1. Introduction to International Relations Week 1 Lecturer: Andris Banka

2. Introduction to International Relations
How you will be graded: 20% participation = 10% attendance + 10% being active in the class 30% Midterm exam 50% Final Exam

3. Objectives of the Course
Focus on the basic concepts and actors in International Relations
See the common points and controversies of different theories
Look at the evolution of the international system

4. Major Questions
Who are the basic actors in world politics? (the structure of the international system, states, classes, genders, individuals)?
Are states the major actors in international systems? What is the role of non-state actors?
What are the causes of war? Is the primary reason nationalism, ideology, the lack of world government, or the fact that people are by nature aggressive?
Can stability be achieved in the international system? If yes how?

5. Peace of Westphalia and the State System
The history of state system is the history of international relations and goes back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). In our time, the Peace of Westphalia has acquired a special resonance as the path breaker of a new concept of international order that has spread around the world.
Peace of Westphalia is regarded as the starting point for the international relations.
It gave an end to the Holy Roman Empire and established the modern European state system. This newly created European state system was based on the concept of sovereignty that was introduced by the Peace of Westphalia. The agreement also encouraged the institutionalization of diplomacy and armies.

6. Peace of Westphalia and the State System
The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or universal rule had prevailed in Europe’s contests.
Instead, each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religious vocations of its fellow states as realities and refrain from challenging their existence.
The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order. The right to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was affirmed.
The structure established in the Peace of Westphalia represented the first attempt to institutionalize an international order on the basis of agreed rules and limits and to base it on a multiplicity of powers rather than the dominance of a single country.

7. State System ( ):
Actors: relatively small number of states, growing but limited number of non-state actors, system focus on Europe, limited impact of ideological divisions between state actors.
Structure: multipolar, five great powers: Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.
Patterns of interaction: great power war diminished in frequency, but increases in intensity, severity. Costs of war increase with industrialization. Developments in communication technologies lead to expansion of international trade and commerce. With the improved communications, importance of diplomacy increases.
Rules and practices: a managed balance of power system. Use of great power conferences to resolve disputes.

8. Enlargement of the State System
After the Second World War, with the decolonization process in Asia and Africa, once colonized states became independent.
Growth of the idea of national self-determination as a basis for the structure of international relations.
Europe, once the center of the international system weakened by two world wars, lost its centrality. By 1945, world arena dominated by two rival superpowers: US vs. SU.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union together with the breakup of Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War, many new independent states joined to the state system: Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia...

9. Enlargement of the State System
The number of actors operating in the system increased, almost 200 states exist in the world today and the state system turned out to be a global institution.
That means that world politics cover variety of states that differ from each other substantially in terms of their cultures, religions, languages, forms of government, military capacity, levels of economic and technological development.
The ordering of the states at the top of the world hierarchy changed: rise of the United States.
International system became also divided in terms of the distribution of wealth between rich and poor countries.

10. What made our lives that international?
Improvements in communications technologies particularly internet and transportation technologies enable us to come into contact with people, places, products, opportunities and ideas from other countries very easily and rapidly.
We now live in a world where it is impossible to isolate our experiences and transactions from an international dimension. Today, international relations could be used to describe a range of interactions between people, groups, firms, associations, parties, nations or states or between these and (non)governmental international organizations.
Participation in international relations or politics is inescapable. No state can exist in isolation or be master of its own fate. Complete isolation is usually not an option. When states are isolated and are cut off from the state system, their people usually suffer as a result. That has been the case recently with regard to Libya, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran.

11. The ‘Rise of the Rest’
Today in addition to around 200 sovereign states, there are more than 300 international intergovernmental organizations. The number of internationally operating NGOs across the world is around 40,000.
Outside the Western world, regions that have played a minimal role in these rules’ original formulation question their validity in their present form and have made clear that they would work to modify them. For example, questioning of the United Nations.
‘Newcomers’ to global level – China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey. Interested in larger regional role.

12. The ‘Rise of the Rest’