In Search of Security Way of Peace

Question 1

How is the world a ‘World of Difference’?

Answer 1

193 States (UN members),
Various forms of political rule from Liberal Democracy to Military Dictatorship.
Differing resources.
Highly developed, developing and underdeveloped states.
Highly ordered and peaceful states.
‘Failed’ states.
Differing provision of welfare, even between highly developed states.
States with highly developed sense f national identity.
States with no sense of nationhood.
Hierarchical: one group of states dominant (but not not necessarily dominance).
Global Heterogeneity; not a Global Village.

Question 2

How is the world ‘Changing Tracks’?

Answer 2

Security Dilemma rooted in Cold War perceptions about the nature of security.
Post-cold war security landscape is changing.
Emergence, or re-emergence, of different ways of thinking about security.
A broadening of the security agenda.

Question 3

How can security be redefined and what is the critique of this?

Answer 3

“Freedom from fear of threats to core values”

All embracing or a bit woolly?

Question 4

What are the 5 core liberal values?

Answer 4

Freedom
Democracy
Rule of Law
Equality
Free-market economics.

Question 5

What are the influences behind idealism?

Answer 5

Idealist theorists: drawn from a wide intellectual and political spectrum.
Broadly Anglo-American development.
UK: Fabian Socialists, Radical Liberals among the leading idealists.
Norman Angell, John Hobson, John Maynard-Keynes, David Mitrany.

Question 6

Which American President is associated with Idealism?

Answer 6

President Woodraw Wilson

‘Wilsonian Idealism’.

Question 7

What is the view on war according to Idealism?

Answer 7

Broad intellectual background but shared common belief that war is no inevitable.
If the root causes of war can be identified it can be eradicated as a feature of international relations.
Idealist diagnosis of the causes of war: two strands: Domestic politics and systematic structure.

Question 8

What are the domestic causes of war according to Idealists and what are the prescriptions?

Answer 8

Led to war by militarists and autocrats.
Legitimate aspirations to stateshood blocked by undemocratic, multinational imperial systems.

Prescriptions: Promotion of liberal democratic government.
National self-determination.

Question 9

What are the causes of war according to idealists in the international system and what are its prescriptions?

Answer 9

‘Structural anarchy’ and ‘secret diplomacy’ led to alliances systems committing states to wars that had not been sanctioned by national parliaments or assemblies.
Balance of power discredited.

Prescriptions:

Abandon the ‘balance of power’ and ‘secret diplomacy’.
‘Open covenants, freely arrived at’.
International organisation to ensure perpetual peace: The League of Nations.
Collective Security.
Law not war as the underlying principles of the international system.
Emphasis on the universal applicability of constittuional government and the rule of law.
Optimistic view of human nature.
Education sen as a means of breaking down the walls of ignorance and misunderstanding.

Question 10

What can idealism be summarised as in the most brief of terms?

Answer 10

A theory with which we can understand and explain the world in which we live (?)
A belief system that borders on being an ideology (?)
A view of how the world should be, not how it is.
Emphasises ideas, values reasoning and choice.

Question 11

What what ways did Idealism ‘fail’?

Answer 11

Weakness of the Versailles Settlement.
USA did not join the League of Nations.
UK and France had little faith in the principle of Collective Security.

Question 12

Following WW”, what was seen as proving a more satisfactory explanatory paradigm?

Answer 12

Realism and Neo-Realism.

Question 13

What is the most damming criticism of realism?

Answer 13

Failure to predict the end of the Cold War.

Question 14

What was seen as being beyond the scope of realism during the 20th century?

Answer 14

Increasingly widening agenda of international relations regarded as beyond the scope of realism.

Question 15

When did Neo Liberalism emerge, what does it seek to offer and what does it draw on?

Answer 15

Emerged as a response to neo-realism in the early 1980’s with the development of Keohane and Nye’s theory of ‘Complex Interdependence’.
Neo-Liberalism seeks to offer a more coherent, ‘scientifically-based’ picture of international relations.
It draws on models from economics and rational choice theories.

Question 16

What does Neo Liberalism stress?

Answer 16

Stresses the importance of the ways in which states, international organisations and other non-state actors promote international co-operation, peace and prosperity.

Question 17

What is the Kantian Triangle?

Answer 17

More institutions

More Democracy More Economic Interdependence

Question 18

What is Kant’s quote regarding democratic peace?

Answer 18

“If the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that wars should be declared…, nothing is more natural than they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, deciding for themselves all the calamities of war”

Question 19

What type of explanations does Kantian Peace provide?

Answer 19

Institutional explanations
Normative explanations
Interest explanations

Question 20

How has European Security changed after the Cold War?

Answer 20

As old threats to what was assumed to be security fade, new ones appear changing the nature of security.
Soft security/soft power
Turning swords into ploughshares.

Question 21

How is the Democratic Peace Theory applicable to European Integration?

Answer 21

Eastward enlargement of the EU: security policy?
Europe: A zone of peace and security.
K Deutsch: Security Community.
Draws together the three types of explanation: Institutional, Normative and Interest.

Question 22

What is the Schuman Declaration?

Answer 22

“The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible” (1950)

Question 23

What is the main criticism of the democratic peace theory?

Answer 23

Liberal Democracies appear willing to engage in violent conflict with non-democratic states.
Arguably more war-prone than non-democratic states.
Democratic imperialism?

Question 24

What is Democratic Pacifism and what are the problems with it?

Answer 24

Democracies are inherently more peaceful than non-democratic states (questionable assumption?)
Empirical evidence is ‘mixed’.
What do we mean when we talk about a ‘democracy’?

Question 25

Who came up with the Decline of War Thesis?

Answer 25

Pinkner

Question 26

What is the Decline of War Thesis?

Answer 26

The Better Angels of our Nature
After a 600- year stretch in which Western European countries started two new wars a year, they have not started one since 1945.
Nor have the 40 or so richest nations anywhere in the world engaged each other in armed conflict.

Question 27

What is the criticism of the decline of war thesis?

Answer 27

Selective ‘western-orientated’ cherry-picking or inevitable systemic dynamic.
Focus on combat deaths misleading and ignores the increasing number of non-combatant deaths.
‘Great Powers’ have avoided direct conflict but many examples of, neo-colonial wars, ‘proxy wars’, direct and indirect support of insurgencies etc.
Great powers have been engaged in violent conflict, of one form or another continuously since WW2.