Pondering the next dimension of societal structure...and using Carr's IR to determine actions for the future
I agree with Holly. Kant was cake compared to Carr.
In previous texts, authors have described societies that want to grow, but ultimately have limits. Kant’s nature, a force that will ultimately bring about universal truth, divided people and held them in conflict over minute differences in language, religion, etc. Rousseau suggests that the strongest nations are the smallest ones, those that are capable of having true democracy. Locke and Hobbes did not suggest limits for the size of their ideal socially contracted societies, but both limited them in that there would always be people outside of them. This brings up the idea of unification against, versus unification for a cause or an entity.
Carr discusses the differences between utopianism (building a fictional ideal organizational structure between nations) and realism (that that fictional ideal would never be possible, rather, it is important to observe this existing organizational structure and build rationally on those observations). He obviously disapproves of the League of Nations, because they are not enough in reality (they do not hold a tangible stick). However, I would contest his statement on page 213: “As has often been observed, the international community cannot be organized against Mars.” I assume this is in response to the broadcast of “War of the Worlds”… but I think if the universe (and this is a sci-fi stretch) were structured like how the world is structured, the world would end up with a real governing body – a league of nations with a stick. This would happen because, despite international conflict on earth, there would be other nations outside of earth to have interplanetary relations with. International relations would become a non-issue, because society would have scaled up one more: from intrastate relations to international relations to interplanetary relations. Of course, Carr’s reality v utopia dispute would then apply to the highest level – in this case interplanetary relations – and would encounter the same problems as on earth.
Once other planets have intelligent life, Earth just becomes one nation in a larger world…However, Earth would still have nations as they are. The idea of a next level up allows for a body to govern the secondary level in the larger social structure.
However, this isn’t Carr. As political science lacks hard and fast facts (as it is based on human behavior), it relies on either observation or utopian models. Carr observes that international relations has been, in the past, an oscillating power system, where some nations or ideas have power, then shift (through the realism-utopianism-realism-… cycle). This is realist because it is observation. Though Carr speaks copiously of observations of past and ideals for using these observations to better manage the future, the issue of hindsight severely limits this possibility. In class we discussed varying opinions of the hindsight is 20/20 idea: I agree that it is, and that, unless we can look back on the existing present, we can’t use realism based political science to determine potential courses of events for the future. Learning from experience is one thing, but determining actions based on analysis of previous events opens up far too many options to accurately determine the appropriate response to a situation.
In previous texts, authors have described societies that want to grow, but ultimately have limits. Kant’s nature, a force that will ultimately bring about universal truth, divided people and held them in conflict over minute differences in language, religion, etc. Rousseau suggests that the strongest nations are the smallest ones, those that are capable of having true democracy. Locke and Hobbes did not suggest limits for the size of their ideal socially contracted societies, but both limited them in that there would always be people outside of them. This brings up the idea of unification against, versus unification for a cause or an entity.
Carr discusses the differences between utopianism (building a fictional ideal organizational structure between nations) and realism (that that fictional ideal would never be possible, rather, it is important to observe this existing organizational structure and build rationally on those observations). He obviously disapproves of the League of Nations, because they are not enough in reality (they do not hold a tangible stick). However, I would contest his statement on page 213: “As has often been observed, the international community cannot be organized against Mars.” I assume this is in response to the broadcast of “War of the Worlds”… but I think if the universe (and this is a sci-fi stretch) were structured like how the world is structured, the world would end up with a real governing body – a league of nations with a stick. This would happen because, despite international conflict on earth, there would be other nations outside of earth to have interplanetary relations with. International relations would become a non-issue, because society would have scaled up one more: from intrastate relations to international relations to interplanetary relations. Of course, Carr’s reality v utopia dispute would then apply to the highest level – in this case interplanetary relations – and would encounter the same problems as on earth.
Once other planets have intelligent life, Earth just becomes one nation in a larger world…However, Earth would still have nations as they are. The idea of a next level up allows for a body to govern the secondary level in the larger social structure.
However, this isn’t Carr. As political science lacks hard and fast facts (as it is based on human behavior), it relies on either observation or utopian models. Carr observes that international relations has been, in the past, an oscillating power system, where some nations or ideas have power, then shift (through the realism-utopianism-realism-… cycle). This is realist because it is observation. Though Carr speaks copiously of observations of past and ideals for using these observations to better manage the future, the issue of hindsight severely limits this possibility. In class we discussed varying opinions of the hindsight is 20/20 idea: I agree that it is, and that, unless we can look back on the existing present, we can’t use realism based political science to determine potential courses of events for the future. Learning from experience is one thing, but determining actions based on analysis of previous events opens up far too many options to accurately determine the appropriate response to a situation.
posted by Rebecca at 11:05 AM
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