An Approach to the Analysis of Bilateral Relations

Abstract

The article presents an approach to assessment of how independent an international actor can be from the political point of view. The author formulates a coordinate system composed of four spaces (fields) of social communication. The first one is the space of ideological interaction. In this space, governments have a possibility to manipulate the policies of their counteragents via exploiting psychological sentiments in the short term or fortifying specific worldview attitudes in the long run among the peoples in foreign countries. The second is the space of international norms. Unlike on the national level, the international relations system does not imply an existence of a common decision-making mechanism that serves as a generator of communication norms. Therefore, states use their national might to establish a normative order, which they are trying to fortify by consequently repeating specific actions in the international arena. In the third space, international actors try to integrate their counteragents into a specific type of economic relations that would serve as a determinant of their behavior. Finally, in the security space, the relations of states are defined by their internal understanding of what specific international trends and policies could threaten their own interests of national survival and development. The author concludes that the state of affairs in these four spaces determines the nature of subjectivity (sovereignty) of international actors on the global political stage. Through this lens, their bilateral relations could be classified into one of three types: subject-subject (interdependent), subject-object (unilaterally dependent) or object-object (independent). Therefore, the assessment of the nature of interstate bilateral relations could serve as a good starting point to characterize the whole structure of the international relations system: whether it is functioning in a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar manner. Moreover, the presented methodology could help to evaluate a degree of effectiveness of the foreign policy strategies implementation, since it presents a measurable coordinate system of the state and the structure of international affairs.