Theories of International Relations

1
Theories of International Relations

• Week 13
• Security IIII - Theorizing the Post-Cold War Era

2
Introduction

• A reminder that the second non-assessed essay is
  due Monday, 2 February at 12 noon at S1.44 (the
  PAIS Undergraduate Office).
• Today, we consider optimistic and pessimistic
  responses to our future security after the Cold
  Wars end in the late 1980s.
• The objective is not to assess whether any of
  these views are accurate.
• Instead, I want to consider these ways of
  thinking as approaches to IR theory.

3
Outline

• Fukuyama
• Evaluating Fukuyama
• Democratic Peace Thesis
• Evaluating Democratic Peace Thesis
• Huntington
• Evaluating Huntington
• Mearsheimer
• Evaluating Mearsheimer
• Main Points and Next Time

4
Fukuyama

• In 1989 Fukuyama argued that the most important
  thing about the cold war was the clash between
  different ideas.
• Fukuyama argued 1989 meant the Western liberal
  ideas had won.
• What this means, said Fukuyama, was that there is
  now no organized body of thinking that opposes
  democracy.
• Because history is about the clash of ideas for
  Fukuyama, the end of this clash with the end of
  the cold war, means that history is over.
• Fukuyama sees post-cold war international
  relations as one where the basis for cooperation
  between states has never been better.
• Theories of IR should now be concerned with
  technical questions of making that cooperation
  happen most efficiently he says.

5
Evaluating Fukuyama

• What are we to make of Fukuyama's idea that
  history is over? The end of history may only
  affect a fairly small proportion of the world's
  population, given that at best maybe 60 states
  are democratic (according to Huntington).
• Huntington also makes the point that even if the
  collectivist idea as we have known it is dead
  this does not mean that it will be Liberalism
  that will win as the new idea.
• If problems appear in the operation of global
  free markets then perhaps some third set of ideas
  will re-establish "history" in terms of a clash
  of ideas?
• Remember Zhou Enlais remark on French Revolution
• The political consequences of Fukuyama's argument
  are important to understand. Fukuyama's article
  underlined the superiority of American values to
  Americans and others, thereby providing
  legitimacy to those who sought to 'export' this
  particular liberalism to other countries.

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Democratic Peace Thesis

• Before I consider the contemporary notion of the
  democratic peace thesis, I am going to discuss
  Kant.
• Kant is important because his work provided clues
  about how peace is generated which the democratic
  peace thinkers have seized upon.
• Kant was interested in identifying the ways and
  means through which an ever-widening zone of
  peace (a pacific union) could be established
  amongst states in order to improve the human
  condition.
• In trying to generate a system of relations
  between states which generate perpetual peace,
  Kant suggested three things were important.
• The First Definitive Article mandates
  representative government in which all citizens
  are legally equal. The purpose of this form of
  government is to prevent tyrannies from
  developing inside states.

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DPT (cont)

• The Second Definitive Article suggests a "pacific
  federation" of states of the form given in the
  First Definitive Article. This would be an
  understanding that a separate peace exists. The
  benefits that flow from peace would influence
  more states to join this separate peace.
• The Third Definitive Article focuses on
  encouraging international commerce, requiring
  agreement to a "cosmopolitan law" which
  guarantees foreigners are treated fairly in the
  conduct of trade.
• Representative governments, he argues, are
  effective ways to meet foreign threats and tame
  ambitious individuals. State aggression is
  tempered in representative systems.
• However, when liberal representative states are
  confronted by illiberal non-representative states
  the outcome may be war because liberal states are
  deeply sceptical of states which do not share the
  definitive articles.

8
DPT (cont)

• The modern counterpart to Kant's ideas emerge in
  the 1980s and become a major focus of American
  international relations theory after 1990.
• The democratic peace thesis has had high level
  political support. President Clinton observed
  that "Democracies don't attack each other" in his
  1994 State of the Union address.
• Levy (1989) has observed that the democratic
  peace idea is "the closest thing we have to an
  empirical law in the study of international
  relations."
• At its heart, the democratic peace thesis says
  that "democracies tend not to fight other
  democracies" (and that "democracies fight
  non-democracies.").
• These simple observations were the result of
  long-term quantitative studies undertaken in US
  universities (eg. the Correlates of War project
  based at Princeton). More recently that
  international relations theorists such as Doyle
  have tried to link this work to the ideas of Kant
  and other writers.

9
DPT (cont)

• While Kant's notion of perpetual peace seems to
  be some way off in our world, advocates of the
  democratic peace argue that similarly organized
  liberal democratic states replace the logic of
  power with the logic of accommodation.
• Russett sees two explanations of the democratic
  peace. First, a cultural-normative (or
  ideological) one which emphasises the resolution
  of conflicts by compromise without violence
  inside democracies.
• Second, structural-institutional explanations
  which focus on internal checks and balances and
  the need to generate public consensus, all of
  which work to prevent violence. Leaders of
  democracies will not fear surprise attack from
  other democracies.
• Advocates of the democratic peace thesis such as
  Russett hope to achieve is an acknowledgement
  that what happens inside states does affect
  international relations, and that the crude
  Realism of a war of all against all is a fallacy.

10
Evaluating DPT

• Many objections can be made to the democratic
  peace thesis. The obvious claim, which we are
  not dealing with here, is that it is factually
  inaccurate.
• Although most social scientists agree that the
  empirical claims of the democratic peace thesis
  are strong, the approach lacks a well-developed,
  convincing theoretical explanation for why war is
  unthinkable.
• For example, if Kant was right about the
  constraints on war established by representation
  (the popular franchise) then why has
  representation not stopped the many wars between
  democratic and non-democratic states?
• It may be the case, as Owen (1994) has written,
  that representation (electoral democracy) is not
  sufficient to constrain the resort to war. He
  argues that states must also be liberal.
  Relatively few nations are actually liberal
  democracies (and they are mainly in northwestern
  Europe and North America).

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Evaluating DPT (cont)

• An alternative explanation for democratic peace
  may be that liberal states tend to be wealthy
  with less to gain (and more to lose) from
  conflict than poorer authoritarian states.
• Perhaps the best explanation lies in relations of
  amity between democratic states which make war
  unthinkable (eg. Canada and the U.S.) arising not
  from being liberal democracies but from being
  friends.
• Even states with very different, mutually
  exclusive systems (Mexico and Cuba) are good
  friends.
• The obvious point to make again is how much the
  democratic peace thesis serves U.S. policy
  concerns after the cold war. Particularly
  interesting, of course, is how it may justify
  intervention in non-liberal states.

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Huntington

• For Huntington, the history of international
  relations is of changing sources of conflict.
  Before the French Revolution, princes fought each
  other in Europe. After the Revolution it was
  nations. The Russian Revolution is the first
  ideological conflict. These were all, Huntington
  says, conflicts within Western civilization.
• With the end of the cold war, international
  relations moves out of its Western-dominated
  phase, Huntington argues, and the central
  interaction is between Western and non-Western
  civilizations (and among non-Western
  civilizations).
• Huntington acknowledges that civilizations blend
  and overlap. He identifies the Western,
  Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu,
  Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and "possibly
  African" civilizations.
• Despite this, he argues that the lines of
  division between them "are real" or significant
  for international relations.

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Huntington (cont)

• He sees six reasons for conflict between
  civilizations
• The cultural differences are fundamental and
  ancient
• The world is becoming a smaller place and the
  intensified interactions encourage animosities
• Revival of fundamentalist versions of religion
• The power of the West encouraging reaction
• Easier to compromise on politics and economics
  than culture, which is more basic. The "What are
  you?" question cannot be changed. According to
  Huntington, "A person can be half-French and
  half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of
  two countries. It is more difficult to be
  half-Catholic and half-Muslim."
• Economic regionalism is growing. Eg. European
  Union, NAFTA etc.

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Huntington (cont)

• The "fault lines" between civilizations are
  replacing the political and ideological
  boundaries of the cold war as the flash points.
• States will still fight each other within a
  common civilization, but these conflicts will be
  less intense.
• What does Huntington recommend for Western
  policy? He recommends Western policy makers
  cooperate more and unify their own civilization
  with this new threat in mind.
• In the longer run, the West needs to develop
  greater understanding of the basic philosophical
  assumptions of other civilizations because there
  will be no universal civilization.

15
Evaluating Huntington

• Huntington's argument is interesting because it
  acknowledges changing sources of tension. He is
  a traditional Realist who has done most of his
  work on states, but here we see acknowledgement
  that things do change in international relations.
  
• There are many difficulties with the set of
  civilizations Huntington selects. Is Indonesia,
  for example, part of Muslim or Confucian
  civilization?
• Are these civilizations as coherent as Huntington
  seems to believe? Islam, for example, is not a
  monolithic body of thought.
• Realists argue that the state system seems to
  continue to divide civilizations despite
  Huntington's warnings. Common culture did not,
  for example, prevent Arabs fighting Arabs in the
  1991 Gulf War.
• Perhaps the greatest problem with Huntington's
  clash of civilizations is that it might tend to
  promote the sense of 'the Other' in both the West
  and the Rest.

16
Mearsheimer

• Neo-Realists assume it is structure of the
  international system which makes the difference
  between an optimistic future of peaceful
  cooperation and a pessimistic view of future
  conflict.
• Mearsheimer predicted that conflict will return
  to the world and that we will soon miss the
  stability that existed between 1945 and 1989.
• He has advocated adoption of nuclear weapons by
  Germany as one way to cope with this uncertain
  post-cold war world.
• Mearsheimers argument seems to be that the
  structure of relationships between states shifts
  with the passing of the old order, bringing more
  chance of conflict.
• The 1945-1989 international system, Mearsheimer
  argues, was one of anarchy. But, within that
  anarchy we have to consider the significant role
  of polarity. Polarity organizes the
  international system.

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Mearsheimer (cont)

• The alternative to the bipolar system which ended
  when the cold war ended, is multipolarity. This
  is when many states face each other without
  falling into two hostile camps.
• States, especially in Europe, put a lot of effort
  into the balance of power so as to hinder the
  ambitions of rising states like Germany in the
  second half of the nineteenth century.
• Mearsheimer argues that the logic of
  multipolarity makes it necessarily more prone to
  conflict.
• The reasoning here is that there are more
  potential enemies for any state. During the cold
  war, west European states had just one enemy.
  Without the binding force of bipolar conflict in
  which two superpowers dominated, a west European
  state may have many enemies both in the
  traditional 'other side' and in what was in the
  bipolar system, 'our side'. The odds therefore
  favour conflict over peace.
• For Mearsheimer, the only thing that can even the
  odds in a multipolar system is weaponry which
  deters states from war.

18
Evaluating Mearsheimer

• Perhaps Mearsheimer has a point. 1945-1989 did
  not see a major European war. There does seem to
  be at least a correlation between absence of war,
  bipolarity and nuclear deterrence.
• But is this correlation just a coincidence?
  Moreover, was the cold war really a period of
  peace given its tensions and the many wars fought
  outside Europe?
• With the advantage of hindsight we can claim that
  Mearsheimer was wrong in that major tensions
  between Britain, France and Germany do not seem
  to have developed since 1989.
• The real difficulty with Mearsheimer's account is
  his use of anarchy. He accepts that bipolarity
  modifies anarchy with stability-inducing effects.
  He argues, as we have seen, that multipolarity
  does the reverse.

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Evaluating Mearsheimer (cont)

• The question is, why does polarity have this
  effect? Keohane answers that the effect of
  polarity is to shape the expectations of
  policy-makers about other states.
• That being so, Keohane says we have to look at
  all phenomena that have the same effect.
• For Fukuyama, these are ideas and for Keohane
  they are the mutual gains that come from
  cooperation via international institutions.
• The implication of this point about expectations
  is that things other than polarity may influence
  expectations about conflict in an optimistic or
  pessimistic direction.
• Maybe Mearsheimer's Neorealist account looks at
  the wrong things because of its exclusive focus
  on the structure of the international system?

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Main Points and Next Time

• The end of the cold war made Liberal ideas much
  more popular in international relations theory
  because it seemed that these Western ideas had
  won the 'war.'
• Liberal ideas like Fukuyama's may be thought to
  justify the export of American values and
  practices around the world.
• The democratic peace thesis became popular after
  the cold war. It argues that democracies do not
  fight other democracies.
• Many of the ideas of the democratic peace
  thinkers come from Kant, but theory is still very
  much being created to explain the lack of war
  between democracies.

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Main Points (cont)

• Huntington's pessimistic view of post-cold war
  international relations is based on the
  reemergence of a cleavage in international
  relations between civilizations.
• Mearsheimer argued that the shift from bipolarity
  to multipolarity increased the chance of that
  tension leading to actual conflict between states
  after the cold war.
• Mearsheimer's focus on the effects of the
  structure of the international system does not
  seem to have been accurate. This may be because
  his account of conflict between states misses
  other variables (eg. Fukuyama's ideas and
  Keohane's institutions) which modify
  policy-makers' expectations.
• Next time we consider critical approaches to
  security.