International Relations HT Readings

18/38

1. Understanding International Bargaining

Sebenius, James K., "International Negotiation Analysis." Chap. 14 in InternationalNegotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues. 2nd ed. Edited by Victor Kremenyuk, 229-252.

Thomas C. Schelling, “An Essay on Bargaining” pages 281-306 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1805498

Andrew Moravcsik, “A New Statecraft? Supranational Entrepreneurs and International Cooperation”, pages 267-306 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2601390

2. American Hegemony After The Cold War

Brooks, S. and Wohlforth, W., World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton UP, 2008) Chapter 2: ‘Realism, Balance of Power Theory, and the Counterbalancing Constraint’.

For Realists, ‘power is checked most effectively by counterbalancing power’ This says that states tend to balance against threats of hegemony over the system.

While Balance-of-power theory predicts states try to prevent the rise of a hegemon, the theory yields no such implications for one that has already been established. This is because the US has such a large amount of power that it would be extremely costly for other nations to try and match this, and even more costly if the US returned its defence budget to Cold War levels (7% of GDP as opposed to the current 4%).

Balance of power theory posits that because states residing in global anarchy have an interest in maximising their long-term odds of survival, they will check great concentrations of power (hegemony) by building up their own capabilities (internal balancing) or aggregating their capabilities in alliances with other states (external balancing). The higher the probability of hegemony, the more likely states are to balance. Leading states by definition represent potential hegemonic threats, and so they must constantly be vigilant, lest their actions, whether or not intended to attain hegemony, provoke counterbalancing by other powers.

It is estimated that over half the military R&D expenditures in the world are American, a sign of its long-term investments in military capabilities, and the US also has 46% of the World’s defence expenditures. In comparison, China has 4%, Russia has 3% and the UK has 5%.

At the height of the British Empire, the UK was outspent, outmanned and outgunned by both France and Russia. At the dawn of the Cold War the US was dominant economically, as well as in naval and air capabilities. But the USSR retained overall military parity due to its location and land power giving it a superior ability to seize territory in Eurasia. But currently, the US has no rivals economically or militarily. It has unprecedented advantages. The EU has the resources to match it but it’s

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requirement of unanimity in decisions from all 27 members places profound limits on its potential, compared to the US which is a single decision making body.

Relative power shifts slowly. The US has accounted for 25-33% of global output for over a century; no other nation will match its combination of wealth, size, technological capability, and productivity in the foreseeable future.

The main obstacles to external balancing are coordination and the collective action problem. Even when states agree on the need to balance, they tend to disagree on how the burden should be shared, with the incentive to free ride being evident. NATO was able to combat the USSR due to having an obvious leader in the US, but there is no obvious leader to confront America.

A final impediment to balancing is the opportunity cost of using resources to counter the US’s hegemony. Also the fact that all potential balancers lie on the Eurasian land mass means that balancing the Hegemon is likely to come at the expense of local security challenges. In many cases the capabilities needed to check the US’ power are ill suited for local security challenges.

The country with the greatest potential to challenge the US is China, but it is estimated it will take until 2050 for China’s total economic size to equal the US, meaning it has a long way to go. This is confirmed by the fact that none of China’s external alignments can be considered counterbalancing, as the only other major power China has an agreement with is Russia, and this is propelled primarily by economic and regional security issues, rather than a counterbalancing alignment.

The lack of fear of invasion or loss of sovereign statehood at the hands of the US that the near majority of the world enjoy is one reason why counterbalancing may not be relevant, especially to states with second-strike capabilities, particularly those with nuclear weapons. If balancing is only a strategy for survival, then it applies only to concentrations of power that might threaten the survival of other great powers. However, if hegemony’s concentration of power is seen to affect not just other nations’ ‘core security’ but also their ability to autonomously resolve less existentially important ‘secondary security’ issues, and even preferences such as prestige and status, then counterbalancing remains an issue.

Counterbalancing constrained Britain, and caused it to adopt a policy of appeasement in many cases due to challenges from France, Russia, and ultimately Germany. The evidence from this case shows that when it is feasible at an acceptable cost, states will engage in counterbalancing even when the problem of counterbalancing does not present direct and plausible threats to core security.

The USSR was able to counterbalance the US with its large military and its second strike nuclear capabilities, even though it had no hope of competing economically or technologically. Note that due to mutual deterrence, the security of the USSR seemed secured, but it continued with counterbalancing due to a perceived need for ideology and status. Both sides endured large costs in order to counterbalance each other. That the USSR could do this with relatively no economic or technological advantages lends credence to the argument that a nuclear-armed China or Russia could counterbalance the US if it had the strong desire to do so.

However counterbalancing is unlikely to happen at present due to the large costs of doing so because of the US’ uniquely powerful position.

John Bolton and others. Global Structure Convocation 1994, "Human Rights, Global Governance, and Strengthening the United Nations". ON RESERVE

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Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, pages 1-47.

Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: the Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy, pages 94-110.

There are 3 general ways in which interest groups (not only those which are ethnic) bring pressure to bear on the political establishment: through the vote; by campaign finance contributions; and by an organisational body (a lobby group).

Voting – it is important not to underestimate the role of ethnic interest groups in shaping American domestic and foreign policy. The Irish-Americans (mainly those that are Catholic), Jewish-Americans, Cubans, Latinos, Armenians, Poles, and African-Americans are all important groups that many politicians actively court in order for votes. While these groups may be small on the national scene, in certain communities they may make up a large percentage of the vote. Clinton’s policies on Haiti, the peace-process in Northern Ireland, and naturalisation of Latinos were all regarded as having dramatically increased support for Clinton from the respective ethnic groups.

Campaign financing – one of the key parts of campaign financing regulations is that individuals from outside a congressional district may make contributions for races in which they are not eligible to vote, giving ethnic groups with no votes power, as through financing they can find politicians willing to represent their interests. According to a pole, the candidate who spent most money won 95% of the time in a House contest, and 94% of the time in a Senate race. Given the evident payoff, the pressure of collecting increasing sums of money has put tremendous stress on the political system. Money gives individuals access to power, with John Mc Cain saying presidential campaign financing is “nothing less than an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.” However it is not simply that ethnic money by political influence; it is also that political influence solicits ethnic money.

Organisational Leadership – Organisational groups bring pressure by formulating a strategy of getting precise pieces of legislation passed, providing unity to the ethnic community, building alliances with other social forces towards common political goals, and monitoring decision-making to ensure that friends are rewarded, opponents punished, and feedback is accumulated so the organisation can become ever more effective. However, votes and money are far from enough to guarantee an interest group access to power. These popular forms of influence must be channelled in specific directions targeted at distinct issues, which sophisticated national organisations alone can manage. An ethnic community becomes a seriously viable political force only when it has an organisation whose chief purpose is to influence decision-makers to adopt policies favourable to the group’s interests.

3. The European Union – A ‘Self-Contained’ Regime

Introductory: Gallagher, M., Laver, M. and Mair, P., Representative Government in ModernEurope, Chapter 5 “The European Union and Representative Government”, pages 115-153

Booker, C. and North, R., The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union, Chapter 15, pages 291-306.

The way many EU laws are made are not exactly democratic, with members of Coreper, the committee of permanent representatives, having all the power, and with ministers being told what

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line to take and in many cases not even being presented with documents on the law or being allowed to read what they were passing.

While many government officials said the EU single market would lead to free trade all across Europe, what it really led to was more regulations. Far from making it easier to sell goods across the EU, it made it more difficult due to costs of testing to acquire the new CE standard, and charging large fees for regulation.

What was now becoming uncomfortably clear was that, whatever the Community claimed it was trying to do, the result was invariably the opposite. A Single Market claimed to be a great act of ‘liberation’ and ‘deregulation’ had produced one of the greatest concentrations of constrictive regulation in history. A ‘reform’ of the CAP intended to cut back over-production and misplaced expenditure ended up producing more unwanted food at even greater expense. The CFP, intended to ‘conserve Europe’s fish stocks’, had resulted in an ecological crisis.

At least on balance, it might be argued that Single Market must have achieved its intended purpose of stimulating economic growth and creating jobs. But even that was a mirage. In the three years preceding the launch, average EU growth had been an unimpressive 2.3% per annum, while average unemployment had been 8.5%. In the four years after January 1993, the growth rate was to slump to 1.67% - the poorest performance of any economic bloc in the developed world – while EU unemployment would soar to 10.9%, with nearly 20 million people out of work.

The significance of what was happening to the ‘European project’ in the early 1990s was that from now on, more than ever before, it was going to become increasingly possible to measure all those euphoric, long-familiar promises of the great things it was going to achieve in the indefinite future, against what it was actually achieving in practice. It was a watershed moment.

T. R. Reid, The United States of Europe, Chapter 4 (“Welch’s Waterloo”), pages 88-110.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric who had seen 80 consecutive quarters of profit, and was set to retire in 2000, but delayed this to complete the acquisition of Honeywell. When asked about potential anti-trust problems Welch replied ‘This is the cleanest deal you’ll ever see.’ He had no idea what was coming. While the merger easily attained the approval of the US anti-trust division, it was to face a long anti-trust review by the EU. Mario Monti, the EU director-general of competition, spent months reviewing the GE-Honeywell merger, and talked to other competitors and inside sources, and decided that the case was in breach of EU anti-trust law. Welch tried offering $2.2 billion in ‘give-backs’, where he would divest certain product lines that violated anti-trust, but Monti turned his nose-up to these. When Monti called to say that he would recommend disapproval of the deal to the European Commission, Welch tried strong-armed tactics, calling President George W. Bush, and asking for political help. Bush was scheduled to meet with the leaders of the EU states in a few days - effectively Monti’s bosses – and Welch stated US pressure must be brought to bear. This was to be a mistake. European leaders disagreed on many things but they were together on being tired of Europe being seen as America’s ‘little sister’, and when Bush expressed concern that ‘US companies might not be being treated fairly’ there was outrage that the American president was lecturing them on the right way to regulate corporate behaviour – specifically at a time when corporate America was awash with crimes of executive crime and dishonest accounting. Even the mild-mannered Monti went ballistic, giving a fiery press-conference to entire Brussels press corps. This final mistake annihilated any chance Welch had of reversing Monti’s decision. When the European Commission met it became more than a simple case of anti-trust, it was now a case of whether Europe had a backbone. And since the two companies involved were both headquartered in the US it was easy to make the decision, and they voted against the merger 20-0. When Welch

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brought the news home many in the US stated the European Commission had no right to meddle in US affairs, with many on the board saying ‘to hell with Europe, Jack. Let’s do it anyway.’ However Welch, the realist, rejected all these fantasies. The power that gave Europe the authority to say no was plain enough: sheer market power. The unification of the continent had produced a single market bigger than the US or Japan. American companies can no longer say ‘to hell with Europe’ because they need that large market place.

Mark Landler, “To Cross to the Other Side, Just Cross A Dutch Frontier”. New York Times, July 5, 2005, page 4.

The article is about Karl Schumacher, perhaps Germany's most successful promoter of cross-border cremation, who attracts 70 paying customers each weekend for a bus tour to a Dutch crematory, where many of the Germans who take his tours sign a contract afterward agreeing to have their bodies cremated there in Venlo, the Netherlands. Schumacher handles the paperwork and transportation, which is easy, because the border between Germany and the Netherlands has been wide open since 1995. Of the 2,500 people cremated each year here, 1,500 are from Germany.

The brisk cross-border trade has sprung up for several reasons, most obviously the price. It is much cheaper to be cremated in the Netherlands than in Germany: $1,320 versus $2,040, and also because Germany imposes strict restrictions on cremations - stipulating, for example, that the urn must be buried under official supervision in a grave site in a cemetery. Ashes cannot be scattered, nor stored on family mantelpieces. The Dutch, however, have no restrictions, aside from a 30-day waiting period before the ashes are returned directly to the next of kin.

William Phelan “Note on the recognition of the Supremacy and Direct Effect of European Lawby the EU member states”. [To be distributed in class or email]

Simma, B. and Pulkowski, D., 'Of Planets and the Universe: Self-Contained Regimes inInternational Law' The European Journal of International Law pages 483-493

“Thus, the principal characteristic of a self-contained regime is its intention to totally exclude the application of the general legal consequences of wrongful acts as codified by the ILC, in particular the application of countermeasures by an injured state.”[The rest of the article can be demanding, discussing various treaty regimes, including the EU, and whether they are compatible with countermeasures – interstate sanctions like WTO trade sanctions – or whether they could be in certain circumstances. No need to read it.]

4. Britain, France, And Germany

Young, H., This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, pages 325-338 on Margaret Thatcher and the Single European Act

Margaret Thatcher initially did not want the Single European Act, wanting to avoid any sort of legislature, preferring simply a gentleman’s agreement to set aside the need for unanimity when it came to matters on the single-market agenda, with QMV being used instead. However, an Inter-Governmental Conference was called instead, which was not what Margaret Thatcher had wanted as it would lead to amendments to the Treaty of Rome (and of the possibility of issues going before the ECJ) which could open the way for uncontrollable constitutional ventures which would be against British Interests.

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However, once things went her way, instead of losing her temper, Thatcher accepted that the IGC would go ahead, and tried to ensure that Britain would be one of the chief architects of a new European Treaty, and that would play to her interests. The British being minimalists were strongly placed, as any changes needed unanimous support. When the final draft of the Single Act was presented, Thatcher was very satisfied, telling the British parliament that it was a ‘clear and decisive’ result. One could say her attitude at this stage was positive and supportive, as she pressed it through the Commons within six days.

However, Thatcher would come to regret her attitude. This was because, like in most international treaties, the wording was vague so as to facilitate agreement, so a lot of wording which Thatcher dismissed as ‘Euro-guff or Euro-twaddle’, which she presumed was just flowery language and nothing more, came to have meanings and interpretations which Thatcher never envisioned, or ever even recognised the possibility of those words meaning something else. This led to the coming of the modern European Union, and far more intensely unifying institutional reforms than Britain had ever wanted. So while Margaret Thatcher’s attitude at the time of signing the Single European Act was positive, it would change once she realised that the ‘Euro-twaddle’ meant a lot more than she had ever envisioned.

Basically as Thatcher was rude and tended to screw European ministers to get her way early on in her career, they screwed her right back through the Single European Act.

Krotz, U., “Parapublic Underpinnings of International Relations: The Franco-German Construction of Europeanization of a Particular Kind”, pages 385-417http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=1381338761&SrchMode=1&sid=2&Fmt=6&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1223115331&clientId=11502

Parapublic means activities that happen below the top level of the state, but are more than just private. ‘Para’ means ‘kind of’. These parapublic activities are financed by the state, but participation and interaction is privatised. This article is about a parapublic act between France and Germany designed to promote cultural exchange leading to greater understanding and improved relations. They set up Parapublic enterprises such as a cross border TV channel which shows cultural programmes in both French and German; they also set up a scheme of foreign-exchanges in schools between the two countries to promote greater cultural understanding and relations amongst the youths in both France and Germany. While these parapublic activities make sense, there is not a lot of hard evidence to back up proof of their success, and it is quite difficult to find evidence.

Meyers, C., “The Great Banana War” in DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War, pages 115-126

After the US complained to the WTO about unfair practices of the EU giving subsidies to African banana growers who sell their bananas to Europe (the US get their bananas from Central and Southern America), Europe were told to stop the subsidies. When the EU intentionally dragged its feet on this issue, the US announced a list of increasing tariffs on European products in retaliation, which it was allowed to do. One of these tariffs was on the Scottish cashmere wool industry, which would have irreparably crippled the industry as cheaper Asian exports would have flooded the US market and the Scots would be unlikely to regain their position, resulting in thousands of jobs being lost.

The chapter is about the British Ambassador, Christopher Meyer, to America trying to get the US to reconsider the tariff on Scottish wool, even though the EU had the responsibility of negotiating trade

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(Meyer’s mother’s family were from the affected area in Scotland). The US refused to remove this tariff, feeling it would encourage the British to work harder at removing the banana subsidies, on the advice of Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott. Meyer tried hard to get a meeting with Lott, but Lott did not want to see him and constantly ignored him. Meyer eventually managed to get a meeting through his wife, who talked to Lott’s wife and then Lott himself over her personal cause of missing and exploited children, something Meyer’s wife suffered from herself with her ex-German partner. Meyer’s wife needed Lott’s support to pass her own bill through Congress on the matter on missing and exploited children, and through this managed to get Lott to meet with her husband.

While Lott initially took his original hard-line stance, he changed his mind when he approached Meyer about organising Tartan day in Washington, in honour of Scottish independence. Lott had Scottish ancestry and was proud of it and wanted to honour Scotland. He asked Meyer to arrange Scottish diplomats to attend the ceremony, but Meyer pointed out they may not wish to do so when they find out the Senator behind the day was the driving force behind the Scottish cashmere wool tariff. When presented with this, Lott sent an aide to look into where matters rested on the tariff, and the rest is history. Scottish cashmere wool was never tariffed.

Moravcsik, A., The choice for Europe : social purpose and state power from Messina to Maastricht, pages 50-67 on interstate bargaining and pages 73-77 on EU institutions as solutions to credible commitment problems. [Choice for Europe is a little difficult, but built directly from bargaining and credible commitment discussions earlier in the course].

5. Ireland In International Relations

[The material from the rest of the course and particularly the previous two weeks – on the EU and other EU member states – is relevant to this topic. Exam or essay questions about Ireland and International Relations must be based on course materials and concepts and not on contemporary/media discussion about ‘Ireland and the EU’ etc. ]

Introductory: Coakley and Gallagher, Politics in the Republic of Ireland (Routledge in association with the Political Studies Association of Ireland, 2004 [Fourth Edition]), “Europe and the international dimension” by Brigid Laffan and Ben Tonra pp. 430-461.

Thomas Mohr, “Law without Loyalty – the abolition of the Irish Appeal to the Privy Council”, Irish Jurist 2002, 187-226. NOT AVAILABLE ONLINE, JOURNAL IN LIBRARY

Henchy, S., The Irish Constitution and the EEC. Dublin University Law Journal (1), 1977, pages 20-25. NOT AVAILABLE ONLINE, JOURNAL IN LIBRARY

Ben Tonra, Global citizen and European Republic: Irish Foreign Policy in Transition, pages 181-196 (“Case Study: The War in Iraq 2003”)

That US troops using Shannon were carrying personal weapons and were in full-military uniform whilst heading to the Iraq war was in violation of the Irish constitution. However, the government just turned a blind eye.

In the absence of agreement within the Security Council, the legal standing of the Anglo-American military operation against Iraq was disputed, and the Irish government would only declare its political preference for a second resolution authorising the use of force. It neither could nor would declare on its legality. The second point of claimed consistency was that a fifty-year-old tradition existed which, with or without UN resolutions, had facilitated the over flight and refuelling of US

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military aircraft and civilian charters carrying US military personnel. Any change to that tradition, according to the Taoiseach, would represent ‘a radical and far-reaching change in our foreign policy ... [which would] only give succour to the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein’. It would also be seen by the US and Britain as being ‘the adoption of a hostile position’, creating a new and dangerous precedent which would ‘run counter to our long-term national interests’. That word ‘hostile’ was then subsequently used more than one dozen times by government deputies to describe the effect of a withdrawal of Shannon’s facilities. The Tánaiste went much further, saying: ‘Our history, our relationships and our interests with the US and Britain are ours uniquely. Our ties with them run deep: historically, culturally, socially and economically’. She added, ‘These are our closest friends who have helped us work for peace over terrorism in our own country. We accept their honesty. We trust them as friends.’ And, as a result of these bonds ‘we will not deny them now when they need us’. Therefore, she insisted, the ‘Government made the right decision yesterday. It is based on our responsibilities to our people, friends, traditions, and beliefs ... We will not abandon our friends in this time’.

What is striking about this case study is the way in which policy segued so smoothly from a pre-war to war footing. The ‘traditional’ position vis à vis Shannon (bar the hiccough when it was realised that US troops were, in fact, carrying their personal weapons) and the firmly expressed view that a second UN resolution was necessary to secure political legitimacy for the military intervention moved almost seamlessly into a radically different situation. Now, we saw Fianna Fáil deputies arguing that the traditions of Irish neutrality demanded that Shannon Airport facilities be made available for US military forces engaged in war against a UN Member State without the authorisation of the UN Security Council. We also witnessed an Irish Foreign Minister declaring that the UN Secretary General’s considered view that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under the UN Charter was simply a useful contribution to a debate about that conflict’s ambiguous legal status.

6. Constructivist Approaches To International Relations

Schimmelfennig, F., "The community trap: Liberal norms, rhetorical action, and the eastern enlargement of the European Union", pages 47-80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3078597

March and Olsen, “The Logic of Appropriateness”, ARENA working paper, 04/09. http://www.arena.uio.no/publications/wp04_9.pdf

Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy, “Constructivism and the Constraint of Legitimacy” pages 171-207

7. International Human Rights Politics

Joy Gordon, “The Concept of Human Rights: The History and Meaning of Its Politicization” ONLY pages 700-720, 763-791 (about Nuremburg tribunal) http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/bjil23&div=32&size=2&rot=0&type=image

Andrew Moravcsik, "Why Is U.S. Human Rights Policy So Unilateralist?" http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/unilateralism.pdf

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, pages 1-3, 11-16, 140-149, 158-166, 186-194.

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King Leopold of Belgium, much admired and considered one of Europe’s more ‘philanthropic’ monarchs, claims he is benefitting Congo through trade, however Morel, an employee of a Liverpool shipping line that has a monopoly on shipping between Europe and the Congo, realises that the ships are coming back to Europe with ivory and rubber, yet they return only with soldiers; there is no trade going on here, only slave labour. Morel set about putting the issue in the public domain and raising awareness of what was going on in King Leopold’s Congo.

Morel quit his job at the shipping company and took up writing about the horrors of Congo, determined to get something done about King Leopold’s abuses. Morel had nothing to gain, and only a promising career to lose, yet he took up this great moral crusade. Morel believed the Congo case was different from other human rights cases, in that the Congo was a state deliberately and systematically founded upon slave labour. Morel, who had a passionate belief in free trade, was upset that the seizure of the land left the Africans nothing to trade with. He was convinced only free trade would humanely bring Africa into the modern age. He assumed that what was good for the merchants of Liverpool was also good for Africa.

Morel wrote frantically about Leopold’s abuses in the Congo, and the more he wrote, the more insiders leaked to him, enraging Leopold. Morel’s campaign encouraged opposition to Leopold in Belgium, especially amongst socialists in Parliament. Morel received damning testimony from the records of the Belgian Parliament, missionaries stationed in the Congo as well as soldiers stationed in the Congo. One soldier reported back that after 6 weeks of painful marching they had killed over 900 native men, women and children; the incentives and the cause of deaths being the potential of adding 20 tonnes of rubber to that month’s crop.

After several years of hard work, Morel and his allies succeeded on putting the ‘Congo Question’ on the front burner of the British public agenda. That year the House of Commons passed a resolution urging that Congo natives be treated with humanity. The resolution also protested King Leopold’s failure to live up to his promises about free trade. Morel had proved a shrewd lobbyist, and behind the scenes he fed information to the prominent speakers who supported the resolution. Leopold was alarmed, as Britain was the Superpower of the day and the most prominent colonial power in Africa, and if it turned its full force against Leopold’s Congo his profits might be put in risk. However Leopold realised there was a difference between passing a resolution and putting pressure on a friendly monarch. So while Morel had thoroughly exposed King Leopold’s rule for what it was, it remained in place.

8. International Environmental Politics

Chasek, Downie and Brown, Global Environmental Politics, (Westview, 2006, FourthEdition), pages 97-128 on transboundary air pollution, ozone depletion, and climate change, pages 151-158 on trade in endangered species.

“Let them eat pollution” [Larry Summers memo] The Economist (2/8/1992), page 1.http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=6&hid=104&sid=ab6a651d-faba-4bc3-af78-d034a1e3eb14%40sessionmgr104&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=9202244211

The Summers memo was a 1991 memo on trade liberalization released while Larry Summers while was Chief Economist of the World Bank. It included a sarcastic section that suggested dumping toxic waste in third-world countries for perceived economic benefits.

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Summers points out the problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCS (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalisation.

It has been argued that the satirical section might seem to be based in economics as a science, but in fact contains strong moral premises which cannot be removed and still leave the argument intact. It demonstrates the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in.

Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science. (New York, Basic Books, 2005), pages 78-101 ‘The Greatest Hoax’.

Cass Sunstein, “A Tale of Two Protocols” in Worst-Case Scenarios, pages 71-117.

9. Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Terrorism

Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, The spread of nuclear weapons: a debate renewed: with new sections on India and Pakistan, terrorism, and missile defence, (WW Norton, 2003), pages 1-87

Robert A. Pape., “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism", pages 343-361. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3117613

Overall, from 1980 to 2001, suicide attacks amount to 3% of all terrorist attacks but account for 48% of total 3463 deaths due to terrorism, excluding September 11th.

The central logic of the strategy of Suicide Terrorism is simple: it attempts to inflict enough pain on the opposing society to overwhelm their interest in resisting the terrorists’ demands and, so, to cause either the government to concede or the population to revolt against the government. Suicide terrorism is rarely a one-time event but often occurs in a series of suicide attacks. As such, suicide terrorism generates coercive leverage both from the immediate panic associated with each attack and from the risk of civilian punishment in the future. What creates the coercive leverage is not so much actual damage as the expectation of future damage. Suicide terrorists' willingness to die magnifies the coercive effects of punishment in three ways. First, suicide attacks are generally more destructive than other terrorist attacks. An attacker who is willing to die is much more likely to accomplish the mission and to cause maximum damage to the target.

3 properties are consistent with the strategic logic: (1) timing-nearly all suicide attacks occur in organized, coherent campaigns, not as isolated or randomly timed incidents; (2) nationalist goals-suicide terrorist campaigns are directed at gaining control of what the terrorists see as their national homeland territory, specifically at ejecting foreign forces from that territory; and (3) target selection-all suicide terrorist campaigns in the last two decades have been aimed at democracies, which make more suitable targets from the terrorists' point of view. They view democracies as "soft," usually on the grounds that their publics have low thresholds of cost tolerance and high ability to affect state policy.

Even if many suicide attackers are irrational or fanatical, the leadership groups that recruit and direct them are not. Viewed from the perspective of the terrorist organization, suicide attacks are designed to achieve specific political purposes: to coerce a target government to change policy, to mobilize additional recruits and financial support, or both.

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The author presents five principal findings:

1. Suicide terrorism is strategic. The vast majority of suicide terrorist attacks are not isolated or random acts by individual fanatics but, rather, occur in clusters as part of a larger campaign by an organized group to achieve a specific political goal. Groups using suicide terrorism consistently announce specific political goals and stop suicide attacks when those goals have been fully or partially achieved.

2. They are specifically designed to coerce modern democracies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. All attacks have been waged by terrorist groups whose main goal has been to establish or maintain self-determination for their community's homeland. All targeted against a state that had a democratic form of government.

3. They’ve learnt that it pays. While they did not achieve their full objectives in all cases, in all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. This pattern of making concessions has probably encouraged terrorist groups to pursue even more ambitious suicide campaigns. From the perspective of the coercer, the key question is whether a particular coercive strategy promises to be more effective than alternative methods of influence and, so, warrants continued (or increased) effort. This is especially true for terrorists who are highly committed to a particular goal and so willing to exhaust virtually any alternative rather than abandoning it. A glance at the behaviour of suicide terrorists reveals that such trade-offs between alternative methods are important in their calculations. All of the organizations that have resorted to suicide terrorism began their coercive efforts with more conventional guerrilla operations, non-suicide terrorism, or both.Terrorists are likely to have some confidence in the efficacy of suicide attacks and having carried out the act they have an interest in justifying their choice. Hence whenever a target of suicide terrorism makes a real or apparent concession they make the plausible interpretation that it was due to the coercion of the suicide campaign, even when there are other plausible reasons. If we look at the case of the Hamas suicide campaign against Israel, the interpretation can be plausibly drawn that the campaign led to the Israeli withdrawal, and therefore terrorists have reasonably learned the lesson from their experience that suicide terrorism pays.

4. Although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concessions, these more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely. Suicide terrorism does not change a nation's willingness to trade high interests for high costs, but suicide attacks can overcome a country's efforts to mitigate civilian costs. Ambitious campaigns are unlikely to compel states to abandon important interests related to the physical security or national wealth of the state. National governments have in fact responded aggressively to ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns in recent years, events which confirm these expectations. Suicide terrorism can coerce states to abandon limited or modest goals, such as withdrawal from territory of low strategic importance or, as in Israel's case in 1994 and 1995, a temporary and partial withdrawal from a more important area. However, suicide terrorism is unlikely to cause targets to abandon goals central to their wealth or security, such as a loss of territory that would weaken the economic prospects of the state or strengthen the rivals of the state. While suicide terrorism has achieved modest or very limited goals, it has so far failed to compel target democracies to abandon goals central to national wealth or security. Thus, the logic of punishment and the record of suicide terrorism suggests that, unless suicide terrorists acquire far more destructive technologies, suicide at-tacks for more ambitious goals are likely to fail and will continue to provoke more aggressive military responses.

5. The most promising way to contain suicide terrorism is to reduce terrorists' confidence in their ability to carry out such attacks on the target society. States should invest significant resources in

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border defences and other means of homeland security. Undermining the feasibility of suicide terrorism is a difficult task. After all, a major advantage of suicide attack is that it is more difficult to prevent than other types of attack. However, the difficulty of achieving perfect security should not keep us from taking serious measures to prevent would-be terrorists from easily entering their target society.

There are 3 main types of terrorism:

1. Demonstrative terrorism is directed mainly at gaining publicity, for any or all of three reasons: to recruit more activists, to gain attention to grievances from soft-liners on the other side, and to gain attention from third parties who might exert pressure on the other side. In these cases, terrorists often avoid doing serious harm so as not to undermine sympathy for the political cause. The essence of demonstrative terrorism is captured in the remark, "Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead."

2. Destructive terrorism is more aggressive, seeking to coerce opponents as well as mobilize support for the cause. Destructive terrorists seek to inflict real harm on members of the target audience at the risk of losing sympathy for their cause. Exactly how groups strike the balance between harm and sympathy depends on the nature of the political goal.

3. Suicide terrorism is the most aggressive form of terrorism, pursuing coercion even at the expense of losing support among the terrorists' own community. What distinguishes a suicide terrorist is that the attacker does not expect to survive a mission and often employs a method of attack that requires the attacker's death in order to succeed. Suicide terrorists often seek simply to kill the largest number of people. Although this maximizes the coercive leverage that can be gained from terrorism, it does so at the greatest cost to the basis of support for the terrorist cause. Maximizing the number of enemy killed alienates those in the target audience who might be sympathetic to the terrorists cause, while the act of suicide creates a debate and often loss of support among moderate segments of the terrorists' community, even if also attracting support among radical elements. Thus, while coercion is an element in all terrorism, coercion is the paramount objective of suicide terrorism.

Given the limits of offense and of concessions, homeland security and defensive efforts generally must be a core part of any solution. Similarly, if Al Qaeda proves able to continue suicide attacks against the American homeland, the United States should emphasize improving its domestic security. In the short term, the United States should adopt stronger border controls to make it more difficult for suicide attackers to enter the United States. In the long term, the United States should work toward energy in-dependence and, thus, reduce the need for American troops in the Persian Gulf countries where their presence has helped recruit suicide terrorists to attack America. These measures will not provide a perfect solution, but they may make it far more difficult for Al Qaeda to continue attacks in the United States, especially spectacular attacks that require elaborate coordination.

Perhaps most important, the close association between foreign military occupations and the growth of suicide terrorist movements in the occupied regions should give pause to those who favour solutions that involve conquering countries in order to transform their political systems. Conquering countries may disrupt terrorist operations in the short term, but it is important to recognize that occupation of more countries may well increase the number of terrorists coming at us.

10. International Health Politics

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Kelley Lee, The World Health Organization (Routledge, 2009), pages 25-45

The main components of the WHO’s organisational structure have remained unchanged since its formal establishment in 1948. The organisation’s supreme decision-making body is the WHA. The WHA meets annually, usually in May, to determine the overall policy direction of the WHO’s six-year General Programme of Work, review and approve reports and activities of the Executive Board, and review and approve the annual budget, among other things. It also appoints the Director-General (for five year terms) and elects the 34 members of the Executive Board.

The Executive Board oversees the implementation of decisions taken by the WHA. While member states are elected by the WHA to propose EB members, the people selected are expected to serve in an individual capacity as ‘technically qualified in the field of health’ rather than as representatives of their particular government.

The Secretariat is the administrative and technical organ of the WHO, responsible for implementing the organisation’s activities. The Secretariat is headed by the Director-General, whose primary responsibilities, as chief technical and administrative officer, are the appointment of Secretariat staff, preparation of annual financial statements, and the drafting of the proposed program budget.

Each member state is allocated to a regional office. The WHO also has six regional offices, in Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, Americas, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Pacific. There were two main reasons for the creation of regional offices: the first was in recognition that effective international health cooperation required effective institutional links to all member states; the second, and more politically based, reason for a decentralised structure was the prior existence of established regional health organisations at the time of the WHO’s creation. While it was widely agreed these organisations needed to be integrated into the WHO’s structure, negotiations over the distribution of authority, membership and financing proved highly sensitive.

As of 2005 there were 144 WHO country offices (COs) located in member states deemed in need of country-level support. Each CO, they vary considerably in size, is headed by a WHO Representative (WR) who is a trained physician and not a national of that country. The overall role of the CO is to work with the government to implement WHO policies and programmes, and more generally, support the development of the country’s health system. They have 3 main functions: policy advice and technical support; information, public relations and advocacy; and management and administration.

The WHO is financed in part by the assessed contributions of its member states, which are calculated biennially according to the UN scale of ability to pay. According to the system, a small number of high-income countries provide most of the organisation’s core funding. To ensure the WHO does not become overly dependent on a single member state, it was agreed that no country would pay more than one-third of the total contributions. The largest single contributor is the USA at 25%. The WHO has also received funding in the form of voluntary contributions from other UN organisations, member states, NGOs, private companies and individuals.

The WHO’s structure and functions are intended to reflect the organisation’s universal membership and mandate to improve the world’s health. The plenary meetings of the WHA permit each member state to voice its views and pursue its health needs. The work of the EB, comprised of individuals acting in their technical capacity rather than as representatives of particular governments, is expected to be less subject to vested interests. In turn, the expert staff of the Secretariat carries out the broad range of programs agreed by the two governing bodies.

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At the same time, its institutional features cannot be disentangled from the political history of international health cooperation. The establishment of its governing bodies and, in particular, the creation of regional and country offices, has been a balancing act between institutional effectiveness and political necessity. While the resultant structure has, in principle, distributed available resources worldwide, the appropriate balance of authority and responsibility between headquarters and regions has been an ongoing source of tension. Capacity across different regions and countries remains markedly unequal.

At the country level, the WHO’s traditional role has been to support ministries of health through its country offices. How large or small these offices should be, and what level and type of resources are needed to support countries, also remains subject to ongoing debate. Since the 1940s, the WHO’s membership has steadily grown to embrace newly independent countries during the 1950s and 1960s, shifting power blocs during and after the Cold War, and the rise and fall of the economic and political power of certain countries and regions. Expectations of how the WHO should structure its programs and allocate its resources have changed accordingly. Thus, despite its being a specialised agency, and deemed to deal with largely scientific and technical matters, world politics set the wider context within which the WHO could pursue its mandate, by becoming embedded within its membership, funding and priority setting.

Mark Zacher, "The Transformation in Global Health Collaboration since the 1990s" in Cooper / Kirton / Schrecker, Governing Global Health, pages 15-28

Laurie Garrett, "The Challenge of Global Public Health", page 14http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=1214614191&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1252417150&clientId=11502

Less than a decade ago, the biggest problem in global health was the lack of resources available to combat the multiple scourges ravaging the world's poor and sick. Today, thanks to a recent extraordinary and unprecedented rise in public and private giving, more money is being directed toward pressing heath challenges than ever before. However, because the efforts this money is paying for are largely uncoordinated and directed mostly at specific high-profile diseases - rather than at public health in general - there is a grave danger that the current age of generosity could not only fall short of expectations but actually make things worse on the ground.

Tackling the developing world's diseases has become a key feature of many nations' foreign policies over the last five years, for a variety of reasons. Some see stopping the spread of HIV, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, avian influenza, and other major killers as a moral duty. Some see it as a form of public diplomacy. And some see it as an investment in self-protection, given that microbes know no borders. Thanks to their efforts, there are now billions of dollars being made available for health spending - and thousands of NGOs and humanitarian groups vying to spend it. But much more than money is required. It takes states, health-care systems, and at least passable local infrastructure to improve public health in the developing world. And because decades of neglect there have rendered local hospitals, clinics, laboratories, medical schools, and health talent dangerously deficient, much of the cash now flooding the field is leaking away without result. Few donors seem to understand that it will take at least a full generation (if not two or three) to substantially improve public health - and that efforts should focus less on particular diseases than on broad measures that affect populations' general well-being.

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As the populations of the developed countries are aging and coming to require ever more medical attention, they are sucking away local health talent from developing countries. Already, one out of five practicing physicians in the United States is foreign-trained. Unless it and other wealthy nations radically increase salaries and domestic training programs for physicians and nurses, it is likely that within 15 years the majority of workers staffing their hospitals will have been born and trained in poor and middle-income countries. As such workers flood to the West, the developing world will grow even more desperate.

The World Bank, for its part, took little interest in health issues in its early decades, thinking that health would improve in tandem with general economic development, which it was the bank's mission to promote. Under the leadership of Robert McNamara (which ran from 1968 to 1981), however, the bank slowly increased direct investment in targeted health projects, such as the attempted elimination of river blindness in West Africa. By the end of the 1980s, many economists were beginning to recognize that disease in tropical and desperately poor countries was itself a critical impediment to development and prosperity, and in 1993 the bank formally announced its change of heart in its annual World Development Report. SEE SUMMERS MEMO.

Poor nations themselves, finally, have stepped up their own health spending, partly in response to criticism that they were underallocating public funds for social services. In the 1990s, for example, sub-Saharan African countries typically spent less than 3 percent of their budgets on health. By 2003, in contrast, Tanzania spent nearly 13 percent of its national budget on health-related goods and services; the Central African Republic, Namibia, and Zambia each spent around 12 percent of their budgets on health; and in Mozambique, Swaziland, and Uganda, the figure was around 11 percent.

One might think that with all this money on the table, the solutions to many global health problems would at least now be in sight. But one would be wrong. Most funds come with strings attached and must be spent according to donors' priorities, politics, and values. And the largest levels of donations are propelled by mass emotional responses, such as to the Asian tsunami. Still more money is needed, on a regular basis and without restrictions on the uses to which it is put. But even if such resources were to materialize, major obstacles would still stand in the way of their doing much lasting good.

One problem is that not all the funds appropriated end up being spent effectively. A 2006 World Bank report, meanwhile, estimated that about half of all funds donated for health efforts in sub-Saharan Africa never reach the clinics and hospitals at the end of the line. According to the bank, money leaks out in the form of payments to ghost employees, padded prices for transport and warehousing, the siphoning off of drugs to the black market, and the sale of counterfeit - often dangerous - medications. In Ghana, for example, where such corruption is particularly rampant, an amazing 80 percent of donor funds get diverted from their intended purposes.

Another problem is the lack of coordination of donor activities. Improving global health will take more funds than any single donor can provide, and oversight and guidance require the skills of the many, not the talents of a few compartmentalized in the offices of various groups and agencies. In practice, moreover, donors often function as competitors, and the only organization with the political credibility to compel cooperative thinking is the WHO. Yet, as Harvard University's Christopher Murray points out, the WGO itself is dependent on donors, who give it much more for disease-specific programs than they do for its core budget. If the WHO stopped chasing such funds, Murray argues, it could go back to concentrating on its true mission of providing objective expert advice and strategic guidance.

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This points to yet another problem, which is that aid is almost always "stovepiped" down narrow channels relating to a particular program or disease. Stovepiping tends to reflect the interests and concerns of the donors, not the recipients. Diseases and health conditions that enjoy a temporary spotlight in rich countries garner the most attention and money. This means that advocacy, the whims of foundations, and the particular concerns of wealthy individuals and governments drive practically the entire global public health effort. Today the top three killers in most poor countries are maternal death around childbirth and paediatric respiratory and intestinal infections leading to death from pulmonary failure or uncontrolled diarrhoea. But few women's rights groups put safe pregnancy near the top of their list of priorities, and there is no dysentery lobby or celebrity attention given to coughing babies.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic, meanwhile, continues to be the primary driver of global concern and action about health. At the 2006 International AIDS Conference, former U.S. President Bill Clinton suggested that HIV/AIDS programs would end up helping all other health initiatives. But this is not true. Part of the problem is that most of global HIV/AIDS-related funding goes to stand-alone programs: HIV testing sites, hospices and orphanages for people affected by AIDS, ARV-dispersal stations, HIV/AIDS education projects, and the like. Because of discrimination against people infected with HIV, public health systems have been reluctant to incorporate HIV/AIDS-related programs into general care. The resulting segregation has reinforced the anti-HIV stigma and helped create cadres of health-care workers who function largely independently from countries' other health-related systems.

Data from international migration-tracking organizations show that health professionals from poor countries worldwide are increasingly abandoning their homes and their professions to take menial jobs in wealthy countries. Morale is low all over the developing world, where doctors and nurses have the knowledge to save lives but lack the tools. Compounding the problem are the recruitment activities of Western NGOs and OECD-supported programs inside poor countries, which poach local talent. To help comply with financial and reporting requirements imposed by the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors, these programs are also soaking up the pool of local economists, accountants, and translators.

Instead of setting a hodgepodge of targets aimed at fighting single diseases, the world health community should focus on achieving two basic goals: increased maternal survival and increased overall life expectancy. Why? Because if these two markers rise, it means a population's other health problems are also improving. And if these two markers do not rise, improvements in disease-specific areas will ultimately mean little for a population's general health and well-being. The OECD and the G-8 should thus shift their targets, recognizing that vanquishing AIDS, TB, and malaria are best understood not simply as tasks in themselves but also as essential components of these two larger goals. No health program should be funded without considering whether it could, as managed, end up worsening the targeted life expectancy and maternal health goals, no matter what its impacts on the incidence or mortality rate of particular diseases.

At a minimum, therefore, donors and UN agencies should strive to integrate their infectious-disease programs into general public health systems. Some smaller NGOs have had success with community-based models, but this needs to become the norm. Stovepiping should yield to a far more generalized effort to raise the ability of the entire world to prevent, recognize, control, and treat infectious diseases -- and then move on to do the same for chronic killers such as diabetes and heart disease in the long term. Tactically, all aspects of prevention and treatment should be part of an integrated effort, drawing from countries' finite pools of health talent to tackle all monsters at once, rather than duelling separately with individual dragons.

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11. THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

John Mearsheimer, “The Rise of China will not be Peaceful at All”http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/P0014.pdf

Mearsheimer predicts that if China continues its impressive economic growth over the next few decades, the US and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war. He believes that the mightiest states attempt to establish hegemony in their own region while making sure that no rival great power dominates another region. The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximise its share of world power and eventually dominate the system.

He believes the best way to survive in the international anarchic system is to be as powerful as possible, relative to potential rivals. The mightier a state is, the less likely it is that another state will attack it. The great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest great power, although that is a welcome outcome; their ultimate aim is to be the world’s sole hegemon. However he feels it is almost impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony in the modern world, because it is too hard to project and sustain power around the globe. Even the US is a regional but not a global hegemon. The best that a state can hope for is to dominate its own back yard.

States that gain regional hegemony have a further aim: to prevent other geographical areas from being dominated by other great powers. Regional hegemons, in other words, do not want peer competitors. Instead, they want to keep other regions divided among several great powers so that these states will compete with each other.

China -- whether it remains authoritarian or becomes democratic – is likely to try to dominate Asia the way the US dominates the Western hemisphere. Specifically, China will seek to maximise the power gap between itself and its neighbours, especially Japan and Russia. China will want to make sure that it is so powerful that no state in Asia has the wherewithal to threaten it. It is unlikely that China will pursue military superiority, the more likely option being that it will want to dictate the boundaries of acceptable behaviour to neighbouring countries, much the way the US makes it clear to other states in the Americas that it is the boss. Also, gaining regional hegemony is probably the only way that China will get Taiwan back.

An increasingly powerful China is also likely to try to push the US out of Asia, much the way the US pushed the European great powers out of the Western hemisphere. These policy goals make good strategic sense for China. Beijing should want a militarily weak Japan and Russia as its neighbours, just as the US prefers a militarily weak Canada and Mexico on its borders.

What state in its right mind would want other powerful states located in its region? Furthermore, why would a powerful China accept US military forces operating in its back yard? American policy-makers, after all, go ballistic when other great powers send military forces into the Western hemisphere. Those foreign forces are invariably seen as a potential threat to American security. The same logic should apply to China. Why would China feel safe with US forces deployed on its doorstep? Would not China's security be better served by pushing the American military out of Asia? Why should we expect the Chinese to act any differently than the US did? China is likely to imitate the US and attempt to become a regional hegemon. It is clear from the historical record how American policy-makers will react if China attempts to dominate Asia. The US does not tolerate peer competitors. Therefore, the US can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence,

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the US is likely to behave towards China much the way it behaved towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

China's neighbours are certain to fear its rise as well, and they too will do whatever they can to prevent it from achieving regional hegemony. Indeed, there is already substantial evidence that countries such as India, Japan, and Russia, as well as smaller powers such as Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam, are worried about China's ascendancy and are looking for ways to contain it. In the end, they will join an American-led balancing coalition to check China's rise, much the way Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and even China, joined forces with the US to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Finally, given Taiwan's strategic importance for controlling the sea lanes in East Asia, it is hard to imagine the US, as well as Japan, allowing China to control that large island. In fact, Taiwan is likely to be an important player in the anti-China balancing coalition, which is sure to infuriate China and fuel the security competition between Beijing and Washington.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, "The Real New World Order", Foreign Affairs, (Sept-Oct 1997), pages 183-197. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=4&hid=117&sid=43293a40-105c-49c9-bd22-fad14e12523f%40sessionmgr103

John Mearsheimer, "E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On", pages 139-152.http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0035.pdf

Mearsheimer argues that the central claims in E.H.Carr’s classic realist work, the Twenty Years Crisis, are still relevant today. Carr maintained that states are the main actors in world politics and that they are deeply committed to pursuing power at each other’s expense. He also argued that British intellectual life in his day was dominated by idealists who largely ignored power politics. Despite the great changes that have taken place in the world since 1939, when The Twenty Years’ Crisis was published, states still dominate the international system and they still pay careful attention to the balance of power.

Furthermore, Mearsheimer believes there is a powerful bias against realism, with idealists now dominating international relations scholarship in Britain, more so than they did in the late 1930s. Indeed, it is hard to find a realist theorist in the contemporary British academy. He argues this is intellectually foolhardy and hurts not only students but the idealist scholars who so dislike realism. He argues that idealism is now more firmly entrenched among British international relations scholars than it was in the late 1930s. His argument is that the interwar idealists had the smart strategy for waging war, which is to rely on reason to show the inadequacies of power politics. It is a far superior strategy to excluding realists from the academy and outlawing realist language and thinking. Or to put it another way, if contemporary idealists really do have powerful theories to offer, they do not need to be afraid of realism.

Carr made two main points in that path-breaking book. First, he argued that states, the principal actors in international politics, care greatly, although not exclusively, about power. Second, he maintained that British academics and intellectuals were idealists who neglected the crucial role of power when thinking about international politics.

Mearsheimer argues that, globalization and al Qaeda notwithstanding, states are still the main actors on the world stage and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Those states will also continue to worry a great deal about the balance of power, and this concern will shape much of what they do. In short, power politics are alive and well in the world around us.

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Carr’s goal in The Twenty Years’ Crisis was not to articulate a theory of realism, but instead to criticize British (and American) intellectuals for largely ignoring the role of power in international politics. The problem with British thinkers, according to Carr, was not just that they ignored power, but that they were utopians as well. He thought they held a hopelessly idealistic view of international politics. In particular, they had a normative agenda which led them to pay little attention to the world around them and to focus instead on changing how states relate to each other. Indeed, they were determined to radically transform world politics and create a peaceful international order where statesmen no longer cared about the balance of power. The idealists, Carr believed, saw themselves as the key agents for accomplishing this revolution. ‘The utopian’, he wrote, ‘believes in the possibility of more or less radically rejecting reality, and substituting his utopia for it by an act of will.’

Carr also forcefully made the case that power is an essential ingredient in politics. ‘International politics’, he wrote, ‘are always power politics; for it is impossible to eliminate power from them.’ Moreover, he asserted that ‘the ultima ratio of power in international relations is war’, which led him to conclude that of all the instruments of statecraft the military is of ‘supreme importance’.However Carr emphasized that international politics is not only about the pursuit of power. Instead he maintained that serious policymakers and intellectuals pay attention to ideals as well as power. Thus, Carr’s claim that states care about both power and liberal ideals is not terribly controversial. The critical task is to explain how power and utopia relate to each other. In Carr’s words, the key is to find the proper ‘combination of utopia and reality’. There are, however, many instances where the pursuit of power conflicts with liberal ideals: where there is, in Carr’s words, an ‘antithesis of utopia and reality’. Realists argue that states will privilege power over ideals in such instances, and the historical record supports that view quite strongly. Carr is no exception in this regard; he believes that power ultimately trumps all other considerations in the nasty and dangerous world of international politics. And that is why Carr is a realist. Carr’s realism comes shining through when he notes that although states almost always use idealistic rhetoric to justify their actions; this cannot disguise the fact that their motives are usually selfish and usually based on calculations about the balance of power. Carr’s realism is also manifest in his discussion of international law, where he makes it clear that he does not see it ‘primarily as a branch of ethics’, but instead considers it ‘primarily as a vehicle of power’.

In sum, there is no question that Carr rejects pure realism; he recognizes that there is an idealist dimension to international politics that bears serious consideration. Nevertheless, he maintains that in the crunch, power calculations matter the most to policymakers. ‘In the international order’, he wrote in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, ‘the role of power is greater and that of morality less.’ Idealists, on the other hand, privilege liberal ideals over power. Indeed, Carr accused them of ignoring power almost completely, which is why he was so hostile to idealism.

Today’s idealists share the same basic goal as the interwar idealists whom Carr wrote about in The Twenty Years’ Crisis. They still abhor the way states behave towards each other, and they still have an imperative to change the world. Of course, their radical agenda aims to change things for the better. Indeed, they want to transform international politics so that states no longer care about power and no longer engage in security competition, but instead are content to live together in harmony.

Where post-Cold War idealists differ from interwar idealists is over how to achieve utopia. Those earlier idealists were children of the Enlightenment who believed that reason could be employed to get beyond realism. Post-Cold War idealists have a different strategy for changing the world. They believe that the master causal variable is discourse, not reason itself. It is not enough to have the better argument; rather, one wins the day by having the only argument. Idealists are also

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determined to get us to stop thinking of the state as the main unit of analysis in world politics, and instead to focus our attention on ‘either humanity as a whole or the individual’.

In short, for the idealist enterprise to work, it is necessary to radically alter how we think and talk about security, while simultaneously shifting our focus away from the state itself and onto the people around the globe who live in those states. This discussion raises an important question: who are going to be the principal agents of change? Who is going to lead the way forward in transforming the existing discourse about international politics? The answer: idealist academics. They believe that they can take us to the promised land because they have significant influence over how large numbers of influential people think about world politics. However, for the post-Cold War idealists to make this truly ambitious social engineering project work, they must completely control the commanding heights of the discipline. They cannot tolerate realists in the ranks, because they are trying to demolish realism and replace it with a more peaceful hegemonic discourse.

Interwar idealists could afford to be more tolerant of realists in their midst, because they believed that reason was on their side and that they could wield that formidable weapon to move the world away from realism. The post-Cold War idealists, however, focus mainly on controlling what people think and say, and doing everything possible to make sure that their discourse, and not realism, is dominant. The idealists’ emphasis on creating hegemonic ideas is coercive in nature and thus cannot help but foster intolerance towards competing worldviews, especially realism. This is why realist theorists are absent from British universities today.

Mearsheimer offers an assessment of post-Cold War idealism, with three main points:

First, while the contemporary idealists have produced a rich body of scholarship, it is not going to transform international politics or how we study the subject in any meaningful way. The best evidence that realism is not headed down the road to oblivion is the remarkable staying power of The Twenty Years’ Crisis. The reason that The Twenty Years’ Crisis is still relevant is that there are enduring features of world politics about which realism has a lot to say. For example, the state remains the main actor in the international system and people around the globe remain deeply loyal to their own state. And people without a state, like the Palestinians, the Kurds, and the Chechens, are determined to create one. While Carr believed that nationalism was a spent force and that the nation-state was rapidly becoming an anachronism, he was wrong. Nationalism remains a potent force.

Second, it is unwise, if not dangerous, for idealists to try to marginalize the study of traditional security issues in British universities. Military questions are of the utmost importance, not simply because states still fight wars with each other, but also because of the danger that a conflict might escalate to the nuclear level. Plus there is the ever-present danger of terrorists with nuclear weapons.

Third, it is unwise from an intellectual perspective for any group of international relations scholars, be they idealists or realists, to promote a hegemonic discourse. Scholarship is best advanced in any discipline when there are contending schools of thought that are free to compete with each other in the marketplace of ideas. Pluralism, not monopoly, is what we should all foster in our departments and in the broader field of international relations. Even if one has an impressive theory or perspective, it cannot tell us all we need to know about international politics. The reason is simple: the world is remarkably complicated and all of our theories – including the best ones – have limited explanatory power. To make sense of the world, we need to have a variety of perspectives at our disposal. He thinks that the effort to make idealism a hegemonic discourse is a mistake. Intellectual diversity is one of the great virtues of democracy, and it should be encouraged, not curtailed.

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