序章 比較政治と国際政治の間

比較政治と国際政治の間

抄録

It has been quite some time since Peter Gourvitch, among others, had indicated that the interaction between international relations and domestic political change might have a more dynamic and theoretically interesting character than previously believed. A lot of water under the bridge since then, but not much has changed: the linkage between international politics and comparative politics has yet to be established. As a preface to the featured articles, this paper illustrates both the origins of this divide, as well as the important attempts that have been made to fill the gap.
There are two sources for the conceptual divide between domestic politics and international politics. The first is the legacy that has been carried over from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which not only ended religious wars in Europe but also established a world composed of secular sovereign states. Such transition to a world divided into secular states, however, was always limited and was placed under various challenges against that division. The Westphalian legacy, in many ways, has been elevated from history into a simplified myth.
A more academic source that established the domestic-international divide will be the works of Kenneth Waltz and his distinction of three analytical levels in international studies, one that effectively ruled out the search for domestic determinants of foreign policy as reductionist. But in effect, Waltz may have been working on a reductionism of his own, where domestic political priorities are reduced to that of a monolithic state, state priorities reduced to a mere outcome of anarchy, where patterns of power distribution appears as the only viable arenas for inquiry.
For students of international political economy, in their studies of the interactions between the international market and individual governments, Waltz's rigid category appeared too narrow and inadequate. Thus started a stream of academic works that aimed to move away from Waltz's third image, first studying the second image in reverse, and then directly castingdoubts on his dismissal of the second image. In this paper, I trace such theoretical developments, first in the field of international political economy, then on regional integration and international sociology, and finally on more regime-level transitions and the role played by international factors in such transition.