International Politics, GOV 207

Worldviews

How Perceptions Influence Images of Reality.

Schematic Reasoning.  Reasoning in general requires language, categories for classifying information, and memory.  The vocabulary which you learned in the previous lecture provides you with an elementary classificatory scheme for understanding world politics.

Cognitive Dissonance. All adults have developed conceptual frameworks, or belief systems, through which they interpret their reality of living in the world.  Cognitive dissonance sets in when existing belief systems are inadequate to deal with new information or if new information contradicts existing beliefs.  Cognitive dissonance may force us to examine our existing beliefs and to try to construct new belief systems.

Constructivism.  Constructivism is an academic approach that alerts and tries to make us self conscious about the fact that our mental maps (belief systems) help to shape our attitudes about international politics and all other facts.

Charles W. Kegley, Jr. writes:  "Tolerance of ambiguity and receptivity to new ways of organizing thinking vary among individuals and personality types.  Some people are receptive to diversity and are therefore better able than others to revise perceptual habits to accommodate new realities.  Nevertheless, so some extent, we are all prisoners of the perceptual predispositions that have shaped us and that, in turn, shape our attitudes, beliefs, and images of world politics.  This is why political ideologies tend to develop and to attract adherents, who join groups to express their common beliefs." (Kegley, World Politics, 11th Ed, Rev., 12) 

How Images Affect Visions of World Political Realities

Enduring Rivalries and The Other. Social groups tend to differentiate between in-groups and out-groups.  We treat members of our own group differently from members of other groups.  The foreigner, the stranger, the other is often treated with suspicion or an an enemy.  Throughout the period of the Cold War, the United States looked at the Soviet Union as the enemy.  Fighting communism became a catch phrase for all that was viewed as bad for most Americans, especially conservative ones.

We are now being programmed to label everything bad in the international system as "terrorism."  Fighting terrorism has come to replace fighting communism as the raison d'etre of American foreign policy.  While it is not quite clear who these terrorists are, for many, they are identified with Islamic fundamentalism.

At earlier times, the rivalries between Germany and France lasted for about 75 years from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 through the end of World War II in 1945. The Arab-Israeli conflict and the Muslim-Hindu conflict are other long-term rivalries.

Mirror Images.  What is interesting about long-term rivalries is that the antagonists often have mirror images of each other.  The current Iranian regime looks at the United States as "The Great Satan" while the US views the Iranian theocracy in similar apocalyptic terms.  The antagonists often project on each other the same negative values.  Mirror images distort the reality of the situation.

Understanding World Politics.

The Elusive Quest for Theory.  Social scientists have been working for generations to come up with viable theories of human behavior, social behavior, and the rise and fall of civilizations.

With regard to international politics, two approaches to understanding what is happening in the world have been geopolitics and the current history approaches.

Geopolitics relates a country's foreign policy to its geographical position.  Large continental states behave differently from small island states.

The current history approach looks at international politics as a specialized branch of history.  If we want to study a country's history, we must include its relationships with other countries, its trade patterns, cultural connections, and wars.

As the social sciences have progressed and have become more specialized, many different social theories have been constructed in psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics.  International politics has borrowed, adopted, adapted, and created many of its own theories. All of these theories have their own strengths and weaknesses.  No single overarching theory has yet been produced that fully explains the complexity of human social behavior.

Theorizing About Theories.  Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the underlying basis for our human understanding.  It evaluates the basis for different conceptual frameworks.  Some epistemological questions arising within particular academic disciplines are usually discussed in courses on methodology.

As all of you have heard, a scientific revolution has been sweeping the West since the seventeenth century.  The Copernican revolution in astronomy was merely the beginning of a radical transformation of mankind's understanding of the universe.  This scientific revolution not only created the modern sciences of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology but also psychology, sociology, and political science.  The natural sciences use a special methodology called the scientific method for creating and validating their theories.  The natural sciences depend on "inter-subjectively verifiable facts."  Beliefs, opinions, and speculations must be subjected to empirical verification.

One of the major epistemological questions is whether knowledge is limited to empirically verifiable knowledge.  And if not, what other kinds of knowledge are are and how do we "know" that this knowledge is more than a dream or fantasy?

Positivism is the methodological position that the social sciences, to be valid sciences, must use the same approach as the natural sciences.  Opinion on your favorite subject is not "science." Only social theories subjected to rigorous testing and validation may be accepted as scientific.  Sometimes this approach to the social sciences is called behaviorism.

Human behavior takes place in a social context.  It always involves questions of morality and ethics.  Morality is the practical application of a value system whereby judgments concerning 'right and wrong', 'good and bad', and 'just and unjust' are made.  Ethics is the branch of philosophy that seeks to understand moral questions and problems.  What reasons can be given for calling an action just or unjust?  Are values relative to particular societies or are they absolute across different societies?  What are universals?

A purely 'scientific' social science which omits questions of values seems to me to be totally inadequate.  Yet theories that include the value preferences of the researcher, author, or professor, however 'scholarly', are biased and clearly not 'objective'.  This is the fundamental problem concerning all theories in the social sciences.

Nonetheless, if we attempt to gain any understanding of social behavior, including world politics, then we must provide some explanations, generalizations, or theories.

Charles W. Kegley, Jr., without quite stating so explicitly, uses the constructivist approach to world politics. Let me quote again:

"Increasingly many students of international relations have turned to constructivist theory to interpret both international life and the various theories others have built to help understand international affairs.  Strictly speaking, 'constructivism is not a theory of international politics'; rather, it helps to 'clarify the differences and relative virtues' of alternate theories. (Wendt 2000). Constructivism maintains that ideas are the main elements in the building of international theories and that debate about rival interests and ideas produces theoretical departures in prevailing images of international realities.  Beyond that, constructivism provides a lens for thinking critically about how theories of international relations can be constructed and about the kinds of premises [and] assumptions that are reasonable for any theorist to make as a starting point for explaining world politics. (Kegley, World Politics, 11th Ed, Rev., 43-6)

Some Major Worldviews Used to Explain World Politics. 

As already stated in our introductory section, the most important actors within the global system continues to be the central governments of sovereign states.  Each central government has relationships with other central governments and other international actors.  These relationships are summarized as that country's foreign policy.

Since World War I, the foreign policy behavior of states has generally been classified as either realist or idealist.  Realist emphasize the power equations between states.  Idealists emphasize values like democracy, economic prosperity, and peace as the primary objectives of foreign policy.  These three ideals are values espoused by liberals.  Kegley labels the idealist approach as the liberal worldview.  We shall use these terms--liberal worldview and idealist worldview
interchangeably.

The major worldviews discussed by Kegley are:

II World Views, Paradigms, Models, and Theories

Worldviews are broad ideological orientations toward government and politics within the international system.

Ideologies are consciously-held systems of belief concerned with secular society.  Examples of ideologies are liberalism, conservatism, communism, socialism, nationalism, and fascism. Ideologies, which concern themselves with mankind's relationship to the transcendental, are generally referred to as religions.

Liberal idealism represents an important worldview about the international system.  It emphasizes the goal of system transformation from an anarchic, war-centered state system toward a legally-ordered, peaceful community of cooperating nations.  It advocates the creation of global institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, and World Trade Organization.  Low politics is seen as gaining priority over high politics.  Ecological, economic, social, and human development are seen as becoming more important that national security, sovereignty, and military power.

Realism is another important worldview, which emphasizes the realities of power in an unstable, anarchic system dominated by sovereign states.  Rivalries between states, insecurity, military power, and the threat of war are realities which can only be ignored at a state's peril.  Wishful thinking about the cooperativeness of human beings and states must not neglect the harsher facts of human aggressiveness, greed, and propensity toward violence.  Realists are neither xenophobic nationalists nor mushy utopians.  They try to be realistic about the international system and they see "power" as the basic "currency" of international politics.

Behavioralism may be viewed as another worldview, not restricted to the international system, which emphasizes the scientific approach toward all research and knowledge.  It holds that only research findings based on scientific method provide true knowledge.  Scientific method requires that all knowledge must be inter-subjectively verifiable.  Since values can not be inter-subjectively proven, they do not belong into scientific inquiries.  Science must be value free and can not make value judgments. The inability of behavioralism to deal with values constitutes a major limitation to that approach within the social sciences, where values always play a role.  Nonetheless, a bahavioral analysis of both idealism and realism is important if the purpose of the discipline of international politics is to understand the global system "as it is" and not as we might "wish it to be.".  Vague concepts like power, national interest, balance of power, and the state system require operational definitions and greater precision.  The same is true of terms like international community, economic development, and peace.

Scientific Method must begin with accurate factual data.  It is often desirable to try to quantify basic information.  Rather than being content with saying that air pollution is increasing, it is necessary to have specific measurements of pollutants in the air at a given place over a period of time.  If states are to be defined in terms of their power, then power must be a term to which quantitative definitions can be given.  Another important aspect of scientific method is the construction of clear, logically consistent, and quantifiable concepts.  Concepts should be related to each other, with clearly defined relationships, to create working models or paradigms.  These working models should be able to generate propositions and hypotheses, that is they should be able to make useful predictions of future behavior.  These propositions and hypothesis must be testable against real world events.  If the predictions of a model consistently prove correct and can not be disproven, either factually or logically, then we may begin to talk about a scientific theory.  As far as I am aware, there have not been any scientific theories within the social sciences that have been conclusively validated scientifically.  There are a good many models and paradigms, but their claims to be theories, as defined above, remains spurious.  At best the social sciences deal with probabilities.  There are empirical models concerning population growth, voting behavior, public opinion, and economic projections.  These models and "theories" make for "soft" science rather than the "hard" science practiced in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and genetics.