Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel H. Deudney is Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has written extensively on international political theory and contemporary global issues.

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"Bounding Power has the potential to revolutionize international political thought. Such an exciting book comes along once in a blue moon."--David A. Welch, University of Toronto, author of Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change and Justice and the Genesis of War

"Daniel Deudney is one of the most creative thinkers in contemporary political science. In this captivating and wide-ranging book, he retrieves classical ideas of republican security theory to critique realist and liberal interpretations of present-day globalization and the ascent of liberal democracy. He then offers novel republican solutions for future world order that square the circle of avoiding nuclear violence while preserving individual freedom."--Henry Nau, George Washington University

"To say that Bounding Power is a significant contribution to the field is an understatement. Indeed, it is a significant contribution to several fields: political theory, U.S. history, constitutional law, ethics, and, of course, international relations. Once it is published, no one will be able to talk about international relations theory without taking the republican legacy into account. This will be the case for years to come."--Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University, author of The Republican Legacy in International Thought

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"Daniel Deudney is one of the most creative thinkers in contemporary political science. In this captivating and wide-ranging book, he retrieves classical ideas of republican security theory to critique realist and liberal interpretations of present-day globalization and the ascent of liberal democracy. He then offers novel republican solutions for future world order that square the circle of avoiding nuclear violence while preserving individual freedom."--Henry Nau, George Washington University

""Bounding Power" has the potential to revolutionize international political thought. Such an exciting book comes along once in a blue moon."--David A. Welch, University of Toronto, author of "Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change" and "Justice and the Genesis of War"

"To say that "Bounding Power" is a significant contribution to the field is an understatement. Indeed, it is a significant contribution to several fields: political theory, U.S. history, constitutional law, ethics, and, of course, international relations. Once it is published, no one will be able to talk about international relations theory without taking the republican legacy into account. This will be the case for years to come."--Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University, author of "The Republican Legacy in International Thought"

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Bounding Power

Princeton University Press

Introduction

I study power so as to understand the enemy. -Stanley Hoffmann

THE GLOBAL VILLAGE AND THE LIBERAL ASCENT

Globalization is the first, most important fact about the human condition at the threshold of the second millennium. Globalization, the rising levels of interdependence on progressively larger spatial scales, has been the dominant trend in human history during the last five centuries, and it has operated in military, ecological, economic, and cultural dimensions. Over this period, all human political communities, initially isolated or loosely connected, have become more densely and tightly interconnected and subject to various mutual vulnerabilities in a manner previously experienced only on much smaller spatial scales. The creation of this villagelike proximity and density on a global scale has occurred through every means imaginable, from genocidal invasion and enslavement to cooperative exchange and progressive emulation. It has produced massive epidemics, world wars, ecological devastation, and cultural annihilation, as well as large populations of humans more secure, more free, and more prosperous than ever before in history. Looking ahead into the new century, globalization shows every indication of further intensifying as human population burgeons, weapons of mass destruction proliferate, lethal new plagues emerge, ecological destruction accelerates, economies further integrate, and information capacities advance.

In the face of these developments, theorists of international relations and world politics have a decidedly divided posture. On one side, numerous globalist and interdependence theorists have charted these realities for more than a century, and many have pointedly drawn the conclusion that increasingly substantive world governance and government are needed to satisfy basic human interests. On the other side, the still hegemonic tradition of Realist international theory maintains a skeptical stance toward globalist claims about the world and doubts the need or the possibility of establishing robust world governance. Labeling these ambitions utopian or idealistic, Realists emphasize the long historical persistence of the fundamentally anarchic sovereign state system and expect the future to look much like the past. The Realist view also seems to gain authority from a conceptually rich tradition of theorizing supposedly stretching back to the ancient Greeks and seemingly vindicated repeatedly by the historical record.

The second most important fact about the contemporary human situation is the liberal-democratic ascent, the rise to an historically unprecedented preeminence of the 'free world' composed of the United States of America and its democratic allies. Republics (polities based on political liberty, popular sovereignty, and limited government) have been historically precarious and rare, generally poor, and massively compromised. They now constitute a zone of peace, freedom, and prosperity far greater than any other in history. For most of history republics were confined to small city-states where they were insecure and vulnerable to conquest or internal usurpation, but over the last two centuries they have expanded to continental size through federal union and emerged victorious from the violent total world conflicts of the twentieth century. In contrast, their major despotic and imperial adversaries have failed spectacularly. The American-led 'free world' overcame the reversals of the 1930s and early 1940s, expanded with the reconstruction of Western Europe and parts of East Asia as capitalist, liberal, constitutional, and federal democracies, and has built a dense network of international institutions. This "compound of federations, confederations, and international regimes" now constitutes a political order more like the domestic spheres of earlier republics than the prototypical Realist state system of hierarchies in anarchy.

On the Liberal ascent international theorists also have a decidedly divided posture. Realists tend to view the United States as simply another nation-state and as a particularly successful great power. They tend to dismiss its exceptionalist liberal-democratic ideology as either dangerously naive or disingenuously self-serving. Realists also have difficulty accepting and conceptualizing the Western liberal order as a distinct type of state system. They have little hope for its persistence and expend little effort in thinking about how it might be sustained or augmented. Contemporary Liberal international theory, growing in strength and sophistication along with the expansion of the liberal system, does better, but its treatment is also fragmented, off center, and increasingly in disarray. In contrast to the pessimistic Realist emphasis on historical patterns of recurrence, contemporary Liberalism, particularly American 'neoconservativism,' has tended toward overoptimism, verging on triumphalism and complacency, thus forgetting the arduous circumstances and severe problems faced by early republican polities. International Liberalism's numerous practical agendas of arms control, democracy promotion, international law, human rights, peacekeeping, international organization, and functional problem-solving regimes still labor inappropriately under the onus of utopianism. These agendas are not well connected to one another or to a larger conceptualization of Liberal and world governance, and the legacies of progressive internationalism are increasingly under assault. Liberals are also increasingly divided about the appropriateness of establishing international restraints on states, and the liberal democracies of America and Europe are increasingly divided about which parts of the liberal-democratic agenda are most important.

The stakes and divisions over intensifying security globalization and the status of broadly liberal political arrangements are particularly acute concerning nuclear weapons. Marking the effective culmination of five centuries of strategic and military globalization, the discovery of nuclear explosives a half century ago created a material context with unprecedented possibilities for large-scale destruction. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the increasing credibility of nonstate actors acquiring and using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction has further raised both the stakes and the intellectual disarray surrounding security globalization and the fate of free polities.

The response of theorists to these destructive possibilities also has been extremely diverse, ranging from the view that the state system is obsolete and must be replaced by effective world government, through the currently dominant middle view that nuclear deterrence has brought about a revolution in interstate relations, to the still influential view that nuclear weapons are not revolutionary in their implications. Within this diverse matrix of theory and policy, Realist views, while themselves varied, have dominated, displacing into increasing marginality early American and liberal views supporting robust international regulation and vigorous arms control. The attacks of 9/11 and the prospects of nonstate nuclear terrorism have brought new urgency to the old question of the relationship between domestic liberty and international order.

THE ARGUMENT

Given these discrepancies between these two...