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The Second Lens

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Through the Second Lens, the complexities of world politics are seen as products of domestic structures and politics. Looking inside countries shows how state variables—government, economy, population, resources, and stability—affect states' international behavior. Second-Lens scholars assume that such variables are more important than the motivations of individual leaders or assessments of the balance of power.

For example, democratic peace theorists such as Michael Doyle emphasize such variables as free markets, representative legislatures, contested electoral systems, and liberal political cultures to argue that liberal democracies do not fight other liberal democracies. The absence of war, from a Second-Lens perspective, is due to the fact that these countries are liberal and democratic. It does not depend on whether the president is John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, or Franklin Roosevelt, but rather that all three presidents governed a nation with democratic institutions. Nor is the absence of war among liberal democracies explained by the distribution of power in the international system; rather, domestic sources trump these variables.

A Second-Lens analysis begins with a series of snapshots of important domestic variables. To start, it is important to ascertain the type of government, economy, population, and natural resource base associated with each country critical to your case. These snapshots provide a basis for some preliminary explanation. For example, we can expect free market economies to be more open to multilateral efforts to reduce trade barriers than are command economies. Likewise, snapshots suggest that democratic states, which tend to have open markets, would be more likely to cooperate with each other on these efforts. For example, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is an effort to reduce trade barriers throughout the western hemisphere. The effort includes all thirty-four democracies in the region, but excludes Cuba—a clear assertion that the type of government and economy matters to obtain FTAA membership.

Analysis must then go beyond basic description of structure to assess the relative condition of the overall domestic political environment. We can collect the individual snapshots and develop a broader measure of the domestic stability of a country, which itself can be seen as an overarching explanatory variable. Our examination of domestic variables must consider both their individual effects as well as their interaction and contribution to a state's overall political dynamic, which in turn influences national and international decision making.

Comparing Pictures: The Second Lens

One of the main challenges of using the Second Lens to explain world politics is the significant detail needed for analysis. For example, the government variable requires attention not only to governmental structures, but also to the processes of government—the political relationships between government agencies, legislative oversight committees, and outside lobbying groups, for example. To assess these bureaucratic politics requires access to information about the key players, national priorities, and power of domestic agencies. In the case of the United States's decision concerning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—a treaty that the George W. Bush administration believes is obsolete—an in-depth analysis would require assessing the power of the Defense Department's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization relative to that of the State Department's Arms Control Bureau.

Even if you can accumulate the necessary information, you are not guaranteed to develop a good explanation. In a democratic, highly bureaucratic society like that of the United States, the person at the top of the hierarchy—the president—makes decisions of great import. In crises, such an individual has a great effect on the direction of international events. If Woodrow Wilson had not been president at the outbreak of the First World War or if George Washington had not stepped aside after two terms, U.S. history would have been altered. Domestic structures can be changed or ignored by powerful leaders. Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev placed the Soviet Union on a different economic and cultural course despite retaining the country's Communist structure during his time in office. A Second-Lens analysis may overlook the importance of leaders at critical moments in history.

Third-Lens analysts criticize Second-Lens analysts for providing descriptive detail without enough core explanation and analysis. As will be discussed in this webBOOK's treatment of the Third Lens, scholars with Third-Lens sympathies note that all major states spend significant money on the military and that a balancing of power occurs when one state acquires a preponderance of power regardless of Second-Lens snapshot variables. The consistency of states' approaches to international trade and security suggests to Third-Lens analysts that the Second Lens's variables do not have a uniform effect and may not be critical to explaining basic international behavior.

Despite these criticisms, Second-Lens advocates marshal enormous amounts of detail to suggest that the causes of international relations lie within states. Although there are many variables that can be studied, as a starting point, Second-Lens theorists focus on five general features of states to support their viewpoint.

Second-Lens Variables

TYPE OF GOVERNMENT
ECONOMIC STRUCTURE AND ACTIVITY
POPULATION CONSIDERATIONS
RESOURCE BASE
DOMESTIC STABILITY

 

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