Points to ponder

• To this point we’ve considered politics within states, where people like you and me are the actors
• We can look at politics between states in much the same way, except that now the actors are not people but states
  • It is a little anthropomorphic, but states have values too
    • Danziger (294-95) identifies three major goals of states, each of which has two or more components
      • Security
        • Survival
        • Autonomy
        • Influence
        • Prestige
        • Dominance
      • Stability
        • Order maintenance
        • Political development
      • Prosperity
        • Economic development
        • Welfare distribution
    • There may be other goals
      • Some people reference universal human values that states may promote
        • One inventory of such universal values would be those associated with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
        • As the cases of Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda and others may suggest, states have been spotty in their commitment to such principles and it is not overly cynical to suggest that states use these principles to justify their actions when convenient and ignore them when it suits them
      • What some have seen in fundamentalist Islam as a rejection of “western values” and secularism--though one should be careful with this because current political crises have given rise to a lot of careless and mean-spirited commentary--has led to an argument about the “clash of civilizations,” and one might make the case that states wish to promote their own particular “civilization”
• As one might expect, in a situation where there are two or more actors (in this case, states), each with their own values, and  there is a scarcity of such values, such that one actor can maximize its share of values only at the expense of another actor, there are lots of conflicts between states
  • For reasons of economic development or autonomy or for some other objective, Iran seeks to develop its nuclear energy capabilities, but the US and Israel regard such a course as threatening their security
  • You should be able to apply this logic to the relations between George Bush’s United States and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
  • In attempting to put down a rebellion in the Darfur region (for reasons of order maintenance and perhaps pro-Arab policy), the government of the Sudan, perhaps in league with the Janjaweed, is allowing attacks on the local population which is displaced, some of the refugees spilling over into Chad, which undermines the autonomy and security of Chad
  • Iceland and Great Britain nearly took up arms in the Great Cod War, an economic resources dispute
  • Survival, dominance, economic, and cultural issues all are at work in the highly conflictual relationship between India and Pakistan only part of which turns on Kashmir
• A critical difference in the relations between states, as distinct from relations within states, is that while politics (persuasion, bargaining, and voting) are used to resolve conflicts between states, one is also more likely to see the use of violence (war) as one state tries to prevail over another
  • War/violence is more often used between states than within states because there is no world government
  • Within sovereign states, there are governments which exercise authority over the territory of the state
    • As the German sociologist Max Weber explained, “government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force”
      • Setting rules governing community life is the principal function of governments
      • Those rules specify how conflict is to be resolved and no state wants its subjects to use force against other subjects in conflict situations
        • For one thing, if citizens have recourse to violence, not only may they use it against other citizens but they may also use it against the government, may challenge the government with violence, something no state can tolerate
      • As you well recognize, states will use their own agents of violence—police and military—to punish citizens who use violence
  • The world community is composed of states which are sovereign, subject to no higher authority; the absence of a higher authority, the absence of a world government, means that each state ultimately may use violence against other states, may engage in war, in conflict situations because there is no world government to deny them the use of violence
    • The only thing that stops a state from using violence against another state is the possibility that the potential aggressor will be beaten by the defensive violence of the second state (or by one or more third-party states)
      • Look what happened to Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990, an action that led to the Persian Gulf War of 1991

 Questions to consider

• How does the earlier discussion about conflict fit with the alternative “realist” and “idealist” perspectives on states’ motives (Danziger 293-94)?
• How is al-Qaeda like the International Red Cross?
• Why might the presence of multinational corporations, aka transnational corporations, reduce the likelihood of war?
• Does globalization increase or reduce the likelihood of war?