Hoarding or Sharing
Academic warfare in the study of international politics is rarely left to the scholarly journals. Rather, it is carried on in the front pages of the discipline - its introductory textbooks read by beginning students, scholars, and journalists alike.
Richard Sterling's new book is, in a dialectical sense, an answer long overdue to what probably was the leading post-World War II treatise (and also a leading textbook) on international politics: Hans Morgenthau's PoliticsAmong Nations. Attacking the kind of political realism preached by Morgenthau, Sterling argues persuasively against an international political (he calls it micropolitical) system based on the primacy of the nation-state. Twentieth century developments such as increased communications, trade, the common thrust towards economic-political development, and the desire for justice, he contends, have combined to make obsolete exclusive reliance on the traditional tools of diplomacy: balance-of-power tactics, divide-and-rule, coercion, etc.
The key to Sterling's approach is contained in his discussion of macropolitics which opens the second section of the book: "Macropolitics, then, necessarily treats international problems as domestic problems of the global system." His model of the future of the international system is based on an understanding of the evolution of the modern nation-state. When elites within the nation shared, rather than hoarded, values, there developed during the period of industrialization a peace-sustaining sense of justice. On the other hand, when elites maintained existing social inequalities within the nation, the resulting sense of injustice sparked a revolutionary fervor. Thus elites attempting to protect what they had often ended up losing everything. All systems, Sterling points out, contain varying mixtures of value-sharing (cosmopolitan) and hoarding (local) elites. When cosmopolitans succeed in shaping policy, sharing and redistribution is the rule.
The present international system is, in Sterling's model, like the underdeveloped nation in which there is a small elite (the developed nations) and a large mass (the underdeveloped nations). The gap, or inequality in the distribution of values, is enormous for such things as wealth, education, and status. The mechanism for reducing the gap is the development process involving both political and economic modernization. If the experience of the nation-state is instructive, elites (the presently developed nations) must become cosmopolitan (sharing) to engender a peace-sustaining sense of justice on a global basis. The cosmopolitan elites of developed and underdeveloped nations must find creative ways of cooperating. Else it will be, as it has been, a war of all against all, and the political realists will again have been shown to be correct.
For Sterling, then, the lesson of domestic politics is that there is no peace without justice, a lesson that global society has yet to learn. He has given us, though, a glimpse of the perspective each of us must acquire if we are to assist in the transformation of global society to global community. This insight is expressed with such force and clarity that you should put Macropolitics on your required reading list.
MACROPOLITICS: INTERNATIONALRELATIONS IN AGLOBAL SOCIETY. By Richard W. Sterling, Professor of Government.Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. 624pp. $16.50.
Dartmouth Professor of Government, Mr.Sullivan teaches American Parties and Politics,Political Behavior, and The Nature of PoliticalInquiry.
