107 L ECT UR E 18
THE STRUCTURES OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES The preceding lectures, although they include some original formulations of well-known material, have been, by design, relatively uncontroversial presentations of standard subjects. This final lecture is largely original – some might say idiosyncratic. Building on several arguments from above, it advances a new framework for structural analysis. Even by the standards of this course, what follows is pretty abstract and theoretical. In fact, to be entirely honest, it really is for advanced students. Nonetheless, if you have gotten this far, I encourage you to at least give it a look. In synthesizing a wide range of material, it provides something of a review of the course – although undertaken with much broader and rather different theoretical objectives.
1. RETHINKING THE ELEMENTS OF STRUCTURE Mainstream IR still operates within Waltz’s tripartite conception of structure: ordering principle, functional differentiation, and distribution of capabilities. In the lectures above I have (explicitly or implicitly) advanced the following critiques of this conception. •
The “ordering principles” of anarchy and hierarchy are not a dichotomy, do not exhaust the range of ordering principles, and should not even be understood as ordering principles, in the ordinary sense of that term.
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Anarchy has no determinate effects. And it is a profound analytical blunder to try to conceptualize the structure of international relations within the confines of anarchy and polarity alone.
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There is functional differentiation in international relations. Institutions, norms, and identities create differentiated actors occupying particular positions with specific roles.
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Institutions and ideas are part of the structure of international societies – because they, no less than force, systematically shape and shove international actors. The same analytical criteria that make the distribution of capabilities structural also make institutions and ideas structural. It is logically inconsistent and substantively selfdefeating to restrict structure to material capabilities.
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Dominant unit type(s) is also structural.