Abstract
The study of middle-power diplomacies cannot escape emerging new standards of theoretical thought in international relations. These standards stem from the necessity, ever more widely recognized, to take into account the lack of univocal relationships between the units of the international system and the structural parameters which organize life in the system.1 On one hand, essentially structuralist explanations have been recognized as insufficient to the extent that international structures have no existence of their own outside the one they are given by state action; by the same token, essentially individualist or statist explanations are equally insufficient, given that, as subjects of collective action endowed with identities and interests, states form up in part through international social action regulated by structures. In other words, states and the structural attributes of the international system are mutually constitutive entities.
This chapter is part of a research project financially supported by the Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche (FCAR) of the government of Québec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We would like to thank Joël Monfils and Martin Roy for research assistance.
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Notes
See Alexander Wendt, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization 41:3, Summer 1987, 335–70
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See Andrew F. Cooper, Richard A. Higgott and Kim Richard Nossal, Relocating Middle Powers: Australia and Canada in a Changing World (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993)
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See Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979)
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See Laura Neack, Beyond the Rhetoric of Peacekeeping and Peacemaking, op. cit. and ‘Empirical Observations on “Middle State” Behaviour at the Start of a New International System’, Pacific Focus 7:1, 1992, 5–21.
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See Richard Bloomfield, ‘Making the Hemisphere Safe for Democracy’, The Washington Quarterly 17:2, Spring 1994, 157–69
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See Carlos Menem, Estados Unidos, Argentina y Carlos Menem (Belgrano: Editorial Ceyne, 1990): 149–57
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James Brooke, ‘Latins Join in New Effort to Get Haitian Leaders to Step Down’, The New York Times, 15 August 1994, A–2.
See Guy Gosselin, Gordon Mace and Louis Bélanger, ‘La sécurité coopérative régionale dans les Amériques: le cas des institutions démocratiques’, Études internationales XXVI:4, December 1995, 799–817.
Gloria Abella, ‘La política exterior de México en el gobierno de Carlos Salinas: ¿una nueva conception?’, Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales 37:148, April–June 1992, 69–70.
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Cited in Geoffrey Hayes, ‘Middle Powers in the New World Order’, Behind the Headlines, 51:2, Winter 1994, 1–14.
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Bélanger, L., Mace, G. (1997). Middle Powers and Regionalism in the Americas: The Cases of Argentina and Mexico. In: Cooper, A.F. (eds) Niche Diplomacy. Studies in Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25902-1_9
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