'Offensive realism' and state motivations

One of the weak points of structural realist theories (or at least of Mearsheimer's, which has been the topic here recently) is their lack of a strong theory of state motivations. M. says states want more rather than less power, because that's the best way to be secure, or safe, in a world in which, according to M., "uncertainty about [other states'] intentions is unavoidable." (TGPP, p.31)  

In the body of the text of Tragedy of Great Power Politics, M. says that "the only assumption dealing with a specific motive that is common to all states says that their principal objective is to survive...." (p.32) But because "there are many possible causes of aggression" [what are they? he doesn't say] "and no state can be sure that another state is not motivated by one of them" (p.31), assuming that all states all the time want nothing more than survival is not warranted. Indeed, in an important end-note -- why this material is buried in an end-note rather than being in the text is rather perplexing -- M. makes clear that:

Security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively. The possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations is a necessary condition for offensive realism, as well as for any other structural theory of international politics that predicts security competition. (p.414 n.8)

Again, he doesn't say what these "non-security calculations" or motives are [except for a brief discussion on pp.46ff.], but this is nonetheless an important clarification. It's one that tends to get lost later in the text, however, for example at the beginning of ch.6 when he writes that "security considerations appear to have been the main driving force behind the aggressive policies of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union" in the twentieth century (p.170). This, of course, is in some tension with the statement in the end-note that "security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively." It may not be a fatal logical contradiction; it's probably more the result of careless use of shorthand phrases (and, to be fair to M., I have quoted only part of the end-note here, not the whole thing). Still, someone who only reads the text of TGPP and doesn't read the notes is likely to be even more puzzled about this issue than someone who has read the notes.

Harknett and Yalcin, in their 2012 article "The Struggle for Autonomy," which I discussed in this post (where, I see, I also quoted the Mearsheimer end-note I've quoted here) recognized some of these problems about state motivation in realist theory and attempted to deal with the issue more satisfactorily than had been done previously. Although I was critical of their effort (not that I have gone back and carefully read that post), they should be given credit for having recognized and tried to address the problem.

Added later: For one useful discussion of this set of issues (and, of course, more thorough than the discussion in this post), see Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (2000), ch.2, "Human Nature and State Motivation."

Bull, Waltz, and the variety of grand theory

There was some interest in this earlier post, to which this post is a sort of follow-up. Its focus is two 'big' books, published around the same time, which are considered the touchstone works of, respectively, structural realism and the English School: Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics [TIP] (1979) and Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society [AS] (1977). A large amount has been written about both books and I won't try to canvass that literature. (I will mention, however, that the E-IR site has a downloadable collection of essays System, Society & the World: Exploring the English School [here].) I should note that this post says nothing new or startling and almost its entire contents would/should have been covered in a decent Intro to IR Theory course.     


Preliminaries

First, are TIP and AS even about the same subject? The question may seem odd; surely they are both about international politics (or world politics)? Bull writes at the outset that "this book is an inquiry into the nature of order in world politics" (AS, p.xi); Waltz writes that his aim is "to construct a theory of international politics that remedies the defects of present theories" (TIP, p.1). So Bull's focus, at first glance, might seem narrower: he says he is concerned "not with the whole of world politics but with one element in it: order" (AS, p.xi). However, the notion of 'order' he uses is general enough to undergird a discussion that, in its own way, is as sweeping as Waltz's. Both books are big-picture "grand theory," albeit very different examples of the genre. Waltz is self-consciously constructing a parsimonious theory that he claims meets "philosophy-of-science standards" (TIP, p.1), whereas Bull is not interested in constructing a theory of that kind (or, arguably, of any kind). Waltz's theory is a 'systems theory' in that it gives special importance to (one particular definition of) the structure of the international system as distinct from the 'units'; Bull's approach, while focusing on system-wide institutions that the 'units' themselves have created and through which they regulate their relations, is not a 'systems theory,' at least not in the Waltzian sense.

The past and continuing preoccupation of many IR theorists with the notions of 'system' and 'structure' has sparked a reaction by some (e.g., R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.31: "There is no international 'system' or 'structure' that exists and functions outside human decision, responsibility and control"), but the allure of 'structure' -- now often reformulated as 'networks' -- remains quite strong. (I won't address networks here, nor will I discuss the "practice turn" in IR theory, which perhaps has some connections to the English School.)


Waltz and "structure"

Structural realism is structural because it holds that the most important thing to know about international politics is the distribution of power across (or among) states, and this distribution is considered a  "structural" rather than a "unit-level" property. Thus, according to this way of thinking, the fact that the U.S. is the most militarily powerful country in the world is not considered a fact about, or a property of, the U.S.; rather, it is viewed as an aspect of the current system's structure. As Waltz put it: "How units stand in relation to one another, the way they are arranged or positioned, is not a property of the units. The arrangement of units is a property of the system." (TIP, p.80) "The distribution of capabilities is not a unit attribute, but rather a system-wide concept." (p.98)

Like many of his realist predecessors, Waltz stresses that the "ordering principle" of "anarchy," i.e., an absence of central authority or world government, means that states (the 'units') ultimately can look only to themselves to protect against (real or perceived) threats and to ensure their survival. The result, in his view, is a strong tendency for balances of power to form over and over, as states find it necessary to prevent the most powerful state in the system from becoming so powerful as to threaten their respective existences as independent entities. 

Thus two main "expectations" of Waltz's theory are that "balances of power recurrently form, and states tend to emulate the successful policies of others." (p.124)  A problem with the first of these expectations or predictions is that it doesn't seem to match up very well with fairly large swaths of history. Waltz tries, to some extent, to anticipate this objection by stressing the difficulty of testing theories, especially those which yield general rather than specific expectations, and by noting that "[b]ecause only a loosely defined and inconstant condition of balance is predicted [by the theory], it is difficult to say that any given distribution of power falsifies the theory." (p.124) He cautions in the opening chapter that "the rigor and complication of tests must be geared to the precision or to the generality of the expectations inferred from the theory." (p.16) He never says explicitly 'don't subject this theory to overly rigorous tests because its expectations are general not precise,' but he comes very close to saying that.

Another main point readers usually take away from Theory has to do with "the stability of a bipolar world," to quote the title of Waltz's 1964 article on that subject. Partly in the interest of keeping this post to a reasonable length, I won't address that aspect of the book here.   

Note (1): The degree to which the entire 'realist tradition' is 'structural' in its emphases is a debatable question. For one perspective on the issue, see J. Parent & J. Baron, "Elder Abuse: How the Moderns Mistreat Classical Realism" (International Studies Review, June 2011).

Note (2): Waltz's definition of 'structure' is obviously not the only one possible. Contrast, for example, the view that "international structure consists fundamentally in shared knowledge...." (A. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics [STIP], p.31)


Bull and the "element of society"

Unlike Waltz, Bull doesn't have to worry, at least not explicitly, about theory construction and testing because he doesn't see himself as doing science (see the so-called 'second great debate'). So whereas Waltz begins with a chapter about what a theory is, Bull doesn't need one. A separate point is that Bull rejects the idea of "value-free" social inquiry (see AS, p.xv), but he doesn't elaborate much on this, at least not in meta-theoretical terms, in the book.

As is well known, Bull distinguishes between an international system, in which states interact enough that "the behaviour of each [is] a necessary element in the calculations of the other" (p.10), and an international society, in which states, "recognising certain common interests and perhaps some common values,...regard themselves as bound by certain rules in their dealings with one another...." (p.13) As is also well known, he aligns himself with what he labels (aptly or not) "the Grotian tradition," which emphasizes the "element of co-operation and regulated intercourse among states." (p.41) It coexists, in different degrees at different times, with 'Hobbesian' and 'Kantian' elements (respectively, "state of war" and "transnational solidarity and conflict"). (pp.41,51)

The heart of The Anarchical Society is Part 2, where five institutions -- the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and the special role of the great powers -- are assessed in terms of their contributions to 'international order'. This is preceded by a chapter on "Order versus Justice." Quoting a passage from that chapter (p.97) will give a taste of Bull's style and also show how normative considerations are woven into his analysis:

...not only is order in world politics valuable, there is also a sense in which it is prior to other goals, such as that of justice. It is does not follow from this, however, that order is to be preferred to justice in any given case. In fact ideas of both order and justice enter into the value systems, the justificatory or rhetorical stock-in-trade of all actors in world politics. The advocate of revolutionary justice looks forward to a time when a new order will consolidate the gains of the revolution. The proponent of order takes up his position partly because the existing order is, from his point of view, morally satisfactory, or not so unsatisfactory as to warrant its disturbance. The question of order versus justice will always be considered by the parties concerned in relation to the merits of a particular case.

For Waltz, the international system is a case of "order without an orderer and of organizational effects where formal organization is lacking." (TIP, p.89) To elucidate these characteristics Waltz looks to "microeconomic theory" (ibid.), in which actors' normative beliefs or commitments are basically irrelevant. For Bull, by contrast, actors' values influence how they behave, which in turn influences system-level outcomes. 

It's sometimes overlooked that Bull in AS sees international society as only one element of international politics. If you're a grad student writing a comprehensive exam, the statement that the English School "treat[s] the international system as a society governed by shared norms" (to quote Wendt, STIP, p.31) will get you through. However, in a brief section called "The Limitations of International Society" Bull writes that the element of international society "is always in competition with the elements of a state of war and of transnational solidarity or conflict" and thus "it is always erroneous to interpret international events as if international society were the sole or the dominant element." (p.51) The word "always" here seems too strong; why foreclose the possibility that there may be periods in which the element of international society is "dominant"? Whether that is the case today is a question best left for another occasion.

Waltz and his legacy: a few reflections

I feel I should add my two cents to the torrent of IR-blogospheric comment on the late Kenneth Waltz, if only to justify my existence as a blogger. I never met Waltz[*] but like virtually every student of international relations I have read his two key books (not the third one). This post is basically a spur-of-the-moment thing, not the product of sustained thought, and it should be read with that in mind.

Man, the State and War (1959), hereafter MSW, and Theory of International Politics (1979), hereafter TIP, are rather different kinds of books, even if they both endorse a "structural" view of international politics. MSW is an analysis of what Great Thinkers in the (mostly) Western tradition have said about the causes of war. The book famously sorts these writers into three camps: those who locate the causes of war in human nature ("the first image"), in the characteristics of individual states ("the second image"), or in the 'anarchical' (meaning, essentially, no-world-government) structure of the international system ("the third image"). Waltz concludes that the third-image view is the most convincing, famously declaring that (to paraphrase him) wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them.

MSW is a very perceptive book that treats a subject of intrinsic interest, and for that reason it will continue to be read. But apart from the fact that (some) students are still required to read it, I doubt it exercises all that much influence over the field today. Few Ph.D. candidates in political science who "do" International Relations will write a dissertation these days about what this or that Great Thinker has said about the causes of war. Such dissertations are still written but I think they are rare, especially in the United States. Someone who is interested in both political/social theory and international relations is more likely nowadays to do what might be called critical disciplinary history (which is, for example, what Daniel Levine's book Recovering International Relations is, or so I gather from hearing him speak about it on one occasion before it was published). Disciplinary history is, obviously, about the development of the discipline or the field of International Relations; it is rather inward-focused. Waltz's MSW is not disciplinary history in this sense. That is not at all to criticize MSW, merely to note the difference.

The other aspect of MSW perhaps worth mentioning is that the phenomenon with which it was concerned, namely traditional interstate war, is now increasingly rare. When MSW was published in 1959, the Korean War had ended only six years before, World War II only fourteen years before. The Cold War was in full swing and there was no guarantee that it would not become hot. Today, although wars are, unfortunately, still with us, traditional interstate wars have become unusual events (the last really big one was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s), and wars directly between two or more great powers are unheard of. Uncovering the causes of interstate war had an urgency in the 1950s which, at least arguably, it no longer has. The 'hot topic' now is civil war, as will be apparent to anyone who glances through the list of political science dissertations completed in 2012 (in the U.S.) that was recently published in PS. I am not saying MSW is passé or no longer relevant; it will always be 'relevant' because its subject is of intrinsic interest, meaning it has inherent interest regardless of what is going on in the world, just as the study of history has intrinsic interest regardless of what is going on in the world. I'm simply observing that the focus of attention in the field seems to have shifted to other things.

Turning now to Theory of International Politics. The reverberations of TIP are still being felt in the field in a much more direct way than those of MSW. The emphasis in TIP on the "shaping" influence of structure -- meaning, in essence, the distribution of capabilities (power) among states under anarchy -- is still a starting point for many, though by no means all, scholars of international politics. However, TIP has come under several different kinds of criticism since it was published -- in fact, too many to catalog exhaustively here. A sampling: Ruggie charged that Waltz in TIP ignored questions of historical change and transition between different kinds of state system, something the English School had always been more attuned to, while Wendt criticized Waltz for not seeing that 'power' and 'interest' are mostly made up of ideas and that the effects of power accordingly depend on the distribution of ideas in the system. Other writers threw doubt on the notion of 'anarchy' and the states-under-anarchy model. And finally (for the non-exhaustive purposes of this post), many have criticized what is perhaps the central substantive proposition of TIP, namely the argument that balances of power recurrently form and that, in Waltz's words, "if there is any distinctively political theory of international politics, balance-of-power theory is it." The other major aspect of TIP was Waltz's views on what 'theory' is; his epistemological-methodological position continues to be both influential and controversial, but I will pass over it here.

Despite all the criticisms, TIP will remain required reading for students, if only so that they can follow the flood of critiques it unleashed. The  appearance as recently as 2011 of a collection of essays about Waltz's work, Realism and World Politics (ed. Ken Booth), suggests that Waltz's writings will continue to generate interest and discussion for quite some time to come and will continue to be seen as canonical works in the field.

(Note: Post edited slightly after initial posting.)

Added later: Waltz's 1988 APSA presidential address, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities," as published in the Sept. 1990 issue of APSR, is available here (pdf).
----
*I did hear him speak on one occasion but that doesn't amount to 'meeting'. 

A new version of structural realism

In their recent article "The Struggle for Autonomy: A Realist Structural Theory of International Relations," International Studies Review v.14, Dec. 2012, pp.499-521 [gated; abstract here], Richard Harknett and Hasan Yalcin propose "a new variant" of structural realism (p.499). 

Harknett and Yalcin (H&Y) replace the struggle for power (or the struggle for power and peace, as Morgenthau's famous subtitle has it) with a 'struggle for autonomy'. Rather than assuming that states always want power or security, H&Y say that the only motive that can be derived from structure -- i.e. from 'anarchy' (lack of a central authority) and the distribution of capabilities -- is a desire "to possess the capacity to act in a sustained manner that preserves and enhances [units'] capacity to act into the future -- they merely want to remain autonomous" (p.506; italics omitted). However, if units (states or non-state actors) don't survive they can't remain autonomous, a point to which I'll return.

Before getting into the weeds, I'll try to give a brief overview of H&Y's approach. Some of their points, when put simply, seem cogent clear enough, if debatable. A problem with the article, though, is that the points are usually not put simply but wrapped up in verbiage and often inelegant sentences. (In some -- not all -- scholarly IR journals, there seems to be no copy-editing to speak of, which means that stylistically everything is left to the authors.)

H&Y argue that states respond to shifts in the distribution of power by adjusting their behavior, based on a calculation of what they want and what they think it's possible to get. When one state has a much larger share of power than all the rest, the other states will not embark on a likely fruitless revisionist quest to change the system. Rather, they will maneuver within it, seeking to enhance their freedom of action without directly challenging the leading state. (This, incidentally, is close to the situation Stephen Walt describes in Taming American Power, a book H&Y don't cite.) Conversely, when the distribution of capabilities is more even, states, H&Y say, will seek to advance their positions more directly and less subtly, leading to the likelihood of intensified security dilemmas and increasing the chances of major war. Put in this way, the argument is plausible enough to be tested, at least in a loose sense, through historical inquiry. The authors don't undertake such a test, though they do have a brief section at the end applying their theory to the Cold War, which they split into three periods characterized, they say, by different distributions of power between the U.S. and USSR.  

The authors distinguish their approach from the extant varieties of structural realism, i.e. defensive and offensive realism, on the grounds that those approaches supposedly assume invariant state motivations (i.e., states always seek to maximize either security or power). According to H&Y, both defensive and offensive realism have erred by taking motives as given, rather than seeing motives as shaped by structure. They write:

[S]tructure shapes not only behaviors but also identities and orientations of agents. In offensive and defensive realist theories, state identities and motivations are defined and assumed independently from the shaping power of structural factors. States are taken to have a specific motivation whatever the constraints and opportunities of structural conditions. Structure does not affect the survival motivation in neorealist theories of IR, which assume that even if there is no direct threat to state survival, it is a survival instinct that is driving action. In contrast, in the structural autonomy theory developed here, units rearrange not only their behaviors, but also their identities and motivations in response to the distribution of power (p.502; italics in original).

The description of structural realist theories in this passage is not, I think, entirely accurate. There is more going on in offensive realism than "a survival instinct." True, Mearsheimer does write that "the only assumption dealing with a specific motive that is common to all states says that their principal objective is to survive" (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.32), but in an endnote (p.414, n.8) he writes: "Security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively. The possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations is a necessary condition for offensive realism, as well as for any other structural theory of international politics that predicts security competition."

H&Y insist that "one could assume a survival motivation" only in "an environment with no opportunity but full of threats" (p.509). The problem here, however, is that the word "motivation" has more than one meaning. "Motive," according to the dictionary I have at hand, can mean "some inner drive, impulse, intention, etc. that causes a person to do something or act in a certain way," but "motive" can also mean simply a "goal." And units can have a goal of surviving regardless of whether the environment is threatening or non-threatening. Indeed, as I mentioned before, a unit that doesn't survive obviously can't remain autonomous. In this sense autonomy presupposes survival. Now it is true that the rate of state death in the present international system is very low and thus survival is not often a motive in the causative meaning of "motive"; but survival can remain a goal even when the desire to survive is not an immediate driver of behavior. H&Y seem wrong to assert that the "traditional realist-ascribed motive of survival implies a logic in which helpless states would eventually require the delegation of state autonomy to a higher authority in a fearful environment populated by units wishing for survival" (p.509). Where do they get the notion that states in a "self-help" system are or may become "helpless"? It doesn't follow.

H&Y proceed to distinguish between "diffuse" and "concentrated" power structures. In diffuse power structures, a category that includes both bipolarity and multipolarity, gaps in power between units are relatively small; in concentrated power structures, as one might guess, power gaps are large and one unit is clearly more powerful than the rest. Diffuse structures are more war-prone, they argue, and against Waltz they maintain that bipolar systems (and balanced multipolar systems) are not more stable than the alternatives. They write:

In what in Waltzian terms would be considered a balanced system, states will feel less threatened (or more secure), but this does not translate into behavior promoting stability. Since the primary motivation is not security (or survival) but autonomy, "balanced" systems will not necessarily be stable, but rather have strong structurally induced incentives to change the power structure (and the relative distributions within it) to gain autonomy. The Cold War behavior of the two superpowers became more change-oriented during periods in which their power was more "balanced" with each seeking a breakout capacity via military technology, additional allies, exploitation of minor states (the competition over the Third World), or expanded realms of competition (the Space Race). The structure, itself, induced intense change-oriented policy, not stability-seeking on the part of the superpowers. (p.514)

This is interesting, but there is at least one problem with the argument in this section: H&Y maintain that a diffuse power structure decreases autonomy ("the very existence of other actors with equal capabilities decreases the level of autonomy for all" -- p.514), but it's not clear why this should be the case given their definition of autonomy, quoted above, as "the capacity to act in a sustained manner that preserves and enhances...capacity to act into the future" (p.506). What seems to happen in this part of the argument is that H&Y take autonomy to mean the degree of a unit's freedom of action, but that's not how they define autonomy at the beginning of the piece.   

***

Reading "The Struggle for Autonomy" raises, among other questions, the issue of what is the most promising direction for realist (or realist-inflected) theorizing about international politics. In their first footnote the authors say that "neo-classical realists with their multi-causal and multi-level frameworks are increasing the number of factors across the realist paradigm. This is a degenerative process from a structuralist perspective."  Yet neoclassical realism emerged precisely because structural realism is limited both in what it can explain and how well it can explain it. Waltz's main substantive generalization -- that given states-under-anarchy there is a strong tendency toward balancing -- has received sustained and quite persuasive criticism, and Mearsheimer's view that supposed uncertainty about intentions pushes great powers to act aggressively (albeit calculatedly) to each other is, if anything, even more questionable. Harknett and Yalcin think the problem, in effect, is that Waltz and Mearsheimer are not structural enough. But is this indeed the problem, or does it rather lie in structural realism's inability to take into account factors that matter -- domestic politics, regime type, ideology, bargaining, to name several? Parsimony is not desirable if parsimonious theories can't explain important outcomes.

Neoclassical realists bring in perceptions and domestic politics not because they want a "hybrid" theory for its own sake but in order to explain outcomes more satisfactorily. Even sticking with H&Y's example of the Cold War, as Lobell et al. observe (see the introduction to this edited volume) the system's structure by itself can't explain why the U.S. after 1945 opted for containment rather than "competitive cooperation" with the USSR. (In the interest of keeping this post shorter than a mini-treatise, I will not go into H&Y's discussion of the Cold War in detail. Suffice to say it is open to criticism.)

In short, it's far from clear, at least to me, that a "refinement of structural realism" (H&Y, p.499) in an even more structural direction is the way to go. To be more direct, I think it's not.  Those interested in these matters can of course read the article and reach their own conclusions.

Added later: There is another issue (well, lots of them but one I should have mentioned): The decreased likelihood of major war in the present period may have very much less to do with structural factors (i.e. with the "concentrated" power structure) and much more to do with  long-term trends and factors that are not structural. Since I've discussed this fairly extensively elsewhere on the blog (see the "decline of war" label under topics), I won't harp on it further here.

Added still later: For Waltz on the survival motive, see Theory of International Politics, pp.91-2.