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54161. Three and a Half Centuries of the Westphalian State System

Author:
Varun Sahni
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
This short paper studies how the international system has evolved over the last 350 years through an identification of its most important features. The paper has a pedagogic rather than research orientation, and is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes the most significant features of international relations from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the Second World War. It demonstrates how, over the centuries, the evolution of alliances and the rise of a peace norm transformed a war system into a peace system, thereby mitigating the basic systemic condition of anarchy on the salient structural characteristics of the sovereign state system. The second section studies international relations during the Cold War, with the focus on the strategic, economic, ideological and cultural factors that defined the international system during that period. The third section of the paper analyzes international relations since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The various developments and trends that are leading to systemic change are examined. Despite the sundry challenges posed to the state by non-state actors, the rise of new issue-areas and sub-systemic supranational integration, the sovereign state and the Westphalian system is expected to endure.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, Development, and Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Berlin and Westphalia

54162. Drug Trafficking in US-Mexican Relations: The Politics of Simulation

Author:
Jorge Chabat
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
This document presents the hypothesis that the Mexican and U.S. governments are trapped in their current anti-drug strategy. This strategy causes high levels of violence and corruption in Mexican territory, and cannot be changed because it responds to pressures exerted by American public opinion on its own government. One of the consequences is that the U.S. government is compelled annually to certify the Mexican government's fight against drugs. This certification constrains an accurate evaluation of Mexico's combat against narcotrafficking, because it tends to underestimate failures and exaggerate accomplishments. Nevertheless, the possibility of change in the anti-drug strategy is limited, so this scenario is expected to endure for several years. In this sense on can also expect a better integration f Mexican and U.S. anti-drug policies in the near and medium term.
Topic:
International Relations, Crime, and Government
Political Geography:
United States, America, North America, and Mexico

54163. International Explanations for Stock Market Opening

Author:
Susan Minushkin
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
Most studies on financial market liberalization focus on wealthy countries, emphasizing international, economic or domestic political factors as explanations for financial liberalization or have specified the conditions under which one factor dominates in causal significance. They have not tested whether their arguments are applicable to the middle-income countries that comprise the 'emerging markets.' Focusing on these countries, this paper seeks to isolate and test a series of propositions derived from international approaches. The main contribution of this article is to provide some first-cut testing of the existing hypotheses, as a guide for other researchers in terms of the timing, pace and style of financial opening in middle-income countries.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, Emerging Markets, and International Trade and Finance

54164. A Theoretical and Statistical Assessment of the Structural Reform in Latin America

Author:
Jorge A. Schiavon
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
This working paper argues that the institutional variation between Latin American countries is one of the central variables that explains the huge differences in the implementation, and level of consolidation of the structural reform process in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, an issue still unexplained in a satisfactory way in the existing literature. The argument is tested and supported using a statistical model that includes macroeconomic indicators in the explained side of the equation (structural reform), and constitutional, electoral, and party system data on the explanatory side (institutional configuration).
Topic:
Development and Government
Political Geography:
South America, Latin America, and Central America

54165. Brazil, India and South Africa: Three Pathways to Regional (In)security

Author:
Varun Sahni
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the regional security problems of Brazil, India and South Africa in the Southern Cone of South America, South Asia, and southern Africa, respectively. The three states are treated as emerging powers, i.e., middle powers that have the capability and intention to maneuver their way into great power status. a study of the regional distributions of military and socioeconomic capability suggest Brazilian regional primacy, Indian regional dominance and South African regional supremacy. Furthermore, while Brazil's neighbors ignore its regional status, India's neighbors contest it and South Africa's neighbors acknowledge it. In the first three sections of the paper, the three regional powers studied in their respective regions, with emphasis on the geographical boundaries, historical evolution, cultural characteristics and power dynamics of each region. A comparative analysis of the nuclear option chosen by each emerging power is presented in the section immediately following the three case studies. The final section situates the regional security of the emerging powers in the context of U.S. grand strategy and analyzes security cooperation between Brazil, India, South Africa and the U.S. It is concluded that in their quest to transcend their regional bounds and have a global impact, the regional security context is a critical factor for the emerging powers.
Topic:
Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
United States, South Asia, India, South Africa, Brazil, and South America

54166. The Globalization of Property Rights: An Anglo and American Frontier Land Paradigm, 1700-1900

Author:
John Weaver
Publication Date:
02-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Old-world ideas accompanied European migrants, and a few changed the globe. An English obsession with landed property was implanted in settlement colonies, so that, between the late 1600s and late 1800s, private initiatives and official planning on British colonial and American frontiers interacted to frame property rights to extensive regions. This paper dwells on that interaction and the tensions between private goals and state sovereignty. The state was essential for framing property rights when these were associated with land and in situ resources. In very recent times, property rights have fostered entirely new industries, for example in software and genetically modified biota. Property rights have changed traditional activities such as art and entertainment. Do new forms of property - "less constrained by physical location" - leave the state with a reduced role in the realm of property rights? Does the paradigm of evolving property rights seen in previous centuries suggest any parallels with struggles over more recent property rights? These are questions for members of the institute to consider. We will offer several concluding thoughts.
Topic:
Globalization, Government, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
America and Europe

54167. Identity, Empathy and International Relations

Author:
Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
The insertion of identity politics into international relations undermines the capacity for cosmopolitan empathy, a capacity that might be useful in ameliorating some of the world's social problems. Empathy is the capacity to put oneself into another's shoes and recognize a stranger's humanity. The useful post-modern stress on the mutability of identity has hardened in identity politics into the creation of exclusive social categories of Oppressed and Oppressor. The social creation of such categories through such devices as the politics of amnesia paves the way for isolationist indifference. Yet data drawn both from the sociology of genocide and from the author's own research shows that humanitarian empathy across lines of identity is possible.
Topic:
International Relations, Civil Society, and Imperialism

54168. Globalization as the End and the Beginning of History: The Contradictory Implications of a New Paradigm

Author:
Arif Dirlik
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
This paper seeks to understand globalization as a new paradigm. It recognizes that there is much about the discourse of globalization that is ideological, that seeks to cover up the detrimental consequences of globalization for the majority of the world's population. It suggests nevertheless that there may be much to be gained from viewing it as a new paradigm, albeit a contradictory one, that has replaced an earlier paradigm of modernization. It makes an analytical distinction between globalization as historical process, which is at least as old as the history of capitalism, if not older, and globalization as a new way of looking at the world and its past, which is quite novel. To illustrate its argument, the paper contrasts present-day political and intellectual consequences of globalization with the late nineteenth-century, where several observers have identified a level of economic globalization greater than that of the present. It argues that whereas earlier globalization produced nationalism, colonialism and epistemological universalism, globalization presently is postcolonial, challenges the nation-state, and is marked by a break-down of universalism. It follows that globalization needs to be understood not just as global integration, as suggested by its ideologues and in economistic interpretations, but equally importantly as a new mode of fragmentation. An analytical distinction between globalization as process and paradigm is necessary to grasping globalization as a new mode of comprehending the world, but it is nevertheless necessary from a critical perspective to keep in mind the historical relationship between the two; globalization may be viewed as a new beginning in breaking down old hegemonies, but globalization may be viewed also as the ultimate victory of capitalist modernity. The contradictoriness may be perceived in the epistemologies of postmodernism and postcolonialism. The paper suggests that these epistemologies are best grasped as symptoms of globalization, that seek to break with modern and colonial ways of knowing, and yet are stamped by those very legacies. The discussion turns, by way of conclusion, to the relationship between globalization and history. While globalization is best understood historically, it also has produced new ways of looking at history. Three modes are selected here as products of globalization: world history writing, which is consciously motivated at the present by the idea of globalization, and seeks to understand the past in nonEurocentric ways, but may be understood also as a mode of containing the break-down of universalism; and two different perspectives on the "end of history" as we have known it. First, a EuroAmerican perspective that sees in the end of universalism(and the crowding of the past with incompatible and incommensurate cultural claims) also the end of history. Second, a conscious challenge to history as a modern way of knowing in the name of "alternatives to history." The paper concludes that these conflicts over history, too, point to the present as both an end, and a possible new beginning-but only as a possibility.
Topic:
Globalization, Political Theory, and History

54169. Building a Partnership, Turkey and the European Union

Author:
David Barchard
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV)
Abstract:
This paper is an attempt to identify some of the main practical issues and themes involved in Turkey's accession process in the run-up to the appearance of the Accession Partnership document in early November 2000. It is also an attempt to explore ways of bridging the gap between Turkish and EU attitudes on the political issues that have to be resolved before full membership negotiations can be started.
Topic:
International Relations, European Union, Partnerships, and Regional Integration
Political Geography:
Europe, Turkey, Middle East, and Mediterranean

54170. The Dynamics of Coordination

Author:
Marc Sommers
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
This study takes a fresh look at coordination dynamics by exploring two situations that were noteworthy both for the difficult challenges humanitarian organizations faced and for their innovative responses. The cases shed light on coordination in general and two contexts in particular: coordination for a country (Sierra Leone in the 1990s) and coordination for refugee camps (Rwandan refugees in Ngara District, Tanzania).
Topic:
International Relations, Human Rights, and International Organization
Political Geography:
Tanzania and Rwanda