which is to say, in times when the reality of Great Power competition could
not be denied, or the dangers underestimated. By the beginning of the
1960s, and especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Cold War
took a new turn, and relations between the superpowers became markedly
less fraught – having looked over the brink in 1962, both sides decided that
nothing was worth fighting a nuclear war for. This new mood –
which led
eventually to the process of ‘détente’ – was accompanied by a new focus
of attention in the United States, namely the developing disaster of the
Vietnam War, the most striking feature of which, from the point of view of
realist theory, was the inability of the US to turn its obvious advantages in
terms of power into results on the ground or at the conference table.
Perceptions and psychology are important here. In point of fact, it is not too
difficult to explain either the lessening of tension in Great Power relations
or the failure of US policy in Vietnam using sophisticated realist categories,
but, in superficial terms, it did look as if power
politics were becoming less
important in this period. This dovetailed with the second, more significant
set of changes that led to a reassessment of the post-war synthesis, the
changes in the area of ‘low’ politics.
The post-war realist synthesis was based on the assumption that the state
is the key actor in international relations (and a unitary actor at that) and
that the diplomatic–strategic relations of states are the core of actual inter-
national relations. Gradually, through the 1960s and 1970s, both of these
assumptions seemed less plausible. Studies of foreign policy decision-making
revealed that the unitary nature of, at least Western pluralist, states was
illusory. Whereas bodies such as the United Nations could plausibly be seen
as no more than
arenas wherein states acted, new international organiza-
tions such as the European Economic Community (the then title of the
European Union) or the functional agencies of the United Nations seemed
less obviously tools of the states who brought them into being. Business
enterprises had always traded across state boundaries, but a new kind of
firm (rather confusingly termed the ‘multinational corporation’ or MNC)
emerged, engaging in production on a world scale, and, allegedly, qualita-
tively different from the old firms in its behaviour. International diplomatic
strategic relations are of central importance when the stakes really are matters
of
life and death, but as the possibility of the Cold War turning into a ‘Hot
War’ declined, so the significance of international social and, especially,
economic relations increased. All told, the feel of international relations
seemed to be changing quite rapidly.
The changes were nicely caught in the title of a book,
Transnational
Relations and World Politics (1971), edited by figures who would be almost
as significant for the next generation of IR theory as Morgenthau had
been for the previous generation, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye. This
collection did not develop a theory as such, but
its description of the world
34
Understanding International Relations
posed an interesting theoretical challenge. Conventional, realist, state-centric
International Relations assumes that the significant relations between different
societies are those which take place via the institutions of the state. Everyone
acknowledges that there are a myriad of ways in which the peoples of one
country might relate to the peoples of another, a great number of cross-border
transactions, movements of money, people, goods and information, but the
conventional
assumption is, first, that the relations that really matter are
interstate relations and, second, that the state regulates, or could regulate if
it wished, all these other relations. The model suggested by Keohane and
Nye relaxes both parts of this assumption. First, it can no longer be
assumed that interstate relations are always the most important; in the
modern world, the decisions and actions of non-state actors can affect our
lives as much as, if not more than, the decisions and actions of states (the
decision taken by Al Qaeda to attack the US on 9/11 being just the most
obvious recent example). Second, it can no longer
be assumed that states
have the power to regulate effectively these actors; in principle, some states
may have this capacity but, in practice, they are loath to exercise it given the
potential costs of so doing in economic, social and political terms. Much of
the time states are obliged to negotiate with non-state actors – Chapter 9
will examine the effects on the state system of the emergence of global civil
society and the MNC in this context. Conventional International Relations
endure but they are now accompanied by many other ‘
Transnational
Relations’ – relationships which involve transactions across state boundaries
in which at least one party is not a state. To
reiterate an important point,
realists have never denied the existence of such relationships but they had
downplayed their significance. The transnational relations model questioned
this judgement.
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