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1
Anarchy, Community and Critical International Theory
The neo-realist contentions that the anarchical international system will be reproduced indefinitely and that competition and conflict will remain endemic in the relations between sovereign states – and especially in exchanges between the great powers – have been at the centre of recent disputes in international relations theory. Neo-realism transformed the contemporary debate in International Relations by anchoring realist criticisms of the first and second images of war in improved theoretical foundations (Waltz, 1990). Although neo-realism supersedes realism in the area of methodological sophistication, it preserves its imperfections, which include the failure to recognise that the international system can be transformed by reconstituting exclusionary political communities. Some brief observations about a major weakness which is common to realism and neo-realism form the starting-point of this inquiry.
According to first-image analysis, war can be abolished by eradicating the propensity to use violence which is inherent in human nature. According to the second-image approach, war will end with the spread of enlightened national government. For liberals, such as Kant, the diffusion of republican regimes held the key to the progressive development of international society; for the exponents of Marxist class analysis, the universalisation of socialist rule would cancel the realm of power politics. Third-image analysis in realist thought maintains that war is an ineradicable product of international anarchy. Its key argument is that states are forced to compete for military power and national security because of the absence of any higher political authority, and are repeatedly brought into conflict by forces which elude their control.1 Neo-realism simplified the analysis by distinguishing between two main strands of international theory: reductionism, which assumes that the nature of the international system is determined by the actions of constituent national regimes, and systemic reasoning, which maintains that international anarchy embroils all states, regardless of the nature of their regimes and societal preferences, in an endless struggle for security and power which frequently culminates in war (Waltz, 1979).
As with third-image analysis, systemic explanation maintains that sovereign states lack the requisite freedom of manoeuvre to bring an end to their anarchic condition. The speed with which revolutionary governments such as the Soviet Union embraced Realpolitik is thought to illustrate the explanatory failures of reductionism (Waltz, 1979, p. 128). Neo-realism has argued that national behaviour is greatly constrained though not wholly determined by the struggle for security and power. It has denied the existence of deep logics which promote radical international political change, and rejected the supposition shared by much liberal and Marxist thought that the extension of the boundaries of moral and political communities can secure the long-term pacification of international relations (Waltz, 1979).2
If sovereign states are likely to survive indefinitely – and neo-realism recognises they are unlikely to survive forever – then reflections on alternative forms of world political organisation are futile; and if domestic moral aspirations are invariably overridden by systemic constraints then reflections on the character of ethical foreign policy are largely, but not completely, otiose. All realist doctrines seek to demonstrate that a progressivist interpretation of international relations is impossible, but neo-realism is by far the most powerful attempt to banish idealist sentiments and reformist projects from the study of international society. It has been more rigorous than its intellectual predecessors in developing powerful theoretical buttresses for the critique of reformist approaches to world politics. The proposition that the anarchic international system and the potential for inter-state violence will be reproduced indefinitely has been its pivotal observation in this regard.
Although neo-realism brought greater theoretical sophistication to the discipline, its effort to eradicate normative imperatives has spectacularly backfired. To a far greater extent than any other perspective, neo-realism has highlighted the moral impoverishment of the study of international relations. Its attempt to equip realist pessimism with deeper methodological insight has had the paradoxical effect of promoting the recovery of critical and normative approaches. All such approaches – critical-theoretical, postmodern, feminist and liberal – have defined their identity through a series of challenges to neo-realism. Those approaches have challenged its conviction that the sole purpose of international theory is to explain the indefinite reproduction of the international states-system; they have contested its account of an allegedly immutable anarchic condition and they have repudiated its effort to reduce rational political action in international relations to technical considerations of national power and self-interest. Such approaches clash with neo-realism but they also question the longer tradition of international pessimism which neo-realism draws on and seeks to refine. Critical approaches to world politics have taken the initiative in recovering the ethical imperative which animated the discipline in the inter-war years (see Long and Wilson, 1995).
Unlike neo-realism, critical approaches take the prospects for ethical foreign policy and the possibility of new forms of political community seriously. Gradually they have brought new images of international relations to the centre of the contemporary debate. These competing images are not concerned with the respects in which human nature, the characteristics of particular regimes or international anarchy cause international conflict, but with the problem of exclusionary political communities and their role in generating conflict and war.3 On the assumption that the connections between moral exclusion and international conflict are not simply fortuitous, critical approaches argue for a political undertaking which the realist analysis of the three images of war and the neo-realist focus on reductionist and systemic theory have ignored. This is the enterprise of reversing what Corrigan and Sayer (1985, p. 4) call the totalising project, in which states seek to construct homogeneous national communities which are sharply distinguished from the world of outsiders and largely unconcerned about their interests. The critical enterprise has two main parts. Reconstructing the modern state and the international states-system to permit the development of higher levels of universality is one dimension of an alternative practice to state-formation and nation-building. Transforming exclusionary political communities so that higher levels of respect for cultural differences can evolve is a second element of the practice of superseding the totalising project.4 Each dimension will be considered in more detail later.
This chapter makes the case for envisaging new forms of political community and for reworking international relations theory in the light of a normative commitment to realising higher levels of universality and difference. There are four parts to the discussion. Part one develops recent claims that neo-realism lacks an adequate account of modern political community. It argues that the neo-realist focus on the anarchic condition which compels states to behave in very similar ways ignores the problematical nature of political community, underestimates the potential for the transformation of the modern state and obstructs political practices which can defeat the totalising project.
Part two considers the problematical nature of modern political community in more detail, and argues that neo-realism has ignored its tenuous existence and precarious legitimacy. There are two dimensions to the problem of modern political community. First, although modern states have insisted that obligations to fellow-citizens take precedence over obligations to the rest of humanity, the precise moral significance of the boundary between citizens and aliens has been the subject of continuing ethical debate. The case for more universalistic loyalties and communities has long been important in the theory and practice of international relations. Second, although state-formation and nation-building have reduced cultural differences within many states, the struggle for cultural rights has been a key feature of national and international politics. These reactions against the effects of the totalising project have become stronger in recent decades and create new possibilities for the transformation of political community. The realist analysis of the three images of international conflict, and the neo-realist distinction between systemic or reductionist inquiry, fail to recognise that modern political communities offer a deeply unsatisfactory response to claims for ethical universality and demands for greater respect for cultural difference. Neither approach has considered the possibility that the boundaries of moral and political community could be redrawn to achieve higher levels of universality and difference.5
Neo-realism may concede that the legitimacy of the modern state has been precarious yet insist that the nature of international anarchy blocks the development of alternatives to the sovereign state. On this interpretation, critical explorations of alternative forms of political community have the unedifying effect of rediscovering the ancient tension between utopia and reality. Part three briefly considers the changing nature of the modern state in the context of globalisation and fragmentation, and notes how the prospects for new forms of political community have improved in recent decades. This is especially the case in Western Europe, which has become the laboratory for a unique experiment in creating post-nationalist or post-sovereign states which are more sensitive than their predecessors to the need for reconciling the claims of universality and difference, but no region of the world is immune to the politics of resistance to totalising projects. Part four argues that critical theories of international relations which explore normative, sociological and praxeological questions about the prospects for novel relations between universality and difference have acquired renewed political relevance with the decline of the totalising project which frustrated the appearance of alternatives to the territorial state.6 It locates the origins of this mode of critical inquiry in the project of modernity developed by Kant and Marx and proceeds to ask how this project can be developed under altered historical conditions.7 The principal aim of the subsequent chapters is to develop an answer to this central question.
The Critique of Neo-realism
The critical turn in international relations has been deeply influenced by debates about the adequacy of the neo-realist analysis of the state. The contention that radically different regimes behave in remarkably similar ways is an instructive theme in neo-realism, but it hardly exhausts the possibilities for theoretical inquiry. Neo-realism maintains that more advanced forms of theory may emerge to explain the respects in which the international system influences the units and is influenced by them. While acknowledging this point, Waltz (1979) argues that the analysis of the homogenising effect of the anarchic system upon national behaviour is the best means of developing the theory of international relations. It will remain so while generalisable statements about the impact of the units upon the anarchic system are unobtainable. Neo-realism does not argue that states are powerless to affect the functioning of the international system but it denies that theory can comment with any precision about any recurrent patterns of behaviour which arise from their limited autonomy and discretion. A role for critical theory which explores the normative purposes to which states can turn their discretionary powers is rejected by neo-realism. Theory is reduced to explaining the patterns of behaviour which result from the eternal quest for power and security.8
The positivist dimensions of neo-realist theory have been subject to telling criticisms which meld important themes in the history of reformist international thought with recent developments in social and political theory. Prominent among these criticisms is the arresting liberal claim, first advanced by Kant and Green, which holds that there is nothing in international anarchy itself which imposes competition and conflict upon nation-states (Linklater, 1990a, pp. 30–2). Current reformulations of this argument note that many of the properties which neo-realism imputes to the system of states should be attributed to its constituent national parts. Neo-realism regards the learned and alterable behaviour of the major powers as inherent features of an immutable anarchy.9 But as an influential formulation correctly maintains, anarchy is what states make of it: the propensity for inter-state violence is not inherent in anarchy itself but is a function of how states have responded to international anarchy by constituting themselves as exclusionary and egotistical units (Wendt, 1992; 1994).10
The related argument that neo-realism lacks an adequate account of the relationship between agency and structure has also helped dislodge its dismal assumption that competition and conflict are inevitable features of international anarchy (Wendt, 1987; Hollis and Smith, 1990). Accounts of the ways in which the meanings of sovereignty, territoriality, statehood and associated concepts have shifted since the birth of the Westphalian era further reveal that national responses to international anarchy are socially constructed (Ruggie, 1983; Ashley, 1988; Bartelson, 1995; Biersteker and Weber, 1996). Claims that these concepts are not passive reflections of an immutable reality, but belong to the world of linguistic conventions through which reality is constructed, invite philosophical reflections on alternatives to the sovereign states-system. The positivist approach to social inquiry which informs neo-realism lacks a historical account of the development of social and political categories and fails to develop a critical exploration of alternatives to the structures which currently dominate. The moral limitations of neo-realism can therefore be simply stated. Its observations about the constraining effects of an immutable anarchy have the consequence of absolving states of the moral responsibility for devising practices which will bring more just forms of world political organisation into existence.
Normative international theory would be impossible without the presupposition that states and other actors have the capacity to overcome the constraints which neo-realism imputes to anarchy. For this reason the critique of the immutability thesis in neo-realism which denies the possibility of close political cooperation between the overwhelming majority of states is especially significant. Reformist projects have a long history in the development of international thought but they have often lacked the sophistication of their counterparts in domestic political theory. The recurrence of relatively shallow analyses of global reform which realists could dismember with comparative ease is one of the most unfortunate consequences of the earlier isolation of the study of international relations from ethics, political philosophy and social theory.11 Important themes from these more critical disciplines have been drawn into the main debates about International Relations in recent years with the consequence that more robust statements of the reformist project have been formulated. In British international relations theory, though not in the United States, the intellectual initiative now lies with the project of reform.
Critical social theory has been centrally concerned with perspectives which purport to distinguish the immutable from the mutable, the natural from the contingent, in human affairs. It has been interested in ideologies which convert historically-contingent and socially-produced phenomena into natural and unalterable facts.12 Its preoccupation with these forms of alchemy is easily explained. Attempts to justify excluding various groups from the benefits which others enjoy often rest on a confident appeal to the authority of nature. Apologists for racial or gender exclusion have frequently argued that it is nature which determines social hierarchies, and nature which will be offended by wilful efforts to modify the prevailing order.13 During the last 200 years, the critique of various systems of exclusion has often begun by delivering a challenge to the accounts of social reality which depict social conventions as natural and which attempt to place them outside the scope of critical inquiries into the possibilities for the transformation of human practices. The Marxist critique of ideology was the decisive intellectual breakthrough in this regard because it revealed how the dominant understandings of allegedly natural social relations emerged under specific historical circumstances, invariably to underwrite and conceal powerful sectional interests. Efforts to subvert immutability claims, to debunk conventional assumptions about the natural qualities of social structures or human behaviour and to identify countervailing and progressive tendencies within existing societies are the principal hallmarks of critical social theory.
As with critical social and political thought in general, so now with International Relations. Critical international theory treats the claim that inter-state violence is inevitable as long as the anarchic international system exists with considerable suspicion. These doubts are far from new, but they are now located in a sophisticated critique of empiricist and positivist aspirations for developing an objective account of the world which exists ‘out there’ independently of the cognitive subject (Rorty, 1989 p. 5). The crucial argument, which is evident in critical social theory, in postmodernism and in feminist analysis, invites human agents to reflect on the disturbing possibility that their efforts to provide an objective understanding of an independent reality can obscure the role that knowledge plays in facilitating the reproduction of problematical social arrangements which are not immune from transformation. This argument has been central to the move beyond neo-realism in recent years (Runyan and Peterson, 1991).
Cox’s argument that knowledge is always for someone and for some purpose remains the most illuminating formulation of this important theme. Cox (1981) stresses the ideological consequences of the neo-realist conviction that systemic theory reveals the impossibility of radical international political change by peaceful means. Neo-realism, Cox argues, has an interest in promoting the smooth functioning of an interstate order which has thus far defeated efforts to secure peaceful change. For Cox, the dominant states and social forces rather than the anarchic states-system are the main source of resistance to the restructuring of international relations. This observation identifies a central weakness in neo-realism. In short, Waltz’s remarks about the ability of states to influence the operation of the international system prompt the question of whether the possibility of long-term radical change should have been so rapidly discounted. Equally important is the question of whether evidence of resistance to the dominant global political and economic structures should have been so systematically ignored. Troubling consequences result from neglecting the possibility of new combinations of state structures and social forces which are committed to the transformation of political communities and global society. Neo-realism, which is a problem-solving theory committed to promoting the smooth functioning of the inter-state system, has the effect of assisting the reproduction of the very structures which many political actors regard as unjust and which they are evidently keen to transform. Important moral consequences follow from the related observation that no social and political order treats all subjects equally or fairly. To privilege the goal of managing the existing order is to privilege the interests of those who benefit most from its survival – the great powers and the dominant groups within the global system. To privilege that goal is to facilitate the reproduction of arrangements which frustrate the political aspirations of systematically excluded groups such as the global poor and refugees (embracing large numbers of women and children), minority nations and the world’s indigenous peoples.
To regard the immutability thesis as an exercise in the politically neutral observation of an independent reality is to lend vital ideological support to the status quo by denying that alternativ...
