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International Affairs
October 2000
After a decade of great progress in diminishing the risks posed by nuclear weapons, international nuclear relations came unstuck in the late 1990s. Why did this happen? This question is best answered through an understanding of how a 'nuclear order' was constructed during the Cold War, how it developed in the early post-Cold War period, and how confidence in it dissipated as the 1990s wore on. After considering how the nuclear order was founded upon linked systems of deterrence and abstinence, the article explains how both were destabilized in the mid- to late 1990s-cause and effect of the United States shifting its ordering strategy towards protection (through missile defences) and enforcement. Can confidence in nuclear order be restored? How should we regard the recent agreement among States Parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement to press for complete nuclear disarmament?
The French government is reassessing the whole basis on which it trains and equips its diplomats for their calling, driven by a growing perception that French diplomacy has not been performing well. The 'Heisbourg Report' on the state of French diplomacy pulled no punches and accused French diplomats of being closed to international influences, untrained for modern diplomacy and stifled by a state-centrist view of modern international relations. On the face of it this can all be interpreted as a milestone in an underlying convergence between Francophone and Anglophone approaches to modern diplomacy and security. In very important respects, however, Britain and France are mirror images of each other. What is defined here as mirror imaging can be seen to exist at three different levels which are self-reinforcing, though not in obvious ways: in the pros and cons of each others' policy-making style; in their inextricable fate to develop the European Security and Defence Policy project; and even at the most abstract levels in the predicaments they face in the light of globalization. Seen in this context, it is evident that it is not merely the skills and techniques of French and British policy-makers that need to be re-examined, but rather their way of thinking about their own state and about the nature of the international system around them in an era when globalization is symptomatic of deep structural change.
Until recently, there has been little 'real' dialogue in Cold War studies between International Relations theorists and international historians. In many ways this is not surprising. For the most part, International Relations theorists took the Cold War as an immutable feature of the international system. Historians did indeed seek to explain the outbreak of the Cold War and the historic features that had given rise to American hegemony and Soviet opposition, but they did so primarily by concentrating largely on archival and related research with only limited attention given to the bigger issues of the Cold War world. However, as the article demonstrates, a dialogue between historians and theorists over some key aspects of the Cold War, such as the role of ideology, is now timely. The evolution of both a broader conception of International History, as well as the partial opening of communist archives and a range of new developments in International Relations, means that it is now possible to 'rethink' the Cold War using both history and International Relations theory.
Political theory and International Relations have become increasingly interpenetrated over the last few years. This article traces the evolution of this relationship and the emergence of a literature now termed international political theory. It also suggests that a convergence of contemporary political and economic factors, together with a particular intellectual fashion, run the risk of promoting an unnecessarily and inappropriately narrow international political theory, and closes by suggesting how this might be avoided.
Strategic discourse and the use of force in the twentieth century have become increasingly virtual. Leading the way, as the dominant actor in global politics, is the United States, whose diplomatic and military policies are now based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compellence that could best be described as virtuous war. At the cyborg heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance-with no or minimal casualties. Using networked information and virtual technologies to bring 'there' here in real time and with near-verisimilitude, virtuous war exercized a comparative as well as a strategic advantage for the digitally advanced. It has already become the 'fifth dimension' of US global hegemony, with a very real gap opening between technological capability and strategic value on the one side, and theoretical understanding and ethical awareness on the other. There is a clear and present need to develop a virtual theory that can assess the perils and promises of this intimate relationship between modes of representation and violence.
A set of ethical issues-tensions between democratization and globalization, about some ways in which the global inequalities have increased, and about gross failures of contemporary international cooperation-provide reason to consider our understanding of global governance and the political forces organized to support or transform it. Many scholars agree on the existence of a global polity characterized by the dominance of neo-liberalism, the growing network of both public and private regimes that extend across the world's largest regions, the system of global intergovernmental organizations, and transnational organizations both carrying out some of the traditional service functions of global public agencies and working to create regimes and new systems of international integration. Scholars who emphasize the historically contingent social construction of human institutions and who focus on the transformative potential of transnational social movements have provided the greatest insight into what can be done to confront the ethical issues raised by contemporary global governance. Almost all analysts agree that the current great powers cannot be relied upon to facilitate progressive change, although that is only one reason why global governance is likely to remain inefficient and incapable of shifting resources from the world's rich to the poor, even though it may continue to play a role in promoting liberal democracy and the empowering of women.
International Political Economy (IPE), as a diverse and fragmented field of inquiry, has often had trouble situating itself in the social sciences. This article argues that IPE belongs firmly in the broader tradition of political economy in the social sciences and begins by summarizing the emergence of IPE in its contemporary context, starting with the late 1960s and early 1970s debates among IR scholars on the nature and meaning of interdependence, of the importance of 'high' versus 'low' politics, and of 'transnational' versus 'international' relations. The article goes on to demonstrate that IPE has emerged in a far from coherent fashion, though this diversity and ecumenism is not to be deplored. The second section of the article argues that the core conceptual issue in IPE remains the nature of the state-market relationship. The way this relationship is viewed has a considerable impact on how the prospects for change in the structures-the normative and material underpinnings-of world order are to be understood. It argues that most IPE scholars, despite their protestations, still see the state and the market as separate and indeed antagonistic dynamics. The logic of the state and the market are distinct. Scholars need to take a final and decisive step in accepting that, in empirical and conceptual terms, the state and the market are part of the same, integrated system of governance: a state-market condominium that operates simultaneously through the competitive pressures of the market and the political processes that shape the boundaries and structures within which that competition (or lack thereof takes place.
Review Articles
This article seeks to uncover the extent to which our ways of understanding contemporary Africa are influenced by our national (historical, cultural, political, intellectual) traditions through an examination of the influential French journal Politique Africaine, whose twentieth anniversary falls this year. In a wide-ranging review article that discusses in detail the 1999 issues of Politique Africaine but is informed by a consideration of the 'deep history' of that journal, the author argues that the French Africanist political scientists whose views appear in the journal are somewhat reluctant to open up to some of the new analysis of Africa available today.