Showing papers on "International relations published in 1985"

Coordination versus Prisoners' Dilemma: Implications for International Cooperation and Regimes

Abstract: The study of political institutions in general and international cooperation in particular has been beneficially influenced by the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) game model, but there is a mistaken tendency to treat PD as representing the singular problem of collective action and cooperation. By relaxing the assumptions of 2 × 2 games and developing an alternate model of the coordination game, I show how some cooperation problems have very different properties from those found in PD. The analytical results of the two games are compared across several important dimensions: number of strategies available, number of iterations of the game, numbers of players, and the distribution of power among them. The discussion is illustrated with specific problems of international cooperation, and the implications of alternative cooperation problems for the formation and performance of international regimes are explored. The basic solutions for PD and coordination have divergent ramifications for the institutionalization, stability, and adaptability of regimes and for the role of hegemony in the international system. However, the coordination model does not replace the PD model but complements and supplements it as a way to understand the diversity of political institutions. These results are widely applicable to areas of politics beyond international relations.

The Game Theory of International Politics

Abstract: Game theory is elaborated as a theoretical approach to international politics by contrasting it with metaphorical and analogical uses of games. Because it embraces a diversity of models, game theory is especially useful for capturing the most important contextual features of the international system that affect prospects for international cooperation. Through a discussion of the relation among and extension of different game models, the versatility and scope of game-theoretic approaches to international relations are demonstrated. Special attention is paid to the empirical issues of international politics which are raised by game theory and are analyzed in other articles in this symposium.

The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century

Abstract: There have always been homeless people, but only in this century have refugees become an important part of international politics, seriously affecting relations between states. This book traces the growth of this 20th-century phenomenon, and takes a stern view of the international community's apathy towards the vast homeless population. While a considerable portion of the book is devoted to the dislocations of the Nazi era, Professor Marrus also looks at the whole period from the late nineteenth century to the present, depicting the astounding dimensions of the problem. He also examines the impact of refugee movements on Great Power diplomacy, and considers the evolution of agencies designed to assist refugees, noting outstanding successes and failures. The book's thesis is that the huge refugee inundations of the twentieth century in Europe represented a terrible new page in human history, presaging what we see today in parts of the Third World. Readership: students and teachers of modern history and politics, especially European.

The rise and decline of the Zairian state

Abstract: Zaire, apparently strong and stable under President Mobutu in the early 1970s, was bankrupt and discredited by the end of that decade, beset by hyperinflation and mass corruption, the populace forced into abject poverty. Why and how, in a new African state strategically located in Central Africa and rich in mineral resources, did this happen? How did the Zairian state become a parasitic predator upon its own people?In this broadly researched study, Crawford Young and Thomas Edwin Turner examine the political history of Mobutu s Zaire, looking at critical structures and patterns of societal flux, inequality, and cleavage, in particular the urban-rural nexus, the problematic of class formation, and the fluid patterns of cultural pluralism.The authors begin with a succinct history of the origins of the Zairian state (formerly the Belgian Congo), examining in particular the problems, inherited from its colonial heritage, that led to the first few tumultuous years of independence. They then turn to the critical aspects of transformation of civil society, including the relationships between urban and rural factions, class formation, and the rapidly shifting nature of ethnicity as a sociopolitical factor. They offer a comprehensive overview of the major political trends, tracing the regime through its successive phases of power seizure, consolidation, growing personalization, crisis, and decline. Finally, Young and Turner assess the state s actual performance in several policy areas: economy, international relations, and its package of Zairianization and radicalization measures.Young and Turner s thorough research, informed analysis, and straightforward style will do much to illuminate the political workings of a major African state long considered an enigma by most Western observers."

Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case

Abstract: This article was inspired – perhaps I should say provoked – by Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions . I believe that her book deserves the general acclaim it has received as a model of comparative historical analysis and as a brilliant contribution to the sociology of revolutions. But I also believe that Skocpol's treatment of the role of ideology in revolution is inadequate. This article begins by developing an alternative to Skocpol's conception of ideology, then demonstrates how this alternative conception can help to illuminate the history of the French Revolution, and concludes with some suggestions for future comparative studies of revolutions. Skocpol's goal in States and Social Revolutions is to specify, by means of a comparative historical analysis, the causes and the outcomes of the three great social revolutions of modern times: the French, the Russian, and the Chinese. She analyzes revolutions from what she terms a “non-voluntarist, structuralist perspective,” emphasizing three fundamental structural relations: (1) between classes (especially landlords and peasants), (2) between classes and states, and (3) between different states in international relations. To summarize a very complex and subtle argument, Skocpol sees a particular combination of conditions as being conducive to social revolution: (1) well-organized and autonomous peasant communities, (2) a dominant class of absentee agricultural rentiers who are highly dependent on the state, and (3) a semibureaucratized state that falls behind in military competition with rival states.

From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation

Abstract: International anarchy and the security dilemma make cooperation among sovereign states difficult. Transformations of balance-of-power systems into concerts tend to occur after large antihegemonic wars. Such wars undermine the assumptions supporting a balance-ofpower system and alter the actors' payoffs in ways that encourage cooperation. The logic developed in “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma” holds: largely because of the increased costs that will be incurred if the grand coalition breaks up, states have greater incentives to cooperate with each other, fewer reasons to fear the consequences of others' defections, and fewer reasons to defect themselves. Cooperation is further facilitated by mechanisms that increase each state's ability to see what others are doing, and to gain “timely warning” of the possibility that the others will defect.

Wealth and Poverty

Abstract: Essays in Development Economics collects many of Jagdish Bhagwati's writings that have established him as a major postwar developmental economist. The selection is diverse and highlights the close relationship and mutual reinforcement in Bhagwati's research between economic theory, empirical validation, and policy debate. Volume I, Wealth and Poverty, addresses domestic or internal development problems. Its 22 essays are divided into five parts covering Development Theory and Strategy; Economic Structure: Regularities and Explanations; Class Structure, Poverty, and Redistrbution; Technology and Employment; and Eminent Economists: Sketches and Commentary. Volume 2, Dependence and Interdependence, deals with international or external problems and its 20 essays are in four parts covering North-South Issues; Developmental Strategy: Import Substitution versus Export Promotion; Foreign Assistance; and International Migration and Investment. Within each volume, the essays are topically grouped and preceded by brief introductions by the author discussing his current views of the nature of the contributions and the relationship among them. In several cases, previously unpublished papers or postscripts to previously published papers have been added to round out the sections. Jagdish N. Bhagwati is Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics and Director of the International Economics Research Center at Columbia University. Essays in Development Economics, in conjunction with the two-volume work, Essays in International Economic Theory (edited by Robert C. Feenstra, MIT Press), constitute a comprehensive selection of Bhagwati's influential and important contributions to the theory and policy ofdevelopment and of international trade. Gene M. Grossman is Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Princeton University.

On international migration and international relations

Abstract: Scholars have yet to incorporate the phenomenon of growing conflict between states over population movements into their understanding of international migration and international relations. This article advances and analyzes three propositions: (1) relations between states are influenced by their actions or inactions vis-a-vis international migration; (2) governments affect international migration through their rules for the exit and entry of peoples; and (3) international migrants often become a political force in the country in which they reside. A fourth idea is proposed "namely that the internationalization of migration issues has introduced new and conflicting interests into consideration of policies affecting migration in both sending and receiving countries." (summary in FRE SPA) (EXCERPT)

Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change

Abstract: Understanding Capitalism provides an introduction to economics with extensive attention to the global economy, inequality, the information revolution, the exercise of power and the historical evolution of economic institutions and individual preferences. Its three dimensional approach focuses on competition in markets, command in firms, governments and international relations, and change as a permanent feature of a capitalist economy promoted by technical innovation and conflict over the distribution of income.

Protectionism and world politics

Abstract: Much unwarranted gloom and doom has been written of late about the new protectionism. It has been widely held to be a major hindrance to Third World development, an obstacle in the path of world economic recovery, and even a threat to good international relations. The facts about trade in recent years suggest a different story–and the need to look far more critically at some of the myths propounded by liberal economists. For it was not protectionism that was responsible for starting the depression of the 1980s any more than that of the 1930s. Then, as now, it was financial uncertainty and the consequent shrinkage of credit that slowed both growth and trade. Nor is protectionism a serious menace. Not only has it failed to stop the flood of industrial exports from Asian countries, there afe good reasons of state and corporate self-interest why it need not be feared in the future. Far from being a threat to the international economic order, as IMF and GATT ideologues would have us believe, bilateral trading agreements between states and corporations are sustaining continued growth in trade despite financial disorder.

Why Cooperation Failed in 1914

Abstract: World War I arose from six remarkable misperceptions that swept through Europe before 1914. Europeans exaggerated the efficacy of offensive military strategies and tactics; overestimated the hostility of neighboring states; falsely believed that strength and bellicosity could intimidate opponents; exaggerated the economic value of empire; believed that war itself was beneficial; and taught themselves a mythical nationalistic history. These misperceptions fostered expansionist foreign policies and bolstered arguments for preemptive and preventive war. They also precluded resort to Tit-for-Tat strategies to achieve cooperation through reciprocity. All of the problems discussed in this collection of essays—perverse payoff structures, short shadows of the future, and large numbers of players—were created or exacerbated by these misconceptions. This case suggests that peace can require political action projects to control malignant misperceptions, although history warns that such projects will not succeed easily.

Lifelong education and international relations

Abstract: Argues that lifelong education has a vital role to play in fostering international political understanding and demonstrates how educational planners can use the concept to deal with inherent contradictions in education systems.

Trade Wars: A Comparative Study Of Anglo-Hanse, Franco-Italian, And Hawley-Smoot Conflicts

Abstract: Three trade wars are examined using variable-sum game theory. The Anglo-Hanse trade wars (1300–1700) are explained as an iterated Prisoners' Dilemma that failed to evolve into cooperation due to transaction costs, rent seeking, and economic recession. The late-igthcentury tariff war between France and Italy is a case of an asymmetric trade war that illustrates the danger to a weak country of provoking a trade war with a strong country, with the result that the former is forced to make major concessions. The Hawley-Smoot conflicts of the 1930s are cited as an example of the cooperation-inhibiting effect of publicness in trade negotiations.

The World Economy Since the War: The Politics of Uneven Development

Abstract: 'an excellent study in political economy, which political scientists will learn much from and which economists should not dismiss' - William Wallace, International Affairs

Global Order: Values And Power In International Politics

Abstract: A survey of international relations, this benchmark text explains concepts of global order from the Westphalian system to current issues in international relations. In this latest edition, Lynn Miller covers new developments in ethnic violence, economic development, human rights, intervention, and environmental issues and discusses the potential developments and choices in the post?Cold War era, posing alternative ?new world order? scenarios that emphasize improving the world's ability to engage in peacekeeping in light of the Gulf War and other recent conflicts. The text advocates critical world-order values and proposes means for minimizing violence, maximizing economic well-being, enhancing human rights, and protecting the environment.

China And The Asean States: The Ethnic Chinese Dimension

Abstract: This book focuses on China's foreign relations with Southeast Asia, with special reference to the ethnic and political dimensions. It deals with the reactions of Southeast Asian governments, especially those of ASEAN, to China's foreign policy; in general, and towards its ethnic Chinese policy; in particular. The position of the 'Overseas Chinese' in the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China and conventional linkages between China and the 'Overseas Chinese' are also examined. In addition, China-ASEAN relations are analysed in order to identify the factors influencing these relations. Important statements, regulations; and treaties regarding China and the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are also included. READERSHIP: Administrators, politicians, ethnologists and those interested in politics, international relations and Ethnic Studies.

Where we are now

Abstract: In reviewing any set of books, it is not often that one has the pleasure of welcoming an obvious classic. There is one here: John Vasquez's The Power of Power Politics, and much of this review article will be devoted to saying why. The other books fit together with it very well. They comprise two undergraduate textbooks, by Chan and by Russett and Starr; two lively contributions from the redoubtable John Burton; and an interesting collection of papers on the inter-paradigm debate, edited and commented upon in a rather muddled way by Maghroori and Ramberg. In different ways, all the books are concerned with the same two problems. How can we explain international relations? And how should we present to students what we think we know about it?

System and crisis in international politics

Abstract: This paper is an effort to overcome a major obstacle to a creative system orientation in international relations—a dearth of knowledge about system-level change. To accomplish this goal two tasks are necessary. First, building upon earlier contributions, a new definition of international system is offered and its essential properties—structure, process, equilibrium, stability—are discussed. The second requirement is to create a new approach to crisis and to forge links between its unit and system levels, the focus of the rest of the paper. This, in turn, will facilitate the analysis of crises as catalysts to system change, that is, as international earthquakes.

Patterns of Cooperation in International Water Law: Principles and Institutions

Abstract: International relations bearing on the use, development, and protection of water resources were restricted mainly to navigation, and the resources involved were frequently identified as "international rivers and lakes" for the purpose of international law. The question of the most appropriate definition of water resources in international relations arises out of several attempts to formulate general rules of international law for the codification and the progressive development of the law of nations. The perspective of international responsibility does not dispel doubts about the binding force of the principles mentioned regarding the use, development, and protection of shared water resources. The UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, also proclaimed a number of principles bearing on water within the broader context of protection of the human environment.

Raymond Aron and the Theory of International Relations

Abstract: The scope of Raymond Aron's work has always caused his commentators and his disciples to despair. Many unpublished works will probably be released in the near future. However, Aron's death makes it possible to study in depth, at last, his scientific contribution and to separate the two activities which he led jointly and never fully distinguished: journalism, or commentaries of current events which he thought he had the duty to clarify and to interpret, and theoretical writings, the works of a philosopher of history who was also a sociologist of contemporary societies and a critic of the social and the political thought of most great writers in history. The only purpose of this essay is to sum up Raymond Aron's scientific contribution to the theory of International Relations. I will therefore leave aside books, or parts of books, that deal primarily with current affairs, nor will I examine that part of his work which takes the form of historical narrative, for instance the major parts of The Imperial Republic. Nor will I discuss the first volume of Clausewitz, which belongs in the realm of the criticism of ideas, nor repeat what I wrote 20 years ago in my detailed account of Peace and War, shortly after the publication of this master work in France (Hoffmann, 1965). However, at the end of this essay, I discuss a posthumous publication in which he re-examines his own main concepts and contributions. Nobody who reads again Raymond Aron's enormous work can fail to be struck by its originality. He was original by comparison with earlier French writers. Until the early 1 950s foreign policy and the relations among states had been the bailiwick of historians, of lawyers and to a lesser extent of economists. Raymond Aron is the man who, in France, almost single-handedly created an autonomous discipline of international relations at the crossroads of history, law, and economics, but also of political science and sociology. This discipline, as he conceived it, consisted in a coherent and rigorous system of questions aimed at making intelligible the constant rules and the changing forms of a specific and original type of social action: the behavior on the world scene of the agents of the units in contest, i.e. diplomats and soldiers. This is what he called diplomatico-strategic behavior. The laws and forms of this behavior were already being studied during those same years by important colleagues of Aron in the United States. In all his books and articles he never ceased dialoguing with his American counterparts, and particularly with Hans Morgenthau, the German emigre thinker whose influence both on academics and on practitioners has been so enormous in the United States. He also exchanged ideas with Henry Kissinger, who was both an academic and a practitioner. But even if one compares him with American specialists ofintemational relations, Aron seems strikingly original.

The Sterling-Dollar-Franc Triangle: Monetary Diplomacy 1929–1937

Abstract: The late interwar years encompass a full spectrum of international monetary conflict and cooperation. Why did Great Britain, France, and the United States cooperate in some periods and not in others? First, the transience of monetary cooperation and conflict is explained in part by inherent characteristics of gold exchange and floating monetary systems. Second, environmental changes—swings between prosperity and depression, between peace and the threat of war, and between monetary orthodoxy and inflationist heresy—altered the strategic setting confronting the central monetary powers. Third, the actions of governments both followed from and shaped the circumstances that they confronted. Through strategies of composition across issues and decomposition across time and actors, nations deliberately fostered the emergence of cooperation by altering the context of monetary diplomacy.

Paths to International Political Economy

Abstract: 1. Perspectives and Theory: A Consumers' Guide 2. Why Economic History? 3. World Politics and Population 4. An Ecological Approach 5. The International Political Economy of Technology 6. Money and World Politics 7 . The Politics of International Trade 8. Political Economy and International Law 9. What about International Relations?

Changing African Perspectives on the Right of Self-Determination in the Wake of the Banjul Charter on Human and Peoples′ Rights

Abstract: In the history of modern Africa the issue of self-determination has always been of special significance. For a better part of a century and in some cases more, almost the entire continent was subject to colonisation by various European powers. The end of the Second World War and the subsequent adoption of the United Nations Charter, incorporating the principle of self-determination, heralded a new phase for the African colonies in international relations. Defined in its simplest terms, self-determination is the principle by virtue of which a people freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Selfdetermination is in essence the right of self-government. A territory exercises the right by either opting to establish itself as an independent state, associating with an existing state or by accepting to be integrated into an existing state. Self-determination so defined was thus used as the basis for decolonisation in Africa and provided the foundations for equal statehood for the former colonies of Africa in international relations.After decolonisation, the issue of self-determination still persists in Africa attracting sentiments and implications well exemplified by the conflicts Over Biafra and Katanga in the 1960s and currently in Eritrea, the Tigray province of Ethiopia and the Southern Sudan. The very successful propagation of self-determination as the right of every people to self-government by African nationalists during the colonial days seems to have left behind a legacy of a question for post-independence Africa—is the ideal of self-determination

E. H. Carr and political realism: vision and revision

Abstract: With undue and perhaps false modesty, E. H. Carr described his brilliant contribution to what he called ‘the infant science of international polities’, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, as ‘already a period piece’ in 1946 when a second edition appeared.1 Teachers of the subject have not accepted Carr's ‘period piece’ characterization. For more than forty years it has been prescribed reading for many of their students and has had to be reprinted many times.

Non-official mediation in disputes: reflections on Quaker experience*

Abstract: The founders of the United Nations seem to have been obsessed with negative concepts: non-permanent members of the Security Council, non-governmental organizations, non-intervention in essentially domestic matters, non-self-governing territories. I am sorry to invent another negative term, 'non-official mediation', but no non-negative will do. By 'non-official mediation', I mean mediation in international disputes by persons who are not employed by or responsible to a national government or an inter-governmental organization. Mediation is one of the techniques included in the UN Charter in an illustrative catalogue of means for the peaceful settlement of international disputes:' it is similar to conciliation and good offices. It was always intended that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with consultative UN status should be related to the international diplomatic process. The UN Charter empowers the Economic and Social Council to make 'suitable arrangements' for consultation with national or international NGOs, but this consultation was supposed to be confined to economic and social matters and not to extend to the legal, political, or security fields.2 My impression has been that diplomats and UN officials do not object if NGOs stray outside the formal restrictions in the Charter, so long as their contribution to UN processes as a whole is a positive one. NGOs with consultative status have both privileges and obligations. Many of them engage in lobbying, either for some altruistic purpose or for the sectional interests of a particular group, or sometimes for a combination of the two. While the Charter thus envisages that non-governmental organizations have a role in international affairs, it is still my view, based on studies of armed conflict since 1945, that the UN system has not yet evolved a satisfactory means for relating to non-state actors.3