Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Kay's Neoliberal Theory
From Kay's perspective, it seems that institutions are great for the states involved, but extremely dangerous to those who aren't involved. For instance, NATO. Turkey avoided any sort of attack for their human rights violations, bceause of their involvement in NATO, while Serbia was bombed, killing many innocent citizens. Democracies don't attack each other, it seems, because they are so busy attacking nondemocracies. Though Kay argues that NATO's actions in this instance actually increased their security costs, it could be argued that Turkey's security costs were much lower than if they would've had to face NATO or the UN. The scariest part about not being in an international alliance is that there are no rules. NATO violated Article 1 of its own accord in order to do what the countries felt like doing. This is great for anyone in the alliance, but very alarming to a nation outside of NATO. By not following their own rules, they give the impression that any misstep could lead to an invasion or attack. There is also the option that whenever a country doesn't feel like dealing with the aftermath of war, they can defect, which is what the US did in this situation. Neoliberalism is right in that alliances and international institutions are beneficial to those involved, but it fails to look at the global effect they have on those who aren't in a particular alliance.
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3 comments:
Interesting question...how is the violation of established social practices perceived by non-members? How would you make the neoliberal case in response to your own post?
Just as NLI advocates cooperation based on its potential benefits, realism points to the costs and potential detriments of cooperation. For example, how much sovereignty is a state giving up for the sake of membership in an international organization?
Though realists may fear giving up sovereignty due to the commitment/power of the groups, in practice there is very little sovereignty given up. Groups like NATO or the UN are run at least semi-democratically. Member nations have a fairly good influence about what is going on in the organization and if anything, by just being a member they have detered perhaps millions of dollars in damages that they could've endured by not being a member and risking an attack. In other words, the safest place to be for the physical survival of the state is as a member of one of these organizations.
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