Chapter 4 Review questions

  1. Liberals think people are 'good'; realists think they are 'plain bad'. What do you think?
  2. More intense relations across borders between people lead to mutual understanding and cooperation – so sociological liberals claim. Can they also lead to conflict? If yes, does that invalidate the ideas of sociological liberals?
  3. Interdependence liberals claim that there is more focus on 'low politics' of economic and social affairs today, than on 'high politics' of security and survival. Is that a valid claim?
  4. Are international institutions important and influential in international affairs – as liberals say they are – or are they 'scraps of paper' subject to the bidding of strong states, as realists argue?
  5. Is the European Union a unique case of regional cooperation or is it showing the way for regional cooperation elsewhere in the world?
  6. Try to think of cases where democracies have gone to war against each other; can you come up with any examples? If you can, do your examples invalidate the liberal claim about democratic peace?
  7. What are the arguments about the ‘dark side of democracy’? Do these arguments undermine the democratic peace theory?
  8. Is history the 'same damned things over and over again' or has there been real progress over the last several hundred years?
  9. Set forth the positions of weak liberals and strong liberals respectively. Who has the better argument?
  10. Do we have a basically liberal world today?
  11. What are the strongest objections against liberal theory?
  12. Compare the international consequences of the rise of Germany in the late 19th century and the rise of China in the 21stcentury. How would liberals explain that the first episode led to great power war but that the second has not done so?
  13. How do different liberal theories place themselves with respect to Waltz’s three levels of analysis (the state system level, the domestic level, and the individual level)?
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