International Relations HT Readings

18/38

1. Understanding International Bargaining

Sebenius, James K., "International Negotiation Analysis." Chap. 14 in
International
Negotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues. 2nd ed. Edited by Victor Kremenyuk,
229252.

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 Worlds 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
1 Sam Whelan 2010

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 its 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 USs 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 Chinas total economic size to equal the US,
meaning it has a long way to go. This is confirmed by the fact that none of
Chinas 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 hegemonys 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
2 Sam Whelan 2010

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

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. Clintons
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
3 Sam Whelan 2010

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 groups interests.

3. The European Union A Self-Contained Regime

Introductory: Gallagher, M., Laver, M. and Mair, P., Representative
Government in Modern
Europe, 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 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 Europes 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 (Welchs Waterloo), pages

88-110.

4 Sam Whelan 2010

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 youll 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 givebacks, 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 Montis 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 Americas 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 Montis 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 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. Lets 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

5 Sam Whelan 2010

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 Law
by the EU member states. [To be distributed in class or email]

Simma, B. and Pulkowski, D., 'Of Planets and the Universe: Self-Contained
Regimes in
International 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 gentlemans 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.
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 Thatchers
attitude at the time of signing the Single European Act was positive, it would

6 Sam Whelan 2010

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 385-417

http://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 Britains 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 (Meyers mothers 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
Lotts wife and then Lott himself over her personal cause of missing and
exploited children, something Meyers wife suffered from herself with her exGerman partner. Meyers wife needed Lotts 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.
7 Sam Whelan 2010

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 fullmilitary 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 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
8 Sam Whelan 2010

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 longterm 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 Shannons facilities. The Tnaiste 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 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 Fil 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 Generals considered view that the invasion of Iraq was
illegal under the UN Charter was simply a useful contribution to a debate about
that conflicts 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=3
2&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
9 Sam Whelan 2010

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

King Leopold of Belgium, much admired and considered one of Europes 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 Leopolds 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 Leopolds 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 Leopolds abuses in the Congo, and the more he
wrote, the more insiders leaked to him, enraging Leopold. Morels 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
months 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 Leopolds 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
Leopolds 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 Leopolds rule for what it
was, it remained in place.

8. International Environmental Politics

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

10 Sam Whelan 2010

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-faba4bc3-af78d034a1e3eb14%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.
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 71117.

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
11 Sam Whelan 2010

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 selectionall 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.
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. Theyve 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
12 Sam Whelan 2010

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 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
13 Sam Whelan 2010

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

Kelley Lee, The World Health Organization (Routledge, 2009), pages 25-45
The main components of the WHOs organisational structure have remained
unchanged since its formal establishment in 1948. The organisations supreme
decision-making body is the WHA. The WHA meets annually, usually in May, to
determine the overall policy direction of the WHOs 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 organisations activities. The Secretariat is
14 Sam Whelan 2010

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
WHOs creation. While it was widely agreed these organisations needed to be
integrated into the WHOs 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 countrys 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 organisations 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 WHOs structure and functions are intended to reflect the organisations
universal membership and mandate to improve the worlds 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.
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.

15 Sam Whelan 2010

At the country level, the WHOs 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 WHOs 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 14

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?
index=0&did=1214614191&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt
=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1252417150&client
I
d=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, healthcare 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.
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
16 Sam Whelan 2010

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 healthrelated 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

17 Sam Whelan 2010

go back to concentrating on its true mission of providing objective expert advice

and strategic guidance.
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, ARVdispersal 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 diseasespecific 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.

18 Sam Whelan 2010

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.

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 worlds 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.

19 Sam Whelan 2010

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, 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, (SeptOct 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 139152.
http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0035.pdf

Mearsheimer argues that the central claims in E.H.Carrs 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 others 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.
20 Sam Whelan 2010

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.
Carrs 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, Carrs 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 Carrs 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 Carrs words, an antithesis of utopia and reality. Realists argue that states
will privilege power over ideals in such instances, and the historical record
21 Sam Whelan 2010

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. Carrs 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. Carrs 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.
Todays 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 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
22 Sam Whelan 2010

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.

23 Sam Whelan 2010