In the world in which we live, the globe is divided up into sovereign nations. Remember that a sovereign state is one in which the state in the form of the government is the highest earthly power – there is no place to appeal a decision of the state except the state itself. So a sovereign state has defined borders that are respected by its neighbors, and control over its territory. In this part of the discussion, when we use the term “the state,” we mean a sovereign nation, not a political subdivision such as a U.S. or Mexican state. States in federal systems such as the U.S. and Mexico are formally referred to as sovereign states, but they are still ultimately dominated by national governments.
Moreover, this is where the challenges of international relations begin. In much of our discussion of politics, it is presumed that the state holds power and uses it as the people who control the state see fit. The power may be divided into different branches and levels of government, or not divided; through mechanisms such as elections, different people may assume power and state policies may change as a result of those elections. This presumption of a kind of state and a kind of allocation of power casts the study and practice of politics in a particular light. There is a way to resolve disputes; ultimately, somebody has the power to say yes or no and, absent violent revolution; everybody has to go along. However, in a world of genuinely sovereign states, which recognize no higher authority than themselves, the system is best described as anarchy.
A sovereign state is said to be the ultimate authority within its boundaries, borders that are respected by its neighbors. The government is legitimate in the eyes of the citizens, who generally obey the law. The United States is a sovereign nation; so are France and Indonesia. Most of the 195 recognized nations on earth are, in fact, sovereign nations.
Somalia, on the east coast of Africa, is not quite. The nation is currently divided into three parts. First is the former legitimate government of Somalia, which controls very little of the country, mostly in the south, and is beset by various warlords and religious factions. In the middle is a functioning state calling itself Puntland, which does not seek independence from Somalia but, at this point, might as well be. In the north is a state calling itself Somaliland, which is mainly functioning as a sovereign nation although few other countries currently recognize it as such.
This world of sovereign states came together in a treaty called the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. That treaty ended the 30 Years War, literally a three-decade-long conflict between Catholic and Protestant rulers and their subjects that tore apart what is now Germany and caused widespread suffering across Europe. Throughout history, people have found creative and largely pointless reasons for killing each other. However, the upshot of the treaty was that states had a right to order their affairs, in this case, the most northern, Protestant principalities of Germany and what was then called the Holy Roman Empire. The treaty, in effect, created the notion of sovereignty as an acknowledged fact of international law and diplomacy, and the Europeans exported the idea from there to the rest of the world.
European colonialism, as when the European nation-states carved up Africa at the end of the 1800s, forced sovereignty onto sometimes disparate groups of people that had previously been more or less sovereign nations in their parts of the continent. Only two African states – Liberia, which had been carved out earlier in the century by freed American slaves, and Ethiopia, which had been successfully fending off invaders for a thousand years—survived the onslaught. Although Africa had long been home to several substantial kingdoms and empires, the Europeans by the late 1800s had taken a technological leap forward that allowed them to conquer the continent in a few decades. The redrawing of the African map lumped together with groups of people who had previously been part of different states, creating political challenges when the Europeans were forced out after World War II.
A world comprising sovereign states means that there is no overarching world power that can tell them what to do. Why not, then, a world government to sort everything out? First, most if not all the sovereign states would have to agree, and both political leaders and ordinary citizens tend to dislike having someone else tell them what to do. The farther away from that someone is, the less they like it. Visions of black helicopters and invading U.N. troops were the stuff of many Americans’ paranoid nightmares in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the lack of any reality to this fear. Even if such a government could be established, the variety and diversity of the world would make it very difficult to rule, even in a highly democratic state. A world government would have to keep control and settle local and regional disputes, becoming, in the process, as despotic as the states it replaces, if not more so.
So, what we are left with are a lot of sovereign states, and a world system that is based on that single fact. Moreover, as there is no referee or overarching power, one state can erase another, as when Prussia and Russia effectively erased Poland, once the most significant state in Europe, from the map in 1795. The Poles, and their language, culture, and traditions remained, but the Polish state did not reappear until 1918. This does not mean that a state can act without consequence. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, states from around the world united in the effort to drive the Iraqis out and re-establish Kuwaiti sovereignty. Later in the same decade, Europeans and Americans joined to end ethnic cleansing in what was then Yugoslavia. So no state operates in a vacuum.
What remained of Poland after its 18th-century partition, and what most defines a place such as Somalia today, is a nation. In the precise terminology of international relations, a state has defined borders, but a nation has a cultural, linguistic, or ethnic similarity among a group of people. A nation is a sense of community among a group of people; that group of people may want to control themselves politically and become a nation as well. So, for example, the Kurds, of whom around 30 million live in the Middle East, are a nation but not a state. They are divided chiefly between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, comprising the largest single ethnic group in the world without its state. Kurdish separatists have fought for independence in Turkey, and all but carved out a sovereign state in the north of Iraq. However, at the moment, the Kurds remain a nation, and not quite a state.
Sometimes, we speak of a nation-state, an entity that combines elements of both these things. The United States, perhaps alone among the states of the world, is a nation based on ideology rather than an ethnicity. Still, the U.S. is sometimes given to nationalism, a sense of how to act and think, a sense of right and wrong, and a sense of separateness from others that includes a sentimental attachment to one’s homeland. Americans are not unique in this regard, but do tend to exhibit it more than others. This is sometimes called American exceptionalism, or the belief that the United States is unlike other states and in fact, has a unique destiny in the world. All states are unique in their ways. Whether the U.S. has a unique role to play is for you to decide.
Sometimes the system is dominated by a hegemon—a single state that is powerful enough to exert some influence on world politics. Hegemony means leadership or dominance of one person or state over others. In the case of international relations, Great Britain exercised a degree of global hegemony in the 1800s; the United States has exercised a similar role in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, a hegemon is not all-powerful, and the price of maintaining hegemony can be very high. Consequently, states are either striving for hegemony, or a balance of power, so that no hegemon arises. The anarchic system is world politics is, in fact, anti-hegemonic, as it resists attempts by anyone power to take over the whole world.
States interact through diplomacy, international law, and war. The Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) referred to war as “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” Clausewitz was not completely a warmonger, so his famous quote probably should not be taken to mean that he thought it was OK to go on the warpath. However, in contemporary international politics, war can be seen as the failure of policy, given the extraordinarily high cost of modern warfare.
To that end, states often prefer to find other ways to solve disputes. For that reason, states pay some attention to international law, which seeks to constrain the behavior of states. International law exists through treaties and agreements negotiated by states, and through rule-making mechanisms in multinational agencies and groups. They also attempt, through diplomacy, to try to convince other states to make choices that will be beneficial to the state, the region, or the world. Diplomacy works when both sides are rational, in the sense that they each have some understanding of their self-interest.
Israel and Palestine
The story of the Israel and Palestine conflict goes back thousands of years and is rooted in religious and cultural differences. However, today’s modern conflict is more than just about religion; it is about water, natural resources, land use, infrastructure, and Israeli settlements. Many would argue that Israel began following World War II, when the United Nations partitioned Palestine into Israeli and Palestinian states. Others, especially Jews, believe the story goes back further to early biblical times. They claim that god thousands of years ago gave them the land.
There is a growing debate around the world about needs to be done to end the conflict between the people of Israel and Palestine. There are three options: 1) create a “two-state solution” where the Israeli people keep most of Israel, but give the Palestinians the West Bank and possibly Gaza Strip, 2) integrate Palestinians into Israel and legal citizens which would make them the majority within Israel, 3) keep a segregation between Israelis and Palestinians as it currently exists and be considered an apartheid by the global community.
Collective Military Force
A collective military force is what arises when countries decide that it is in their best interest to pool their militaries in order to achieve a common goal. The use of collective military force in the global environment involves two primary concepts: collective security and collective defense. These concepts are similar but not identical.
Collective Security
Collective security can be understood as a security arrangement, regional or global, in which each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all, and agrees to join in a collective response to threats to, and breaches of, the peace. Collective security is more ambitious than collective defense in that it seeks to encompass the totality of states within a region or indeed globally, and to address a wide range of possible threats.
Collective security is achieved by setting up an international cooperative organization, under the auspices of international law. This gives rise to a form of international collective governance, albeit limited in scope and effectiveness. The collective security organization then becomes an arena for diplomacy.
The UN and Collective Security
The UN is often provided as the primary example of collective security. By employing a system of collective security, the UN hopes to dissuade any member state from acting in a manner likely to threaten peace, thereby avoiding any conflict.
Collective Defense
Collective defense is an arrangement, usually formalized by a treaty and an organization, among participant states that commit support in defense of a member state if it is attacked by another state outside the organization.
NATO and Collective Defense
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the best known collective defense organization. Its now-famous Article V calls on (but does not fully commit) member states to assist another member under attack. This article was invoked after the September 11 attacks on the United States, after which other NATO members assisted in the US War on Terror in Afghanistan. As a global military and economic superpower, the US has taken charge of leading many of NATO’s initiatives and interventions.
Benefits and Drawbacks to Collective Defense
Collective defense entails benefits as well as risks. On the one hand, by combining and pooling resources, it can reduce any single state’s cost of providing adequately for its security. Smaller members of NATO, for example, have leeway to invest a more significant proportion of their budget on non-military priorities, such as education or health, since they can count on other members to come to their defense, if needed.
On the other hand, collective defense also involves risky commitments. Member states can become embroiled in costly wars in which neither the direct victim nor the aggressor benefit. In the First World War, countries in the collective defense arrangement known as the Triple Entente (France, Britain, Russia) were pulled into war quickly when Russia started full mobilization against Austria-Hungary, whose ally Germany subsequently declared war on Russia.
Modern Influences on the Political Landscape
It has been argued that the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused the most substantial geopolitical upheaval since World War II, dramatically changing the political map and the world balance of power. The disbanding of Cold War alliances led to the creation of 15 independent states including, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. In the past twenty-five years, these sweeping geopolitical changes resulted in a dramatic shift from military power to economic power. For example, Russia lost significant economic power after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, oil is an abundant natural resource in Russian, and as the price of oil increases, the Russian economy has begun to rebound. This rebound has provided vast amounts of money to rebuild their infrastructure, military, and economy and has thus dramatically improved their influence in the world.
As Russia’s economy has grown, so has the desire to reunite many former USSR states under Russian rule. In 2014, during civil unrest in Ukraine, Russia moved troops into the Crimean Peninsula, telling the world community that it was to protect the nation’s cultural and economic interests in the region. Considering the conflict from a spatial perspective makes it easier to understand why this region is so important to Russia.
Located on the Northern Coast of the Black Sea, Crimea was a Russian territory until 1954 when it was given to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in an attempt to distribute natural resources more equitably in the USSR equally. When the Soviet Union broke up more than thirty years later, Crimea became part of the newly- independent Ukraine rather than Russia. In 2014, it was reported that nearly 60 percent of the population on the Crimean Peninsula still spoke Russian and considered themselves to be ethnic Russians.
Language and culture are only part of the story. Consider this:
- The Crimean Peninsula has been home to Russia’s the Black Sea naval fleet since the 18th century.
- The small waterway between Crimea and the Russian mainland is the only access to the Azov Sea, the western heart of Russia’s oil and natural gas distribution to Europe.
Additionally, Russia’s annexation of Crimea has thrown a spotlight on other disputed regions whose unresolved status could be a spark for conflict in the region (Region 4.4). Transnistria is a slim sliver of Moldova that split away from the country as the Soviet Union collapsed and has effectively been a Russian and Ukrainian speaking enclave ever since.
Transnistria residents aspire to join Russia. The Moldovan government has already warned Russia not to attempt a Crimean-style. Other hot spots include Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in 1993. South Ossetia has been the subject of an unresolved conflict with Georgia since 1992 and provided Russia justification for a short war with Georgia in 2008. Ethnic Armenians have controlled Nagorno-Karabakh since 1994, despite being claimed by Azerbaijan, and the presence of Russia’s 102nd Military Base in Armenia prompts speculation that Russia could again intervene there. Ethnicity trumps nationality in these areas, and the legacy of mixed communities hitherto part of the Russian Imperial and Soviet empires is coming back to haunt international relations.
Another modern influence on the political landscape comes from the rise in democratic governments. In a democracy, most governments draw up functional regions called electoral districts (or voting districts) to determine who may vote for whom, which a specific government office represents areas and which laws govern the actions of which regions. The smallest American electoral region is the precinct, which, at least in urban areas, is roughly “your neighborhood,” usually consisting of a few city blocks. Citizens may vote only in the precinct assigned to their home address, and this precinct is typically part of multiple, larger, nested electoral districts, like wards, townships, counties, congressional districts, and states. Most of the time, electoral districts have roughly the same number of people in each equivalent district. So for example, in 2011, each of California’s 80 State Assembly Districts had between 461,000 and 470,000 people. Each district has almost the same population as its neighbor. Efforts are made to keep all such districts similarly sized, so when a district loses or gains population, the boundaries must be redrawn to ensure even representation and avoid over, or underrepresentation called malapportionment.
Every ten years, after the decennial U.S. Census is completed, the U.S. Constitution requires electoral districts must be redrawn following the census results. This process, known as political redistricting, involves a great deal of geographic strategizing, and the outcome of this process fundamentally shapes American politics. In most U.S. states, the state legislature controls the redistricting process, and this fact opens the process to unfair political practices. The reason why the political redistricting process is so essential is that elections are heavily influenced by how the boundaries of electoral districts are drawn. Political groups that control the placement of boundaries are far more likely to control who gets elected, which laws get passed, and how tax money is collected and spent.
Each redistricting cycle, politicians in many locations, are accused of purposefully constructing political district boundaries to favor one group (Democrats, Latinos, labor unions, gun advocates, e.g.) over another. The construction of unfair districts is called gerrymandering. The odd term, “Gerrymander,” comes from a newspaper story that characterized the unfair redistricting map of South Essex County in Massachusetts in 1812. The map of the redrawn districts strongly favored Massachusetts’ governor at the time, Elbridge Gerry. The shape of one district was so distorted that reporters suggested it looked like a salamander, thus providing the two words that became the halves of the term used today to describe the process of creating unfair political districts.
There are several different strategies that politicians use to gerrymander districts. Where there is little cooperation between political parties (or other interest groups), politicians may pursue strategies that aggressively seek to limit the political influence of opposition groups.
If the opposition (or ethnic minority) party is small enough, then the controlling group may draw lines through the minority areas, minimizing the opposition’s ability to influence the outcome of elections in as many regions as possible. This process, called cracking, has commonly been used to divide inner-city ethnic minority groups into multiple districts, each dominated numerically by whites. If the opposition grows too numerous to split, then group controlling the redistricting process may draw district lines so that the opposition is dominant in a few districts, or even a single district to minimize the power of the opposition in the overall system. That strategy is called packing. Even a statistical minority can control power by carefully packing the majority group into cleverly drawn district boundaries.
There are dozens of other techniques by which one group can control the political power of others through manipulating election boundaries. However, it is likely that the most common unfairly drawn electoral district is the so-called sweetheart gerrymander drawn up cooperatively by incumbents from opposing political parties in order to help maintain the status quo. This involves drawing up safe districts, which favor one party over the other, ensuring maintenance of the status quo and nearly guaranteeing uncompetitive general elections – the primary elections may still be competitive. The most controversial type of districts are those based on race, and whether minority groups benefit or are harmed by minority-majority districts.
Due to the perceived negative issues associated with gerrymandering and its effect on competitive elections and democratic accountability, numerous countries have enacted reforms making the practice either more difficult or less effective. Countries such as the U.K., Australia, Canada, and most of those in Europe have transferred responsibility for defining constituency boundaries to neutral or cross-party bodies.
Under these systems, an independent, and presumably objective, commission is created specifically for redistricting, rather than having the legislature do it. This is the system used in the United Kingdom, where the independent boundary commissions determine the boundaries for constituencies in the House of Commons and the devolved legislatures, subject to ratification by the body in question (almost always granted without debate). A similar situation exists in Australia, where the independent Australian Electoral Commission and its state-based counterparts determine electoral boundaries for federal, state, and local jurisdictions.
To help ensure neutrality, members of a redistricting agency may be appointed from relatively apolitical sources such as retired judges or longstanding members of the civil service, possibly with requirements for adequate representation among competing political parties. Additionally, members of the board can be denied access to information that might aid in gerrymandering, such as the demographic makeup or voting patterns of the population.