Download answer six and only six of the following

Some Questions and Answers from past IPA FINAL EXAMS
A. Short-answer questions: 30 points, five points for each question. PLEASE
ANSWER SIX AND ONLY SIX OF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS. YOUR
ANSWERS SHOULD BE BRIEF—NO LONGER THAN A PARAGRAPH AT
MOST.
1. Provide two underlying reasons that realist scholars would give for the
current crisis in relations between the US and numerous West European
states, notably France and Germany.
Ans. End of Cold War; European balancing against the US; US
unilateralism/decline of multilateralism; Differing attitudes towards role of
international institutions and/or the use of military force
2. Provide three reasons that scholars give for the growth of ‘Islamist’
political movements
Ans. Demographic bulge; Iranian revolution; Sense of powerlessness;
Lack of Democracy; Israel-Palestine conflict; Gulf War;
Modernization/Westernization backlash
3. Define the ‘intergovernmentalist’ theory of regional political integration.
Ans. Pace and direction of integration is dictated by leading regional
powers and the degree to which their interests are convergent or divergent.
4. What two key elements do realists identify as explaining the relative
stability of international politics during the Cold War.
Ans. Bipolarity; nuclear deterrence.
5. Provide two reasons why the US might not—other than in the case of
Iraq—launch military attacks against other (alleged) “rogue states” (e.g.
North Korea, Iran)?
Ans. 1) Weaker international legal justification against other states (e.g. no
UN disarmament resolutions); 2) Different military balance of power, esp.
with North Korea; 3) Lack of American domestic support for further
military campaigns; 4) opposition of regional allies (eg Japan, So. Korea
opposition to war against No. Korea)
6. Provide two reasons why cross-strait political relations have been more
conflictual during the last decade compared with the period of the later
Cold War (1970-1989)?
Ans. Democratization in Taiwan; Growing national identity in Taiwan;
Growing military power in China; Growing nationalism in China; Chinese
reunification with Hong Kong and Macao; End of the Cold War/Decline
in Chinese importance to US as balancer against USSR; Decline in US
importance to China as balancer against USSR
7. Please define the concept of ‘hegemonic stability’.
Ans. Hegemonic stability theory refers to the willingness and ability of a
single power to shape cooperative relations in world politics or
Hegemonic stability refers to the theory that world politics resembles a
prisoner’s dilemma game and that a dominant power is required to enforce
international agreements.
8. How did Francis Fukuyama define the ‘end of history’?
Ans. Absence of an ideological competitor to economic and political
liberalism as an organizing principle for economic and political life.
9. Define the “tragedy of the commons.”
Ans. An environmental “prisoner’s dilemma” in which states fail to
cooperate to manage such common pool resources as the atmosphere and
the oceans.
10. Define the “Washington Consensus.”
Ans. The set of “good economic policies” defined by the International
Monetary Fund including macroeconomic stabilization, market
liberalization, privatization and economic openness.
11. Define the “Triffin Dilemma.”
Ans. The lack of confidence by American trading partners in the value of
the US dollar in terms of gold that came with the increasing use of the
dollar for international trade and payments during the 1960s; named for
Yale economist Robert Triffin.
B. ESSAY QUESTIONS: 70 points, 35 points each. PLEASE ANSWER TWO
AND ONLY TWO OF THE FOLLOWING ESSAY QUESTIONS. IN
PROVIDING AN ANSWER, PLEASE MAKE REFERENCE TO THE COURSE
READINGS. EACH ESSAY SHOULD BE NO LONGER THAN FOUR PAGES
IN LENGTH!
1. Scholars often refer to the United States as a “unipolar” or “hegemonic”
power. What does that term mean? How stable is American unipolarity?
What are the possible sources of instability that could lead to the erosion
of the unipolar order? What would be the consequences of American
“decline” for international cooperation in such issue-areas as trade and
finance? Ensure that your theoretical perspective is clear in providing your
answers.
2. Imagine that you are advising the United States government on rebuilding
the Iraqi economy. You have been asked for your opinion—from the
perspective of trying to rebuild Iraq’s economy as quickly as possible—as
to whether Washington’s first priority should be to establish a democratic
government, or whether it should first install a “benign dictator” who
would be charged with carrying-out an economic reform program. In your
view, does democracy promote or retard the process of economic reform?
What are the economic arguments in favor of democracy on the one hand,
or dicatorship on the other, and what are the arguments against each
regime type? Ensure that you make reference to the appropriate readings
in providing your answers.
3. After graduating from INSEAD, you have been employed by a major
international company in its strategic planning division. The company’s
CEO asks you to write a quick and brief analysis of whether the Euro will
survive the next two decades as the single and common currency of the
majority of the existing member states of the ‘Eurozone’. What do you tell
him/her?
4. East Asia (including Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Taiwan and the two
Korean states) is a region in which in the last few years some ambitious
regional integration projects have been discussed or launched. It is also
home to several major potential or actual international crises (two Koreas,
China-Taiwan conflict, growth of Islamic terrorism, regional
independence struggles and violence in Indonesia). In which direction do
you think East Asia will evolve in the future – will it become a more
‘peaceful’ or a more ‘violent’ region?
5. The Al Qaeda attack on the US in September 2001; the US-led attack on
Afghanistan in late 2001; the US-led attack on Iraq in March-April 2003.
Do these and other post-Cold War developments prove that, as Huntington
prophesied in his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, world politics has indeed
now entered an era of the ‘clash of civilizations’? If it has, what are the
likely consequences for the existing international political and economic
orders?
ANSWER GUIDELINES
1. US Unipolarity:
Students should define hegemony or unipolarity as an international system in which
the distribution of economic and military power is concentrated in a single state.
From a realist perspective, the sources of instability include balancing the hegemon
(for example, by the EU and/or Russia and China; or by a civilization like Islam, from
a clash of civilizations perspective); technological change, such as the spread of
weapons of mass destruction; and economic change, such as rapid growth in China
vs. slow growth in the United States. This latter could lead to American “imperial
overstretch,” or an inability to finance foreign commitments. From a liberal or statelevel perspective, sources of instability would be found within American politics, and
particularly in a return to isolationism following a prolonged period of American
military action overseas, with the costs in human lives and treasure that this entails. A
final source of instability could be found in an individual leader like George W. Bush
whose politics manage to alienate allies overseas, who then seek a more independent
political course. In terms of the consequences of American decline, students could
cite the prisoner’s dilemma or anarchic structure of international politics, which
suggests that cooperation is difficult to achieve in the absence of an external
enforcement mechanism. The degree of conflict that would follow American decline,
however, would depend upon whether states still had shared interests, and the degree
to which democratisation had spread. Under the assumption of a democratic peace,
state conflict would be limited and would never escalate to the point of militarization.
Some students might wish to argue that with American decline it would be possible to
create a “fairer” international system of trade and finance, as they might seek to show
that the current system distributes the gains from cooperation mainly to the United
States itself.
2. Economic Reform
Students who have read the EBRD’s Transition Report will likely argue that
democracy should be pursued first, because it promotes economic reform for the
following reasons: 1) democratic systems can constrain the capacity of narrow elite
groups that exercise undue influence on government; 2) democracy, a political system
bound by law, tends to guarantee property rights. Market economies cannot function
in the absence of these property rights. 3) Democracy implies transparency in public
transactions. By enhancing transparency and trust, democracy undermines rentseeking and corruption. 4) Good public administration is critical to economic growth
and is more likely to occur in democracies. Students could argue that these three
arguments are particularly strong in the Iraq case, since oil economies tend to
promote a narrow elite which benefits disproportionately from that natural resource.
However, they should also make clear the arguments against democracy (and of
course those who favor an authoritarian regime will emphasize these points): 1)
democracies have difficulty crafting, implementing, and executing coherent economic
policies given the myriad interest groups that must be satisfied; 2) democracies are
easily captured by special interest groups; 3) democracies tend to under-invest and
over-consume, given the political necessity to satisfy voters; 4) democracies tend
towards irresponsible budgetary policies, for the same reasons. However, they should
also recall the arguments against dictatorship: 1) you cannot always pick your
dictator—you may not end up with a Lee Kuan Yew; 2) dictators often lack economic
policy credibility because they fail to create institutions that “lock in” the reforms 3)
once a dictator is installed, it may be difficult to make the transition to democracy.
3. The Euro
History knows relatively few examples of successful (in the sense of durable)
multinational monetary unions. More such unions have failed than succeeded.
The EMU certainly does not appear to meet the ‘economic’ criteria for durable monetary
unions as identified in Optimal Currency Area theory, notably because of the continuing,
mainly non-legal (cultural, linguistic) barriers to the free movement of production factors,
especially labour.
Nonetheless, as Cohen has pointed out, not economic outcomes per se, but rather political
variables typically determine the fate of monetary unions. Cohen identifies two such
variables: the presence or absence of a hegemonic power in the union and the strength of
a sense of community or common identity among the member states, which is
underpinned by a longstanding and dense pattern of ‘institutional linkages’.Other
analyses of the outcome of monetary or broader regional integration projects identify as
other important variables the organizational design of monetary union or the level of
regional economic interdependence.
Empirical analysis of the history of the EU as well as the EMU suggests that the EU has
no single hegemonic power, but rather a hegemonic duopoly in which France and
Germany constitute the two poles. In the case of EMU, France got the monetary union to
try to ‘Europeanize’ Germany’s monetary power, while Germany could largely dictate
the actual terms of the union (anti-inflationary bias, independent Central Bank, etc.) One
decisive factor for the future of the Euro is thus likely to be the stability of the FrancoGerman partnership. Despite conjunctural fluctuations in the intensity and quality of this
relationship, geopolitical considerations (the desire to bind each other to the EU, perhaps
also increasingly to try to balance the power of an increasingly unilateralist US) has made
its maintenance is one of the highest priorities of both states’ foreign policies. This is
arguably likely to change only if there is a major shift in the domestic balance of political
power in Paris and/or Berlin.
If one goes by opinion surveys, there is a growing sense of European identity among
citizens of the member states, although this sense overall is considerably stronger in the
original six member states than in many more recent members (especially the UK and the
Scandinavian states). This identity seems to be complementary to pre-existing national
(or regional) identities rather than replacing or superseding them. Such evidence,
however, does not really shed any light on the strength of a sense of common European
identity or community. It remains doubtful whether this sense is strong enough to
legimitize politically large volumes of transfer payments between economically
flourishing and languishing member states, given that distributional conflicts in the EU
are already quite intense, although the EU budget does not amount to much more than 1
per cent of member states’ combined GDP.
What does speak in favour of the durability of the Euro is the ‘dense pattern of
institutional linkages’ and institutions and norms of inter-state cooperation that have
developed within the EU over now several decades. European political and bureaucratic
elites have arguably developed a strong capacity to manage crises – so far at least as these
do not relate to member states’ external relations – and to keep the integration process
‘on the road’.
Likewise, the organizational design of the monetary union – the fact, in contrast to
various failed multinational monetary unions in the past (Latin, Scandinavian, etc.), there
is a single currency with a single central bank – is conducive to the durability of the Euro,
if for no other reason than that it raises the cost of exit to member states as compared with
a mere ‘exchange-rate union’. The relatively high level of economic interdependence
may have a similar effect, in as far as it points to the existence of sizeable transnational
business constituencies who favour a single currency because it diminishes the crossborder transaction costs.
Finally, not only Cohen, but also other scholars of multinational currency unions point to
the overwhelming importance of a strong commitment to political integration among
member states’ political elites for the survival of such unions. Where this commitment is
weak (and can express itself), political integration is likely to fail, causing simultaneously
monetary unions to collapse (witness the cases of the former USSR and Yugoslavia). The
‘pro-European’ orientation of hitherto dominant moderate right- and moderate left-wing
political elites in the Euro member states may therefore form a critical foundation for the
survival of the Euro. If, by contrast, as a consequence of economic slowdowns or crises
in the Eurozone, anti-European movements or coalitions were to come to power in
critical member states (France, Germany, etc.) or the growth of support for such
movements were to force moderate parties to abandon their traditional pro-European
positions, the survival of the Euro may be jeopardised.
4. East Asia
The prospects for the maintenance of peace or stability in East Asia may be in analysed in
terms of the major – (neo-) realist, institutionalist and liberal – theories of international
relations.
Hitherto East Asia has been a comparatively ‘under-institutionalized’ or ‘underintegrated’ region, especially as compared with Western Europe. There have been signs,
however, in the recent past that this state of affairs is changing or in the process of doing
so. The Asean & 3 states agreed a noteworthy currency swap agreement recently,
ASEAN and China have agreed to launch a free trade zone by the year 2010, Japan has
proposed a ‘closer economic partnership’ in the form of ASEAN & Five (including also
Australia and NZ), and – for the longer term – even a common East Asian currency has
been mooted. The East Asian region nonetheless presents a number of unfavourable
conditions for the realization of closer political integration. Although, accelerated by the
boom in the Chinese economy, economic interdependence in the region may be growing,
critical political preconditions of integration are arguably lacking. East Asia has two
states that could potentially fulfil the role of a benevolent or stabilizing hegemonic or
leading power identified in much of the theory as decisive for closer integration.
Arguably, however, neither of these , for different historical reasons, would easily be
accepted by smaller states in the region as such a power. More importantly, neither would
be acceptable to the other. Alternatively, one could hypothetically envisage a SinoJapanese coalition providing leadership for the region along similar lines to that provided
by France and Germany in Western Europe. However, there is no sign that, despite an
increasingly intense and important economic relationship, Japan and China will
overcome their historically rooted mutual political animosity in the foreseeable future.
Further important obstacles to closer regional integration consist in major variations in
levels of economic development, which result in strong differences in states’ attitudes to
regional trade liberalization, and in the structure of domestic political systems, which,
among other things, shape governments’ attitudes towards the sharing of decisionmaking
competences with supranational or intergovernmental organs – authoritarian states tend to
have more hostile attitudes to such measures than democratic ones. For these reasons, it is
on balance unlikely that peace can be secured by closer political integration and its
consequences (closer institutional linkages, greater mutual trust between governments,
heightened economic interdependence, etc.)
Different strands of liberal international relations theory posit that international relations
can be rendered more peaceful by democratisation (democratic peace theory) or growing
economic interdependence (commercial liberalism). It is notable, however, that growing
economic interdependence in East Asia over the last few decades does not appear to have
gone hand in hand with a diminution of intra-regional tensions and conflicts. Cross-strait
relations represents a particularly striking case of simultaneous growing economic and
increasingly turbulent political relations. (In one major crisis spot, the Korean peninsula,
the level of economic and interpersonal exchange between the two Korean states is still in
any case extremely low). Democratization has also advanced in East Asia over the last
couple of decades, with South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia
(not to mention Russia) making (initial or, after intervening periods of authoritarian
government, renewed) transitions to democracy. The region’s most populuous state and
most rapidly growing economic and military power, namely China, retains, however,
authoritarian. The Communist regime has arguably evolved towards a more ‘softauthoritarian’ style of government over the last decade or so, as various trends (village
elections, greater autonomy of the NPC, expansion of the number of lawyers, greater
freedom for citizens in their choice of residence, occupations, etc.) indicate. Going by
other countries’ experience, China’s economic and social transformation are also likely to
lead to the emergence of stronger popular pressure for political liberalization and
democratisation. In as far, however, as it remains uncertain if and when China may
democratise, it is unlikely that, even if democratic peace theory is correct,
democratisation of China can be relied upon to stabilize international relations in East
Asia.
Given that the prospects for closer regional political integration and the democratisation
in particular of China (not to mention North Korea) are at best uncertain, the best
prospects for the maintenance of peaceful international relations in East Asia may lie, as
realist theory suggests, in the preservation of some kind of approximate balance of
military power in the region. If one looks at the future of East Asia through the lens of
realist theory, which strongly emphasizes the centrality of the number of ‘poles’ of power
in any given international order, the balance of military power between them, and mutual
deterrence, especially through the mutual possession of nuclear weapons, then a couple of
conclusions tend to emerge: first, it is crucial that the regional order be or remain
basically bipolar as opposed to multipolar and, second, the two dominant powers are able
to deter each other from action that could lead to a regional military confrontation. The
first of these conditions will be fulfilled as long as nothing occurs that could cause third
states such as North and South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons
capacity. The second is fulfilled as long as there is a strong US military presence in the
region which can deter China and North Korea, as China becomes technologically and
militarily more powerful on the back of its rapid economic growth, from asserting any
claims for regional domination by threatening or using military force, and as North Korea
threatens to “go nuclear.” At this point of time, there is no sign at all that US, which will
long enjoy a strong overall military advantage over China, is likely to reduce its military
presence in East Asia, where it is concerned not to permit the development of any ‘peer
competitor’. In the longer term, however, as or if China gradually closes the military
‘gap’ with the US, there may be a question as to whether the US will be willing and able
credibly to deter China from exercising coercion in particular to force Taiwan to reunify
with the Chinese mainland. Much may depend on the extent to which, in the intervening
period, China remains economically dynamic and politically stable and/or undergoes
significant domestic political liberalization or democratisation.
5. Clash of Civilizations?
Huntington’s COC thesis posits that, following the end of the Cold War, political
ideologies will be superseded by religion- or culture-based civilizations as the main
cleavage in international (and, in the case of culturally diverse countries, national)
politics. This trend has to do not only with the end of the Cold War, but with a number of
trends that Huntington identifies, including the greater visibility of ‘real and basic’
civilizational differences as distances shrink, the growing role of religion as a source of
people’s identity, and ‘re-indigenization’ processes in post-colonial non-Western
cultures. In this new world, there is the danger of a conflict between the ‘West’ and ‘the
Rest’, but the principal immediate challenge to Western interests stems from an ‘IslamicConfucian’ connection related to the trade in arms between several Middle Eastern states,
China and North Korea.
The consequences of the emergence of a COC for the international economic and
political orders could be expected to be overwhelmingly negative. The negative impact
on international/multilateral institutions, such as the UN and the WTO, would arguably
be particularly pronounced. The multilateral economic institutions are quintessentially
‘Western’ institutions whose membership has broadened rapidly since the end of the Cold
War and which have facilitated trade liberalization/economic globalization. Any
remaining hopes that the UN might play a more active role in international conflict
resolution following the end of the Cold War may be dashed as the Security Council
(divided between the Western powers on the one hand and Russia and China on the
other) may once again be as hamstrung as it was in the pre-1990 era. If regional
organizations begin to be formed or re-formed reflecting civilizational affiliations, some
existing organizations (such as ASEAN) would collapse, others (eg the Organization of
Islamic States) would presumably be rejuvenated and new ones – hypothetically, one
linking the predominantly ‘Confucian’ states in East Asia – created. How unstable and
conflictual international relations may be in a world divided up between civilizationbased blocs may depend on the depth of the ‘cultural differences’ between the various
civilizations, but in as far as it would be a multipolar world, realist theorists at least
would expect it to be more unstable and conflictual than the bipolar world of the Cold
War era.
For the COC to become a reality and ‘civilizations’ the major axis of international
conflict, however, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:
1. Differences in religion or culture or religion- or culture-based values would have
to be the principal sources of antagonism between states;
2. The principal protagonists in international conflicts would have to come from
different civilizations;
3. Alliances or coalitions would form around civilizational affiliations or
allegiances.
It is doubtful whether the major international conflicts of the post-Cold War period –
such as the first and second wars involving Iraq, the Al Qaeda network’s attack on the US
in September 2001 and the ensuing American-led ‘war on terrorism’, the wars in former
Yugoslavia, the ‘civil wars’ in Ruanda and Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the
Congo – correspond to this criteria. In some cases, the principal protagonists came from
different ‘civilizations’ as Huntington defines them, but the roots of such conflicts
seldom lay in differences in religion- or culture-based values and the coalitions
supporting the respective protagonists rarely ran cleanly along civilizational lines. Hence,
the bone of contention between Iraq and the US-led coalitions in 1990-91 and 2003 were
respectively Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with a view to controlling its oil resources and its
actual or alleged possession of weapons of destruction. In the first war, the US-led
coalition enjoyed very broad international support, including that of most Majority
Muslim states; in the second, the number of majority Muslim states that supported the
US-led invasion overtly or covertly was far smaller, but on this occasion the US-led
invasion was opposed by far more other, including Western, states than it was in 199091.
Of all the major post-Cold War international conflicts, that involving the Al Qaeda and
the US/the West may come closest to confirming Huntington’s thesis, not least since Al
Qaeda is an explicitly Islamic movement and its hostility to the US and the West has
clearly a religious inspiration that underpins its opposition to specific political issues,
most of all the stationing of US troops in the land of the holy sites of Islam, Saudi Arabia.
However, the Al Qaeda attacks gave rise to a very broad coalition of states, not only
‘Western’ but also from the other ‘civilizations, including the ‘Islamic’, who have
cooperated with the US in the ‘war on terrorism’. It may, however, be useful to
distinguish between the levels of governments and mass or popular sentiment. At the
latter level, it is evident that the Al Qaeda attacks attracted a good deal of sympathy or
admiration on the ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim street’. Critics of the US-led invasion of Iraq argue
that this action may produce a durable alienation of Muslims from the US/West and thus
give rise to a COC that hitherto had been avoided and was by no means inevitable.
Supporters of US strategy argue, by contrast, that the invasion and the projected
democratisation of Iraq will lay the foundations of sweeping wider changes in the
political landscape of the Arab Muslim world and root out the sources of Islamic
terrorism.
Even in the worst-case scenario of the current conflict over Iraq giving rise to a
protracted and violent confrontation between the US/the West and the Islamic world, this
would not entirely bear out Huntington’s thesis of a generalized COC, in which relations
between all the civilizations that he identifies become increasingly violent and
conflictual. As Huntington himself argues in his most recent work, the ‘problem’ lies in
the Islamic world as much as in its relations with the West, especially the US – and a fullscale confrontation between the West and the Islamic world remains in his view less
probable than ‘dispersed, varied and frequent’ violence involving Muslims.