Talk:Polarity in international relations
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[edit] fixes in multipolarity
I made several changes in this article. It had heavy grammatical mistakes as well as some awkward wording. I've also tweaked the examples, as well as adding a few.
[edit] problems
Yeah, uh, who came up with the percentages? As in:
"Bipolarity in international politics describes a distribution of power in which two states taken together control 50 % or more of strategic resources, each of the two leading states both control at least 25 % of strategic resources, and no other state controls 25 % or more."
Those numbers seem to be arbitrary. Also, a lot of the examples given in the article aren't necessarily grounded in reality. Example:
"{bullet point} The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (later the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) and the German Empire from the late 1800s until World War I"
In the 19th century, the world was not bipolar with the UK and the German Empire constituting the two poles, it was multipolar, i.e. there were several great powers (France, Austria, etc.), all having more or less comparable influence over international politics.
And the 'Regional Examples' in the article don't make much sense at all, either. Bipolarity refers to the division of power over the entire globe, not a localized condition in a particular region of the world.
And saying that during World War II the world was bipolar between the Axis and Allies is kind of stretching it. Generally when one talks about the polarity of the world, one is referring to a stable balance of power, not a constantly-shifting unstable tug-of-war between two groups of nations immersed in total war.
And why is there a link to bipolar disorder in the article?
And why does that pie chart towards the bottom of the article have the US, EU (not a country, has no common strategic policy and no military wing), and China on it, but then skips Japan and includes India? There is no reason to be found anywhere on the page.
And then there's a "linguistic complaint" on the bottom of the page. That seems pretty out of place.
And that complicated mathematical formula near the bottom belongs in the correlates of war article.
This whole article needs to be cleaned up or rewritten.
Also, it needs to address the current balance of power system. Our world, today, is not multipolar, it's unipolar, with the US as the sole pole. Europe could be a second pole, but its too fractured, and any differences in foreign policy between that continent and the US are minimal in the grand scheme of things. China is poised to become a global power and soon after the second pole of a bipolar system of power, but its not there yet and won't be for at least a decade. India is the only other candidate, given its population and economic growth, but it's way behind China, and won't become really important on the world stage for several decades.
This paper [1] by Goldman Sachs has their projections of future nominal GDPs for several nations.
The current power heirarchy, I would suppose, is as follows:
Superpower: US Great powers: Japan*, Russia, China, Germany, UK*, France
- =aligned with US
(what kind of stupid program doesn't let me start a line with an asterisk? wiki's got to have an escape character key somewhere)
And China and Russia are more-or-less aligned with each other when it comes to international issues. This isn't strictly based on economic size- it has to do with military power, alliances, and other factors as well, which is why I didn't include Italy. It has the same size population and economy as UK and France within a couple percent, but doesn't have a seat on the UN Security Council, for one thing.
Of course, I should probably have written that in the article and not in the discussion page. Hm.
[edit] yes it has problems
Any definition of a word is arbitrary, the pursentages, i gess come from the reference, but i didn't read it.The definition of a unipolar system can't be tautologic, saying that USA is a superpower is not enought
'Regional Examples' it's just for an example,so that the reader can exstrapolate ,since ther are no many historical examples of bipolarity
pie chart ,i pick ,it from the superpower article, to ilustrate that USA are something like 20% of worlds gdp, and that cauling that unipolar world is a litel bit streched.
current balance of power system.Whell ther are two ideologies,one sayes that USA is a superpower ,the second , that the even greatest power of the world(usa) is not powerfull enoughf to act with out considering the authers, i think that this view is well explained and referened.You probably want to add stuf in the unipolar section. --87.65.186.9 19:29, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] The concentration equation
Could someone from the international relations field take a look at the equation please. the summation is over k but k is neither explained nor is k one of the indices. I presume the summation should be over i?!
- Good catch. I looked up one of the original articles on this using JSTOR and found the correct formula there:
- I'll update the article with the equation and the ref.—Perceval 04:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
