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Structural Analogies in International Relations

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Great Powers and International Hierarchy

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Abstract

One of the most enduring characterizations of international relations is that international relations are structured by anarchy and domestic politics by hierarchy. I demonstrate that this distinction is attributable to an analogy between the international system and the “state of nature” described by Thomas Hobbes. I then provide a second potential analogy for international relations, rooted in kinship structures that were prevalent in pre-modern political organization. The chapter closes by problematizing the assumption of “like units” in international relations. In this section, I explore the ways in which states at the head of international hierarchies are different from those within them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Relations (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 81, 111–114.

  2. 2.

    Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (SUNY Press, 1998), p. 41.

  3. 3.

    Waltz, Theory of International Relations, p. 94.

  4. 4.

    John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 6.

  5. 5.

    G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001).

  6. 6.

    Waltz, Theory of International Relations, p. 133.

  7. 7.

    David A. Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 48.

  8. 8.

    Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 33.

  9. 9.

    James Raymond Vreeland, The IMF and Economic Development (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 11.

  10. 10.

    Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, p. 22.

  11. 11.

    Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order, vol. 32 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 68.

  12. 12.

    John M. Owen IV, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–2010: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–2010 (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 1, 10.

  13. 13.

    Seva Gunitsky, “From Shocks to Waves: Hegemonic Transitions and Democratization in the Twentieth Century.” International Organization 68.3 (2014), pp. 188, 561–597.

  14. 14.

    Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars, p. 21.

  15. 15.

    Randall W. Stone, Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 13.

  16. 16.

    Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 [1977]), p. 198, emphasis mine.

  17. 17.

    Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (Macmillan, 1940), p. 2.

  18. 18.

    William T.R. Fox, “Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience.” World Politics 2.1 (1949), pp. 67–79, p. 67.

  19. 19.

    Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, “Empires at War, 1911–1923.” In: ed. by Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela. Oxford University Press, 2015, chapter 1, pp. 3, 109–129.

  20. 20.

    Quoted in Edward Paice, World War I: The African Front (Pegasus Books, 2008), p. 4.

  21. 21.

    Robert S. Thompson, Empires on the Pacific: World War II and the Struggle for the Mastery of Asia (Basic Books, 2002).

  22. 22.

    Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Penguin, 2008).

  23. 23.

    Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 407.

  24. 24.

    I return to this point in much greater detail in the next section.

  25. 25.

    John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma.” World Politics 2.2 (1950), pp. 157–180, p. 157.

  26. 26.

    Waltz, Theory of International Relations, pp. 103–104.

  27. 27.

    Michael C. Williams, “Hobbes and International Relations: A Reconsideration.” International Organization 50.2 (1996), pp. 213–236, p. 213.

  28. 28.

    Michael Joseph Smith, “Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger” (1986), p. 13.

  29. 29.

    David Singh Grewal, “The Domestic Analogy Revisited: Hobbes on International Order.” Yale Law Journal 125 (2016), pp. 618–785, p. 625.

  30. 30.

    Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” p. 157.

  31. 31.

    Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, p. 47.

  32. 32.

    Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 33.

  33. 33.

    Waltz, Theory of International Relations, p. 102, emphasis mine.

  34. 34.

    Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 4.

  35. 35.

    R. Harrison Wagner, War and the State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 30.

  36. 36.

    See Wagner, War and the State, pp. 76–85.

  37. 37.

    Theodore Marburg and Alpheus H. Snow, “The League to Enforce Peace.” The Advocate of Peace (1984–1920) 78.7 (1916), pp. 131, 200–207.

  38. 38.

    George W. Egerton, “Collective Security as Political Myth: Liberal Internationalism and the League of Nations in Politics and History.” The International History Review 5.4 (Nov. 1983), pp. 496–524, p. 503.

  39. 39.

    Grewal, “The Domestic Analogy Revisited: Hobbes on International Order,” pp. 626–627.

  40. 40.

    Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, ed. by Kenneth W. Thompson, 3rd ed. Knopf, 1965, pp. 501–502.

  41. 41.

    Henry Cabot Lodge, War Addresses, 1915–1917. Houghton Mifflin, 1917, pp. 36, 41, emphasis mine.

  42. 42.

    Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 210.

  43. 43.

    Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton University Press, 2010), chapter 5.

  44. 44.

    Guenther Roth, Max Weber, and Claus Wittich, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [volumes I and II] (University of California Press, 1978), p. 1007.

  45. 45.

    Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (Macmillan, 1984), p. 127.

  46. 46.

    Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, vol. 940 (Oxford Clarendon, 1940), p. 137.

  47. 47.

    Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Macmillan, 2011), chapter 16.

  48. 48.

    Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manyon 2 (1961), pp. 432–437.

  49. 49.

    Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, p. 231.

  50. 50.

    Liping Wang and Julia Adams, “Interlocking Patrimonialisms and State Formation in Qing China and Early Modern Europe.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 636.1 (2011), pp. 164–181.

  51. 51.

    Judy Bieber, Power, Patronage, and Political Violence: State Building on a Brazilian Frontier, 1822–1889. University of Nebraska Press, 1999, p. 78.

  52. 52.

    Bieber, Power, Patronage, and Political Violence: State Building on a Brazilian Frontier, 1822–1889, p. 153.

  53. 53.

    Charles Lindholm, “Kinship Structure and Political Authority: The Middle East and Central Asia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28.2 (1986), pp. 334–355, p. 351.

  54. 54.

    Bob Rijkers, Caroline Freund, and Antonio Nucifora, “All in the Family: State Capture in Tunisia.” Journal of Development Economics 124 (2017), pp. 41–59. ISSN: 0304-3878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.08.002. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387816300608.

  55. 55.

    Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations, p. 51.

  56. 56.

    See Wagner, War and the State, p. 79.

  57. 57.

    Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, p. 191.

  58. 58.

    Indeed, segmentary aggregation suggests that in the absence of a global threat, a global-level political aggregation is unlikely to emerge.

  59. 59.

    Barbara F. Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.” International Organization 51.3 (1997), pp. 335–364.

  60. 60.

    Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  61. 61.

    Brantly Womack, Asymmetry and International Relationships (Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 5.

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    Daniel McCormack

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McCormack, D. (2019). Structural Analogies in International Relations. In: Great Powers and International Hierarchy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93976-6_2

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