World Politics

An Introduction to International Relations

Brian Hocking, Michael Smith

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317903826
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politik

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CHAPTER

1

	The nature of world politics
	The aim of this chapter is to outline some of the central features of world politics, and to set out some of the ways in which the study of world politics can be organised. The questions posed are those relating to world politics as an area of social and political life: Who and what is included? What are the central problems and issues? How are the issues approached and tackled? How (if at all) are the problems and issues resolved? How does change occur, and with what results?

Consider the following list of issues and events:

■ The break-up of former Yugoslavia and the war over Bosnia.

■ The opening of the Channel Tunnel by Queen Elizabeth II and President Mitterrand. The Gulf crisis and War of 1990–1.

■ Police cooperation in the European Union in relation to the drugs trade.

■ Palestinian takeover of government in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

■ Disputes between the United States and the People’s Republic of China about the links between trade and human rights.

■ The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa.

■ The spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and efforts to counter it.

■ Problems of nuclear disarmament in the former Soviet Union.

■ The holding of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, United States in 1996.

■ The plight of refugees in Rwanda and other parts of Central Africa after the conflicts of 1994.

Very few people would deny that each of the examples cited above constitutes an important problem, trend or event. Many would also agree that each of them has either direct or indirect political significance. A growing number of people, but by no means all, would agree that these are all examples of world politics in action during the 1990s and that each, in its ownway, demonstrates the global reach of political activities which, in earlier times, might have remained at a local or national level. But what is it about these and similar phenomena which makes them part of ‘world politics’ ? How can such a variety of concerns and events be described and interpreted without adopting the rather unhelpful position that everything is potentially relevant to world politics and that everything is connected with everything else?

One of the central aims of this book is to explore these questions and to suggest ways in which they might be answered. The function of this chapter is to identify and outline some of the major features of world politics at the end of the twentieth century and to suggest ways in which thinking about them can proceed. In Chapter 2, this is followed up by an outline of some of the major schools of thought which will be encountered both in this book and more generally in the study of world politics.

The examples quoted above raise three problems for the study of world politics, and for the student taking his or her first steps in the field. These can be described as the problems of range, complexity and distance:

■ The problem of range arises from the need to find a place for widely differing areas of human activity and to account for events in different parts of the globe. Is it really possible, for instance, to bring under the same general heading the problems of former Yugoslavia and the Channel Tunnel?

■ The problem of complexity arises from the ways in which ‘everything seems to be connected with everything else’, and from the highly technical nature of some international problems: is it really possible to connect human rights with trade, or to find political solutions to the technical problems of nuclear disarmament and the human environment?

■ Finally, the problem of distance arises from the sheer strangeness of many international events and issues: for many students of world politics, the process itself will remain remote from their everyday experience. This being so, is it possible to say anything accurate or useful about the problems of refugees in distant parts of the world, or about the establishment of Palestinian rule in Gaza?

In fact, for many citizens of the world these problems never really arise in a direct form, because their interest in events elsewhere, beyond national or even local boundaries, is not highly developed. Even where they become involved, for example in watching the Olympic Games on television, or in similarly viewing the events in Rwanda, this might be said to be a passive form of involvement, with no awareness of the political manoeuvering which enters into major international sporting events or of the political and military background to refugee problems. However, for the interested layperson and for the new student of world politics, such problems are unavoidable and often raise difficult emotional or political dilemmas.

Given that there are such questions to be confronted, how is the student to approach them? The concern here is with the kinds of questions that can be asked: in Chapter 2, these will be related to the development of world politics as an academic discipline, and to the theories which have emerged within it.

The concerns of world politics

Three fundamental and general concerns have run through the development and study of world politics:

1. There is the perennial question of the political process, which applies to world politics as well as to other branches of the discipline: ‘who gets what, when and how’, and how are competing goals reconciled? This question lies behind problems as apparently disparate as those of the AIDS crisis and the collapse of Yugoslavia, since each in its way expresses competition for attention, resources and status.

2. There has been a central focus not only on the ways in which international relations are political but also on the way in which they give rise to a political system of a distinctive type. A fundamental problem of world politics is thus the occurrence of conflict and cooperation in the absence of a commonly accepted system of world government. This problem in one form or another lies behind the attempt to achieve disarmament and the efforts to deal with refugees, as it does behind the occurrence of trade disputes; each of them raises the problem of management and conflict in a situation where it is not obvious who has the last and authoritative word.

3. The study of world politics has an unavoidable focus on continuity and change. The upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s, both in Europe and elsewhere, brought forth a spectrum of views, some of which claimed that everything had changed and that we lived in a totally transformed world, whilst others claimed that essentially nothing had changed and that world politics continued to all intents and purposes in its established forms. A third view contended that world politics had in effect reverted to the conditions and the problems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with competing nationalisms and a new version of the crises in the Balkans leading to World War 1. None of these extreme views was correct, but each of them raised vital issues of both analysis and policy, since they shaped the ways in which policy-makers and populations responded to the ‘new world’.

All three of these broad concerns – with the political process, with the distinctive nature of world politics, and with continuity and change – will emerge throughout this book, and part of its purpose is to show the ways in which they are relevant to a wide variety of cases.

Although there are natural and important areas of dispute about world politics, there has also been a high degree of continuity in the focus of interest. From the very beginning of thought about international politics, there has been constant attention to four elements of the subject matter: the nature of the world arena and of the participants or ‘actors’ within it; the agenda of problems or issues with which the actors are concerned; the processes by which actors pursue their aims and come into interaction with others; and the results of this action and interaction, in terms of continuity and change, order and justice. A brief discussion of these four elements will help to clarify their importance, and to lay the foundations for discussion in Chapter 2 of a range of approaches to the study of world politics.

The world political arena

The most striking feature of the world arena, even in the final decade of the twentieth century, is its domination by states and their governments. There are many more of these states than there were even as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, and they are more diverse as a group than at that time. In particular, the late 1980s and 1990s have seen the creation of large numbers of new states with the break-up of the Soviet bloc. Although there has thus been a notable series of changes in the ‘world of states’ during the period since World War II, a number of its central political features have remained essentially unchanged, and this has persuaded many writers that there is a fundamental continuity to world politics.

This continuity is based on several features of statehood. States claim sovereignty – the freedom to decide their own affairs – and at least a formal independence and equality, so the chances that any world government can constrain the activities of states are slight at best. States pursue security in an endless competition, so there is a constant danger of escalation and war, however remote this might appear at any given time. Although states will collaborate, this must never be taken for granted and international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) are conditioned by this fact. States, and more particularly the governments which act on their behalf, operate as a bridge between the domestic political and economic scenes and, at the same time, act as a barrier against unwanted and often threatening incursions from other states, governments or societies.

As a result of these features, there is a paradox: states, which can be seen as the source of competition, disorder or even anarchy in the international arena, also operate to provide order, legitimacy and predictability both for their own citizens and for the world more generally (see Chapter 4 and Part 4 of this book). This paradox has effectively existed since states of the modern type became apparent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, and has been sharpened by the increasing numbers and power of states in general.

The world of the 1990s, though, is not simply made up of the nearly 200 states that belong to the UN. Some important international forces, such as the Roman Catholic Church, long predate the states which now exist and there has never been a time at which merchants and terrorists (or their historical equivalents) were not part of the international landscape. One has only to consider the ways in which the Crusaders or the pilgrims of the Middle Ages traversed the face of Europe and the Mediterranean to realise that a focus on the modern state does not provide a full account of the development of international relations. Even at the height of nineteenth-century nationalism focused on the increasingly powerful states of Europe, there were important roles for industry and for other social and economic movements in shaping the international scene.

However, during the 1970s and 1980s there has been a greater tendency than ever before for both academics and practitioners to build the activities of non-state groupings into their calculations. Some have even gone to the extreme of arguing that states are no longer an appropriate agency for the solution of global problems and that, as a result, they will fade slowly but surely from the scene (see Chapter 5).

This is a powerful but inconclusive argument. New problems – of technology, of resources, of the environment or of the economy – demand new measures and new structures, and as a result there has been an explosion of new types of international organisation. But states have proved to be resilient, innovative and in demand as the source of solutions to new problems as well as old. Many apparently novel institutions have thus reflected the continuing dynamism of states and the creativity of their policy-makers in tackling new challenges. The arena of world politics, therefore, is best thought of not in terms of a stark choice between states and non-states but in terms of a spectrum of forces, each of which is relevant to the process of political life: subnational, transnational, governmental, intergovernmental and supranational (see Chapter 5).

Because there is a spectrum of forces in the world arena, it is often difficult to know where to draw the boundaries of the arena itself. This has two particular implications. On the one hand, thanks to the development of new forms of communication and political action, there is almost no part of the globe which is immune to the forces of world politics; the process is more continuous and more all-encompassing than ever before. In addition, it is on occasions almost impossible to define at what point ‘domestic politics’ ends and ‘international politics’ begins.

While the state was still accepted as the building block of world politics, this task was, at least in theory, quite simple – ‘international politics’ was everything that occurred between national states and in which their governments were involved. In contrast, acceptance of the idea that there is a spectrum of political actors and participants in the world arena leads logically to the notion that there is also a spectrum of political contexts in which they act and interact.

To give an indication of the practical implications of this situation it will be helpful to look at two of the examples listed at the beginning of this chapter – the Gulf crisis and War of 1990–1 and the Atlanta Olympic Games. In the first case, it seems that the example fits at least in part the classic image of international politics, with a confrontation and invasion leading to threats and to open warfare between the aggressor and a range of interested states. But the war also dragged in the United Nations, the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), multinational oil companies, arms-dealers, religious groups and a variety of others. Of course, not all of these played a large or continuous part in the conflict – but can they legitimately be ignored?

In the case of the Olympic Games, the issues are technically ‘private’ – between the national Olympic Committees of the countries concerned and the event organisers – but given the intense political symbolism and the economic significance of sport in the contemporary era no-one would pretend that governments could be excluded from any analysis of the case, along wit...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Approaches the book and the subject
• Chapter 1 The nature of world politics
• Chapter 2 The study of world politics
• Part 1 The international arena
• Part 2 The international agenda
• Part 3 Policy, process and power in world politics
• Part 4 Order, justice and change in world politics
• Chapter 14 Power, order and justice in world politics
• Chapter 15 Law, institutions and regimes in world politics
• Chapter 16 Case Study Human rights
• Chapter 17 Images of world politics
• Index