[ScatterHerz <C>]

That is why I hate english from time to time:

ROBERT O. KEOHANE, JOSEPH S. NYE, Jr.

POWER AND INTERDEPENDENCE: WORLD POLITICS IN TRANSITION, 1977
[P.3-5, 8-11, 23-37].


// Viotti, Paul R. and Mark V.Kauppi. International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism. 2nd ed. N.Y./Toronto: Macmillan Publishing Company / Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993. – P.401-421.


INTERDEPENDENCE IN WORLD POLITICS

We live in an era of interdependence. This vague phrase expresses a poorly understood but widespread feeling that the very nature of world politics is changing. The power of nations —that age-old touchstone of analysts and statesmen — has become more elusive: "calculations of power are even more delicate and deceptive than in previous ages."1 Henry Kissinger, though deeply rooted in the classical tradition, has stated that "the traditional agenda of international affairs —the balance among major powers, the security of nations — no longer defines our perils or our possibilities. . . . Now we are entering a new era. Old inter-national patterns are crumbling: old slogans are uninstructive; old solu¬tions are unavailing. The world has become interdependent in eco¬nomics, in communications, in human aspirations."2
How profound are the changes? A modernist school sees telecommu¬nications and jet travel as creating a "global village" and believes that burgeoning social and economic transactions are creating a "world with¬out borders."3 To greater or lesser extent, a number of scholars see our era as one in which the territorial state, which has been dominant in world politics for the four centuries since feudal times ended, is being eclipsed by nonterritorial actors such as multinational corporations, transnational social movements, and international organizations. As one economist put it, "the state is about through as an economic unit."4
Traditionalists call these assertions unfounded "globaloney." They point to the continuity in world politics. Military interdependence has always existed, and military power is still important in world politics — witness nuclear deterrence; the Vietnam, Middle East, and India-Pakistan wars, and Soviet influence in Eastern Europe or American influ¬ence in the Caribbean. Moreover, as the Soviet Union has shown, authoritarian states can, to a considerable extent, control telecommuni¬cations and social transactions that they consider disruptive. Even poor and weak countries have been able to nationalize multinational corpora¬tions, and the prevalence of nationalism casts doubt on the proposition that the nation-state is fading away.
Neither the modernists nor the traditionalist have an adequate frame¬work for understanding the politics of global interdependence.5 Modern¬ists point correctly to the fundamental changes now taking place, but they often assume without sufficient analysis that advances in technology and increases in social and economic transactions will lead to a new world in which states, and their control of force, will no longer be impor¬tant.6 Traditionalists are adept at showing flaws in the modernist vision by pointing out how military interdependence continues, but find it very dif¬ficult accurately to interpret today's multidimensional economic, social, and ecological interdependence.
Our task . . . is not to argue either the modernist or traditionalist po¬sition. Because our era is marked by both continuity and change, this would be fruitless. Rather, our task is to provide a means of distilling and blending the wisdom in both positions by developing a coherent theoreti¬cal framework for the political analysis of interdependence. We shall develop several different but potentially complementary models, or intellectual tools, for grasping the reality of interdependence in contem¬porary world politics. Equally important, we shall attempt to explore the conditions under which each model will be most likely to produce accu¬rate predictions and satisfactory explanations. Contemporary world politics is not a seamless web; it is a tapestry of diverse relationships. In such a world, one model cannot explain all situations. The secret of under standing lies in knowing which approach or combination of approaches to use in analyzing a situation. There will never be a substitute for careful analysis of actual situations.
Yet theory is inescapable; all empirical or practical analysis rests on it. Pragmatic policymakers might think that they need pay no more heed to theoretical disputes over the nature of world politics than they pay to medieval scholastic disputes over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Academic pens, however, leave marks in the minds of statesmen with profound results for policy. Not only are "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influ¬ences" unconscious captives of conceptions created by "some academic scribbler of a few years back," but increasingly the scribblers have been playing a direct role in forming foreign policy.7 Inappropriate images and ill-conceived perceptions of world politics can lead directly to inap¬propriate or even disastrous national policies.
Rationale and rationalization, systematic presentation and symbolism, become so intertwined that it is difficult, even for policymakers; them¬selves, to disentangle reality from rhetoric. Traditionally, classical theories of world politics have portrayed a potential "state of war" in which states' behavior was dominated by the constant danger of military conflict. During the Cold War, especially the first decade after World War II, this conception, labeled "political realism" by its proponents, be¬came widely accepted by students and practitioners of international re¬lations in Europe and the United States.8 During the 1960s, many other wise keen observers who accepted realist approaches were slow to perceive the development of new issues that did not center on military-security concerns.9 The same dominant image in the late 1970s or 1980s would be likely to lead to even more unrealistic expectations. Yet to ex¬change it for an equally simple view— for instance, that military force is obsolete and economic interdependence benign – would condemn one to equally grave, though different, errors…

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