positions (great power roles, presidency roles). Agency as well as structure are important besides role conceptions.
Looking at roles in this way, a direct connection can be made to neo-institutional theory and its emphasis on a logic of appropriateness. According to this logic, actors behave in the way they believe is expected from them in a particular situation or context. Variation may, however, also be linked to external policy context.
At the foreign policy level the main cluster has been that of strategic literature; and there is now a growing literature on decision-making. Applications of prospect theory to international relations have grown.
One of the many happy ironies of the study of the political theory of international relations is the recognition of odd couples in the History of ideas. Realism and Marxism, for example, are generally supposed to occupy different conceptual worlds and to be, in broad terms at least, completely opposed to one another. And so, at some levels at least, they are to really existing thoughts and ideologies. One example is the way in which Marxist thought engages with international relations.
And, In explaining patterns of war, for example, liberals do not stress inter-state imbalances of power, bargaining failure under incomplete information, or particular nonrational beliefs, but conflicting state preferences derived from hostile nationalist or political ideologies, disputes over stituencies.
For liberals, a necessary condition for war is that these factors lead one or more aggressor states to possess revisionist preferences so extreme that other states are unwilling to submit.
Similarly, in explaining trade protectionism, liberals look not to shifts of hegemonic power, suboptimal international institutions, or misguided beliefs about economic theory, but to economic incentives, interest groups, and distributional coalitions opposed to market liberalization.
- Perhaps the most important advantage of liberal theory lies in its capacity to serve as the theoretical foundation for a shared multicausal model of instrumental state behavior; thereby moving the discipline beyond paradigmatic warfare among unicausal claims (Reus-Smit and Snidal, 2010. Lake and Powell 1999, outline a similar vision).
Three specific variants of liberal theory focus are defined by particular types of state preferences, their variation, and their impact on state behavior. Liberal theories link state behavior to varied conceptions of desirable forms of cultural, political, socioeconomic order.
For example commercial liberal theories stress economic interdependence, including many variant of endogenous policy theory. Republican liberal theories stress the role of domestic representative institutions, elites and leadership dynamics, and executive-legislative relations.
Such theories were first conceived by prescient liberals such as Immanuel Kant, Adam Smity, John Stuart Mill, John Hobson, Woodrow Wilson, and John Maynard Keynes, writing well before the independent variables thy stressed (democratization, industrialization, nationalism, and welfare provision) were widespread.
What basic assumptions underlie the liberal approach? Two assumptions liberal theory make are the assumptions of anarchy and rationality. Specifically, states (or other political actors) exist in an anarchic environment and they generally act in a broadly rational way in making decisions.
The anarchy assumption means that political actors exist in the distinctive environment of international politics, without a world government or any other authority with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They must engage in self-help.
The rationality assumption means that state leaders and their domestic supporters engage in foreign policy for the instrumental purpose of securing benefits provided by (or avoiding costs imposed by) actors outside of their borders, and in making such calculations, states seek to deploy the most cost-effective means to achieve whatever their ends (preferences) may be.
The critical theoretical link between state preferences, on the one hand, and state behavior, on the other, is the concept of policy interdependence. Policy interdependence refers to the distribution and interaction of preferences—that is, the extent to which the pursuit of state preferences necessarily imposes costs and benefits (known as policy externalities) upon other states, independent of the “transaction costs” imposed by the specific strategic means chosen to obtain them.
Depending on the underlying pattern of interdependence, each of the qualitative categories, the form, substance, and depth of conflict and cooperation vary according to the precise nature and intensity of preferences.
Drawing on a sample of geopolitical or economic realities to outsiders. The Commission on Growth and Development (2008) notes that inclusiveness – a concept that encompasses equity, equality of opportunity, and protection in market and employment transitions – is an essential ingredient of any successful growth strategy. Conventional wisdom suggests that growth comes at the price of rising inequality, but regions differ in their growth-equity trade-off. In some instances, strong growth has been achieved without compromising equity.
Across emerging markets as a whole, the heterogeneity in economic growth performance and income distribution outcomes provide insight to the growth-equity trade-off. The commission described its case. The limited gains in inclusiveness are explained by relatively low growth in some countries and widening inequality in others. A key issue is that when poverty is reduced, the condition of everyone, including women, improves, and second, gender inequality declines as poverty declines, so the condition of women improves more than that of men with development.
Liberals argue that the universal condition of world politics is globalization. States are, and always have been, embedded in a domestic and transnational society that creates incentives for its members to engage in economic, social, and cultural interactions that transcend borders. Demands from individuals and groups in this society, as transmitted through domestic representative institutions, define state preferences that is, fundamental substantive social purposes that give states an underlaying stake in the international issues they face.
To motivate conflict, cooperation, or any other costly political foreign policy action, states must possess sufficiently intense state preferences.
This is not a distinctively liberal claim it is the only procedure consistent with the assumption of instrumental behavior shared by realism, institutionalism, liberalism, and even many variants of constructivism.
The liberal focus on variation in socially determined state preferences distinguishes liberal theory from other theoretical traditions. This is because preferences shape the nature and intensity of world politics that states are playing; thus they help determine which systemic theory is appropriate and how it should be specified.
- In solving particular inter-state collective action problems:
States, liberals argue, orient their behavior to the precise nature of these underlying preferences: compatible or conflictual, intense or weak, and their precise scope. States require a “social purpose” — a perceived underlying stake in the matter at hand — in order to pay any attention to international affairs, let alone to provoke conflict, inaugurate cooperation, or take any other significant foreign policy action.
If there is no such interdependence among state objectives, a rational state will conduct no international relations, satisfying itself with an isolated and autarkic existence. Conflictual goals increase the incentive for of political disputes. Convergence of underlying preferences creates the preconditions for peaceful coexistence or cooperation.
When you observe conflict, think Deadlock-the absence of mutual interest-before puzzling over why a mutual interest was not realized. Without controlling preference-based explanations, it is easy to mistake, notes (Reus-Smit and Snidal, 2010).
State behavior should thus be modeled multi-causally that is, as a multi-stage process of constrained social choice in which variation in state preferences comes firs. In modeling the process, however, states nonetheless first define preferences, as liberal theories of state-society relations explain, and only then debate, bargain, or fight to particular agreements, and thereafter commit in subsequent stages to institutional solutions; explained by realist and institutionalist as well as liberal theories of strategic interaction. Of course, liberal theory is more powerful or that it explains more.
The necessary of preferences over strategic action is hardly surprising to many political scientists. Yet, this has been and is the fundamental lesson of Robert Dahl´s classic work on political influence.
His research focused on the nature of democracy in actual institutions, such as American cities. His influential early books included A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), Who governs?: Democracy and power, arguing that many competing groups shared power.
Liberal international relations theory´s fundamental premise state preferences derived from the domestic and transnational social pressures critically influence state behavior -can be restated in term of three core assumptions.
1. The Nature of Societal Actors: Globalization generates differentiated demands from societal individuals and groups with regard to international affairs.
2. The Nature of the State: States represent the demands of a subset of domestic individuals and social groups, on the basis of whose interests they define “state preferences” and act instrumentally to manage globalization.
3. The Nature of the International System:The pattern of interdependence among state preferences shapes state behavior as an organization with many higher goals.
- International politics along institutional
One, more difficult is that institutional cooperation in international relations. Imagine how many coordination problems new states experience. Many coordination and collaboration problems, in which their autonomous self-interested behavior results in deficient outcomes.
Many situations, form trade to arms races, have been characterized as Prisoner´s Dilemma games, and these are precisely ones in which states have either created, or tried to create, international institutions. The Prisoner´s Dilemma game is the quintessential example of a situation in which autonomy results in poorer outcomes. In such cases, institutions can resolve the collective action problems and allow states to reach mutually preferred outcomes.
But remember the definition of a state as and organization, controlling the principal means of coercion within a given territory, which is differentiated from other organizations operating in the same territory, autonomous, centralized and formally coordinated.
If there is something to the trends of models of international politics of state behavior they can be significant in variation and in the attractiveness of cooperative or competitive means.
State behavior are rooted in power and they threaten almost every single one of these defining features of the state (the autonomy, the centralization, the formal coordination, the monopoly of coercion, the exclusiveness of control within ones territory).
In defining the security dilemma as consisting of the dilemmas of interpretation and response faced by policymakers. Here Bototh and Wheeler coined the term “security dilemma sensibility” to refer to the ability of policymakers to perceive the motives behind, and to show responsiveness towards, the potential complexity of the military intentions of others. In particular, it refers to the ability to understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including crucially, the role that one´s own actions may play in provoking that fear.
When policymakers show security dilemma sensibility, they enter into the counterfears of other states, acknowledging how their own defensive military postures may have contributed to the fears of others. Under such circumstances, policymakers would be more inclined to seek diplomatic and security postures that assuage the security concerns of other states. Status quo states might, for example, implement Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) that adress the securty concerns of others and build trust to mitigate the effects of uncertainty in an anarchic world.
In a hugely influential article, Robert Jervis (1986) showed how “Security-dilemma” consequence of anarchy could lead security seeking states into costly spirals of mistrust and rivalry. He argued that the severity of the security dilemma depends on two variables: the balance between offense and defense, and the ability to distinguish offense from defense.
The best known theoretical proposition about international relations is balance-of-power theory.
Given the basic problem that under anarchy any state can resort to force to get what it wants, it follows that states are likely to guard against the possibility that one state might amass the wherewithal to compel all the others to do its will and even possibly eliminate them.
The theory posits that states will check dangerous concentrations of power by building up their own capabilities (internal balancing) or aggregating their capabilities with other states in alliances (external balancing).
Because states are always looking to the future to anticipate possible problems, balancing may occur even before any one state or alliance has gained an obvious power edge. Thus, Britain and France fought the Russian Empire in Crimea in the middle of nineteenth century less because they saw an immediate challenge to their position than because they reasoned that, if unchecked, Russian power might someday be a threat to them.
Balance-of-threat theory adds complexity to this picture. As its name implies, this theory predicts that states will balance against threats. Threat, in turn, is driven by a combination of three key variables: aggregate capabilities (that is, its overall military and economic potential), geography, and perceptions of aggressive intentions.
Most preemptors do not want war but believe it is imminent and unavoidable. Prevention is a response to a future threat rather than an immediate threat. It is driven by the anticipation of an adverse power shift and the fear of the consequences, including the deterioration of one’s relative military position and bargaining power and the risk of war—or of extensive concessions necessary to avoid war—under less favorable circumstances later. The incentive is to forestall the power shift by blocking the rise of the adversary while the opportunity is still available. Thucydides (1972) concept of preventive war has become a staple of realist thought, influencing modern analyses of the origins of war.
If one state becomes especially powerful and if its location and behavior feed threat perceptions on the part of other states, then balancing strategies will come to dominate their foreign policies. Thus, the United States began both external and internal balancing after the end of the Second World War.
The U.S.-led international order and the opportunity for cooperation and integration into it, both are alive and well in the current system, and the balance provides a continued ability to solve problems and to manage crises at roughly the same rate as when American dominance was unquestioned.
If there is one rule of international affairs that the Obama administration has forgotten, it is that mediated settlements reflect power balances. The principal way such balances are changed is through force of democracy. This is not a popular thing to say, but as the disasters in Syria illustrate, plenty of people can die when force is abjured and the place of military action in diplomacy is forgotten.
Mediated settlements reflect power balances and any effective peace agreement should not only eliminate the conditions which led to conflict, but should also seek to ensure that those conditions do not reoccur.
The imbalances that led to violence must be resolved. There was a moment in the Syrian conflict when decisive military aid to the opposition could have changed Assad’s calculation. The balance of power is associated with moral neutrality, manage crises and letting each nation follow core values. Maintaining that balance is central to the question of whether we will live in a stable or unstable system in the period to come.
Four years after the Bosnia bombing, a further NATO intervention in Kosovo changed the balance of forces there and led to Milosevic’s fall. Fifteen years later, there has been successful mediation of the long-festering Serbia-Kosovo conflict. The point, of course, is not to use force for its own sake. War is a terrible thing, as the 100th anniversary on 28 june 2014 of the outbreak of World War I reminds everybody. But diplomacy unbacked by any credible threat of force or attempt to change the balance of power is vain.
Promoting Security Responsibly U.S. policy for conventional arms transfer has an important role in shaping the international security environment. A Key Tool of U.S. Foreign Policy.
Great sense of the degree to which a theoretical picture of international system really applies is a matter of judgment. What began as the study of international organizations and regional integration took a dramatic turn in the early 1980s in what came to be called regime theory, and was subsequently rechristened neoliberal institutionalism.
Key to politics in any area is the interaction between social and material power, an interaction that unfolds in the shadow of the potential use of material power to coerce, as Waltz (1979) put it.
- If Moravcsik provides the theoretical muscle and Slaughter the descriptive power, then Forging a World of Liberty under Law (Ikenberry and Slaughter 2006 restatement and development of themes found in earlier work but this time conjoined, sometimes awkwardly, to a project to re-envisage US national security) is a full-blown set of policy prescriptions and application to join the rulership cadre of states, promoting wise and effective statecraft”(Reus-Smit and Snidal, 2010)
This is a world to be “forged,” sometimes through military intervention, sometimes through economic integration. It is a world of liberty in which states that practice the virtues of freedom and democracy will flourish. It is a world in which law is the handmaiden to liberty, promoting it at every turn.
A deeper contradiction lies at the heart of the democratic governance project in international law. There is a call for the creation of a world of mature liberal democracies and there is a Kantian tolerance of imperfect existing institutions combined with the promise and responsibility to protect. The latter a reaffirmation of the Rawlsian principle that liberal states ought to have the right to intervene in states (Rawls 1999; United Nations 2004.)
The Princeton project contains a great deal of good sense of the need to update conceptions of deterrence, liberal ethics concern for issues of global health, and so on. It may be that the purpose of international law is to restrain sovereigns, liberty under law, but if those sovereigns exercise authority as an expression of popular will, then international law must have to be, at times, antidemocratic and antilibertarian (Rabkiin 2004; Anderson 2005).
In Forging a World of Liberty, members of the Concert of Democracies are required to pledge not to use force against one another. If such pledges are necessary in a world of democratic states, it may be because the popular will can become bellicose or because liberal states might have good reason to attack one another (for example, over remaining oil stocks, in response to mass refugee flows, because of chauvinstic media cammpaigns.)
The deeper question about Moravcsik´s strategy is whether liberal states do behave differently?, as new liberalism predicts that they will.
Moravcsik argues that both war and intensified cooperation can be explained by configuration of domestic preferences. So, war in the twentieth century is marked by global conflict between rival ideologies (communism, liberalism, and fascism), while supranational cooperation (involving the pooling of sovereignty) is a feature of regions in which there is uniform commitment to democratic norms.
Although the earlier general rules may have prohibited states from using force except in anticipation of an imminent attack, in more recent practice, the imminence standard has changed. States have initiated and cooperated in the use of force to extend self-defense to instances in which the possibility of an attack is not imminent, but merely expected.
International law sets properly, if not always effectively, enforceable limits on the freedom of states. Such an investigation seem especially appropriate to those mainly internationalists rather than realists or cosmopolitans who are more interested in understanding or reforming the world we actually inhabit than in advocating for an ideal world order.
Political realists typically claim to be part of a tradition that stretches back, through Thomas Hobbes and Niccolo Machiavelli. But the definitions of realism vary considerably in their details, but then reveal a striking family resemblance. Realists tend to converge around four central propositions:
- Groupism, Politics takes place within and between groups.Group solidarity is essential to domestic politics and conflict and cooperation between polities is the essence of international politics. People need the cohesion provided by group solidarity, yet that very same in group cohesion generates the potential for conflict with other groups.
- Egoism. When individuals and groups act politically, they are driven principally by narrow self interest. This egoism is rooted in human nature, but can be overcome by national and international political structures, institutions, and values.
- Anarchy. The absence of government dramatically shapes the nature of international politics.
- Power politics. The intersection of groupism and egoism in an environment of anarchy makes international relations, regrettably, largely a politics of power and security.
Perhaps the strongest realist arguments appeal to the nature of states and statesmanship. The doctrine of raison détat reasons of state.
In the study of international relations, neoliberalism refers to a school of thought which believes that states are, or at least should be, concerned first and foremost with absolute gains rather than relative gains to other states. Neorealism treats international affairs as anarchic, that is, as self-help system lacking a dominant power that can enforce agreements. It hypothesizes that political stability in the form of the survival of states is ensured by national efforts to maximize security through alignments. Although both theories use common methodologies—including game theory—neoliberalism is not the same as neoliberal economic ideology. what those interests are.
Neoliberalism is a response to Neorealism; while not denying the anarchic nature of the international system, neoliberals argue that its importance and effect has been exaggerated. Neoliberal international relations thinkers often employ game theory to explain why states do or do not cooperate; since their approach tends to emphasize the possibility of mutual wins, they are interested in institutions which can arrange jointly profitable arrangements and compromises.
The neoliberal argument is focused on the neorealists’ underestimation of “the varieties of cooperative behavior possible within a decentralized system Both theories, however, consider the state and its interests as the central subject of analysis; neoliberalism may have a wider conception of what those interests are.
Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, in response to neorealism, develop an opposing theory they dub “Complex interdependence.” Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye explain, “… complex interdependence sometimes comes closer to reality than does realism.” In explaining this, Keohane and Nye cover the three assumptions in realist thought:
- First, states are coherent units and are the dominant actors in international relations;
- second, force is a usable and effective instrument of policy; and
- finally, the assumption that there is a hierarchy in international politics.
The heart of Keohane and Nye’s argument is that in international politics there are, in fact, multiple channels that connect societies exceeding the conventional Westphalian system of states. This manifests itself in many forms ranging from informal governmental ties to multinational corporations and organizations.
Here they define their terminology; interstate relations are those channels assumed by realists; transgovernmental relations occur when one relaxes the realist assumption that states act coherently as units; transnational applies when one removes the assumption that states are the only units. It is through these channels that political exchange occurs, not through the limited interstate channel as championed by realists.
The English School´s use a category international system of “inter-state system” that shares a great deal with the use of systems theory in realist thought. But, what sets them apart is that the English School are interested in the “system”, primarily, for what it tells us about the history of international society.
As when a system becomes a society what level and type of interactions are required in order for the units to treat each other as ends in themselves? And under what circumstances might a society lapse back into a system order in which their actions impact upon one another. One can find the English School the view that there is logic of balancing in the states system.
- The systemic interactions of world into a globalized society of sovereign states remain a possible future. Event in the cold war “A hypothetical case of a major nuclear confrontation could become a reality if great powers acted in ways that were catastrophic for international society. As a result, the society collapses back into the system idea of a states system”. This opens series of discussions in the system.
balance of power
Under conditions of anarchy, where there is no overarching power to disarm the units and police rules, it is in the interests of all states to prevent the emergence of a dominant or hegemonic power.
Those who take the balance of power seriously point to repeated instances in modern history where states with hegemonic ambition have been repelled by an alliance of powers seeking to prevent a change in the ordering principle of the system.
The English School argue that the states system demands “balancing states behavior.
Given the strategic interests and values shared by the United States and Europe, China’s remarkable rise in economic, political, and military power has the potential to significantly challenge some of today’s existing liberal international order. The international community, meanwhile, demands in principle that China should pay more respect to civil and political rights in order to become a fully legitimate member of international society.
China’s rise must become a central element to U.S.-Europe strategic and political dialogue and policy coordination.
“This coordination must be founded upon a shared U.S.-Europe understanding of mutual interests and the potential challenges and opportunities posed by an increasingly powerful China” Managing China’s Rise by Abraham M. Denmark. Stockholm China Forum October 2011.
The concept of a system plays three important roles in the English School´s theory of world politics.
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First, system, the system/society distinction provides a normative benchmark for addressing the question of how far international society extends.
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Secondly,by looking at the formation of the system, it is possible to discern mechanisms that shape and shove international and world societies.
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Thirdly, the category of the system can be used to capture the basic material forces in world politics that flows of information and trade, levels or destructive capability, and capacities of actors to affect their environment. Tim Dunne examines each of these, Chapter 15 in Reus-Smit and Snidal (2010).
Dunne argue “The English School is the oldest and arguably the most significant rival to the American mainstream and the subject is becoming a global discipline.” and for that international relations is not longer an American social science, as Stanley Hoffmann (1977) proclaimed.
Political science has a much longer history than international relations. It was only the twentieth century that brought democratization to foreign policy. Diplomatic issues moved because more states joined in the game that had been the preserve of a small number of actors and (mainly European) and above all because within many states parties and interests established links or pushed claims across national borders.
Two literatures, often described separately, could be applied today´s use of institution and in effect redefine all international politics along institutional lines. One school is that of social constructivism, in which all social reality is constructed intersubjectively though interaction.
The very units of international politics, states, are social constructions, as is the sovereign state system in which they interact. Combining a broad view of institutions with a view of social and political reality as socially constructed leads to the argument that the sovereign state system is itself an institution of international political life.
In this view all international politics is subject to a set of rules that are human constructions and in which actors are subsequently socialized.
From the perspective of such principles, matters that are usually treated separately – sovereignty and its limits, the morality of international law, cultural pluralism, economic inequality, and the user of force – can be brought within an integrated theoretical framework. Rawls had proposed a principle of distributive justice in A Theory of Justice: Economic inequalities within a society are unjust unless they benefit everyone, including the least advantaged (the “difference principle”). But he did not apply the principle internationally.
Recognizing the importance of this mutual sensitivity to the rules and norms conditioning the actions of others is one facet of the changing role of professional diplomats and, consequently, the necessary skills and training strategies appropriate for the 21st century foreign service.
Sources and nature of diplomatic rules and norms Rules and norms are derived from two interrelated sources which locate the diplomat at the interface of: a transnational diplomatic community sharing a professional culture, language and recognized sets of working procedures; a national diplomatic community whose norms and rules are traditionally embodied in the organizational cultures and values of the foreign ministry.
At the transnational level, The Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Representation continue to provide the formal constitution of the world of diplomacy codifying a system based on the assumption that sovereign, territorial states are, if not the only actors in international relations, by far the most significant.
Article 3 The text of the Convention lingers over definitions of sending and receiving states and diplomatic communications. Article 41 of the Convention also stipulates that diplomats have a ‘duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of the State’.
These documents reflect the power, interests and claimed privileges of states.
Perhaps the most apparent is that diplomacy is a search for peace. This system, with its attendant rules, conventions and norms, simplifies, clarifies, privileges and secures the work of professional diplomats. For diplomats, collaboration complements and reinforces the achievement of negotiation. Effective negotiations turn not just on a deal being done but on the expectation that it will be successfully implemented. This also means that agreements have to be supported more widely by key stakeholders and citizens.
Louis XIV made France the dominant power in Europe, however, his model of absolutist monarchy collapsed within less than a century after his death.
What was true for diplomacy under the reign of Louis XIV of France is as true today…Louis XIV may not have said, “I am the state”, but he ruled as if he had said it. Louis XIV broke with tradition and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister…
Officers also got regular training and were much more strictly under the rule. A diplomatic necessity more than anything else.
But what has changed is that diplomacy has expanded because of the multiplicity of stakeholders, the growth of the media and the rapid communication of information, privately and publicly.
A second literature is in many ways similar; (it is known as English School) it emphasizes the existence of international society. Although the School recognizes an international system that involves the mere interactions of states and that is subject to power politics, it argues that typically and international society, rather than system, constitutes international reality.
Communication is the essence of diplomacy, determining its purpose and operational modes.
One People Oration. The phrase “One People” was coined by Edward Carpenter (then Archdeacon, later Dean of Westminster) in 1965-6. The orations commenced in 1966, and were intended to make people “think not only of all Christian people but of all mankind”
Each phase in the long evolution of diplomacy has therefore been marked by the need to adjust to and seek to shape the dominant features of the communication and information environment.
The definition of international society provided by the School seems delimiting:
An international society exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.
This idea is expanded by Bennett and Stam (2004) who argue that over long periods of time, cooperation though alliances can lead to “shared institutional structures over time that will provide incentives and /or mechanisms to avoid conflict.” Alliances arise from states attempts to maintain a balance of power with each other. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance forming a European-American alliance.
This definition of international society appears in a book titled The Anarchical Society : A Study of Order in World Politics by Bull, H. (1977). Bull’s thesis is that a society of sovereign states exists in our world today and that this “international society” is anarchical in form given the absence of a central orderer.
Order in the contemporary “international system”. At various points he outlines the notion that order is a pre requisite for justice.
The English School is applied to the traditional notions of; the balance of power; international law; diplomacy; war; and the Great Powers. Although eventually concluding that the study of world politics is purely an intellectual pursuit.
This is an important caveat within The English School. Theirs’ is a tripartite outlook of an “international system, international society and world society” simultaneously coexisting.
Various changes in international criminal law have significantly restricted the circumstances in which state leaders can claim immunity form humanitarian crimes committed while they were in office. Similarly, the Rome Statute of the international Criminal Court adds another layer of international jurisdiction in whole, one authority on the English School argued that they may be interpreted as involving a clear shift from an international society to a world society.
Tens of thousands of women, girls and men were raped during the war in Bosnia. We can and must change the entire global attitude to these crimes. Serious violations of the law of armed conflict attract individual criminal liability for those who breach the law, including for commanders who order their subordinates to commit war crimes. The Rome Statute system aims to help prevent such crimes, to protect all peoples from them, and to uphold what is best, but also most fragile, within us: the shared sense of justice that is a common bond of all humanity.
Under the Geneva Conventions, all States are required to criminalise war crimes in domestic law, and to assert ‘universal jurisdiction’ over such crimes. While national criminal law usually only applies within that State’s own territory, the principle of universal jurisdiction allows States to criminalise war crimes which occur outside their territory, even where neither the victims nor the perpetrators are nationals of that State.
The international community regards such crimes as so serious that there should not exist safe havens or impunity for those who commit such crimes. This is a good example of how international law is primarily implemented through national law and national courts,
The idea behind universal jurisdiction is to ensure that perpetrators of war crimes cannot escape justice by fleeing to another country, which would not have jurisdiction if international law did not permit universal jurisdiction to be exercised.
International law plays an increasingly important role, even in cases once considered purely domestic. Courts around the world have important contributions to make towards bridging different political and legal cultures and doing the fundamental legal and institutional work required to shape law, especially as state, federal and international law become increasingly interconnected.
One way of illustrating what world society or “Global Society” the English School mean is by considering the effects of anarchy on their foreign policies, the patents of their interactions, and the organization of world politics. Particularly the identification of an increasingly dense fabric of international law, norms, and rules that promote forms of association and solidarity, the growing role of an increasing dense network of state and nonstate actors that are involved in the production and revision of multilayered governance structures, and the movement toward forms of dialogue that are designed to help identify shared values of humankind, issues such as environmental politics, security and human rights.
Although these issues remain on the agenda, they increasingly share the stage with small states and with a multitude of other actors. There are also a great many civilian UN staffers as well as members of NGOs from various countries.
This shift to “global society” is reflective of several important developments including multilateral form that are shaping global relations and structures focused on states as actors in order to maintain their security and generate wealth in an inhospitable environment. Simply put, the shift symbolize “Global Governance”, maintenance of collective order, the achievement of collective goals, and the collective processes of rule through which order and goals are sought (Rosenau 2000).
What makes system a”Systemic”?
Complex systems are hard to predict because they are hard to understand. The primary source of the complexity is the multiplicity of interactions within the “system”, or as Jervis (1997) calls them, “interconnections”.
The challenge is a meta-cognitive one: thinking systematically about when to engage in systems thinking; and weighing the costs and benefits of using simple or complex heuristics in policy environments that can shift suddenly from quiescence to turbulence. Based on the literature, it is hard to answer these questions. But, they are systemic in that for the most part they fall outside the institutional arrangement developed by states to regulate order and promote justice.
World society is not just about the growing importance of transnational values grounded in liberal notions of rights and justice. Transnational identities can also based upon ideas of hatred and intolerance.
Robert Jervis has long had a keen eye for our collective blind spots. In Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976).
We expect pushback from at least two philosophical camps. Readers of an objectivist or pragmatic bent may suspect that we are trying to repackage as controversial an obvious and non-controversial hypothesis. All knowledge rests on relationships between causes and effects that we identify through the explanation of effects, and that we test through prediction.
When a prediction is confirmed, we become more confident in both the reliability of forecaster and the explanatory framework that produced the prediction; when a prediction fails, we dial back our confidence.
The ‘‘systemic’’ nature of the political world no more precludes confidence in predictions than does that of the natural world.
We suspect that Jervis is fundamentally right. However, a core precept of Jervis’s ‘‘systems thinking’’ is that causes are so interconnected that the historian can only with great difficulty imagine causation by subtracting all variables but one. Prediction, according to Jervis, is even more problematic. Thus, Jervis challenges our ability to make sensible political choices. And the challenge cannot be overcome simply by thinking about it.
In the political process it sometimes happens that new elites can down the work of their predecessors simply because it was the work of their predecessors. One constraint on such a process is the presence of technically minded professionals in the orbit of the political elites. Nearly any agency or legislative body has at least some such individuals who will be a ballast for technical rationality. And forums that mange to cut across opposed advocacy coalitions may be able to give technical rationality a better hearing than it otherwise might receive.
Historical analysis and policy making often require counterfactual thought experiments that isolate hypothesized causes from a vast array of historical possibilities. Among a significant body of world public opinion, the strongest identification is to the faith and not to the state.
This generates countervailing ideologies of liberation on the part of fundamentalist Christians and holy war on the part of certain Islamist groups. In English School thinking, such dynamics can usefully be considered in the context of earlier revolts against Western dominance that were apparent during the struggle for decolonization. After 11 September, the question is whether suicide bombers can be deterred, with some arguing they are the ultimate irrational actors,and would be difficult to locate following an attack, whereas other scholars are suggesting that deterrence is possible even with respect to terrorists networks, and thus many of the old theories of deterrence developed during the cold war remain relevant. The English School accepts the role that Great Powers play in determining the values and processes of international society and settling questions of stability, possibility of cooperation and change.
Both social constructivism and the English School characterize, if not define, the study of international institutions so broadly as to make all international relations institutional. In doing this, they in effect argue that recent developments do not constitute anything new but merely a continuation or a development.
The roots of institutional theory run richly through the formative years of the social sciences, enlisting and incorporating the creative insights of scholars ranging from Marx and Weber, Cooley and Mead, to Veblen and Commons.
Institutional theory attends to the deeper and more resilient aspects of social structure. It considers the processes by which structures, including schemas, rules, norms, and routines, become established as authoritative guidelines for social behavior.
It inquires into how these elements are created, diffused, adopted, and adapted over space and time; and how they fall into decline and disuse.
Institutions impose rules on the behavior of social actors – or they are supposed to do so. However, it cannot be assumed that those whose behavior is to be ruled, or governed, have always internalized the rule in question (i.e., adopted it as a “script”) or will follow it voluntarily out of self-interest.
Social science institutionalism considers social systems to be structured by sanctioned rules of obligatory behavior. Its perspective is one of collective ordering, or governance, through regularization and normalization of social action, either by public authority or by private contract.
- Political economy and knowledge system.
The development and diffusion of “knowledge system” is center stage in many fields. Modern theories of economic growth and international trade, for instance, place emphasis on the accumulation of tangible factors such as capital and labor, focusing almost entirely on access to knowledge. Knowledge, as an intangible, seems ideally suited to overcoming spatial frictions, although there appear to be limits to the transfer of knowledge.
In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith formulated the basis of what was later to become the science of human capital. Over the next two centuries two schools of thought can be distinguished. The first school of thought distinguished between the acquired capacities that were classified as capital and the human beings themselves, who were not. A second school of thought claimed that human beings themselves were capital.
For policy makers the development of a KBE is viewed as essential for economic growth in the face of increased global competition. This calls for a single-minded focus on improving education—and, in particular, on the potentially massive effects of technological change on employment.
Looking ahead, factors such as the internet revolution, the rise of smart machines, and the increasing high-tech component of products will have dramatic implications for jobs and the way we work. Yet governments are not thinking about this in a sufficiently strategic or proactive way.
Most countries develop their labour market (Developments Economics) intelligence on current and future skills needs, though such observatories which bring together labour market and education and training. These models and analyses help even to shape qualification standards and adapt training systems to labour market needs. High human capital countries develop technologies and intermediates of relatively high skill intensity.
Institutional: Political economy looks at the interrelations between collective action in general and collective rule-making in particular, and the economy; it extends from economic and social policy-making to the way in which economic interests and constraints influence policy, politics and social life as a whole.
More precisely, there is a set of interrelated social institutions, and as a historically specific system of structured as well as structuring social interaction within and in relation to an institutionalized social order.
Recent progress in institutionalist political economy has involved a conception of institutions as Weberian Herrschaftsverbände linking rule makers and rule takers inside a surrounding society of “third parties” (Streeck/Thelen 2005). Rule makers govern the behavior of rule takers – the distinction being an analytical one, as the two may be identical– by creating and enforcing a normative order that is sanctioned by the society at large.
The new interdependence literature has useful things to say both about power and about the causal mechanism underlying institutional change in a globalized world. Adapted to the post–Cold War world, this argument was taken to mean that in the future, states would have to adopt the principles of liberal capitalism to keep up.
Closed, communist societies, such as the Soviet Union, had shown themselves to be too uncreative and unproductive to compete economically and militarily with liberal states. Their political regimes were also shaky, since no social form other than liberal democracy provided enough freedom and dignity for a contemporary society to remain stable. But, that process will not be peaceful, and whether or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics.
Good theory often takes us beyond our current knowledge. In short a central insight of postmodernism is that actors construct their identities through radical others and who we are is defined against an other who is everything we are not. Theories may as well become our social identities and in constructing these theoretical identities. Reus-Smit and Snidal, (2010) Handbook highlight two similarities among all theories, a style that integrates questions, assumptions and logical argumentation across existing theoretical differences, while focusing on developing explanations of how international relations is developed and professionalized as a field.
institutional variation resolve key puzzles in political economy as to the shifting influence of major powers despite stability in relative economic size.
In some cases, a key theoretical puzzle for example, why is there cooperation? or why democracies do not fight one another? has motivated enormous research effort and substantial advancement into a rich analysis of the institutions that surround cooperation.
psychology should be of greatest interest to different kinds of international relations scholars. New work in cognitive social psychology and behavioral decision theory simultaneously expands on and qualifies earlier error-and-bias portraits of the foreign policy maker, thereby enriching our understanding of internal divisions within the realist camp.
Work on bounded rationality in competitive markets and mixed-motive games, as well as the literature on the power of human emotions to shape judgments of what represents an equitable allocation of scarce resources or a just resolution of conflicts of interest, can inform neo-institutionalist and constructivist theories. Developments in cross-cultural social psychology shed light on constructivist arguments about the creation and maintenance of international social order that typically rest on assumptions about decision making that are qualitatively different from realist and institutionalist approaches to world politics.
As power relations have changed, so too has the logic of extraterritorial regulation and pathways to institutional change to produce asymmetric power. This fails to explain the kind of system change that Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye observe a more “Complex interdependence.” Here, the new interdependence moves beyond simple definitions of power rooted in market size and underscores the critical role of different domestic institutional arrangements to produce regulatory capacity, so that decisions made in one polity or market have consequences in another – is ubiquitous in international and comparative politics. Arguments focusing on institutional variation resolve key puzzles in political economy as to the shifting influence of major powers despite stability in relative economic size.
The struggle to maintain that balance is central to the political life of all our democracies. In Central and Western Europe we have achieved far greater liberty than ever before, and in the most diverse spheres. But, the restoration of a military balance in Europe is not an end in itself. It is the necessary condition for the development of relations between East and West.
The challenge to our way of life represented by the Soviet Union is deep-seated. The Russians have equipped themselves with military forces whose capabilities and philosophy are better matched to the demands of an offensive than of a defensive policy and whose ambitions are global in scale.
Nor is the Russian challenge only military. It is also political and ideological.
The Russians talk loudly, and rightly so, about the need for peace. But they also proclaim the certain demise of the Western system of democracy. They claim the right to promote this end through what they call the ideological struggle.
Our democracies have proved themselves able to adapt to change—the immense changes of the twentieth century. They have adapted to universal suffrage, to the technological revolution in communications, to the most dramatic upsurge of prosperity in their history. Other places in the world dictatorships have succeeded in doing few if any of these things. Democracy may be less than perfect but, as Churchill forcibly pointed out, all the other systems so far devised by man are much worse.
Faced by these new challenges, over the years, the Alliance has proved an invaluable meeting place where the Atlantic nations could discuss their problems and affirm their purposes. In the years ahead discussions will also focus on improving the European security system. But the function of the Alliance is to hold a common line against a common threat. Its problems are those of keeping in good repair a machine which we hope will never have to be used.