Study sheet: International Relations and World Order

📋 Course Outline

1. International Relations in a Global Era
2. Scope and Controversies of IR
3. Competing Histories of the Discipline
4. International Orders and Globalization
5. The Nineteenth-Century Transformation
6. The World Between Two Wars
7. Versailles and the League of Nations
8. Depression Isolationism and Appeasement

📅 Key Dates

1. 1648The Peace of Westphalia is often considered the foundational date of the modern international order in International Relations.
2. 1789/1791The French and Haitian Revolutions began an Atlantic wave of revolutions lasting into the 1820s, introducing republicanism and popular sovereignty and challenging slavery.
3. 1865The International Telecommunications Union became the first standing intergovernmental organization, symbolizing the rise of permanent institutions of global governance.
4. 1905Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and became the first non-Western, non-white Great Power.
5. 1919The Department of International Politics was established at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and this is often presented as the formation of the academic discipline of International Relations after the First World War.
6. October 1929The Wall Street stock market crash in the United States is often considered the beginning of the Great Depression.

📖 1. International Relations in a Global Era

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• International Relations : the study of interactions among states and other actors, and of the historical, political, and socioeconomic consequences of those interactions for domestic populations.
• International State System : created by the interactions among all states in the world, whose consequences affect domestic populations.

📝 Essential Points

• International relations involves:
  • states
  • multinational corporations
  • nongovernmental organizations
  • multilateral institutions

💡 Memory Hook

State interaction → international system → domestic consequences

📖 2. Scope and Controversies of IR

📝 Essential Points

• International relations studies issues including peace and war, imperialism and nationalism, unequal wealth and poverty, nuclear weapons, global warming, human rights, state formation and dissolution, the European Union, international organizations, religion, trade, multinational corporations, race, gender, globalization, and the information revolution.

📌 Moral disagreements concern what policies ought to do and cannot be resolved by factual evidence alone, whereas theoretical disagreements concern explanatory propositions and can ultimately be tested against facts.

💡 Memory Hook

Moral disagreements cannot be settled like theoretical disagreements

📖 3. Competing Histories of the Discipline

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Foundation Myth : a discipline created after the First World War to identify the causes of war and help politicians prevent future wars.

📝 Essential Points

• The Journal of Race Development was first published in 1910 and later became the influential US-based publication Foreign Affairs.

💡 Memory Hook

Postwar peace project versus imperial and racial history

📖 4. International Orders and Globalization

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• International Order : regularized practices of exchange between political units that may be sparse or intensive, hierarchical or egalitarian, and formal or informal.

📝 Essential Points

📌 Globalization is debated because some scholars argue that it erodes state power, while others treat states as continuing central actors in an interdependent international order.

💡 Memory Hook

Sparse or intensive; hierarchical or egalitarian; formal or informal

📖 5. The Nineteenth-Century Transformation

📝 Essential Points

• The nineteenth century transformed international relations through revolutions, imperial expansion, transnational corporations, permanent intergovernmental institutions, instantaneous communication, and standardized world time.

💡 Memory Hook

Revolutions → empire → corporations → institutions → instant communication

📖 6. The World Between Two Wars

📝 Essential Points

📌 The First World War began among European states but spread globally and became the first modern industrialized total war because belligerents mobilized populations, economies, and armies.

📌 The Second World War was more total in nature and global in scope than the First World War and fundamentally changed world politics.

💡 Memory Hook

The First World War was total; the Second was even more global and total

📖 7. Versailles and the League of Nations

★ Must-know

• 🔄 The Treaty of Versailles emerged through: an armistice on 11 November 1918, the Paris Peace Conference from 18 January 1919 to 21 January 1920, the treaty signed on 28 June 1919

📌 The Treaty of Versailles imposed territorial losses, military disarmament, and financial and economic punishment on Germany, fixed German responsibility for the war, and set reparations eventually at £6600 million.

• Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points promoted:
  • open diplomacy
  • free trade
  • reduced armaments
  • self-determination
  • territorial adjustments
  • the creation of a League of Nations

📌 League members had to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other nation-states and reject the use or threat of military force to resolve international conflicts.

• The League of Nations reached 58 member-states at its largest, but it failed to prevent the Second World War because it lacked effective enforcement mechanisms and many countries did not join.

Further detail

• The Treaty of Versailles included a covenant establishing the League of Nations, whose first council meeting took place on 16 January 1920.

💡 Memory Hook

Armistice → Paris Conference → Versailles → League of Nations

📖 8. Depression Isolationism and Appeasement

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Great Depression : a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939 marked by unemployment, poverty, reduced liquidity, industrial production and trade, and widespread bank and business failures.
• Appeasement : a policy of reducing tensions with an adversary by removing the causes of conflict and disagreement through concessions.

★ Must-know

• The Great Depression pushed the United States further into post-First World War isolationism, while Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt prioritized economic recovery, unemployment, and domestic social dislocation.

• On 30 September 1938, Britain and France accepted Germany's demand that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland, but German forces seized all of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939.

Further detail

• Neville Chamberlain defended the 1938 Munich Agreement as bringing “peace for our time,” but Hitler's subsequent actions made the statement ring hollow and gave appeasement its strongly negative meaning.

💡 Memory Hook

Economic crisis and domestic priorities → limited opposition to aggression → war

📊 Synthesis Tables

Competing Origins of International Relations

Account	Historical setting	Purpose or implication
Peace-project account	Post-First World War Aberystwyth	Identify causes of war and improve the world
Imperial account	Colonial administration and imperialism	Expose hierarchy, race, and continuing white supremacy
Journal history	Journal of Race Development, first published 1910	Shows the field's connection to race and empire