2: What's order

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers concepts from the 'Europe in a Global Order' lecture, including definitions of international order, historical transitions such as Westphalia and the mid-19th-century global transformation, and theoretical frameworks like Power Transition Theory and the English School.

International Orders

Regularized practices of exchange between political units or patterned/structured relationships among units.

International Order (Bull's Definition)

A pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society.

Elementary Goals of Social Coexistence

The three primary goals identified by Hedley Bull: life (security against violence), truth (ensuring promises are kept), and property (ensuring stable possession of things).

International Society

A system where two or more states have sufficient contact and mutual impact that makes them part of a whole, without the absolute need for formalization through international organizations.

Peace of Westphalia ($1648$)

The historical event often seen as the starting point of the modern international order of sovereign states, ending the Thirty Years' War and religious wars.

Sovereignty

A claim to political authority over a geographical space, emphasized in the Peace of Westphalia.

Global Transformation

A mid-$19$-th century process that linked regional orders into a more global order through a global economy, global system of states, and global circulation of ideas.

Theory of Comparative Advantage

A principle from David Ricardo ($1817$) stating that countries prosper by concentrating on what they produce best and trading for other products.

Bretton Woods Institutions

Created in July $1944$, these include the IBRD (later part of the World Bank) and the IMF, established to order the post-WWII international economy.

Shrinking of the Planet

The result of travel and communication infrastructural improvements, such as steam engines, railways, telegraphs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, increasing interdependence.

Structural Power

Power derived from the ability to provide core infrastructure (like $5G$ or railways) that others depend on, or from the dominance of ideational/Western narratives.

Power Transition Theory

A realist theory by A.F.K. Organski ($1958$) suggesting a rising state will challenge a hegemon when it has higher growth, reaches power parity ($80\%$), and is dissatisfied with the order.

Social Power Parity

The threshold of $80\%$ power relative to the hegemonic state and its allies that a rising state must reach to challenge the existing international order.

Technological Deterministic View

The perspective that orders change when new technologies act as structural modifiers that alter the effects of the international structure, favoring either the attacker or defender.

Commercial Peace Theory

The theory that economic interdependence makes the cost of war prohibitively high, thereby encouraging cooperation.

Structural Realism

Kenneth Waltz's theory ($1979$) arguing that economic interdependence is a main cause for tensions under the condition of international anarchy.

English School

A theoretical approach, including Hedley Bull, which argues that an international order can exist or emerge even in the absence of a hegemonic leader.