Anarchy and power politics
Classical realists such as Thomas Hobbes, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans Morgenthau attributed egoism and power politics primarily to human nature, whereas structural realists or neorealists emphasize anarchy. The difference stems in part from different interpretations of anarchy's causal powers. Kenneth Waltz's work is important for both. In Man, the State, and War, he defines anarchy as a condition of possibility for or "permissive" cause of war, arguing that "wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them."14 It is the human nature or domestic politics of predator states, however, that provide the initial impetus or "efficient" cause of conflict which forces other states to respond in kind.15
5 Waltz is not entirely consistent about this, since he slips without justification from the permissive causal claim that in anarchy war is always possible to the active causal claim that "war may at any moment occur."'16 But despite Waltz's concluding call for third-image theory, the efficient causes that initialize anarchic systems are from the first and second images. This is reversed in Waltz's Theory of International Politics, in which first- and second-image theories are spurned as "reductionist," and the logic of anarchy seems by itself to constitute self-help and power politics as necessary features of world politics.17 This is unfortunate, since whatever one may think of first- and second-image theories, they have the virtue of implying that practices determine the character of anarchy. In the permissive view, only if human or domestic factors cause A to attack B will B have to defend itself. Anarchies may contain dynamics that lead to competitive power politics, but they also may not, and we can argue about when particular structures of identity and interest will emerge.
In neorealism, however, the role of practice in shaping the character of anarchy
is substantially reduced, and so there is less about which to argue: self-help and
competitive power politics are simply given exogenously by the structure of the
state system.
I will not here contest the neorealist description of the contemporary state
system as a competitive, self-help world;18 I will only dispute its explanation. I
develop my argument in three stages. First, I disentangle the concepts of
self-help and anarchy by showing that self-interested conceptions of security
are not a constitutive property of anarchy. Second, I show how self-help and
competitive power politics may be produced causally by processes of interac-
tion between states in which anarchy plays only a permissive role. In both of
these stages of my argument, I self-consciously bracket the first- and second-
image determinants of state identity, not because they are unimportant (they
are indeed important), but because like Waltz's objective, mine is to clarify the
"logic" of anarchy. Third, I reintroduce first- and second-image determinants
to assess their effects on identity-formation in different kinds of anarchies.
Anarchy, self-help, and intersubjective knowledge.
Waltz defines political structure on three dimensions: ordering principles (in
this case, anarchy), principles of differentiation (which here drop out), and the
distribution of capabilities.19 By itself, this definition predicts little about state
behavior. It does not predict whether two states will be friends or foes, will
recognize each other's sovereignty, will have dynastic ties, will be revisionist or
status quo powers, and so on. These factors, which are fundamentally
intersubjective, affect states' security interests and thus the character of their
interaction under anarchy. In an important revision of Waltz's theory, Stephen
Walt implies as much when he argues that the "balance of threats," rather than
the balance of power, determines state action, threats being socially con-
structed.20 Put more generally, without assumptions about the structure of
identities and interests in the system, Waltz's definition of structure cannot
predict the content or dynamics of anarchy. Self-help is one such intersubjec-
tive structure and, as such, does the decisive explanatory work in the theory.
The question is whether self-help is a logical or contingent feature of anarchy.
In this section, I develop the concept of a "structure of identity and interest"
and show that no particular one follows logically from anarchy.
A fundamental principle of constructivist social theory is that people act toward objects,
including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them.21 States act differently toward enemies than they do toward friends because enemies are threatening and friends are not. Anarchy and the distribution of power are insufficient to tell us which is which. U.S. military power has a different significance for Canada than for Cuba, despite their similar "structural" positions, just as British missiles have a different significance for the United States than do Soviet missiles.
The distribution of power may always affect states' calculations, but how it does so depends on the intersubjective understandings and expectations, on the "distribution of knowledge," that constitute their conceptions of self and other.22 If society "forgets" what a university is, the powers and practices of professor and student cease to exist;
if the United States and Soviet Union decide that they are no longer enemies, "the cold war is over." It is collective meanings that constitute the structures which organize our actions.
