International Relation II

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International Relation II

Agata Kobialka

04031915

Essay:

9) Why have environmental issues emerged as important for international relations in recent years?

An environmental issue has become an important part of international relations politics since 1960s. It does not mean that they did not exist before that time, but just did not have such a big volume over international relations. Moreover from that time environmental problems become more evident and dangers matter.

“Billions of people suffer daily from air pollution. Acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, and climate change are major regional or global problems arising from atmosphere pollution.”(Green, 2004, 452)

From 1960s become certain than enviromental problems are not local or national but global responsibility. World started to see that pollution, climate change or ozone depletion have not have boundaries and are affecting whole globe.

“Problems of the global commons are frequently transboundary: for example, climate change, ozone depletion and marine pollution do not respect national boundaries. Global problems represent a major threat to the environment and can only be solved through concerted action by international community.”(Carter, 2001, 164)

The single state can be to small or to weak to do anything about the environmental issues and even if it could do something it would be probably pointless, simply because effort of one state could be destroyed in minutes by other, since we life on the same planet. So collective action is needed as joint venture has bigger chance to make the change.

The three approaches are associated with the environmental issues in international relations, taking into account the sovereignty of state and global problems solving. The first approach called “international regime” approach does not recognise any contradiction between sovereignty of the state and cooperation on global scale to solve environmental crises.

“Perhaps most importantly, they make a normative assumption that states system caning participle respond to global change, because of the premise that there are no insuperable obstacles to cooperation under the basic anarchy of international politics (Paterson, 1999, 794)

Second global governance approach is talking about huge importance of international organisations as NGO, UN in the process of governance on global scale.

“For Hamplel, global environment governance emerges because the sceptical scale of the state is inadequate in dealing with the scales of environmental change. The state is simultaneously too small and too big to deal effectively with such change, and thus practices of governance move towards local levels, in response. (Peterson, 1999, 795)

Some writers are opinion that international organisation have more influence over global issues that states itself. The third approach associated with Karlinger’s term “grassroots globalisation” is taking critical view on global governance over environmental issues, as it may pose threats for states sovereignty and security matters. Fallowers of this approach were concerned that “going global” could build serious problems for the particular countries. The question arises: if most powerful military and economies power can have more influence on decisions making during agreements and pacts? And could the environmental politics lead to violent conflicts?

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“Discussion of-balance-of-power politics, military hegemony, and gunboat diplomacy seem alien to international problem solving. Military threats are strikingly irrelevant to efforts to persuade China not to fully exploit into high-sulphur coal resources, for instance, or to convince Brazil and Malaysia not to decimate their forests.”(Litfin, 1999, 332)

 So the answer is not and as history shows has not lead to violent conflicts but does not mean that is free from any conflicts completely.

From Stockholm Conference in 1972, Montreal Protocol in 1987 on ozone depletion, Rio Conference on emission of greenhouse gases to Kyoto protocol in 1997, up to this ...

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