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ABSTRACT
In the international field of visa policies, states observe how other states act in terms of global mobility control or the facilitation of wanted cross-border mobility. But towards whom do they orient themselves? And what drives nation states to cooperate with others and grant their citizens visa-free travel or not? To tackle these questions, we conceptualise visa waiver agreements as positive relations between two states. A new data collection ‘Visa Network Data’ (1969/2010) provides information on all visa waiver agreements worldwide. By means of social network analysis (blockmodelling), we analyse the global structure of the network of nations in this policy field as well as its change over time. In the centre of the network we find evidence for the existence of a global model at which many others orient themselves. However, a second distinct position in the network shows a high degree of stability: Autocratic states that do not want to be involved in the exchange of these bilateral relations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The data set is available from the following website: www.fiw.uni-bonn.de/visanetworkdata. We ask researchers who use the data set presented here to cite the article by Mau et al. 2015. For questions concerning the data set, please consult Lena Laube ([email protected]).
2. The GDP per capita helps to account for the standard of living of the population in a given country. The Penn World Table provided the data necessary for this article. The Polity IV Index is an indicator for measuring democracy in a given country compiled by the Centre for Systemic Peace. Polity IV has the advantage to integrate a graded variable on democracy as well as one on autocracy (Hadenius and Teorell Citation2005). The value for democracy (0 to 10) is measured against the value for autocracy (0 to 10) which results in a continuous index with values between 10 and −10. Countries with a 10 to 6 value are defined as ‘democracies’, countries with 5 to −5 are defined as ‘anocracies’ and countries with −6 to −10 as ‘autocracies’ (Marshall and Gurr Citation2005).
3. After 1991, some of the Warsaw Pact states became NATO members (such as Poland and Romania), while others joined the NAM (such as Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), or did not enter a new defence treaty (e.g. Georgia and Moldova). The NAM (founded 1961) is still existent today and has grown from 29 members in 1969 to 77 in 2010. The number of NATO member states has grown as well, namely from 14 to 28 members, not only through the integration of the former East European countries, but also through Western countries, which were not part of the NATO in 1969, like France and Spain.
4. South Africa is a special case, since it is assigned as colonial power of Namibia in the UN-List, but is also by itself a former colony of Great Britain. Therefore, Namibia is coded as former South African colony and South Africa as former British colony.
5. This procedure conforms to the blockmodelling approach implemented in Pajek.
6. As a blockmodel starts with a random partition of the network, it is necessary to run the algorithm several times to make sure that the found solution is not just a local optimum. Therefore, we performed several blockmodels and we chose those solutions that produced a good fit.
7. The USSR block also shows self-ties, which have to be interpreted carefully since they spring from the fact that the Soviet Union was decomposed into the single republics of the Union. Within the Soviet Union citizens enjoyed the right to move freely as in most other nation states worldwide.
8. Two exceptional cases in this position are Israel und Uruguay, which do not really fit in the role pattern. Consequentially Israel later on becomes part of a small new position labelled Rich Enclave.
9. Again, we counted the seven countries formerly belonging to Yugoslavia as single states already for 1969.
10. Ireland (2nd), Chile (17th), and Isreal (18th) are all among the Top Twenty of the most globalised countries worldwide. Hong Kong is not included in the Globalisation Index data set of 140 countries.
11. We removed Qatar for this calculation since it is a strong outlier with a GDP per capita of $159,144. The GDP per capita values are from 2009.