Modern International Relations Theory Research Articles

The new anarchy: Globalisation and fragmentation in world politics

Modern International Relations theory has consistently underestimated the depth of the problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border wars, and internally disaggregated and transnationally connected state actors, leads to a complex and multidimensional restructuring of the global, the local and the uneven connections in between. We ought to abandon the idea of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ once and for all. This does not remove the problem of anarchy but rather deepens it, involving multidimensional tensions and contradictions variously described as ‘functional differentiation’, ‘multiscalarity’, ‘fragmegration’, disparate ‘landscapes’, the ‘new security dilemma’ and ‘neomedievalism’. Approaching anarchy from the perspective of plural competing claims to authority and power forces us to think again about the nature of global order and the virtues of anarchy therein. Will the long-term outcome be the emergence of a more decentralised, pluralistic world order or a quagmire of endemic conflict and anomie?

THIS MEANS (BANK) WAR! CORRUPTION AND CREDIBLE COMMITMENTS IN THE COLLAPSE OF THE SECOND BANK OF THE UNITED STATES

The demise of the US central bank in the 1830s “Bank War” remains one of the most significant shifts in the history of American political and economic development. Traditional accounts frame the bank as the casualty of the inevitable clash of hard-money and soft-money interests and ideologies. This paper re-examines this shift through the lens of modern international relations theory. It argues that this “war,” like so many interstate wars, could have been—and very nearly was—averted. In the months prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the bank’s president (Nicholas Biddle) and the US president (Andrew Jackson) agreed to a set of reforms that both sides preferred to fighting. Jackson, however, came to believe that no amount of reform could curb the bank’s hegemonic ascent. Facing the logic of preventive war, Jackson issued a decisive veto that initiated a “total war.” His triumph in the 1832 election sealed the bank’s fate. This paper thus offers a novel interpretation of this key historical episode; and it demonstrates the value of using international relations theory to understand intrastate political dynamics.

Constructing Global Order with Chinese Characteristics: Yan Xuetong and the Pre-Qin Response to International Anarchy

China’s rise as a great power has promoted a great deal of soul searching among Chinese scholars, and concern about whether China’s contribution to the world of International Relations scholarship lags behind its rise as an important shaper of the international system. There is a common understanding that China cannot escape addressing the role of theoretical discourse in directing Chinese foreign policy and framing its understanding of China’s role in the world. A perception of China as suffering from a dependent relationship to International Relations (IR) theory, and a desire to transform the role of Chinese scholars from consumers of theory to its producers inspires a debate over the formation of a distinctive ‘Chinese school’. The leading figures in China’s IR were mostly schooled in other fields and came to IR scholarship after completing their undergraduate education. Some, like Yan Xuetong and Qin Yaqing, took postgraduate programmes in the West before entering China’s academia. Others switched from fields like ideology, philosophy, or history, including diplomatic history. Others still worked as practitioners and diplomats before taking up a life of scholarship, and may never have been exposed to systematic training in modern international relations theory. The emergent generation of Chinese-trained international relations specialists possesses varying degrees of linguistic competence in Western languages. Their overall coherence to the debate is shaped by the perceived need for China to project onto the world stage a vision of the contours of its preferred world order, and to adequately engage foreign scholars and diplomats over the impact of China’s growing material power within the international system. General Secretary Hu Jintao’s call

The Great Equalizer

I the late 1800s, the proliferation of the Colt 45 revolver eventually tamed the lawless American West by allowing even the weak and socially disenfranchised, who lacked the traditional instruments of power and influence, to assert their will and defend themselves against those endowed with land, position, and political status. The revolver thus earned itself the moniker “the Peacemaker,” or more aptly “the Great Equalizer.” But in today’s world, where some may consider nuclear weapons to be a modern version of “the Great Equalizer,” a nuclear “shoot-out” at the OK Corral could have devastating consequences on a global scale. Both the negative and positive aspects of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in an anarchic world are convincingly argued in the updated edition of The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, by Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz. Sagan is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and a widely respected author of many publications on nuclear strategy and deterrence. Waltz, known to all serious students of international relations as the author of several seminal works on modern international relations theory, is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. The first version of the book, published in 1995, comprised a debate between Waltz, the optimist, and Sagan, the pessimist, regarding the consequences of nuclear proliferation. In addition to the original material, this updated edition includes a timely and intriguing chapter extending the debate to the emerging nuclear relationship between India and Pakistan as well as some additional material on the impact of missile defenses. Waltz’s claims are logical extensions of the dominant school of thought that emerged in the post-1945 world. He argues that nuclear weapons are “absolute” in their effects on world politics and that “the dangerousness of war

When States Choose to Die: Reassessing Assumptions About What States Want

In order to explain the creation and maintenance of a number of important international institutions, scholars must reconsider a commonly held assumption about what states want. Structural realists show that the assumption that states desire survival explains a wide range of outcomes. Yet the survival assumption prevents both realists and liberal institutionalists from offering a plausible account of international organizations that are costly to autonomy. The cultures of anarchy argument helps explain when the desire to survive is more or less salient but is burdened with the survival assumption nonetheless. I argue that it is useful to assume that states pursue the national interest and that survival is only a potential means to that end. By employing this assumption within the cultures of anarchy framework, we can begin to formulate an explanation for the willingness of states to cede autonomy to international institutions. Recent events in world politics make it necessary for international relations scholars to reassess the utility of one of the most important and long-standing assumptions in international relations theory. For millennia, prominent political thinkers have suggested that the primary aim of independent political entities is survival. For Aristotle, the test of a good government is its staying power (The Politics: 6.5.1). Cicero is even more explicit, saying, ‘‘the state ought to be so organized that it will endure forever y when a state is destroyed y it is somewhat as ifFto compare small things with greatFthis whole world should perish and collapse’’ (On the Commonwealth: 3.23). And of course, Machiavelli’s The Prince, if taken literally, is a kind of how-to book for the survival of a regime, if not a state. He says, ‘‘[c]ruelty can be described as well used (if it is permissible to say good words about something evil in itself) when it is performed all at once, for reasons of self-preservation’’ (27). Modern international relations theory is no less enamored with the idea that states seek to survive, even if the claim is posited less in normative terms than as a useful way of explaining events in international affairs. For prominent realists, institutionalists , and constructivists, the survival motive is understood to be the best shorthand for the aims and desires of states. Indeed, in order to explain the degree of cooperation or conflict in the world, contemporary international relations scholarshipFalmost to a personF begins by positing a survival motive. This paper

Technology and Governance-Evolution or Revolution?

Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance. Edited by James N. Rosenau, J. P. Singh Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 312 pp., $75.50 cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-5203-4), $25.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7914-5204-2). Technology, Development, and Democracy: International Conflict and Cooperation in the Information Age. Edited by Juliann Emmons Allison. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 248 pp., $75.50 cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-5213-1), $25.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7914-5214-X). Advances in technology, and especially the development of the Internet, have contributed to an increasingly fractured and competitive global political economy. One of the results of this fracturing, or what James Rosenau (1997) might call fragmegration, is an increased tendency for nonstate actors to become the creators of rules and institutions, a role formerly thought of as reserved to nation-states. This trend, in turn, raises a number of questions about the changing nature of authority in the global political economy. How, for example, will transnational technology infrastructures be regulated? Who will make the rules? How will they be enforced? How will conflicts be resolved? What is the relationship between state and nonstate actors in developing governance structures in the global political economy? The international relations (IR) literature offers many competing and contradictory answers to these questions (see, for example, Risse-Kappen 1995; Strange 1996; Zacher and Sutton 1996; Deibert 1997; Haufler 1997; Keohane and Nye 2001). Unfortunately, the qualitative changes in the global political economy—brought about in part by the development and proliferation of information technology, the heightened role of finance, and the increased mobility of people—have outpaced advances in theory. Indeed, much of modern IR theory development occurred as a result of the Cold War, a period of bipolarity that was rife with military tensions and colored by the constant (even if generally unlikely) threat of nuclear war. It should not surprise us then that many of our conceptual tools are ill-equipped to explain phenomena in a post-Cold War world characterized by economic multipolarity and military unipolarity—a world in which strength is measured in initial public offerings instead of intercontinental ballistic missiles and in which security threats come less from nation-states than from terrorists. In such a world, the proliferation of actors and the means …

British Idealist International Theory

International relations theorists have long complained about the paucity of rigorous political philosophy in their discipline, and especially bemoan the lack of classic texts to guide them. It is suggested that with the exception of Thucydides, there is little exclusively concerned with International Relations, and nothing that international relations theorists have constructed to resemble the received canon comparable with its sister subject of political theory. Yet all of the major political theorists accommodate international relations in some way, and are invoked by contemporary international relations theorists as having something important to say. Contemporary international relations theory, however, is immersed in its own sense of self-importance, seeing the value of everything in utilitarian or practical terms. The desire to change the world, and not merely to understand it, predisposes the discipline to scale the obligatory heights of Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, Hegel and Marx in order to pillage what is useful, and to ignore the attempts of philosophers more immediately at the root of modern international relations theory who addressed many of the questions currently thought important and which pointed the way to some of the contemporary answers. Hegel's ill-deserved, but not wholly unfounded, reputation as a brutal realist, and the association of Bosanquet and the rest of the British Idealists with German or Prussian philosophy during and between the two world wars in popular and learned journals, newspapers, and the publications of leading philosophers, including Hobhouse, Hobson, Dewey, Santayana, Laski, Delise Burns, Cole and Joad, have served to bury almost without trace a wealth of literature that applied what are now fashionably called communitarian principles to international questions. Even Chris Brown, who relates Hegel, Green and Bosanquet to the communitarian approach to international relations, ignores the fact that British idealists addressed the key issues of the possibility of extending the community to the international sphere and the establishment of supranational institutions.

The origins of modern international relations theory

‘Who is the founder of modern international relations theory?’ is a popular question and much ink has been spilt trying to answer it. JL C. Scott championed Vitoria's claim to the title; T. E. Holland, Gentili's; Hedley Bull, Grotius's. Whatever the merits of these and similar claims, they do little to explain the origins and evolution of modern international relations theory. They may describe pieces of the puzzle, but they do not, either individually or collectively, reassemble those pieces to reveal the nature of the whole development. It is the aim of this article to redress, in some small measure, this comparative neglect.

Collective Goods, Mobile Resources, and Extraterritorial Trade Controls

In 1981-82, the United States imposed a set of far-reaching extraterritorial restraints on sales of oil and gas transmission equipment and technology to the Soviet Union in an effort to prevent or delay completion of the Yamal natural gas pipeline. This touched off the most violent dispute over extraterritoriality in the history of American trade controls. Numerous review articles, a few legal briefs, and even a judicial opinion have discussed this incident. Most of these writings deal with the extraterritoriality issue by testing the validity of the American controls against what are presented as the accepted rules of international regarding national prescriptive jurisdiction. Some writings discuss the reasonableness principle set forth in section 403 of the Restatement (Revised) of Foreign Relations Law as a limit on extraterritorial controls. The predominant approach, however, is to focus on the minimum bases of jurisdiction to prescribe law set out in section 402 of the Restatement (Revised), as the principles of by which the validity of the pipeline regulations should and can be judged. This article considers the extraterritoriality issue more broadly. The perspective of the article is based in part on modern international relations theory. Using this approach, the article identifies two general problems in international politics that are important in understanding the positions of the two sides in the extraterritoriality controversy, their emotional commitment to these positions, and even their legal arguments. The article also discusses the inadequacies of international legal doctrines currently available for dealing with these problems.