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International Relations

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I. Introduction• Why should policymakers and practitioners

care about the scholarly study of international affairs?

1. Foreign policymakers often dismiss academic theories-rely on their ideas.

2. But it is hard to make good policy, if not basic organizing principles are flawed.

3. Disagreements about usually rest on more fundamental disagreements about the basic forces that shapes international outcomes.

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II. Debates• Case One: How to respond emerging

China?– Perspective one: China’s ascent is the latest

example of the tendency for rising powers to alter global balance of power in potentially dangerous ways, especially as their growing influence makes them more ambitious.

– Perspective two: The key to China’s future conduct is whether its behavior will be modified by its integration into world markets and by the (inevitable?) spread of democratic principles.

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Continue (China) • Perspective three:

– Relations between China and the rest of the world will be shaped by issues of culture and identity: Will China see itself (and seen by others) as a normal members of the international community or a singular society that deserves special treatment?

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• Case Two: NATO expansion?1. Realist’s perspective:

• NATO expansion is an effort to extend Western influence-well beyond traditional sphere of US vital interest-during a period of Russian weakness and is likely to provoke a harsh response from Moscow.

– Liberal’s perspective: • Expansion will reinforce the nascent or

emerging democracies of Central Europe and extend NATO’s conflict-management mechanism to a potentially turbulent region.

– A third view: • It stresses the value of incorporating

some eastern European countries within in the Western security community- whose members share a common identity that has made war largely unthinkable.

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III. Analysis

• No single theory/approach can capture all the complexity of contemporary world politics.

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IV. Where are we coming from?

• The study of IR is best understood as a protracted competition between realist and liberal and radical traditions.

Three Core Assumptions of Realism1. Groupism

– Humans face one another as a member of groups (nation-states etc.). To survive at anything above subsistence level, people need the cohesion provided by group solidarity, yet that very same in-group cohesion generates the potential for conflict with other groups.

2. Egoism– Self-interest ultimately drives political behavior.

3. Power Centrism– Power is the fundamental features of politics. – Once past the hunter-gatherer stage, human affairs are always marked

by great inequalities of power in both sense of that term: social influence or control and resources.

– Key to politics in any area is the interaction between social and material power, an interaction that unfolds in the shadow of potential use of material power to coerce.04/20/23 9

Realism

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Realism• Realism was the dominant theoretical tradition

throughout the Cold War.• It shows IR as a struggle for power among self-

interested multiple sovereign states.• Pessimistic about the prospect of eliminating war and

conflict.• Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr (classical

realists) believed that states, like human being , had an innate desire to dominate others which led to conflict or war.

• They also stressed that bipolar rivalry is extremely dangerous compared to multi-polar one.

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Continue• By contrast, neorealist theory advanced by

Kenneth Waltz ignored human nature and focused on international system.

• He stated that international system consisted of number of great powers, each seeking to survive because the system is anarchic.

• He argued that this condition (anarchic international system) would lead to weaker states to balance against, rather than bandwagon with, more powerful rivals.

• For him, bipolarity was more stable than multi-polarity.

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Refinement of realism- offense and defense theory

1. Defensive2. Offensive

• Defensive realists– They argued that the stronger identity

(nationalism) is the harder it is to conquer and subjugate other groups.

– The harder conquest is, the more secure all states can be.

– Technology may make conquest harder- the capacity to strike back (Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD). Thus, states have still ways defending themselves without threatening other states.

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• Offensive realists– They argued that with no authority to enforce agreements,

states could never be certain that any peace-causing condition today would remain operative in the future.

– Even if conquest may seem today hard owing to geography, technology, or group identity, there is no guarantee against the prospect that another state will develop some fiendish or evil device for overcoming these barriers.

– Given this uncertainty, states can rarely be confident of their security and must always view other states’ increases in power with suspicion.

– They (Offensive Realists) reinforce the classical realists’ argument about the competitive nature of life under anarchy, regardless of internal properties of states.

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Liberalism• Liberalism is identified with three essential principles as

follows:1. The centrality of individual rights,

• The importance of moral freedom – the right to treat and a duty to treat others as ethical subjects, not as objects or means only.

2. Private property • The right to hold, and therefore to exchange property

without fear of arbitrary seizure.3. Representative government

• It is necessary to guarantee the other two rights.

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Strands of Liberalism

1. Interdependence liberalism2. Republican liberalism3. Institutional liberalism4. Sociological liberalism

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Interdependence liberalism

• Economic interdependence would discourage states using force against each other because warfare would threaten each side’s prosperity.

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Republican liberalism

• This strand saw the spread of democracy as the key to world peace.

• It is based on the claim that democratic states were inherently more peaceful than authoritarian states.

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Institutional liberalism

• It is argued that international institutions (IMF, IEA, IMF etc.) could help overcome selfish state behavior, mainly by encouraging states to forego immediate gains for the greater benefits of enduring cooperation.

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Radicalism

• Marxism• Dependency theory

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Marxism/Marxist

• Orthodox Marxist theory saw capitalism as the central cause of international conflict.

• Capitalist states battled each as a consequences of their incessant struggle for profits.

• Capitalist states battled against socialist states because they saw in them the seeds of their own destruction.

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• But it was discredited because the extensive history of military and economic cooperation among the advanced industrial powers showed that capitalism did not necessary lead to conflict.

• The bitter schisms that divided the communist world showed that socialism did not always promote harmony.

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Dependency Theory

• It focused on the relations between the DCs and LDCs.

• It was discredited because it was empirically proven that active participation to world economy was better route to prosperity than autonomous socialist.

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Constructivism

ConstructivismFour Core Propositions of Constructivism1. A belief in the social construction of reality and the

importance of social facts. 2. A focus on ideational as well as material structures

and the importance of norms and rules3. A focus on the role of identity in shaping political

actions and the importance of the logics of actions4. A belief in the mutual constructiveness of agents

and structures, and a focus on practice and action.

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– 1. A belief in the social construction of reality and the importance of social facts.

– A. Constructivists understand the world as coming into being rather than existing as pre-given entity. So their understanding of reality is derived from inter-subjective knowledge and the interpreted nature of social reality. From this perspective, constructivists agree that although some aspects of reality clearly exist as brute facts whose concrete existence is not contested, their meaning is.

• E.g. North Korean nuclear warhead may look similar to French nuclear warhead, and both have devastating consequences, but despite their similar attributes, we attach different meanings to each. This is of relevance to the culture of anarchy because different meanings will also imply different practice and different foreign policy choices, as witnessed in the different U.S. foreign policies vis-à-vis a nuclear armed France and a nuclear-armed North Korea

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– b. Apart from brute facts with different shared meanings, constructivists agree that there are portions of reality that are regarded as facts only through human agreement and which are made observable through practice.

• E.g. money• Social facts in IR. e.g. NATO, ASEAN, etc.

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– 2. A focus on ideational as well as and material structures and the importance of norms and rules• Constructivists emphasize the importance of shared knowledge

material factors, rules, symbols, and language, which all shape how we interpret the world and actions of others.– The insistence that the world is socially constructed is lined to

the second essentially proposition of constructivism- that structure cannot be understood through reference only to material forces such as natural resources and military power, but that it consists of both material and ideational factors.

– Constructivists argue that although structure consists partly of material facts (North Korean and French nuclear warheads) shows, material facts alone have no meaning without understanding the social context, the shared knowledge and the practice surrounding it (French nuclear warheads interpreted in social context of friendship by the U.S., while North Korean … enemy).

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– 3. A focus on the role of identity in shaping political actions and the importance of the logics of actions• Identity is agent’s understanding of self is always dependent on

an ‘other’ for its constitution and, although relatively stable, is a condition that is always in a process of reconstitution and is always supported by a narrative to ensure biographical continuity that makes any changes seem natural. Constructivists believes that identities strongly imply a particular set of interests or preferences in respect of choice of actions (Smith et. al., 2012: 85; Hoft, 1999: 175). – This constructivist’s view of identity as constitutive opposed to

realist and liberal assumption that actors in IP have only one pre-existing identity-that of self-interested state engaged in producing and reproducing a predictability stable world.

• By conceptualizing agents in IP as influenced by their identities, constructivists acknowledge the importance of historical, political and social context of the agents in question, as these the factors that would have contributed to the construction of identity, in the first place. 04/20/23 29

• They maintain that a sole focus on material factors provides an incomplete basis for analysis.– E.g. Denmark and Sweden would be assume to

be like units as small and therefore would be assumed to display similar pattern of action. Yet Sweden’s self-identity as a middle power rather than small state has had profound effects for Swedish policy choices, such as a long tradition of a policy of armed neutrality and expectation of being heard in international negotiation.

– In contrast to Sweden, Denmark whose self-understanding as a small state has produced FP based on protection through alliances and close military cooperation with trusted partners.

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• March and Olsen include both logic of actions in their analysis of political institutions. – They agree with both realist and

liberal who think that action is driven by a logic of consequences.

– However, they contend that actors may also act in the logic of appropriateness (to do things in accordance with their identities).

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– 4. A belief in the mutual constructiveness of agents and structures, and a focus on practice and action.• It claims that structures and agents are mutually

constituted. • Anthony Giddens argues that structures influence agents,

but agents also influence structures through their practice.• Constructivists argue that it is through practice that social

facts are externalized and haitualized and thereby ensured independent existence from the agents who first constructed the social fact and it is through practice that institutions such as self-help or cooperation become embedded.

• However, once it is embedded as taken for granted day-to-day routine, practice will not only underpin the existence of social facts and institutions, but may also be constitutive of structure and identity.

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Conclusion

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Thank you

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