History of the International System - Course Outline

Central questions of the course:

What is a state?

What is a sovereignty?

What is the relationship between the domestic political world and the international system of which it is a part?

"All of us know that what we want to do and what we do is always the subject of an interaction between our will and the world around us. We continually face as we live our lives, friction, that is the resistance of the world to our effort to master it and to act within it"

- Martin White

This conflict between freedom and necessity, will and circumstance, is a part of all life and politics.

It has a particular meaning on the international scene, because there are people who want to prevent us from doing what we want. There is a built in competition and conflict in the international scene that makes the struggle particularly intense.

Constant thread that runs through the study of international relations: struggle of people in power to master their world and resistance the world puts up.

Metaphor: Public transportation in London - omnibuses driven by teams of powerful horses, the men holding their reins might look immensely powerful but in reality aree continually hammed in by other vehicles and traffic. They were very lucky if they got to where they were going without tipping over. That's the way it is when you're making policy.

Insider/Outsider bias

Outsider bias - that which most of us share - tends to greatly overestimate what is possible.

Insider bias - decision making bias, which tends to think that nothing can be other than it is, that what was done HAD to be done.

We should be aware of both underestimating and overestimating the ranges of choice as we try to understand the POVs of the decision makers and those who must both carry out and suffer from their decisions.

SPACE/TIME

These decisions are made within the dimesions of space and time.

Space

PHYSICAL SPACE of the world.

A book called "The Earth is Flat" by Thomas Freedman postulated that physical space had lost its meaning in the tangible world. Tell that to the people wandering in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan/Iraq. Physical space means a lot in terms of distance, resistance it puts up & setting limits to states.

Famous encounter between a Japanese and an American diplomat in the 1930s:

A: What were the principles that Japanese foreign policy was based on?

J: Your policy might be based on principles, but Japan is based on an archipelago.

The island nature of Japan, its limited resources, was the most powerful determinant of what the Japanese could and could not do.

SACRED SPACE of the world. Historical space.

Space that has an importance beyond its physical location and size.

Think about the small province of Kosovo - not rich of natural resources/oil. And yet this impoverished province, destitute piece of real estate, is something for which a good # of people are willing to die. Because although now inhabited by a majority of Albanians, it is the site of the most sacred of Serbian historical sites: "The Field of Black Birds", the place where the Serbs lost a battle in the Middle Ages, thought of as being the beginning of the Serbian history.

Think about Temple Mount in Jerusalem: sacred space for the three monotheistic religions in the world. Sacred for the memories that it holds.

Time

These decisions, efforts to impose ones will, takes place in TIME.

The pressures of time are rarely as pressing to the outsider as to the insider.

Decisions must be made swiftly and on the basis of information that is always incomplete and often wrong. The insider is profoundly aware of these limitations, of the speed with which decisions must be made & their difficulty.

In international affairs the pressure of time is always acting.

Just as with space, there is a HISTORICAL dimension of time. Historical past can be a burden, a limitation. Weight of the past makes rational alternatives impossible. Think about Kosovo - think about the Israelis and Palestinians. The time that presses upon them as they try to find some accommodation.

Space & time as the nexus for decision is something Americans must be particularly conscious of. To understand what space & time mean to most of the world because we have the advantage of living on a great continent with oceans separating us from potential enemies, with no great power on either border. Space does not mean what it means to the Kosovans, Palestinians, the Czechians, the Sri Lankans. For us space is there to be moved in with freedom.

As with time. America - blessed with resources, distance, space we inhabit, all the advantages for which we like to claim credit but which are largely the result of historical good fortune.

Hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those for whom history, your name, your family's history, is a burden.

INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

The society of states.

Society because states, like individuals, need one another.

In the society of states there is a built in tension between our need for community, collective existence & cooperation and our desire to impose our own will --> An ancient philosophical problem. NEED FOR OTHERS & DESIRE TO GET OUR OWN WAY.

Nature of all society and the society of states, which develops rules to regulate individual desires so that common life is possible --> conventions, customs, laws, etc.

BUT in the society of states there is no 911. There are rules but no one to enforce them.

Mutual needs, individual desires & rules -> but there is no one to make states conform to the rules.

This truth has a structural impact on the way the international system works.

Law of the jungle: "A war of all against all, held in check by calculations of power and interest, but always inherently possible to break out." -Thomas Hobbs

.:. there is in the society of states what you would have in all human societies without a sovereign leader: a potential for violence & chaos.

Mutual needs, individual desires & rules...and a potential for violence.

SOVEREIGNTY

Principle honoring category for the society of states: sovereignty.

Sovereignty:

1. The right to act independently in the international scene. To some legal degree autonomous.

ie: Have a delegate to the UN, an army, postal stamps, currency.

2. Have control over your own territory.

3. The government/state is the last resort/source of power at home.

4. Independence abroad, preeminence at home.

5. All have territories, boundaries, laws, claim the right to enforce these laws.

Very important if you're a state to be SOVEREIGN, because if you are not there are profound limitations.

Is the Congo a sovereign state? It has a delegate to the UN, an army, postal stamps. BUT it cannot act independently, it's being violated by its neighbours all the time. It's government does not have control over its own territory. Abridgements of sovereignty - practical or legal - have enormous consequences for everyone involved.

The basis of sovereignty by the end of the 19th century is connected to NATIONS and the NATIONAL WILL. We tend to use nation & state synonymously, and yet it is of extreme importance for the international system and for the domestic life of states that sovereignty and democracy, popular sovereignty, have come to be the norm. Popular sovereignty is a very elusive property. One thing to say the nation should have sovereignty but that assumes that you know what the nation is.

In Ireland, Sri Lanka, Spain, Cyprus, and MANY more, the conflict between nation and state, where the definition of popular in popular sovereignty is deeply problematic.

ELEMENTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

1. A society of sovereign states without and external force without an external force to impose ORDER.

2. Economic system/Market: which by the end of the 19th century has become a global market. Like the society of states, is of a social construct, with units that need one another but need to exert their interests. The units are individuals, firms, coorporation...The mode of operation have to do with the pursuit of profit whereas in the society of states we pursue power and security. In the international market, the ends are material advantage and the means are trade, negotiation, compromise, etc. There is nothing "natural" about markets - all depend upon instruments of power. Necessary linkage between states and markets...Think of currency, contracts, property relations. And of course states use this market, seek to monopolize certain commodities, etc. .:. Markets and political systems work in a symbiotic relationship.

3. Culture: International forms of culture that we begin to see at the end of the 19th century. Internationalization of culture is driven by the same forces that drive the economy: media, market relationships, transportation, etc. In fashion & sports, beginning at the end of the 19th century and certainly by the end of the 20th, we begin to have an international culture. Think of the World Cup. Most important aspect of these culture relationships come from cultural forms that give meaning, direction and value to life.

- Religion: Some would say the world is becoming secularized and bears less effect, but it remains a powerful force, of meaning and political action.

- Ideology: Maps of the world have an international dimension, the Cold War was an ideological conflict between 2 ways of mapping the world. Liberalism, the dominant ideology at the moment, and international phenomena, source of meaning and political action.

Both international in their character, of essential importance to the way the international system works. Culture has both an international dimension and a close relationship to the society of states. Just as states use the market to further their power, so states have used religion. Spain used Catholicism, Britain used Protestantism, the Ottoman Empire used Islam.

See the world of the market and international culture through the prism of states and their interactions.

UNIVERSALISM

From the Renaissance (15th, 16th century) when people began to think of the world as broken up into conflicting entities, realizing the old Empire was gone forever, they began to dream of other versions of universalism. Taking this conflict ridden international system and bring to it some everlasting ORDER. As we would expect, these dreams of universalism are made up from the historical material at hand.

So the first dreams of universalism were RELIGIOUS. A world of Christians, Muslims, etc.

Beginning in the 18th century the dreams of peace drifted towards unification through the ECONOMY. Adam Smith and others believed trade and commerce could be a source of peace and cooperation, that commercial men (merchants) were by nature non-violent: compromisers, not warriors. As these men became more powerful the world would become a more peaceful place. The 21st century version of that is globalization: global markets will produce a peace of consumption, people struggling to better their lives.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries there were those that believed that universalism would come from DEMOCRACY, that democratic institutions (parliaments, voting) that seemed to be providing a source of non-violent conflict resolution could be transferred to the world as a whole, that democratic states would not fight each other and that the more prominent democracy became in the international system the less chance there would be of violence. We recognize this refrain, think of the 1790s and the writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kahnt, we hear echoes of this in the contemporary world.

Our TIME together is not going to give us a great deal of confidence in any of these dreams of universalism. Looking at the history of the last century, there is very little reason to believe that there is some source of peace and order that will drain from the international system its inherent propencities for violence.

These three dreams, each valuable in itself, are not TOGETHER enough to control the international system.

Rather unhappy lesson of the last 100 years or so:

"Justice is not bought per say. It's not bought as a single product that will make the world a different and ultimately peaceful place. Doesn't mean the search for justice, for peace for security is not an important one, but it means that it's a search that is likely to result in short term, minor advantages and gains rather than single, all-out victories."