International Relations

Publisher:: Sage Publications, Inc.
Publication date:: 2021-09-06

ISBN:: 0047-1178

Issue Number

No. 38-4, December 2024

Latest documents

China’s bid for international leadership in Central and Eastern Europe: role conflict and policy responses
China and Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) have intensified their cooperation over the past decade or so. Despite some modest progress, this cooperation has performed below the expectations of the CEECs in general, and, even more so, generated negative feedback and implications more widely. This study is motivated by the puzzle over why there are widening discrepancies between the two sides after initially positive expectations. Informed by the role theory of international relations, this paper mainly argues that there is an intrarole conflict between China’s perception of its international leadership role and the corresponding role expectations of China held by the CEECs. This framework is empirically assessed on the 17 + 1 cooperation, through which China strives to forge a leadership role for itself in relation to the CEECs. Amid generally low expectations of China’s leadership role, three general patterns of responses can be identified among the CEECs, including those of dissenters, pragmatists, and persisting partners. Furthermore, China’s leadership demands encountered challenges from other players, particularly the European Union and the United States.
Saving capitalism from empire: uses of colonial history in new institutional economics
This article contributes to theorising colonialism and capitalism within the same analytic frame through a critical engagement with the uses of colonial history in new institutional economics (NIE). The ‘colonial turn’ in NIE holds significant diagnostic value because although it incorporates colonialism into its account of the ‘great divergence’, it maintains a liberal conception of capitalism predicated on private property, competitive markets, and the rule of law. It is argued that NIE achieves this effect by admitting colonialism into its history of capitalism while excluding it from its theory of capitalism. By filtering colonialism through the dichotomy between ‘inclusive’ and ‘extractive’ institutions, NIE upholds the categorical association of capitalist growth with inclusive institutions. Drawing on critical theories of political economy, the article shows the limits of the NIE framework by identifying forms of colonial capitalism that do not resolve into a stylised opposition between inclusion and extraction. Colonial slavery, commercial imperialism, and settler colonialism strain the inclusive/extractive binary by highlighting (1) the interdependence of inclusive and extractive institutions in imperial networks accumulation, and (2) the violent expropriations at the origins of inclusive institutions, above all private property. Proposing to view NIE’s critique of colonialism as a ‘liberal critique of capitalist unevenness’, the article concludes on broader questions about inclusion and exclusion under ‘actually existing capitalism’.
A contestation of nuclear ontologies: resisting nuclearism and reimagining the politics of nuclear disarmament
The global politics of nuclear disarmament has become deeply contested over the past decade, particularly around the negotiation of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Different explanations are offered, but these tend to centre on the geopolitics of the ‘security environment’ conceived in realist terms. This article makes sense of the TPNW and the global politics of nuclear disarmament by examining its underlying discourse and contestation within a wider framework of nuclear hegemony and resistances to it, drawing on Robert Cox’s theory of hegemony. It argues that the politics of nuclear disarmament has hardened into a contestation between two broadly incommensurable nuclear worldviews, or nuclear ontologies: hegemonic nuclearism and subaltern anti-nuclearism. These are not just different perspectives, but fundamentally different ways of understanding global nuclear politics that have important implications for the nuclear disarmament movement. Three conclusions emerge from this: that intersectionality is vital to understanding subaltern anti-nuclearism within wider processes of resistance in global politics; that contestation between hegemonic nuclearism and subaltern anti-nuclearism is agonistic; and that ‘bridge building’ approaches to find a middle ground generally deny this agonism and thereby close down debate, and that this explains why they often fail to gain traction. The article builds on the critical scholarship on nuclear hegemony, discourse and resistance and develops an original framework of hegemonic and subaltern nuclearism and anti-nuclearism.
Fashion’s diplomatic role: an instrument of French prestige-based commercial diplomacy, 1960s–1970s
This article re-examines the aid-to-couture plans enacted by France at the end of the 1960s from both historical and diplomatic perspectives. In so doing, it assesses the decision-making process of French public authorities, couturiers and textile manufacturers by cross-referencing archives from multi-stakeholder meetings with diplomatic archives. By building on the current literature in Fashion Studies that stands at the confluence of cultural and business perspectives, this article adds to it a diplomatic perspective to re-evaluate the role of fashion for diplomacy. It argues that contrary to the traditional narrative on the role of fashion in favour of textile exports, haute couture and fashion instead became a fixture of France’s post-war prestige-based commercial diplomacy through a mix of nation branding avant la lettre and export branding.
The Chagos Islands and international orders: human rights, rule of law, and foreign rule
This article uses the Chagos Archipelago that is administered by the United Kingdom, used as a military base by the US, and claimed by Mauritius, as a case study to explore competing international orders and move the theorization of international orders forward. Considering international orders as functionally and geographically limited sets of rules, I focus on those three sets of orders that functionally relate to human rights, the rule of law, and foreign rule. I show that those orders that promote human rights and the rule of law more consistently and reject foreign rule have extended their geographic scope. The Chagos Islands dispute is an intriguing case study to probe shifts of and attempts to protect these orders as a vote in 2019 at the United National General Assembly forced states to take sides. At the same time, my analysis highlights that realpolitik prevents the full overturn of the challenged orders.
Realism, reckless states, and natural selection
Why is daredevil aggression like Russia’s war on Ukraine such an important factor in world politics? Neither offensive nor defensive realists give a fully satisfactory answer. This paper maintains that the problem lies in their shared assumption that states pursue security. Tracing neorealism’s roots in evolutionary economics, and hence indirectly in biological theories of natural selection, I argue that many policies are compatible with state survival. What is hard is surviving as a great power. States that rise to that rank, and remain there, behave as if they sought to maximize their influence, not their security. This Darwinian competition selects in favor of states with expansionist institutions and ideologies. Failing to recognize this phenomenon risks conferring a spurious legitimacy on imperialism. At the same time, neorealists have also committed a fallacy familiar to biologists: assuming that traits enhancing group fitness are selected even when they diminish fitness in intragroup competition. Whereas interstate competition selects in great powers for traits that promote influence-maximization, with the spread of democracy, intrastate competition increasingly selects for security-seeking. Yet the former process sometimes still dominates the latter, above all in authoritarian great powers.
State of nature versus states as firms: reassessing the Waltzian analogy of structural realism
This paper examines one often overlooked aspect of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics: the analogy he makes between firms and states. Specifically, I contrast this ‘states as firms’ analogy adopted by Waltz with the state of nature analogy that has often been attributed to him. I make three separate but interrelated claims: (1) the state of nature analogy is not only different from the states as firms analogy, but may also be an inappropriate one for structural realism in the sense that it fails to account for some of the theory’s key theses; (2) the states as firms analogy helps us to better understand, if not to fully embrace, how Waltz arrives at certain central premises of his theory; and (3) the states as firms analogy provides a more comprehensive account of dynamic effects of the international system, including the transformation of state attributes that would have been neglected by those who subscribe to the state of nature analogy.
The limits of US national identity: interests and values in US military aid
According to policymakers, US national values shape US foreign aid policy. However, these national values clash with material interests when policymakers are faced with the decision of whether or not to grant US military aid to countries that do not adhere to US national values but do serve US security and economic interests. To what extent are US national values resilient to clashes with these material interests? This paper hypothesizes that national values are resilient to clashes with interests to the extent to which these values are a salient feature of US national identity. The findings indicate that more prominent values (democracy) are almost impervious to countervailing interests while more tangential values (enterprise and human rights) exhibit different effects on US military aid allocation depending on the security and economic importance of the recipient state.
Mission saves us all: Great Russia and Global Britain dealing with ontological insecurity
In this paper we analyse a situation wherein the political establishments of Russia and the United Kingdom, in the face of ontological insecurity, use narratives with messianic overtones in their foreign policies. Although these narratives do not feature prominently in the official discourse, they are nevertheless noticeable and provide a valuable insight into dynamics of national identity. We call them ‘mission narratives’ and interpret their (re)appearance in foreign policy as a reaction to a ‘critical situation’ which undermines the stability of the autobiographical narrative of both countries. Although different in scope and nature, the fall of the USSR and the Brexit referendum both resulted in the status and identity of the two states being questioned. Both countries reacted by emphasising their special role in the world. Referring to mission in foreign policy strengthens a coherent autobiographic narrative which soothes ontological uncertainties.
The North-South divide and everything that gets left out in-between: conceptualizing Central and Eastern Europe to explain its positioning on climate change
The North-South divide forms the central axis along which scholars study the contemporary global order. Yet many countries fall in-between the cracks of a world divided into core and periphery. This paper develops a structural account to understand the position of countries in this space of in-betweenness. The focus is on Central and Eastern Europe. I draw on already existing scholarship on liminalities, the varieties of capitalism and transition studies to argue that a liminal identity of in-betweenness goes hand-in-glove with a domestic logic of transitioning, as the state seeks to move somewhere else. Furthermore transitioning dynamics position the state in the semi-periphery, as the transition to the civilizational core requires capital and know-how from abroad. The resulting semi-peripheral position further underlines the liminal identity. The paper uses this apparatus to understand why CEE countries are typically climate change laggards within the EU. Their continuing liminal identity results in frustration over and resistance against the schooling tendencies of Brussels and Western European capitals. The dynamics of a sense of imposition of climate change mitigation policies stem from CEE’s liminal positioning as apprentices, but the reasons for the perceived alienness of such policies are located in domestic societal dynamics, and CEE countries’ economic structure. The specific political structures of communism and the communist transition have strengthened particularistic personal ties of friendship and family between individuals and the localities they live in, while simultaneously weakening general and abstract conceptions of the public good. Accordingly initiatives for preserving specific localities can be strong, but conceptions of protecting an abstract, global climate, are not well developed. Additionally, the material costs of protecting the climate are higher in post-communist economies due to their comparative advantage in resource and labour intensive industries, their reliance on foreign capital, and a lack of domestic innovations.