Terms Of International Relations Research Articles

The changing ‘logics’ of capitalist competition

This article criticizes contemporary attempts within the Marxist tradition to understand the current juncture of international relations in terms of either a return to classical Marxist theories of inter-imperial rivalry or ultra-imperialism. It argues instead to put the debate on a new theoretical footing that is able to capture the rich diversity of international relations and permutations of territorial orders within the entire history of capitalism since its inception in 17th-century England. It argues specifically that the system of multiple states and capitalism, rather than being causally co-emergent and co-constitutive, have historically different origins. Since the latter emerged within the former, their interrelation is not structurally determined by any ‘logic of capital’ per se or by a ‘logic of anarchy’ (or by their intersection). Rather, profound variations in capitalist international orders result from the contested construction of diverse projects of territorialization by historically situated capitalist classes and states. They are neither subject to an evolutionary long-term logic of globalization and global state-formation, nor to a recurring logic of inter-imperial rivalry, but far exceed the limits of these narrow options.

Phantom Menace: What Junior Greek Army Officers Have to Say about Turks and Turkey

This chapter focuses on the discourse of low-rank Greek army officers about the Turks and the state of Turkey. This is a combination of the hegemonic narratives promoted by the Greek state and other forms of conventional, informal rhetoric. Concentrating on the Greek and Turkish states rather than on the respective populations, the officers reveal a form of nationalism built on seemingly rational arguments as opposed to sentimental reactions. Their struggle to think globally, however, does not necessarily allow them to disengage from a view of the world order that is very much based on local, culturally informed perceptions of micro-level social interaction. Despite their attempt to analyse the current situation in terms of international relations, the subjects of this study do not abstain from recycling hypothetical scenarios and conspiracy theories that ultimately present Greece and Turkey as predictably non-sovereign countries whose policies are dictated by larger and more powerful interests, states and coalitions.

From Ter-Petrossian to Kocharian: Explaining Continuity in Armenian Foreign Policy, 1991-2003

Although foreign policy seems somewhat beyond the democratization and liberalization (leitmotiv) present in the addresses made to the Newly Independent States (NIS), it is actually a relevant observation in studying the evolution of the republics. Foreign policy is situated at the crossroads of development, regional stability, and globalization. Since gaining independence, the Republic of Armenia has been trying hard to impose its sovereignty on the definition of foreign policy.This brief research is based on two political science approaches, usually disjoined. On one hand, foreign policy is studied in its content, in terms of international relations, focusing on the role of the state.1 On the other, it is explained through its functions, which means focusing on the building of internal politics and actors engaged in this process. While the description of Armenian foreign policy has often been reviewed, the decision-making process related to it is practically uncharted territory. This article is not intended to completely cover the decision-making process; rather they are intended to outline its significance. This has a two-fold advantage: First, it provides a method for studying micro-foreign policy which, in the case of a small and constrained state as Armenia, is more often than not seen through the interests of external and more powerful states. second, focusing on the actors and institutions of foreign policy permits emphasizing the link between the choices made and the internal forces determining them.During the first years of independence, Armenia was regarded as the only stable state in the South Caucasus. Levon Ter-Petrossian, who joined the Karabakh Committee in May 1988, soon appeared as the leader who, entrusted by the will of the majority, was taking Armenia toward independence. This became a reality three and a half years later after an exemplary constitutional process. The Armenian National Movement (HHSh), a coalition succeeded the Karabakh Committee, ran the country for a decade and laid the foundation of the Armenian state. Reelected in 1996, Ter-Petrossian was forced to resign in 1998. The prime minister, Robert Kocharian, replaced him as president. For most observers this change of leadership has meant a change in foreign policy. Thus, they adopted a void rhetoric that usually overrides internal crises, such as the one that lead to Ter-Petrossian's resignation. Nevertheless, continuity, surprisingly, has been the prime feature of foreign policy between 1991 and 2003. Although nuances do exist, the questions of classical foreign policy-defense, alliances and definition of priorities-have remained unchanged. This is due to a lack of choice, given the unchanging nature of the main issues facing Armenia and the caution of decision makers, rather than to a long-term political vision. The government's lack of accomplishment in domestic affairs, along with the lack of capital in Armenia, limits the scope of Armenia's foreign policy.A change in leadership has no impact on the conditions in which foreign policy is implemented. On the contrary, it is foreign policy that weighs more on Armenia's internal politics. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which has been at the center of foreign policy since independence and in the minds of all Armenians since the late 1980s, has been a major determinant in the formulation of foreign policy. To a certain extent, the Karabakh issue is linked with every other item on the agenda, conferring on it this main feature: the security priority. The consequences of this particular foreign policy question weighed substantially on the new administration. But this change resembles a substitution more than an alternation. The two kinds of elites, though different in personality and image (the military versus the intellectual, the manager versus the charismatic leader), share an ideological proximity. The second Armenian adminisration, whose members were allies of the first government before opposing it, has been running Armenia since 1998. …

An African Assertion? The Question of Reconciliation’s Place in a Time of Emergency

In the last decade, the idea and practice of reconciliation has come to play an important, if not central, role in the international discourse of nation - building and democratisation. This development marks an African assertion in terms of international relations. Focused primarily on the South African transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy, this essay reflects on reconciliation’s current global currency, the ways in which it has complicated standing norms of political subjectivity and international law, and how the rhetorical operativity of reconciliation may stand in significant opposition to the logic of emergency that increasingly defines the west’s approach to international “relations”.

Roots of the American Anti-Terrorism Crusade

The 11 September 2001 attacks are a denning moment for the USA. They have changed its perception of international reality by formulating an ideological framework to justify a new political and military strategy that is changing the terms of international relations. This article analyses the strategy towards ‘rogue states’ and ‘regime change’, and explores the emergence of the crusade against terrorism. It examines the domestic roots of this crusade, particularly the roles played by the Christian Right, the Neo-Conservatives, and the pro-Israeli lobbies. These combined forces push US domestic politics to the right, leading to an aggressive interventionist policy in the Middle East. Israeli actions dovetail with this crusade, thus becoming intertwined with domestic American issues. With their self-serving definition of terrorism, the US and Israeli governments prepare to launch a war against Iraq. Whether these combined efforts succeed will depend on the extent of domestic and international opposition.

Geopolitics after geopolitics: A French experience

What can be the goal for a state that is no more an empire in an environment where empire cannot be a goal anymore? In this paper, it is argued that there is a classic French geopolitical stance which has conserved a large part of its characteristics over centuries and which can be compared to the attitudes of other European states. It is precisely because this long‐lasting, consistent set of ideas and behaviours is coming apart that it is urgent to put it in the perspective of its own historical development. After some general remarks on the particular part played by France on the European geopolitical checkerboard, the fate of the ‘special relationship’ between France and Africa, as a dramatic case study of the widening gap between the traditional imperial stance and newly emerging realities, is considered. The third aspect of this reflection is an analysis of the original characteristics of the European Union in terms of international relations and the impact of this new context on the evolution of the French state.

World Society in the Chicago Laboratory

In the disciplinary history of the study of international relations, the methodological experiments of Charles Merriam, Quincy Wright, Harold Lasswell and others in the University of Chicago since the early 1920s argued for a scientific approach as distinct from the traditional wisdom outlook. Textual interpretation of the Chicago School's writings is intended to show how these early conceptions may be mediated in the methodological fabric of the present research orientations. In analysing the historical meaning of these early texts, the organizing concepts and epistemic codes are related to their contemporary contexts and discursive practices. The Chicago School absorbed methodological principles from current debates concerning evolutionary theories, Social-Darwinism and Pragmatism. Their principal research object was urban community and the evolutive relationship between personality, society and environment. This scheme was supposed to apply from local communities to world-wide structures. In this sense, the Chicago School argues for a unified base for policy studies. In the history of international relations as a discipline, the Chicago School represents early attempts to define international relations in terms of reductive methodologies, participatory research, democratic institutions and pluralistic conceptions of politics. The textual interpretation shows that the Chicago School is mediating to the present two fundamental methodological issues: (a) as a research outline it takes for granted some social and political setting, a context of interpretation and prescription; (b) the scholar must imagine a position and justification for his own activities between this context and the organized body of knowledge he is supposed to represent in contemporary discourses.

Moral Membership in a Postliberal State

This review article interprets Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality as a radical argument for community. It demonstrates the continuity between this volume, in which the particular community and its own moral understanding is the foundation of justice, and Walzer's study of international relations in terms of universal human rights m Just and Unjust Wars. It questions the appropriateness of Walzer's conception of community, of membership, and of shared moral understanding for heterogeneous and differentiated modern societies, and in particular for the United States. It defends liberalism, with its indirect market relations and legal formalism, against Walzer's communitarian challenge, with its substantive agreement among members about the meaning, value, and distribution of goods.

Russia and the Road to Appeasement: Cycles of East-West Conflict in War and Peace (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Russia and the Road to Appeasement: Cycles of East-West Conflict in War and Peace. By George Liska. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 261 pp. $25. Russia and the Road to Appeasement is George Liska's fourth and final volume focusing on the postwar U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Unlike its three predecessors which dealt largely with U.S. foreign policy and the structure of international politics, the latest Liska book looks primarily at U.S. strategy vis-à-vis Soviet Russia. Liska has produced an extremely stimulating, original, and intellectually logical piece of scholarship. Nothing less was to be expected of him, and yet, the question remains, in this case as in those of his previous books, to what extent Liska's writings are relevant to current American political debates regarding relations with the Soviet Union. In the first volume of his monumental memoirs, Henry Kissinger tells of an early encounter he and several other foreign policy scholars had with Nelson Rockefeller, then special assistant for national security affairs to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. According to the former secretary of state, "one professor after another volunteered clever tactical advice on how to manipulate nations—or at least the bureaucracy; how to deal with a president we did not know; or (the perennial problem of national security advisors) how to prevail over an equally unfamiliar secretary of state." Rockefeller was not impressed. He commented sternly: "I did not bring you gentlemen down here to tell me how to maneuver in Washington—that is my job. Your job is to tell me what is right. If you can convince me I will take it to the president. And if I can't sell it to him I will resign." Since that meeting twenty-seven years ago, academics in greater and greater numbers have left their ivory towers and become active participants in policy battles. They advise presidents and secretaries of state and, on occasion, as both Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have demonstrated, they turn into important policymakers in their own right. Today a successful foreign affairs scholar is often not measured by the respect he enjoys among his academic peers, nor by 207 208 SAIS REVIEW the critical acclaim his books receive, but rather by how close he is to the centers of power in Washington and by how well he can play the game of bureaucratic politics. The game, as I am the first to admit, is addictive. It is also constructive when knowledge talks to power. This is especially true at a time when the decline of the old Eastern internationalist establishment, and more specifically of the professional foreign service, together with an influx of ambitious but often ignorant and parochial outsiders confident of their ability to reshape the world, make education of policymakers particularly indispensable. But, as always, there is a price to pay, a price so well illustrated by Kissinger in his memoirs—"What you gain in access to power, you lose in clarity and integrity of thought." When scholars act as politicians there is a danger that the depth and detachment of their analysis will be colored by the political needs and pressures of the moment. Whatever scholarship gains in political power, it probably loses in intellectual power. George Liska is in no such danger. He is virtually unique among leading specialists in international relations in terms of his almost total immunity to Potomac fever. Moreover, he is not all that interested in shifts in American political opinion and, more generally, in what kind of policies this opinion can sustain. His is the world of state entities interacting on the global chessboard, competing, cooperating, and on occasion, fighting each other. The policies Liska recommends could probably be embraced only by an enlightened autocrat. It is more doubtful whether they could be sold to the U.S. political process. Liska is only too well aware of this. He doesn't hide his impatience with domestic determinants of U.S. foreign policy. And his distaste for populist reactionaries calling themselves conservatives (whether of neo-conservative or New Right brand) is self-evident. "The right-wing American pseudo-conservative is suspect of lacking a concrete idea of...

Distributive Justice and the Criticism of International Law

Debate concerning international justice has shifted during this century from issues of legality to those of welfare. Underlying present controversies are differences regarding the character of international society and of political association itself. One division separates those who accept the premises of the states system from others who look forward to a cosmopolitan world society of individuals. And where some identify international justice with conduct according to common rules, others link it with social and economic equality or the achievement of minimum levels of welfare. The idea of distributive justice reflects the view that law and government should promote the latter ends. This raises the question (explored here using some ideas of Michael Oakeshott's) whether the pursuit of distributive justice is compatible with international relations in terms of common rules.

Power Politics and World Organization

Le Pouvoir est la manifestation supreme de la peur que l'homme fait à luimême par ses efforts pour s'en libirer. Là est peut-être le secret le plus profond et obscur de l'histoire. Ferrero, Pouvoir, p. 43.The current discussion of a future world order has made it plain that the problem of coming international relations is of a magnitude surpassing even that of winning the war. It is not intended here to add to the rising tide of concrete plans in this field, but rather to elucidate certain proposals in the light of some basic features of the present system of international relations and, starting from a clearer picture of what is, to seek to discriminate between what is desirable and undesirable, possible and utopian. Wrong concepts of the forces underlying the present system have too often produced “peace plans” built on the sands of wishful thinking, and therefore bound to be wrecked on the rocks of reality. Disappointment caused by the failure of ill-conceived devices, in turn, is apt to produce a “realism” which ridicules any attempt to discuss international relations in terms of a possible evolution toward a more integrated stage.Power, in modern international relations, has been the ultimate means of deciding issues and adjusting relationships among the units constituting international society. The states have regarded themselves as “sovereign” entities, not subordinated to any superior political power nor guided in their power politics by considerations of an a-political, i.e., power-alien, nature.