Politics and International Relations

Unit 5 What is international politics? Before you start reading, answer the questions: – What are the main forms of international politics?– What is the role of force in international politics?– What is the difference between domestic and internationalpolitics? Read and translate the text, write down and learn the new words. Text 1 World politics15 Over the centuries, there have been three basic forms of world politics. In a world imperial system one government is dominant over most of the world with which it has contact. The greatest example in the Western world was the Roman Empire. Spain in the sixteenth century and France in the late seventeenth century tried to gain similar supremacy, but they failed. In the nineteenth century, the British Empire spanned the globe, but even the British had to share the world with other strong states. Ancient world empires — the Sumerian, the Persian, the Chinese — were actually regional empires. They thought they ruled the world, but they were protected from conflict with other empires by the lack of communication. Their fights with barbarians on the peripheries of the empire were not the same as wars among roughly equal states. A second basic form of international politics is a feudal system, in which human loyalties and political obligations are not fixed primarily by territorial boundaries. Feudalism was common in the West after the collapse of the Roman Empire. An individual had obligations to a local lord, but might also owe duties to some distant noble or bishop as well as to the pope in Rome. Political obligations were determined in large extent by what happened to one’s superiors. If a ruler married, an area and its people 15 From: “Understanding international politics” by Josef S. Nye, Jr., Harvard University, 1993.