Introduction

While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations (IR) said of the term ‘national interest’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world's population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O'Callaghan 2002: 202–13). The discussion that follows will survey debates on nation and nationalism around four broad questions. The first concerns debates around terminology and their contemporary relevance for the study of IR. The second relates to questions of nation formation and the origins of nationalism, particularly in terms of how it came to shape modern states and international society. The third explores how the ideas of nations and nationalism have been important in IR theory and practice. The fourth section briefly considers the rise of new nationalism in contemporary world politics.

As a discipline, IR has made a surprisingly modest contribution to this scholarship (see Carr 1945; Hinsley 1973; Mayall 1990; Breuilly 2013). Nationalism is often not addressed explicitly, but it has a significant tacit presence in all of the major schools of thought in the discipline. Consequently, mainstream IR theories have compounded some of the analytical problems associated with understanding nationalism. For example, classical realists have tended to conflate nation and state into the concept of ‘national interest’, while liberal and Marxist theorists have been internally conflicted over the merits of nationalism versus its potential to undermine ideals of internationalism. The study of nationalism should be a central consideration for any analysis of the major issues in contemporary global politics because taking questions of national interest, values and identity seriously is one way of invoking the idea that culture and ‘people’ matter.

Introduction

The discipline of International Relations (IR) owes its origins to the study of war and peace. But do the wars of the early twenty-first century differ so fundamentally from their predecessors that they need to be considered in quite different ways? This chapter provides a barometer on the character of warfare and its implications for contemporary international relations. It begins with warfare's diverse ends and means before considering five leading issues: the role of violence in warfare; the extent to which that violence is organised; the political nature of war; the interactive nature of warfare; and the scope and scale of war. The overall argument presented here is that while war today may look rather different from wars of earlier periods, much of its essential nature remains intact. This should make us sceptical about claims that the role of war in international relations has somehow been revolutionised.

The diversity of warfare

IR students need little reminder that they are traversing a discipline with hotly contested leading concepts. But we might be excused for supposing that the meaning and character of something as concrete as war would be an open and shut case. As this author has indicated elsewhere (Ayson 2006: 10–24), the field that looks at the place of war in international politics – strategic studies – often avoids debates about meaning and terminology, let alone theory.

But war can mean quite different things to different people in different parts of the world. Aside from such unhelpful notions as the ‘War on Terror’ and the ‘war on drugs’ (which are about as meaningful as the idea of a ‘war on war’ itself), our subject admits to a quite remarkable variety. It includes large-scale and nearly total war between states (and groups of nation-states) as seen in the twentieth century's two World Wars. It includes interstate war fought in more limited fashion for more limited goals (as in the war between Britain and Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in the early 1980s). Also included are the messy internal wars including the American Civil War in the 1860s, China's long war which Mao's communist forces, eventually won in the late 1940s, and, much more recently, the violence between multiple factions in Syria's brutal civil war, which began in 2011.

Introduction

One of the fundamental characteristics of any international system is the distribution of power among states. The sheer fact that states are unequal in terms of power entails a number of important implications for international politics. For example, while the desires and concerns of weak states are often neglected, the demands of strong states usually shape the international agenda; relations among strong states, in turn, significantly affect patterns of international stability, order and change. In short, if you want to shed light on some basic dynamics of international affairs, for analytical or practical purposes, always ask yourself a set of very simple questions: How is power distributed among states? Which are the strong states? How do they stand in relation to each other? Although the relationship of forces is by no means the only explanatory variable at play, it frequently goes a long way in accounting for who gets what, when and how on the international stage.

What we have generically called ‘strong states’ are often referred to as great powers. At first sight, the definition of ‘great power’ seems unproblematic. After all, do we not know who the great powers are today? And do we not know who the great powers were in, say, the nineteenth century? Do we not recognise a great power when we see one? Yet if we look closer and try to come up with a working definition, things immediately get more complicated. The next section of this chapter will therefore focus on the attributes of a great power, on the elements – or the combination of elements – that allow us to tell a great power from other states. Such a conceptual effort will be followed by a brief historical regression intended to show the role played by the great powers in the modern and contemporary international systems. Next we will examine the main theories of International Relations (IR) that claim to explain broad patterns of cooperation and conflict between great powers. Some emphasise the special functions that great powers perform; some rely on the number of the existing great powers; some identify in the rise and decline of the great powers the basic force behind international change. The last section will assess the relevance of the established knowledge for the post-Cold War international system.

Introduction

The first section of this chapter looks at how the two terms ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ came to be defined as distinct from each other in the context of the modern state. As the reification of borders intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, citizenship became an essential part of ‘belonging’ to a state as well as indicating the strength of the state itself. Hence, the categorisation of those ‘outside’ the state developed as a way of ascertaining who belonged and who did not. The second section examines how states define and categorise refugees through laws that seek to contain and limit their flow. The third section is concerned with the consequences of limiting the definition of a refugee, which has led to an unequal burden between developed and developing states. The final section canvasses the various options presented to reduce the present imbalance, where the vast majority of the world's refugees eke out an existence in refugee camps in developing countries. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the choices made by states in border protection become the key determinants of how refugees will be accepted. Adherence to international refugee law will not necessarily address all the problems associated with refugees, but nor will seeing refugees as unwanted intruders in contrast to ‘desirable’ migrants.

States, refugees and immigrants

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard campaigned in the 2001 federal election under the slogan ‘We will decide who comes to this country and under what circumstances’ (Marr and Wilkinson 2003: 277). As this demonstrates, there is arguably no greater control than determining who is a ‘legitimate’ citizen of the state – that is, determining who can and cannot live within your borders. Being able to secure borders and identify when they are being breached is essential to state sovereignty. Consider how Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban recently called Syrian refugees attempting to enter his country ‘a poison’ that his country ‘won't swallow’. Orban went on to describe refugees as migrants that the country did not want or need, because ‘every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk’ (The Guardian 2016). The determination of whether an individual's crossing of a border is illegal, whether they are crossing as a migrant or a refugee, is part of how a state constructs its identity and territoriality.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the theory and practice of global climate politics. First, it presents a brief history of the politics of climate change as they play out in the international negotiations on the issue overseen by the United Nations. Second, it looks at the formal organisational and institutional structures that exist to manage the international community's response to climate change. Third, it reviews the ways in which different theories of International Relations (IR) have been applied to climate change, assessing both their potential and limitations. Finally, it offers some thoughts on the evolving nature of the ‘global’ governance of climate change.

The issue of global climate change (see Box 35.1) has moved to the centre of the international agenda in recent years. As scientific consensus about the severity of uncontrolled warming strengthens around the idea that nations should take immediate steps to reduce their contribution to climate change, politicians are under pressure to act. Yet the fact that climate change is caused by such a wide array of everyday human activities creates a coordination and cooperation challenge of staggering proportions. Added to this, the uneven contribution of nations to the problem and the uneven exposure of different social groups to the worst effects of climate change make it an issue of social justice since, for the most part, those who will suffer the worst impacts of climate change have contributed least to the problem. This links climate change to broader North–South debates about aid, finance, technology and development. Also, despite the fact that many people in vulnerable locations are already exposed to the effects of climate change, some of the most dramatic effects will not be felt for many years. This introduces the complex question of inter-generational justice while providing few incentives for this generation of politicians to bear the brunt of the costs of taking actions from which unborn children will be the primary beneficiaries.

As well as being seen as a serious issue in its own right, climate change is also increasingly connected to other key issues in international relations, such as development, trade and security.

Introduction

World politics has always had a plurality of players. The key is not so much to determine which have primacy, but how they interact to produce the prevailing order. This chapter is structured around a discussion of multinational corporations (MNCs) and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) respectively. Each is discussed in terms of: first, the degree to which it has transnationalised; second, the extent to which it constitutes a social formation able to exert international agency; and third, the degree to which it is able to marshal political influence and status. It is argued that there is no necessary antagonism between state and non-state realms. Instead, relations between state and non-state forces are intermeshed and shaped by broader systemic conflicts. The chapter charts material class antagonisms that shape the role of MNCs and INGOs, and argues that these generate patterns of transnational contestation within international relations.

In the post-Cold War context, globalisation theory made considerable headway. For hyper-globalisationists at least (see Chapter 28), newly powerful transnational forces were overwhelming state and inter-state incumbents. With US power embedded in a range of inter-state frameworks, a model of multilateral unipolarity appeared to be emerging – a model in which US dominance was embedded and restrained by a network of multilateral institutions. More recently, we have seen the advent of a significantly more unilateralist unipolarity, as the United States increasingly has disengaged itself from multilateral institutions by adopting exceptionalist and pre-emptive doctrines. The consequences for globalisation theory have been wide ranging. By the mid-2000s, not only had the hype been exposed as ideology, but the ideology itself was claimed to have been superseded (see McGrew 2007).

The global financial collapse of 2008 exemplified the problem. The crisis was driven by non-state actors (banks and financial institutions), but it was concerted state action that restored the system. Resulting bail-outs and stimulus packages amounted to a fifth of global GDP, and produced a wave of austerity (Harvard Business Review 2010). By 2016, advocates of financial globalisation had been widely discredited, and new challengers were gaining government both on the left and right.

Introduction

This textbook is designed specifically for students studying introductory international relations (IR) courses. Like any good textbook, it aims to introduce students to the study of IR by laying out its chief theories, main actors and institutions, and leading issues in a manner that both excites interest and lucidly explains topics for students with no previous background in IR. Carving up the topics of a complex, dynamic, growing discipline like IR is no easy task. Decisions inevitably must be made about which topics to include and which to exclude. The topics chosen no doubt reflect but one particular perspective of the discipline's present make-up – one account of what is important for students to learn and what is not. Since there is no single correct way to present the material to undergraduate students, there is always a degree of arbitrariness involved in topic selection, and we do not pretend otherwise. However, we believe that the structure adopted here, developed and adapted over many combined years of teaching undergraduate introductory IR courses, offers one useful way into the wide range of fascinating topics that fall under the heading ‘international relations’.

Once again we have revised and updated chapters from the previous edition, but we have also added new chapters and a new part. The textbook is now divided into four parts: Part I on theories of IR; Part II on international history; Part III on what we term the ‘traditional agenda’ of IR, which focuses on states, war and law; and Part IV on the ‘new agenda’, which focuses on globalisation and global governance. These are explicated in more detail in the Introduction, but it is worth emphasising that the new agenda does not succeed the traditional agenda in either time or intellectual resourcefulness. The distinction between traditional and new agendas is a heuristic device meant to remind students that the discipline has evolved and changed, and to encourage reflection on the discipline's historical character. Quite often, textbooks imply that our present conception of the discipline represents something like the end-point in the discipline's ineluctable progression from primitive origins to full development. This conceit is easy to succumb to in the absence of historical-mindedness.

Introduction

This chapter presents a fleeting history of key changes in global trade and finance in the post-war period, organised around the themes of crisis and cooperation. The first section of the chapter discusses the key themes; the second section considers the emergence of the post-World War II Bretton Woods regime; the third section outlines the rise of private capital in the 1970s; the fourth section traces the impact of the Debt Crisis of the 1980s; the fifth section considers discussions of global financial architecture in the 1990s and the early 2000s; and the sixth section discusses changes from 2004 to 2016, focusing on how the trade regime has stalled and the financial regime has partly been rolled back. Finally, the concluding section reflects on what changes in the US administration and the reassertion of economic nationalism might mean for global trade and finance. Key terms relating to global trade and finance are explained in Box 26.1.

Who is afraid of the global economic system?

Calls for the study of global trade and finance were initially based on fears that the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (discussed below) gave market actors the upper hand over states, and that the states needed to cooperate to avoid tariffs and encourage economic growth. Without cooperation on trade and finance, the world economy would be prone to frequent and severe economic crises, reinforcing trade wars, agitating actual military conflicts and creating a drain on the established welfare systems in advanced industrial economies. Such a failure would also hinder economic growth and statebuilding in developing economies, deepening their structural economic dependence on the West.

Within International Relations (IR), the study of global trade and finance in international relations has developed a broad range of research questions and analytical perspectives. The sub-field of International Political Economy typically considers two key themes: (1) crisis – why the contemporary world economy is prone to international economic crises; and (2) cooperation – how to combat crises and enhance cooperation through the creation of a better designed regimes, especially through international organisations. The most common aspect of both themes is the role of the United States as the ‘hegemon’ within global trade and financial regimes, as it respectively propagates crises in trade and finance in reaction to domestic pressures, and seeks to dominate formal decision-making in trade and finance regimes.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the concept and practice of security in international relations. It explores the dilemmas faced by states, individuals and the global community by first, looking at contemporary crises and disagreements about security; second, examining how security has been differently defined and focused; and third, surveying how different theoretical approaches have understood and analysed security.

Security and insecurity in the early twenty-first Century

Security has been a major focus of national policy and global governance since the end of World War II, although its origins date back to the Renaissance. In modern political thought, security is associated with the perpetuation of a social order and constellation of power controlled and guaranteed by a sovereign—which, by the twentieth century, meant the government of a sovereign nation-state (Burke 2007a; Neocleous 2008). With the rise of the national security state after 1945, security became associated with national defence, deterrence and alliance management, and it also remained concerned with the security of major power empires, trade and investment. However, the devastation of World War II meant that it also became a global concern expressed in the Charter of the United Nations, which in Article I declared that its primary purpose was to ‘maintain international peace and security’ and ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’; it therefore established major organs such as the Security Council and General Assembly. Over the subsequent half-century, member states have expanded global security governance with new treaties such as the chemical and biological weapons and landmines conventions, the Geneva conventions codifying the law of armed conflict, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and new norms such as the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). This global system based in international law is termed ‘collective security’, and coexists with (and aims to regulate) the national security policies of states and strategic alliances into which they have entered, such as NATO. Another layer of global security governance is provided by regional organisations like the African Union, South America's Organisation of American States (OAS), East Asia's ASEAN and Europe's CSCE.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the principal actor in international relations: the sovereign state. It begins by defining the state. Second, it explores the origins of the state in the transition from the Medieval to the modern world. Third, it examines the concept of sovereignty, especially as it was enunciated in early modern political thought. Fourth, it surveys different historical explanations of how the sovereign state triumphed over alternative forms of political society. Finally, it surveys some of the continuing debates about the morality and utility of the modern state.

What is a state?

The state may not be the only actor in world politics (see Chapter 23), but it is widely recognised as the one that has the greatest impact on people's lives. It is, as John Dunn (2000: 66) says, ‘the principal institutional site of political experience’. This is why the title of J.D.B. Miller's book, A World of States (1981), seems like such an apt description of international relations. But although we live in a world of states today, it was not always thus. At various moments in time, city-states, empires, feudal states, absolutist states or nation-states have been the dominant institutional form. So, although humanity has always been divided into separate political societies, the character of these societies has varied both historically and geographically. Sovereign states are distinctly modern inventions, and how long they will remain the principal institutional site of politics is a contentious issue, with some scholars suggesting that globalisation may be eclipsing the sovereign state (see Chapter 28). Whether or not the sovereign state is declining in importance, moral doubts about it continue to find expression. The state is, in many respects, a perpetually controversial subject precisely because it has been so central to domestic and international political life since the sixteenth century.

It is worth noting at the outset that a modern state, in its simplest sense, refers to an abstract entity comprising a government, a population and a territory (see Box 11.1). Much more needs to be said about this abstract entity, but for the moment it is enough to note that it possesses ‘a collective personality which makes it immortal’ (van Creveld 1999: 258).

Introduction

This chapter explores the role of three global economic institutions (GEIs) in contemporary economic governance: the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The impact of GEIs on states and societies is complex, and widely varying assessments of the performance of these organisations can be found in the literature. The first part of the chapter discusses global governance and globalisation, and examines competing perspectives on international organisations given the absence of theoretical consensus on the roles and functions of international economic organisations. Controversies over the role of the GEIs in the global economy have focused on the economic impact of their activities and their representative nature as institutions of governance. The second part of the chapter therefore explores the historical evolution of the IMF, World Bank and WTO as they have adapted to the challenges of an evolving global economy. In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), there has been renewed speculation concerning the continuing relevance of key international economic institutions. The third section of the chapter therefore focuses on key challenges facing the GEIs in the wake of the GFC.

The three global economic institutions discussed in this chapter owe their existence to the creation of a multilateral economic order after the end of World War II. This commitment to a multilateral order based on liberal economic principles has been called into question since the GFC. It has been argued that ‘multilateral institutions and the aspirations for them have not matched the pace of global change or new rationales for multilateral engagement emerging from global challenges’ (Adams and Luchsinger 2012: 10). In this context, it is pertinent to note that the heads of key global economic institutions have intervened in this debate. For example Pascal Lamy, then the Director- General of the WTO, warned in 2012 that

Introduction

This chapter introduces students to the rich and controversial legacy of Marxism and one of its major offshoots in the twentieth century, critical theory. The chapter is presented in two parts. The first touches on the historical and intellectual context that ‘created’ Marxism; Marx's notion of historical materialism and the issue of how Marx's ideas have been received in IR. The second part concentrates on the two strands of critical theory that have emerged within IR: one derived from the so-called Frankfurt School and the other from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

Historical and intellectual context: Marx and the critique of capitalism

During the nineteenth century, European societies underwent dramatic and sometimes traumatic changes internally while expanding their colonial rule to almost every corner of the world. Importantly, this expansion of European imperialism and the global consolidation of what is often referred to as the ‘Westphalian states-system’ occurred simultaneously with the comprehensive shift to industrialised production (known as the Industrial Revolution), significant changes in the ownership and control of property and large-scale population transfers, both internally and externally towards parts of the colonised world. By the nineteenth century economic affairs were also changing significantly, with the gradual demise of mercantilism and the rise of capitalism. Victorian Britain (England, specifically) had emerged as the hotbed of these developments, with its extraordinary innovations in industrial production and technology, and in the capitalist production process. It also provided many of the conceptual principles for understanding and legitimising the socio-economic transformations inaugurated by capitalism.

At the intellectuall core of this major historical transformation were philosophers such as Adam Smith (1723–90) in the eighteenth century and David Ricardo (1772– 1823) in the nineteenth century, who helped develop what became known as the liberal ‘political economy’. An outgrowth of moral philosophy, this field of inquiry was concerned primarily with the political and economic conditions of social change. It also became the basis for the discipline of (neoclassical) economics.

The new political economists advanced more stringent conceptions of ‘efficiency’ under capitalism. Arguing against the accumulated wealth and land ownership of the traditional aristocracy, they insisted wealth must be circulated and invested across the whole society. In this regard, they were advocates for an ‘entrepreneurial’ shift from subsistence economies to industrial production, and for social progress guided by scientific reason.