A notebook

[bds]

Let me copy them

I don't really read enough non-fiction books to take notes.

The Borderline Simpleton,
Too dumb to read real books.

[Mu]

OK

I read so much zen literature and ancient Japanese and Chinese texts that it is probably bad for me  I will try making notes on some of them.

Also i read lots of particle / theoretical physics books

[bds]

Let me just deflate Mu's ego, one sec...

Okay. Continue.

[Cain]

Stephen Krasner

At the end of his autobiographical reflections on his career thus far, Stephen Krasner urges students 'to resist succumbing to the fashion of the moment and to try to develop a mode of inquiry that does lend itself to some form of empirical validation, even if such validation can never be fully compelling'.

Along with the work of Kenneth Waltz and Robert Gilpin, his contribution to the study of international political economy has helped to entice some liberal scholars (such as Robert Keohane) to present their own work as a modification of structural realism rather than a direct challenge to its core assumptions.

On the basis of his careful analysis of the empirical data, Krasner then makes a number of bold propositions and explains them by appealing to the continuing importance of the realist approach. He argues that periods of openness in the world economy correlate with periods in which one state is clearly predominant. In the nineteenth century it was Great Britain. In the period 1945–60, it was the United States. Consequently, the degree of openness is itself dependent on the distribution of power among states. Economic 'interdependence' is subordinate to the political and economic balance of power among states, not the other way round.

A powerful state with a technological advantage over other states will desire an open trading system as it seeks new export markets. Furthermore, large, powerful states are less exposed to the international economy than small ones, so what Krasner called 'the opportunity costs of closure' will be lower too. In addition, they are less vulnerable to changes from abroad and can use this power to maintain their access to overseas markets. On the other hand, if power is more evenly distributed among states, they are less likely to support an open trading system. The less economically developed states will try to avoid the political danger of becoming vulnerable to
pressure from others, while states whose hegemony may be declining fear a loss of power to their rivals, and find it hard to resist domestic pressures for protection from cheap imports. A crucial factor in Krasner's argument is his claim that states do not always privilege wealth over other goals. Political power and social stability are also crucial, and this means that, although open trade may well provide absolute gains for all states that engage in it, some states will gain more than others. What is rational for the collective good of states is not necessarily the case for individual states.

What emerges from this study is that the American national interest in the international commodity markets has three components, ranked in order of increasing importance: stimulating economic competition; ensuring security of supply; and promoting broader foreign policy goals, such as general material interests and ideological objectives. His claim is that while smaller states focus on
preserving their territorial and political integrity and their narrow economic interests, only great powers will try to remake the world in their own image.

Krasner concludes that US decision-makers were often willing to protect the interests of American corporations, but they reserved the large-scale use of force for ideological reasons. This explains the use of force against Vietnam, an area of negligible economic importance to the United States, and the reluctance to use force during the oil crises of the 1970s, which threatened the oil supply to the entire capitalist world.

The national interest is a term that has been used very vaguely both by defenders of realism as well as its critics. For Krasner, it refers to 'an empirically validated set of transitively ordered objectives that did not disproportionately benefit any particular group in a society'.

Regimes are principles and rules that regulate the interaction of states and other actors across a range of issue-areas, and they impart a degree of 'governance' to the international system.

Hans Morgenthau

In contrast to what he claims is the dominant liberal belief in progress, based on an optimistic set of assumptions regarding human nature, Morgenthau asserts the more traditional metaphysical and religious conception of 'fallen man'. All politics is a struggle for power because what he calls 'political man' is an innately selfish creature with an insatiable urge to dominate others. Human nature has three dimensions: biological, rational and spiritual. Although Morgenthau acknowledges that all three combine to determine human behaviour in different contexts, he focuses on the 'will-to-power' as the defining characteristic of politics, distinguishing it from economics (the rational pursuit of wealth) and religion (the spiritual realm of morality). Since the defining character of politics is the use of power to dominate others, morality and reason are subordinate virtues in politics, mere instruments for attaining and justifying power.

On the basis of his interpretation of the historical evidence, Morgenthau argues that all foreign policies tend to conform to, and reflect, one of three patterns of activity: maintaining the balance of power, imperialism and what he calls the politics of prestige (impressing other states with the extent of one's power).

In the past, when peace depended on a stable balance among five or six great powers in Europe, the loose alliance structure among them induced caution and prudence in the foreign policy of each. The bipolarity of the second half of the twentieth century had robbed diplomacy of a necessary flexibility, and it resembled a zero-sum game in which marginal shifts in power could lead to war. Second, there was no great power to act as a buffer between the superpowers, and Morgenthau argued that this had been a key ingredient of European politics in the past when Britain could act as a neutral 'arbiter' in continental conflicts. Third, in the era of decolonization, territorial compensation was no longer available to maintain the central balance. In the past, the territorial division and distribution of colonies and lesser powers in Europe (such as Poland) had been an important technique for negotiating concessions in European diplomacy. Finally, the application of new technologies of transport, communication and war had transformed the twentieth century into an era of what Morgenthau called 'total mechanisation, total war, and total domination'.

Although the struggle for power was kept within barely tolerable limits by the mutual deterrence provided by nuclear weapons, he had no faith in their ability to maintain the peace. Since weapons were not the source of instability in the Cold War, neither could they be a cure.

He believed that American foreign policy was continually plagued by four main flaws (legalism, utopianism, sentimentalism and isolationism) that arise from the fortuitous geographical, historical and diplomatic separation of the USA from the European balance of power. If the USA were to play a constructive role in stabilizing the new balance of power after 1945, it would have to rid itself of these preconceptions and engage in a sober analysis of the new balance of power and the concomitant requirement to promote the national interest. In particular, Morgenthau was eager to demolish the 'moralistic' assumptions that he argued had characterized the diplomacy of Woodrow Wilson after the First World War. Instead, he urged a return to the 'realistic' diplomacy of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in the eighteenth century, when the USA recognized and acted on behalf of the national interest – to prevent France or Britain from establishing sufficient power in Europe to threaten the security of the USA.

Second, as Kenneth Waltz and others have pointed out, there is an important 'level-of-analysis' problem in Morgenthau's work. It is never clear whether his pessimism about the nature of international politics derives from his metaphysical assumptions about 'human nature' or the anarchical nature of the international system per se. Insofar as human nature is the source of power politics among states, this is to commit the ecological fallacy in reverse – the analysis of individual behaviour used uncritically to explain group behaviour. As Waltz points out, one cannot explain both war and peace by arguing that humans are wicked.

Kenneth Waltz

In marked contrast to all those scholars who were arguing that international relations was undergoing a radical transformation as a result of growing interdependence in the international economy as well as the limitations of force in the nuclear age, Kenneth Waltz reaffirmed the salience of the state as the main actor in international politics and castigated his opponents' arguments as reductionist and non-falsifiable.

He defines the international political structure by two criteria. The first is a principle of arrangement by which states relate to one another. The interstate system is a self-help, or anarchical, one. This principle, he argues, is constant over time, and severely constrains the degree to which a division of labour can take place between states. They are, as Waltz puts it, functionally undifferentiated. Multiple sovereignty therefore limits the scope for interdependence among states. While anarchy is a constant, the second criterion of the structure, the distribution of capabilities, varies among states. States are similar in the tasks they face, although not in their abilities to perform them. The empirical referent for this latter variable is the number of great powers that dominate the system. Given the small number of such states, and Waltz suggests that no more than eight have ever been consequential, international politics 'can be studied in terms of the logic of small number systems'. He argues that this logic can be understood without making any untestable and vague assumptions about whether and to what extent states seek to pursue power. 'Balance-of-power politics prevail whenever two, and only two, conditions are met: that the order be anarchic, and that it be populated by units wishing to survive.'

Having isolated the structure, Waltz then argues that a bipolar structure dominated by two great powers is more stable than a multipolar structure dominated by three or more great powers. It is more likely to endure without system-wide wars. Again, in contrast to earlier realists who were concerned about the ideological confrontation of the superpowers in a nuclear era, Waltz claims that there are striking differences between multipolarity and bipolarity in terms of strategic behaviour. Under multipolarity, states rely on alliances to maintain their security. This is inherently unstable, since 'there are too many powers to permit any of them to draw clear and fixed lines between allies and adversaries'.

Some of his critics have argued that the 'stability' of the Cold War had much more to do with nuclear weapons (a 'unit level' phenomenon) than bipolarity. Just because the superpowers were more powerful than other states in the system did not mean that they were equally as powerful as each other and had become successfully 'socialized' to the prevailing structure. Again, the explanatory and predictive power of Waltz's theory was compromised by the difficulty of separating levels of analysis and determining the content of each.

In particular, he argues that in the absence of effective countervailing pressures, the United States is likely to become increasingly unilateral in seeking to secure its foreign policy interests, and in so doing to rely on its military preponderance to secure any vision of a new world order.

[Cain]

Karl W. Deutsch

Deutsch is perhaps best known for his work on the social prerequisites and dynamics of nationalism and regional integration, as well as his rigorous application of behavioural methods to study processes of social mobilization at the domestic and international levels. Social mobilization refers to a process of change which affects substantial parts of the population in countries that are undergoing rapid modernization. He was concerned to develop empirical quantitative indicators of such change, so that propositions regarding its political consequences could be tested for their validity across time and space.

He proposed a model of nationalism based on the idea that it was fuelled by the need for the state to manage processes of mobilization that were, by definition, quite traumatic for citizens who were both uprooted from old settings, habits and commitments, and mobilized into new patterns of group membership and organizational behaviour

Social mobilization, when it emerges on a large scale, tends to politicize increasing numbers of citizens and increases the range of human needs that the state must respond to.

Deutsch also studied the international conditions that might affect whether a state would channel its citizens' energies towards the outside world. In this context, he was a pioneer in the study of regional integration, and he introduced greater complexity into the usually sharp dichotomy between hierarchical authority relations at the domestic level and anarchical struggles for power and security at the international level.

He made a clear distinction between amalgamation and integration. An amalgamated community has one supreme decision-making centre, but it does not follow that its opposite is mere anarchy.  Deutsch pointed out that it is possible to have a number of legally sovereign states that relate to each other in the form of a 'pluralistic security community' and that are confident that the chances of force being used to resolve conflicts between them are extremely low. In other words, they are sufficiently 'integrated' to resemble an amalgamated security community without the need to transfer sovereignty to a supranational level. He argued that the anarchy/hierarchy distinction should not be thought of as a dichotomy, but rather as a spectrum.

Of crucial significance to this project is Deutsch's idea of the 'transaction–integration balance'. The growth of transactions among people does not automatically lead to greater integration. Consistent with his earlier work on social mobilization, Deutsch pointed out that 'it is the volume of transactions, political, cultural, or economic, which throws a burden upon the institutions for peaceful adjustment or change among the participating populations'.

There are also several fundamental assumptions or criteria that are relevant to the emergence of a security community. For example, whatever regional organization exists, it must possess sufficient institutional maturity to generate the diplomatic techniques deployed to diffuse problems and crises. Furthermore, such maturity must have been accompanied by the mutual willingness among member states to resolve their differences at the organizational level. Indeed, mutually benign expectations of member states must be clearly matched by a discernible pattern of interaction or reciprocity. And finally, states in a security community must have a common perception of threat regarding external actors.

A good example of the use of such analysis can be found in his article (co-authored by J. David Singer) on balance-of-power systems in world politics. Here he employed sophisticated mathematical techniques to help determine the stability of international systems composed of varying numbers of great powers, and concluded that a multipolar system composed of at least five great powers was historically more stable than those that contained fewer great powers but were prone to structural instability. This is because, on the basis of chance alone, a four-to-one coalition rather than a three-to-two coalition is likely to occur at some point, and such overwhelming strength in one coalition of great powers is likely to lead to the destruction of the system. The analysis explicitly modelled the impact of arms races upon the stability of the international system, and is a good illustration of the benefits of quantitative data when used by scholars who are also sophisticated historians in their own right. However, Deutsch did not believe that international stability was best studied in terms of varying numbers of great powers, since such static analysis precluded attention to the more significant processes of interaction among states which could not be either reduced to, or managed by, conservative diplomatic techniques and a strong emphasis on military deterrence. As he put it, 'dependable coordination cannot be built by deterrence and bargaining alone. A world of deterrent powers, a world of bargaining powers will, as a total system, be ungovernable.'

Michael Doyle

Prior to the publication of Ways of War and Peace, Doyle was best known for his work on nineteenth-century European imperialism, as well as for his rigorous examination of the alleged connection between the prevalence of liberal democracy within states and the absence of war between them. In 1986, he published Empires, a fully multicausal analysis of European imperialism. The latter, he argues, has been poorly defined within the literature, making it difficult to generate testable hypotheses on the causes of this elusive phenomenon. Doyle defines imperialism as 'a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another'. A comprehensive explanation of empire, therefore, should demonstrate the nature of such effective control, explain the motives for seeking control, and explain either the submission or ineffective resistance of the peripheral society. Any theory intended to describe and explain imperial relationships should, he argues, take into account four factors: the interests and capabilities of the metropole; the capabilities and interests of the periphery; the dynamics of transnational forces; and the nature of international systemic relations. Transnational forces are the means through which the imperial power affects the periphery. These may be military, trade, missionary or some combination of all three. International systemic relations refer to the balance of power among imperial states.

In particular, three characteristics separate imperial states, or those with imperial potential, from states liable to imperial rule. Size and wealth, interestingly enough, are not the key factors, although these may affect the struggle between imperial states and have an effect on the scope of empire. More important are political centralization, unity and differentiation. Thus, a highly centralized, unified, differentiated state, such as England, is likely to overwhelm decentralized, fragmented, less differentiated states with which it comes into contact, resulting in imperialism even when the target states – such as China and India – are larger and even wealthier in aggregate terms.

He notes that European powers generally preferred informal rule where at all possible, as a less expensive way of obtaining the trading rights they valued. Yet trade required security, law enforcement and adjudication of interests between representatives of the imperial power and members of the peripheral states. Where the latter were weakly differentiated tribes of people, the peripheral state could not perform these tasks. The imperial state was then drawn, sometimes reluctantly, to exercise direct rule and undertake the necessary services itself through consular authority. State-making in the periphery was thus a consequence of imperial activity.

Empires is a fine example of the way Doyle engages with classical international theory. First, he reads the conventional theorists on the issue, re-presenting their arguments with due regard to the particular contexts within which they were arguing. Next, he extracts from their work a set of empirical generalizations. Third, he carefully examines the evidence to see how well classical theories stand up under the test of time.

To simplify greatly, if the explanation for the separate peace between liberal states is due to their liberalism, it is tempting to argue that relations between liberal and non-liberal states cannot be peaceful, for the latter are, in a sense, at war with their own people. Lacking internal legitimacy, non-liberal states will be more willing (other things being equal) to engage in aggression against other states when it is in the interests of their leaders to do so. Doyle does not argue that this is the case, merely that liberal states, such as the United States, may act on this presupposition, and therefore be unwilling to accord non-liberal states the same degree of respect that they give to other liberal states.

"A pluralistic model of world politics is not a contradiction to theoretical knowledge, but a basis for it. We as thinking human beings need not be, and for the most part are not, singular selves. Our modern identities are pluralistic, found in individual identity, nation, and class, as well as religion, race, and gender. We cannot escape multiplicities entering into our policy choices, nor, if we want to be true to ourselves, should we try to."

[Dr. Paes]

I am posting in this thread.
Thanks Cain.

[Cain]

More IR theory droppings:

Francis Fukuyama

By the phrase 'end of history', Fukuyama is referring to the history of thought about legitimate first principles governing political and social organization. His argument is primarily a normative one. At the end of the twentieth century, the combination of liberal democracy and capitalism has proved superior to any alternative political/economic system, and the reason lies in its ability to satisfy the basic drives of human nature. The latter is composed of two fundamental desires. One is the desire for material goods and wealth and the other (more fundamental) desire is for recognition of our worth as human beings by those around us. Capitalism is the best economic system for maximizing the production of goods and services and for exploiting scientific technology to generate wealth. However, economic growth is only part of the story. Fukuyama appeals to Hegel's concept of recognition to account for the superiority of liberal democracy over its rivals in the political arena. While economic growth can be promoted under a variety of political regimes, including fascist ones, only liberal democracies can meet the fundamental human need for recognition, political freedom and equality. It was Hegel who contended that the end of history would arrive when humans had achieved the kind of civilization that satisfied their fundamental longings.

"Liberalism pacifies and de-politicises the aristocratic world of mastery by turning politics into economics. Liberalism pacifies the masterful thymos of the first man and replaces it with the slavish thymos of the last man. Instead of superiority and dominance, society strives for equality. Those who still long for dominance have the capitalist pursuit of wealth as their outlet."

In a series of lectures delivered in Paris in the 1940s, Kojève argued that the welfare state had solved the problems of capitalism identified by Marx. Thus, capitalism has managed to suppress its own internal contradictions. Furthermore, it not only provides material prosperity, but also homogenizes ideas and values, thus undermining the clash of ideology between states, thereby reducing the threat of war. Hegel did not believe that the end of war within states could be replicated at the international level. Kojève and Fukuyama argue that while wars will not disappear, the homogenization of values among the great powers will promote peace among the most powerful states, and these are the ones that matter in a long-term historical perspective.

Despite the victory of liberal democracy as a normative model over its rivals, Fukuyama is concerned that the subordination of megalothymia to isothymia may be also the pursuit of equality at the expense of the pursuit of excellence. If there is too much equality, and no great issues to struggle for, people may revolt at the very system that has brought them peace and security. We cannot subsist merely on equal rights and material comfort alone, and those that satisfy themselves with these become what Nietzsche called 'last men' or, as C.S. Lewis put it, 'men without chests'. At the end of the book, Fukuyama sounds a note of warning. Unless there are ways to express megalothymia in those societies lucky enough to have reached the 'end of history' (and according to his own statistics, less than one-third of all states have arrived thus far), liberal democracy may atrophy and die. At one point Fukuyama argues that perhaps Japan may offer an alternative to American liberal democracy and combine a successful economy with social bonds strong enough to withstand the fragmentary forces of liberal democracy. Many Asian societies, he claims, have 'paid lip service to Western principles of liberal democracy, accepting the form while modifying the content to accommodate Asian cultural traditions'.

Globalization is a blanket term that conveys the limits to state power arising from the myriad dynamics of a global economy in which the state seems to be relatively powerless to manage its domestic economy. In particular, the integration of global capital, much of it speculative, tends to subordinate domestic politics to the demand for flexibility, efficiency and competitiveness on a global playing field that is anything but level

Consequently, as governments become less accountable to those they claim to represent over a broader range of issues, so the spectrum of democratic choice before citizens narrows considerably. To the extent that economic globalization and political fragmentation are operating at different levels of social, political and economic organization, one could plausibly accept much of Fukuyama's philosophical assumptions and reach opposite conclusions to the ones that he draws. On the reasonable assumption that global capitalism is exacerbating economic inequality both within and between states while simultaneously denying them a redistributive capacity to moderate its impact, the 'struggle for recognition' may take reactive forms such as ethnic nationalism.

To some extent, there is continuity between the two books. The underlying paradox of liberalism is the same. If you universalize liberal individualism, extending its premises to all spheres of life, liberal institutions (including the market) will eventually malfunction and then liberal democratic society will itself decay.

In his view, the long and sustained pattern of state downsizing or market liberalization (in which the market and civil society were expected to promote democracy) has had mixed results. While it has spurred growth development, it has weakened civil society and stripped the state's capacity to promote security and order. Some might say that this critical examination weakens his earlier
thesis and downplays the benefits achieved from neoliberalization. On the other hand, Fukuyama is willing to concede that stronger regulations must be implemented in order to control the effects of capital flows and to promote peace and order within states.

Ernst Haas

Haas defined integration as 'the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities towards a new and larger centre, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states'.  He argued that such a process was easier to achieve in a regional context such as Western Europe, particularly in light of its history and shared democratic values in the postwar era.

Unless there is a concerted attempt to develop democratic procedures of decision-making to secure the legitimacy and accountability of regional organizations staffed by technical experts and bureaucrats, a dangerous gap can develop between national citizens and regional organizations. This gap can then be exploited by political parties that are still nationally based, and used to attack incumbent governments at election time. The problems of moving towards greater monetary and political union in the contemporary European Union cast some doubt on the effectiveness, let alone the legitimacy, of automatic 'integration by stealth'.

Stanley Hoffman

"like Aron, I tend naturally to think 'against' Utopians who tempt me into demonstrating (gleefully) that their recipes are worthless. Crass realists provoke me into trying to show that they have overlooked some exits."

"Power at a nation's disposal ought to be used in full awareness of the external conditions that define which uses are productive and which are not, as well as of the domestic predispositions and institutions that channel national energies in certain directions or inhibit the country from applying them in other ways."

In this book, he argues that the contemporary international system (in the 1960s) is characterized by revolutionary dynamism, qualified or muted bipolarity, and ideological clashes. He distinguishes between three related levels of the system, each of which exhibits different structural attributes. Most fundamentally, the system is bipolar in terms of the nuclear destruction the superpowers can unleash, but the very restraints imposed by the nuclear stalemate have given the nation-state a new lease on life and have allowed, on a second systemic level, the emergence of political polycentricism. This, in turn, has encouraged the trend towards nuclear proliferation, which lends a multipolar attribute to the third 'systemic' level.

The complexity of the world is especially challenging to the United States because of a debilitating set of attitudes that stem from the American 'national style' (a function of America's past and principles) and American governmental institutions. The major institutional problem is the dispersal of power among and within the governmental structure and bureaucracy. Deficiencies in foreign policy 'style' are reflected in legalism, reliance on formulas, short-range planning and the conflict between quietism and activism.

Hoffmann argues against overly relying on military force as an instrument of policy, but he recognizes that, in its absence, revolutionary forces are likely to undermine international order. In short, the book is an appeal for the United States to adapt to an increasingly 'multihierarchical' international system and to allow Eastern and Western Europe to emerge from the Cold War as part of a united political entity.

Hoffmann argues that Kissinger's diplomacy was based on the illusion that the United States could enjoy primacy and world order, whereas for Hoffmann sees a tradeoff between them. He urges (once again) US policy-makers to conduct their rivalry with the Soviet Union at benign levels of parity and to abandon any attempt to achieve world order on the basis of imperial control.

In the angriest essay in the book, Hoffmann ridicules Reagan for his dangerous attempt to recreate a global containment strategy that once again reduces the world to an ideological and military confrontation between the superpowers, and for his dubious claim that the United States had merely lost the will to employ its power. In 1983, Hoffmann argued that Reagan's nostalgia for the world of the 1950s would result in another dead end – alienated allies, a spiralling arms race and an obstinate Soviet Union.

"The structure of the international milieu which limits possibilities for moral action, the conflicts of value systems which result in very sharp disagreements on conceptions of human rights and on priorities, the difficulties of assessment and evaluation are all manifest here and lead repeatedly to failure, or to confrontation, or to distorted uses of the human rights issues for purposes of political warfare at home or abroad."

Despite these problems, Hoffmann argues that the United States would not be true to its conception of itself if it did not promote the pursuit of human rights, and he endorses a policy of liberal internationalism. At the same time he warns that such a policy must coexist with the realization that emphasizing political and civil human rights at the expense of economic and social rights can often appear as neocolonialism in another guise.

"the tension between morality and politics will always remain – because morality is always at war not only with egotistical or asocial interests, but also with the will to power and domination. In the world of international relations, it's going to be an uphill struggle. Albert Camus wanted us to imagine a happy Sisyphus. In international affairs, this simply is not possible."

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

OK

I read so much zen literature and ancient Japanese and Chinese texts that it is probably bad for me  I will try making notes on some of them.

Also i read lots of particle / theoretical physics books

DO IT!

We should start NOTEGASM: A COLLECTIVE NOTEBOOK

I have a bunch of Aesthetics notes people might find interesting.

[Cain]

I can set up a blog easily enough.  With gmail accounts, its easy for multiple people to use.  If that sounds cool, I'll go ahead and sort out the details.

Anyway, more notes:

Robert O. Keohane

The basic argument of the book is that, in a world of interdependence, the realist 'paradigm' is of limited use in helping us to understand the dynamics of international regimes, that is, the rules of the game governing decision-making and operations in international relations on particular problems, like money, or between specified countries, like the United States and Canada.

Keohane and Nye begin by constructing two theoretical models, realism and complex interdependence. The former portrays international relations as a struggle for power. It is based on three core assumptions: states are coherent units and are the most important political actors; force is a usable and effective instrument of policy; and there exists a hierarchy of issues in world politics dominated by questions of military security. In contrast, under conditions of complex interdependence: actors other than states participate; there is no clear hierarchy of issues; and force is ineffective. Under these conditions, outcomes will be determined by the distribution of resources and 'vulnerabilities' within particular issue-areas, they will be unrelated to the distribution of military power, and transnational relations will be crucial factors in the decision-making process, including international bureaucratic coalitions and non-governmental institutions.

They demonstrate that some issues and conflicts conform more to the assumptions of the complex interdependence model than to realism, and reinforce the need to focus on particular 'sensitivities' and 'vulnerabilities' of actors in specific issue-areas. They also argue that under conditions of complex interdependence, which they expect to become stronger in the future, it is difficult for democratic states to devise and pursue rational foreign policies.

Textbooks were written and courses were taught that portrayed the field as divided between realism, complex interdependence and radical Marxism. Each paradigm seemed to have its own agenda of issues, identification of key actors and theoretical models. And yet, between 1977 and the publication of After Hegemony in 1984, Keohane abandoned his attempt to portray 'complex interdependence' as a rival model to realism.

For example, in his study on US raw materials policy, Krasner demonstrated the ability of the United States to pursue a consistent 'national interest' against the demands of domestic interest groups. He also showed a link between hegemonic power and the degree of complex interdependence in international trade.

Keohane tries to determine how the international system might evolve towards stable configurations of co-operation in spite of the decline of American power relative to Japan and Europe since 1945. The theory of co-operation is based on the functional utility of 'regimes'– principles, rules, norms around which state expectations and behaviour converge in a given issue-area – that assert the long-term, rational self-interest of states in perpetuating co-operation despite shifts in the underlying balance of power. He argues that such regimes are established primarily to deal with political market failure. They lower the cost of international transactions by delimiting permissible and impermissible transactions, by combining transactions through issue linkage, thereby enabling states to assemble packages of agreements, and by reducing uncertainty.

In short, the maintenance of institutionalized co-operation among states does not depend on the perpetuation of the hegemonic conditions that are necessary to set regimes in place.

His answer is that, yes, power and self-interest are important, but writers such as Waltz, Gilpin and other structural realists exaggerate the degree to which the international system is anarchical. It is not. Despite the absence of a formal, legal hierarchy of authority at the international level, informal elements of governance exist in the form of regimes and 'institutions', 'related complexes of rules and norms, identifiable in space and time'. They help states to overcome problems of collective action and market failures. In international relations, transaction costs are high and property rights are often ill-defined. States may not co-operate because they fear that others can renege on deals, or because they may not be able to monitor others' behaviour. Institutions can be of great help in overcoming such problems. They allow the principle of reciprocity to function more efficiently by providing information about others' preferences, intentions and behaviour. Thus, they allow states to move closer to the Pareto frontier. By altering the systemic environment, institutions facilitate changes in state strategies so that rational, self-interested states can continue to co-operate reliably over time.

In After Hegemony, he suggested that his systemic theory of international co-operation needed to be supplemented by a theory of learning within states, and we may expect the next stage of Keohane's research to fill this important gap in the literature.

Richard Rosecrance

Despite the key exceptions of the (then) Soviet Union and the United States, trade had replaced territorial expansion and military might, he argued, as the key to international prestige, power and wealth. The balance of trade was supplanting the balance of power. What appeared to be a novel proposition in the mid-1980s has, with the end of the Cold War, become more broadly accepted.

Rosecrance established his reputation in the field in the 1960s and early 1970s for his work on systems theory. He combined his extensive historical knowledge of European statecraft since the eighteenth century with formal explanatory models to explain state behaviour and the stability of different historical systems.

In his first book, Rosecrance divides the history from 1740 to the present (circa early 1960s) into nine historical systems. In general, he uses the outbreak of war to delimit the end of one system and the beginning of another. Unlike those who use the term 'system' to refer to a continuous process of political relations at the international level, Rosecrance refers to what might be called the 'diplomatic constellations' or the patterns of power and diplomatic relations that characterize a given historical period. Major changes in these patterns, often accompanied by conflict, indicate the development of a new system. On average, each system lasts only for a couple of decades.

These are the direction which elite groups give to foreign policy (and the compatibility of direction and objectives between states), the degree of control of elites over foreign policy within their respective states, and the resources ('persuasive skills, the quantity of mobilizable resources and the speed of mobilization') which can be used in support of foreign policy. Of these determinants, he argues that the second is most crucial in explaining systemic stability. Four of the nine systems were in 'disequilibrium' when there were major changes in the security of tenure of national elites, suggesting that the latter often attempt to solidify support by aggressive behaviour in the international system. However, in the final analysis, the stability of any particular system depends most on the fourth determinant, the capacity of the environment to absorb or placate the objectives of states. In turn, capacity can be analysed in terms of the interplay between regulative forces (direct preventative action against disruptive policies) and more passive environmental factors.

Rosecrance's argument in the 1960s and early 1970s is a direct challenge to structural realism, according to which the international system can be treated as an entity separable from the interactions of the states within it, rather than a network of relations among sub-system actors. According to Rosecrance, it is not possible to isolate domestic from foreign policy in evaluating systemic stability. System-wide action is brought into play only in response to policy initiatives of member states. In Action and Reaction, Rosecrance leaves little doubt that he believes the chief causes of foreign policy behaviour lie within domestic political systems. Serious international instability and upheaval arise from the inability of the existing international system to cope with the disturbances from domestic causes.

Similarly, the upsurge of nationalism and the wars of national unification, which destabilized mid-nineteenth-century Europe and led to the final collapse of the Concert of Europe, arose from the successful attempts of conservative elites to outbid their liberal opponents in domestic struggles for political power. The liberals had used democracy to rally the people against conservative rule, but the conservatives won back support by appealing to nationalism, thereby combining traditionalism and democracy. The environmental capacity of the system in Europe was limited by the absence of open territory, and the result was a great deal of unregulated conflict.

"The future study of international politics will have to take account of the failure of [each]. Power and [the number of great powers] are sufficient criteria neither of international politics nor international stability. Instead, international politics exists on a continuum that ranges from Waltz's extreme structural formulation at one end, in which all units are homogeneous, to an extreme formulation at the other, in which all units are heterogeneous. Neither is sufficient by itself and neither, like the model of pure competition in formal economics, applies consistently. Most cases exist toward the middle of a continuum."

Five years later, Rosecrance published his most well known book, The Rise of the Trading State. In it he rejects 'monistic' explanatory frameworks for the study of international relations. Instead, he proposes a 'dualistic' approach, suggesting that the international system is characterized by the presence of two worlds, the 'military–political world' and the 'trading world'.

The reasons for this switch are very simple, and can be understood on the basis of rational choice. In the nuclear era, the costs of territorial expansion and military defence are rising exponentially, while the benefits are declining. Since the Second World War, the benefits of trade have risen in comparison with the costs, and those states (such as Japan) that understand the advantages of trade are benefiting at the expense of states such as the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, as war has become more costly and dangerous, domestic support for militarism and high defence expenditure has declined. Finally, since 1945, the previous trend towards fewer states in the international system has been reversed. From the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century, the number of states in Europe had shrunk from about 500 to fewer than 25. But after the Second World War, when European empires finally collapsed and decolonization proceeded apace, the number of states in the world grew to about 150 by the mid-1960s. After the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there are at present 192 member states in the United Nations, and that number may be closer to 200 in the mid-part of the twenty-first century. In this context, the importance of trade between states becomes crucial for their continued survival.

Any coalition of states can be sustained only on the basis of three principles: 'involvement of all, ideological agreement, and renunciation of war and territorial expansion, giving liberal democratic and economic development first priority'. In the absence of agreement on such principles, the benign consequences of the new system may not materialize, and Rosecrance is aware that there is an inherent tension between the demands of commercial liberalism in the 1990s and the prospects for democratic liberalism.

[Honey]

I've been reading P. Rabinow's The Foucault Reader & found this to be interesting.  (I have a secret admirer at work & he drops books (mostly good ones) off in my office when I'm not around - Lucky me! - I think I know who he is too.)  I know you were talking about Foucault a page back I think?  Found this interview here, it's also in the book. 

Polemics, Politics and Problematizations

This interview took place in order for Foucault to answer questions frequently asked by American audiences.
It was conducted by Paul Rabinow in May 1984, just before Foucault's death.
Translation by Lydia Davis, volume 1 "Ethics" of "Essential Works of Foucault", The New Press 1997.

...

P.R. You have recently been talking about a "history of problematics". What is a history of problematics ?

M.F. For a long time, I have been trying to see if it would be possible to describe the history of thought as distinct both from the history of ideas (by which I mean the analysis of systems of representation) and from the history of mentalities (by which I mean the analysis of attitudes and types of action [schémas de comportement]). It seemed to me there was one element that was capable of describing the history of thought—this was what one could call the problems or, more exactly, problematizations. What distinguishes thought is that it is something quite different from the set of representations that underlies a certain behavior; it is also quite different from the domain of attitudes that can determine this behavior. Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.

To say that the study of thought is the analysis of a freedom does not mean one is dealing with a formal system that has reference only to itself. Actually, for a domain of action, a behavior, to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from social, economic, or political processes. But here, their only role is that of instigation. They can exist and perform their action for a very long time, before there is effective problematization by thought. And when thought intervenes, it doesn't assume a unique form that is the direct result or the necessary expression of these difficulties; it is an original or specific response—often taking many forms, sometimes even contradictory in its different aspects—to these difficulties, which are defined for it by a situation or a context, and which hold true as a possible question.

To one single set of difficulties, several responses can be made. And most of the time different responses actually are proposed. But what must be understood is what makes them simultaneously possible: it is the point in which their simultaneity is rooted; it is the soil that can nourish them all in their diversity and sometimes in spite of their contradictions. To the different difficulties encountered by the practice regarding mental illness in the eighteen century, diverse solutions were proposed: Tuke's and Pinel's are examples. In the same way, a whole group of solutions was proposed for the difficulties encountered in the second half of the eighteenth century by penal practice. Or again, to take a very remote example, the diverse schools of philosophy of the Hellenistic period proposed different solutions to the difficulties of traditional sexual ethics.

But the work of a history of thought would be to rediscover at the root of these diverse solutions the general form of problematization that has made them possible—even in their very opposition; or what has made possible the transformation of the difficulties and obstacles of a practice into a general problem for which one proposes diverse practical solutions. It is problematization that responds to these difficulties, but by doing something quite other than expressing them or manifesting them: in connection with them, it develops the conditions in which possible responses can be given; it defines the elements that will constitute what the different solutions attempt to respond to. This development of a given into a question, this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response, this is what constitutes the point of problematization and the specific work of thought.

It is clear how far one is from an analysis in terms of deconstruction (any confusion between these two methods would be unwise). Rather, it is a question of a movement of critical analysis in which one tries to see how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed; but also how these different solutions result from a specific form of problematization. And it then appears that any new solution which might be added to the others would arise from current problematization, modifying only several of the postulates or principles on which one bases the responses that one gives. The work of philosophical and historical reflection is put back into the field of the work of thought only on condition that one clearly grasps problematization not as an arrangement of representations but as a work of thought.

http://www.foucault.info/foucault/interview.html

[Cain]

Even more IR theory

Friedrich Kratochwil

Thus, rather than embracing some of the scientific assumptions of rationalism, Kratochwil has elected to focus on the epistemological limits and problems of rationalism and, to a lesser extent, middle-ground constructivism. It is for this reason that many have come to regard his critique of rationalism as radical or deconstructionist. Both labels, however, are not entirely fair. In fact, Kratochwil's approach is far less combative or uncompromisingly contested than it is discursive in nature. Indeed, his open-ended critique is neither deconstructionist nor post-Nietzschean, but partakes of immanent social theory rooted in the emancipatory project and its attendant guiding principles of rationality, history, justice and liberty. It would therefore be more reasonable to conclude that Kratochwil would agree most with Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit's critical assessment of the compatibility between critical theory and constructivism: that constructivism can and should be reconciled with critical theory.

In short, Kratochwil's approach might best be summed up as follows: to ensure that we maintain an open-ended dialogue about what constitutes social knowledge or what reproduces social life in international relations. There is, in other words, a tendency within the social sciences to objectify thoughts, ideas and interests. Kratochwil's overarching mission is to expose and interrogate these tendencies within constructivism itself, and within other international relations theories. If, then, Robert Keohane can be considered the principal gatekeeper of much of mainstream and alternative international relations theory, then Kratochwil might well be considered the gate-breaker, though not in the Nietzschean sense of value-breaker. By gate-breaker, we are referring to his aim of constructing reflexive self-understandings of international relations, that is, an open-ended approach that eliminates the ontological (or structural) constraints on our understanding of the world. Keeping an open mind in this sense is much like keeping the gates open, or eliminating the need for a gatekeeper to impose his or her own preferences as to what counts as practical knowledge in the discipline.

First and foremost, social critical theory opposes positivist formulations of knowledge, that is, the idea that scientific knowledge of our social world is acquired through objective and positivist methods based on the separation of fact and value, or the objectification of facts for hypothesis-testing and explanation (of social behaviour). Second, critical social theory holds that concepts
and theory can never be fixed per se. Rather, concepts remain contingent on our social experience and social change. As already noted, it is this notion of contingency, or the irreducibility of facts and social experience to any fixed construct (hegemony), that places Kratochwil either before or beyond middle-ground constructivism.

Yet the most significant problem with Wendt's theory, as Kratochwil suggests, is that the variables of coercion, calculation and belief, and their grounding in three corresponding cultures (Hobbes, Locke and Kant), usher in what he calls a new orthodoxy, in which culture and ideas are reducible to material resources.

He claims that reasoning about international rules and norms should represent a more open-ended and practically oriented approach. As Kratochwil puts it: 'practical reasoning not only deals with issues of action but also investigates the formal properties of arguments which satisfy neither the conditions of induction nor those of deduction.' Practical reasoning does not assume that knowledge can be reduced to ontology, and ontology to reason. Instead, the logical and contextual meanings of actions reflect the choices and reasons we make and the desire we hold to play by the rules. The important point to consider here is that knowledge can never attain some fixed and autonomous position in our social experience.

If, then, there is one predominant theme in Kratochwil's work, it is that facts, structures, values are not autonomous, given units or entities.

Again, for Kratochwil the recurring question in international relations is this: why do we treat structures and facts as autonomous and fixed in the first place? And how does immanent social theory explain the limits and problems of theorizing about our globalizing world?

In fact, as Kratochwil suggests, actors acquire their knowledge through their particular surroundings or social contexts: they act and form their own choices from their particular cultural understandings of the world. In this sense, international relations concepts such as anarchy, sovereignty and international norms represent the political and social means of understanding and describing this dynamic. As he states: 'Precisely because social reality is not simply out there but is made by the actors, the concepts we use are part of a vocabulary that is deeply imbricated with our political projects.'

In short, we must be self-conscious of the social order we are assuming, or are tying to establish. As mentioned above, practical reasoning calls into question the very idea that scientific knowledge can produce objective results. Because sentiment and emotions reflect loyalties to something, they must be accounted for in the process of understanding the exchange of ideas between and among actors. As Kratochwil states: 'Here both a mistaken scientism and legalism have blinded us to the fact that issues of justice...depend on shared sentiments of resentment, as well as those of compassion. Similarly "trust" and the "pride" one feels when a (common) undertaking has succeeded, as well as sentiments of "loyalty" are important resources for solving collective problems'.

History instead reflects a complex process in which forgetting about events often constitutes the reason for investigating our past. As he explains, 'social theory cannot be disengaged from history since history not only incorporates the politics of things but historical reflection is...the precondition for a proper appreciation of action and agency'.

It may be fair to say that Kratochwil would remain critical of any approach that builds on a given or assumed social order.

Nicholas Onuf

The metaphorical dividing line between the state of nature and the hierarchical political state also serves, for many, as the demarcation between the organizing principles of the disciplines of international relations and political science/political theory. The state of nature is equivalent to anarchy and the recurrence of similar patterns of violence and distrust, while the political state allows for hierarchy, normative theory and history. Martin Wight famously used this distinction to explain 'why there is no international theory'.

For Nicholas Onuf, however, the Hobbesian construction of the 'state of nature' is where many of our problems begin. For Onuf, there is no pre-social human endeavour; we are always, already deeply embedded in social practices, and the problem with much social theory is that it is (micro-)founded on a conception of autonomous individuals that is essentially pre-social. Onuf describes the forms of social theory committed to an atomistic, rational, maximizing individual as operating within the paradigm of liberalism, and argues 'anarchy is liberalism carried to its logical extreme: the only limits on rational conduct are those imposed by material conditions'.  Onuf's description of liberalism, then, subsumes theories of (neo)liberalism and (neo)realism within international relations. Due to the impoverished form of social theory resulting from this asocial foundation, Onuf rejects liberalism and offers 'constructivism' in its place.

"The reconstruction of international relations requires that the discipline be stripped of its current pretensions. If this is taken as abandonment of international relations (the discipline as it is) and the possibility of international theory (theory peculiar to international relations), then I agree. I do not agree that it means giving up on international relations as well. Rather it honors their importance and thus their place in the operative paradigm of political society. More than any other matters of politics, international relations are the subject of this book only because I have thought more about them. Such is the legacy of my discipline."

Clearly, for Onuf there is no strong distinction to be made between a discipline of international relations and other forms of political theory.

Onuf, drawing on the political theorist J.G.A. Pocock, argues that our contemporary understanding of anarchy is of much more recent origin. Essentially, Onuf argues that it was only with the rise of democratic regimes, and the attendant needs for legitimacy of the ruler, that our contemporary understanding of order inside the state evolved. And it was this conception of order inside the state that anarchy would be negatively defined against. Thus, with the birth of legal principles of rule inside the state, the lack of such legal principles outside the state gave rise to our contemporary accounts of anarchy. Before the rise of modern liberal political theory, the justification for order and authority was dependent on religious and other principles, and the 'problem of anarchy' was not anything like the contemporary account.

"In the Middle Ages the order–authority problem simply did not exist. The affairs of man obtained their order from a higher, authoritative order. Authority attested to the fact of higher order and assured mundane order. That order was imperfectly realized in human affairs cast no doubt on the perfection of its source or even the legitimacy of its less than perfect agents. It is this openly anti-empirical quality of medieval thought that lent itself to secular challenges and in due course invited the scientific revolution. International legal doctrine reflects the long decline of the medieval world view. Secular challenges to the premise of a higher order eventually prevailed, perhaps too thoroughly, by denying the existence of order at any level."

Onuf argues that agents (people) and structures (recurrent forms of social institutions) mutually constitute each other. This is a seemingly simple but very important point in understanding Onuf's argument. Against the asocial and micro-founded, broadly construed liberalism that he is attacking, Onuf argues that structures matter. No individual is ever free of, or precedes, the social structures in which they live.

Neither agents nor structures are ontologically prior or privileged in Onuf's formulation. They mutually constitute each other.

Social practices are defined by rules – indeed, rules are in some sense the condition of existence for social interaction. Onuf uses Searle's speech act theory to identify three types of rule. The first is 'assertive', where a claim is made about the world in the manner of 'this is that type of thing' or 'X is Y'. The second is 'directive', where an agent is directed to do something, as in 'do this now'. The third type of rule is 'commisive' or 'commitment' rules, where agents commit themselves to performing some act, as in 'I will do that'.

Onuf is convincing in his argument that anarchy, as conceptually deployed in international relations theory, is a thoroughly modern construct. Onuf's argument about rules and rule constituting order suggests that he might be open to the English School's interest in how order occurs under anarchy.

The starting point of poststructural research is the notion that 'what dominates (society) is the practice of language'.  Discourse in Anglo-Saxon scholarship is commonly associated with language, but there are many other linguistic and non-linguistic forms of discourse. When Onuf says 'constructivism begins with deeds. Deeds done, acts taken, words spoken – These are all that facts are', Onuf does not know it, but he is in fact working with Lacan and Foucault's notion of discourse. Indeed, replace the Lacanian schemata with Onuf's rule and the language becomes almost identical.

Consistent with arguments made in World of Our Making, Onuf claims that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the triumph of the liberal individual, and the liberal state, in legal thought and political theory, obscuring the legacy of republican thought. Onuf traces republicanism back to the Greeks, and argues that republican thought evolved around the notion of community and the common good. By exploring the history of republican thought, Onuf is able to demonstrate that important areas of international relations, such as sovereignty, humanitarian intervention and the democratic peace, have been deeply influenced by republican thought. Of course, what makes republicanism attractive to Onuf is how the individual and the community constitute each other. In a claim about how society is constituted, we can see how Onuf's understanding of agents and structures animates all of his work. 'Individuals make societies through their deeds, and societies constitute individuals'.

[Jasper]

I just copied this to .txt, so today when I finally replace my e-reader I will have it on the go.

[Cain]

Christian Reus-Smit

Risse, for instance, argued that rationalism, and to a lesser extent, constructivism, required a discursive framework to explain the behavioural outcomes in international politics. For him, decision-making bodies in international institutions were not simply about strategy-making or strategic action, but rather, reasoned argumentation that explained why actors learned to trust and agree with one another. The starting point for this latter process was moral persuasion, or a common knowledge rooted in empathy and the motivation to agree with one another. Christian Reus-Smit's constructivist approach is, in many ways, similar to this communicative approach, but in other ways it is arguably a more substantive application of Habermas's ideas, which interweaves differing perspectives into a conception of historical change and social interaction in international relations.

One of the key arguments in a co-authored article (with Richard Price), 'Dangerous liaisons? Critical international theory and constructivism', is that constructivism, in spite of its engagement with the mainstream 'on issues of interpretation and evidence, generalizations, alternative explanations and variation and comparability', remains compatible with critical international theory. In fact, constructivism and critical theory, they point out, arose from the same tradition of social theory (Marxism) and thus share similar methodological objectives of assessing the social origins of practice and human agency. Bridging constructivism with critical theory, therefore, is not unreasonable, but in fact remains an overlooked task of integrating critical strands of thought in international relations theory and, in this case, of explaining the evolution of international structures and norms.

He argues that while each of these societies of states was governed by differing institutionalized practices and values, the differing governing norms show how values and beliefs are constitutive of evolving political structures, or what he calls 'constitutional structures'. Tracing the evolution of norms and rules in this manner shows just how norms and rules have been shaped by changing social and political forces and values. Yet most constructivist approaches assume that norms, rules and institutionalized practices are constitutive of, and constituted by, given values and beliefs of agents. For Reus-Smit, the very constitutivity of norms and institutional practices is part of a discursive and historical process that, if framed properly, can address why some norms have become new standards of legitimacy. Indeed, as he explains, constructivists have 'failed to pay sufficient attention to the discursive mechanisms that link intersubjective ideas of legitimate and rightful state action to constitutional fundamental institutions'.

The question, then, is not simply how norms and moral principles regulate and constitute state identity and power, but how they have emerged out of negotiations, agreements within international institutions such as international law and diplomacy.

Since institutions provide a forum for discussion and deliberation, they involve ethical and moral claims to truth, or reasons that are compelling enough to persuade others that new rules and norms need to be institutionalized. Legitimization is thus a discursive process in which the struggle to reach reasonable consensus presupposes the recognition of a fair and just authority to implement such rules. It is in this way that moral persuasion helps to explain the constitutivity of values.

John Gerard Ruggie

Ruggie's early work has to be understood in the context of the American debate between neorealism and neoliberalism and of the rise of hegemonic stability theory as a partial compromise between the two sides.

In his critique of Waltzian neorealism, Ruggie argues that its rigid separation of 'levels of analysis', particularly between domestic, transnational and structural levels, is a barrier to understanding the complexities of change in the international system. He claims that both the medieval and the modern system are characterized by anarchy, but one could hardly claim much continuity between the two eras. The momentous change from one era to another can only be understood by examining how the very principles of differentiation among political units (the shift from heteronomy to anarchy) took place

In other words, neorealism is far too static an approach. By separating the structure of the international system from processes among and within the units (states) that make up the system, it is unable to incorporate and thereby explain (let alone predict) change of the system.

"There is an extraordinarily impoverished mindset at work here, one that is able to visualise long-term challenges to the system of states only in terms of entities that are institutionally substitutable for the state. Since global markets and transnationalised corporate structures (not to mention communications satellites) are not in the business of replacing states, they are assumed to entail no potential for fundamental international change. The theoretical or historical warrant for that premise has never been mooted, let alone defended."

In the early 1980s, Ruggie argued that multilateralism was crucial to the stability of relations among states in the West after the Second World War. An extended period of co-operation and economic growth among states in Europe, the Americas, Japan and parts of Southeast Asia was made possible by the multilateral institutions set up at Bretton Woods.

Three apparent aims define his social constructivist project: to stress the functionality of collective intentionality, or its 'deontic' function of creating rights and responsibilities'; to show how social constructivism, which he calls a 'theoretically informed approach', provides a realistic explanation of action by demonstrating how actors interpret their collective situation; and to show that social constructivism offers a 'non-causal' explanatory account of international relations. In drawing on the sociology of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, Ruggie argues that an alternative explanatory approach is needed to avoid the ontological limits of the methodological individualism of (neo-)utilitarianism. Social constructivism, in his view, offers a worthy alternative approach by focusing on the material and ideational factors that shape and explain social action. In sum, Ruggie's constructivist project might be best characterized in the following way: to define the analytical parameters of a social epistemology in international relations theory, so that international relations theorists can explain how actors acquire their knowledge, and how this social knowledge constitutes, and is constituted by, the rules and obligations of the international system.

Alexander Wendt

Alexander Wendt's work is invaluable for those who think that something is always wrong with the conduct of international relations, and that statespersons need instruction from social scientists in how to put it right. He reminds us of the need to take our subject matter seriously, not as a set of 'things to be explained' by reference to some independent 'causes' at a different level of analysis, but as a set of phenomena that cannot be adequately accounted for independently of their interpretation by the agents involved. In the study of international relations, he believes, understanding the tacit knowledge of those we study is of crucial importance.

Many students of international relations claim that the broader our empirical reference, the more abstract must our theories become, appealing less to the 'intersubjective' meanings among the participants in those empirical processes and more to the play of large structural forces. Wendt has devoted his research to criticizing this claim as at best one-sided, and at worst counter-productive. For if it is the case that 'agents' can do little to change the 'structures' that allegedly determine their behaviour, there is not much point in instructing them in the first place!

The phrases 'how things really are' and 'how things really work' are ontological creeds. The basic belief system of neorealists and neoliberals is rooted in a realist ontology. States exist in an anarchical international system, and the study of collective action among them 'takes self-interested actors as constant and exogenously given, [focusing] on the selective incentives that might induce them to cooperate'. In addition to this commitment to the subject matter of international relations theory, neorealists and neoliberals practice an objectivist epistemology, which refers to the relationship between the inquirer and the object of inquiry. If there is a real world operating according to natural laws, then the inquirer must behave in ways that put questions directly to nature, so to speak, and allow the real world to answer back directly. The inquirer must stand behind a thick wall of one-way glass, observing the real world rationally. Objectivity is the 'Archimedean point' (Archimedes is said to have boasted that, given a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the Earth) that permits the inquirer to discover the way states behave without altering them in any way. But how can this be done, given the possibility of inquirer bias? The positivist answer is to recommend the use of a manipulative methodology that controls for bias, and empirical
methods that specify in advance the kind of evidence necessary to support or falsify empirical hypotheses.

Constructivism is a structural theory of the international system that makes the following core claims: (1) states are the principal units of analysis for international political theory; (2) the key structures in the states system are intersubjective, rather than material; and (3) state identities and interests are in important part constructed by these social structures, rather than given exogenously to the system by human nature or domestic politics.

Although neorealists and neoliberals claim that they can explain the primary sources of conflict and co-operation in international relations on the implicit structure of anarchy, without a detailed social theory of state interests, they cannot. For example, we know that 'cooperation under anarchy' is possible in a world of positive-sum interactions, but not in a world of zero-sum interactions. The former is more likely to exist than the latter when state actors define their interests to include those of other states, that is, if they are other-regarding rather than strictly self-regarding. There is a great deal of literature exploring the internal logic of state strategies within these contexts, particularly using sophisticated game theory. But the literature cannot explain the sources of the precise game under consideration because its implicit model of the international system lacks a theory of state preferences and action.

Drawing inspiration from, among others, Anthony Giddens in sociology and Roy Bhaskar in the philosophy of science, Wendt believes that students of international relations should adopt the main principles of 'structuration' theory. Agents (state actors) do not exist independently of the structures around them, but at the same time those structures do not exist independently of their reproduction (and possible transformation) by the agents. Hence the importance of paying attention to this co-constitution of agents and structures, which means refusing to overlook the way in which states interpret the meaning of what they do in favour of some underlying structural dynamic.

Perhaps his most radical substantive argument is that we should give as much priority to the dominant representations of international relations in understanding state conduct as the distribution of material forces among states, whether they be military, political or economic. What matters, according to Wendt, are not the raw facts of material distributions of one kind or another, but their interpretation and signification by the actors themselves. Students of international relations tend to study behavioural outcomes associated with different distributions of power among states throughout history. Wendt argues that attempts to deduce patterns of stability and peace from this kind of analysis is inadequate in the absence of any theoretical examination of how states understand the nature and identity of threats from other states.

[Cain]

Robert Cox

"Theory is always for someone and for some purpose."

Nature cannot be seen as it 'really is' or 'really works' except through a value window. Since values enter into every inquiry, the question immediately arises as to what values, and whose values, shall govern. If the findings of studies can vary depending on the values chosen, then the choice of a particular value system tends to empower and enfranchise certain individuals and groups while disempowering and disenfranchising others. Inquiry thereby becomes a political act.

Their concern with the phenomenon of 'false consciousness' discloses a belief in the possibility of 'true consciousness', and it is the self-appointed task of critical theorists to reveal the material and social forces that prevent people from achieving their 'real' interests in a world that manipulates their desires and limits their potential. The task of critical inquiry is, by definition, to raise people to a level of 'true' consciousness.

The basic assumption of the book is that forces of production create the material base for social relations, generating the capacity to exercise power in institutions, but power and production are related dialectically. Power, in turn, determines how production takes place and is organized.

In the first, Cox distinguishes between no fewer than 12 'patterns' of production relations, which he calls 'modes of social relations of production'. They include subsistence, peasant–lord, primitive labour market, household, self-employment, enterprise labour market, bipartist, enterprise corporatist, tripartist, state corporatist, communal and central planning. Each of these 'modes' is explored as a self-contained structure with its own developmental potential and ideational/institutional perspective. Social relations of production arise in three analytically distinct ways: the accumulated social power that determines the nature of production; the structure of authority that is shaped by the internal dynamics of the production process; and the distributive consequences of production. Cox demonstrates how these aspects of social relations are related to each other in a dialectical manner, and he is particularly interested in the ways in which contradictions and conflicts arise between them in particular historical phases.

Despite his panoramic survey of these patterns of production relations, Cox quickly focuses on two basic modes of development, which he calls capitalist and redistributive. Development is associated with, and made possible by, the generation of an economic surplus within a mode of social relations. Simple reproduction, in which the mode is merely reconstituted over successive production cycles, cannot produce meaningful development. Both capitalist and redistributive forms of development accumulate in order to grow, and both may organize production in similar ways to generate a surplus for further development. But the mechanisms and underlying rationale for accumulation in the two modes are different. Capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit in the market, while in redistributive societies what is produced is determined by political decision-making.

Cox argues that any meaningful comparison between capitalist and redistributive modes of development must be located in a global context, taking into account the relations among states within which these two modes are concentrated.

"States create the conditions in which particular modes of social relations achieve dominance over coexisting modes, they structure either purposively or by inadvertence the dominant–subordinate linkages of the accumulation process...each state is constrained by its position and its relative power in the world order, which places limits on its will and its ability to change production relations."

Gramsci challenged the reductionist conception of the state as exclusively a 'class' state, an instrument of ruling-class coercion and domination. He insisted on the 'educative' role of the state, its significance in constructing those alliances that could win support from different social strata, and its role in providing cultural and moral 'leadership'. Although the economic structure may be, in the last instance, determinative, Gramsci gave much greater autonomy to the effects of the actual conduct of the struggle for leadership, across a wide front and on a variety of sites and institutions. He argued that the role of the Communist Party was to engage and lead in a broad, multifaceted struggle for 'hegemony'. A shift in socialist political strategy was necessary, away from an outright frontal assault on the state to the winning of strategic positions on a number of fronts. Socialist struggle was conceived as a 'war of position' in the first instance against the forces of capitalist hegemony in civil society and culture.

Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, Cox focuses on what he terms 'the internationalization of the state'. By this, Cox refers to the process whereby national institutions, policies and practices become adjusted to the evolving structures and dynamics of a world economy of capitalist production. Cox identifies three dimensions of this process. First, 'there is a process of interstate consensus formation regarding the needs or requirements of the world economy that takes place within a common ideological framework'. Second, participation in the negotiation of this consensus is hierarchical. Third, 'the internal structures of states are adjusted so that each can best transform the global consensus into national policy and practice'.

He believes that our era of 'hyper-liberal globalizing capitalism' is the site of some major contradictions and struggles: between the rhetoric of democracy and the 'democratic deficit' caused by the internationalization of the state; between the growing demands for international protection of the environment and the surrender of state authority to international corporate finance and business; and between the rhetoric of victory in the Cold War over socialism and the accelerating inequality both within and between states.

Andre Gunder Frank

In his work on Latin America in the 1960s, Frank, along with other radical scholars such as Rudolfo Stavenhagen and Fernando Cardoso, turned much of the conventional wisdom on its head. He argued that the Parsonian dualisms were exaggerated and that there was no empirical evidence to back up Rostow's claims concerning the stages of growth. Indeed, he claimed that 'underdevelopment', far from being a characteristic of countries and regions insufficiently integrated into the global economy, was in fact a consequence of their incorporation into what later became known as the capitalist world system.

Thus, in order to understand the process of 'underdevelopment', we must see it as an epiphenomenal manifestation of the expansion of capitalism. Contrary to the modernization paradigm, capitalism is the disease rather than the cure. As for economic aid as a means to establish some of the preconditions for 'take-off', Frank argued the opposite. He argued that satellite states were in fact net exporters of capital to metropolitan countries, which exploited the satellites while pretending that their economic policies were 'aiding' them.

"The upshot of all these theoretical and political reflections...was that continued participation in the world capitalist system could only mean continued development of underdevelopment. That is, there would be neither equity, nor efficiency, nor economic development. The political conclusions, therefore, were to de-link from the system externally and to transit to self-reliant socialism internally (or some undefined international socialist cooperation) in order to make in- or non-dependent economic development possible."

In the transition from mercantilism to industrialization, Frank argues that the triumph of the commercial revolution was a product of colonial conquest as well as the hugely profitable slave trade. This was the centre of two trade triangles, the Atlantic and the Oriental, joined together by the role that Europe (and Britain in particular) played in each. Thus, the industrial revolution was not simply a European phenomenon, for it also involved substantial transfers of colonial precious metals and raw materials to certain countries that comprised the funds later invested as capital with the onset of industrial and manufacturing capitalism. Thus, an accumulating position in the various triangular trades was critical in deciding whether a country would become a developing or an underdeveloping one in the course of the next 200 years.

Stagnation and crisis were, he argued, the consequence of the limitations of productive forces, which over time tended to run up against decreasing returns to scale. The ensuing depressions led to a predominance of 'internal' pressures within individual countries to reorganize production: the successful, such as England, managed to establish their dominance over other countries in the next phase of the economic cycle. Frank argued that the United States became a developing rather than an underdeveloping country for two main reasons. On the one hand, it benefited from a substantial mercantile accumulation of money through its key position in the Atlantic trade triangle of the eighteenth century. On the other, the colonizing power, Britain, treated its colony with benign neglect, allowing local yeoman farming to develop and generate surplus funds to finance further growth. By contrast, Frank devoted a great deal of attention to British colonial policies in India. There, he stressed the way in which the British exploited peasants via the taxation system, and organized production almost exclusively for the export of raw materials and the import of British manufactured goods.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Needs moar Wendt.