A Student's Guide to International Relations (Guides to Major Disciplines) - Softcover

Codevilla, Angelo M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935191918 ISBN 13: 9781935191919

Verlag: ISI Books, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A Student’s Guide to International Relations provides a vital introduction to the geography, culture, and politics that make up the global environment. Angelo Codevilla, who taught international relations at some of America’s most prestigious universities, explains the history of the international system, the dominant schools of American statecraft, the instruments of power, contemporary geopolitics, and more. The content of international relations, he demonstrates, flows from the differences between our global village’s peculiar neighborhoods.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Angelo M. Codevilla (1943-2021) was professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and taught political theory and international relations at Princeton and Georgetown. A former Foreign Service officer and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, he was the author of many books, including Advice to War Presidents, The Character of Nations, and a translation of Machiavelli's The Prince.

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A Student's Guide to International Relations

By Angelo M. Codevilla

ISI BOOKS

Copyright © 2010 Angelo M. Codevilla
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-935191-91-9

Contents

Introduction..............................................................1The Stage and the Characters..............................................15The International System in History.......................................45The Instruments of Power..................................................57Contemporary Geopolitics..................................................73What Is All This to America-and to the Student of IR?.....................91Recommended Reading.......................................................93

Chapter One

THE STAGE AND THE CHARACTERS

Understanding one's own country is the indispensable prerequisite for dealing with others. Necessarily, the way we deal with foreigners follows from how we understand what America itself is about, and generally how we believe we should relate to the rest of the world. How professors and books present international relations reflects their understanding of America implicitly. But because no IR curriculum teaches American history or institutions explicitly, serious students are well advised to read about and to understand America independently. Samuel P. Huntington's Who Are We? (2004) is a good place to start. The first two volumes of Walter McDougall's history of the United States-Freedom Just Around the Corner (2004) and Throes of Democracy (2008)-are indispensable.

The Stage

Ultimately, IR is about peoples and places that are very different. You must learn how deeply the global village's many neighborhoods differ from one another. Moreover, the maps that show the world divided into distinct states should not be taken to imply that the entities represented in the United Nations are nations in the dictionary meaning of the term, or that they are equivalent in any way. While no government can make "Bosnia" out of a place containing at least three warring tribes, the word "Japan" describes an entity that exists regardless of government.

Geography makes a difference. What are the soil and climate like? Is the topography steep or smooth, accessible by land or water? How numerous are the people? How young or old? What are their measurable characteristics? How many of them do what? What is in the people's heads, and what does that dispose them to do or not do? What do they worship, love, and hate? What is acceptable and unacceptable among them? How are they governed, what kinds of people among them set the tone for life, and what do they want? What is it like to make a living there and get ahead? What are their collective fears, hopes, and interests? What is their international agenda, if any? What "comparative advantages" do they have? What do they have to give and need to receive? What kind of power can they generate-how much, and for what purpose?

A good place to begin this tour of our planet is Sir Halford Mackinder's Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), which shows geography's influence on politics. As you go through this classic introduction, refer often to a historical atlas as well as to specialized studies of individual regions.

Geography and Demography

Start from what Mackinder calls the "World Island"-namely, the Eurasian land mass plus Africa-beginning with its heartland, central Asia and Russia.

East of the Ural Mountains, Siberia's low ground, impassably wet and mosquito-infested in summer and frozen solid most of the rest of the year, slopes northward to the Arctic Ocean. Flowing from south to north, the Lena, Ob, and Yenisey rivers inhibit east-west traffic and are useful mainly as ice roads in the winter and for supply runs from the Arctic Ocean in the summer. Farming is inconceivable. Russia has long since overwhelmed northern Siberia's native nomadic tribes and has always used either slave labor or extraordinary incentives to exploit the region's vast timber and minerals. Oil and gas produced in self-contained camps flow out by pipeline. Siberia's southern edge is a gentle arc of higher ground that, in the west, touches the lower Volga valley and the Ukrainian plains, and that reaches eastward to the Amur River valley of the Pacific. This was the route by which Russia conquered central Asia and established itself on the North Pacific. Here, along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, are Russia's major eastern outposts: Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok, as wall as its intercontinental missile bases. This is also the route by which the Mongol peoples near its northeastern end conquered Russia, eastern Europe, and Asia in the thirteenth century.

Southward, east of the Caspian Sea, are the central Asian steppes and foothills of the great mountains, beyond which are China and the Indian subcontinent. Along the mountains' northern edge in today's Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan runs the Silk Road that once connected China with the Western world. Along this road came Tamerlane, the fourteenth-century Persian-Turkic successor to Genghis Khan, who conquered much of the area from Syria and Persia to the Volga River and India. The area's peoples-the Azeris, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyz-retained their identity under Russian and Soviet rule, and have mixed Russian ways into their own. Because they are reproducing vigorously, unlike the Russians, they may well regain primacy in the region. Ted Rall's Silk Road to Ruin (2006) and Rene Grousset's Empire of the Steppes (1970) give tours of the area in our time.

Southwest of the Urals lie the vast lower valleys of the rivers Ural, Volga, Dnieper, and Don. In this fertile land, Russians mix with Ukrainians and Cossacks. Farther south, between the Caspian and Black seas, mountains divide the Caucasian Peninsula into climatically different valleys that separate peoples of different ethnicity, religion, and culture, among whom are the Christian Armenians, Muslim Azeris, Orthodox Georgians, Muslim Chechens, and countless other groups and subgroups. Since the sixteenth century, all of the above have been subjects of Russia's empire, from time to time, more or less. Vicken Chetarian's War and Peace in the Caucasus (2008) charts this historical labyrinth.

European Russia runs westward from the Urals as far as the Russian people have displaced others on the fertile northern European plain that reaches the Atlantic. On these western borders, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, and many others mingle with and dispute Russians, as do Finns in the north. Just as Russia's continental climate is known for polar cold and torrid heat, the Russian people are known for geniuses, peasants, and tyrants. But the land, the weather, and even the people's capacities cannot fully explain why Russia has dominated Eurasia under some regimes and merely become one of its parts under others, or why at one time it was one of the world's bread-baskets and has since become dependent on imported food. In our time, Russia's population is shrinking rapidly because fewer families are being formed and fewer children are born. Astolphe de Custine's Journey for Our Time (1839) is a good introduction to perennial Russia.

Russians have always looked hungrily at the Iranian plateau, and beyond the Caucasus and Anatolian highland to where the land falls steeply to the Persian Gulf and the warm Mediterranean Sea. In this junction of Asia, Europe, and Africa live the Persians, who mingled with and challenged...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISI Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1935191918
• ISBN 13: 9781935191919
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 99
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar