PART 1.

INTRODUCTORY TEXT

The world of nowadays is a global community of nations, all of which coexist in some measure of political and economic interdependence. By means of rapid communication systems -- radio, television, and computers much of what happens in one place is quickly known almost everywhere else. The speed of transportation in modern aircraft also makes it possible for people to get around the globe in hours instead of days or weeks. The modern world community was not, however, created by communications and transportation alone. The present global situation is new to history and owes its origins to a variety of factors that include the great conflict of World War II, the postwar breakdown of colonial em-pires, the long rivalry between the former Soviet Union and the United States, and the fast-growing economic interrelationships of all nations, large and small. Ever since there have been organized political entities variously called states, kingdoms, nations, and countries, there have been relations between them based on economics (trade) and on politics (war, territorial expansion, and colonization). International relations today encompass the foreign policies of about 200 nation-states and the regional blocs in which some are associated.

By the 1990s the world had become a community of about 200 independent nations, a situation that had never existed before. Some of these nations were huge: Russia, China, Canada, and the United States, while others were as small as Monaco on the Mediterranean coast. The old empires were history, but a new factor arose to offset them: hegemony, or dominant spheres of influence.

Most of Europe was destroyed both physically and economically by World War II. Even Great Britain, among the victors, was on the brink of financial ruin.

Japan was also devastated. The old colonial societies had not yet begun to throw off their imperial shackles. Only the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, were left to aid in rebuilding the world economy.

The World Community, 1945-90Unfortunately for the world community, the two superpowers emerged from the war in a state of mutual distrust and hostility. Each was wary of the other's intents. The United States was concerned that the Soviet Union would expand its influence by incorporating Eastern Europe into its political system, and this is, in fact, what happened. The presence of the Soviet Army in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany, and Bulgaria resulted in these nations' becoming Soviet satellites: They fell within the Soviet sphere of influence. The Soviet Union itself, however, was left in rains by the war. That country was fearful that the United States, which at the time was the only nation possessing atomic weapons, would attempt to destroy the Soviet system. Out of this situation of mutual superpower hostility there developed the Cold War, with each of the

two nations seeking to enlarge its sphere of influence around the world by forming alliances, offering foreign aid, selling massive quantities of arms, and undermining the governments of smaller nations. The Cold War never became a hot war between the superpowers, probably only because of the awesome threat of nuclear weapons. American anxieties over Soviet power were greatly increased by the success of the Communist revolution in China. After Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-lung) and his followers came to power in 1949, evincing great hostility toward the United States, there was a general fear that the might of international Communism would be impossible to contain.

The Cold War, while perhaps the dominant feature of international relations in the late 20th century, was by no means the only important development. All over the world, former colonies were gaining independence. A new world structure was emerging, because these new nations were demanding a role in international politics and were slowly becoming integrated into a growing world economy. Revolutions, some homegrown and some fomented from the outside, were going оn in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. And perhaps most unsettling of all, the United States lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, and perhaps others joined the international "atomic club."

The world that emerged in the 1950s had to be described in new terms. It turned out that the community of nations could be divided into four fairly distinct groups, or "worlds." The first world consisted of the United States and its allies, primarily Western Europe and Japan. The second world denoted the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe. The third world, actually referred to as "the Third World," consisted of Asian and African nations emerging from colonial status, along with some underdeveloped Latin American states. More specifically, the term has come to mean nonindustrial or developing countries in general. Last, it appeared that there was a fourth world, a group of desperately poor, undeveloped nations that showed few signs of economic life. Notable among this group of countries are Haiti, Somalia, and Mozambique.

The Third World. The number of poverty-stricken and underdeveloped nations was great in the 1950s. Many were just emerging from colonialism. Others had been badly governed for decades. Since I960 the number of worst-case economies has diminished. Africa remains, for the most part, underdeveloped, Latin America, however, has had some dramatic changes as dictatorships gave way to democracies. Mexico proved to be one of the economic miracles of the late 1980s. Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, after decades of misrule, began making significant progress after 1985. In the Far East, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia all showed great signs of economic development by the early 1990s. Even China, long considered the largest Third World society, experienced striking economic growth in its southern regions. The Arab states of the Middle East prospered if they had petroleum reserves. India, the world's second most populous nation, still struggled to free itself from government

paternalism, ancient traditions, excessive regulations, and the socialist legacy of its immediate postcolonial years.

Third World leaders in the early Cold War decades realized that, acting independently, they could have little impact in international relations. To remedy this, they organized. In April 1955 at Bandung, Indonesia, delegates from 29 countries met in a conference organized by Indonesia, India, Burma (now Myanmar), Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). These delegates formed an association of nations not aligned with either of the two superpowers, although they tended to identify more with the Soviet Union and China than with the democracies. This policy of nonalignment, or neutralism, was strengthened and advanced by President Tito of Yugoslavia. In September 1961 he hosted a conference of nonaligned nations in Belgrade. The conference, convened by India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Carnal Abdel Nasser, and Tito, denounced colonialism, demanded an end to armed action against dependent peoples, endorsed the Algerians in their war for independence from France, and called for a policy of perpetual neutralism between the great powers. As Cold War tensions eased in the 1980s, the nonaligned movement began fading. Many member countries were undergoing economic transformation and wanted to strengthen ties to the industrialized regions the United States, Japan, and Western Europe.

The industrial North. With the exceptions of Australia and New Zealand, the prosperous regions of the globe are in the Northern Hemisphere. The industrial leaders are the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. At the end of World War II, the United States stood alone in industrial might. All of Europe and Japan had been devastated by the war. The Soviet Union was an economic shambles. To rebuild the West and Japan, the United States launched a massive foreign aid program called the Marshall Plan, named after George C. Marshall, who proposed the plan in 1947. During the four-year life of the plan, Western Europe was provided with more than 17 billion dollars in aid for economic reconstruction. Japan was also assisted in rebuilding.

The result of these efforts was an era of unprecedented affluence in the industrialized societies. After the war-torn nations got back on their feet, however, the efforts also produced an era of economic rivalry. As long as the prosperity lasted, the rivalry was little noticed. But when the oil-producing countries of the Middle East instituted marked increases in prices during the 1970s the economic scene darkened. A worldwide recession, coupled with perpetual inflation, set in.

By the early 1980s the solidarity of the industrial West had weakened as each nation was trying to maintain economic stability amid unfavorable conditions. What did keep them together was their distrust of the Soviet Union. The Eastern bloc nations, led by the Soviet Union, also faced the task of rebuilding after the war. The process took longer because they chose not to be recipients of Marshall Plan funds. And they had always been poorer and less industrialized than the nations of Western Europe.

Worlds in turmoil. The conclusion of World War II ended the drive by Germany, Italy, and Japan for world domination; but the seed of smaller conflicts had already been planted. Even as Japan was evacuating Southeast Asia, Vietnam, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, was planning to get rid of French colonialism for good. Vietnam's effort resulted in a long war, a conflict that ended in 1975 with a Communist victory. Instead of rebuilding the region, however, the victors went on to fight among themselves and to leave Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in desolation (see Vietnam War).

The Vietnam War was only one of several conflicts that erupted out of the Cold War. Soviet and American power confronted each other in several places, especially in Europe and Korea. The settlement in Europe after World War II not only divided the continent into two hostile factions; it also divided Germany into two countries and Berlin into two cities, This was a source of strife in 1948, when the Soviets instituted a blockade of West Berlin, geographically in the heart of Soviet-occupied territory. West Berlin was rescued dramatically by an airlift of goods and services, and the failed blockade was abandoned in mid-1949. The hostilities, though, endured until 1989 (see Berlin, Germany; Korean War.) Numerous other Cold-War trouble spots continued to disturb the peace of the world. One of the most notable was in Cuba, where forces led by Fidel Castro staged successful revolution in the late 1950s. Cuba then became a Soviet dependency and hoped to engulf the whole of Latin America in revolution. In the early 1980s much of Central America was torn by conflict, with guerrillas supplied by the Soviet Union and Cuba fighting soldiers armed and trained by the United States. The Cuban threat was at one time aimed directly at the United States. In 1962 it was learned that the Soviet Union had placed in Cuba guided missiles aimed at the United States. This brought on a crisis that was resolved only when the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the removal of the missiles.

Not all of the global trouble spots owed their origin to the Cold War, though most of them were affected by it. The most persistent area of conflict since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 has been the Middle East. There has been relentless hostility, and several wars were fought between the Arab states and Israel.The wars were all won by Israel, deepening Arab hostilities toward both Israel and its major ally, the United States. The Cold War injected itself into the Middle East, when the Soviet Union started supplying some Arab states with weapons; Syria and Iraq were notable examples. Other Muslim nations Saudi Arabia and Jordan among them tried to maintain neutrality in the Cold War. In some cases they openly welcomed aid from the United -States and Western Europe.

New World OrderWith a suddenness that no one could have predicted, the Cold War ended in 1990. The most striking symbol of its end was the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and its subsequent destruction. The end of the Cold War was made possible by the demise of Communism first in Eastern Europe, then in the

Soviet Union itself. This amazing event surprised the world, but it had been in the 'making for a long time. The process began on March 6, 1953, the day after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The totalitarian state he had ruled for about 30 years was suddenly in the hands of men who were relieved at his departure and unwilling to rule with his style of brutality. In addition, by the end of the decade relations with China had worsened significantly. There was a genuine break between the two countries in the early 1960s. The myth of international Communism was shattered. While maintaining a sure hold over Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union attempted to gain better relationships with the West, particularly the United States. Both superpowers realized the futility of edging toward nuclear war. The internal condition of the Communist societies worsened economically. The persistent shortages of consumer goods, even food, frustrated the citizens of these countries. By the early 1980s it was apparent to the rulers of the Soviet Union that real reform was needed if their country was going to survive. Then, in 1985, a new type of Soviet leader became president of the country: Mikhail Gorbachev. He recognized the serious economic situation and desired to reform it, while intending to perpetuate control by the Communist party. His plan did not work. Once he allowed freedom of speech, a policy called glasnost, he suddenly watched the whole society reject Communism and demand democracy. Gorbachev also made it clear to the leaders of Eastern European Communist states that Soviet troops would no longer be available to keep them in power. This policy triggered the rapid collapse of Communist regimes in all of Eastern Europe. It began in Poland, spread to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, then spread to East Germany. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall, there was to be no turning back. The rest of the countries of Eastern Europe abandoned Communism within a few months. By October 1990 Germany was reunited.

The Cold War was suddenly over. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved. And by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist, breaking apart into its constituent, and BOW independent, republics. There remained in „ the world only one superpower, the United States. The end of the Cold War and of Communism did not signal the end of international strife. Old problems re-mained, but they no longer flourished under cover of East-West competition. In the Middle East, for example, the weakness of the Soviet Union after 1989 meant that such warlike states as Iraq and Syria could no longer rely on it for weapons and support. Thus, when Iraq invaded tiny Kuwait in August 1990, it found itself opposed by a whole United Nations (UN) coalition of armed forces including those of Syria. The end of the Cold War had given the United Nations a new lease on life. For the first time in decades the UN was able to take concerted action against a common foe, and it won. The success of the offensive against Iraq rearranged conditions in the Middle East. The United States found itself with new allies and few enemies. This prestige enabled President George Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, to persuade Israel and its Arab enemies to sit down at the negotiating table to work out a means of living together. The peace talks began in September 1991.

In Southern Europe the collapse of Communism had bred civil war in Yugoslavia. The small nation had been ruled by Tito from 1943 until 1980. His death weakened the bonds that held the six provinces together. Old ethnic hatreds resurfaced. When Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence in mid-1990, the mostly Serbian Yugoslav army invaded, plunging the country into civil war. The war worsened when Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded in 1991. Although the independence of these republics was recognized by the European Communities (now European Union) and the United States, the fighting continued.

In the Far East, the Chinese government rejected democracy in June 1989, when it crushed the youth demonstration in Beijing's Tiananmen Square a rebellion that was seen worldwide on television. Yet, in spite of the regime's harshness toward the rebels, it permitted economic reforms to continue. By 1993 the southern sector of China had one of the fastest growing and most prosperous economies in the world. Outsiders, mainly in the United States, complained about China's human-rights violations, but they were unwilling to break off relationships or impose sanctions on the world's most populous nation.

The Conduct of International Relations Each nation has three foreign-policy goals: physical security the freedom from outside attack and internal revolution; political security the freedom to run its own affairs without outside interference; and economic stability and development the freedom to trade in world markets and to satisfy its own population’s demands for goods and services.Nations had always traditionally dealt with each other on a one-to-one basis or in strategic alliances in pursuing these goals. But in the complicated arena of the modern global community, it is more common to work through organizations. To meet the needs of international cooperation, a vast number of organizations of all types have been created.Organizations. The most comprehensive international organization was founded in 1945 (he Untied Nations and its many affiliates. Regional associations include the Organization of American States (1948), the Organization of African Unity (1963), the League of Arab States (1945), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (1967). All of these organizations deal with the whole range of political and economic issues in their areas. The Cold War spawned a number of regional mutual-defense alliances, the best known are the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed in 1949, and the Warsaw Pact, signed in 1955. NATO was a military alliance formed to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union; the Warsaw Pact was the Soviet counter-alliance, ANZUS a security treaty between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States was signed in 1951, The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was formed in 1954 and disbanded in 1977.Many international and regional organizations have evolved to deal with the financial needs of the global community. There are too many to be able to list

them all, but some of the leading ones include the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the Caribbean Community, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the African Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Asian Development Bank.

Foreign policy. All the complex devices and attitudes that a nation develops to use in its interactions with other nations make up its foreign policy. Policy formulation is the responsibility of specific government agencies the United Stales Department of State or the British Foreign Office, for example.In the United States the direction of foreign policy is the task of the president, though in many matters he must have the approval of the United States Senate, Other agencies also contribute to formulation of policy. Among them are the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Since foreign policy in the late 20th century can be quite complex, other agencies may also contribute information. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for instance, keep abreast of economic conditions in most countries and play a major role in offering foreign aid.Each national government operates worldwide through its embassies and consulates. An embassy is the highest official representation one nation maintains in another. Normal diplomacy is conducted by ambassadors and their subordinates. Consulates deal primarily with commercial issues and the protection of the economic interests of their nationals. A consul is not a diplomat and therefore cannot take up duties until the host nation grants permission. A nation has only one embassy in a given country, but it may have several consulates.

Task 1. Give the Russian equivalents of the following:

1. to coexist in some measure of political and economic interdependence2. to owe one’s origins to a variety of factors3. to be wary of sb’s intents4. relentless hostility5. to fall within one’s sphere of influence6. awesome threat of nuclear weapons7. to contain the might of international communism8. to foment revolutions from the outside9. to have little impact in international relations10.an era of unprecedented affluence11.economic shambles12.to shatter the myth of international communism13.the demise of communism

14.to reject communism15.persistent shortages of consumer goods

Task 2. Give the English equivalents of the following:

1. в считанные часы облететь земной шар 2. быть на грани финансового краха3. взаимное недоверие и враждебность4. расширять сферу влияния5. сесть за стол переговоров6. начать крупномасштабную программу помощи зарубежным странам7. экономическая разруха8. окончательно избавиться от колониализма9. навсегда сохранить руководящую роль коммунистической партии10.распад колониальной системы11.ввергнуть страну в пучину гражданской войны12.воспрянуть духом13.действовать сообща против общего противника14.удовлетворять потребности населения в товарах и услугах15.вызвать к жизни ряд оборонительных альянсов

Task 3. Match the words with their definitions:

FOMENT, OFFSET, PATERNALISM, IMPACT, FACTION, SHAMBLES, RECESSION, RECIPIENT

- the effect or influence that an event, situation etc has on someone or something

- the governing of a country in a manner suggesting a father’s relationship with his children

- a scene of great disorder; mess- one who receives something- a group in an organization working in a common cause against the main

body- a period of reduced business activity; slump- to stir up (trouble); to incite- to balance or compensate

Task 4. Arrange the words in antonymous pairs:

a) regional, cold war, poverty, modern, to place (missiles), to approveb) affluence, to denounce, ancient, global, to remove, hot war

Task 5. Arrange the words into synonymous pairs:

a) nonalignment, to denounce, to endorse, to incite, death, confusion, constant, for ever, to place (missiles), concerted (actions), collapse

b) to condemn, for good, neutralism, turmoil, to deploy, perpetual, joint, to support, to foment, demise, breakdown

Task 6. Use the information of the text and your background knowledge to answer the following questions:

1. What is the meaning of the global community and what are the factors contributing to its emergence?

2. What are global international relations based on?3. What is meant by spheres of influence?4. What factors determined the development of the World Community after

World War 11?5. What groups of states could be distinguished in the world during the Cold

War?6. What were the reasons for the development of the non-aligned movement?7. What is the essence of the Marshall plan?8. What were the major Cold War trouble spots?

Task 7. Suggest the Russian equivalents of the following word combinations and phrases. Do you remember the context in which they were used in the text?

1. a suddenness that no-one could have predicted2. to rule with Stalin’s style of brutality3. a new type of leader4. to break apart into independent republics5. war-like states6. to weaken bonds7. to crash a demonstration

Task 8. Speak on:

- the sudden end of the Cold War- the demise of communism in the Soviet Union and East European societies- the continuation of international strife

Task 9. In the introductory text M. Gorbachev was referred to as a new type of leader. Discuss with your partner the qualities of the old and new types of leader in the Former Soviet Union and independent republics of nowadays.

Task 10. Arrange the words properly to restore the quotation and comment upon it.

THE SAME, PROMISE, ARE, POLITICIANS, ALL OVER, THEY, A BRIDGE, EVEN, TO BUILD, WHEN, NO, RIVER, THERE’S Nikita Khrushchev, New York, 1960

TEXT 2 ( RECOMMENDED FOR SIGHT TRANSLATION)

a) The disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly accelerated in 1991 with the growing transfer of power from the central government to the fifteen republics. On September 6, the Soviet government formally recognized the political independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, ending Soviet control begun in 1939. And on December 8, the three leading Soviet republics – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – implicitly announced their independence from the Soviet state by establishing a Commonwealth of Independent States (SIS), an informal confederal alliance designed to facilitate economic, political, and military cooperation. On December 21, eight of the remaining nine Soviet republics (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) joined the SIS. Only the small republic of Georgia declined to join the new alliance.

b) Although Gorbachev continued to defend the Soviet state and oppose the SIS, the transfer of political authority to the republics made the demise of the Soviet Union inevitable. Not surprisingly, on December 25 Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, thereby confirming the death of the Soviet state. Following his resignation and the transfer of nuclear weapons control to Boris Yeltsin, the Soviet flag was lowered at the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian flag – an event signaling the end of the Soviet communist state.

TEXT 3 (RECOMMENDED FOR SIGHT TRANSLATION WITH THE FOLLOWING SUMMARIZING IN ENGLISH)

The End of the Cold War

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War came as a surprise to most Western policy makers and scholars. Because of the authoritarian character of the Soviet Union and its significant military capabilities, most policy makers in the late 1980s continued to believe that the Soviet Union, although facing significant domestic political and economic challenges, would continue indefinitely as a superpower. Moreover, most Western political leaders believed that bipolar configuration of power would continue to characterize global society.

International relations scholars were similarly surprised when the Soviet-led coalition began to dissolve in 1989, eventually resulting in the collapse of Soviet communism itself. Some of the explanations that have been given for scholars’ failure to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet regime include: (a) theories of international relations had become insensitive to important and unexpected development, in great part because of reliance on inappropriate scientific methodologies; (b) the study of the Soviet Union (Sovietology) had succumbed to “group think” and was influenced by “revisionist” scholars who were overly sympathetic to the USSR; and (c) because the Cold War had brought about global stability, scholars were unconsciously sympathetic to a continuation of a bipolar system dominated by the superpowers.

Why did the Cold War end? Policy analysts and scholars attribute the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War to many different sources. Even though historians and international relations scholars will continue to debate the causes of the Soviet empire’s collapse, two competing perspectives have been especially influential, representing the major alternative orientations of many Western scholars and political leaders. The first perspective, based on an international or systematic level of analysis, attributes the fall of communism to external factors and in particular to the military containment of Soviet expansionism. During the 1980s this perspective was articulated by the Reagan administration through the strategy of “peace-through the-strength”. The second perspective, based on a domestic or state level of analysis, attributes the end of the ideological conflict and collapse of the Soviet Union to internal economic and political weaknesses. Whereas the first approach credits the United States for the victory of the West, the second attributes the collapse of the Soviet Union to the flawed principles and institutions of communism.

Although the Cold War was one of the most durable disputes in world history, it also, ironically, resulted in one of the longest periods of global peace. John Lewis Gaddis, who calls this era the long peace, has identified several theories and arguments to help to explain the longevity of Cold War peace: first, nuclear arms, by making war unthinkable, helped to promote global peace; second, the bipolar distribution of power contributed to the stability of the international system; third, the development of a liberal international economic order was made possible by the hegemonic role of the United States; fourth, the increasing obsolescence of great power war, the increasing permeability of state borders, and the failure of command economies – tenets that Gaddis associates with an approach termed ‘triumphant liberalism” – have contributed to the strengthening of global society; finally, the long peace can be partly explained by the cyclic nature of history, which has, according to some scholars, demonstrated recurring patterns of hegemonic dominance.

TEXT 4.

What do you think are the most significant consequences of the end of the Cold War? Discuss your ideas with your partner. Then read the text and compare your conclusions with those represented in the text.

Effects of the End of the Cold War

The precipitous decline of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union are the most important political events in post-World War 11 international relations. Even though the economic power of the United States

declined relative to Europe and Japan during the 1970s and 1980s, the demise of the USSR left the United States as the undisputed power in the international system. The fact was underscored during the Persian Gulf crisis, during which time the United States led a UN-sanctioned military coalition in defeating Iraq in February 1991.

The decline of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet empire has had a number of important effects on the structures of the international community. First, the expensive U.S.-USSR arms race ended, resulting in a peace dividend not only for the two contestants but also for their allies. Although both Russia and the United States continue to maintain comparatively large and well-equipped armed forces in the late 1990s, the financial resources allocated to defense by Russia and the United States in 1997 were at least 35 to 40 percent less than would have been the case had the Cold War not ended. In addition, the United States has greatly reduced its overseas military forces, cutting for example, its NATO forces in Europe from about 300,000 troops to less than 80,000. Finally, Russia and the United States have carried out significant reductions in the number of nuclear weapons and placed its strategic arsenals on a low alert status.

A second consequence of the end of the Cold War is that communism has become a discredited theory of political economy. After the Soviet Union collapsed political leaders in Russia and other former communist republics embarked on the implementation of economic reforms based on privatization and free enterprise. Russia’s repudiation of state socialism and adoption of market-based economic reforms had an especially profound impact in the discrediting of Marxist-Leninist principles of political economy. Robert Heilbroner has described the loss of socialism’s influence as follows:

Less than seventy-five years after it officially began the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won. The Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactory than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy, however mindless the culture of commercialism, it is more attractive than state moralism, and however deceptive the ideology of a business civilization, it is more believable than that of a socialist one.

The discrediting of central economic planning in the former Soviet empire coupled with the relative economic success of free enterprise in East Asia and selected states in Latin America and elsewhere, has resulted in a growing popularity of capitalism. In Latin America, for example, a number of countries, including Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, are following Chile’s example of market economy. In Asia and Africa, too, a growing number of states, including India, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, have abandoned state planning in favor of privatization of state enterprises and market-oriented domestic and international economic policies.

A third important consequence of the end of the Cold War and the death of Soviet communism has been the expansion of political freedom and democratic governments. The number of states classified as “free” increased by 55 percent (from51 to 79) during the 1981-1997 period, while the number of “partly free” countries increased by 16 percent (from 51 to 59). To be sure, although the post-Cold War expansion of democracy has been due to many factors, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union have surely contributed significantly. As of 1997, communist governments remained in power in only a few countries including Cuba and North Korea.

Finally, the end of the Cold War has resulted in greater harmony and cooperation between Russia and the West. For example, despite Russia’s strenuous opposition to NATO membership for former Soviet-bloc states, Russia accepted, in the end, NATO’s inclusion of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic in mid-1997, after it was promised a vote in NATO affairs. Similarly, in 1997 Russia became a member of the so-called G-7, the Western economic summit, thereby further consolidating Russia’s increasing participation in world economy.

TEXT 5.

PRE-READING ACTIVITY:

Work in pairs. Do you think the following statements are true or false?

1. The post Cold-War world has passed its first series of major tests with ease.2. A bipolar world has given way to a unipolar world with the USA playing the role of the “world’s

police force”.3. The USA is a disinterested world power.4. The very idea of a new world order might be a piece of historical engineering aimed at

safeguarding US interests.5. It’s doubtless that the USA has the economic resources to sustain its global role.6. The existence of an external threat promotes internal cohesion.

Discuss your considerations with the rest of the group.

SCAN reading: look through the text to find answers to the true/false statements.

A NEW WORLD ORDER

1. The birth of the post-Cold War world was accompanied by a wave of optimism and idealism. The superpower era had been marked by East-West rivalry that extended across the globe and led to a nuclear buildup that threatened to destroy the planet. As communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, and Soviet power was in retreat both domestically and internationally, “one world” speaking with “one voice” appeared to have come into existence. The “new world order” was going to be based not on ideological conflict and a balance of terror, but on common recognition of international norms and standards of morality. Central to this emerging world order was the recognition of the need to settle disputes peacefully, to resist aggression and expansionism , to control and reduce military arsenals, and to ensure the just treatment of domestic populations through respect for human rights. What is more, the post-Cold War world order appeared to pass its first series of major tests with ease.

2. Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait in August 1990 led to the construction of a broad Western and Islamic alliance which, through the Gulf War of 1991, brought about the expulsion of Iraqi forces. The disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991 saw the first use of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) (renamed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in December 1994) as a mechanism for tackling international crises, leading to hopes that it would eventually replace both the Warsaw Pact and NATO.

3. In many ways, the linchpin of the hoped-for new world order was the USA. A bipolar world order had given way to a unipolar one, with the USA, the only power with the military capacity and political authority to intervene effectively, playing the role of the ‘world’s police force’.

4. There are several reasons, however, for questioning this image of the USA-sponsored international fraternity and world peace. In the first place, there are those who challenge the idea that the USA is a disinterested world power, and doubt that there is anything “new” about the world order. For example, the anti-Iraq coalition of 1990-1991 perhaps only reflected the fact that the US and broader Western concerns about oil supplies coincided with regional anxieties amongst Islamic powers such as Syria and Saudi Arabia about a “Greater Iraq”. In other words, rhetoric about international law and national sovereignty merely camouflaged power politics and the pursuit of national interests. The very idea of a new world order might, indeed, be a piece of historical engineering aimed at safeguarding US interests and maintaining the USA’s mastery of the global economy.

5. There are also doubts about the capacity of the USA to play the role of the world’s police force, even if this were thought to be desirable. In the first place, preponderant nuclear power does not always translate into effective military capacity. At a deeper level, however, it is questionable whether the USA has the economic resources to sustain its global role, particularly in a context of relative decline highlighted by the economic resurgence of Japan and Germany. One manifestation of this has been an upsurge in isolationism. How long will Americans be prepared to pay the price of the USA being “number one”? In the same way as after the First World War, the idea of the USA disengaging itself from international affairs (“leaving the world to sort itself out”) has come to have a potent appeal in the USA, and his may grow still stronger.

6. Further stresses within the new world order have been generated by the releasing of tensions and conflicts that the Cold War had helped to keep under control. The existence of an external threat (be it international communism or capitalist encirclement) promoted internal cohesion and gives societies a sense of purpose and identity. To some extent, for instance, the West defined itself through antagonism towards the East, and vice-versa. There is evidence that, in many states, the collapse of the external threat has helped to unleash centrifugal pressures, usually in the form of racial, ethnic and regional tensions.

7. As opposed to the world being policed and orderly, the emerging international scene seems to be typified by lawlessness and inaction; it appears to resemble more a new world disorder. This may indeed, be the natural condition of a multipolar world order. Whereas bipolarism is structured, albeit by mutual hostility, multipolarism creates more fluid and less predictable conditions in which major actors are unclear about their roles and responsibilities. Thus, the USA, a German-led Europe, Russia, Japan and South East Asian “tigers”, China, and possibly the Islamic world are all engaged in redefining themselves as international actors freed from the straight-jacket that superpower rivalry imposed. However, the very instability of the post-Cold War politics illustrates its trnsitionary character. The USA-USSR superpower period may have passed, but a new and stable world order has yet to come into existence. The central question is whether this order will come about through cooperation, engineered by international bodies such as the UN and the EU, or whether it will be imposed through economic domination and military force.

AFTER-READING ACTIVITY (read the text in more depth to do the after-reading exercises)

Task 1. Comprehension check.

1. What was the superpower era marked by?2. What were the preconditions for a new world order?3. What is it based on and what is central to this emerging world?4. Give examples of its first successful tests.5. Why was the USA considered to be the linchpin of the hoped-for new world order?6. List the reasons for questioning this image of the USA.

7. What have new stresses within the new world order been generated by?8. Why may a new world disorder be the natural condition of a multipolar world?9. Name the main international actors who are redefining themselves and their roles in the new world order.10. What is the central question to a new and stable world order?

Task 2. Give the Russian equivalents of the following:

1. to be in retreat internationally2. to come into existence3. nuclear build-up4. common recognition of international norms5. what is more6. to pass the first series of major tests with ease7. to maintain the mastery of the global economy8. economic resurgence9. the linchpin of the hoped-for new world order10. to disengage oneself from international affairs

Task 3. Give the English equivalents of the following:

1. решать конфликты мирным путем2. сократить военные арсеналы3. во многих отношениях4. взаимная враждебность5. относительный спад6. поставить под сомнение7. внешняя угроза8. менее предсказуемые условия9. уступить место однополярному миру10. справедливое обращение с местным населением

Task 4. Arrange the words in antonymous pairs:

a) external, to reduce, unilateral, foreign (policy), to come into existence, resurgenceb) decline, home, to disappear, internal, multilateral, to build up

Task 5. Arrange the words in synonymous pairs:

a) epoch, demise, to emerge, to reduce (military arsenals), to reduce (international tension), economic domination

b) mastery of the economy, collapse, to cut, to relax, era, to come into existence

Task 6. Look at how the words below are used in the text and then match them to the meanings given:

Disinterested, preponderant, upsurge, linchpin, resurgence, identity

main or most important (formal) able to judge a situation fairly, because you are not concerned with gaining

any personal advantage from it a strong feeling of belonging to a particular group; the qualities and

attitudes you have that make you feel you have your own character and are different from other people

a sudden increase the appearance again and growth (of a belief or activity)

a person or thing in a group or system that is most important, because everything depends on them

Task 7. Find in the text the words which have the following meanings:

continuous competition (par. 1) taking control of a country or area next to your own, especially by using

force (par. 2) speech or writing that sounds impressive, but is not actually very sincere

or useful (par. 4) to change something from one form into another (par.5) the opposite situation we have just described is also true (par. 6) the fact that someone is not doing anything (par. 7) even though (used to add information or details that are different from

what you have already said (par. 7)

Task 8. Use your active words and phrases to paraphrase the following sentences:

1. The demise of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe led to the emergence of one world speaking and acting unanimously.

2. The post-Cold-War world order successfully stood the test of rime.3. The key political actor of the new world order was supposed to be the USA.4. There are certain doubts about the idea that the USA is objective and

impartial in the international arena.5. It is questionable whether the USA has necessary resources to maintain its

mastery of the global economy.6. During the Cold War period piling up nuclear weapons was thought to be

the main menace to peace. Task 9. Learn the following synonyms of the noun “threat”, give their derivatives and make up sentences with them.

A threat – a warning, pending evil (he threatened to retaliate) A danger – likelihood (of falling on ice) A menace – a danger (but of hostile character) A jeopardy – extreme danger A peril – imminent danger Hazard – a risk, a chance (uncontrollable) of danger; occupational

hazard – профессиональный риск

Task 10. Find the words with the prefixes “multi”, “uni”, “bi” in the text, learn them and look up some other words with the same prefixes.

Task 11. Fill in the blanks with “power”, “force”, and “strength”.

1. The USA, the only … with the military capacity and political authority to intervene was playing the role of the world’s police … .

2. Preponderant nuclear … does not always translate into effective military capacity.

3. The super … era was marked by the East-West rivalry that extended across the globe.

4. As communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Soviet … was in retreat both domestically and internationally.

5. The broad western and Islamic alliance brought about the exclusion of Iraqi … from Kuweit.

6. The … of political party lies in its unity.7. The USA-USSR super … period may have passed, but anew and stable

world order has yet to come into reality.8. There are also doubts about the capacity of the USA to play the role of the

world’s police … .9. It is questionable whether the USA has the economic resources to sustain its

global role, though it has, no doubt, gathered enough … .10.The central question is whether a new world order will come about through

cooperation or whether it will be imposed through military … .

TEXT 6.

The Myth of Post-Cold War ChaosG. John IkenberryFrom Foreign Affairs, May/June 1996  G. John Ikenberry is Co-Director of the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.THE 1945 ORDER LIVES ON

A great deal of ink has been shed in recent years describing various versions of the post-Cold War order. These attempts have all failed, because there is no such creature. The world order created in the 1940s is still with us, and in many ways stronger than ever. The challenge for American foreign policy is not to imagine and build a new world order but to reclaim and renew an old one--an innovative and durable order that has been hugely successful and largely unheralded.

The end of the Cold War, the common wisdom holds, was a historical watershed. The collapse of communism brought the collapse of the order that took shape after World War II. While foreign policy theorists and officials scramble to design new grand strategies, the United States is rudderless on uncharted seas.

The common wisdom is wrong. What ended with the Cold War was bipolarity, the nuclear stalemate, and decades of containment of the Soviet Union--seemingly the most dramatic and consequential features of the postwar era. But the world order created in the middle to late 1940s endures, more extensive and in some respects more robust than during its Cold War years. Its basic principles, which deal with organization and relations among the Western liberal democracies, are alive and well.

These less celebrated, less heroic, but more fundamental principles and policies--the real international order--include the commitment to an open world economy and its multilateral management, and the stabilization of socioeconomic welfare. And the political vision behind the order was as important as the anticipated economic gains. The major industrial democracies took it upon themselves to 'domesticate' their dealings through a dense web of multilateral institutions, intergovernmental relations, and joint management of the Western and world political economies. Security and stability in the West were seen as intrinsically tied to an array of institutions--the United Nations and its agencies and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) only some among many--that bound the democracies together, constrained conflict, and facilitated political community. Embracing common liberal democratic norms and operating within interlocking multilateral institutions, the United States, Western Europe, and, later, Japan built an enduring postwar order.

The end of the Cold War has been so disorienting because it ended the containment order--40 years of policies and bureaucratic missions and an entire intellectual orientation. But the watershed of postwar order predated hostilities with the Soviet Union. The turning point was not a Cold War milestone such as the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 or the creation of the Atlantic alliance in 1948-49. It might have come as early as 1941, when Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter declaring the liberal principles that were to guide the postwar settlement. The process became irreversible in 1944, when representatives at the Bretton Woods conference laid down the core principles and mechanisms of the postwar Western economic order and those at Dumbarton Oaks gave the political aspect of the vision concrete form in their proposals for a United Nations.

Read the author’s summary of the article and fill in the gaps with suitable words. Choose from the words given in the box:

World War 11, agreement, order, Japan, cooperatively, containment, durable, rooted, stronger

Summary:  Stop searching for ------ .The international structure established by the liberal democracies after ……. is still in place, and in many ways ….. than ever. …….. got most of the attention, but the liberal powers …… to manage trade,

security, and other big matters …… has been more ..….. , and more successful than most recognize. Besides, the order is deeply …… in the American experience of democracy and constitutionalism. It shaped the Germany and ……. of today, and now most of the rest of the world wants to join.

TEXT 7. (RECOMMENDED FOR SIGHT TRANSLATION WITH THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION IN ENGLISH)

CHOMSKY AND THE POWER OF CRITICISM

Noam Chomsky is a brilliant American linguistic theorist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Marginalized in his own country—he once referred to himself as a dissident in the land of the deaf and the blind--Chomsky has been a radical voice in what he regards as an American academic wilderness peopled by those either too spineless or too dependent to attack the status quo. Yet from his position on the edges of the mainstream, Chomsky has managed to influence and inspire many younger scholars. A best-selling writer who refuses to keep quiet, Chomsky has painted an impressionistic but powerful picture of the modern world. Chomsky's analysis might be summed up thus:1. The basic character of the international system post-1989 may have altered in outward appearance, but in essence it has changed very little: it still remains divided between the rich powerful states and the highly dependent ones in the Third World.2. Far from representing a force for good in the world the United States is an imperial and expansionary power, whose principle aim in the post-cold war period has been to make the world safe for the multinationals.3. The purpose of modern elite democracy and US democracy promotion is not to empower ordinary people around the world, but to reduce political choice. Indeed, if anything, the US is actually afraid of real democracy and would soon undermine it if it did not advance its own material and strategic interests.4. The reach of the American state globally is matched by its ability to 'manufacture consent' at home, thus ensuring that few people seriously question what is being done abroad in their name.5. We should beware the new humanitarian interventionism sometimes practiced by the West after 1989: it is only old-style imperialism wearing new ideological clothes.

TEXT 8. (RECOMMENDED FOR SIGHT TRANSLATION)

REGIONAL INSTABILITY -- PART OF POST-COLD WAR ORDER, GEORGE SAYS

STANFORD -- The United States sits in the driver's seat for constructing a "new world order" but will experience serious difficulty gaining the American public's support for an ambitious, expensive foreign policy.

That is the message that Stanford University political scientist Alexander George delivered in a paper presented at the Nobel Institute's Jubilee Symposium, "Beyond the Cold War: Future Dimensions in International Relations," held in Oslo on Dec. 6-8 to mark the 90th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Fifteen scholars from around the world and 17 Nobel Peace Prize laureates were invited by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to take stock of where the world stands and where it is headed.

George, who is a distinguished fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., was one of three scholars invited to discuss the role of regional conflicts in international affairs. He joined Nobel laureates Oscar Arias Sanchez, former president of Costa Rica, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

Although the superpowers have been cooperating to liquidate their past stakes in regional conflicts, regional instability is likely as a result of the end of the Cold War, George said. The patron-client relationships that developed between the superpowers and states in most regions of the world have either been loosened or broken. The former clients are forced to "rethink their relationships with other nations in the region," George said. "Those who felt constrained by superpower pressure have new freedom that may lead them to more daring policy moves in future regional disputes."

"As for Israel, the collapse of the Soviet position in the Middle East weakens Israel's strategic importance to U.S. policy in the region. Although America's moral commitment to the security of Israel remains undiminished, it will not prevent Washington from increasing pressure now on Israel to show more flexibility on some regional issues."

The United States gained "assets and opportunities" worldwide from its role in the Gulf crisis, as well as from the collapse of its superpower rival. Washington has an unusual opportunity to shape the contours of a new international system, George said.

Some have suggested this new international system could rely on "collective security" provided through the United Nations. George said that is unlikely because the United States and other major powers still will have national interests that won't always coincide with the larger community's.

Also, "since other states have only a very limited power- projection capability, it would be difficult for the U.N. to mount effective action of any substantial size

without the participation of U.S. military forces to provide the necessary logistical support," he said.

The United States may be in the strongest position to prescribe the new world order, but the U.S. president is severely constrained by pressing domestic priorities and sharp disagreements at home as to how ambitious an international role America should play.

In addition, "it would be a mistake to assume that the 'Vietnam syndrome' is no longer present to serve as a major constraint on U.S. military interventions," George said. "Success in the Gulf War has not dimmed responsible Washington policymakers' understanding of the ever-present domestic constraints on interventions abroad and other lessons of the Vietnam experience. . . .

"Given the diversity of foreign policy perspectives among influential Americans, it will not be easy for the administration to develop a broad, stable consensus on behalf of a comprehensive and well-defined role in the post-Cold War, post-Gulf War era. This does not exclude useful progress towards a better international system, but the administration's efforts are likely to take the form of ad hoc measures and building blocks that are not part of a larger, more ambitious conceptual design."

The building blocks include policies to:

Encourage free markets and trade. Encourage human rights. Support peaceful resolution of disputes. Prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Curb international terrorism. Promote democracy abroad, based on a general belief that totalitarian

regimes pose a greater threat to peace than democratic states.

George also said that the end of the Cold War has contributed indirectly to rising incidence of internal state ethnic and religious conflicts, part of the new regional "disorder."

However, "responses to Kurdish and Shiite difficulties raise the possibility that, in the future, members of the international community may assert a new norm demanding the right to intervene for humanitarian purposes in the internal affairs of a regime engaged in repression of minorities," he said.

Yet the European Community has not been able to take decisive action in the Yugoslav case, which "calls attention to the need to give more attention to strengthening the mediation and peacekeeping capability of regional organizations

Comment upon the quotation:

Americans think themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on a twenty-four hour call to any spot of the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt.

Eldridge Cleaver (1935 - ), U.S. writer and civil rights activist

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

Explaining the Post-Cold War Order: An International Society Approach

Mark E. Pietrzyk

George Washington University

International Studies Association 40th Annual ConventionWashington, D.C.February 16–20, 1999

Despite the fears of many realists, the demise of the bipolar structure of the Cold War era has not resulted in major instability, but rather a largely pacific international system (albeit with occasional regional flare-ups). Many theorists are inclined to attribute this stability to the triumph of democracy, but there is another explanation rooted in a theoretical tradition different from either realism or democratic peace: the British school of “international society.”

According to international society theorists, anarchy may be the fundamental reality of international politics, but anarchy is not equivalent to chaos. Order within anarchy is possible through the evolution of a variety of norms, institutions, and understandings which regulate conflict, and the dominance of the Cold War in our consciousness has blinded us to the fact that there has actually been increasing order in international politics. The chief sources of order in the post-Cold War era are: the solidification of state borders through agreement and tradition; the institutionalization of norms of sovereignty and anti-imperialism; and great power/superpower leadership buttressed by legitimacy.

 

Introduction

The end of the Cold War has brought about a renewed debate over competing theoretical traditions in the study of international relations. Realism and so-called Neo-Realism, which formerly dominated the discipline, appear to be increasingly unhelpful in explaining broad trends in international politics today. Contrary to fears that the collapse of the bi-polar order would result in large-scale instability, the contemporary international system is characterized by a high degree of peace and cooperation among the major developed powers. Certainly, the developing world still contains a good deal of strife, but even here, great power cooperation has often had the effect of checking and moderating such conflicts so that they do not spin out of control. The type of great power conflicts which led to major wars in the past are hardly to be found today, and international cooperative institutions such as the United Nations and the European Community appear to be growing in effectiveness. Traditional realist notions of national interest, power-seeking among states, and pervasive competition and conflict appear to be inadequate in accounting for these developments.

One popular alternative to realism in explaining post-Cold War events is the “idealist” theory of “democratic peace.” According to democratic peace theory, realism may be useful in explaining interactions between non-democratic states, or between a democratic and non-democratic state. But in relations between democracies, realism is obsolescent. Because of their popular input and checks and balances, democratic governments recognize each other as having a common interest in peace, so they band together. Thus it is said that “democracies do not fight one another,” and that the more democracies arise in the world, the larger the zone of peace that is created. 1

However, while mutual democracy can be a causal factor for peace, it is difficult to easily accept the notion that democracy in itself has had such revolutionary effects in international politics as democratic peace proponents have claimed. One can recognize a correlation between democracy and peace in the post-World War Two era, and there are some general but still rather vague causal models which explain this peace by reference to democratic norms and institutions. However, there is a dearth of solid, in-depth case studies which demonstrate that democracy has such powerful effects on international politics that we can confidently expect that democracies do not and will not fight each other because of their common domestic political systems. Even several prominent democratic peace proponents have admitted that there is some truth in the charge that there has not been enough in-depth case-study analysis of the democratic peace proposition, that “process-tracing of decision-making can be enlightening, and not enough of it has been done on this topic.” 2

There is, however, a theoretical school different from both realism and democratic peace which can explain developments in contemporary international politics and which also can account for a number of anomalies that realism and democratic peace cannot—the school of “international society.” International society theorists

are primarily British scholars, and perhaps for that reason, they are not well known in America. In brief, international society theorists argue that while anarchy may be the fundamental reality of international politics, anarchy is not equivalent to chaos. Order within anarchy is possible through the evolution of a variety of norms, institutions, and understandings which regulate conflict. In this view, the dominance of the Cold War in our consciousness has blinded us to the fact that there has actually been increasing order in international politics. The chief sources of global order are: the solidification of state borders through agreement and tradition; the institutionalization of norms of sovereignty and anti-imperialism; and great power/superpower leadership buttressed by legitimacy.

It must be stressed that this paper does not purport to provide a thorough description and analysis of all the works of international society theorists. Such an attempt would be a book in itself. Rather, the analysis contained within should be understood as the author’s attempt to apply some important concepts from the international society school to explain certain aspects of contemporary international politics and to demonstrate the advantage of these concepts over those of realism and the democratic peace.

 

The Meaning of Anarchy and Order

The fundamental premise of the international society approach, as put forth by Hedley Bull, C.A.W. Manning, Evan Luard, and Adam Watson, among others, is that order in international politics is possible even under conditions of “anarchy.” That is, despite the lack of a world government, global politics is not a never-ending war of all against all, but a social order with norms, written and unwritten, which guide behavior. These rules are the foundation of an international society which makes it possible to establish long periods of peace between states, though not necessarily “perpetual peace.”

International society theorists note that there are several problems with the concept of anarchy as it has been traditionally used by theorists of international politics. First, although the word “anarchy” is often used as a synonym for “chaos,” anarchy simply means “without government.” While it is obviously true that international politics is characterized by the absence of an overarching world government, it does not necessarily follow that international politics is without order. All societies have nongovernmental sources of social order—explicit or implicit rules, cultural practices, traditions, etc. Primitive societies in particular are usually characterized by the absence of a government with instruments of enforcement; yet they manage to maintain a tolerable degree of order by means of social norms. Indeed, it is quite possible, as history demonstrates, to have a society without a government, but it is not possible to have a society without norms. The proper way of conceptualizing international politics, then, is not as a Hobbesian

“war of all against all” but as a society without government, analogous to a primitive society. 3

Second, international society theorists argue that the absence of a world government in international politics is not quite analogous to an absence of government among individuals. Individuals in a state of nature are nearly equivalent in power capabilities—consequently, every person in a state of nature is potentially vulnerable to harm or extinction, especially when asleep, sick, or otherwise incapacitated. States, however, are powerful and secure in a way that individuals cannot be, because a collective organization can cover for the frailties of individuals. Thus while anarchy among individuals greatly hinders the advancement of a large and complex civilization, anarchy between states still permits the growth and survival of civilization. 4

States which happen to be great powers are even less vulnerable. Indeed, the large disproportion of power between states provides the possibility of a hierarchical order in international politics. Although great powers do not govern the world in the same way as governments rule over populations, they do have a large say in how inter-state relations as a whole are to be conducted. According to Robert Gilpin, “In every international system the dominant powers in the international hierarchy of power and prestige organize and control the processes of interactions among the elements of the system.” Thus the international system can be considered to have an oligopolistic organization. 5 Although there is no uncontested center of authority in international politics, there is some authority in international society flowing from the hierarchy of power and status.

The norms governing the international society of states have been many and varied over time, but a number of fundamental norms have demonstrated their importance over time. These norms include: (1) Preservation of the society of states against attempts to build a world empire; (2) Maintenance of the independence and equality of states under international law; (3) Peace, except insofar as military action may be required to enforce the previous two norms. 6

Although it is true that there are many examples of the violation of norms and rules of international society, international society theorists note that this does not prove their impotence any more than the violation of social norms and laws in domestic societies prove the impotence of domestic norms and laws. Indeed, the power of many international norms tends to be overlooked precisely because they are usually respected, and therefore taken for granted. The voluntary observance of other states’ borders, territorial waters, and airspace, the observance of international treaties, the respect paid to the principle of freedom of the seas—all these are everyday events. The norms these actions are based on attract public notice only during the relatively infrequent occurrences when they are violated. 7

It is true that international norms may abandoned altogether by states during war or as a prelude to war. However, between any two given states in the international system, relations will tend to be peaceful most of the time. In fact, if norms and rules did not restrain states at all, if states never or hardly ever respected borders, treaties, freedom of the seas, etc., violence in the international system would be omnipresent and continual instead of episodic. Because states, like individuals, cannot tolerate pervasive disorder and violence, international norms are usually observed. 8

 An Evolutionary Order

An important concept in the international society approach is the idea of evolutionary order. That is, the order provided by norms and rules is a progressive creation, with international society becoming more orderly over time. One example of this phenomenon can be found in patterns of warfare. In general, newly emerging states experience the most warfare, as they establish their sovereignty within particular boundaries and defend their gains from other states. Examples of this include the newly independent states of Latin America in the nineteenth century, Germany and Italy in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and Israel in the post-World War Two era. Over time, however, one can observe states becoming less involved in war as they become firmly established and accepted into international society. Indeed, a broad survey of the international system over the past five centuries indicates that inter-state war in general has become rarer and rarer over time and that periods of peace have become longer.

This long-term trend toward peace was first spotted by two analysts in the early part of this century, who published their study under the title Is War Diminishing? The authors, studying the history of wars in Europe from 1450 to 1900, claimed that historical trends indicated a decreasing prevalence in war, measured in terms of the number of years that a state was involved in war per century. 9 Although the authors had the misfortune to complete their study on the eve of two world wars, their general thesis of a long-term decline in the incidence of war bears some examination. (See Table One).

Table 1: Prevalence of War, Measured in Years per Century

  16th cent. 17th cent. 18th cent. 19th cent.

Austria/Hapsburgs 75.5 73.5 48.5 13.5

Denmark 32.5 30.5 12 15

England 54.5 43.5 55.5 53.5

France 60.5 46.5 50.5 35

Holland   62.5 29.5 14.5

Poland 55 68 22.5  

Prussia/Germany   58.5 31 13

Russia 78.5 57.5 49.5 53

Spain 73 82 48.5 53.5

Sweden 50.5 50 29.5 6.5

Turkey 80.5 89 23 39.5

Average Total 62.3 60.1 36.4 29.7

Note: From Frederick Adams Woods and Alexander Baltzly, Is War Diminishing? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), pp. 28–105. The authors base their calculations on the beginning and end dates of wars cited in several dozen major historical works.

According to the Woods/Baltzly study, nearly every major and minor power in Europe has experienced a substantial drop in the number of years devoted to war over the centuries. Part of this trend can be attributed to the fact that once great powers, such as Sweden and Holland, dropped out of the international competition for power and devoted themselves primarily to defense and commerce. However, there has also been a decline in war among the great powers. The chief exception to this trend, England, is unique in that it has, historically, operated primarily as a seafaring and colonial power, its wars being mostly small in nature and conducted well outside its territory. This decline in war cannot be attributed to the rise of democracy, since it began long before the rise of democracy and the trend holds for autocracies such as Russia, Turkey, and Spain in addition to states which became democracies, such as Holland and Sweden.

More recently, Jack Levy has compiled data on trends in warfare involving the great powers in the past five centuries. Levy concentrates his focus on the great powers because it has been the great powers which have largely shaped and governed the international system through war and the threat of war. According to Levy’s measures, the international system has indeed experienced a decline in the frequency and pervasiveness of war.

Levy measures trends in two types of wars: (1) interstate wars involving at least one great power; (2) great power wars (those with a great power on each side). It has been the latter type of war which has been the most significant type of war, having had the greatest impact on the shaping of the international system. (See Tables Two and Three.)

Table 2: Interstate Wars Involving At Least One Great Power

Century War Frequency Proportion of Years

  (No. of WarsPer Century)

War Underway (%)

16 th. 34 95 %

17 th. 29 94 %

18 th. 17 78 %

19 th. 20 40 %

20 th. (through to 1975) 15 53 %

Note: From Jack Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 50–76, 88–91, 139. Levy defines a war as an armed conflict between the organized military forces of independent political units which result in at least 1000 battle deaths.

Great powers include France (from 1495 to 1975), Britain (1495–1975), Austria (1495–1519; 1556–1918), Spain (1495–1519; 1556–1808), Ottoman Empire (1495–1699), United Hapsburgs (1519–1556), Netherlands (1609–1713), Sweden (1617–1721), Russia (1721–1975), Prussia/Germany (1740–1975), Italy (1861–1943), United States (1898–1975), Japan (1905–1945), and China (1949–1975).

Wars which do not include at least one great power are excluded, as are civil wars and colonial wars (unless the intervention of another state widens the war).

Table 3: Great Power Wars

Century War Frequency Proportion of Years

  (No. of Wars Per Century)

War Underway (%)

16 th. 26 89 %

17 th. 17 88 %

18 th. 10 64 %

19 th. 5 24 %

20 th. (through to 1975) 5 25 %

Note: From Levy, pp. 50–76, 141.

Both tables demonstrate a significant decline in the occurrence of war involving great powers. While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an interstate war was underway about 95 percent of the time, this proportion has dropped to 78

percent in the eighteenth century, and 53 percent in the twentieth century. Looking specifically at great power war, the decline has been even more dramatic, from 89 percent in the sixteenth century to 25 percent in this century.

It must be granted that measuring war in terms of frequency and years is not fully adequate, in the sense that such measures do not take into account the severity of war (no. of battle deaths) and intensity of war (no. of battle deaths as a proportion of the population). In previous centuries, war-making was a lengthy affair, but casualties were generally lower than those of twentieth century wars, both in absolute terms and proportionately. Even so, it must be noted that when one measures war casualties spread out over the years, there is still a slight decline in the yearly amount of war casualties over the past five centuries. 10

If one looks beyond the great powers to countries in the developing world, one can detect a similar long-term trend toward longer periods of inter-state peace. In the case of South America, there was a number of bloody wars in the years following independence from Spain, but state borders subsequently became defined and stabilized, and since the late 1880s, with the exception of the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1932–35, South American states have been largely at peace with each other. The states of Africa have also experienced very few wars between themselves since independence, despite the artificiality of their borders. On the other hand, the developing world has experienced a great many bloody civil wars. Although these wars have in many cases brought on foreign intervention, they have originated primarily in domestic disputes. Of all the wars that have taken place since 1945, 98 percent have occurred in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, and the majority of these wars have been civil wars. 11

Thus although civil war is a major problem in the developing world, it is noteworthy that inter-state military competition does not appear to be a pervasive phenomenon, as it was for European states in the past five centuries. According to one scholar:

Since the end of the Second World War, very few Third World states have fought inter-state wars of the type that affected the evolution of European states. The few Third World inter-state wars that have occurred (e.g., India–Pakistan, Iran–Iraq, China–Vietnam) have obscured the fact that the vast majority of Third World states most of the time do not face significant external threats. . . .

Even in Africa, the continent seemingly destined for war given the colonially-imposed boundaries and weak political authorities, there has not been one involuntary boundary change since the dawn of independence era in the late 1950s, and very few countries face even the prospect of a conflict with their neighbors. Most of the conflicts in Africa that have occurred were not, as in Europe, wars of conquest that threatened the existence of other states, but conflicts

over lesser issues that were resolved without threatening the existence of another state. 12

One could argue that civil war has somehow displaced inter-state war in the developing world. However, historical patterns have indicated a strong tendency for civil wars to spill over and cause more inter-state wars, rather than displace inter-state wars. Indeed, many theorists posit that states with strong and stable internal structures are an important prerequisite for lasting inter-state peace. 13 Yet, for all the civil wars that have taken place in Latin America and Africa, borders between states have been mostly respected. Even inter-state military competition short of war—arms races, competing alliance formation, etc.—is relatively rare in the developing world.

One can also detect a sharp overall decline in aggressive wars of territorial expansion in international society since the end of the Second World War. Although a great many wars have taken place in the world since 1945, most of these wars have been internal or fought for some limited aims. That is, unlike previous eras in which military imperialism was rampant, most states today have come to accept the existing division of territory in the world. 14 In addition, there has been an increase in the number of international conferences and institutions and an increase in the number of inter-state disputes that have been submitted to an arbitration process since 1945. 15 Finally, one can detect an tendency toward multilateral diplomatic exchange over international issues. Military intervention in states which are unstable or chaotic, for example, is no longer a unilateral but multilateral affair, indicating greater order and political cohesion in international politics. 16

Why is there increasing order in international society over time? For one, the frequency and extent of human interaction around the globe has increased dramatically within the past several centuries, leading to an increase in the formalization and institutionalization of global ties. 17 As increasing socialization within states led to the development of large, cohesive nations, increasing global socialization has led to an increase in understanding and the working out of procedures for enhancing cooperation on the international level. Thus international order is more comprehensive than it once was. Second, social norms by their very nature take time to become rooted, nurtured, and spread. They require inculcation and habituation, so that eventually social actors play certain roles and behave certain ways without even being consciously aware that they are following norms. Today we take it for granted that global territory is divided into sections, each with a recognized authority to rule its territory, conduct diplomatic exchanges, sign treaties, etc. However, we forget that this order is a social creation, that one time it did not exist, and that we accept it today simply because we were raised to believe that such things as states, borders, sovereignty, etc. exist and we have become habituated to these concepts. 18

 

Why Increasing Order? The War-Making/State-Making Process

Let us take one of the most basic conceptual distinctions in international relations, the distinction between internal (domestic) and external (international) politics. This distinction appears to be one of those unavoidable “facts” of life which all reasonable people must agree to. However, this “fact” is a social creation—in many places in the past, a hard and fast distinction between “internal” and “external” politics did not exist. Today, we recognize this distinction as solid and universal, but only because international society evolved to recognize such a distinction.

If we look at Europe under feudalism, it was quite a different matter. Under feudalism, political authority devolved to local lords, towns, and regions. Individuals identified with and pledged their loyalty to a number of different religious and secular authorities: lord, king, bishop, abbot, town council, or a combination of these authorities; then to the Pope and perhaps the Holy Roman Emperor. The idea that individuals had to pledge their ultimate loyalty exclusively to one authority within a clearly defined territory simply did not exist. According to one analyst:

As with all forms of political organization, feudal authorities occupied a geographical space. But such authority over territorial areas was neither exclusive nor discrete. Complex networks of rival jurisdictions overlaid territorial space. Church, lords, kings, emperor, and towns often exercised simultaneous claims to jurisdiction. Occupants of a particular territorial space were subject to a multiplicity of higher authorities. 19

It was out of this haphazard structure, nevertheless, that the form of political organization known as the national state emerged. A number of feudal princes, beginning with a small extent of territory, gradually extended their domains through war and marriage, eliminating competing centers of authority and building centralized bureaucracies to administer their domains. The first national states developed in Western Europe—England, France, and Spain. Eventually national states covered the entire globe.

The first stage of state-building was a phase of “primitive power accumulation” in which the state forcibly conquered territory, extracted resources from the population, and defended its domain from predators. Initially, individuals and groups resisted state power, and other states battled for the same space. But eventually a single state solidified and consolidated its power in a delineated territory to such an extent that violent resistance from within and external attack against that territory became increasingly costly and risky. The use of violence on a large scale by the early state was reflective not of the failure of political order but of “movement towards political order on a new scale” 20 (i.e., the national

state). The apparent stability of modern Western states as compared with developing states is due to the fact that the violent phase of state-making has been successfully completed for the advanced states of the West, whereas it is still taking place in the developing world.

Sovereignty did not merely pacify states internally, but also reduced the incidence of inter-state war by organizing and mobilizing populations in such a way as to pose immense barriers to conquest. Territorial regions in which sovereign control was weak or ambiguous practically invited attempts at conquest by other states. Regions under firm sovereign control deterred penetration and conquest.

A necessary adjunct to the establishment of sovereignty and an effective distinction between internal and external politics was the creation of stable, defensible borders. The establishment of these borders was a long, violent process, with warfare only gradually diminishing over the centuries as equilibrium set in and borders stabilized. In the early centuries of the state-building process, feudal princes battled back and forth across the expanse of the European continent hoping to establish great kingdoms. Princes in England claimed and fought for territory in France, Sweden made frequent forays on the European continent, Spain fought for the Netherlands, and Poland battled with Russia over the plains of Eastern Europe. Often, the territorial claims of princes were not even geographically continuous, making for a crazy patchwork quilt of kingdoms. Eventually, however, the costs of fighting for and maintaining distant lands became increasingly clear. Princes restricted their claims to modest-sized, continuous territorial areas, and established their authority within those limits.

An important factor in stabilizing the borders of early states was the unalterable facts of geography. Rivers, mountains, forests, swamps, and seas in Europe impeded the movement and operation of armies, and thus served as natural stopping points and defensive barriers. These barriers carved out pieces of land which were ready foundations for viable, defensible national states. The barrier of the sea and its inlets was the most significant kind of geographic feature, carving out the territories which would become Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.

Although originating in Europe, the society of states gradually spread from its birthplace, bringing its norms throughout the world. European colonial expansion created the basis for the inclusion of more states into the society of states. Whereas initially, European treatment of territories outside Europe was characterized by domination, colonization, and the imposition of unequal treaties, European diplomats later applied the “standard of civilization” to decide whether or not a non-European country could be admitted as a sovereign equal of international society. Although experts on international law often differed on what precise attributes qualified a state as “civilized” enough to enter international society, in practice, a state could be admitted if it was stable enough to undertake

binding commitments under international law and was willing and able to protect the life, liberty, and property of foreigners in that country. Thus, by 1899, the government of Japan was deemed civilized enough to enter international society as an equal, and European powers renounced their extraterritorial privileges in Japan. 21

Sometimes, the “standard of civilization” would be raised to require that states protect certain basic human rights, adhere to the laws of war, and forbid such backward practices as suttee, polygamy, and slavery. However, the standard of civilization was never raised so high as to exclude non-liberal-democracies, probably because such exclusion would alienate too many powerful states which could be useful members of international society. Russia, for example, though an autocracy, was welcomed as a ‘civilized’ state because it generally adhered to the rules of international society and joined in alliances against countries such as France and Germany which, although ranking higher in protection of basic human rights, threatened the independence of other states. Likewise, Japan was accepted as a full member of international society when it showed itself to have a stable government willing to protect the lives and liberties of foreigners in Japan, not when it instituted a full democracy. Indeed, merely having the capacity for self-defense was understood as being an indicator of “civilization,” pointing to the role of sheer defensive power as a qualification for entrance into international society. 22

At the same time that national states were developing, multi-national empires began to break apart. In centuries past, multi-national empires could offer much in the way of profits and power. As long as imperial subjects were unorganized, ill-educated, and isolated, the amount of coercion necessary to hold together an empire was low enough to make that form of political organization economically viable and militarily powerful. When nationalities began to mobilize and demand self-rule, the cost of continued coercion by the imperial capital rose steeply. In addition, industrialization brought to the fore the benefits of unified, fully-integrated populations in states. In the competition for global influence, multi-national empires declined and fell, while national states survived and triumphed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered, the Ottoman Empire disintegrated into separate states, Great Britain beat a hasty retreat from imperial responsibilities after its heavy losses in World War Two, France abandoned its colonial claims after several bloody defeats, and Russia shed its outer core of nationalities after the collapse of the economic and political system of communism.

The past few centuries have witnessed the final stages of the consolidation of the national state system on a global scale. This consolidation has contributed to peace in two ways: first, by demarcating all (or nearly all) global territory into clearly defined sections, each under the control of one recognized sovereign authority, disputes over territory have been greatly reduced in frequency and extent; second,

with each section of territory under the effective control of a single government and national population, a rough equilibrium between states has been created, making the costs of conquest prohibitive in most cases.

In the past, when much territory was weakly held or sovereignty was ambiguous, conditions were favorable for war. As the national state system consolidated, however, several things happened. Borders became more well-defined, leaving less and less ambiguity over territorial claims—in other words, good fences made better neighbors. In addition, integration of populations into national wholes made conquest and changes in sovereignty much more difficult and expensive. Whereas in previous centuries, conquest was a relatively simple matter of incorporating disorganized populations and making them pay tribute (or driving them away), by the twentieth century, nearly all territory on the globe was demarcated into areas occupied by populations capable of organized resistance on a scale which was enough to erase the prospect of any possible economic gain for the conqueror. State borders hardened and national integration advanced to the point at which offensive warfare anywhere was costly and new territory was virtually indigestible. 23

In much of the developing world, the consolidation of viable national states is still problematic. Many states are still experiencing difficulties exerting sovereign control and integrating their populations. This means that warfare is still a common occurrence in much of the developing world. In many ways, the developing world is going through the same war-making/state-making process as European states did in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, 24 with the exception that current state borders, having already been drawn by colonial powers, are largely accepted by all as essential to political stability. What tends to be lacking in these states is a cohesive national identity, which is why the dominant form of warfare among late-developing states is civil war.

 

Great Power Management and Hegemonic Stability

Broad trends in the spread and inculcation of norms, solidification of borders, and the decline of imperialism have contributed to the stability of the post-Cold War world. However, another important factor is the configuration of the great power hierarchy in international politics.

Statistical studies have indicated that great powers have had a significantly higher incidence of war than minor powers and that great powers which decline to minor status usually experience a sharp decline in war participation. It is not hard to see why this is so. Great powers have the resources and capability to assert themselves in global inter-state competition. Minor powers avoid involvement in military conflict because of their weakness and vulnerability. It is not just that minor powers are afraid of great powers—minor powers are also aware that if they war

against another minor power, there is a good chance that one or more great powers will intervene and decide the contest.

However, while great powers tend to be war-prone, there are times in history when the configuration of great powers in the international system is such that a long period of international peace is made possible. As pointed out earlier, the wide variance in power among states in international society creates the possibility of a hierarchical order in international politics. When there is a single state which is clearly the most powerful state in the international system, or there is a tightly bound group of great powers (a collective hegemony, such as the post 1815 Concert of Europe) a high degree of governance of the international system is possible, and international politics is characterized by stability and peace. The existence of hegemony in the international system is not quite equivalent to the monopoly of force possessed by an actual government in domestic politics, but it is an approximation.

Historically, it is rare for great powers to have such a high degree of cooperation as to make a collective hegemony possible. In fact, great powers usually compete for higher status in the global hierarchy through war and threats of war. It is usually only when one state is clearly predominant over the rest that a stable hegemonic system is established, as under the nineteenth century Pax Britannica.

As long as a hegemon maintains a preponderance of power, other states are inclined to accept its leadership (though much also depends on the hegemon’s legitimacy, a concept which will be discussed later), since challenging a hegemon can be a high risk project. However, historical change dictates shifts in power preponderance over time. Other states begin to rise in power, due to uneven rates of economic growth and technological advance, and the hegemon declines, relatively or absolutely. When a rising power or powers sees an opportunity to challenge and displace an existing hegemon, the risk of major war is high. Thus, when British hegemony declined in the face of the rising challenge from Germany, the stage was set for the First World War.

In international society, an established hegemony helps the cause of international peace in a number of ways. First, a hegemon deters renewed military competition and provides general security through its preponderant power. Second, a hegemon can, if it chooses, strengthen international norms of conduct by punishing violators. Third, a hegemon’s economic power serves as the basis of a global lending system and free trade regime, providing economic incentives for states to cooperate and forego wars for resources and markets. Such was the nature of British hegemony in the nineteenth century, hence the term Pax Britannica. After World War Two, the U.S. has performed the roles Britain once played, though with an even greater preponderance of power. 25 Thus, much of the peace between democracies after World War Two can be explained by the fact that the political-

military hegemony of the United States has helped to create a security structure in Europe and the Pacific conducive to peaceful interaction. 26

Traditional balance of power theory rejects the notion of hegemony as a means to peace; it claims that any state that aims at preponderance causes other states to ally against it out of fear of being conquered or bullied by the aspiring hegemon. However, there are states which, though preponderant in power, generally respect the independence of other states. Historian Paul Schroeder distinguishes between “predatory” and “benign” hegemons (perhaps better labels would be “offensive” and “defensive/status quo” hegemons), pointing to the late Soviet Union as an example of the former and the United States as an example of the latter.

Defensive hegemonies often arise out of the unequal alliances of states formed to stop offensive hegemons—witness the rise of Britain against Napoleonic France and the rise of the U.S. against Germany and Japan. According to one theorist of international society,

The propensity to hegemony in a system of multiple independences cannot simply be equated with the urge to conquer and dominate. . . . Defensive as well as offensive reasons may impel a single power (in the European society the Hapsburgs, for instance) or the great powers in a society collectively (the Concert of Europe) to institute a hegemony—that is, to introduce a greater degree of order into the system, to lay down the law on the relations between the component states and even to intervene in the domestic government of some of them. 27

Today, U.S. hegemony is welcomed by many states in Europe and Asia, not because the U.S. is particularly beloved, but because of the perception that the absence of a U.S. presence might result in aggression by aspiring regional hegemons.

It is true that hegemonic stability theory can be classified as belonging in the “realist” tradition because of its focus on the importance of power structures in international politics. The problem is that power alone cannot explain why some states choose to follow or acquiesce to one hegemon while vigorously opposing and forming counter-alliances against another hegemon. Thus when international society theorists employ the concept of hegemonic stability, they supplement it with the concept of legitimacy.

Legitimacy in international society refers simply to the perceived justice of the international system, as viewed by the states able to pose a challenge to that system. As in domestic politics, legitimacy is a notoriously difficult factor to pin down and measure. Still, one cannot do away with the concept, since it is clear that all political orders rely to some extent on consent in addition to coercion.

The traditional European states society, for example, rested at least as much on the appeasement of various states’ claims as it did on pure power calculations. The

historian Paul Schroeder has argued that nineteenth century European diplomats usually employed the term “equilibrium” in their writings as a goal of policy (“equilibre des droits” or “equilibre europeen”) and that this term has been inaccurately translated by British and American analysts as “balance of power.” In fact, Schroeder argues that in terms of power, the 1815 Vienna settlement was enforced by a joint Anglo-Russian hegemony, and that “the stable, peaceful political equilibrium Europe enjoyed from 1815 to 1848 rose not from a balance of power but from ”a mutual consensus on norms and rules, respect for law, and an overall balance among the various actors in terms of rights, security, status, claims, duties and satisfactions rather than power. 28 It is not insignificant that European diplomats often employed the phrase “just equilibrium” in their writings as a prerequisite for peace. 29

Historically, hegemonies have been most stable when they buttressed their power with legitimacy. That is, in addition to relying on superior military force, they granted a degree of autonomy to other nations and provided some important public goods to the areas they dominated. The Roman Empire, for example, earned loyalty among its subjects by allowing local autonomy, building roads and other public facilities, providing security for commerce, and eventually expanding citizenship rights to residents of outlying provinces. Ancient China buttressed its regional hegemony with its reputation as the center of civilization. Great Britain upheld peace on the seas and aided economic development in other countries by means of loans and trade. Past attempts by Napoleonic France and Germany to dominate Europe, by contrast, provoked counter-alliances by other states, since their military campaigns demonstrated an unlimited appetite for control and they offered little in the way of benefits for subject nations.

Thus hegemony without legitimacy is insufficient to deter violent challenges to the international order, and may provoke attempts to build counter-alliances against the hegemon. Hegemonic authority which accepts the principle of the independence of states and treats states with a relative degree of benevolence is more easily accepted. 30

 

Competing Explanations: The Value of an “International Society” Approach

An international society approach would emphasize the following points in explaining the nature of the post-Cold War world: First, the international system may be anarchical, but anarchy is not equivalent to chaos. There are sources of political order other than government which bring a degree of coherence, predictability, and peace to the international system. Second, order in international politics is evolutionary. The existing arrangement of borders and sovereignty in the world today developed as a result of a series of military campaigns and diplomatic agreements, gradually solidifying through tradition. Likewise, norms

and rules of inter-state conduct have expanded in number and scope, in some cases becoming formalized in international law and institutions. As a result, international politics is becoming more orderly over time. Third, although world government still exists only in the imagination, there is something of a great power hierarchy which regulates international affairs to an extent. In general, the international system is most orderly when a single power or tightly bound group of powers is clearly predominant. Finally, as with a domestic government, international order must be undergirded with legitimacy as well as power. In the absence of a general consensus on the basic justice of the structure of the international system, both norms and hegemonic authority will be challenged.

How, then, does the international society approach compare with the theoretical outlooks of realism and democratic peace as a means of explaining the post-Cold War order? It has become increasingly clear that realism is limited in accounting for many characteristics of contemporary international politics. It would be rash to dismiss the realist theoretical tradition altogether. But many of the fundamental concepts of realism—self-help, clashing interests, power-seeking, the emphasis on a sinful and unchanging human nature—are inadequate or insufficient in accounting for a number of developments in international politics, including the long-term decline in the incidence of inter-state warfare, the decline of imperialism, the (sometimes grudging) acceptance of American hegemony by much of the world, and the high degree of cooperation among many states on economic and security matters.

Can democratic peace theory do a better job? At first glance, democratic peace theory appears to be plausible. Relations between the democracies since the end of the Second World War have been remarkably peaceful, and it is not unreasonable to attribute at least part of this peace to the institutional restraints and common ideals possessed by democratic states. In addition, the fact that the collapse of communism and the rise of democracy in the former Soviet Union has effectively ended the Cold War would seem to further support democratic peace theory (though realists counter that Russian quiescence is due to its attempts to restructure and revive itself as a great power and that the eventual recovery of the Russian economy and military will result in new wave of Russian expansionism.)

There is still a huge question, however, as to whether democracy in itself has had such revolutionary effects on international politics that we can speak of “perpetual peace” and the “end of history” among democracies, as some have. After all, it is one thing to state as an empirical fact that “democracies have not gone to war against one another.” It is quite another to state that “democracies do not go to war with one another.” The first claim is a mere statement of fact (dependent to some extent, of course, on how one defines a democracy); the second claim is a theoretical statement with an implied prediction—democracies have not and will not fight one another because they are democracies. (In fact, one scholar has gone so far as to claim that “democracies will not fight one another).” 31 For such a

claim to hold, one would have to demonstrate that democracy is not merely a causal factor for peace, but that democracy is so important that it overrides all other factors which might otherwise push states toward war.

Unfortunately, democratic peace theory at the moment is still woefully underdeveloped. As I noted in the introduction, there is a dearth of in-depth case studies which establish a detailed cause-and-effect chain linking mutual democracy to peace. Among those case studies that have been made, many do not support democratic peace theory. They tend to show that democracy had little to do with preventing war between states, that other factors such as power preponderance or geographic distance played the predominant role. 32 Some studies have even found evidence of reverse causation, of peace causing democracy. 33

Most significantly, democratic peace theory does not account for the fact that the long-term trends in war and peace noted previously appear to apply broadly to states, not merely democratic states. As international society theorists have pointed out, warfare is most frequent for newly emerging states, which have to establish borders and sovereign control amidst surrounding states. After a state is established, the incidence of warfare for that state declines, as it is accepted into international society. In the developing world, inter-state wars in the post-1945 period have been relatively rare, especially when compared to the record of pre-1945 Europe. The legitimacy of existing borders and states has been broadly accepted, despite the fact that democracy has not been a pervasive or consistent phenomenon in the developing world. 34

Much of this can be attributed to the sharp decline in the legitimacy of imperialism in international society. Once, states gathered at conferences to carve up regions amongst themselves in an equitable manner, or if diplomacy did not work, they went to war over imperial rights. Today, the legitimacy of imperialism itself has been rejected. Democratic peace theory attempts to explain this development by pointing to the nature of liberal ideology, arguing that democratic states may have engaged in aggressive wars in the past to bring civilization to backward areas, but that as liberal ideas spread to these areas, the contradiction between liberal ideals and imperialism led democratic states to abandon their empires. The problem with this explanation is that it too easily equates liberal domestic ideals with anti-imperial ideas, as if authoritarian states could not also adopt an anti-imperialist position. In fact, most of the newly emerging states which were once part of colonial empires have not been consistently democratic—yet, as the patterns of war discussed above have indicated, these states have for the most part rejected imperial wars of expansion. Rejection of the legitimacy of racism and imperialism is not restricted to the democracies, but rather is held by the authoritarian states of the developing world as well.

Another problem with democratic peace theory is that it has difficulty explaining how relations between the democracies have changed from the pre-1945 period to the post-1945 period. Though it is not often remembered today, before 1945, relations between democratic states were not always friendly. Democratic states frequently competed with each other militarily, and on several cases came to the brink of war. In the late nineteenth century, relations between Britain and the U.S. were quite tense, and there was much talk of a war between the two states. Crises between the two powers arose over territory in the Northwest, British involvement in Latin America, and freedom of the seas. In the 1920s, the U.S. and Britain competed with each other in the post-World War One naval arms race as vigorously as they competed with Japan. 35

Britain also engaged in a heated military competition with France in the late nineteenth century. In 1898, French–British competition over Egypt came to a head at Fashoda, a city on the upper Nile. Britain threatened war if French forces were not withdrawn from Fashoda. France, facing a marked British military advantage, capitulated. When Britain fought the Boer War in 1899, France sided with the Boers, increasing tensions between the two powers. Fears arose in Britain that France would take advantage of Britain’s preoccupation with the Boers to attack Britain in conjunction with other powers. France, fearing the possibility of a war with Britain upon the conclusion of the Boer War, drew up contingency plans for war which included a possible attack on British colonial holdings and even an invasion of Britain itself. 36

After World War One, relations between democratic France and the Weimar Republic were so hostile that only the disarmament of Germany prevented a new war. The Versailles Treaty had imposed massive reparations demands on Germany, and when Germany fell behind in its payments, French military forces occupied portions of Germany. At the same time, Britain grew apprehensive of French dominance of the European continent and the continuing French arms buildup. British policy-makers began to feel that German rearmament might be necessary in order to balance out France. This concern was one major factor in Britain’s subsequent policy of appeasement toward Germany. 37

Since 1945, however, military competition between the major democracies has practically vanished. The prospect of any crisis arising which could bring democracies to the brink of war with each other seems remote. So what has changed?

It has been claimed that the reason democracies do not engage in arms races and go to the brink of war with each other as they used to is that norms of peaceful relations between democracies have gradually strengthened over time and that democratic states have further expanded rights to their populations, including women and minorities. 38 However, there has been no specified causal mechanism

which clearly links developments in domestic politics to the changes in relations among the democracies.

A more plausible explanation for why democratic states occasionally confronted each other in the pre-World War Two era would point not to domestic political structures but to certain characteristics inherent in the international political structure of that time. First, imperialism was still a normal mode of international conduct, and issues of sovereignty and borders were still ill-defined in much of the developing world. These factors tended to lead to great power clashes over colonies. Second, there was a relative equality of power potential between a number of different democratic and semi-democratic states, setting the stage for a competition for global hegemony, or at least regional hegemonies. By the late nineteenth century, British hegemony had begun to decline, and countries like France, Germany, and the U.S. were beginning to challenge British dominance on the seas and in colonial areas.

Since 1945, however, two major developments have taken place which have helped to pacify relations between the major democracies: (1) a norm of anti-imperialism has taken root in international society; and (2) the United States has become the predominant world power, a position which has been further enhanced since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because imperialism is no longer a normal mode of international affairs, clashes over colonies between the democratic states no longer take place. And because the U.S. is so clearly predominant, other democratic states have acquiesced to U.S. leadership, rather than choosing to compete.

It is noteworthy that while peace and cooperation between the European democracies since the end of World War Two has become more firmly established over time, this peace was aided and guided by a substantial U.S. military presence in Europe. Many of the most important developments in European cooperation on security matters and economic were aided by U.S. leadership in the wake of the Second World War. Even with a common fear of Soviet aggression, the states of Western Europe found it difficult to trust one another without the security guarantees provided by the U.S. Today, Europe prefers that a U.S. military presence continue because of fears of the consequences of a total U.S. withdrawal from the continent

The importance of U.S. hegemony in maintaining peace in Europe is admitted even by certain prominent proponents of the “democratic peace” idea. Michael Doyle argues for the continuing presence of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia, claiming that “independent and more substantial European and Japanese defense establishments pose problems for liberal cooperation.” The decline of U.S. political-military leadership and presence, in his view, might lead to new rivalries which could destroy the democratic peace. 39 Francis Fukuyama also agrees with this assessment, arguing that it is important for the U.S. to continue to maintain a

substantial forward military presence while preventing the military independence of Germany and Japan. 40 However, if hegemonic stability is a vital co-factor in guaranteeing peace between democracies, then this amounts to a significant qualification in democratic peace theory. If “democracies don’t fight each other” is to retain its status as an empirical law of international politics, as democratic peace proponents claim, it must hold even in the absence of a hegemonic arbiter—and this remains to be seen.

Democratic peace theorists argue that U.S. hegemony is easily accepted by other countries precisely because the U.S. is a democracy. There is some truth to this, but it exaggerates the importance of democracy as compared to legitimacy. As pointed out above, hegemonies in international society may be accepted if the hegemon is largely defensive, respects the norms of international society, and provides important public goods in the way of security and trade. Democratic institutions in the hegemon may help other (particularly democratic) states recognize the hegemon’s leadership, but democracy in itself is not sufficient. To see why this is so, one should compare the different results of the post World War One order as compared to the post-World War Two order.

After World War One, the U.S., along with Britain and France, composed a peace settlement at Versailles which sought to end the problem of war by encouraging democracy in Germany and instituting a new international organization, the League of Nations. However, the Versailles settlement was resented from the beginning by the new democratic government in Germany because of its punitive conditions, conditions which violated a number of President Wilson’s pre-truce promises. At Versailles, German territory and colonies were taken, the German army was reduced to the level of a police force, and astronomical reparations payments were imposed, all in an agreement definitely not “openly arrived at,” as Wilson promised.

Although Germany was militarily defeated, it was never fully reconciled to the new international order Wilson tried to create, because of the perceived illegitimacy of that order. Indeed, the only thing which prevented a new war from breaking out was the near-total disarmament of Germany. Coercion was the chief tool used to keep Germany under control—and when the victors grew weary of maintaining forces in place to control a resentful Germany, the results were disastrous. (Even before the rise of Hitler, the Weimar Republic was cheating on the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty.)

The post-World War Two order, by contrast, emphasized not merely the importance of democracy, but generous treatment for the defeated, economic rejuvenation rather than punishment, and the provision of general security rather than the one-sided application of force. The military forces of Britain, France, and the U.S. disarmed and de-Nazified West Germany, but it was widely known that force alone could not reconcile the population of West Germany to the

democracies. The economic revitalization of West Germany, the restoration of sovereignty to the West German government, and the active interest of the U.S. in the security and well-being of West Germany, expressed in both words and deeds, succeeded in bringing West Germany to acknowledge American leadership. The combination of U.S. hegemony with legitimacy created the basis for an international order which to this day remains largely peaceful.

Overall, then, many of the concepts employed in the realist tradition and the democratic peace school still retain some value. However, in terms of providing a broad and comprehensive understanding of the origins and nature of the contemporary international order, the international society approach is generally superior.

 

Endnotes

Note 1: Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 (Summer 1983): 205–35; “Part 2,” (Fall 1983); “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986): 1151–69; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992); Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Note 2: Bruce Russett, “And Yet it Moves,” International Security 19 (Spring 1995): 165; See also John M. Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 5, 10–11.

Note 3: Evan Luard, International Society (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 6, 201–3.

Note 4: Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 47.

Note 5: Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 28–30.

Note 6: Bull, pp. 1–21.

Note 7: For example, during the investigation into the Pueblo incident of 1968, in which North Korea forcibly seized an American intelligence ship, the commanding American admiral argued that he did not foresee the need for military protection of the Pueblo, since the law of freedom of the seas had been

largely observed by states during peacetime and no American ship had been illegally seized for over 150 years.

Note 8: Alan James, “Law and Order in International Society,” in The Bases of International Order, ed. Alan James (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 61–69.

Note 9: Frederick Adams Woods and Alexander Baltzly, Is War Diminishing? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915).

Note 10: Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 131, 170.

Note 11: Evan Luard, War in International Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 59, 68.

Note 12: Jeffrey Herbst, “War and the State in Africa,” International Security, 14 (Spring 1990): 123.

Note 13: Kalevi J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. xiii.

Note 14: Evan Luard, Conflict and Peace in the Modern International System (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 30–45.

Note 15: Ibid., pp. 202–204, 242–43.

Note 16: Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

Note 17: Michael Banks, “Charles Manning, the Concept of ‘Order’, and Contemporary International Theory,” in The Bases of International Order, pp. 200–205.

Note 18: C. A. W. Manning, The Nature of International Society (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), pp. 11–27.

Note 19: Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 12.

Note 20: Youssef Cohen, Brian R. Brown, A.F.K. Organski, “The Paradoxical Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order,” American Political Science Review 75 (December 1981): 901–910.

Note 21: Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 3–36.

Note 22: Ibid., pp. pp. 3–16.

Note 23: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 203; Luard, War in International Society, pp. 90–96, 154–55, 397; Evan Luard, The Blunted Sword: The Erosion of Military Power in Modern World Politics (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988), pp. 1–3.

Note 24: This point is made in Darryl Lamont Roberts, The Origins of War in the Periphery of the International System, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1984, pp. 1–5, 254–65.

Note 25: It is usually said that the post-World War Two order (before the collapse of the Soviet Union) was bipolar rather than hegemonic. In terms of conventional land power and later, nuclear weapons, this is true. However, hegemonic stability theorists assign greater importance to naval power and economic power, and in these respects, the U.S. was supreme.

Note 26: Gilpin, pp. 1–49.

Note 27: Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 313–14.

Note 28: Paul W. Schroeder, “Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on a Balance of Power?,” American Historical Review, 97 (June 1992): 683–706, 734–5.

Note 29: Edward Vose Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), p. 128.

Note 30: Watson, p. 315.

Note 31: Spencer Weart, Never At War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another.

The Post Cold War Settlement in Europe: A Triumph of Arms Control

Michael Mandelbaum

On March 26, Michael Mandelbaum, Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, addressed the annual luncheon meeting of the Arms Control Association (ACA). Mandelbaum, who is also director of the Project on East West Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke on the impact of arms control advances on European security. As one of the leading critics of NATO enlargement, he focused on the implications of the expansion policy for future arms control agreements. Mandelbaum delivered his remarks only days after the Helsinki summit meeting between President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

Mandelbaum has written and edited several books on U.S. foreign policy, including The Dawn of Peace in Europe (Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996), and has taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard University. Mandelbaum earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. The text is an edited version of his luncheon speech.

If a cure for cancer were discovered, what would be the response? There would be admiration for the discoverers and celebration of the discovery. It would be a great, triumphal public event.

For the political equivalent of cancer, a cure has been discovered. The greatest scourge of our century is war. The worst and most destructive wars—World Wars I and II—have begun and been fought in the heart of Europe. The Cold War began and ended there. The danger of a major war in Europe was the central obsession of the American government for much of the 20th century, and rightly so. But that danger is now at its lowest level in decades, perhaps in all of Europe's modern history.

What is the reason for this? What is the equivalent, for war in Europe, of a cure for cancer? It is, among other things, arms control. The post Cold War settlement now in place in Europe is a triumph of arms control. That statement raises three questions. First, how and why could this statement be true? Second, if it is true, why has this achievement been so little appreciated? And third, why does it matter whether this achievement is appreciated?

In my book, The Dawn of Peace in Europe, I argue that there is a new security order in place in Europe, one that differs from the two most familiar ways of organizing security: balance of power politics and world government. Balance of power politics has been the source of such stability as Europe has enjoyed for most of its recorded history, including during the Cold War years. World government is a utopian dream that has been envisioned and advocated but never implemented, and that might not be a

source of celebration if it were implemented, which it almost surely will not be.

The theme of The Dawn of Peace in Europe is that, in the wake of the Cold War, Europe has established a third method for achieving security, which I call common security and that owes something to the concept of cooperative security that was developed at the Brookings Institution. Within this common security regime, Europe is still made up of sovereign states. There is no supranational authority. The states of Europe are still armed. But peace in Europe does not depend—as it has for most of Europe's recorded history—on a finely balanced hostility between and among the most powerful European nations. The new common security order has dramatically reduced both the incentives and the capabilities for war.

The incentives have been reduced by the great political changes of 1989 and 1991. It is important to understand the events of those years as not only liberating the people involved, from whom the yoke of communism was lifted, but also as reducing substantially the threat of war. Communism itself, and the imperial domination that came with it in Europe, were standing causes of war. As long as communism and a communist European empire lasted, those oppressed would struggle to break free and those of us who were already free would struggle against the threat that communism posed.

Not only the end of communism, but also the beginnings of democracy contributed to peace in Europe. For democracy is associated with peace. There is, of course, no iron law that democracies are necessarily and always peaceful. And the most problematical country in Europe for the purposes of European security, Russia, is not fully democratic. Nonetheless, there has been since 1989 and 1991, a marked and remarkable surge of democratization across formerly communist Europe, and that contributes to the unprecedentedly peaceful character of relations between and among sovereign states there.

The military capabilities of the countries of Europe are also less threatening now than in the past, and this has been accomplished by arms control. Specifically, it has been accomplished by the remarkable series of accords that were signed beginning with the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces [INF] agreement of December 1987, and culminating with the START II accord of January 1993. These arms control agreements are similar in appearance to those of the earlier part of the Cold War, but as I argue in The Dawn of Peace in Europe, they differ in content in two truly revolutionary ways.

First, the later series of arms reduction agreements is characterized by "defense dominance." That is, they have reshaped military arsenals to make them more useful for defense than for offense in the case of conventional forces, and more useful for deterrence than for actual war fighting in the case of nuclear armaments. Country "X" will be concerned, of course, about the capabilities of its neighbor, Country "Y" no matter what "Y" says about its own intentions. Country "X" will be least concerned

about Country "Y" if Country "Y" has no weapons at all. But the nations of Europe have not laid down their arms completely, and are unlikely to do so.

The next best circumstance, from the point of view of peace, is if Country "X" does not feel threatened by the armaments of Country "Y" because those armaments are suitable for self defense and not for attack. That is now the status quo in Europe thanks to arms control.

Country "X" will also want to know that Country "Y" is abiding by the limits to which it has agreed, and that what Country "Y" is actually doing with the armaments that it legally has is not threatening. The later arms control in Europe fulfills both conditions. The 1987 to 1993 agreements, that is, provide for both "static" and "operational" arms control.

The second revolutionary feature of the post 1987 arms agreements, both conventional and nuclear, is that they establish transparency. That is all the countries of Europe and North America now can know what armaments all the other states have, what they are doing with them, and whether they are violating the agreed limits—and they can know this at all times. This is an important development.

Verification did not, of course, begin in 1987. "Verifiability" has been a necessary condition for almost all arms control accords into which the United States has entered since 1945. The issue of verification has been a major theme of the nuclear age. Verification would be available even without formal agreements, through what have come to be known as "national technical means"—that is, satellites.

But verification under the auspices of the later arms agreements is more comprehensive and more intrusive than what was available previously and what would be available in the absence of these agreements. And it is significant that verification is mandated by treaty. This makes violations plainly illegal, which means that it is more likely that countries that detect violations by others will act on them. The reason surprise attacks succeed, as Richard Betts has written, is not that the country being attacked lacks warning, but rather that it lacks the political will to respond. It is easier to muster the requisite political will when the violation is unambiguously illegal. Under the later series of arms control agreements, this would be the case.

To summarize: A balance of power system rests on deterrence. A world government, should it ever exist, would rest on unchallenged authority. Common security, however, the system of security now in place in Europe, rests on confidence. The entire system of security—including changes of regime, changes of borders and changes in the military balance—can be seen as one large confidence building measure. Together, these measures have generated more confidence than ever before in modern history that there will be no war in Europe, and for good reason. Where security is concerned, Europe now enjoys the best of all possible worlds.

This is surely cause for celebration: yet it is not being celebrated. Why's this so? I believe that the sweeping, comprehensive—indeed, revolutionary—arms control accords now in place have been overlooked for the same reason that made them possible in the first place.

Historically, arms control has been tied to, has depended on and has been subsumed by international politics. Arms control is, to use a term common in social science, a dependent variable, and the independent variable on which it has depended has been the status of East West relations. For most of the Cold War, East West relations were hostile and frozen. They were marked by disagreement on fundamental issues. Neither side would budge on these issues and neither dared try to budge the other, which would have been extremely dangerous.

In this context, early arms control took on a symbolic role. It was a form of reassurance. It demonstrated that both sides understood the dangers of the nuclear age and would keep their rivalry within bounds. Arms control in the 1970s and in the 1980s did not, could not, indeed was not intended to, end the East West rivalry. Because this was so, arms accords affected the instruments of that rivalry, namely, armaments—with the notable exception the ABM Treaty—only marginally.

If the effects on actual deployments were marginal, arms control was still important because the rivalry that it addressed was a real one. Arms control riveted the eyes of the world because the world needed reassurance about the rivalry between the two great nuclear powers. Peace rested on prudence, not on the absence of any reason to go to war. Arms control did not cause the prudence that preserved the peace, but it did signal that both sides would practice that prudence.

Then, with the changes set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the political differences at the core of the East West rivalry disappeared. They disappeared because the Soviet Union gave up the goals to which the West had been opposed. This was the meaning of 1989 and 1991. Under these new political circumstances, the role of arms control changed. It was no longer marginal to actual military deployments; it became central. It was no longer a symbolic but, rather, a substantive matter. Instead of making small adjustments to large arsenals for political effects, arms control came to involve the wholesale restructuring of armaments on both sides with sweeping military effects.

These revolutionary changes in arms control, however, were little noticed because of the absence of political conflict between East and West, which, as I've suggested, was precisely what made them possible in the first place. People turned out to be uninterested in what happens to weapons they do not expect or fear will be used against them. That, I believe, is the reason for the lack of appreciation for what is a remarkable historic achievement.

Yet, both American political parties have reason not only for interest but for pride in

what has been achieved. Democrats, after all, were the champions of arms control in the 1970s and 1980s. They considered it central to East West relations. But now that they are in power, they seem to have all but forgotten about arms agreements that exceed in scope what were once their fondest wishes.

Republicans tended to be skeptical about arms control in the latter stages of the Cold War. Indeed, President Ronald Reagan entered office opposed to it, claiming that it was "bad medicine." He said that, had he been in charge in the 1970s, where negotiations with Moscow were concerned he would have done things differently. And in office he proceeded to do things differently. The current accords—the ones to which first the Soviet Union and then Russia agreed—were designed in and by his administration, based on its criticisms of what had gone wrong previously. The post 1987 arms treaties are, in effect, Republican agreements and are among the most important diplomatic achievements in the history of the United States.

If the common security regime now in place endures, the arms treaties will be the pillars of the post Cold War order, even as the Marshall Plan and NATO were the pillars of the West's Cold War policy. This is no small achievement. Yet, these agreements get less respect than they deserve. But this raises the third question I mentioned at the outset: Does this lack of interest really matter? After all, these treaties have been negotiated and signed. Those that have been implemented are doing their work. It is a historical commonplace that what once seemed miraculous quickly becomes routine. The world does not celebrate Jonas Salk's birthday, despite the importance of the Salk vaccine for polio. Every day, millions of people unthinkingly cross bridges, the construction of which was once regarded as an engineering miracle. That's progress. Isn't this true of arms control as well?

Unfortunately, it is not quite true. The significance of these achievements does matter because the achievements are not secure. They are not irreversible. Indeed, I believe they are threatened by the prospect of NATO expansion to Central Europe. They are threatened in two ways.

First, the arms treaties are threatened. For example, START II, which would reduce the number of nuclear weapons aimed at the United States and is therefore of some interest to Americans, has been held hostage in the Russian Parliament, the Duma, to the prospect of NATO expansion. In Helsinki in March, President Yeltsin promised to try to get the Duma to ratify this treaty. He's promised this before.

There is an even larger problem with NATO expansion. It puts the entire post Cold War settlement, in which the post 1987 arms agreements are embedded, in jeopardy. That settlement is extraordinarily favorable to the United States. It was tailored to our specifications. The liberation of Eastern Europe in 1989 was something we had demanded since 1945. Indeed, the liberation of Eastern Europe removed the basic cause of the Cold War. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was an event so favorable to the West that we never imagined that it was possible. And it is crucial that

all of these changes were voluntary; first the Soviet Union and then Russia agreed to them. Thus, the post Cold War settlement has a certain legitimacy in Russian eyes. Because this settlement is so extraordinarily favorable to us, that legitimacy is a priceless asset for the West. But with NATO expansion we are in danger of squandering it.

The post Cold War settlement rests on three principles, all of which NATO expansion would violate. The first is the principle of consensus, according to which changes will be made with the acquiescence of everyone. NATO expansion, however, is the first major change in the security architecture of Europe to be made over the objections of Russia.

The second principle underlying the post Cold War settlement is inclusion, meaning that Russia will be welcomed into the international community in general, and into specific international organizations to the extent that it is willing and able to join them. But NATO expansion is an act of exclusion. It draws a new line of division in Europe where none existed before, and places Russia—and not only Russia—on the far side of that line.

The third principle is embedded both in the common security order as a whole and in the arms treaties that are so important to it: transparency. NATO expansion is the opposite of transparent. The American government has asserted that expansion will be open ended and that there will be further expansions after the first one, but it has refused to say where, when, or by what criteria this further expansion will take place.

What is the danger in all this? It is not that Russia will be able to stop the expansion. Russia is too weak to do so. Nor, I think, is there an immediate danger that the Russians will break out of the constraints of the arms treaties that they have signed. They're too poor to do that now. Rather, the danger that NATO expansion poses to the post Cold War settlement arises over the long term. The risk is that in the eyes of the Russian political class—and therefore ultimately in the eyes of ordinary Russians—NATO expansion will delegitimate the entire settlement, and make it a central goal of Russian foreign policy in the 21st century to overturn what has been put in place.

This is not, to say the least, a desirable outcome. If it should come to pass—if we should return to a Europe of military blocs, balances of power and political hostility—no doubt the United States and its allies could hold their own. We could once again deter Russia if we had to. But this would not necessarily be easy, it would not necessarily be cheap, and it would certainly not be free of risk. One thing, however, it certainly would be: If, 25 years from now, we look back at this period as a turning point, the moment when the common security order dissolved and Europe returned to the kind of balance of power arrangements so familiar in history, one point will be beyond dispute: this need not have happened.

Questions and Answers

Q: In one of the joint statements from the Helsinki summit, President Clinton cites the unprecedented progress in arms control during the past four years. Is it really unprecedented? Are we making more progress now than we made four years before?

Mandelbaum: From a historical perspective, the years from 1987 to 1993 constitute the great period of arms control. The task of this administration was and is to build on and consolidate what was achieved then. It has certainly made an effort to do so, but NATO expansion will hinder, not consolidate, it.

Q: If at one end of the spectrum you have world government, I assume that on the opposite end there is anarchy, and in between balance of power. In your remarks, you didn't mention collective security. Is there a difference between common security and collective security?

Mandelbaum: As Humpty Dumpty said, a word means what I choose it to mean; no more, no less. In The Dawn of Peace in Europe, I define collective security in such a way that it doesn't belong on that spectrum. By my definition it refers to two things: alliances, which are perfectly compatible with a balance of power and were at the core of the balance during the Cold War; and a regional or world police force, in which countries band together to deal with trouble spots. I devote a chapter to this subject in The Dawn of Peace in Europe.

Such a police force, I argue in that chapter is undoubtedly desirable, but it is not feasible. The political will to pay a significant price to calm trouble spots around the globe is lacking in the United States and in other countries that might contribute to such a force.

Q: Administration officials are saying that NATO enlargement is a done deal, and I know you don't agree. They also say that attempts to block enlargement will destroy U.S. leadership in the world and particularly in Europe. Can you respond to both these points?

Mandelbaum: It is certainly not too late to stop NATO expansion unless the Constitution of the United States has been repealed. The Constitution provides that the Senate must ratify treaties by a two thirds majority.

As for the argument that terrible consequences would follow if expansion were stopped—an argument that will drown out all others if NATO does formally opt to invite new members this summer—this is an artifact of the Cold War. It has a certain resonance because it had certain plausibility during the Cold War, which created a set of conditions that no longer exists.

Then, the United States was confronting a militant, militarized, hostile adversary

around the world. It was reasonable to fear that pulling back in one area would invite aggression elsewhere. This was, after all, the reason the U.S. fought in Korea. The Korean Peninsula was of no strategic significance to the United States in 1950, but President Truman and his advisers believed that a failure to respond in Korea would produce trouble in Europe. This was also the reason for standing firm in West Berlin—an enclave that was militarily indefensible except by nuclear weapons. It was the reason for fighting—possibly even after 1968—in Vietnam.

Whatever one may think of the way this argument was applied during the Cold War, at least it had some plausibility. There was, after all, a Cold War. There was a Soviet Union. Now there is neither. So the question arises: What would be the consequences of stopping expansion now? What would be the consequences of postponing the decision, of taking another course? Is it really imaginable that the Soviet army would be in West Berlin the next day? There is no Soviet army; there is no divided Berlin. The world is now safe for the United States to admit and correct its mistakes in foreign policy. This is a mistake. We ought to admit it and then correct it.

Q: The thrust of your argument is that Russia is going to, with NATO expansion, set as its goal for the next century the overthrow of the post Cold War settlement. Assuming NATO enlargement stops short of drawing in the republics of the former Soviet Union, even in Russian eyes, won't the forces of economic growth and expansion be much more powerful forces in shaping Russia's long term views of its security and foreign policy goals?

Mandelbaum: I would hope that this would happen. But your premise is that NATO will not expand to the former Soviet republics. However, this administration has already effectively promised that expansion to some former Soviet republics—notably the Baltic states—will take place. Those former Soviet republics believe that they have been promised eventual NATO membership, in which case the danger of a nationalist backlash in Russia would be greater.

There are many powerful forces at work in Russia and on Russia, pushing Russia toward the kind of internal organization and international conduct that is desirable. NATO expansion to Central Europe would not necessarily and automatically override these forces. But expansion lends support to countervailing forces.

Q: If NATO expansion is such a bad idea, what is the right idea for including the Eastern and Western European security objectives, and what is the right future for NATO?

Mandelbaum: A number of second and third order issues in European security ought to be addressed. Further reductions in nuclear and non nuclear arms are desirable. Kaliningrad ought to be demilitarized. The independence of Belarus ought to be put on a formal basis. But the basic structure of the optimal European security order is, I believe, in place. What will improve it is something that by definition cannot be

rushed: time. Over time the security order will become more normal, more deeply rooted and more legitimate.

As for the future of NATO, I believe it ought to be maintained. It is important to have an American commitment to Europe for modified versions of the original reasons: "To keep the Americans in, to keep the Russians out and to keep the Germans down." We need NATO to relieve the Germans of the need to conduct an independent security policy, something that the Germans themselves do not wish to do. In addition, NATO ought to be sustained because if things go wrong in Russia, as they might, the Atlantic alliance would form the basis of an opposing coalition, just as it did during the Cold War. But if things do go wrong in Russia, they won't go wrong in a hurry. The Russians won't be in a position to threaten anybody for years; there will be plenty of advance warning.

How many troops are now needed in Europe? That depends on the magnitude of the threat. Now it is not great. If all goes well, it will diminish further over time. In that case it would be possible to bring troop levels down further. At some point, under the best case scenario, no American troops would remain in Europe. In that case NATO would have reverted to what it was intended to be in the first place: a guarantee pact. What began simply as a treaty, only became an integrated military force on the European continent in response to the outbreak of the Korean War.

Moreover, I believe that there is enough political support in the United States to sustain the NATO we need. But I do not believe that there will be domestic political support to sustain an expanded NATO which is not needed.

Indeed, if there is a backlash in the United States against the costs of an expanded NATO—and those costs, in political and economic terms, are likely to be considerably higher than the administration is claiming—it will call into question not just simply NATO expansion but the American commitment to Europe itself.

Q: If Russia views NATO as an alliance that opposes it, would European security be vastly increased by allowing Russia also to join NATO? Why are we precluding Russia from joining NATO?

Mandelbaum: I'm lukewarm, at best, to the idea of including Russia in NATO, but the prospect now seems to me less implausible than it once did, for four reasons. First, it is a better idea than the one this administration is proposing to carry out. Second, it preserves one of the fundamental principles on which the Cold War was ended: inclusion. Third, it might give the United States some leverage on the issue that matters most to us: Russian nuclear weapons. If Russia were part of NATO, it would be easier to reduce and control weapons that can strike North America. Fourth, if NATO does expand to Central Europe, it will then face three choices: to stay where it is, thus establishing in perpetuity a "grey zone" between NATO and Russia, the countries of which—Ukraine and the three Baltic states—would thereby become vulnerable in a

number of ways; to expand to include this grey zone, which the Russians have suggested they would regard as akin to an act of war; or to expand to include Russia itself. Under those circumstances, the last option might be the least worst one.

Q: If the administration were to turn around and all of the sudden say: "Fine, no more NATO expansion," or if the Madrid summit were to be canceled, what do we tell those countries that have now had false expectations of protection under the NATO umbrella?

Mandelbaum: The countries that are expecting admission aren't threatened. None has a border with Russia. So none would be in a worse position where its security is concerned.

I also think it's a myth that there is powerful sentiment in favor of joining NATO in the prospective new member states. This is true of Poland; none of the surveys of opinion that I have seen show very much public enthusiasm in the Czech Republic or in Hungary. If membership in a Western international organization is necessary for the well being of these countries, the proper organization for them to join is the European Union, not NATO.

Q: What combination of inside politics and appeal to American public opinion do you see as most likely to bring about a change in the administration's policy on NATO expansion, and in what time frame?

Mandelbaum: There are deep reservations about NATO expansion in the foreign policy community and among those few members of Congress who follow the issue closely. I also believe that, to the extent that this issue is publicly discussed, support drops away. This is one of those issues about which people, when they first hear about it, think, "Oh, that's a good idea. Let's take them in." Then, when the details and the contingencies and the dangers are probed, support plummets.

The further the debate goes, the more unease there's going to be, which is why I believe that the administration will increasingly fall back on the argument: "It's too late. Maybe we made a mistake, but you—the Congress and the public—have to back us up because if you don't the whole world will collapse." But this argument, too, is specious.

Note 32: Christopher Layne, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace,” International Security 19 (Fall 1994): 5–49.

Note 33: William R. Thompson, “Democracy and Peace: Putting the Cart Before the Horse?,” International Organization, 50 (Winter 1996): 141–74; Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Note 34: Luard, Conflict and Peace in the Modern International System, pp. 38–45, 288–90.

Note 35: Christopher Hall, Britain, America and Arms Control, 1921–37 (London: MacMillan Press, 1987), p. 35.

Note 36: Stephen R. Rock, Why Peace Breaks Out: Great Power Rapprochement in Historical Perspective (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 91–93.

Note 37: Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), pp. 249–55; Raymond J. Sontag, A Broken World 1919–1939 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 98–99, 133, 136–37.

Note 38: Russett, p. 22.

Note 39: Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” p. 233. B

Note 40: Francis Fukuyama, “The Beginning of Foreign Policy,” The New Republic, August 17 & 24, 1992, pp. 30, 32.

PART 2.

TEXT 1.

Skimming and scanningFind the answers for the following questions:

1. What does the term “Globalization” refer to?2. What is the difference between multinational and transnational

corporations?3. What are the positive aspects of Globalization?4. What are its negative aspects?5. What is the most dramatic evidence of Globalization?6. What do many scholars attribute Globalization to?

Globalization, comprehensive term for the emergence of a global society in which economic, political, environmental, and cultural events in one part of the world quickly come to have significance for people in other parts of the world. Globalization is the result of advances in communication, transportation, and

information technologies. It describes the growing economic, political, technological, and cultural linkages that connect individuals, communities, businesses, and governments around the world. Globalization also involves the growth of multinational corporations (businesses that have operations or investments in many countries) and transnational corporations (businesses that see themselves functioning in a global marketplace). The international institutions that oversee world trade and finance play an increasingly important role in this era of globalization.

Although most people continue to live as citizens of a single nation, they are culturally, materially, and psychologically engaged with the lives of people in other countries as never before. Distant events often have an immediate and significant impact, blurring the boundaries of our personal worlds. Items common to our everyday lives such as the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the cars we drive are the products of globalization.

Globalization has both negative and positive aspects. Among the negative aspects are the rapid spread of diseases, illicit drugs, crime, terrorism, and uncontrolled migration. Among globalization’s benefits are a sharing of basic knowledge, technology, investments, resources, and ethical values.

The most dramatic evidence of globalization is the increase in trade and the movement of capital (stocks, bonds, currencies, and other investments). From 1950 to 2001 the volume of world exports rose by 20 times. By 2001 world trade amounted to a quarter of all the goods and services produced in the world. As for capital, in the early 1970s only $10 billion to $20 billion in national currencies were exchanged daily. By the early part of the 21st century more than $1.5 trillion worth of yen, euros, dollars, and other currencies were traded daily to support the expanded levels of trade and investment. Large volumes of currency trades were also made as investors speculated on whether the value of particular currencies might go up or down.

Most experts attribute globalization to improvements in communication, transportation, and information technologies. For example, not only currencies, but also stocks, bonds, and other financial assets can be traded around the clock and around the world due to innovations in communication and information processing. A three-minute telephone call from New York City to London in 1930 cost more than $300 (in year 2000 prices), making instant communication very expensive. Today the cost is insignificant.

Advances in communication and information technologies have helped slash the cost of processing business orders by well over 90 percent. Using a computer to do banking on the Internet, for example, costs the banking industry pennies per transaction instead of dollars by traditional methods. Over the last third of the 20th

century the real cost of computer processing power fell by 35 percent on average each year. Vast amounts of information can be processed, shared, and stored on a disk or a computer chip, and the cost is continually declining. People can be almost anywhere and remain in instant communication with their employers, customers, or families 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or 24/7 as it has come to be known. When people in the United States call a helpline or make an airline reservation, they may be connected to someone in Mumbai (Bombay), India, who has been trained to speak English with an American accent. Other English speakers around the world prepare tax returns for U.S. companies, evaluate insurance claims, and attempt to collect overdue bills by telephone from thousands of kilometers and a number of time zones away.

Advances in communications instantly unite people around the globe. For example, communications satellites allow global television broadcasts to bring news of faraway events, such as wars and national disasters as well as sports and other forms of entertainment. The Internet, the cell phone, and the fax machine permit instantaneous communication. The World Wide Web and computers that store vast amounts of data allow instant access to information exceeding that of any library.

Improvements in transportation are also part of globalization. The world becomes smaller due to next-day delivery by jet airplane. Even slow, oceangoing vessels have streamlined transportation and lowered costs due to innovations such as containerized shipping.

Advances in transportation have allowed U.S. corporations to subcontract manufacturing to foreign factories. For example, in the early 2000s the Guadalajara, Mexico, factory of Flextronic International made pocket computers, Web-connected TVs, computer printers, and even high-tech blood-glucose monitors, for a variety of U.S. firms. Low transportation costs enabled Flextronic to ship these products around the world, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) made the Mexico location more attractive to Flextronic.

Advances in information technologies have also lowered business costs. The global corporation Cisco Systems, for example, is one of the world’s largest companies as measured by its stock market value. Yet Cisco owns only three factories to make the equipment used to help maintain the Internet. Cisco subcontracts the rest of its work to other companies around the world. Information platforms, such as the World Wide Web, enable Cisco’s subcontractors to bid for business on Cisco’s Web site where auctions take place and where suppliers and customers stay in constant contact.

The lowering of costs that has enabled U.S. companies to locate abroad has also made it easier for foreign producers to locate in the United States. Two-thirds of the automobiles sold in North America by Japan’s Toyota Motor Company are

built in North America, many in Kentucky and in seven other states. Michelin, the French corporate giant, produces tires in South Carolina where the German car company BMW also manufactures cars for the North American market.

Not only do goods, money, and information move great distances quickly, but also more people are moving great distances as well. Migration, both legal and illegal, is a major feature of this era of globalization. Remittances (money sent home by workers to their home countries) have become an important source of income for many countries. In the case of El Salvador, for example, remittances are equal to 13 percent of the country’s total national income: a more significant source of income than foreign aid, investment, or tourism.

Use the information of the text and your background knowledge to discuss the benefits provided by improvements in communication, transportation and information technologies.

TEXT 2. Study the arguments in favor and against globalization and make

your own conclusions.

GLOBALIZATION: MYTH OR REALITY? The main arguments in favor of globalization comprising a new era of

world politics are: 1. The pace of economic transformation is so great that it has created a new

world politics. States are no longer closed units and they cannot control their economies. The world economy is more interdependent than ever, with trade and finances ever expanding.

2. Communications have fundamentally revolutionized the way we deal with the rest of the world. We now live in a world where events in |one location can be immediately observed on the other side of the world. Electronic communications alter our notions of the social groups we work and live in.

3. There is now, more than ever before, a global culture, so that most urban areas resemble one another. The world shares a common culture, much of it emanating from Hollywood.

4. The world is becoming more homogeneous. Differences between peoples are diminishing.

5. Time and space seem to be collapsing. Our old idea of geographical space and of chronological time is undermined by the speed of modern communications and media.

6. There is emerging a global polity, with transnational social and political movements and the beginnings of a transfer of allegiance from the state to sub-state, transnational, and international bodies.

7. A cosmopolitan culture is developing. People are beginning to 'think globally and act locally'.

8. A risk culture is emerging with people realizing both that the main risks that face them are global (pollution and AIDS) and that states are unable to deal with the problems.However, just as there are powerful reasons for seeing globalization as a new stage in world politics, often allied to the view that globalization is progressive, that is to say that it improves the lives of people, there are also arguments that suggest the opposite. Some of the main ones are given below.

1. One obvious objection to the globalization thesis is that it is merely a buzz-word to denote the latest phase of capitalism. In a very powerful critique of the globalization theory, Hirst and Thompson (1996) argue that one effect of the globalization thesis is that it makes it appear as if national governments are powerless in the face of global trends. This ends up paralyzing governmental attempts to subject global economic forces to control and regulation. Believing that most globalization theory lacks historical depth they point out that it paints the current situation as more unique than it is and also as more firmly entrenched than it might in fact be. Current trends may well be reversible. They conclude thatthe more extreme versions of globalization are 'a myth', and they support this claim with five main conclusions from their study of the contemporary world economy: First, the present internationalized economy is not unique in history. In some respects they say it is less open than the international economy was between 1870 and 1914. Second, they find that 'genuinely' transnational companies arc relatively rare, most are national companies trading internationally. There is no trend towards the development of international companies. Third, there is no shift of finance and capital from the developed to the underdeveloped worlds. Direct investment is highly concentrated amongst the countries of the developed world. Fourth, the world economy is not global, rather trade, investment, and financial flows are concentrated in and between three blocks—Europe, North America, and Japan. Finally, they argue that this group of three blocks could, if they co-ordinated policies, regulate global economic markets and forces. Note that Hirst and Thompson are only looking at economic theories of globalization, and many of the main accounts deal with factors such as communications and culture more than economics; nonetheless, theirs is a very powerful critique of one of the main planks of the more extreme globalization thesis, with their central criticism being that seeing the global economy as something beyond our control both misleads us and prevents us from developing policies to control the national economy. All too often we are told that our economy must obey 'the global market', but Hirst and Thompson believe that this is a myth.

2. Another obvious objection is that globalization is very uneven in its effects. At times it sounds very much like a Western theory applicable only to a small part of humankind. To pretend that even a small minority of the world's population can connect to the World Wide Web is clearly an exaggeration when in reality most people on the planet have probably never made a telephone call in their lives. In other words, globalization only applies to the developed world. In the rest of the World, there is nothing like the degree of globalization. We are in danger of overestimating the extent and the depth of globalization.

3. A related objection is that globalization may well be simply the latest stage of Western imperialism. It is the old modernization theory. The forces that are being globalized are conveniently those found in the Western world. What about non-Western values? Where do they fit into this emerging global world? The worry is that they do not fit in at all, and what is being celebrated in globalization is the triumph of a Western world view, at the expense of the world views of other cultures.

4. Critics have also noted that there are very considerable losers as the world becomes more globalized. This is because it represents the success of liberal capitalism in an economically divided world. Perhaps one outcome is that globalization allows the more efficient exploitation of less well-off nations, and all in the name of openness. The technologies accompanying globalization are technologies that automatically benefit the richest economies in the world, and allow their interests to override local ones. So, not only is globalization imperialist, it is also exploitative.

5. We also need to make the straightforward point that not all globalized forces are necessarily ‘good’ ones. Globalization makes it easier for drug cartels and terrorists to operate, and the World Wide Web's anarchy raises crucial questions of censorship and preventing access to certain kinds of material.

6. Turning to the so-called global governance aspects of globalization, the main worry here is who are the transnational social movements responsible and democratically accountable to? IBM or Shell becomes more and more powerful in the world, does this not raise the issue of how accountable are they to democratic control? David Held has made a strong case for the development of what he calls 'cosmopolitan democracy' (1995), but this has clearly defined legal and democratic features. The worry is that most of the emerging powerful actors in a globalized world precisely are NOT accountable. This argument also applies to seemingly 'good' global actors such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace.

7. Finally, there seems to us to be a paradox at the heart of the globalization thesis. On the one hand it is usually portrayed as the triumph of Western, market-led values, but how do we then explain the tremendous economic success that some national economies have had in the globalized world? We are thinking here in the main of the so-called “Tigers” of Asia, countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Korea, which have enjoyed some of the highest growth rates in the international economy, but subscribe to very different 'Asian' values. These nations emphatically reject Western values, and yet they have had enormous economic success. The paradox then is whether these countries can continue to modernize so successfully without adopting Western values. If they can, then what does this do to one of the main themes of globalization, namely the argument that globalization represents the spreading across the globe of a set of values? If these countries do continue to follow their own roads towards economic and social modernization, then we must anticipate future disputes between 'Western' and 'Asian' values over issues like human rights, gender, and religion.

Translation practice: Translate the following emphatic sentences from the article into Russian:

So, not only is globalization imperialist, it is also exploitative. IBM or Shell becomes more and more powerful in the world, does this

not raise the issue of how accountable are they to democratic control? If these countries do continue to follow their own roads towards

economic and social modernization, then we must anticipate future disputes between 'Western' and 'Asian' values over issues like human rights, gender, and religion.

Memorize the following opening phrases to be used in discussions and disputes:

An obvious objection is that..A related objection is that…We need to make a straightforward point that…The argument that suggests the opposite is that …

TEXT 3.

ASPECTS OF GLOBALIZATION

In terms of communications, for example, globalization has been occurring through the growth of computer networks, telephony, electronic mass media, and the like. Such technologies permit persons to have neatly immediate contact with each other, irrespective of their location on earth and regardless of the state borders that might lie between them. Hence a fax will reach a destination across the ocean almost as quickly as a receiver next door.

In respect of organizations, globalization has been transpiring through the proliferation and growth of companies, associations, and regulatory agencies that operate as transborder networks. Bodies such as Nissan Corporation, Save the Children, and the World Intellectual Property Organization treat the whole planet as their field of activity and regard humanity at large as their actual or potential clients.

Ecologically, globalization has been taking place through such phenomena as planetary climate change (or 'global warming'), stratospheric ozone depletion, and a decline in Earth's biological diversity. None of these environmental developments can be isolated in one or the other country; they have arisen in, and affect, the world as a single place.

In respect of production, so-called 'global factories' have expanded in sectors like motorcars and microelectronics. Here the various stages of manu-facture (for example, research and development, processing of materials, preparation of components, assembly of parts, finishing, and quality control) are not confined within a national economy, but link up across several countries in a single production line. Concurrently, globalization has been unfolding in respect

of money and finance, with the emergence of round-the-clock round-the-world stock and bond markets, the spread of globally recognized credit cards, the Increasing use of currencies like the US dollar, the yen, and the euro all over the world, and so on.

Meanwhile the military sphere has seen the advent of global weaponry. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and spy satellites, for instance, have in certain respects turned the world as a whole into a single realm of battle. Although the Gulf War of 1990-1 was fought on the ground in Iraq and Kuwait, it equally involved satellite remote sensing, supersonic bombing raids, electronic transborder payments to fund the operations, a propaganda struggle in the global mass media, and a transworld coalition against the Baghdad government legitimated through a global governance agency, the United Nations.

Globalization has also encompassed many norms that govern our lives, including thousands of technical standards and (purportedly) universal human rights. These and an ever-increasing number of other rules have acquired a supraterritorial rather than a country-specific character.

Finally, globalization has been evident in everyday thinking. People living at the start of the twenty-first century are aware of the world as a single place to an extent that earlier generations were not. Perhaps the greatest spur to this shift in consciousness came in 1966, with the production of the first photographs taken from outer space showing planet Earth as one location.

Taking the preceding observations in sum, we see that globalization has had very wide-ranging scope. Indeed, the process has in some way touched every aspect of social relations. The radio brings reports from Buenos Aires and Beijing straight to our breakfast tables. Swings on the global financial markets make and break our fortunes, sometimes from one day to the next. We drink Coca-Cola, munch a Mac, wear jeans, listen to the latest hit singles, and] watch the newest video releases simultaneously with millions upon millions of other people all over the planet. Our car adds to the greenhouse effect together with the bus in Bombay. Via the Internet, the worldwide network of computer networks, our office can be in immediate contact with Warsaw or Washington. Suprastate regimes like the European Union are largely determining our food prices while soldiers from our national army are joining troops from multiple other states in a single peacekeeping operation. Our contributions to Oxfam translate overnight into relief work in Rwanda. These sorts of circumstances did not exist when our parents were children, and there is present every indication that our children will experience globality even more intensely than we currently do. Today we live not only in a country: in very direct and immediate senses we also live in the world as a single place.

Choose one of the aspects of globalization and develop it into a 300-word essay.

TEXT 4

Look through the information and choose three events which, in your view, are crucial for the process of globalization

SOME KEY EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF GLOBALIZATION

500s вс emergence of the first world religions 1522 first circumnavigation of the earth 1700s Enlightenment thinkers posit a trend toward the social unification of the world1851 first world's fair (in London)1852 establishment of the first foreign manufacturing subsidiary1865 creation of the first global regulatory agency (the International Telegraph Union)1866 first permanent transoceanic telegraph cable comes into service1884 introduction of transworld co-ordination of clocks (in relation to Greenwich Mean Time)1891 first transborder telephone calls (between London and Paris)1919 initiation of the first scheduled transborder airline services1920 inauguration of the League of Nations1929 institution of the first offshore finance arrangements (in Luxembourg)1930 first global radio broadcast (the speech of George V opening the London Naval Conference, relayed simultaneously to 242 stations across six continents)1945 formation of the United Nations Organization1946 construction of the first digital computer1949 introduction of package holidays sets the stage for large-scale global tourism 1954 establishment of the first export processing Zone (in Ireland)1954 launch of the 'Marlboro cowboy', a future global icon1955 first McDonald's restaurant1956 first transoceanic telephone cable link1957 advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles 1957 issuance of the first Eurocurrency loan (by a Soviet bank, in US dollars, on the London market1960 Marshall McLuhan coins the phrase 'global village'1962 launch of the first communications satellite 1961 introduction of direct dialing of transborder telephone calls 1963 issuance of the first Eurobond (by a borrower in Italy, in US dollars, on the London market) 1966 first photographs of planet Earth from outer space 1969 construction of the first wide-body passenger jet (the Boeing 747) 1969 creation of the first multi-site computer network (the ARPANET of the US military)1971 establishment of the first wholly electronic stock exchange (the US-based NASDAQ system)

1972 first global ecological conference (the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment)1974 US Government eliminates foreign exchange controls on current account transactions (other states follow in later years)1976 launch of the first direct broadcast satellite (i.e. transmitting to rooftop dishes)1977 first commercial use of fiber-optic cables, vastly increasing capacities of telecommunications1977 creation of the SWIFT system for electronic interbank fund transfers worldwide 1987 appearance of a near-complete ‘ozone hole' over Antarctica, heightening global ecological awareness 1987 stock-market crash on Wall Street spreads world-wide overnight 1991 introduction of the World Wide Web1997 completion of a continuous round-the-world fiber-optic cable link1999-2000 upsurge of 'anti-globalization' protests against global economic institutions

TEXT 5.

PRE-READING ACTIVITY:

Match the terms with their definitions:PROTECTIONISM, SUPRANATIONALISM, INTERGOVERNMENTALISM, VETO, SUBSIDIARITY, COLLECTIVE SECURITY, INTERNATIONAL LAW

Any form of interaction between states which takes place on the basis of sovereign independence preserved through giving each state a veto, at least over matters of vital national importance

Import restrictions such as tariffs, designed to protect domestic producers

The formal power to block a decision or action through the refusal of consent

Devolution of decision-making from the center to lower bodies A system of rules that are binding on states and thus define the

relationships between states The existence of an authority that is higher than that of a nation-state and

capable of imposing its will on it. It can therefore be found in international federations , where sovereignty is shared between central and peripheral bodies

The theory and practice of resisting aggression through united action by a number of states

SKIM reading. Look through the text and single out the topical sentences conveying the main ideas of the text.

TOWARDS WORLD GOVERNMENT

One of the most significant features of twentieth-century policies has been the growing importance of international organizations. These are organizations that are transnational in that they exercise jurisdiction not within a single state, but within an international area comprising several states. Typically, they have been set up by a number of sovereign states to facilitate international cooperation. International organizations thus now reflect a growing recognition of national interdependence in an increasingly shrinking world.

The principal reason for the growth in the number and importance of international organizations is the recognition by states that, in a number of areas, they provide a more effective means of pursuing national interests. This applies particularly to national security and economic development. Quite simply, an anarchic international order in which states refuse to acknowledge an authority higher than themselves is inevitably biased towards conflict, protectionism and war. Whereas splendid isolation was a luxury that states could afford in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, this option is no longer available in a world of nuclear weapons and economic globalization. State survival is now dependent on collective security, and economic development requires guaranteed access to international and global markets. Both these goals can only be achieved through cooperation under the auspices of international organizations such as NATO and the OSCE on the one hand, and the WTO and the IMF on the other. Growing awareness of ecological problems, such as global warming and acid rain, makes the need to construct effective international and supranational bodies all the more pressing.

In addition to providing a way of tackling problems that are beyond the power of national governments to solve, international organizations have also managed to acquire a momentum and identity of their own. Once seen as peripheral and untested, many international bodies have become established and seemingly indispensable features of world politics. This is clearly illustrated by the contrasting histories of the League of Nations and the UN.

It is not possible, however, to explain the drift towards supranational organizations simply in terms of convenience and the pursuit of national self-interest. To some extent, it reflects an idealistic commitment to internationalism and the belief that such institutions embody a moral authority that is higher than that commanded by nation-states. In this respect, international organization has given renewed impetus to the notion of a global state or world government, an idea that can be traced back to Imperial Rome. To examine how viable such a project is in modern circumstances, it is instructive to look at the experience of European integration, and the progress that has been made by the UN.

The “European idea” (broadly, the belief that, regardless of historical, cultural and linguistic differences, Europe constitutes a single political community) was born long before 1945. However, until the second half of the twentieth century, such aspirations proved to be hopelessly Utopian. Since the Second World War, Europe has undergone a historically unprecedented process of integration, aimed, some argue, at the creation of what Winston Churchill in 1946 called a “United States of Europe”. Indeed, it is sometimes suggested that European integration provides a model of political organization that will eventually be accepted worldwide as the deficiencies of the nation-state become increasingly apparent.

The EU is a very difficult political organization to categorize. In strict terms, it is no longer a confederation of independent states (as the EEC and EC were at their inception). For, the result is a political body that has both intergovernmental and supranational features, the former evident in the Council of Ministers and the latter primarily in the Court of Justice. The EU may not yet have created a federal Europe, but because of the superiority of European law over the national law of the member states, it is perhaps accurate to talk of a federalizing Europe.

AFTER-READING ACTIVITY:

Read the text in more depth to do the “after-reading exercises”.

Exercise 1. Suggest the Russian equivalents of the following word-combinations and phrases. Do you remember the context in which they were used in the text?

7. to exercise jurisdiction8. to facilitate international cooperation9. effective means of pursuing national interests10.to acknowledge an authority higher than themselves11.guaranteed access to international and global markets12.under the auspices of international organizations13.drift towards supranational organizations14.an idealistic commitment to internationalism15.to be hopelessly Utopian16.to become increasingly apparent

Exercise 2. Give the English equivalents of the following:

1. ряд суверенных государств2. признание национальной (государственной) взаимозависимости3. такого варианта больше не существует

4. выживание государства5. всеобщее потепление и кислотные дожди6. создавать международные и надгосударственные организации7. насущная необходимость8. рассматривать проблемы9. жизнеспособный проект10.в современных условиях

Exercise 3. Find in the text the words which mean the following:

1. a lack of something that is necessary; a weakness or fault in something2. the ability to keep increasing, developing or being more successful3. providing a lot of useful information, explanations and knowledge about

something4. so important and useful that it is impossible to manage without them

Exercise 4. Look at how the word “momentum” is used in the text and explain the meaning of the expression “to acquire/gain/gather momentum”.

Exercise 5. Make sure that you can successfully deal with the following words and phrases. Match them with their definitions and then use them in sentences of your own.HANDLE, TACKLE, GRAPPLE WITH, HAVE A BLITZ ON, MANAGE, COPE, COME/GET TO GRIPS ON

to deal successfully with a fairly difficult but quite ordinary situation to consider, understand, and deal seriously with a very difficult or important

problem or situation to make a determined effort to deal with a difficult problem to succeed in dealing with a very difficult situation or problem to begin to deal, especially in a very determined way, with a problem that

has been ignored for some time to try hard to deal with a difficult problem , especially for a long time to deal with a problem or a difficult situation in an effective and skilful or

sensitive manner

Exercise 6. Use the information of the text and your background knowledge to answer the following questions:

1. What are the major transnational features of international organizations?2. Why cannot states afford a luxury of isolation?3. What can guarantee survival and economic development of the states?4. Which organizations have managed to acquire a momentum and identity of

their own?5. What does the drift towards supranational organizations reflect?6. Why is it instructive to look at the experience of the European integration?

7. What is behind the European idea?8. Why is it difficult to categorize the EU?

Exercise 7. Translate the following sentences into English.

1. Главная особенность процесса глобализации заключается в том, что территориальные границы, существующие между национальными государствами, имеют все меньшее значение.

2. Это, однако, ни в коей мере не означает, что «местное» или «национальное» вторичны от глобального. Напротив, последнее еще больше подчеркивает углубление и расширение политического процесса в том смысле, что местные, региональные, национальные, международные и глобальные события связаны между собой и оказывают влияние друг на друга.

3. В результате враждебности между двумя сверхдержавами ОБСЕ практически сразу же после своего создания в 1975 г. была оттеснена на обочину политической жизни мира.

4. По мере возникновения новых форм волнений и нестабильности первоначальные надежды на международное сотрудничество и гармонию оказались иллюзорными.

5. США по многим соображениям рассматривались как главная опора ожидаемого нового мира.

6. Однако есть целый ряд соображений, по которым можно поставить под сомнение инициированный США образ международного братства и мира во всем мире.

7. Есть также сомнения относительно способности США играть роль мирового полицейского, даже если это и считалось бы желательным. Большой вопрос, есть ли у США достаточные экономические ресурсы, чтобы сохранить свое глобальное лидерство, особенно в контексте его некоторого снижения в связи с экономическим возрождением Японии и Германии.

8. Нео-идеализм – это взгляд на международную политику, который подчеркивает практическую ценность морали, и , в частности, уважение прав человека и национальной независимости.

9. Интернационализм – это теория и практика политики, основанной на транснациональном и глобальном сотрудничестве.

10.Баланс сил – система взаимодействия между государствами, которая стремится обуздать агрессию и экспансионизм, доказывая их несостоятельность.

11.Неореализм – это взгляд на международную политику, который меняет модель силовой политики, подчеркивая структурные ограничения, существующие в международной системе.

12.Суверенитет, в самом упрощенном смысле, -- это принцип абсолютной и неограниченной власти.

TEXT 6. (RECOMMENDED FOR SIGHT TRANSLATION)

UNDERSTANDING GLOBAL POLITICS

The recognition that there is an international dimension to politics is as old as the discipline itself.

The 20th century witnessed the emergence of world politics in the sense that the patterns of conflict and cooperation amongst states and international organizations extended across the globe.

As the 20th century was drawing to a close there was a growing recognition that the very parameters of political life had been changing. This called into question the conventional distinction between a domestic realm and an international realm of politics. These complex and multifaceted changes have increasingly been referred to as “globalization”.The emergence of global interdependence has been a consequence of a variety of processes and developments. In the first place, it was one of the results of the superpower rivalry that characterized the Cold War period. Both the world wars of the 20th century were hegemonic conflicts fought between powers seeking worldwide military dominance. However, the capabilities and resources of the post-1945 superpowers (the USA and the USSR) were so overwhelming that they were able to extend their influence into virtually every region of the world. Secondly, the spread of international trade and the transnational character of modern business organizations has brought a global economy into existence. As the significance of national economies has declined, the world economy has increasingly been characterized by rivalry amongst regional trading blocks. Thirdly, globalization has been fueled by technological innovation. This has affected almost every realm of existence, ranging from the development of nuclear weapons and the emergence of global pollution problems such as acid rain and ozone depletion to the introduction of international telephone links, satellite television, and the “information superhighway”. Fourthly, globalization has an important politico-ideological dimension. One aspect of this has been the spread of western liberal political views, portrayed as the world triumph of liberal democracy. But globalization can also be linked to the growth of Islam as a transnational political creed, and to the growing interest in Green ideas and philosophies

Exercise 8. Translate the text into English.

ПОЛИТИКА В УСЛОВИЯХ ГЛОБАЛИЗАЦИИ.

Двадцатый век принес с собой признание того, что мир, по словам Маршала МакЛуана, превратился во «всемирную деревню». Феномен глобализации полностью изменил наше понимание политики и природы

политического взаимодействия. Традиционное представление о политике всегда фокусировалось на государстве: государство рассматривалось как главное действующее политическое лицо, и все внимание обращалось на управленческую деятельность на национальном уровне. Из этого логично следовало, что существовала четкая грань между внутренней и внешней политической деятельностью, т.е. между тем, что происходит внутри государства, и тем, что происходит вне его. Последнее стало предметом самостоятельной дисциплины – международные отношения.

Глобализация ослабляет и, возможно, разрушает границу между «национальным» и «международным», приводя, по мнению многих, к возникновению мирового общества.

Хотя национальные государства все еще остаются главными действующими лицами на мировой арене, нельзя отрицать все возрастающее влияние надгосударственных органов, транснациональных групп и организаций.

TEXT 7. (RECOMMENDED FOR SIGHT TRANSLATION WITH THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION OF THE BENEFITS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION)

TOP 10 BENEFITS OF EU ENLARGEMENT

Enlarging the EU will make Europe more secure, more properous and more effective. Here’s how:

1. More prosperity – Independent research suggests that EU enlargement could increase EU GDP by 11 billion euros a year, UK GDP by £1.75 billion a year and add 1.5% a year to the candidates’ GDP. This means more jobs and prosperity. Other research estimates that the 2004 enlargement will create over 300,000 new jobs in original EU member states and around 2 million new jobs in the new member states.

2. Opportunities for consumers – Enlargement will mean access to a wider range of goods and services – all meeting EU health and safety standards – and at lower prices. It will also open up new opportunities to travel, live and work anywhere in Europe.

3. More trade – European companies will benefit from access to the largest single market for trade and investment in the world. This market now contains approximately 450 million consumers - around 70 million more before 1 May 2004 – and is larger than the USA and Japan combined. Since 1990, UK trade with the new member states has increased by 400%, compared with a 43% increase in UK trade with the rest of the world.

4. The fight against terrorism – The EU’s latest anti-terrorist measures, such as the European arrest warrant, common definition of terrorism and

increased intelligence sharing, will be more effective when they apply to an enlarged EU of 27 rather than just to the original 15 member states.

5. Combating international crime – Enlargement will boost co-operation between present and future member states on tackling organised crime, drug trafficking and people smuggling. Candidates are bringing their police forces and border controls up to EU standards and will participate in EU anti-crime institutions, such as Europol.

6. Enhanced stability and security – The prospect of enlargement has already made a real difference to the political stability and international security in Central and Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. This includes new constitutions and the entrenchment of parliamentary democracy after years of Communist rule.

7. A cleaner environment – The new member states have made major improvements in air and water quality to meet EU standards. This will reduce cross-border pollution.

8. A louder voice in the world – With a population of 450 million, the EU is now bigger than the USA and Russia combined. This should increase its weight in international negotiations and action.

9. Democracy and human rights – Membership criteria demand stable institutions that guarantee human rights, democracy, rule of law and respect for and protection of minorities. This improves and maintains the standard of living for many citizens across Europe as candidate countries align their legislation and practices to EU standards.

10. Motor of EU reform – Enlargement prompted the Agenda 2000 package of internal policy reforms agreed at the Berlin European Council in 1999, and the institutional reforms agreed at the Nice European Council in December 2000. It will continue to provide pressure for further reform to improve the effectiveness and transparency of the EU. Since 1990, UK trade with the new member states has increased by 400%, compared with a 43% increase in UK trade with the rest of the world.

"Our vision of Europe is one where all countries - big or small, old members or new - are equal." Tony Blair, speech in Warsaw, 30 May 2003

TEXT 8. (RECOMMENDED FOR WRITTEN TRANSLATION)

TIME EUROPE MAGAZINEMonday, Jan. 31, 2005The Davos ManDoes globalization make the world richer or poorer?By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

"Davos Man" has been easy to poke fun at from the time the World Economic Forum, founded in 1971, first got widespread attention in the 1990s. And this year is no different, as business leaders, politicians and, O.K., some lucky inky-fingered wretches prepare to trek to the conclave in the Swiss Alps town of Davos. The annual meeting of the international business elite, Davos developed a reputation as a cheerleader for globalization. But by the late 1990s, it was fashionable to argue that economic integration benefits only those who live in rich countries and who work in multinational companies, able to source--and sell--their products anywhere they choose. The world, it was argued, is at the mercy of tectonic forces capable of impoverishing millions.

Of late, globalization's critics have taken a different tack. Among the world's fastest-growing economies are China and India. Not so long ago dirt poor, both nations, once closed economies, have opened themselves up with substantial success. You might think the prosperity of some Indians and Chinese would be something to celebrate. But no. Whether because it is thought that all the rich world's jobs will be "outsourced" to India and China or because people believe that cheap labor in India and China will drive down wages everywhere else, the rise of the two Asian giants is now viewed as a threat as much as it is a triumph. Globalization has been turned around from something that makes poor people poorer to a phenomenon that makes rich people poor.

The best intellectual case for this argument was made last year by Paul Samuelson, a Nobel prizewinner, a professor emeritus at M.I.T. and one of the most respected economists of all time. Samuelson took aim at the theoretical underpinning of globalization. For its proponents, globalization is the latest proof of the virtues of free trade, for which the case was first made in 1817 by the British economist David Ricardo. Ricardo argued that trade was always beneficial because it encourages nations to specialize in the products at which they are best and import those they are less good at. So if a rich country like the U.S. is much better at making computers than a poor country like China but only a little better at making sweat shirts, the U.S. should concentrate on making computers, and American colleges should source their logged goods in Guangdong province. Both the U.S. and China would benefit. Samuelson argued, however, that if the poor country suddenly learned how to make more efficiently the goods in which the rich country specialized--say, if China became brilliant at making computers--then the rich country would no longer benefit from free trade. In fact, wages in the rich country would fall.

Globalization's defenders reply by saying, Relax: it will never happen. This counterblast (much of it in a paper written by Columbia University's Jagdish Bhagwati, today's unchallenged intellectual champion of free trade) has two parts. First, free trade's defenders say, it is unrealistic to assume that China or India will suddenly develop a monstrous capacity in high-end, high-technology innovation. "The oft repeated argument that India and China will quickly educate 300 million of their citizens to acquire sophisticated and complex skills," write Bhagwati and his colleagues, "borders on the ludicrous. The educational sectors in those countries face enormous difficulties." This rings true. For the past few months, there have been reports of skilled-labor shortages in the most economically advanced areas of China. Second, free traders argue that even if China and India become advanced economies almost overnight, they will look just like Germany and Japan. And nobody--well, nobody you would trust--argues that trade between rich economies doesn't benefit everyone.

Such abstract arguments do not address the real concerns of American workers whose jobs have moved overseas. But the true nature of their plight might be easier to understand if leaders were more honest about what lurks behind the globalization-makes-you-poor argument. In 1945, when almost every potentially rich economy apart from the U.S. lay amid the rubble of war, the U.S. accounted for about 50% of world economic output, and U.S. wages were much higher than those elsewhere. But other nations caught up--first Western Europe, then Japan, then Southeast Asia, then Eastern Europe, now India and China. The U.S. share of the world economy is now only about 22%, and wages elsewhere are closer to those of Americans. Why anyone should think this process is a source of net human unhappiness beats me, but then--may as well admit it--I'm a Davos man.

Comment upon the following quotation:

Globalization is what we in the Third World have for several centuries called colonialism.

Martin Khov (1995)

Questions for discussion: 1. Is Globalization a new phenomenon in world politics?2. Is Globalization a positive or negative development?3. Does Globalization make the state obsolete?4. Does Globalization make the world more or less democratic?5. Is Globalization merely Western imperialism in a new guise?6. Does Globalization make war less likely?

REVIEW QUESTIONS: GLOBALIZATION AND THE POST-COLD WAR ORDER

1. What is meant by “international order”? 2. What is meant by “internationalization”? 3. Why is it difficult to identify the features of the contemporary order? 4. Define multilateralism. How important is it for the contemporary order? 5. What are the elements of continuity and discontinuity between the Cold

War and post-Cold War order? 6. Did globalization contribute to the end of the Cold War? 7. Or did the end of Cold War contribute to globalization? 8. What is meant by global governance? 9. Have relations between North and South altered much in the post-Cold War

order? 10.How have the “politics of identity” impacted on the post-Cold War order? 11.Have regions increased or decreased in political significance in the post-

Cold War order? 12.What is meant by the “social state”? 13.How has globalization transformed the role of the state? 14.Are states now obsolete? 15.What is meant by globalization as a state form? Do you agree? 16.Is there a relationship between liberal rights and globalization? 17.How important is polarity for the post-Cold War? 18.Has American foreign policy drastically changed in the post-Cold War

order? 19.What is the political economy of the post-Cold War order? 20.Is there a post-Cold War order at all? Give arguments for and against.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

The development of instant, international communications, the growth of international trade, and other factors have contributed to the creation of an unprecedented global economy. As Chicago Tribune writer Richard C. Longworth points out in this March 1999 Encarta Yearbook article, the increasing internationalization of finance can bring major benefits to investors and nations, but it can also have disastrous consequences. Recent economic crises in Asia and Russia and their repercussions on world markets have raised the question of whether more effective regulations are needed in the new global economic climate.

The New Global Economic OrderBy Richard C. Longworth

On August 17, 1998, the cash-strapped Russian government announced that it would devalue the nation's currency and default on part of its foreign debt. News of the decision rocked stock markets around the world. Within weeks the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a key index of the value of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)—the world's largest—plunged 1,800 points.

Just seven years earlier, in August 1991, a diehard band of hard-line Communists seized President Mikhail Gorbachev at his vacation home in the Crimea and attempted to take control of the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). For a while it seemed that the USSR—still a mammoth, nuclear-armed superpower—was about to slide back into hard-line Communism. But if the world trembled, its stock markets did not even notice. The NYSE barely moved on the news of the coup, or the later news of the coup's defeat.

Why the difference? Why did Russia's currency crisis matter to stock markets while the political crisis of its predecessor—the much larger and stronger USSR—did not? Why did events halfway around the world in 1998 have such a resounding effect on the United States?

The reason is the global economy. In 1991 the global economy was just emerging and held only a fraction of the power it commanded by decade's end. In 1991, too, the USSR was an isolated giant on the brink of collapse, barely in touch with the international economy through trade or investment. By 1998 Russia was deeply involved in the global economy, able to borrow worldwide but unable to pay its debts. When it finally caught cold, Wall Street sneezed.

The Russian default was not an isolated incident. It was preceded by the collapse of economies in Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and followed by a currency crisis in Brazil. This rapid succession of crises triggered widespread fears that more economies could soon fall and alerted a suddenly attentive world that a new global economic order had arrived.

The global economy is changing not only the way the world does business but also the way it lives and governs itself. The global economy is still very much a work in progress, presenting challenges to economists and politicians alike. Many analysts believe that the emerging global economic order, like the Industrial Revolution 200 years before it, is an epoch-making event that will fundamentally alter the world. Peter Drucker, a leading management consultant, has called the new era of the global economy “the age of social transformation … Every few hundred years in Western history, there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself—its worldview: its basic values: its social and political structure: its arts: its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world.”

Explaining the Global Economy

Globalization is a catchall term for many processes that are at the heart of the global economy: the spread of instant global communications; the rapid growth of international trade, global capital markets (markets in which national currencies are traded), and foreign investment; and the emergence of a new breed of global corporation. The global economy is the product of all these things, and more than the sum of them. It is a revolution that enables any entrepreneur to raise money anywhere in the world and, with that money, to use technology, communications, management, and labor located anywhere the entrepreneur finds them, to produce goods or services that can be sold anywhere there are customers.

The global economy has been building for 25 years, since the early 1970s. But it burst into public view only in the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War (the post-1945 struggle between the USSR and its allies and the United States and its allies) fundamentally challenged the claims of Communism, diluted the draw of socialism, and enabled supporters of open markets to proclaim the superiority of capitalism. Many nations that formerly followed the theories of German social philosopher Karl Marx abruptly abandoned that philosophy, bringing virtually the entire globe into the orbit of the market.The global economy is different than the preceding international economy, which took much of its present form in the 17th and 18th centuries with the establishment of nation-states. For hundreds of years nations promoted foreign trade to increase their wealth and power, but rarely hesitated to limit such trade when it was perceived as harmful. The new global economic order is unique in its sheer scope, size, and speed

—its ability to leap borders, to treat the world as one market and the nation-state as though it does not exist.

Globalizing TrendsMost analysts believe the global economy is the result of several reinforcing trends, which have only recently come fully into view. Taken together, these trends are creating increasingly open and unfettered markets that stretch around the globe.One trend is the emergence of instant global communications, made possible by technological breakthroughs such as the semiconductor and the communications satellite. The ability to send messages around the world in a split second enables corporations to manage far-flung operations and currency traders to make their trades anywhere, anytime. Communications technology literally makes the global corporation and global markets possible.

A second trend is the wave of deregulation, which began in the late 1970s and weakened the control of national governments over economic activity. Governments once controlled the flow of currencies, held corporations to stern labor laws, and limited imports through tariffs and quotas. Most of these rules and regulations, and many others, have now been dismantled or weakened to enable markets to function more freely.

A third trend is the growth of enormous global capital markets, the first of which emerged in the early 1970s when the Bretton Woods system of fixed currencies collapsed. After the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, all national currencies were assigned a fixed exchange rate against the United States dollar, which was backed by gold. When the Bretton Woods system broke down in 1973, currencies began to “float” against each other: in other words, they were worth only what the market said they were worth at any given moment. Suddenly, there were vast profits to be made by speculating on the market value of currencies, and so the great global capital markets—linked by instantaneous global communications—were born.

The global economy is far from complete. It is still much easier to do business between Illinois and California, for example, than between the United States and Poland or between the United States and Japan. All countries have some limits on trade and foreign investment. If jobs can move from country to country, people seldom do. Even in this mobile age, only about 2 percent of the world's population lives outside its own country, and most of these people are refugees, not workers chasing jobs.

The Expanding Grasp of Global MarketsBut if the global economy is not yet complete, it is becoming more intertwined and integrated every day. International trade is growing by 8 percent per year, more than

double the rate at which the world's total economic output is growing. Foreign investment (investing in the ownership of foreign businesses) has been growing by 12 percent per year and is now more valuable than trade: The annual economic output of foreign-owned businesses exceeds the value of all foreign trade combined.

Of all the parts of the global economy, the most developed are the capital markets that trade national currencies. These markets operate virtually unregulated and trade no less than $1.5 trillion every day, or $400 trillion per year. About 15 percent of this vast sum is vital, because it pays for the world's trade and investment, and because it pays for the hedging that makes this trade and investment possible. Through this hedging, businesses and investors buy foreign currencies to protect themselves against potentially costly swings in currency exchange rates. For example, if the value of a country's currency rises rapidly, businesses that hold a reserve of that currency can continue to make purchases and pay debts in the same country without first purchasing the currency at its new, higher price. Without such hedging, many companies probably would be reluctant to trade or invest abroad. But apart from this useful hedging, all the rest is speculation, as traders operating around the globe and around the clock buy and sell currencies, looking for quick profits of as little as 0.05 to 1 percent or less.

This is not idle speculation. Large capital markets are conduits for potent and relentless waves of money, constantly seeking the best price, a momentary edge. As nations in Asia recently discovered, these markets can confer wealth, jobs, industrialization, and riches on societies they favor. As the Asians and, later, the Russians found out, the markets can also pull these benefits out virtually overnight and, in the process, undermine entire societies. With the smell of fear in their nostrils, traders can cast instant judgments on other vulnerable economies, sending the panic careening around the globe, from Asia to Brazil to Russia and, finally, to Wall Street, which is what happened in 1998.

This tight linkage between global capital markets and national economies is something new. After World War II (1939-1945), the victorious powers set up systems of nation-based safety nets, rules, regulations, and other barriers to assure the safety of their currencies and economies from panic elsewhere. The global economy, powered by technology and deregulation, has eroded this system of safeguards. A prominent objective of deregulation, for example, has been to dismantle capital controls limiting the speed and size of currency movements in and out of countries. These controls have been removed in all but a few nations.

National and international policy makers are now pondering how to create a new set of global rules and regulations to replace the old web of national regulations. Their goal is to hem in the power of the global economy and restore some confidence and

stability to global markets and the nations where they operate. One important target of these new rules and regulations is likely to be the powerful global corporation.

The Global Corporation

The preceding 20 years have witnessed a widespread restructuring of the corporate landscape. An estimated 50,000 corporations now have operations that are primarily global in scope. Their predecessors were multinational corporations (MNCs), with sales and manufacturing branches abroad, but with all major functions, including the international branches, run from headquarters back home.

The new global corporation typically has a tight, lean headquarters staff, but scatters its other functions—research and development, accounting, procurement, and sales—wherever the people are the best and the costs lowest. This corporation seldom has an international department, because the entire corporation is international. Multinational corporations that have evolved into global corporations include Ford Motor Company, General Motors Corporation, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, BP Amoco PLC, Siemens AG, Nestlé S.A., and Zenith Electronics Corporation, among many others.

Global corporations, in turn, are reshaping the political and social landscape. During the last 50 years, major corporations in the United States and other industrialized nations struck a social compact with their employees and communities, through a web of labor agreements, environmental and tax laws, charitable giving, and other obligations, voluntary or imposed. The global corporation is now mobile enough to escape these obligations and break the social compact. Companies that once competed domestically with other companies sharing the same social obligations now compete with firms halfway around the globe, where environmental laws may not exist and pay scales are a fraction of Western wages.

In the United States, for example, hundreds of corporations—from automakers to electronics manufacturers—have moved jobs from high-wage U.S. facilities to low-wage plants in Mexico and other Latin American nations. In response to this trend, policy makers in the United States have reduced corporate taxes in an effort to keep at least some business operations at home. United States federal tax receipts tell part of the story: Corporations that once paid a full 30 percent of total federal taxes have seen their tax share fall to 12 percent.

Throughout much of the industrialized world, declining corporate taxes mean less money for welfare, unemployment, and other social programs that were initially established to help economically vulnerable workers. In the future, political debates

will likely focus on efforts by governments and citizens’ groups to force corporations to resume their economic and social obligations—in a sense, to declare their corporate citizenship—when they no longer are geographically bound to any particular location.

Loss of Sovereignty

Governments themselves are joining regional trade groupings to give themselves more size and power in a globalizing world. Fifteen European nations have submerged much of their national sovereignty in the European Union (EU), by far the most evolved of these groupings. Eleven EU nations adopted a common currency, the euro, in January 1999, and several others are expected to join. Over time, many analysts believe the common currency will force EU nations to coordinate many other policies, such as budgeting and taxation. These issues are at the heart of a nation's political life, and the adoption of the euro is widely viewed as a decisive step toward a single European government.

The United States has also become involved in regional trade groupings. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a much looser bloc connecting the United States, Canada, and Mexico, but with little of the economic coordination of the EU process. Talks are currently underway to expand NAFTA, which aims to eliminate tariffs and other barriers to trade, to most Latin American nations. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) agreement is more a dream of cohesion than a reality. Its leaders meet annually, but the Asian and North American economies are so different and the impact of the Asian crisis so severe that real coordination, even on the NAFTA level, is likely to be years away at best.

Despite growing regional cooperation, national governments have seen globalization erode much of their ability to control their own economies as traders and corporations move beyond the reach of national law. For the world's market-oriented democracies, erosion of national sovereignty means a reduction in the power of the ordinary citizen's ability to influence events through the vote; hence, it has the potential to erode democracy.

In this partial vacuum, international organizations, new and old, have assumed some functions that national governments once controlled. For example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an independent agency of the United Nations (UN), has become both a safety net for nations in economic crisis and a global enforcer of economic behavior. Both roles, however, have become controversial, and there have been proposals for a new global economic authority. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has succeeded the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and has become not only a forum to settle international trade disputes but a court with power to enforce its decisions.

An alphabet soup of other international bodies, such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Switzerland and the International Organization of Securities

Commissions (IOSCO), are setting up new codes and regulations. These organizations are, in effect, now writing the global economic rulebook for the 21st century.

The global economy, then, is still evolving. No one can say yet what long-term effect it will have on the economies and societies it touches, nor whether regional and international organizations will succeed or fail to tame its power. To its boosters, the global economy offers the promise of immense global markets working with maximum efficiency to speed money, goods, and services to the places where they will do the most good and produce the highest return. Such boosters include free-market economist Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize laureate, and United States treasury secretary Robert Rubin. To many in the developing world, globalization promises to bring the prosperity so far enjoyed only by wealthy industrialized nations. For analysts such as Drucker, as well as billionaire trader George Soros, the global economy already has succeeded the Industrial Revolution and, like that epochal economic event, eventually will change the world.

To its detractors, including organized labor and such critics as conservative U.S. presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, the global economy is an untamed force that will undermine wages and living standards in the industrialized world while bringing little but chaos and exploitation to the developing world, impoverishing the many as it rewards the few. For proponents and critics alike, the events surrounding Asia's spectacular economic boom and dramatic bust offer revealing lessons about the great promise, and peril, of the new global economy.

The Growth of the “Asian Tigers”

The seeds of the Asian financial crisis were sown at least 20 years ago, as many Asian nations—Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and, later, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia—adopted market-friendly policies, opened their domestic markets, and courted foreign investment. This investment poured in. Once-poor nations found themselves awash in money, factories, jobs, rapid economic growth, and all the things that go with it: new roads and airports, soaring skyscrapers, good restaurants, and luxury hotels.

These were the “Asian tigers,” and they became the market's darlings. Nations anxious to borrow money met banks that were equally anxious to lend it. The good times rolled, and not enough questions were asked. In retrospect, once the bubble burst, it became clear that too much money could cause as much trouble as too little money. Asian banks lacked the supervision and control that had been worked out over the decades in more developed economies. Too often, loans were given to businesses distinguished primarily by their ties to government officials or the military. Much of the investment in Asia went for solid productive facilities. But much also went for

speculative projects, such as the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that are now the world's tallest buildings, and which stand mostly vacant.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Western nations learned that uncontrolled capitalism can destroy as surely as it builds. Over the years, they put into place a web of rules and regulations to prevent excesses, enforce accountability, and ensure safety nets, such as unemployment insurance. The Asian nations, new to the game and flush with money, lacked key economic safeguards, including teams of trained bank supervisors, bankruptcy laws, sophisticated commercial courts, and rules requiring corporations to report their finances honestly. So long as the funds flowed, these nations had no interest in adopting those safeguards.

In the meantime, most of the Asian countries pegged the value of their currencies to the American dollar—a move intended to reduce the threat of costly and destabilizing currency fluctuations, and to reassure investors and lenders that their bets were safe. The IMF warned of trouble ahead but in tones so muted that no one paid attention. The end, when it came, was brutally swift.

The Crisis Begins

The crisis began in Thailand, where years of over-lending and growing debts resulted in a sudden loss of confidence in the economy in mid-1997. There does not appear to be a specific reason why it happened just then, nor any one incident that set it off. Rather, the excessive exuberance that led to the boom turned suddenly into excessive fears of its future. Just as there were no real controls on the flow of investment into Thailand, so there were no controls on the flow out. Foreign banks and investors pulled out billions of dollars of investment and demanded repayment of billions of dollars in loans.

Global capital markets, suddenly convinced that the Thai currency, the baht, could no longer stay pegged to the dollar, began to sell it in such volume that the fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The value of the baht plummeted, and Thai investors, having borrowed billions of dollars, found that it would take nearly twice as many baht to repay those dollars. Depression followed quickly. National output fell by 8 percent, and the Thai stock market lost 75 percent of its value. Factories closed, jobs disappeared, consumer demand dried up, and the dreams of middle-class life evaporated.

And then the crisis moved on. Again, there was no reason why it should have. Other Asian countries had their problems of debt, corruption, over-building, and inadequate regulation. But these were problems, not crisis points. These problems had existed during the boom years, when the markets happily overlooked them. But panic has its own logic. As Soros has pointed out, markets always overshoot: They invest too much

when times are good and pull back too sharply when times turn bad. Markets are fueled as much by emotion as logic, and a herd mentality is common.

This is what happened to Malaysia, and then to Indonesia, then to the Philippines and, at year's end, to South Korea. Each had grown rich on foreign investment, and each was plunged into depression by the market's sudden disapproval. The government fell in Thailand. In Indonesia, the weakening dictatorship of President Suharto was toppled. Currencies collapsed and standards of living fell.

The International Community Intervenes

Foreign governments reacted complacently until the crisis reached South Korea, the world's 11th largest economy, where only a massive IMF bailout in December 1997 staved off total collapse. The bailout—one of the largest ever arranged by the IMF—was organized because of growing fears that Japan, the world's second largest economy, might be next.

The IMF oversaw the bailouts of the stricken countries and, as is its custom, tied these bailouts to demands that the countries lower inflation, cut back spending, and in other ways impose a diet of economic austerity. The IMF, in an official report released on January 19, 1999, admitted it misjudged the nature of the Asian crisis and hence prescribed austerity programs that only made the crisis worse. The problem, the IMF concluded, lay not with too much government spending or high inflation, but with over-borrowing and lax oversight by private corporations and banks.

In 1998 the crisis moved from Asia to other emerging markets, so-called because they are all emerging from economies where markets were historically weak or nonexistent, including Communist and undeveloped agrarian economies. Simply because they were new and untested, emerging markets became suspect, first to currency traders and then, as their currencies fell, to other investors. Countries as far removed as Estonia and Venezuela came under attack. But neither suffered as much as Russia and Brazil. In Russia deep corruption and a total lack of commercial law undermined all attempts at market reforms, while Brazil struggled under the burden of heavy public debt. In both Russia and Brazil, global capital markets drove down currencies, increased the economic pain for millions of people, and, in Russia's case, led to a default on foreign debt that essentially removed Russia as a serious player in the global economy.

Reining in the Global Economy

The crises left behind not only vast wreckage but also a growth industry in ideas on how to cope with a global market so powerful that it could rapidly turn once-prosperous nations into virtual paupers. Scholars, officials, corporate executives, and traders suggested some form of new global financial authority to regulate the markets.

Analysts who once saw the free flow of currency as the key to global prosperity suddenly agreed that emerging nations might be justified in imposing capital controls, at least in the short run. Malaysia did so in September 1998 and suffered little of the international criticism that such a move would have invited just one year earlier.

Suggestions blossomed for slowing down the speculative trading on capital markets. One idea, first proposed by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin, would impose a tiny tax—less than 0.5 percent on each currency transaction—on grounds that most speculative currency trades involve margins no bigger than that. Another suggestion, pioneered by Chile, would penalize short-term investments that do not stay in a country long enough to do some real good. The Group of Eight, an informal organization that includes the world's seven leading industrialized nations and Russia, announced in October 1998 plans to “create a strengthened financial architecture for the global marketplace of the next millennium,” a phrase vague enough to permit almost any reform that the nations choose.

Some critics want to do away with the IMF and World Bank altogether; some others want to hold an international conference to create new institutions to fit the new global era. Still others argue that the IMF and World Bank, plus others such as the BIS, are established institutions with experienced staffs that need only new marching orders to be effective. Virtually everyone now agrees that emerging countries should not open themselves to global markets until they have a structure of laws and regulations ready to cope with the markets' power.

The Future of Global Capitalism

The unquestioning euphoria that surrounded global markets just a year or two ago has vanished. But utter condemnation of these markets is little accepted. Organized labor in the United States is likely to continue to oppose trade agreements such as NAFTA, and opinion polls show that nearly half of all Americans support some tariffs. But Buchanan's call for a “new economic nationalism,” imposing tight limits on trade and immigration, does not appear to have much of a future. Even analysts who think Buchanan is asking the right questions about trade and investment feel that the imposition of new national barriers would not solve the problem, but only insulate the United States from the real benefits that the global economy can bestow.

More global economic shocks like the Asian financial crisis are likely to come, if only because the markets that produced them still exist and the global and national regulations necessary to prevent the shocks are not yet in place. The work ahead is as much political as it is economic. The new rule makers will have to balance the need for social stability and broad prosperity with the efficiency and profit demanded by free markets. In all successful market democracies in the past, struggles over these

issues have resulted in compromise, involving something less than totally free markets and something short of complete regulation.

Market reforms, no matter how necessary, may limit the ability of the global economy to spread wealth to developing nations. Some analysts believe that the creation of global safety nets—to protect stricken countries and prevent crushing depressions—may only provide a cushion that encourages the speculation and risk-taking that caused the problem in the first place. Others point to the need to reach solutions to global economic problems within a democratic framework. Global rule making, like global markets, takes place now in an arena that democracy and the vote cannot reach. Making the global economy responsive to the people who live within it may be the great challenge of the coming century.

About the author: Richard C. Longworth is an award-winning senior writer for the Chicago Tribune and author of Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First-World Nations (1998).

Further reading:

Bryan, Lowell, and Farrell, Diana. Market Unbound: Unleashing Global Capitalism. Wiley, 1996.

Buchanan, Patrick J. The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy. Little Brown and Company, 1998.

Burtless, Gary, Lawrence, Robert Z., Litan, Robert E., and Shapiro, Robert J. Globaphobia: Confronting Fears About Open Trade. Brookings Institution, 1998.

Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Kuttner, Robert. Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Mishel, Lawrence, Bernstein, Jared, and Schmitt, John. The State of Working America 1998-99. Economic Policy Institute, 1999.

Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and its Discontents. The New Press, 1998.

Yergin, Daniel, and Stanislaw, Joseph. The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace that is Remaking the Modern World. Simon & Schuster, 1998.

THE INSTITUTIONS OF GLOBALIZATION

Three key institutions helped shape the current era of globalization: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). All three institutions trace their origins to the end of World War II (1939-1945) when the United States and the United Kingdom decided to set up new institutions and rules for the global economy. At the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire in 1944, they and other countries created the IMF to help stabilize currency markets. They also established what was then called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) to help finance the rebuilding of Europe after the war.

WORLD BANK

Following Europe’s postwar recovery the IBRD became known as the World Bank. Its mission was redirected to help developing countries grow faster and provide a higher living standard for their people. The World Bank made loans to developing countries for dams and other electrical-generating plants, harbor facilities, and other large projects. These projects were intended to lower costs for private businesses and to attract investors. Beginning in 1968 the World Bank focused on low-cost loans for health, education, and other basic needs of the world’s poor.

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND

The IMF makes loans so that countries can maintain the value of their currencies and repay foreign debt. Countries accumulate foreign debt when they buy more from the rest of the world than they sell abroad. They then need to borrow money to pay the difference, which is known as balancing their payments. After banks and other institutions will no longer lend them money, they turn to the IMF to help them balance their payments position with the rest of the world. The IMF initially focused on Europe, but by the 1970s it changed its focus to the less-developed economies. By the early 1980s a large number of developing countries were having trouble financing their foreign debts. In 1982 the IMF had to offer more

loans to Mexico, which was then still a developing country, and other Latin American nations just so they could pay off their original debts.

The IMF and the World Bank usually impose certain conditions for loans and require what are called structural adjustment programs from borrowers. These programs amount to detailed instructions on what countries have to do to bring their economies under control. The programs are based on a strategy called neoliberalism, also known as the Washington Consensus because both the IMF and the World Bank are headquartered in Washington, D.C. The strategy is geared toward promoting free markets, including privatization (the selling off of government enterprises); deregulation (removing rules that restrict companies); and trade liberalization (opening local markets to foreign goods by removing barriers to exports and imports). Finally, the strategy also calls for shrinking the role of government, reducing taxes, and cutting back on publicly provided services.

WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION

Another key institution shaping globalization is the World Trade Organization (WTO), which traces its origins to a 1948 United Nations (UN) conference in Havana, Cuba. The conference called for the creation of an International Trade Organization to lower tariffs (taxes on imported goods) and to encourage trade. Although the administration of President Harry S. Truman was instrumental in negotiating this agreement, the U.S. Congress considered it a violation of American sovereignty and refused to ratify it. In its absence another agreement, known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), emerged as the forum for a series of negotiations on lowering tariffs. The last of these negotiating sessions, known as the Uruguay Round, established the WTO, which began operating in 1995. Since its creation, the WTO has increased the scope of trading agreements. Such agreements no longer involve only the trade of manufactured products. Today agreements involve services, investments, and the protection of intellectual property rights, such as patents and copyrights. The United States receives over half of its international income from patents and royalties for use of copyrighted material.

THE DEBATE OVER GLOBALIZATION

Very few people, groups, or governments oppose globalization in its entirety. Instead, critics of globalization believe aspects of the way globalization operates should be changed. The debate over globalization is about what the best rules are for governing the global economy so that its advantages can grow while its problems can be solved.

On one side of this debate are those who stress the benefits of removing barriers to international trade and investment, allowing capital to be allocated more efficiently and giving consumers greater freedom of choice. With free-market

globalization, investment funds can move unimpeded from where they are plentiful (the rich countries) to where they are most needed (the developing countries). Consumers can benefit from cheaper products because reduced tariffs make goods produced at low cost from faraway places cheaper to buy. Producers of goods gain by selling to a wider market. More competition keeps sellers on their toes and allows ideas and new technology to spread and benefit others.

On the other side of the debate are critics who see neoliberal policies as producing greater poverty, inequality, social conflict, cultural destruction, and environmental damage. They say that the most developed nations—the United States, Germany, and Japan—succeeded not because of free trade but because of protectionism and subsidies. They argue that the more recently successful economies of South Korea, Taiwan, and China all had strong state-led development strategies that did not follow neoliberalism. These critics think that government encouragement of “infant industries”—that is, industries that are just beginning to develop—enables a country to become internationally competitive.

Furthermore, those who criticize the Washington Consensus suggest that the inflow and outflow of money from speculative investors must be limited to prevent bubbles. These bubbles are characterized by the rapid inflow of foreign funds that bid up domestic stock markets and property values. When the economy cannot sustain such expectations, the bubbles burst as investors panic and pull their money out of the country. These bubbles have happened repeatedly as liberalization has allowed speculation of this sort to get out of hand, such as in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand in 1997 and since then in Argentina, Russia, and Turkey. According to critics, a strong active government is needed to assure stability and economic development.

Protests by what is called the antiglobalization movement are seldom directed against globalization itself but rather against abuses that harm the rights of workers and the environment. The question raised by nongovernmental organizations and protesters at WTO and IMF gatherings is whether globalization will result in a rise of living standards or a race to the bottom as competition takes the form of lowering living standards and undermining environmental regulation. One of the key problems of the 21st century will be determining to what extent markets should be regulated to promote fair competition, honest dealings, and fair distribution of public goods on a global scale.

The debate over globalization focuses in particular on how it can be regulated to address growing income and wealth inequalities, labor rights, health and environmental problems, and issues regarding cultural diversity and national sovereignty.

INEQUALITY

By the late 1990s the 20 percent of the world’s people living in the highest-income countries had 86 percent of the world’s income; the bottom 20 percent had only 1 percent of the world’s income. An estimated 1.3 billion people, or about one-sixth of the world’s population, have incomes of less than a dollar a day. Inequality is growing worse, rather than better. More than 80 countries had lower per capita income (income per person) at the end of the 1990s than they had at the end of the 1980s. In 1960 the top 20 percent had 30 times the income of the poorest 20 percent. This grew to 32 times in 1970, 45 times in 1980, and 60 times in 1990. By the end of the 20th century the top 20 percent received 75 times the income of the bottom 20 percent. The income gap is even apparent in cyberspace. The top fifth in income make up 93 percent of the world’s Internet users and the poorest fifth only 0.2 percent.

These inequalities in living standards and participation in the global economy are a serious political problem in an era of globalization. Some countries have been unable to function at even a minimum standard of basic competence in the globalized economy. The only profitable economic activity in some of these countries is linked to criminal behavior, such as the trade in illegal drugs, smuggling, and extortion of various kinds. Governments that are helpless to stop such activity or to collect taxes to meet basic public service needs are characterized as failed states. Sometimes failed states can become havens for terrorists and foreign criminals who use them as bases for activities harmful to other governments and their people. These states may also provide safe haven for mercenary forces that conduct raids into neighboring countries. In parts of Africa, for example, where diamonds and other valuable resources attract criminal despots, mercenary armies have been engaged in mass killing to terrorize local populations into giving them what they want. The international arms trade and easy importation of weapons, which allows such behavior, is a serious problem.

Source: Encarta Yearbook, March 1999© 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.