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Answered: - Please help with the definitions and the questions on this study
Please help with the definitions and the questions on this study sheet.
POS 310 ? INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The Midterm Examination is two hours long and covers material from Modules 1?4 of the course. It
consists of 30 multiple choice questions and 2 essay questions.
The Final Examination is two hours long and covers material from Modules 5?9 of the course. It consists
of 35 multiple choice questions and 2 essay questions.
?globalism.? - Globalization is the process of ideas, products, and people moving around the planet with
greater ease and efficiency. Globalization takes advantage of cheaper labor in less developed nations but
increases free trade between nations and the free flow of capital.
An historical period - an era of history having some distinctive feature
An economic phenomenon ?
We come to our announced topic, the economic phenomenon. Modern society exhibits a vast
development of technology, and correlatively, a vast advance in the scope and channels of social
administration?and correlatively, a vast increase in the complexity and scope of production, transport,
and consumption of use-values. The latter make up the physical economy. It might be thought of as
technology or engineering by someone for whom economics begins with commodification. However, its
sociality makes it very different from engineering in the usual sense. At any rate, just this physical
economy warrants a discipline which describes it, measures it, ponders its manifold dynamics. The
discipline would be quantitative and network-conscious because the subject-matter itself is.
But then there is something else. The entire phenomenon is commodified. All use-values are
property. Delivery of a use-value typically means an exchange of property for an equivalent in an
auction. Its paradigm, then, is the trade; everybody all the time is engaged in trade. (But the emphasis
which Neoclassical economics puts on the trader?s autonomous choice is ideological.) As for production,
its paradigm is the industrialist and factories. (Not the household or school, which, in a less ideological
perspective, would not have to be separated in conception from production.) Work is sold to an owner
by workers. Workers spend most of their time working?and that is what a physical perspective would
see?but all that commodity economics sees is the very small amount of time the worker spends making
the wage bargain with the employer.
The circumstance that the vast system is steered, or at least locally steered, by trades is mindboggling. (But not so mind-boggling if we remember that in reality, equilibration is not painless.)
Beyond that there is financialization. Money, borrowing, and the secondary market in IOUs.
Green pieces of paper are treated as use-values. Wealth is a vast pyramid of debt. Wealth becomes a
vast financial illusion. The relation between the physical world and the world of fictions is inverted. The
availability of loans comes to control the possibility of economic activity at all. A constitutive illusion
called inflation becomes an urgent concern. What is this at all? How has human survival become
dependent on the stipulation and transmission of trillionfold illusions? To that has to be added the
unique phenomenon of taxation. And that returns us to the institutional side of it, because the state
acts as guarantor of property and contracts (for example)?in the broadest senses. Another institutional
fact: the state has made the interest rate a policy variable. That is an incredible development, a
cancellation of laissez-faire from above.
It is entirely quantitative?and the physical is interwoven with the fictitious (prices and money).
One of the goals of the discipline has to be to account for this vast network of quantified phenomena, all
human-made.
But that is only the beginning, because there are so many dimensions to it. Economies have
overarching behavioral principles. In this society, engineering is not a neutral discipline; it is inseparable
from Neoclassical economics. In a certain sense, if Neoclassical economics were discarded, nothing of
the physical economy would be left. Even physics is inseparable from Neoclassical economics: the
action principle. Engineers maximize several physical goals simultaneously?how? By adding them
together with ?weights??prices, in effect?to get objective functions. No engineer knows how to design
an automobile without commodification. No engineer can discuss capital construction without interest
rates.
Another dimension. Determined attempts have been made by ?radical economists? to show that
some activities consist in the ?cheating? of one group by another, in the guise of a ?fair trade.? Capitalist
exploitation; imperialist exploitation. I write about that?I don?t blame people for suspecting that there
is such a thing as a ?windfall to the capitalist role,? for example?but the received arguments of this
nature such as Marx?s labor-power?well, they haven?t convinced.
Two questions of the greatest breadth may be asked. Let us take the speculative question first.
Is an economy possible at an advanced technical level which treats property and behavioral
imperatives entirely differently? (The question of communism, collectivism, abolition of profitmaximization and prices.) We do not speak of a mere policy, reversible after the next election or change
of dictator, but of the accession to a higher civilization.
Pursuant to this question, certain fundamental observations about capitalism come to the
forefront. Property rights do not inhere in the human condition. Private property is appropriation.
(Who owns people, who owns the air, who owns time?) Then, to posit relative efficiency as an
economy-wide goal is ideological posturing. (It describes no economic system, certainly not capitalism.)
From a communist vantage-point, then, market equilibrium is an equilibrium of force and fraud. All
prices are invidious constructs (more so than IQs, for example).
Most of my work in economics has explored this subject-matter?has been concerned to theorize
the economics of a higher civilization. But clearly this subject-matter is not the order of the day, not
remotely. It is far in advance of a political program. Moreover, the question of whether a higher
civilization is ?good? has to be treated cautiously. It could be, for example, that in a higher civilization
nobody would own a stock of jewels as a store of wealth. (How about a slave to fan you in hot
weather?) Some people will always consider that a deprivation. We are abstracting from what I would
call anachronistic privilege; we ask whether we can imagine anything that would be coherent and
feasible. We are competing not with Gerard Debreu but with Freeman Dyson.
Our second question is down-to-earth. What is the economic phenomenon in our time, what is
its measure, what are its behavioral patterns, how does it change in the large? In recent years I have
done more work on this question, all preliminary. Let me say at the outset that to idealize the free
market mathematically in order to prove the existence of an equilibrium which is also optimum is
ideological trash. My research excludes any such exercise.
One side of a descriptive investigation would be to delineate actual system flows. Physical inputoutput models, or linear models with joint products and depreciation, give a foretaste of the apparatus
required. Because of capital wear etc., such modeling already goes far beyond any lay discourse on the
economy. The utilization of the modeling apparatus cannot be dictated by Walrasian idealization to
secure ideological results. When there is unemployment, for example, the researcher must register it
without being argumentative or coy.
Then the pecuniary magnitudes which are operative in the economy need to be tracked.
Empirical prices, interest rates, money supplies, volume of debt, etc. Again, there are various realities
which embarrass the ideologues which must be registered without being argumentative or coy. The
state sets the governing interest rate (abolishing the free market at the core). Then?it is normal for
markets to be rigged. The analysis of price-determination in markets would look nothing like the
Neoclassical model.
There certainly are phenomena of demand in market behavior. Substitute and complementary
products can be observed; one can attempt to test elasticities of demand statistically (if one is willing to
accept results that belie Neoclassical theory). On the other hand, the deduction of demand for coffee or
rice from the autonomous psyche is ideological nonsense.
As for pecuniary indices which governments have created for administrative purposes, such as
?inflation? or GNP, whether economics need to recognize them even as an operative fiction is an open
question.
I am sneaking up on a critical analysis of the existing economy by making qualitative studies of this or
that piece of commercial activity.
a) What businessmen actually do. (Enron etc. etc.) It can never be spoken about in school for obvious
reasons: the Establishment and the criminals are one and the same.
b) Special sectors, such as lending, i.e. interest as income. Although Neoclassical economics legitimates
lending at interest, economic institutions continue to treat lending as highly suspect. The possibility of
economic activity at all is dependent on a line of business which continues to be highly suspect, like
selling addictive drugs.
The triumph of American values ?
1. The Founders believed that unnecessary government is dangerous and destructive of the moral
character of its people.
2. Character begins in taking responsibility for oneself. State involvement, when a person can care for
himself, damages moral character and reduces care for the truly needy.
3. Government entitlement programs have terrible moral consequences. These programs lead to a loss
of self-worth, an attitude of entitlement, and a lack of gratitude for what is provided. Why work if the
government provides a handout?
4. People need the emotional reward of feeling needed. Men especially have been denied rewards for
their involvement. When the State becomes totally responsible for the financial support of their women
and children, men are denied this reward. As the State expands its role, nothing is left of liberty and
dignity.
5. American churches and other voluntary groups have been an essential part of American culture that
becomes denigrated when government expands into their role. Charity and volunteerism are reduced
substantially in leftist states, a detriment to the needy and to the volunteers' sense of community
contribution.
Another jewel. "There are fine individuals on the left and selfish individuals on the Right. But as a rule,
bigger government increases the number of angry, ungrateful, lazy, spoiled and self-centered
individuals."
And another jewel. "The Left's altruistic motives have created the Welfare state, and the Welfare state
creates selfishness."
Prager's book discusses all the many underlying philosophical differences between conservatives and the
Obama left, and in my opinion, he discloses the fallacy underlying all the liberal concepts. Prager
discusses how the Age of Reason's and the Enlightenment's rejection of religion and God resulted in the
rejection of the concept of the inherent immorality of man -- a rejection which took over Europe.
Contrary to this European post-Enlightenment concept, the Founders retained in the Constitution the
concepts that man is immoral and that the essence of man is most interested in self-satisfaction. This
led the Founders to incorporate Montesquieu's advice in the Constitution and to create three branches
of government in which each branch had equal power. This was their attempt to counter the inherent
self-interest and immorality of man. It is my dream that a clear-thinking philosophy major would use
Prager's book to generate a short version for consumption by independents. Such a text would help the
world appreciate the inherent weaknesses underlying the social democracy of the Obama
administration.
A social and technological revolution - Technological revolution is (in general meaning) a relatively not
long period in history when one technology (or better a set of technologies) is replaced by another
technology (or by the set of technologies). As Nick Bostrom wrote: ?We might define a technological
revolution as a dramatic change brought about relatively quickly by the introduction of some new
technology.? [1] It is an era of an accelerated technological progress characterized not only by new
innovations but also their application and diffusion. A new technological revolution should increase a
productivity of work, efficiency, etc. It may involve not only material changes but also changes in
management, learning, social interactions, financing, methods of research etc. It is not limited strictly to
technical aspects. Technological revolution so rewrites the material conditions of human existence and
also reshape culture, society and even human nature. It can play a role of a trigger of a chain of various
and unpredictable changes.[4]
"What distinguishes a technological revolution from a random collection of technology systems and
justifies conceptualizing it as a revolution are two basic features:
1. The strong interconnectedness and interdependence of the participating systems in their technologies
and markets.
2. The capacity to transform profoundly the rest of the economy (and eventually society)."[5]
The consequences of a technological revolution are not exclusively positive - for example, it can have
negative environmental impact and cause a temporal unemployment (so called technological
unemployment).
The concept of technological revolution is based on the idea (not unquestioned) that technological
progress is not linear but undulatory. Technological revolution can be:
sectoral (more technological changes in one sector, e.g. Green revolution, Commercial revolution)
universal (interconnected radical changes in more sectors, the universal technological revolution can be
seen as a complex of several parallel sectoral technological revolutions, e.g. Second industrial revolution,
Renaissance technological revolution etc.)
The annihilation of distance -
Levels of analysis -
Evolving modern history -
Foreign policy ?
On power - Power is a central concept in international relations, but its meaning is contested.
Predominately, it is understood as control over resources, others, and/or outcomes; however, scholars
increasingly recognize that these conceptions of power are inadequate. Progress towards a more
sophisticated understanding of power relations is hampered by outdated meta-theoretical assumptions
about the structure of concepts. At the heart of many debates about contested concepts lies the
assumption that definitions must capture a singular, unifying essence of concepts, and that specifications
of sub-types must be contained within the bounds specified by one overarching definition. Recent
developments in cognitive science reveal that these assumptions?prevalent in the Western political
thought?are untenable. Dispensing with these assumptions makes room for a richer understanding of
the different types of power. It allows us to develop a typology of power that includes not only the
dimension of power that is associated with domination, coercion, oppression, exploitation, military
might, and violence, but also the dimension that relates to the capacity of a collectivity to stabilize and
shape political order based on a horizontal social contract. These two dimensions cannot be contained
under one overarching definition of power.
World affairs since the end of the Cold War have made it clear that the traditional view of power is too
narrow. In this context, I argue that Hannah Arendt's conception of power as corresponding, in her
words, ?to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert,? offers invaluable insights. I build on
Arendt's insights about horizontally generated power to distinguish four different types of power in
international relations: coercive power, bargaining power, concerted power, and political power. Coercive
power and bargaining power are different forms of ?power as control?. They depend on military and
economic resources. My explication and analyses of concerted power and political power provide
grounds to believe that it may be possible to replace political dynamics in which violence always looms
as an immediate, if implicit, threat with dynamics that relegate violence to the margins?even in
relations between states.
Anarchy as the essence of international life - Power is a central concept in international relations, but its
meaning is contested. Predominately, it is understood as control over resources, others, and/or
outcomes; however, scholars increasingly recognize that these conceptions of power are inadequate.
Progress towards a more sophisticated understanding of power relations is hampered by outdated metatheoretical assumptions about the structure of concepts. At the heart of many debates about contested
concepts lies the assumption that definitions must capture a singular, unifying essence of concepts, and
that specifications of sub-types must be contained within the bounds specified by one overarching
definition. Recent developments in cognitive science reveal that these assumptions?prevalent in the
Western political thought?are untenable. Dispensing with these assumptions makes room for a richer
understanding of the different types of power. It allows us to develop a typology of power that includes
not only the dimension of power that is associated with domination, coercion, oppression, exploitation,
military might, and violence, but also the dimension that relates to the capacity of a collectivity to
stabilize and shape political order based on a horizontal social contract. These two dimensions cannot be
contained under one overarching definition of power.
World affairs since the end of the Cold War have made it clear that the traditional view of power is too
narrow. In this context, I argue that Hannah Arendt's conception of power as corresponding, in her
words, ?to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert,? offers invaluable insights. I build on
Arendt's insights about horizontally generated power to distinguish four different types of power in
international relations: coercive power, bargaining power, concerted power, and political power. Coercive
power and bargaining power are different forms of ?power as control?. They depend on military and
economic resources. My explication and analyses of concerted power and political power provide
grounds to believe that it may be possible to replace political dynamics in which violence always looms
as an immediate, if implicit, threat with dynamics that relegate violence to the margins?even in
relations between states.
The role of balance of power - The balance of power theory in international relations suggests that
national security is enhanced when military capability is distributed so that no one state is strong enough
to dominate all others.[1] If one state becomes much stronger than others, the theory predicts that it
will take advantage of its strength and attack weaker neighbors, thereby providing an incentive for those
threatened to unite in a defensive coalition. Some realists maintain that this would be more stable as
aggression would appear unattractive and would be averted if there was equilibrium of power between
the rival coalitions.[1]
When confronted by a significant external threat, states that look to form alliances may "balance" or
"bandwagon". Balancing is defined as allying with others against the prevailing threat, while states that
have bandwagoned have aligned with the threat.[2] States may also employ other alliance tactics, such
as buck-passing and chain-ganging. There is a longstanding debate among realists with regard to how the
polarity of a system impacts on which tactic states use,[3] however, it is generally agreed that balancing
is more efficient in bipolar systems as each great power has no choice but to directly confront the other.
[4] Along with debates between realists about the prevalence of balancing in alliance patterns, other
schools of international relations, such as constructivists, are also critical of the balance of power theory,
disputing core realist assumptions regarding the international system and the behavior of states.[5]
Alliances - Alliance, in international relations, a formal agreement between two or more states for
mutual support in case of war. Contemporary alliances provide for combined action on the part of two or
more independent states and are generally defensive in nature, obligating allies to join forces if one or
more of them is attacked by another state or coalition. Although alliances may be informal, they are
typically formalized by a treaty of alliance, the most critical clauses of which are those that define the
casus foederis, or the circumstances under which the treaty obligates an ally to aid a fellow member.
Alliances arise from states? attempts to maintain a balance of power with each other. In a system
composed of a number of medium-size countries, such as that in Europe since the Middle Ages, no single
state is able to establish a lasting hegemony over all the others, largely because the other states join
together in alliances against it. Thus, the repeated attempts by King Louis XIV of France (reigned 1643?
1715) to dominate continental Europe led to a coalition in opposition to France and eventually to the
War of the Grand Alliance; and the ambitions of Napoleon were similarly thwarted by a series of
alliances formed against him.
Although typically associated with the Westphalian states system and the European balance of power,
alliances have taken shape on other continents and in other eras. In his classic work Artha-??stra (c. 300
bc), Kau?ilya, an adviser to Indian king Chandragupta, argued that in pursuing alliances countries should
seek support and assistance from distant states against the menace of neighbouring ones (according to
the logic that the enemy of one?s enemy must be one?s friend). The legacy of colonialism in Africa
retarded the development of collective-defense schemes there, but elsewhere in the developing world
alliances played a critical role in the evolving regional balance. For example, in the 1865?70 Paraguayan
War, the Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay devastated Paraguay, reducing its territorial
possessions as well as its population by about 60 percent. Until the Cold War in the last half of the 20th
century, ideology was not usually a significant factor in the formation of such coalitions. For example, in
1536 Francis I, the Roman Catholic king of France, joined with the Ottoman sultan S?leyman I, who was a
Muslim, against the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, another Catholic, because Charles?s possessions
almost encircled France. Similarly, in World War II Great Britain and the United States allied themselves
with the communist Soviet Union in order to defeat Nazi Germany.
A new level of alliance building in Europe was reached in the late 19th century, when enmity between
Germany and France polarized Europe into two rival alliances. By 1910 most of the major states of
Europe belonged to one or the other of these great opposing alliances: the Central Powers, whose
principal members were Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the Allies, composed of France, Russia, and
Great Britain. This bipolar system had a destabilizing effect, since conflict between any two members of
opposing blocs carried the threat of general war. Eventually, a dispute between Russia and AustriaHungary in 1914 quickly drew their fellow bloc members into the general conflict that became known as
World War I (1914?18). The war?s outcome was effectively decided when the United States abandoned
its traditional isolationism and joined the Allied side in 1917 as one of several ?Associated? Powers.
The Allied victors sought to ensure the postwar peace by forming the League of Nations, which operated
as a collective security agreement calling for joint action by all its members to defend any individual
member or members against an aggressor. A collective security agreement differs from an alliance in
several ways: (1) it is more inclusive in its membership, (2) the target of the agreement is unnamed and
can be any potential aggressor, including even one of the signatories, and (3) the object of the
agreement is the deterrence of a potential aggressor by the prospect that preponderant power will be
organized and brought to bear against him. The League of Nations became demonstrably ineffective by
the mid-1930s, however, after its members declined to use force to stop aggressive acts by Japan, Italy,
and Germany.
These three countries soon formed...
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