Re-thinking Imperialism in International Relations مقالة

خلاصة:

Alongside the thought that considers humans to be essentially the same as animals and believes that the relationship of power is the basis of social relations, and calls itself Realism, there is another perspective that, from the point of view of Realists, belongs to the valley of illusion and wishful thinking. However, international conditions in the 1970s and 80s of the 20th century, along with the theories that were formed to explain the new situation, show that this perspective is not much further from reality than Realism. Many of the assumed axioms in Realist theory are collapsing, while some of the intellectual elements of the so-called Idealism perspective are being re-presented from various angles. In Realist theory, there were two basic elements that established international relations on war: one was state-centrism and the other was power-centrism. If these two elements lose their centrality in the theories of international relations, there will be no justification for permanent war. The basis of peace-oriented perspectives is precisely the negation of the centrality of these two elements. Instead of the state as the only actor on the stage, humans are placed, and instead of power, various relationships from brotherhood to economic and cultural ones are placed. Humans are considered the basis of every relationship, and the barriers between them are either arbitrary or artificial. The first people to describe human relationships, including international relations, from this angle were the Stoics. They believed in the unity and equality of humans, that nothing separates them. They perfectly embodied the verse of Sheikh Saadi on their conscience: 'The children of Adam are limbs of each other, having been created from the same substance.' From their point of view, any other division in the world was invalid. If it came to forming a government and state, only a world government could exist, within which other arbitrary formations, including city-states, could be imagined. In fact, they believed in a world government in which the cities of ancient Greece acted as bricks of a building. This idea emerged in ancient Greece with Zeno (born 490 BC) and found supporters in ancient Rome such as Cicero (died 43 BC) and Seneca (died 65 AD). After that, this thought was pursued in another way in Christianity until finally, in the 20th century, it was combined with other theories in the fields of law, economics, and philosophy, creating the contemporary school of Idealism. Contemporary Idealism, mainly in the period after World War I, gained global prominence as a way to prevent such wars. This school, while intellectually rich, suffers from a kind of ambiguity and lack of supporting texts and gospel-like scriptures of the kind found in Realist theory, because it is composed of different elements that have formed throughout the history of political and social thought on various occasions. In our opinion, the first step in understanding the school of Idealism is to understand the historical elements of this thought. Author: Dr. Ahmad Naghibzadeh -