Chapter 7
Global Politics
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‘War, in our scientific age, means,
sooner or later, universal death’.
Bertrand Russell Unpopular Essays (1950)
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Key issues
• How has international or world politics
been analysed and explained?
• What is globalisation? What are its
implications for the nation-state?
• Is globalisation a beneficial or a destructive
force?
• Could the idea of a world government ever
become a reality?
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Understanding world politics
The major theoretical ‘schools’ of
international politics are the following:
• idealism
• realism
• pluralism
• Marxism
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Idealism
• The defining characteristic of idealism is
that it views international politics from the
perspective of moral values and legal
norms. It is concerned less with empirical
analysis (i.e., with how international actors
behave) than with normative judgements
(i.e., with how they should behave).
• Therefore, idealism is sometimes seen a
species of utopianism.
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Realism
• The realist tradition, sometimes called ‘political
realism’, can claim to be the oldest theory of
international politics.
• It can be traced back to Sun Tzu’s classic work on
strategy, the Art of War, in China.
• Realism is grounded in an emphasis on power
politics and the pursuit of national interests.
• Its central assumption is that the state is the
principle actor on the international or world stage,
and, being sovereign, is able to act as an
autonomous entity.
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Pluralism
• Pluralism is a socio-political theory that
emphasised the diffusion of power amongst
a number of competing bodies or groups. As
a theory of international politics, it
highlights the permeability of the state, and
provides an alternative to the state-centrism
of the realist model.
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Marxism
• What makes the Marxist approach distinctive is its
stress on economic power and the role played by
international capital.
• The global structure of production and exchange is
highly ordered in the sense that it has divided the
world into ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ areas. Core areas e.g.
the developed North benefit from technological
innovation and high and sustained levels of investment,
while peripheral areas e.g. the less developed South
provide a source of cheap labour, and are often
dependent on cash crops.
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Dynamics of globalisation
• Globalisation
- It is the emergence of a complex web of
interconnectedness that means that our lives are
increasingly shaped by events that occur, and
decisions that are made, at a great distance from
us.
- The central feature of globalisation is therefore
that geographical distance is of declining
relevance, and that territorial boundaries, e.g.
those between nation-states, are becoming less
significant.
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System interdependences
Global
National
Local
National
Local
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• The interconnectedness that globalisation
has spawned is multidimensional. The
popular image of globalisation is that it is a
top-down process, the establishment of a
single global system that imprints itself on
all parts of the world.
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• Globalisation as ‘a shift from a world of
distinct national economies to a global
economy in which production is
internationalised and financial capital flows
freely and instantly between countries.
the OECD (1995)
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
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• Political globalisation is evident in the
growing importance of international
organisations. These are organisations that
are trans-national in that they exercise
jurisdiction not within a single state, but
within an international area comprising
several states. Most such organisations have
emerged in the post-1945 period: e.g. UN,
NATO, European Economic Community,
World Bank, IMF, OECD and WTO.
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United
Nations
Headquarters,
New York
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Globalisation: theories and debates
• The most intense debate about globalisation
nevertheless concerns its implications for equality
and poverty. Critics of globalisation have drawn
attention to the emergence of new and deeply
entrenched patterns of inequality: globalisation is thus
a game of winners and losers.
• Globalisation has also been criticised because if its
tendency towards risk, uncertainty and instability.
(financial markets, rising individualism and an
associated weakening of tradition, community and
established institutions)
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• The most significant political debate
associated with globalisation concerns its
impact on democracy.
• Supporters: major factor underpinning the
trend towards democratisation; economic
freedom is inevitably associated with
political freedom.
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• Opponents:
- multinational corporations are allied to the
ability to manipulate consumer tastes and
entrench materialist values through the
development of brands; are provided with cheap
labour and low production costs without longterm investments.
- Democracy is threatened by the fact that the pace
of economic globalisation far outstrips that of
political globalisation.
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Regionalisation
• Regionalisation has been fuelled by
strategic, economic and, possibly, cultural
factors.
• The most significant impetus towards
international regionalisation is undoubtedly
economic.
• A further dimension of regionalisation is
cultural.
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The forerunner to the European Union was formed by six countries in 1952 and
now has 28 members with a combined population of more than 500 million
people.
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Towards World Government?
• The logic behind the idea of world
government is the same as that which
underlies the classic liberal justification for
the state– social-contract theory. Just as the
only means of ensuring order and stability
amongst individuals with different interests
is to establish a sovereign state, the only
way of preventing international conflict
between states each pursuing its national
interest is to create a supreme world power.
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The United Nations
• The UN, constructed at the San Francisco
Conference (1945) in the dying days of the
Second World War, is the most advanced
experiment in world government to date.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt expresses that this
period would be marked by a rejection of
the power politics of the past, paving the
way for an era of peace and international
cooperation.
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The UN structure:
- General Assembly (193 member states since
2011)
- Security Council (15 members, ‘big five’ are
permanent ‘veto powers’, and the other ten are
non-permanent members elected every two years)
- The World Court (formerly the International
Court of Justice) (in the Hague, Netherlands,
consists of a panel of 15 judges elected for nineyear terms)
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United Nations
Headquarters,
New York
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International Court of Justice
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WTO Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland
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