CIAO DATE: 03/04

International Affairs

January 2004

• A Self-Restrained Approach to Nation-Building by Foreign Powers  Amitai Etzioni

  Nation-building by foreign powers can rarely be accomplished and tends to be very costly, not merely in economic resources and those of political capital, but also in human lives. Foreign powers often attempt to tackle numerous tasks with little discernible effect. Therefore, whatever resources foreign powers are willing and able to commit should be focused on a modest agenda—what is termed in this article a 'restrained approach'. A restrained approach focuses first and foremost on pacification and security, it deals with whoever is in power initially and it requires local people to overcome some challenges by themselves. Greatly curtailing foreign ambitions and promises will lead to much greater credibility of drives for democratization; will provide stronger domestic support for such efforts among the taxpayers and donors who have to foot the bills; and will pay off by focusing more resources on the few facets of society that are relatively easy to change.

• On the Pedagogy of 'Small Wars'  Tarak Barkawi

  This article argues that flawed western strategies for 'small wars', those fought in the non–European world, have been informed by illusions concerning the cultural, military and political superiority of the West. With 9/11, such wars ceased to be small. The main threat to the western powers no longer emanates from other states organized along lines similar to their own, but from a transnational network enterprise that has its origins in the global South and the Islamic world. Nonetheless, old imperial and orientalist constructions continue to inform western and particularly US perceptions of the war on terror. 'Knowing thy enemy' and 'knowing thyself', Sun Tzu's formula for victory, requires abandoning flattering accounts of western identity and learning to empathize with those we call terrorists.

• Blair's Project in Retrospect  John Gray

  New Labour came into being as an attempt to frame a successor project to Thatcherism, but in practice it has proved to be a continuation of it. Blair's project was to achieve hegemony for Labour by blending free market policies with a concern for social cohesion. He accepted the new economic settlement that Thatcher had established, but believed it could be made more sustainable if it was tempered with a concern for social justice. Within the Labour Party his project was set in terms of modernizing social democracy, but in the country as a whole it was perceived as a variation on One Nation Toryism—a strand in the British political tradition which the Conservatives had seemingly forgotten. In fact, Blair's domestic agenda has had more in common with Thatcher's than with either social democracy or One Nation Toryism. There were significant constitutional reforms in the first term, but privatization and the injection of market mechanisms into hitherto autonomous institutions has remained the central thrust of policy.

  Blair has been committed to modernizing Britain, but his conception of modernization was a variation on Thatcher's. In one centrally important area, Blair diverges from Thatcher: he believes an essential component of Britain's modernization was an improved relationship with the EU, culminating in British entry into the euro. Yet his uncompromising support for the US over Iraq has left Britain as deeply alienated from France and Germany as it had ever been in Thatcher's time. Britain may still some day join the euro, but it will not be Tony Blair who takes us in.

  Blair's strategy was to attain hegemony for New Labour by appropriating the Thatcherite inheritance. In domestic terms, this strategy has been a success, but it relies on continuing Conservative weakness and an economic and international environment congenial to neo-liberal policies. At present both of these conditions appear to be changing to Blair's disadvantage. The Conservative Party seems to be shaping a post-Thatcherite agenda. At the same time, the US is leading a movement away from neo-liberal orthodoxies towards protectionism and deficit financing and faces an intractable guerrilla war in Iraq. In these circumstances, the neo-Thatcherite strategy that sustained Blair in power could prove to be his undoing.

• Does My Bomb Look Big in This? Britain's Nuclear Choices after Trident  Michael Clarke

  The United Kingdom has always been a committed nuclear power, from the inception of the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb in 1945, to the commissioning in 1999 of HMS Vengeance, the latest submarine in the nation's nuclear deterrent fleet. Though the UK's nuclear stance has been domestically and internationally controversial at various times, as in the late 1950s and the early 1980s, successive governments have generally grappled only with how they could most affordably remain an effective nuclear power, not whether they should. The international environment of the Cold War always appeared to provide an imperative answer to the 'whether' question, even up to the decisions taken in the early 1980s to develop the strategic nuclear deterrent the UK now operates. That nuclear capability now exists in an international environment which renders the UK territorially safer than at any other time in its history. Modern terrorism threatens many cherished ideals of western democracy, but does not constitute the threat to its territorial integrity against which the state traditionally defends itself. The fact that UK forces are deployed in many parts of the world is an option the government chooses to exercise for both foreign policy and wider defence reasons; none of these operations are intrinsic to the physical well-being of the UK. Its interests may be threatened, but as a country the UK is uniquely safe.

• NATO: The Practice and Politics of Transformation  Paul Cornish

  The Iraq crisis caused a deep rift in US-European relations and within Europe. NATO seemed sure at least to be damaged, if not fatally undermined. But to the dismay of those who have been waiting for many years for NATO finally to unravel, the Atlantic alliance spent 2003 proudly showing off its transformation project, and looking forward to its next enlargement in 2004. Yet these necessary improvements to NATO's political and military structures, and to its deployable capability, cannot alone secure the alliance's future. This article argues that what is needed, as ever, is a shared determination among governments that NATO can continue to serve their needs. There has been no better opportunity since the end of the Cold War to place the US-European security relationship on a firm footing through NATO. There has also been no moment when the penalties of failure have been higher. If NATO's transformation agenda, together with the NATO-EU 'Berlin Plus' arrangement, are not exploited to the full, then US-European security relations are unlikely to recover from Iraq.

• Feminist International Relations: a Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender Are Essential to Understanding the World 'We' Live In  Gillian Youngs

  This article examines the argument that women and gender are essential to the study of International Relations. It explains why this understanding is based on ontological revisionism and examines key areas where feminist International Relations has explored this possibility: war, militarism and security; sovereignty and the state; and globalization.

• I. Dominant and Destructive Masculinities  Andrew Andrew

  In the first of three commentaries on Gillian Youngs' article on 'Feminist International Relations', Andrew Linklater argues that what is at stake in the discussion of the neglect of gender differences in mainstream IR analysis is the nature of international political reality, how best to analyse it and how to understand the consequences for women. He suggests that to further Youngs' argument that both feminists and non-feminists can contribute to an explanation of international political structures and processes, a large-scale empirical project is required—how did one version of masculinity come to prevail over others in the modern period and earlier? Other 'spin-offs' fitting Youngs' study of competing masculinities are apparent and an analysis of how different ethical traditions favour one conception of masculinity over another, he suggests, would be a profitable exercise.

• II.  War of the Worlds/Invasion of the Body Snatchers  Terrell Carver

  In this second commentary on Gillian Youngs' article, Terrell Carver turns from Youngs' image of the 'gulf between mainstream/malestream International Relations on the one hand, and feminist International Relations on the other, to that of 'war' and asks if critical feminist and mainstream/malestream scholars in IR are even in the same world. He senses a level of intellectual and professional conflict that amounts to a 'war of the worlds' and argues for new skills to be adopted and new ways of thinking introduced into the discipline transforming it so that gender no longer divides its practitioners methodologically and personally. Most men in IR still need to address the 'lived experience' that feminists have so far successfully tackled in mainstream IR.

• III.  'Gender' Is Not Enough: The Need for a Feminist Consciousness  Cynthia Enloe

  In the final commentary, Cynthia Enloe thinks again about Gillian Youngs' question: why do many IR academics find it so difficult to take feminist analysis seriously? She argues there are two fears: the first, for men, concerns how their own relationships with masculinity are affecting what they see as a 'serious' topic of investigation; the second is the fear of appearing feminized by colleagues making a judgement on the topic's seriousness.

  Cynthia Enloe argues that 'gender' alone is insufficient for transforming IR into a more reliable and useful discipline. What is needed is a feminist consciousness informing work on gender.

• 'Better Off Without Them'? Politics and Ethnicity in the Twenty-First Century  Neal Ascherson

  In the various 'liberations' of the past 15 years, from the collapse of the Soviet system to the forcible regime changes of today, a disconcerting pattern often emerges; the disintegration of old multicultural societies, and the drift towards ethnic separation. The author asks why the experience of 'freedom' can lead towards a new, inflamed sense of group identity and whether the current ideal of multiculturalism has a future.

• Book Review: Just a War against Terror? Jean Bethke Elshtain's Burden and American Power  Nicholas Rengger

  This article discusses Jean Bethke Elshtain's recent book Just war against terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World. It argues that Elshtain's book, though characteristically powerful and thought provoking, combines both an intelligent and thoughtful defence of the idea that the immediate US response to September 11 was a just use of force, as well as a claim about the moral importance of US power in contemporary world politics. It concludes that the problems with the second claim run the risk of nullifying the considerable power of the first.