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Summer 03: The Hidden Actors of Global Politics · Diplomacy and International Relations

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So picture this right, You're just sitting on your couch and
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you're scrolling through your news feed on your phone.
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Like we all do. Yeah, exactly.
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And you swipe past a headline about, you know, a brutal
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territorial war in Eastern Europe.
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Then you swipe again and it's this breakdown of some global
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climate summit where like 200 countries are fighting over
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carbon emissions. Yeah, just massive structural
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disagreements. And then you swipe 1/3 time and
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it's an alert about a huge multinational tech company
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dodging billions in taxes by shifting profits through three
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different countries. It's exhausting just hearing
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about. It, it is, it feels totally
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chaotic, right? Like there's no underlying
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logic, just this terrifying lottery of global events
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happening all at once. I mean, it's completely
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overwhelming. Or it is entirely overwhelming,
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and you know, the reason it feels that way is that we're
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essentially trying to read a completely foreign language
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without a dictionary. Yeah, that makes sense.
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We look at the world stage and we just see a bunch of random
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noise, but in reality there is a very specific, deeply entrenched
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architecture dictating almost everything you just mentioned.
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Which brings us to our mission for this deep dive.
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Today we are handing you the ultimate decoder ring I.
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Love that framing. Because we're working through
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this really comprehensive academic text on the foundations
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of international relations, and we are just going to skim the
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surface here. No, we are really getting into
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the weeds. We are going to dismantle the
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entire machine of global politics and show you the gears.
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We'll look at where the concept of a, you know, a country even
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came from. Because it wasn't always just
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there. Exactly.
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And we'll see how scholars predict whether states will go
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to war or trade, and why massive, borderless corporations
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and human rights activists are like completely rewriting the
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rules of the game as we speak. To really understand the
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machine, you have to look at the factory where the parts were
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made right. If you want to comprehend why a
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modern border dispute happens, or why the United Nations
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operates the way it does, you have to realize that the primary
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actor on the global stage, the sovereign state, is an
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invention, right? It's a piece of technology.
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And it's not a natural phenomenon at all.
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A state isn't a mountain or a river, but we treat it like one.
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Don't. We, we absolutely do.
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We take it completely for granted.
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Like when you look at a globe, the colored patches for France
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or Brazil or Japan, they look permanent.
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But if we wind the clock back to Europe before the 1600s, those
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neat lines completely disappear. They do.
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It was a very different world. The text calls this the medieval
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system, but I honestly just think of it as the medieval
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mess. The medieval mess.
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Honestly, that is an incredibly accurate description.
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He really is right, yeah. So imagine you are a farmer
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living in what we now call Germany in the 14th century.
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Your life is intensely local. You.
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You never leave your village. You're.
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Just farming, paying taxes. Exactly.
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You owe taxes and labor to a local feudal Lord, but that Lord
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answers to a higher Duke who maybe answers to a king.
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But wait, it doesn't stop there, right?
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Because layered right on top of that local hierarchy are these
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massive, overarching universal authorities.
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Right, the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire.
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Yeah, and the church wasn't just a place he went on Sunday.
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Oh, not at all. It was an immense political and
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economic power. It levied its own taxes, called
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tibes right out of your harvest. It had its own courts.
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It owned vast swaths of land, and alongside the church you had
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the Holy Roman Emperor claiming this sort of divinely ordained
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secular authority. Over hundreds of overlapping
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territories. Yes, hundreds of semi
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independent principalities, free cities and Dutchies.
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So as that peasant, your loyalties are completely
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fractured. I mean, your local Lord wants
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your labor, the emperor wants you for a military campaign, and
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the Pope says he holds the keys to your eternal soul.
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And demands your absolute obedience.
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And you like a massive chaotic group chat where everyone
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everyone is an admin? That is a great way to put it
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right? Everyone keeps changing the
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server rules, deleting each other's messages, claiming they
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are the one true owner. There's no single authority you
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can point to and say you know the buck stops there.
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And that fractured system? It was inherently unstable.
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When it finally broke, it resulted in one of the most
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cataclysmic events in human history, the 30 Years War.
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Which ran from 1618 to 1648, right?
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Exactly. And it's often taught as a
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religious war sparked by the Protestant Reformation.
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You know, Catholics fighting Protestants.
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But the text reveals a much darker structural reality to.
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It it does. Religion was the spark, sure,
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but the fuel was this desperate, vicious scramble for hegemony.
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The medieval order was dying. The Pope's universal authority
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was crumbling. And the monarchs of Europe just
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recognize an opportunity to consolidate power.
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Yes, and the devastation was unimaginable.
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We throw around historical dates, but let's sit with the
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human cost of this for a second. Yeah, please, as the text points
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out that up to 1/3 of the population of Germany was wiped
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out. 1/3. Just a third of the people gone.
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And armies didn't have modern supply chains back then, they
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were essentially heavily armed mobs of mercenaries roaming the
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countryside. Just eating everything insight.
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Eating everything, burning farms and bringing the plague wherever
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they went. It was a complete societal
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collapse. It's just horrifying to think
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about. It really is.
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And it was out of that profound trauma that the leaders of
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Europe finally reached their break point.
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In 1648 they convene and signed the Treaty of Westphalia.
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And this is like arguably the most crucial pivot point in the
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foundation of international relations.
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Absolutely. The Westphalian system
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introduced A radical new software update for global
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politics. Which was sovereignty.
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Sovereignty which? Fundamentally changed that crypt
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chat we were talking about instead of 1 chaotic room where
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the Pope, the Emperor and the kings are all shouting over each
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other. Westphalia basically created
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separate private discord servers.
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That's the perfect analogy. If you are the king of France,
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France is your server. You have absolute exclusive
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control over the rules, the religion, and the people inside
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that server. No one from the outside, not the
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Pope, not the Emperor can ban your users or change your
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settings. That mechanism of exclusive
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territorial control that is the bedrock of our modern world.
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It is, and because every state is sovereign, every state is
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formally equal in legal terms. But this introduces the most
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fundamental dilemma in international relations.
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Right, because if every state is supreme within its own borders
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and there is no overarching authority above.
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Then that means the international system is in a
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perpetual state of anarchy. Now, anarchy is one of those
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words that immediately makes people picture rioters smashing
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windows. Yeah, total chaos.
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But IR scholars use it entirely differently, don't they?
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It doesn't mean chaos, it means literally without a ruler.
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Right. Think about the difference
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between domestic life and international life.
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If your neighbor steals your car, you call the police.
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Because there is a higher authority.
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Exactly. An authority with a monopoly on
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violence that enforces the law. But if country A invades country
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B, there is no Global 911. There's no world police force
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with the authority to arrest a state.
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No, it's a pure self help system.
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You either have a big enough military to defend yourself, or
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you find some really strong friends to form an alliance
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with. The wait, I'm stuck on a
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terminology issue here. The text and scholars in
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general. They keep calling this the
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international system or the nation state.
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Oh, right. But in 1648 there were no
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nations. These were absolute monarchs
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treating territories like personal real estate.
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The people living there didn't feel like a nation, right?
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That is a critical distinction to make.
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Westphalia gave us the state, the physical container.
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It gave us the borders, the standing armies, the tax
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collectors, the bureaucratic machinery of control.
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But you're right, it did not give us the nation.
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Because the early modern state was basically a coercive
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extraction machine. The king was the state, the
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people were merely subjects. They were property.
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They were property. Precisely.
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The fusion of the nation with the state didn't happen for
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another century and a half. We really have to look to the
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end of the 18th century, specifically the American
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Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789.
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Let's focus on the French Revolution, because the
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psychological shift there is just staggering.
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It's massive. You go from a society where a
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peasant works the land for King Louis the 16th to suddenly you
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know we are the citizens of France, right?
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The state is no longer the King's property.
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The state is the physical manifestation of the shared
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identity, culture and soul of the French people.
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It's the birth of the nation state.
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And this wasn't just a philosophical shift either.
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It completely revolutionized warfare and power.
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Oh, completely. Before this, monarchs fought
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wars using small armies of paid mercenaries.
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Or unwilling subjects who would desert at the first opportunity.
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Exactly. But once the French
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revolutionary government and later Napoleon instituted the
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Lavey on mass, the mass conscription of citizens, they
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were suddenly fielding armies of hundreds of thousands of men.
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Because they were fighting for their patri, their homeland.
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Right. They were fueled by patriotism,
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not just a paycheck, and that made them a terrifying
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juggernaut. Napoleon just steamrolled over
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the old traditional kingdoms of Europe.
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He did, and the text highlights how those older aristocratic
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states looked at France with absolute horror.
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Not just because of the guillotine.
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No, because they realized they were functionally obsolete, they
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had to adopt this new nation state model.
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They had to cultivate a sense of national identity just to
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survive the military threat. And throughout the 19th century,
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we see this play out. National communities began
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demanding their own states. This mechanism drove the
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unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, and you
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know, the slow agonizing collapse of the massive multi
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ethnic empires. Like the Austro, Hungarian and
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Ottoman empires, the map of Europe was completely redrawn
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around the idea that every distinct nation deserved its own
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sovereign state. OK, so I follow the logic of how
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Europe sorted itself out, but calling this the global
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international system feels like a massive historical sleight of
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hand. How so?
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Well, this wasn't a global consensus.
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It was a very specific European blueprint that got violently
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forced onto the rest of the planet.
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It is the original sin of the international system.
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You're absolutely right. Europe didn't just invent the
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nation state, they exported it at the barrel of a gun.
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Through ruthless imperialism and colonization, European powers
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subjugated the vast majority of the globe.
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You had corporate state hybrids like the Dutch East India
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Company acting as sovereign entities.
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For violent resource extraction in the Americas.
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In the literal carving up of the African continent at the Berlin
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Conference of 1884, right where European and diplomats drew
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arbitrary lines on maps, completely ignoring pre-existing
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ethnic, linguistic or political realities on the ground.
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They took the Westphalian software and aggressively
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installed it on hardware that wasn't designed for it.
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That's such a good way to put it.
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And the tragedy, the really bitter irony here, is how this
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model became truly universal. It is tragic.
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During the 20th century, when colonized peoples across Africa
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and Asia fought these brutal, exhausting wars for
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decolonization, they realized something terrible.
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What was that? The only way the international
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community, which was still run by their former colonizers,
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would recognize their hard won independence was if they played
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by the European rules. They had to adopt the exact
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aesthetic and bureaucratic structure of their oppressors.
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To be taken seriously, to get a seat at the table, a newly
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independent society needed to find Ridge borders.
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They needed a capital city, a foreign ministry, a standing
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army, a national anthem, a flag. They had to set up a discord
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server that looked exactly like the French or British servers.
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Wow. And understanding this
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historical baggage changes everything.
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Like when we see a state in the Global South struggling today
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with civil war or corruption or unstable borders, we tend to
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view it as a failure of their leadership.
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We do. Yeah, but the text forces us to
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realize they were forced into a structural mold that completely
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fracture their traditional ways of life.
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We are essentially judging a fish by its ability to climb a
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tree. That historical context is
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vital. So we now have the game board.
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We have a world carved entirely into sovereign nation states
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interacting in a state of anarchy with no world police.
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Right. So the obvious next question is
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how do we actually analyze what these states are doing?
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Exactly when something massive happens, how do scholars and
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policymakers filter the noise? That brings us to our
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theoretical toolkit. To make sense the chaos, IR
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scholars use what they call levels of analysis.
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It's basically adjusting the zoom lens on a microscope.
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And the text uses the 2008 global financial crisis as the
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perfect case study to show how this works.
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Let's walk through that. OK, so if you are trying to
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understand why the 2008 crash happened and you start the
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widest possible view the system level, you aren't looking at
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individual people at all. You are looking at the
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overarching structure of the global economy.
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Right, You see how deeply intertwined global markets have
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become. You see a massive systemic trend
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toward financial deregulation across multiple continents.
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So from this altitude, the crisis is a story of structural
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linkages, where a housing bubble bursting in Florida instantly
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triggers banking collapses in London, Tokyo and Reykjavik.
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Exactly. But if you click the lens down 1
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notch to the state level, the picture completely changes.
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Now you aren't looking at the whole globe, you're looking at
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specific countries acting as single units.
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You're asking how do the United States specific regulatory
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policies fail? Or why did the UK government
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choose to bail out certain banks while the German government took
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a different approach? It becomes a story of national,
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foreign and domestic policy. OK, so zoom in again to the
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group level and you basically break the state open.
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Now you're looking at the factions operating inside the
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government and society. The text specifically calls out
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the misrule of experts. Oh, right, the incredibly
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powerful influence of technocrats, central bankers and
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massive financial lobbying groups.
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At this level, 2000 8 is a story of regulatory capture.
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It's about how specific agencies like the SEC or credit rating
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agencies like Moody's were influenced by corporate groups
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to label toxic subprime mortgages as safe investments.
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And finally, you zoom all the way down to the individual
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level. Think about your own mortgage or
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your own bank account. At this level, scholars are
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studying human psychology, right?
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They are analyzing the specific cognitive biases, the greed or
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the fear of individual actors. Why did the CEO of Lehman
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Brothers refused to see the warning signs?
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Why did a specific mortgage broker in Nevada push a family
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into a loan they couldn't afford?
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Why did Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, possess
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an ideology that completely blinded him to the flaws of
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unchecked capitalism? It's fascinating because each
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level provides a completely different explanation for the
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exact same event. And none of them are wrong,
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they're just incomplete without the others.
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But levels of analysis are just the zoom function.
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Right. IR scholars also need grand
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theories to explain and why actors behave the way they do at
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any of those levels. And for decades the field has
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been dominated by two heavyweight theories, realism
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and liberalism. Let's start with realism,
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because it is incredibly bleak. It really is.
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It's the Darth Vader of IR theories.
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Realism views human nature as inherently selfish, fearful, and
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power hungry. Thinkers like Hans Morgenthau
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argued that because we live in an anarchic system, because
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there is no world police to protect you, every single state
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must prioritize its own survival above everything.
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Else and how do you ensure your survival?
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By maximizing your power. Realists argue that you can
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never, ever truly know the intentions of another state.
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They might be friendly today, but their leadership could
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change tomorrow. Therefore, the only logical,
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rational response to anarchy is to build up your military and
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economic might. Morality, ethics, human rights,
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these are luxurious illusions in the realist worldview.
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Politics is a 0 sum game. If your neighbor gets stronger,
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you automatically become less secure.
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It's pure paranoia's policy it. Is liberalism, on the other
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hand, is the optimistic counterweight.
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And it's important to note we aren't talking about liberal in
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the American domestic political sense like Democrats versus
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Republicans. No, we are talking about
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classical liberal IR theory, which goes back to thinkers like
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Immanuel Kant. Liberals look at the exact same
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anarchic system and draw a totally different conclusion.
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They acknowledge that the system is anarchic, but they deeply
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believe in human progress and rationality.
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They argue that states can learn, adapt and realize that
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constant warfare is incredibly destructive and expensive.
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So how do you solve the anarchy problem?
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You build institutions and you trade.
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The idea is that if Country A and Country B integrate their
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economies, if they're constantly buying each other's goods,
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relying on each other's supply chains, going to war becomes
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economic suicide. Plus, liberals argue that shared
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values, particularly democracy, create peace.
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Democracies rarely, if ever, go to war with other democracies
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because leaders are accountable to the public and the public
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doesn't want to die in a trench. So you have realism focusing on
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military power and survival, and liberalism focusing on economic
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interdependence in international organizations.
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But the text shows how the field has evolved beyond just these
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two. We now have middle ground
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theories like constructivism. Constructivism is fascinating to
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me. Realists and liberals both treat
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the world purely in terms of material things, right?
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Tanks, bombs, money. Yeah.
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But constructivism says, wait a minute, the world's actually
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made of ideas. It's made of norms and social
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constructs. The most famous quote here is
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from Alexander Went. Anarchy is what states make of
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it. That quote is so profound.
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Wint is saying that the lack of a world police doesn't
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automatically mean states have to act like rabid dogs.
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It's not a law of physics. Right.
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If states behave aggressively and constantly prepare for war,
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they construct a reality of enmity.
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But if they begin to interact cooperatively, build trust and
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establish shared norms, they can literally construct a different
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kind of reality. It reminds me of the concept of
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paper money. Oh, how so?
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Well, $100 bill is physically just a useless piece of cotton
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and linen. It has 0 intrinsic value, but
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because we all socially agree that it has value, it runs the
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entire planet. That's a great comparison.
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Constructivists argue that concepts like sovereignty or
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enemies are just like paper money.
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They only exist because we collectively agree to act like
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they exist. And we can't ignore the critical
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theories the text introduces, like Marxism and post
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structuralism. These theories don't just want
19:01
to explain the world, they want to challenge its core
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assumptions. Marxism, for instance, looks the
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entire Westphalian state system and says this is a distraction.
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Marxists argue the state is merely a tool, a committee
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managing the affairs of the global ruling class, the
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bourgeoisie. For them, the real struggle
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isn't between America and China, it's between the global
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capitalist class and the global working class.
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And poststructuralism goes even further.
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It completely deconstructs the language of power.
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Post structuralists ask why we even accept the state as the
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natural unit of human life. They look at how politicians use
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language, labeling groups as terrorists versus freedom
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fighters, or calling an intervention A peacekeeping
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mission versus an invasion to justify violence and maintain
19:45
control. These theories are essentially
19:48
different lenses you can apply to reality.
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I always picture them as Instagram filters applied to the
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exact same photograph. OK, I like this.
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You take a picture of the world, throw the realism filter on and
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it turns up the shadows. In the contrast, everything
20:01
looks dangerous, stark and competitive.
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Swipe over to the liberalism filter and it boosts the
20:07
brightness and warmth. You see the connections, the
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trade routes, the potential for cooperation.
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Swipe to the Marxist filter and the borders disappear
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completely, replacing them with heat maps of wealth and poverty.
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The dangerous part about those filters is that leaders forget
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they are wearing them. Theories aren't just academic
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thought experiments debated in university halls.
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They are cognitive maps that dictate life and death
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decisions. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
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If a leader goes into power wearing the realist filter, they
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assume their neighbor is a threat no matter what.
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So to be safe, they build a bunch of tanks and put them on
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the border. But their neighbor looks out the
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window, sees 100 tanks on their border and says, Oh my God,
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they're preparing to invade us. So the neighbor builds 200
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tanks. The first leader sees that and
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says aha, I knew they were aggressive.
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The theory created the exact conflict it predicted through
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what scholars call the security dilemma.
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We saw that security dilemma play out to its absolute
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terrifying extreme during the Cold War.
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Which brings us to the next vital piece of the puzzle,
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diplomacy and international law. If theory is the blueprint of
21:14
global politics, diplomacy is the day-to-day maintenance
21:18
required to keep the House from burning down.
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And there is no better example of diplomacy literally saving
21:24
humanity than the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
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It is the ultimate case study. The United States and the Soviet
21:31
Union were locked in a massive security dilemma.
21:34
The Soviets secretly transported nuclear ballistic missiles to
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Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Flaherty.
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When US spy planes photographed the launchpads, the world froze.
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It was the closest we've ever come to full scale nuclear
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annihilation. U.S.
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President John F Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev
21:54
were staring into the abyss. Kennedy's military advisers were
21:57
pushing for immediate airstrikes and an invasion of Cuba.
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Which we now know would have almost certainly triggered A
22:02
Soviet nuclear response. There's a 13 day day standoff.
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13 days of just pure terror honestly.
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But what stopped the missiles from flying wasn't one side
22:11
having a bigger military. It was intense, high stakes
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diplomacy. It was structured communication.
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Through secret back channels and incredibly tense negotiations,
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they found a compromise. Khrushchev agreed to publicly
22:24
dismantle and remove the missiles from Cuba.
22:26
In exchange, Kennedy publicly pledged not to invade Cuba.
22:30
And crucially, he secretly agreed to remove US Jupiter
22:34
nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy, which have been
22:37
threatening the Soviets. That compromise, saving face for
22:40
both sides, was the triumph of diplomacy, and it fundamentally
22:44
altered the architecture of the Cold War.
22:46
The sheer terror of those 13 days forced both sides to
22:50
realize they needed better tools for crisis management.
22:53
It directly led to the creation of the Moscow Washington
22:56
Hotline, ensuring direct communication between leaders,
22:59
and it paved the way for the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty.
23:03
Diplomacy works, but diplomacy often relies heavily on
23:07
international law, and this is where my brain always stalls out
23:10
a bit. Why is that?
23:10
Because we already established the international system is
23:13
anarchic. There is no world police.
23:15
So if I break a law in my city, the cops show up and arrest me,
23:18
right? But if a sovereign state breaks
23:19
international law, who arrests them?
23:22
Nobody said I was at actually law.
23:23
It relies on consent and the immense power of norms.
23:27
International law is not a top down command, it is a horizontal
23:30
agreement. The text details how a legal
23:33
norm actually comes into existence through what scholars
23:36
call the norm life cycle. Walk me through that.
23:39
First, you have norm emergence. This is usually driven by
23:42
activists, NGOs, or specific states who highlight a horrific
23:46
issue and propose a new rule. OK, then you reach a tipping
23:49
point. This happens when a critical
23:51
mass of influential states adopts the new rule.
23:54
Finally, you reach widespread internalization, where the rule
23:58
becomes so accepted that it just becomes expected behavior.
24:01
And breaking it becomes unthinkable.
24:03
Exactly. The global prohibition against
24:05
torture is a classic example of that, or the responsibility to
24:09
protect the R2P doctrine. The text tells the story of how
24:12
R2P was born. Back in 1999, NATO intervened in
24:16
Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing. But they did it without the
24:19
authorization of the UN Security Council, making it technically
24:23
illegal under international law. Even though many felt it was
24:26
morally necessary, this sparked a crisis.
24:28
Yes, it highlighted a massive flaw in the system.
24:32
Does the international community just sit by and watch a genocide
24:35
happen because the paperwork wasn't approved?
24:38
To answer this, a private Commission was formed, heavily
24:41
backed by the Canadian government, they developed the
24:43
R2P concept. Which argues that sovereignty
24:46
isn't just a right to control territory, it implies a
24:49
responsibility to protect the people living there.
24:52
If a state fails that responsibility, the
24:54
international community has the right to step in it.
24:57
Was a massive shift in how international law views human
25:00
life versus state power. But here is the elephant in the
25:04
room. I think of international law as
25:08
the house rules in a shared apartment.
25:10
OK, I'm tracking. There is no landlord.
25:12
You and your roommates agree to wash your own dishes and keep
25:14
the noise down after midnight because you have to live
25:16
together. But what happens when the
25:18
biggest, richest roommate just decides to blast music at 3:00
25:22
AM? They just ignore the rules.
25:23
Right. The text brings up the US
25:25
invasion of Iraq in 2003. the US wanted UN Security Council
25:29
authorization. They failed to get it, and they
25:32
invaded anyway. Doesn't that prove that when
25:35
push comes to shove, international law is an
25:37
illusion? That critique is incredibly
25:39
common, especially among realists, but it misses the
25:43
broader, more subtle power of the law.
25:46
So. Even when the global hegemon
25:48
breaks the rules, they do not escape the consequences.
25:51
Following the 2003 invasion, the United States suffered A
25:54
catastrophic loss of what political scientist Joseph Nye
25:58
calls soft power. Soft power being the ability to
26:01
attract and persuade others rather than forcing them or
26:04
paying them off. Exactly.
26:05
The US didn't get arrested, but their global reputation
26:09
plummeted. Their ability to build
26:10
coalitions to persuade allies to support their initiatives in the
26:13
future became incredibly difficult.
26:16
The blowback was immense because they broke the house rules and
26:19
suddenly none of the other roommates trust them anymore.
26:21
Furthermore, observe how the US invaded.
26:24
They didn't just say we're the strongest, we do what we want.
26:26
They spent months trying to build a legal case.
26:29
They presented intelligence to the UN.
26:30
They argued that Iraq had violated previous UN resolutions
26:34
regarding weapons of mass destruction, even when breaking
26:38
international law. The most powerful state in the
26:40
world felt compelled to use the language of international law to
26:44
try and justify its actions. Wow, yeah.
26:46
The law isn't a police force. It is a language of legitimacy.
26:50
If you lose your legitimacy, your power becomes incredibly
26:53
expensive to maintain. That reframes it completely.
26:57
The law forces states to explain themselves, and if the
27:01
explanation is bad, they pay a massive political price.
27:04
Precisely. So far, we've been entirely
27:06
focused on states, the roommates in the apartment.
27:09
But if we look at the actual stage of global politics today,
27:12
it is incredibly crowded. States are no longer the only
27:15
actors that matter. No, they aren't.
27:17
We have to look at the massive network of international
27:19
organizations and civil society groups.
27:21
The modern world is far too complex for states to manage
27:24
alone, hence the explosion of institutions.
27:28
But we have to make a very sharp distinction between the two main
27:30
types. First, we have intergovernmental
27:32
organizations or Igos. The heavyweight champion being
27:36
the United Nations. The UN is the prime example,
27:39
Yeah, but the defining characteristic of an IGO is
27:42
right in the name intergovernmental.
27:45
It is created by states, funded by states, and ultimately
27:48
controlled by states. The UN does not have independent
27:51
sovereignty over its members. It is a forum for interaction.
27:54
And it inherently reflects the power dynamics of the states
27:57
that filled it. The text points to the UN
27:59
Security Council as the ultimate proof of this.
28:02
The Security Council has 15 members, but five of them the
28:05
USUK, France, Russia and China are permanent members.
28:09
And they hold the veto. Yes, the veto is crucial.
28:12
If 14 countries vote to send peacekeepers to stop a conflict,
28:16
but Russia or the US raises their hand and says no, the
28:20
resolution is dead. The UN is paralyzed.
28:22
It was a pragmatic compromise made in 1945.
28:25
The architects of the UN knew that if the major superpowers
28:28
didn't have a veto, they simply wouldn't join and the UN would
28:32
collapse, just like the League of Nations did before World War
28:34
2. And state sovereignty is guarded
28:36
so fiercely within the UN that it leads to absurd situations.
28:40
Look at Taiwan. By almost any practical metric,
28:43
Taiwan functions as an independent state.
28:46
They have a government, an economy, a military, passports.
28:50
But they're completely blocked from UN membership or even
28:52
participation in bodies like the World Health Organization.
28:56
Because China claims Taiwan as its own territory and uses its
29:01
diplomatic leverage to freeze them out, state power dictates
29:04
the limits of the IGO. Contrast that structural
29:07
paralysis with the second category, international non
29:10
governmental organizations or NGOs.
29:12
These are formed by private individuals and groups, totally
29:16
independent of governments, and their ability to reshape the
29:19
world is astounding. The text highlights the origin
29:22
of the Red Cross as a prime example.
29:23
This is one of the most incredible stories in the book.
29:25
It really is. It's 1859.
29:28
A Swiss businessman named Henry Danaan is traveling in Italy,
29:31
and he accidentally rides near the aftermath of the Battle of
29:34
Solfarino. It was a bloodbath between the
29:36
French Sardinian alliance and the Austrian army.
29:39
Danaan arrives and sees nearly 40,000 dead and wounded soldiers
29:44
literally just left in the dirt. There was almost no Medical
29:47
Corps. Men are dying of easily
29:49
treatable wounds, crying out for water.
29:51
And Danon didn't just walk away. He was so horrified that he
29:55
abandoned his business trip. He rallied the local civilian
29:57
population, mostly women, from nearby villages, and convinced
30:01
them to treat the wounded from both sides.
30:03
Regardless of what uniform they wore.
30:04
He goes home and writes a book about it called A Memory of
30:07
Sulfarino, which becomes a massive bestseller across
30:10
Europe. It sparks a movement that
30:11
directly leads to the founding of the International Committee
30:14
of the Red Cross in 1863. And Duna specific proposals in
30:18
that book LED governments to sit down and draft the original
30:21
conventions. One random businessman witnessed
30:25
a horror, used his voice, and literally wrote the foundation
30:28
of modern international humanitarian law.
30:31
And we see that same mechanism of civil society creating global
30:34
change today. The text sites The Jubilee 2000
30:37
campaign. A massive transnational network
30:40
of churches, activists and rock stars who successfully pressured
30:44
the world's wealthiest governments and the IMF to
30:47
cancel over $100 billion in debt for the world's poorest
30:51
countries. Or the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty in
30:54
1997 where a coalition of NGOs managed to get anti personnel
30:58
land mines banned globally, bypassing the slow veto ridden
31:02
UN process entirely. So if the UN is like a massive
31:06
corporate boardroom where 5 founders hold 51% of the voting
31:10
stock and constantly veto each other, NGOs are like the
31:13
activist shareholders. They're the whistleblower
31:15
standing in the parking lot with megaphones.
31:17
They can't change the corporate bylaws by themselves.
31:19
They don't have armies or tax revenue, but they have immense.
31:23
That is the crucial dynamic. NGOs have the agility and the
31:26
grassroots connection to set the global agenda.
31:29
They shine a spotlight on the darkness.
31:31
But the magic only truly happens when the megaphone interacts
31:34
with the boardroom. The defining successes of global
31:36
governance occur when civil society generates so much public
31:39
pressure that States and Igos are forced to enshrine that
31:42
moral outrage into binding legal treaties.
31:45
The text mentions the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio as the perfect
31:48
example. You had 10s of thousands of NGO
31:51
activists mobilizing the public, putting climate change and
31:55
biodiversity on the map. And that pressure forced the
31:58
state leaders inside the UN summit to actually sign
32:01
monumental framework agreements. Yeah, OK, let's bring all of
32:04
this high level governance, these treaties and vetoes back
32:07
down to earth because ultimately all of this lands on the kitchen
32:10
table of the everyday citizen. We have to talk about the global
32:13
political economy. How does the movement of money
32:17
across these sovereign borders actually impact human lives?
32:21
To frame this, the text relies heavily on the work of the
32:23
political economist Carl Polanya Polanyi.
32:27
Revolutionize how we think about markets.
32:29
Classical economist tend to treat the market as an abstract
32:32
mathematical machine, totally separate from society.
32:34
Polanyi argued that this is a dangerous fiction.
32:37
Markets are deeply embedded in human communities.
32:40
Economic life and social life are one in the same.
32:43
And he introduced this concept of the double movement.
32:46
When massive, unregulated free market policies are unleashed,
32:49
they inevitably cause severe social disruption.
32:52
They displace workers, destroy environments or concentrate
32:56
wealth at the very top. That's the first movement.
32:58
The second movement is society's natural reaction.
33:01
People push back. They demand labor unions,
33:04
environmental regulations, tariffs or welfare protections
33:07
from the state to shield themselves from the brutal logic
33:10
of the market. It is a perpetual tug of war
33:12
between the expansion of the market and the self protection
33:15
of society. And in our era of
33:18
hyperglobalization, that tug of war has gone global.
33:21
We can see the dark, destructive side of market expansion in
33:25
modern global supply chains. The text tells a harrowing,
33:28
infuriating story about Cambodia.
33:30
In 2006, the Cambodian government granted massive land
33:33
concessions to private corporations to create sugar
33:36
plantations. They literally evicted 1700
33:39
families from their ancestral lands.
33:42
The military and police came in, bulldozed farms, burned down
33:45
houses and shot livestock. Just like that for sugar.
33:48
And why did they do this? To produce a cash crop for
33:50
export. Specifically, they were
33:52
exploiting a trade initiative created by the European Union
33:55
called Everything But Arms, which allowed developing nations
33:59
to export goods to the EU. Tariffs free the massive demand
34:04
for cheap sugar in European supermarkets, directly
34:07
incentivize violent displacement in Southeast Asia.
34:10
This is what activists later called blood sugar.
34:14
But this is where it ties back to civil society.
34:16
The Cambodian families didn't just give up.
34:19
They couldn't rely on their own government for justice because
34:22
their government was the one bulldozing their homes.
34:25
So they used a strategy scholars call boomerang activism.
34:29
They realized they lived in a globalized world, so they threw
34:32
their pleas for help outward into the international arena.
34:35
They partnered with global NGOs. They launched the Clean Sugar
34:39
campaign. They flew to Europe.
34:41
They shamed the international banks that were financing the
34:43
plantations, and they literally filed a lawsuit in London
34:47
against Tate and Lyle, the massive British sugar company
34:50
that was buying the product. They threw the boomerang out and
34:53
it looped around to hit the corporations and the Cambodian
34:56
government from the outside. It's a brilliant strategy, but
34:59
it also highlights a terrifying reality of the modern political
35:03
economy, the immense unchecked power of multinational
35:08
corporations. Corporations have become
35:10
incredibly adept at exploiting the anarchic structure of the
35:13
Westphalian system. Remember, the system is made of
35:16
separate sovereign borders. Corporations operate
35:19
transnationally across all borders, but they are regulated
35:23
and taxed locally within specific borders.
35:26
They play the discord servers against each other.
35:28
The text highlights how companies engage in tax
35:31
avoidance. Look at the example provided
35:33
regarding Netflix. Netflix has millions of paying
35:36
subscribers in the UK, generating massive revenue.
35:39
But they managed to route those European profits through
35:41
subsidiaries in places like Luxembourg, taking advantage of
35:45
wildly low tax rates, the text notes.
35:47
They paid essentially of 5% income tax.
35:50
This practice, broadly known as base erosion and profit
35:53
shifting, drains hundreds of billions of dollars from public
35:56
treasuries globally. States are so desperate for
35:58
foreign investment and jobs that they engage in a race to the
36:01
bottom, slashing corporate taxes and regulations to attract these
36:05
massive companies. The corporations end up wielding
36:08
more leverage than sovereign governments.
36:10
This brings up a massive contradiction.
36:13
If you listen to mainstream liberal economists, they will
36:15
tell you that globalization and free trade are the ultimate
36:19
engines of human progress. It's the rising tide that lifts
36:22
all boats. But if I look at the news, I see
36:25
massive populism, anger over cororate tax evasion, and
36:29
horrific supply chain stories like the Cambodian sugar graft.
36:33
If free trade is so great, why is there so much backlash?
36:37
That is the defining tension of our era, because both narratives
36:40
are technically true depending on which level of analysis you
36:43
use. OK, if you look at the system
36:45
level, globalization has been an unmitigated triumph.
36:48
Global GDP has skyrocketed. Hundreds of millions of people
36:52
in places like China and India have been lifted out of extreme
36:55
poverty. But if you zoom down to the
36:57
individual or group level, the picture fractures.
37:01
The wealth generated by globalization has been captured
37:04
largely by the very top tier of society.
37:06
It is hollowed out the working class and developed nations,
37:09
shifted immense power to unaccountable corporate boards
37:13
and caused environmental devastation.
37:15
The populist backlash we see today, the anger, the protests
37:19
of the demand for closed borders is Palani's double movement.
37:23
It is society desperately trying to protect itself from the
37:26
destabilizing force of the global market.
37:29
Which perfectly transitions us to the final piece of our
37:31
decoder ring. We've talked about states,
37:33
theories, laws and money, but at the core of all of this are
37:37
human beings. Beliefs, identities and
37:39
individual safety are woven deeply into international
37:42
relations. For a very long time, academic
37:44
IR scholars operated with a massive blind spot.
37:48
They completely ignored religion.
37:49
The dominant assumption in the 20th century was secularization
37:52
theory, the belief that as societies modernized, grew
37:56
wealthier, and adopted science, religion would naturally fade
37:59
away as a political force. It was viewed as a relic of the
38:02
medieval mess. But then September 11th, 2001
38:05
happened. The 9/11 attacks were a massive,
38:08
violent wake up call to the policy in academic worlds.
38:12
They realized that not only was religion not fading away, it was
38:16
actually surging as a transnational political force.
38:19
Scholars had to scramble to understand why.
38:21
The text explains that religion provides something that standard
38:24
political ideologies like liberalism or socialism simply
38:27
can't. It provides sacred symbols.
38:29
It offers powerful deep seated narratives of absolute good
38:32
versus absolute evil, of martyrdom, of divine justice and
38:36
eternal salvation. When a political movement
38:39
attaches its grievances to sacred sales, it mobilizes
38:43
people in a way that transcends borders and rational economic
38:46
calculations. A standard realist scholar
38:48
assumes the state will back down from a fight if the cost is too
38:51
high. But how do you deter an actor
38:53
who believes that dying in the conflict guarantees them
38:55
paradise? Traditional deterrence theory
38:58
completely breaks down. This realization forced a
39:00
broader shift in how we think about security itself.
39:04
The text details the transition from state security to human
39:07
security. In the traditional Westphalian
39:10
mindset, the only thing that matters is protecting the
39:12
state's borders from an invading army.
39:14
If the border is secure, the state is secure.
39:18
But that definition ignores A horrific, undeniable statistic.
39:22
In the 20th century, far more people were murdered by their
39:25
own governments than were killed by foreign enemies in wars.
39:29
Scholars call this demicide. Stalin's purges, Mao's Great
39:33
Leap Forward, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide.
39:37
The sovereign state, the entity supposedly designed to protect
39:40
its people, was historically the greatest threat to their lives.
39:44
I always use the analogy of a nightclub bouncer.
39:47
The traditional concept of sovereignty means the state is
39:49
the bouncer. Their job is to stand at the
39:51
door and protect the patrons inside from the dangerous
39:54
elements out on the street. But human security asks what
39:58
happens when the bouncer locks the doors, pulls out a weapon
40:00
and starts attacking the patrons.
40:02
Oh, that's a terrifying thought. And that question leads to the
40:05
most agonizing moral dilemma in international relations.
40:08
If the state is massacring its own people, does the
40:12
international community, the police outside the club, have a
40:15
moral obligation to kick the door down, breach the club's
40:18
sovereignty and save the patrons?
40:21
This is the responsibility to protect R2P coming back around,
40:24
but it's incredibly divisive. If you allow states to breach
40:28
sovereignty for humanitarian reasons, don't you just create a
40:32
massive loophole for powerful empires to invade weaker
40:35
countries whenever they want? Exactly.
40:37
Scholars are violently divided on this.
40:39
The optimistic or liberal interventionist camp argues that
40:43
human rights must trump state sovereignty, but we must use
40:46
strict multilateral UN mechanisms to ensure the
40:49
intervention is genuine and not just a land grab.
40:51
In the other side. The tragic or realist camp
40:55
argues that powerful states are entirely self interested.
40:58
They will weaponize the language of human rights.
41:00
They will claim they are intervening to save people when
41:03
in reality they are just toppling A regime they dislike
41:05
or securing access to oil. They argue that opening the door
41:09
to humanitarian intervention destroys the Westphalian rule of
41:13
non interference, which will ultimately lead to endless
41:16
chaotic wars that kill even more people.
41:18
And compounding all of this human complexity is technology.
41:22
The text points out that the digital age is the ultimate
41:25
double edged sword. On one hand, the Internet
41:28
bypasses borders completely. It connects humanity.
41:31
It allows a young activist in Cairo during the Arab Spring to
41:34
use Twitter to organize a massive democratic protest that
41:38
topples A dictator. It empowers the individual.
41:41
But the state pushes back. The Great Firewall of China is
41:44
the textbook example of a state asserting its sovereignty over
41:48
the digital realm. The state uses the exact same
41:51
technology, the Internet AI facial recognition to filter
41:54
information, silence descent and build a surveillance apparatus
41:57
that absolute monarchs in the 1600s couldn't even dream of.
42:01
Technology empowers the citizen, but it's supercharges the state.
42:05
OK, take a deep breath. We have journeyed through
42:07
centuries of history and complex theory.
42:09
Today, let's look at the decoder ring we've built.
42:12
We started with the sheer trauma of the 30 Years War, which
42:15
birthed the Westphalian sovereign state.
42:17
The ultimate group chat where everyone gets their own private
42:21
server. We watched the French Revolution
42:23
infuse those states with the fiery passion of the nation,
42:27
creating the nation state model that Europe violently exported
42:30
to the rest of the globe. We learned to adjust our lenses
42:33
using levels of analysis to see how the 2008 financial crisis
42:37
looks totally different depending on whether you focus
42:40
on global systems or individual grade.
42:42
We explored how realists see a world of paranoid survival,
42:46
while liberals see the potential for trade and peace, and
42:49
constructivists remind us that the rules are only what we make
42:53
them. We stood in the room during the
42:54
Cuban Missile Crisis and saw how diplomacy pulled humanity back
42:58
from the nuclear brink. We learned that international
43:00
law isn't a police force, but a set of house rules that punishes
43:04
rule Breakers by destroying their soft power and legitimacy.
43:07
We navigated the crowded 21st century stage, balancing the
43:11
structural gridlock of the UN Security Council against the
43:14
moral megaphone of Ng OS like the Red Cross.
43:17
We saw the human cost of globalized markets, from
43:20
Cambodian land grabs to corporate tax havens.
43:23
And finally, we confronted the undeniable power of religion,
43:27
the moral agony of human security, and the digital
43:30
battleground. Which leaves us with one final
43:33
provocative thought to Mull over, drawn right from the
43:36
conclusion of our source text. We've spent this entire deep
43:39
dive establishing that the Westphalian state, that private
43:42
Discord server with hard borders is the undisputed fundamental
43:46
building block of our world. We have cyber warfare where
43:49
malicious. Code travels from Moscow to
43:51
Washington in milliseconds, completely ignoring borders.
43:54
We have a rapidly warming climate that.
43:56
Doesn't care about customs checkpoints or passports.
43:59
We have massive multinational. Corporations with economies
44:02
larger than entire continents and digital currencies designed
44:05
specifically to bypass national central banks, the Westphalian
44:08
state was invented. To solve the specific
44:10
territorial problems of 17th century Europe, the burning
44:14
question is, is that 400 year old technology finally becoming
44:18
obsolete in the face of 21st century borderless crises?
44:22
Are we currently living to the painful?
44:23
Messy death of the nation state and if the state is dying, what
44:28
on earth comes next that is something for you to think about
44:31
the. Next time you scroll through
44:32
your newsfeed. The world stage is complex but
44:36
is built by people and what was built by people can't be changed
44:39
by people. Keep questioning the map because
44:42
the lines are definitely blurring.
44:44
Thanks for taking this Dee dive with us.