International Relations In A Changing Global System

Toward A Theory Of The World Polity, Second Edition

Seyom Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780813323534
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429974793
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book expands and deepens the analysis of a new approach to the study of international relations in a changing global system, elaborating the essential characteristics of the anarchic structure of the world polity.

Part One

Analytical Framework

1 The Anarchic Structure of the Nation-State System

Throughout the world the most powerful institutions of governance—those vested with supreme rule-making and rule-enforcing capabilities—operate within and on behalf of one of the some 190 territorially demarcated countries, frequently called “states.” The entire population of the planet is divided into, and governed by the laws of, one or another of these units. Usually most of the humans living in a particular country consider themselves part of a “nation,” a distinct people valuing a particular way of life.

Although there may well be more than one nation within a country, and even though some nations may claim members in more than one country, each of these territorially demarcated complexes of governance is generally regarded as a nation-state; and the pattern of relationships among these entities is often referred to as the nation-state system. I will retain this conventional terminology.

What is most striking about the nation-state system, and probably most significant for understanding how it functions in the world at large, is its essentially anarchic political structure. A society has an anarchic polity to the extent that it lacks society-wide rule-making and rule-enforcing institutions. International anarchy, it should be noted, does not preclude cooperation among the autonomous nation-states; nor does it necessarily mean the absence of shared international norms or explicit rules of international behavior. Thus, the core norm of the nation-state system—that each country has sovereignty over everything within its territorial jurisdiction—has been the foundation of international law since the middle of the seventeenth century. When the world society’s core national-sovereignty norm is threatened by one country’s aggressive intervention across another’s borders, that norm itself allows each member of the world society the sovereign prerogative of deciding if and how to come to the aid of the victim.

Attempts to overlay this basic structural anarchy with rudimentary global “collective security” institutions (to be analyzed in Chapter 2) have had only limited success, for member governments are determined to limit their freedom of action as little as possible. The United Nations Security Council resolutions in 1990 authorizing members to apply sanctions, up to and including military force, against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait preserved the right of each member of the United Nations to decide how to implement the resolutions.

Characteristically, in the nation-state system no country is bound by rules to which it does not voluntarily subscribe, and most sanctions on individuals or groups to comply with international rules are administered by the national governments upon individuals or groups within their respective jurisdictions. Yet there are institutions to which most of the nation-states belong (specialized agencies of the United Nations primarily) that are mandated by the UN Charter or special international treaties to make rules for the whole international society and, though lacking substantial powers of enforcement, to oversee their implementation.¹ There are a few selective-membership, international institutions functioning on a global or nearly global basis, such as the International Monetary Fund or the International Maritime Organization, that do have limited sanctioning powers (such as the withholding of funds or technical assistance resources) granted them by their members.² Still, efforts to enforce a rule of behavior upon a nation-state against its determined will to resist usually must be undertaken by other nation-states, not directly by the international rule-issuing institution, particularly if the enforcement includes violent sanctions.

There are many detailed rules of interstate interaction subscribed to by large sets of countries and spelled out explicitly in signed treaties that have the force of law within each of the signatory states. But, again, these treaties are negotiated and subscribed to on a voluntary basis. Treaty signatories may charge each other with violation of their subscribed-to obligations and can attempt to enforce obligations on each other through economic or military sanctions. (They can even ȧttempt to mobilize concerted, near-universal sanctions, as the United States did against Iran in the 1979–1980 embassy hostage crisis for Iran’s violation of its treaty obligations vis-à-vis foreign embassies.) However, there is no centralized international mechanism for the enforcement of state-to-state treaty obligations.

The view of the nation-state system as anarchic, or essentially anarchic, is widely recurrent in the literature on international relations—albeit with varying terminology and detail in its elaboration. A few theories of international relations, most notably Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations³ and Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics,⁴ attempt to systematically deduce all of the important behavioral characteristics of international politics, especially the prevalence of war, from this anarchic structure. Basically, they start with international anarchy as a given and treat it throughout as a constant. Morgenthau at least makes a gesture in the direction of deriving his characterization of international anarchy from a more basic (albeit questionable) assumption about human nature: namely, his proposition that “The tendency to dominate ... is an element of all human associations, from the family through fraternal and professional associations and local political organizations, to the state.” The nation-state, the largest viable form of human domination, therefore will be engaged in a perpetual struggle for power against other nation-states to avoid falling victim to their domination.⁵ Waltz is content to start and stay with a priori assumptions at the observable surface of international behavior: “The parts of international political systems stand in relations of coordination. Formally, each is the equal of the others. None is entitled to command; none is required to obey. . . . Whether those units live, prosper, or die depends on their own efforts.”⁶

Neither Morgenthau nor Waltz, nor for that matter any of their prominent disciples, after assuming that the anarchic structure of the nation-state system is the principal determinant of the way things happen in international politics, takes the next step and treats international anarchy as an “independent variable,” in the sense of a factor to be manipulated (at least analytically), which would allow them to examine how its diminution or absence might affect other features of world politics.⁷ Rather, they treat it as an axiom, from which other features of international relations are to be deduced.

I agree that much of significance in world politics appears to flow from the anarchic structure of the nation-state system; but for that very reason a theory of international politics, and surely a theory of the world polity, would seem to require an explanation both of the origins of the anarchic nation-state system and of its persistence. Moreover, to examine systematically just what in world politics is the result of the anarchic nation-state system, we need to think through—hypothetically—how world politics would differ (or remain the same) under a substantially altered structure.

Why Anarchy?

There are material reasons or ideational⁸ reasons—usually some combination of both—why any particular human population or society operates without centralized rule-making and rule-enforcement to govern interpersonal or intergroup interaction. Some of these reasons are unique to particular times and places. But there also seem to be some specifiable general determinants of anarchy (while varying in their influence with differences in group size, density, complexity of natural interaction patterns, and the like) that are common across eras of human history and to most societies, ranging from neighborhoods to world society as a whole.

Matérial Reasons

The material reasons for the presence or absence of anarchy have primarily to do with (1) the natural supply and human accessibility of essential and valued goods, and (2) the capabilities of certain people to control access to what is generally needed and valued. These factors strongly affect both the internal structure of groups and the structure of intergroup relationships.

Where the supply of needed and desired goods is abundant (relative to demand) there is little incentive to control access and distribution, either by commonly accepted rules or by imposition of the selfish and powerful, and an anarchic regime of open access, “first come/first served,” tends to evolve. The connection between abundance and relatively benign anarchy has been observed by anthropologists studying simple societies. Small tribes with basically peaceful dispositions tended to develop in regions of abundant natural food and water resources, where a tribe that might encounter another tribe monopolizing the natural resources in one locale could move on to another locale. Characteristically, such peoples fulfilled their subsistence needs more by hunting and gathering than by subsistence agriculture. Prototypical examples from the anthropological literature are the Semai of Malaya, the Arapesh of New Guinea, the Kung Bushmen of Southern Africa, and the Zuni Indians of the American Southwest.⁹ Resource abundance also seems to be a good part of the explanation for the basic durability over many centuries of a world ocean regime of open access and free use of the waters and fish of the high seas.¹⁰

The relationships between conditions of material scarcity and anarchic social structures are more complicated. Where there is not enough of a valued good to satisfy the demands for it on the part of those to whom it is physically accessible, a regime for controlling access and use is likely to develop, either through voluntary agreement or through tests of will and strength among rivals for control. Anthropologists and economic historians locate these changes in the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the latter developing when scarcities generate incentives to establish exclusive communal or family ownership over plants and animals, preferably in a fertile area. Property rights are established and enforced among members of the community, and the frontiers of the area are defended against intruders. Communal rules and organizations become more complex, and common policies are developed to govern any relationships with outsiders. Order within territorially demarcated communities concomitant with persisting anarchy—but anarchy of a more competitive, even belligerent kind—between such communities are thus the expected political counterparts of economic scarcity.¹¹

Some communities, through the development of technologies allowing them to operate agricultural and industrial economies on a large scale and also militarily to subdue (or protect) weaker neighbors, have expanded their frontiers over vast regions, sometimes striving to encompass entire continents. Beginning about 3500 B.C., large parts of the Eurasian landmass and the northern half of Africa were thus divided among huge empires. The earliest of these spanned outward from hierarchically organized communities that had been able to build and sustain large irrigation systems: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India, and later China. The ancient riverine empires were soon challenged by the great maritime powers bordering the Mediterranean—Greece, Carthage, and Rome. In the Western Hemisphere, regional empires appear to have been centered in what are now Peru and Mexico.

None of the ancient imperial hegemons, however, nor their more recent counterparts (Ottoman Turkey, Ming China, Moscovy, Portugal and Spain in the fifteenth century, France under Louis XIV and then Napoleon, Britain in the nineteenth century, Hitler’s Third Reich, Tojo’s Japan, and the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II), have come even close to dominating the entire world. Why?

The explanation of the inability of any state to establish world empire, once again, as with the rise of the territorial state in the first place, must give heavy weight to basic material and geographic factors. Imperial expansion beyond a certain size produces negative marginal returns, or what historian Paul Kennedy has termed “imperial overstretch”: Distance from the center of power and the vast circumference of the realm make the peripheries increasingly difficult to integrate economically and politically and to defend against hostile outsiders; the need to sustain such increasingly unviable peripheries saps material and human resources away from regenerative and developmental pursuits at the centrȧl core of the empire, contributing either to its decline relative to rival empires (sometimes as a result of defeats in wars) or to a decision by its rulers to cease further imperial expansion, possibly even to retract the realm back to a more viable size.¹²

These material factors preventing global empire, and therefore sustaining some form of anarchic world polity, seemed possibly to have been transcended by the middle of the twentieth century with the development of weapons, transportation systems, and communication systems of truly global range. A superpower with superiority in such capabilities might well be able to establish globally extensive hegemony. Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s it was commonplace among geopolitical experts in both the United States and the Soviet Union that the rival superpower had such a grand design to establish a world empire and would do so unless stopped by countervailing power. The bipolar organization of most of the world into two rival cold war coalitions was in large part a result, and apparent confirmation, of these assumptions.

As it turned out, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States was able to convert its hegemony into a sustainable empire over even half of the world. Perhaps, were it not for the opposition of its main rival superpower, the new globe-spanning reach and massive destructive power of its strategic nuclear arsenal might have provided the basis for either to hold sway over the rest of the world. But having to face a similarly armed rival not only prevented each from attaining a global imperium; paradoxically, it also undermined the basis of sustainable hegemony over ones own coalition, for two main reasons: (1) It became evident that superpower pledges of strategic protection of its allies were incredible insofar as their implementation would initiate a massive nuclear exchange of blows with the rival superpower. (2) The superpower arms race, and the superpowers’ need to assist their respective allies in military buildups, required both the United States and the Soviet Union to divert material resources and human energies to the military sector, meanwhile neglecting to stay sufficiently ahead of other countries in general technological and economic modernization to maintain clear leadership in the global market over other economic powers. Coalition partners came to realize that at moments of truth they might have to fend for themselves—the implication being that they had better develop independent foreign policies and defense capabilities, particularly to service interests that might not fit the cold war priorities of their superpower protector. Meanwhile, particularly in the U.S.-led coalition, revived centers of economic power (Japan, members of the European Community) began to pursue their own interests, including growing commercial intercourse with members of the Soviet-led coalition, more in competition with the United States than under its direction.

By the late 1980s, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a growing realization among statespersons that the era of global bipolarity following World War II had been a temporary abnormality. The “natural” configuration of international ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Need for a Theory of the World Polity
• PART ONE: ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
• PART TWO: TOWARD NORMATIVE THEORY
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index