Sovereignty and Anarchy

While the internet isn't hurting for intellectually dishonest pontifications on the subject of international relations, there's surprisingly little actual discussion of the fundamentals of IR and foreign policy. We at FTB suspect there is a shocking level of ignorance of these basic ideas among both the major editorial writers and their readership. Thus, we get Thomas Friedman's intellectually hard-hitting bubble theory of history capped by his SUCK. ON. THIS. approach to foreign policy. Honestly, we can't even mock his interview because he spends 2+ minutes rambling about a wall-hopping, talking, metaphysical bubble that he wants to beat to death with a stick. Watch it, and think back on those heady days of the 1990's when everyone thought terrorism was groovy and OK.

Unfortunately, the academic side of IR is produced and consumed by a tiny audience. The members of the academic community aren't ignorant of the screeds that fill our nation's newspapers, but prefer to take a hands off approach and surrender that territory to the dread Krauthammer and the foolish Friedman. Of course, our aged protestant grandmother taught us that if you surrender the pulpit you don't get to complain about the sermon. In that spirit, and embracing the style of our earlier Dr. Doom vs. Voltron analysis, we present a couple of central tenets of IR theory:

Sovereignty

So, back in 1648 Europe decided that the Thirty Years War wasn't the ripping good time everybody thought it would be. After all, there are only so many times you can set a Catholic/Protestant on fire before someone decides to set you on fire and then it becomes old hat rather quickly. One of the important outcomes of the Peace of Westphalia was that it established the principle of territorial integrity, which, vastly simplified, says "this area is France, in France the French sovereign says what's what, and those flippin' British don't get a say in our internal affairs." Pretty straightforward, right? Well, there was a long period of time when the Catholic Church was running around telling people how they could run their principalities, excommunicating rulers, and whatnot. Henry VIII notably took exception to this state of affairs, with sexy results. 

So that's more or less what we have now. We can tell France that we don't like their labor practices and that they'd be a lot richer if they spent less time sipping wine and smoking and more time working. But, in the end, the French get to look at us cockeyed, take a long drag from their Gauloises and maybe nibble a bit of gruyere. Because that's how the French do, and in France nobody except the French gov't gets to say otherwise. Even then, it doesn't always work out so well.

Anarchy

Now, this isn't your great-grandaddy's anarchy. It doesn't have anything to do with Bakunin or McKinley's assassination. Instead, it's a fundamental characteristic that arises when you have a system of sovereign states. In IR jargon, anarchy simply means that there's no world government with the obligation to address the crises that crop up in the world. 

Again, this wasn't always the case. Back in the day, you could whine to the Pope that a particular prince or king was embarking on an unjust course of action, and the Pope would duly threaten to excommunicate the sovereign in question. In those days, excommunication was a hassle. Your nobles would immediately start plotting your downfall, and if someone happened to put a knife in you, your soul went straight to hell. The Pope had the power to proclaim a general truce in Europe (frequently so that everybody could send their soldiers to die in the Holy Land). One upside of being Pope is that nobody can excommunicate you, so it wasn't long before a few enterprising Popes figured out that they could have a war anytime they felt like it. To bring this tangent full circle, it was this lack of accountability that led to a lot of the bad blood (and real blood) during the Reformation, which led to the 30 Years War, which led to the Peace of Westphalia.

Anyway, there's no world government and you can't whine to the Pope anymore. We IR nerds refer to this state of affairs as "anarchy." These two concepts have implications we'll explore in another entry, after we talk about cooking and the Yankees for a while.