CH 1 Global Trend Trend Short Note
CH 1 Global Trend Trend Short Note
GLOBAL AFFAIRS
2022
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CHAPTER ONE
UNDERSTANDING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Nationalism‘s triumphis accepted as ultimate, legitimate and the most basic form of political entity.
Nationalism is the doctrine that asserts the nation as the basic political unit in organizing society.
The words nation’, state’ and country’ are used interchangeably and this is not correct.
According to Heywood,
Nations are historical entities that evolve more similar ethnic communities and they
reveal themselves in myths, legends, and songs (2014).
At the end of the 19th c this state came to be radically transformed.
The state‘was combined with a nation’ forming a compound noun.
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The idea of self-determination undermined the political legitimacy of Europe‘s empires.
If all the different peoples that these empires contained gained the right to determine their
own fates, the map of Europe would have to be radically redrawn.
In 1848 this prospect seemed to become a reality as nationalist uprisings quickly spread
across the continent.
Everywhere the people demanded the right to rule themselves.
1.2. Understanding International Relations
International relation is not merely a field of study but it is an integral aspect of our
everyday lives.
It is impossible to isolate our experiences and connections from an international
dimension.
Studying international r/n
Enables to make better understand the information we receive daily from newspapers,
television and radio.
As members world community,
people have to be equally aware of both their rights and their responsibilities
People should be capable of engaging in important debates concerning the major issues
facing the modern international community.
One crucial feature of the world in which we live is:
its interconnectedness by geographically,
Intellectually and socially – and thus we need to understand it.
International relations:
- describe a range of interactions between people, groups, firms, associations, parties,
nations or states or between these and (non) governmental international organizations.
IR - could have direct or indirect implications for political relations b/n groups, states or
inter-national organizations.
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What are the main causes for study of international relations?
international conflict
inter-nationalconferences
International crimes.
In International relations:
Participation in IR/n or politics is also unavoidable (inescapable).
No individual, people,nation or state can exist in isolation or be master of its own fate.
No one state can maintain or enhance their rate of social or economic progress or keep
people alive without the contributions of foreigners or foreign states.
Every people, nation or state is a minority in a world that is (anarchic) disordered, that is,
there is an absence of a common sovereign over them.
There is politics among entities that have no ruler and in the absence of any ruler.
That world is pluralistic and diverse.
Each state is a minority among humankind.
No matter how large or small, every state or nation in the world must take account of
foreigners‘.
In International relations:
There are legal, political and social differences between domestic and international
politics.
Domestic law is generally obeyed, and if not, the police and courts enforce sanctions.
International law rests on competing legal systems, and there is no common
enforcement.
Domestically a government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
In international politics
No one has a monopoly of force or power,
Therefore international politics has often been interpreted as the realm of self-help.
States are stronger than others.
Locke took
He took a more optimistic( positive) view
He suggested that sociability was the strongest bond between men – men were equal,
sociable and free
They were not dissolute because they were governed by the laws of nature.
It was clear that nature did not harm man against man,
International politics is pre - eminently (extremely) concerned with the art of achieving
group ends against the opposition of other groups.
If physical force were to be used to resolve every disagreement there would result an
intolerable existence for the world’s population.
Society would not prosper and every human being would be suspicious of every other
human.
Sometimes this happens on the international stage, given that every state is judge and jury
of its own interests and can decide for itself whether to use force.
It is necessary that states and international organizations can come up with a way of
resolving differences.
Although such ideals have been difficult to establish across the board it has become the
case that there are non-violent options available to states.
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The rise of the sovereign state in medieval Europe consisted of a complicated pattern of
overlapping jurisdictions and loyalties.
Most of life was local and most political power was local too.
At the local level there was an enormous diversity of political entities:
feudal lords who ruled their respective estates ,
cities made up of independent merchants,
States ruled by clerics and smaller political entities such as principalities and duchies.
In medieval Europe there were two institutions with pretensions to power over the continent as
a whole – the (Catholic) Church and the Empire.
The Catholic Church was the spiritual authority, with its center in Rome.
Apart from a small Jewish minority, all Europeans were Christian and the influence of
the Church spread far and penetrated deeply into people‘s lives.
In 14th c, the system was greatly simplified as the state emerged as a political entity located
between the local and the universal.
The new states simultaneously set themselves in opposition to popes and emperors on
the universal level, and to feudal lords, peasants and mixed other rulers on the local level.
This is how the state came to make itself independent and self-governing. The process
started in Italywhere northern city-states such as Florence, Venice, Ravenna and Milan
began playing the pope against the emperor, eventually making themselves independent
of both. Meanwhile, in Germany, the pope struggled with the emperor over the issue
of who of the two should have the right to appoint bishops. While the two were fighting
it out, the constituent members of the Holy Roman Empire took the opportunity to assert
their independence.
Self-assertive states were:
Not only picking fights with universal institutions but also with local ones.
In order to establish themselves securely in their new positions of power, the kings
rejected the traditional claims of all local authorities.
This led to extended wars in next to all European countries.
Peasants rose up in protest against taxes and the burdens imposed by repeated wars.
There were massive peasant revolts in Germany in the 1520s with hundreds of thousands
of participants and almost as many victims.
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In the latter part of the 16th c,
There were major peasant uprisings in Sweden, Croatia, England and Switzerland.
In France, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the nobility rose up in defence of its
traditional rights and in rebellion against the encroachments of the king.
The European states emerged in the middle of struggle and strife (conflict), and struggle
and strife have continued to characterize their existence.
Yet, in early modern Europe it was no longer the competing claims of local and universal
authorities that had to be combated but instead the competing claims of other states.
The 30’ Yrs ‘War, 1618–1648, was the bloodiest and most protracted military confrontation of
the era.
As a result of the war, Germany‘s population was reduced by around a third.
What the Swiss or the Scottish mercenaries did not steal, the Swedish troops destroyed.
Many of the people who did not die on the battlefield died of the plague.
The Thirty Years’ War is often called a religious conflict since Catholic states
confronted Protestants.
Yet, Protestant and Catholic countries sometimes fought on the same side and religious
dogma was clearly not the first thing on the minds of the combatants.
Instead the war concerned which state should have hegemony (or dominance) over
Europe.
The main protagonists were two Catholic states, France and Austria, but Sweden – a
Protestant country – intervened on France‘s side and in the end no dominant power
emerged.
The Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, which concluded the 30 years of warfare, has come to
symbolize the new way of organizing international politics.
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From this point onwards,
International politics was a matter of relations b/n states and no other political units.
All states were sovereign, meaning that they laid claims to the exclusive right to rule their
own territories and to act, in relation to other states, as they themselves saw fit.
All states were formally equal and they had the same rights and obligations.
The states interacted with each other in a system in which there was no over arching
power.
Sovereignty and formal equality led to the problem of anarchy.
States had made themselves independent both of the pope and the emperor;
They soon discovered that their relations had become vastly more complicated.
Other European countries joined in this scramble for colonies, not least in Africa.
Colonial possessions became a symbol of great power‘ status, and the new European
nation-states often proved themselves to be very aggressive colonizers.
France added West Africa and Indo - china to its growing empire, and
The Germans and Italians also joined the race once their respective countries were
unified.
This explains in the First World War 1914, most parts of the world were in European
hands.
But – China, Japan, Siam, Persia, Ethiopia and Nepal, among others are independent
countries.
But this was not how the European state and the European way of organizing international
relations came to spread to the rest of the world, at least not directly.
After all, a colonized country is the very opposite of a sovereign state;
The colonized peoples had no nation-states and enjoyed no self-determination.
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1.4. Actors in International Relations
Trans-governmental organizations
where the relations between players are not controlled by the central foreign policy of the
state – such as the exchange rate of a state‘s currency being determined by the money
markets.
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The relations between states were governed by mutual cooperation.
In the traditional context –
State is the main framework of political interaction and the main point of reference for
both society and the individuals within it has lost a lot of its meaning and importance.
The majority of global interactions -
related to global finance, production, education, personal and professional travel, labor
migration or terrorism
No longer occur via state channels the way they once did.
We could say that the increased focus on non-state actors and cross-border issues has
marked a close-to-revolutionary turn in IR; something that could be interpreted as a shift
away from the inter-national (‗between-states‘) to the ‗trans-national‘ (‗across/beyond-
states‘ and their borders).
Robert Keohane, stated that:
I R’ is no longer a suitable label
In today‘s world, few societal and political issues, challenges and problems are neatly
confined by the borders of individual states or even groups of states. Thinking about
world affairs in ‗ trans – national’ rather than in purely ‗inter-national’ terms therefore
seems more of an analytical necessity than just a choice.
International commercial aviation and the rapid spread of information technologies has
further increased people‘s mobility and the rate at which interactions occur across and
beyond state borders.
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at the behaviors,
motivations,
beliefs and
Orientation of the individual in affecting a particular international phenomenon.
Psychological factors do not only matter at the level of individual members of society or
of a group.
They are also an important factor in the analysis of foreign policy, whenever particular
mindsets and perceptions of political leaders and key actors might influence their
decisions and behavior.
They also consider state as a point of reference for other types of actors.
The state acts as the arena in which state officials, politicians and decision-makers operate.
The state is seen as the framework that sum up society and as the main point of reference
for the individual.
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how states interact with each other to deal with the crisis, their foreign policy; how they
build off each other’s suggestions and
how they react to international developments and trends;
how they cooperate, in the framework of international organizations.
A state-level study would also require careful consideration of
what kinds of states we are looking at (how they are ordered politically),
their geographical position,
their historical ties and experiences and
Their economic standing.
In this perspective,
Global conditions are seen as the ability and opportunity of individual states and groups
of states to pursue their interests in cooperative or competitive ways.
The view of states being embedded in a global context traditionally comes with the
assumption that our international system is anarchic‘.
An anarchic system is one that lacks a central government that regulates and controls what
happens to states in their dealings with each other.
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Global linkages that go beyond single interactions between states.
It would need to look the balance of power between states and how that determines what
happens in global politics.
This could include developments that are even outside the immediate control of any
particular state or group of states, such as the global economy, transnational terrorism or
the internet.
A global level would give us the big picture and help us to grasp wide ranging dynamics
that emerge from the global economic system’ to affect its various components, states,
national economies, societies, and individuals.
1.6. The Structure of International System
International Relations scholars maintain that political power is usually distributed into three
main types of systems namely:
uni-polar system,
bipolar system and,
Multi polar system.
These three different systems reflect the number of powerful states competing for power and
their hierarchical relationship.
There are two dominant states (super powers) and the less powerful states join either
sides through alliance and counter alliance formations.
It is vulnerable for zero-sum game politics because when one superpower gains the
other would inevitably lose.
One typical historical example where the world was under bipolar system is the cold
war period.
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In such system, it is possible to bring change without gaining or losing power.
Power
Power is the currency of international politics.
As money is for economics, power is for international relations (politics).
In the international system, power determines the relative influence of actors and it
shapes the structure of the international system.
Power can be defined in terms of both relations and material (capability) aspects.
The relational definition of power is formulated by Robert Dahl.
Dahl‘s definition understands power as A‘s‘ ability to get B‘ to do something it would
not otherwise do.
Anarchy
Anarchy is a situation where there is absence of authority (government) be it in national
or international/global level systems.
Within a country ‘anarchy’ refers to a breakdown of law and order, but in relations
between states it refers to a system where power is decentralized and there are no shared
institutions with the right to enforce common rules.
An anarchical world is a world where everyone looks after themselves and no one looks
after the system as a whole.
Instead, states had to rely on their own resources or to form alliances through which the
power of one alliance of states could be balanced against the power of another alliance.
Yet, as soon became clear, such power balances were precarious, easily subverted, and
given the value attached to territorial acquisitions, states had an incentive to engage in
aggressive wars.
As a result, the new international system was characterized by constant tensions and
threats of war – which often enough turned into actual cases of warfare.
Sovereignty
Sovereignty is another basic concept in IR and it can be defined as an expression of:
(i) a state‘s ultimate authority within its territorial entity (internal sovereignty) and,
(ii) the state‘s involvement in the international community (external sovereignty).
The politics of global interactions is now more accessible than the past.
There are a variety of factorsglobal interactions
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conflict in the Middle East,
the break-up of Yugoslavia,
human rights violations or
poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa,
In Kant‘s eyes,
Taking liberal ideas into practice,US President Woodrow Wilson addressed his famous.
He presents 14 Points’ to the US Congress in January 1918 during the final year of the WWI.
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it reflect a perpetual or permanent peace
it form the basic foundations for the liberal internationalism
The creation of the League of Nations after the end of the WWI
Was the culmination of the liberal ideal of international relations.
The League would function as the guarantor of international order
the League was collapsed due to its failure and the outbreak of the WWII in 1939,
Its failure became difficult for liberals to comprehend the events seemed to contradict
their theories.
Therefore, despite the efforts of prominent liberal scholars and politicians such as Kant and
Wilson, liberalism failed to retain a strong hold and a new theory emerged to explain the
continuing presence of war.
As a result,
The operating system of international law functions in some ways as a constitution does
in a domestic legal system and not as law proper i.e it does nothing beyond setting out the
consensus of its constituent actors on distribution of authority, rights and responsibilities
for governance within the international s9ystem.
1.7.2. Realism
Liberal internationalist ideals are now recognized for their significant contribution in the
development of normative approaches,
They appear at the beginning of the 1930s and ultimately the outbreak of the WWII,
futile and utopian.
Therefore
it was the subject matter of international relations,
it was dominated as it had been by international law and diplomatic history,
it was was transformed to an intellectual agenda which placed power and self-interest at
the forefront of concern.
The idealism’ of the interwar period
was henceforth to be replaced by realism, and
it is this school of thought which, in its various articulations, remains dominant in the
discipline. E.H.
Carr‘s Twenty Years’ Crisis’, published in 1939, was the text which positioned what he
called utopianism in opposition to realism.
Realists argue that;
values are context bound,
morality is determined by interest, and
The present conditions are determined by historical processes.
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Domestic society is ruled by a single system of government;
The international system of states lacks such a basis and renders inter-national law non-
binding and ultimately ineffectual in the regulation of relations between states.
Conflict is hence an inevitable and continual feature of inter-national relations.
Key Concepts:
Liberalism depicts optimism by arguing that human beings are good, cooperation is
possible and conflict can be resolved peacefully
Realism depicts(show) pessimism by arguing that human beings are bad, conflict is
inevitable and war is the most prominent instrument of resolving conflict
Structuralism / Marxism focused on the structure of dependency and exploitation caused
by the international division of labor
Constructivism / Critical Theories challenge the foundations of the dominant perspectives
and argue for the marginalized and the voiceless
One central area that sets realism and liberalism apart is how they view human nature.
Realists do not typically believe that human beings are inherently (naturally) good, or
Have the potential for good, as liberals do.
Instead, they claim individuals act in their own self-interests.
For realists,
People are selfish and behave according to their own needs without necessarily taking
into account the needs of others.
Realists believe conflict is unavoidable and continuous or perpetual
So, war is common and inherent to humankind.
Hans Morgenthau, a prominent realist,
He is known for his famous statement all politics is a struggle for power’
He demonstrates politics is primarily about domination as opposed to cooperation
between states.
Here, it is useful to briefly recall the idea of theories being lenses.
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Tend to dismiss optimism as a form of misplaced idealism and instead they arrive at a
more pessimistic view.
This is due to their focus on the centrality of the state and its need for security and
survival in an anarchical system where it can only truly rely on itself.
As a result,
realists reach an array of accounts that describe IR as a system where war and conflict is
common and
Periods of peace are merely times when states are preparing for future conflict.
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It is inspired by Marx and Lenin scholars within what came to be known as the
structuralist paradigm focused on;
dependency,
exploitation and
the international division of labor which relegated the vast majority of the global
population to the extremes of poverty, often with the complicities of elite groups
within these societies.
The basis of such manifest inequality was the capitalist structure of the international system
which accrued benefits to some while causing, through unequal exchange relations, the
impoverishment of the vast majority of others.
The class system that pre - dominated internally within capitalist societies had its parallel
globally, producing centre – periphery relations that permeated every aspect of
international social, economic and political life.
1.7.4. Constructivism
Is commonly viewed as a middle ground, but this time between mainstream theories and
the critical theories that we will explore later.
Unlike scholars from other perspectives, constructivists highlight the importance of
values and shared interests between individuals who interact on the global stage.
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Alexander Wendt,
regularly argue that the internationalization of the state as the standard operating principle
of international relations has led ordinary people around the globe becoming divided and
alienated, instead of recognizing what they all have in common as a global proletariat.
For this to change, the legitimacy of the state must be questioned and ultimately
dissolved. In that sense, emancipation from the state in some form is often part of the
wider critical agenda.
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The realists explain why the League of Nations was unsuccessful – failing to allow for
Germany and Japan‘s expansionist desires in the 1930s.
A contemporary example would be the United States invading Iraq in 2003 despite the
Security Council declining to authorize it.
The United States simply ignored the United Nations and went ahead, despite
opposition.
Without the UN, IR would likely be even more chaotic – devoid of a respectable
institution to oversee relations between states and hold bad behavior to account.
It is true that the United States ignored the UN and invaded Iraq, by doing so it violated
the standard practices of international relations.
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Post-colonialists would also point to the presence of former colonial powers on the
Security Council and how their ability to veto proposals put forward by other countries
perpetuates a form of continued indirect colonial exploitation of the Global South.
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