434 CHAPTER ElEvEn ■ TransnaTional issues
participation, were willing to make concessions, others, afraid that the treaty would
be weakened by too many exceptions, were not. Bargaining is a much more compli-
cated pro cess in the age of transnational issues.
Second, transnational issues themselves may be the source of conflict, just as the
Marxists predicted in the nineteenth century. The need to protect the petroleum sup-
ply, for example, was a primary motivation for the West’s involvement in the 1991 Gulf
War. Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Socie ties Choose to Fail or Succeed docu-
ments how the strug gle for scarce resources led to the collapse of empires in the past
and to state failure in Rwanda and Burundi, resulting in the abrogation of human
rights.^21 The relationship between environmental and resource issues and conflict is a
complex one, just as we have seen with the discussion of resource depletion and degra-
dation; it is usually worsened by population increase, which is likely to result in con-
flicts when some groups try to capture use of scarce resources. Nonrenewable resources
such as oil may lead to particularly violent conflicts, because such resources are vital
for industry, economic health and welfare, and national security, and there are few
viable substitutes. How else can we explain the conflict over remote and uninhabited
islands in the China Seas? Only with the possibility of oil or other natu ral resources
beneath the waters surrounding the islands does the conflict make sense. Changes in
the distribution of these resources may lead to a shift in the balance of power, creating
an instability that may lead to war, just as realists fear. In contrast, issues such as ozone
depletion or global warming are not particularly conducive to violent interstate conflict.
In these cases, the commons and responsibility for its management are diffuse.
Third, transnational issues pose direct challenges to state sovereignty, setting off a
major debate about the nature of sovereignty. In Chapter 2, we traced the roots of sov-
ereignty in the Westphalian revolution. The notion developed that states enjoy inter-
nal autonomy and cannot be subjected to external authority. That norm— noninterference
in the domestic affairs of other states— was embedded in the UN Charter.
Yet the rise of nonstate actors— multinational corporations, nongovernmental
organ izations, and supranational organ izations such as the Eu ro pean Union— and
the forces of globalization, whether economic, cultural, or po liti cal, undermine Westpha-
lian ideals of state sovereignty. Communicable diseases, the environment, human rights,
and transnational crime were traditionally sovereign state concerns, and interference
by outside actors was unacceptable. After World War II, those norms began to change,
a pro cess that continues today. The prob lems raised by transnational terrorism, for
example, necessitate a multinational response: by transnational terrorism’s very nature,
single states, no matter how power ful, cannot solve these prob lems on their own. This
is one of the main reasons that discussion has turned to a power shift, an erosion of
state authority and the severe weakening of state power overall. Issues that once were
the exclusive hallmark of state sovereignty are increasingly susceptible to scrutiny and
intervention by global actors.