International History

Question 1

What is structure and agency?

Answer 1

• Structure = context in which units (actors) interact with each other
• Agency = the ability for actions

Question 2

What is modernity?

Answer 2

• Is both an historical period whose emergence is difficult to pin down, a mode of social organisation and an aesthetic or sensibility
• As a mode of social organisation it is market by the emergence of certain political norms: Equality among men, the rule of Law, sovereignty of states, the secularisation of politics
• Also a division of social, economic and political affairs into constituent parts (church from state, culture from politics, public from private etc.)

Question 3

What is the modern state?

Answer 3

• “Ideal Typical”
  
  • Political form
  • Limited territory
  • Bureaucratic (divide governance
    by function)
  • Democratic
  • Legitimate monopoly of the use of
    force internally and
    externally
  • Independence: Modern states
    recognise the existence of other
    states and their sovereignty in
    the system

Question 4

What are political units?

Answer 4

Organised bodies of collective action

Question 5

What is hegemony?

Answer 5

Occurs when one or more states in a system have the power and authority to lay down the law for other states and to determine external relations between states while leaving them domestically independent

Question 6

What is Suzerainty?

Answer 6

- When one state exercise political
  (internal and external) control over
  another while retaining nominal
  independence 
- Relationship has an element of
  acceptance

Question 7

What is Dominion?

Answer 7

• When imperial authority determines
  the internal government but the communities retain independence
• More indirect governance than direct
• Soviet relations w/ eastern europe or British Raj prior to 1857

Question 8

What is Empire?

Answer 8

Direct administration of control or control over peripheral territories

Question 9

What is legitimacy?

Answer 9

• Protestant reformation
• Major concern of Locke, Hobbes
• Acceptance of authority
• Public right
  
  • There is an institutionalisation
    of state legitimacy
• Right of ruler to be obeyed
• Feeling of belonging to the polity
• Citizenship

Question 10

Give an overview of The Peloponnesian War

Answer 10

• Because of the perpetual behaviour of the different states, the enemy of today could become the ally of tomorrow, it wasn’t in any of the actor’s interests to completely annihilate any of the others, leading to a natural limit to aggression
• Merchant-class funded tyrants often upheaved the existing government of their city state - democracy associated with financial enterprise and imperial thinking
• Actors (Athens) exploited the political systems of the different states/tribes/periphery to meet its ends - never altruistic always instrumental

Question 11

What is the norm and exception historically?

Answer 11

Historically is appears that Empire is the norm and State is the exception

Question 12

What brought about the Holy Roman Empire?

Answer 12

The Pope, threatened by his own papacy and other states, crowned Charlemagne, king of modern day germany (Lombards & Franks) the Holy Roman Emperor, because he needs the military strength that the king had.

Question 13

What was the relationship between the Church and the New World?

Answer 13

• The church provides legitimacy for
  the conquest of the Americas -
• The church also provides authorisation of the conquest and subjegation of the new lands discovered - Pope Nicholas V licenses the portugese king to reduce to perpetual slavery all inhabitants of Africa and Southern coasts until their end as the enemy of christ
• Roman imperium helped to consodliate european states in their relationships with the new terrorise in the americas