Across these boards, in any given moment, dozens of nations are acting upon the chaotic game-field; they make war, make peace, forge empires and lose them, enter alliances and dissolve unions. They collide like billiard balls, ricocheting as they slam into each other, or pushing together towards a new goal.
Pandemonium. Anarchy. Yet, within a certain structure, rational, and productive.
Issues arise when nations do not share a vocabulary, and engage in arguments over terminology, because of a lack of common language. Worse still, is when nations act in ways that are bizarrely counter-productive to a simulation of nation-states, and then grow incensed when their bizzaro-verse is questioned.
International relations has rules. It has structures. It has definitions. It has facts.
It is a science.
There are rules.
These rules can be violated, as this is fiction, but they should be understood before they are discarded. This guide will serve a quick trip through International Relations terminology, as most commonly seen/referenced inside the bounds of the International Incidents board. As the “billiards balls” dog-whistle above may have indicated, I will be using Realist language to frame these definitions, for two reasons:
- The chaos of II, with the complete lack of “long-game”, due to the shifting nature of who even exists, makes many schools irrelevant aside from in-character viewpoints, and makes liberalism a howling joke, to a degree that would set Woodrow Wilson into sobbing fits.
- Realism is the quickest shorthand to express the mechanisms of International Relations to neophytes.
Now, some of you may object to the things I am about to discuss, and to the metric by which I am measuring them. If you wish to object on material grounds, I hold you to this standard: state for me the definitions of classical realism, liberalism, neorealism (structural realism), neoliberalism, describe the role of game theory in international relations, and explain where, inside the confines of international relations, as a field of political science, where I have gone wrong. Those of you that understand what I just listed: I am using realism as the best logical shorthand for these boards. Those of you that have no idea what those things are? I speak holy truth. Accept my words as doctrine.
If you chose to object, but do not understand those terms: you are wrong. You do not argue chemistry without knowledge of stoichiometry. You do not argue physics without understanding classical mechanics. Likewise, you do not argue international relations without understanding basic definitions, theories, and mechanisms. Now, on to the meat of it!
The Big Terms:
To understand why you, and every other player in this game, is important, you need to understand four points. To be a relevant actor on the top tier, you need to be a sovereign nation-state. What is that? Well, stick around, cause here come some definitions!
Sovereignty – This is the grandfather of everything else. This is the gods-holy-truth of International Relations. The actors that matter are all sovereign. This means, to quote the wiki, “Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory.” That means, that to a sovereign entity, it answers to no higher power. Your city is not sovereign. Your nation-state is. If an actor (state) is not sovereign, then it does not matter, since it is merely a component of another, larger, actor. No one on the world stage wonders, “Oh, shit, how will this treaty play in Liverpool?” They wonder, “How will this play with the United Kingdom?” Only inside the UK would the concerns of Liverpudlians be truly relevant.
By default (de facto and de jure), your nation is sovereign. Your nation does not answer to any higher power than itself (you), unless you deliberately construct a giant puppet-show (empire – and poor form). While no nation has true OOC sovereignty (they are controlled by players, and by Max, and by his mods), for purposes of RP, they are sovereign. If a nation gives up its sovereignty, it no longer matters. This is a Bad ThingTM.
Think of losing sovereignty as being forum banned. You still might exist, but you really don't matter. Someone else speaks for you.
Nation – A nation is, to quote the wiki, “a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history”.
State – Again, quoting the wiki, “an organized community living under a unified political system”. To quote Max Weber (one of the three founders of modern sociology), “a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.” That little phrase, “monopoly of legitimate use of force”, is a real doozy. That is why it is okay for the police to carry weapons, use them when necessary, for the criminal justice system to place a person into custody for extended periods of time, whereas if you, random schmuck number forty-three, attempted to “carry out law and order” on your neighbors, you would have to answer to the aforementioned criminal justice system. (War extends from this, as well. Legitimate states can legitimately kill the piss out of each other, and it's not held up as forty-thousand counts of murder on their governments. Legitimate use of force.)
Nation-State – Somehow, that term seems familiar on this page. I wonder where I've seen it? Anywho, from the wiki, “The nation state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit. The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity. The term "nation state" implies that the two geographically coincide.” Well, that was a mouth-full.
It's important to understand that this term comes from the fusion of the two terms inside it, and has become the dominant form of sovereign actor in the modern world. It's also the default setting for your “nation-state” (holy crap, word in the definition!) in this game. If I have to explain why, you should probably go back to playing Farmville.
Basically, a nation-state is a unified government that is comprised of a unified people. Sometimes, this can be traced to a common ancestry and/or history, such as France (Franks). Other times, it can be forged from a submission to a common world-view (USA – all hail the Constitution). Most of the time, it is a hybrid.
Some of you crazy “nations” out there might not be nation-states, but it is important to understand the concept, since it is the default political setting, and, in International Relations, the most important.
Secondary Actors:
Not everything is a sovereign nation-state, though. There are important (but not as important) actors that don't quite qualify for the top tier. Most common are IGOs, NGOs, and “task groups”. Now, here, the classical realists start to bitch, but they can sit right back down, because a little structural theory just stepped up in “dis hizzy”.
Intergovernmental Organizations – This is the biggest of the second tier. An IGO is, to quote the wiki, “an organization composed primarily of sovereign states”. These are formed by a treaty or charter that spells out their objectives, rules, and obligations. They can be short or long term, bilateral (two states) or multilateral (many states), broad or specific. Examples of IGOs are the WHO, the World Bank, NATO, or the UN itself.
Now, just because you have a treaty, doesn't mean you have an IGO. Some treaties can form structures, but not an organization, instead relying on the member states to carry out their functions.
Further, IGOs serve the member states. That is, they are composed of member states, but are not governments unto themselves. If at any point, the UN told a member of the P5 – digression: the permanent five members of the Security Council, who wield veto power, aka, the nations who actually matter – that it had to cough up some money, that nation would instruct the UN to go drown itself, and that would be the end of that.
Again, sovereignty. It's cool like that. The nations are sovereign, the IGO is not.
Non-Governmental Organizations – The next most important actors are NGOs. These include multinational corporations, international charitable organizations, possibly the Catholic Church (not the Papal State itself), and a whole slew of special clubs that are not comprised of nation-states or acting in the name of a nation-state.
NGOs have a lot of power, but even the biggest of them can shake a stick at a sovereign nation-state. If Syria decides that Google doesn't get to be in Syria, Google gets the hell out of dodge before Bashar Assad locates the nearest can of cyclosarin.
Some of you enterprising future-tech nations (or past-tech: here's looking at you, East India Company) may have cooked up a pseudo-sovereign NGO-state. The rules of the game still apply, even if you exist in limbo between the pages. If you were clever enough to cook up the structure of the pseudo-state, then you should be more than clever enough to figure out where you fall in this.
The rest of you? The International Red Cross / Red Crescent is not the equal of the Russian Federation. Sorry, guys.
Task Groups – These are the workhorses of the second stringers. Task Groups are organizations constructed to solve specific problems. The “Quartet on the Middle East” is one of these. They are not full fledged IGOs, as they possess no true structure or overhead, and exist only to solve a single problem or fulfill a single purpose, often temporary in nature. (The Quartet, obviously, has been spectacularly successful.)
The Obligatory “I'm a Unique Snowflake” Section
“Oh, but wait!” You say. “What about supranational unions?”
Well, first off, in the most classical of terms, go stuff yourself. Second, since you had to go an show off in front of the class, here are the outliers.
Empire – Quoting from my favorite wiki, an empire is “a geographically extensive group of states and peoples (ethnic groups) united and ruled either by a monarch (emperor, empress) or an oligarchy.” That is, it is a group of nations bound under one state. The empire, as a whole, is one sovereign state, since nothing inside it is sovereign, at least at the moment. Just wait a century or two, then check again, but for now, it can be dealt with as one sovereign whole.
Supranational Union – Pay attention, mathletes, this is the bonus round. A superstate (or supranational union) is a “type of multi-national confederation or federation where negotiated power is delegated to an authority by governments of member states”. (Thanks, wikipedia!) When many of you speak of “alliances”, you are using the language of IGOs, but thinking of these monsters.
Now, how common are superstates? Well, the only realized (and partially) example in our world would be the EU. The United States (and modern Germany) may once have qualified as these sorts of confederations, but have since transcended (blended) into unified federated states. That is, while people will still speak about France, and the EU, as linked but unique entities, no one is tempted to get Ohio to split with the US Federal Government.
Supranational unions exist at a unique balancing point, where they share sovereignty with a superstate governing body. This is a delicate state to roleplay, since any decision would have to be balanced against the other members of the superstate, and any “breakaway” would dissolve the superstate back into a mere IGO, whereas successful blending leads them into a federated union.
Attempting to stitch a meaningful supranational union out of the chaos of II would be, to put it gently, “trippin' balls”. If you have a large enough nation-state, it could be cool to roleplay as a superstate. Similarly, I am in a very large supranational union with several real life friends. This only functions on these boards because we operate in an OOC-cooperative manner, with all cards played openly. To attempt to carve out a superstate in game... well, that would be interesting (and doomed to failure – II is simply too transient).
Truth be told, most alliances-cum-superstates are really just empires, masquerading as confederacies. And remember, kiddos, in an empire, only one state is sovereign.
And that, if you remember, is a very Bad ThingTM for you to give away.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
I hope this was useful, informative, and helpful. There's plenty more where that came from, and if there's sufficient interest, I might cook up another run of IR pointers. Maybe Prisoner's Dilemma?
Thanks to all of you, for a rich gaming world, and to Professor Belanich, all those years ago, and to the founders of wikipedia for letting me be lazy and let all my old Poli-Sci books rot in the closet while I whore about with the internet's loose data.
Peace,
K-stan
