How (Not) to Evaluate U.S. Decline and the Emerging Great Power Rivalry

William С. Wohlforth is an American political scientist. Since 2000 he has been a Member of the Government Department’s faculty at Dartmouth College. William С. Wohlforth graduated with a degree in international relations from Beloit College, worked as a legislative aid in the U.S. House of Representatives, and did his graduate work at Yale University, earning an M.A. in international relations and PhD in Political Science. He taught at Princeton and Georgetown. William С. Wohlforth's expertise covers international security and foreign policy. His most recent books are “America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century” (Oxford, 2018), with co-author Stephen G. Brooks, and “The Oxford Handbook of International Security” (Oxford 2018) co-edited with Alexandra Gheciu. He is currently working on a book on subversion among great powers.

Working the machinery

This chapter explores how technocratic internationalism found new fields of application in international development and regional integration. During the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of international organizations began to work on the socio-economic tasks that functionalists had recommended for international action. With the expansion of the United Nations system of organization, global governance took a markedly technocratic but also a welfarist turn. In this explicit orientation towards human welfare and concrete projects, they differed from the technical standard setting organizations active since the 19th century. The concept of socio-economic development was congenial to functionalists since its promise of progress is linked to the technocratic belief in technical solutions. Functionalism also became a textbook doctrine for European integration, with the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 as a direct product of functionalist thinking. This chapter also discusses the professionalization of political science in the 1950s and 1960s, where scholars began to perceive Mitrany’s ideas as ‘reformist ideology’ rather than as a serious theory of international organization. To remedy these defects, American political scientist Ernst Haas re-formulated it as ‘neo-functionalism’. Although ostensibly an empirical-analytical approach eschewing normative commitments, neo-functionalism remained committed to the ideal of rationalized governance.

Prophets of international technocracy

This chapter is focused on the emergence of technocratic internationalism. The first section shows how praise for rational public administration developed in philosophy. It discusses Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideas about the virtues of expert government; the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill; and how German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel idealized Prussia’s efficient bureaucracy. From these philosophical foundations, the chapter proceeds to the professionalization of public administration that in the 19th century took place in all industrialized countries and some of their colonies. The trend spilled over to the international level in the form of the ‘international public unions’, expert bodies with administrative tasks which ignited the imagination of technocratically inclined visionaries. Having sketched the historical context, the second part of the chapter presents the first programmatic proposals for bureaucratic international governance. They were tabled in the 1880s, when international lawyers moved from an analysis of these public unions to a programmatic vision of international relations managed by these bodies. The discussion zooms in on the Russian law scholar Pierre Kazansky and the American political scientist Paul S. Reinsch, whose respective works offer clear examples of how colonialism influenced early thinking about international organizations.

MASS MEDIA AND POLITICAL CULTURE

In the context of recent political realities, the issue of “political culture” is becoming a major issue, both in practical terms, ie the way “how it translates into life” and conceptually. The notion as such was introduced into the scientific circuit by the contemporary American political scientist Herman Finer (1956) and developed by Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (1963). The mission of training the political culture has been undertaken by several institutions and organizations in the public segment, the media sector having the role of monitoring and knowledge of the processes that occur in various areas of socio-political and economic life, training the new democratic values of liquidation of the handicap that the “new democracies” have in correlation with the developed countries. In this study, the author aims to identify the extent to which the press, especially in the Republic of Moldova, fulfills its role as a trainer of political culture.

North-Eastern India (NER) as an example of “clash of civilizations”

This article attempts to analyze the current situation in North-Eastern India (NER) in the light of well-known concept clash of civilizations developed by S. Huntington (the American political scientist and proponent of the modern version of the civilizational approach to History). One may say that even a superficial glance at NER problems demonstrates a very characteristic example of the visual manifestation of this concept. The relevance of the work implies the possibilities of practical application of this concept for the analysis of India and NER existing ethnic and religious problems as well as the best ways to solve them. The author (besides S. Huntingtons work Clash of civilizations) used the works of the Russian indologists - S. Baranov (Separatism in India), B. Klyuyev (Religion and conflict in India), K. Likhachev (Ethnic separatism in NER: old problems in the new century) and the book of the Indian specialist on separatism in NER S. Bhaumik (Troubled periphery: crisis of Indias North East) as well as other sources.

Soft Power: theoretical framework and political foundations

Although 30 years have passed since it was first formulated by the American political scientist Joseph Nye Jr, experts in international relations still debate on the contribution that soft power can give in foreign policy. This article aims to analyse the epistemological framework of soft power since its elaboration over the years till now. The research delves into two essential angles of soft power. The former is the study on the relevance of the concept of soft power in the current political dynamics. The latter is the definition of the idea of soft power with a focus on the evolution of such an idea since it was formulated by Joseph Nye Jr. The academic debate around the concept of soft power can be summarised mostly around four points: (1) the definition of soft power, (2) the relationship between hard and soft power; (3) resources and behaviours generating soft power; (4) the actors involved, when we speak about soft power. In the political debate of the last few years, some political scientists and practitioners have raised doubts about relevance and effectiveness of soft power in the current international political dynamics. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, which is reshaping the global order, is demonstrating that deploying effective public diplomacy is still crucial in international relations.

Public criticism as an instrument of prevention of violence in society

Power is often interpreted as a violence, which is answered by other violence on the part of the opposition. The stronger the tyranny of the government, the stronger the resistance from the opposition, even to the use of terror. The Norwegian conflictologist J. Galtung in his concept of structural and cultural violence and the American political scientist R. Galtung have convincingly shown what comes out of such a confrontation. Dahl, who explored the relationship between the government and the opposition through public rivalry. Today often consider a category of «power» is not so much traditional power key as a communicative, discourse – as a phenomenon arising out of communicating and involving the society to choose a certain political code of the alternatives proposed by the management group and resulting from their joint discourse. In this case, such tools of political communication as public criticism and alternative views on what is happening on the part of the public, the opposition helps to avoid violence and understand not only how power arises, but also why it loses its authority and the opposition strengthens. The basis for this analysis, we find in critical theory of the German marxists and, above all, the scientific representatives of the Frankfurt school H. Arendt and J. Habermas, in genetic structuralism P. Bourdieu in the theory of self-referential systems of N. Luhmann, in post-sructuralism in M. Foucault et al. The reluctance of the authorities and the opposition to cooperate with each other in the form of constructive discourse is explained in particular by the «fundamentalism» in the thinking of both. The historical concept analysis of the Russian radical opposition shows that its ontogenesis is persistently reproduced every time a political (ideological) resource of the government is developed and society loses its perspective of development, when the government does not create itself and does not perceive alternatives from its opponents and prohibits public criticism.

PHENOMENON OF BIG DATA DIPLOMACY IN WORLD POLITICS

In 2015, the attention of Western researchers was attracted by the concept introduced by Timothy Dye, the American political scientist, who described Big Data analysis as an invaluable resource for the foreign policy of states. Its relevance is evident as in 2020 the methods of data collection, processing, and usage in the projects of digital diplomacy were successfully implemented by the governing bodies in the United States, Russia, China, Iran, Brazil, and others. Thanks to the interest of the countries in Western Hemisphere, Asia, and Europe in the development of artificial intelligence (AI),thistrend issure to take a global character. Some authors consider this advancement of digital diplomacy to be a promising leap into the future, but others – a huge threat to cybersecurity around the world. The purpose of this article is to study a new technology for the development of foreign policy influence called (Big) Data Diplomacy through the analysis of the publications of authoritative scholars and experts from the United States. The American experts are the first drivers for the introduction of the Big Data Diplomacy to word politics. Therefore, the present paper examines the expert community’s views on the Data Diplomacy and reveals the essence, functions, qualitative characteristics, and the main challenges emanating from this new digital instrument in relation to the foreign policy of various countries. In conclusion, we have formulated the general conclusions regarding the vision of the concept of Data Diplomacy and its impact on world politics.

Theda Skocpol’s Theory of Revolution

The article analyzes several ideas suggested by American political scientist Theda Skocpol in regards to the theory of revolution. From the author’s point of view, Skocpol’s attitudes are noteworthy both in terms of studying the history of political science and understanding the current state of “the theory of revolution” as a scientific direction. The author critically examines the classification of “generations of the theory of the revolution contributors” offered by J. Goldstone, according to which T. Skocpol belongs to “the third generation”. At the same time, the key provisions of Skocpol’s concept continue the ideas of the first and second generations, as is suggested by Goldstone. The author highlights the importance of the conceptual provisions related to the questions of social system failures and the reasons and consequences of revolutions in the context of revolutionary modernization.

Colonialism with benefits? Singaporean peoplehood and colonial contradiction

Most of the research presented in this special issue questions the notion of a singular Singaporean story, and yet this narrative persists as a form of Gramscian common sense for most Singaporeans, whether young or old, and also for recent immigrants and international commentators. To understand the reasons for this persistence, I turn to American political scientist Rogers M. Smith's concept of narratives of peoplehood, and in particular his notion of ethically constitutive stories that are central to individual subject formation. The role of the colonial past in such stories of Singapore is contradictory, in that the relationship between colonialism and the nation-state is seen simultaneously in terms of rupture and continuity, and this conceals a further contradiction in terms of the relationship between individual and the collective. In exploring these contradictions, and in tracing reparative possibilities for new stories of peoplehood, I will, in conclusion, turn to recent literary narratives, and in particular recent historical speculative fiction that revisions the colonial past.