International Relations - Public and Cultural Diplomacy (EN) PDF

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December 22nd: short paper review submission deadline February 1st: final paper based on simulation submission deadline INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSINTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSInternational relations are a relatively recent discipline among all the disciplines belonging to the field of politic...

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- December 22nd: short paper review submission deadline - February 1st: final paper based on simulation submission deadline INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS International relations are a relatively recent discipline among all the disciplines belonging to the field of political and social sciences. It was created in the early 19th century, and as a matter of fact the first chair of international relations was set in the oddest place one could imagine, namely the university of Aberystwyth in Wales. It is important to stress this factor of novelty of the discipline of international relations. Indeed, the birth of a discipline may be compared to the birth of a new nation-State. International relations had to find its place among towering disciplines with long traditions, like history and international law, and colonise a discipline that was not as old as international law but still older than international relations itself, namely political sciences. Therefore, the history of the birth and development of international relations is a history of academic fights and theoretical and methodological justifications as to why a discipline that was in the middle between international law and history was needed. A combination of practical factors and scientific reasons underlies the need for this new hybrid discipline. On the one hand, the need for international relations to exist in a way that was as independent as possible from both international law and history stems from the fact that IR was born thanks a general mood among social scientists to try to mimic natural sciences in their success. The idea is that since natural sciences are so successful and able to affect the world in which one lives, why should political scientists not mimic the methods of natural scientists and adapt them to the research in international relations? Even historical forces pushed the need for international relations to become as scientific as possible as a discipline. It is not by chance that international relations were born in the period after the First World War, as WWI made people realise that mankind was able to make itself undergo enormous suffering in empirical terms. Because people did not want the events of WWI to repeat themselves, the question that was raised dealt with exactly that – avoiding the massacre of the war. This idea became the driving force of international relations, possibly more than any other branch of political sciences. The need to avoid conflicts and their grievous consequences presented itself once again later in time when it came to understanding what to do with nuclear weapons. In this framework, a group of scholars developed the theory of rational deterrence, which was an attempt to transform nuclear weapons into a political weapon. The connections between reality and scientific reasons in IR is much closer than in other disciplines. IR has been developing as an American discipline, since the US was the country that transformed a British invention into an American discipline. This happened because at the end of the WWII the US had greater responsibilities than ever before, for instance vis-à-vis the Europeans. Therefore, the US created an entire academic infrastructure to study international relations to carry out their role as “global leaders”, while at the same time helped their government in order to conduct a foreign policy that was compliant with the goals of the US. This also explains why IR is heavily influenced by the behavioural methodology that characterises the study of political sciences in the US, which focuses on the study of the behaviour of States and individuals. Over the years the situation has changed, and nowadays the relationship between IR in the US and in the EU is more balanced also thanks to the emergence of many different schools of international relations. This allows these schools to enjoy greater autonomy when it comes to the study and analysis of international relations. 1. Contents To understand the contents of IR, it is necessary to introduce some basic terminology first. The first two concepts that need to be introduced are epistemology and ontology. Ontology studies the essential elements of a society and its politics, and there are two answers or two ways to approach this question: individualism and wholism. These two concepts identify the minimum common 1

denominators of our realities, and the first one was effectively identified by Margaret Thatcher. She once indeed said that the foundational view of ontological individualists relies on the fact that the essence of a society consists in its ideals, that there is no society per se but only individuals. This view of the society is contrasted by another perspective, the structuralist or wholist perspective, that suggests that a society is more than just its individual parts and that there is a structure – a network of elements – that influences the behaviour of each single element of the society. Epistemology on the other hand deals with the way one knows and studies the world scientifically. The way one knows and learns in general is known as gnoseology, therefore there is a difference. From the epistemological point of view, there are also two different perspectives that explain the way the world is scientifically. The first one is objectivism or behaviouralism, which maintains that social and political sciences can be studies in the same ways that natural sciences are studied. This means that even in political or social sciences it is possible to find laws (or regularities) that help explain behavioural patterns. The second is an interpretative perspective, which was promoted by Max Weber. This theory maintains that in order to explain social sciences’ phenomena, one must interpret them – this means understanding them according to the context, the conventions, and the habits that influence the choices of individuals and also by putting oneself in the shoes of the individual that took the decision it took. Of course, international relations has incurred into some methodological issues. One of the main characterising elements of international relations is that IR scholars claim they have a family of methods, contrary to international law scholars or historians. According to some scholars, our world works as clocks and the objective of international relations is to understand the mechanisms behind the clock, namely how it works. This view is a deterministic view of the world, which is not popular anymore nowadays. According to the indeterministic perspective, in order to understand reality one should look at it as if it were clouds. Clouds move, it is difficult to predict how or when they will all assemble together for a thunderstorm, they have a component of probabilistic reasoning that makes it difficult to precisely predict what is going to happen. Most social scientists side with this latter view, mainly because international relations scholars have not always been able to predict the behaviours of States and the outcomes of their actions. Moreover, most regularities or laws are probabilistic. What makes scholars of IR different from historians and scholars of international law are four elements. First of all, IR scholars are interested in inferential statements, which means that the topics studied are of interest because they allow one to apply the same study or research to a number of other cases. Therefore, the goal of IR is inferential. The second element is that the procedures of IR are public. Lots of attention in scientific papers is devoted to the explanations given by the author as to what procedures they used to reach the conclusions that they reached. This is done because the procedures through which one reaches a conclusions must be debatable and criticisable. The third element is that the conclusions that scholars and authors reach in their research are uncertain. This happens because the world is not perfect, and studies and inferences that scholars make are always probabilistic. Last but not least, the contents of international relations are its methods. Indeed, what makes international relations scholars different is the method through which they reach their conclusions. The method used to reach the conclusions is almost as – if not more – important than the conclusions themselves. All these elements concur to making international relations a scientific enterprise.

1.1 Levels of analysis 2

Explanations for the theories that have been developed in the field of international relations are arranged along different levels of analysis. At each level, a different unit of analysis is the one on which scholars devote their attention. There are six levels of analysis. The first layer is the international system as the main element of influence for foreign policy decisions. However, this level of analysis does not allow scholars to precisely predict and pinpoint State behaviours as international system theories only explain patterns of behaviours. The second level is that of dyadic relationships, where the main topic studied is influence, deterrence, compellence, and coercive diplomacy – or the way States affect and influence one another. The third level is the one dealing with the structure of the States, with the way a State is organised. On the one hand, Marxists suggest that the capitalistic or non-capitalistic nature of the State underlies all foreign policy decisions; liberals suggest that the key variable to predicting foreign policy behaviour is the democratic or non-democratic nature of the State. The fourth level deals with society, or with the idea that the State is nothing more than the main representative agent of the pressures coming from societal actors and public opinion. The fifth level deals with the actual implementation of the policy-making process. The sixth level, or the core level of analysis deals with the decision-makers, their roles, backgrounds, and psychology even. 1.2 Theoretical perspectives The main theoretical perspectives dealing with international relations are three: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. However, these are not the only perspectives belonging to this discipline and there are many more sub-disciplines (such as Marxism and post-modernism). Realism is the most used theoretical perspective in international relations, and it could represent several different things. For this reason, it is also defined as a “big tent”. It entails a particular vision of the world which can be stretched back to the times of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War – in fact, realism cannot be defined as a theory. It also comprises different schools of thought, like classical, neo and neoclassical realism, hegemonic theories, et cetera. There are four elements that make a realist a realist. The first is the answer to the question “who is the main actor on the international scene?” – the answer of all realists is that the main actor is the nationState, so the main mechanism of international relations is the system of interactions among States. According to realism, not all States are born equally, but those who run the show are those holding great power. The second element is anarchy, which is the main defining element of international relations. However, in this context, anarchy does not mean chaos, but rather it means living in a world without a superordinate authority to whom States can appeal to seek justice for the torts they received. The third element is what drives States, namely their interests. The answer of realists is that States are unitary (meaning States can be considered as individuals), rational (meaning that they behave assuming that they make rational calculations weighing pros and cons of their actions), and self-interested. The fourth element is the role of power. What defines States is power, which is the main currency of international relations. Realists see power as a stock that States hold that allows them to do things on the international scene. Therefore, what defines these conditions of the international system is that States live in a permanent condition of insecurity due to the anarchic nature of the international system itself, which pushes States to protect themselves making them inherently conflictual and prone to war. All realists have certain common traits, which are “groupism” – or the State as a central actor –, anarchy, egoism – namely that States as central actors are driven by self-interest, and power. However, realists are divided among themselves in different subfamilies according to cleavages. The firs cleavage among realists distinguishes those who think that IR is a science and those who take 3

inspiration from an older school of thought that sees IR as a way of thinking rather than as a science: the formers are known as neorealists while the latter are known as classic realists. The second cleavage creates a distinction between those who claim that explanations of foreign policy have to be accounted for at the international level and those who claim that domestic variables must be taken into the picture to explain foreign policy choices. The latter are known as neo classical realists, while the former are still known as neorealists. The third cleavage is a distinction between those who point to the role of the balance of power, claiming that States must balance their power to act on the international scene, and those who point to the role of one single, hegemonic actor as the main dominant power in the international scene (like the US during the post-WWII period or the UK in the 1800s). Last but not least, there are those who claim that realists are now dead because in a world of interdependence where every State is united in a framework of global challenges the idea of general wars among great powers for global power is outdated. These scholars have collaborated with other school of thoughts, for instance the collaboration between liberals and realists, which further complicated the situation of IR. The liberal perspective is the second main theoretical perspective, and it has some defining traits. For a liberal, the main actors of the international systems are societal actors like individuals or groups (economic, social, political), who put demands forwards when they are interested in seeing their objectives realised. Societal actors need to find a way to make their voices heard, which is where the State comes into the picture for domestic representation. The State is seen as an institution through which societal actors’ interests are represented, although not equally: some groups are more closely taken care of than other groups, so there are imbalances. Indeed, the process of domestic representation is deemed aristocratic. The last element that characterises liberals is that they believe in the interdependence of States on the international scene, especially policy interdependence. Policy interdependence means that the world is made of actors, whose decisions affect others either positively or negatively. This means that the world is not anarchic according to the liberal perspective. Liberals are obviously divided among themselves, and these divisions are based on the main driving forces behind the different societal interests. These are three: one main source of interest is identity, which can be national, related to political ideology, or to socioeconomic order; the second source of interest is economic and it realises itself in the concept of commercial liberalism, which emphasizes the importance of economic interdependence and free trade (Kant’s “universal hospitality”) in maintaining peace; the third source is political, which means that the process of political representation creates the interest that drives a State’s foreign policy decision. The main application of this theory is the democratic peace proposition, which maintains that democratic countries have a different approach to foreign policy because democratic leaders have to account for their behaviours to their own voters. Constructivists are the only group that takes its name from the methodological perspective rather than from the content of their theories. The constructive perspective configurates itself as an alternative to materialism. Its main defining traits are their beliefs that the meaning of the reality around us is socially determined, which means that State interests are a social construction and that interests are not allocated on the basis of societal dynamics, but they are rather built according to the interactions taking place among different societal groups. Moreover, constructivists claim that anarchy is not a unique condition, it can be different things – it can turn out to be a war, an omo omini lupus situation. The two fundamental principles of constructivism are that people act towards objects on the basis of the meanings that the gave to those objects (Wendt, 1992). This means that an object is an object because people give it a certain meaning. Moreover, the meanings in terms of which action is organised arise out of 4

interaction (Wendt, 1992), which means that meanings are earned via interactions or social processes. There are differentiations among constructivists as well. There are three main sources of debates, among which the first one deals with the role of State as a fundamental unit of analysis; the second one deals with the role of science, which creates the distinction between positivists and post-positivists (meaning they are sceptical towards the scientific attitude adopted towards IR and object the idea that IR can be a science); lastly, they are divided about the role of anarchy, on the basis of which we can have conventional constructivists (according to which there are authorities that are in a leadership position) and anarchists. THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM The international system is the first and outer layer of the level of analysis of foreign policy. 1. The role of anarchy The key word when talking about the IR system is anarchy, which is both its defining element and its main problem at the same time. Realists, liberals, and constructivists have all tried to find a way for States to get out of the context of anarchy. First of all, one must give a definition of what anarchy is. There are two main definitions for anarchy, namely anarchy as a lack of order and anarchy as a lack of government. For scholars of IR, anarchy does not represent a situation of chaos but rather a condition of order under specific circumstances, which means that there is not a unitary government that can impose order on the other actors. Different scholars have given different definitions of the logic of order. The first is Waltz, who makes a sharp difference between the domestic and international realms based on the so-called principles of order. The principle of order that distinguishes a situation of anarchy from a hierarchical situation maintains that in the anarchic international system, States have to rely on themselves to survive according to the principle of selfhelp. On the other hand, in a situation of hierarchy States rely on a supranational authority that can provide them with the resources States need to survive. Hierarchical and anarchic realms are divided on the basis of functional differentiations. In a hierarchical system there will be a division of labour among the different actors working in the State, while this does not happen in the international system. Indeed, some States – especially those who hold greater powers – can be policemen, judges, and parliament of the system, therefore covering multiple roles at once. The third element that characterises the international system deals with power distribution, which determines how stable the international system is. The condition of anarchy has different implications for nation-States. The first implication has to do with the notion of interest: for liberals, interests are born on the basis of interactions; for realists, interests are given by the anarchic nature of the international system itself, which makes it so that the main interest is survival. In an anarchic world, the effort that States put into coordinating their policies in periods of crisis is enormous because States do not trust each other. 2. Realism 2.1 The balance of power The balance of power is the main m...