Democratic states and commitment in international relations

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Taylor Gaubatz

Making credible commitments is a formidable problem for states in the anarchic international system. A long-standing view holds that this is particularly true for democratic states in which changeable public preferences make it difficult for leaders to sustain commitments over time. However, a number of important elements in the values and institutions that have characterized the liberal democratic states should enhance their ability to sustain international commitments. Indeed, an examination of the durability of international military alliances confirms that those between democratic states have endured longer than either alliances between nondemocracies or alliances between democracies and nondemocracies.

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Svetlana Cebotari ◽  
Selena Stejaru

Currently, we experience a conditional reality imposed by the COVID19 pandemic, with both immediate and long-lasting repercussions on the international system and the behavior of each state. For this reason and because the new virus has a dynamic evolution in time and space, research of the impact of the new virus is needed not only from a biogenetic perspective but also in the context of other fields, including the international relations realm. The events we are witnessing at the present challenge to keep up with transformations taking place in the international arena, especially those in the field of virology. As epidemics over time, viruses that cause them to change and occur constantly remain only the fact that they will always influence not only interpersonal relations but impose conditions for new realities in the system of international relations. This article aims to highlight the main gaps in the work of the institution responsible for maintaining peace and security in the international arena, especially in the context of the COVID-19 crisis.


2019 ◽  
pp. 073889421987028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F Diehl ◽  
Gary Goertz ◽  
Yahve Gallegos

This data article reviews the revised “peace data,” describing the motivations behind them and offering a general description of the different peace scale levels—severe rivalry, lesser rivalry, negative peace, warm peace, and security community respectively. A brief overview of the evolution of peace and rivalry for the 1900–2015 period is presented. Peace in the international system has increased over time, with a decline in rivalries and an increase in security communities being the most notable findings. The article concludes with a discussion of how the peace data might be used to address new questions in international relations research or reconfigure existing ones.


2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL J. WHITENECK

Recent literature in International Relations has argued that the absence of ‘balancing’ behaviour by European states during the Napoleonic Wars from 1798 to 1815 calls into question current explanations for the presence or absence of such behaviour in international relations. This literature has argued that: (1) Napoleonic France presented a significant threat to the stability of the international system; (2) European states did not balance against this threat from 1798 to 1813, and subsequently balanced only after Napoleon's defeat in Russia in 1812; (3) members of the system possessed adequate power to balance successfully against this threat; and (4) since European states engaged in co-opting, rewarding, avoiding, or bandwagoning behaviour towards the French threats to the system, a new explanation for the absence of balancing behaviour is required. Each of these four points can be refuted by: taking a longer time perspective of the international system during the period in question, expanding state motives to include interests other than security, using a long cycle model of coalition leadership by a global leader, recognizing the constraints faced by European states in their choices of balancing or bandwagoning behaviour under threats from France, and taking into account the role of innovation and change in a period of global war.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-305
Author(s):  
Luiz Felipe Brandão Osório

O advento da década de 1990 trouxe ao sistema internacional um cenário de mudanças substanciais, as quais se refletiram fundamentalmente na expansão do direito e das organizações internacionais. Nesse panorama, aprofundaram-se as iniciativas de integração regional, cujo vetor prioritário, o econômico, conheceu um desenvolvimento institucional e normativo inédito. É, no entanto, nos anos 2000, no ápice desse período, que a experiência mais desenvolvida nesses moldes de integração, a União Europeia, entrará em uma espiral de crise sem precedentes. A explicação da contradição entre o aprofundamento formal e o ocaso econômico passará por uma visão materialista das relações internacionais, a qual focará na forma política internacional como elemento nodal para extrapolar a aparência e desnudar os recônditos da essência desse fenômeno social. Por isso, buscar-se-á nas raízes da consolidação do projeto comunitário pós-Maastricht, dentro da nova face do capitalismo, o pós-fordista, a elucidação das fraturas da integração regional em meio ao sistema internacional. É justamente o avanço na arquitetura formal capitalista que gesta a crise das experiências integracionistas mais desenvolvidas, como se comprova na mirada crítica sobre o arranjo comunitário. Palavras-chave: forma política; integração regional; organizações internacionais; União Europeia.     Abstract: The advent of the 1990s brought to the international system a scenario of substantial changes, which were fundamentally reflected in the expansion of law and binternational organizations. Within this panorama, the regional integration initiatives were intensified, whose priority, the economic vector, was an unprecedented institutional and normative development. It is in the 2000s that the most developed experience in these forms of integration, the European Union will enter an unprecedented crisis spiral. The explanation of the contradiction between the formal deepening and the economic decline will pass through a materialist view of international relations, which will focus on the international political form as a nodal element to extrapolate the appearance and undress the essence of this social phenomenon. Therefore, the roots of the consolidation of the post-Maastricht communitarian project will be sought within the new face of capitalism, the post-Fordist, and the elucidation of fractures of regional integration within the international system. It is precisely the advance in the formal capitalist architecture that causes the crisis of the more developed integrationist experiences, as evidenced in the critical look on the communitarian arrangement. Key words: political form; regional integration; international organizations; European Union.     Recebido em: novembro/2016. Aprovado em: setembro/2017.


1979 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
John Hoffman

There can be little doubt that of the three approaches to the international system which Dr. Little explores,1 what he calls the “organized complexity model” is the most useful and valid for an understanding of international relations. While the first of the models he considers, the mechanistic one, has “no room for evolution, adaption or self-regulation,” the second, the organic model still focuses problematically on structures which are supposed to maintain a given system and so both lack what the third seeks to provide: a fluid, dynamic perspective which can account for change.


2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
EWAN HARRISON

This article compares Waltz and Kant as theorists who explicitly advocate a systemic approach to international relations. Waltz and Kant are compared with respect to their views on the nature of systemic approaches, the composition and dynamics of the international system, and the relationship between the international system and world society. It is argued that there are deep underlying similarities between their views on the nature of systemic approaches to international relations that may facilitate a much broader account of the international system. A final section examines the relevance of a Kantian view of the international system to the post-Cold War era by comparing its insights to those offered by neorealist and classical realist perspectives.…the best way to understand the writings of philosophers is to seek out the questions they were attempting to answer.


Author(s):  
Marwan Awni Kamil

This study attempts to give a description and analysis derived from the new realism school in the international relations of the visions of the great powers of the geopolitical changes witnessed in the Middle East after 2011 and the corresponding effects at the level of the international system. It also examines the alliances of the major powers in the region and its policies, with a fixed and variable statement to produce a reading that is based on a certain degree of comprehensiveness and objectivity.


Author(s):  
Salah Hassan Mohammed ◽  
Mahaa Ahmed Al-Mawla

The Study is based on the state as one of the main pillars in international politics. In additions, it tackles its position in the international order from the major schools perspectives in international relations, Especially, these schools differ in the status and priorities of the state according to its priorities, also, each scholar has a different point of view. The research is dedicated to providing a future vision of the state's position in the international order in which based on the vision of the major schools in international relations.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hunold

In this essay I examine the dispute between the German GreenParty and some of the country’s environmental nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) over the March 2001 renewal of rail shipmentsof highly radioactive wastes to Gorleben. My purpose indoing so is to test John Dryzek’s 1996 claim that environmentalistsought to beware of what they wish for concerning inclusion in theliberal democratic state. Inclusion on the wrong terms, arguesDryzek, may prove detrimental to the goals of greening and democratizingpublic policy because such inclusion may compromise thesurvival of a green public sphere that is vital to both. Prospects forecological democracy, understood in terms of strong ecologicalmodernization here, depend on historically conditioned relationshipsbetween the state and the environmental movement that fosterthe emergence and persistence over time of such a public sphere.


Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.


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