THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: The study of the interactions among the various actors that
participate in international politics; the study of the behaviors of these actors as they participate
individually and together in international political processes.
INTERNATIONALIZATION: phenomenon which the interactions between states are
deepening.
State - is a distinctive political community with its own set of rules and practices and that is
more or less separate from other countries. State is a formally constituted sovereign political
structure encompassing people, territory, and its institutions on the one hand, and maintaining its
autonomy from other states on the other hand.
Nation - according to Benedict Anderson is an “imagined community,” refers to a people rather
than any kind of formal territorial boundaries or institutions. It is also a collective identity
grounded on a notion of shared history and culture.
State is a political concept, while a nation is a cultural concept.
Nation-state - is a territorially bounded sovereign institution that governs individuals sharing a
collective history, identity and culture.
ADVOCATES OF LIBERAL NATIONALISM
 Immanuel Kant - Likened states in a global system to people living in a given territory.
Imagined a form of “world government” and emphasized the need to form common
international principles
 Jeremy Bentham - “international” in 1780”. Advocated the creation of international law
that would govern inter-state relations
 Guiseppe Mazzini - First thinker who reconciled nationalism with internationalism.
Believed in a republican government; proposed a system of free nations that cooperated
with each other to create an int’l system. Free, unified nation-states should be the basis of
global cooperation.
 Woodrow Wilson - Considered nationalism as a pre-requisite for internationalism and
forwarded the notion of self-determination. Democratic countries would be able to build
a free international relations system based on international law and cooperation.
Advocated for the creation of the League of Nations.
ADVOCATES OF SOCIALIST INTERNATIONALISM
 Karl Marx believed that any true form of internationalism should deliberately reject
nationalism and placed a premium on economic equality. He did not divide the world into
countries, but into classes – the capitalist class (companies & factories) and proletariat
class (workers).
  His co-author, Friedrich Engels, believed that in a socialist revolution is needed to
overthrow the state and alter the economy. They opposed nationalism as it prevents the
unification of the world’s workers.
 The followers of Marx established the Socialist International (SI) in 1889 that reflects
his vision. It was a union of European socialist and labor parties formed in Paris. Despite
that it was short-lived, SI contributed the following – declaration of May 1 as Labor Day,
creation of International Women’s Day, and the initiated the 8-hour workday.
 After the collapse of SI, a new state was formed known as the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) after a revolutionary government was formed led by the Bolshevik
leader Vladimir Lenin that overthrown Czar Nicholas II.
 Unlike the members of the SI, the Bolsheviks did not believe in obtaining power for the
working class through elections, but rather they promoted that it is in the form of the
creation of revolutionary “vanguard” parties that will lead the revolutions across the
world, using methods of terror if necessary. Today, these parties are referred to as
Communist parties.
 To encourage socialist revolutions globally, Lenin established the Communist
International (Comintern) that serves as the central body for directing Communist
parties across the world.
 When the Soviet Union allied with the United States and the Allied Powers during World
War II, there was a growing distrust among the latter to the former. To appease the allies,
Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin dissolved Comintern.
 After the war, Stalin re-established the Comintern as the Communist Information
Bureau (Cominform). Similar with its predecessor, it helped direct the various
communist parties that had taken power over Eastern Europe.
 With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, whatever existing thoughts about
communist internationalism also practically disappeared.
MODULE 4:
TYPES OF NON STATE ACTORS:
 Intergovernmental Organization (IGO’s)
 International Non-governmental Organization (INGO’s)
- Pressure Groups (Amnesty International)
- Organized Religions (Roman Catholic Church)
- Multinational Organization (Shell Oil)
- Armed Political Group (al-Qaeda)
- Organized Criminal Groups (Russian Mafia)
Organizations are the focal points for coordination and make state commitments more credible,
specifying expectations and establishing reputations for compliance.
POWERS OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS:
 The power of organization.
  The power to fix meanings.
 The power to diffuse norms.
United Nations - is one of the leading political organizations in the world where nation-states
meet and deliberate. However, it remains as an independent actor in global politics.
The UN with its headquarters in New York City, was designed to be a place where countries
could come to discuss their issues without resorting to violence and war, which had plagued our
planet for several years in the past.

THE UN’s AGENDA:

 Peace and security figured prominently in the thinking of the great powers responsible for
creating the UN and its predecessor, the League of Nations. These institutional forms
were inspired by the liberal conviction that both war and the management of other global
problems are best controlled by managing global anarchy—the absence of supranational
authority to regulate relations between states—on the international scene.
 During World War II, the U.S., British, and Russian allies began planning for a new
international organization, the United Nations, to preserve the post-war peace because it
was believed that peace could not be maintained unilaterally by any one great power
acting alone.
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE:
 THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY. Established as the main deliberative body of the United
Nations, all members are equally represented according to a one-state/one-vote formula.
Decisions are reached by a simple majority vote, except on so-called important questions,
which require a two-thirds majority. The resolutions it passes, however, are only
recommendations.
 SECURITY COUNCIL. Given primary responsibility by the charter for dealing with
threats to international peace and security, the Security Council consists of five
permanent members with the power to veto substantive decisions (the United States, the
United Kingdom, France, Russia, and the People’s Republic of China), and ten non-
permanent members elected by the General Assembly for staggered two-year terms.
 ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL. Responsible for coordinating the UN’s social
and economic programs, functional commissions, and specialized agencies, its fifty-four
members are elected by the General Assembly for staggered three-year terms. This body
has been particularly active in addressing economic development and human rights
issues.
 TRUSTEESHIP COUNCIL. Charged with supervising the administration of territories
that had not achieved self-rule, the Trusteeship Council suspended operation in 1994
when the last remaining trust territory gained independence.
 THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE. The principal judicial organ of the
United Nations, the International Court of Justice is composed of fifteen independent
 judges who are elected for nine-year terms by the General Assembly and Security
Council. The competence of the court is restricted to disputes between states, and its
jurisdiction is based on the consent of the disputants. The court may also give nonbinding
advisory opinions on legal questions raised by the General Assembly, Security Council,
or other UN agencies.
 SECRETARIAT. Led by the secretary-general, the Secretariat contains the international
civil servants who perform the administrative and secretarial functions of the UN.
MODULE 5:
Regionalism - is often seen as a political and economic phenomenon, but it must be treated as a
process and as an “emergent, socially constituted phenomenon.”
Regions are a “group of countries located in the same geographically specified area” or are “an
amalgamation of two regions (or) a combination of more than two regions organized to regulate
and oversee flows and policy choices.”
“New regionalism” varies in form; they can be “tiny associations that include no more than a
few actors and focus on a single issue, or huge continental unions that address multitude of
common problems from territorial defense to food security.”
Organizations representing this “new regionalism” likewise rely on the power of individuals,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and associations to link up with one another in pursuit
of a particular goal (or goals).
THE GLOBALIZATION OF RELIGION:
 Globalization has played a tremendous role in providing a context for the current revival
and the resurgence of religion. Today, most religions are not relegated to the countries
where they began.
 Globalization provided religion a fertile milieu to spread and thrive. Information
technologies, transport means, and the media are deemed important means on which
religionists rely on the dissemination of their religious ideas.
 Globalization has allowed religion or faith to gain considerable significance and
importance as a non-territorial touchstone of identity.
 Globalization makes religions more conscious of themselves as being “world religions”
reinforcing their respective identities. Since religions have distinct internal structures,
their connections to different cultures and their rituals and beliefs contradict.
 Religion seeks to assert its identity in the light of globalization. As a result, different
religious identities comes to the fore and assert themselves.
 It has been difficult for religion to cope with values that accompany globalization like
liberalism, consumerism, and rationalism.
 The challenges of globalization to religion link automatically to the challenges of religion
to globalization. In other words, while religion takes caution against the norms and the
values related to globalization, it challenges the latter since religion does not approve its
hybridizing effects.
 Globalization is also associated with Westernization and Americanization. The
dominance exerted by these two processes, particularly on the less developed countries,
makes religion-related cultures and identities take defensive measures to protect
themselves.