A Holistic Approach to the Study of
International Relations
The state is any
body of people occupying a definite
territory and politically organized under one government6. The terms state, government and nation differ
in meaning. A government is the
established form of political
organization of a state. A nation
may be a body of inhabitants occupying a
definite territory with a common culture. A “nation” may also mean any aggregation of people
having like institutions and customs and a sense of social homogeneity and mutual interest”.
A nation may extend beyond the borders of a particular state. State, nation and country
are used
interchangeably by writers for choice of words not
necessarily because they mean exactly
the same thing.
States have vast
differences which include size, population,
culture, government , military strength, etc. Through international law, all states are
equal and sovereign, but in actual fact
there are many inequalities and many degrees of
dependence among states. For
instance, the annual budget of the city of New York is larger than that
of the states of the world.
The
national budget of India with a population of more than half a billion is
smaller than that of Britain which is
less than 19th as
many people. States also differ significantly cultures,
religion, language, history, tradition, ethical codes social patterns, economic and political
ideologies. A state may operate
parliament or military, some governments are dictatorial and honest. Others are
democratic and corrupt, etc.
In international
affairs, the most common way classifying states is with a re-course to national
power “great power” or “major
powers” and “small powers”, world power, super powers, middle powers and powers
of uncertain status. The United States of America is a
world power in terms of worldwide commitments and extra-ordinary military
strength.
During World War
II, which involved Japan, Italy and
Germany on one side and USA, great Britain,
France and Russia on the other, France was easily overrun, but with a
combined effort of Russia, great Britain and USA, Nazism
in Germany was utterly
destroyed, fascism in Italy, and
military fascism and emperor system in Japan were equally crushed
japans attack on the pearl harbour in
1941 forced the USA to
join the war on the side of
allied powers. At the end, USA and
Russia emerged as world powers.
In its broadest
historical perspective, the present
state system is explained by Aristotle’s
celebrated observation that man
is by nature a political animal. This means that at all
stages of development people have needs and wants which they cannot realize alone. Hence, they form
social groups. Such groups differ
greatly in their nature and scope according
to circumstances but they invariably
strike a host of
organizational problems pertaining to the structure
of the group and also its relationship with other groups, the
equivalent of modern international
relations. They had the problems of delimitation and induing the size
best suited for
the groups. Plato and Aristotle discussed it in
their analyses of the Greek city
states. The first large scale
politically organized states and state
systems of which there are records
developed about 5000BC in the
Nile valley, the Tigris and Euphrates
and later in the great rivers of
China. This development was not due to
accident but to a social need common to all these areas. In these areas,
states became enmeshed in networks of
interstate relations alternating between
the two patterns of separate warring and cooperating units and of great empires imposed on them.
These political systems usually led by civilizations were fluctuating in their
boundaries but were geographically fairly segregated from one another, early development of a degree of culture and
political coherence. The medieval Christian commonwealth successfully preserved the idea of unity
through the intuitions of the church and
the universities. The medieval order
eventually crumbled under the impact of the renaissance and the reformation. The local princes who rose to political prominence through the acquisition of
territory became immersed in
religious wars, fighting for their creeds abroad and trying to ensure their complete sway at home Machiavelli rightly observed that modern states are based
on power but religious origin must not be neglected. Religious
forces did not disappear
from politics completely but in form of national churches, generally adapted themselves to the new units.
The system of
sovereign territorial state was formally established by the peace treaty of
Westphalia in 1648. It was first limited to Europe. Gradually, however,
European states extended their rule over other
continents which they considered fair game for their expansion.
They thus molded oversea territories within their empires.