All International Politics Is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization

3. Empirical Data, Measurement, and Methods

CHAPTER 3 Empirical Data, Measurement, and Methods To this day many of our comrades still do not understand that they must attend to quantitative aspects of things.... They have no "figures" in their heads and as a result they cannot help making mistakes. (Mao Tse Tung 1962: 379-80) This chapter addresses issues of data and measurement that arise in analyzing the hypotheses outlined in chapter 2. I first delimit the domain of the analysis. I then explain in greater detail how I derive measures of local or regional context based on the minimum distances among polities . I review the theoretical rationale for the particular sources of data used as indicators of the concepts and address various issues of measurement and operationalization. The Domain and Units of Analysis The principal unit of analysis here is the sovereign polity or nation-state. States are obviously not the only actors in world politics. Important nonstate actors include intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), transnational commercial enterprises such as IBM and Microsoft , nongovernmental organizations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International, and subnational actors such as the Basque and Albanian separatist movements Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). However, most comparative data are available for nation-states only, and the nation-state remains the best available unit of aggregation - or even the only feasible one - for observing the influences that such nonstate actors exert. The Modern State System and Its Origins International relations theory typically traces the modern interstate system back to the Treaty of Westphalia, signed in the wake of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, which established the territorial sovereignty of states. The principle of state sovereignty did not itself imply an end to all 65 66 All International Politics Is Local intervention in internal affairs. But when it was coupled with the growth of the coercive and extractive powers of the state, the modern nationstate emerged as the undisputed central actor in international relations. States' ability to monopolize the use of "legitimate violence" went hand in hand with the principle of sovereignty, which conferred on states exclusive jurisdiction over their territories and citizens by virtue of the existence of the state itself. As the power of central authorities became more pervasive in the domestic arena, the influence of states relative to other actors in world politics - such as the church - grew dramatically as well. Despite the focus on sovereignty, the evolution of formally sovereign states was closely shaped by their interaction. Scholars such as Gurr (1988), Tilly (1985, 1990), and Rasler and Thompson (1989) emphasize the duality between "external" and "internal" aspects of state making. Internal violence against opponents allowed state-building elites to establish effective rule within the state, and external violence intended to keep enemies at bay also facilitated the growth of the power and capacity of the state apparatus. The development and evolution of one state frequently shaped the development of others. State sovereignty and the process of state building diffused from a network of European states to European settlements in the Western Hemisphere, changed the nature of existing states in Asia, and eventually came to encompass the entire international system through the process of decolonization. A second wave of nation-state building followed in the wake of the nationalist revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century. Nationalism derived the legitimacy of the state by reference to some form of national community among citizens that had preceded the state and was held to exist outside the institutions of the state itself.' The shift to the right to national self-determination as the basis for statehood was radical insofar as it frequently challenged the territorial sovereignty of existing states. Even though most states are not ethnically homogeneous and one might question the "authenticity" of national communities, national selfdetermination has effectively become the primary criterion of legitimate statehood. In this sense, the unification of the last major European nation-states - Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871- can be seen as a plausible beginning for the contemporary international system of nationstates . In order to avoid the lingering influences of the Franco-Prussian War, the specific starting date adopted here is 1875. The growth in the number of nation-states within the interstate system over the study period has been quite dramatic. By some accounts , starting with 49 polities in 1875, the international system encom- Empirical Data...