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Political Science 170 Section 002
Introduction to World Politics
Spring Term 2008
MWF 4:00-5:50 pm
241 MSRB
Instructor: Professor Brian Champion
Office: 1225 HBLL
Extension: 2-5862
email: [email protected]
Office hours: 2:00 pm-3:30 pm Mondays (and/or by appointment)
First day of class:
Tuesday 29 April 2008
Last day of class:
Monday 16 June 2008
A former British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, is reputedly once to have said of Great
Britain:
We have no permanent allies,
we have no permanent enemies,
we only have permanent interests.
–attributed to Henry John Temple Viscount Lord Palmerston 1784-1865, Foreign Secretary and
two-time Prime Minister under Queen Victoria.
What he actually said was [concerning apparent
British apathy regarding Polish struggles against Russian hegemony, which Palmerston did not
believe that it met the threshold of justifiable war
]
“He concluded with the famous peroration
that Britain had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only interest that were eternal
and perpetual . . .”
--quoted in David Brown,
Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy,
1846-1855
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 82-83.
And former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright has written on the importance of knowing
the past:
History never repeats itself exactly,
but we ignore its lessons at our peril.
--Madeline Albright, “The Role of the United States in Central Europe”,
Proceedings of the
Academy of Political Science
38(1):
71-84.
The exact quote, found on page 72, is:
“History is a
strange teacher.
It never repeats itself exactly, but you ignore its lessons at your peril”.
The
bolded version above is the more common iteration.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the subdiscipline within political
science of international politics, sometimes called international relations or world politics.
This
subdiscipline complements other political science subdisciplines such as comparative
government, international studies,
and political theory in that it surveys world events for points
of commonality and of divergence, and analyzes political theories (such as democracy, realism,
liberalism, neorealism/neoliberalism, and civil society, to mention just a few) found in the
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