Concept of interdependence Free Essay Example

By the early 1970s the concept of interdependence was rising as an unique analytical outlook on international relations, however effectively specifying it continued to be prevented by its vulnerability and sensitivity symptoms, in addition to by wider disputes concerning the status of the discipline (Viotti and Kauppi 1987, 209). However, it was now important to distinguish connection in its common use from its usage in a “new” method to global relations.

The primary authors and expositors of “complicated interdependence,” Keohane and Nye, utilized the idea for identifying and attending to evident weak points in a Realist understanding of global politics (Keohane and Nye 1977).

Although, like the basic orientation of neoliberalism into which it would develop, intricate interdependence was footed not on a rejection of Realism, nevertheless on an expedition of “the conditions under which [the] assumptions of Realism were enough or required to be supplemented by a more complex model of change” (Keohane and Nye 1977, 32).

Charles Kegley and Eugene Wittkopf argue that interdependence boils down to three primary intellectual contributions and challenges to global relations theory.

First, at the exact same time as frequently accepting implicitly or overtly that states remain crucial analytical systems, they undergo “penetration” from a host of procedures and advancements beyond the scope of foreign-economic policy, and have to compete for power and influence with other (non-state) stars.

Second, interdependence blurs the conventional Realist differences in between “high” and “low,” and foreign and domestic, policy problems, calling into question the salience of Realism’s security dominant issue-hierarchy. Put persuasively, “guns” and “butter” are no longer quickly apart or traded.

Third, military force is a more and more “unimportant or unimportant” policy instrument (Kegley and Wittkopf 1993, 33).

Consequently constituted, interdependence has a clear affinity and intellectual debt to liberal institutionalism, as it’s progressively more close association with international organizations and regimes attests. It is therefore misleading to propose that interdependence is a neoliberal concept, and more suitable to view neoliberalism as an elaborated form of complex interdependence. Complex interdependence, though, has restricted paradigmatic potential and amounts to little more than a new set of observations on some old problems.

It is merely in recent years, and with advantage of hindsight, that interdependence has appeared to discover a paradigmatic home in neoliberalism. However interdependence remains a contested concept, or somewhat its implications carry on to be a matter of debate, with the disputants divided now, as always, over whether increased interdependence can be expected to cause more or less cooperation.

The very asking of this question, though, marks a significant thematic shift for international relationists, and complex interdependence has been instrumental in lifting issues of cooperation to new theoretical importance. In general, liberalism has strong affinities to the principles of classical idealism, and interdependence (in spite of its interparadigmatic character and compatibility with Realism) carries on in this idealist vane.

If the concept of complex interdependence is taken more to heart by liberal scholars, it is for the reason that it “captures much of the essence of their view of world politics” (Viotti and Kauppi 1987, 209). However neoliberal interpretations of international politics have so intentionally obscured the conceptual boundaries of Realism and liberalism that the above point might be disputed. Neoliberalism has not only embraced the concept of interdependence, although has done much to popularize and shape it.

But regardless of its neoliberal and corrupted adolescence, interdependence was born of traditional liberal arguments regarding comparative advantage, economic specialization, and exchange, and spent its formative years in the characteristically liberal milieu of integration theory (Burton 1969, 135; Holsti 1985, 27-9). Whereas often connected to “new types of phenomena in international politics” (Holsti 1985, 5), and observed as a novel fact of international life, interdependence is a somewhat old idea, if one whose time may finally have come.

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