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 eelusive “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 international patterns are crumbling; old slogans are unin-structive; old solutions are unavailing. The world has become interdependent in economics, in communications, in human aspirations.”
2 How profound are the changes? A modernist school sees telecommunications and jet travel as creating a “global village” and believes that burgeoning social and economic transactions are creating a “world without borders.”3 To a greater or lesser extent, a number of scholars see our era as one in which the territorial 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 China’s military threats toward Taiwan or American intervention in the Caribbean. Moreover, as the Soviet Union has showed, authoritarian states could, at least until recently, control telecommunications and social transactions that they considered disruptive. Even poor and weak countries have been able to nationalize multinational corporations,and the prevalence of nationalism casts doubt on the proposition that the nation-state is fading away.Neither the modernists nor the traditionalists have an adequate framework forunderstanding the politics of global interdependence.
5 Modernists 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 important.
6 Traditionalists are adept at showing flaws in the modernist vision by pointing out how military interdependence continues, but find it very difficult to interpret accurately today’s multidimensional economic, social, and ecological interdependence.Our task in this book is not to argue either the modernist or traditionalist position. Because our era is marked by both continuity and change, this would be fruit-less. Rather, our task is to provide a means of distilling and blending the wisdom inboth positions by developing a coherent theoretical 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 contemporary world politics. Equally important, we shall attempt to explore the conditions under which each model will be most likely to produce accurate 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 understanding 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 they need pay no more heed to theoretical disputes over the nature of the world 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 influences”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 inappropriate or even disastrous national policies.Rationale and rationalization, systemic presentation and symbolism, become so intertwined that it is difficult, even for policymakers themselves, to disentangle reality from rhetoric. Traditionally, classical theories of world politics have portrayed apotential “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, became widely accepted by students and practitioners of international relations in Europe and the United States.8 During the 1960s, many otherwise keen observers who accepted realist approaches were slow to perceive the development of new issues that did not center on military-security concerns.* The same dominant image in the late 1970s or 1980s would be likely to lead to even more unrealistic expectations.Yet to exchange 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.