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International Relations- Principles and History

Introduction to International Relations

Week 1

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The Study of International Relations

•International relations concerns peoples and cultures throughout the world.
•Narrowly defined: The field of IR concerns the relationships among the world’s governments.

–Relationships cannot be understood in isolation.
–Central trend in IR today: globalization

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IR profoundly affects your life as well as that of other citizens.

September 11
Global economic recession of 2008-2010
Prospects for getting jobs

Global economy
International economic competition

Better transportation and communication capabilities.
Individuals can influence the world.

Choices we make in our daily lives ultimately affect the world we live in.

GLOBALIZATION,

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,

AND DAILY LIFE

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Core Principles

•IR revolves around one key problem:

–How can a group – such as two or more nations – serve its collective interests when doing so requires its members to forego their individual interests?

•Example: Problem of global warming. Solving it can only be achieved by many countries acting together.

–Collective goods problem

•The problem of how to provide something that benefits all members of a group regardless of what each member contributes to it

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Core Principles

•In general, collective goods are easier to provide in small groups than large ones.

–Small group: defection (free riding) is harder to conceal and has a greater impact on the overall collective good, and is easier to punish.

•Collective goods problem occurs in all groups and societies

–Particularly acute in international affairs

•No central authority such as a world government to enforce on individual nations the necessary measures to provide for the common good

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Core Principles

•Three basic principles offer possible solutions for this core problem of getting individuals to cooperate for the common good without a central authority to make them do so.

–DOMINANCE
–RECIPROCITY
–IDENTITY

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Table 1.1

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Dominance

•Solves the collective goods problem by establishing a power hierarchy in which those at the top control those below

–Status hierarchy

•Symbolic acts of submission and dominance reinforce the hierarchy.
•Hegemon/superpower

•The advantage of the dominance solution

–Forces members of a group to contribute to the common good
–Minimizes open conflict within the group

•Disadvantage of the dominance solution

–Stability comes at a cost of constant oppression of, and resentment by, the lower-ranking members of the status hierarchy.
–Conflicts over position can sometimes harm the group’s stability and well-being.

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Reciprocity

•Solves the collective goods problem by rewarding behavior that contributes to the group and punishing behavior that pursues self-interest at the cost of the group

–Easy to understand and can be “enforced” without any central authority
–Positive and negative reciprocity
–Disadvantage: It can lead to a downward spiral as each side punishes what it believes to be the negative acts of the other.

•Generally people overestimate their own good intentions and underestimate those of opponents or rivals.

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Identity

•Identity principle does not rely on self-interest.
•Members of an identity community care about the interests of others in the community enough to sacrifice their own interests to benefit others.

–Family, extended family, kinship group roots

•In IR, identity communities play important roles in overcoming difficult collective goods problems.

–Nonstate actors also rely on identity politics.

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IR as a Field of Study

•Practical and pluarlist discipline
•Theoretical debates are fundamental, but unresolved.
•IR is about international politics, but the field is interdisciplinary: relates to economics, history, sociology, and others

–Usually taught within political science classes
–Domestic politics of foreign countries, although overlapping with IR, generally make up the separate field of comparative politics.

•Issue areas: global trade, the environment, etc.
•Conflict and cooperation mix in relationships among nations
•Subfields

–International security studies
–International political economy (IPE)

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Actors and Influences

•Principal actors in IR are the world’s governments.
•IR scholars traditionally study the decisions and actions of those governments, in relation to other governments.
•Individual actors: Leaders and citizens, bureaucratic agencies in foreign ministries, multinational corporations, and terrorist groups

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State Actors

•Most important actors in IR are states.
•State: A territorial entity controlled by a government and inhabited by a population.

–State government exercises sovereignty over its territory.
–Recognized as sovereign by other states
–Population forms a civil society; group identity
–Seat of government with a leader – head of government or head of state

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State Actors

•The international system:

–Set of relationships among the world’s states, structured according to certain rules and patterns of interaction.
–Modern international system has existed for less than 500 years.
–Nation-states
–Major source of conflict: Frequent mismatch between perceived nations and actual borders.
–Populations vary dramatically.
–Great variation in terms of the size of states’ total annual economic activity

•Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

–Great powers

•Most powerful of these states are called superpowers

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Figure 1.1

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State Actors

•Not formally recognized as states

–Taiwan: operates independently but claimed by China
–Formal colonies and possessions: Puerto Rico (U.S), Bermuda (British), Martinique (French), French Guiana, the Netherlands Antilles (Dutch), the Falkland Islands (British), and Guam (U.S.)
–Hong Kong (reverted from British to Chinese rule)
–The Vatican (Holy See) – ambiguous status

•Including various such territorial entities with states brings the world total to about 200 state or quasi-state actors.
•Other would-be states:

–Kurdistan (Iraq), Abkhazia (Georgia), and Somaliland (Somalia) may fully control the territory they claim but are not internationally recognized

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Nonstate Actors

•State actors are strongly influenced by a variety of nonstate actors.

–Called transnational actors when they operate across international borders

•Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)

–Examples: OPEC, WTO, African Union, UN
–Vary in size from a few states to the whole UN membership

•Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)

–Private organizations; no single pattern
–Examples: Amnesty International, Red Cross

NGO, House of Peace

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Nonstate Actors

•Multinational corporations

–Companies that span multiple countries

•Substate actors

–Exist within one country but either influence that country’s foreign policy or operate internationally, or both
–Example: State of Ohio (entirely a U.S. entity) operates an International Trade Division

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Table 1.2

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Levels of Analysis

•Many actors involved in IR

–Leads to complexity of competing explanations and theories

•Response: IR scholars sorted out the influences, actors, and processes, and categorize them into different levels of analysis

–Perspective on IR based on a set of similar actors or processes that suggests possible explanations to “why” questions
–Individual, domestic (state or societal), interstate, global levels of analysis

•Example of applying different levels of analysis

–War in Iraq

•No correct level for a given “why” question.
•Levels of analysis help suggest multiple explanations and approaches to consider in trying to explain an event.

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Table 1.3

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Globalization

•Globalization: Three conceptions of/schools of thought on this process compete.

1.Globalization as the fruition of liberal economic principles/global marketplace
2.Perspective characterized by skepticism: World’s major economies are more integrated today than before WWI. North-South divide increasing with globalization; distinct and rival regional blocs; fragmenting of larger units into smaller ones
3.Globalization as more profound than the skeptics believe, yet more uncertain than the view of supporters of liberal economics.

•Globalization is changing both international security and IPE, but IPE more quickly and profoundly.

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Global Geography

•World regions – geographical distinction/divisions of the world
•Global North-South gap

–Between the relatively rich industrialized countries of the North and the relatively poor countries of the South is the most important geographical element in the global level of analysis.

•East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea
•Southeast Asia: Countries from Burma through Indonesia and the Philippines.

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Global Geography

•Russia is considered a European state.
•The Pacific Rim: East and Southeast Asia, Siberia, and the Pacific coast of North America and Latin America
•South Asia only sometimes includes parts of Southeast Asia.
•Narrow definitions of the Middle East exclude both North Africa and Turkey.
•The Balkans are the states of southeastern Europe, bounded by Slovenia, Romania, and Greece.

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Figure 1.2

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Table 1.5

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The Evolving International System

•The basic structures and principles of international relations are deeply rooted in historical developments.

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The Two World Wars, 1900-1950

•Occupied only ten years of the 20th century, but shaped the character of the century.

–WWI: Tragic irrationality of war; century of peace and suddenly a catastrophic war that seemed unnecessary, even accidental

•Prior major war: Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871

–Germany clear winner; railroad borne offensive and rapid victory

•WWI was not short or decisive

–Trench warfare along a fixed front
–Russia first state to crumble; revolution at home
–Entry of U.S. on the anti-German side in 1917 quickly turned the war

•Treaty of Versailles of 1919
•German resentment against the harsh terms of the treaty would contribute to Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s.

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The Two World Wars, 1900-1950

•Would lead to the League of Nations

–Senate did not approve U.S. participation
–League did not prove effective

•U.S. isolationism between WWI and WWII, declining British power, and a Russia crippled by its own revolution left a power vacuum in the world.
•In the 1930s, Germany and Japan stepped into the vacuum

–Aggressive expansionism
–Led to WWII

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The Two World Wars, 1900-1950

•In Europe, Nazi Germany re-armed, intervened to help fascists win the Spanish Civil War, grabbed territory from its neighbors

–Weak response from the international community and the League of Nations to fascist regimes in Italy and Spain emboldened Hitler
–Munich Agreement of 1938

•Appeasement has since had a negative connotation in IR.

•1939 – Hitler invaded Poland, leading Britain and France to join the war against Germany

–Hitler signed a nonagression pact with his archenemy Stalin (Soviet Union) and then invaded France.

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The Two World Wars, 1900-1950

•Hitler double-crossed Stalin; invaded the Soviet Union in 1941

–Soviet Union took the brunt of the German attack and suffered the greatest share of the 60 million deaths caused by WWII.

•U.S. joined WWII in 1942

–Important supplier of weapons and supplies for allied armies
–Important role with Britain in bombing of German cities, including Dresden (100,000 civilian deaths)
–1944 British-American forces pushed into Germany from the west while the Soviets pushed from the east.
–Ruined Germany surrendered and was occupied by the allied powers.

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The Two World Wars, 1900-1950

•During this time, Japan fought a war to control Southeast Asia against the U.S. and its allies.

–U.S. cut off its oil exports to Japan in retaliation for Japan’s expansionism.
–Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and destroyed much of the U.S. navy.
–Hiroshima and Nagasaki
–Japan’s surrender

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The Two World Wars, 1900-1950

•Lessons of the two world wars seem contradictory:

–Failure of the Munich Agreement in 1938 to appease Hitler used to support hard-line foreign policy – deterrence
–BUT in 1914 it was just such hard-line policies that led Europe to WWI, which might have been avoided with appeasement.

•IR scholars have not discovered a simple formula for choosing the best policy to avoid war.

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The Cold War, 1945-1990

•U.S. and Soviet Union – two superpowers of the post-WWII era

–Each had its ideological mission (capitalist democracy versus communism).
–Each had network of alliances and clients and a deadly arsenal of weapons.

•Stable framework of relations emerged.
•Central concern of the West: that the Soviet Union might gain control of western Europe

–Marshall Plan
–Containment

•Sino-Soviet alliance

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The Cold War, 1945-1990

•Sino-Soviet split when China opposed Soviet moves toward peaceful coexistence with the U.S.

–Cultural Revolution

•Korean War
•Cuban Missile Crisis
•Use of Proxy wars
•U.S. policy in the Cold War

–Flaw: Seeing all regional conflicts through East-West lenses

•Vietnam War

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The Cold War, 1945-1990

•Afghanistan
•1970s strategic parity between U.S. and Soviet Union
•Pro-democracy movement in China
•Perestroika
•Break-up of the Soviet Union
•Scholars do not agree on the important question of why the Cold War ended.

–U.S. military strength under Reagan forced the Soviet Union into bankruptcy.
–Soviet Union suffered from internal stagnation over decades and imploded.

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The Post-Cold War Era, 1990-2009

•Iraq invades Kuwait, 1990

–Gulf War

•Collapse of Soviet Union

–Declaration of republics as sovereign states
–Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

•Only three small Baltic states are nonmembers

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The Post-Cold War Era, 1990-2009

•Western relations with Russia mixed since the 1990s

–Little external aid for Russia during the harsh economic transition
–Chechnya
–Russian nationalism
–Japan and Russia lingering, mostly symbolic, territorial dispute

•Break-up of the former Yugoslavia

–Bosnia crisis
–Serbia and Kosovo- ethnic cleansing

•Somalia

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The Post-Cold War Era, 1990-2009

•Rwanda
•Haiti
•New rifts between the U.S. and both China and Europe

–Signal of a realignment against U.S. predominance in world affairs?
–Kyoto treaty and other developments

•September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York
•War on Terrorism

–Afghanistan’s Taliban
–Iraq and Saddam Hussein

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The Post-Cold War Era, 1990-2009

•North Korea
•Post-Cold War more peaceful than the Cold War
•Warfare is diminishing
•Globalization

–Some backlash; resurgence of nationalism and ethnic-religious conflict
–Concerns about environmental degradation and disease

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The Post-Cold War Era, 1990-2009

•China becoming more central to world politics

–Size and rapid growth
–Only great power that is not a democracy
–Holds but seldom uses veto power in the UN Security Council
–Has a credible nuclear arsenal
–What will happen in terms of China’s position in the international system?
–2008 Olympics in China
–Communist ideology losing hold on young in China

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