International Relations current issue

Introduction

Foley, M. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

Bringing Realism to American Liberalism: Kenneth Waltz and the Process of a Cold War Adjustment

Foley, M. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

Despite being a period of reputed liberal ascendancy and settlement in the United States, the 1950s also marked a time of considerable uncertainty, not least in the matter of America’s own identity in relation to the rest of the world. Louis Hartz’s quintessential depiction of US development threw into high relief the problematic nature of a liberalism that fluctuated between the two poles of principled withdrawal and transformative engagement. This article examines the social and political context of Waltz’s Man, the State, and War in relation to the specific issue of the American liberal predicament during the emergence of the cold war. Waltz’s work tapped into deep political insecurities generated by the onset of an apparently unstable and dangerous international order that threatened to be exacerbated by America’s own indigenous ambiguity over its international position. Waltz illustrated a way by which it was possible for American liberalism, and thereby the United States, to achieve a stable and sustainable form of international involvement without falling prey to the violent swings between the Hartzian extremes of liberal overreaction. Waltz’s kind of realism contained a positive core that implicitly addressed the issue of American engagement in the international system. In effect, the dynamics of international bipolarity had enhanced the possibility of diminishing the chronic nature of liberalism’s own bipolarity.

Waltz, Realism and Democracy

Williams, M. C. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

Waltz is generally seen as one the most important advocates of a systemic theory of international politics that stresses the importance of international anarchy and marginalizes domestic politics. Locating Waltz’s thinking against debates within realism in the 1950s, and drawing especially on his neglected Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics, this article argues that Waltz’s thinking actually contains powerful domestic political dimensions that centre on a defence of democratic foreign policymaking. Rather than marginalizing domestic politics, Waltz’s theory — and his critique of classical realism — is in part actually a subtle intervention in domestic politics.

Left Behind: Neorealism's Truncated Contextual Materialism and Republicanism

Deudney, D. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

Anarchy and the balance of power are the two core ideas in Waltz’s neorealism, and he explicitly draws them from early modern political theory, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. Unfortunately, Waltz leaves behind a key variable in these early modern state-of-nature arguments: violence interdependence — the capacity of actors to harm one another (independent of distribution of power). This difference between the extreme insecurity of the state of nature and the tractable insecurity of the state of war derives from different degrees of violence interdependence. The variable is implicit but powerful in Hobbes, and explicit in Rousseau’s analysis of topographic fragmentation as a foundation for the European state system. As the effects of the industrial revolution made themselves felt, many theorists (the global geopoliticans, Carr and many liberals) continued to employ the variable Waltz dropped, and they generally argued that Europe had shifted from a state-of-war to a state-of-nature anarchy, thus posing the choice of catastrophe or integration. Herz and Morgenthau continue this argument in the nuclear era, reaching very different conclusions than Waltz. Similarly, the balance of power was conceived by early modern republican theorists as the counter to hierarchy, and this was transposed to the ‘system level’ via the device of referring to Europe as a whole as a ‘republic’ that was in part ‘by nature’. Other important republican power restraints (notably division, mixture and union) were dropped by Waltz but are developed by liberal globalist security theory.

Understanding Man, the State, and War

Suganami, H. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

This article expounds and assesses the key contentions of Man, the State, and War. It notes that the book contains meta-theoretical and theoretical components. Through a close re-examination of the text, the article shows how Waltz arrives at his third-image conclusion, reveals a number of errors of a conceptual or logical nature in the meta-theoretical moves that lead him to this conclusion, and explains how such errors are partly rooted in a deeper issue that the book addresses — how to integrate the three images (or three contending estimates of the major cause of war) into one overarching image of world politics based on the agent/structure dichotomy and the distinction between macro and micro enquiries. The article goes on to outline Waltz’s substantive theory of international politics, found in an embryonic form in Man, the State, and War, speculates on the sources of the book’s success, and assesses its main significance.

Lost in Transition: A Critical Analysis of Power Transition Theory

Lebow, R. N., Valentino, B. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

In this paper we identify and critique the key propositions of power transition theory. We find little support for any of power transition theory’s main empirical implications. Contrary to most versions of the theory, we fin d that the European and international systems almost never have been characterized by hegemony. No state has achieved a position that allowed it for any extended period to order the international system to suit its interests at the expense of the other major powers. Power transitions are remarkably rare, they seldom occur as the result of differential rates of economic growth, and have most often occurred peacefully. Power transitions are more often the results of wars, rather than the causes of them. Wars between rising and dominant powers are infrequent and are not waged by either side primarily in the effort to defend or revise the international order in their favor. Finally, we find that war rarely resolves the fundamental conflicts of interest caused by power transitions.

Hegemony, Equilibrium and Counterpower: A Synthetic Approach

Beyer, C. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

This article claims that realist and constructivist ideas are compatible. Structural realism is needed to understand the constraining and stabilizing role of material factors. Furthermore, it detects process in a law-like tendency towards international power equilibrium which is achieved via balancing. Constructivism, in turn, highlights the importance of ideas and norms as engines for change and the creative role of agency. The article therefore combines a materialist and an idealist perspective. It both detects elements of stability and argues for necessary improvements in current international relations (IR) by looking at the issues of United States hegemony, the rise of new challengers and the threat of sub-state international terrorism. This article, therefore, takes up important claims made by Kenneth Waltz on realism, hegemony and terrorism, and interprets them in the light of IR theory today. It is argued that structural realism and Waltz’s ideas are still important and viable, but that we need to combine them with additional perspectives, notably constructivism.

Beyond Waltz's Nuclear World: More Trust May be Better

Wheeler, N. J. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

In 1981 Kenneth Waltz published a controversial Adelphi Paper, ‘The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better’, in which he turned the conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that the spread of nuclear weapons would not be a terrifying prospect. This article rejects the proposition that fear of nuclear destruction can serve as a permanent basis of international order, and argues that securing order depends upon the building of trust between nuclear-armed and arming powers. A key contribution here has been the theory and practice of security communities, which opens up the promise of replacing nuclear threats by a new international politics in which force has been delegitimated as an instrument of state policy. This article discusses the potential for nuclear trust-building through the example of the security community that developed between Argentina and Brazil in the 1980s. Both countries had the potential to develop nuclear weapons by the end of the 1970s, and there were concerns that their rivalry might lead to a regional nuclear arms race. Having explored the factors that promoted trust between Buenos Aires and Brasilia, the article considers the lessons that can be learned for nuclear trust-building elsewhere.

Waltz and World History: The Paradox of Parsimony

Buzan, B., Little, R. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

This article provides a critique of Waltz’s work from the perspective of world history. It shows how Waltz’s commitment to a highly parsimonious theoretical approach paradoxically both sets up the possibility of his theory being universally applicable, and undermines its prospects as a viable approach to understanding world history. Using the key concepts from Waltz’s work — units, systems, structure, process — we show the detailed grounds on which his theory fails to apply to such large swathes of time and place, so that its claims to universality fall, even though it can usefully be applied to some times and places. We also show its shortcomings in relation to the essential historical task of periodization. We argue that international relations needs to engage more with world history, and that the task of doing so will fall to approaches other than Waltz’s.

How Hierarchical Can International Society Be?

Clark, I. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

Waltzian analysis proceeds from the distinction between the ordering principles of anarchy and hierarchy. This raises the large question whether the introduction of pockets of ‘authority’ would represent a fundamental challenge to an anarchical international society. The article investigates this theme by exploring a putative institution of hegemony. It begins with a distinction between primacy and hegemony, and develops the idea of hegemony as a potentially legitimate practice of international society. Since most political systems are ‘mixed’, it then concludes that adoption of a hierarchical principle of hegemony is no more contradictory for international society than is its development of other such institutions. In common with much recent scholarship, it agrees that international society can function as a form of ‘hierarchy under anarchy’, within which hegemony could play its part. The article finally demonstrates what is distinctive to hegemonic behaviour, and suggests that practices such as soft balancing do not represent any form of balancing at all, but are better understood as attempts to institutionalise hegemony.

Human Interconnectedness

Linklater, A. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism abstracts the international political domain from other spheres of social interaction to explain recurrent patterns of competition and conflict across the millennia. There are similarities between the structural realist ‘grand narrative’ and the process-sociological approach developed by Norbert Elias. But the latter supported ‘high-level synthesis’ in the social sciences in order to understand how relations between material, ideational and emotional forces have contributed to the growth of human interconnectedness. The analysis contended that one of the purposes of the social sciences is to increase knowledge of how humans can gain control of the processes that bind them together in global networks of interdependence. Elias was opposed to partisan inquiry such as Kant’s notion of a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent. But a shared emphasis on how humans have developed the capacity to cause distant harm reveals how future grand narratives can combine the analysis of the growth of interconnectedness with the ethical argument for greater transnational solidarity.

The Virtue of Adversity

Waltz, K. N. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT

This article is a personal account of how the author came to write his two best-known books, Man, the State, and War and Theory of International Politics. He explains the context of his early career, his army service, and some key academic influences. The article then discusses the origins of his two other major works, on foreign policy and democratic politics and on the implications of the spread of nuclear weapons. In commenting on the course of his long writing and teaching career, Professor Waltz highlights the critical importance and influence of his wife, Helen Waltz.

Contributors

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:21:04 PDT