The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations. By Christian Reus-Smit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 199p. $35.00.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 264-265
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sterling-Folker
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Greek City ◽  
State Culture ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States ◽  
Institutional Rationality ◽  
Modern Nation State

The central puzzle motivating this book is why different systems of sovereign states develop different types of systemic institutions. Why did Greek city-states favor arbitration, whereas Italian city-states adopted what the author calls "oratorical diplomacy," the absolutist state preferred "old diplomacy" instead, and the modern nation-state relies on international law and multilateralism?

Thucydides, International Law, and International Anarchy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
Greek City ◽  
City States ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
International Anarchy

Ancient Greek city-states existed in a world that was essentially bereft of international law. This lack of international law had profound effects on international relations. The anarchic environment encouraged the development of heavily militarized and diplomatically aggressive societies. The prevalence of such societies, combined with the absence of any overarching authority over them, made wars between polities common. Faced with a conflict of interest with another polity, every government independently decided what constituted justice for itself, and—in the absence of international law--all governments had to be ready to use violence or the threat of violence to enforce that view of justice. Hellenic intellectuals—most famously Thucydides, but including Aristotle and Demosthenes--reacted to the anarchy by hypothesizing that interstate relations were determined above all by relations of power. Thucydides expressed this view of power-politics in international life most clearly in what is called the Melian Dialogue (Thuc. 5.84-116). This essay also emphasizes Thucydides’ analysis of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (1.23), and underlines the nature of what he considered “the truest cause” (1.23.6) of that devastating conflict, demonstrating that the shift in the balance of power (ibid.) expressed itself in the specific “quarrels and disputes” of 1.23.5, so that there is no contradiction between the two Thucydidean explanations.

scholarly journals Secret origins of the state: the structural basis ofraison d'état

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Structural Basis ◽  
Marine Insurance ◽  
Publicly Traded ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
Bill Of Exchange ◽  
Double Entry ◽  
The Town

The Italian city-state system occupies a special place in the canon of orthodox international relations. For, as Martin Wight says, ‘it was among the Italian powers that feudal relationships first disappeared and the efficient, self-sufficient secular state was evolved, and the Italian powers invented the diplomatic system’. And of course this was not all they invented. In addition to the earliest modern discourse ofRealpolitik(‘Machiavelli’, Carr tells us, ‘is the first important political realist’), it is in the Italian city-states that we find the first routine use of double-entry book-keeping, of publicly traded state debt, of marine insurance, of sophisticated instruments of credit (such as the bill of exchange), of commercial and banking firms coordinating branch activity across the continent, and so on. Here, too, the citizen militias gave way earliest to the mercenary armies that would later characterize European Absolutism; and within the town walls, a population given over increasingly to commerce and manufacture elaborated new forms of urban class conflict.

‘My Capitalism Is Bigger than Yours!’

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maïa Pal
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems

AbstractThis article reviews Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’s How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (2015). It argues that the book offers a stimulating and ambitious approach to solving the problems of Eurocentrism and the origins of capitalism in growing critical scholarship in historical sociology and International Relations. However, by focusing on the ‘problem of the international’ and proposing a ‘single unified theory’ based on uneven and combined development, the authors present a history of international relations that trades off methodological openness and legal complexity for a structural and exclusive consequentialism driven by anti-Eurocentrism. By misrepresenting the concept of social-property relations in terms of the internal/external fallacy, and by confusing different types of ‘internalism’ required by early-modern jurisdictional struggles, the book problematically conflates histories of international law and capitalism. These methodological problems are contextualised by examples from the Spanish, French and British empires’ conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction and their significant legal actors and processes.

PENERAPAN PRINSIP PERSONA NON GRATA TERHADAP DUTA BESAR DITINJAU DARI PERSPEKTIF HUKUM INTERNASIONAL (STUDI KASUS PENGANIAYAAN TKI OLEH DUTA BESAR ARAB SAUDI DI JERMAN)

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-71
Author(s):  
Devi Yusvitasari
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Recipient Country ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Vienna Convention ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
National Interests ◽  
The World ◽  
Diplomatic Immunity ◽  
The Right

A country needs to make contact with each other based on the national interests of each country related to each other, including among others economic, social, cultural, legal, political, and so on. With constant and continuous association between the nations of the world, it is one of the conditions for the existence of the international community. One form of cooperation between countries in the world is in the form of international relations by placing diplomatic representation in various countries. These representatives have diplomatic immunity and diplomatic immunity privileges that are in accordance with the jurisdiction of the recipient country and civil and criminal immunity for witnesses. The writing of the article entitled "The Application of the Principle of Non-Grata Persona to the Ambassador Judging from the Perspective of International Law" describes how the law on the abuse of diplomatic immunity, how a country's actions against abuse of diplomatic immunity and how to analyze a case of abuse of diplomatic immunity. To answer the problem used normative juridical methods through the use of secondary data, such as books, laws, and research results related to this research topic. Based on the results of the study explained that cases of violations of diplomatic relations related to the personal immunity of diplomatic officials such as cases such as cases of persecution by the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to Indonesian Workers in Germany are of serious concern. The existence of diplomatic immunity is considered as protection so that perpetrators are not punished. Actions against the abuse of recipient countries of diplomatic immunity may expel or non-grata persona to diplomatic officials, which is stipulated in the Vienna Convention in 1961, because of the right of immunity attached to each diplomatic representative.

Sleepwalking into a New World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wickham
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The People ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Italian City ◽  
New Form ◽  
City States ◽  
City State

Amid the disintegration of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new form of collective government—the commune—arose in the cities of northern and central Italy. This book takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world. The book provides richly textured portraits of three cities—Milan, Pisa, and Rome—and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. It argues that, in all but a few cases, the élite of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. The book makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. It describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites “chosen by the people,” and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. This book reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance.

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