Who Won? Reflections on Module 3 Class Debate

Reflections on Module 3 Class Debate

While team coordination was a challenge, the exercise in taking a position on whether the international environment can be fundamentally remade was worthwhile.  I enjoyed, to some extent, playing off one another as a team in composing arguments and felt the activity as a whole lent some clarity to all we had discussed to date.   That said, it was very difficult for many to join in when they would have liked due to other obligations and work constraints.  Like some others who have noted similar sentiment in their blogs, I am concerned the schedule for composing team positions and rebuttals assumes all or most, across time zones and with varying work and travel schedules, are available to contribute equally on very specific dates.  It may have played out more effectively over a loose timeline and perhaps as an in-character discussion rather than a team debate with formal openers and rebuttals.   The assignment of pros and cons would be the one component I would keep in place, adding a requirement for all to contribute at least twice to the discussion over the course of the week.  Those with other obligations (work, family, etc.) might, in this way, have had more opportunity to significantly contribute with the flexibility to write over the course of six days rather than two. 

Regarding who won, though I was on the “pro” side and do stand by that position, I felt the “con” team did an excellent job articulating their argument.  In that sense, I feel they won the debate.  They gained ground in noting the quadrupling of sovereign states in less than a century and reiterating Waltz’s argument that historically, we tend to circle back to the familiar.  The team, from my perspective, lost some ground in its dismissal of “common ground” platforms as fundamental transformations. They make a statement regarding new institutions as solely rational, interest-based mechanisms to retool negotiations, cooperation and compromise more efficiently That may be the case to a certain degree, but they fail to acknowledge that this kinder, gentler approach, in itself, is historically new, and a step toward the next incremental change.  Fundamental change would not occur suddenly and I found it interesting that one argument made from the “con” team - that change would be an evolution not a revolution – was the same one made by the “pro” team in our opening statement: “Our world is evolving…this is not an abrupt shift, but rather growth or adaptation to contextual stimuli….”  And, toward the end of the opener, another statement that incremental change does not mean a “new order” that emerges from that evolution is not fundamentally different from the thing that came at the start.   We cannot compare the time period between the inception of rational organizations such as the U.N. and the WTO – no more than a few decades - to the centuries between Hobbes and those organizations.  It would be like comparing the span the time between the advent of agriculture and the city-state organization of Ancient Greece to a Greece-Rome comparison.   We see fundamental change in the longer term.  Territoriality, for instance, would seem more “fundamental” or “inherent” from the fixed cultural perspective of an agricultural society – or one founded in that tradition – than from a nomadic perspective.

The pro team made some good points.  Those related to cooperation, from the Paris Agreement to human rights activity were especially strong.  Where I feel we dropped the ball was in developing and refining many of our points more cohesively as a team.   For the debate as a whole, there may have been some opportunity, in looking at each argument, to clarify concepts (it seems many have brought this up) and to refine what was presented.  Again, though, even without the in-character class experience, I think we all gained some perspective from the activity.