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Revision guide 3eBaylis & Smith:
Int.Relations Notes on IR
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• Through their rivalries and wars European states developed the military
organization and technology to project their power on a global scale and few non
European political systems could block their expansion.
• European international law, diplomacy, and the balance of power came to be
applied around the world.
• Indigenous non Western nationalists eventually went into revolt and claimed a right
of self determination which led to decolonization and the expansion of international
society.
• That was followed by a further expansion after the Cold War, brought about by the
disintegration of the Soviet Union and several other communist states.
• During the 1990s, for the first time in history, there was one inclusive international
society of global extent.
• Whether this model of international society can endure under US hegemony is the
subject of some dispute.
• Today international society is usually conceived as a global social framework of
shared norms and values based on state sovereignty.
• An important manifestation of that social framework is the UN Charter.
• But those shared norms and values have provoked unprecedented problems and
predicaments of contemporary world politics.
• There is a current debate about the future of state sovereignty and thus also about
the future of the contemporary global international society.
• The Polish union Solidarity illustrated the deep currents of dissent, whose
momentum was maintained even after the banning of the organization in 1981.
• A catalyst for the revolutionary process was Gorbachev's abandonment of the
Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty for Eastern Europe.
• Failure of the attempts by Eastern European leaders to stem the tide of revolution
in 1989 by installing new personnel illustrated the degree to which the crisis of
communism was systemic.
• Opinion about the American role in ending the Cold War has tended to polarize:
either the Reagan hard line forced the Soviet Union to its knees or Reagan's policies
were immaterial or actually served to prolong the Cold War.
• Soviet–American relations did not change overnight with the advent of Gorbachev.
The United States responded cautiously to his initiatives.
• Gorbachev's new thinking in foreign policy overthrew the conventional wisdom of
Soviet foreign policy.
• Gorbachev's concessions, which helped to produce the INF Treaty and generally
improve the climate of Soviet–American relations, were promoted initially in a
controlled fashion but tended to become more unilateral and sweeping as the pace of
domestic reform quickened.
• The story is not simply one of Soviet concessions. The United States made some
significant movement too, indicating that a polarized interpretation of the end of the
Cold War is too simple and schematic.
• The causes of the end of the Cold War are to be found not only in internal and
external conditions considered separately but in the interaction between the two.
• The separation of the communist bloc from capitalism, though not apparently
disadvantageous to communism until the 1970s, left it at an increasing relative
disadvantage to the capitalist West.
• Growing consciousness of relative disadvantage was a factor in the collapse of
communism.
• The end of the Cold War offered grounds for both pessimistic and optimistic
speculation.
• Both the above approaches could find evidence for their contentions in the varied
and conflicting tendencies in post Cold War international developments.
• The novelty of the post Cold War international system lay not in the existence of
instability and conflict but in the environment in which conflict took place.
• In the aftermath of the Cold War, globalization and the future of the United States
were considered by many scholars to be closely linked, though countervailing
processes to both could be expected to develop.
• Until the second half of the 1990s the accepted wisdom was that Asia Pacific had
achieved economic take off: many even predicted a new 'Pacific Century'.
• The Asian economic crisis that began in 1997 has led to a massive shake out and
profound social and political consequences.
• The crisis also had a major impact on the stability of the world financial system.
• Since 2000 there has been economic recovery in the region; however, this is now
being driven by China as much as Japan.
• Europe has been a major testing ground for liberal and realist international
relations theories.
• The key political question facing Europe after 1989 was how to manage the process
of German unification.
• The expansion and integration of the European economic space has not been
accompanied by a parallel development of a Common Foreign and Security Policy.
• The collapse of Yugoslavia was a major test which the European Union failed to
pass.
• The United States remains the key provider of security in Europe.
• Many experts now question the use of the term 'Third World'.
• In the 1990s, poverty remains a reality for the majority of people.
• The end of the Cold War has produced contradictory results in the less developed
countries.
• The political tensions caused by underdevelopment cannot be isolated from the
advanced countries.
• 11 September 2001 marked the end of the post-Cold War era.
• The two key factors shaping world politics since 9/11 have been Islamic terrorism
and the US-led war on terror.
• US foreign policy has come under sustained attack after it decided to go to war
against Iraq.
• The world is now a less stable place than it was before 9/11
• Outside of the academy, Realism has a much longer history. Scepticism about the
capacity of human reason to deliver moral progress resonates through the work of
classical political theorists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.
• The unifying theme around which all realist thinking converges is that states find
themselves in the shadow of anarchy with the result that their security cannot be
taken for granted. In such circumstances, it is rational for states to compete for
power and security.
• At the end of the millennium, Realism continues to attract academicians and inform
policy makers, although in the period since the end of the cold we have seen
heightened criticism of realist assumptions on the grounds that they are of declining
relevance in a globalized world.
• There is a lack of consensus in the literature as to whether we can meaningfully
speak about Realism as a single coherent theory.
• There are good reasons for delineating different types of Realism. The most
important cleavage is between those who grant theoretical primacy to human nature
and those accentuate the importance of international anarchy and the distribution of
power in the international system.
• Structural realism divides into two camps: those who argue that states are security
maximizers (defensive realism) and those who argue that states are power
maximizers (offensive realism).
• There are contemporary realists who dissent from both defensive and offensive
variants of structural realism. Neoclassical realists bring individual and until variation
back into the theory while rational choice realists recognize the importance of
international institutions.
• Statism is the centrepiece of Realism. This involves two claims. First, for the
theorist, the state is the pre eminent actor and all other actors in world politics are of
lesser significance. Second, state 'sovereignty' signifies the existence of an
independent political community, one which has juridical authority over its territory.
• Key criticism: statism is flawed both on empirical (challenges to state power from
'above' and 'below') and normative grounds (the inability of sovereign states to
respond to collective global problems such as famine, environmental degradation,
and human rights abuses).
• Survival: the primary objective of all states is survival; this is the supreme national
interest to which all political leaders must adhere. All other goals such as economic
prosperity are secondary (or 'low politics'). In order to preserve the security of their
state, leaders must adopt an ethical code which judges actions according to the
outcome rather than in terms of a judgement about whether the individual act is
right or wrong. If there are any moral universals for political realists, these can only
be concretized in particular communities.
• Key criticism: are there no limits to what actions a state can take in the name of
necessity?
• Self help: no other state or institution can be relied upon to guarantee your
survival. In international politics, the structure of the system does not permit
friendship, trust, and honour; only a perennial condition of uncertainty generated by
the absence of a global government. Coexistence is achieved through the
maintenance of the balance of power, and limited co operation is possible in
interactions where the realist state stands to gain more than other states.
• Key criticism: self-help is not an inevitable consequence of the absence of a world
government; self-help is a logic that states have selected. Moreover, there are
historical and contemporary examples where states have preferred collective security
systems, or forms of regional security communities, in preference to self help.
• The high water mark of liberal thinking in international relations was reached in the
inter-war period in the work of Idealists who believed that warfare was an
unnecessary and outmoded way of settling disputes between states.
• Domestic and international institutions are required to protect and nurture these
values. But note that these values and institutions allow for significant variations
which accounts for the fact that there are heated debates within Liberalism.
• Liberals disagree on fundamental issues such as the causes of war and what kind of
institutions are required to deliver liberal values in a decentralized multicultural
international system.
• An important cleavage within Liberalism, which has become more pronounced in
our globalized world, is between those operating with a positive conception of
Liberalism who advocate interventionist foreign policies and stronger international
institutions, as against those who incline towards a negative conception which places
a priority on toleration and non-intervention.
• Early liberal thought on international relations took the view that the natural order
had been corrupted by undemocratic state leaders and out dated policies such as the
balance of power. Prescriptively, Enlightenment liberals believed that a latent
cosmopolitan morality could be achieved through the exercise of reason and through
the creation of constitutional states. In addition, unfettered movement of people and
goods could further facilitate more peaceful international relations.
• Although there are important continuities between Enlightenment liberal thought
and twentieth-century ideas, such as the belief in the power of world public opinion
to tame the interests of states, liberal idealism was more programmatic. For
Idealists, the freedom of states is part of the problem of international relations and
not part of the solution. Two requirements follow from their diagnosis. The first is the
need for explicitly normative thinking: how to promote peace and build a better
world. Second, states must be part of an international organization, and be bound by
its rules and norms.
• Central to idealism was the formation of an international organization to facilitate
peaceful change, disarmament, arbitration, and (where necessary) enforcement.
The League of Nations was founded in 1920 but its collective security system failed to
prevent the descent into world war in the 1930s. The victor states in the wartime
alliance against Nazi Germany pushed for a new international institution to be
created: the United Nations Charter was signed in June 1945 by fifty states in San
Francisco. It represented a departure from the League in two important respects.
Membership was near universal, and the great powers were able to prevent any
enforcement action from taking place which might be contrary to their interests.
• In the post-1945 period, liberals turned to international institutions to carry out a
number of functions the state could not perform. This was the catalyst for integration
theory in Europe and pluralism in the United States. By the early 1970s pluralism had
mounted a significant challenge to realism. It focused on new actors (transnational
corporations, non governmental organizations) and new patterns of interaction
(interdependence, integration).
• Neo-liberalism represents a more sophisticated theoretical challenge to
contemporary realism. Neo-liberals explain the durability of institutions despite
significant changes in context. According to neo-liberals, institutions exert a causal
force on international relations, shaping state preferences and locking them in to
cooperative arrangements.
• Democratic peace Liberalism and neo-liberalism are the dominant strands in liberal
thinking today.
• Neo-realists are more cautious about cooperation and remind us the world is still a
competitive place where self interest rules.
• Neo-liberal Institutionalists believe that states and other actors can be persuaded
to cooperate if they are convinced that all states will comply with rules and
cooperation will result in absolute gains.
• This debate does not discuss many important issues that challenge some of the
core assumptions of each theory. For example, neo-realism cannot explain foreign
policy behaviour that challenges the norm of national interest over human interests.
Neither theory addresses the impact of learning on the foreign policy behaviour of
states.
• Globalization has contributed to a shift in political activity away from the state.
Transnational social movements have forced states to address critical international
issues and in several situations that have supported the establishment of institutions
that promote further cooperation and, fundamentally challenge the power of states.
• Neo-realists think that states are still the principle actors in international politics.
Globalization challenges some areas of state authority and control; but, politics is still
inter-national.
• Neo-realists are concerned about new security challenges resulting from uneven
globalization, namely, inequality and conflict.
• Globalization provides opportunities and resources for transnational social
movements that challenge the authority of states in various policy areas. Neo-realists
are not supportive of any movement that seeks to open critical security issues to
public debate.
• Free market neo-liberals believe globalization is a positive force. Eventually, all
states will benefit from the economic growth promoted by the forces of globalization.
They believe that states should not fight globalization or attempt to control it with
unwanted political interventions.
• Some neo-liberals believe that states should intervene to promote capitalism with a
human face or a market that is more sensitive to the needs and interests of all the
people. New institutions can be created and older ones reformed to prevent the
uneven flow of capital, promote environmental sustainability, and protect the rights
of citizens.
• Among the key concerns of critical theorists is emancipation, and, in particular, the
human capacities and capabilities appealed to in calls for emancipatory action.
• Several different understandings of emancipation have emerged from the critical
theory tradition. The first generation of the Frankfurt School equated emancipation
with a reconciliation with nature. Habermas has argued that emancipatory potential
lies in the realm of communication and that radical democracy is the way in which
that potential can be unlocked.
• Andrew Linklater has developed on critical theory themes to argue in favour of the
expansion of the moral boundaries of the political community and has pointed to the
European Union as an example of a post Westphalian institution of governance.
• New Marxism is characterized by a direct (re)appropriation of the concepts and
categories developed by Marx.
• Warren deploys Marx's analysis of capitalism and colonialism to criticize some of
the central ideas of dependency and world system theorists.
• Rosenberg uses Marx's ideas to criticize realist theories of international relations,
and globalization theory. He seeks to develop an alternative approach which
understands historical change in world politics as a reflection of transformations in
the prevailing relations of production.
• Marxists are rather sceptical about the emphasis currently being placed on the
notion of globalization.
• They see the recent manifestations of globalization as not a recent phenomenon
but part of long-term trends in the development of capitalism.
• Furthermore the notion of globalization is increasingly being used as an ideological
tool to justify reductions in workers rights and welfare provision.
• Social rules are regulative, regulating already existing activities, and constitutive,
make possible and define those very activities.
• Social construction denaturalizes what is taken for granted, asks questions about
the origins of what is now accepted as a fact of life and considers the alternative
pathways that might have and can produce alternative worlds.
• Power can be understood not only as the ability of one actor to get another actor to
do what they would not do otherwise but also as the production of identities and
interests that limit the ability to control their fate.
• Although the meanings that actors bring to their activities are shaped by the
underlying culture, meanings are not always fixed but are a central feature of
politics.
• Although Constructivism and rational choice are generally viewed as competing
approaches, at times they can be combined to deepen our understanding of global
politics.
• The recognition that the world is socially constructed means that constructivists can
investigate global change and transformation.
• A key issue in any study of global change is diffusion, captured by the concern with
institutional isomorphism and the life cycle of norms.
• Although diffusion sometimes occur because of the view that the model is superior,
frequently actors adopt a model because of external pressures or its symbolic
legitimacy.
• Institutional isomorphism and the internationalization of norms raise issues of
growing homogeneity in world politics, a deepening international community, and
socialization processes.
• Charles Tilly looks at how the three main kinds of state forms that existed at the
end of the Middle Ages eventually converged on one form, namely the national state.
He argues that the decisive reason was the ability of the national state to fight wars.
• Michael Mann has developed a powerful model of the sources of state power,
known as the IEMP Model.
• Like realism, historical sociology is interested in war. But it undercuts neo-realism
because it shows that the state is not one functionally similar organization, but
instead has altered over time.
• The concerns of historical sociology are compatible with a number of the other
approaches surveyed in this chapter including feminism and postmodernism.
• Normative theory was out of fashion for decades because of the dominance of
positivism, which portrayed it as 'value-laden' and 'unscientific'.
• In the last fifteen years or so there has been a resurgence of interest in normative
theory. It is now more widely accepted that all theories have normative assumptions
either explicitly or implicitly.
• The key distinction in normative theory is between cosmopolitanism and
communitarianism. The former sees the bearers of rights and obligations as
individuals; the latter sees them as being the community (usually the state).
• Main areas of debate in contemporary normative theory include the autonomy of
the state, the ethics of the use of force, and international justice.
• In the last two decades, normative issues have become more relevant to debates
about foreign policy, for example in discussions of how to respond to calls for
humanitarian intervention and whether war should be framed in terms of a battle
between good and evil.
• Liberal feminism looks at the roles women play in world politics and asks why they
are marginalized. It wants the same opportunities afforded to women as are afforded
to men.
• Marxist/socialist feminists focus on the international capitalist system. Marxist
feminists see the oppression of women as a by product of capitalism, whereas
socialist feminists see both capitalism and patriarchy as the structures to be
overcome if women are to have any hope of equality.
• Standpoint feminists, such as J. Ann Tickner want to correct the male dominance of
our knowledge of the world. Tickner does this be re-describing the six ‘objective’
principles of international politics developed by Hans Morgenthau according to a
female version of the world.
Chapter 13: International and global security in the post-cold war era
• Security is a 'contested concept'.
• The meaning of security has been broadened to include political, economic,
societal, and environmental, as well as military, aspects.
• Differing arguments exist about the tension between national and international
security.
• Different views have emerged about the significance of 9/11 for the future of
international security.
• Debates about security have traditionally focused on the role of the state in
international relations.
• Realists and neo-realists emphasize the perennial problem of insecurity.
• The 'security dilemma' is seen by some writers as the essential source of conflict
between states.
• Trust is often difficult between states, according to Realists, because of the problem
of cheating.
• Realists also point out the problem of 'relative gains' whereby states compare their
gains with those of other states when making their decisions about security.
• 'Contingent realists' regard themselves as 'structural realists' or 'neo-realists'.
• They believe standard 'neo realism' is flawed for three main reasons: they reject
the competition bias in the theory; they do not accept that states are only motivated
by 'relative gains'; they believe the emphasis on cheating is exaggerated.
• 'Contingent realists' tend to be more optimistic about cooperation between states
than traditional 'neo-realists'.
• Supporters of the concept of 'mature anarchy' also accept that structure is a key
element in determining state behaviour.
• There is, however, a trend towards 'mature anarchy', especially in Europe, which
focuses on the growing importance of international security considerations.
• This is occurring because more states in the contemporary world are recognizing
that their own security is interdependent with the security of other states.
• The more this happens the greater the chances of dampening down the security
dilemma.
• Mercantilists describe the world-economy as an arena for inter state competition for
power.
• Marxist analyses focus on the structure of the world capitalist economy, proposing
that state and government choices simply reflect the preferences of those who own
the means of production.
• The three traditional perspectives usefully highlight different actors, different
processes, and different 'levels of analysis' in the study of IPE.
• Rational choice explains outcomes in IPE as the result of actors' choices which are
assumed always to be rationally power or utility maximizing within given particular
incentives and institutional constraints.
• Political economy applies rational choice to sub-state actors such as coalitions,
interest groups, and bureaucrats in order to explain outcomes in a state's foreign
economic policy.
• Institutionalists apply rational choice to states in their interactions with other states
in order to explain international cooperation in economic affairs.
• Constructivist approaches pay more attention to how governments, states, and
other actors construct their preferences, highlighting the role of identities, beliefs,
traditions, and values in this process.
• Neo-Gramscians highlight that actors define and pursue their interests within a
structure of ideas, culture, and knowledge which itself is shaped by hegemonic
powers.
• Globalization poses some new constraints for all states, including the most
powerful. In particular, the emergence of global capital markets means that all
governments have to be cautious in their choice of exchange rate and interest rate
policies.
• On other issues of economic policy, wealthier and more powerful countries are less
constrained by globalization than is portrayed by the globalists. This is because the
firms and investors whom governments are keen to attract are not solely concerned
with levels of taxation and wages. They are equally concerned with factors such as
the skills of the workforce, the provision of infrastructure, and proximity to markets.
• At the international level the more powerful states in the system get to set (and
enforce) many of the rules of the new global economy.
• Weaker states in the system not only must accept and abide by rules set by others,
but also have little capacity to manage their integration into the world economy.
These states do not enjoy much sovereignty or independence of policy choice in the
global economy.
international law, particularly the way in which weak actors have been able to use
international law lever genuine reform in their states.
Chapter 16: International regimes
• Regimes represent an important feature of globalization.
• There is a growing number of global regimes being formed.
• The term regimes, and social science approaches to them, are recent but fit into a
long-standing tradition of thought about international law.
• The onset of détente, loss of hegemonic status by the USA, and the growing
awareness of environmental problems sensitized social scientists to the need for a
theory of regimes.
• Liberal Institutionalists and Realists have developed competing approaches to the
analysis of regimes.
• Regime theory is an attempt initiated in the 1970s by social scientists to account
for the existence of rule-governed behaviour in the anarchic international system.
• Regimes have been defined by principles, norms, rules, and decision making
procedures.
• Regimes can be classified in terms of the formality of the underlying agreements
and the degree of expectation that the agreements will be observed. Full-blown,
tacit, and dead-letter regimes can be identified.
• Regimes now help to regulate international relations in many spheres of activity.
• The market is used by Liberal Institutionalists as an analogy for the anarchic
international system.
• In a market/international setting, public goods get underproduced and public bads
get overproduced.
• Liberal Institutionalists draw on the Prisoners' Dilemma game to account for the
structural impediments to regime formation.
• A hegemon, 'the shadow of the future', and an information-rich environment
promote collaboration and an escape route from Prisoners' Dilemmas.
• Realists argue that liberal institutionalists ignore the importance of power when
examining regimes.
• Realists draw on the 'Battle of the Sexes' to illuminate the nature of coordination
and its link to power in an anarchic setting.
• The notion of the 'tragedy of the commons' provides an instructive model of how
common resources can become over-exploited.
• The collective management of global commons on principle is more widely
applicable than approaches focusing on 'privatization', though the development of
international collective management regimes poses particular challenges.
• Much international environmental politics can be said to focus around the
development and implementation of international environmental regimes.
• The development of international environmental regimes can roughly be divided
into four phases: agenda formation; negotiation and decision-making;
implementation; and further development.
• The regime developed to limit and reverse ozone layer depletion illustrates each of
these phases, and is justifiably regarded as an important and effective environmental
regime.
• Three new conventions were agreed as the Rio Conference, aimed at limiting
climate change, preserving biodiversity, and combating desertification. Each of these
came rapidly into force, but the process of making these conventions affective has
proved a long-term task.
• The negotiations to develop further the Climate Change Convention demonstrated
the immense challenges involved in achieving a sufficient response to prevent
substantial anthropogenic climate change, and also the complexity of equity issues in
negotiations. The Kyoto Protocol agreed in 1997 established substantial legally
binding commitments, but many challenges remain.
• There are still major disputes about the main aims and objectives of the
Biodiversity Convention and means to achieve them.
• The institutions established to promote the implementation of Agenda 21 have
simulated the production of national plans for sustainable development and provided
a forum where plans can be reviewed and where networks of NGOs, government
representatives, and international secretariats can develop and influence agendas.
However, their influence on overall patterns of development has been small.
• The relationship between environment and trade regimes has emerged as a key
issue.
• Elements of globalization that permit the rapid exchange of ideas and goods can
also be levered and exploited by terrorist groups.
• The technologies associated with globalization allow terrorists to operate in a highly
distributed global 'network' that shares information and allows small cells to conduct
highly coordinated, lethal attacks.
• Globalization may allow some terrorist groups to acquire, manufacture, and use
weapons of mass destructions in order to conduct catastrophic attacks.
• States, individually and collectively, have political, military, legal, economic, and
technologies advantages in the struggle against terrorist groups.
• Differences between states over the nature and scope of the current terrorist
threat, and the most appropriate responses to combat it, reflect subjective
characterizations based on national biases and experiences.
• The effects of nuclear weapons are considerable and are manifest in the form of
blast, heat, and nuclear radiation.
• Since 1945, the spread of nuclear technology for civil and military purposes has
meant that states beyond the five which possess nuclear weapons now have the
capacity to produce nuclear devices at relatively short notice, if they have not already
done so.
• Over the same period the structure of the civil nuclear trading market has also
changed, leading to proliferation concerns because there are more nuclear suppliers
around, including transnational supply networks operating outside the established
export control guidelines.
• There has also been a diffusion of ballistic missile and space launch technology
since 1945.
• A debate over the merits of deploying defensive systems to counter ballistic
missiles has emerged and the ABM Treaty agreed in 1972 between the United States
and the former Soviet Union is no longer in force.
• Over time, the characterization of motivations for acquiring nuclear weapons has
become more complex.
• There are also difficulties associated with determining whether nuclear proliferation
has actually occurred due to technical ambiguities and the observation that a nuclear
capability can be constructed without the need for a nuclear test.
• A number of states have the potential to manufacture nuclear weapons if they
wanted, and a few actually embarked on military nuclear programmes before
abandoning them.
• The role of non-state actors and transnational nuclear supply networks have added
a further dimension to the nuclear proliferation issue.
• There is an ongoing task of ensuring the safety and security of nuclear materials
around the world and efforts have been made to improve the prospects of personnel
who formerly worked in the Soviet Union's nuclear weapon complex.
• The complexity surrounding compliance and non-compliance with international
obligations has been a key feature of debate since the early 1990s.
• Nuclear control and anti-proliferation measures have been evolving since the end of
the Second World War.
• The IAEA has established a global safeguards system.
• Attempts to implement a CTBT and negotiate a fissile material cut-off have stalled
following a period of renewed impetus after 1995.
• Islam remains a powerful influence in the Muslim world. When secular states
faltered, Islam was there to fill the vacuum of leadership.
• Islam revivalists have embraced a cultural conflict with the West. In the 1980s, the
Iranian revolution led militant Islamists against the West. In the 1990s, the Sunni
Islamists of the Al Qaeda network took up the torch of conservative rejectionism.
• Islamic movements are suspicious of the global, but the pressures to be pragmatic
are strong. The Iranian Revolution is a good example of how political and economic
realities can force compromise on Islamists.
• Islam does not have a single voice. Muslims will meet the forces of globalization in
different ways. Muslim societies will continue to change in the twenty-first century.
• In the polarized world of the late 1970s, reactions to the Tanzanian and Vietnamese
interventions were conditioned by cold war geopolitics.
• Media images of human suffering have led Western publics to pressurize their
leaders into post-cold war humanitarian interventions.
• Humanitarian intervention secures its greatest legitimation when it is done through
the Chapter VII enforcement provisions of the Security Council.
• Efforts to establish free trade areas and customs unions in Asia and in North and
South America received a boost during the 1990s.
• On the whole, these forms of regionalism differ from European integration in only
focusing on economic matters and relying on a very limited degree of
institutionalization.
Chapter 28: Causes and consequences of the communications and Internet revolution
• Communications and IT firms are at the core of a new world information economy.
• The rise of cheap global communications added new players to the decision-making
mix and often forced decisions to be taken more rapidly.
• National monopolies provided telephone services in almost all countries for
decades. They used the International Telecommunication Union to prevent
competition in the provision of international communications services.
• The introduction of domestic and international communications competition in
national and international communications, and unleashed significant technological
innovation.
• The United States is the lynchpin of interregional telecommunications and data
traffic, but European countries generate a third more international traffic flows than
North America.
• Growth rates are higher in Europe, Latin America, the Pacific, and Africa than in
North America or Asia.
• International data traffic has grown faster than international voice traffic and is now
the larger of the two. The distinction between voice data is losing its meaning. The
rise of the Internet, the Web, and e-commerce complements this trend.
• Wireless Internet voice traffic and international video-phones will increase in
popularity.
• Different professional expertise is used by firms to create advantage. Computer
programmers and engineers can design software and standards to create competitive
advantages for firms within networks.
• Lobbyists work to shape laws and public policy to advantage their clients.
• Economists try to devise systems to increase the revenue and profits of their
clients, firms or governments.
• Lawyers use intellectual property laws to maximize the power of firms over content.
• Business executives are paid to find ways to create advantages and profits for their
firms relative to their competitors.
• The information revolution increased the influence of the market and of giant firms
relative to governments.
changes in the implementation of the orthodox view, for example by the World Bank.
• 9/11 and the war on terror had the effect of further militarizing, and masculinizing,
international politics.
• There are now different transnational women's movements, for example, for
women's health and reproductive rights.
• International conferences, especially women's conferences, have been very
important in building transnational women's networks, and in putting women's issues
on the global agenda.
• The Beijing conference is seen by some as an example of global feminism in action,
while for others it illustrated the difficulties facing women's rights struggles globally.
• Contemporary global politics are strongly anti-feminist, and threaten the gains of
the last two decades.
• Second, there is the contest between political and liberal and social and economic
formulations of human rights.
• Finally, there is the assertion of the rights of peoples to be different.
• The politics of rights varies according to whether constitutional or non-
constitutional regimes are involved.
• In any event, the international community rarely acts on human rights cases unless
public opinion is engaged.
• Economic and social rights are conceptually different from political rights, and
present a more basic challenge to existing norms of sovereignty and non-
intervention.
• The human rights template severely limits the degree of acceptable variation in
social practices.
• This universalism can be challenged on feminist grounds as privileging patriarchy.
• More generally, the liberal position on rights privileges a particular account of
human dignity.
• Cultural critics of universal rights such as proponents of 'Asian Values' can be seen
as self-serving, but no neutral criteria for assessing this criticism can exist.
• But a set of basic rights may be defensible, likewise the idea of a human rights
culture.
Chapter 32: Globalization and the transformation of political community
• The members of a political community are committed to governing themselves.
• Totalitarian states attempted to make the political community absolute but liberal-
democ
ratic states recognize that their citizens value their membership of many
communities including the nation-state.
• Because they expected to be involved in major wars, states have tried to persuade
their citizens to place obligations to the state ahead of duties to other communities,
whether local or global.
• Globalization and the declining significance of military competition between the
great powers have raised the question of whether political communities will become
more cosmopolitan in future.
• Most forms of political community in human history have not represented the
nation or the people.
• The idea that the state should represent the nation is a European development
which has dominated politics for just over two hundred years.
• War and capitalism are two reasons why the nation-state became the dominant
form of political community.
• The extraordinary power of modern states—the growth of their 'intensive' and
'extensive' power—made global empires possible.
• States have been principal architects of globalization over the last four centuries.
• The global spread of the sovereign state and nationalism are key examples of
globalization.
• Demands for citizenship rights emerged in response to the growing power of the
modern state.
• The demand to be treated as a citizen was initially concerned with securing legal
and political rights but citizenship was redefined early in the twentieth century to
include social or welfare rights.
• The stability of modern forms of political community has owed a great deal to the
fact that citizens won these rights.
• Modernization theory argued that Western liberal democracy had solved the social
conflicts which earlier dominated industrial societies.
• Modernization theory also assumed that non-Western societies would follow the
Western path of economic and political development. This controversial thesis
resurfaced in the West at the end of the bipolar era.
• Globalization and fragmentation are two phenomena challenging traditional
conceptions of political community and national citizenship.
• Ethnic fragmentation is one reason for the failed state in Europe as well as in the
Third World, but demands for the recognition of cultural differences exist in all
political communities.
• Globalization theorists have argued for cosmopolitan democracy on the grounds
that national democracies are less able to influence global forces which affect them.
• The ‘war against terror’ has sharpened the division between a ‘Hobbesian’
conception of national security politics and the ‘Kantian’ belief in the possibility of
perpetual peace.
• The apex of nationalism in relations between the Great Powers occurred in the first
half of the twentieth century.
• Nationalism remains a powerful force in the modern world but globalization and
fragmentation have led to discussions about the possibility of new forms of political
community.
• Cosmopolitan approaches which envisage an international system in which all
individuals are respected as equal have flourished in the contemporary phase of
globalization.
• Communitarians argue that most people value their membership of a particular
political community; they are unlikely to shift their loyalty from the nation-state to
the human race.
• Post-modern writers argue that all forms of political community contain the danger
of generating the domination or exclusion of significant sections of society.
• There are strong trends towards regionalism, but they take different forms in
various regions.
• Matters to do with human rights have a much higher profile than in earlier historical
periods.
• Globalization is often portrayed as an effect of the end of the cold war because this
led to its further geographical spread.
• At the same time, globalization has to be understood as one of the factors that
caused the end of the cold war. It was the Soviet Union's marginalization from
processes of globalization that revealed, and intensified, its weaknesses.
• Accordingly, globalization is an element of continuity between the cold war and
post-cold war orders, and the latter should not be regarded as wholly new.
• A variety of authors are sceptical about the claim that globalization is the hallmark
of contemporary order.
• One of the reasons is that, as a long term historical trend, globalization is not
specific to the late twentieth, nor the early twenty-first, century.
• Globalization embodies a range of often competing values.
• Globalization is too much outside our control to form an order. We are its objects
rather than its subjects.
• There is evidence of resistance to globalization.
• Some of this is generated by the feeling that traditional democracy does not offer
effective representation in the global order.
• National elections may not make politicians accountable if they cannot control wider
global forces.
• There is a heated debate about whether global civil society can help democratize
international institutions, or whether they themselves are largely undemocratic.
• Some governments in the South remain suspicious of social movements that may
be better organized in developed countries.
• Globalization is often thought of as an extreme form of interdependence. This sees
it largely as a change in the external environment in which states find themselves.
• The implication of such analyses is that states are now much weaker as actors.
Consequently, they are in retreat or becoming obsolete.
• If this were the case, ideas of international order would be much less relevant to
our concept of order.
• In this case, there is no contradiction between the norms and rules of a state
system, operating alongside globalized states.
• This international order will nonetheless have different norms and rules in
recognition of the new nature of states and their transformed functions. Rules of
sovereignty and non-intervention are undergoing change as symptoms of this
adaptation.
Wahab Hussain
hellowahab
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