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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide Chapter 1: Globalization and global politics •

Over the last three decades the sheer scale and scope of global interconnectedness has become increasingly evident in every sphere from the economic to the cultural. Sceptics do not regard this as evidence of globalization if that term means something more than simply international interdependence, i.e. linkages between countries. The key issue becomes what we understand by the term 'globalization'.

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Globalization is evident in the growing extensity, intensity, velocity, and deepening impact of worldwide interconnectedness.

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Globalization denotes a shift in the scale of social organization, the emergence of the world as a shared social space, the relative deterritorialization of social, economic, and political activity, and the relative denationalization of power.

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Globalization can be conceptualized as a fundamental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents.

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Globalization is to be distinguished from internationalization and regionalization.

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The contemporary phase of globalization has proved more robust in the aftermath of 9/11 than the sceptics recognize.

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Contemporary globalization is a multidimensional, uneven, and asymmetrical process.

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Contemporary globalization is best described as a thick form of globalization or globalism.

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Globalization is transforming but not burying the Westphalian ideal of sovereign statehood. It is producing the disaggregated state.

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Globalization requires a conceptual shift in our thinking about world politics from a primarily geopolitical perspective to the perspective of geocentric or global politics— the politics of worldwide social relations.

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Global politics is more accurately described as distorted global politics because it is afflicted by significant power asymmetries.

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Globalization creates a double democratic deficit in that it places limits on democracy within states and new mechanisms of global governance which lack democratic credentials.

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Global politics has engendered its own global political theory which draws upon cosmopolitan thinking.

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Cosmopolitanism offers an account of the desirability and feasibility of the democratization of global politics.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide •

Distorted global politics can be interpreted as expressing a contest between the forces of statism and cosmopolitanism in the conduct and management of world affairs.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide Chapter 2: The evolution of international society •

'International society' is any association of distinct political communities which accept some common values, rules, and institutions.

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It is the central concept of the 'English School' of International Relations.

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Although originally coined to refer to relations among European states, the term may be applied to many different sets of political arrangements among distinct political communities.

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Elements of international society may be found from the time of the first organized human communities.

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Early forms of diplomacy and treaties existed in the ancient Middle East.

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Relations among the city-states of ancient Greece were characterized by more developed societal characteristics, such as arbitration.

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Ancient China, India, and Rome all had their own distinctive international societies.

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Medieval Europe's international society was a complex mixture of supranational, transnational, national, and subnational structures

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The Catholic Church played a key role in elaborating the normative basis of medieval international society.

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Islam developed its own distinctive understanding of international society.

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The main ingredients of contemporary international society are the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention and the institutions of diplomacy, the balance of power, and international law.

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These took centuries to develop, although the Peace of Westphalia (1648) was a key event in their establishment throughout Europe.

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The Napoleonic Wars were followed by a shift to a more managed, hierarchical, international society within Europe and an imperial structure in Europe's relations with much of the rest of the world.

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The League of Nations was an attempt to place international society on a more secure organizational foundation.

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The United Nations was intended to be a much improved League of Nations but the cold war prevented it from functioning as such.

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Decolonization led to the worldwide spread of the European model of international society.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide •

The collapse of the Soviet Union completed this process.

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Globalization poses serious problems for a sovereignty-based international society.

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These include the challenges emanating from new forms of community, failing states in Africa, American hyperpower, growing resistance to Western ideas, and global poverty and environmental issues.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide Chapter 3: International history 1900–90 •

Debates about the origins of the First World War focus on whether responsibility should rest with the German government or whether war came because of more complex systemic factors.

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The Paris Peace settlement failed to address the central problems of European security, and in restructuring the European state system created new sources of grievance and instability.

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The rise of Hitler posed challenges that European political leaders lacked the ability and will to meet.

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The German attack on the Soviet Union extended the scope and barbarity of the war from short and limited campaigns to extended, large-scale, and barbaric confrontation, fought for total victory.

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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war in Europe and eventually led Germany into war on two fronts (again).

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Debate persists about whether the atomic bomb should have been used in 1945, and about the effect that this had on the cold war.

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The First World War produced the collapse of four European empires (the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey).

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Different European powers had different attitudes to decolonization after 1945: some, such as the British, decided to leave, while others sought to preserve their empires, in part (the French) or whole (the Portuguese).

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European powers adopted different attitudes to different regions/countries. For example, British withdrawal from Asia came much more quickly after 1945 than from Africa.

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The process of decolonization was relatively peaceful in many cases; it led to revolutionary wars in others (Algeria, Malaya, and Angola), whose scale and ferocity reflected the attitudes of the colonial power and the nationalist movements.

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The struggle for independence/national liberation became embroiled in cold war conflicts when the superpowers and/or their allies became involved, for example Vietnam.

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Whether decolonization was judged successful depends, in part, on whose perspective you adopt—that of the European power, the independence movement, or the people themselves.

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There are disagreements about when and why the cold war began, and who was responsible.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide •

Distinct phases can be seen in East–West relations, during which tension and the risk of direct confrontation grew and receded.

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Some civil and regional wars were intensified and prolonged by superpower involvement; others may have been prevented or shortened.

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The end of the cold war has not resulted in the abolition of nuclear weapons.

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Nuclear weapons were an important factor in the cold war. How far the arms race had a momentum of its own is a matter of debate.

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Agreements on limiting and controlling the growth of nuclear arsenals played an important role in Soviet–American (and East–West) relations.

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Various international crises occurred in which there was the risk of nuclear war. Judging how close we came to nuclear war at these times remains open to speculation.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide Chapter 4: From the cold war to the war on terror •

The cold war was a complex relationship that assumed competition but remained cold in large part because of the existence of nuclear weapons.

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Most experts assumed the cold war would continue and were surprised when it came to a peaceful conclusion.

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There is no academic consensus as to why the cold war came to an end when it did or why it did.

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The end of the cold war divided—and still divides—International Relations scholars into mainstream realists and ideas-oriented constructivists.

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The term 'globalization' was rarely used before 1989 but became one of the most popular ways of defining international politics after the cold war.

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Though globalization is a much disputed term, analysts agree that it describes a one-world system where all actors have to play by the same economic rules.

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Globalization has become the master discourse of governments around the world.

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Globalization has produced many winners and a large number of losers, but there would appear to be no escaping its competitive logic.

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Most experts did not anticipate—and some did not look forward to—the new American hegemony following the end of the cold war.

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In spite of the spread of democracy and globalization, most US policy-makers still viewed the world as a threatening and dangerous place during the 1990s.

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After the fiasco in Somalia the majority of Americans were reluctant to use US forces abroad.

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The United States after the cold war is best described as a 'superpower without a mission'.

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In spite of the break-up of former Yugoslavia, Europe benefited as much from the end of the cold war as the United States.

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Europeans after the cold war were divided over a series of key issues, most notably the degree of European integration, economic strategy, and the foreign policy aspirations of the European Union.

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The European Security Strategy of 2003 was one of the first serious efforts by the EU to think about its international role under conditions of globalization.

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Many issues face Europe, including Turkish membership of the EU, the position of Europe's Muslims, and China's economic challenge.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide •

The first Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, sought a new partnership with the West but was often accused by his domestic enemies of not defending the Russian national interest.

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Vladimir Putin, his successor, has pursued more authoritarian policies at home, brought Russia's economic assets back under state control, and pursued a more nationalist foreign policy abroad.

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A new cold war between the West and Russia is unlikely because of the important economic and political changes that have occurred in Russia since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

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Compared to Europe after 1945, the international relations of East Asia during the cold war were highly volatile, marked by revolutions, wars, and insurgencies.

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The end of the cold war left many issues in its wake and led Aaron Friedberg (1993) to conclude that Asia was primed for further rivalry.

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Friedberg's thesis has been challenged as being too pessimistic: economic growth, regional integration, America's presence, and Japan's peaceful foreign policy continue to make the region less dangerous than he suggested.

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One of the big questions now facing the region and the United States is 'rising China'. Realists insist it will challenge the status quo. Others believe it can rise peacefully.

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One of the defining areas of instability during the cold war was the Third World.

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With the end of the cold war the term 'Third World' has been challenged by many analysts.

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China and India are prime examples of countries where globalization has produced high levels of development.

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Inequality creates security challenges in the form of migration, refugees, and in certain instances, political violence directed against the more powerful West.

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September 11 effectively brought the post-cold war era to an end and in the process transformed US foreign policy.

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The war to remove Saddam Hussein was sold as part of the war on terror; very few analysts, however, saw a connection between Iraq and 9/11.

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The reasons for going to war have been much disputed, though most people now believe it was a strategic error.

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The longer-term impact of the Bush doctrine could very easily weaken America's global position over the long term.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide Chapter 5: Realism •

Realism has been the dominant theory of world politics since the beginning of academic International Relations.

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Outside the academy, Realism has a much longer history in the work of classical political theorists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.

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The unifying theme around which all realist thinking converges is that states find themselves in the shadow of anarchy such that their security cannot be taken for granted.

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At the end of the millennium, Realism continues to attract academicians and inform policy-makers, although in the period since the end of the cold we have seen heightened criticism of realist assumptions.

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There is a lack of consensus in the literature as to whether we can meaningfully speak about Realism as a single coherent theory.

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There are good reasons for delineating different types of Realism.

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Structural realism divides into two camps: those who argue that states are security maximizers (defensive realism) and those who argue that states are power maximizers (offensive realism).

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Neoclassical realists bring individual and unit variation back into the theory.

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Statism is the centrepiece of Realism. This involves two claims. First, for the theorist, the state is the pre-eminent actor and all other actors in world politics are of lesser significance. Second, state 'sovereignty' signifies the existence of an independent political community, one which has juridical authority over its territory. Key criticism: Statism is fl awed both on empirical (challenges to state power from 'above' and 'below') and normative grounds (the inability of sovereign states to respond to collective global problems such as famine, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses).

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Survival: The primary objective of all states is survival; this is the supreme national interest to which all political leaders must adhere. Key criticism: Are there no limits to what actions a state can take in the name of necessity?

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Self-help: No other state or institution can be relied upon to guarantee your survival. Key criticism: Self-help is not an inevitable consequence of the absence of a world government; self-help is a logic that states have selected. Moreover, there are historical and contemporary examples where states have preferred collective security systems, or forms of regional security communities, in preference to selfhelp.

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Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 4e Revision Guide Chapter 6: Liberalism •

The liberal tradition in political thought goes back at least as far as the thinking of John Locke in the late seventeenth century. From then on, liberal ideas have profoundly shaped how we think about the relationship between government and citizens.

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Liberalism is a theory of both government within states and good governance between states and peoples worldwide. Unlike Realism, which regards the 'international' as an anarchic realm, Liberals seek to project values of order, liberty, justice, and toleration into international relations.

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The high-water mark of liberal thinking in international relations was reached in the inter-war period in the work of Idealists who believed that warfare was an unnecessary and outmoded way of settling disputes between states.

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Domestic and international institutions are required to protect and nurture these values. But note that these values and institutions allow for significant variations which accounts for the fact that there are heated debates within Liberalism.

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Liberals disagree on fundamental issues such as the causes of war and what kind of institutions are required to deliver liberal values in a decentralized, multicultural international system.

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An important cleavage within Liberalism, which has become more pronounced in our globalized world, is between those operating with a positive conception of Liberalism, who advocate interventionist foreign policies and stronger international...