Conceptualizing Politics

PART III
World politics and the 
future of politics

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The journey we are going to undertake has two intentions. It is going to check the 
validity of the fundamental categories examined in the first three chapters of this 
book outside of the domestic realm and facing the present state of the world. But 
it also wants to build up a batch of conceptual knowledge related to the evolution 
of peace and war, poverty and cooperation in order to know what we are talking 
about when we deal today with the normative problems that come up with these 
issues and require more than a generic ethical answer.
The journey unfolds in this chapter in four stages. In §1 it draws a general 
picture of international relations in the modern era under the label of an ‘anarchi-
cal society’, while §2 focuses on war, a crucial feature of those relations. How to 
restrain war or how to establish and protect peace is discussed in §3, but also in 
§4, in which a paramount example of pacification by political means of previously 
bellicose populations is presented, also in its theoretical aspects: the process of Euro-
pean integration.
States face each other in the international arena as sovereign states, though in our 
time not all actors that confront each other in the international arena are states: 
think of liberation movements, terrorist groups, worldwide advocacy groups, pow-
erful multinational corporations (MNCs), and, of course, international institutions, 
whether political or economic or scientific – the so-called ‘epistemic communities’ 
such as the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change).
In this dimension, states exert the external dimension of their sovereignty: exter-
nal with respect to other states or actors, in the sense of a state’s recognised claim 
to autonomy that is to govern itself by its own statutes, held valid in the same terri-
tory and over the same population, as we saw in Chapter 4. We also remember that 
sovereignty, in particular external sovereignty, depends very much on the recognition 
granted by other states (since 1945 it is a vote in the General Assembly of the UN 
that makes the difference). In other words, sovereignty means independence from 
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