World Politics

Introduction, Jan 23 - 25

Today:  Introduction to the course, and we’ll delve into the case of Rwanda a bit, and talk about why the course is developed in the way it is.

International Relations traditionally looks at the interaction between sovereign states.   We usually start our study at 1648, the year the modern sovereign state was born, and then after a brief description of how sovereignty and the state developed, investigate various aspects of state interaction: warfare, trade, international law and international organization.

We usually have some theoretical frameworks that students learn.   We’ll talk more about theory in a couple weeks, but these frameworks provide lenses based on assumptions about reality and human nature, that color how one understands and interprets world events.  The most popular ones have been realism and liberalism. 

Note about language:  Don’t assume you know what terms mean.  Realists are not necessarily more realistic; they believe they are, but the term refers to a theory, not truly realistic people.  Liberals are not the same as political liberals in the US.  Liberalism as an ideology that includes proponents such as George W. Bush – his goal for Iraq is to spread democracy and capital, this is an essentially liberal approach.  So as terms come up, make sure you think about what they mean, and don’t just grab on to how a term is understood in general.

Other theories have been neo-Marxian (again, don’t assume this is communist; most current neo-Marxists were opposed to the totalitarian regimes of the east bloc in the Cold War era), feminist, green, constructivist, etc.  We’ll spend most of our time on the first two, but consider others.

The goal in most IR classes thus is: a) introduce students to the theories; b) introduce students to the issues (war, trade, economics, etc.); and c) prepare students for upper level study, touching on what the scientific study of international relations means.

The traditional approach is becoming obsolete.

There are three problems with it:  1) we may be in a period of transition leaving the era of the modern sovereign nation-state into another era, tentatively named an era of globalization.  This suggests that we have to reconceptualize international relations and think about what a transition entails; 2) too often the theoretical/analytical approach that courses tend to follow hides the reality of the human side of international relations.  War is turned into a video-game kind of virtual reality, where one roots for ones’ own country like a football team; poverty is understood as being exotic weird pictures of children from distant lands with a different look, not something one identifies with; and 3) connectedness is growing, we are buying things from all over the world, we are impacted and impact almost every aspect of the globe, and terrorism is a more recent example of how we are not disconnected from reality, even if we can feel we are in the comfort of rural Maine.

Thus this course is designed to do what traditional courses do, but at the same time:

a) explore the human side of international relations – what does all this mean for real people, to avoid simply losing ourselves in the abstraction and academic jargon; and

b) consider the changes in the international system – what is emerging as ‘globalization’ develops, and how do we understand the interdependent and connected nature of human interaction in this “brave new world.”

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE STATE

A fundamental question: why is it that the international system is the way it is?  Why do we have states fighting for pieces of territory?   We assume that this is just the “way it is.”  As political scientists, one finds this a puzzle.  WHY is this ‘the way it is’?  Must it be this way?  To answer that, and show how theories have developed in the field of international relations, we have to look at history.  Again, this will not be detailed history, much is left out -- this is a poli-sci class.  I’ll focus on precisely those issues which lead to the theories that dominate today, and prepare us for our discussions of current problems later on.

Feudalism

From the 4th to 14th Century AD there was a complex web of authority, often called feudalism.  The structure was based on the Catholic Church, which was seen as the supreme authority on the Earth.  The Church granted titles of nobility to certain rulers, loosely connected under what was called The holy Roman Empire. 

This came from the effort of Charlemagne or Charles the Great to save European culture and learning from dissolution around 800.  The result was an empire ultimately named the Holy Roman Empire, and he attempted to rekindle learning and progress, and uniting Europe under one rule.  When he died, however, things broke down again -- his kingdom was split in three, representing, among other things, the division that would later become France and Germany.  From there dissolution would continue into a web of complicated agreements, traditions, and customs.

So the reality was that power was decentralized, and from 1000 on the there were emerging conflicts between political leaders and the church, but the essential point of legitimacy – rulers supposedly had the divine right to rule, sanctified by the Church – remained.  It’s hard for us to imagine what every day life was like in that era; it’s completely different than the kind of world we have now.

Life:  What you did to prepare for the afterlife.  Progress or improvement was not something you sought; consistency and stability was the norm; the past was higher tech and more advanced than the present, and there was little effort to build a better future, at least in the sense we now think of progress.  You had to accept life's struggles, you didn't question authority.  The church gave power to the Emperor and while custom and past agreement defined the utterly incomprehensible way in which power was divided in the so-called Holy Roman Empire, theoretically it stemmed from God.  No one really had central authority in a bureaucratic sense, but the church held moral sway.  The church would have liked to control the hinterlands more effectively, but they didn’t have the technology.  Communication was difficult, reading and writing ability was rare, and authority was therefore decentralized.

Change: Breakdown of religious order -- rise of secularism

Gundpowder, printing press and the reformation

PRINTING PRESS:  Major invention:  made nationalism possible (language shared), and lead to attack on the legitimacy of Rome.   It is hard to over estimate the impact that the printing press had.  Before then knowledge was controlled by the church; they could write, choose what to make into a book and what not, and even those who doubted church doctrines were educated in a religious manner.  Control of information and knowledge was important to the church maintaining political control.  Humans didn’t have high tech objects like books, they relied on their memories and minstrals that came from town to town and sing about what was happening was the closest thing to our newspapers or CNN.  Villages kept oral histories, nation groups weren’t yet unified by a sense of common culture and language.  A different world, with a different type of politics.  When the printing press was developed, a few things changed:

a) people could now spread non-church approved messages at a mass level, using the common language, not church latin.

b) literacy could expand

Note: this had the impact of bringing together language groups into a culture (making nationalism possible), and breaking the church’s monopoly on knowledge and education.  The impact was felt when in Germany a Catholic monk nailed some complaints about church practices to a door, expecting to start a little academic debate.  But his friends used the printing press to send these complaints across Germany.  This monk later translated the Bible into German, helping create a common language and culture.  Things were changing!

Martin Luther's attack on the Catholic Church was a spark that ignited a revolt against the Church.  It had been growing, bit by bit, as political leaders wanted more power, and had a variety of disputes against the increasingly corrupt Catholic Church.  Moreover, education had been spreading, and the old order was slowly becoming untenable.  If it hadn’t been Luther, something would have caused a change.  But it was Luther, and the reformation shaped the way Europe would be altered.

This combined with a discovery of gunpowder that gave leaders the technology necessary to wage war.  Gunpowder came from China (they were well advanced technologically; the Europeans were backwards), and had been in use for over a century in Europe.  But as it became more effectively used as a weapon it altered the very nature of warfare.  Suddenly major forts and fiefdoms could be broken, and the power existed to create larger centralized States.  So two technological inventions -- involving weapons and information – were an important part of a process that changed politics completely.  The world would not be the same.  It would become what we call the modern state system.

Ultimately this would lead to something called the Thirty Years War, which was part about religion (the Catholic Hapsburgs wanting to stop Protestantism in the Holy Roman Empire) and part about politics (the Catholic French helping the German protestants in order to weaken the Hapsburgs).  In essence, the old order was destroyed, the unity of Christendom over, the political arrangements untenable, and a new situation was needed.

Start of the Modern State system: The Treaty of Westphalia -- 1648.  This treaty was signed to end the 30 years war (it was signed in Osnabrück and Münster, I have been in the room in Münster where it was signed).  In order to transplant religious authority, the concept of sovereignty was implemented.  A new idea, developed first by Hugo Grotius it offered a way for the church and the political leaders to compromise.  The Holy Roman Empire and its bizarre relationships would persist, but within 100 years the Hapsburgs would be forming the Austrian Empire, Prussia would emerge, and the other German regions would slowly turn into statelets before Germany would unify.  But more on that after the Rwanda case.

The bottom line question of this course will be whether or not the rise of WMD and computers parallels the rise of the printing press and gunpowder, suggesting we’re in the midst of another major transition.  We’ll get back to that question, but first – info on the Rwanda case. 

As we go over the Rwanda genocide, I know all this is new to you, you don’t know about theories of IR yet, or explanations.  So at this first case, let yourself simply experience the emotions, thoughts and reactions to what we’re going to read and watch.  Your paper will be, simply, a reaction.  So let’s get some background information.

(In class: power point on Rwandan genocide)