Unit 4

Question 1

What are the principles of the Westphalian system?

Answer 1

• State sovereignty – state institutions were to have ultimate legal power.
• Exclusive territoriality – each state had sole claim to affairs within a defined geographical space.
• Legal equality – each state was formally given equal status and rights.
• Secular politics – state rather than religious institutions were to be supreme.
• Non-intervention – in principle no state was entitled to intervene in the domestic affairs of another state.
• Standing diplomacy – states would have permanent representations in each others’ territories.
• International law – law created by and operating between nation states.
• Multilateral diplomacy – the processes of diplomacy conducted between three or more states.

Question 2

Which historical markers were key for the spread of the Westphalian system?

Answer 2

• Napoleonic wars
• Congress of Vienna
• Unification of Italy and Germany
• Post WWI break-up of AH and OE
• Post WWII process of decolonisation
• Post Cold War break-up of USSR

Question 3

Why is capitalism important for the understanding of the development of the modern international system?

Answer 3

1. Capitalism is strongly associated with features of ‘modernity’ such as the development of modern states, modern corporations, science and secularism.
2. Capitalism thoroughly transformed the system of states into which it was born by reinforcing its political fragmentation into nation states and creating a global process of uneven development.

Question 4

What did Marx argue in hist most famous work, ‘Capital’, about the impact of capitalism on other states?

Answer 4

He developed an analysis of the rise of capitalism in England on the basis that it was the prototype that others would follow: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’

Question 5

What is meant by ‘combined development’?

Answer 5

Capitalism caused development in many countries that were originally different. Thus, countries developed differently. Some had authoritarian regimes, some had a new mix of capitalism and traditional social system, others built a social democratic regime, etc.

Question 6

Describe the nature of the industrialisation process.

Answer 6

Socially and geographically uneven, and geopolitically combined?

Question 7

What did Britain’s industrial advance base on?

Answer 7

• Chinese technological innovations
• India’s forcible de-industrialisation
  (but be careful with this notion)

Question 8

Why did India experience starvation in 1876?

Answer 8

Not because of lack of food production but because much of the food surpluses were being exported to England

Question 9

How could the British Empire compete with Germany, the US and France?

Answer 9

• Massive surpluses from transactions with India and China
• East India Company and opium exports to India and China to finance growing deficits generated by expensive military operations
• One-sided trade between India and China helped to subsidise imports of US cotton that fuelled industrial revolution in Lancashire

Question 10

How did capitalism reshape state and military capabilities?

Answer 10

By the application of industrial technologies to transport, armaments and communications. Industrialised warfare generated a direct interest in promoting capitalist social relations.

Question 11

What effect did ‘late development’ have on the societies involved?

Answer 11

Countries integrated intellectual achievements into structures of their own development. The later the development, the more unique the system.

Question 12

In which way was communism a threat to Wilsonianism?

Answer 12

Not because of the differenced to industrialist countries but because of the emergence of a new social system -> two different systems of organising states and societies

Question 13

Which points did Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech in 1918 include?

Answer 13

1 Open diplomacy
2 Freedom of the seas
3 Free trade
4 Reduction of military forces
5 Fair settlement of colonial disputes
6 Self-determination for Russia
7 Restore Belgium’s independence
8 Restoration of French territory
9 Adjust Italy’s borders based on ethnicity
10 Autonomous development for the peoples of Austria-Hungary
11 Independence for Serbia, Montenegro and Romania
12 Sovereignty for the Turkish portion of the Ottoman Empire but independence for its other components
13 Independence for Poland
14 Formation of an association of nations (later, the League of Nations) to guarantee independence of nations