Its the people, stupid

The structural realism article by Karen Ruth Adams, in my opinion, raised more questions than it answered. She did a very good job of explaining how Yugoslavia was allowed to break up because of the end of the Cold War, and she showed why the US and NATO became involved in the conflict, but she never really answered the question of why Yugoslavia was breaking up in the first place. This should be the first and most important thing that anyone attempting to explain Kosovo should talk about. The US and NATO intervention in Kosovo is only the response to this original problem. And that is what needs to be understood.

Why in the first place was Yugoslavia falling apart?

Adams is unable to answer this question because realism doesn’t have a way to answer it. Realism focuses too much on states and not enough on the people living inside of these states. Anyone who knows anything about Yugoslavia can tell you that it was a mixture of many different ethnic and religious groups. The lumping of all these people together after WWI went against the idea of self-determination. Yet the Allied powers created Yugoslavia anyways. So it should come as no surprise that Yugoslavia in the end failed as a state once the external forces holding it together disappeared. But it is not the disappearance of these forces that caused Yugoslavia to dissipate; it was the ethnic and religious diversity inside of the country that caused it to fail. The end of the Cold War merely allowed the forces inside of Yugoslavia to tear itself apart, it did not create them. But no where in the article does Adams discuss this. Instead she treats Kosovo as any realist has to, as an interaction between state actors.

This is the inherent flaw in realism, it ignores the foundation of everything thing that we know, individual people. States, just like all other organizations, are composed of people and this is a fact that can not be forgotten. For just as states struggle between themselves for power in the international system so do people struggle between themselves for power inside of those states.

Matt Bank

The Changing role of Hamas

I would like to expand a little upon what I said near the end of class of Thursday. I believe that after having won the Palestinian elections Hamas is in a very interesting position. They are no longer just a rogue, islamofacist, extremist, (insert other buzzwords here) terrorist group. Now they are a government. This changes all the rules.

Fighting terrorist or guerilla groups has always been difficult. The US in Vietnam or the USSR in Afghanistan shows this. Even in the current War on Terrorism one of the biggest problems we have faced is trying to figure out how exactly to fight terrorism. I remember a SNL skit from a few years ago where Will Ferrell as George W. Bush asked Osama Bin Laden to create a state so that he could invade it. This seems funny but it has a lot of relevance to IR. How exactly do you fight terrorists? You can try to arrest them and break up their cells and hiding spots, but ultimately they are an idea and it is very difficult to destroy an idea short of killing all the people who believe it, or by proving it completely wrong. You can’t fight terrorist like you can a state by invading their land and taking their capitol and killing their leader. That just doesn’t work. And that is one of the biggest problems when you are fighting terrorists.

But now Hamas isn’t just a terrorist group, they are a government. They have borders (kind of), they have people that they have to protect, they have an economy (once again kind of), and they have to run the Palestinian government. Now the US, Israel, the European Nations and Russia can deal with them on a state to state basis. This is the way that all governments are used to interacting. State to state. Hamas has become something, and is no longer just an idea floating around. They exist inside of the international system. This is important.

Now all of the rules have changed. This could prove to be a real break through for the peace process in the Middle East. Or this could turn back the peace process by years. I don’t know what is going to happen and I don’t think my making uneducated guesses about what will happen is very important. But if you want to hear them please by all means ask me and I will prepare the Magic 8 Ball.

Matt Bank

On Realism and Neoliberal Institutionalism

I would like to draw your attention to the chart on page 494 of the summer of 1988 issue of International Organization, or as you might also know it page 10 of the first reading we had to do for class. On this page Joseph M. Grieco, the author, presents the reader with a graph showing the difference between realism liberal institutionalism and this new version of neoliberal institutionalism. While Mr. Grieco highlights only five topics, and surly there are more issues that liberalism and realism might agree or disagree on, these five topics are the fundamental foundations of realism according to Mr. Grieco. Thus when comparing neoliberal institutionalism with realism we notice that they agree, more or less, on three out of the five subjects and the two that they do disagree on are highly related to each other. The two issues that they disagree on, the ability of international institutions to facilitate cooperation and optimism or pessimism over the ability for cooperation, both have the issue of cooperation at their heart. Thus the only issue that it appears that realism and neoliberal institutionalism are arguing over is whether or not cooperation is possible in the long run, with or without international institutions. Mr. Grieco seems to think that it is not, since he proposes that cooperation might help one state more than the other, and this would thus relatively hurt one state and make them unwilling to cooperate. He also says that neoliberal institutionalists discount, or more accurately, don’t look at relative gain, and focus entirely on absolute gain. Thus since cooperation can create a situation where all sides gain absolutely, neoliberal institutionalists would believe that cooperation is possible. But the problem, in my opinion, with both of these arguments is that they are attempting to speak for all states, in all situations, in all times. I propose that the relationship between the two states that are interacting will determine whether or not the states are concerned with absolute or relative gains.

While ultimately realism is correct in its assumption of anarchy in the world system, I believe that this anarchy can be subdued in certain cases between states that wish to cooperate (but I acknowledge that ultimately there is nothing stopping one state from ceasing to cooperate and invading their idealistic neighbor). The Western European Democracies are a great example of this. Whether through economic, political or civilizational bonds (that is a debate for another day), these states have created a situation where cooperation is very possible. War is no longer thought to be a possibility between these states, they have created a supranational government, and they have tied their economies very closely together. This has removed many opportunities for relative gain in the hope of absolution gain for everyone. Thus neoliberal institutionalism is applicable in this situation.

But you could not hope to replicate these results in most other places of the world. Other countries do not have the bonds and the desires for absolute gains and instead focus on relative gains. It would be very difficult to convince countries such as Israel and Iran that they could each gain absolutely through cooperation. Thus realism is the best way to analyze these countries interactions with each other.

So I propose that scholars need to be able to look at different situations in different ways. No two countries are exactly alike and the relationships between countries are almost always different. So keep an open mind and be able to look at things from more than one perspective.

Matt Bank