Foundation course: International relations

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International Foundation Programme

Foundation course:

International relations

Richard Campanaro

FP0003

2013

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This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that due to pressure of work the author is unable to enter into any correspondence relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject guide, favourable or unfavourable, please use the online form found on the virtual learning environment.

University of London International Programmes Publications Office Stewart House 32 Russell Square London WC1B 5DN United Kingdom www.londoninternational.ac.uk

Published by: University of London © University of London 2013

The University of London asserts copyright over all material in this subject guide except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher. We make every effort to respect copyright. If you think we have inadvertently used your copyright material, please let us know.

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i

INTERNA

TIONAL RELA

TIONS

Introduction to the course ... 1

Unit 1: States, nations and countries

Introduction to Unit 1 ...8

Section 1.1: An introduction to IR concepts – states, nations,

countries and international society ...11

Section 1.2: Regional international societies 1: Africa ...17

Section 1.3: Regional international societies 2: The Americas ...24

Section 1.4: Regional international societies 3: East Asia and the Pacific ...32

Section 1.5: Regional international societies 4: South and Southwest Asia ...40

Section 1.6: Regional international societies 5: Europe and the former

Soviet Union ...47

Test your knowledge and understanding ...55

Concluding comments ...56

Unit 2: Four models of international relations

Introduction to Unit 2 ...57

Section 2.1: The English School: understanding international society ...60

Section 2.2: Liberalism: interdependence and regimes ...66

Section 2.3: Realism: anarchy and insecurity ...71

Section 2.4: Marxism: political economy and international relations ...77

Test your knowledge and understanding ...82

Concluding comments ...83

Unit 3: Analysing regional issues in international relations

Introduction to Unit 3 ...84

Section 3.1: Humanitarian intervention in Africa ...87

Section 3.2: Non-state transnational actors and international organisations

in the Americas ...93

Section 3.3: International security in East Asia and the Pacific ...100

Section 3.4: Terrorism and globalisation in South and Southwest Asia ...105

Section 3.5: Regime formation in Europe and the former Soviet Union ...111

Test your knowledge and understanding ...119

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Unit 4: Global issues in international society

Introduction to Unit 4 ...121

Section 4.1: The changing character of war ...124

Section 4.2: Development: achieving human security ...130

Section 4.3: Global environmental change ...137

Section 4.4: Key international organisations...144

Section 4.5: Analysing the international order ...151

Test your knowlegde and understanding ...158

Concluding comments ...159

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1 Introduction to the course

Intr

oduc

tion t

o the course

Route map to the guide

2 What is international relations?

2 Syllabus

3 Aims of the course

5 Learning outcomes for the course

5 Overview of learning resources

6 Examination advice

7

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Route map to the guide

This International Foundation Programme (IFP) course will introduce you to key concepts, theories and methodological approaches in international relations (IR), which you will apply to key issues covered in the units and sections to follow. It will help you to think critically about international events, using different theoretical tools to address and assess claims made by international actors. Using tools that you will become more familiar with throughout the course, it will ask you to bring together empirical information and theoretical models to analyse real-life contexts. In the process, you will become familiar with IR as a social scientific discipline, its history and its key contributors.

You will be introduced to key areas of IR over the course of four main units. These will cover background knowledge of states, nations and countries around the world; important theoretical approaches to help you to address issues arising from their interactions; problems and issues in different regions of global international society; and analysis at the global scale. Each unit consists of a number of interrelated sections that cover the basic landscape of the course. Throughout, you’ll be asked to pause and reflect on the ideas that you are learning about. Discussion is a great tool, so share your ideas on the virtual learning environment (VLE), where you’ll also find a wealth of information and further exercises for use in class and on your own. You’ll also be directed to readings either in the main textbook, or on the VLE. Read them! They will be food for thought and absolutely essential if you hope to digest the entire course.

What is international relations?

International relations is the study of human interaction at the international scale. This gives it a very wide range of themes. Fred Halliday identifies at least three: ‘relations between states, non-state or “transnational” relations across frontiers, and the operations of the [international] system as a whole’ (Halliday, F. Rethinking international relations. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995) [ISBN 9780774805087] p.1). This gives you a lot to choose from when deciding what to study. Classical IR often focuses on the first of Halliday’s areas, looking at war and peace and diplomatic practice. More recently, IR has widened its field of view to include economic, social and ecological issues and systems around the world. One of the challenges you will face in your study of IR is the overwhelming volume of information available about states, nations, countries, region and systems. It is impossible for you to know everything about everything. As Unit 1 will show you, the world is extremely complex. The Earth is inhabited by over seven billion individual human beings organised into more than 200 states and thousands of overlapping nations, many of which claim or occupy overlapping territories. These groups interact with one another in a variety of ways – some cooperative, others competitive and still others combative. They also interact across different sectors of human behaviour – political, economic and social. As a result, global international society is even more complex than the sum of its parts. If you hope to understand IR, it is not enough simply to study the individual states, nations and countries of the world. You also need a theoretical toolkit capable of identifying key relationships in international society, allowing you to address questions of human interaction at an international scale.

If the idea of IR theory frightens you, don’t worry. Theories are simply ways of prioritising questions and information. They should simplify rather than complicate the way you see the world, allowing you to focus on the topics that you find most interesting. As Barry Buzan and Richard Little put it, theories in IR play a role much like lenses in microscopes, telescopes, and infrared imagers used by scientists (Buzan, B. and R. Little. International systems in world history: remaking the study of international relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) [ISBN 9780198780656] p.73). Each lens allows the viewer to see different things about the world –

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Introduction to the course

3

some very big, some very small, and some taking place in a different part of the light spectrum. At the same time, each lens excludes certain kinds of information. Microscopes cannot look at the structure of the universe, telescopes tell us little about the structure of our cells, and infrared images seem alien compared to those in the visible light spectrum. Theories perform the same essential function in IR: highlighting some aspects of reality for analysis while masking others. As mentioned above, this subject guide is broken into four main units. The first introduces you to the states, nations and countries of the world, focusing on today’s regional and global international societies. Unit 2 then introduces you to four useful theoretical toolkits with which to address issues and questions arising from Unit 1. The English School, Liberalism, Realism and Marxism will give you four very different ways of looking at the world, allowing you to weigh the merits of different arguments and claims. Unit 3 returns to the regions, using these four theories to explore different international issues. The powerful interactions between regional international societies will finally be explored in Unit 4, which looks at four key questions in global international society before concluding with a reflection on the global system as a whole.

Syllabus

The main body of the course is structured into four units as follows:

Unit 1: States, nations and countries

This unit will introduce students to IR by looking at regional and global issues facing the discipline. Over the course of six sections, the unit will expose you to basic IR concepts and essential information about events in different parts of the world. This will give you the empirical knowledge you will need to engage with issues facing regional and global international societies.

Unit 2: Four models of international relations

This unit will introduce you to four ways of understanding IR at the global and regional scale: the English School, Liberalism, Realism and Marxism. Each of these theoretical approaches will be discussed in terms of the general principles by which it understands the world and by looking at more specific concepts and terms. Finally, each will be considered in terms of its ability to inform the regional and global issues discussed in Unit 1. The aim of this unit is to provide you with the theoretical tools used by IR to understand world events. In so doing, it will introduce you to four different ways of understanding international events at the global and/or regional scale, define key terminology and assess the ability of each approach to inform our understanding of specific issues in the area.

Unit 3: Analysing regional issues in international relations

This unit will ask you to apply the theoretical tools introduced in Unit 2 to analyse issues in regional international societies. Each of the sections that follow identifies and discusses a pressing IR concern, using the four theories from Unit 2 to consider different perspectives on each issue. The aim of this unit is to discuss the context behind regional issues, to consider them from many theoretical perspectives, and to use the resulting information to analyse ongoing events.

Unit 4: Global issues in international relations

This unit will ask you to apply the key concepts and theoretical tools introduced in Units 1 and 2 to deepen your understandings of international issues at a global scale. As in Unit 3, the sections that follow will use IR theories and concepts to explain the context of global international issues and to evaluate proposed solutions. These sections will look at the character of war in the 21st century, the impact of development on global IR, international society’s efforts to manage the causes and effects of global environmental change (GEC), and the role of major international

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organisations in addressing major issues. Section 4.5 steps back from these narrow topics to consider the international order writ large, using the tools and knowledge that you have developed over the past 20 sections to analyse IR from eight different perspectives – any one of which can tell you something different about any given international situation.

Week Unit Section

1 1: States, nations and countries Introduction to the course

1.1: An introduction to IR concepts – states, nations, countries and international society

2 1.2: Regional international society 1: Africa

3 1.3: Regional international societies 2: The Americas 4 1.4: Regional international societies 3: East Asia and

the Pacific

5 1.5: Regional international societies 4: South and Southwest Asia

6 1.6: Regional international societies 5: Europe and the former Soviet Union

7 2: Four models of international relations

2.1: The English School: understanding international society

8 2.2: Liberalism: interdependence and regimes 9 2.3: Realism: anarchy and insecurity

10 2.4: Marxism: political economy and international relations

11 3: Analysing regional issues in international relations

3.1: Humanitarian intervention in Africa

12 3.2: Non-state transnational actors and international organisations in the Americas

13 3.3: International security in East Asia and the Pacific 14 3.4: Terrorism and globalisation in South and

Southwest Asia

15 3.5: Regime building in Europe and the former Soviet Union

16 4: Global issues in international relations

4.1: The changing character of war

17 4.2: Development: achieving human security 18 4.3: Global environmental change

19 4.4: Key international organisations 20 4.5: Analysing the international order

Aims of the course

This course aims to:

introduce students to IR as a social scientific discipline

use IR’s theoretical models to help students analyse international events at regional and

global scales

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Introduction to the course

5 Learning outcomes for the course

At the end of this course, and having completed the Essential reading and activities, you should be able to:

identify and explain key concepts and theories in IR

connect these concepts and theories to regional and global international issues

discuss major world events in the news

analyse these events from a number of theoretical perspectives.

Overview of learning resources

Essential reading

This guide has been written to work alongside the textbook for this course:

Baylis, J., S. Smith and P. Owens. The globalization of world politics: an introduction to international relations. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) fifth edition [ISBN 9780199569090].

All Essential reading has been drawn from this text, which provides a broad overview of many issues in IR. As you work your way through this subject guide, you will be prompted to read specific sections from the textbook. I encourage you to read outside of these mandatory sections to gain a deeper understanding of the issues under discussion. Please note that the textbook contains an extensive glossary and a very good index in which you can search for topics of interest to you. Both will be of use to you as you proceed through the course.

Accessing the Student Portal and virtual learning environment

To manage all of your student administrative processes you will need to log in to the Student Portal via: http://my.londoninternational.ac.uk

You should have received your login details for the Student Portal with your official offer, which was emailed to the address that you gave on your application form. You have probably already logged in to the Student Portal in order to register. As soon as you register, you will automatically be granted access to the VLE, Online Library and fully functional University of London email account. If you have forgotten these login details, please click on the ‘Forgotten your password’ link on the login page.

In order to access your learning materials for each course, you can click on the VLE tab within the Student Portal or login to the VLE directly via: https://ifp.elearning.london.ac.uk/

Other learning resources

Current events are an important aspect of this course, requiring that you engage with global media sources to get a good overview of issues and crises around the world. Thanks to its worldwide presence, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a good ‘one-stop shop’ for global news, which it breaks down by region.

Over the coming months, you should track international affairs via the BBC World Service’s five-minute news summary. Keeping track of the stories you hear and read in a current events

journal will give you a working knowledge of important issues in parts of the world that you

might not normally think about. As your knowledge grows, so will your capacity to analyse and assess recurring stories. Some stories may be assigned by your tutor in order to illustrate key points in the next week’s lesson. In all cases, you should take notes that, whenever possible, address the following questions:

Who is involved? What are their goals?

Why are they acting as they are? Where is it happening?

What other news stories might it be connected to?

What is the URL link of the news story and when did I access it?

You should also check the VLE regularly for material related to each section of this subject guide. For this and your other courses in the IFP, the VLE has been designed to complement and enhance your learning experience. It will house a number of enriching materials and learning exercises, including:

news articles relating to the issues analysed in the course

discussion forums where you can share your ideas with fellow students from institutions

around the world

an interactive glossary where you can access definitions and post comments

an interactive reading list where you can access sources and post comments learning activities relating to the subject guide

video links and podcast presentations relevant to the sections

external links to databases and websites

Sample examination papers and Examiners’ commentaries

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Introduction to the course

7

You can also use the Online Library of the University of London, which places a range of valuable print and digital materials at your fingertips. You will have to use your University of London Student Portal login details to access the library’s resources.

Finally, I would encourage you to keep abreast of international events by reading, listening to and watching the news. Sources include publications such as The Economist, news sites such as www. bbc.co.uk/news, and programming from a number of television news stations. Many of these can be accessed without subscriptions.

Examination advice

Important: the information and advice given here are based on the examination structure used

at the time this guide was written. We strongly advise you to check both the current Regulations for relevant information about the examination and the VLE where you should be advised of any forthcoming changes. You should also carefully check the rubric/instructions on the paper you actually sit and follow those instructions.

The examination is essay-based and requires you to answer a number of short- and long-answer questions. Short answers can be presented in one paragraph while long answers should take the form of a complete essay. Short-answer questions are specific and usually relate to one section or unit of the course. Long-answer questions call for a more elaborate answer linking lessons from more than one section.

You should always address the question that is posed. Do not answer a different question as the Examiners will notice. Your answers also need to reflect critical understanding of the issues under discussion. The mere reproduction of memorised concepts will not be rewarded with a good grade, particularly in the long answer questions. It is also important to link theoretical concepts to real-life examples. Answers should never amount to a list of statements of bullet points. There are very rarely any definitive answers in IR. Theories, concepts, history and policy are contested by students, professors and policy makers alike. As indicated in the examination preparation material on the VLE, Examiners look for well-crafted arguments that use conceptual tools to understand and analyse real-world events. Before sitting your examination, be sure that you have worked through every section in this subject guide. You must be familiar with the Essential readings for each chapter. These can be supplemented with material from the Further readings, various printed media and other literary sources available through the VLE. A Sample examination paper is also included at the end of this guide (Appendix 1).

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Introduction to Unit 1

Unit 1:

Stat

es

, nations and countr

Overview of the unit

9 Aims

9 Learning outcomes

9 Essential reading

10

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Unit 1: States, nations and countries

9 Overview of the unit

This unit will introduce you to international societies around the world, laying foundations on which the remainder of the course will be built. The first section will introduce you to four concepts in IR: states, nations, countries and international society. These will be used throughout the five sections that follow to describe the regional international societies of:

Africa the Americas

East Asia and the Pacific South Asia and the Middle East Europe and the former Soviet Union.

As in other academic disciplines, many of IR’s most important terms and concepts are deeply contested, meaning that they are constantly being debated and discussed by students, academics and practitioners. As such, it is very important that you keep a record of vocabulary terms as they arise in the unit, particularly the different definitions assigned by thinkers in the discipline. Many key terms are highlighted in green throughout this subject guide. Let’s now turn our attention to four of these: states, nations, countries and international society.

Week Unit Section

1 1: States, nations and countries Introduction to the course

1.1: An introduction to IR concepts – states, nations, countries and international society

2 1.2: Regional international society 1: Africa

3 1.3: Regional international societies 2: The Americas 4 1.4: Regional international societies 3: East Asia and

the Pacific

5 1.5: Regional international societies 4: South and Southwest Asia

6 1.6: Regional international societies 5: Europe and the former Soviet Union

Aims

This unit aims to:

introduce you to states, nations and countries around the world define key IR terms and concepts such as international society

encourage the use of IR terms and concepts to help you to think critically about the causes and effects of ongoing international events.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this unit, and having completed the Essential reading and activities, you should be able to:

define and discuss states, nations, countries and international societies identify the world’s states on a political map and discuss their power identify regions’ major physical features and socio-cultural divisions comment on basic elements of regions’ international societies.

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Essential reading

This guide introduces Essential readings throughout the sections that follow. These should be completed as they arise, along with any associated activities on the VLE. All the Essential reading for this unit is drawn from the course textbook:

Baylis, J., S. Smith and P. Owens. The globalization of world politics: an introduction to international relations. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) fifth edition [ISBN 9780199569090].

References cited

Buzan, B. From international to world society? English School theory and the structure of globalization. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) [ISBN 9780521541213].

Halliday, F. Rethinking international relations. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995) [ISBN 9780774805087] p.1.

International Monetary Fund ‘Report for selected countries and subjects’, World Economic Outlook Database, October 2012. www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2012/02/weodata/index.aspx Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. www.princeton.edu/~achaney/

tmve/wiki100k/docs/Montevideo_Convention.html

Skocpol, T. States and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of France, Russia and China. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) [ISBN 9780521294997].

United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report 2011. http://hdr.undp. org/en/statistics/

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11 Unit 1:

Stat

es

, nations and countr

ies

Section 1.1:

An introduction to IR concepts

– states, nations, countries and international

society

Introduction

12 States

12 Nations

13 Countries

14 International society

15 Conclusion

16

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Introduction

Studying IR is a lifelong pursuit. As you will recall from our discussion of IR on p.2 of this subject guide, Fred Halliday describes three broad categories of interest to our discipline – interstate relations, transnational relations and systemic relations (Halliday, 1995, p.1). These three issue areas cover everything from war and diplomacy, through trade and human rights, to the challenges posed by globalisation and global environmental change (GEC). Simply put, IR is a vast discipline with many interests. Rather than try to introduce you to every international issue on Earth – an impossible task in any case – this unit will provide you with some tools with which to analyse international issues as you encounter them. Four concepts are central to this analytical toolkit: states, nations, countries and international society. These will provide you with the basic vocabulary needed to understand a wide variety of international situations, from territorial disputes in the South China Sea to the spread of democratic institutions following the 2011 Arab Spring.

States

Before we consider ongoing international issues, we need to answer a fundamental question: who takes part in international affairs? Most social sciences, such as economics and political science, focus on trying to understand the activities and behaviour of individual human beings. IR is quite different. As a rule, our discipline is more interested in understanding the behaviour of

collective actors – groups of individuals with enough centralised decision-making ability to: reproduce their groups over time

be treated as individuals for the purposes of analysis (Buzan, 2004, p.119).

For example, when you read about ‘the USA’ and ‘Egypt’ mediating a ceasefire between ‘Israel’ and ‘the Palestinian Authority’, you are reading about the interaction of four collective actors. Though presidents and prime ministers are the public faces of these events, they are influential because of the collective actors they lead. Without their groups, presidents and prime ministers have no more influence on the international stage than you or I. The same is true of transnational corporations (TNCs) – such as Apple and Toyota – and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. Each is made up of many individual human beings who cooperate in the pursuit of shared goals. As Bill Gates’ personal involvement in the fight against malaria and HIV illustrates, individuals can have a very real impact on

international affairs. However, as noted earlier, individuals exercise influence through the organisations they lead or fund, bringing us back to IR’s initial focus on collective actors.

The most influential collective actors in contemporary IR are states – political and administrative organisations that claim to govern territories and populations. Theda Skocpol defines states as sets ‘…of administrative, policing, and military organisations headed, and more or less well-coordinated by, an executive authority’ (Skocpol, 1979, p.29). Figure 1.1 illustrates this relationship, with each part playing an important role in exercising state sovereignty.

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Unit 1: States, nations and countries • Section 1.1: An introduction to IR concepts

13 Executive

(i & ii)

Police

(i)

Administration

Bureaucrats/Diplomats

(i & ii)

Military

(ii)

Figure 1.1: A diagram of Theda Skocpol’s definition of a ‘state’, indicating the role of each organ in protecting the state’s (i) domestic and (ii) international sovereignty. Sovereignty describes a state’s ability to:

control the peoples and territories it claims to rule defend itself against interference from other states.

States therefore have to deal with at least two priorities: maintaining order within their territorial boundaries by means of bureaucrats and police, and maintaining their independence from other states by means of diplomats and militaries. This definition of sovereignty is broadly accepted in international law. According to Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a state must fulfil four requirements in order to qualify as an actor in international law. They must:

rule over a permanent population rule over a defined territory possess a government

have the ability to engage in diplomatic relations with other states.

A failure to achieve these goals may undermine an actor’s claim to sovereignty and therefore its claim to statehood.

As you will see throughout this course, much of IR focuses on relations between states. This kind of IR can be labelled state-centric, meaning that it concentrates exclusively on states. The advantage of a state-centric approach is that it makes it easier to analyse international events. Instead of looking at the thousands of state, corporate and non-governmental relationships that drive an issue, you can focus on the relations of just 200 or so sovereign states. This simplicity comes at a price, however. This will be discussed in the Essential reading that follows ‘Nations’.

Nations

As your textbook argues, states are all too often confused with nations. Whereas a state is a system of government, a nation describes a group of individuals who see themselves linked by a shared identity. This identity can be based on a common language, culture, religion or history. Because a group’s sense of shared identity is often fostered by the government that rules it, nations and states are closely associated. As discussed by sociologists such as Benedict Anderson, many nations have been created by the states in which they live. Through government support for education, independence celebrations and patriotic anthems, states can ‘create’ national

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feelings in their populations. In the resulting nation-states, citizenship is a precondition for nationality, and vice versa. For more than a century after the French Revolution (1789–99), it was impossible to be a member of the French nation without also being a citizen of the French Republic. In all probability, you consider yourself part of a nationality based on your citizenship, be it Brazilian, Singaporean, Malaysian or German.

Though states are powerful sources of national identity, they are not the only ones. Even the most homogenous nation-states include groups who do not see themselves as part of the dominant nationality. France’s population today includes a number of cultural and linguistic minorities who consider themselves distinct from the French nation, including the Basques and Bretons of France’s Atlantic coast. Many Malaysians associate themselves with a cultural minority by embracing their local cultural heritage, which might originate in one of Malaysia’s peninsular provinces, Malaysian Borneo, or elsewhere in the world. This phenomenon will be familiar to any citizen of a largely immigrant nation such as Canada, where people often refer to themselves as French-Canadian, Scottish-Canadian, Italian-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, and so on. People’s ability to identify with two or more national groups at the same time makes ‘the nation’ a difficult concept to pin down in IR. Nevertheless, as you will see in subsequent discussion, nations and identities play a central role in guiding the course of many global and regional issues, often in Halliday’s second area of IR study: non-state or transnational relations.

Essential reading

Stop and read the ‘Problems with the state-centric approach’ section in Chapter 20 of your textbook (pp.328–30).

Note the four main problems identified by the author.

Countries

Countries refer to the physical environments in which states and nations exist. Whereas a state

refers to a government and a nation refers to a group of people with a shared identity, a country refers to the lines and symbols on a map that represent borders, geographical features, ecologies and natural resources. The three concepts are closely related. A country can refer to the territory ruled by a state. It can also refer to the territory inhabited by a nation. A number of states around the world either claim territory that they do not effectively rule, or rule territories that fall outside their ‘official’ borders. The government of Somalia, for example, can effectively control only a tiny fraction of the country it claims to rule. Likewise, states like Morocco and Israel administer territories outside their internationally recognised borders. These examples illustrate the fact that states and countries, though related, are not synonymous.

ACtivity

Look at the three maps of the world listed under the heading ‘States, nations and countries of the world’ on the vLE.

Each of these presents a different view of the world and is organised according to states, nations or countries.

Which kind of unit do you think is most commonly used to understand global affairs? What does this say about the relative influence of states, nations and countries in iR? Compare and contrast your responses with other students in your class.

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Unit 1: States, nations and countries • Section 1.1: An introduction to IR concepts

15 International society

Now that you have grasped the basic relationship between sates, nations and countries, it is time to consider how they fit together into a system. One of the most useful ways to understand IR at this broad scale has been developed by the English School – an informal group of academics and diplomats based at and around the London School of Economics and Political Science who describe the world as an international society. An international society is a community of international units – that is, collective actors – whose relationships are structured by shared practices and principles. These influence units’ behaviour by establishing ‘codes of conduct’ that they are supposed to follow in their relations with one another. Though often codified in formal treaties and declarations, practices and principles need not be formalised in texts. They can be, and often are, informal in the sense that they are not written down in treaties or international agreements. Even so, they are an important source of order in interstate and transnational relationships alike.

This brings us to the primary function of international society. We live in a world without a global government, in which no single collective actor is able to force all others to live by a specific set of rules. International society is therefore anarchic in that there is no final authority that governs international relationships. That said, international society is not chaotic. Instead, state and non-state actors alike tend to relate to one another on the basis of relatively stable sets of practices and principles. The principle of diplomatic immunity, which protects diplomats from prosecution in foreign courts, is one example. These practices and principles – called institutions by the English School – create patterns of behaviour that bring a degree of order to international anarchy, explaining Hedley Bull’s decision to call the world an ‘anarchical society’. But how can an anarchic system be orderly? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? No, it isn’t. Anarchy – from the Greek roots a- (without) and -archos (ruler) – refers to a type of government in which there is no final judge or leader. Though chaos is one possible outcome of such a situation, it is not the only possibility.

The main insight of the English School is that order – defined as regular patterns of behaviour – can evolve in anarchy. Internationally, shared institutions (i.e. practices and principles) represent rules of membership and behaviour by which members of international society regulate their interactions without the need for a supreme ruler to mediate their disputes. For example, a state’s membership in African international society is premised on its acceptance of other states’ sovereignty. This requires them to recognise one another’s rights to independence from outside interference and to rule their populations and territories as they see fit. Governments that do not accept this principle of state sovereignty may find their relations with neighbouring states limited by sanctions – punishments – imposed by the other members of African international society. These can range from limits on trade and travel to extreme measures such as blockades and war. Morocco has experienced a range of sanctions in response to its continuing occupation of Western Sahara – a territory officially ruled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. These sanctions include its expulsion from the formal decision-making processes of the African Union, an intergovernmental organisation that brings together states from across the continent. Though so far insufficient to bring about a Moroccan withdrawal from Western Sahara, such societal punishments may cause offending actors to alter their behaviour on the international stage. By taking collective steps to punish units that violate its institutional codes of behaviour, an international society has the potential to regulate its members’ relations without the need for a final decision-maker.

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Analysing an international society is therefore a matter of understanding the: actors who inhabit it

shared institutions that define who is a member of the society in question and how they should behave.

Institutional practices and principles differ from one international society to another, and can also vary greatly depending on whether one is analysing international society in a single region or across the world as a whole. As you will see as you work your way through this guide, the principle of state sovereignty works very differently in Europe from how it does in East Asia. In Europe, states have voluntarily surrendered some of their independence to a supra-state organisation – the European Union – that can force its members to accept laws that they may otherwise reject. This is certainly not the case in East Asia, where states remain very protective of their sovereign independence and normally refuse to cede any of their independent decision-making capacity to an external organisation. Tracing and explaining these differences will be a main task of the five regional studies that follow.

Essential reading

Stop and read ‘introduction: the idea of international society’ in Chapter 2 of your textbook (pp.36–37).

Note the vocabulary terms in bold.

ACtivity

Look at the list of international practices and principles included under the heading ‘institutions of international society’ on the vLE.

Using the definitions included in Griffiths, O’Callaghan and Roach (also available on the vLE), rank them in terms of their importance.

Write a short explanation of your decisions. then, in groups or as a class, discuss your rankings.

What does your list say about the way that you look at iR?

Conclusion

This section has introduced four important analytical tools for understanding IR: states, nations, countries and international society. These will form the basis for the sections that follow, each of which will look at the units in play in different parts of the globe and at the institutional practices and principles that define their international society. Each section will require you to consider states, nations and countries of the region concerned, leading to a discussion of the regions’ defining institutions. GLOSSARy collective actors states sovereignty nations nation-states countries international society institutions sanctions

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160 A

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endix 1:

Sample examination paper

Appendix 1: Sample examination paper

Important note: This Sample examination paper reflects the examination and assessment

arrangements for this course in the academic year 2013–2014. The format and structure of the examination may have changed since the publication of this subject guide. You can find the most recent examination papers on the VLE where all changes to the format of the examination are posted.

Time allowed: two hours

Candidates should answer NINE of the following THIRTEEN questions: ALL SIX from Section A (25 marks), BOTH from Section B (25 marks) and ONE (out of five) from Section C (50 marks).

Section A

Answer all of the following six questions [25 marks]

1. Define the following terms: state, nation, country. [3 marks] 2. Define international society. [3 marks] 3. Define unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity. [3 marks] 4. Is the United Nations an example of global government or global goverance? [4 marks] 5. Briefly outline the main arguments of two of the following IR theories: Realism, Liberalism,

Marxism. [6 marks]

6. Who are the ‘P5’ and what distinguishes them from other states? [6 marks]

Section B

Answer both of the following two questions [25 marks]

7. On the map provided, mark the following features using the letter references below [1 mark each]:

A. Republic of South Africa B. Nile River

C. Nigeria

D. the Democratic Republic of Congo E. the Sahara Desert

F. the Great Rift Valley G. Egypt

H. Algeria

I. the Mediterranean Sea J. the Suez Canal

K. South Sudan L. Lake Chad M. Angola N. Senegal O. Somalia P. Limpopo River Q. Western Sahara R. Mount Kilimanjaro S. Kenya T. Zimbabwe U. Niger River V. Mali

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8. On the map provided, draw the dividing line between majority Muslim and majority Christian populations on the continent. [3 marks]

Section C

Answer one of the following essay questions [50 marks each]

9. Why do some analysts claim that Europe and the former Soviet Union inhabit ‘a region divided by regimes’?

10. What effects will China’s increasing political power have on international society in East Asia and the Pacific?

11. Under what conditions is humanitarian intervention effective and desirable?

12. ‘New wars are a greater threat to international society than traditional, interstate wars.’ Discuss 13. What effects does development have on human and international security?

Foundation course: International relations

International Foundation Programme