Talk:Polarity (international relations)

International relations Start‑class High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject International relations, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of International relations on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.International relationsWikipedia:WikiProject International relationsTemplate:WikiProject International relationsInternational relations
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Politics Start‑class Mid‑importance

	Politics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of politics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PoliticsWikipedia:WikiProject PoliticsTemplate:WikiProject Politicspolitics
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Needs Fixing

"Allies" in WWI should be changed to "Triple Entente." Especially since the page it links to is a generic description of the term allies and not at all referring to the specific bloc mentioned in the article. Someone please fix this, I can't because edits seem to be disabled or something.

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.

The

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.

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)[reply]

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:

$Concentration_{t}={\sqrt {\frac {\sum _{i=1}^{N_{t}}(S_{it})^{2}-{\frac {1}{N_{t}}}}{1-{\frac {1}{N_{t}}}}}}$

I'll update the article with the equation and the ref.—Perceval 04:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just because the USA relies on imports doesn't mean it's not self sufficient. Also the conclusion that the USA might not be a super power is farse. The USA could smash and grab anything they wanted. Just certain things could cause a world war though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.7.52.18 (talk) 13:30, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Serious Issue

Most of the empires overlap in this article, given the dates. By definition, a unipolar state has no competition, so there can be no overlap in the dates of unipolarity. The only true unipolarity the whole world ever saw is the US; even Rome had little impact on the other side of Eurasia or Africa, let alone the Americas. It is also foolish to suppose the Egyptians, Chinese, or Aztecs were ever unipolar, as what they did had little or no effect on the rest of the world far from their borders, especially the Aztecs. 65.51.202.21 (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Those are intended to be examples of regional unipolarity. In a premodern world with poor communication there's no need for polarity to be global; just as we consider the US unipolar when it has no contact with or influence over alien civilisations. Restricting the concept to the modern United States makes it fairly useless. However, there are serious problems in that section. It seems to assume that any particular instance of failure to project power disproves unipolarity, which I think is wrong; the US failure in Somalia in 1993, for example, simply meant that the US was unwilling to devote more resources to a distant region it cared little about. I think a similar case could be made for the Persian Empire after the Peace of Callias; in both cases, it's not that unipolarity had come to an end, it was just that the region was entirely peripheral. 58.84.237.195 (talk) 04:46, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The British Empire

I'm removing the British Empire from the list of examples of hegemons, here's why;

The Great Game

World War I

World War II

——67.180.86.254 (talk) 23:42, 12 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The British Empire enjoyed almost unchallenged dominance for 100 years during her Imperial Century. All of the powers listed as Unpolarity powers have been challenged at one time or another during their period of regional control. Britain controlled much of the world including its GDP, Economy, Oceans, Land, Military (Largest Navy and an Army second to none). It was more powerful than the USA today and has experienced the least challenge out of any Unpolarity power or Hyperpower.

Global Military Spending

Text under the NATO graphic claimed that NATO spending was 70% of the global total. SFAICT, this is false, but it maybe over half. Based on the SIPIRI and others and the Economist graphic however, about 1.2 trillion out of the 1.6 trillion total is the U.S. and its Allies (not just NATO). 72.228.177.92 (talk) 16:12, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"NATO, the NATO 'Partners in Peace', and their close trading partners" though are probably more than 80%. 72.228.177.92 (talk) 16:29, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]