Thomas Schoonover

Bio: Thomas Schoonover is an academic researcher from Stephen F. Austin State University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & German. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 34 publications receiving 323 citations. Previous affiliations of Thomas Schoonover include University of Georgia.

Mexican Cotton and the American Civil War

Abstract: For Mexico the years 1861 to 1867, encompassing the United States Civil War and French intervention, were violent, tumultuous years, and Mexico was already exhausted by five decades of revolution, war, civil disorder and banditry. The last years of the 1850's had witnessed the guerra de la reforma , an intense, bitter civil war. Not only was Mexico politically exhausted, she was also economically in bad need of peace to permit regeneration. The war with France, beginning in late 1861, was, however, to continue the economic as well as political strain upon Mexican society. Still, the United States Civil War, for all its tragic course north of the Rio Grande, was apparently to have a beneficial effect upon the Mexican economy in several aspects.

Prussia and the protection of German transit through Middle America and commerce with the Pacific basin, 1848-1851

Abstract: Prussia was sucked into the imperial competition between Britain and the United States in Central America during the 1848 to 1851 period. Factors propelling Prussia into this competitive struggle at the unpropitious time immediately after the grave internal crisis of the 1848 revolution and Frankfurter Parliament were related to internal German-Prussian objectives. Prussia sought to use the Zollverein (Customs Union) to facilitate Prussia's supremacy in Germany, to prevent Austrian predominance in Germany, to adopt policies attractive to other German states such as the Hansa cities and the industrial areas of northern Germany and on the Rhine, and to fortify German nationalism, while subordinating it to the Prussian monarchy. Such far-reaching objectives placed pressure upon Prussia to grow stronger on a world scale, yet to adopt courses of action acceptable to its actual or potential allies within the context of German unification, while strengthening the image and reality of German power, prestige, and world reputation.

Democracy from the Outside-In? International Organizations and Democratization

Abstract: Scholars and policymakers alike have recently begun to tout the ability of international organizations (IOs) to encourage and secure democracy throughout the world. Despite this stance, little theoretical attention or empirical investigation has attempted to ascertain why or whether this relationship truly exists. One challenge to answering this puzzle is that extant theories of international institutions do not generally delineate clear hypotheses about how IOs influence domestic politics. In this article, I address this paucity of both theory and empirical evidence. I delineate three causal mechanisms that link IOs to domestic actors' calculations about political liberalization and test the argument. I find that membership in regional IOs is correlated with transitions to democracy during the period from 1950 to 1992.

Why are some international agreements informal

Abstract: Informal agreements are the most common form of international cooperation and the least studied. Ranging from simple oral deals to detailed executive agreements, they permit states to conclude profitable bargains without the formality of treaties. They differ from treaties in more than just a procedural sense. Treaties are designed, by long-standing convention, to raise the credibility of promises by staking national reputation on their adherence. Informal agreements have a more ambiguous status and are useful for precisely that reason. They are chosen to avoid formal and visible national pledges, to avoid the political obstacles of ratification, to reach agreements quickly and quietly, and to provide flexibility for subsequent modification or even renunciation. They differ from formal agreements not because their substance is less important (the Cuban missile crisis was solved by informal agreement) but because the underlying promises are less visible and more equivocal. The prevalence of such informal devices thus reveals not only the possibilities of international cooperation but also the practical obstacles and the institutional limits to endogenous enforcement.

The search for modern China

Abstract: This course explores the history of early-modern and modern China, from the seventeenth century to the present. We will examine the rise and fall of China’s last empire, the emergence of a modern nation-state, the sources and development of revolution, and the implications of complex social, political, cultural, and economic transformations in the People’s Republic of China. Course materials include scholarly monographs, a memoir, primary sources, and visual and material artifacts that offer diverse perspectives. We will meet twice a week for a combination of lectures, discussion, and viewing of visual texts.

Trade Blocs, Trade Flows, and International Conflict

Abstract: The relationship between foreign trade and political conflict has been a persistent source of controversy among scholars of international relations. Existing empirical studies of this topic have focused on the effects of trade flows on conflict, but they have largely ignored the institutional context in which trade is conducted. In this article we present some initial quantitative results pertaining to the influence on military disputes of preferential trading arrangements (PTAs), a broad class of commercial institutions that includes free trade areas, common markets, and customs unions. We argue that parties to the same PTA are less prone to disputes than other states and that hostilities between PTA members are less likely to occur as trade flows rise between them. Moreover, we maintain that heightened commerce is more likely to inhibit conflict between states that belong to the same preferential grouping than between states that do not. Our results accord with this argument. Based on an analysis of the period since World War II, we find that trade flows have relatively little effect on the likelihood of disputes between states that do not participate in the same PTA. Within PTAs, however, there is a strong, inverse relationship between commerce and conflict. Parties to such an arrangement are less likely to engage in hostilities than other states, and the likelihood of a military dispute dips markedly as trade increases between them.

Explaining the resurgence of regionalism in world politics

Abstract: The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of regionalism in world politics. Old regionalist organizations have been revived, new organizations formed, and regionalism and the call for strengthened regionalist arrangements have been central to many of the debates about the nature of the post-Cold War international order. The number, scope and diversity of regionalist schemes have grown significantly since the last major ‘regionalist wave’ in the 1960s. Writing towards the end of this earlier regionalist wave, Joseph Nye could point to two major classes of regionalist activity: on the one hand, micro-economic organizations involving formal economic integration and characterized by formal institutional structures; and on the other, macro-regional political organizations concerned with controlling conflict. Today, in the political field, regional dinosaurs such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have re-emerged. They have been joined both by a large number of aspiring micro-regional bodies (such as the Visegrad Pact and the Pentagonale in central Europe; the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the Middle East; ECOWAS and possibly a revived Southern African Development Community (SADC, formerly SADCC) led by post-apartheid South Africa in Africa), and by loosely institutionalized meso-regional security groupings such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) and more recently the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). In the economic field, micro-regional schemes for economic cooperation or integration (such as the Southern Cone Common Market, Mercosur, the Andean Pact, the Central American Common Market (CACM) and CARICOM in the Americas; the attempts to expand economic integration within ASEAN; and the proliferation of free trade areas throughout the developing world) stand together with arguments for macro-economic or ‘bloc regionalism’ built around the triad of an expanded European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and some further development of Asia-Pacific regionalism. The relationship between these regional schemes and between regional and broader global initiatives is central to the politics of contemporary regionalism.