The Line in Water: International and Domestic Politics

Abstract

Goldmann, K. The Line in Water: International and Domestic Politics. Cooperation and Conflict, XXIV, 1989, 103-116. It is common to criticize political scientists for separating the inseparable and making a sharp distinction between international and domestic politics. The problem pre sumably is that different models of the fundamentals of politics are used by those concerned with international and domestic politics, that this separation reduces their ability to understand both, and that therefore the separate models ought to be merged with each other. The merger can take the form of establishing the linkages that may obtain between politics at the international and the domestic levels, or of presuming that the two levels are isomorphic and hence that international and domestic politics are not just interrelated but the same. In the paper, various merged models of politics are surveyed, and examples from Swedish politics are used to suggest a variety of new tasks for the comparative study of politics.