Chapter One: Understanding International

Relations
 1.1. Conceptualizing Nationalism, Nations and States

• What is a nation? According to Heywood, ‘nations are historical entities that evolve
organically out of more similar ethnic communities and they reveal themselves in
myths, legends, and songs (2014).

• A nation, in contrast to a state, constitutes a community of people joined by a shared

identity and by common social practices.

• Nationalism in the first part of the nineteenth century was a liberal sentiment
concerning self-determination – the right of a people to determine its own fate. This
programme had far-reaching implications for the way politics was organized
domestically, but it also had profound ramifications for international politics. Most
obviously, the idea of self-determination undermined the political legitimacy of
Europe’s empires.

• Although the nationalist revolutions of 1848 were defeated by the political

establishment, the sentiments themselves were impossible to control.
• The revolutions that took place in Britain’s North American colonies in
1776, and in France in 1789, provided models for other nationalists to
follow. ‘We the People of the United States’ – the first words of the
Preamble to the US Constitution – was a phrase which itself would have
been literally unthinkable in an earlier era.

• In France, the king was officially the only legitimate political actor and the
people as a whole were excluded from politics. In addition, the power of
the aristocracy and the church remained strong, above all in the
countryside where they were the largest landowners. In the revolution of
1789, the old regime was overthrown and with it the entire social order.
The French nation was from now on to be governed by the people, the
nation, and in accordance with the principles of liberté, égalité et
fraternité– liberty, equality and brotherhood.
• Across Europe an increasingly prosperous middle-class
demanded inclusion in the political system and their demands
were increasingly expressed through the language of
nationalism. The Finns wanted an independent Finland; the
Bulgarians an independent Bulgaria; the Serbs an
independent Serbia, and so on. In 1861 Italy too – long
divided into separate city-states and dominated by the
Church – became a unified country and an independent
nation. Yet it was only with the conclusion of the First World
War in 1918 that self-determination was acknowledged as a
right. After the First World War most people in Europe
formed their own nation-states.
 1.2. Understanding International Relations

• We now live in a world where it is impossible to isolate our

experiences and transactions from an international dimension.

• If an Ethiopian student watches the sitcom Friends or the soap

opera Neighbors, they are both learning about and
participating in a culture different from their own.

• If a student flies from Addis to Washington DC or London they

are subject to international air space agreements and
contributing to global warming. If a student chooses to buy a
fair-trade coffee they are making a conscious decision about
contributing to a state and a people’s development.
• Should you work for an inter-national company
or international organization, or even if you
work for a locally based company there will
inevitably be an international dimension to the
functioning of the company as it negotiates the
myriad of regional laws, international trade
laws, international employment laws and tax
laws. The limits to how international relations
will continue to impact your life is tremendous.
• Studying international relations enables students and
professionals to better comprehend the information
we receive daily from newspapers, television and
radio. People not only live in villages and towns, but
form part of the wider networks that constitute
regions, nations and states. As members of this world
community, people have to be equally aware of both
their rights and their responsibilities – and should be
capable of engaging in important debates concerning
the major issues facing the modern international
community.
• One crucial feature of the world in which we live is its
interconnectedness – geographically, intellectually and
socially – and thus we need to understand it.

• Today, international relations could be used to describe a

range of interactions between people, groups, firms,
associations, parties, nations or states or between these
and (non) governmental international organizations.
These interactions usually take place between entities
that exist in different parts of the world – in different
territories, nations or states.
• To the layperson interactions such as going on holiday abroad, sending
international mail, or buying or selling goods abroad may seem personal
and private, and of no particular international concern. Other interactions
such as choosing an Olympics host or awarding a film Oscar are very public,
but may appear to be lacking any significant international political agenda.
However, any such activities could have direct or indirect implications for
political relations between groups, states or inter-national organizations.

• More obviously, events such as international conflict, inter-national

conferences on global warming and international crime play a fundamental
part in the study of international relations. If our lives can be so profoundly
influenced by such events, and the responses of states and people are so
essential to international affairs, then it is incumbent on us to increase our
understanding of such events.
• Recent experience has taught us that matters that were once
purely domestic and of no great relevance internationally can
feature very prominently on the international political agenda.
Outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and
avian flu exemplify how domestic incidents can become
international and can lead to foreign policy changes and
commitments.
• International relations, therefore, is too important to be
ignored but also too complex to be understood at a glance.
Individuals can be the victim or victors of events but studying
international relations helps each one of us to understand
events and perhaps to make a difference.
• Studying international relations provides the
necessary tools to analyze events, and to gain
a deeper comprehension of some of the
problems that policy-makers confront and to
understand the reasoning behind their
actions.
• International politics is also about maintaining
international order.
• 1.4 Actors in International Relations
• Considered in relation to the primacy of the state,
international politics come to be defined in terms of
interactions between states in an international system of
states where these are ‘sovereign’ entities, territorially bound,
and independent ultimately of any external authority. The
‘international’ is hence structurally differentiated from the
‘domestic’ in that where the former, according to this ‘realist’
perspective, is defined as ‘anarchical’, the latter is hierarchical.
State sovereignty comes to be the defining element in the
study of international relations, even where other
perspectives challenge the primacy of the state.
• What is significant in this context is that, the traditional conception of the
state as the main framework of political interaction and the main point of
reference for both society and the individuals within it has lost a lot of its
meaning and importance. If we look at the world around us, state borders do
not seem to accurately delimitate global affairs. The majority of global
interactions – be they related to global finance, production, education,
personal and professional travel, labor migration or terrorism – no longer
occur via state channels the way they once did. We could say that the
increased focus on non-state actors and cross-border issues has marked a
close-to-revolutionary turn in IR; something that could be interpreted as a
shift away from the inter-national (‘between-states’) to the ‘trans-national’
(‘across/beyond-states’ and their borders). Robert Keohane, one of the
leading scholars in the field, recently stated that ‘International Relations’ is
no longer a suitable label and that we should instead refer to the discipline
as ‘Global Studies’ or ‘World Politics’ (Keohane 2016).
• Individuals and groups interact across borders and thus
relativize the meaning of space and territory as conventional
IR knew it. International commercial aviation and the rapid
spread of information technologies has further increased
people’s mobility and the rate at which interactions occur
across and beyond state borders. The ability for common
people to store, transfer and distribute large amounts of
information, the possibility for data to travel across the world
in virtually no time, and the increasing availability of high-
speed internet have not only changed lives at personal and
community levels but also dramatically altered the general
dynamics in politics and global affairs.
• Although this idea of the global or system level as a context of anarchy features in
many contributions to the IR literature, the main focus remains on the state as the
dominant unit of analysis. This enduring focus on the state, and therefore, on the
state level of analysis, is referred to as the relative ‘state-centrism’ of the discipline.
This means that IR scholars would generally not only regard states as the central unit
of analysis as such, they also conceive of the state as a point of reference for other
types of actors. From this perspective, the state acts as the arena in which state
officials, politicians and decision-makers operate. The state is seen as the framework
that encapsulates society and as the main point of reference for the individual.
• This predominant focus on the state is strongly related to an assumption IR scholars
have made about the state also being the main location of power within the
international sphere. This idea that the state is where power is primarily
concentrated and located has to be seen against the historical context within which
some of the most prominent IR scholars operated – the Cold War. It was an era in
which much of international affairs appeared to be run via state channels and in line
with particular state interests.
• States form the primary kind of actor in major international organizations
such as the United Nations, they feature prominently in the global discourse
on most of the major challenges of our time, and states still hold what famous
German sociologist Max Weber called the monopoly on violence – the
exclusive right to the legitimate use of physical force. States continue to
matter and thus have to be part of our considerations about what happens in
the world and why. The state as a unit of analysis and frame of reference will
certainly not go away any time soon, nor will the interactions of states as a
key level of analysis in IR.
• The system level perspective would like to conceive the global system as the
structure or context within which states cooperate, compete and confront
each other over issues of national interest. You might visualize it as a level
above the state. Particularly important in that context is the distribution of
power amongst states, meaning, whether there is one main concentration of
power (unipolarity), two (bipolarity) or several (multipolarity).
• In this perspective, global circumstances are seen to condition the
ability and opportunity of individual states and groups of states to
pursue their interests in cooperative or competitive ways. The view
of states being embedded in a global context traditionally comes
with the assumption that our international system is ‘anarchic’. An
anarchic system is one that lacks a central government (or
international sovereign) that regulates and controls what happens
to states in their dealings with each other.
• The international system can be conceived of as made up of states,
groups of states, organizations, societies or individuals within and
across those societies. IR generally distinguishes between three
levels of analysis: the system, the state, and the individual – but the
group level is also important to consider as a fourth.
• A system-level study would need to consider global linkages that go beyond single
interactions between states. It would need to look at such things as the balance of
power between states and how that determines what happens in global politics. This
could include developments that are even outside the immediate control of any
particular state or group of states, such as the global economy, transnational terrorism
or the internet. A global level would give us the big picture and help us to grasp wide
ranging dynamics that emerge from the global economic ‘system’ to affect its various
components, states, national economies, societies, and individuals.
• The Structure of International System
• International Relations scholars maintain that political power is usually distributed into
three main types of systems namely: (i) uni-polar system, (ii) bipolar system and, (iii)
multipolar system. These three different systems reflect the number of powerful states
competing for power and their hierarchical relationship. In a uni-polar international
system, there is one state with the greatest political, economic, cultural and military
power and hence the ability to totally control other states. On the other hand, in both
bipolar and multipolar systems there is no one single state with a preponderant power
and hence ability to control other states.
• As a result, the states in such systems are forced to balance each
other’s power. In the case of the bipolar system, for instance, there
are two dominant states (super powers) and the less powerful states
join either sides through alliance and counter alliance formations.
The problem with bipolar system is that it is vulnerable for zero-sum
game politics because when one superpower gains the other would
inevitably lose. One typical historical example where the world was
under bipolar system is the cold war period. Multipolar system is the
most common throughout history. During the period around World
War I it was a typical world system. It usually reflects various equally
powerful states competing for power. It is not necessary for states to
change their relationship with zero-sum game. In such system, it is
possible to bring change without gaining or losing power.
• Power
• Power is the currency of international politics. As money is for
economics, power is for international relations (politics). In the
international system, power determines the relative influence
of actors and it shapes the structure of the international
system. That is also why it is often said that international
relations is essentially about actors’ power relations in the
supra-national domain. For instance, Hans Morgenthau, a
famous thinker of realism theory in IR, argues that
International politics, like all other politics, is a struggle for
power. It thus follows from this that power is the blood line of
international relations.
• Power can be defined in terms of both relations and material (capability)
aspects. The relational definition of power is formulated by Robert Dahl.
Dahl’s definition understands power as ‘A’s’ ability to get ‘B’ to do something
it would not otherwise do. To better understand this definition, consider this
historical example: The United States and Soviet Union had roughly balanced
capabilities during the cold war era. Even though they can mutually destruct
each other, the two world powers were in a stalemate for the whole of the
cold war period. Why? Because wherever capabilities are equal, power tends
to vanish totally. However, a small rise in the capabilities of one of the two
nations could translate into a major advantage in terms of power balance.
With the demise of the Soviet Union, for instance, the power balance
between Russia and the United States has changed in favour of the latter, i.e.
the United States emerged as more powerful than Russia and in
consequence managed to exercise power over Russia- meaning the USA
owned the ability to get Russia to do what Russia would not otherwise do.
• Anarchy
• Anarchy is a situation where there is absence of authority (government) be it
in national or international/global level systems. Within a country ‘anarchy’
refers to a breakdown of law and order, but in relations between states it
refers to a system where power is decentralized and there are no shared
institutions with the right to enforce common rules. An anarchical world is a
world where everyone looks after themselves and no one looks after the
system as a whole. Instead, states had to rely on their own resources or to
form alliances through which the power of one alliance of states could be
balanced against the power of another alliance. Yet, as soon became clear,
such power balances were precarious, easily subverted, and given the value
attached to territorial acquisitions, states had an incentive to engage in
aggressive wars. As a result, the new international system was characterized
by constant tensions and threats of war – which often enough turned into
actual cases of warfare.
• Sovereignty
• Sovereignty is another basic concept in international
relations and it can be defined as an expression of:
(i) a state’s ultimate authority within its territorial
entity (internal sovereignty) and, (ii) the state’s
involvement in the international community
(external sovereignty). In short, sovereignty denotes
double claim of states from the international
system, i.e., autonomy in foreign policy and
independence/freedom in its domestic affairs.
• . Idealism/Liberalism
• Liberalism in IR was referred to as a ‘utopian’ theory and is still recognized
as such to some degree today. Its proponents view human beings as
innately good and believe peace and harmony between nations is not only
achievable, but desirable. Immanuel Kant developed the idea in the late
eighteenth century that states that shared liberal values should have no
reason for going to war against one another. In Kant’s eyes, the more liberal
states there were in the world, the more peaceful it would become, since
liberal states are ruled by their citizens and citizens are rarely disposed to
desire war. This is in contrast to the rule of kings and other non-elected
rulers
• who frequently have selfish desires out of step with citizens. His ideas have
resonated and continue to be developed by modern liberals, most notably
in the democratic peace theory, which posits that democracies do not go to
war with each other, for the very reasons Kant outlined.
• Further, liberals have faith in the idea that the permanent
cessation of war is an attainable goal. Taking liberal ideas
into practice, US President Woodrow Wilson addressed his
famous ‘Fourteen Points’ to the US Congress in January
1918 during the final year of the First World War. As he
presented his ideas for a rebuilt world beyond the war,
the last of his points was to create a general association of
nations, which became the League of Nations. Dating back
to 1920, the League of Nations was created largely for the
purpose of overseeing affairs between states and
implementing, as well as maintaining, international peace.
• In the early years, from 1919 to the 1930s, the discipline was
dominated by what is conventionally referred to as liberal
internationalism. The primary concern of this approach was that
conditions which had led to the outbreak of the First World War and
the devastation which followed should not be allowed to occur in the
future. The driving force was therefore normative in orientation and
the underlying assumption was that the academic study of
international relations had the potential to contribute to the
prevention of war and the establishment of peace. With foundations
in the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century, liberal
internationalism, as Scott Burchill points out, suggested that ‘the
prospects for the elimination of war lay with a preference for
democracy over aristocracy, free trade over autarky, and collective
security over the balance of power system’ (Burchill, 1996: 31).
• The two interrelated ideas that emerge from Kant’s reflections on a perpetual
peace and which formed the basic foundations for the liberal internationalism
that dominated the discipline of international relations in its early days
centered on democratic governance and institutionalized law-governed
relations of cooperation between states. The two formative pillars of liberal
internationalism, democracy and free trade, required the establishment of
international relations which would promote collectivist aspirations in place
of the conflictual relations which formed the basis of balance-of-power
thinking. For it was just such thinking, based as it was on the premise that
relations between states are determined solely by the pursuit of power, which
led to violations of international law and ultimately to the outbreak of war in
1914. A system of ‘collective security’ was advocated to replace antagonistic
alliance systems with an international order based on the rule of law and
collective responsibility. The domestic analogy of a social contract was
deemed to be transferable for the international level.
• The creation of the League of Nations after the end of the First World
War was the culmination of the liberal ideal of international relations.
The League would function as the guarantor of international order
and would be the organ through which states could settle their
differences through arbitration. Any deviance from international law
would be dealt with collectively in the name of a commonly held
interest in the maintenance of peace and security. However, when the
League collapsed due to the outbreak of the Second World War in
1939, its failure became difficult for liberals to comprehend, as events
seemed to contradict their theories. Therefore, despite the efforts of
prominent liberal scholars and politicians such as Kant and Wilson,
liberalism failed to retain a strong hold and a new theory emerged to
explain the continuing presence of war.
• Liberals also argue that international law offers a mechanism by which
cooperation among states is made possible. International law refers to the body
of customary and conventional rules which are binding on civilized states in their
intercourse with each other. Notwithstanding this, however, states are the
subjects of international law in the sense that they are in principle obliged to
implement the decisions of international tribunals or courts. Essentially,
international law provides the normative framework for political discourse
among members of the international system. The framework does not guarantee
consensus, but it does foster the discourse and participation needed to provide
conceptual clarity in developing legal obligations and gaining their acceptance.
• In playing this role, international law performs two different functions. One is to
provide mechanisms for cross-border interactions, and the other is to shape the
values and goals these interactions are pursuing. The first set of functions are
called the ‘‘operating system’’ of international law, and the second set of
functions are the ‘‘normative system.”
• In short, the purpose of international law is thus to regulate the conducts of
governments and the behaviors of individuals within states. For instance, in
the case of human rights law we have one area called International human
rights law which provides a normative system for regulating states’ behavior
in their treatment of human rights within or outside their jurisdiction.
• Realism
• Realists argue that values are context bound, that morality is determined by
interest, and that the conditions of the present are determined by historical
processes. Where idealism sought a universally applicable doctrine, Carr’s
call is for a historical analysis of the contingent frameworks which determine
politics. The formative assumptions of realism as a school of thought centre
on the view that the international system is ‘anarchic’, in the sense that it is
devoid of an all-encompassing authority.
• Where domestic society is ruled by a single system of government, the international
system of states lacks such a basis and renders inter-national law non-binding and
ultimately ineffectual in the regulation of relations between states. Conflict is hence an
inevitable and continual feature of inter-national relations. As liberal internationalism
sought foundations in the Enlightenment and the birth of reason so realism locates its
roots further back, citing Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes as its founding voices.
Thucydides and his account of the Peloponnesian War is read as the formative
paradigmatic text in that it covers themes such as power, intrigue, conquest, alliance-
building and the intricacies of bargaining.

• Hans Morgenthau, whose Politics among Nations(1948) leads the realist perspective,
points to a clear line of descent from Thucydides when he asserts that ‘realism
assumes that its key concept of interest defined as power is an objective category
which is universally valid, but it does not endow that concept with a meaning that is
fixed once and for all’. Morgenthau’s text starts with the assumption that there are
objective laws which have universal applicability, ‘international politics, like all politics,
is a struggle for power’.
• Where liberal internationalism had been openly normative and
prescriptive in orientation, the realism expressed by Morgenthau
purports to be scientific and explanatory. Theories of international
relations must, according to Morgenthau, be consistent with the facts and
it is these which must be the ultimate test of the validity of theoretical
statements. Morgenthau, like other realists, hence assumes a clear
separation of fact and value, of theory and practice.
• Structuralism/Marxism
• Marxism is an ideology that argues that a capitalist society is divided into
two contradictory classes – the business class (the bourgeoisie) and the
working class (the proletariat). The proletariats are at the mercy of the
bourgeoisie who control their wages and therefore their standard of
living. Marx hoped for an eventual end to the class society and overthrow
of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.
• This third perspective or paradigm which emerged as a critique of both
realism and pluralism concentrated on the inequalities that exist within
the international system, inequalities of wealth between the rich ‘North’
or the ‘First World’ and the poor ‘South’ or the ‘Third World’. Inspired by
the writings of Marx and Lenin, scholars within what came to be known
as the structuralist paradigm focused on dependency, exploitation and
the international division of labor which relegated the vast majority of the
global population to the extremes of poverty, often with the complicities
of elite groups within these societies. As many in this tradition argued,
most states were not free. Instead they were subjugated by the political,
ideological and social consequences of economic forces. Imperialism
generated by the vigor of free enterprise capitalism in the West and by
state capitalism in the socialist bloc imposed unequal exchange of every
kind upon the Third World (Banks, 1984).
• The basis of such manifest inequality was the capitalist structure of the international
system which accrued benefits to some while causing, through unequal exchange
relations, the impoverishment of the vast majority of others. The class system that pre-
dominated internally within capitalist societies had its parallel globally, producing
centre–periphery relations that permeated every aspect of international social,
economic and political life. Thus, where pluralism and its liberal associations had viewed
networks of economic interdependence as a basis of increasing international
cooperation founded on trade and financial interactions, neo-Marxist structuralism
viewed these processes as the basis of inequality, the debt burden, violence and
instability.
• Constructivism
• Unlike scholars from other perspectives, constructivists highlight the importance of
values and shared interests between individuals who interact on the global stage.
Alexander Wendt, a prominent constructivist, described the relationship between
agents (individuals) and structures (such as the state) as one in which structures not
only constrain agents but also construct their identities and interests. His famous phrase
‘anarchy is what states make of it’ (Wendt 1992) sums this up well.
• Critical Theories
• Critical approaches refer to a wide spectrum of theories that have been established in
response to mainstream approaches in the field, mainly liberalism and realism. In a
nutshell, critical theorists share one particular trait – they oppose commonly held
assumptions in the field of IR that have been central since its establishment. Thus,
altered circumstances call for new approaches that are better suited to understand, as
well as question, the world we find ourselves in. Critical theories are valuable because
they identify positions that have typically been ignored or overlooked within IR. They
also provide a voice to individuals who have frequently been marginalized, particularly
women and those from the Global South.
• Critical theorists who take a Marxist angle often argue that the internationalization of
the state as the standard operating principle of international relations has led ordinary
people around the globe becoming divided and alienated, instead of recognizing what
they all have in common as a global proletariat. For this to change, the legitimacy of
the state must be questioned and ultimately dissolved. In that sense, emancipation
from the state in some form is often part of the wider critical agenda.