The Motives for International Involvement

Suggested Activities

Students explore the stated and unstated motives for countries' chosen roles in various international issues by assessing the reasons for participation or nonparticipation in an assigned international issue and then by ranking, overall, the top five reasons why countries become involved internationally and the top five reasons why countries refrain from international involvement.

A.  Identify the top two or three reasons why countries chose to become involved in an assigned international issue and the top two or three reasons why other counties chose not to become involved.

Introduce the concept of internationalism
Explain to students that internationalism is a means for nations and/or states to work cooperatively while still representing differing perspectives and interests. Indicate that internationalism means many things and takes many forms. You may want to provide students with several definitions or statements about internationalism.

To help students identify key attributes of internationalism, you may want to adapt the activities for teaching globalization in Recognizing Globalization (Critical Challenge).

Identify examples of international issues
Invite students to think of contemporary international issues. Record their ideas on the board. If students have difficulty identifying many international issues, provide recent newspapers, newsmagazines and relevant Web sites to help students generate topics, such as the following:

• acid rain
• global warming
• copyright infringement on music and movies
• pandemics
• drug and/or arms trafficking
• resource depletion and distribution
• renewable and nonrenewable resources
• intellectual property
• expanding markets for goods and services
• border control
• children's rights
• working conditions
• terrorism
• nuclear materials control.

Examine examples of international involvement
Direct students to use the Internet and newspapers to identify the ways in which various countries were involved in each of the identified international issues. Record these national actions, e.g., sent advisors, passed laws, created embargoes, on the board. Invite students to speculate about or to look for specific evidence of the stated reasons for participating in these international events; e.g., national security, economic gain, political pressure. In addition, ask students to look for instances of countries that chose not to become involved in these issues and to identify the statedreasons for their noninvolvement. You may want to provide students with this chart to facilitate their individual research or create a class version on the board.

The Nature and Motives for International Involvement

Postulate less obvious reasons for involvement
To extend students' thinking, encourage them to speculate on the reasons why nations or states may become involved in an international affair that does not directly or obviously affect them; i.e., the event appears to be a localized situation. After an initial brainstorming of possible reasons, provide students with visual images to spark further considerations of the various reasons for international involvement. The visuals might depict the following kinds of international situations:

• Canadians working with AIDS victims in Africa
• national boundaries in Europe pre- and post-WWI
• coalition forces in Gulf War 1991
• Americans in Iraq 2003 and/or post 2003
• a map showing the Iron Curtain
• Canadian peacekeepers in Rwanda
• international aid efforts to feed the poor
• international organizations teaching worldwide
• medical care or shelter for communities devastated by natural disasters.

Record on the board the kinds of involvement and the reason behind decisions to act or not to act in these situations.

Explore unstated reasons for involvement
Suggest to the class that countries may be reluctant to state publicly all of the reasons they do or do not take part in a particular international affair. For example, the stated American and British reasons for going to war against Iraq in 2003 were to prevent the possible use of weapons of mass destruction and to liberate the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Others have suggested that a desire to secure a reliable supply of cheap oil and to establish political control over the region may have been motives behind these countries' decisions to act. Invite students to speculate on hidden reasons why countries do or do not take part in each of the identified international initiatives; e.g., economics, politics, environmental concerns, humanitarianism, competition for resources, ideology, religion, military security. Encourage students to add to the list of motives by assigning a particular issue to one or more students and asking them to research the unstated reasons for participation or noninvolvement. Add students' findings to the master chart developed above.

Decide on the main reasons
When students have assembled an extensive list of international issues and have identified the nature of the involvement and the stated and unstated reasons for participation or noninvolvement, draw attention to the idea that nations may have many reasons for their actions. Assign students to work individually or with a partner to determine the most significant motives for action or inaction on their assigned international issue. Invite students to consider the following factors when judging the most significant reasons:

• consistency with past practices
• credibility of information sources on the reasons for the action
• plausibility, given the situation and conditions.

Help students to appreciate the difficulty in deciding why people or nations act as they do. Invite them to list and assess each of the possible reasons for their assigned issue and to explain which two or three reasons are most significant and why the other reasons seem less significant. Students are to complete this assessment twice: firstly, to identify the main reasons why some countries became involved in the issue and, secondly, to identify the main reasons why other countries chose not to become involved.

To structure and assess this activity, you may want to adapt one of the charts and assessment rubric in Justifying My Choice (Support Material).

The revised chart might look like the one below.

Why Countries Act as They Do

Share conclusions on individual issues
Arrange for each student or group to present the conclusions about the main reasons for involvement and noninvolvement in their assigned issue. You may want to record their findings by highlighting the motives on the master chart or by making a separate list and tallying how many times each motive is stated. Collapse very specific motives into more general categories. For example, the desire to secure oil and to safeguard water may be lumped into a single category—secure supplies of scarce resources.

B.  Rank the top five reasons why countries participate in international efforts and the top five reasons why they are reluctant to participate in international efforts.

Rank the most significant motivations
Ask individual students or groups to rank, overall, the five primary motivations for nations' involvement in international affairs and the five main reasons for noninvolvement in international affairs. Encourage students to consider the following factors in making their decisions:

• frequently recognized as a primary consideration by various countries
• evidence of countries' willingness to commit considerable effort and resources to achieve the goal
• plausible, given what is known about nations and the pursuit of national interests.

To structure and assess this activity, you may want to adapt the chart and assessment rubric in Ranking Options (Support Material).

Share overall conclusions
Arrange for students to present their rankings of the main reasons for involvement and noninvolvement. Discuss the findings and look to see if there is general agreement on the motives behind national involvement in international affairs.