Scientific Realism and International Relations

Scientific Realism and International Relations

Also by Jonathan Joseph and Colin Wight REALISM, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE (with Kathryn Dean and John Michael Roberts) Also by Jonathan Joseph MARXISM AND SOCIAL THEORY

Scientific Realism and International Relations Edited by

Jonathan Joseph Reader in Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, UK

and

Colin Wight Professor of International Relations, University of Exeter, UK

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jonathan Joseph and Colin Wight 2010 Individual chapters © contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24006–3

hardback

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Contents List of Figures

vii

Notes on the Contributors

viii

1 Scientific Realism and International Relations Colin Wight and Jonathan Joseph

1

2 Reductionism, Emergence and Explanation in International Relations Theory David Leon

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3 The International as Emergent: Challenging Old and New Orthodoxies in International Relations Theory Jonathan Joseph

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4 State Theory in International Relations: Why Realism Matters Marjo Koivisto

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5 Inside the American State: Reconciling Structural and Interpretive Analyses within a Critical Realist Perspective Douglas Porpora

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6 What is Realism in International Law and Human Rights? Bill Bowring

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7 Is It Real? The Question of Juridical, Actual and Causal Responsibility in Sovereign Debt Settlements Tomohisa Hattori

115

8 Critical Realism and the Analysis of Democratisation: Does Philosophy of Science Matter? Milja Kurki

129

9 Exploring Possible, Likely and Desirable Global Futures: Beyond the Closed vs Open Systems Dichotomy Heikki Patomäki

147

10 Critical Realism, International Relations Theory and Marxism Faruk Yalvaç

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11 World Market, World State, World Society: Marxian Insights and Scientific Realist Interrogations Bob Jessop

186

v

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Contents

12 Realism. For Real this Time: Scientific Realism is not a Compromise between Positivism and Interpretivism Jorge Rivas

203

Bibliography

228

Index

251

List of Figures 2.1

Philosophical positions on emergence in IR theory

9.1

A system and its environment

41 151

12.1 Wendt’s Via Media vs scientific realism

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12.2 Mapping the ontological and epistemological positions of positivism, interpretivism, Wendt’s Via Media and SR

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Notes on the Contributors Bill Bowring is Professor of Law at Birkbeck College and is a practising barrister. He previously taught at the University of East London, Essex University and London Metropolitan University. He is International Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and President of the European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (in eight European countries). He serves as an Executive Committee Member of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales, a Member of the Council of Liberty, and a Trustee of the Redress Trust, working for torture survivors. Professor Bowring founded the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC) in 2001, and is Chair of its International Steering Committee. EHRAC, in partnership with the Russian NGO Memorial and the Bar Human Rights Committee, is assisting with over 200 cases against Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia and Russia to the European Court of Human Rights. He has published over 60 books, articles and chapters on topics of international law, human rights, minority rights and Russian law. Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. He is best known for his contributions to state theory, critical political economy (including the regulation approach), welfare state restructuring, and his critical realist – or scientific realist – account of structure and agency (the strategic-relational approach). Recent publications include The Future of the Capitalist State (2002), Beyond the Regulation Approach (2006, co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum), State Power: a Strategic-Relational Approach (2007), and Education and the Knowledge-Based Economy in Europe (2008, co-edited with Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak). He is currently working on the cultural political economy of crisis management. Jonathan Joseph is Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has previously taught at Aberystwyth University and Goldsmiths College. His books include Hegemony: a Realist Analysis (2002), Social Theory: Conflict Cohesion and Consent (2003), Marxism and Social Theory (2006) and Realism, Philosophy and Social Science, co-authored with Kathryn Dean, John Roberts and Colin Wight (2006). He is currently working on a book on governmentality, social theory and international relations. Milja Kurki is a Lecturer in International Relations Theory at Aberystwyth University and currently the principal investigator of a European Research Council funded project ‘Political Economies of Democratisation’. She is the author of Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis viii

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(2008) and co-editor (with Tim Dunne and Steve Smith) of International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (2007). David Leon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, where he has taught courses on world politics. His research interests include international relations theory, international institutions and the philosophy of social science. Heikki Patomäki is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Innovation Professor of Human Security – Globalization and Global Institutions at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He is also the Vice Director of the Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research, funded by the Academy of Finland. Patomäki’s recent books include Democratising Globalisation: the Leverage of the Tobin Tax (2001), After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (2002), A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions (with T. Teivainen, 2004), Globalizing Finance and the New Global Economy (co-edited with P. James, 2007) and The Political Economy of Global Security. War, Future Crises and Changes in Global Governance (2008). Patomäki is writing a new book tentatively entitled Global Futures. On the Temporality of the Human Condition, while also working on neo-liberalism and economic crisis, theories of political economy, cosmological sources of cosmopolitanism, new forms of global political agency and other issues. Douglas Porpora is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He has written widely on social theory. His books include How Holocausts Happen: United States in Central America (1990) and Landscapes of the Soul: the Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (2001). He is interested in how the American public sphere deliberates over such macro-moral matters as war and torture and is currently writing a book on how America debated the 2002 attack on Iraq. Colin Wight is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter. He has previously taught at Aberystwyth University and Sheffield University. His latest books are Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (2006), and Realism, Philosophy and Social Science, co-authored with Kathryn Dean, John Roberts and Jonathan Joseph (2006). He has published in International Studies Quarterly, Political Studies, Millennium and the European Journal of International Relations. He is also currently the Editor in Chief of the European Journal of International Relations. Faruk Yalvaç is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences of Ankara University. He holds an

x Notes on the Contributors

MSc and a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The title of his unpublished thesis is ‘Sociology of International Relations: System, Structure and Class’ (1981). His main academic interests are international relations theory, critical realism, historical sociology and political theory. He has published two books on the international relations theory of Rousseau and Hegel and numerous articles on different aspects of international relations theory in Turkish.

1 Scientific Realism and International Relations Colin Wight and Jonathan Joseph

In the mid-1980s international relations (IR) moved into what is known as its post-positivist phase. Underpinning many of the major theoretical debates that have occurred since then has been a concern to reconsider the manner in which research into international phenomena can best be conducted. At the heart of many of these debates was, and still is, a deep dissatisfaction with the positivist model of IR. Problems with the positivist model of social scientific research had been identified for some time in cognate disciplines long before they came to the attention of the IR community of scholars. Indeed, in the philosophy of science, positivism had been rejected as an adequate model of science in the 1950s (Kolakowski, 1969). When the rejection of positivism and the search for alternative models of social inquiry finally produced a range of alternative positions in the discipline of IR, they were united in their rejection of the positivist model there but had little else in common. Steve Smith identifies five distinct ‘post-positivist’ approaches in IR: constructivism, postmodernism, feminism, critical theory, historical sociology (Smith, 1995). Smith also identifies scientific realism (SR), which underpins Alex Wendt’s version of constructivism, as a potentially fruitful epistemological position to adopt in opposition to positivism. Notwithstanding Smith’s problematic understanding of SR as an epistemology, there is no doubt that it, and associated positions, such as critical realism (CR), have begun to make inroads into the way IR scholars conduct research. Often, however, the influence of SR remains hidden due to the manner in which it plays an ‘underlabouring’ role for research, rather than providing new and innovative theories of IR. As such, SR/CR works at the level of philosophical critique, challenging the philosophical assumptions of much contemporary IR theory and in so doing it also introduces important epistemological and ontological insights in its own right. In this respect, SR is less visible than many of the other post-positivist positions that have gained prominence. Arguably, however, out of all of the post-positivist approaches SR has had the greatest, albeit unacknowledged, influence on the discipline, due to its role in Wendt’s version of constructivism, which has itself become 1

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a major new approach within IR, and the manner in which SR has begun to reshape understandings of science within the discipline. However, it is wrong to think that SR can provide an alternative to mainstream approaches to IR such as neo-realism and neo-liberalism. SR simply does not engage at that level. As an underpinning philosophy, there is no reason why SR cannot be used to support a range of substantive theories of IR. But it cannot support them all and some theories of IR are not compatible with SR/CR (see for example the later discussions of Waltz). The aim of this book is to bring together scholars with a broad interest in using SR in order to try and draw out exactly how SR and CR can be used within the field of IR, to see how philosophical enquiry raises questions over our understanding of key theoretical issues, and to look at how scholars in IR use SR and CR in different ways to help guide and shape their research practices. SR is a philosophy of and for science. It provides one way of thinking about the practice of science that runs counter to broadly conceived positivist approaches. CR is a specific development of SR that attempts to show how these issues might impact on social scientific practice. Neither SR nor CR provides a substantive theory of either society or IR. As such, their impact on the discipline will be fed through issues surrounding the philosophy of social science. No discussion of the philosophy of science in IR could avoid situating itself in relation to positivism. Positivism constitutes not only the standard around which the mainstream is said to converge, and the focal point around which non-mainstream approaches situate their criticisms, but also, perhaps, the very definition of science itself. This is a serious error, and throughout this book all the authors will attempt to demonstrate how the positivist vision of science is flawed and how SR/CR might help correct some of the persistent misunderstandings concerning science and show how a non-positivist account of IR can accommodate many of the so-called ‘post-positivist’ criticisms of positivism without regressing into a debilitating, and potentially relativistic, anti-science stance. CR is a very specific development of SR within the human sciences. It is normally associated with the work of Roy Bhaskar and a group of social researchers that have taken his ideas and developed them in a range of social sciences. It is possible, however, to be a scientific realist about the social sciences, but not a critical realist. Equally, one could extend the notion of CR beyond the narrow confines of Bhaskar’s particular framework. Indeed, there has been something of a ‘realist turn’ in the philosophy of social science that in some ways mirrors the turn to realism within the philosophy of science. We would not go as far as to claim that realism is now the dominant approach taken to the philosophy of social science, but it does represent an important and identifiable strand (Mantzavinos, 2009; Manicas, 2007). Most realist philosophies of social science accept the following basic principle concerning social science. They maintain (or at least do not deny) the view that there is a social reality which consists of multiple

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forces that condition individuals’ lives; that some of these forces may well be unobservable, but nonetheless real; that these forces are structured by forms of internal and external relations, power structures and social roles; that the social sciences cannot capture the nature of causal forces in the social sciences merely through empirical investigation; that social and political sciences are fundamentally social and political in nature and reflect, in part, the inquirer’s position in social reality; and that the interaction of agents and structures and material and ideational forces is an important question to be settled empirically and not by theoretical fiat. Before proceeding to outline some of the basic principles of SR/CR, however, we need to address some of the persistent misunderstandings that surround its place and application in the discipline. First, as already indicated, SR/CR is not a theory of IR per se, or even a theory of the social. Certainly some authors working within an SR/CR perspective have developed particular insights concerning IR or other aspects of the social, but these do not amount to anything approaching a critical realist theory of IR. This is important in terms of Chris Brown’s claim that CR is basically reducible to a form of Marxism (Brown, 2008; cf. Yalvaç in this volume). Brown argues that SR and CR are best understood and most fruitfully employed when associated with Marxist or historically materialist concerns. He prefaces his argument by tracing the historical and sociological conditions of the rise of critical realist thought, notably the motivations behind Roy Bhaskar’s thought (pp. 410–12). Despite the overall veracity of Brown’s description of the emergence of CR, his attempt to describe SR/CR as reducible to a form of Marxism is problematic. First, Bhaskar’s account of SR/CR is not the only one and it is possible to develop an account of SR that draws on a wide, and differing, range of intellectual resources that go well beyond Bhaskar, but which are all generally compatible with a realist view of social science. To reduce SR/CR to simply Bhaskar’s work is an error. Of course, one might legitimately argue that Bhaskar’s work has varying affinities to Marxism (his earlier work much more so than his contemporary position), but it does not follow that CR, as a body of thought, must be Marxist. It is certainly correct that many critical realists are indeed Marxists and historical materialists, but it is equally true that many Marxists are deeply critical of CR. Those Marxists who do find CR attractive are drawn to its emphasis on the non-positivist study of the social world that emphasises unobservable and materially embedded social structures and processes as opposed to the lawlike empirical regularities foregrounded under a positivist account. Critical realism also advocates the use of explanatory critique by linking certain theories to the reproduction of social reality, a view consistent with Marxism, feminism and critical theoretical strands of IR. But unlike some constructivist and post-structuralist approaches, CR avoids the conflation of theory with the world itself, or of embracing a relativistic account of the relationship between power and knowledge. This all helps in providing philosophical

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support to a Marxist position that grounds itself in the study of exploitative social relations, but to assume ‘critical realism equals Marxism’ is erroneous and unhelpful (even to Marxism).1 Firstly, SR emerged as an account of science that can be applied to biology or geography, just as much as to politics or IR. Indeed, many scientific realists have not tried to develop the implications of this account of science in terms of social science, and many of those that have, have concluded that SR cannot be easily incorporated into the social sciences. Nonetheless, there are many who believe that SR can provide an adequate account of social scientific practice. However, not all of those who take this position agree with either CR or Marxism. Mario Bunge, for example, is a scientific realist and also committed to the role SR can play in the social sciences, yet he never cites Bhaskar, or even acknowledges CR, and moreover he is a deep critic of Marxism. Equally, others, such as Roberto Unger, Manuel DeLanda and Pierre Bourdieu, have explicitly advocated a realist approach to social science, and none, we think, can be described as Marxist in the traditional sense of the term. Hence while SR/CR may delimit what kind of social theory can be advanced, it does not determine substantive theoretical choices in the way Brown suggests. Indeed, as Brown recognises, CR does not aspire to be a theory of social reality and it steps aside to allow social theorists to get on with their business. There is no reason to suppose that CR would a priori rule out non-Marxist approaches to IR, and it is more than possible to contend that certain arguments – be they feminist, English School, realist or even post-structuralist – might be consistent with critical realist meta-theoretical premises. Indeed the most influential use of SR in IR is that of Wendt and his position can hardly be described as Marxist. A second important issue to note is that it is vital to differentiate SR from CR. SR is a philosophy of science that arguably is the dominant approach now taken within the philosophy of science. In fact, the only serious contender to SR is Bass Van Fraassen’s ‘constructive empiricism’, but this approach is fighting a rearguard defence of an empiricist account of science; something that seems to most to be a lost cause. However, while the fact that SR is currently dominant in the philosophy of science does not make it correct, it is surely worthy of consideration for any discipline that aspires to the label ‘science’. Fred Chernoff’s critique of SR is to a large extent commensurate with Van Fraassen’s ‘constructive empiricism’ and in effect differs little from the position staked out by Kenneth Waltz in Theory of International Politics (Chernoff, 2005, 2007b). There is, however, a fundamental difference in the relationship between the philosophy of science and the practice of science that stands at the heart of our position when compared to that of Chernoff. Chernoff considers the aim of the philosophy of science to be concerned with the provision of a logical account of what science is, that is prior to and privileged in relation to the practice of science. Thus for Chernoff, the philosophy of science takes precedence over the practice of science. Accordingly, Chernoff seems to suggest that if the practice of science is not

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consistent with the philosophy of science then it is the practice of science that needs to alter to bring it into line with the philosophy. We think this would be disastrous. The aim of the philosophy of science according to SR is to reflect on the practice of science, and in so far as possible, provide an account of what that practice is. If the practice of science conflicts with the philosophy, then it is the philosophy that will need to be amended. After all, this is a philosophy ‘of’ science, not a science ‘of’ philosophy. In the social sciences, however, the situation is different. The natural sciences are often said to have only fully matured when they left philosophy behind and established themselves as autonomous modes of knowledge generation. The social sciences, on the other hand, have always turned to philosophy for guidance and have constantly attempted to assert their scientific status through appeals to the philosophy of science. Moreover, the social sciences have not yet managed to replicate the practical success enjoyed by the natural sciences. Equally, there are good reasons (discussed below) as to why the social sciences must engage in philosophical reflection. In our view philosophical inquiry in IR, while clearly not the primary aim of IR scholarship, has an important role within it. This is because any discussion over the meaning of science, the nature of social ontology, the balance of agency and structure, or the study of causality is fundamental to all IR accounts: there is simply no avoiding these meta-theoretically loaded areas, nor engaging in (explicit or implicit) philosophy of social science argumentation to justify one’s particular approach to such matters (see e.g. Kurki, 2007; Wight, 2007: 13–33). Whether one argues that IR is characterised by laws, such as democratic peace, or structural conditions of anarchy, or socially constructed norms and rules, or ethical and normative decisions, one is assuming something about the nature of the social sciences as a discipline, its ontological objects of study and the nature of the epistemological claims made about it. However, contrary to Nuno Monteiro and Keven Ruby (2009), we do not see SR/CR as attempting to construct robust foundations for social scientific practice. We do not believe such foundations are possible. What SR/CR does hope to achieve, however, is the much less ambitious aim of ensuring that reflection on the philosophical claims of alternative approaches is grounded in appropriate reflection on the prevailing wisdom in the philosophy of science. The aim is not to provide foundations as such, but merely to use CR to reflect on the deep ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions that are integral to all research even if these assumptions remain largely hidden. In fact, given the SR/CR focus on ontology then the idea of foundations is a non-starter, since differing ontological domains may well necessitate differing approaches to the problem at hand. Of course, there are many in the social sciences that find philosophical debate concerning the nature of social science to be an irritating distraction and argue that we would be better advised in simply engaging in the practice of ‘doing’ social

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science, rather than introspectively discussing ‘how to do’ it (Wallace, 1996; Gunnell, 1998). One can undoubtedly sympathise with such views. After all, one major aim of political science is to understand, and perhaps explain, those sets of practices we call politics. Surely we can just get on with the task of producing substantive theories of our chosen realm of study in the manner of the natural sciences and leave philosophy to the philosophers. Attractive as this might seem, however, there are historical, ontological and ethico-political reasons why this is simply not possible, at least for the social sciences. Historically we cannot simply leave philosophy behind because the discipline already has certain philosophical narratives about what constitutes good science which inform its methods, theories and discourses. To leave philosophy behind at this stage of disciplinary history would be to leave in place a certain form of political analysis that is already deeply embedded within particular philosophical assumptions that may be problematic. Moreover, the philosophies of science that dominate in the discipline can only be tackled at the appropriate level, and that is at the level of philosophy. Like it or not, even if the idea of a political science without philosophy was attractive, it could only be achieved through more not less philosophy; at least temporarily. But perhaps this concern with philosophical groundings is just what social scientists do anyway, and any critique of this practice could only emerge from an alternative philosophical position that seemingly holds the truth of what ‘real’ social science should be (i.e. no philosophy), but currently is not. Another important reason for maintaining a role for the philosophy of science and the philosophy of social science in the social sciences is the ontology of social practices (what they are and what they involve). Philosophy forms part of the object of study for the social sciences because the practices of the actors in that world are already embedded within philosophical positions. Indeed Peter Winch thought social science was a form of philosophy (Winch, 1958) and used Wittgenstein’s theory of language games to justify philosophy’s role in shaping human practice. And by this we do not simply mean to highlight the manner in which certain political leaders are believed to be guided in their practices by an explicit engagement with the philosophies of Plato, Machiavelli, Locke and Hume, and so on. Rather, it is the recognition that even a social actor with little or no awareness of political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of social science, ethics, epistemology, or the whole range of philosophical discourses will, and can only, act on the basis of some or other account of the world: What is truth? What is a fact? How do I know anything? How should I live? What is a cause? What is an explanation? These are very basic philosophical questions that play a role in almost all social practices, even if those engaged in those social practices never stop to reflect on such questions. In many respects, unreflective social practices are governed by answers without due consideration of the questions. Indeed, we see one important function of

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any properly conceived social science to be the uncovering of just those assumptions that underpin social practice, particularly in those instances where the actors involved are not aware of the role and function of those philosophical assumptions (i.e. that the truth is self-evident, that to believe is to know, that social wholes do not exist, etc.). The objects of the natural sciences, on the other hand, have no such philosophical issues that govern their practices; or at least, as far as we can tell they do not. At the ethico-political level the need for reflection on the claims of social science is also clear. Social scientific results are not simply descriptive but normative. Given this, and the particular place of science in the contemporary world, we believe it is wholly appropriate to examine the claims produced by the social sciences in terms of their claimed scientific status. Of course, the claims of the natural sciences should also be subject to both internal and external scrutiny, but this issue is much more pressing in the social sciences, since their status is already highly contested and the potential implications in terms of social action are more immediately apparent. The claim that a certain gene should not reproduce is meaningless (yet still scientific); yet to imply, for example, that single mothers and crime rates are related is an altogether different claim, and carries with it a normative element. The social sciences study human beings and social scientific outcomes are concerned with explanations of the practices of human beings. The natural sciences, on the other hand, can have an impact on human practices, but they do not necessarily involve a critical comment on those practices. The social sciences always do. This introduction now goes on to provide a broad understanding of SR and CR and hence situate the approach that unites all the authors. Obviously not all of the authors will accept all aspects of this account, and SR is a broad movement with many differences within it concerning the key principles and implications of it for research.

The approach to philosophy It is important to note that the form of SR advocated here begins by placing some rigorous limits on its scope of application. These limitations are derived from the fact that the conclusions of the philosophy are based upon empirical aspects of the practice of science. For Roy Bhaskar, the philosophy of science examines a specific set of existing practices, in this case science, and as such, it provides no transhistorical transcendent truths. The approach is transcendental in the sense of examining the conditions of possibility for a given set of practices; in this instance science.2 Because philosophy has as its object of inquiry a set of actually existing social practices – again in this case science – it is always a historically located enterprise. The most it may aspire to is the possible enunciation of insights pertaining to those practices from which the arguments are derived. There can be no philosophy of science

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in general, but only the philosophy of particular, historically determinate, specific forms of scientific practice. Thus scientific practice forms the object of concern for the philosophy of science. This both historically embeds it and establishes its particular character. Hence no philosophy of science can consider itself privileged by some special (high) subject matter or (superior) mode of truth (Bhaskar, 1986: 12). However, although the practice of science constitutes the object through which SR is developed it does not follow that it is bound to particular scientific theories, but rather, SR makes the more fundamental claim that science itself must be of a certain form if the practice is to be intelligible. SR is derived from the practice of science, not particular existing scientific theories; such theories are always in principle revisable and/or refutable. This is an important point, since many of the rejections of SR that have emerged within IR suggest that since some of the theoretical entities postulated in theories have turned out not to exist then SR is problematised (Kratochwil, 2000). This view rests on a mistaken understanding of the claims of SR. SR does not suggest that the theoretical entities postulated in all scientific theories must have existed at some point in time, it only suggests that science progresses because in their practices scientists set out to test the supposed reality of the proposed mechanisms. Some may exist, and some may not, but it is the attempt to differentiate between the two that drives the scientific enterprise on. SR makes intelligible what scientists do, it does not entail that all scientific claims relating to theoretical objects are necessarily correct. Indeed, no matter how much epistemological support there may be for the existence of a given theoretical entity, the ontological question of whether or not it exists is independent of the epistemological claims. This approach to the philosophy of science in particular and philosophy in general indicates a reversal of a long-standing philosophical orthodoxy and a turn away from epistemological concerns to those of ontology. For realist philosophies of science, to be is more than to be perceived and the nature of the object itself may well place limits on what we can know of it and how we might come to know it (Outhwaite, 1987). The knowledge we might gain of subatomic particles, for example, will differ from the knowledge we might gain of societies because subatomic particles and societies are differing types of thing. The attempt to specify epistemological and/or methodological criteria for science in advance of ontological commitments is an act of unnecessary closure. Any discourse on epistemology or methodology is bound to be more or less arbitrary without a prior specification of an object of inquiry. Epistemological questions cannot be settled in advance of, or distinct from, ontological questions. The realist move to ontology provides a more open, less dogmatic, approach to epistemological matters. This is not to say that ontological statements can be dogmatically asserted. All ontological assertions will require some form of epistemological support. But the scientific realist approach to epistemological

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concerns is to reject ‘epistemological monism’ in favour of epistemological opportunism. From the analysis of scientific practice SR concludes that science can be understood as the attempt to specify explanations that make sense of the deep underlying structures and mechanisms that make experience possible. This means that it is committed to: ontological realism (that there is a reality independent of the mind(s) that would wish to come to know it); epistemological relativism (that all beliefs are socially produced); and judgemental rationalism (that despite epistemological relativism, it is still possible, in principle, to choose between competing theories).

Ontological realism Every theory of knowledge must logically presuppose a theory of what the world is like (ontology), for knowledge (epistemology) to be possible. In which case, all philosophies, discourses and practices presuppose a realism – in the sense of some ontology or general account of the world – of one kind or another. The question is not of whether to be a realist, but of what kind. In the social sciences, however, realism does face some major problems. Realism normally implies that objects have a mind-independent existence. Social objects, however, depend upon minds for their existence. This has led all manner of positions to declare that ‘reality is a social construct’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967), or, that ‘there is nothing outside of discourse’ (Campbell, 2001). Contemporary social scientific anti-realism can be traced, on the one hand, to the rejections of, and attempts to transcend, positivism, which is wrongly believed to adhere to philosophical realism; and, on the other hand, to the twentieth-century fascination with linguistics. As should be clear, the first is simply mistaken. Positivism has always been an anti-realist philosophical position. Indeed, as Martin Hollis has argued, all empiricist theories of knowledge are anti-realist at bottom, even though they try to finesse their way to speaking of an independent world (Hollis, 1996: 303–4). At best, when positivists overtly espouse realism it is an empirical realism as opposed to the depth realism enunciated by SR. Of course, we can only know things under certain descriptions. But there is no inference from ‘there is no way to know a thing except under a particular description’ to ‘there is no way to know that that thing exists (and acts) independently of its particular description (and descriptions in general)’ (Bhaskar, 1991a: 24). Empirical realists and contemporary linguistic/conceptual realists both commit two closely related philosophical errors. The first consists in the way both positions define the real. Whereas the former define the world in terms of our experience of it, the latter define it in terms of our theories and/or linguistic conventions. Both give an epistemological category an ontological task. This is an error that Bhaskar

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calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’: the transposing of epistemological arguments into ontological ones (Bhaskar, 1997: 36–8). This is most clear in positivism where all that we can know is what we can experience and what we cannot experience has a mere methodological function, but no ontological import. But statements about being cannot be reduced to, and/or analysed solely in terms of, statements about our knowledge of being. The second error consists in the belief that the possibility of being experienced or the possibility of being conceptualised, and/or talked about, is an essential feature of reality itself. This assumption is unwarranted. There is no reason to assume that all of existence might be susceptible to human cognition. What empirical realism and linguistic conceptual realism both overlook is the role of a causal criterion for the ascription of something as real. On a realist ontology, on the other hand, being is independent of human experiences and/or expressions of it. Indeed, ‘all science would be superfluous if the outward appearances and essences of things directly coincided’ (Marx, 1971: 817). Science, then, is driven by a commitment to a deep realism, and not just an empirical realism. The understanding of science as a practice requires the depth realism suggested by SR.3 The empirical realist error is the conflation of three domains, or levels of reality, into one – that of the empirical. In contrast to this, scientific realists argue that in order to make sense of the scientific enterprise we need to distinguish between the domains of the empirical (experiences and impressions), the actual (events and states-of-affairs, i.e. the actual objects of potential direct experience) and the real or non-actual (the deep structures mechanisms and tendencies) (Bhaskar, 1979: 56–62). If the word ‘empirical’ is to have a particular meaning in human knowledge, it must be restricted to denote only that which we humans experience at particular locations in space and time. This should not be taken to imply a rejection of the importance of the empirical to human knowledge production. Any coherent epistemology requires an empirical component. In order to say things are, or are not as they seem, we need to look, to experience, to examine. We do not need, however, to make knowledge, in its entirety, dependent upon experience; this is the error of empiricism. The empirical is not exhaustive of reality but it does constitute a crucial element in any epistemology. SR is not opposed to empirical research and can incorporate it into its account of science without reducing scientific practice to nothing but an exercise in empirical data gathering. The empirical forms an important core to our understanding of the world around us, but it does not exhaust it. A commitment to depth realism presupposes that there are things, entities, structures and/or mechanisms that operate and exist independently of our ability to know or manipulate them. The laws of nature, the entities, structures or mechanisms, which are often not empirically ‘observable’, are what Bhaskar terms the ‘intransitive objects of knowledge’ which exist independently of us and are separable from our ability to know them. Science is

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possible, then, because the world consists of ‘intransitive’ objects which form the focus of scientific discourses, with the aim of science, in particular, being the production of knowledge of mechanisms that in certain combinations produce the phenomena that are actually manifest in experience/ appearance. Likewise, the causal laws that science has discovered must be transcontextual – that is must operate in open and closed systems alike – if we are to make any sense of the application of science outside of the confines of tight experimental closure. The clarity and order that appear to accompany law-like regularities often disappear when we move from the laboratory and attempt to explain outcomes in the open world of everyday life. Thus, the objects of scientific inquiry are not only constant conjunctions or other such empirical regularities, but also the structures or mechanisms that generate such phenomena. This suggests that the Humean account of cause as ‘constant conjunctions’ is inadequate (Kurki, 2008). A scientific realist causal account would involve the theoretical identification of these structures and mechanisms and their causal powers. The explanation, identification and cataloguing of the powers, effects and liabilities these entities possess and produce, not prediction, becomes the object of scientific knowledge. In effect, many of the crucial questions in science are concerned not with the mapping of causal relations in time, but with the causal power of entities, structures and mechanisms. This process of cataloguing is what Wendt calls ‘constitutive’ theorising (Wendt, 1998). Surface forms or phenomena, and our experiences of them, then, do not exhaust the real. What we experience is the result of a complex interaction of these structures and mechanisms, which in controlled experimental conditions produce law-like regularities. If we are to make sense of how this experimental knowledge is then put into practice in open systems, then these same entities must also generate effects in the world beyond the laboratory; but devoid of the interventions of scientists, not in the same clean, recurrent stream of cause and effect. Outside of the human-induced effects of experimental closure they are part of a natural interactional complexity that sometimes results in particular causal relations, while at other times in the suppressing or complete neutralisation of the generative effects in question. The arguments for depth realism suggest that the universe (material matter) existed prior to the emergence of humanity (biological matter) and that what living organisms there are, are composed of, surrounded by, and dependent upon, matter. In this very limited sense, matter may be said to be more ‘basic’ than life and to be necessary for life; life can be said to be more ‘basic’ than rationality and to have preceded it; and, matter, life and rationality can all be said to be more ‘basic’, and to have preceded, human society and history. This is what it means to talk of reality as being stratified. A superficial understanding of this stratification would suggest that those sciences that explain a more basic layer could claim explanatory primacy

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over those explaining a less basic layer. Such explanations are common. Modern genetics seems to suggest all explanations of human behaviour can be traced to the one level, that of genetics. Scientific realists reject this reductive approach and advance the idea of an emergent ontology, in which, although the more basic sciences might be able to explain something about the mechanisms of the less basic ones, they cannot explain them away. The laws discovered and identified at one level are irreducible to those at other levels. Each level has its own emergent powers that although rooted in, emergent from and dependent upon, other levels, cannot be explained simply by explanations based at the more fundamental levels. The emergent levels, then, have powers and liabilities unique to that level. Moreover, when a mechanism at a particular level has been identified, described and used to explain some phenomena, it itself then becomes something to be explained; and often this explanation will be incomplete without recourse to other mechanisms located both horizontally and vertically in relation to the explained mechanism. Scientific progress is a process where our knowledge of nature is deepened and underlying each mechanism, or level, there are always other levels waiting to be explained. This ontological commitment to depth when combined with the theory of emergence has important consequences for all forms of scientific explanation. It entails that reductive explanations, in either upwards or downwards directions, will not suffice. Some entities, humans for example, will be subject to laws operative at more than one level. Hence, the identification and distinguishing of vertical and horizontal explanations is necessary. Emergence means that although the more complex levels of reality, for example, societies, presuppose the more basic or less complex levels, for example, people, explanations of them are not reducible to the other.

Epistemological relativism and judgemental rationalism The commitment to depth realism also has implications for how we understand the process of knowledge construction. For if we reject the view that descriptions of reality are directly given to us in experience (the world of experiences/appearances does not exhaust the real) then we are left with a problem making sense of how our descriptions do come about and also explaining why some seem to be better than others at capturing various aspects of the world. Knowledge emerges through a transformation of pre-existing knowledge; a set of antecedent materials; theories, paradigms, models, facts, speculations, linguistic conventions, beliefs, hunches, hypotheses, guesses, symbolic gestures, and so on. Knowledge is a social product, dynamically produced by means of antecedent social products – albeit on the basis of a continual engagement, or interaction, with its (intransitive) object. Since a mode of knowledge production is concerned with something other than itself, science can be mistaken about its objects. Hence science

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is an inherently fallibilist enterprise. Because it is fallibilist it is also necessarily continuously critical of its own knowledge claims. SR recognises that the science of any given time can be wrong about its object. Indeed, the continuous possibility of being wrong drives science on. The production of scientific knowledge should be seen as a specific social practice; a form of work that takes existing scientific theories as its starting point, even if only to reject them and/or transform them into ever deeper knowledge of the world. Science is an active intentional examination, and possible intervention, into nature or some aspect of the world. Equally, since it is difficult to conceive of our minds being formed outside of the influence of specific societies, non-scientific knowledge is also historically specific. Different societies will instil different ideas and practices. Given the historically specific nature of knowledge, we have to accept the fact of epistemological relativism; namely, that all beliefs are socially produced, so that knowledge is transient, and neither truth values nor criteria of rationality exist outside of historical time. It is conceivable that all of our current stock of knowledge could be overturned at some point in the future. To recognise that science is the social production of knowledge by means of knowledge means no more than to place it within, rather than outside of, history. That is, that ‘whenever we speak of things or of events, etc. in science we must always speak of them and know them under particular descriptions, descriptions which will always be, to a greater or lesser extent, theoretically determined’ (Bhaskar, 1975: 249). Bhaskar introduces the distinction between the transitive and the intransitive in order to account for the relationship between the production of knowledge and the world that this knowledge is about. Our knowledge of the world is embodied in the social practices that produce transitive objects of knowledge whereas the intransitive refers to that which this knowledge is about. These intransitive objects (real things, structures and mechanisms) are generally independent of our (transitive) knowledge of them. SR is epistemologically relativist, that is, relativist about the transitive object (the knowledge object), not ontologically relativist (about the entities this knowledge explains). And because it is knowledge of an intransitive object, some knowledge claims may be better than others. Hence there is at least the possibility of judgemental rationalism. This means that fallibilism can be embraced without endorsing a debilitating epistemological nihilism.

From science to social science According to SR then, the positivist account of science does not, epistemologically, methodologically or ontologically, provide an accurate model of the actual practices of scientists. Insofar as science is successful in understanding, explaining and manipulating nature, both in closed laboratory situations and/or in the open world, it is because it operates with, and

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utilises, a multi-layered realist conception of the world, even if scientists rarely make this explicit. According to this realist model of science the world is seen to be an ensemble of powers, propensities and forces which are a result of the ways in which things and entities are composed, structured and related to each other within systems. These powers, propensities and forces can be given abstract formulations as laws, but these laws are used to help refer to and explain real complex situations, processes and events. It is the discovery of the real powers, propensities and forces of the world that gives science its explanatory power. Furthermore, new levels of reality may emerge from the combination of particulars into systems, and these new levels will possess their own emergent powers. Thus, science has to construct explanations of causation on several levels without always attempting to make reductions to lower levels. Given that reality consists of these complex structured entities, possessing their own powers, propensities and forces, the problem of epistemic access takes on a different form than that suggested by positivism. The practising scientist does not search for constant conjunctions of observable events, but rather is involved in a process of modelling hypothetical mechanisms and inferring their necessary existence from their effects within emergent structured systems. Once this non-positivist account of science is accepted, any argument about the possibility of a science of society that bases itself on positivism is bound to be misleading. If positivism cannot be assumed the correct account of the method of natural science, the question of naturalism versus anti-naturalism must be re-examined. Ontologically this re-examination takes the form of establishing three important factors about societies. First, societies are irreducible to people; social forms are a necessary condition for any intentional social act. Second, their pre-existence establishes their autonomy as possible objects of study. Third, their causal power establishes their reality. All social activity presupposes the prior existence of social forms. ‘Speech requires language; making materials; actions conditions; agency resources; activity rules’ (Bhaskar, 1979: 43). Put simply, these can be seen as arguments for the reality of social forms that are not explainable solely in terms of individuals. Of course, societies are (in part) made up of people who have causal powers that can be brought to bear upon the material world, but people do not exhaust the social. Thus the social ontologies of individualist and structuralist theories are deficient in one or other area. On an individualist reading there are actions but not the conditions that make action possible, whereas on a structuralist account, there are the conditions that make action possible but no actions. Social action never occurs outside of a social setting, but social settings, or as more commonly put, social structures, ‘don’t take to the streets’, that is, do not in themselves act. Societies are an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions that individuals reproduce or transform, but which would

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not exist unless they did so. Societies do not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification); but nor are they the product of it either (the error of voluntarism). Society is both the ever-present condition, that is, the material cause, and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency. All social practices have an action and a structural aspect that is integral to the practice. The crucial ontological issues in terms of the agent–structure problem are those concerned with the nature of these action and structural aspects and their relationship. The study of social objects, then, is concerned with the persistent relations between individuals (and groups), and with the relations between these relations (and between such relations and nature and the products of such relations). According to this relational model of societies, one is what one is, in virtue of the relations within which one is embedded. At any particular moment in time an individual may be implicated in all manner of relations each exerting its own peculiar causal effects. This ‘lattice-work’ of relations constitutes the structure of particular societies and endures despite changes in the individuals occupying them. Thus, the relations, the structures, are ontologically distinct from the individuals who enter into them. At a minimum, then, the social sciences are concerned with two distinct, although mutually interdependent, strata. There is an ontological difference between people and structures, ‘people are not relations, societies are not conscious agents’ (Collier, 1994: 147). Any attempt to explain one in terms of the other should be rejected. If there is an ontological difference between society and people, however, we need to elaborate on the relationship between them. Bhaskar argues that we need a system of mediating concepts, encompassing both aspects of the duality of praxis into which active subjects must fit in order to reproduce it: that is, a system of concepts designating the ‘point of contact’ between human agency and social structures (Bhaskar, 1979: 51). This is known as ‘positioned practices’. In many respects, the idea of ‘positioned practices’ is very similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus: Thus social practices are produced in and by the encounter between: (i) the habitus and its dispositions; (ii) the constraints and demands of the socio-cultural field to which the habitus is appropriate or within; and, (iii) the dispositions of the individual agents located within both the socio-cultural field and the habitus. Society has a specific shape and form and it has material and potentially empirically perceivable effects, despite the fact that it would seem to be in principle unobservable. In this respect, we would be justified in saying that social power, for example, is real if it results in observable human action, utterances and perhaps, institutionally organised patterns of behaviour.

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Thus, and preserving the insight of hermeneutic theorists, it is argued that social action occurs in large part due to the knowledge and beliefs about social situations that are shared by groups of people. However, it is equally important to note that roles, rules and relations structure behaviour in ways that are sometimes opaque to consciousness, decisions or choices. Hence the conceptual aspects of society do not provide an exhaustive account. On this view, society does not simply consist of individuals and/or groups and their activity, but rather, is the sum of the relations within which individuals and groups stand. Thus the raison d’être of the social sciences consists in the move from the specification of manifest phenomena of social life, as conceptualised in the experience of the social agents concerned, to the uncovering of the social relations that necessitate and regulate such experiences and phenomena. This gives social science a critical impulse insofar as the agents, whose activities are necessary for the reproduction of these relations, may be unaware of the social relations which (in part) explain their activities. It is through the capacity of social science to illuminate such relations that it may come to play an emancipatory role.

How does scientific realism relate to international relations? SR, in contrast to the different theories of IR, is a philosophy not a theory, producing second-order, conceptual or meta-theoretical claims. While not being a theory of IR in its own right, it can criticise some of the assumptions of different theories by examining their philosophical underpinnings, while offering support to alternative theories by strengthening their ontological and epistemological claims. SR is useful to those who want to study IR in the sense that it can offer a critique of the philosophical underpinnings of mainstream theoretical positions, and point to the way that the assumptions these theories make hold back a proper analysis – particularly where power relations, inequalities exploitation and other issues are concerned. For example, Waltz’s Theory of International Politics clearly makes assumptions of a positivist nature – that scientific laws are based on the relations between variables along the lines of if a then b with probability x (Waltz, 1979: 1). Waltz adds that theories differ from laws in showing why these associations obtain; in other words, theories explain laws (ibid., 6). The ontological consequences of Waltz’s views can be found in the familiar statements that ‘The texture of international politics remains highly constant, patterns recur, and events repeat themselves endlessly … The enduring anarchic character of international politics accounts for the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia’ (ibid., 66). Like other positivists, Waltz embraces assumptions about states being the basic units and ‘structure’ being comprised of external relations between units. For all the talk that one should focus on the relation of unit to structure rather than

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interactions among the units, the structure is ultimately nothing more than precisely these interactions. For Waltz, structural questions are about the arrangements of the parts of a system. In the international system each part is said to be formally the equal of another (ibid., 88). The effect of this analysis is typical of any number of positivist approaches – that is to say, to naturalise a reified view of the social world (in this case its international system) and to hide the deeper structures of the international system by focusing on recurring relations between formally equal units. This can tell us nothing about the specificity of North–South relations, for example, or the reasons why such relations are exploitative. To do so, we would have to go to the underlying conditions that generate the unequal relations between North and South, something that positivist approaches rule out. For Waltz, international politics is about discovering and explaining law-like regularities (1979: 116). Even if we were to accept the argument about law-like regularities (which we should not) there is no possibility of conceiving of any underlying processes that produce them. Put in scientific realist terms, Waltz embraces a philosophy that focuses at the level of events, but ignores the level of the underlying structures – those unobservable social structures, causal processes and generative mechanisms that produce the events. Unless IR theory is to switch attention to the level of underlying structures, there is little possibility of discovering the reasons why North–South relations take on the unequal form that they do. The ontological implications of positivist assumptions can be seen in most aspects of realist, neo-realist and other ‘rationalist’ theories of IR which are underpinned by positivist assumptions about unitary actors (states) engaging in rational behaviour, and engaging with one another in the manner of a billiard-ball model of interaction, which emphasises external connections producing regularities and predictable outcomes. This results in a reified social ontology that excludes underlying structures, causal mechanisms or constitutive processes. In other words, the very things that might explain the nature of IR and get at the exploitative basis underlying these (relating to the international capitalist system) are already excluded from analysis. As an alternative, SR can bring a clearer understanding of the ontological implications of positivism and other philosophical positions – something that is often denied or obscured in mainstream work. It is common to see such issues as ‘methodological’ such as is the case with the Second Debate, when in fact such debates have important ontological implications about what the world itself is like (as well as how it should be studied). Often positivism is talked of by IR theorists as if it is merely a methodology to be used in analysing the world rather than having its own ontological assumptions about what the world itself is like. Positivism is thus more than an epistemology or methodology; it is a philosophical position that makes ontological assumptions about the world as comprised of patterns and regularities that

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can be explained by the correct methodology. Yet positivism conflates these issues so that ontological matters are disguised as questions of epistemology and methodology. An ontological approach such as suggested by SR then moves beyond questions of knowledge to ask what the world itself must be like for this to be the case. The distinction between the knowledge we have of the world and the world that this knowledge is of is captured by Bhaskar’s distinction between the transitive and the intransitive. The chief error of alternative approaches within IR – whether constructivist, critical theory or post-structuralism – is to deny this distinction. Indeed, even the positivists, for all their talk of an objective reality, commit the epistemic fallacy of conflating their own identification of scientific laws (transitive) with the intransitive real processes they attempt to explain. Having said this, knowledge takes place within a social context which influences and shapes it. This is particularly clear in the discipline of IR given the way that the socio-historical context of the Cold War has shaped the manner in which IR problems have been posed and addressed. Theories are a product of the same society they seek to explain. This should not mean that we should abandon attempts at explanation because they are historically conditioned, but we should strive for explanatory adequacy or the best possible explanation. This would include explaining why it is that certain theories like neo-realism come to dominate thinking during particular historical periods, and how alternative theories can provide both a better explanation of real conditions, and account for the way that these conditions influence alternative explanations. So we now move to what is distinctive about the kind of social ontology a scientific realist approach advocates. IR theories underpinned by positivism – realism, neo-realism, neo-liberal institutionalism, interdependence theory and so on – exhibit a shallow, surface or flat ontology that operates at the level of events without examining underlying causes. By focusing on the constant conjunctions of these events, or empirical regularities, mainstream theories of IR reduce ontology to behaviour and its outcomes, or conflate reality itself with their own theories of law-like regularities. Yet as Steve Smith notes, rejecting the positivist insistence on the observable and positing the idea of non-observable structures gives us the best chance of explaining social action (Hollis and Smith, 1990: 207). Following Bhaskar we should say that these structures ‘are non-empirical but empirically identifiable, transfactually efficacious but only contingently manifest in particular outcomes and they form the very real ground of causal laws’ (Bhaskar, 1986: 106). However, and against those versions of Marxism or world-systems theory that invoke economic reductionism to explain the determining influence of one particular structure – the economy – on all others, it should be argued that each structure has its own specificity. Even if a structure, process or

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event is dependent on an underlying structure like the economy out of which it might be said to emerge, it cannot be reduced to this base level and we cannot explain the goings-on at one level simply by invoking another. Political processes can no more be reduced to the economic structure of production than mental processes can be reduced to physical ones, even if the former, in both cases, are rooted in the latter. Political and mental processes have their own specificity that is emergent out of the ‘lower order’ structure, but not reducible to it. Instead, we should conceive of these relations in terms of a stratified and differentiated totality of social relations. These different structures, processes and mechanisms are overlapping and co-determining. It is difficult to single out any one structure or process as autonomous in the way reductionist Marxism might. Structures are both externally and internally related. However, it should still be possible, within this, to identify which structures and tendencies are the more powerful or influential. Indeed if we are to come to an adequate understanding of IR we have to be able to do this and to highlight the power of economic processes within a complex set of structural relations. Marx’s own approach recognises this, implicitly at least, with its advocacy of abstraction to identify the dominant social processes while also stressing that ‘the concrete is … the concentration of many determinations’ (Marx, 1973a: 101). This points to the important tasks facing the social or political theorist. To identify what might be the most significant social relations, to engage in a process of abstraction to examine how these relations operate, while also recognising that in the open context of the real world such relations interact with other relations. The powers and liabilities present at the level of the real may or may not be exercised depending on a particular set of circumstances – SR, unlike positivism, does not reduce powers to their exercise. These powers exist as tendencies, rather than as fixed laws. The domain of the real is the domain of the possible, rather than the actual. Tendencies, if they exist, may have counter-tendencies. Processes may be the product of a coincidence of a number of different tendencies and causal powers. They may, in turn, act back upon the causal process and change it. In other words, SR points to an open world comprised of various complex sets of interrelations that produce a structured but differentiated social totality. The social world is different from the natural world in that social structures are bound up with the activities that they govern while society is not independent of agents’ conceptions and, therefore, society has an essential conceptual element. This has led to constructivists in IR seizing on the structure–agency issue as indicative of their unique contribution to a social ontology of IR. Constructivists view structure and agency as mutually constitutive and have drawn on a range of philosophers from the hermeneutic and interpretivist traditions to support this view. This section will argue against such a conflation and will emphasise a clear distinction between the properties of structures and the properties of agents, giving rise to an

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ontological hiatus between the two (Bhaskar, 1989: 37). It is important to conceive of this relationship correctly if we are to then identify how agents must act in order to transform structures. Wendt’s contribution to the structure–agency debate starts by comparing two of the influential theories in IR that have been mentioned earlier, namely neo-realism and world-systems theory. Wendt argues that the neo-realists reduce the structure of the states system to the properties and interactions of its constitutive elements (states), while world-system theorists reduce state agents to the effects of the reproduction of the world (capitalist) system (1987: 339). Wendt believes that the correct response is to show how structure and agency are mutually constitutive. Although he flirts with the ideas of Roy Bhaskar and CR, citing Bhaskar’s argument that ‘Society is both the everpresent condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human activity’ (Bhaskar, 1989: 34–5), Wendt’s position really owes its argument to Anthony Giddens and structuration theory. The term Giddens uses to describe the relationship between structure and agency is ‘instantiation’. For Giddens, social structure and the activity of agents are mutually constitutive, with the structure only ever in existence (or instantiated) in the present moment of its renewal (see Rivas’s chapter). By contrast, scientific realists like Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and Douglas Porpora reject this conflation of structure and agency. Archer’s alternative to structuration theory develops a position where ‘the social relations upon which they [agents] depend are held to have independent causal properties rather than being mere abstractions from our repetitive and routinised behaviour … these relations which constitute structures pre-date occupants of positions within them, thus constraining or enabling activity’ (Archer, 1995: 106). Structures and agents possess distinct properties. As Carter and New have argued, among the unique properties of structures are firstly anteriority – such things as legal systems and linguistic systems are preexisting features of the world we engage with, secondly endurance over time, and thirdly that structures possess powers of enablement and constraint – for example, existing allocations of wealth enable some and constrain others. Meanwhile, among the sui generis properties of agents are self-consciousness, reflexivity, intentionality, cognition and emotionality. Such properties of agency, and the properties of structure, are irreducible to one another (Carter and New, 2004: 5). Therefore, the relationship is one of ‘pre-existent structures, possessing causal powers and properties, and people, possessing distinctive causal powers and properties of their own, result[ing] in contingent yet explicable outcomes’ (ibid., 6). This form of SR argues against instantiation by insisting that structures and agents have distinct properties and powers and that social structures are deeper and prior to the social activities that they govern as well as the conceptions that agents may have of this activity. One way to look it this is to focus on the way that while structures may depend upon human actions for their

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reproduction, these actions are already conditioned by the structures in a way of which the actors are seldom aware. It is accepted that agents act consciously, but their awareness is connected to the practices that they engage in rather than the deeper structures that these practices tend to reproduce. The model proposed here, then, is that agents act consciously within (positioned) practices, but that the effect of this is generally the unconscious or unintended reproduction of deeper social structures that the agent is largely unaware of. Agents may believe that they are acting within a particular context – like earning a living, getting married or generating development aid – but the consequences may well be to contribute to the reproduction of a wider set of structural relations – various aspects of the capitalist system, to put it crudely – beyond any intention that the agent may have. We can see how this model clearly goes beyond the social ontology presented by constructivism that focuses on practices and rule-governed behaviour, but does not situate these practices within a deeper social context (and thus find it impossible to explain what generates the rules and norms that agents follow in their practices). A scientific realist ontology should therefore insist on the irreduciblity of structure to human actions or intersubjective relations. While social structures may depend on human activity for their reproduction, this reproduction is normally the unconscious rather than intentional product of such activity. Societies pre-exist the human agents who live in them and structures have prior causal power over agents. It is the prior existence of structures and their relatively enduring nature that provide the very conditions within which agents may act. This has the effect of defining and limiting the parameters of this activity. David Dessler, in his contribution to the structure–agency debate, criticises the neo-realist account of structure in IR, arguing that it refers to the spontaneously formed unintended consequences of action, as a by-product rather than a consequence of interaction (1989: 450). Actually structure is largely the unintended consequence of action. This is what distinguishes a structural approach from an intersubjective one. Social structures have an existence independent of the agent’s (proper) conception of them. However, this caution about the role of agents is important if we are to correctly understand precisely what powers agents do have. Since structures are the reproduced outcome of human activity then a possibility does exist for agential activity to go beyond mere reproduction and engage in transformation. Such a transformation or development needs to be carefully located within the structural conditions, but it nevertheless exists. Under particular conditions or in particular circumstances agents may act consciously to change or transform these conditions, albeit within structural limits. This points to four important factors – context, position, limitations and possibilities. The political scientist who wants to look at the possibilities for social transformation – and the analyst of IR should surely be one of these – needs

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to look at which social groups have the power or potential to act in a transformative way. These powers and liabilities derive from the structural location of these groups and the powers and potentialities conferred upon them. Usually social transformation only takes place under exceptional conditions when structural crisis occurs. Moments of structural crisis tend to throw the process of unconscious reproduction into question and agents become more aware of the situation confronting them and the possibilities open to them. At the same time, if some agents may become aware of their transformative capabilities, then certain other agents will attempt to resist this. The process of transformation encounters resistance from those who have an interest in maintaining the structure as it is. They will engage in an act of conservation. Thus struggles break out over transformation and conservation of structures. These struggles can be called hegemonic struggles where agents, through their practices, act to preserve or transform a given set of relations (Joseph, 2002: 38–40).

From explanatory critique to emancipatory critique We can now put the various sections together to show why SR is a holistic philosophy with radical consequences. First, scientific realism insists on the independent nature of the intransitive object in opposition to those attempts – including many alternative theories in IR – which blur the boundary between reality and the knowledge we have of it. This separateness is the very thing that makes knowledge intelligible. Without this, knowledge becomes the product of the subject, the collective, the group or community or else is bound up with some sort of worldview, discourse, text or language game. Whether we take a hermeneutic, idealist, constructivist or post-structuralist stance on this, the end result is a relativisation of knowledge and a denial of either a necessary relation to an object or else a denial of ‘objects’ themselves. This does not mean that we should not recognise the impact of such things as communities or discursive contexts as necessary features of the transitive production of knowledge. Knowledge is of an object, but at the same time it is produced within a specific social and historical context and within particular communities. Knowledge must be understood in relation to the transitive conditions of its production and in relation to the intransitive object. Against post-structuralism and constructivism, SR insists on the separateness of knowledge and the objects of knowledge; against positivism it insists on the social and historical nature of knowledge. It also insists on its critical nature. Social science – political science perhaps more than all others – is implicitly critical in nature, criticising other ideas and the claims that they make and the inadequacies of their explanations. In drawing attention to these inadequacies, critical social theory should attempt to explain why these inadequacies occur and what it might be that produces them. It must ask the

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question as to whether it is something about the object of inquiry itself that gives rise to false theoretical beliefs. If a connection can be made between social objects themselves and the ideas we have of them, then a critique of these objects – as well as of the theory – follows. An explanatory critique does not simply criticise the theory at the level of ideas, but examines the relationship between the theory and that which it is trying to explain and may, ultimately, critique that which theory is trying to explain for helping to generate such false ideas. Such is the case, for example, with Marx’s critique of capitalism and his linking of this to the failings of classical political economy. The same point might be made in relation to IR, and theoretical approaches to IR such as realism or neo-liberal institutionalism. Explanatory critique flows from the distinctive social ontology developed by SR. It is radical in the sense of identifying the dominant social structures and mechanisms, examining how they operate and what they do. In the social world the question of how these structures are maintained and reproduced is important. This also raises the subsequent question of whether such relations might be other than what they are and whether they might be transformed. An explanatory critique becomes an emancipatory critique when it points to the wider consequences of social activity, looking at how structures operate, the effects they have and how social structures generate and distribute on agents certain causal powers, identities and interests. It points to the social context of agents and their activities and the range of possibilities open to them. SR does not offer radical political solutions to the questions it raises. It is radical by raising these questions in the first place, when other philosophies hide behind the neutrality of the status quo. It opens up social processes to scrutiny while putting social theories and ideas in their appropriate social context. The partisan stance of SR comes not from offering political solutions, but from criticising the assumptions of social theories and the way these might be linked to dominant social structures and power relations – for example, showing how mainstream IR theory reinforces a reified view of structures and agents that is consistent with existing power relations.

Summary: How to study international relations SR is a meta-theory. But in social analysis, due to the conceptual nature of that which we study, it is difficult for meta-theory to remain as such. This has led to confusion with SR being claimed as a theory of IR. Rather than trying to do this, it should instead provide a critique of existing theories of IR, while making enough ontological claims to provide assistance to those approaches best placed to account for IR. While we have seen Brown tries to claim that SR equals Marxism, this does not necessarily have to be the case, and we would wish to argue that even if SR is put to work as an underlabourer

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to Marxist IR theory, SR would always aim to question the claims that such theories make, in particular warning against Marxism’s tendencies towards reductionism, economic determinism, teleology and other potential problems.4 If SR can offer anything to an analysis of IR, then it is a critique of the assumptions of dominant theories, especially of IR, which prevent depth enquiry and hide the real nature of things. The empirical realism upon which such approaches are founded ‘establishes at once the destratificatification of being in ontology and the dehistoricisation of knowledge in epistemology’ (Bhaskar, 1986: 96). For example, Branwen Gruffydd Jones (2001) has looked at how the World Bank’s analysis of poverty reduces the issue to those things that can be observed and measured without any reference to underlying relations of production or those deep-rooted causes of the problem. In particular, such approaches lack sufficient social context, while at the same time denying the social nature of their own assumptions by hiding behind claims to neutrality and scientific objectivity. Such approaches exemplify the mystification of the fact-form which, like Marx’s commodity-form, hides from view the underlying social relations. A scientific realist approach should begin by raising the issue of a depth ontology that deals with the question of dominant social structures and generative mechanisms. Rival philosophies like constructivism also claim to deal with such ontological questions. But SR goes beyond constructivism’s intersubjective social ontology in that the social world cannot be reduced to the interactions between people, shared norms, rules and understandings. SR argues for a deeper sense of structure that can explain the context within which rules might operate. Human action, meanwhile, might be intentional at the level of human practices, but in the main, it unintentionally reproduces pre-existing, deeper structural relations. Why should this social ontology be good for IR theorists? First, because it is argued that it is the structured nature of the world itself that makes knowledge possible and meaningful. Against postmodernism and other forms of post-positivist IR, this allows us to make clear statements of an ontological nature. Our understanding of North–South relations should therefore be grounded in a social ontology based on underlying social relations. This moves us away from the positivist world of events and states of affairs where discussions such as that of the World Development Report on Poverty can get no further than, at best, suggestions that amount to an amelioration of affairs. It also avoids rooting discussion in liberal discourses about rights. To have rights, we need social transformation. To have social transformation, we need to base our approach on a social ontology that normative theory largely avoids. Next, this type of approach is critical of other theories and develops this critique by looking at the relationship between such ideas and the social and historical context within which they are located. The weaknesses of realist

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IR or the statements of the World Bank must be related to actual power structures within society if the arguments of such theory are to be fully explained. Once this is done, the question of the status of such structures, practices and institutions itself becomes a matter for discussion. In relation to North–South questions, as with relations of explanation in general, we might say that the exploited have an interest in knowledge that the exploiters do not have. Wrong social theories simply do not have the ability to explain real structures, social processes and contradictions. Thus to truly tackle issues like the North–South divide is to already engage in a partisan form of politics. From here, we might go to the matter of social transformation. The structure–agency question poses the possibility of transformation and it is the task of the social theorist to identify such things as what is possible, what is not possible, who has the power to transform and what obstacles need to be faced. Again, it needs to be stressed that SR itself does not perform this task. Instead its radical nature comes from the way it conceives of the connectedness of these issues, its advocacy of a totalising critique, and the fact that unlike positivist, constructivist and post-structuralist approaches, it has led us to this conclusion.

Structure of the book We start the book with two chapters that are more focused on analysing the discipline of IR, albeit in a critical way. Together they challenge the way the discipline of IR sets up its ‘levels of analysis’ and which instead explore the idea of emergence. David Leon’s chapter focuses on the scientific realist idea of emergent properties, i.e. causally efficacious properties that are neither ontologically reducible to, nor analytically exhausted by, their constituent parts. He notes how in recent years, there has been a growing recognition among philosophers of science, theoretical biologists and some social scientists that emergence can provide the basis for strong anti-reductionist arguments. Contemporary with this interdisciplinary development, however, is a demand within IR for explanations to be grounded in microfoundations, often cast in terms of opening up ‘black boxes’ of states and integrating domestic and international politics. Leon’s chapter first shows that the importance attached to the micro-level rests on notions of scientific explanation that are philosophically problematic. Then, drawing on the theory of emergence and combining it with a scientific realist stance on the ontological status of causal entities, this chapter argues that there are good grounds for rejecting empiricist and reductionist arguments in favour of those which take full account of emergent properties in the international system. Like Leon, Jonathan Joseph challenges the way that IR has traditionally set up its field of analysis. According to Joseph, while post-structuralists in IR have indicated the problematic nature of such oppositions as inside/outside,

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anarchy/sovereignty and self/other, his concern is to illuminate how these issues are themselves largely underpinned by an unproblematic acceptance of a framework structured by notions of system and unit. This framework, Joseph argues, has been reinforced by the work of neo-realism and the levels of analysis debate to the point where it is accepted even by critical IR scholars. By and large the international has come to be defined as a structure or a system, while the units may range from individuals to states. This distinction runs parallel to other (perhaps more methodological) oppositions such as holism/individualism and macro/microtheory. While there are many debates as to where to place the emphasis, there are not so many debates about such distinctions themselves. Joseph’s chapter is concerned with showing how we might question such a way of seeing things and examines the Marxist tradition to see how things might be conceptualised differently. The next two chapters raise important questions about how IR theorists should understand the state. Marjo Koivisto’s chapter addresses important questions about the nature of states as entities. Scientific and critical realist contributions on the state in IR have posited that instead of being mere fictions or like units of a system, states are real entities in world politics in possession of specific causal properties. Causal powers of the state have been suggested to arise from states being people-like social organisms, or from agents acting in state roles. Yet as existing accounts take IR theories as their starting point to examine the state in the international, they leave open many questions concerning the range of social systemic and structural emergent properties of the state. Starting from Weberian and Marxist theories of the state in historical sociology and global political economy of IR, Koivisto’s chapter advances a framework for a realist analysis of the historically specific causal properties of the state. She argues that realist analysis can further existing theories of transformations of contemporary capitalist states (including processes of privatisation and norm socialisation) in world politics, and thus offer a powerful analytical alternative to rational choice and constructivist theories of the state for the field of IR. In his chapter Doug Porpora argues that it is important for IR to better understand how states as complex collectives come to act on the world stage. Toward that end, the chapter examines how the United States reached a collective decision to attack Iraq and what it means and does not mean to call that decision a collective one. In the process, the chapter illustrates how a critical realist perspective permits a synthesis of two approaches normally considered opposed: political economy and discourse analysis. The decisionmaking process will be shown to have been a decentred one, dependent on rhetorical manoeuvres among elite actors within a field of structured power relations and against a background of public inattention. The account Porpora develops will hardly accord with the traditional IR conception of nation states as simple rational actors pursuing clear national interests.

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Called into question as well is the traditional Kantian confidence in the moral behaviour of democracies. Recent work on the theory of international law is addressed in Bill Bowring’s chapter. Although the next few chapters cover a diverse range of topics, they follow on from Porpora’s chapter in taking normative questions as a key concern. Bowring is concerned with the way that social constructivism has colonised many areas of the field precisely because it offers what he considers to be a false normative allure. His chapter explores the genesis and trajectory of social constructivism in IR theory through the work of Christian Reus-Smit (2004), Antony Anghie, Dino Kritsiotis and David Wippman, arguing against the idea that their methodology is a progressive one. The social practice of law, it is argued, is better seen through the methodology proposed by the Bhaskar’s early work (1979, 1989). A rich variety of social structures, displaying causal powers, existing across human generations, have their own laws and dialectic. However, international law and human rights have commonly been analysed as normative discourses, ignoring the material conditions that make these discourses possible. In looking at the construction of responsibility, blame and sanction in loans to states in the course of dealing with debt problems since the 1970s, Tomohisa Hattori also examines important normative issues. His chapter argues that this process can be best described as the gradual institutionalisation of the assignment of responsibility, blame and sanction based on the juridical construction of knowledge. Because juridically constructed causes often contradict real social causes – which include, at a minimum, the agency of creditors and indebted states, institutional settings and structural conditions – they are inaccurate and inadequate bases for ethical inquiry. The chapter provides what critical realists call an explanatory critique that examines how the dominant ethical discourse about a social practice, such as the debt reduction practice, not only justifies the existing order and power relations surrounding the practice but also contradicts a scientific explanation that clarifies the causal mechanism of this practice. Milja Kurki’s chapter aims to demonstrate how a critical realist approach to research can contribute to the analysis of processes of democratisation. She argues that many existing frameworks of democratisation have tended to work with empiricist, or quasi-empiricist, assumptions regarding the law-like logic of democratisation and methods appropriate to study democratisation. She attempts to show how in the adopting of procedural understandings of democracy they have often failed to study democratic political systems as conditioned by complex social and economic contexts. She also demonstrates that many researchers do not recognise that deeply held normative underpinnings often inform the seemingly neutral social scientific understandings of democracy and democratisation in the field. The chapter does not seek to develop a new theory of democratisation, but rather only seeks to use CR to highlight the kinds of considerations that

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researchers in IR should keep in mind in approaching an empirical field of study. In his chapter Heikki Patomäki uses CR to explore the relationship between closed and open systems and then examines the implications of this for important research into possible futures. According to Patomäki, it has become increasingly evident that systems are always open and closed only to a degree. Equally, the allegedly radical asymmetry between explanation and prediction does not hold and the future can also be analysed in terms of more or less likely conditional possibilities of becoming. This entails that we should therefore try to overcome the prevailing past-orientation of human and social sciences and build a methodology for futures studies. The point of his chapter, then, is to demonstrate how futures studies can work in practice, rather than by deploying abstract conceptual arguments. As examples he engages in a critical discussion of various scenarios of global futures until 2045 and shows how these scenarios should be reassessed and developed further in the light of new evidence. New evidence, he argues, can assume two forms, concerning either (i) our explanatory models of the past and present or (ii) how world history unfolds over time as a possible future is becoming present. In particular, his attention is focused on the implications of the global financial crisis of 2008–9 and on the new evidence about the acceleration of the process of global warming. The next two chapters deal more explicitly with Marxist theory. Faruk Yalvaç, in particular, is concerned to look at the relationship between Marxism, CR and IR theory. His chapter argues that a Marxist social theory enriched by the principles of CR can provide a radical alternative to both the positivist and constructivist accounts of IR, which ultimately consolidate and reproduce the worldwide system of capitalism, along with its structured inequalities. In this current conjuncture of IR theorising, Marxism, enriched and developed by CR, it is argued, provides the best way to overcome the current stalemate brought about by the rationalist/reflectivist or positivist/ post-positivist divide. Bob Jessop’s chapter considers how theorists from different perspectives have been investigating the dynamic of the world market, the possibility of a world state or global governance, and the emergence of a distinctive world society. His contribution subjects each of these concepts to a critical interrogation, paying particular attention to the emergent logics of the world market, the prospects of a world state, and the reality of world society. In each case it explores the spatio-temporal as well as material–institutional and discursive–strategic dimensions, paying particular attention to the role of spatio-temporal fixes in displacing and deferring contradictions and conflicts as the basis for the temporary stabilising of interstate relations, and a shrinking world society. It is emphasised that there is no single dynamic to world society but a series of conflicting dynamics with no overall logic and that this poses a series of problems, both theoretical and practical,

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on how meta-stability, if any, can be secured on a global scale. Some reflections on recent developments in systems theory are introduced to address these problems and they are linked to reflections on the ecological dominance of the world market within the overall development of world society. The final chapter by Jorge Rivas returns to some of the main themes of this volume and provides an overview of the benefits an SR approach brings to IR. It does this by comparing the possibilities offered by SR with the problems presented by constructivist approaches to IR. Above all, he addresses the hugely influential work of Alexander Wendt, and is particularly concerned with the detrimental effect of Wendt calling his approach SR. He suggests that in making the case for the scientific study of ideas in international politics, Wendt’s version of SR preserved many vestiges of the positivist model of science. In order to establish scientific validity within a discipline whose philosophical vision has not yet discarded the mistaken conflation of science and positivism, Wendt constructed a middle way between the alleged positivist/interpretivist dichotomy, rather than rejecting both altogether and turning to a fundamentally different alternative offered by philosophical realism. This chapter explains how the failure to complete the break with the positivist model of science has distorted and undermined his presentation of SR, created confusion around the content and implications of SR, and compromised the valuable philosophical potential of his wider project. Given the great importance and widespread impact of Wendt’s contributions in IR to the understanding of SR in particular and knowledge of philosophy of science in general, this chapter will refine and, where appropriate, correct Wendt’s presentation of the realist positions on ontology, epistemology, material–ideational dualism and the agent–structure relationship, with the intention of maintaining and furthering Wendt’s philosophical objectives while overcoming the limitations inherent in his presentation, and thus clarifying these vital theoretical issues for our discipline.

Notes 1. Despite their apparent closeness on some issues, CR is useful to Marxism precisely because it is different from Marxism and can therefore act as a critical tool that can subject Marxist claims to scrutiny in a way that traditional forms of Marxist philosophising cannot. There is much within the Marxist tradition that a CR approach would question, ranging from economic determinism to structural Marxism to praxis theory. And above all, CR would criticise the idealist view that Marxism can be a self-contained theory that does not need to engage with and incorporate non-Marxist approaches (see Joseph, 2001). 2. Bhaskar labels his approach transcendental to indicate the close links to Kant. This is not identical with Kant’s transcendental approach. For Kant, transcendental logic is the apparatus of concepts and principles, common to all rational minds, that organises experience and is thus logically prior to it. Thus for Kant,

30 Scientific Realism and International Relations a transcendental inquiry would be one in which a critical philosophy works out the presuppositions of our knowledge. In effect, the question: ‘What must be the case for knowledge to be possible?’ Having established these presuppositions they must be considered ahistorically, existing as they do prior to experience. It is for this reason that Kant labelled his philosophy ‘Transcendental Idealism’. Bhaskar, on the other hand, asks the question: ‘What must be the case for science to be possible?’ Now, insofar as science is a human practice with a discernible history Bhaskar’s conclusions cannot be ahistorical; that is, they provide no timeless routes to secure knowledge. Moreover, since Bhaskar’s concern is with both the ontological and the epistemological conditions of possibility for science it is simply incorrect to view him as giving ontology priority over epistemology. Science makes no sense without both dimensions. For Bhaskar, the very conditions of possibility for science require both dimensions. 3. Chernoff (2002) argues that science does not need this depth realism. However, while his points concerning the conventionality of all science are well taken – indeed SR would insist on it – the realism issue refuses to go away. The role of conventionalism in science is important, but the practice of science suggests that it is not the core of science as an inherently sceptical enterprise. No matter how much general agreement there might be concerning core issues of any science, the practice of scientists is to take any and every claim as potentially subject to doubt. But why do they do this if we have agreement and modes of validation, perhaps related to the practical implications of theories for practice? Only the commitment to realism can explain this constant process of critical enquiry. Indeed, a conventional account of science would tend towards conservativism. 4. For more detail on the relationship between SR and Marxism see Joseph (2006).

2 Reductionism, Emergence and Explanation in International Relations Theory David Leon

2.1 Introduction In contemporary international relations (IR) research there is a growing interest in anchoring explanations to microfoundations, often cast in terms of opening up ‘black boxes’ of states and disaggregating larger social actors and processes. The return to prominence of micro-level explanation can be contextualised by situating it within broader debates in various disciplines that are grappling with the central issue of reductionism vs emergence. Emergent properties, i.e. causally efficacious properties that are neither ontologically reducible to, nor analytically exhausted by, their constituent parts, have a long history in the social and biological sciences. Increasingly there is a recognition at the intersection of complex systems research, philosophy, theoretical biology and the social sciences that emergence can offer a strong rebuttal to reductionism, the idea that explanation ought to aim for progressive analytical disaggregation. After discussing the allure as well as pitfalls of reductionism, this chapter develops a typology organised along the axes of analytical explainability and ontological reducibility in order to delineate the logics and scopes of different philosophical positions in IR theory. Building on the theory of emergence and combining it with a scientific realist stance on the ontological status of causal entities, this chapter argues that there are good grounds for rejecting empiricist and reductionist arguments in favour of those which take account of emergent properties in the international system, while discussing why taking emergence seriously has consequences for substantive social research. This chapter is divided into three main sections. Section 2.2 provides a critical appraisal of various forms of reductionism, their common philosophical lineage and some of the key problems associated with them. Section 2.3 develops a typology organised along the axes of analytical explainability and ontological reducibility, illustrating that IR theory may be mapped onto four main positions – microfoundationalism, macroreductionism, non-reductive individualism, and what may be called synthetic emergentism. This section 31

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also examines the implications of adopting a philosophically realist and emergentist stance by highlighting those often unexamined background presuppositions that make theoretical explanations intelligible. Emergence theory is central to this chapter because it both undermines the reductive position and articulates a philosophically principled position that is non-Waltzian while anti-reductionist. As a working definition, an entity or property is said to be emergent if it organisationally arises out of, but is analytically irreducible to, its constituents.1 This chapter examines extensions of the baseline definition, specifies its scope conditions and indicates some of the potential contributions of emergence theory to the study of world politics. In the context of IR, the implications of emergence are that certain phenomena may be characterised as ‘emergent’ in so far as lower-level interactions and processes may result in a new structural configuration that cannot analytically be exhausted by (even complete) information about such interactions and processes. Emergent properties or entities must be dealt with on their own terms rather than be analysed in terms of their component parts. If emergence is taken seriously, IR scholars will have to rethink the reductive research strategy.

2.2 International relations theory and philosophy of social science2 Irrespective of their theoretical orientations, many contemporary IR scholars are putting more emphasis on explanations that are grounded in microfoundations. There are at least two senses in which this term has been used: the first is about the basic-level building blocks of a theory; the second has to do with how theoretical assumptions are causally linked to outcomes (e.g. Lake and Powell, 1999: 21–5). Liberal, neoclassical-realist, coalitional, as well as strategic-choice approaches have made common cause in analysing domestic institutions, organised interests, veto-players and the ‘transmission belt’ that translates individual preferences into collective political phenomena (e.g. Moravcsik, 1997; Schweller, 2006; Solingen, 1998; Snyder, 1991). Even among institutionalists – who once shared key structuralist assumptions with neo-realists – and constructivists, increasingly qualified in their commitment to methodological holism, an overriding concern now is ‘how to get from microfoundations to outcomes’ (Checkel, 1998: 242; cf. Simmons and Martin, 2002; Keohane and Martin, 2003; Finnemore and Sikkink, 2001). In short, microfoundations are sought after; structural theories appear outmoded, and calls for ‘reintegrating’ IR and domestic politics ring louder than ever (e.g. Russett, 2003; Caporaso, 1997). Werner et al. (2003: 1–2) express the sentiment for this movement succinctly, arguing that IR and domestic politics ‘can be unified under a single theoretical framework that focuses attention on political leaders as actors interested in attaining and maintaining themselves in power while subject to institutional and other political constraints’. While recognising that this line of inquiry may be ‘reductionist’, Fearon (1998: 290) observes that many of the ‘domestic-political

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explanations’ are ‘essentially case studies plus the argument that a particular foreign policy choice or international outcome can be explained only by invoking some facet of a state’s domestic politics’. 2.2.1 Inter-theoretic reduction, social science and international relations Analytical reductionism of the type that is being advocated in earnest in IR theory today comes under different labels and appears in various disciplines. A key, albeit often implicit, assumption that unites these microfoundational, individualist or broadly reductive approaches in both natural and social sciences is that higher-level predicates such as ‘minds’, ‘structures’, ‘institutions’ and ‘states’ are only constructs that stand in for their lower-level building blocks. The physicist Robert Laughlin has defined reductionism as the idea that ‘things will necessarily be clarified when they are divided into smaller and smaller component parts’ (2005: xv).3 To give an often cited example in the natural sciences provided by Nagel (1961), what we in ordinary language call ‘temperature’ has been shown to be reductively identifiable with ‘mean molecular kinetic energy’. For many, the attractiveness and persistence of reductive research lie in the fact that knowledge gained through the disaggregation of entities or properties into their components seems to promise a more informative or even more complete understanding than that which could be offered by the deliberate bracketing of the lower level. The closest parallel to Nagel’s classic example in IR is probably the proverbial ‘black box’: the state,4 which is increasingly seen as reducible – and epiphenomenal – to preferences held by political entrepreneurs and coalitions, who logroll, bargain or otherwise act through various political channels; epiphenomenal because the ‘state’ is seen as causally inert in a way that individual or group preferences are not. This ontological stance has a direct bearing on causality and explanation. Mahoney, for example, argues that ‘[t]he population level does not exhibit any “emergent” properties that cannot be reduced to (i.e. explained in terms of) processes that occur in the individual cases. Causation at the population level is thus ephiphenomenal; case-level causation is ontologically prior to population-level causation’ (Mahoney, 2008: 414). On this view, the progress of IR theory hinges on its ability to explicate the microprocesses of international outcomes. As Keohane and Martin (2003: 96) put it in a programmatic statement, ‘[f]or international relations theory to make really significant progress, it will need to … explain variations in state preferences … to develop theories with microfoundations, that is, theories that begin with individuals and groups’. If the case for reductionism (under whatever name) is that corporate entities in international politics are only more or less useful fictions, and that international outcomes ought to be progressively explicated in terms of microfoundations, then it also implies that individual human beings are the rock-bottom causes. Yet if causal powers are said to rest with individuals, it seems that there is no reason to stop reducing them further to, say, their psychological states

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and thence to neural networks and biochemical processes, if those are the ‘real’ causes (cf. Jackson and Nexon, 1999: 322). In philosophy of science this is called inter-theoretic reduction, the notion that theories containing higher-level predicates or terms ought in principle to be reducible to those stated in terms of lower-level ones, i.e. the reduction of supposedly less fundamental theories to more fundamental ones (Nagel, 1961; Sklar, 1967; Popper, 1986: 345–56; cf. Nickles, 1973: 182; Kincaid, 1986; Humphreys, 1997b).5 This was a main tenet of the unity-of-science thesis once widely held by positivist philosophers of science (cf. Kolakowski, 1969: 8–10; Oppenheim and Putnam, 1958). To be able to make a reductive explanation that subsumes theories involving higherlevel abstractions or ‘black boxes’ is seen as a step forward. A key implication of inter-theoretic reduction is that higher-level (or ‘special’) sciences such as politics, sociology and psychology are reducible to lower-level (physical) ones – physiology, neuroscience and ultimately microphysics (cf. Zahle, 2003; Strevens, 2003: Ch. 5; Fodor, 1974 [1994]; Salmon, 1998: 69). On this positivist view, the social sciences are simply pragmatic analytical measures or even confessions of temporary ignorance, awaiting the gradual discovery of underlying physical laws that can truly explain the micro-level causes of aggregate behaviours and effects.6 While inter-theoretic reduction may seem absurd for most IR scholars and other social scientists, they often partake of some circumscribed versions (e.g. methodological individualism) of this more general philosophical view. This notion of science, while providing fuel for scientific research, has already been rejected as untenable by most philosophers of science since the 1970s (cf. Kim, 1999: 3-4), and the limits of reductionism in scientific research are increasingly recognised as emergence has returned to scientific and philosophical debates (cf. Bedau and Humphreys, 2008).7 Reductive research has, however, been transplanted to various social science disciplines. In fact, there is a growing interest among some scholars in using cognitive or biological independent variables to explain political crises, attitude formation, identity and culture at the level of genes and testosterone (Alford et al., 2005; Carmen, 2007; McDermott et al., 2007). Elster (2007: 258–9), apparently still very smitten with the reductive scientific model, contends that ‘reductionism is the engine of progress in science’ and that ‘reductionism is a progressive and antireductionism an obstructionist force in science’. Though sceptical of a ‘nuts-and-bolts view of social action’ where knowledge of ‘inside-the-box relationships’ is favoured, Gerring (2007: 175–6) has nonetheless observed that ‘[m]acro is out, micro is in’ – research has shifted to causes that are close to outcomes, viz., proximate causes. Recently the search for explanatory microfoundations has become a major preoccupation for many IR scholars as well. The reductive research programme manifests itself in IR as research strategies that are reductionist to the level of individuals and groups, often driven by the belief that increasingly sophisticated models of domestic processes and/or individual preferences can at last banish the supposed indeterminacy of structural logics (cf. Haggard, 1991).

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Two highly visible developments are the strategic-choice literature and Moravcsik’s (1997, 2003) attempt to systematise the argument for microfoundationalism on behalf of liberal IR theory. For strategic-choice theorists, ‘the processes of socialization remain constant over a single “round” of interaction’ so that preferences can be assumed to be fixed for analytical purposes (Lake and Powell, 1999). Recognising the limits of such an assumption, Lake and Powell (1999: 33) argue that preference formation can be analysed through disaggregation, where problems of fixed preferences are viewed as ‘boxes within boxes’, and can be tackled by breaking an ‘actor down into a more basic set of actors … [and] by looking to the behavior and interaction of substate actors’. Disaggregation is assumed to be central to explanation. From a different theoretical perspective, and drawing on the Lakatosian model of scientific progress (Lakatos, 1970), Moravcsik argues likewise. He states that a ‘core’ assumption of liberal IR theory is that ‘the fundamental actors in international politics are individuals and private groups … [whose demands] are treated’ as ‘analytically prior to politics’ (1997: 516–17) and as ‘exogenous causes of the interests underlying state behavior’ (2003: 161). The ‘state’ in this attempted synthesis of major IR theories, is not a unitary actor, but a representative institution that translates individual and societal preferences into policies to be executed by political leaders operating under constraints. One such constraint is the distribution of capabilities and information, the main analytical foci of neo-realism and institutionalism, respectively. Moravcsik claims that liberalism is a systemic theory ‘in the strict Waltzian sense’ (2003: 166). His emphasis on policy interdependence notwithstanding, it is difficult to see how a theory which treats individuals as analytically and ontologically prior to larger social collectives and which insists on the disaggregation of the state can be non-reductive. One possible solution is to understand strategic behaviour not psychologically, but ‘externally’ (Satz and Ferejohn, 1994; Lovett, 2006), or to theorise microfoundations not as rock-bottom causes but rather as consistency tests, i.e. macro-level theories should not contradict what is known about micro-level behaviour (cf. George and Bennett, 2005: 140–2).8 In broad agreement with Moravcsik’s individualist critique of the earlier, more structuralist institutionalism, Keohane and Martin (2003: 96) argue that institutionalists and IR scholars more generally need to do more research on domestic institutions and to develop theories with microfoundations. At least two assumptions underwrite this view on the nature of IR theory: one is that analytical reduction provides better specifications of the actual causal mechanisms (individuals and groups) responsible for producing observable effects and outcomes. The other is that IR theory has reached a point where the (more or less) useful categories of systems and even states ought to be jettisoned in favour of concrete micro-level interactions and processes. As Keohane and Martin put it, ‘Institutionalist theory … [is moving] farther from its neorealist roots, putting more emphasis on agency, less

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on structure’ because structures are now considered instances of ‘analytical convenience’ used to create a ‘rhetorical effect’ (2003: 103, 81). In short, this conception of scientific progress in IR is a call for a more sophisticated form of methodological individualism. 2.2.2 Methodological and ontological individualism Methodological individualism (MI) refers to the view that explanations of outcomes and behaviours, including international ones, ought to be articulated in terms of groups or individuals. The renewed focus on explicating individual and group preferences and dynamics as the foundation of IR theory closely echoes Karl Popper’s (1957) and J. W. N. Watkins’s (1957: 105–6) view that ‘the ultimate constituents of the social world are individual people … [and] every complex social situation, institution, or event is the result of a particular configuration of individuals, their dispositions, situations, beliefs, and physical resources and environment’. In an influential articulation of MI, for example, James Coleman (1990: 19–20) argues that individualist theories of macro-social phenomena involve what he calls Type I, Type II and Type III relations, namely: a macro-to-micro transition, the explanation of individual actions, and a micro-to-macro transition. MI proceeds by first disaggregating social phenomena into explainable micro-level actions and then by reaggregating these micro-level actions at the macro-level. MI is often taken as an epistemological claim about how world politics should be analysed. A number of scholars (Ashley, 1984: 243; Wendt, 1987; Wimsatt, 2000: 283–7; Wight, 2006a: Ch. 3) have pointed out, however, that MI is not only an epistemological thesis: it necessarily implies ontological assumptions whereby (a) individuals are designated as ontological building blocks from which social entities or relations are derived, and (b) higherlevel social entities are only different scalar representations of people and could therefore be reduced to, ‘conflated with’, and analysed ultimately in terms of, them (cf. Archer, 1995; Bhargava, 1992; Searle, 2008). MI, then, makes sense only in terms of its commitment to ontological individualism. Microfoundationalism, which is used here to designate positions that are committed to both the methodological and ontological strands of reductionism, stems from an empiricist notion of science that has been rejected by many philosophers of science, particularly though not exclusively the scientific realists.9 One of the core scientific realist arguments is that causally efficacious entities or properties are real, even if unobservable (Boyd, 1973; Bhaskar, 1975; 1998 [1979]). As Grover Maxwell (1962: vii) puts it in his classic piece, ‘The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities’, unobservables such as ‘electrons, photons, and even electromagnetic fields are just as real, and exist in the same full-blooded sense, as chairs, tables, or sense impressions’. This is the case despite their being observable only through their effects. In other words, both observables and unobservables are capable of

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producing observable consequences, so the latter cannot be rejected a priori as legitimate referents or objects of study. In short, empiricism’s disparaging views of theories with unobservables unwarrantably restrict the universe of valid causal claims and foreclose arguments about the relational and structural dimensions of social systems (Shapiro and Wendt, 1992: 204).10 One further reason for rejecting the empiricist criteria for determining the ontological status of social objects and hence whether such objects can be included in theoretical explanations is that while observability–unobservability constitutes a continuum, existence–non-existence is a dichotomy (Kukla, 1998: 130, 9; Maxwell, 1962: 7–9, 14). Thus, the existence or non-existence of an entity or property cannot be determined by its observational status. So, for instance, while the state is invisible, that is not to say that it is no more than the sum total of societal interests; similarly, society, in a meaningful sense, is not simply an aggregation of people, or of individual practices (Bhaskar, 1998 [1979]: Ch. 2). For another example, in IR, a largely underappreciated insight from recent work in the bargaining theory of war is that private information is key to understanding war, even if that means war is, at the point of outbreak, very difficult to predict (Frieden and Lake, 2005: 148; Clark and Reed, 2005: 611). The empiricist fallacy is to assume that sense-data – observable properties, powers, and parts at various levels (Harrison and Singer, 2006: 26; Singer, 1971: 17) – have a privileged role in explanation.11 2.2.3

Reductionism and aggregativity

The ontological–individualist view of the world takes entities or properties to be summative, resolutive–compositive or aggregative.12 Even when enthusiasm about inter-theoretic reduction was in its heyday, Nagel and Quine – two representatives of that view – argued that inter-theoretic reduction would be possible only if certain demands are met, namely: that there is a synthetic identity of all entities of the reduced theory with the entities of the reducing theory which can be specified, and that a one-to-one correspondence (type identity) between the predicates or type descriptions of the reduced theory and the reducing theory be established through a series of ‘bridge laws’ (Nagel, 1961; Zahle, 2003: 80). It has become clear, however, that the required bridge laws, which are supposed to provide the grounds for reduction, likely do not exist for complex social phenomena. In the natural sciences, things like mass, energy, momentum and net charge are truly aggregative, but it is generally hard to find entities or properties that satisfy the conditions for aggregativity or decomposability, especially when it comes to complex social systems (Niiniluoto, 1999: 22; Wimsatt, 1997). In the social sciences, ‘balance of power’, ‘a monopoly over the legitimate use of organised violence’ and ‘anarchy’ are approximations of, or candidates for, emergent properties or configurations. IR scholars such as Beyerchen (1992: 61–2) and Jervis (1997: 12–13) have argued that aggregativity and proportionality – changes in the outputs of a system

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being proportional to changes in the inputs – constitute linearity; this is in agreement with Wimsatt’s (1997, 2000) notion of emergence as failure of aggregativity. Non-linear social systems exhibit behavioural patterns that are indicative of the disjuncture between inputs and outputs (i.e. minor changes leading to disproportionately large or consequential effects), at times involving interactions in which the whole has become different from the sum of the parts, a transformation that can be seen as the social analogue of phase transitions in nature. International anarchy – whether it be theorised in materialist terms, as the absence of a powerful state capable of imposing a ‘domestic’ hierarchy on a world scale (Waltz, 1979; Mearsheimer, 2001), or in ideational terms, as Hobbesian, Lockean or Kantian culture (Wendt, 1999) – makes sense only as an environmental causal force. It is no coincidence, then, that Waltz and Wendt, two of the most influential IR theorists in the past 30 years, have both devoted much effort to building a philosophical basis for accounting for structure, before turning to defending a theoretical position, be it realist or constructivist, that carries import for substantive research. In the same vein, the rest of this chapter discusses different philosophical bases for IR theory, before providing a defence of a synthetic form of emergence and outlining its implications for social research.

2.3 Emergent properties and international relations theory In philosophy of science, IR – like other social sciences – is considered a high-level or special science vis-à-vis those at the lower, especially physical, levels (cf. Strevens, 2003; Fodor, 1994 [1974]). The objects of inquiry in IR are several layers removed from what ontological individualists consider to be constitutive of the social world. From the standpoint of emergence theory, that poses no problem, since it is readily accepted that social systems are entities with emergent causal powers – entities which are composed of, but not reducible to, other entities, such as groups and human beings, who in turn have their own emergent properties in relation to still lower levels. Emergent properties exist at all levels of organisation. Now, the argument in defence of emergence should not be construed to mean that reductive research strategies can never be useful to social (or natural) scientists. ‘Micro’ and ‘macro’ are relative terms that can denote individuals, parties, institutions, states and systems, depending on the question at hand. The concern of this chapter, however, is a general one that has to do with the international. 2.3.1 Emergence: a working baseline While different conceptions of emergence exist, there is broad agreement regarding its main features: a complex system, be it natural or social, can exhibit properties that are neither reducible to and/or explainable in terms of its component parts, even if it is composed of them. Such properties,

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including causal powers, are often considered ‘novel’ in the sense that they belong to the emergent level of organisation (the higher or macro-level) and not to the constituting parts (the lower or micro-level) (cf. Kim, 1999; Niiniluoto, 1999: 22; Elder-Vass, 2007: 413–15; Cunningham, 2001). An early articulation of the concept of emergence (or rather a forerunner of it) can be found in John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic (1906 [1843]: 243), where he argues that no mere summing up of parts would amount to an organised whole. Unlike the laws of vector addition of forces, certain chemical compounds have properties and dispositions that are non-aggregative. A distinction can be made between an emergent and a resultant: an emergent is non-aggregative and is not reductively explainable – its properties are novel, whereas a resultant exhibits linearity and is aggregative, predictable and thus analytically reducible to its constituents (Ablowitz, 1939; Kim, 1999; Tienson, 2002: 94–6). Things such as solidity, liquidity and consciousness are often cited as examples of emergence. It is a well-established fact in solid state chemistry that the electronic structure and the long-range atomic order, and not just the chemical bonding, of the elements are central to understanding the properties of an object (Sadoway, 2004). In IR, Cederman (2005: 882) has argued that under conditions where ‘complex networks exhibit general patterns and regularities’, ‘macrolevel effects occur irrespectively of the particular microlevel mechanisms involved’. As we shall see, other scholars, ranging from philosophers to social scientists, have contended that emergent properties exhibit causal powers that are peculiar to the emergent level of organisation. Emergent causal powers are sometimes downplayed in various (‘thinner’) forms of emergence but are central to what this chapter calls the synthetic emergence position, as examined below. The implications of emergence for social inquiry were becoming clear even in Durkheim’s time when he argued that the combination of individuals would give rise to a novel emergent entity called ‘society’, situated ‘outside the consciousness of individuals as such, in the same way as the distinctive features of life lie outside the chemical substances that make up a living organism’ (Durkheim, 1982 [1895]: 39–40). The contemporary literature on emergence often notes that its implications can, mutatis mutandis, be generalised to any whole–parts relations, including social and political ones (cf. Bhaskar, 1998 [1979]; Jervis, 1997: 15–17; Humphreys, 1997a: S337; Sawyer, 2005; Zahle, 2003). The following section analyses some of the key philosophical issues surrounding emergence – focusing on non-reductive individualism and synthetic emergence. It tries to show that these often abstract issues impinge on, and have important implications for, IR theory. 2.3.2 A conceptual map of emergence A conceptual map of emergence (Figure 2.1), organised along the axes of ontological reducibility and analytical explainability, can illustrate how

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different versions of emergence stand in relation to reductionism and its explanatory foci. For our purposes here, one of the most important differences among scholars has to do with whether or not they view emergence as compatible with ontological individualism. At least four implicit philosophies of IR theory are possible on this two-dimensional conceptual map, each of which corresponds to a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions about the nature and study of international politics. They are: (A) microfoundationalism, (B) macroreductionism, (C) non-reductive individualism (NRI), and (D) synthetic emergentism.13 Additionally, segments of complexity theory, as variants of emergence, will also be examined. As examined in Section 2.1, (A) tacitly denies the reality of structures and corporate actors and is a ‘thick’ individualist position entailing ontological and analytical reduction. By contrast, (B) tends to argue for the causal efficacy of the whole in relation to the parts, and (C) and (D) represent two ways in which emergence theory may be articulated. At the level of ontology, (A) and (C) are committed to individualism, a form of philosophical anti-realism, which holds that emergent social properties or configurations have no ontological status and only serve as shorthand analytical categories, whereas (B) accepts the (thin) ontological non-reductive thesis that such entities are capable of producing observable effects (as opposed to being causally inert), and (D) goes further and argues that emergent properties are not useful fictions and have downward causal powers in their own right. At the level of epistemology, (A) and (B) accept (the former explicitly and the latter only implicitly) a form of MI which holds that emergent properties, whatever their ontological status, ought to be explained by reference to their microfoundations (e.g. through analytical disaggregation or unit-level filters), whereas (C) and (D) hold that emergent properties require some form of higher-level causation, but they differ on the form that it should take. Some IR scholars implicitly incorporate elements of emergence theory into their accounts. The question is whether all accounts of emergence can equally sustain a non-reductive philosophy of science for IR theory, which is necessary for it to counter the claims of inter-theoretic reduction. After laying out the scope conditions for, and logics of, various positions on emergence, including complexity theory, I specify some of the conditions under which synthetic emergentism is best suited for the development of theories that are capable of characterising the irreducible properties of international politics as a complex social system. In other words, this chapter defends a form of structuralism, albeit one which has to be respecified and reformulated. Macroreductionism Macroreductionism, or cell (B), is a somewhat unusual position and accordingly there are relatively few IR theories that occupy this conceptual space, although

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Ontological reducibility

Explainable by reference to the micro-level

Reducible

Irreducible

(A) Microfoundationalism

(B) Macroreductionism

(C) Non-reductive individualism

(D) Synthetic emergentism

Analytical explainability

Unexplainable by reference only to the micro-level

Figure 2.1 Philosophical positions on emergence in IR theory

as Goddard and Nexon (2005: 12–13) have pointed out, Mearsheimer’s (2001) ‘offensive’ realism and Wallerstein’s (1974) world systems theory approximate this philosophical outlook. Macroreductionist theories argue that states are motivated by the political or economic structure of the international system. Varieties of globalisation theory, such as Thomas Friedman’s (2000) concept of the ‘golden straitjacket’, are indicative of macroreductionism. Theories of this kind can be said to accept systemic and environmental conditions as emergent but still account for international outcomes or effects in terms of local decisions or ‘filters’ after the relevant structural determinants and constraints have been specified.14 A non-reductive individualism? An important variant of emergence theory which has been advanced in recent years in the philosophical and sociological literature is R. Keith Sawyer’s (2002, 2003, 2005) non-reductive individualism (NRI), or cell (C) in the figure. It is important to analyse it because the theory of synthetic emergence, to be defended below, is formulated at least partially in reaction to this innovative but ultimately flawed contribution. Building on nonreductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind, Sawyer has argued that NRI can have potentially useful implications for the social sciences. Nonreductive physicalism is an attempt to come to terms with the mind–brain problem, where anti-reductionist philosophers of mind argue that mental states are (1) irreducible to and relatively autonomous from (physical) brain

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states, even if they rely on physical instantiations; and (2) they have sui generis higher-level causes not derived from lower-level brain states. Just as emergentists in the philosophy of mind argue that the mental has causal powers which are not reducible to the physical (i.e. the mind-to-brain reduction) while subscribing to physicalism, so, some scholars argue, social scientists can deny that corporate actors or emergent phenomena have ontological status and still approach them non-reductively (Udehn, 2002).15 As a philosophy of social science, NRI advances an argument against MI, while accepting the idea that only individuals exist in the social world, i.e. ontological individualism, or what Patomäki and Wight (2000) – in philosophical usage – call anti-realism. Like Wendt (1999), Sawyer draws on the multiple realisability argument, but arrives at a different position (NRI). At its simplest, the multiple realisability argument holds that a higher-level predicate can be realised in multiple and radically heterogeneous ways by lower-level properties (cf. Witmer, 2000: 278). In political science, Shapiro (2004: 30) has formulated this problematic in terms of multiple true descriptions, where determining the ‘right descriptive cut’ or finding the ‘right sorting criterion’ is a matter of problematising descriptions of social reality. Put differently, particular descriptions of the ontological status of a social fact would yield different strategies – with varying degrees of germaneness – for studying that fact. Theorising the state in terms of multiple realisability, Wendt (1999: 164) argues that the state could be realised by a wide range of internal organisational and political arrangements, practices, actions and dispositions, even as there might be certain necessary (for him, Weberian) conditions for being what he calls ‘the state-as-such’. Radically different lowerlevel descriptions or properties such as being ‘democratic’, ‘authoritarian’, ‘liberal’ or ‘fascist’ and other finer-grained distinctions – e.g. parliamentary vs presidential systems; plurality vs proportional representation models – can all realise the higher-level predicate ‘state’. The same logic holds for ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘collective identity’ or ‘culture’ (Zahle, 2003: 84, 89). Although non-reductive individualism is an important rejoinder to methodological individualism, it takes an anti-(philosophical) realist ontological position with respect to social structures and configurations, which undermines the case for social or higher-level causation. It is true that if the conditions for radically heterogeneous realisations hold, a multiply realisable property exists, and micro-to-macro causation becomes highly difficult. But aside from having analytic consequences (anti-reductionism), multiple realisability also means that the higher level becomes relatively autonomous and ontologically irreducible as well. It is partly because of relative autonomy that higher-level or anti-reductionist explanations can be theoretically tenable. Non-reductive individualists, however, believe that ‘[s]ocial properties do not have autonomous causal force, because their causal consequences obtain in virtue of their realizing individual supervenience base’ (Sawyer, 2003: 207).16 Put differently, for NRI, causal powers reside in the lower level(s)

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and the socially emergent is in fact causally inert. This position is problematic because properties are only considered emergent if they are qualitatively different from, and could not be possessed by or reduced to, a lower level (Silberstein and McGeever, 1999: 186; Humphreys, 1997a: S342). Within IR, Waltzian structural realism most closely resembles the philosophical posture of NRI, for it seeks to counter the tendency to reduce systemic properties to the characteristics of units, arguing for instance that order and stable patterns persist in spite of changes and variations at the micro-level. Analytically, it aspires to be an anti-reductionist programme. On the other hand, powerful states in the international system are analogised to major firms in a market (namely, an oligopolistic market) so the causal efficacy of structure seems on this view to be ultimately explainable by reference to the properties of major parts even if those properties (e.g. material capabilities) are understood in loosely relational terms (e.g. the relative distribution of capabilities throughout the system, constituting a particular polar configuration). As Fearon (1998: 294) has pointed out, however, while state desire for survival may be a reasonable assumption in general, it is hardly the logical outcome of a purportedly structural theory built on micro-economistic foundations. Maximisation of gains, not survival per se, is the primary motive of firms in neoclassical theory. If shareholder value can be enhanced through mergers or acquisitions, the existence or the identity of the firm itself becomes a secondary concern. The same cannot be said of the state or of political communities. Waltz’s particular notion of market ontology and its attendant instrumentalism thus inadvertently undermine the case for non-reductive inquiry in IR theory.17 In an important sense, this can be seen as a consequence of adopting a form of non-reductive individualism because while NRI holds that emergent entities or configurations are able to produce observable, tangible effects independently of their realising lower-level properties, those entities or configurations have not been postulated to be real, or they have been analogised to fictitious or unsuitable entities. Thus, in sharing the same anti(philosophical) realist ontological commitments with microfoundationalism, NRI’s – and Waltz’s – analytical programme of structural theorising is compromised. Although Wendt (1999) has employed the concept of supervenience (in addition to multiple realisability) in IR theory, he now appears to have some reservations about supervenience without repudiating it (2004: 302, fn. 56; 305, fn. 72). Unlike Sawyer, however, Wendt has maintained a scientific realist position regarding social ontology, and should not be regarded as holding an NRI position. 2.3.3 Synthetic emergence and social explanation Synthetic emergence, cell (D), adopts the multiple realisability argument, but rejects NRI’s hidden ontological individualism and substitutes in its place a non-reductive view towards social ontology and causation. Against

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NRI, and pace Wendt, the emergence argument advanced here holds that the supervenience thesis cannot, as we have seen, be easily (if at all) accommodated within the framework of emergence, nor can it support a downward causation argument in international politics. Thus, though NRI may seem an attractive alternative due to the perceived need for ‘compromise’ and injunctions against reifying social structures, it cannot serve as an adequate framework onto which properly anti-reductionist theories of international politics are grafted. To distinguish synthetic emergence from other varieties of emergentism (e.g. NRI) and also to make clear why the particular strand of emergence theory being advanced here is ‘synthetic’, the question of complexity theory needs to be examined, if briefly (cf. Brunk, 2002; Holland, 1998). There are at least two views on complexity within the political science literature: agentbased and emergent. A major part of the former focuses on simulations of artificial societies and agent-based modelling, which often begin by specifying a set of basic rules for individual agent behaviour and for the interaction of these agents in a system. Cooperation, in Axelrod’s (1984, 1997) well-known example, is said to emerge from the interactions of lower-level actors operating under ‘tit-for-tat’ rules. Similarly, Jervis (1997) has emphasised emergent properties in social systems and reinterpreted Waltzian realism to mean that systemic patterns of balancing are maintained through unit-level responses to local threats without any central coordination. Indeed, Waltz himself has called this a form of ‘organized complexity’, where ‘[o]rder may prevail without an orderer; adjustments may be made without an adjuster; tasks may be allocated without an allocator’ (Waltz, 1979: 77; cf. Beyerchen, 1992). While not employing an emergence argument (of the NRI variant) explicitly, Waltz’s critique of reductionism begins with the specification of an international ‘system’ composed of a ‘structure’ and ‘interacting units’ (1979; cf. James, 2002: Ch. 4). This system is characterised by (1) an ordering principle, anarchy, that is, the absence of a world sovereign authority, (2) states as units of the system, functionally undifferentiated and similar to one another, and (3) the relative distribution of capabilities within the system. As pointed out above, while Waltz’s goal of developing an anti-reductionist theory points in the right general direction, his reliance on microeconomic analogies and the invisible hand metaphor does not address the issue of ontological reductionism in neo-realist theory. Wendt (1987: 341–2) has rightly pointed out that though Theory of International Politics aspires to explanatory anti-reductionism, it founders – like NRI – on a tacitly individualist or at least instrumentalist social ontology. Perhaps alone among political realists, Copeland (2000: 198) recognises that without a philosophically realist scaffolding for structure, structural theory will always be vulnerable to the challenge of reductionism from the social ontological flank. Although work in the agent-based complexity genre has sometimes been characterised as ‘emergent’, and one of its aims is to show the inadequacy

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of reductionism, it is not entirely clear how social structures constructed from the ground up can be considered irreducible, much less how they can exert downward causal powers. This is crucial, because one of the key reasons for structural entities or configurations to be taken seriously is because they are emergent, and can exercise causal powers which govern or regulate the lower levels (cf. Wendt, 2003: 500; Silberstein and McGeever, 1999: 182). Reductionism, taking its own ontological commitments seriously, would have to reject downward causation, whereas anti-reductionism would defend it. This point is not in dispute for either side of the reduction vs emergence debate in the social sciences, the philosophy of mind, or in theoretical and systems biology (cf. Brodbeck, 1968: 283; Kim, 1999: 19; Rosenberg and Kaplan, 2005). Unlike most other agent-based theorists in political science, Cederman – who has used complexity theory to model state formation (1994), the democratic peace (2001) as well as the power-law patterns of the size of wars (2003) – recognises the importance for complexity research to adopt a more emergentist approach that incorporates downward causation. The reason for this is that in most agent-based models, agents have very ‘primitive cognitive capacity’ and operate under few and unrealistically simple rules, which means that such models ‘conceive of emergent properties as epiphenomenal configurations … that do not feed back down to the microlevel’ (Cederman, 2005: 877). This observation rightly alludes to the need for the explanatory component of synthetic emergence to be articulated in terms of downward causation. Besides a scientific realist view towards social structures, then, it is the downward causation argument that distinguishes synthetic emergence from NRI and microfoundationalism, neither of which can well support a downward causal argument in virtue of their ontological presuppositions. This is significant because while emergentism and reductionism both share a layered view of ontological organisation, the latter implicitly accepts the inter-theoretic reduction thesis, whereas emergence theory holds that different levels of organisation have irreducible causal powers and propensities (Wendt, 2003: 499; Emmeche et al., 2000; Wight, 2006a). In this sense, that which is international has relative causal and ontological autonomy from the lower levels, but does not attain absolute analytical priority. Thus, this conception separates the theory of emergence not only from inter-theoretic reduction and MI, but also from Waltzian and Wallersteinian structuralism. International politics is considered to be neither strictly explicable by reference to microfoundations, nor structurally (pre)determinate. Downward causation does not sit very well with conventional notions of causation in IR. This is partly because Humeanism has for a long time been dominant in IR research (cf. Hollis and Smith, 1990; Kurki, 2008: Ch. 3). This causal model posits that causal relationships are established by a regularity of conjoined events (or constant conjunction of events).18 Downward causation,

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by contrast, is a form of higher-level explanation that involves emergent configurations or properties; its causal mechanisms can be formal, generative or regulatory, not necessarily efficient (cf. Wendt, 2003; Emmeche et al., 2000). In an early work on systems, Kaplan (1957: 89) may be said to have identified some of the features of downward causation when he describes regulation as the ‘process by means of which a system attempts to maintain or preserve its identity over time as it adapts to changing conditions’. Today the idea that multiply realised emergent configurations are capable of preserving macro-structures by ‘filtering out’ micro-level fluctuations is once again gaining traction and attention (Hooker, 2004: 470; Bar-Yam et al., 2009). Downward causation works through higherlevel boundary conditions that regulate the developmental trajectories of their lower-level components. A case in point in the social world could be Wendt’s cultures of anarchy. From the standpoint of downward causation, structures do not so much cause lower-level events as constitute, constrict and regulate them.19 It is concerned primarily with what kinds of structural configurations are, the tendencies and powers peculiar to them, and their relations and effects on the lower level, and only secondarily with prediction (cf. Bhaskar, 1975: 18). Since some lower-level outcomes and interactions obtain in virtue of causal relations at the emergent level of organisation, a key explanatory strategy of synthetic emergence would be to ‘account for the properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue of which they exist’ (Wendt, 1998: 105; cf. Kaplan, 1957: 89–93). In theorising power, for example, Barnett and Duvall (2005) have argued that the effects of power can be produced at a social distance and through relations of constitution, in addition to being the direct outcome of agentic interactions. If research is guided primarily by a focus on agent-specific and micro-level mechanisms, the multifaceted character of power in international politics will be overlooked. Similarly, if institutions are indeed authoritative social forms for the distribution of resources, knowledge and/or information, then examining ‘domestic institutional conditions that make it rational to delegate authority to international institutions’ – a research frontier for institutionalists (Simmons and Martin, 2002: 205; Hawkins et al., 2006) – will likely fail to capture the spatial or temporal distance that imparts authority to international institutions (Barnett and Duvall, 2005: 51; cf. Gruber, 2000; Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Moe, 2006). Authority, in this sense, should be seen as an emergent property, rather than simply as a derivative phenomenon. Clearly, not every property is emergent and not every institution has the property of being ‘authoritative’. Insofar as an institution is authoritative at all, however, it can no more be considered the product of particular, resource-laden actors, than law can be regarded as specific pieces of legislation or the work of individual legislators through a ‘reductive translation’ (cf. Dworkin, 1986: 168–9, 228–9). Institutionalisation means that power

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cannot be fully monopolised, nor can control over social or international outcomes be guaranteed (cf. Grafstein, 1992: 36). Put differently, the degree of authority may be inversely related to the extent to which an institution can be reduced to, or derived from, its delegating microfoundations. An emergent view would conceptualise social phenomena not only organisationally but also temporally. Ontological presuppositions impinge on the levels at which social explanation is provided, as well as on the time horizons which it covers.20 Different levels of social life and organisational forms move at different speeds (Archer, 1995: Ch. 3). Attention to the microlevel, while important, often translates willy-nilly into a neglect of causes and effects that have longer time horizons in part because of the implicit assumption that all causes are operative in the same instance or at the same speed.21 It is not coincidental that in reductive explanations causality is often ‘attributed to those factors that … are temporally proximate to outcomes of interest …’ (Pierson, 2003: 203). This can in turn lead to erroneous causal inferences in accounts of institutional autonomy,22 democratic transitions, state-building and other phenomena (cf. Pierson, 2004). Theorising emergence has major implications for social-scientific research because it can help researchers guard against or avoid erroneous causal and time-sensitive inferences that draw attention away from what Pierson (2003) has identified as threshold effects, cumulative events and causal chains in the study of macrosocial processes. Taking emergence theory seriously is therefore an important step towards removing the theoretical and conceptual blind spots created by the hidden peculiarities of an empiricist and reductionist philosophy of science.

2.4 Discussion and conclusion Emergence theory, much like rationalism and constructivism, is crossdisciplinary and meta-theoretical in nature. Political contents, both theoretical and empirical, have to be grafted onto the framework in order to generate substantive knowledge and insights about world politics (cf. Snidal, 2002: 74–5; Finnemore and Sikkink, 2001: 393). This chapter has set out to consider what is really a prior question or debate; it has sought both to show the inadequacy of different forms of reductive approaches in IR theory and to introduce ‘synthetic emergence’ as a necessary corrective to reductive versions of emergence. This chapter has endeavoured to show that the search for explanatory microfoundations in IR theory is embedded within complexes of epistemological claims that feed on background ontological commitments in the form of a reductive philosophy of science. Microfoundationalism and other forms of reductive approaches are susceptible to the challenge of intertheoretic reduction, which means either that individualists in IR (and in the social sciences generally) are not coherent individualists, or that they must

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have had an implicit, if unexamined, theory of emergence about the social microfoundations of international politics. After all, taking individuals and groups to be primary analytical units means that mechanisms internal to these units are bracketed and that these units are assumed – albeit tacitly – to be emergent in some meaningful sense. Reduction and emergence are incompatible philosophies that set different aims and scopes for substantive theories, in this case, theories of IR. On the assumption that few IR scholars would subscribe to the programme of inter-theoretic reduction once they had realised its connection to individualism in the social sciences, the question then becomes whether they would acknowledge (and analyse) irreducibly emergent properties at a higher, international, level. This chapter has argued that there are good social-scientific and philosophical grounds for doing so, and it has demonstrated this through a critical engagement with some key recent developments in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and social theory on reduction and emergence. Developments in these and other fields provide the contours for a reasoned defence of the continuing relevance of structural analysis in IR theory. Synthetic emergence theory subscribes to a scientific realist view on the ontological status of emergent properties and an anti-reductionist analytical component. Taking this view seriously would mean that, as those who work at the intersection of social science, philosophy and systems theories have argued, theoretical advance ‘should increase the degree and kinds of emergence postulated of system properties’, which directly contradicts the positivist and reductionist prescription that emergent and structural theorising ought to decrease over time (Wimsatt, 2000). Structural theorising is indispensable to IR, but it has to be reformulated, and this chapter has used synthetic emergence to show why it is sound to theorise emergent causal entities or configurations, even unobservable ones. The research on emergence has wide-ranging implications for natural and social systems, and is fast becoming a converging point of sophisticated research from a multitude of disciplines. This chapter has sought to situate the concept and theory of emergence in IR theory, and to indicate the promise that it holds for the study of international politics as a complex social system. Inasmuch as emergence is centrally concerned with addressing the explanatory problems confronting reductionism, it offers a fruitful conceptual framework to IR scholars and other social scientists.

Acknowledgements Special thanks go to Bud Duvall for valuable comments and discussions. For helpful suggestions I also thank Michael Barnett, Fred Chernoff, Arjun Chowdhury, the late Andy Dickinson, Jim Farr, Joe Gerteis, Patrick Jackson, Jonathan Joseph, Juha Käpylä, Harri Mikkola, Jorge Rivas, Amit Ron, Anna Shulman, Frank Shulman, Alex Wendt, Colin Wight, participants at APSA and ISA panels, and other friends and colleagues.

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Notes 1. As I argue and elaborate in Section 2.3, this useful baseline does not explicitly include the crucial part, ontological emergence, which combines the ontological autonomy of emergent entities and configurations with a critique of analytical reduction. 2. Social scientists are not obligated to look to philosophers for inspiration. The relationship between philosophy and (social) science, however, can be productive, as Grafstein has noted (1992: 9), following Nelson Goodman: ‘ “The practical scientist does the business but the philosopher keeps the books.” Sometimes, only a careful audit will reveal that business is not as good as it seemed to be.’ 3. For a discussion of different types of reductionism, see Searle (2008). 4. It need not be ‘the state’. It could be the international system, a social structure or, in fact, any social entity or configuration that has not been analytically disaggregated. 5. I agree that IR is a higher-level inquiry, but argue – below – that it is no less fundamental than lower-level inquiries because of emergence and downward causation. 6. Within political science, this sentiment is captured in quite colourful language by a scholar who argues that ‘sociogenomics’ should ‘replace the shopworn conceptions of yesterday’s political science’ (Carmen, 2007: 34; also 40). For the debate in theoretical biology between reductionism and anti-reductionism, see Rosenberg and Kaplan (2005). 7. As a prominent case in point, the Human Genome Project’s promise to provide a complete account of human life (and to devise remedies of diseases accordingly) is increasingly seen to be overstated, and has been described by some as ‘facile genetic reductionism’ (Sarkar as quoted in Goldman, 2005: 1121). 8. Also, while Lake and Powell (1999: 33) would agree with Moravcsik about the importance of microfoundations, they do seem to acknowledge that disaggregation would not be the task of ‘systemic theory’. 9. It is impossible to go into all the intricate debates between scientific realists and non/anti-scientific realists here. Still this chapter tries to show briefly why it would make sense to adopt certain scientific realist propositions with respect to emergence. For scientific realism, see e.g. Maxwell (1962), Boyd (1973), Bhaskar (1975; 1998 [1979]); Kukla (1998); Niiniluoto (1999); contributions in Archer et al. (1998); for scientific realism in IR, see e.g. Wendt (1987, 1999), Dessler (1989), Wight (2006a, 2007), Joseph (2007). For non-scientific realist and anti-scientific realist views in IR, see e.g. Jackson (2008), Kratochwil (2000) and Chernoff (2002, 2005, 2007a). 10. This is a form of the fallacy of nominalism, which issues from phenomenalism. See Kolakowski (1969: Ch. 1) and Porpora (1998: 350). 11. It can be argued that reductionism can theorise unobservables such as preferences and utility functions. However, there appears to be an instrumentalist stance towards these unobservables in practice: people are assumed to act as if they do complex calculations (often requiring formal proofs) in their minds, have stable, transitive preferences, etc. 12. Hobbes propounded an early resolutive–compositive view of politics in Leviathan (Hobbes, 1968 [1651]). 13. To avoid unnecessary neologisms, I borrow the terms ‘macroreductionism’ and ‘NRI’ from Goddard and Nexon (2005) and Sawyer (2002, 2003), respectively.

50 Scientific Realism and International Relations 14. There is a potential pitfall which is the reverse image of microfoundationalism, where human agency is entirely obliterated and all causal powers are left to the other end of the scale. Anti-reductionism, in rightly recognising environmental forces, should guard against this form of ‘macroreductionism’. See Archer (1996: Chs 2–4). 15. For parallel debates in biology, see Monetti and Albano (1997) and Korn (2005). 16. Interested readers should compare this with Sawyer (2005: 69–73), which appears to articulate a less ontologically individualist position. Yet none of his works cited in the present chapter is listed among the works that he specifically singles out as having been ‘superseded’ by his book (Sawyer, 2005: ix). 17. Waltz does allow for the possibility of ‘amalgamation’, but for theory-building purposes he still adheres to the as-if assumption that survival is the first and foremost priority. For problems of instrumentalism in Waltz (1979), see Wendt (1999: 61), Patomäki and Wight (2000: 215) and Chernoff (2002: 192). 18. Hume (1975 [1777], §7); Hempel (1970); cf. Gerring (2005). For discussions and critiques of this view, see Wendt (1998), Patomäki and Wight (2000: 222, 228), Ron (2002), Wight (2006a) and Kurki (2008). 19. This is still a form of causality, more broadly construed, i.e. in non-positivist terms. 20. The relationships among reductionism, emergence and time-sensitive explanation are intricate and can only be touched on briefly here. See Archer (1995) for an extended treatment of these issues. 21. See e.g. Scheuerman (2004: Ch. 2) for the different properties generated by the temporal separation of powers in liberal democratic political systems. 22. I explore this in another work.

3 The International as Emergent: Challenging Old and New Orthodoxies in International Relations Theory Jonathan Joseph

This contribution challenges the way that IR has traditionally set up its field of analysis and in particular the framework of system/unit. This framework has been reinforced by the work of neo-realism and the levels of analysis debate to the point where it is accepted even by many critical IR scholars. By and large the international has come to be defined as a structure or a system, while the units may range from individuals to states. This distinction runs parallel to other (perhaps more methodological) oppositions such as holism/individualism and macro/microtheory. While there are many debates as to where to place the emphasis, there are not so many debates about such distinctions themselves. This essay is concerned with showing how we might question such a way of seeing things and examines the Marxist tradition to see how things might be conceptualised differently. The first section will criticise IR approaches while the second will explore Marxist approaches. By switching attention to Marxism it can be shown how issues raised within IR such as reductionism have quite different meanings elsewhere.

3.1 IR theory: system and unit 3.1.1 From neo-realism to microtheory The system–unit relationship in IR is introduced by Singer’s level-of-analysis question of whether to focus on the parts or the whole, the components or the system, the micro or the macro (1961: 77). Transposed to IR, this means whether to focus on the international system or the actions of states. Although Waltz (1959) starts by looking at three levels or ‘images’ – the individual, state and international – he soon settles into a system–unit model while the methodological implications are presented as holist versus individualist. The level-of-analysis approach is based on a positivist understanding that social science is about finding law-like regularities,1 or in Singer’s case, looking for correlations rather than causal relations.2 51

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For Waltz the issue is whether we can understand the international as a system produced by or distinct from the units that make it up. Reductionist accounts are then defined by Waltz as those that look at the capabilities of the units rather than the system and that rather than looking at capabilities of states, we have to focus on the level of the international system. Waltz argues that reductionism fails to develop an account of international structure and is present in classical realist, liberal and socialist views. He is obviously targeting classical realism when he criticises explanations based on socio-psychological phenomena and national political and economic characteristics (Waltz, 1979: 19). For him, the international system has to be abstracted from other levels of society and politics. But the irony of Waltz’s approach is that it still has to resort to a microtheory of the parts. Structure is based on differently juxtaposed units that interact and thus produce different outcomes. Microeconomic theory upon which Waltz draws, ‘describes how an order is spontaneously formed from the self-interested acts and interactions of individual units’ (ibid., 89). Structures are emergent from this coaction of units and once formed it becomes itself a force. International-political systems, like economic markets, are formed by the coaction of self-regarding units. International structures are defined in terms of the primary political units of an era, be they city states, empires or nations. Structures emerge from the coexistence of states … International-political systems, like economic markets, are individualist in origin, spontaneously generated, and unintended … Both systems are formed and maintained on a principle of self-help that applies to the units. (ibid., 91) Without the microeconomic assumption of rational self-interested actors, Waltz’s ‘structural’ theory of international politics is unthinkable. Neo-realism entails atomistic assumptions about states being the basic units and ‘structure’ being comprised of external relations between units. Ultimately structure is nothing more than such interactions. Structural questions are no more than the arrangements of the parts of a system. Ultimately the system is a product of individual behaviour which Waltz assumes to be based on self-help or egotistical views. Thus the neo-realist conception of structure is based on stable patterns of aggregate behaviour ultimately traceable to micro-level behavioural patterns. Critics like Ashley and Wendt are right to claim that ultimately Waltz is an individualist rather than a structuralist or holist.3 As Ashley writes: ‘For the neorealist, the state is ontologically prior to the international system. The system’s structure is produced by defining states as individual unities and then by noting properties that emerge when several such unities are brought into mutual reference’ (Ashley, 1984: 240). In response to such arguments Hollis and Smith write that while this may be the starting point, once created the

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monster (the system) takes on a life of its own (Hollis and Smith, 1991: 401). But even if this might be accepted, it has to be said that the monster takes on a very particular life and the reason is because it is made up of very particular units which simply do not allow it to become, for example, a Kantian or a Lockean monster. This may be a case of international system as emergent, but the monster emerges in a very particular form. If Waltz is an individualist then, despite neo-realist insistence that analysis should be focused on structure, the schema of system and unit actually works to legitimate a certain view of the interaction of units and makes it easy for alternative approaches to resort to microfoundationism so that when, for example, the black box of the state is opened up, individuals are found to be inside. Microtheory in IR focuses on how institutions have individual foundations and claims that these are the causal factors behind such institutions. They advance the belief that by moving from the structural level to the individual level, causal connections can be established. In calling such an approach reductionist, Waltz legitimates it as the only alternative to his failed attempt at structural abstraction. Andrew Moravcsik represents a good example of the turn to microtheory with his advocacy of a ‘bottom up’ view of politics. For him the fundamental actors are individuals and private groups which are the ‘exogenous causes of the interests underlying state behaviour’ (2003: 161). Going inside institutions like the state or the bodies of the EU means looking at how individual preferences constitute national interest (thus we might say that institutions (or structures) are emergent from individuals). Despite seeming to be at odds with Waltz these approaches reinforce one another in terms of defining what is open for dispute – reductionism versus emergence – and limiting this to micro-level and structure. For Moravcsik individuals are ontologically prior to structures and institutions. For Waltz we must not be reductive, but if we were to be reductive, this is what reductionism would be. To summarise, if we take mainstream IR theory – neo-realism and neo-liberalism – as our starting point, then discussions of reduction and emergence cannot but be anything other than discussions about the relation between the micro-level (individualism) and structural (macro) level of the international. The turn to micro-level individualism further reveals and reinforces the socially impoverished view of mainstream international politics rather than challenges it. The rest of this piece will thus be concerned with finding a suitably social alternative way to conceptualise the emergent character of the international. 3.1.2

The English School

International society is about the institutionalisation of shared ideas, interests and beliefs. It is established through common rules and institutions which mediate interstate relations. This is certainly a more historical approach than neo-realism that looks at how these rules, norms and expectations evolve

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and are institutionalised.4 It can also be contrasted with other rationalist approaches like neo-liberal institutionalism which, despite accepting cooperation in the form of things like international regimes, sees this as emerging from rational decision making on the part of states rather than as the product of more deep-rooted but historically contingent rules, norms and cultural conventions. Thus international society emerges when states are conscious of their common interests and values and form a society because they recognise that their relations should be bound by common rules and institutions (Bull, 2002: 13). This view can be said to be emergent insofar as international society presupposes an international system, but not the other way round. International society can be said to represent a higher form of social organisation. Thus the international is regarded as considerably more ordered with a lot less violence than realists admit. Alongside institutions are normative factors that give international society its own logic separate from the states that make it up. These ideas are embodied in international organisations and in turn influence the behaviour of actors. International society can therefore be seen as a way that states reach agreement over ways of behaving and interacting with one another, how they learn to control their violent tendencies through agreeing to abide by some moral and legal principles and recognition of each other’s legitimacy. Perhaps the best way to conceive of this is through Linklater’s use of Elias’s work on the civilising process. International society is a process whereby civility develops through principles of legitimacy, responsibility and accountability (Linklater and Suganami, 2006: 130–1), moving beyond purely strategic relations to develop rules of association. Linklater is concerned to look at recent ‘global’ developments such as international legal obligations to avoid suffering caused by war and various other normative commitments (ibid., 215), but we could go back to the emergence of international society as a peculiarly European affair and focus less on Linklater’s progressive agenda and more on ‘civilised’ rules of conduct and communication – that is to say, civilising as in acceptable table manners more than civilising as in cosmopolitan good. This may be a cynical reading, but it guards against the problems arising from the notion of ‘civilising’ and its Eurocentric connotations. Given that the origins of international society are European, we have to be careful in equating the civilising process with a progressive agenda. Historically, international society becomes something that non-European states have to try and fit into by adopting certain norms of conduct and behaviour. This is raised in the English School’s discussion of the evolution and expansion of international society to include powers like Japan and Turkey and later the opening up of international society to new waves of independent states from Africa and Asia. Despite international society being of European origin, the new states show less of a desire to change such arrangements, it is claimed (Bull and Watson, 1984: 434), than to improve their position within international society. This suggests a view

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of international society as closer to that of rules of conduct for interacting states, than something more deeply social in nature. This sort of international society does not need a deep-rooted basis and Bull was able to note that common culture was not a necessary requirement. It has more to do with agreed ways of behaving rather than with common cultural values. At this point we have reached the question of which branch of the English School to follow. We could take the solidarist path which, as Buzan suggests, moves from a concept of international society to a concept of world society. This move brings in non-state actors and cosmopolitan notions of humankind (Buzan, 2004: 48). A solidarist view appeals to human beings as the ultimate members of international society. Leaving aside the question as to whether this is a realistic way to see today’s world, the simple truth is that the pluralist view is much more in keeping with the main thrust of the English School’s work. Indeed most writers take quite a narrow, states-based, Westphalian view with the occasional hint at the world society idea or at alternative forms of international society. Bull limits his discussion of international institutions to such things as the balance of power, international law, diplomacy and war. International society is based on the interactions of states (and possibly communities). This view is emergent in the sense that international institutions and the rules of coexistence and cooperation among states are emergent. There could be a deeper premise – shared understandings and values. This would give the English School a stronger concept of emergence. But this would require us to take a normative turn rather than pursuing a more social scientific analysis. And this approach is always open to the charge that the concept of international society becomes overly philosophical or an ideal type that does not exist in reality.5 In general, the problem here is that while the English School may have a more social view of the international, it is an approach that arrives at a social view rather than starts with one. Indeed the problem might be summarised thus: that the social is emergent out of the international rather than the international as emergent out of the social. States come together realising that it is better to have some semblance of order and shared institutional framework rather than stand alone and face constant uncertainty. Linklater and Suganami note that there is something of a constitutive element here – a progressive potential to form a more civil environment (Linklater and Suganami, 2006: 266), but the English School often goes no further than pluralist rules for coexistence. We could say that that it is more a case of rules of social (civil) behaviour rather than socially embedded commonality. Thus this form of sociality derives from interactions between states rather than being grounded in the sort of deeper social structures to be discussed in the rest of this piece. It is less a structural sociality than an intersubjective sociality. If we take a list of features of the English School given by Robert Jackson, they are rather intersubjective – ‘recognition, association, membership, equality, equity, legitimate interests, rights, reciprocity, customs

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and conventions, agreements and disagreements, disputes, offences, injuries, damages, reparations, and the rest’ (Jackson, 1992: 271). This is worth remembering for when we consider the constructivism of Alexander Wendt there are two principal questions to consider – whether he is able to give a more social starting point, and whether he too embraces an intersubjective social ontology. 3.1.3

Wendt’s constructivism

Wendt makes some powerful criticisms of neo-realism, claiming that neorealists tend to define international structures in terms of the distribution of capabilities or ‘the observable attributes of their member states’ so that ultimately ‘they understand the explanatory role of these structures in individualist terms as constraining the choices of pre-existing state actors’ (1987: 335). As we mentioned earlier, this in effect reinforces rather than challenges a unit-based understanding of structure. We can say that this flows from Waltz’s implicit ontology. Wendt, therefore, makes a very useful distinction between explanatory reduction and ontological reduction, arguing that even if Waltz might try to avoid the former, he certainly commits the latter: This rejection of what might be called explanatory reductionism does not in itself, however, impose any particular restrictions on the ontological issue of how system structures should be defined since an opposition to agent-level explanations is analytically independent of how system structures, once recognized as causally significant, should be theorized. Thus, neorealists’ individualist definition of the structure of the international system as reducible to the properties of states ... is perfectly consistent with the important role system structures play in neorealist explanations of state behaviour. (1987: 341–2) Wendt’s alternative to neo-realism is based on a redefinition of international structure as social rather than material. This rests on the belief that materialism refers to material capabilities as expressed in Waltz’s neo-realist theory. It also rests on an idealist interpretation of the social as a ‘distribution of knowledge’ (Wendt, 1999: 20). These moves I have criticised elsewhere and will summarise at the end of this section (Joseph, 2006). It means, though, that we get a view of structure as more than just the sum of the properties of individual units, but as actually constitutive of these entities and thus social in Wendt’s sense of the term. The problem with neo-realism is that it understands system structures ‘as only constraining the agency of preexisting states, rather than, as in world-system and structuration theory, as generating state agents themselves’ (1987: 342). We might call this an emergent view of agency and contrast it with neo-realism which has no such concept of emergence since, according to Wendt, ‘system structures cannot generate

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agents if they are reduced to the properties of agents in the first place’ (1987: 342). But still for Wendt, like Waltz ‘it is impossible for structures to have effects apart from the attributes and interactions of agents’ (1992: 12). Wendt blends together structuration theory and symbolic interactionism, allowing him to distinguish micro- and macro-levels, the micro being structures of interaction, the macro being structures of outcomes (ibid., 143). The relation between macro and micro is described through the concept of supervenience. Macrostructures depend on microstructures for their existence, but are not reducible to them (ibid., 155–6). Thus we certainly have an emergent notion of macrostructure in Wendt. But while macrostructures cannot be reduced to micro-level activities, Wendt takes the structurationist view that these social structures only exist through their instantiation in human practices (1999: 313). Thus ultimately individual interaction is the basis for structure in Wendt. Ultimately Wendt relies on an intersubjective ontology that sees structure in terms of the properties and interactions of the constitutive elements (albeit, he adds identities and beliefs to the mix). This may be set up as an alternative to the individualism of neo-realism and holism of World Systems Theory (WST), but in reality Wendt is simply exchanging one (crude) form of interaction for another (intersubjective) form of interaction. Structure becomes an epiphenomenon of agents, instantiated through their activities. Ultimately structure is denied its own distinct properties and powers, neither is it given causal primacy or anteriority. In conflating structure and agency, it is interaction, rather than structure, that shapes identities and interests (neo-realism of course does not even get this far). Structure, as we have said, is deprived of its own properties. Wendt’s position is certainly a step in the right direction, but ultimately he too is unable to draw a clear ontological distinction between structure and interacting units.6 A second issue that Wendt needs to be questioned about concerns the ideational status of deep structure and his understanding of materialism. In his view the deep structure of the international system is formed by shared understandings so that deep structure, in other words, is a culture. With Wendt’s notion of deep structure, we have something that is ideational. We have seen that Wendt likes to call this type of structure ‘social’ and contrast it with the material. He criticises Waltz for focusing on the material and thereby suppressing the social dimension of structure. But in doing this he only describes one aspect of the social (the ideational) and effectively denies that materialism can also be seen in social terms. This of course comes from Wendt buying into Waltz’s definitions even if he wants to challenge their consequences. For Wendt the problems of neo-realism come from its materialist and individualist ontology and his solution is to see the international system in idealist and holist terms (1999: 370). But the problem is that it is Waltz’s individualism (rightly highlighted by Wendt) which leads to an impoverished version of materialism (as the material capabilities of units),

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not materialism itself. As we shall see, starting from this neo-realist account of materialism poses serious problems when it comes to making an assessment of Marxism which, it will be argued, is both materialist and social. The constructivist approach of Wendt can be said to offer important criticisms of neo-realism’s empty concept of international system, but does not question the system–unit framework itself. Simply put, Wendt also sees structure in terms of the interaction of the units, but he does give the units, and their interactions, more of a social character. To put this in the words of Buzan and Little (2002: 214), this is a difference between mechanistic systems of physical units and intersubjective systems of sentient units. What is not on offer is a view of structure that sees it as more than these interactions between units. In summary, despite offering some significant insights, these challengers to neo-realism fail to break from the level-of-analysis framework and despite their questioning of how we should understand systems, structures and units, they never actually challenge the system–structure distinction itself.

3.2 Marxism and World Systems Theory The aim of this piece is not to justify a Marxist view, but to contrast it with IR approaches to things like the system–unit relation, society and emergence, and to show that alternative views exist based on quite different assumptions from those common in IR theorising as well as to show that Marxism can be quite different from the narrow materialist doctrine often portrayed by IR theory.7 A Marxist approach justifies itself, above all other things, on assuming the centrality of production. For without production, societies and their members simply will not survive. IR theory too is concerned with survival, but from a quite different set of assumptions – usually focused on matters of power and security. It could be argued that the Marxist assumption precedes the IR one, but in doing so we might also justify the IR assumptions as emergent ones. In other words, Marxist assumptions about production are of a more basic social nature. Following this assumption arise questions like how production is organised, how reproduction is secured and so on. Societies then start to take on ever more complex features, including the possibility that there may be more than one form (or mode) of production, more than one social system (or social formation) and indeed more than one state (or a states-system). Marxists arrive at questions of power and security in the states-system once they have progressed through questions of how production might be organised, its effect on the social formation more widely, the role and character of the state and the possibility that there might be such a thing as an international system comprised of various states each with their own interests to defend. Such a view does not guarantee protection against the errors of IR theorisation of these issues, but at least we can see that it is an emergent view that holds that IR problems

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are real problems that are emergent out of the social nature of production, but certainly not reducible to them. If Marxist approaches are reductionist (as we shall argue in the case of WST), this has nothing to do with focusing on the units or micro-relations as Waltz’s arguments imply.8 Marxism does not primarily see the international in terms of the intentions of nation states (whether conceived of as units or otherwise) but starts from what flows from the mode of production, the process of capital accumulation, capital–wage-labour relations, the expansion of the circuit of capital and so on. These are the processes generating the pressures on states, pressures which are systemic (although not in the states-system sense). Taking WST as an illustration, if reductionism means individualism (as Waltz claims) then Wallerstein is a holist who believes that social change only happens in systems and that the only social system is the world system (1974: 7). The world system is a social system with structures, boundaries, rules of legitimation and member groups who are often in conflict with one another (ibid., 347). It is clear that this conception of world system is not primarily a political one and that the basic linkages between the parts are economic (ibid., 15). It therefore breaks with realist-inspired IR theory that holds that the international is about relations between states with such interactions producing a states-system. As Hollist and Rosenau note, such an approach is based on political diplomacy and ignores such things as class, production and exchange (Hollist and Rosenau, 1981: 11–12). By contrast, WST starts not from diplomacy and the military capabilities of states, but from control of the economic market. WST argues (specifically against the developmentalist perspective) that the unit of analysis is not the individual state, nation or people, but a global entity with an ongoing division of labour. WST seeks to discuss if this entity is unified or not, politically and culturally, and what the consequences are of this unity/ non-unity. There is no presumption in any of this that there might be such a thing as an international society (Wallerstein, 1979: 155). However, this suggests that the world system is not purely an economic thing. WST ties together economic system with a particular political structure. In contrast to world empire which has a unified centre, world economies are made up by similar division of labour, decentralised political authority and the existence of a states-system. So WST supports the idea that the international must be understood in terms of fundamental underlying structures, primarily economic in nature, which assert their influence over the behaviour of states and other actors. It provides an account of the historically specific emergence of capitalism (emergence being both synchronic and diachronic), which expands outwards from Europe in the sixteenth century, developing a core, periphery and semi-periphery. This is based on a worldwide division of labour and the existence of bureaucratic state machineries (Wallerstein, 1974: 63; 1980: 8). These are important in reproducing unequal exchange whereby economic

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surplus is transferred from periphery to core. Strong states with developed state machinery can help to politically enforce this unequal exchange and allow producers to maximise profit in the world economy. So looked at historically, Europe developed as a result of its dominance over the world economy and the European states acted within the world system to maintain their dominance over peripheral states. In this way WST starts from an economic basis but connects it to the world political system. Wallerstein claims that the basic demands of the capitalist world economy are a single market, states of varying strength which intervene and distort the working of the market, and the three layers of core, periphery and semi-periphery (1979: 223). At its crudest, critics will say that WST reduces the role of states to the appropriation of the optimum level of world surplus (Linklater, 1990: 131). Being more charitable we might say that WST does bring states back into the picture, but that their behaviour is closer to the realist view rather than international society, in that they attempt to maximise their gains through intervening in the world economy. But critics will respond, as Wendt does, that states tend to get viewed as the effects of the world capitalist system and that WST is in danger of functionalism if it sees the activities of states and outcomes such as wars, for example, simply in terms of the requirements of the world system. So despite states emerging as important to the world system, there remains the danger of a passive conception of state and class agency (Wendt, 1987: 348). The main criticism of WST, then, is that it sees the states-system as secondary to the economic system of production and exchange. Theda Skocpol writes that economic conditions and the world market are used by Wallerstein to explain differences in the strength of various states, ignoring other important factors such as ‘historically pre-existing institutional patterns, threats of rebellion from below, and geopolitical pressures and constraints’. Writing like a good Marxist, Skocpol claims that WST uses market-technological explanation at the expense of a specifically grounded class analysis (1977: 1080).9 She follows the Marxist historian Robert Brenner in arguing that markets alone cannot explain social-structural transformations and there is a need to look at pre-existing class relations which Brenner famously uses to explain the difference in the development of agriculture in France and England (ibid., 1082; Brenner, 1976). Skocpol also neatly summarises some of our earlier discussions about WST’s tendency to economic reductionism: ‘Wallerstein has managed to create a model that simultaneously gives a decisive role to international political domination … and deprives politics of any independent efficacy, reducing it to the vulgar expression of market-class interests’ (Skocpol, 1977: 1080). This is not an entirely fair criticism as a reading of Wallerstein’s historical chapters shows, but it is probably a fair general summary of the overall placing of emphasis. Chase-Dunn’s defence of WST is a good place to conclude as it reveals the failure of WST to develop an emergent conception of IR. He rightly begins

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by stressing the importance of deep underlying structures, suggesting that the mode of production has a uniqueness in providing long-term stability (1981: 21–2). He then proposes an expanded notion of mode of production to include political–strategic elements. He seeks to integrate both class relations and the state into the accumulation model, suggesting that a relation of interdependence exists between the accumulation process and political reorganisation. The states-system enforces the capital–labour relation in the core countries and coerced labour extraction in the periphery while providing ‘the political underpinning of the mobility of capital, and also the institutional basis for the continuing expansion of capitalist development’ (ibid., 31). But this is reductionism. Chase-Dunn talks of a single logic coming from the capitalist mode of production which explains not just the appropriation of surplus value but political–military power (ibid., 20). While it might be acceptable to say that capital accumulation and the states-system are part of the same interactive socio-economic system (ibid., 21), it is problematic to suggest that this relationship is governed by a single logic. This single logic is reflected in the way something like the balance of power is regarded as functioning to prevent any one state from controlling the world economy and imposing a political monopoly over accumulation, clearly a reductionist, not to mention functionalist, view of IR. The issue now is how we might be able to conceive of the power of underlying structures like the mode of production, while also giving IR its own specificity. We turn now to scientific realism (SR) to see if a non-reductionist, emergent view of the international can be developed.

3.3 Scientific realism We are now in a position to summarise the various conceptions of the international as emergent. To say that the international is emergent, at least for a scientific realist, is to say that it is much more than its constituent parts, that it is in fact irreducible to these parts. This is clearly at odds with a microtheory approach. It is also clearly at odds with a positivist view. A scientific realist approach would not accept the framework of system and unit while any idea of ‘levels’ must be an emergent one. The idea of units suggests treating these things as unitary entities and objects when in fact they are more complex sets of social relations. The term ‘unit’, for example, does not do justice to a body like the state, which might be better defined, following Jessop (1990), as an institutional ensemble of different social relations. Structures are emergent out of other structures, relations out of other relations, while bodies like the state are not unitary entities but complex social relations. The social world is therefore a combination of different structures and social relations that, contra neo-realism, are neither vertical, nor horizontal, but complexly overdetermined.

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Nor is it right to constantly focus on actors. Even if the realist view that states are the main actors in IR can be challenged by alternative views, it would be wrong simply to shift attention to another set of actors, for example to Marxism’s focus on classes (Hollis and Smith, 1990: 39). Following Marx, it can be said that actions only ever take place in a context not of the actor’s own choosing, and to understand why actions have unintentional consequences, we have to consider the decisive influence of deeper social conditions. Ultimately this view is not only radically at odds with neo-realist and neo-liberal views of the international as the interaction of rational units responding to conditions of anarchy, but also with constructivist views that conflate structures and agents through the idea that structures only exist by virtue of their instantiation in human activities.10 Scientific realist ideas of emergence reject the argument that lower levels are constituted by smaller units (that society is comprised of individuals or international society made up of states) and instead focus on the idea of underlying relations. It is wrong therefore to look for explanations of the international at some lower domestic level; rather such explanations lie in the nature of social relations which produce complex domestic and international outcomes. Thus emergence should not be about how the international is emergent out of the national (or domestic) as many opponents of neorealism might argue, but that national (or domestic) and international are both emergent out of underlying social conditions. The task of the social theorist is to make the case for what these social relations might be and the influence that they might have on international politics. Our argument here is that such relations include (although are not exhausted by) the capitalist mode of production. If this is so, then the next issue is how to guard against the sort of reductionist tendencies in WST. According to Wendt, WST and reductionist forms of Marxism adopt a ‘pyramid-style approach to thinking about base and superstructure’ where ‘material conditions are thought to constrain ideas’ (Wendt, 1999: 168). This would be a reductionist approach insofar as the material base is said to determine the political and ideological superstructure and it is possible to see how WST might meet this description if ultimately everything is explained by production and exchange in the world economy. But Marxism does not have to be viewed in this way and we have seen that there are critiques within the Marxist tradition of this way of thinking. This does not mean abandoning Marxism’s emphasis on production – without this it is difficult to see how an account of the world might be Marxist. But production can be interpreted in a much richer way than the base–superstructure metaphor allows. The concept of mode of production contains social relations inseparable from political, cultural and ideational factors. The economic aspect of these relations is inconceivable without considering how such relations are organised. The organisation of relations of production involves cultural, political, legal and ideational affairs. For example, capitalism is unimaginable without private

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property relations and these in turn are established through a legal framework guaranteed by political sovereignty and an ideational belief in their legitimacy. In other words, these are no mere superstructural elements, not elements that are determined by the mode of production, but issues that are integral to the mode of production itself. Again, SR’s concepts of stratification and emergence can help in developing a non-reductive understanding of social differentiation. A tentative suggestion is that, first, we need an expanded concept of the mode of production. Second, we should note that the capitalist mode of production is not the only mode of production; nor is there simply one world economy.11 Third, the continued reproduction of this mode of production is not guaranteed but has to be socially, politically and culturally secured. Fourth, that this process is itself a historically contingent one with many possible variations and outcomes. Fifth, that this process runs through institutions like the state and other social bodies that cannot simply be reduced to the function of reproduction, but have their own distinct properties and dynamics. Sixth, that such a process runs alongside other processes and that different social structures and generative mechanisms combine in various ways. This means that there is no one single (capitalist) logic as WST might claim. We might call these historically specific combinations emergent social features that are irreducible to any one social level including the mode of production. The emergence of the international therefore means that it takes on some autonomy from the lower social levels upon which it depends – clearly something that is missing in accounts of the states-system given by WST. We can generalise to say that emergence means that those things existing at a higher layer will be governed by more than one law or mechanism. The higher level is rooted in and emergent from the lower, more basic one – which is a condition of its possibility – but is not reducible to it. The best way to conceive of this is through a non-reductive notion of social stratification where various social layers overlap and co-determine one another and where social hierarchy exists – some structures and processes are clearly more causally influential than others – but exists in a complex and differentiated way. Scientific realist arguments about stratification stress that the causal powers of different social structures and mechanisms should be regarded more as tendencies rather than as strong causal laws. The higher the order, the more complex and contingent the outcome, the more that other counteracting processes and tendencies come into play and thus the more open the system becomes. SR advocates ontological depth whereby underlying structures and causal mechanisms are identified, but where counteracting processes and socially and historically contingent outcomes are recognised. This might mean, for example, looking at the underlying causal powers of something like the capitalist mode of production while also recognising that it both influences and is contradicted by the actions of states or developments in IR.

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At this late stage in the discussion we might now want to question whether the international is really a ‘level’ at all. As Patomäki notes, ontological depth has little to do with IR theory’s levels of analysis which fail to capture the idea of emergent social layers: ‘Real emergent powers and properties do not seem to be pre-organised neatly in accordance with the territorial logic of states’ (2002: 81). Patomäki’s suggestion is to abandon IR’s talk of levels in favour of ‘complex, layered assemblies of social relations’ (ibid., 85). If we follow Patomäki then does this mean that we have to abandon the idea of the international as emergent? The answer should be ‘yes’ if this means the international. This is no great loss. Political theorists and social geographers have long talked of local relations without resort to the local. Thus talk of the international is more like a metaphor that helps as shorthand in certain theoretical contexts. It points to spatio-temporal complexity, but it is not really a ‘level’ in the sense that biology, physics, the social, the economic or the political might be considered ‘levels’ (strata). Indeed the international is an aspect of the social, economic and political, not something distinct from them. But we can still talk of the international as emergent insofar as the international is an emergent feature or emergent aspect of social (including economic or political) processes. The problem is precisely that the level-of-analysis framework employed by IR has worked against such a social interpretation with the international usually separated from underlying social layers rather than seen as an emergent aspect of them. Thus my tentative conclusion, based on a scientific realist ontology, is that the international is an emergent feature of social relations with its own irreducible properties, dynamics and specificities even if it is not a layer, level or stratum in the strict IR sense. Moreover, to say this means taking an ontological view that breaks from seeing things simply in terms of systems and units or discrete entities (positivism) and looks instead at the objects of the social world as complex, dialectical, often internally related and overlapping social relations.

3.4 Conclusion: weaker claims Let us summarise the detrimental influence of neo-realism and other positivist-inspired approaches on IR theorising before offering a guide to what IR theory should and should not do. The effect of neo-realism and its closest alternatives is to present a reified view of the social world and to hide the real nature of the international system by focusing on recurring relations between formally equal units. International politics is viewed through the positivist lens of discovering and explaining law-like regularities (Waltz, 1979: 116) which leaves little possibility of conceiving of the underlying processes that might produce them.12 Neo-realism is underpinned by positivist assumptions about rational behaviour, taking states

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as the (atomistic) units of analysis, employing a billiard-ball model of state interaction, focusing on regularities and predictable outcomes and generally presenting a reified social ontology that excludes underlying structures, causal mechanisms or constitutive processes. Microtheory does nothing to challenge this. At best all it does is challenge the level of analysis and as we saw, it simply moves from capabilities to distribution of preferences (Moravcsik, 2003: 165). Mainstream IR cannot talk about underlying processes, only about systems and units. It is therefore incapable of saying anything about the social and historical specificity of IR. Following SR we can say that a level-of-analysis question should be to do with the ontological issue of the different layering of the social (and natural) world and the appropriate theoretical orientation that follows from this. By contrast, the level-of-analysis question as posed by Singer and subsequently followed by most in IR is better described as a methodological debate about how best to describe the world rather than what it is really like, although we should not go so far as Smith in saying that it is methodological not ontological (Hollis and Smith, 1990: 203) since assumptions about how to describe the world are always based on ontological assumptions about what the world is like. In this sense the level-of-analysis debate fits with the Second Debate in appearing to be a methodological debate, but which actually has serious ontological consequences when it comes to how we see IR. In fact the ironic consequence of the level-of-analysis debate – along with Waltz’s intervention – is that IR’s world has come to be seen in terms of system versus unit or international versus domestic, instead of in terms of different levels, or as SR is better able to put it, in terms of different, overlapping social strata that reflect the complexity and ontological depth of the social world. The first suggestion is therefore to resist such heavy reliance on the unit and structure or system and unit frameworks. Likewise, we should resist talk of holist versus individualist explanation. The problems stemming from these dichotomies are clearest in Waltz but they occur almost everywhere in IR theory, including the work of Wendt which despite its criticisms of Waltz, seeks to give the relationship greater sophistication rather than rejecting it as inappropriate. Second, we should be wary both of reductionism and determinism, and of talk of reductionism and determinism. This should not, however, mean a rejection of ordering and hierarchy. The notion of reductionism needs to be reclaimed following its use by Waltz. In fact it can be argued that Waltz is himself a reductionist or at least leaves the door wide open to reductionism. This could be of the individualistic sort as found in microtheory, or it could be of the material sort in that international politics is reduced to power, interests and material capabilities. This type of explanation can be said to be just as determinist as any other theory, leaving out social, cultural and political explanations.

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Third, we need to move beyond explanations that focus on interacting units. Taking the international as emergent we can see how the English School advances on neo-realism by distinguishing between system and society. The English School conception of society deserves to be called an emergentist notion as it is something that develops out of the interactions of the system and goes beyond it. However, the problem of the international as defined by interacting units still remains. A deeper or underlying sense of culture is possibly present in the solidarist wing of the English School, and is certainly present in Wendt’s constructivism and its arguments about the constitution of the identities of actors. But ultimately Wendt reduces these issues to intersubjective understandings while not investigating what underpins intersubjectivity itself. Ultimately, both the neo-realists who follow Waltz and the constructivists who follow Wendt share something in their understanding of structure. Rather than structure having a complex range of properties and processes, it is reduced to interactions between units. Whether this is cultural or material, intersubjective or ‘objective’, both the mainstream and the constructivist critics reduce structure to interacting units. This is quite different from the conception of structure present in Marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production, for example. Fourth, how can Marxism break from these views of structure and interacting units while avoiding errors of a different kind? Marxist approaches that are straightforwardly reductionist should be rejected. WST is not as reductionist as its critics like to claim. Clearly it has a place for political system and culture. Nor does it embrace the schematic view of historical development present in some Marxist accounts. But in insisting on a single system with a single logic it fails to develop sufficient differentiation, specificity and stratification of the different parts of the system. The error of WST is to build everything up from production and exchange instead of looking at the emergent specificity of international relations. Fifth, having said this it should be noted that many critics of WST are simply critics of Marxism and do not like the focus on capitalist production. If this is so, then in a sense it is up to them to show why we should not start from production, but from some other process identified by IR theory. Again, to defend some of the arguments of WST, Wallerstein is right to talk of systemic pressure inherent in capitalism such as ‘the need of the world-economy to expand its boundaries’ and that the incorporation of new areas into the world economy was not down to particular agency (as Waltz tries to claim is the Marxist view), but ‘the outcome of pressure internal to the world economy’ (Wallerstein, 1989: 129). If such views show a tendency to reductionism, the task is not to bring individual agency back in by exchanging such structural explanation for an intersubjective constructivist ontology, but to look at how such structural processes intersect with other processes including the behaviour of social classes and political leaderships.

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The sixth point, then, is to bring in genuine structural explanation that does not reduce causality (or ‘constitution’) to the interactions of agents either in the neo-realist sense or the intersubjective sense. So finally we arrive at a scientific realist account of IR. But unfortunately there is not one since SR does not speak of these sorts of things. So let us say that of the various accounts presented, Marxism holds the best opportunities for understanding complex social relations. But only if its claims are subjected to the rigorous criticism of SR and only if it is prepared to develop a sufficiently complex, differentiated, stratified and emergent conception of the international.

3.5 Conclusion: stronger claims Let us now condense these arguments into some strong points: 1. The system–unit model is not necessarily the best way to understand IR and often results in an asocial and ahistorical viewpoint. 2. Attempts to introduce sociality (e.g. the English School and constructivism) concentrate on the interaction of the units when the social world (as Marxist accounts will argue) is much more than material or intersubjective interaction. 3. Social structure can be much more than interacting units, it has a deeper, underlying, relatively enduring existence irreducible to the actions or interactions of agents or units. 4. There is more to reductionism than the system–unit question. For example, Marxists who reduce IR to economic relations are not resorting to unit-level explanation but are making claims about the determining influence of laws and social structures. 5. There are numerous ways of understanding levels. Instead of restricting this to unit and system or domestic and international we can also understand levels as deeper social strata and underlying social relations in the form of structures, causal processes and generative mechanisms. 6. Questioning what we mean by levels means a rethink of what we mean by the international. My final suggestion is that IR would benefit from a conception of emergence in order to better capture the way the international emerges out of underlying social relations, but develops its own irreducible characteristics.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

For a discussion of this see Hollis and Smith (1991: 3) and Patomäki (2002: 74–5). A classic example of Humean scepticism. Although for a counter-argument see Wight (2006a: 91–9). Which of course is why Bull took the stance he did in the Second Debate.

68 Scientific Realism and International Relations 5. Indeed these criticisms have been levelled at Bull, never mind more solidarist writers (Miller and Vincent, 1990). Bull would accept that international society is an ideal type which of course is different from saying that it is an idealist construct. 6. For an alternative see Bhaskar (1989), Archer (1995) and Wight (2006a). See also note 9 below. 7. Smith’s (2002) dismissal of Marxism’s narrow materialism and Wallerstein’s economic determinism is typical of this attitude. 8. See for example Waltz’s attempts to pin this on Lenin’s theory of imperialism (Waltz 1979: 36). 9. Indeed it is an age-old debate within Marxism whether to base historical explanation on the development of the productive forces or class struggle. One only has to compare Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’ (Marx, 1975) with his ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ (Marx, 1973b). 10. The constructivist view that structures and agents are mutually constituting should be contrasted with the scientific realist arguments of Bhaskar (1989) and Archer (1995) which argue that there exists an ‘ontological hiatus’ between structures and agents in that structures pre-exist agents, are more enduring and have enabling and constraining effects. I have gone into these issues in greater detail elsewhere (Joseph, 2006). 11. Gills, for example, has argued that there is not one world system but several (Gills, 2002). Let us say here that Wallerstein’s starting point is unconventional for a Marxist. Most Marxists would start from mode of production and then go on to explain market (exchange) relations, so in a sense, by emphasising world economy, Wallerstein starts from the other way round. If we start from mode of production, we can say that this is a general feature that may find expression in several outcomes (economic markets). Starting from world market does not allow for such an option. 12. This is simplifying somewhat. Waltz does distinguish between law-like statements and theoretical model building. However, the latter’s explanation of the former is understood in instrumentalist terms.

4 State Theory in International Relations: Why Realism Matters Marjo Koivisto

4.1 Introduction1 ‘The state’ is one of the most used concepts in IR theory, and yet as recently as in 1987 – over half a century into the disciplinary study of IR – Fred Halliday argued that the discipline does not have an adequate theory of the state (Halliday, 1987; Rosenberg, 1994). Some regard this as no great loss: international theory worth its name must concern itself with accounting for ‘third image’ phenomena, of which the balance of power and its occasional collapse provide one substantive example (Waltz, 1959). John Hobson suggests third image theories see the state as ‘passiveadaptive’: ‘high’ on domestic agency, but extremely ‘low’ on international agency (Hobson, 2000). A recent disciplinary return to the ‘second image’ characteristics of states claims to recover ‘state agency’ (Moravcsik, 2003), but it is not clear whether (a supplementary) focus on ‘domestic’ politics and processes risks losing sight of state capacity altogether. Indeed, surely an ‘adequate’ theory of the state in IR should avoid endlessly reducing its unit of analysis to more concrete social agencies (e.g. the government, the executive, the Prime Minister, the citizenry)? As the political scientist Arnold Wolfers once alluded, the paucity of state theorising in IR results primarily from the widespread (if often implicit) analytical assumption that while ‘the state’ is a ‘useful’ conceptual abstraction for the analysis of world political analysis, it is not ‘real’ (Wolfers, 1962; Wendt, 1999, 2004; Wight, 2004, 2006a). Wolfers’ challenge has recently been rigorously taken up by scientific and critical realist IR scholars, most predominantly in Alexander Wendt’s scientific realist defence of the states systemic project. Wendt argued for a non-reductionist, anthropomorphic theory of the state as a corporate agent, as a ‘person’ in world politics (Wendt, 1999, 2004). Debates around Wendt’s theory have, as this chapter seeks to show, both reinvigorated state theorising in the discipline, and simultaneously begun to demonstrate the key implications of realist philosophies for substantive IR social science. 69

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Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Wendt’s theory of state personhood is that Wendt left the state unit/international system distinction untouched (Wendt, 1999: Ch. 1). Post-positivist IR scholarship, along with international historical sociology, has consistently argued against commitment to this distinction predominantly extenuated by behaviourist IR theory since the 1950s (Walker, 1993; Halliday, 1994; Rosenberg, 2006), and has done so correctly on the grounds that the distinction reifies a particularly asocial reading of both the state and the international in world politics (e.g. Walker, 1993; Rosenberg, 1994; Patomäki, 2002). Wendt’s intervention once more raised methodological issues regarding framing units of analysis in IR. The first part of this chapter will discuss the state of this contemporary debate, especially as it pertains to either including or excluding further state theorising in the field. I will highlight the promise of critical realism (CR) in this regard; a critical realist concept of ‘levels of analysis’ refers IR theorists to the various more or less concrete ontological strata of world politics, directing attention not only to the physical organisational form of the state (specified by the state’s territorial moment), but also to the state’s social institutional form (Hay, 1996: 11–12). Through reconceptualising IR ‘levels of analysis’, a commitment to realism thus enables us to broaden and deepen IR theory on the state. Section 4.2 will return to Wendt’s argument for anthropomorphic corporate agency. The argument for an analytical focus on the state’s institutional form entailed in critical realist interventions relies on an alternative realist social ontology of the state to that in Wendt. As Colin Wight has highlighted, it is one thing for a realist to posit that the state is real and that actual effects in social relations can be attributed to it, but another to argue these effects pertain to a collective consciousness of social groups (Wight, 2004). Focusing in on realist social ontologies of the state, I will outline the limitations of the corporatist concept of ‘the state’, and advocate the maintenance of an ontologically stratified view of state power. Finally, I will suggest that a ‘strategic–relational’ social ontology of the state as a relatively coherent ensemble of institutionalised social relations and strategic actors offers the best way to mobilise realist arguments in the context of substantive research on state power in world politics. Tying the “methodological” and “social ontological” strands of the argument in the previous parts of the chapter together, Section 4.3 elaborates the substantive argument that learning from SR and CR, the state in IR should be viewed as a ‘multiscalar institutional ensemble’. In the context of the behaviourist levels-of-analysis framework this move seems counterintuitive. But combining realist arguments about levels and the state’s (strategic–relational) institutional form, I argue that behaviourist and methodologically nationalist assumptions about the relationship between the constitutive properties of state power and the national space can be

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denaturalised, allowing for manifold advances in the international political sociology of the state.

4.2 Rethinking ‘levels of analysis’ in international theory While many IR scholars subscribe to the view that studying international politics concerns understanding the extra-territorial or extra-national production of the power of states, the demarcation of world politics analysis into ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ ‘variables’ remains a surprisingly common assumption. Recent meta-theoretical debates have been important here, not least in highlighting that the carving up of world politics into select spatial levels is enabled by a particular set of philosophical, often methodological commitments and have thus unsettled the view that the resultant ‘levels-of-analysis’ framework provides a social ontology of world politics. Scholars have also suggested social scientific alternatives to framing objects of analysis in IR. In an important recent analysis, Michael Williams argued that the conventional notion of the ontological primacy of the national scale in IR, and the exclusive association of the state with that scale – both extenuated by IR’s traditional conception of its ‘levels of analysis’2 – has its origins in Hans Morgenthau’s deployment of Weberian ‘ideal types’ in his analyses of world politics (Williams, 2004). Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending specify that in his highly influential book Politics Among Nations, Morgenthau employed an ideal type to delimit ‘international’ politics as a field of study – as politics amongst national states (Neumann and Sending, 2007: 684). Significantly, ideal types, as formulated by Weber, were contingent historical generalisations resulting from extensive empirical analyses. They are analytical frames according to which actually occurring action, including the values actors associate with this action, could be interpreted (Weber, 1949; Calhoun et al., 2002). Emigrating to America and working in the context of the post-war behavioural revolution in the US academe, Sending and Neumann argue Morgenthau increasingly ruled out the hermeneutic aspect central to the original Weberian ‘ideal type’. His analysis of the international moved towards (what became a widely influential disciplinary) behaviourist agenda of trying to establish universal laws about the international politics of territorial statehood (Neumann and Sending, 2007: 684; also see Guzzini, 1998). Thus a particular social scientific concept of ‘good explanation’ served to reify what was originally an ‘ideal type’, analytically freezing this ideal type so that ‘the state’ now appeared a static, timeless, territorial ‘container’ (Giddens, 1985; Taylor, 2003). The revival of classical realist scholarship in IR has thus highlighted an important variation in conceptions of ‘good’ social scientific explanation as international theory pertains to the state. A ‘national container view’ of the

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state was seemingly only reified in the behaviourist turn in the 1950s and the 1960s, in Kenneth Waltz’s and J. David Singer’s influential levels-ofanalysis framework that set out to establish causal laws of state behaviour at the international ‘level’ (Waltz, 1959; Singer, 1961). As many in the field now recognise, this levels-framework must be seen as representative of a set of methodological commitments that only specifies the analyst’s point of view (Onuf cited in Wight, 2006a: 103). Such principles of research design, it is worth reiterating, conflict with Weberian conceptions of social science. Recent scholarship has also re-emphasised the need to distinguish between the agency–structure issue (social ontology) and the levels-of-analysis issue (methodology) in IR, and this is of importance for state theory in IR (Wight, 2006a: 102–20; Patomäki, 2002; Onuf, 1995). As Wight has highlighted, levels-of-analysis (such as ‘the international’ and ‘the state’ in Singer’s conception) do not relate to one another as agents and structures (Wight, 2006a: 110). Indeed, if the distinction between the two analytical issues goes unidentified, the fact that the conventional levels of analysis in IR are underpinned by thin and oftentimes asocial theories of social objects is concealed (Danermark et al., 2001: 49). A necessary corrective is the recognition that assumptions about what counts as a ‘good explanation’ (of the research object framed for analysis) reveal prior assumptions about the nature of the object being studied. Early behaviourist social science resolutely avoided this task in taking the position that it is possible to apply methods of explanation from the natural sciences to the study of world politics (cf. King et al., 1994). The behaviourist agenda solidified the ‘domestic’ and ‘the international’ worlds of a state, providing IR social science with the notion that while domestically we might speak of the ‘structures’ of the state, in the ‘international arena’ the unit of explanation is the behavioural patterns of states. The task of international theory was not to theorise the state, state agency or state power, but rather ‘state behaviour’. Of course ‘state behaviour’ can only be a unit of analysis if we assume states share some central behavioural traits in common. Yet, given the behaviourists’ reluctance to elaborate a theory of the state,3 the curious question is ‘how can behaviourist social science in IR establish what these features are?’ The answer emerges from reflections on the usual prompts for state behaviour. In the traditional levels-framework, protection of the national space is the key behavioural trait states share in common, whereby the attribute all states share is their specificity to the national space. In IR, this notion continues to demarcate ‘key patterns of behaviour’ in the interstate system (Waltz, 1979; March and Olsen, 1989).4 4.2.1

Reframing IR ‘levels’

Engagement by IR social scientists with the largely meta-theoretical debates of the discipline’s ‘post-positivist turn’ is beginning to have an impact on

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substantive or empirical research on world politics (Hay, 2002; Jackson, 2006; Klotz and Prakash, 2008). An interesting development is the new ideas on how to frame the units of analysis of international theory, and as such the emerging alternatives to the behaviourist ‘levels of analysis’. These alternatives also reframe the study of ‘the international’ and ‘the state’ in IR theory, beginning with the former no longer consisting in the patterns of behaviour of state units. The contemporary alternatives to behaviourist social science, first, insist on the difference between natural science and social science, predominantly on the grounds that the two are studying different kinds of phenomena (Jackson, 2006; Klotz and Prakash, 2008). Social phenomena set limits on what can be known about a particular object in IR theory. The nature of the objects IR social science studies suggests how they may be analytically framed, and, as such, what constitutes a ‘level of analysis’ in IR. It follows that, second, a level of analysis is decided on ontological, not purely methodological grounds.5 Such is the starting point of the two main contemporary approaches in IR social science to the study of the state: the ‘configurational’ and the ‘emergentist’6 frameworks. 4.2.2 Framing state power: configurations as “levels” A major challenge to traditional concepts of the state in IR emerged in the context of globalisation theories, which encouraged analysts to focus on social processes and relations in place of self-contained and self-interested actors in world politics (Scholte, 2000; cf. Rosenberg, 2006). Postmodern social theory drew IR theorists’ attention to social networks and complex systems, and to how behaviourist frameworks of analysis had reified international social relations and their conglomerations, creating what was held to be ‘problematic state-centrism’ in the discipline (Ferguson and Mansbach, 2007). Globalisation theory could have meant the twilight of state theory in the social sciences. A contemporary rebuttal of globalisation theory, however, is that it did not amount to much more than a description of the latest phase of expansion of societal structures in world politics (Rosenberg, 2006). A stronger analytical approach to transforming ‘macro-level’ sociopolitical processes and narratives concerning the capacities of the state was to be found in a much older body of social theory, namely the Weberian tradition of configurational analysis (Moore, 1965; Katznelson, 1997). Recently advocated mostly in political sociology and comparative politics as an alternative to behaviourist models of statistical and case study research, configurational macroanalysis develops what Katznelson calls ‘analytical narrativity’, attempting to ‘reconstruct and plot over time and space the ontological narratives and relations of historical actors … and the crucial intersection of these narratives with other relational social forces’ (Somers quoted in Katznelson, 1996: 96). In IR, this approach has been used to rethink ‘levels of analysis’.

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As Patrick Jackson and Daniel Nexon have argued, behaviourist research pays too little attention to the constitutive social relations of statehood, and as a result diverse polities and societies such as the ‘Spanish society’ and ‘English society’ became comparable entities (Jackson and Nexon, 1999: 300). In place of such views, Jackson and Nexon suggest IR scholars should rather think of the composure of states as configurations of social processes and ties. These configurations, it is argued, constitute the ‘levels’ of analysis to be focused on (Jackson and Nexon, 1999: 304).7 Research on configurations of social relations, moreover, treats neither ‘social ties’, such as ‘international society’, nor the elements involved making up the ties, such as states, as static variables. Moreover, because it is argued that there are no social entities of a finished or fixed form, we can only talk of things like states as ‘configurations’ – as aggregations of particular ties and processes. The sociologist Charles Tilly’s argument that European states ‘converged’ on the national state form (a highly centralised, territorial form of polity that is capital- and coercion-intensive) is an example of an argument about the state as a configuration (Tilly, 1990). It is argued that territoriality of the state polity, and the state’s national form, results from a configuration of social processes specific to historical time and place. As such, the unit of explanation is the non-static, processual configuration of social ties, which cannot be captured in establishing statistical relationships between unitary variables. Configurational research, in the broader political sciences and IR, aims to capture the historicity of the state. Indeed, configurations are viewed as ‘inventions’ emerging from political processes, ‘perhaps developed incrementally by trial and error, no doubt reinvented … many times’ (Tilly, 1996: 404). Moreover, as a configuration of various space-time specific social–relational ties, the constitutive features of the state need not be defined by territoriality, nor by a coercive character. The constitutive features of the state might be defined by territoriality, but the territorial organisation of the state would only result relationally from how other forms of polity configure simultaneously in world politics. Illustrating this point, Daniel Nexon writes about coconsolidation of empires and other composite forms of rule with national states (Nexon, 2009). Importantly, configurational analysis breaks down the assumption that the state, and more specifically state capacity or state power in world politics, could be explained in terms of a formal similarity between alike units (states). Nevertheless, given that the state continues to be treated as an aggregation of particular ties and processes, it is not clear whether and how the state itself is a source of any social power in global politics. Treated as aggregations of social ties, states continue to be endlessly reducible to component parts. Is state power endlessly reducible to the social institutions of the state such as taxation, foreign-policy agenda-setting, or the reproduction of a national culture? Can the state be only an aggregation of social ties? What

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are we to make of the contrasting notion that states are capable of reproducing their constituent social institutions, and of changing them, while still remaining (primarily the same) state (Hay, 1996)? To be sure, configurational researchers including Tilly acknowledge that configurations like states are likely to produce social outcomes given they are recognised or more or less deliberately installed as means of coordinating social life (Tilly, 1996: 104). This view reduces state capacity to those transactions in which individuals and non-state collective agencies formally recognise they are dealing with the state. The configurational notion of the state might be taken to indicate that the state possesses no social power beyond the relationships of interaction that formally specify the state (e.g. taxation). Overall, the configurational explanatory frame seems more suited for providing a ‘roadmap’ as to how social institutions within an existing configuration interlink than for explaining the means by which a given configuration (the state) produces social effects. Indeed, Tilly has alluded that the configurational position may be contested in arguing that the ontological status of the configurations is in fact ‘emergent’: irreducible to their constitutive contingent (or historical) processes and ties, and capable of producing effects in the social ties and processes that are said to ensemble the configuration (Tilly, 1996). 4.2.3 Framing state power III: emergent levels The configurational agenda illustrates well why the traditional IR levels of analysis must in fact be treated as contingent outcomes of political processes (a return to Weberian ideal types?). Given the constellations of such political processes are spatio-temporally specific, IR scholars should seriously reconsider the notion of ‘the international’ as an aggregation reducible to the patterns of interaction of national–territorial state units. Moreover, if the properties of lower-level units (states) in the international system cannot be said to be constant, the international cannot be a self-contained unit or ‘level’ of analysis of these interactions. Instead, to paraphrase Robert Jervis, the international must be viewed as ‘different from, not greater than, the sum of the parts’ (Jervis, 1997: 13). This formulation of ‘the international’ has recently been conceptualised as ‘emergent’ by scientific and critical realists working in the discipline (see Wight, 2006a; and Joseph, this volume). Could levels understood as ‘emergent’ also imply a new dawn of state theory in IR? The ‘emergent’ understanding of a ‘level’ is already present in IR scholarship that sought to overcome the treatment of ‘the state’ and ‘the international’ as two separate variables (e.g. Clark, 1999; Shaw, 1997). Justin Rosenberg argues that the international is not merely the (institutionalised) relations between territorial states but a much richer and complexly interpenetrated social sphere of formal and informal relations (Rosenberg, 2006). For Rosenberg,

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the international is not something that states form; rather the international, conceived of as tendentially emergent from underlying social relations (for Rosenberg, capitalist social relations of production), is an emergent level, constitutive of state formation (Rosenberg, 2006; Teschke, 2003). The units political analysis focuses on, including the international and the national, are thus co-realised with other levels of analysis. Scientific and critical realist scholars working in IR, including Wight and Jonathan Joseph, have elaborated on the theoretical terms of this understanding of ‘levels’ of world political analysis.8 Wight draws on Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic social theory suggesting that IR levels of analysis be associated with a stratified ontology of the social world, characterised by emergent layers (Wight, 2006a; Archer, 1995). Different kinds of ‘things’ in the social world, moreover, including humans, social structures and cultural constellations, possess different kinds of tendential powers that will be realised in particular social forms. While consciousness is an emergent property particular to (human) individuals, social structures exhibit characteristics of their own which are irreducible to the capacities of individuals. Structural features of political institutions, particularly the positions of president or secretary of state, provide good examples: specific individuals might inhabit these roles differently, but however individuals act in these roles, an unintended outcome of their actions is the reproduction of the structure of the political institution. Ignoring the stratification of social capacity/power, behaviourist and configurational approaches have tended not to frame social institutional power for analysis. Nevertheless, abstract social structures provide the conditions of possibility for the continuation of social practices, including those coordinated by the state such as tax collection and participation in international organisation. Moreover, irreducible to specific physical form and organisation, state capacity would be better specified by a collision of social structures which serve to coordinate various concrete social practices.9 Beyond gains specific to theorising the state in IR, therefore, the benefit of the emergentist approach must be the avoidance of reification of ‘units’ of IR analysis. Thinking of levels of analysis in IR in emergent terms, moreover, suggests no hierarchy between the traditional levels of world political analysis (e.g. international and national). Of course, this does not mean the state is thus a superfluous unit of analysis to international and global processes. Such appears to be the conclusion of the configurational approach, which reconceptualises bounded, unitary conceptions of national states as configurations of political processes consolidating on a national terrain. Instead, the ‘emergent’ conception of levels of analysis in IR illustrates, as Jonathan Joseph argues, that ‘the national (or domestic) and international are both emergent out of underlying social conditions’ (Joseph, this volume). On the one hand, therefore, ‘the international’ is not a separate set of social

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relations, and thus cannot be explicable in terms of social processes contained at a domestic or national level. Similarly, the state and the international ‘levels’ could be seen to arise from alike social processes and conditions.10 Of further importance are the insights entailed for state theory in IR. As it is recognised that the state is no longer an ontologically primary unit in world politics, the relationship between the national scale and ‘the state’ also becomes denaturalised. It follows that theories of the state in IR should not concern the ‘behaviour’ of bounded national states in world politics, but rather IR theorists should concern themselves with institutionalisation and reinstitutionalisation of state power at various emergent levels of world politics (including national, regional and international levels). Moreover, given that the state is not synonymous with the organisation and protection of the national space, post-behaviourist IR needs to and will accommodate more ‘adequate’ theories of the state. This is the case particularly with substantive international theory informed by SR and CR. What, then, is the ontological form of the state on the emergent conception? As Wight argues, no discussion about a particular level of analysis in IR can be had in ‘isolation from a discussion of the properties pertaining to the chosen levels (i.e. a discussion of the agent–structure problem)’ (Wight, 2006a: 111).11 Pursuing a scientific realist argument about the constitutive properties of ‘the state’, to avoid the state’s endless reduction to lower-level properties (e.g. the executive, the government, the citizenry), Wendt conceptualised the state as ‘a person’. Wendt did, however, leave the traditional organisation of the IR levels of analysis untouched, thus naturalising the connection of the state to the national scale. To argue for a non-reductive alternative to the Wendtian conception, some further examination of the ‘ontological status of the state’ is in order (Ringmar, 1996).

4.3 On the ontological status of the state: a strategic–relational position As Wight has recently argued, the state appears in IR theory as an instrumental device aimed at facilitating explanation: it is treated ‘as if’ it existed, as a necessary explanatory abstraction from other, more primal social objects (Wight, 2004: 269). As has been discussed above, ‘levels of analysis’, in both the traditional and the configurational framings of ‘the international’ and the national, are in fact abstractions and aggregations of lower-level social phenomena – units, individuals, social facts, social processes, and so on. The realist focus on emergent social forms brings largely unobservable social formations like the state ‘back in’. Indeed, the social ontology of states must consist in more than the groups of people who are currently in charge of a state, given for instance that ‘the access to political power associated with a landslide electoral triumph does not necessarily bring with it the institutional and/or strategic capacity to translate such a mandate into lasting social,

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political and economic change’ (Hay and Lister, 2006: 11). The implications of such a realist social ontology for state theory can be further brought out in contrasting it to Wendt’s position. 4.3.1

States as people

In contrast with much IR theory, as well as state theory, Alexander Wendt has famously rejected the treatment of the state as simply an empirical entity, and argued that the state is a person (Wendt, 2004; Hay et al., 2002). Wendt, like other states systems theorists, assumes that if we are to understand how international politics work, we should take the existence of both an international system and national states as given (Wendt, 1999: 246). In contrast to neo-realisms and neo-liberalisms, as Heikki Patomäki notes, Wendt wants to replace the capitalist conception of (self-interested) man with a socio-psychological conception of man (sic) (Patomäki, 2002: 86–7). Wendt accepts that the social site of the state includes both agents and structures, structures referring mostly to the patterns of interaction between individuals. The existence of the social structural properties of this site, for Wendt, means that state power cannot be reduced to mere collective action (whereby such power would be attributable mainly to individuals). Instead, he argues that states possess person-like characteristics themselves: they are best conceived of as organisms – or rather, as ‘superorganisms’ – as corporate agents (Wendt, 2004). Corporate agency, Wendt argues, is to be distinguished from collective agency, because in the former ‘individual(s’) intentions are constituted by the shared meanings in which they are embedded, making the relationship between individual and group intentions mutually constitutive rather than asymmetric’ (Wendt, 2004: 304–5). Because the state is the site (of individuals acting in state roles; of institutional cultures) and the object (e.g. the representative of citizens and the nation) of such interactions, the state, as a social being, is defined by collective intentionality and consciousness, and these in turn facilitate decision-making processes and the production of social outcomes. Collective identity is another emergent property of the group of citizens, and is also manifested in the state (Wendt, 2004). Three questions can be raised regarding whether Wendt’s concept of states as corporate agents can advance a social theory of the state in IR. The first concerns the aspects of the social that Wendt considers ‘emergent’. In the philosophy of the mind, the kind of argument Wendt makes for corporate agency is referred to as ‘panpsychism’, an argument for the possibility of supervenience of collective consciousness (Searle, 2004). While philosophers of the mind are in broad agreement that consciousness is an emergent (or more accurately, supervening) property of individual human beings, many philosophers reject the argument for consciousness as an emergent property of social groups. For instance, the philosopher John Searle finds panpsychic assumptions thoroughly unconvincing, as consciousness ‘does not spread

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out like jam on a piece of bread, but rather, it comes in discrete units’ (Searle, 2004: 105; Nagel, 1974; cf. Meijers, 2003). Therefore, even if social outcomes did not ultimately result solely from individual consciousness, the idea of collective consciousness as (one of) their social cause(s) is in question. Furthermore, the notion of the state as a corporate agent possessive of collective consciousness begs questions about the ability of state officials to review and reflect upon the state’s policies and institutions in their roles (Wight, 2004: 277). Indeed, Wendt suggests that when manifested, collective phenomena of collective intentionality and collective identity supervene on individuals and the group they form (Wendt, 2004). Can individuals not strategise against corporate agency formation? Indeed, if we are to conclude that Wendt’s argument about the emergent properties of the state exhibits ontological structuralism, then the ultimate outcome of the social interactions of corporate state persons in the system must entail the transcendence of the established logics of states systems theory in IR, and entail a teleological argument about the future of ‘unintended actions’ of states in global politics (see Wendt, 2005). Finally, Wendt’s argument focused on collective consciousness opens up the question whether it is implied that the state is only a collectivity, or a group (Wight, 2006a). An understanding of the state as a group would not amount to an emergent treatment of the constitutive properties of the state, but rather be suggestive of an aggregative conception of the level and the unit of analysis. These hesitations regarding Wendt’s non-reductive concept of the state ‘as a person’ call for further reflection on the alternatives. 4.3.2 States as ‘institutional ensembles’ A non-reductive alternative found in critical realist works is the concept of the state as an emergent ‘institutional ensemble’ (Jessop, 1990). States, on this conception, are ‘real’, but do not possess consciousness given the state is not fully anthropomorphic – it is not a ‘person’. The constitutive features of the state are seen rather differently here from Wendt’s theory. The state is not viewed as a collectivity of people, or as ultimately reducible to any of its concrete parts or practices. The state as a social form cannot be explained merely by tracing discursive or material patterns or preferences (e.g. norms, shared customs, patterns of behaviour or choices) between individuals or social groups. Instead, the concrete and observable attributes of state power (e.g. state leaders, national defence budgets, election of a new president, coordinated taxation) would not produce social outcomes without the largely unobservable social relations that contingently allow for the reproduction of concrete state practices. Jessop’s strategic–relational theory of the state unpacks this abstract moment of state power. The concept ‘institutional ensemble’ unpacks the notion that state power results from both human strategies towards the state and from the structural selectivities that are present in the relations that

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constitute the state (Jessop, 1990). Jessop maintains a stratified notion of the capacities particular to different strata of the social world, and argues that ‘it is not the state which acts: it is always specific sets of politicians and state officials located in specific parts of the state system’ (Jessop, 1990: 367). The distinctness of this position from Wendt’s is illustrated by Colin Wight’s conceptualisation of ‘state action’. In contrast to Wendt’s organicist ‘state persons’, Wight associates state agency with the ways in which particular state managers and officials embody the positioned practices of the state.12 The agency of individuals is crucial for the realisation of state power: ‘the state can only be understood by examining the emergence of individual initiatives to develop and/or safeguard collective projects’ (Wight, 2006a: 223). Equally crucial is the realisation that state officials’ agency is ‘layered and differentiated and inextricably linked to social contexts through the relations in which it is embedded’ (Wight, 2006: 213). The key social ontological insight of the related strategic–relational position is that the emergent or irreducible properties of social forms, such as the state, are not properties of a single underlying structure, but rather also encompass agentic properties such as positioned practices and roles (Hay, 2002: 125). The institutional ensemble of the state is a site for politics about and for state power, giving state power both a strategic and, given the ‘emergent’ status of the institutional ensemble, a strategically selective character. Furthermore, state power consists in structured ‘institutional ensembles’: ‘a distinct set of institutions and organisations whose socially accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on a given population in the name of their “common interest” or “general will”’ (Jessop, 2007a/b: 9). The institutional ensemble of the state is irreducible to the particular concrete and political articulations of the state. Herewith lies the strategic– relational approach’s strength for furthering state theorising in IR. Hay stresses that the ‘institutional moment’ of the state, captured in Jessop’s ‘ensemble’, avoids reducing state power to its ‘territorial’ or ‘national’ (or symbolic) moments (Hay, 1996: 11). Rather, the concept entails the state’s more concrete articulations, highlighting the dependence of their social power on the emergent (and partially self-organising) properties of the institutional ensemble of the state. Two important examples of the social power of the institutional ensemble of the state can be given to establish the significance of the concept for IR social science. First, Jessop’s concept aptly demonstrates how state capacities in world politics are only explicable by the relations that necessitate the particular institutional ensemble that the state is in a particular historical context (Bhaskar, 1993: 73; 1994: 75). For example, if the state indeed has concrete sovereign monopolies (such as those of means of violence over a given territory), this is a result of the strategic–relational reproduction of state institutions – not because of states being ‘separate’ from society (international,

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domestic, global or local) (Jessop, 2007a/b: 4–5). State institutions, and their organisational forms, are not fixed but dynamic and reshaped. Indeed, the effective integration of the state as an institutional ensemble (that can produce practices and policies) is a socially contested process, and involves various governmental rationalities, political practices and administrative programmes oriented towards achieving integration that would produce institutionalisation (Jessop, 2007a/b: 10). The kind of ‘temporal fix’ that the state is at any given moment in time, is thus strategic in its form, content and operation. This also means that state power is always the site for hegemonic struggles over competing ‘state projects’. If the social institutions of the state are strategically selective, so are the concrete organisations of the state (such as state bureaucracies, the government and a government programme): they emerge conditioned by the ‘past strategies’ towards the state. Indeed, Jessop argues that the ‘very form of the state resides in the crystallisation of past strategies’ (Jessop, 1990: 129; cf. Mann, 1988). Moreover, he writes: the structure and modus operandi of the state system can be understood in terms of their production in and through past political strategies and struggles. These strategies and struggles could have been developed within that system and/or at a distance from that system; and they could have been concerned to maintain it and/or to transform it. In this sense the strategic selectivity of the state is in part the emergent effect of the interaction between its past patterns of strategic selectivity and the strategies adopted for its transformation. (Jessop, 1990: 263) This returns us to Wight’s concept of state agency. Those who operate on the strategic terrain constituted by the state are in part constituted by the strategic selectivity of the state and its past interventions. Significantly, these past strategies and the strategic terrain only contingently refer to the national, territorial form of the state. In addition to elaborating the state’s political form, therefore, the constitutive concept of the state as an institutional ensemble thus refers us to international theory. The properties of the state as a real institutional form are not reducible to either the national or the international level (conceived of as emergent). Rather, substantive international theory must better explore the crystallisation of state power in various local, national, international and global contexts.

4.4 Multiscalar institutional ensembles of state power in world politics In conceptualising the state as an emergent institutional ensemble we move away from the notion of states as territorial ‘power-containers’: there is no

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‘natural’ connection between the state, territoriality and national society. Because the state’s institutional ensemble is interpenetrated and emergent, state power is not contained by territory. This idea has been elaborated upon in recent international political sociology in critiques of methodological nationalist concepts of the nation state (Chernilo, 2007). Moreover, in sociology, ‘methodological nationalism’ is the analytical assumption that the nation state is the necessary representation of modern society. Sociologists of ‘high modernity’ or ‘postmodernity’ (e.g Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992) have mobilised critiques of the key concepts of classical sociology (including ‘class’ and the ‘nation state’), classifying them as ‘methodologically nationalist’. In contrast, the social theorist Daniel Chernilo does not take ‘globalisation’ to constitute an epochal societal shift warranting new concepts, and instead stresses the ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ of those classical social theorists who advanced concepts like the nation state and class (including Weber and Marx). Rather than being methodologically nationalist, classical social theorists saw national statehood as one kind of historical formation of the state, not its natural form (Chernilo, 2007: 11). Chernilo thus advocates that social scientists pay more attention to the sociological conditions of possibility for the institutionalisation of the state in the national state form. One way to advance this argument in IR theory is to employ Jessop’s concept of the institutional ensemble, and to substantiate this concept on multiple scales of politics and polity. In conceptualising the state as an institutional ensemble, important questions for substantial international theory are opened up concerning the spatial extension of the social (re)production and societal penetration (or ‘integration’) of state power. Theories of the state in IR should address these, for conceivably even those forms of state power (embedded in the state as an institutional ensemble) that are taken to be the most ‘national’ (e.g. the ‘welfare state’) must be attributed to practices of institutionalisation of state power in not only national, but also local, regional and global politics (Swyngedow, 1997; Brenner, 1997; Jessop, 2007a/b; Brenner et al., 2003). 4.4.1

Multiscalar state power

This final section seeks to show that the critical realist concept of the state as an institutional ensemble should be substantiated across the various established scales of world politics. The analytical purchase of this social theoretical concept pertains to the state’s institutional form being not reducible to the state’s historically specific territorial, or discursive–symbolic forms. The section concludes in reflecting on how transformations in the institutional form can be captured in employing Jessop and Hay’s strategic–relational approach. Clearly, an important ‘moment’ of modern statehood has been the maintenance of territorial borders, but as Neil Brenner has stressed, the territoriality of state power must be treated as an outcome of political processes, and as such illuminates only a narrow sense of what he calls ‘state space’

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(Brenner et al., 2003: 6). On first impressions, territoriality refers to the state’s distinctive form of spatiality, namely to the territorialisation of political power. In IR and in the broader social sciences, analyses of state territoriality include those of the changing organisation of state territoriality in the modern interstate politics, the changing meaning of borders, boundaries and frontiers, and more (Brenner, 2003: 6). In a second, representational or symbolic sense, state territoriality and unity are also discursively reproduced and ‘imagined’ (Andersen, 1991; Weber, 1995; Campbell, 1998). Indeed, approaches focused on this ‘moment’ of statehood highlight both the discourses and practices that constitute territorially divided statehood (Bartelson, 1995), and the critical role that discourses and narratives of the idea of the state, including nationalist and internationalist discourses, play in linking state institutions to the state’s broader social context (Hay, 1996; Jessop, 2007a/b). Particularly discursive approaches, including IR scholarship on the political process of European integration, have convincingly shown that discourses about state power are one way in which ‘state space’ might be rearticulated (Hansen and Weaver, 2002; Ryner, 2002; Patomäki, 2002). Yet neither the territorial nor the discursive approaches fully capture the third, ‘institutional’ dimension of ‘state space’ discussed here. Not limited to a national ‘apparatus’ or configuration of social relations, state space, in an ‘integral sense’, refers to the ‘territory-, place-, and scale-specific ways in which state institutions are mobilized strategically to regulate and reorganize social and economic relations, and more generally, to the changing geographies of state intervention into social and economic processes’ (Brenner, 2003: 7). Thus, with regards to its social penetration, state power, at any given time, extends beyond the territorial and juridical features of state institutions to include these social institutions’ contested imprints and effects upon social relations that are not necessarily nationally defined (cf. Mann, 1988). These processes of contestation, or social struggles for power, control and opportunity, can be captured in the concept of a ‘scale’.13 At any given time, state institutions will spread over multiple ‘scales’, the hierarchical political articulation of which will define a state’s political space. In this sense, the institutional power of the state is always multiscalar – there are national, international, regional, local and global dimensions to it, the hierarchical ordering of which we can hope to capture by studying the political processes the state is engaged in (Swyngedow, 1997). The institutional power of the state thus concerns the politics over the scales of state capacity, given that social actors (including particular state officials advocating new projects towards state power) are always more embedded in some scales than others. As an example we may consider the variegated political positions of international human rights advocacy groups, transnational state elites, migrants, and homeless people in relation to state power. As political contestation over state power’s scope and purpose concerns the political articulation of a variety of scales, the specific institutions become

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successfully institutionalised in what constituted the state as an institutional ensemble, and in fact represent a temporary (or temporal), but nevertheless effective institutional solution reached in multiscalar politics (Smith, 2003: 228).14 There is also contestation between state power and non-state power as regards to institutionalising politics on different scales – consider for example the claims made for the national scale by international human rights activists, or international legal institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) advocating universal jurisdiction (Brown with Ainley, 2005: Ch. 11). The state, in its institutional ensemble, has a variety of strategies available to both resist attempts at institutionalisation by other actors (including restructuring the state’s social policy, migration policy and foreign policy), and to pursue multiscalar strategies in attempt to articulate new state space. Overall, the key issue here is that the social power of state institutions is conditioned by the state’s multiscalar compromises; these are the more concrete manifestation of the state as ‘an institutional ensemble’. In international theory, for instance John Ruggie’s notion of ‘embedded liberalism’ can be reconceptualised as one illustration of such an ensemble in the context of the international institutions of post-Second World War world politics (Ruggie, 1982). Multiscalarity of the state means that state power is best understood in terms of the social processes whereby state institutions are reproduced and transformed (through political strategies towards the state), which are both produced through politics on multiple scales, and result in institutions on multiple scales (Jessop, 2007a/b: 105). Most importantly, this means that the state in its institutional specificity must be understood as relatively autonomous of the national scale, even if the historical practices of the modern state have been institutionalised on that scale most predominantly. Because institutionalisation processes are a key constitutive element of state power, critical aspects of all state power, including nation-state power, are not confined to one scalar level: the state makes successful (or unsuccessful) claims to institutionalise state space at various scales, and so do other social forces. It follows that the state does not ‘possess’ the national scale; instead the state’s pursuance of the national scale must be understood in relation to other social forces potentially pursuing the same scale. For example, the state institutions that emerged in the late nineteenth century can be seen, in one respect, as resulting from the competition between socialist movements and liberal democratic state projects (Lyons, 1963). The example of socialist movements with a preference for internationalist institutions of public power and the liberal democrats’ preference for national public institutions illustrates how competing claims to state power, or competing ‘state projects’, are differentially ‘scaled’. Antonio Gramsci’s argument about the rise of the fascist state in Italy illustrated this point well. He argued that the failure to halt the development of national socialist, fascist state institutions in Italy was conditioned by the Italian intellectuals’ scalar positioning as embedded in cosmopolitan rather than national

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politics, which meant that no authentic hegemony could be realised as an alternative to fascism (Gramsci, cited in Jessop, 2007a/b: 107–13; Gramsci, 1971; Morton, 2007).15 This example also illustrates how a scale can never be understood in its own terms, but it must be understood in terms of (and can be seen as) the politics that go into its production (Swyngedouw, 1997: 141), and strategically selective reproduction. Indeed, as was discussed above, ‘the national’, ‘the international’ and other scales of politics, are ‘emergent’. Indeed, further illustrating the substantive relevance of realist state theorists’ arguments to denaturalise the equation between the state and the national ‘level’, historical scholarship across various social scientific disciplines stresses that the national scale is not the only level at which state projects have been pursued. Consider the spread of empires in the nineteenth century, and the politics of international law and juridical practice as examples (Watson and Bull, 1984; Wight, 1966; Reus-Smit, 2004). As the examples illustrate, some state projects entail the pursuing of institutionalisation at multiple scales. Importantly, while the specificity of the state’s institutional form, as has been argued here, is highlightedly political, the existing cultural and socio-economic context conditions, or ‘strategically selects’, the political projects that specify the institutional form of the state. Hence we need to examine not only particular state projects but also their inherited institutional context very closely to understand state power in specific cases. A most fascinating example is the welfare state form, a case in which state power, as is rarely recognised in IR, was successfully institutionalised on various scales in all identifiable periods of the state form (Mishra, 1984; Polanyi, 1944; Ruggie, 1982). Overall, the above examples provide substantive illustrations of the promise of grounding thinking about the state in IR in scientific and critical realist interventions.

4.5 In conclusion It is evident that Halliday’s call for more adequate state theory in IR cannot be responded to without considering the meta-theoretical arguments that either frame ‘the state’ as a unit of IR analysis, or leave it outside disciplinary debates. Arnold Wolfers, and recently, scientific and critical realist IR scholars have stressed that IR scholarship has far too long appropriated the state as only a ‘useful’ analytical abstraction: not real itself, but endlessly reducible to its constituent parts. I have suggested that a commitment to realism matters in moving us beyond such instrumentalism, accommodating further state theorising in IR social science. Realism matters for both denaturalising the relationship between the national space and the state, and for framing the state as an emergent institutional ensemble as a unit of analysis in world politics. In contrast to Wendt’s non-reductive theory of the state in IR, it was suggested that despite the state having an organizational core, the state is

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not a real subject: it is not ‘a person’. Instead, as Jessop’s strategic–relational social ontology suggests, we should ‘speak about the various potential structural powers (or state capacities), in the plural, that are inscribed in the state as an institutional ensemble’ (Jessop, 2007a/b: 37). State power, it was argued, is specific to the strategies and activities that its officials reflexively mobilise in the context of the state’s strategically selective institutions. Learning from configurational sociology’s critique of behaviourist frameworks for analysing the state, this chapter advocated that realist state theory in IR will not reduce the state to its territorial and national–symbolic moments (Hay, 1996). Appropriating the substance of the state’s institutional ensemble to the multiple scales of politics about state power, the chapter also lends support to Charles Tilly’s view that the institutionalisation of the state on the national scale and the ‘nation state’ are two different moments of statehood (Tilly, 1990). Further, it was argued that as state power in world politics is understood in terms of multiscalar, strategic–relational institutional ensembles, it becomes clearer why specifying the state in terms of its empirically observed features such as its organisational or infrastructural features including border control, taxation practices or redistributive policies, at any moment in time is just that – an empirical specification of the state (Chernilo, 2007: 21–32; Hay, 1996: 12). Learning from the interventions of scientific and critical realists in IR and state theory, we must conclude that it is specifically the state’s institutional form, and the power of this form in world politics, that international theory should pay more attention to.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Jonathan Joseph and Bryan Mabee for their valuable comments on this chapter. 2. World politics, on this conception, is thought to concern three (sometimes four) levels of social interaction: those at the level of human individuals, those within states and those between states (‘the system’) (Singer, 1961; Waltz, 1959; cf. Hollis and Smith, 1991). 3. A common criticism of behaviourist social science is that its concepts (e.g. ‘the state’) are often no more than statistical markers (Hay, 2002). 4. Jonathan Joseph further highlights the commonalities in neo-realist and (some) constructivist theories of the international in showing how the latter scholarship often rather too discretely shifts ‘from the neorealist conception of structure as stable patterns of aggregate behaviour to a constructivist system of shared behaviour’ (Joseph, 2007: 359). 5. For further elaboration on this argument advocated by scientific and critical realist scholars, the reader is referred to Patomaki (2002: Ch. 3), Wight (2002, 2006a: Ch. 1), Kurki (2008), Sayer (2000) and Manicas (2007). 6. For analyses elaborating the meta-theoretical principles of each position, see Emirbayer (1997), Jackson and Nexon (1999) and Kivinen and Piiroinen (2002) – the configurational approach – and Patomäki (2002) and Wight (2006a) – the emergentist approach. The argument here focuses only on the implications of these arguments for framing ‘the state’ as a unit of IR social science.

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7. Bull’s institutionalist analysis of neo-medievalism pertaining to his world society concept might be considered a predecessor to this approach (Bull, 1977: part 3). On the focus on institutional analysis as emphasising the configurational approach, see Nexon (2005). 8. For a sustained discussion of the idea of ‘social emergence’, see Sawyer (2005). 9. Andrew Collier uses the term ‘structuratum’ to refer to a social form with concrete manifestations that is a combination of various social structures (1988: 85). 10. On the concept of non-linearity, see Sawyer (2005). 11. For further discussion of the relationship between structurationist social theory and critical realism, see Wendt and Shapiro (1997), Hay (2002), Wight (2006a) and Joseph (2007). 12. Wight gives the following, layered account of human agency embedded in social contexts: ‘if we call the level of agency that relates to the “freedom of subjectivity”, agency1, the second level, agency2, refers to the way in which agency1 becomes an agent of something and this something refers to the socio-cultural system into which persons are born and develop.’ Finally, agency3 refers to socialised actors: the ‘positioned-practice places’ that agents1 inhabit (Wight, 2006a: 213–14). See Chapter 3 in that work for further reflections on this ‘layered’ account of agency. 13. A ‘scale’ is ‘the nested (and sometimes not so nested) hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size: for example, local, regional, national, continental, and global’ (Jessop, 1990: 315). 14. Delorme and Andre argue that the state, in this precise sense, is ‘an ensemble of institutionalised compromises’ (Delorme and Andre, 1982, cited in Jessop, 2007a/b). 15. Here one might highlight that the discourses and ideas that agents apply to politics also result from agents’ scalar positioning, as is often seen in the way transnational state elites share visions for legitimate statehood which are not necessarily shared by ordinary citizenry, or by non-state elites.

5 Inside the American State: Reconciling Structural and Interpretive Analyses within a Critical Realist Perspective Douglas Porpora

The objectives of this chapter are both practical and theoretical. At the practical level, the purpose of this chapter is to contribute to a better understanding of how the US decided to go to war against Iraq in 2003. In its approach to this question, however, the chapter also pursues a theoretical objective. Specifically, with increasing challenges to the once hegemonic political realism, it has become clear that states cannot be understood exclusively as monadic rational actors. Instead, their internal decision-making processes must also be studied (Wight, 2007). How national decision-making processes are best studied is a theoretical issue. After positivism, one of the remaining theoretical battles in IR is the divide between idealist and materialist approaches to the international social order. At the extremes, these two approaches reflect incompatible ontologies. It is quite possible, however, to incorporate elements of both. It is quite possible on the one hand to grant an important role to ideas without simultaneously maintaining that social life is ‘ideas all the way down’ (see Wendt, 1999) or at least not exclusively so. Conversely, it can be recognised that social behaviour is also governed by objective relations and circumstances that Marx described as independent of human will without claiming that human behaviour is completely determined by them. The tension between idealism and materialism is not only ontological. It also involves differences in methodological focus – between such interpretative approaches as discourse or rhetorical analysis and a more materialist, structural analysis. Debate among politically powerful actors naturally requires both together. A debate clearly is in itself a form of discourse that must be analysed as such. We must understand what is being said and why it is said. On the other hand, what is said and by whom needs also to be explained in terms of motivations deriving from position-based interests that presuppose objective relations and circumstances. Thus, showing how understanding and explanation (see Hollis and Smith, 1990 for the distinction) might be brought together is the major theoretical objective of this chapter. 88

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5.1 Understanding, explanation, and the philosophy of science Against the positivist covering law model of causality, the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers (e.g. Winch, 2007) held that human behaviour is governed by reasons. They went on to show fairly clearly that reasons in turn function discursively rather than lawfully. Reasons, they therefore argued, are not causes. Thus, the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers contrasted explanations in terms of reasons with explanations in terms of causes. This distinction led to a divide that has since marked the social sciences, including prominently IR (Hollis and Smith, 1990), between explaining and understanding social behaviour. Those continuing to subscribe to a positivist unity of science movement continue to uphold the applicability of the covering law model to social behaviour, which they accordingly seek to explain. On the other side are those who consider the distinction between reasons and causes to mark a deep division between the natural and human sciences. According to this view, which goes back to Dilthey, explanation is appropriate to the determinism of the natural order, whereas the understanding of reasons through what Weber (1947) called Verstehen is appropriate to the realm of freedom represented by the social order. One main problem with the post-Wittgensteinian view is its own acceptance of the covering law model of causality. Once the covering law model is accepted, causality does in fact become deterministic and as such inapplicable to the discursive play of reasons. Critical realism (CR), on the other hand, rejects the covering law model as an apt description of causality and in its place talks of causality not in terms of laws but in terms of how things work (Bhaskar, 1975, 1979). Some things, like human reasoning, just do not work in a deterministic fashion. Even so, as some (Davidson, 1971; Margolis, 1979) have pointed out, reasons function in a way we ordinarily associate with causes, i.e. they support counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals. Thus, while there may be a difference between discursive and non-discursive causation, there is no need to exclude reasons from a more open, not necessarily deterministic, understanding of causality. With its broader, non-deterministic understanding of causality, CR is able to reclaim a unified approach to science. The basis of that unity, however, is quite different from that of the old positivism. Whereas positivism dismissed historical narrative as descriptive or ideographic, CR instead dismisses the nomothetic approach to causality of the covering law model. Because for CR, particularly in the social realm, causality is always contextual and non-deterministic, narrative in fact becomes the canonical form of explanation (Porpora, 1987, 2001). In a historical narrative as in any story or account, discursive and non-discursive causes are combined in a contextual manner that positivism would have dismissed as ideographic. It is

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such a narrative account of American political decision-making that will be offered here, integrating interpretative (rhetorical) and material (structural) components.

5.2 Debate as object of study Social scientific literature on entire debates is sparse. Instead, analyses tend to address the rhetorical devices associated with one-sided discursive pronouncements such as speeches. With little prior rhetorical study of political debate to provide guidance, we must fall back on what has been done on political discourse. Most help comes from the field of communication, especially the subfield of rhetoric. The place to begin perhaps is Bitzer’s (1968) classic definition of the rhetorical situation: ‘A complex of persons, events, objects and relationships presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.’ ‘In any rhetorical situation’ Bitzer (1968: 6–7) argues, ‘there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions as the organizing principle: it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected.’ In political contexts, the ultimate audience will be the public, which, Bitzer (1978: 68) contends, possesses ‘a fund of truths, principles, and values’ from which ‘to accredit new truth and value and to authorize decision and action’. Bitzer’s formulation has been much debated by rhetoricians (Young, 2001), but it hardly seems to qualify as a full-blown theory. Even as a definition, the formulation is problematic. The debate over Iraq, for example, is arguably not a situation where an exigence precedes discourse but one where discourse attempts to create public perception of an exigence not previously perceived. In this case, we need to ask, ‘What happens when only the rhetor perceives the situation in a particular way?’ (Young, 2001: 280). Yet, however faulty Bitzer’s formulation may be even as a definition, it at least collects the elements that belong to a rhetorical situation: audience, context, exigence, rhetor and discourse.

5.3 The American political context To fully understand the American debate over Iraq, it is important to attend to five objective, i.e. non-discursive features of the American political context. The first objective feature is the political disengagement of the American public, which may in turn be a function of political disempowerment (Porpora, 1990). The situation is most acute when it comes to foreign policy, about which the public exhibits what social judgement theory calls low ‘ego involvement’ (Sherif and Sherif, 1969). Thus, after nearly ten years of low-intensity conflict in Central America during the 1980s, two-thirds of

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Americans could not say whether the US government was attempting to topple the government of Nicaragua and uphold the government of El Salvador or whether it was the other way around (Porpora, 1990). More recently, even with mid-term Congressional elections under way, two-thirds of Americans likewise did not know how their own Congressional representatives voted on the resolution authorising force in Iraq (CBS/New York Times, 2002). The low ego involvement of the public in foreign affairs both enables and constrains elite political actors. It gives rise to what has been called ‘image politics’ (Schell, 1975; Vogel, 1996; White, 1982), which constrains all actors to cloak the positions they adopt in easily understood imagery and which likewise enables some actors to promote positions that are predominantly image over substance. Most enabled in this respect is the President, who in the US is both head of state and ceremonial leader of the nation, making the President the one around whom the public rallies in foreign conflicts. After September 11, 2001, the public had in fact rallied around President Bush. Rewarded for the forceful, presidential way he was perceived as responding to 9/11, Bush enjoyed strong public approval as he moved the country toward war in 2002. The strong public approval for the President was a second objective feature of the context that must be considered. The third objective element that was important to the context was the still unsettled nature of the President’s war powers. Whereas Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution assigns Congress the power to declare war, Article 2, Section 2 makes the President the nation’s commander-in-chief, who can, even without a declaration of war, unilaterally deploy American troops for a period of up to 60 days. The War Powers Act, passed in 1973, was intended to curtail this presidential power to wage undeclared war. Yet its applicability has always been a source of contention between Congress and the White House with the President generally able to flout it. If presidents have been able to flout the restrictions of the War Powers Act, that ability in large part comes with the complicity of Congress. The fact is – and this is the fourth objective or non-discursive feature important to the context – it is not in the interests of individual Congressional representatives to vote on anything controversial. Doing so in fact is always a losing proposition. Even though such a vote may win friends, it will also make enemies. Much better is to avoid such votes altogether. Since the cold war, therefore, Congress’s pattern on controversial foreign policy decisions has been to send rhetorically mixed messages, enough acquiescence to enable the President to do what he wants and enough ambiguity for Congress to distance itself from the consequences should matters go badly (Ely, 1995). The fifth and final objective feature of the context to be considered here was the timing of the debate. It was only in late August 2002 that the Bush administration abandoned its dark hints and came out specifically for war

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with Iraq. It was only in September that the administration began to make its case. Why September? As White House chief of staff Andrew Card told the New York Times, ‘From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.’ Marketing considerations aside, such timing also backed the decision-making process up against the mid-term Congressional elections in November. The spectre thus hung over more dovish representatives and senators of being immediately clubbed with their vote should they decline to support the President’s war resolution. For this reason, much of the debate hinged not just on whether Congress should be consulted but also when.

5.4 Creating the exigence The theoretical nature of exigence has fuelled one of the longest running debates over Bitzer’s account of the rhetorical situation. If it is an exigence that defines a rhetorical situation in the first place, the implication is that an exigence is something ontologically objective that always precedes the rhetoric motivated to address it. While many rhetoricians hold this view, others see exigence as a social construction that does not exist ontologically until the rhetor discursively constructs it or even until the audience accepts that construction (see Young, 2001). A critical realist distinction clarifies the issues in a way that allows all possibilities to be theoretically encompassed. Specifically, CR distinguishes between what it calls the transitive and intransitive dimensions of epistemology. The intransitive dimension refers to what is ontologically real independent of human recognition (arguably, for example, the roundness of the earth or the heliocentric nature of the solar system). The transitive dimension refers to what some community – including our own – thinks is objectively real at any moment in time. In terms of this distinction, we can similarly distinguish between transitive and intransitive exigence. An intransitive exigence is an ontologically objective exigence that like, presumably, global warming exerts its effects whether or not it is recognised as such. Yet we only come to know of and intentionally act toward an intransitive exigence when we recognise it in some way that constitutes a transitive exigence. The social working and reworking of transitive exigences is said to be the object of rhetorical analysis. Yet, it is also possible, for reasons serving their own private agendas, for rhetors to attempt to create in the transitive dimension a collective sense of exigence that does not objectively exist in the intransitive dimension. In such case, rhetoric is not a response to a previously existing exigence and rhetorical situation but what creates the exigence – at least in the transitive dimension – and the rhetorical situation in the first place. Indeed, with an ill-informed American public as the ultimate audience for the actions and disquisitions of politicians, what matters

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politically is not truth but public perception of truth. As some communication scholars have put it, ‘Credibility is the issue, not facticity’ (McGee and Nelson, 1985: 149; see also Vogel, 1996: 20). In order to create a transitive exigence that did not exist intransitively, President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s employed what Hofstadter (1966) called ‘the paranoid style in American politics’ (Bass, 1992: 184; Nikolaev and Porpora, 2006). The paranoid style employs overblown language of good and evil in a ‘selective presentation of information, simplification, and dramatization’ (Bass, 1992: 190, 195). It always includes claims that the enemy presents a ‘clear and unmistakable’ threat such that inaction puts the safety ‘of our homeland’ in jeopardy (Bass, 1992: 197). Demonisation of the enemy is one of its most important stylistic features (Bass, 1992; Hofstadter, 1966), which elevates the conflict to cosmic proportions. The paranoid style serves two main objectives. First, it is obviously meant to rally the public around a constructed sense of exigence. Second, the paranoid style also seeks ‘to monopolize the interpretation the public receives’ (Bass, 1992: 200; Nikolaev and Porpora, 2006). It does so by maintaining an overly dramatic, almost hysterical register. Countering the paranoid style requires carefully reasoned, often complex, argumentation that requires more attention from the audience while delivering less emotional impact. The consequence is that even if the paranoid rhetoric is not fully believed by the public audience, the effectiveness of oppositional voices nevertheless tends to be ‘nullified’ (Bass, 1992: 184). Like President Reagan before him, President George W. Bush adopted the paranoid style in relation to Iraq, complete with the same rhetorically effective alternation between alarmism and demonisation. In Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, the old evil empire had now been replaced by a new ‘axis of evil’, in which Iraq featured prominently. In this address, Bush adumbrated his new doctrine of ‘pre-emptive’ strikes: ‘I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer … The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.’ If a policy as drastic and unprecedented as pre-emptive strike was necessary, that could only be because the danger posed was so serious and imminent. After the September 11 attack on the World Trade Towers, such danger was a plausible possibility. As the September 11 attack had seemingly come from out of nowhere, our terrorist enemies might be anywhere. Iraq seemed as likely a place as any. Still, as news increasingly leaked that the Bush administration was actually mobilising forces to attack Iraq, there were increasing calls for the administration to justify the apparent urgency of such action. The primary justification was that Iraq had or was on the verge of having weapons of mass destruction – including nuclear weapons, which posed a grave danger

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to the US. As per the paranoid style, Bush assumed the role of prophet, warning his people about the apocalyptic danger of inaction: The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons … And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line will be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists … and through its inaction, the United States would resign itself to a future of fear. (Bush, 2002a) Positing a direct danger to the US was morally and politically important as otherwise an attack on Iraq would constitute unprovoked aggression. It was difficult to maintain, however, that Iraq could pose a direct danger to the US or its citizenry. Even if Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, it would still need to deliver the blow somehow. During the previous Gulf War, Iraqi missiles barely reached Israel. How, then, even with weapons of mass destruction could Iraq possibly threaten America? Thus the line of argument Bush suggested that Saddam Hussein was linked to terrorists like al-Qaeda, who would smuggle the weapons into the US. Early on, Richard Cheney cited a secret meeting in Prague between September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi spy. It turned out, however, that no such meeting ever took place (Allen, 2002). On the contrary, US intelligence officials themselves were reporting that any link between Iraq and al-Qaeda was ‘sketchy’ and even unlikely. According to what ‘senior intelligence officials’ told the Washington Post (Allen, 2002) about ‘links between Hussein and global terrorism’, ‘the CIA had not found convincing proof, despite efforts that included surveillance photos and communication intercepts’. The threat Iraq allegedly posed was accordingly widened. It was not perhaps to the US itself that Iraq was a direct threat but to US allies and interests in the region. Even this threat was predicated on Iraq’s having or almost having weapons of mass destruction. What was the evidence of that? The news media, Congressional representatives and America’s international allies all kept waiting for hard evidence on this subject. This evidence was finally supposed to be issued by Bush in his 12 September address to the UN. Instead of evidence, however, the world received only a litany of Saddam’s past evils. In other words, rather than providing evidence of peril, Bush instead delivered demonisation: Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. … In one place – in one regime – we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind

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of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront. … Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. … Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime’s repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents – and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state. (Bush, 2002b) Bush’s charges against Saddam Hussein were all largely true. None, however, constituted evidence that Saddam had or was about to have weapons of mass destruction. In a kind of bait-and-switch, Bush had substituted demonisation for empirical evidence. The presidential use of the paranoid style ‘sets the agenda’ for political debate (Lukes, 2004) by what social judgement theory (Sherif and Sherif, 1969) calls positioning the ‘anchor point’ of acceptable judgement. The anchor point represents an opening position on an issue. To the left and right of the anchor point lie ‘latitudes of acceptance’. Beyond the latitudes of acceptance lie ‘latitudes of noncommitment’ and beyond those, ‘latitudes of rejection’, which, for a given anchor point, will be judged too extreme. In effect, like Reagan before him, Bush was able to use the paranoid style of politics to shift the anchor point of public debate far to the right. Sandinista Nicaragua resembled more a Western social democracy than a ‘totalitarian, communist dungeon’, but with Reagan establishing the latter as the public anchor point, any opposing argument featuring a democratic Nicaragua was already in the rejection region, beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. The effect was to force counter-arguments to begin with the disclaimer, ‘No one is saying Nicaragua is a democracy, but …’ Thus, in their 1984 presidential campaign, Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro more or less conceded that Central America was crawling with communists; they championed only different tactics (Porpora, 1990). The same dynamic transpired with Iraq. The Bush hysteria on Saddam Hussein might be overblown, but the anchor point tended to shrink the latitude of acceptance to at least conceding that Saddam had to go.

5.5 Further setting the agenda of debate The nature of the ensuing debate was further shaped by the legally unsettled state of the War Powers Act and the ability of presidents to disregard it. With that circumstance, the Bush administration placed Congress immediately on the defensive.

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The neo-conservatives behind the Bush administration supported in effect an imperial presidency, an imperial presidency for an imperial America. Internationally, the Bush administration was not only prepared but eager to flout international law. The so-called ‘new sovereigntists’ (see Spiro, 2000) in the Office of Legal Counsel believed that previous administrations had allowed international law to encroach too much on America’s own, sovereign, democratic decision-making. They were consequently eager for the administration to turn things around. Thus, early on, in an article in Foreign Affairs (2000), Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, explained that in contrast with prior administrations, the new Bush administration would no longer privilege ‘humanitarian interests’ or the laws and norms of an ‘illusory international community’ over the interests of the nation. Accordingly, the Bush administration signalled its apparent willingness, even eagerness, to wage war unilaterally without UN authorisation. Domestically as well, the Bush administration was signalling its imperial independence. Congressional support, it held, might be politically advisable but Congressional approval was not legally necessary. The administration’s position worried even Republicans. Congressmen like Chuck Hegel (R-Neb) and Dick Armey (R-Tx) urged the administration to seek support from the UN Security Council. Two former Republican secretaries of state, James Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger, both pressed the same advice. Finally, three retired generals also urged a resolution of support from the Security Council. As an opening posture, the Bush administration’s readiness to act unilaterally enabled it to reconstitute the rhetorical situation to its advantage. Technically, the default situation called for UN and Congressional approval. Rhetorically reconstituted, approval by neither body was any longer necessary; both bodies had only to be consulted. On 12 September, Bush consulted with the UN Security Council by issuing it what was effectively an ultimatum: My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq’s regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced – the just demands of peace and security will be met – or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power. We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress. We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather. We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that

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stand. And, delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand, as well. (Bush, 2002b) In the passages above, Bush expresses a desire to ‘work with’ the Security Council. At the same time, he makes it unmistakably clear that the US will not be bound by the Security Council. Instead, the Security Council is just invited for its own sake to join the action the US has already decided to take.

5.6 The Congressional response In a number of respects, the interplay between the President and Congress in this circumstance fits the prescient analysis of John Hart Ely (1993), written some ten years prior. First, Ely notes that there is always a coterie of Congressional people who want Congress to perform its constitutional duty of deciding whether or not the nation should go to war. To its credit, in this case, the Democratic Congressional leadership did feel this way. According to Russell Feingold (D-Wis), head of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, unless Iraq had somehow participated in the September 11 attack on the US, the President was required to get Congressional approval for any major military initiative against it. This position was endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-SD), Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.). On 26 August, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo) called it imperative for Congress to debate and vote on the issue. A second point Ely makes is that despite reservations presidents may have about conceding their prerogatives, it is often nevertheless in their interests at least to consult Congress in times of war. The reason is that such consultation can strengthen the image of national consensus for presidential action and spread the blame should anything go wrong. It was for such reasons, Ely (1993: 50) points out, that the first George Bush solicited a Congressional vote on the first Gulf War. Of course, Ely (1993: 51) goes on to say, the first Bush did not seek Congressional authorisation – or ‘support’ – without first receiving firm assurances that he would receive it. Ely notes that even with such assurances, the vote in the Senate turned out to be rather close. Ely speculates that future presidents would need even stronger assurances of support in order for them to consult Congress and that they will be reluctant to consult Congress should that body show any disinclination to accede to presidential initiatives. True to form, in the current case, Congressional members began signalling early on that should President Bush consult Congress, he would receive

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the authorisation he sought. Consider, for example, why Gephardt called it imperative that the President consult Congress: This issue is much more than just a legal debate. The president will need the decisive support of the public and their elected representatives in order to initiate and sustain the effort that will be required to eliminate the threat posed by this regime. (Gephardt, 2002) As noted, Bush’s paranoid hysteria on Saddam Hussein had served to shift the anchor point of debate so that the latitude of acceptance at least conceded that Saddam had to go. In Gephardt’s reasoning above, we see that to cajole the President to consult Congress, Gephardt has in fact already conceded just that proposition. This ground was conceded as well even by the more critical Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca), future Speaker of the House, who eventually voted against war authorisation: ‘Saddam Hussein should take no comfort in the fact that we are debating how we would go about making the world a safer place. It’s not a question of if. It’s just a question of how’ (Pelosi, 2002). In fairness, the ‘how’ question still potentially contained considerable substance. ‘How’ could potentially involve questions of international legality and the role of the United Nations. It could involve the exhaustion of other options. Still, enough ground was conceded to the President that even by 12 September, Henry Hyde (R-Il) could express his confidence that while Congressional debate was necessary, Congress would authorise Bush to act. If ‘how’ the US would act could in principle have depended on considerations of law and morality, in practice such considerations were marginalised in the ensuing Congressional debate. In their NPR interview, Hyde and Pelosi adumbrated the considerations that would actually dominate Congressional deliberation. For all their differences, Hyde and Pelosi articulated very similar considerations: There are a lot of questions that have to be addressed. You’ve raised a couple of them. How much is this going to cost? What’s the impact on the world economy? What about after the war? What about if Saddam Hussein is deposed? Who is going to take over? What kind of a government will succeed his government? These things deserve full discussion, and I think after we have some hearings we’ll be ready. (Hyde, 2002) And we have all said to the president in order to build consensus in our country for a course of action, the American people have to know at what cost; at what cost in terms of human lives of our young people; at what cost in terms of dollars, especially if we go it alone – it could cost tens of billions of dollars; at what cost in the war against terrorism; and

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at what cost in terms of the length of an occupation of Iraq that may be necessary if, indeed, Saddam Hussein is toppled. (Pelosi, 2002) The considerations Hyde and Pelosi mention are entirely prudential in nature, concerned exclusively with US interests. Concern for international legality or the prospect of unprovoked aggression are of no consequence. Thus, in neither the Congressional debate nor in the preceding discussion on the opinion pages of the mainstream press was much attention accorded the legal or moral legitimacy of Bush’s newly released national security strategy calling for ‘pre-emptive strikes’ against America’s enemies. What received considerably more attention was a procedural issue: when the Congressional debate and vote would be scheduled. At first, the Democratic leadership wanted the debate and vote postponed until after the mid-term Congressional elections in November. Despite what former White House Chief of Staff Carl Rove went on to claim, it is fairly clear that the Bush administration was forcefully insisting on earlier deliberation. The Democratic concern was that with an earlier vote, the issue would become politicised, a prospect conversely welcomed by the Republicans. It became clear, however, that the issue would not go away and that as long as it remained, public attention would remain focused on foreign policy, where Bush and the Republicans were strong, and off the economy, where they were very weak. The Democratic strategy thus changed to get the vote over with as soon as possible, thereby returning electoral politics to domestic matters. Once the Congressional vote was scheduled for before the elections, Congress people up for re-election had to be concerned about being depicted as soft on national defence. Such a problem was most acute for those in more disputed districts. Pressure thus built on the Democratic leadership to come up with a war resolution that Democrats could support. Once the Democrats embarked on this path, the task was to reframe rhetorically what the Congressional vote actually signified. What it signified in reality was what a rather small group in Congress called it: a ‘blank cheque’ authorising the President to use whatever force against Iraq he deemed necessary. The Democrats supporting the resolution represented the vote differently. Support for the President’s resolution was not a blank cheque. It was rather a way to help the President to exercise diplomacy. By showing the world and Saddam Hussein that the US stood united behind Bush’s readiness to use force if necessary, Bush could putatively better pressure both the UN and Saddam Hussein to act responsibly. The US President, the argument ran, had already demonstrated his own commitment to responsible action. On 12 September, he had ‘consulted’ the UN and he now clearly had consulted Congress. The President, therefore, could be trusted with the authority Congress would now give him.

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In both houses of Congress, the resolution was overwhelmingly supported. The Senate voted 74–24 in favour, and the House similarly, 296–133. Congress had acted just as Ely predicted. It gave the President the national security authorisation he sought but in a way that would allow Congress to pretend otherwise. The pretence began almost immediately with Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) emblematic. The President, she declared, should not interpret the positive vote in favour of the resolution as an authorisation for war.

5.7 Conclusion This chapter has tried to accomplish several objectives. The first was simply to offer a better understanding of how the US as a whole came to go to war against Iraq. In the process, the chapter pursued two theoretical objectives. It tried to demonstrate more fully how to analyse not just a single speech or speech act but an entire debate in which proffered interpretations of events are rhetorically framed and reframed over time. Such frame contests always occur within a context of structural relations that it was also the task of this essay to explore. In so doing, the chapter sought further to demonstrate the theoretical integration of considerations normally segregated by analyses coming from an exclusively materialist or idealist direction. Such integration is a possibility recovered by the abandonment of a deterministic, positivistic conception of causality in favour of the newer, post-positivist conception of causality championed by CR. There is one more theoretical issue to which this essay seeks to contribute, although it is beyond its scope to say much. There is now much attention in IR on the internal mechanisms according to which states act, particularly so after the discussion of Wendt’s (2004) provocative claim that states constitute actual persons. The description in this chapter of a national dynamic of deliberation is also meant to contribute to a further consideration of the nature of collective action and its ontological status. That consideration, however, will need to await another time.

6 What is Realism in International Law and Human Rights? Bill Bowring

6.1 Introduction This chapter reflects on recent work on the theory of international law. The primary focus is on the apparent recent colonisation of international law by a theoretical paradigm which has become popular in the social sciences and in particular in the theory of international relations (IR), ‘social constructivism’. The leading social constructivist theorist of nationalism, Rogers Brubacker, in his Nationalism Reframed, celebrates the undermining of treatment of groups as real, substantial entities. This he sees as part of ‘a shift from broadly structuralist to a variety of more “constructivist” theoretical stances’ (Brubacker, 1996: 13). In his own words, his project ‘… is to focus on nationness as a conceptual variable, … not on nations as real collectivities …’ (Brubacker, 1996: 14). You can see where this leads! In this chapter I start by exploring the genesis and trajectory of social constructivism in IR theory, and the interest expressed by an important legal scholar, Gunther Teubner. I then turn to the collection The Politics of International Law edited by Christian Reus-Smit (2004), which includes chapters by Antony Anghie on international financial institutions (2004), Dino Kritsiotis on the use of force (2004) and David Wippman on the International Criminal Court (2004). Anghie and Kritsiotis are thoroughly progressive international legal scholars; yet, I argue, the methodology to which they are here attracted is far from progressive. One question which arises is: how to identify the best critical resources for analysis of this tendency. Law is par excellence a social practice, and it is suggested here that it is thus a prime object for the still exhilarating methodology proposed by the early Bhaskar (1979, 1989). A rich variety of social structures, displaying causal powers, existing across human generations, have their own laws and dialectic. However, international law and human rights have commonly been analysed as normative discourses, the paradigm being Kant’s vision of perpetual peace. Yet their subject matter is also the apparently anarchic 101

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(mis)behaviour of states; and the motor of their development is often the adversarial practice of lawyers, poignantly viewed from the inside by the scholar and practitioner – and fierce critic of constructivism – Martti Koskenniemi (1991, 2005, 2008). So, what is constructivism?

6.2 Social constructivism in international relations theory – and autopoiesis Stefano Guzzini (2002: 147) wrote of constructivism: ‘What a success story! Hardly known a decade ago, constructivism has risen as the officially accredited contender to the established core of the [international relations] discipline.’ Social constructivism now has the stature of an acknowledged orthodoxy. It has a clear presence in IR theory, strongly contrasted with competing approaches. Reus-Smit, to whom I return below, in an earlier article (1997) contrasts constructivism with ‘neo-realism’, for example the work of John Mearsheimer of Chicago (2001),1 and ‘neo-liberalism’ (ReusSmit, 1997: 558–61). For him, ‘Constructivists argue that the foundational principle of sovereignty defines the social identity of the state and, in turn, constitutes the basic institutional practices of particular historical periods’ (Reus-Smit, 1997: 556). To jump ahead a little, I ask: how can a concept, the proposed foundational principle, a linguistic artefact, define the identity of an institution with real existence? This is to put the cart before the horse, and is the purest idealism, as is shown when he turns for support to Habermas’ theory of ‘communicative action’. It is quite clear to me that both Habermas’ ‘linguistic turn’ and social constructivism are part of the same idealist constellation. The term ‘constructivism’ was coined in 1989 by the IR scholar Nicholas Onuf (1989). Roy Bhaskar, obviously, did not comment on this fundamentally conservative social theory in the two books in which he introduced to an astonished world (at least in my case), and mapped out his version of ‘scientific realism’, A Realist Theory of Science (1975) and The Possibility of Naturalism (1979). During the period at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s when he was writing Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom (1993) and Plato etc (1994) he discussed social constructivism and regarded it as a major challenge which his own theories could overcome.2 At this time, in a short but pithy entry on ‘Realism’ (1991b: 458) he also explained that: ‘explanatory structures, generative mechanisms or (in Marx’s favoured terminology) essential relations are (a) ontologically distinct from, (b) normally out of phase with and (c) perhaps in opposition to the phenomena (or phenomenal forms) they generate’. Marx himself asserted that ‘… all science would be superfluous if the outward appearances and essences of things directly coincided’ (Marx, 1971: 817). Science in this sense therefore rejects representation, or (as the sociologist Margaret Archer (1995) has explained

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‘representation’) a one-dimensional reality coming through the senses. For scientific realists, a social science implies a stratified social world including non-observable entities. Social structures really exist, and have emergent causal powers. This is the polar opposite of social constructivism. It is also the version of ‘realism’ which for me is best suited to the study and practice of international law and human rights. According to Jutta Brunnée and Stephen Toope (2000–1: 26; and see Checkel, 1999), constructivism finds deep roots in the social theories of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. This point was also made, in more detail, by John Ruggie (1998), who also emphasised the strong influence of the work of Anthony Giddens (Ruggie, 1998: 856). Brunnée and Toope (2000: 28) explain that ‘For contemporary constructivists, social structures are built through the interaction of states and other actors. These so-called intersubjective structures give the world meaning’ (citing Katzenstein, 1998: 679). While they are at pains to deny that constructivism reveals any ‘intrinsically idealist bias’ (Brunnée and Toope, 2000: 32), something on which I comment throughout this chapter, Brunnée and Toope correctly acknowledge (2000: 33) one fundamental problem: ‘Why do constructivists, like other IR theorists of quite different orientations, have trouble explaining political change?’ I contend that in fact social constructivism is inimical to political change, or indeed to politics under any description. Guzzini (2000: 148) adds a further criticism: that the phrase ‘the social construction of …’ is often either eclectic, as a general category from which researchers pick and choose their particular version without regard to coherence, or redundant, when constructivism simply ‘adds some face lift to already existing approaches’. He describes its use as ‘increasingly inflationary and at times woolly’ (2000: 174). When I turn below to its deployment in the field of international law, it becomes clear that nothing new or distinctive emerges as a result. Guzzini’s own ‘reconstruction’ understands ‘constructivism in terms both of a social construction of meaning (including knowledge), and of the construction of social reality’ (2000: 149). He acknowledges that an important question arises for constructivists: ‘What does the real world mean …?’ Or, one might add, is there a real world at all for the social constructivists? This is a point made by the critical realists to whom I will return. According to Guzzini (2000: 159, citing Patomäki and Wight, 2000) critical realists suspect that ‘putting epistemology in front of the meta-theoretical cart ends up in a shallow, mainly implicit, ontology’. For Guzzini (2000: 159), constructivism does not deny the thought-independent existence of natural phenomena, but challenges their language-independent observation. Jonathan Joseph, in a passage cited below, demonstrates acutely that even if constructivism is not solipsism, it cannot account for the thought- or language-independent impact of the very same natural phenomena on human beings. That is, the causal powers not only of objects, but of real social structures.

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I have already observed that social constructivism is inherently idealist. An explicit link has been made on this basis by Gunther Teubner, the legal scholar who has done the most to promote the system of Niklas Luhmann, namely the theory of autopoiesis, as an account of law which converges with post-structuralism and critical theory. For Teubner, post-structuralism is exemplified by Foucault, and critical theory by Habermas, and both are united ‘in their antirealism and their anti-individualism’ (Teubner, 1989: 729). His thesis is that ‘under a constructivist social epistemology, the reality perceptions of law cannot be matched to a somehow corresponding social reality “out there”. Rather, it is law as an autonomous epistemic subject that constructs a social reality of its own.’ Furthermore, ‘It is not human individuals by their intentional actions that produce law as a cultural artefact. On the contrary, it is law as a communicative process that by its legal operations produces human actors as semantic artefacts’ (Teubner, 1989: 730). As he points out, this position does indeed radicalise the notion of the ‘social’, to the point that human beings themselves are eliminated! Most social constructivists would not follow Teubner all the way in this radicalism: but what he shows clearly is the direction in which social constructivism, indeed all idealism, must inevitably lead.

6.3 Social constructivism and international law The next question is – what influence do these ideas have on international law? In his recent – and very successful – edited collection The Politics of International Law (2004), Reus-Smit notes without embarrassment that constructivists have been labelled ‘the new idealists’ (2004: 21).3 This, it seems to me, is entirely accurate, and he does not seek to evade the description or its connotations. Although in the first of his three ‘core propositions’ Reus-Smit invokes the ‘material environment’, he does so in order to insist that ‘normative and ideational structures’ are just as important. He also makes it quite clear that ‘modern liberal politics’ is a – highly desirable – given, which positively conditions the institution of international law (2004: 44). In this way, he confirms explicitly the observations I have made above as to the idealism and liberalism of social constructivism. It is interesting therefore to examine how Anghie and Kritsiotis interpret the theoretical menu on which the collection is based. In his empirically based chapter on international financial institutions, Anghie distinguishes between realists, who view financial institutions ‘principally as mechanisms by which powerful states further their own interests’; ‘neo-liberal institutionalists’ who study factors leading to state cooperation to create a legal regime, the reasons why such regimes help governments to make credible policy commitments to market actors, and the conditions under which compliance with the regime is likely; and constructivists, who see financial organisations as powerful independent actors, seek to account

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for their dysfunctional or pathological behaviour, and contend that they acquire a life of their own, independent of the intentions of the states which created them (Anghie, 2004: 217). His conclusion shows that he does indeed understand international financial institutions as persons, using law ‘to legitimate themselves and consolidate and expand their power’ (2004: 238). It is not to be denied that all institutions as social structures have a real existence, causal powers and a degree of autonomy. But they are the product of and located in larger social structures, namely, for example, capitalism; and in thoroughly material processes, such as the recent credit crisis, which have critical impact on millions of people, whether or not they are endowed with any discursive description or meaning. Kritsiotis, in a powerful dissection of law and practice on the use of force, in which he concedes that ‘normative advances have indeed been made’ (Kritsiotis, 2004: 78), takes from Reus-Smit a desire to appreciate the ‘fascinating complexity’ that ‘has evolved between international politics and law’ (2004: 47). That is, constructivism is for him an alternative to seeking to equate all law with political action, or seeking to hierarchise law and politics in relation to each other. International law is, for him, ‘part of an attempt at persuasion, a sort of intellectualised diplomacy’ (2004: 47). That is, it is located as far as he is concerned for the purpose of Reus-Smit’s collection, exclusively within the linguistic sphere, the realm of discourse. He concludes by reference to his own earlier work, insisting on the value of international law as a communicative device, ‘helping to frame the various claims which states wish to make to other states and institutions in defence of their coercive actions under international law’ (2004: 79; see also Kritsiotis, 1998). Again, the effect of this strategy would be to provide a description of the discursive activities of states, without any possibility of explanation, or of collective human action. Finally, Wippman, in his chapter on the International Criminal Court, starts by asserting that the ‘entire enterprise of creating the ICC does not fit comfortably within the realist framework’, while the ‘neoliberal institutionalist analysis’, seeing states ‘as rational actors in pursuit of efficient means to realise their individual and collective interests’, captures only part of what happened in Rome in 1998, with the agreement and promulgation of the Rome Statute of the ICC (Wippman, 2004: 152). For him, only constructivism can explain the fact that the creation of the ICC was driven by normative as well as material interests (2004: 153). He therefore wants to study ‘purposive and identity-constitutive forms of reason and action’. His chapter contains an effective critique of the neo-realism of John Bolton (2004: 176–9), but his arguments in favour of the ICC are in essence reaffirmations of liberal principle rather than analysis of its social and political context, and by the time he reaches the conclusion of his chapter he appears to have forgotten entirely about constructivism as a theoretical model.

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In his concluding chapter, Reus-Smit makes his own position even more explicit. He asserts that ‘… only by comprehending the multiple faces of political liberalism can we account for the form, practice and content of the modern international legal order’ (2004: 273). He also demonstrates in detail how close his version of social constructivism is to Habermas’ communicative ethics. This is demonstrated by his ‘social conception of power’ (2004: 290), as negotiation, and as a relation of exchange. Exchange, that is, in the discursive sphere.

6.4 The politics of Antony Anghie Antony Anghie is a profoundly influential critic of international law, and genuinely radical in his recasting of international legal theory. But I maintain that his Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Anghie, 2005) has important lacunae. It fails to provide any account of the role of politics, specifically, the politics of the Russian Revolution and the USSR, in his consideration of the principle and the right to self-determination of peoples. This Anghie has in common with all the major commentators on contemporary international law. There is one notable exception, although he is not an international lawyer: Pheng Cheah, in his Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Cheah, 2003). I return to him below. The fact that the first word of Anghie’s title is the controversial one ‘Imperialism’ should already alert us to the radical nature of his inquiry. All credit should be given to him for deploying such a contentious but absolutely accurate term. His mission is to focus on ‘the colonial origins of international law’ (Anghie, 2005: 3). His broad argument is that: … colonialism was central to the constitution of international law in that many of the basic doctrines of international law – including, most importantly, sovereignty doctrine – were forged out of the attempt to create a legal system that could account for relations between the European and non-European worlds in the colonial confrontation. (2005: 3) It will be seen already that as in his contribution to Reus-Smit’s collection, Anghie’s proposal is restricted to the discursive sphere. For him, someone or some people, unspecified, create a legal system, that is a linguistic construct based on a concept, sovereignty, with a view to explaining colonial conflict. But while the attempt might well be made to use law as a means of resolving conflict, the explanation of the conflict must surely take account of the economic, political and historical context and dynamics of colonialism. Anghie was inspired in particular by his research work for Judge Weeramantry of the International Court of Justice, and by the fact that Weeramantry’s jurisprudence ‘… draws from a variety of legal systems and

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traditions in an attempt to create a truly universal international law that promotes a compelling vision of international justice’ (Anghie, 2005: 320). The case on which he worked for Weeramantry was the classic decolonisation case of the Nauru islanders, whose home, placed by the League of Nations under a mandate held by Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, was destroyed by phosphate mining.4 The Nauru islanders won their case, but their island had already been destroyed. Weeramantry’s jurisprudence and vision could not explain why disaster befell the islanders; nor could it provide the basis for resistance. Indeed, Anghie’s aim is not to condemn ideals such as ‘the rule of law’, ‘good governance’ or ‘democracy’ as being ‘inherently imperial constructs’, but rather: ‘… to question how it is that these ideals have become used as a means of furthering imperialism and why it is that international law and institutions seem so often to fail to make these ideals a reality’ (Anghie, 2005: 320). Anghie is, therefore, motivated by a response to injustice. In essence, he wishes to show how the rank injustice and inequality of colonialism have torn international law from its proper ideals. It should already have been noted, therefore, that Anghie has a fundamentally – albeit radical – liberal foundation for his critique of international law. He wishes the law to make a better job of living up to its own ideals. Those ideals are not subject to question; and from this position there flow political consequences. There is a further, biographical, reason why this should be the case. Anghie’s book originated as his thesis at Harvard Law School, supervised by K. Anthony Appiah and Duncan Kennedy. These are great names in critical international law. However, the scholar whose influence Anghie also acknowledges is none other than the doyen of American liberal international legal theory, Thomas M. Franck.5 Franck examined Anghie’s thesis, and Anghie relates that Franck provided him with ‘… extremely acute, detailed and illuminating comments, the true significance of which, in some cases, I realised only years later’ (Anghie, 2005: xiv). It seems to me, therefore, that the intellectual space inhabited by Anghie is very much that established by Franck in his extraordinarily influential works (Franck, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1999, 2002). I have explained elsewhere in detail how Franck’s scholarship can appear as ‘… the words of the most sunny optimist, the normative liberal par excellence, the true believer in the legitimacy of norms and rules in international law …’ in his interpretations of US government action in Iraq (1991), Serbia (1999) and Afghanistan (2001) (Bowring, 2008a: 40). It therefore comes as no surprise that in his examination of the pivotal role of colonialism in shaping contemporary international law, Anghie fails to notice the thoroughly contradictory but decisive interventions of the USSR from its inception right through to the post-Second World War struggles for decolonisation (Bowring, 2008b). He mentions Lenin only in

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a footnote (Anghie, 2005: 142, n.115), and only in the context of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, not his advocacy of self-determination – although Anghie does note that ‘Lenin went a stage further in his analysis, which pointed to the centrality of colonialism to the entire capitalist system.’ In the same vein, Anghie refers to ‘… Woodrow Wilson’s forceful promotion of the concept of self-determination’ (2005: 139) without mentioning Lenin’s even more forceful promotion, some time before Wilson. This is curious, since Lenin’s vision extended to the British, French, American and other colonial empires, which Wilson’s most certainly did not. Wilson’s vision was confined to post-war continental Europe, to the new states emerging from the ruins of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Indeed, Anghie permits himself the following passage (2005: 35), betraying an extraordinary ignorance as to the political and historical origins of the principle and right to self-determination: Even when the colonies were perceived to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions of the discipline, as in the case of the doctrine of self-determination which was used in the 1960s and 1970s for the purpose of effecting the emergence of colonial territories into sovereign states, these challenges were perceived as threatening to disrupt a stable and established system of international law which was essentially and ineluctably European and which was now faced with the problem of now accommodating these outsiders. The conceptualisation of the problem in this way suggested again that the non-European world was completely peripheral to the discipline proper; and it was only the disconcerting prospect of Africans and Asians acquiring sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s that alerted international lawyers to the existence of a world that was suddenly discovered to be multicultural. This, I maintain, is to turn history entirely on its head. It was not the doctrine of self-determination which brought about colonial independence; it was the struggles of the colonised, under the banner of the doctrine, which brought the slogan of the right of nations (peoples) to self-determination, first deployed by Lenin before the First World War, back to life. It appears that, for Anghie, the history of the national liberation movements and the anticolonial struggles simply does not exist. In Chapter 3 of his book ‘Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions: the Mandate System of the League of Nations’ (Anghie, 2005: 115ff.) he has nothing at all to say about V. I. Lenin, the Russian Revolution, the USSR, or even the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination itself. I return therefore to Pheng Cheah. His book Spectral Nationality (2003) draws from Benedict Anderson and others on the importance of what Cheah terms the ‘organismic’ content of decolonising nationalism. Cheah, unlike Anghie and Knop, recognises the crucial role played by Lenin’s contribution.

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Lenin’s importance for Cheah is in particular as precursor and constant point of reference for Amilcar Cabral (1979) and Franz Fanon (1963). Indeed, this section of his book is headed ‘Acts of Culture: the Return of the Nation-People in Socialist Decolonisation’ (Cheah, 2003: 208). According to Cheah, Lenin made a distinction between two successive stages of capitalism: a stage where national state-formation is the norm because the nation is the condition for the growth of capitalism and its victory over feudalism and absolutism; and an advanced stage, immediately preceding the transition to socialism, in which national barriers are eroded (Cheah, 2003: 210). Thus, again in Cheah’s formulation, based on Lenin’s argument with Rosa Luxemburg (Lenin, 1913), Western European nationalism was by then reactionary, with no mass democratic movements. But the proletarian movement was under a duty to support the struggle for selfdetermination elsewhere in the world, ‘because political democracy is a step closer to socialism’ (Cheah, 2003: 211). As Cheah observes (2003: 212), Lenin revelled in the spontaneous vitality of the national liberation movements: ‘Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light and freedom. What delight this world movement is arousing in the hearts of all class-conscious workers ...’ (Lenin, 1913). For Cheah, Cabral’s and Fanon’s ‘… exemplary theories of decolonising nationalism continue this legacy’ (Cheah, 2003: 214).

6.5 A ‘postmodern’ legal critique of constructivism In his contribution to Susan Marks’ recent collection, International Law on the Left (2008), very different altogether from that of Reus-Smit, Martti Koskenniemi, who combines scholarship with diplomatic practice, accurately identifies constructivism for what it is. He points out (although by reference to Maja Zehfuss’ Derridean critique (Zehfuss, 2002)) that ‘“Reality” is today seen as constructed by frameworks involving normative preferences’ (Koskenniemi, 2008: 43). He sees the ‘normative turn’ in IR as paralleled by the turn to ethics in international politics, as in the ‘clash of civilisations’. In this peculiar world, Protestantism created the Westphalian system, and anticolonial ideas brought about decolonisation. Koskenniemi concludes, brilliantly, that ‘As in all idealism, the conditions of the emergence or decline of such ideas remain shrouded in mystery’ (2008: 44). Koskenniemi’s magisterial work, From Apology to Utopia (2005), was devoted to the demonstration of his ‘indeterminacy thesis’. ‘As immanent critique, it shows that the justifying principles of international law – the liberal doctrine of politics – in fact fail as justifying principles’ (2005: 610). It will be recalled that the entire basis of Reus-Smit’s position is – the liberal doctrine of politics. However, as the long title of this book suggests, Koskenniemi’s basic position is that international law ‘provides resources for defending good and bad causes, enlightened and repressive

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policies’ (2005: 613). It is ‘… always already complicit in the actual system of distribution of material and spiritual values in the world … the task for lawyers would no longer be to seek to expand the scope of the law so as to grasp the dangers of politics but to widen the opportunity of political contestation of an always already legalised world’ (2005: 615). His conclusion is that ‘International law is what lawyers make of it’ (2005: 615). From the standpoint of the international legal practitioner, striving to get the best result for her client in an environment in which indeterminacy is essential (or why bother to fight the case?), such a position is understandable. Yet despite his criticism of the constructivists, Koskenniemi appears to fall in the end in a position not far from theirs.

6.6 Constructivism’s competitors in international legal theory Even if the sources of international law are a matter of some controversy, given the absence of world government or a single recognised legislature, positivism has been a powerful influence in the theory of international law. Social constructivists perceive themselves as challenging the limitations of positivism, which lies at the foundations of the ‘realism’ of Carr and Morgenthau. For Malcolm Shaw, author of the sixth edition of the leading textbook on international law (2008), the positivist school which developed in the nineteenth century and reached its apogee with Hans Kelsen (2002) ‘declared that law as it exists should be analysed empirically, shorn of all ethical elements’ (2008: 49). In the view of Shaw and most contemporary writers, positivism is in the end ‘tautological: it merely repeats that states which obey rules ought to obey those rules’ (Shaw, 2008: 51) However, B. S. Chimni, an acute Marxist scholar of international law, diagnoses the dominant Mainstream International Law Scholarship (MILS) as essentially positivist (Chimni, 2008: 53), but also as a ‘narrative of progress’, in which ‘every increase of international legal regulation is necessarily a step towards establishing a just world order’ (2008: 54). But this scholarship is characteristically unwilling to speak truth to power. It should already be clear that Martti Koskenniemi is far from being a positivist. Indeed, a constant source of reference for him is Rosalyn Higgins, former professor at the LSE, first woman judge on the International Court of Justice, and most recently the Court’s president. She insists that international law is not rules, but a normative system, harnessed to the achievement of common values (Higgins, 1994). She adheres to the New Haven, ‘policy-oriented’, school of thought, developed at Yale University by Myers McDougal (1960), his colleagues and many disciples. Shaw characterises this school as part of the ‘behavioural approach’ to IR (Shaw, 2008: 59). For Chimni, although the New Haven School presents itself as sharply critical of MILS, and to an extent is, it is ‘even less willing to speak truth to power’

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(Chimni, 2008: 54). Indeed, as he pointed out earlier, it is ‘fused with an arbitrary assertion of the superiority of the liberal democratic model of human rights …’ (Chimni, 1993: 116). As a reaction to New Haven and the prevailing mainstream positivism, a so-called ‘New Stream’ of more radical international legal scholarship has arisen, introduced first of all by the critical scholar David Kennedy (1988). Its project is to ‘dislodge the discipline … from its stagnation … and rejuvenate the field as an arena of meaningful intellectual inquiry’. It draws from the Critical Legal Studies movement, which on both sides of the Atlantic has been dominated by strands of ‘postmodernist’ theory. In this case postmodernism means a highly eclectic borrowing from French poststructuralist theory, in particular the work of Jacques Derrida (Douzinas, 1991). Latterly, the doyen of the movement in Britain, Costas Douzinas, has tended ever closer to the dubious attraction of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi ‘crown jurist’ (Douzinas, 2007). Schmitt contended that the last great act of a common European international law was also the last common landappropriation of non-European soil by the European powers – in Africa, by way of the Congress of Berlin in 1884–85 (Schmitt, 2003: 214). International law for him is ‘the spacelessness of a general universalism’ (2003: 230). This approach, although presented as a new and superior realism, in no way challenges social constructivism. China Miéville,6 who has sought to systematise a Marxist theory of IR and international law, argues acutely that ‘One of the limitations of the New Stream approach is in its implicit theory of the social world, an idealist constructivism’ (Miéville, 2008: 95). This for me hits the nail on the head. Miéville continues: ‘The structures of every day life that surround us – such as international law – are deemed the accretions of ideas. Ideas progress here by autopoeisis. This is a radically idealist philosophy, privileging abstract concepts over the specific historical context in which certain ideas take hold, and how’ (2008: 95). I could not put this better myself. Miéville’s hugely impressive work of reconstruction of a Marxist theory of international law (Miéville, 2005) is itself also open to criticism (Bowring, 2008a: 21–30); he and Pashukanis can be taken to have missed the significance of the ‘right of peoples to self-determination’ as what I describe as ‘the revolutionary kernel of international law’ (Bowring, 2008a: Ch. 1).

6.7 Scientific realism contra constructivism There is another important resource in the understanding and critique of social constructivism, especially its marriage to idealism. Roy Bhaskar set the stage for the theory of scientific realism (SR) in his early work, published in 1975 and 1979, mentioned above. I recall the explosive force, the sense of genuine enlightenment, which attended its publication. In The Possibility

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of Naturalism, he accurately foresaw constructivism, arguing against this kind of idealism with telling force: Now whereas few people nowadays … would hold that a magnetic field is a construction of thought, the idea that society is remains quite widely held. Of course in the case of society the grounds for this view are liable to consist in the idea that it is constituted (in some way) by the thought of social actors or participants … (Bhaskar, 1979, 1989: 26) It will be recalled that the proponents of social constructivism examined above could not be more explicit in their conviction that society is indeed a function of language, of discourse – which amounts to the same thing. Two scholars who are influenced by SR have expressed their views on the matter more recently. Jonathan Joseph reminds us that ‘… constructivism believes that the (social) world is socially constructed and is bound up with our beliefs and understandings’ (Joseph, 2007: 345, n. 2). He makes the following, highly pertinent, point: It is no good simply saying that nuclear weapons are socially constructed or discursively articulated and that prior to this construction or articulation they are meaningless physical things (ie that it is only through discourse that they become meaningful). This merely raises a further question – what is it about the physical or material properties of something that allows it to lend itself to particular forms of social construction or discursive articulation? (2007: 353) For my purposes, the minority groups (or for that matter nations or peoples) with which I began this essay have emergent causal powers, and act on human beings and are in turn acted upon, irrespective of any construction or articulation. Furthermore, Brubacker, to whom I referred in my introduction, is answered when Joseph turns to ‘structure and agency’. Joseph observes that the scientific realist position, exemplified in the work of Roy Bhaskar and the sociologist Margaret Archer, maintains that structures and agents possess their own distinct properties. ‘Structures are pre-existing features of the world we engage with that are relatively enduring and possess powers of enablement and constraint.’ Thus, contra Brubacker, it follows from the position of Bhaskar and Joseph that peoples, nations and ethnic minority groups are indeed real entities in the world and not simply ‘conceptual variables’ (Joseph, 2007: 356). In another recent article, Colin Wight (2007), already presented above as a critic since at least 1999 of social constructivism, notes that the position of Kratochwil (1991), whom he terms a ‘radical constructivist’ (Wight, 2007: 387), is essentially Kantian: ‘he accepts the existence of an independent

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world, but claims we can know nothing of it’ (2007: 391). Andrew Sayer (2000: 63) has also noted that the use of the ‘hopelessly misleading metaphor of construction invites idealist slippage’.7

6.8 Conclusion: What do I mean by realism in international law? For me, as explained in detail in my recent book (Bowring, 2008a) as well as in my contribution to Susan Marks’ collection (Bowring, 2008b), the most important achievement of the United Nations has been the firm establishment of the right of peoples to self-determination, first as a principle, then as a right in international law. Although the USSR, in many ways itself a colonial power, argued for the inclusion of the right in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, three of the other permanent members of the Security Council – Britain, France and the US – were still colonial powers. This right is now recognised by the International Court of Justice as jus cogens, that is the highest form of international law binding on all states whatever treaty obligations they have or have not entered into. The achievement owed much to the former USSR and its allies, and had its roots in the theoretical and practical engagements of V. I. Lenin; but in a thoroughly paradoxical manner (Bowring, 2008b). First of all, I insist that the peoples in question are not linguistic constructs, but are real in the sense that, in common with social institutions, they constitute a crucial part of the world in which human beings find themselves. As Marx pointed out in 1852, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’ And part of the essence of groups such as peoples is the tendency and strong desire to continue into the future. Peoples, national minorities and other social groups have emergent causal powers; they act upon the world, and are acted upon. Here a thoroughly dialectical case can be made. There is no question that the movements for colonial freedom and decolonisation were, as shown above, bitterly opposed by all the imperialist powers. In each case – France in Vietnam and Algeria, Britain in Kenya and Malaysia, the US, to this day, in Puerto Rico, Portugal in Mozambique and Angola, the South African and Israeli experiences – the response of imperialism was ferocious and bloody. It is not enough to note that some of these anticolonial movements became petty imperialisms in their own right, or in many ways simply served the interests of the former colonial power. In a paradoxical – and dialectical – fashion, the USSR, despite the profound deracination of its approach to international law, found itself obliged to give very considerable material support to self-determination struggles, despite the fact that this was not only materially costly but often contrary

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to its own geopolitical self-interest. I mean dialectical in the following way: the content of the proposed norm often came into sharp conflict with its juridical form, and in the process the content was imbued with a new significance, in due course transforming the form as well. In every case the process was not ideal – it was not constituted in some way by discourse or even by the work of professors – but was thoroughly material. This is what Patricia Williams in The Alchemy of Race and Class (1992) refers to as the subversion and appropriation of bourgeois legal norms – a process of alchemy. It is the argument of this chapter that social constructivism provides no productive resource for international legal theory, despite its apparently attractive restoration of normativity to the ‘realism’ of IR theory. It has no explanatory force, and occludes important issues rather than clarifying them. International legal scholars should avoid it.

Notes 1. Mearsheimer’s work, although theoretically conservative, has much to recommend it. Readers may recall the intense controversy surrounding publication in March 2006 of ‘The Israel Lobby’, written with Stephen Walt (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2006). 2. Conversations between the author and Roy Bhaskar in Battersea. 3. Although Reus-Smit means this more in the IR sense than the philosophical sense. 4. The islanders won their case in the ICJ: Certain Phosphate Lands in Nauru (Nauru v Australia), ICJ Reports 1992, p. 240. 5. On the relationship between Franck and social constructivism, see Koh (1997). 6. He is best known as a brilliant writer of science fantasy, but wrote his PhD on IR under Fred Halliday at the LSE, and has an unmatched grasp of international law theory. 7. See also Westerhuis (2007).

7 Is It Real? The Question of Juridical, Actual and Causal Responsibility in Sovereign Debt Settlements Tomohisa Hattori

This chapter problematises the institutionalised assignment of responsibility for debt and the Debt Crisis to indebted states in the course of the 1980s. Much of the sovereign commercial lending of the 1970s was extended without the normal ‘due diligence’ of credit analysis and was characterised by striking ethical lapses, such as the extension of export credits to dictators for arms or for overblown development projects that primarily benefited contractors. Indeed, scholars who have examined the Debt Crisis in a wider context have argued persuasively that creditors bear more than their fair share of responsibility, especially given the declining well-being of the people of debtor states (Lipietz, 1989; Lissakers, 1991). The development of subsidised discount markets for these bad loans in the late 1980s shifted part of the financial burden from the indebted to the creditors. What is significant in this development is the fact that it reduced the debtors’ liability without assigning any blame to creditors. Blame had been settled by then; and it was squarely fixed on the debtors. This chapter examines how responsibility – ex ante responsibility and ex post facto responsibility (sometimes known as blame) – in the case of the rescheduling and reduction of sovereign debt in the 1980s was prescribed in the juridical language of loan contracts in such a way that the causal notion of responsibility became excluded. In order to examine how ex ante responsibility became ex post facto responsibility in this case, the chapter starts by exploring the conditions behind the juridical construction of the notion of responsibility. The question of responsibility, blame and sanction was not only settled prior to the development of specific debt reduction and cancellation practices but fell squarely on the debtors. The juridical framework that governs commercial transactions was extended to creditor–debtor relations involving states, effectively institutionalising the interests of creditors, international financial institutions (IFIs) and their key member states.1 To elaborate, when individuals or corporations fail to repay the debts, they become bankrupt. In the United States, this triggers two legal options for creditors: liquidation or reorganisation (Gross, 1997). When states fail 115

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to repay their debt obligations, by contrast, no such creditor options exist: states cannot be liquidated or forcibly reorganised because, under international law, their sovereignty is inviolable.2 What occurred in the protracted response to the Debt Crisis, however, appears to be undermining this basic principle of non-intervention in favour of what can only be described as a reorganisation option for creditors. This has involved an institutionalisation of the coercive enforcement power of IFIs known as ‘conditionality’, that is, the combination of policies designed to adjust a debtor state’s economy and macroeconomic measures designed to evaluate its economic performance which become the condition for financial disbursement packages that enable the rescheduling of existing debt obligations (IMF, 2005, 2009; World Bank, 2005).3 In short, the absence of a liquidation option for sovereign debts still leaves creditors with the possibility of a reorganisation, or ‘work out’, option, commonly known as ‘structural adjustment’.4 The result has been a redefinition of debtor states from inviolable sovereigns to juridical persons subject to juridical norms and rules.5 Examining the conditions behind the institutionalisation of these norms and rules is significant because they appear not only to violate the longstanding principle of non-intervention but also to justify a new norm of intervention based on a new form of sovereignty. This new form of sovereignty is not recognised by those who regard non-intervention as a long-standing principle of international relations (IR). The chapter argues, in short, that the extensive intervention surrounding debt settlements has fostered a different normative framework that is based on the juridical construction of knowledge, or the type of knowledge that attributes the causes of a social problem entirely to agents. The philosophy of social science that allows me to pursue this inquiry is the critical naturalist version of the realist philosophy of science (Bhaskar, 1989; Archer et al., 1998). This philosophy is based on the assumption that social processes are ontologically deep, requiring social scientists to move from empirical observations to actual, though not necessarily observed, events, happenings and discourses, and then to underlying, often unobserved, social reality. In particular, this approach allows me to identify the ontological, epistemological and methodological gap between the underlying social reality and the juridical construction of responsible and blameworthy agents. Ontological realism, the first principle of critical naturalism, makes it clear that the causal mechanisms of social reality, which exist independently of the scientists who produce knowledge, are real. Epistemic relativity, the second principle, makes it necessary to look for the geo-historically specific actualisation of such causal mechanisms. Accordingly, this chapter starts with the identification of the gap between the causal mechanism that generated the Debt Crisis in the early 1980s and the juridical process by which debtor states were made responsible for their debts and sanctioned for their delinquencies. More specifically, it focuses on the process by

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which the delinquency in sovereign loans was juridically established and sanctioned by IFIs, a process which, I argue, was substantially in place by the late 1980s. In fact, it was the weak balance sheets of major US banks that triggered the Debt Crisis. This fact allows me to criticise the conventional assignment of responsibility to the debtor states. It is an example of the use of the third principle of critical naturalism, judgemental rationality, or the use of scientific explanations to criticise an accepted knowledge or conventional beliefs. The lack of an adequate explanation of the Debt Crisis suggests the need for further inquiry – beyond the juridical assignment of responsibility or the actual trigger. The second half of the chapter takes the contradiction between the Westphalian principle of non-intervention and the pervasive intervention of the ensuing structural adjustment programmes as a clue to uncovering the deeper causes of the Debt Crisis. In particular, it takes the blatant and extensive intervention of these programmes as an indicator of the existence of a different form of sovereignty. I argue this different form of sovereignty, a capitalist form, follows juridical rules and norms internal to loan contracts like its second nature. Here, the discovery of the operation of this form of sovereignty in handling debt settlements leads to what critical naturalists call an explanatory critique (Collier, 1994: 170–90), which in this case reveals the ideological nature of the juridical assignment of responsibility to the debtor states and the false theoretical adherence to the Westphalian notion of sovereignty. The conclusion briefly discusses the implications of this explanatory critique for moral responsibility and practical reason.

7.1 An actual crisis for creditors based on a real possibility of a default The specific condition that escalated the balance of payments problem of Mexico in 1982 into a systemic problem of international finance was the concentration of a large amount of commercial sovereign loans in a few US-based banks. Because the banks’ exposure from previous rollovers and rescheduling had undermined their balance sheets, further rollovers without some kind of assurance of repayment made them vulnerable to a Mexican default (Cline, 1983: 13–20; 1995, 39–88). When they put too much pressure on smaller banks to increase their debt exposure at the London Club, where commercial creditors and sovereign borrowers negotiated the rollover of loans, the smaller banks pulled out. The collapse of the negotiation exposed a potentially huge gap between the book value and the real value of commercial sovereign loans to Mexico and other Latin American countries. Capitalist production in these countries is not sufficient to fill this gap, threatening creditors with an actual crisis. The Debt Crisis of the 1980s was a classic example of an ever-present possibility of financial crises based on the fictitious nature of capital in the

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initial stage of production that has not yet actualised its value through the sale of products. In order to avoid crises, a capitalist financial system must not only bridge but mask the contradiction between the fiction of value and its realisation (Ito and Lapavistas, 1999: 123–53). When the ratio of the book value as a share of a bank’s capital is relatively manageable, as in the Argentinean crisis in early 1982, a bank might still let the situation linger. When that ratio is high, as in the case of the Mexican crisis in late 1982, it creates a critical situation for the bank. A default could mean a loss of assets which approaches a bank’s own capital. While the real possibility of a contradiction between fictitious and actualised capital is ever present in this business, it was the generalisation of this condition across large US-based banks that raised the threat to a systemic crisis (Cline, 1983: 30–6). In the Mexican crisis, this was the context in which the United States stepped in. US officials allowed US commercial banks to maintain the book value of non-performing Mexican loans if they provided new loans to Mexico; at the same time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pledged to provide loans only if the commercial banks provided new loans (Cline, 1995: 205–6). In the meantime, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) stepped in to provide emergency credits to weather the crisis (Cline, 1983: 30–44; 1995: 205–6; Lipson, 1985, 1986).6 What occurred in this case was high-level multilateral cooperation among the US Federal Reserve Board, the US Treasury, the IMF, the BIS, the Mexican government and large US banks. The outcome was a conditional loan extended by the IMF to Mexico known as a ‘stabilisation agreement’ on Mexico’s use of the Extended Fund Facility (EFF). This conditional loan agreement allowed the IMF to coordinate the short-term crisis management package involving major private creditors and manage the longer-term restructuring of the Mexican economy. Instead of endless rollovers and rescheduling that would have resulted from a direct negotiation between commercial creditors and the debtor state (usually at the London Club), the IMF – a third party to commercial loans – was brought in as the central institution to settle debt problems. What made this crisis different from previous debt settlements was the implicit demand of the large banks for some kind of assurance that a reasonable level of their claims would be paid. In return, they became part of a rescue package coordinated by the IMF.7 The rescue package, in turn, established a basic prototype of the commercial sovereign debt settlement, including: (1) official bridging loans (bilateral or multilateral, such as the BIS) to weather immediate financial difficulties; (2) the addition of sanctions to an IMF loan – that is, austere policy prescriptions for domestic economic restructuring; and (3) commercial loan rescheduling (Lipson, 1986: 226–8). What happened in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis, in short, was the institutionalisation of a type of intervention which ensured that the debtor states would have the economic capacity to pay off the loans. In the mean

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time, however, the exposure of commercial banks to Latin American sovereign debt remained high, preventing them from setting aside sufficient funds to cover potential losses. This, combined with their previous emphasis on short-term rollovers and medium-term rescheduling, precluded the obvious solution of a viable secondary discount market through the mid-1980s. According to William Cline, it was only the commercial banks’ improved balance sheets toward the end of the 1980s that allowed them to set aside reserves to take advantage of the subsidised discount markets created by the Brady Plan. This reduced commercial sovereign debts substantially by the early 1990s (Cline, 1995: 74–5). If this was indeed the case, the actual trigger – that is, the efficient cause – of the Debt Crisis was not the debtor states as attributed by the juridical framework but the commercial banks themselves. If the banks had possessed stronger balance sheets with sovereign debts representing a more limited share of their loan assets, the crisis would not have occurred. Although debtor states still would have been liable, the banks could have rolled over and rescheduled the bad debts. Cline, however, does not examine how the liquidity problem of the banks – that is, despite total assets exceeding liabilities, liquid assets do not cover current liabilities – developed in the first place (Cline, 1995: 92–3, 93–138). The Debt Crisis of the 1980s involved more than the causal role of debtor states and commercial banks. Neither the juridically based assignment of responsibility to the indebted states nor the actualist assignment of responsibility to the banks adequately captures the real causal mechanism. This necessarily involved institutions of the post-war liberal international economic order, such as the trade regime under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), whose rules and norms stabilised the distribution of authority and resources in favour of the industrial states. It also involved the internal social relations that structure the dominant characteristics of capitalist society. These are crucial to explaining how the relation between capital and labour in the North during the post-war Fordist era conditioned and often marginalised the interests of capital in the South, effectively excluding the South, especially the UN-designated least developed countries, from the most significant circuits of capital accumulation (Ominami, 1991: 115–54; Altvater, 1993: 125–78).8 By extension, the changing structural relations between capital and labour in the North under the crisis of Fordism in the late 1960s onward conditioned a shifting relation between capital in the North and capital in the South, as indicated by the changing distribution of available credit. The increase in commercial credit flows to the South dates back to the early 1970s when oil dollars became available for recycling, amplifying changes in the world money supply that originated with the development of the Euro-currency markets in the late 1960s. Without the underlying crisis of Fordism, in short, the oil dollars would have been absorbed in the North (Ominami, 1991: 115–30).9

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7.2 Breaking the principle of non-intervention This brief description of the Debt Crisis of the 1980s challenges the juridical construction of knowledge about responsibility, blame and sanction associated with the crisis. It also allows us to identify the juridical understanding of who owes how much to whom as an ideology or, to borrow Bhaskar’s (1989: 30) words, ‘a normative theory of efficient action, generating a set of techniques for achieving given ends’. As the juridical understanding is shared by commercial creditors, sovereign debtors and IFIs, it is also the normative core of the new institutionalisation of sanctions in the form of structural adjustment programmes – imposed on ‘delinquent’ states. Of particular importance in this process was the role of the IMF. By setting procedures, affirming juridical obligations, assigning blame to the debtor states and devising sanctions in the form of radically reorganising their domestic economies, the IMF effectively extended the juridical norms and rules that govern commercial exchange between private parties to credit relations involving states. The modern history of sovereign debt settlements suggests that there were relatively limited political and economic pressures on debtor states before the Second World War (Suter, 1992: 8–104). The post-war period, however, shows a steady increase in such pressures (ibid., 105–7; Lipson, 1989). What started as a panicky case-by-case crisis management with the Mexican default of 1982 was successfully institutionalised through the Baker Plan in 1985; it was internationalised through the establishment of the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Facility (1986) and Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (1987), and further refined in 1999 via the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility for the poorest countries (IMF, 2000: 49–61). This international institutionalisation of the juridical norms and rules governing sovereign loans effectively assured large banks that ‘delinquent’ states would be sanctioned with policy conditions and macroeconomic performance measures that ensured their compliance with the new loan conditions. In the process, it qualitatively intensified external pressures over indebted sovereign states and redefined them as sanctions within this juridical framework. What is notable for IR scholars is the apparent violation of the prevalent principle of non-intervention. As Chris Brown (2002: 79) rightly points out, it is important to distinguish intervention, which is illegitimate under public international law, and influence, which is legitimate. So, it is worth examining this distinction in the context of sovereign debts. When the IMF provides routine annual surveillance over member states’ exchange rate policies and consultations concerning their balance-of-payments situation under Article IV of its Articles of Agreement, it can be safely regarded as influence. When member states borrow with a stand-by agreement that imposes a set of specific conditions at each instalment, surveillance by the IMF comes dangerously close to intervention. When member states borrow

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from special facilities, such as the Extended Fund Facility (since 1974) and the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (since 1999), in connection with a structural adjustment, the conditions imposed by the IMF are effectively a medium- to long-term national economic plan – a clear case of intervention (IMF, 2009). The institutionalisation of intervention – structural adjustment programmes across the globe – followed rules and norms internal to loan contracts (e.g. paying debt obligations on time) that identified indebted states as blameworthy. Viewed in the context of Westphalian public international law, it was clearly a violation of the principle of non-intervention. Viewed as the integration of normative principles of capitalism into capitalist public international law, however, the concept of intervention in the specific context of debt settlements gains a different meaning. To put it another way, there are two notions of sovereignty that must be examined here. One is a historically enduring notion of Westphalian sovereignty as the claim to sovereign autonomy.10 The other is a historically specific notion amenable to a specific kind of domestic intervention (Rosenberg, 1994: 126–39; Teschke, 2003: 31–40, 61–4, 151–2). For political realists like Stephen Krasner (1999: 127–51), the institutionalisation of juridical norms and rules governing sovereign debt transactions represents a revolutionary erosion of sovereignty, similar to the rise of international human rights law that has begun to justify intervention in cases of gross human rights violations. Indeed, Krasner rejects the relevance of Westphalian sovereignty altogether on the basis of such observations, reinforcing his claim that sovereignty is ‘organised hypocrisy’. For scholars in the English School who regard the society of states as descriptive of the current international order, by contrast, the institutionalisation of domestic economic intervention in debt-related delinquencies has not eroded the principle of non-intervention; they justify economic interventions, such as structural adjustment, in terms of the good of the international order or the good of the indebted state’s own economy (Brown, 2002: 35–7). Although such institutionalised interventions have been rare within the European core of the states-system, they represent an acceptable aberration for newer states at the periphery of the expanding system (ibid., 137–41, 157–9). In contrast to this enduring notion of sovereignty, a historically specific notion differentiates absolutist Westphalian from capitalist sovereignty and uses this distinction as a basis for criticising the dominant conceptions of sovereignty described above. Briefly, when ‘sovereignty was “privately” held by the ruling dynasty’ as in European absolutism, it did not mean that the king owned territory (though he owned his own private lands) but rather that he possessed ‘the legitimate and exclusive right of command within the realm and, in particular, personal ownership of the rights of taxation, trade, and legislation’ (Teschke, 2003: 126, 171).11 The absolutist state apparatus of centralised bureaucracy and tax farming was a distributive

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mechanism constrained by the stagnant pre-capitalist agrarian economy, which conditioned the externally expansionist geopolitical character of the absolutist age: winning a new arable territory represented new opportunity for extraction from agrarian, peasant-based production because a land with peasants meant more agrarian production and state extraction (Teschke, 2003: 151–96). Because the king embodied sovereignty, moreover, he could be held privately liable for both his and the state’s debts, just as he could privately make use of the state’s coffers. It was only when sovereignty was depersonalised and dissociated from the direct political extraction of surplus in the long transition to capitalism that the liability of the state became dissociated from the liability of the king. As the personalised sovereignty of the absolutist state was deinstitutionalised, it became necessary to institutionalise a new kind of depersonalised debt liability. The institutionalisation of juridical norms and rules governing sovereign loan transactions, in short, was a necessary step in the formation of a depersonalised capitalist state. To elaborate further, the specific historical context of this transformation of personalised absolutist into depersonalised capitalist sovereignty was the generalisation of private property in sixteenth-century England. The shift of property regime from customary tenures to economic leaseholds coincided with a shift in the legal regime from customary to common law, as indicated by the slow but steadily increasing protection of private property (Wood, 1991: 153–5). Between the Glorious Revolution (1688) and 1820, laws punishing crimes against property carrying a capital sentence grew fourfold, indicating hardship and penury (Hay, 1975: 18; Thompson, 1966: 60). It is no coincidence, in short, that a peculiar juridical form – the Crown as a ‘corporation sole’ – developed in sixteenth-century England during the long transition to capitalism. There was the increasing necessity for separating the king from the Crown, the symbolic office of the state (Maitland, 2003: 32–48). Prior to the late seventeenth-century resolution of the conflict between Crown and Parliament in England, the typical English response had been ‘to remain studiously vague about the distribution of powers between the Crown and the ruling class in Parliament’ (Wood, 1991: 57). It was during this period that the murky notion of the Crown as a ‘corporation sole’ emerged, recognising two corporate personalities – the king and the Crown – in the single natural person. Under typical Continental European absolutism, by contrast, sovereignty was held by one juridical person, who was also a natural person (i.e. the sovereign king). According to Frederic Maitland, the Crown as a ‘corporation sole’ prevented English lawyers from providing a consistent answer to the question of who was liable: the Crown (symbolically signifying the state) or the king (Maitland, 2003: 41–2; Runciman, 1997: 102)?12 The explanation for this juridical confusion is not only that England was the first to undergo a transition to capitalism – a long, slow process – but also that it kept its monarchy throughout.13 Modern

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capitalist sovereignty, of course, was held by the state as a juridical person, not a natural person.14 The necessity of making states responsible and blameworthy juridical persons emerged in the later transition to capitalism as well. ‘Developmental’ states like the state of Ohio or post-independence Peru significantly overborrowed in the early nineteenth century to develop key economic infrastructures, such as canals and railroads, causing delinquencies. Some of these early ‘developmental’ states in the nineteenth century defaulted in their attempts at the transition to capitalism.15 When a dispute between a creditor and a debtor arises within a state, it is resolved through the court system. When such a dispute arises internationally, the parties face a potentially critical situation: the absence of a world state means that there is no enforceable mechanism of dispute resolution. Many scholars argue that because disputes in an anarchical world of the states-system are not transformed into juridical disputes, world peace is likely to be endangered. This, however, is not well supported by historical evidence regarding sovereign debts. Since 1820, the failure to resolve debt disputes has led to armed conflicts in only two cases: the invasion of Mexico by France, Spain and Britain in 1863 and the blockade of Venezuelan ports by Britain, Germany and Italy in 1902–3 (Krasner, 1999: 128, 131–43; Suter, 1992: 92–3). Over the same period, nine negotiated settlements were achieved, all of which transferred exclusive economic control over certain public property rights to creditors. In the 1889 settlement of the Peruvian state railway debt, the creditors’ rights extended for 66 years (Suter, 1992: 92–3). According to Christian Suter (1992: 93), in only 20 out of 113 cases did creditors achieve any political or economic control over the indebted states between 1820 and 1975 – a significant contrast with the 53 IMF structural adjustment loans between 1986 and 1990.16 The institutionalisation of juridical norms and rules governing sovereign loan transactions in the 1980s is historically unprecedented. It has developed a new international juridical mechanism of dispute resolution involving private property and contract, which not only allows commercial creditors to recover their claims but also enables ‘delinquent’ states to re-enter financial markets with relatively limited disruption.17 The missing ingredients in comparison with past debt settlement practices were (1) the capacity to intervene in the domestic economy of ‘delinquent’ states and (2) the addition of a third party with the capacity to impose punitive and corrective sanctions – devaluation, trade liberalisation, free capital mobility, privatised state enterprises, etc., all designed to commit the state to the capitalist development path.18 It is a mechanism, in short, that cannot be understood in the context of traditional Westphalian sovereignty but must be conceived as constitutive of a new capitalist sovereignty. The rights and duties of this new sovereignty are constrained by the norms that define what it is to be a juridically responsible and recognised member of a capitalist states system.

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As such, it is neither the ‘organised hypocrisy’ of Krasner’s political realist view nor the aberration that Brown implies but a juridical construct that facilitates entry and re-entry into the international circuits of capital accumulation – and by extension, a domestic transition to capitalism. Although debt-bound stagnation is still possible (Suter, 1992: 113–77; Schwartz, 1989), so is economic growth – that is, the expanded reproduction of capital – as long as a capitalist path to development is followed.19 Given the uneven nature of capitalist development, of course, the indebted states may be in and out of indebtedness – thus, in and out of domestic economic intervention – in the long course of their formation as capitalist states.20 If the absence of a sufficient institutionalisation of juridical norms and rules governing sovereign loan transactions was indeed one of key factors causing the Debt Crisis, then it is difficult to assign blame solely to either the commercial banks that loaned too much or the debtor states that borrowed too much. Behind the excesses of creditors was a combination of the non-intentional causal factors noted above, including the availability of the offshore Eurodollar markets since the late 1960s (also amplified by the infusion of petrodollars), the lack of attractive corporate borrowers in the advanced industrial economies, and generally the low rates of profitability in these economies (Brenner, 2009). Similarly, behind the excesses of debtor states was a combination of the non-intentional causal factors, including a high level of inflation (which ballooned interest obligations) and worsening terms of trade due to stable agricultural and raw material prices relative to sky-rocketing oil and industrial commodity prices (which reduced the ability to service interest payments) (Ominami, 1991). It was these causal factors emerging out of the crisis of post-war Fordism that conditioned the gap between the underlying social reality and the juridical construction of responsible and blameworthy agents.

7.3 Conclusion This chapter has made two interrelated claims. First, it has argued that the institutionalisation of juridical norms and rules governing sovereign loan transactions demonstrates the empirical substance behind the claim of some scholars that states and international institutions can be regarded as moral agents, not only blameworthy but also capable of performing corrective tasks that result in maintaining the capitalist order (Erskine, 2003). What is significant about the assignment of responsibility, blame and sanction associated with the Debt Crisis of the 1980s is that it was entirely a juridical construction. The institutionalisation of juridical norms and rules governing sovereign loans is evidence not of the moral agency of states and international organisations but rather of a misrecognition of social reality in two senses: (1) the false attribution of conscious intention to social entities (i.e. non-human entities); and (2) the failure to distinguish the institutionalisation

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of juridical norms from the moralisation of these norms as socially accepted conventional morality.21 Second, this chapter has argued that the serious and persistent violation of a key principle of IR – non-intervention – over the last few decades is evidence of the ongoing institutionalisation of a capitalist form of sovereignty in the heavily indebted states. The structural adjustment programmes that imposed policy correctives on ‘delinquent states’ are themselves a form of intervention, specifically one that constitutes a distinctively capitalist sovereignty. Continued theoretical adherence to the Westphalian principle of non-intervention in this case highlights the relative lack of concern for historical specificity in the theories that embrace this principle. Moreover, the social construction of a capitalist form of sovereignty as a juridical entity demonstrates the inapplicability of the assumption that states are autonomous agents capable of making decisions (and corrections if prior decisions turn out to be less than desirable). The presumption of a state’s moral agency based on its autonomy from other states was simply false in the case of the Debt Crisis. There are two implications of these claims. The first concerns moral responsibility.22 Because individual human beings are the only agents capable of understanding the causal role of existing social structures and institutional frameworks, they are the only ones capable of conceiving and carrying out their transformation through conscious action. It is this transformative agency of real human beings that characterises the distinctively human quality of consciousness required for moral responsibility. Moral responsibility, by extension, must go beyond one’s responsibility for acting within actually existing conventional rules, norms and principles that affirm existing institutional frameworks and social structures. It must also include a willingness to transform them when a rational judgement to do so is reached through explanatory critique, that is, after identifying a gap between a scientific explanation, such as the complex causal mechanism of a sovereign debt settlement practice, and the accepted belief regarding that practice, such as the juridical construction of debtor states’ responsibility. The second implication concerns practical reason, or the type of reason that drives us to be good and right by taking good and right action. This chapter implies that practical reason – what ‘I’ or ‘we’ ought to do – is likely to be either unsuccessful or inadequate unless it takes into account the causal understanding of a specific social practice. In the absence of a causal explanation, the simple guideline of old practical reason – responsiveness – does not succeed. As described in this chapter, very few policy makers in industrial capitalist societies questioned the violation of sovereignty associated with structural adjustment programmes. How was this outright violation of a supposed principle of the international system possible unless a fundamental transformation of the form of sovereignty itself took place? No one at the IMF ever worried about the change in the Article of Agreement regarding the nature of intervention before Anne Krueger, Deputy Managing Director of

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the IMF, attempted to develop the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism in 2003, which would formalise the IMF’s power to intervene in domestic affairs of its member states.23 It is not just examining why Krueger’s proposal failed but examining how it became possible for her to try to legitimise the IMF’s coercive power to intervene in the domestic affairs of indebted states that leads to the adequate explanation of a problem. Practical reason examining Krueger’s proposal and its failure does not acknowledge the transformation that has already taken place. It is only practical reason examining the condition of possibility behind her proposal that recognises its consistency with the capitalist form of sovereignty (thus, a proposal’s continued relevance despite its initial failure). It is this focus on the condition of possibility that enables critical naturalists to connect practical reason with causal explanation, opening up the possibility for not only a solution to the problem but a structural transformation of the existing order.

Notes 1. On the juridical frame of responsibility/blame/sanction, see Daniel Warner (1991). On the juridification of commercial relations, see A. Claire Cutler (2003). 2. For earlier historical exceptions, see Stephen D. Krasner (1999: 129–31) and James Macdonald (2003: 115, 128–38, 143–7, 355–60). 3. The IMF developed two kinds of conditional loans for debt-related problems: one is a short-term conditional loan from the credit tranche (requiring the ‘stand-by agreement’), starting from 1952; and the other is a longer-term conditional loan from special facilities (requiring the ‘stabilisation agreement’), such as the Extended Fund Facility (1974), which was to provide medium-term conditional loans for those countries severely affected by the Oil Crisis and thereafter. Two concessional loans were added in the mid-1980s: the Structural Adjustment Facility (1986) and the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (1987); and the latter was replaced by the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (1999). The guidelines for IMF conditionality were rewritten in 1968, 1979 and 2002. The Fund continues to use macroeconomic measures though there was an intense annual review of the use of microeconomic measures – intruding into the Bank’s territory – in the mid-1980s and beyond (IMF, 1986: 44–5; 1987, 43–4; 1988: 47–8; 1989: 31, 38; 2001: 41–6; 2002: 40–5; 2003: 35–7; 2005: 35–40; L. Taylor, 1987: 33–45; World Bank, 2006). 4. Kindleberger (1991: 288). Kindleberger provides four conditions for work-out: (1) low interest rates to hold down payments; (2) sustained prosperity in creditor countries; (3) successful government resistance to demands for protection against debtor country exports; and (4) more loans. 5. On the view that although states are real structured social entities, they also exist as juridical persons, see Wight (2006a: 215–25). It implies states are fictitious persons. On two views of the person of the state, fictitious and artificial persons, respectively, see Runciman (1997) and Skinner (1999: 1–29). 6. The Mexican crisis was followed by crises in Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Uruguay. For the domestic dimension of the Mexican crisis, see Rojas (1991). 7. In this case, the assurance came domestically. See Rojas (1991: 174) and Lipson (1986: 228).

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8. Page references for Ominami (1991) are from the Japanese translation. For the current list of least developed countries, see UN High Representative (2009) < www.un.org/special-rep/ohrlls/ldc/list.htm (accessed 31 May 2009). 9. This absorption of capital in the North is what critical naturalists call a transfactual possibility that is contained in the domain of real social structures and causal powers (and it is, therefore, real). Within the conventional philosophy of science, it is referred to as a ‘counterfactual’ (thus, not real). See Hartwig (2007: 85–6). On the selective integration of the South and, consequently, the stratification within the South, see Ominami (1991: 219–54). Poland was not a member of the IMF until 1986 and thus did not get IMF structural adjustment loans in the early 1980s. Its official debt rescheduling took place at the Paris Club, a club of creditor states represented by their respective finance ministries. For this exceptional case, see Friedhelm Wachs (1991: 193–-202). 10. On Westphalian sovereignty based on territoriality and the exclusion of external actors from domestic affairs, see Krasner (1999: 20–5). On Westphalian sovereignty based on the claim to political autonomy, thus ‘no internal equals and no external superiors’, see Brown (2002: 19–34). 11. ‘The sovereign state was unknown in the Middle Ages’ (Teschke, 2003: 61). On the medieval parcelised sovereignty (ibid., 61–4), where feudal lords extracted surplus directly from peasants and were not subject to the king’s tax. In other words, the medieval king became an absolutist sovereign when he was able to centralise the system of extracting surplus directly from peasants. On the difference between the medieval character of French absolutist sovereignty and English sovereignty, see Wood (1991: 43–58). 12. On Thomas Smith’s clear identification of the distinction among the state (i.e. the commonwealth constituted by individuals, not by corporate entities as his contemporary, Jean Bodin, conceptualised), the government and the king – and by extension, the ambiguity as to the location of sovereignty in England – in the late sixteenth century, see Wood and Wood (1997: 43–50). According to Wood and Wood (p. 104), Thomas Hobbes’s theoretical project emerged in his attempt to justify the location of sovereignty in the king, while acknowledging the constitution of the commonwealth by individuals. 13. Thus, as Corrigan and Sayer (1985) elaborated in their book on the English state formation, older forms – including the juridical form of the Crown as corporation sole – tended to continue to play social roles in the long transition to capitalism in England. Since the Crown has been a ‘corporation aggregate’ since 1888, it would be juridically interesting to see how Prince Charles upon his accession to the Crown tries to reclaim the Crown Estate if that is indeed his intention as the New York Times (Bowley, 2007) reported. See also Maitland (2003: 48). 14. Although the Glorious Revolution of 1688 resolved this problem politically, the juridical resolution finally came in 1888, according to Maitland (2003: 48). See also Runciman and Ryan (2003: xvi) and Kantorowicz (1957). 15. For default cases, see Scheiber (1969), Schwartz (1989) and Suter (1992). For the use of the term ‘developmental state’, see Johnson (1982). 16. Fifteen of these took place between 1871 and 1925. For IMF structural adjustment loans, see IMF (1975–93; 1993: 109). 17. In contrast, in the past cases of debt disputes, defaults led to a long period of credit crunch, leading to a long period of economic stagnation and a slow pace in the transition to capitalism (Suter, 1992: 113–77; Schwartz, 1989).

128 Scientific Realism and International Relations 18. On the first point, see Tabb (2004: 162, 406–12); on the second point about the significance of the third party to the development of a juridical mechanism of rectification as distinct from mere vengeance, see Minnow (1999). 19. Scholars who do not recognise the significant distinction between capitalist state formation and past-dependent development argue the inevitability of continued stagnation due to unsustainable debt. For the early critique of the dependency perspective, see Lipietz (1987). 20. Thus, for example, even relatively successful capitalist development faces crises. In response to the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, the IMF established the Supplemental Reserve Facility to deal with the short-term financial problems of newly industrialising countries. See Tabb (2004: 204, 214–15, 235, 385). 21. This conclusion is consistent with the critique of sociological reductionism by Bhaskar (1989: 30) and Sayer (1992: 5–12, 46–50, 218–24). For a review of the literature that moralises financial obligations, see Jacqueline Best (2003). 22. Here, this implication builds on my study of debt settlements and Colin Wight’s notion of moral responsibility (2006a: 193–9, 211–14). 23. It has been temporarily stalled (as it was tabled internally by the IMF’s International Monetary and Financial and Committee in April 2003). See IMF (2003: 30–3). See also Helleiner (2006: 2008).

8 Critical Realism and the Analysis of Democratisation: Does Philosophy of Science Matter? Milja Kurki1

Critical realism (CR), a school of thought associated with Roy Bhaskar’s critical naturalist philosophy of social science, has made a discernible impact across the social and political sciences during the last few decades (see e.g. Sayer, 2000; Danermark et al., 2001; Archer et al., 1998; Lawson, 1997; Patomaki, 2002; Wight, 2006a). Yet, critics have accused CR of being difficult to ‘apply’ in the concrete study of social and political affairs and for not generating a specific theory of society, politics or, indeed, of international relations (IR). These have been tricky accusations for critical realists to deal with for CR, as its defenders often proclaim, is but a meta-theoretical framework: one that explores the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions that underlie social research. But what use is this framework exactly in generating new explanations of social and political processes if it provides no specific theory or approach, and what kinds of inquiries of social and political processes might CR lead us towards? This chapter, along with others in this volume, seeks to deal with some of the difficult questions raised by attempts to ‘apply’ the critical realist philosophy of social science to the concrete study of social and political processes. It does so by analysing the ways in which philosophy of science frameworks, and specifically the critical realist position, might be expected to affect debates concerning democratisation. In particular, my focus here is on analysis of debates concerning the economic determinants of democratisation, an important aspect of current political science and international relations attempts to understand why and when democratisation succeeds. This area of interest is chosen here partly because of the author’s interest (as part of a wider project2) in the different forms that economic explanations of democratisation take in the social sciences, partly because meta-theoretical differences between approaches are played out in interesting ways in the chosen debates and partly because this field, while not an example from IR theory, should be of interest to students of IR because, as we will see, explanations of economic conditions of democratisation shape in interesting ways attempts to encourage and promote democracy and markets globally. 129

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Economic determinants of democratisation of course make up only one aspect of explanations of democratisation – nowadays it is accepted that a ragbag of causes and conditions exist that explain this complex phenomenon (see e.g. Huntington, 1990; Shin, 1994; Geddes, 1999) – yet, economic determinants have classically been identified as central to democratisation. However, little agreement has been reached on how economic determinants matter and on how economic determinants should be conceived of or studied. Indeed, an interesting aspect of the contested debates over economic determinants of democratisation has been that disagreements over democratisation have tended to be attached to sharp contestation over the kinds of methods or ‘investigative attitudes’ that should be applied in the analysis of democratisation. Thus, while some have argued for systematic large-scale study of regular patterns from which the economic causal variables explaining democratisation can be unearthed (Lipset, 1960; Cutright, 1963; Bollen and Jackman, 1985; Barro, 1999), others have advocated a more historical and interpretive approach with an emphasis on the contextual uniqueness and contingency in democratisation processes or historical transformations in class structures (see e.g. Moore, 1966; Rueschemeyer et al., 1992; Whitehead, 2000). Analysts have been torn with regard to which kinds of economic factors are the most crucial, and indeed over how to ‘get at’ these factors methodologically. My focus here is on analysing the philosophy of science positions that inform, or could potentially inform, studies of economic determinants of democratisation. Taking a philosophical approach to these debates might seem strange to some, and indeed democratisation studies scholars have traditionally been highly sceptical of abstract or philosophical approaches: the study of democratisation has been overwhelmingly dominated by a belief that empirical study of key variables, patterns and cases should be the focus of analysis. However, this chapter guards against complete dismissal of philosophy of science concerns in democratisation studies. Philosophy of science assumptions, and CR, may play a more important role in the analysis of democratisation and the structure of the debates within the field than is often recognised. Also, it is argued here that with a critical realist model of science in hand we might be able to move away from some of the problematic tendencies that positivistic assumptions have fostered: for example, away from the objectivist, isolationist and predictive models of democratisation, towards more contextual, interpretive and normatively reflective – yet unapologetically ‘social scientific’ – studies of economic determinants of democratisation. Nevertheless, it is also recognised here that the contribution of CR is but meta-theoretical. Critical realist contributions, I conclude, are not necessarily unique, and still rely on analysts’ engagements with (often critical) theoretical literature. Also, CR, it should be recognised, suffers from limitations of its own and hence, although it can be useful in clarifying hidden aspects of debate, is unlikely to ‘resolve’ the debates about economic determinants of democratisation.

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8.1 Philosophy of science and the study of democratisation Meta-theoretical inquiry does not concern the analysis of how we might theorise a world political event or pattern, but rather philosophical analysis of the kinds of theoretical concepts and tools that researchers use in their empirical analyses. Thus, meta-theoretical inquiry is in a sense ‘twice-removed’ from ‘factual’ empirical analysis of world politics. Given this abstraction from concrete social analysis, what is the relevance of discussing the philosophy of science positions in analysing the economic determinants of democratisation? This is not a straightforward question and we will offer some answers to it only towards the end of this chapter. To begin, the best we can do is start by exploring the core question that concerns those interested in the role of the philosophy of science in the social sciences, that is: ‘what kinds of conceptions of science characterise the studies of the object in question and how may they influence debates about the object of study?’ With this question in mind, the first section will briefly examine a selection of key studies exploring the links between economic determinants and democracy, with the focus on drawing out the conceptions of science that they work with and their consequences. 8.1.1 Economic variables and democracy: the positivist science approach The study of democratisation has been a relatively recent obsession in political science and comparative studies. While historically many scholars, from moral philosophers to economists and historians, have commented on the complex relationships between economic factors and democracy, the focus on the study of economic causes or conditions of democratisation itself is a twentieth-century phenomenon, partly brought on by the newly conceived attempts to ‘promote’ democracy (and markets) globally. It is the rise of the so-called modernisation agenda during the Cold War especially that precipitated an interest in the key causal factors that bring about democratisation or hinder it. Economic factors became identified as crucial early on, and the study of economic determinants of democratisation became the mainstay of the mainstream debate revolving around the approach often called ‘modernisation theory’. One of the most influential engagements with the economic determinants of democratisation, and the origin of the so-called modernisation theory, was Seymour Lipset’s analysis (1960). Lipset suggested that to understand the failures and successes of democratisation we should carefully study ‘the social requisites … of democracy’ (1960: 24). The key requisite he identified was the relationship of economic development and democracy. Lipset found that when holistic observational evidence is examined we can see that democratic countries have consistently higher mean levels of socio-economic development than authoritarian

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ones. Lipset concluded that ‘the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy’ (Lipset, 1960: 31). Level of economic wealth then seemed to explain the success and durability of democracy. This finding came to form the core of the modernisation approach to democratisation. Modernisation theorists argued that key to successful democratisation is the promotion of successful economic development policies in target states. Economic development was seen as a precondition of democratisation and hence advocated as a primary aim in foreign and development policy. Over the years Lipset’s thesis has been responsible for the encouragement of a number of studies that have sought to specify with increasing precision how and which ‘economic variables’ can best explain levels of democracy. Philip Cutright (1963) was the first to seek specification of economic variables and many analysts have followed him in focusing on investigation of the precise nature of the statistical link between the level of wealth or income of a country and its level of democracy (Przeworski et al., 2000; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2004). Others have studied the link between economic growth and democracy (Barro, 1996) or ‘development’ and democracy (Robinson, 2006). Yet others focus in on analysis of the relationship between economic inequality and democracy (Bollen and Jackman, 1985), while a few combine multiple foci analysing the interrelationships of these variables (Muller, 1995). Most of these studies provide significant support to Lipset’s original claim that economic development and democracy are linked in some way, although a rare few are sceptical of its statistical validity altogether (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2004). Whatever their position on Lipset’s proposition, crucially all of these different self-avowedly scientific studies share a set of assumptions about how the economic determinants of democracy should be studied. Indeed, it should be noted (although it is rarely discussed) that Lipset’s analysis was based on a very specific set of philosophy of science assumptions concerning how we should study the economic determinants of democracy: empiricist–positivist ones. Lipset’s analysis started from the assumption that observable indicators should be formulated to capture ‘variables’ (e.g. ‘level of economic wealth’, or ‘level of economic growth’) that might explain the dependent variable ‘level of democracy’. Clear testable comparative analysis should then be conducted across time, probing the statistical relationships between the independent and dependent variables as defined and measured. Through observable quantitative evidence and statistical analysis of mathematical associations between different indicators, Lipset wanted to decipher to what extent specific socio-economic ‘variables’ account for the general observable levels of democracy in the target regions. These Lipsetian assumptions are now accepted as a matter of course by most of the key ‘scientific’ scholars of economic determinants of democracy.

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The researchers are so committed to the positivist philosophy of science assumptions that little justification is provided for a quantitative statistical approach to the topic. The focus is rather on developing methodological precision within a positivist view of what a scientific analysis entails. This has entailed tweaking the statistical methods used in analysis of the relationships between variables but also rendering more precise the measures of wealth or development and, crucially, of democracy, a historically elusive term (see e.g. Acemoglu et al., 2008; Bollen and Jackman, 1985; Papaionnaou and Siourounis, 2008). Crucially, belief in scientific methods as conceived by positivists is unflappable and distrust is shown in the ability of ‘sciencesceptic’ or ‘soft scientific’ (historical or sociological) literature to tackle with adequate sophistication the causal analysis of economic determination of democracy (see e.g. Robinson, 2006: 524). But even if mainstream scholars of economic determinants of democracy are positivists, so what? Are there any limitations to this approach? Importantly, Lipset himself was well aware of the limitations inherent in his account and recognised that he did not really manage, through correlational analysis, to deal with the ‘causal mechanisms’ through which economic variables were connected with democracy. Indeed, he later attempted to provide some indication of what such causal mechanisms might be, although unsuccessfully: they have been seen as little more than ‘presumptions’ associated with the correlations identified. They fail to ‘explain’ them (Potter, 1997: 13). Similar problems have been identified in the current positivist analysis of economic determinants of democracy: some of the positivist scholars themselves recognise that the causal mechanisms through which growth or inequality could be conceived to be linked to democracy have been theoretically poorly conceived (Robinson, 2006: 504; Barro, 1999: S159; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2004: 1; Rueschemeyer et al., 1992). Some general claims are made about how economic growth can ease social demands or foster an independent middle class, or about how a rise in inequality can raise anti-democratic demands, yet these explanations are rarely systematically developed or placed in concrete contexts. They remain little more than generalised statements and the correlations identified between income/wealth/inequality and democracy fail to corroborate them. Indeed, although more attention has been called to be paid to theoretical explanation of causal mechanisms (Robinson, 2006), it is unclear how exactly positivist approaches are able to conceptualise causal mechanisms or test these. Importantly, despite awareness of the limitations of the positivist approach the focus in meta-theoretical terms has shifted little: positivist assumptions still provide the framework and improvements in causal logic are perceived to consist in achievements of increased precision in methodological framing of variables or their interrelations (Robinson, 2006; Bollen and Jackman, 1985; Muller, 1995).

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Interestingly, however, criticisms regarding the lack of explanatory capacity can be avoided altogether by steering clear of questions of causal mechanisms and causal explanation. The recent work of Adam Przeworski et al. is interesting in this regard. Przeworski et al. (2000) famously find that economic development does not tend to generate democracy, although it is the case that democracies tend to survive in wealthy societies. Przeworski et al. argue their case, like modernisation theorists whom they criticise, on the basis of large-n quantitative evidence and statistical modelling of the relationships between distinct observational variables. Interestingly, however, and in line with radical empiricism, Przeworski et al. admit that they are not actually interested in ‘explanations’ as such at all, they are in fact interested in gathering and analysing the general patterns of observable ‘facts’ from which effects can be predicted: ‘our own posture is largely minimalist: We simply try to establish what one should reasonably believe about the experience of the forty years we examine, the “facts”’ (Przeworski et al., 2000: 7). Their emphasis is then squarely on the observable, the quantifiable and the predictable.3 The focus on predictability, crucially, entails that a key aim is to find parameters within which reliable predictions, even if probabilistic predictions, about democratisation can be made. We can predict where democracy will rise (Barro, 1999) or as Przeworski and Limongi suggest (1997: 165), in what conditions it takes place: The simple fact is that during the period under our scrutiny or ever before, no democracy ever fell, regardless of everything else, in a country with a per capita income higher than that of Argentina in 1975: $6,055. … Above $6,055, democracies could expect to last forever. The application of positivist assumptions has been a mainstay of analysis of economic determinants of democratisation. This has entailed the search for parsimonious single (or limited number-) variable explanations and development of predictive logics ‘when x, then (with probability z) y’. Nowadays these methods are applied in unison with rational choice modelling4 (see especially Acemoglu and Robinson et al., 2006; Przeworski, 1991). This research is meticulous, but suffers, as we have seen, from some weaknesses in ability to explain the relationships between variables. Crucially, this literature has a further characteristic linked to the structure of its philosophical underpinnings. While many of the scholars of economic determinants of democracy are agnostic about whether democracy should be promoted, and how economic conditions of democracy might be advanced, the predictive ‘when A, then B’ logic embedded in the positivist analysis lends itself to curious uses. Indeed, it is interesting that the scientific studies of economic determination of democracy can be used by some (who do not engage in scientific analysis themselves) to justify bold predictive claims about relations of wealth and democratisation (see e.g. Mandelbaum,

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2007: 101–2). It follows that positivist studies can (sometimes quite unfairly) be applied in support of rather universalist and also ‘interventionist’ approaches to democratisation: if economic freedom will lead to increase in national wealth then democracy, it seems, can be promoted through promotion of economic liberalisation across the globe. Interestingly, and somewhat unfortunately, the positivist structure of philosophical argumentation lends itself to this sort of use, even if positivist scholars themselves are quite sceptical of universalist claims or interventionist strategies (as are for example Muller, 1995 and Acemoglu and Robinson, 2004). The positivist approach, however, is not the only one that could be adopted in the study of economic determinants of democracy: in fact, radically different approaches exist with very different methodological and argumentative emphases. 8.1.2 The sceptics: historical comparativists and sociologists If the researchers mentioned above have emphasised scientific study of democratisation through observational variables, it is notable that some theorists reject the generality of the conclusions reached and the positivist methods applied. There are a number of researchers that have emphasised contextual, historical and complexity-sensitive ways of analysing democratisation. They agree with Tilly (2004: 9) that ‘we should not search for a single set of circumstances or a repeated series of events that everywhere produces democracy … We should look instead for robust recurring mechanisms that combine differently, with different aggregate outcomes, in different settings.’ An influential text that challenged the tendency to talk about the economic conditions of democracy in terms of isolated independent quantifiable variables and that instead turned our attention to interpreting the long-term social and historical context of democratisation was Barrington Moore’s analysis of the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). Moore aimed to explain, historically and sociologically, the roles of the landed upper class and peasantry in the transformation of agrarian societies to modern industrial ones. While still interested in making some generalising claims – he is after all famous for his statement ‘no bourgeoisie, no democracy’ – methodologically Moore emphasised throughout the importance of studying specific historical case studies closely, a comparative historical mode of study. General statistical generalisations, he argued, are useful in preliminary stages, but to really understand the roots of democracy in Europe and elsewhere, for Moore, entailed an investigation of the role, positions and intentions of class actors at different times and in different social and political contexts (1966: xi). Crucially, he argued that when analysed in historical detail we can see that there is no linear relationship between income and democracy, but rather that three very different ‘developmental paths’ could be identified in the modern world: bourgeois capitalism,

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reactionary/fascist capitalism and communism. Wealth would only lead to democracy under certain specific social structural circumstances. This study of democratisation was quite distinct from the Lipsetian empiricist–positivist approach and more in line epistemologically and methodologically with historical analysis and ‘the humanistic tradition’ of social inquiry. Barrington Moore was primarily interested in the study of qualitative empirical data and in historical interpretation of its significance. Moore then was engaged in ‘understanding’ or ‘interpretive’ social inquiry first and generalising ‘social science’ only second. In so far as scientific language infiltrated into his account, science was conceived of as not just generalising but rather as ‘explanatory’. The focus of his study was not on measurement of indices and behavioural patterns (on an empirical observational level) but historical study and conceptual/theoretical abstraction about the role of specific classes and their social foundations (deep social ontology). Subjective judgements would be inevitable in interpretation of historical data and sources, although little systematic engagement with possible normative leanings embedded in his approach was evident. This study by Moore opened the doors for many more in the same vein: the historical comparative tradition has since been followed by many others such as Tilly (2004). It has influenced many more, including key transitologists such as Guillermo O’Donnell (1979) and Linz and Stepan (1996), who have moved towards more process-oriented and path-dependency-focused approaches to analysis of democratisation. Crucially, all these authors attacked the positivist approach to income–democracy linkage, turning instead to case study material to study how specific kinds of democratisation processes arose in specific contexts. The historical sociological approach has also influenced some influential ‘soft positivist’ political economists, such as Haggard and Kaufman (1995), who in developing their political economy of transitions explicitly avoid relying solely on quantitative and rational choice based methods: Haggard and Kaufman argue that we must study the institutional constraints of strategic choices and avoid easy assumptions about general laws or universal explanations. Crucially, in all these cases, the move towards a more sociologically and historically attuned approach has thrown significant doubt on any ‘regularity account’ eager to predict either the success or failure of democratisation in relation to single parsimonious variables. Indeed, interestingly, studies influenced by historical and ‘interpretivist’ currents of thought, rather than Lipset’s positivism, tend to be more hesitant about the possibility of generating democratic transitions through singular policy avenues, for example through attempts to advance economic liberalisation. Such scepticism is, it seems, inbuilt in the very structure of the argumentation: if democratisation is created in a complex and contingent environment and does not move in a linear or universally applicable manner, ‘advocating’ markets for the sake of democratisation becomes a far trickier proposition to maintain.

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Methodological differences then seem to also translate, although not in a straightforward manner, to differences of attitude to democratisation and democracy promotion. 8.1.3 Towards an alternative conception of science of democratisation? Rueschemeyer et al. We have identified examples of positivist and ‘moderate interpretivist’5 positions in the study of economic determinants of democratisation. These approaches have historically been sharply juxtaposed to each other for they disagree not only on methods and sensibilities to analysis of economic conditions of democratisation, but also the way in which the causality of economic factors is conceptualised. For historical sociologists simple empirical correlations relating to the level of wealth or income are not sufficient as ‘causal explanations’, and a universalistic predictive approach is seen as patently inadequate and indeed dangerous. For positivists a scientific analysis of democratisation necessitates open engagement with the basis on which generalisations are made and, for them, speculative interpretive historical macro-engagement is problematic and vague in specifying causal claims (Robinson, 2006). However, there are also positions in the field that challenge the methodological and attitudinal divide characteristic of these debates. One such approach has been developed by Rueschemeyer et al. (1992). This analysis is not only empirically important in highlighting a new key actor in democratisation, the working class, but also meta-theoretically so. Rueschemeyer et al. agree with the modernisation theorists that a close link exists between capitalist development and democracy, but they reject the reasons generally advanced for this link in the literature. This is because they do not think the statistical analyses advanced in the field linking wealth, growth or inequality and democracy manage to explain the correlations they point to, or to deal with the contradictory evidence that exists about the complex link between capitalism and democracy. They call for a more theoretically nuanced and historically and sociologically nuanced treatment of the issue (1992: 4). They come to argue that it is the social transformations initiated by capitalism and contradictions within it that give rise to the power of democracy in capitalist contexts (1992: 7). Importantly, against Moore, they emphasise that the bourgeois and middle classes are by no means the key agents of democratisation. It is the working classes that are seen as the fiercest pro-democratic force in society, albeit it is recognised that their role can be diminished in specific contexts by powerful state controls or specific kinds of transnational forces. This account, importantly, makes a contribution to debates over what kind of science should be applied to study of political economy of democratisation. Rueschemeyer et al. are underwhelmed by the seemingly ‘scientific’ statistical analyses and also by the overly particularistic focus of some of the

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comparative–historical analysis. They call for a combination of approaches. Rueschemeyer et al. reject that regularities/laws alone can ‘explain’ the role of capitalist economic development in engendering democracy: causal explanation of this link, they argue, is too complex and historically conditioned to be explained in reference to universal trans-temporary variables (while also being irreducible to single cases). They argue that the only way to capture the complex social link between economic factors and democracy is through closely argued theoretical and conceptual analysis of the inter- and counteraction of different social objects on global and local levels. Their approach also opens up breadth of evidence to be examined about the link: use of both generalising and historical evidence is ‘allowed’ and constructively used in the analysis. Another important aspect in this account is that it recognises the normative and political implications of the conceptions of democracy we use (1992: 1, 10), something that the positivist scholars, having simply worked with a narrow Schumpeterian electoral model, fail to note. Interestingly this innovative approach, while aiming to build a new framework for analysis of democratisation, is surprisingly reluctant to accept that it is engaging with meta-theoretical issues. Interestingly, Rueschemeyer et al. reject that their own approach constitutes a new ‘meta-theoretical’ position (1992: 27, 38). Yet, they seem to make a number of bold claims about what constitutes adequate explanation in the social world and what causal analysis should entail in the social world. These claims are, it seems, ‘philosophical’ claims, invoking alternative non-positivist conceptions of science. Yet again, however, there is a tendency here to overlook the influence of philosophical debate on positions adopted in the study of democratisation. This is problematic because it means that blindness to how philosophical debate penetrates empirical analysis is further reproduced here, but also because it entails in many ways an incomplete and less than adequately justified critique of the positivist mainstream. This is where reconsideration of the philosophy of science, but also CR as an alternative non-positivist philosophy of science, might be able to provide useful insights.

8.2 Critical realism and analysis of democratisation: contributions and limitations A number of different meta-theoretical leanings have been identified in the study of economic determinants of democratisation. These have effects for the kinds of evidence and causal questions that scholars turn to, for the kinds of causal claims that are made, and also, it seems, the kinds of conclusions drawn from them with regard to prospects and modes of democratisation. But what can CR, a position on social science not previously explored in democratisation studies, add to the study of economic conditions of democratisation? I argue here that critical realist ideas make contributions

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to debates on democratisation in four areas. These contributions, however, are tempered by three important limitations that should be kept in mind when applying critical realist insights. 8.2.1

Potential contributions

CR (as set out elsewhere in this volume) is a philosophy of science explicitly critical of positivist approaches to science and sceptical of unmitigated interpretivist philosophies of science (Bhaskar, 1979). CR challenges both positivism and radical interpretivism, claiming to overcome the problems of both approaches by advocating a stratified ontology, which recognises the role of ‘deep ontological’ forces that may not be directly observable; by arguing for judgemental rationalism, the ability to make judgements over knowledge claims despite the condition of epistemological pluralism; and by maintaining methodological pluralism in the social sciences. I will not focus on setting out the core premises of CR for these have already been covered many times in this volume and are set out in a number of authoritative texts (see e.g. Collier, 1994; Archer et al., 1998; Sayer, 1992, 2000). Rather I focus here on outlining four areas where CR might make a contribution to the study of democratisation. First, I would like to suggest that with its non-positivist conception of science CR guards against unrealistic expectations set for ‘scientific’ study of democratisation by some scholars. Specifically it guards against overstretched generalising and predictive claims, and provides a clear philosophy of science justification for the inappropriateness of overextending predictive logics in the analysis of democratisation. Many democratisation scholars have of course already noted the difficulty of overstretching predictive and law-like claims (Whitehead, 2002; O’Donnell, 1979; Moore, 1966). CR provides philosophical support for such claims. Critical realist conceptions of social science acknowledge that gaining precise knowledge of patterns, including general laws of economic determinants of democratisation, is wrought with difficulty when the social objects and processes involved, including democracy, are constantly changing and under contestation. Trying to ‘predict’ states of affairs, for example ‘levels of democracy’, on the basis of analysis of specific isolated variables, such as level of income or level of economic growth, is then deeply problematic. CR then directs us towards a sceptical treatment of the more ambitious predictive claims of the modernisation theorists, Przeworski et al. (2000) or Mandelbaum (2007). Critical realists, instead, would emphasise, much like Rueschemeyer et al., that the social scientific study of economic determinants of democratisation should involve the construction of ontological conceptual systems that aim to grasp the complex social structures and processes within which behaviour and perceptions of agents (states, elites, economic actors, transnational actors, civil society) involved in democratisation can be understood. While some demi-regularities can be observed on

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economic determinants of democratisation, such as those summarised by Rueschemeyer et al. (1992: 30), these do not on their own explain or predict but merely indicate possible areas of study for ‘deeper’ causal analysis engaged in through ‘intensive’ (qualitative) methods and careful conceptualisation. Recognising the problems of prediction does not mean that no economic determinants can be identified or that no economic policies can encourage democratisation: it merely means that the expectation that there are laws that explain or predict democratisation may be untenable, unrealistic and undesirable given the nature of social sciences as an area of inquiry. CR would direct us to deal with the open-endedness and non-linear nature of democratisation (see e.g. Patomäki, 2003). Second, CR would also guard against uncritical acceptance of ‘additive’ and parsimonious models of causal analysis. Critical realists point out that identifying single ‘isolated’ causal variables, such as level of wealth or income, as a cause of democratisation can be problematic. Some positivists too have noted the problems of the parsimony-driven approach but critical realists arguably take the critique of a variable-approach much further. For critical realists it is important to note that isolation of factors into distinct ‘variables’ – income, wealth, growth, inequality, democracy – may be the wrong thing to do in the social world where causal factors cannot be separated as if they existed in a laboratory environment. Not only can these variables be endogenous (Muller, 1995) but they may not be fruitfully framed at all as separate variables, but rather as aspects or outcomes of wider causal mechanisms or processes. Indeed, contrary to the focus on observable/measurable variables, systematic analysis of universal relations between such variables, and parsimonious explanation, CR directs us to recognise ontological depth and complex causal embeddedness of objects of study, including the economic determinants of democracy. States’ level of prosperity, for example, could be seen as a function of multiple structural and internal factors, and can be seen to have various different effects on democracy, depending on wider contextual determinants, from structures of inequality to ideological forces within a state. The critical realist approach forces us to deal with causal complexity, and to do so not just methodologically (recognising many simultaneous variables), but theoretically and ontologically – in terms of providing adequately nuanced conceptual systems and explanatory narratives to deal with the interlinkage of wealth, other economic factors and democracy. While there has already been a move away from parsimony in the literature (see e.g. Haggard and Kaufman, 1995), it seems that full realisation of the contradictions that may have arisen between the application of ‘parsimony seeking’ and ‘event-focused’ quantitative methods and ‘deep ontology’ interests in contextual and strategic analysis has not come about (see Hall, 2003). The analysis called for by the critical realists would arguably seek to establish a full ontological turn and would be supportive of the kinds of

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theoretically complexity-sensitive attempts to deal with economic causal conditioning of democratisation that Rueschemeyer et al. (1992), for example, have put forward. Another important aspect distinct about critical realist causal analysis is that it directs us towards taking seriously the contextual forms of causation involved. Critical realists emphasise that individual human actors are always conditioned in multiple ways by various discourses, rules and social structures. It follows that exploration of ‘conditioning causes’ is also something that CR is interested in (Kurki, 2008). It may be useful to move away from analysis of economic determinants of democratisation as akin to ‘efficient causes’ – ‘when A, then B’-causes. Through the idea of conditioning causes we can talk of enabling and disenabling, facilitating and conditioning, forms of causation that need not have specific or universal effects but may simply influence, shape or delimit. This emphasis on conditioning causation may have a role in identifying new kinds of causal factors. For example, arguably, it could be maintained that it is not just economically interested actions of elites that bring about democratisation (efficient cause focused, rational choice account), but also economic discourses and positioning of states and actors in transnational sets of economic social relations enable and constrain the kinds of decisions they come to (a more structural ‘strategic–relational’ approach taking account of conditioning causes). A study informed by CR may help reveal more deeply the complexity of the structural conditioning of democratisation and the different forms of power involved in democratisation. Third, CR supports epistemological relativism and methodological pluralism in the field, arguments that have the important consequence of ‘levelling out’ the field of study away from emphasis on only one kind of ‘scientific analysis’. Observational empiricist methods, for critical realists, are no more scientific than are discursive or historical methods. Laurence Whitehead (2000) as well as Rueschemeyer et al. (1992) has similarly noted the importance of methodological pluralism in the study of democratisation. Yet, arguably, they have not adequately justified it. They have tended to merely highlight the problems of positivist explanations without a systematic meta-theoretical account of the reasons for these problems. CR provides an explanation for these problems and provides a philosophy of science justification for methodological pluralism. For critical realists methodological pluralism is justified by the nature of the objects of science. Critical realists argue that the objects of social sciences are multifaceted, dynamic, socially constructed and unobservable and should be got at through all means possible. Empiricist methods have no privileged access to these objects, although they provide one way of generating clues as to what kind of explanatory issues might be involved. Empirical regularities, however, do not explain as such and hence can be on their own quite inadequate in the social sciences. Crucially, for critical realists, we have

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no direct observational access to causes in the social world: reasons, norms, rules, discourses and social structures are all unobservable causes, and this necessitates conceptual and theoretical engagement with these objects, and importantly, interpretive reasoning over the reasons and behaviour expressed by actors. Indeed, in terms of explanation in the social sciences we must engage with qualitative, and if the object of study so requires, historical and discursive forms of analysis. Methodological pluralism is required, not just because positivists’ methods have failed to explain democratisation (Whitehead, 2000; Rueschemeyer et al., 1992) but because the ontology of the objects of study of the social sciences so require (for more detail on the role of these methods see e.g. Sayer, 1992). This move towards methodological pluralism has at least two consequences. First, it allows us to move beyond the qualitative–quantitative method divide in the study of democratisation. As Rueschemeyer et al. argue, this methodological divide is not necessary, nor marks the boundary of science and non-science. A social scientific analysis can use both kinds of methods and the divide between these methods should not be treated as an ultimate fixed line of debate. This is not a new argument as such, for positivists too would call for bridging the divide between methods. This bridging suggested here, however, is not based on ‘smuggling’ of positivist empiricist ideas to methodological bridging: for example, the requirement of generalisability of qualitative data (King et al., 1994). Another important consequence of the emphasis on methodological pluralism is that this allows us to highlight the fact that radical forms of interpretive analysis also have their role in the analysis of democratisation. At the moment, only moderate forms of interpretivism, with emphasis on qualitative and historical analysis, have been present in the analysis of democratisation. However, there is arguably an important role also for discourse analysis and deconstruction in analysis of democratisation: indeed, these modes of analysis seem worryingly absent from the analysis of democratisation. The radical interpretivist approaches, CR would remind us, have an important role in the analysis of discursive causes in social life (Kurki, 2007, 2008). Also, an important aspect of radical interpretivism is the emphasis on the contested nature of conceptual premises used in democratisation and its research. Thus, radical interpretivist interventions remind us that not only conceptions of democracy, but also conceptions of economic development should be opened up for analysis. Fourth, the critical realist intervention is important because it advances a mode of analysis that highlights the normative and political consequentiality of all analyses of democratisation ignored by many analysts of economic determinants of democratisation. Critical realists remind us that social scientific analysis is inherently normative and political in nature and that social scientists must constantly be aware of and reflective of the consequences of normative leanings in their analyses. They must also be aware

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of the ‘critical’ power that social scientific ‘explanatory judgements’ have in (world) politics. The critical realist understanding of science allows us to reclaim the normative and critical purposes of social science. It allows us to see that some democratisation theorists, for example, tend to accept methodological (and political) individualism and with it a voluntaristic approach to ‘bringing about’ democracy. They also, importantly, tend to accept a Schumpeterian elitist ‘procedural’ view of democracy, even though this conception of democracy is highly politically consequential and widely contested (by e.g. participatory democrats). By focusing our attention on such hidden aspects of existing accounts, CR encourages us to expose some of the deep, yet often implicit, normative leanings in existing democratisation studies. We can see for example that the liberal economic order is given normative sustenance by the majority of studies of economic determinants of democratisation (Lipset, 1960; Przeworski, 1991; Haggard and Kaufman, 1995). Crucially, the normative consequences of analytical frameworks become, with a critical realist framework in mind, an important aspect of the study of democratisation itself. In sum, the critical realist assumptions can have an important role in debates about the study of economic determinants of democratisation. Prompted by critical realist ontological emphasis on complex and conditioning causation, contingency of social life, methodological and epistemological pluralism, and awareness of the fact–value relationship, certain old questions are reinforced and some new ones may be raised for theoretical evaluation. The kinds of questions critical realists would likely focus in on might include for example: What are the causal mechanisms and enabling conditions that explain the correlational link between economic development/growth/ inequality and democratisation, or, rather, how do economic structures of capitalist development condition processes of democratisation? How (by what process) do actors come to democratising decisions and what economic considerations and constraints are their decisions conditioned within? What global and local social structures and institutions are implicated in the economic conditioning of democratisation? What forms of power and hierarchy are at work in the economic structuring of democratic transitions? How is economic structuring of democratisation produced in our knowledge claims about it? Why do liberal democracy and liberal economics set the parameters of our normative vision for democracy, markets and democratisation? What alternative empirical and normative models of democracy and economics may there be and how practicable would they be in the current world political context? In directing us to ask these types of questions, CR allows the possibility, if not for entirely new kinds of studies of economic conditions of democratisation, at least studies that may be able to reinterpret the rich empirical data in the field in the light of more context- and complexity-sensitive, as well as more politically and normatively reflective, conceptual systems.

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8.2.2 Limitations of critical realist engagements with democratisation There are important limitations, however, to the uses of CR, which should be noted. The first of these is the familiar one already mentioned at the outset: CR does not, nor should it be expected to provide, a ‘theory of democratisation’. CR is not a theory of politics or IR. It provides no specific empirical or theoretical explanation of democratisation or its economic conditioning, but rather merely an orientation, a background set of assumptions, in framing the analysis of democratisation. Indeed, while meta-theoretical assumptions are clearly linked to theoretical assumptions we come to have, there is no direct link between CR and a specific analysis of democratisation. Various theories of democratisation – although not an infinitely variable set of theories (see below) – can be supported by CR, just as various theories of democratisation can be supported by positivism or interpretive meta-theoretical positions. This of course means that there is empirically or theoretically speaking nothing unique about CR. It does not provide us with new accounts of the social world. We still have to turn to the institutionalists, contextualists or Marxists, for a theory of democratisation, a theory that explains in reference to specific causal mechanisms why democratisation takes place and why it happens under specific economic conditions, for example. This means that there may still be substantial empirical and scientific disagreement over the economic conditions of democratisation even within a critical realist overall framework. Also, crucially, this means that we may also do well without CR: that is, despite the fact that CR can push us in certain useful directions, we can also explain democratisation in various empirically and theoretically adequate ways without the insights of CR. While CR can provide superior philosophical reasoning on certain points, it is not necessary for conduct of informative and innovative democratisation research. This is an important point to note – both for critical realists and their critics. Furthermore, it should be noted that CR is, like all other meta-theoretical positions, a stance that is fallible. CR has philosophical limitations which are fairly well known, involving for example the inability to provide clear criteria for superiority of certain knowledge claims over others, and the vagueness of core concepts such as social structures, as well as the lack of clear research criteria entailed by methodological pluralism. Also, CR has been accused of ontological dogmatism: why should particular kinds of ontological objects, such as social structures, be prioritised exactly? Post-positivists, on the other hand, would point to the problems of CR in insisting on language of science, causality, reality, rationality and mechanisms. Critical realists have a number of more or less plausible answers to the kinds of criticisms that are posed against them. I will not rehearse these here, suffice it to say that critical realists often point to the fact that critics fail to take into account the specific justifications advanced within CR for social science

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criteria, language of reality, or concepts of truth or causal mechanisms (see e.g. Sayer, 2000; Kurki, 2007). Nevertheless, it is important to note that CR does not constitute an infallibly correct philosophical position. Further, even if we were to give critical realists the benefit of the doubt and accept their defences against critics, there is another aspect to CR that generates limitations and that should be kept in mind. This is the normative and political leanings of this philosophical school of thought. Not only is CR not the final word on philosophy of science issues, it moreover has a very interesting history and political context itself. CR, like all philosophies of science, arises from somewhere, in this case from a post/neo-Marxist philosophical tradition with emancipatory aims at its heart. It could then be contended that CR is not a neutral ahistorical or apolitical school of thought but implicated, albeit indirectly and in very complex ways, in social and political debate. Thus, for example many critical realists, with their emphasis on structural causality and conditioning factors, tend to lean towards more social and contextual forms of explanation, which also associates them often with critical theory or left positions politically. Indeed, it seems that (neo)-Marxist and historically materialist arguments do fit with CR particularly well (Brown, 2007). If true, this creates a significant limitation for CR, for it means that CR in a politically and theoretically pluralist social science does not resolve debates in the social sciences, it provides simply one approach among many possible ones and one that we should not expect all theorists to agree on theoretically, politically or normatively despite its ability to overcome many long-standing methodological, epistemological and ontological debates.

8.3 Conclusion This chapter was guided by an interest in the question: do meta-theoretical positions on science, and specifically CR, matter for how we study economic conditions of democratisation? Rather disappointingly, no wildly enthusiastic conclusions have been reached on the usefulness of CR. Instead, the position here is tentative: CR can provide specific kinds of pointers in the study of democratisation but it is also simultaneously limited in what it can provide for the concrete study of democratisation. Crucially, while meta-theoretical positions condition how we study reality, the kinds of questions we ask, and the kinds of ontological forces we might look towards, they do not transpose themselves into specific theories of democratic transitions, nor self-evidently ‘correct’ ones. Nevertheless, paying attention to meta-theoretical leanings in research does seem to be important. This is because meta-theoretical decisions can be deeply embedded in the kinds of causal questions we ask, the kinds of causal arguments we make and even, it seems, the kind of attitudinal perspectives we adopt to processes such as democratisation. Thus, it seems to

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matter for example whether democratisation can be characterised as a linear trend in relation to which ‘when A, then B’ kind of claims can be made, or not. It matters for our approach to democratisation too whether ‘level of income’ statistically correlates with ‘level of democracy’ or whether perhaps specific social structural developments in societies generate different paths to democratisation. It matters too whether some academic accounts are deemed more ‘scientific’ than others in public policy, because as a result some explanations of democratisation can be prioritised over others. It matters also how we define democracy, or its economic determinants, and whether inbuilt in our accounts are implicit normative preferences for specific socio-economic or political systems. Given that these kinds of leanings, fundamentally linked to philosophy of science positions, matter for our analysis, and through them potentially for (world) political relations too, it would seem that it is essential that we remain ‘attuned’ to the role of philosophy of science assumptions in our theoretical and empirical engagements with (world) political trends. CR is helpful here: in focusing our attention on philosophy of science debates and their multiple consequences, it provides a useful corrective to the often empirically obsessed and philosophically blinkered debates on political processes, such as democratisation.

Notes 1. The research leading to these results has received funding under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 2007–2013) ERC grant agreement No. 202 596. All views expressed here are those of the author. Thanks also go to the Finnish Academy Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research: the first draft of this chapter was prepared under the postdoctoral fellowship of the centre. Additionally, many thanks to Chris Hobson, Heikki Patomäki and the researchers at IBEI in Barcelona and ISA 2008 for many useful comments on ideas presented here. 2. The author is currently engaged in a wider analysis of the politico-economic models of democracy worked with by democracy promoters and economic actors in global politics. This is part of European Research Council-funded project ‘Political Economies of Democratisation’ based at Aberystwyth University. See above. 3. Causal explanation is actually equated with predictability (Przeworski et al., 2000: 137). 4. Rational choice models of democracy and democratisation have become very influential and often underpin statistical tests. They start from the assumption that democratisation is a result of rational decision-making by elites: democracy arises in specific scenarios only where elites, and opposition, can benefit from making specific kinds of concessions or pacts with each other. Rational choice assumptions are applied in a formal and statistical manner (predictions made verified in relation to patterns) by the ‘scientific’ scholars of democratisation, but assumptions of strategic rational action also characterise more sociological literature. 5. Radically interpretivist positions informed by deep hermeneutics or post-structuralism tend to be distinctly absent from analysis of economic determinants of democracy.

9 Exploring Possible, Likely and Desirable Global Futures: Beyond the Closed vs Open Systems Dichotomy Heikki Patomäki

9.1 Introduction The current era of neo-liberal globalisation is in some important ways similar to the era of new imperialism from the early 1870s to 1914. In The Political Economy of Global Security (Patomäki, 2008), I suggest that we can learn from the study of the causes of the late nineteenth-century neoimperial competition that led to the Great War – an outcome that was not necessary but possible and likely. However, as history does not repeat itself, only limited aspects of historical processes may prove sufficiently similar to provide insights into future possibilities. The point is not to look for exactly similar episodes or sequences, but for comparable structural liabilities and tendencies that may yield in some ways analogical outcomes, albeit in a non-deterministic way. Moreover, what is needed is a causal analysis of the existing structures and ongoing processes, on which scenarios of possible futures can be built. The key point of The Political Economy of Global Security is to analyse the dialectics between limited-scale future wars and economic crises, and the possible rise of a transformative movement that could respond to the problems and contradictions of the global political economy in terms of collective learning, and by building new global institutions. Because I do not exclude the possibility of catastrophic outcomes such as an all-out nuclear war or a runaway process of global warming, my analysis – although the argument is about institutional transformations – has been characterised as ‘sceptical, realistic and dismal’ (Rivas, 2009: 93). The three scenarios I propose are not mutually exclusive, but they do differ in the ways they envisage the main dynamics of twenty-first-century history. Scenarios A are concerned with a politico-economic competition among great powers that is partly analogical to the developments that led to the Great War. Scenarios A are also based on an analysis of the consequences of neo-liberalisation as a self-reinforcing process involving securitisation and enemy constructions. Scenarios B focus on the possibilities for emancipatory 147

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transformations towards something that may be called green-democratic global Keynesianism (seen as a transient state of world history and global governance). And scenarios C spell out the implications of possible nuclear and climate catastrophes. In this chapter, I respond to the criticism that has been raised against the methodological and ethico-political underpinnings of my scenarios and, then, use the opportunity to update the scenarios of The Political Economy of Global Security and develop the overall argument a step further. In his review entitled ‘Sawing Off the Branch on Which We Sit? Critical Realism, Open Systems, and Possible Futures’, Lars S. Skålnes (2009) complains that while I stress – in line with critical realism (CR) – that prediction is proble-matic, I also claim that the key goal of social sciences is to identify possible global futures. ‘If the scenarios of possible global futures are not predictions, then what are they?’ (ibid., 195; the same point has been made, in relation to my earlier theoretical writings, also by Fred Chernoff, 2005: e.g. 129). Following a sympathetic summary of the substantial scenarios, Skålnes concludes his review by raising again his main point against critical realist ontology and methodology: Apart from peace researchers and scholars in future studies, The Political Economy of Global Security will have particular appeal to students interested in the nature of the relationship between empirical research and meta-theoretical positions such as that of critical realism. Particularly interesting in this regard is the book’s emphasis on treating social systems as open systems. It seems paradoxical, however, that to gain the analytical tractability necessary to develop its scenarios, the book relies heavily on theories or models that at least implicitly treat social systems as closed. The problem, I suspect, is that the future is just too open if we take the notion of open systems seriously. To act in the world, we seem forced to pretend (most likely wrongly) that social systems are closed. Put differently, the insistence on treating social systems as open risks sawing off the closed system branch on which we all sit. (Ibid., 197) From a different perspective, Anna Leander (2008) has raised concerns about the ethico-political implications of building scientific scenarios of world history as a whole. Leander agrees with me that it is critically important to study possible futures. So far ‘thinking about the future, let alone modelling it, is a marginal activity in IR/IPE’ (ibid., 447). But from her point of view, the attempt to ground scenarios on real tendencies and real working of spatio-temporal causal complexes is bound to be too abstract, selective and in some ways also too close to positivist prediction ‘to be useful in thinking about where to direct action, what kind of emancipatory struggles are possible, why, where and how’ (ibid., 449). She evokes suspicion that scientific realist scenario building may become a practice of symbolic power

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in its own right, narrowing in an authoritarian manner imagination about possible futures: There is no easy way out of this competition over the legitimate authority to scientifically depict the world, by no means unique to scenario-building. But precisely because that is so, making symbolic power visible rather than producing scientific scenarios might be the more fruitful approach if the aim is to equip us with images of possible futures. Patomäki has spent quite some time making symbolic power visible and does it also in this book. However, the scientific scenario production works in the opposite direction. It may therefore end up sidelining rather than fostering political imaginations. (Ibid., 449) Skålnes and Leander have raised important points, worth tackling in some depth and detail. In response to Skålnes, I stress that systems are always open and closed only to a degree. The allegedly radical asymmetry between explanation and prediction does not hold (unlike what some critical realists claim). The future can be analysed in terms of conditional and more or less likely possibilities of becoming. The closer we get to a given point in the future, the more shaped and structured it is. Moreover, it is possible to apply the Bayesian theorem in assessing the intersubjective–qualitative probability of different scenarios. I do this with my scenarios A–C, in light of (i) the election of Barack Obama as the President of the US and (ii) the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2008–9. In response to Leander, I discuss briefly the humanistic moment of futures studies. While scenarios are scientific and based on explanatory models, they are also self-critically reflexive exercises in cultural studies, moral philosophy and creative ability. Thus I conclude this chapter by summarising the key normative arguments, concrete eutopias1 and dramatic stories embedded in The Political Economy of Global Security.

9.2 Closed vs open systems Skålnes’ criticism that the concept of open systems means ‘sawing off the branch on we sit’ is valid only if the distinction between closed and open systems is taken as categorical. Many critical realists have been verging on committing this mistake, which originates in the formulations of Bhaskar’s early texts (e.g. Bhaskar, 1997/1975: 19). While I have always talked about systems being ‘more or less open’ (Patomäki, 1996: 112), I did not thematise the relativity of openness and its implications before ‘Realist Ontology for Futures Studies’ (Patomäki, 2006). I am of course not the first to make this essential qualification to CR. In Dialectic. The Pulse of Freedom, Bhaskar (1993: 235) himself makes an important distinction between epistemological predeterminism and ontological determination, and then goes on to

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theorise time and the ontological determination of the future (ibid., 140–4, 250–8). Similarly, but from a specific angle, Petter Næss (2004) maintains that qualitative and rudimentary predictions concerning the aggregate-level effects of particular policies and measures are, and for pragmatic reasons must be, possible. Pertti Töttö (2004: 269–84) criticises the dichotomy between open and closed systems and makes the point that almost all systems – including our solar system, the object of Newton’s mechanical theories – are in fact situated somewhere between absolutely open and absolutely closed systems, i.e. they are in fact closed to a varying degree. One of the key arguments of CR is that scientists are actively involved in creating artificial closures in laboratories – they must work hard to reveal the secrets of nature. Scientists isolate a particular mechanism of nature and thereby study its law-like effects. In A Realist Theory of Science, Bhaskar (1997/1975: 14) starts by first defining a closed system circularly as one in which a constant conjunction of events obtains. Then he proceeds by examining what this might entail. Bhaskar explains that cutting off a spacetime region from non-constant external influences is not enough. It must also be ensured that no qualitative changes will occur within the system. Thus its individual parts must be atomistic or remain constant and the whole of the system can be described exhaustively by the behaviour of its parts (ibid., 69–77). While helpful in trying to understand and overcome the empiricist position in the philosophy of science, Bhaskar’s concept of closure (ibid., 76) does not fully accord with the use of the concept of a closed system in science. The concept of a closed system is often used to refer to a theoretical scenario where perfect closure in a sense of isolation from the surroundings is an assumption. However in practice no system can be completely closed in this sense; there are only varying degrees of closure. Except at the quantum level, real world systems are thermodynamic systems, i.e. various quantities are flowing through it, such as matter, energy, work, heat and entropy. In thermodynamic systems, the boundary does not isolate the system in any absolute sense. In physics, a closed system can thus exchange heat and work, but not matter, with its surroundings (see Figure 9.1). However, for systems which are undergoing a chemical reaction, all sorts of molecules may be generated and destroyed by the reaction process. In this case, the fact that the system is closed is expressed by saying that the total number of each elemental atom is conserved, no matter what kind of molecule it may be a part of. In life sciences, living systems appear to defy the second law of thermodynamics by constantly creating order from disorder. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy within closed systems should gradually become maximal and disorder should eventually reign (entropy is a measure specifying the amount of disorder or randomness in a system that contains energy or information). In other words,

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SURROUNDINGS

SYSTEM

Boundary Figure 9.1 A system and its environment

closed systems are not stable but experience a tendency of increasing disorder called entropy (Kauffman, 1995: 9). Yet living beings are structures and systems exhibiting high levels of order. An organism stays alive in its highly organised state by taking energy and information from outside itself and processing these to produce, within itself, a lower entropy, more organised state (see Mingers, 1994; Schneider and Kay, 1994). Humans are complex living beings and self-organised systems. The point about living systems is therefore applicable to embodied human beings and indirectly to social structures as well. All levels of reality seem to allow only for what Bhaskar calls the epistemically recessive case, namely, for the constancy of extrinsic and intrinsic conditions and the non-additive principle. All systems – including those artificially created in laboratories – can only be closed to a degree, whether naturally or artificially. This applies also to Bhaskar’s key example of the only apparent closure that has occurred naturally, the solar system (Bhaskar, 1997/1975: 61, 68, 198). Despite being stable and regular in many ways, our solar system is not really a closed system. Firstly, it is part of the Milky Way galaxy and its huge gravitational field, orbiting around its massive centre once in about 200 million years. Secondly, the short-term comets originate in the outer solar system; they are thrown inwards towards the Sun by gravitational perturbations not only from planets but also from nearby stars. In the scale of 100,000 astronomical units, we can also see the entirety of the Oort Cloud of long-term comets that surround the Sun and extend to the boundaries of interstellar space (Sagan, 2006: 8–11). This part of the solar system is recurrently being shaped by the fields of gravitation of nearby stars (also depending on how close the Sun is to the plane of the galaxy at any given time, as our solar system is oscillating vertically across the plane of the galaxy), which also explains why the orbits of the comets are not in the same plane as planets’ orbits. Multiple gravitational

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fields within the solar system also cause small perturbations to the orbits of planets, which change over time and which cannot be calculated with perfect accuracy. Similarly, the behaviour of asteroids exhibits disorganised complexity, being partly chaotic and irregular, although the system as a whole possesses many orderly and analysable average properties (for a classic text in complexity theory, see Weaver, 1947). Hence, as the example of the solar system demonstrates, practically all systems are closed only to a degree. Although thought or laboratory experiments and artificially created or natural approximations of closures have played a very important role in modern science, and should continue to do so, we should not exaggerate their role. The closure/predictive approach does not work at all if (Jakosky, 2006: 71): • • • •

the system is too complex; it is too large; it operates over too long a timescale; or if random events can have a large effect on the outcome.

Partly for this reason, and partly because it has now been realised that the cosmos as a whole is a historically evolving entity, many sciences have become increasingly historical. Often their object of study consists of a particular historical episode or process such as the development of our solar system and planet Earth, the latter involving plate tectonics, climate changes, etc. For instance, the ways in which the planets in our solar system came together involved random collisions that cannot be predicted solely from an initial set of conditions. Yet given the narrowness of the habitable zone in a solar system and the specificity of many other celestial conditions of life, these chaotic outcomes have been decisive for the possibility of life. Explanations consist of an inferred sequence of events to construct a historical narrative of what must have taken place in order to leave the evidence that we see today (see ibid., 71–84). On the other hand, no system can be categorically open without losing its order, structures and identity. If ‘no constant conjunction or regular sequence of events is forthcoming’ (cf. Bhaskar, 1997/1975: 33), we can have no knowledge of what will happen next. In principle, anything can happen. Yet, fields of science such as meteorology, ecology or medicine, while studying open and chaotic systems, which exhibit markedly multiple and complex causation, can also predict many practically important things within the confines of particular categories of significance to us and limited spacetime areas. Their predictions can usually be expressed in probabilistic terms. The specified outcome is within a given range of variation with certain probability. The required accuracy depends on the exact purpose. The possibility of some useful predictions indicates that for many practical purposes sufficiently regular events do obtain also in comparatively open and in some

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ways chaotic systems. Hence, if the closed/open systems distinction is taken as categorical, it is a misleading guide to science, including human sciences. As virtually all systems are in fact situated somewhere between absolutely open and absolutely closed systems, i.e. they are closed to a varying degree, we should expect to find not only tendencies but also some regularities. This is acknowledged by Tony Lawson, who has introduced the concept of contrastive demi-regularity, indicating the existence of partial closures also in society. Contrastive demi-regularities concern contrasts between categories or space-time areas and are expressed in terms of regularities within a given range of variation with certain probability. They are not strict regularities but probabilistic, limited to a particular space-time area, and liable to change (Lawson, 1997: 204–13). Critical realists are of course right that it is not sufficient to find contrastive demi-regularities and, then, specify the conditions of their continuation. Rather, there should be a movement towards analysing the deeper social structures and causal complexes gene-rating these manifest phenomena. Also the degree of closure of social systems can vary and become the explanandum of critical social sciences (this is a key theme of many critical theories from the Frankfurt School to CR, concerned with freedom, but it has been perhaps most clearly articulated by Unger, 2004). Moreover, what is the use of social sciences if they can say nothing at all about the future, conditionally, possibilistically or otherwise? From the pivotally important point of view of futures studies, it is legitimate to search for contrastive demi-regularities also as partial guidance to and illumination about possible and likely short- to mid-term futures. Contrastive demi-regularities are pervasive also in relatively open systems, and many aspects of world futures are very difficult to study systematically without resorting to empirico-analytical models. Although not the only task of futures studies, the anticipation of possible and likely outcomes of existing processes, tendencies, mechanisms and fields is an important part of what relevant human and social sciences should do. In future scenarios the focus is on ongoing and future choices and actions rather than on something that has already happened. A futurologist: • explains the development of various conjunctures and compounds; • specifies boundary conditions for the existence and continuation of trends and demi-regularities and for the endurance and transfactual efficacy of the related historical structures and fields; • develops plausible scenarios and narratives of world history up to a particular, relevant future point. Sciences, including human and social sciences, study everything from the beginning of the cosmic evolution to the long-term future of life and humanity. Most social sciences are concerned with short- and mid-term

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futures, but as I will make clear in the conclusion, our scenarios can be and often are enmeshed with much longer-term considerations as well.

9.3 Global future as an increasingly shaped possibility Also in nature, structures, fields and mechanisms operate transfactually and generate effects in open systems. The interplay of many conditions, fields and mechanisms results in a diversity of outcomes. However, human and social sciences are different from the areas of science such as meteorology, ecology or medicine in that human agency involves the reflective capacity to act otherwise – the possibility of deviating in principle from any given and known expectation or anticipation. As social beings are historical and actions temporal, time is involved in social phenomena in a complicated and reflexive fashion. Expectations and anticipations of the future are a necessary part of social action, and parti-cularly so in the world of modern organisations. Structured and reflexive anticipations may also constitute a part of the organising rules and principles in a social system. A case in point is an organisation that plans its future actions on the basis of various anticipations and forecasts. Actors may try to shape others’ anticipations in a variety of ways. Prophecies can thus be self-fulfilling or self-denying – also on purpose (for an interesting discussion, see Houghton, 2009). Nevertheless, it is not true that anything can happen, or that all real possibilities are equally likely. Our reflective agency is built upon layers of biological evolution, human prehistory, and history; and geo-historical structures, mechanisms and fields constitute and shape action possibilities. Many social structures and fields endure for long times. Social systems are closed to a varying but significant degree, and while also changing, they exhibit multi-layered continuities. There are poorly known and not very reader-friendly passages in Bhaskar’s Dialectic (1993, especially 142–4) providing useful concepts and ontological ideas for futures studies. Bhaskar explains that tense is irreducible and the future is real. He argues that the future is an increasingly shaped and structured possibility of becoming, mediated by the presence of the past. ‘The future is paradigmatically shaped possibility of becoming’ that, as a possibility, ‘may be closer or more distant from us, more or less about, and more or less likely to be actualized’. People and institutions are structured entities that contain various possibilities as powers, liabilities and tendencies. The future is thus an increasingly shaped possibility, existentially constituted by layers of geo-histories embedded in the relevant actors and institutions and interacting in complicated ways. In The Political Economy of Global Security, I assessed the relative probability of the actualisation of four possible global futures. The first is the contrastive case of smooth neo-liberal and neo-imperial developments without changes in the current principles and institutions of global governance. This is

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rather unlikely, albeit not impossible (this possibility cannot be excluded also because of the limits of our knowledge and epistemological relativism). Probability assessments of more or less unique historical processes can at best be well-informed but readily revisable qualitative judgements based on knowledge of (i) similar and contrastive historical cases and (ii) existing structures and processes that are, however, liable to change sooner or later. My probability estimate for the ‘40 years of neoliberal business-as-usual scenario’ is less than 10 per cent. The US turn to new imperialism in the early twenty-first century was a jump-off point in the sense of creating a new imperialist horizon of possibility, not only for the US but for others as well; and a branching point, gradually foreclosing possible lines of development towards a pluralist security community in the world as a whole. This nodal point involved the presence of layers of the past, especially the legacy of the Cold War, itself in part a result of the First World War (the Russian Revolution would probably not have happened without the Great War). But most importantly, this nodal point has resulted from the self-reinforcing process of neo-liberalisation. The main mechanisms, reinforcing the turn to new imperialism, include (i) uneven growth, economic imbalances and contradictory responses to them; (ii) neo-imperial competition over increasingly scarce resources; (iii) crisis-prone global finance and the precarious role of the US dollar in the global monetary system; (iv) de-democratisation and the increasing role of vested interests, and (v) securitisation, enemy construction and an armaments race. On this basis, I developed three versions of scenarios A about possible paths involving escalation of the emergent conflicts that will gradually assemble the conditions for a global military catastrophe. In scenario A1, the long downturn and uneven growth will persist in the world economy. Neo-imperial competition between superstates and blocs will lead to securitisation, enemy construction, new alliances and an armaments race. In scenario A2, the US will crumble economically and react aggressively, causing a rapid process of securitisation and antagonisation. In my assessment, the third scenario A3 appeared as the most unlikely one, as it is built on the assumption of a new surge in the global economy as a whole. However, in A3, following the jump-off point of the early 2000s, rapid new growth will co-generate conflicts and an arms race and thus will prove lethal in the sense of lateral pressure theory, as the world remains on the geohistorical path opened up by the nodal point of the rise of new imperialism in the early twenty-first century. Scenarios B are based on the alternative idea that peaceful and democratic reform of global governance is possible without any major global catastrophe. In scenario B1, the long-term learning processes, combined with some sort of generic understanding of global threats, will suffice to generate a movement to transform and rebuild the systems of global governance.

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This movement will eventually also convince a number of governments to change and create new international and global law. In scenario B2, the same thing will happen only after a series of relatively limited economic crises and wars. Crises and wars are likely to generate resistance to the neo-liberal and neo-imperial framings of the problems of the global economy and security. They can also create momentum for transformative movements to organise collective action. There are three scenarios C. The first two, scenarios C1 and C2, anticipate a major catastrophe, but as a result of global warming, or as a consequence of a catastrophic strike by weapons of mass destruction by lesser states or other actors, not as a result of a war between superstates. C1 and C2 may nonetheless result indirectly from the competitive and neo-imperial policies essential to scenarios A. The industrial revolution has increased human capacity to produce and destroy, particularly as a consequence of the use of fossil fuels, developments in explosives and metallurgy, and emergence of nuclear power. However, their increasingly large-scale use has had a major impact on the climate of the planet. This may set in motion cosmopolitan movements and lead to far-reaching changes. Finally, scenario C3 spells out the possibility of a major catastrophe as a direct result of competing new imperialisms, enemy building and an armaments race (or something equivalent); and radical changes in the decades following the massive catastrophe. Scenarios are not predictions. They start with an analysis of the existing structures and processes and their inherent potential, coupled with the assumption that futures remain open until a particular possibility is actualised. It is possible to assess the probability of various possibilities in a qualitative manner on the basis of systematic scenarios by employing contextual human judgement, open to intersubjective contestation and argumentation. In The Political Economy of Global Security, I merely proposed an order of likelihood, amended here to include all the inter- and intradependent possibilities: p(B2) ⬎ p(C1) ⫽ p(Ai) ⬎ p(C2) ⬎ p(C3) ⬎ p(B1) Ai : p(A1) ⫽ p(A2) ⬎ p(A3) On the basis of historical comparisons and analysis of existing structures and tendencies, the scenario of further economic crises and wars creating a momentum for reform movements is the most likely one, followed by a scenario of global warming triggering essential changes in global governance. Given the existing mechanisms and tendencies, further wars involving the US, and possibly also other superstates, are very likely, and it will also be very difficult to avoid financial and other economic crises. These developments are part of scenarios Ai as well, which may co-generate C2 (a strike by weapons of mass destruction) and/or ultimately amount to C3 (changes after a massive global catastrophe). Global warming is already happening; the question

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is only how much, how fast and with what consequences. B2 (changes following a series of limited wars and crises) and C1 (changes triggered by global warming) are mutually reinforcing which increases the likelihood of both of them. Economic crises, wars and global warming are likely to generate not only resistance to the prevailing orthodoxy but also democratic cosmopolitical responses among peoples, movements and parties. However, everything hinges upon timing. A critical question is whether global warming might become self-accelerating before sufficient measures have been taken. A runaway global warming process without legitimate and effective systems of governance and a widely shared sense of climate justice is likely to contribute to the materialisation of scenario C2 (a strike by weapons of mass destruction) as well as perhaps scenario C3 (changes after a massive global catastrophe), the latter via Ai (superpower conflicts and possible catastrophe). Another critical question of timing is whether reforms will make a difference before it is too late to prevent a gradual transformation from world politics to the logic of security and violence, involving a high risk of a major global military catastrophe. Scenario C2 (a limited strike with weapons of mass destruction triggers global changes) is more likely than scenario C3 of fundamental changes following a major catastrophe. This assessment is in part based on the unpredictability of the outcome of such a huge catastrophe as the 2044 nuclear war imagined by W. Warren Wagar (1999). It is overly optimistic to think that the outcome of such a catastrophe would be a cleaner and safer world and a global federation run by a world parliament. However, C2 is also undesirable, risky and dangerous. A strike with weapons of mass destruction would be a unnecessary and unwanted disaster. There is also a risk that its effects would not be confined to a particular time and place but would be uncontrollable. Most importantly perhaps, this kind of strike could actually lead to hypersecuritisation, spelling an end to formal democracy in many places, and strengthening tendencies towards scenarios of a major violent catastrophe. Although this kind of a catastrophe would probably also strengthen democratic cosmopolitan sentiments, it might simultaneously weaken people’s and non-state actors’ capacity to organise collective action. Intensive securitisation and divide-and-rule policies may make the conditions for emancipatory actions next to impossible.

9.4 How to revise scenarios over time: the role of the Bayesian theorem Since writing these scenarios, many relevant things have already happened. Here I would like to focus on two episodes: (i) the election of Barack Obama as the President of the US in 2008 and the commencement of his term in 2009; and (ii) the outbreak and development of the 2008–9 global financial

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crisis. The importance of (i) lies in the way President Obama may have been partly reversing the policies of neo-imperialism that constituted the jump-off and branching point during the George W. Bush administration in 2000–8. On the other hand, the global financial crisis (ii) was a key ingredient of my scenarios A1, A2 and B2 and thus seems to have reinforced the original assessments and their background assumptions. It is helpful to use the Bayesian theorem as a heuristic device to estimate roughly the extent to which these new events and turns necessitate amendments or revisions to the original probability assessments – and at the same time use it to specify the limits of our precise knowledge about the future (for basic texts on Bayesian statistics, see Bolstad, 2004; Lynch, 2007). The prior distribution of probabilities of the actualisation of different possibilities is based on historical and structural analysis, and on intersubjective judgements about the likelihood of different possible paths of history. The plausibility of the assigned probabilities is conditional on meeting the standards of qualitative historical and futurological research and on the scrutiny of intersubjective criticism. Now, the basic idea of the Bayesian theorem is that we revise our beliefs on the basis of quantitative data acquired from observations: p(B A ) =

p( A B) p(B) p( A )

where p( A ) =

∑

Bi ∈SB

p( A Bi ) p(Bi )

The theorem says that a conditional probability for event or development B given event or development A is equal to the conditional probability of A given B multiplied by the prior probability of B and divided by the prior probability for A (the sum of the conditional probability of A under all possible events Bi in the sample space). The intuition behind the Bayesian theorem is similar to the idea of the hermeneutic circle. We do not calculate probabilities blindly, on the basis of the data only and then compare it to the abstract distribution of probabilities across abstract space-time (this interpretation implies universally regular probabilities). Rather our prior information of likelihoods and understandings of structureand field-specific and changing causal relationships must co-determine the answer. Nonetheless, our answers must be criticisable and revisable on the basis of new observations. For example, if an original probability is very low, a single contrary occurrence does not necessarily increase probability even to a noticeable chance; but even in the case of a very low original probability, like occurrences should have a cumulative effect of making a difference to our estimation of probabilities.

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When assessing the probability of future scenarios, many relevant observations become available only in the course of history. A key problem is, however, that we do not have numerical values for the original probabilities. Furthermore, the new observations tend to be theory-laden descriptions of geo-historical events and processes rather than systematic quantifiable data. And yet, somehow the occurrence of these events and turns should slide the estimated probability in the direction of the occurrence in accordance with the Bayesian theorem. The theorem helps to analyse the impact of an occurrence of something by decomposing the problem into smaller parts. For instance: p( A i Obama ) =

p(Obama A i ) p( A i ) p(Obama A i ) p( A i ) + p(Obama not − A i ) p( A i )

What is the probability that the possible path of world history outlined in scenarios Ai will be actualised given that Barack Obama became the President of the US in January 2009? This depends crucially on our estimation of the likelihood of the occurrence of Obama administration policies, given (a) that the world history is actually following one of the paths Ai or (b) that it is not following any of paths Ai. The question is really about how compatible the Obama administration policies are with each of these possibilities. If Obama does not make much difference and is fairly compatible with both possibilities, the chances of Ai are in fact being increased by Obama’s election (as the relevant processes are anyway moving towards the direction of Ai). The probability of Ai is decreased only if Obama is (highly) compatible with not-Ai and simultaneously (highly) incompatible with Ai. Not-Ai can mean two things: 1. Either the world will muddle through the next 40 years and beyond without any of the above scenarios being realised. This may be in line with the expectations of neo-liberalism, but in my estimation an unlikely possibility (as stated above, likelihood less than 10 per cent). 2. Or adequate changes in global governance will be realised through the fulfilment of B1 or B2 before any of the scenarios Ai is fulfilled, creating the conditions for a global security community and constituting a leap in ‘the long march of mankind toward its unity and better control of its own fate’ (Triffin, 1968: 179). Barack Obama’s liberal public rhetoric seems more in line with not-Ai than with Ai. The key question is: how much difference do the actual policies of his administration make? In The Political Economy of Global Security, the paths outlined in scenarios Ai are being produced by the self-reinforcing process of neo-liberalisation and its intended and unintended consequences, including the rise of the neo-imperial mode of responsiveness. The actualisation of

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Ai is in line with a slide towards late nineteenth-century-style geopolitics, militarisation and arms race. Especially A1 and A2 are fully compatible with slackening economic growth and increasing inequalities; and with the occurrence of economic crises and interventions and wars in the troubled zones of the planet, especially in the global South. A3 is otherwise similar but involves more growth, perhaps to a significant degree generated by military Keynesianism. Briefly, while the US is pulling out from Iraq and eliminating the longstanding US arrears to the United Nations, and pushing for disarmament negotiations, at the same time the Obama administration is increasing military spending by 4 per cent over the fiscal year 2009 and has not revised the US security doctrine in any significant way. There are preparations to improve US capacity to make further military interventions (Los Angeles Times, 2009). The war in Afghanistan is continuing and may be escalating into Pakistan. The financial crisis of 2008–9 has prompted some Keynesian measures, but so far without any significant deviation from the substantive path of neo-liberalisation in most dimensions of policy (Patomäki, 2009a). The responses to financial and economic crisis have not involved attempts to build new global-Keynesian institutions, but have remained national and contradictory. Elsewhere, I have argued that it is likely that if (a) the negative real per capita global growth rate remains, on average, at the annual level of not much more than 1 or 2 per cent, and (b) if the crisis can be contained and a recovery starts in 2010 or at the latest in 2011, we will see just another round of neo-liberal and technical business-as-usual ‘reforms’ (Patomäki, 2010). After a partial economic recovery, governments, central banks, media corporations and other authorised bodies are likely to return to their official optimism, grounded in the standard neoclassical theory; and the bulk of regulators and lawmakers can continue to pursue relative state competitiveness at the expense of long-term stability and collective development, also because they do not see any alternative. If the ‘recovery followed by neo-liberal business-as-usual’ scenario proves right, the underlying superbubble that has already lasted for three decades will continue to grow, gradually creating conditions for an even bigger crash in the late 2010s or early 2020s. So far, the evidence indicates that Barack Obama has not made a significant difference either way. Unlike Obama’s rhetorics, his policies are compatible with Ai and not-Ai alike. If anything, they appear surprisingly compatible especially with A1 and may even be working against not-Ai. This seems to indicate that scenarios Ai are now closer to being fulfilled than at the time of writing the book. A3 would postpone the possible catastrophe the furthest, whereas A2 would bring the catastrophe much closer. A1 – which now seems the most likely of the three scenarios – is somewhere in between. Moreover, on the basis of a similar analysis (no space for details here), scenario B2 – involving major changes of global governance through a rise

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of a transformative movement after a series of limited wars and crises – has not yet become more likely after the 2008–9 crisis. Only if the crisis proves really deep and long are short-term transformations of global institutions likely. In that case, two things will probably happen: • The tendency towards beggar-thy-neighbour policies by states will become stronger, reinforcing the already ongoing neo-imperial competition over resources and markets and accelerating the already ongoing armament race. • Demands for global reforms will become stronger and more radical and are likely to include major regulatory and institutional reforms, paving the way for the actualisation of B2. This implies a dialectic between two opposing tendencies: (i) a general tendency towards a repetition of the mistakes of the eras 1871–1914 and the 1920s; and (ii) a tendency towards a rise of a global ethico-political imaginary and new globalist movements focusing on global sustainability, justice and democracy. In the two years since completing the book, neither tendency has gained much strength. However, while there are signs of rising economic nationalism (Economist, 2009) the actualisation of B2 has not come any closer. No worldwide transformative movement has risen, and global civil society remains marginal for high politics. A few more occurrences into this direction will suffice to change the order from [p(B2) ⬎ p(Ai) ⫽ p(C1)] to [p(Ai) ⫽ p(C1) ⬎ p(B2)]. But, for the sake of argument, let us assume that Obama’s policies are in fact making a difference, working dialectically with global movements that represent the long-term learning of humankind. In the first half of the 2010s, the momentum for major democratic, ecological and Keynesian changes in global governance is rapidly building up even in the absence of any further crises or catastrophes. Or alternatively, decades will pass by smoothly without any major changes or catastrophes; even global warming turns out much less serious than anticipated. Any clear discrepancy between probability assignments and the actual course of history should be taken as a reason to revise also our explanatory models of the underlying structures, liabilities and tendencies. History should be allowed to falsify also our pet theories and models of the world.

9.5 On the humanistic moment of futures studies As Leander (2008) points out, the construction of global scenarios is a highly selective process. It is necessary to decide which actors, structures/mechanisms and nodal points to use in the construction of scenarios. How do we know whether I have included the right ones? Perhaps other ones should have assumed the main role instead? Perhaps. The upshot is that iconic modelling and scenario construction are continuous and dialogical processes.

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Well-taken substantial criticism and alternative and possibly better scenarios can and, if there are good reasons, also should lead to revisions and learning. Ideally the process would constitute a small step in the collective learning of humankind. Furthermore, it is not only the scenarios themselves that can and should be improved but also the methodology of revising them. Scenarios are in some ways similar to claims about past ‘eras’, such as the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century, the Westphalian era or the Bretton Woods era (cf. Staley, 2006: 73). Claims about eras or epochs are not in themselves causal explanations. Geo-historical events and processes are generated by complexes of structures, fields, powers and actions. There may be any number of important processes within a location or period, involving a variety of possible scales of time. Claims about past eras are abstractions that are relevant only in relation to certain particular questions. Moreover, within the hermeneutic circle of research, and also given subsequent geo-historical processes, claims about past eras may turn out to be inadequate or misleading. Likewise, the global politico-economic scenarios about the first half of the twenty-first century are abstractions that are relevant only in relation to particular questions; the point is not to exclude numerous other possible and legitimate normative and emancipatory concerns. But even then, does this kind of scientifically realist methodology of scenario production impede our capacity to see and seize historic opportunities? Does it not lead to authoritarian objectivism and to the exclusion of unforeseen possibilities and historical opportunities for change? To paraphrase the classical point about philosophy, the alternative to futures studies is not no anticipation of possible futures, but implicit and bad assumptions about possible futures. In The Political Economy of Global Security, I have done my best to identify also weak signals of healthy collective learning and transformative movements and opportunities. Nonetheless, I agree with Leander and Jorge Rivas (2009) that the overall conclusion is somewhat pessimistic. The twenty-first century has a lot of potential to turn out even worse than the twentieth. There is nothing I would welcome more than plausible scenarios proving me wrong. A key point of exploring scenarios of major conflicts is early warning. The focus is on how a major global conflict might be expected to evolve in the absence of various preventive causal interventions and emancipatory transformations. While the three variations of scenario A deal with the gradually accumulating potential for a major military conflict, the two scenarios B analyse the potential for emancipatory transformations of global governance in terms of global Keynesianism, justice and democracy, involving worldwide redistribution and planning of economic growth (the direction of emancipatory changes is also a matter of normative political discourse to assess). While I estimate the probability of transformations based merely on long-term learning and related activities of political movements

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to be fairly low, there are still good reasons to expect the dialectics of limited economic crises/wars and critical movements to yield emancipatory outcomes in the next 10–30 years (despite B2 becoming less likely and Ai and Ci more likely). The first two variations of the C scenario present global warming or a one-off catastrophe (such as the use of weapons of mass destruction by a non-state actor) as a trigger for global reform. In both cases, the prospects are ambivalent and a lot depends on timing. For instance, in the case of global warming, the future of global security depends on the timing of learning the lessons from the by-products of industrialisation and growth, and the resultant remedial actions. The third variation of the C scenario is the most pessimistic and tragic of them all. In this scenario, humanity can learn historical lessons in a Kantian manner only by suffering the catastrophic consequences of its inaction first – similar to what happened in the twentieth century, but this time with more devastating consequences. Apart from being scientific and based on explanatory models, scenario construction should also be seen as a critically reflexive exercise in cultural studies, moral philosophy and creative ability (in the same way that both research and development and the arts are creative). Social scientific models involve structured stories that may contribute to the resignification and transformation of practices. Although each possible line of world development is an alternative story of how the future may unfold, all scenarios thus involve narratives and, when put together, different stories may also constitute a kind of myth and grand narrative of the possibilities and outlook for humankind. Temporal myths and stories have a structure which is based on both the general human condition and cultural variations in storytelling and world understandings. Every myth and story locates presence as part of a wider and structured temporal whole. Myths and stories organise the anticipation of futures. The overall narrative structure of my scenarios A–C is a storm warning, which at the same time constitutes a normative argument for global institutional transformations. Storm warnings are typical of a lot of futures studies and science fiction. In contrast to the mainstream of these genres, however, I try to be self-critically reflexive about the storylines I adopt. Within the confines of the scenarios A–C, it is indeed possible to tell many different stories about the likely world history of 2010–50. But what is the best way of telling these stories? The key ethical and methodological question was formulated by Hayward Alker (1996: 269–70): ‘Is there a way of making world historical accounts empirically revisable while at the same time allowing them to have the reflective character and dramatic force of a tragic morality play or the ironic happiness of a Russian fairy tale?’ The point is that accounts of possible futures have to be simultaneously empirically revisable and reflective about their dramatic force and implications. Any account of the prevailing mechanisms, fields and processes can be

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challenged on conceptual and empirical grounds. The theoretical framework on which causal explanations and scenarios are based must be open to various empirical, conceptual, philosophical and methodological criticisms. As history unfolds, new events and turns can be taken into account and scenarios and their likelihood of being actualised must be reassessed accordingly. But it is equally important to be mindful of the dramatic force and motivating power of scenarios. Thus, in the last chapter of The Political Economy of Global Security, I compared the merits of farce, comedy and tragedy (but omitted epic, lyric and fairy tale, even though a modernised version of epic, for instance, would have been quite pertinent). Interesting and complex combinations of these genres are possible and often desirable. I argued that on both ontological and ethical grounds we should avoid Manichaeism, i.e. the construction of binary self–other relations in terms of good and evil. Manichaean thinking and discourses may be part of the world we are studying, but they should not be a part of the researcher’s own meaningful story of temporal events in reality. Moreover, I suggested reading the ongoing era not as an inevitable tragedy, but rather as a farce that may still turn into either a comedy or tragedy – as a story with an open end.

9.6 Conclusions The idea behind the study of possible futures is to shape worlds that are yet to come rather than merely adjusting to given future realities. The future is an increasingly shaped possibility but at no point predetermined. This is the ontological ground for human freedom. However, given the current institutional context – the lack of adequate planetary institutions – the ability of humanity to control its own fate and shape the path of world history is severely limited. Modernity might have revolved around the principles of autonomy and self-determination, but there are few if any global institutions that would embody these principles. This suggests an epic tale, involving a much wider timescale than that of The Political Economy of Global Security. The tale opens with a prehistoric humanity spreading from Africa to all corners of the planet and gradually cultivating separate languages and cultures. Developments started to speed up about 10,000 years ago, during the agricultural revolution. Some things may have been invented independently by separate cultures and civilisations, but especially in the Afro-Eurasian continent people also learnt religious, social and technological innovations from each other. Nonetheless – despite occasional vast empires – communication was relatively slow (at least compared to the standards of the early twenty-first century) and awareness of the distant others, of the same human species, was often highly mythological. Some of this started to change with the expansion of the European statessystem and the capitalist world economy, from the long sixteenth century

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onwards. The consequent ‘waves of globalisation’ (Robertson, 2003) – starting with the imperial reintegration of the American continent with Europe and thus the rest of the world – have meant a new coming together of humanity, even if this coming together has often occurred under violent, oppressive and tragic circumstances. The global industrial age has generated new modes of existential interconnectedness. The fate of humanity is now inseparable, and yet humanity remains partitioned into separate communities and states. The meaning of the twenty-first century lies in the way this contradiction will be resolved. The muses of this epic tale are those who are ready and willing to create new concepts, myths, models, scenarios, stories and concrete eutopias of new global institutions, i.e. new realities. The main themes are political economy and security. The muses stress that coordinated actions anticipating possible futures, whether real and concrete or illusionary, shape the present and thereby also contribute towards the materialisation of a particular line of development in world history. There are long lists of global problems that have to be addressed in the coming decades to avoid catastrophe. Thousands of formal scholarly articles and books are being written on these problems; and thousands of speeches are being given by scholars, politicians, international civil servants and representatives of civil society organisations. In the absence of divine or extraterrestrial intervention into human affairs, however, the shocks and turning points of this epic tale are man-made, even if often unintentionally. ‘Heroes’ – this concept may the most suspicious and ethico-politically problematic part of the epic tale – emerge that embody the values of a new planetary civilisation and propose new myths to respond to the ‘quest to ensure human and intergenerational security on and for the planet, as well as democratic human development and human rights’ (Gill, 2003: 211). Like in classical tales, the planetary heroes will face adversaries and serious difficulties and will be significantly transformed in the course of twentyfirst-century history. But ultimately, they will establish worldwide movements and new forms of political agency – and turn the planet into a home for all of humanity and all life on it. This is an epic tale par excellence. It is exciting and dramatic. Even better, there is a sense in which it can be said to be thus far true, the future remaining open-ended. This epic tale is certainly compatible with scenarios A–C (which in turn are compatible with a multitude of developments and emancipatory concerns not captured by these scenarios). It has motivating power and may thus play an important role in the emergence of new movements and forms of political agency. But we have learnt the value of scepticism, too. While all identities are constructed and open, it is all too easy to fix one’s identity, in various ways, with potentially or at least metaphorically violent effects. It is also difficult to create ethico-political spaces free from asymmetrical or biased relations of

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power; and all stories have effects of power. There is thus no substitute for self-critical reflexivity and openness about the stories we tell. Democracy is valuable also because we cannot trust anyone to know a priori better than others. In democracy, all stories must be open to contestation and revision. This applies to global democracy too.

Note 1. The term ‘concrete utopia’ emerged in the late 1960s discussions within the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. I have used it in my previous writings, including in passing in The Political Economy of Global Security, but I now realise that ‘utopia’ is misleading. The term ‘utopia’ comes from Greek, combining ou and topos, meaning no-where. Even a concrete ‘no-where’ would be nowhere. The logical counterpart to modern dystopia is actually eutopia, where the Greek prefix dys means ‘abnormal’ or ‘defective’, and eu means ‘good’. An abstract eutopia, and similarly an abstract dystopia, may never be any-where except in human imagination because it is geo-historically impossible, but ‘concrete eutopia’ and ‘concrete dystopia’ designate real geo-historical possibilities. For further discussion, see Patomäki (forthcoming), especially Ch. 8, ‘The Humanistic Moment of Futures Studies’.

10 Critical Realism, International Relations Theory and Marxism Faruk Yalvaç

Recent years have seen the rise of different idealist accounts of IR theory, such as post-structuralism, reflectivism, interpretivism and constructivist idealism, the latter having been the most powerful among them. Yet despite their apparent diversity, all these positions are based on a philosophical anti-realism and share parallel ontological commitments (Wight, 2006a, 2007; Joseph, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2007; Potamäki and Wight, 2000). A Marxist social theory enriched by the principles of critical realism (CR) can provide a radical alternative to both the positivist and constructivist accounts of IR, which ultimately consolidate and reproduce the worldwide system of capitalism, along with its structured inequalities. In fact, in order for IR theory to fully exploit the implications of CR, it must be developed in connection with a historical materialist understanding of IR. And while claims have been made that CR can be forced to work with other theories of IR, it is most compatible with the principles of Marxism, which is the ‘critical science of capitalism’ (Laffey and Dean, 2002: 92). In the words of Jonathan Joseph, ‘Although scientific realism can be put to work on a range of different theories … its relationship to Marxist theory is the most convincing’ (Joseph, 2007: 345). Chris Brown also refers to Marxism when he argues that CR ‘might perform an important role in reinvigorating a tradition of thought which has been unjustly neglected for the last twenty years or more’ (Brown, 2007: 409, 415). CR indeed provides very fruitful grounds on which to heed Fred Halliday’s call for an ‘encounter’ between IR theory and historical materialism (Halliday, 1994). At the current conjuncture of IR theorising, a Marxism inspired by critical realist philosophy represents a very important means for overcoming the current stalemate brought about by the rationalist/reflectivist or positivist/ post-positivist divide. This can be made clearer by returning to some of the theoretical controversies of the 1970s and early 1980s, when the need for a critical realist understanding of IR theory was as acute as it is today. The late 1970s can be understood as the moment of initial crisis in mainstream IR theorising, at the core of which was the recognition of the positivist nature of 167

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IR theory, its ahistorical and problem-solving nature and its shortcomings in explaining social change. Many of the defects associated with mainstream IR theory are acknowledged today, but their initial exposure occurred almost 30 years after the Cold War at a time when realism had achieved undisputed hegemony in IR theory. It was after this period of crisis that IR theory witnessed the proliferation of new approaches such as critical theory, historical sociology and, somewhat later, various post-positivist approaches. The emergence of CR coincided chronologically with the emergence in the 1970s of the interparadigm debate, the growth of neo-realist structuralism and the development of a historical sociology of IR (Yalvaç, 1981). In 1978, Roy Bhaskar published A Realist Theory of Science, and in the following year, in The Possibility of Naturalism, he turned the views he had developed regarding the natural sciences towards the social sciences. At the time, Bhaskar’s arguments concerning a non-positivist naturalism in social sciences provided a very important alternative to the undisputed hegemony of positivism in social sciences, including IR theory. Today, CR is presented as offering a solution to the concerns of both positivist and post-positivist understandings of the reality of IR and providing a basis for understanding its discursive and structural aspects without separating the two (Joseph, 2007). In the 1970s, however, the intellectual climate was completely different. I will try to substantiate the claims for a critical realist understanding without separating the two today by summarising its major issues in the chronology of IR theorising that made it not only possible, but also necessary, to benefit from CR for an alternative understanding of IR.

10.1 Critical realism: shift from epistemology to ontology Comprehensive examinations of CR can be found in an increasingly expanding literature (Bhaskar, 1978, 1979); Collier, 1994; Archer et al., 1998). What I am going to present here is a brief discussion of CR in so far as it is necessary to understand the unresolved issues of IR theory that existed in the 1970s as well as to develop a perspective to understand some of the main controversies today. Applying the principles he developed in A Realist Theory of Science, Bhaskar argued for the possibility of a non-positivist naturalism in social sciences at a time when the belief in science was fading, due especially to the influence of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory of IR, which saw science not as a liberating force, but as a technical instrument of domination in late capitalism. CR re-emphasised not only the possibility of social scientific enterprise, but its importance for human emancipation and freedom (Brown, 2007). Historically, the scientific study of IR was mainly a subject of debate between traditionalists and behaviouralists (and, later, post-behaviouralists). The terms of this discussion are well known. However, although such a long time has passed since this discussion took place, it still keeps its importance

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in demonstrating the positivist bias around which the scientificity of IR was discussed. Whereas the behaviouralists argued for a science of IR, the traditionalists insisted that scientific explanation was unsuited to the study of IR. There is no doubt that the great error that united the proponents of both sides – just as it united the proponents of the naturalist and antinaturalist traditions in the field of sociology – was taking the positivist concept of science as the non-controversial sole representative of scientific activity within the natural sciences. Implicitly, the traditionalists accepted the validity of positivism by rejecting the possibility of a scientific study of IR (Yalvaç, 1991: 99–100). A similar argument has recently been advanced by Milja Kurki concerning the concept of causation dominant in IR theory. Referring to a more contemporary debate between the positivists and postpositivists, Kurki has argued that ‘While IR theorists from different schools of thought have historically agreed in their substantive analysis of causes of war and peace, for most of the history of the discipline the idea of causal analysis, conceived of in a positivist fashion, has been largely unquestioned’ (Kurki, 2007: 363). Both the positivists and the post-positivists of the fourth debate in IR, she asserts, are ‘informed by an uncritical acceptance of a rather narrow positivist conception of cause’ (ibid., 364). Kurki demonstrates that an anti-realism unites the two sides in a manner similar to that of the previous arguments between traditionalists and behaviouralists as well as post-behaviouralists. The main feature of CR is that it shifts the attention of the philosophy of science from epistemology to ontology (Wight, 2007). For instance, the disputes within IR theory that have engaged positivists as well as postpositivists (and also constructivists) have largely revolved around epistemological issues, i.e. not about being, or what exists, but about what can be known. This is why CR is also known as ‘ontological realism’. CR argues for the independent existence of reality outside of our perceptions or cognition. This assumption is crucial to understanding what it is that scientists are doing when they try to explain why and how something happens around us. Bhaskar uses the term ‘transcendental realism’ to describe the fact that the world has an ordered, intelligible and relatively enduring structure that is open to investigation. If the world did not have this structure, then it would not be possible to have an intelligible knowledge of the world. The most important aspect of CR is its rejection that the sole content of science consists of empirical knowledge. According to empiricism, the social and natural worlds consist only of observable phenomena and events and the aim of science is to uncover regularly occurring patterns of events in order to make accurate predictions for the future. Scientific explanation, accordingly, consists of the observation and description of what can be empirically perceived. In contrast, critical realists argue that the real is not identical with the empirical. Reality consists not only of what can be observed, as the

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empirical realism of the realists, neo-realists and neo-liberal institutionalists assert (Joseph, 2007: 346), but also of the unobservable structures and generative mechanisms which govern the observable phenomenon. CR considers unobservables to be ontologically real. Identifying the real with only what can be observed confuses epistemology and ontology in what Bhaskar has referred to as an ‘epistemic fallacy’. The question of what exists is not the same as the question of what can be known or what can be observed. Things may exist without our knowing them. Therefore, unlike positivist accounts of science, in which the aim of science is to observe regularities and make predictions based on what is observed, CR insists that the aim of science is to provide explanations of the mechanisms that generate the observable phenomenon. Bhaskar makes a distinction between three levels of reality: the actual, the empirical and the real. Unlike the flat ontology of empirical realism, reality is differentiated and stratified according to varying levels of causal power. The ascription of reality to an entity is not associated with its empirical existence, but to the causal power it possesses. The level of the real is the ‘realm of objects, structures and powers’ (Sayer, 2000: 11). It is the domain that causes events. Structures may have powers that are both different from and irreducible to their constituents. Events are caused by structures coming into different ‘contingent relationships’ with each other ‘to co-determine the occurrence of events thus breaking the one to one relationship between structures and events found in the closed system of scientific experiments’ (ibid., 73). A much cited example of this is water, a substance quite different from its components, hydrogen and oxygen, both of which individually are highly flammable. CR rejects the empiricist Humean notion of causality as the regular conjunction of events. The objects of knowledge are structures and mechanisms that generate phenomena (experiences), therefore causality is not related to events but with the underlying powers, structures and mechanisms that govern them. Empiricism confuses causal laws with their empirical grounds. Unless they are created artificially in closed systems through the experimental activities of science, regularities such as those the empiricist would like to identify occur very rarely in the open systems of nature and society. Accordingly, scientific laws are not statements about regularities between events, but about underlying mechanisms and structures. The absence of closed systems is important in that for the social sciences, ‘criteria of rational assessment … of theories cannot be predictive, and so must be exclusively explanatory’ (Bhaskar, 1979: 163). Bhaskar argues that ‘Humean theories of causality and law, deductive–nomological and statistical models of explanation, Popperian theories of scientific development and criteria of falsification, together with the hermeneutical contrasts parasitic upon them, must all be totally discarded’ (Bhaskar, 1979: 57–8). Science itself is a process ‘whose aim is the production of knowledge of the mechanisms of

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production of phenomena in nature’, in other words, ‘intransitive objects of inquiry’ (Bhaskar, 1978: 162). The intransitive object of science is the reality which science seeks to know, which pre-exists science and which is unaffected by our knowledge of it. The transitive object of science, on the other hand, is the real that science knows at a particular point in time, but it does not exhaust all that can be known. The transitive dimension of science includes all theories, paradigms and models available to the social scientist to explain different aspects of the world. Although these explanations may change over time, the intransitive dimension of reality which consists of structures, mechanisms and processes is independent of us and does not change (Bhaskar, 1978: 22). Science therefore is a never-ending process through which we acquire deeper and deeper knowledge of intransitive objects. As Bhaskar argues, ‘to be fallible about knowledge, it is necessary to be a realist about things. Conversely, to be a sceptic about things is to be dogmatic about knowledge’ (Bhaskar, 1979: 43). This is the point where the concept of totality needs to be addressed, as it is precisely here that the significance of CR for IR theory can be found. Totality as a concept differs from the concepts of system and society. It is an ontological concept that refers to different determinants of social phenomena and to ontological depth. It refers to the stratified nature of reality. Stratification does not refer to the relations between ‘entities’ but to different ‘generative mechanisms’ (Collier, 1998: 271). As Bhaskar argues: the predicates ‘natural’, ‘social’, ‘human’, ‘physical’, ‘chemical, ‘aerodynamical’, ‘biological’, ‘economic’, etc. ought not to be regarded as differentiating distinct kinds of events, but as differentiating distinct kinds of mechanisms. For in the generation of an open-systemic event several of these predicates may be simultaneously applicable. (Bhaskar, 1978: 119) Therefore, when we refer to something as economic, political or ideological, what is meant are the generative mechanisms and institutions or events (Collier, 1998: 271). There are different generative mechanisms at work in the production of a phenomenon: economic, political and ideological. IR theory analyses the problems indicated by the notion of totality in terms of the false problem of ‘levels of analysis’. For instance, insofar as the systems approach is an application of scientific thinking, science is understood to be concerned only with describing empirical reality and the observation of behavioural regularities. Totality here does not refer to an expressive totality as understood by Lukacs, ‘where each moment contains the whole’ (Lukacs, 1971: 170), but to complex strata of reality possessing causal powers with indeterminate effects. Since most social phenomena are ‘conjuncturally determined’, their explanation involves many different causes. Therefore, it is not possible to understand social totalities only with reference to one single factor (for example mode of production or ideas). This conjunctural

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nature of the subject matter of social science means it is constantly changing; thus, new totalities can always be discovered, requiring new explanations to be devised. As Bhaskar argues, although totalization is a process in thought, totalities are real. Although it is contingent whether we require a phenomenon to be understood as an aspect of a totality (depending upon our cognitive interests), it is not contingent whether it is such an aspect or not. Social science does not create the totalities it reveals, although it may itself be an aspect of them. (Bhaskar, 1998b: 223) In short, the question that needs answering is whether it is possible to understand and explain any phenomenon without reference to a social relation of which it is a part. Another important concept that has raised numerous discussions both in the IR literature as well as with respect to CR is the concept of structure. While the notion of structure in IR theory has sometimes been used as synonymous with that of system, most of the time structure has been defined as the existence of empirical regularities in the interactions between states. This positivist conception which identifies the real only with what can be observed does not allow any unobservable underlying relations as the cause of social systems. Unobservables are sometimes mentioned as in classical balance of power theory or in Waltz’s definition of structure. In both of these instances, structures refer to the unintended consequences of the interaction between states and do not refer to any real social relations. They are descriptive and posit ‘a positional picture’ of the international system defined by the structural arrangements of the different actors. As Bhaskar argues, ‘all social structures – for instance, the economy, the state, the family, language – depend on or presuppose social relations’ (Bhaskar, 1989: 4). Bhaskar defines structures in terms of different relations – ‘between people and each other, their products, their activities, nature and themselves’ (Bhaskar, 1989: 81). These relations pre-exist individuals, so that people either reproduce or transform these structures. As Bhaskar argues, ‘people, in their conscious activity, for the most part unconsciously reproduce (and occasionally transform) the structures governing the substantial activities of their production’ (Bhaskar, 1979: 35). This is known as the transformational model of social activity, and unlike neo-realism and other forms of structuralism, it avoids the one-sidedness of voluntarist (Weberian) and structuralist (Durkheim) accounts of structure. In other words, structures cannot be reduced to the activities of the agents. However structures are also not reified and do not determine agential behaviour. In other words, Bhaskar separates structures and agents ontologically. What connects them are ‘positioned’ practices. Therefore, although social structures may be unobservable, they are real because they have real effects. However, their effects are seen only

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in the human activities they govern, for they do not exist independently of the agents’ conceptions of what they are doing. Moreover, although social structures are relatively enduring, they are historical and therefore subject to change (Bhaskar, 1998b: 218–19). The advantage of this account of social structures is that unlike neo-realism which defines structures in terms of regularities in the interaction of states or constructivism which defines it in terms of intersubjective relations or rules or resources, CR can incorporate both the structural and the ideational aspect of social relations under one description.

10.2 Interparadigm debate As mentioned above, the first major crisis and the resulting expansion of IR theory coincides with the development of the interparadigm debate of the 1970s (Banks, 1985). The interparadigm debate applied Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) conception of scientific development in terms of scientific revolutions to the study of IR. In a way, the interparadigm debate helped IR theory to understand its own developmental logic. Kuhn argued that science proceeds according to different paradigms. Kuhn uses the term ‘normal science’ for the periods when scientists work with the assumptions of a paradigm. He argued that new paradigms are the outcome of scientific revolutions that change the way in which we see things. Because each paradigm sees the world in a different way, Kuhn argued, different paradigms are incommensurable, as there is no rational yardstick with which to compare one with the other. Emerging within approximately the same time frame as neo-realism and structuralism, the interparadigm debate in IR argued for the existence of three paradigms that dominated IR theory, namely realism, pluralism and structuralism, providing alternative accounts of IR. The debate gave rise to the problem of how to understand the relationship of these three different paradigms, each of which attempted to explain a different aspect of IR, namely power, interdependence and socio-economic equality between states. It should be remembered that at the time the interparadigm debate emerged, neo-realism had just made its entrance into IR theory, there was no critical theory and the post-positivist stage in IR had not yet started. It was a period when theories of interdependence competed with realism as well as with the newly emerging structuralist theories of IR. Realism dominated explanations of the relations between states, whereas pluralism competed with realism in providing an analysis of non-state actors. But what about structuralism? Michael Banks’ formulation of the interparadigm debate was motivated primarily by the rising importance of the world systems perspective and dependency theory. What was referred to as structuralism by the interparadigm debate emerged in sociology under the theories of under-development first developed by Andre Gunder Frank and then expanded by Immanuel Wallerstein

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as the world systems perspective (Wallerstein, 1974). Banks used structuralism to refer to the relations of social and systemic inequality on which the traditional realist agenda was silent. Within the framework of the inter-paradigm debate, structuralism referred not to neo-realist structuralism, but to theories of dependency and underdevelopment and the world-system perspective. No distinction was made as to the meaning of structure for neo-realist structuralism, Marxist structuralism, or the French structuralist philosophical tradition – a distinction that is crucial to an understanding of the difference between the structuralist concept of structure and the critical realist one. Significantly, the interparadigm debate posited realism as the undisputed paradigm for analysing the relations between states. As Stefano Guzzini has noted, Kuhn’s concepts eventually ‘became a welcome protective shield used by realists (and others) against attacks from other schools’ (Guzzini, 1993: 486). Another item of controversy within the inter-paradigm debate was the commensurability issue between the different paradigms. The interparadigm debate was an epistemological position arguing for the incommensurability of different paradigms. Therefore, from the perspective of CR, the debate relates to the transitive dimension of reality. Each paradigm can be seen to cover only a limited aspect of the real and deal with different aspects of the transitive domain. However, under the principles of CR, the different paradigms can be considered as parts of a totality of social relations that are united by underlying and unobservable structures, i.e. the intransitive or the real domain. The critical realist solution to the Kuhnian problematic therefore would suggest that if there is an ‘intransitive dimension’ of knowledge, then ‘deeper and deeper knowledge of unchanging structures’ not only explains scientific change, but also, as we correct our previous knowledge, the process of scientific development. CR argues that the different strata of reality are related in different complex ways that may not yet have been fully demonstrated. As Brown argues, ‘the recognition that reality is layered in … emergent strata is able to explain the development of new “paradigms”. The development of a new paradigm may simply correspond to the uncovering of a hitherto unknown stratum’ (Brown et al., 2002: 18). Therefore, different paradigms I suggest can be seen as dealing with different dimensions of the actual or the transitive dimension linked however with each other by their common ontology in the intransitive domain. In other words these three different paradigms can be seen as part of a single totality of social relations which include an unobservable domain in the intransitive dimension of reality. I further think that if understanding different social phenomena as part of a shared and stratified ontology is important, then Marxism as a social theory has greater explanatory power compared with the mainstream theories of IR in attempting to understand social phenomena as part of a larger totality of social relations. The second important development of the 1970s which was crucial in demonstrating the importance of CR for IR was the publication of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics. For the past 20 years, IR theorists

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have been trying to discuss different aspects of Waltz’s seminal work on neo-realism, and the controversies raised have yet to be resolved satisfactorily. The positivist nature of his theory and its atomistic assumptions have been well documented (Joseph, 2007). In the 1970s, the tradition of structuralist philosophy had its effects on IR theory as it did on other social sciences. When I mention structuralism, I am referring to the French structuralism best represented in the works of Lévi-Strauss and Althusser, whose theoretical positions dominated the 1970s. Structuralism is known for its emphasis on the determination of social phenomena by different structures. The synchronic and ahistorical analyses of structuralism have been widely criticised. Ashley’s classic analysis of the relation between structuralism and neorealism was one of the most important articles to take up this issue. Despite the fact that many accounts of Waltz’s concept of structure exist, I want to draw attention to one item that I think is crucial to understanding the distinction between Waltz’s concept, which resembles structuralist accounts, and the critical realist one. As in the critical realist understanding of today, structuralism examined social phenomena ‘as the outward expressions or concrete manifestations of their invisible inner structures’ (Sumner, 1979: 10). In the 1970s, Giddens developed his concept of structuration precisely to avoid the one-sided determinism of structuralist explanations. As Giddens explained, the concept of structure in structuralist thought refers to the underlying social relations that explain phenomena (Giddens, 1979) and appears to resemble CR’s notion of unobservable causal structures. However, there are important differences between Lévi-Strauss’s concept of structure, which remains committed to a residual positivism and to the idea of an empirical world, and the critical realist understanding, which defines structures in terms of real social relations. Lévi-Strauss argued that the term ‘social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality, but only with the models that are built upon it (in Godelier, 1977: 45). This concept of structure appears to be similar to that of Waltz and needs to be distinguished from a critical realist and Marxist understanding. Colin Wight discusses this issue in the context of Waltz’s instrumental conception of theory. Wight refers to instrumentalism as an ‘attempt to make sense of theoretical references to unobservable entities’. ‘Instrumentalism,’ he says, ‘is at the core of Kenneth Waltz’s version of structural realism, but it also underpins the rationalist mainstream and is at the heart of most positivist approaches’ as well as ‘many reflectivist’ ones and is a reflection of their commitment to an empirical world ‘over the non-observable’ (Wight, 2007: 380). As Onuf also recently claimed, Waltz’s theory can be described ‘as a kind of structural idealism’ that offers support to a ‘strong version of constructivist social theory’ (Onuf, 2009: 183). These interpretations also demonstrate the mistaken reasoning behind calling rationalist theories materialist, when philosophically, what is being spoken of is really a form of idealism.

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In defining the concept of structure, Waltz sometimes takes an anti-empirical approach that brings him to a realist position. He argues that ‘the structure of the international system is not observable’ and the notion of structure is a ‘generative notion’ that operates as a ‘cause’. These structures ‘cannot be seen, examined, and observed’ and it is the task of the theoretician to ‘invent’ these structures (Waltz, 1979: 79, 72, 87, 73, 59). The crucial issue here is that insofar as unobservables are mentioned in this definition, the term is used to refer not to real relationships but to the unintended consequences of the interaction between states. For instance, Waltz argues that an international system functions like a market. ‘The market is a cause interposed between the economic actors and the results they produce. It conditions their calculations, their behaviours, and their interactions.’ Markets and systems, Waltz argues, ‘are formed by the co-action of self-regarding units’, all seeking to fulfil ‘their own internally defined interests by whatever means they can muster’ (Waltz, 1979: 39). As Wendt has correctly argued, despite all the talk about structures, Waltz is an individualist, since he posits that structure is derived from the interaction of states (Wendt, 1999: 15). In the Waltzian model, structures refer not to real underlying social relationships, but to different ‘positions’ of states vis-à-vis each other. As Joseph argues, ‘the neorealist conception of structure is based on stable patterns of aggregate behaviour ultimately traceable to micro-level behavioural patterns’ and ‘there is no possibility of conceiving of any underlying processes that produce them’ (Joseph, 2007: 348). Another instance in which CR provides important criticisms and insights into an issue raised by neo-realist structuralism is in the well-known issue of the relationship between structures and agents (Wight, 1999, 2006a). Wendt and Dessler have addressed this issue within the contexts of neorealist structuralism and the determinism of the world systems perspective and proposed Giddens’ structurationist approach as a solution to the structure–agent problematic. Despite the different ontological implications of Giddens’ idealist and constructivist theory of structuration and Bhaskar’s transformational model of society, Giddens’ assumptions were, nevertheless, adopted by Wendt in his development of a critical-realist solution to the structure–agent problem encountered in Waltz’s theory. However, there is an important difference between critical realist understanding and Giddens’ concept of structure. Giddens uses the concept of structure as referring not to essential social relations but to rules and resources associated with those relationships (Porpora, 1998: 345). This understanding is closer to the idealist constructivist account of structure than the materialist realist one. Since rules and norms are seen as causal mechanisms, there is a realist element in this understanding. However, realism refers more to ‘the causal significance of objective social relationships and more fundamentally to the analytical priority of those relationships vis-à-vis intersubjective rules, norms, ideologies and symbolic orders’ (Porpora, 1998: 346). It does not share the materialism

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of realism. This is also the point where Wendt’s (1999) use of CR is more close to Giddens than to CR. Wendt primarily built his own theory on the criticism of Waltz and this perhaps accounts for some of the difficulties encountered in his own theory. Wendt’s primary criticism of Waltz’s concept of structure is its materialist nature, although what he means by material is not always clear but is certainly distinct from the way in which the concept is used in CR where it refers to objective relations of production. Wendt’s use of CR to resolve the antinomies of Waltz’s structuralism is based on an idealist ontology that differs substantially from Bhaskar’s CR. Wendt defines international structures in terms of social (idealistic) and cultural rather than materialist terms. ‘The basis of sociality’, he argues, is ‘shared knowledge’ and this ‘leads to an idealist view of structure as “a distribution of knowledge” or “ideas all the way down”’ (Wendt, 1999: 20). His understanding of material is derived mostly from neo-realism which defines the material mainly in terms of powers, capabilities and material resources. However, these are important in his constructivist approach only by the meanings allotted to them by agents. The important point to underline is that CR’s notion of a stratified ontology does not permit any simple distinction between the material and social, as there are different strata of reality which are in complex and irreducible causal relations with each other. CR embraces the idea of a ‘nonreductive materialism that gives primacy to the material without embracing determinism’ (Porpora, 1998: 346). Therefore, the use of structuration theory by Wendt to resolve the issue of structure and agency is equally beset by difficulties. As Porpora argues, Giddens’ theory of structuration refers to structures ‘as both the cause and effect of human action’ and does not resolve the tension between the ‘material (or objective) or the ideal (subjective) realms’. The duality of structures and structuration is used to imply the ‘mediation’ ‘among different elements of the subjective realm and no do not touch base with material circumstances’ (Porpora, 1998: 347).

10.3 Marxism and the concept of totality It is commonly acknowledged that Marxism has been misinterpreted and underestimated in IR theory, the most well-known instance of which can be found in Martin Wight’s (1966) infamous classification of the different IR traditions of realism, Grotianism and revolutionism, which placed Kant in the revolutionary category while excluding Marx, whose concerns were deemed irrelevant to IR theory. Another line of argument sometimes put forward on the inadequacy of Marxist accounts for IR is the priority given in Marxist theory to classes and the secondary role given to the state (Berki, 1971). The development of critical theory and historical sociology of IR have partly shown the insufficiency of these

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traditional treatments of Marxism and its relevance for IR theory. While true that IR, especially the state system, is not given theoretical treatment in the classical works of Marxism, when CR is allowed to act as underlabourer for Marxism, it is possible to appreciate the importance of Marxist philosophy for IR theory not only with respect to the basic premises of historical materialism and its social theory, but also with respect to its epistemological and ontological claims. As Kurki has argued, CR ‘can provide a meta-theory to a variety of different kinds of scholarship in IR’ (Kurki, 2007: 368). Bhaskar himself has noted that CR is especially compatible with Marxism in attempting to combine a realist ontology and a relational sociology (Bhaskar, 1998b: 211). While the different forms of both CR and Marxism preclude the establishment of any direct relation between the two, there is an expanding literature on this (Brown et al., 2002; Joseph, 2006; Dean et al., 2006). The implications of these views for IR theory have not yet been fully demonstrated, perhaps with the exception of Jonathan Joseph, who has not only attempted to clarify the relation between Marxism and CR and its importance for IR theory (2007), but who has developed a critical theory of hegemony that includes a proposed solution to the structure–agent problematic (Joseph, 2007, 2008). It is one of the failures of the neo-realist structuralist and positivist IR heritage to assume a type of totality based on abstract and ahistorical principles, identifying totality as either the concept of system or (international) society. These mainstream approaches attempt to identify certain regular patterns of interaction and are based on an empirical understanding of the world and thus are anti-realist in nature. The essence of Marx’s concept of totality is the relational aspect of social reality. It is neither the individual nor society that is the subject matter of Marx’s sociology, but social relations, the relations men enter into in their productive activity, i.e. relations of production. As Marx put it, ‘Society is nothing more than man himself in social relations’ (Marx, 1971: 149). The Marxist concept of structure refers exactly to social relations and thus differs both from both the neo-realist understanding which defines structures in terms of the interaction of states, and the idealist definition of constructivist accounts which sees structures as constituted by rules and resources. As Bhaskar argues, ‘for Marx to understand the essence of some particular phenomenon is to understand the social relations that make that phenomenon possible’ (Bhaskar, 1998b: 230). This also implies the transformational model of society since according to this model ‘to understand the essence of social phenomena … such phenomena must be grasped as productions’ (ibid.) Therefore, the relations that are referred to are relations of production. In line with this conception, in order to understand social phenomena, it is necessary to understand the underlying relations that make social phenomena possible. Marx’s understanding of the relation between society and the individual is

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indeed compatible with the transformative view as can be seen clearly in the following passage: History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus on the one hand continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and on the other modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. (Marx and Engels, 1974: 57) In his categorisation of the different stages of historical development and the laws peculiar to each state, Marx’s method is consistent with that of CR. In Capital as well as in Grundrisse and The Theories of Surplus Value, Marx tries to explain the underlying relations that generate the phenomenal forms in the capitalist mode of production. Marx attempts to explain why phenomena take the forms in which they appear – why, for instance, class domination takes the form of a state, or why certain relationships come to take legal forms. These phenomenal forms, according to Marx, are ‘forms of essential relations’ particular to each mode of production (Sayer, 1979: 39–40). Marx argued that although the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production are real, they could be obscured by phenomenal forms. Thus, theories and models could not based on abstractions from apparent social relationships, for phenomenal forms may contain ideological elements, thus concealing social contradictions. Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism was intended to show how ideology can conceal the relationships between the surface appearance of phenomena and the underlying but unobservable relations that govern them. Without the correct method, it would be impossible to explain the inner workings of society, thus making it the task of science to discover what lies behind these forms. ‘All science,’ Marx argued, ‘would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided’; he defined the aim of science as the reproduction in thought of this real object (essence) (Marx, 1967: 817). Therefore – and in line with the principles of scientific realism – according to Marx the object of knowledge is both real and at the same time exists independent of thought, although knowledge itself is a product of human activity. The aim of Marx’s method of ‘rising from the abstract to concrete’, which he outlined in the Grundrisse (Marx, 1973a: 100f.), was to provide a deductive analysis of the surface appearance of social phenomena. In this regard, Marx argues that The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking therefore as a process of concentration, as a result not as a point of

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departure, even though it is the real departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception. (Ibid., 100–1) As Sayer argues, the concrete referred to here is ‘not something which is reducible to the empirical or to the factual’ (Sayer, 1998: 123). An object is concrete because it has multiple determinations, not because it exists as a fact. Unless these multiple determinations are revealed, abstract concepts – the state, for instance – are bound to offer only partial descriptions of social phenomena. Marxist social theory shows that different social forms of capitalism such as the state cannot be taken as given but have to be seen in terms of the underlying social relations of capitalism. Abstractions of science and the reproduction of the ‘concrete in thought’ reveal what is discovered in reality, and is not an imposition on reality but the product of our thoughts (Sayer, 1998: 123–7). According to Bhaskar, abstractions concern the causal powers and mechanisms of the level of the real and the level of the actual where these mechanisms show their effect. It is of course true that conceptual relations are neither the same nor structured in the same way as real relations. However, Marxist realism is based on the fact that some type of correspondence between the real and the abstract may be created, for such correspondence implies the unity of theory and practice, the subject and the object and therefore the possibility of changing social reality. It is impossible to draw out here the full implications of these arguments for IR theory. However at this point, it would be helpful to return to the concept of totality and its implications with respect to the analysis of the interstate system, as it is on this issue that the relation between CR, Marxism and IR theory is most relevant for the purposes of this chapter. As Lacher argues, ‘The relevant historical totality to the conceptualization of the system of sovereign territorial states is capitalism’ (Lacher, 2002: 162, 148). This implies that the state system is above all a socio-historical category related to capitalist social relations of production. The issue of the relation of capitalism and the state system has indeed recently become the subject of intense debates (Callinicos, 2007: 533–49; Teschke and Lacher, 2007: 565–80; D. Morton, 2007: 599–617), raising a number of important points with respect to the role which concepts of CR can play in IR theory. Current discussions concerning the relation between capitalism and the state system resemble the ones that originated with the criticism of the world system perspective in the 1970s. That period witnessed the development of different works of neo-Weberian historical sociology which increasingly focused on the importance of the international state system and the phenomenon of war for social change, thus creating an overlapping area of interest between IR and sociology (Skocpol, 1979; Tilly, 1990). While IR became more sociological by increasingly taking account of the domestic sources of international change, sociological studies began to emphasise the role of the international state system in the origin of domestic social change, thus creating common concerns between the fields (Yalvaç, 1991).

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The impetus for the development of a historical sociology stemmed from various controversies concerning Marxist theories of the capitalist state and the world systems perspective. The insufficient treatment of external relations of states has been traditionally viewed as the major defect of Marxist theories of the state. As Teschke notes, Marx and Engels ‘never systematically addressed … the question of the spatial and interspatial dimensions of social processes over time on a universal scale’ (Teschke, 2008: 163–4). Even in classical works on imperialism by Hilferding, Bukharin and Lenin, the state system is not given theoretical treatment, but conceived merely as an instrument in the expansion and universalisation of capital. As the concepts of ‘inter-imperial rivalry’ (Lenin, 1973) or of ‘ultra-imparialism’ (Kautsky, 1970) demonstrate, in classical theories of imperialism the dynamics of the international system is articulated as a ‘spill over problem’ and does not involve a theoretical analysis of the state system. While Barker argues that the state is a structure of competition internally and a structure of competition externally vis-à-vis other states, in most Marxist analyses of the state, ‘the external concerns of states tend to be tagged on as an afterthought, not taken into the general analysis of the form and functions of the capitalist state’ (1978: 25). The crucial issue behind the analysis of capitalist totality is the separation of the political from the economic and the public from the private in the capitalist mode of production. Ellen Wood (2002) in particular emphasises this separation as one of the most crucial features of the capitalist mode of production. Wood argues that the main feature of capitalism is the separation of the economic from the political such that ‘appropriation takes place not by direct coercive means, through the exercise of political or military power (as, for example, in feudalism), but by purely economic means, the “free” exchange between capital and labour in which direct producers are compelled by their propertylessness to exchange their labour power for a wage’ (Wood, 2002: 18). This separation creates a semblance of autonomy of the economic from the political, but in actual fact is part of the complex mechanism of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. If, as Burnham says, the state is seen solely as an institution or a ‘thing’ as in mainstream IR and not conceptualised as a part of social relations of capitalism, then the crucial but insignificant question becomes to what extent its role has decreased or increased visà-vis the powers of the market (Burnham, 2002: 124). However, what is important is the active role of the state in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Marx provides us with an abstract analysis of the capitalist mode of production in accordance with the principles of historical materialism, but he does not specify at which level the abstract concepts used to analyse capitalism actually apply. In fact, the last chapter of Capital was to be devoted to the implications of the concept of totality for the world market,

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but this chapter was never completed. Marx argued that the ‘world market is the context in which production is posited as a totality together with all its moments, but within which at the same time all contradictions come into play’ (Marx, 1973a: 227); however, he does not provide a theoretical account of how these contradictions were displayed at the level of the world market. Marx provides us a theoretical analysis of the inner contradictions of capitalism in which history appears as a reflection and concretisation of the ‘capital logic’. It is here that the world system perspective and the debates within the capital logic school have made important contributions in advancing theoretical propositions concerning the relationship between the capitalist world market and the state system. Wallerstein (1974a), for instance, takes Lukacs’ concept of totality and argues that its locus should be the capitalist world economy. Over the years, Wallerstein’s arguments have been criticised theoretically as well as empirically. Some of the most widely voiced criticism has been over his definition of the capitalist mode of production (Brenner, 1977), which does not directly interest us here. However, his definition of capitalism as exchange relations has stimulated alternative forms of explanations. Wallerstein locates the dynamic of the relation between the state system and capitalism in the sphere of exchange relations. His exchange-based concept of capitalism is different from the classical Marxist understanding of the capitalist mode of production which takes the exploitative relationship between capital and waged labour in the sphere of production as the defining feature of capitalism. Von Braunmühl (1977), for instance, also starts with the world market but in contrast to Wallerstein she underlines the importance of production as opposed to exchange relations in her analysis of the state system and the world economy. What is crucial about Wallerstein’s and Braunmühl’s approaches is that they both have shifted the theoretical locus of totality from national formations to the world system. The outcome of this new emphasis has been to start discussions on the relation between capitalism and the state system which also provide the basis for many contemporary perspectives. The main positions concerning the complex nature of the worldwide capitalist totality with reference to the relation between capitalism and the international system can essentially be divided into three. The first approach, maintained especially by the first wave of neo-Weberian historical sociology and represented mainly by Skocpol, Tilly and Mann, argues for a sociological realism that in many ways resembles mainstream realism and neo-realism. In the words of Skocpol, the international states system is ‘an analytically autonomous level of transnational reality – interdependent in its structure and dynamics with world capitalism but not reducible to it’ (Skocpol, 1979: 229). Aspects of this argument are similar to the atomistic arguments of mainstream IR theory that take the state as an autonomous unit in search of survival in a decentralised anarchic state system. As Teschke argues, this approach ‘remains hampered by a neo-Weberian pluralism that can

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only conceive of historical development in terms of the external interaction of independently constituted spheres of reality’ (Teschke, 2003: 271). The failure of this approach is not its awarding primacy to geopolitical competition as such, but ‘its disability to decode the geopolitical as a social relation and to overcome its orthodox pluralism’ (Teschke, 2003: 272). A second approach sees a direct link between the development of capitalism and the interstate system. The most well-known proponent of this approach is Wallerstein whose arguments have already been referred to above and who sees the emergence of the international system as part of the same process as the development of capitalism. For Wallerstein ‘capitalism and a world-economy (that is a single division of labour, but multiple polities and cultures) are obverse sides of the same coin’ (Wallerstein, 1974: 391). Wallerstein argues that ‘the interstate system is the political superstructure of the capitalist world-economy and was a deliberate invention of the modern world’ (Wallerstein, 1995: 141). From his world system perspective, the world economy is conceived as a system of exchange relationships in which the state system serves in the appropriation of surplus from the periphery and each state is considered ‘an instrument used by the dominant classes for assuring certain terms of trade … in economic transactions’ (Wallerstein, 1974: 401). In the world systems perspective there is a functional correspondence between the state system and capitalism, and the state system serves as the vehicle for the transfer of surplus and reproduction of capitalism. However, because of this assumption of functional compatibility between capitalism and the state system, this approach does not address the reasons for the territorial organisation of political power and assumes a relation of compatibility between the two (Teschke, 2008; Lacher, 2002). Here, as Teschke argues, in this first type of explanation, ‘neorealism’s transhistorical assumption of anarchy is paralleled by a transhistorical assumption of capitalism’ (Teschke, 2003: 137). A third approach which is more widely shared argues that the state system preceded capitalism but it is the main framework for its reproduction. In this argument, it is suggested that the state form within the capitalist mode of production is a system of national states with antagonistic relations with each other. However, this position rejects any direct identification between the development of capitalism and the interstate system. Rosenberg (1994), Burnham (2002), Teschke (2003) and Lacher (2002) have provided different theoretical accounts of this relationship. The main theses advanced by the proponents of this third approach can be summarised as follows. Firstly, in this argument geopolitical competition cannot be separated from different ‘structures of production and reproduction of social life’ (Rosenberg, 1994: 6). This implies that there have been precapitalist geopolitical systems with their own distinct features which are different from capitalist geopolitics based on the separation of the political from the economic in the capitalist mode of production (the main feature of capitalist

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totality). Second, capitalism established itself on the basis of a pre-existing states-system where states are related to each other in a sphere of competition shaped by the world market. However, a functional compatibility between capitalism and state system cannot be assumed (as in Wallerstein and suggested by the expressive totality of Lukacs). Although the international state system, the modern state and the development of capitalism have ‘co-developed’ together, this development cannot be connected to a single origin (Teschke, 1998: 178). Because of the historical discontinuity between the state system and the development of capitalism, the ‘genetic disjuncture’ between the two requires an ‘explanation of the profound historical variation in the configurations between the spaces of capitalist accumulation and political jurisdiction’ (Teschke, 2008: 172). Finally, ‘interstate-ness of capitalist political space (should not) be explained by reference to the nature of capitalism or the “laws” or “logic” of capital’ (Lacher, 2002) in a reductionist manner. Instead it should be in relation to the ‘pre-capitalist history which continues to structure social relations into the present period’ (Lacher, 2002: 148). As Lacher argues, ‘the in terstate system is capitalist because it has become capitalist in the process of the totalization of capitalism – in other words, in the process of capitalism becoming a totality (a totality, moreover, which inherently produces difference and contradictions’ (Lacher, 2002: 162). No matter which argument is supported in these discussions, these varied explanations indicate an important advance in developing a historical materialist analysis of the interstate system which neither reduces the state system to an autonomous dynamic of its own as in mainstream IR theory nor reduces it to the expression of an underlying capitalist logic (as in different arguments adopting a Lukacsian concept of totality). In principle, these approaches to the explanation of the international state system, the modern state and capitalism are compatible with principles of CR as at the bottom they share its materialist ontology. However, although these sociological accounts of the relation between capitalism and the state system have always referred to the arguments of Marx, they have not always discussed its philosophical underpinnings. Nor are they written with the principles of CR in mind. The argument of this chapter has been more to suggest that the historical sociology of IR is a fertile ground to show the link between CR and Marxism. The upshot is that CR’s insights about the non-reductive nature of different levels of reality will help sensitise these historical sociological analyses of IR to more philosophically based principles.

10.4 Conclusion There are a wide range of issues that need to be addressed with respect to CR and its relation to IR theory. This short account of the relation between CR, IR theory and Marxism may not be enough to convince readers that IR

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is moving towards the development of a Marxist theory of IR underpinned and strengthened by the principles of CR. As argued above, CR is compatible with diverse theoretical positions as a philosophical project, but it is most compatible with Marxism. Nearly 20 years ago I wrote that a Marxism underlaboured by CR would signify the beginning of a ‘new stage in the theory of IR that can be called “Marxist realism”’ (Yalvaç, 1991: 110). Chris Brown expresses his hope that this does not happen as he believes that all the previous debates in IR have been futile. This may be true. However, I still believe that IR should be a discourse about totalities without being a totalizing discourse in the sense of reducing its explanations to the outcome of a single factor such as mode of production or ideas as in constructivist accounts. The critical realist concept of ontological depth provides a critique of mainstream IR theorising and suggests an alternative which can be found in the realist structure of Marxist social theory. Combined with its critical and emancipatory intent, such an alternative also directs our theoretical efforts to that aspect of international reality which is unobservable yet underlies the level of the actual that is the main concern of IR theorising. ‘All science,’ Marx argues, ‘would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided’ (Marx, 1967: 817). In this sense, mainstream IR theory serves an ideological function of concealing the contradictions in international reality. A Marxist social theory strengthened by the principles of CR demonstrates the need to construct a theory of modern IR in the categories of capitalism. Marx himself had never fully integrated his two research programmes – the abstract economic theory of Capital and his historical materialist theory of history which was put to work only in some historical and conjunctural analyses (Bhaskar, 1998b: 244). Furthermore, his analysis of the international is particularly undertheorised in both accounts. If the relevant totality for the analysis of the state system is capitalism, then this theory needs to be complemented by an analysis of the international as various works referred to above aspire to do. As Bhaskar notes, ‘If Marxism without detailed social scientific and historical work is empty, then such work without Marxism (or some such theory) is blind’ (Bhaskar, 1998b: 224). The claim of this chapter is that CR can help Marxist social theory to develop a non-reductionist and non-determinist account of the international. Such an analysis can be based on the concept of a historical totality where different levels of social relations are analysed in their multideterminations.

11 World Market, World State, World Society: Marxian Insights and Scientific Realist Interrogations Bob Jessop

Theorists from different perspectives have long been studying, explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, the dynamic of the world market, the prospects of a world state or global governance, and the emergence of world society. This chapter critically interrogates these and similar notions, paying particular attention to the emergent logics of the world market, the nature of the world political order, and the status of world society. In abstract terms, it emphasises the importance of the ‘doubly tendential’ nature of tendencies and explores this in relation to the world market. In more middle-range terms, it introduces ‘variegated capitalism’ as a concept that serves both to avoid the temptations of methodological nationalism and the assumption that there is a pre-given logic to the world system. Another concern is to highlight the basic contradictions within the capital relation as enduring real mechanisms that can produce quite different effects at the level of the actual, i.e. in the present context, the global economy and international relations (IR), depending on the circumstances. To ignore these contradictions or to conflate them with specific manifestations in particular periods or conjunctures would be to seriously misread the logic of capital. Reflections on these and other matters lead to suggestions for a scientific realist research agenda on the world market and interstate relations. But I begin with reflections on scientific realism (SR) from the perspective of critical realism (CR), which has much in common with the former. This chapter does not directly confront the field of IR. Not only is this not my field of expertise compared with international political economy but also, from a scientific or critical realist perspective, IR is basically a ‘chaotic conception’ and, to the extent that it can be defined coherently, refers to an ensemble of relations at the level of the actual. From a scientific or critical realist perspective, it is more important to address the underlying mechanisms, located at the level of the real, that interact to produce the changing IR scene. SR, like CR, often devotes excessive time and energy to defending SR in general against competing ontological, epistemological and methodological views. But there is no such thing as SR in general and it will become 186

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more important (hopefully sooner rather than later) to debate the merits of competing particular scientific realist approaches and their substantive claims. In this spirit, after some brief reflections on the critical realist and strategic–relational approach, this chapter explores one particular approach to the world market, its articulation with a plurality of territorialised state forms, and the role of global civil society. In doing so, it often refers to the work of Marx and Engels not because they said the last word on these topics (far from it) but because they introduced, avant le concept, a scientific realist approach to the world market, IR and world society and because they remain a source of insight and provocation.

11.1 Scientific realism SR is a term of art in IR that corresponds in large part to SR as a position in the philosophy of science (especially concerning the natural sciences) and to ‘critical realism’ in the social sciences taken as a whole. It is not a theory in itself (nor claims to be so) but does provide a distinctive philosophical standpoint with strong ontological commitments along with major implications for theory construction, empirical research and policy paradigms (cf. Joseph, 2007; Wight, 2006a). SR locates itself in part through contrast with two other positions in IR: the empirical realism of realist and neo-realist theories and the tenets of social constructivism respectively. The first alternative posits a directly observable reality (and thereby rejects a ‘depth ontology’) and also regards states as observable actors (or units) with directly given material interests that they seek to advance as relatively unified subjects against other states (units). The second alternative inclines to idealism because it not only claims, with some justice, that ideas and social practices are constitutive of social relations but also commits the ‘epistemic fallacy’ in assuming that reality corresponds to the knowledge that we have about it (cf. Bhaskar, 1989; Sayer, 2001). In contrast, SR is committed to a depth ontology that distinguishes in general terms the levels of the real (causal mechanisms that include tendencies, counter-tendencies, capacities, liabilities, etc.), actual (the product of the interaction among a plurality of mechanisms in specific conditions) and empirical (observations concerning the actual and/or the real). It also endorses a modified social constructivist position in recognising that the social world is always-already meaningful but qualifies this through the claim that there are complex material as well as discursive mechanisms that shape the variation, selection and retention of ideas, concepts and practices. This implies that, while all ideas are equal, some are more equal than others. SR is also sensitive to questions about the respective roles of events and structural causation, the agency–structure problem, strategic action and issues of free will. There are other features that need not detain us here (see the editors’ introduction to this volume; and Jessop,

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2001, 2007a). But we can nonetheless affirm that ‘[t]he debate between a realist and anti-realist philosophy of science is the fundamental metaphysical issue that structures competing philosophies of science’ (Wight, 2006a: 18–19). Here I want to emphasise the implications of SR for the analysis of the world market, the world polity and world society. In short, the world market should be regarded as actual rather than real; the world polity connotes the global ‘political scene’ (or current affairs) to be analysed in terms of real actors and forces rather than as a singular, underlying structure with distinctive causal properties; and world society should be seen as the sum of social relations across multiple sites and scales of social action that cannot be anchored in particular institutional orders. While these actualities may affect the dynamic of social relations, they do so as complex emergent ensembles that provide strategic contexts and potential horizons of action. From a scientific realist viewpoint, none of these categories can serve as the pre-given starting point for an analysis – they should first be constructed through a process of theoretical and empirical inquiry that explores the interaction of mechanisms, (counter-)tendencies, processes and events that correspond to different planes of analysis and different levels of abstraction– concreteness. Applying this method involves a double movement from the abstract to the concrete within a single plane of analysis (e.g. from capitalin-general to particular capitals) and from the simple to the complex by combining determinations from different planes of analysis (e.g. exploring the intersection of class, ‘race’ and gender). This requires a spiral movement as first one and then another plane of social relations comes into focus as the analysis becomes more concrete and complex. This does not mean that the complexities of the external world can ever be fully grasped in real time; on the contrary, all accounts, however concrete–complex, still remain partial (on the ontological presuppositions and methodological implications of this approach, see Jessop, 2007a, 2009). Our knowledge of the real world is never theoretically innocent but always starts from a pre-interpreted analytical object. Knowledge advances through ontological broadening (synthesising multiple determinations) and deepening (identifying the underlying real mechanisms and linking them to the actual and empirical aspects of the real–concrete). In general, this involves two types of articulation: (a) concept formation based on combining categories from different analytical planes to produce ‘hybrid’ concepts situated at more or less concrete–complex levels of analysis; and (b) explanations that focus on the contingent interactions among causal mechanisms, tendencies and counter-tendencies, agential forces, etc., to produce a given explanandum. This often poses serious forensic problems of causal attribution in the face of many competing explanations – as evidenced, of course, in the IR and international political economy literature as sites of paradigmatic and political conflict.

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11.2 The world market The world market is a good entry point for interrogating the implications of SR for IR and international political economy. It is a central category in Marx’s critique of political economy – a critique that he approached from what we would now consider a scientific realist (or critical realist) viewpoint. But he deemed it a topic, together with crisis, that could only be analysed systematically in the final book of a proposed six-book treatment of capital.1 It could not be the starting point (Marx settled on the commodity) but it could have provided its end point, its culmination. Its analysis had to follow more abstract and simple analyses of value, commodity, money, capital, wage-labour, credit, etc. For ‘the most developed mode of existence of the integration of abstract labour with the value form is the world market, a place in which production is posited as a totality together with all its moments, but within which, at the same time, all contradictions come into play’ (Marx, 1973a: 227). That is, as a real–concrete phenomenon, it must be reconstructed in thought and analysed as the complex synthesis of multiple determinations (Marx, 1973c: 101). It would be necessary to show that ‘[c]apital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments it is always capital’ (1973a: 258). This is reflected in Marx’s observation, as he turned from money to capital, that, ‘[i]f we speak here of capital, this is still merely a word’ (1973a: 262). Thus, as the spiral of scientific enquiry continues, the elements of the ‘real–concrete’ come to be defined with growing complexity and concreteness, culminating in the analysis of the world market. This also highlights the importance of investigations that explore the interaction of the real and actual and the ways in which emergent events, processes and structural features react back on real mechanisms by virtue of what I will describe as their doubly tendential character. The complexities of the world market as an actual ensemble of social relations and as an analytical object illustrate how SR (at least in the social sciences) must pay due regard to the ‘doubly tendential’ nature of tendencies. Not only do real mechanisms involve tendencies that may (not) be actualised, they are themselves tendential. For example, while the logic of capital tends to create the world market, it is subject to leads, lags and reversals; and, only insofar as it does get formed, does the world market provide the global context in which all the laws of capital accumulation are actualised. The doubly tendential nature of tendencies is already implied in The German Ideology (drafted in 1845), where Marx and Engels noted that: [t]he movement of capital, although considerably accelerated, still remained, however, relatively slow. The splitting up of the world market into separate parts, each of which was exploited by a particular nation,

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the exclusion of competition among themselves on the part of the nations, the clumsiness of production itself and the fact that finance was only evolving from its early stages, greatly impeded circulation. (1976: 56n.) They added that this limitation was overcome in part by the rise of big industry, which ‘universalized competition, established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralization of capital’ (1976: 57). Furthermore, the effective operation of the world market ‘requires the full development of the credit system and of competition on the world market’ (Marx, 1971: 110). Marx also studied uneven and combined development in relation to differences in the national intensity and productivity of labour, the relative international values and prices of commodities produced in different national contexts, the relative international value of wages and money in social formations with different degrees of labour intensity and productivity, the incidence of surplus profits and unequal exchange, and so on (e.g. Marx, 1974a: Ch. 12). In these and other remarks the formation of the world market is seen as tendential. It follows that the tendencies inherent in the world market are themselves tendential. Marx suggests this in his comment that: All those laws developed in the classical works on political economy, are strictly true [only] under the supposition … that trade be delivered from all fetters, that competition be perfectly free, not only within a single country, but upon the whole face of the earth. These laws, which A. Smith, Say, and Ricardo have developed, the laws under which wealth is produced and distributed – these laws grow more true, more exact, then cease to be mere abstractions, in the same measure in which Free Trade is carried out. ... Thus it can justly be said, that the economists – Ricardo and others – know more about society as it will be, than about society as it is. They know more about the future than about the present. (Marx, 1976b: 289, italics added) I will argue later that this also holds for Marx himself insofar as the recent wave of neo-liberal globalization has promoted even more forcefully (and, in many cases, forcibly) world market integration under the logic of capital. He also knew more about the future than about his present – the mid- to late nineteenth century – and, far from being a theorist of the capitalism of that period, developed an account of the underlying mechanisms, tendencies, counter-tendencies, contradictions and social antagonisms that continue to shape the dynamic of the world market in our century.

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The analysis of the world market must extend to bourgeois societies and states. This is because the domestic economy [must be studied] in its external relations to other capitalist (and non-capitalist) countries, and ultimately as one element in a totality which embraces all countries. Only then do we arrive at the category ‘world market’ and the ‘world economy’ as a ‘rich totality of many definitions and relations’. This rich totality would include the study of war and of the reciprocal influence of international relations on internal social developments. (Marx, 1973c: 109) This indicates that the world market has crucial extra-economic preconditions (such as law, the state or specific systems of ideas) and is also affected by extra-economic events, practices and institutions (such as war and diplomacy). At stake here is the contrast between capital’s inherent tendency to develop the world market and the multiple contingencies that condition its tendential realization. ‘The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome’ (Marx, 1973a: 408). For the realisation of the potential and the contradictions of the capital relation at the level of the world market are connected, inter alia, to the latter’s division into a tangled, unevenly developing hierarchy of local, regional, national, transnational and supranational markets corresponding to the territories associated with particular states.2 This is grounded in the key role of states in securing the conditions for primitive accumulation before the commodity form has been extended to labour power as well as to other inputs into the circuit of capital and capital can become self-valorising; and to the uneven development of primitive accumulation on a world scale (with different nations experiencing primitive accumulation at different times and, indeed, primitive accumulation being one of the permanent tendencies of capital accumulation). In these respects the shape of the emerging world market is related to ‘the particular preexisting territorial features of the pre-capitalist system of reproduction and the structure of its administrative apparatus of rule’ (von Braunmühl, 1978: 167). Initially the nature of pre-capitalist states was critical for the primitive accumulation of capital (through external conquest, plunder and colonies as well as dispossession of pre-capitalist classes at home), the creation of a home market, the development of foreign trade, the relation between national monies, international currencies and an emergent world money, and, finally, the global division of labour. Different modes of insertion into the world market at different stages in its development are associated with quite different forms of capitalism and political regime. Indeed, ‘(t)he world market, which is not only the internal market in relation to all foreign markets existing outside it, but at the same time the internal market of all foreign markets as, in turn, components of the home market’ (Marx, 1973a: 280). In this

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context, of course, Marx and Engels provided rich and detailed studies of the ‘motley diversity of states’ (Marx, 1974b) that shapes the dynamics of IR as well as domestic struggles.

11.3 States, state power and the world polity Rosenberg argues that ‘any theory of international relations … needs to begin by grasping the historical uniqueness of both sovereignty and anarchy as social forms arising out of the distinctive configuration of social relations which Marx called the capitalist mode of production and reproduction of social life’ (1994: 172). Following the general historical materialist axiom that the form of sovereignty, the relation between the politically dominant and politically subordinate classes, generally reflects the specific economic form in which surplus labour is appropriated (Marx, 1971: 791), we can note that the typical form of the modern political association is the classic ‘Westphalian state’ with mutually recognised formal sovereignty within its territory. But this state form emerged only stepwise over three centuries on the basis of pre-existing forms of statehood (ranging from stateless societies to world-historical empires) (Teschke, 2003), and few contemporary states match this model in formal, let alone substantive, terms. This makes it even more imperative to regard the state (or, better, state power) in the same way as capital, i.e. as a social relation. For, like ‘capital’ (or, better, capital accumulation), the state is ‘a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions, such as this is expressed within the State in a necessarily specific form’ (Poulantzas, 2001: 128–9, italics in original). In other words, state power (not the state apparatus) is a form-determined condensation of the changing balance of forces in political and politically relevant struggle. It comprises an ensemble of power centres and capacities that offer unequal chances to different forces within and outside the state and that cannot, qua institutional ensemble, exercise power. Its powers (always plural) are activated in specific conjunctures through the agency of definite political forces, which will usually attempt to take account of the prevailing and, perhaps, future balance of forces within and beyond a given state. How far and in what ways state powers (and any associated liabilities or weak points) are actualised depends on the action, reaction and interaction of specific social forces located within and beyond this complex ensemble. As such the state is more accessible to some forces than others according to the strategies they adopt to gain state power; and it is more suited to the pursuit of some types of economic or political strategy than others because of its typical modes of intervention and resources. How significant is this differential impact on political forces’ capacity to pursue their interests will depend on the nature of their goals, strategies and tactics and the changing sets of constraints and opportunities within which these forces are located (cf. Jessop, 1990, 2002, 2007a).

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Whatever the actual standing of the Westphalian state system, we can certainly observe the coexistence of a world market, which is tendentially unified and integrated through the logic of profit-oriented, market-mediated competition based on the generalisation of global trade and [capitalist] commodity production, and a world political system, which remains characterised by a ‘motley diversity’ of states at different scales that tend to coexist as hostile rivals, if not as deadly enemies. Different authors see the survival of this contrast as more or less advantageous or disadvantageous from a capitalist viewpoint. Some highlight the capacity of individual capitals to divide and rule states at different scales by forcing them to compete to attract or retain investment under threat of capital flight and disinvestment from their respective economic spaces (e.g. Arrighi, 1994; Cowling and Tomlinson, 2005). Others note the problem that such particularistic competition may prevent national states from pursuing the overall interests of capital, especially when this leads to a counterproductive race to the bottom rather than pursuit of the ‘high road’ to competitiveness (e.g. Messner, 1998; Reinert, 2008). Yet others argue that the capitalist type of state may have sufficient autonomy to override short-term pressures from particular capitals to pursue these long-term interests – even if the resulting policies still favour some fractions of capital more than others (e.g. Poulantzas, 1975; Gritsch, 2005). And yet others note that the tension between the world market and the plurality of states can be overcome through the emergence of a hegemonic state that articulates economic, juridico-political, military and sociocultural strategies and projects that advance its own long-term interests whilst securing the short- to medium-term interests of subaltern states (e.g. van der Pijl, 1984; and, on Marx’s position, see below). All four positions are one-sided and their significance depends on how we approach the relation between particular capitals and the overall logic of capital accumulation, but taken together they highlight the site of real problems in the articulation of the world market and the world political system. An appropriate way to approach these different positions is through the inherent contradictions, dilemmas and paradoxes of the capital relation and its increasing dominance on a world scale. Common to these positions is the fact that the interaction of world market dynamics and state capacities is shaped by the continued separation of the profit-oriented, market-mediated dimension of accumulation from its crucial extra-economic supports in the legal and political system (among other institutional orders) and, notwithstanding this variable institutional separation, by the continued reciprocal interdependence of ‘market’ and ‘state’ as complementary moments of the capital relation. This is a fundamental observation that should inform critical scientific realist work in IR and international political economy. For the complex mutual implications of world market dynamics and state power cannot be grasped at the level of the actual because they are shaped by underlying mechanisms. Two of

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the most important sets of such mechanisms comprise: (1) the inherent contradictions in the capital relation, especially between use-value and exchange-value; and (2) the typical separation of the profit-oriented, marketmediated capitalist economy from its crucial extra-economic preconditions. States have key roles in mediating this relation, both directly and in seeking ways to defer or displace problems generated by capital’s inherent economic contradictions and the separation of its economic and political moments. The inherent contradictions in the capital relation include: (a) the contradiction between the growing socialisation of productive forces through the deepening of the social division of labour on a global scale and the continuing private ownership and control of the forces of production and the appropriation of profit; and (b) the contradiction between the usevalue and exchange-value aspects of the commodity form and its related forms in the capital relation. This second contradiction has many faces. For example, productive capital is both abstract value in motion (notably in the form of realised profits available for reinvestment) and a concrete stock of already invested time- and place-specific assets in the course of being valorised; the worker is both an abstract unit of labour power substitutable by other such units (or, indeed, other factors of production) and a concrete individual (or member of a concrete collective workforce) with specific skills, knowledge and creativity; wages are both a cost of production and a source of demand; money functions both as an international currency exchangeable against other currencies (ideally in stateless space) and as national money circulating within national societies (or pluri-national monetary blocs) and subject to a measure of state control; land functions both as a form of property (based on the private appropriation of nature) deployed in terms of expected revenues in the form of rent and as a natural resource (modified by past actions) that is more or less renewable and recyclable; knowledge is both the basis of intellectual property rights and a collective resource (the intellectual commons) (for a more detailed discussion, see Jessop, 2002).

11.4 Variegated capitalism and the world market The notion of ‘variegated capitalism’ is useful for more concrete–complex (or middle-range) analyses of the world market without thereby displacing the concept entirely. It improves on two other claims that are found in both heterodox and mainstream approaches: (a) there are distinct varieties of capitalism each with their own logics that coexist in a heterogeneous global economy; and (b) there is a single world system that, operating through the logic of capitalist competition, tends to converge on a single model of capitalism. First, it overcomes the methodological nationalist temptation to assume there is a more or less enduring set of national varieties of capitalism or the broader temptation that, by analogy, we might, rather inelegantly, call ‘methodological variationism’, i.e. the view that several varieties of

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capitalism (or another phenomenon) exist that, despite certain family resemblances, have their own distinct properties that can be analysed independently of each other. Second, focusing on variegated capitalism enables us to identify and explain zones of relative stability in terms of their changing complementarities, contradictions and crisis tendencies in a complex ‘ecology’ of accumulation regimes, modes of regulation, and spatio-temporal fixes; and to note their respective capacities to displace and defer contradictions and crisis tendencies into zones of relative incoherence, instability and even catastrophe or into the future. And, third, interpreting conventionally defined varieties of capitalism in this way highlights the need to connect relatively successful performance in certain economic spaces not only to their external as well as internal preconditions but also – and crucially – to the costs that this imposes on other spaces and future generations. A further implication of this approach is that, however successful a given ‘variety of capitalism’ might seem to be at the level of the actual, it may not be generalised easily across the world market. For example, not all economies can control the world currency where this is a national money, not all economies can run massive trade deficits, not all national states can be military masters in a unipolar world, and so on. This is not just a matter of logical compossibility. It also concerns discursive–material, spatio-temporal compossibility, i.e. the substantive fit (or not) among varieties of capitalism. In this sense the world market is both an emergent effect of the interaction of capital’s laws of motion and a constraint on the forms that varieties of capitalism can assume. Or, as Marx put it, the world market is both result and the substratum of capital accumulation (1973a: 163, 228). Marx and Engels adumbrate such an approach to variegated capitalism in the German Ideology. They write that ‘(t)he mutual relations of different nations depend on the degree to which each of them has developed their productive forces, the division of labour and the internal commerce’ (1976: 21). The resulting international order should not be seen as the mechanical sum of different nations but as a concrete, emergent international order, at the centre of which is a particular (national) class. Marx relates this to the uneven development of capitalism across the globe and notes the historical sequence of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England (1974a: 703). Thus, for most of the nineteenth century, ‘the world market is dominated by England and England is dominated by the bourgeoisie’ (Marx, 1977: 214). In this sense, behind the formal equality of national states in the state system, there was also an informal hierarchy of states. This was closely related to the hierarchical structure of accumulation of social surplus among states and their constituent classes as mediated by force (Gill, 1990). The essence of this structure is the economic and political subordination of secondary centres of accumulation to the hegemon. The secondary centres have in turn subordinated their own respective zones of surplus extraction.

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Recognising ‘variegated capitalism’ is only a first, albeit important, step to analysing the world market in terms of an uneven and combined development that integrates not only particular branches of capitalist production with their related ‘social bodies’ (or forms of social embedding) but also a wide range of pre- or non-capitalist forms of production into the logic of the world market. The totality of production includes subsistence production, petty commodity production, household production, informal productive and reproductive labour and, a fortiori, their dynamic interrelations with capitalist production in all its variety. These modes of production and forms of labour are unified, to the extent that they are, through the increasing ‘ecological dominance’ of capital accumulation in the world order. Indeed, the more strongly integrated is the world economy, the stronger do we find the contradictions of capital accumulation operating on a world scale. This has both positive and negative effects. For uneven and combined development can serve not only as a factor that drives world market integration forward but also as an obstacle that may fetter it (for further discussion of ecological dominance, see Jessop, 2007b).

11.5 The growing dominance of the logic of capital the credit system accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the establishment of the worldmarket. It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction – crises – and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production. (Marx, 1971: 441) Continuing internationalisation and globalisation, especially of financial capital, are crucial in enabling the logic of capital to operate more completely than ever on a global scale. Thus the formation of an average rate of profit also operates on this scale via the commensuration of local conditions through the law of value. In this sense neo-liberalism promotes the conditions on a world scale in which ‘all these contradictions come into play’. Thus it reduces the frictions linked to ‘national power containers’ and frees money capital (and its associated forms of credit) as the most abstract expression of the capital relation to move around the world market to maximise its chances for profit. It reinforces the dominance of the exchange-value moment (or, stated subjectively, the profit motive) associated with the various forms of the capital relation. It also enhances capital’s capacity to defer and/or displace its internal contradictions by increasing the scope of its operations on a global scale, by reinforcing its capacities to disembed

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certain of its operations from local material, social and spatio-temporal constraints, by enabling it to deepen the spatial and scalar divisions of labour, by creating more opportunities for moving up, down and across scales, by commodifying and securitising the future, and by rearticulating different time horizons. This helps in turn to emancipate the monetary profit-oriented, market-mediated moment of capital accumulation from extra-economic and spatio-temporal constraints, increases the emphasis on speed, acceleration and turnover time, and enhances capital’s capacity to escape the control of other systems insofar as these are still territorially differentiated and fragmented. The dominant neo-liberal approach to extending and deepening world market integration is especially significant in actualising the contradictions and crisis tendencies inherent in the capital relation. In particular it reinforces their exchange-value moments over their use-value moments. The typical policies of neo-liberalism comprise: liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, the use of market proxies in the residual state sector, internationalisation, and the lowering of direct taxes. Separately and together these measures privilege value in motion, the treatment of workers as disposable and substitutable factors of production, the wage as a cost of (international) production, money as international currency (especially due to the increased importance of derivatives), nature as a commodity, and knowledge as intellectual property. Moreover, as capital becomes increasingly freed from the constraints of national power containers and increasingly disembedded from other systems, unrestrained competition to lower socially necessary labour time, socially necessary turnover time, and naturally necessary production time3 becomes an ever more powerful driving force in the dynamic of capital accumulation. Supported by an emphasis on shareholder value, this particularly benefits hypermobile financial capital, which controls the most liquid, abstract and generalised resource and has become the most integrated fraction of capital, and enhances its abilities to displace and defer problems onto other economic actors and interests, other systems and the natural environment. Indeed, in contrast with Fordism and the post-Fordist knowledge-based economy, the post-Fordist neo-liberal financial regime militates against the long-term structured coherence of accumulation regimes and their modes of regulation. In particular, it weakens the spatio-temporal fixes with which regimes based on the primacy of productive capital manage the contradictions between fixity and motion in order to produce zones of relative stability by deferring and displacing their effects. This is shown in the impact of financialisation not only in Atlantic Fordism but also in the export-oriented economies of East Asia and the viability of import-substitution industrialisation strategies in Latin America and Africa. One of the interesting features of the current crisis is that it is the first post-war global crisis made in the USA to have broken out there too. Neo-liberal market integration also

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reinforces tendencies to uneven development as the search continues for new spatio-temporal fixes to move the costs of capitalist contradictions elsewhere and/or into the future to create local zones of relatively crisis-free expansion. A recent example is the displacement of the centres of economic gravity associated with the rise of the BRIC (Brazil–Russia–India–China) economies at the expense of more advanced capitalist economies. But this occurs on many different scales and not simply at the level of interstate relations. The most recent wave of world market integration is distinctive less for its tendential planetary reach than for the enhanced speed of its linkages and their repercussions in real time. Indeed much of the pressure that state managers claim to feel from globalisation has less to do with its spatial extension than its temporal compression. For the continuing integration of the world market affects not only the territorial sovereignty of states (through the gap between intensified world market integration and the still largely national architecture of many critical state apparatuses) but also their temporal sovereignty in the sense that hypermobile, superfast capital undermines normal policy cycles. The dominance of neo-liberalism has also introduced some interesting new features into the world market that set it apart from earlier periods of free trade imperialism as well as from more overtly statist periods of capitalist development. In particular, neo-liberal globalisation strengthens capital’s chances of avoiding the structural constraints of other institutional orders and their control efforts, thereby increasing its ‘indifference’ to the operating environment. The overall impact of increasing integration of the world market along primarily neo-liberal lines does not mean that finance can postpone for ever its overall dependence on the continued valorisation of productive capital or escape crisis tendencies rooted in capital accumulation on a world scale. The constraints of valorisation sooner or later reassert themselves. This was shown again in the liquidity, credit and financial crises that intensified in 2007–8 and their repercussions in the wider economy as crises serve once more to forcibly reimpose the unity of the circuits of capital at the expense of hyperextended credit markets. The revenge of the ‘real economy’ can be seen in the current liquidity, credit and financial crises and their role in forcibly reimposing the unity of the circuits of capital by deflating the associated bubbles. The crisis of neo-liberalism shows that the national state remains the addressee in the last resort of appeals to resolve economic, political and social problems. Paradoxically, even as neo-liberal capital and its allies demand decisive state intervention, neo-liberalism has undermined the territorial and temporal sovereignty of states and their capacity to resolve these crises. Crises on a world scale also transform capitals into hostile brothers along fractional lines, position in the world market, and articulation with states at different scales. This is reflected in the difficulties confronting national states (as material condensations of the changing

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balance of social forces tied to hegemonic or dominant fractions of capital) who cannot coordinate their interests in forums such as the NAFTA, the European Union, the G8, the G20, the IMF or other forms of summitry. Even where states on other scales can be mobilised for the purposes of crisis management, national states are still currently irreplaceable given their fiscal–financial powers and the scope for redistributive politics in rearranging the balance of forces and securing (or breaking) social compromises. This is especially evident in the massive subsidies and bailouts given to failed and failing financial institutions in the most neo-liberalised metropolitan economies and the efforts made in economies that simply made neo-liberal policy adjustments but have since been caught up in the generalisation of the contradictions of neo-liberalism in an integrated world market. Given these arguments, it is tempting to suggest that the currently dominant neo-liberal form of globalisation restricts state power. But this argument is, at best, a half-truth. It applies to those states that are largely passive victims of neo-liberalism – not to those whose state managers have actively supported the move towards neo-liberalism as an accumulation strategy and state project. To argue otherwise would be to reproduce the liberal (or neoliberal) myth of the separation of economic and political institutions and of the distinctiveness of unequal economic class relations based on private property vis-à-vis formally equal political relations based on citizenship and democratic government. But capital accumulation is not confined to a narrowly delimited economic sphere but has important extra-economic supports, secured in part through state capacities and state power; and class relations characterise the political sphere and the dynamics of ‘civil society’ too, with struggles for class domination being mediated as much through coercion and political, intellectual and moral leadership as they are through the profit-oriented, market-mediated logic of capital accumulation. It follows that the restrictions on state power generated by the generalisation of neoliberalism are, in some cases, self-imposed restrictions, the product of specific class projects, rather than the inevitable effects of the invisible hand of the world market or the unanticipated, unwanted side-effects of narrow economic policy decisions. In short, any attempt to analyse the relations between world market integration and the plurality of states (national or otherwise) must involve a close account of the structural coupling of economic and political institutions and of the strategic attempts to coordinate and steer the relations between the economic and political orders.

11.6 Is there a world society? ’World society’ is an increasingly popular term in the social sciences. It indicates that the ultimate horizon of all social action is increasingly global in reach and that the geographical boundedness of national societies associated with the post-war period (which was only ever relative even in

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the heyday of national territorial statehood) is in decline. For some systems theorists, world society encompasses all the functional systems of social organisation (technical, economic, scientific, legal, political, educational, religious, medical, sport, etc.) (e.g. Jung, 2000; Luhmann, 1982; Martinell, 2005; Stichweh, 2000). As such it is not a specific institutional space with its own structured coherence nor is it an autonomous domain of social life with its own logic. Instead it comprises a site of interaction among different systemic or functional logics that cannot be controlled directly by any single system and therefore poses major problems of system and social integration. In this regard we see continuing struggles to unify not only national societies (which are, in fact, increasingly porous and fuzzily bounded segments of the emerging world society) but also world society itself under the dominance of one or another principle of societal integration (Vergesellschaftungsprinzip) such as capital accumulation, military security, religion, science, or deliberative forms of politics. This is associated in turn with a proliferation of transnational and global governance regimes oriented to specific problems of world society integration, each with its own forms of strategic selectivity and its own modes of material condensation of social forces. None of this excludes the possibility that the logic of one system may be structurally dominant in the co-evolution of different systems within an ecology of self-organising systems by virtue of causing more problems for other systems than they can cause for it (on ecological dominance, see Jessop, 2007b). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the integration of a variegated capitalism in the shadow of neo-liberalism has turned accumulation into this ecologically dominant principle. For others, world society is better interpreted as ‘global civil society’ – although this term is often poorly defined and seems to cover many different forms of transnational social relations, informal as well as formal. My preferred definition is that global civil society comprises a wide range of identities, interests and social relations that are not tied to any specific functional system or institutional order but cross-cut them by virtue of their grounding in the experiences and ‘lifeworlds’ of whole persons and that are committed to global horizons of action even where they remain locally, regionally or nationally anchored. From this perspective, ‘global civil society’ would have a dual significance. First, it would develop as a ‘public sphere’ based on dialogue not only among individuals but also among organisations or associations as representatives of a wide range of personal, interpersonal, organisational, inter-organisational, systemic and intersystemic interests. The development and expansion of social forums, either independently of or in parallel with inter-governmental or business forums, illustrates this. But for global civil society to become an influential factor in global governance, its actors must acquire the resources, capacities and collective will to resist hegemonisation, domination or colonisation by the institutional logics associated with one particular functional system (e.g. the profit-oriented,

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market-mediated logic of the capitalist economy, the authority of science, the fetishism of law, the prioritisation of military security) or by the power interests of one superpower or bloc of states. Only then could it serve as a space for dialogue between different systemic and organisational logics with a view to developing mutual understandings and sustain negative and positive coordination among different organisations and systems. In this sense, civil societies and any emergent global civil society provide a reservoir of antagonistic ‘instincts’ (rooted in other identities) and social resources for resisting attempts to colonise or dominate a wider social formation. Continuing dialogue might lead to consensus on hegemonic values, axial principles of societalisation, and procedural roles for system integration and social cohesion without the need for an increasingly impossible top-down government or blind co-evolution of anarchic market forces.

11.7 Conclusions I began with Marx because he was one of the first scientific realists, because it is often claimed (inaccurately as well as anachronistically) that Marx and Engels did not explore IR, and because he regarded the world market as a complex–concrete ensemble of social relations that could be fully understood as both the result and the substratum of capital accumulation only after the inherent logic of capital had been explored. Thus my chapter has dwelt less on the complexities of SR in general than on specific mechanisms, laws of motion, contradictions and crisis tendencies and on how their interactions can be investigated to explain specific features of the world market. A key feature of this approach, which is often overlooked in mainstream IR work, is the complex articulation of the world market and its articulation to complex, pluralistic forms of statehood that are associated with their own distinctive structural features and dynamics. This is not something to be explored solely at the level of the actual but must be integrated into critical (international) political economy as a core mechanism with fundamental effects on the overall logic of the world market. Equally important is concern with the inherent contradictions of the capital relation and their contribution to the dynamic of accumulation on a world scale. One implication of these complexities with direct relevance to the field of IR is that the dynamics of the world market does not (and could not) generate a uniform set of pressures on all states. Rather, the many social forces and mechanisms that generate globalisation put pressure on particular forms of the state with particular state capacities and liabilities and with different unstable equilibria of forces. This requires serious engagement with the modalities of world market integration and with the specificities of state forms and political regimes. These aspects are often associated because different kinds of state favour different modalities of globalisation based on inherited modes of insertion into the world market and the recomposition of power

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blocs and class compromises. Likewise, the differential and uneven dynamic of globalisation will have different impacts on metropolitan capitalist states, export-oriented developmental states, rentier oil states, post-colonial states, post-socialist states, etc. This excludes a zero-sum approach to the relation between world market and state power in terms of a singular emergent borderless flow-based economy operating in timeless time that is expanding at the expense of a plurality of traditional national territorial states operating as ‘power containers’ that control fixed territorial boundaries. First, the dynamic of the world market is irreducible to flows – whether of merchandise, productive capital, interest-bearing capital or variable capital (i.e. labour power). It has major territorial dimensions (reflected in concepts such as industrial districts, agglomeration economies, global cities, and regional or national capitalisms). Second, states are more than ‘power containers’: they also operate as power connectors, i.e. as nodes in a network of states and other political forces. Third, world market integration does not put pressure on the state (sovereign or otherwise) in general but on particular forms of state or political regime with specific state capacities and liabilities. Thus different forms of integration affect different forms of state quite differently. Fourth, the world market also puts pressures on capital and labour through the widening, deepening and intensification of global competition. These issues would constitute a major research programme for a scientific realist exploration of the dynamic of the world market in its articulation with state power.

Notes 1. The so-called missing books from the six-book project were concerned with the state, foreign trade, and the world market and crisis; it is argued that the books on capital, landed property and labour were published in one form or another (or can be reconstructed). On the problem, see Rosdolsky (1977). 2. Thus Marx notes the historical sequence of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England (1974a: 703). 3. The term ‘naturally necessary production time’ refers to the increasing attempts to speed up the rhythms of nature as an important (natural) source of wealth – most evident today in the growing importance of biotechnology and the life sciences.

12 Realism. For Real this Time: Scientific Realism is not a Compromise between Positivism and Interpretivism Jorge Rivas

12.1 Introduction Within the fields of international relations (IR) and political science, philosophical realism (from here, ‘realism’) and scientific realism (SR) have been understood primarily through the highly influential works of Alexander Wendt. Given all the attention Wendt has received,1 scientific realists in IR might be happy with the well-known introduction to SR that he has provided to such an extensive audience. But this coverage has come with a great deal of discomfort for many scientific realists because of Wendt’s representation of SR as a compromise, or a ‘Via Media’, between positivism and interpretivism (2006: 182). In other words, while Wendt’s overall project of making ‘the study of ideas in international politics … scientifically respectable’ (2000: 165) has been tremendously successful, it has produced the impression that the content and implications of SR are primarily a compromise between positivism and interpretivism, which results in an unfortunate misunderstanding. While such a compromise may be tenable, and, for some, attractive, this chapter will argue that it should not be seen as the primary understanding of SR. By doing so, it will present alternative understandings on SR’s crucial positions regarding ontology and epistemology, as well as the implications of these positions for scientific realist understandings of the relationship between structure and agency, thus highlighting the real advantages of SR and its difference from positivism and interpretivism. The focus of this chapter is not on challenging Wendt’s work but rather on clarifying the subject of this book (i.e. SR). However, the importance of Wendt’s presentation of SR to many of us working from a realist perspective comes precisely from the tremendous influence Wendt has had in the field of IR, and thus it requires the kind of direct examination found in this chapter. This chapter’s goal is to emphasise that SR is not a middle-ground position between positivism and interpretivism, and that the latter two positions actually share much more in common with each other than either does with 203

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SR. Thus, by associating SR with a Wendtian Via Media, the general picture of SR held by the IR and political science communities has been, in our view, very unfortunate. By declaring himself a positivist while claiming to be using realism, Wendt bundled together the two philosophical approaches (despite the fact that they are so diametrically opposed) and thus undermined the potential of SR as being seen to have an alternative set of solutions to the challenges, and indeed, the quagmire of the positivist/post-positivist debates in IR. Unfortunately, this is not just a matter of labels. The key elements of any social science approach are the philosophical positions on (1) ontology, (2) epistemology, (3) the structure–agency question, and (4) the relationship between the material and the ideational. In a nutshell, Wendt’s Via Media explicitly claimed to draw on SR to combine the subjective ontology of interpretivism (i.e. ‘anarchy is what states make of it’; ‘states are people too’, etc.) with the objective epistemology of positivism (e.g. ‘The epistemological issue is whether we can have objective knowledge of these structures’ (Wendt, 1995: 75). This chapter will explain how a more coherent realism in philosophy entails the inverse: an objective (realist) ontology and a subjective (relativist) epistemology, a combination which is wholly different from either positivism or interpretivism, and not a compromise between the two. Consequently, rather than adopt the understanding of structure and agency as ontologically distinct, these positions led Wendt to apply an ‘instantiationist’ approach that conflates agents and social structures by claiming that structures are entirely dependent on the understandings and practices of the agents who instantiate them (à la Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory). The result is that the real emergent existence, properties and causal powers of social structures are denied; social structures are confused with both their genesis and their effects. Finally, these philosophical positions end up determining his substantive constructivist IR theory (in privileging an ideationalist account of social structures). Material structures are relegated to being inconsequential because they only have causal force through the interpretations and practices of actors. Wendt accepts that material structures exist, but not that they can have any significant real causal force (‘rump materialism’). In sum, rather than base his constructivist IR theory on the empirical evidence in favour of the causal weight of an ideationalist account of social structures, he bases it on his (idealist) foundational philosophical positions. Thus, in IR, these positions are now associated with SR.2

12.2 Realism as a Via Media? One of the central goals of Wendt’s work is to argue that the social world can be studied and explained in a scientific manner, and that this is still possible even if ideational factors (meanings, beliefs, rules, roles, ideologies, culture – in other words, ideas) play a central role in the social world. This included not only making the case for the possibility of the scientific study

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of the ideas, but also defending a more general scientific approach to social science from the postmodern and interpretivist challenges to the credibility, and indeed the very possibility, of social science. Wendt’s goal was not to dispute the constructivist, interpretivist, hermeneutical or postmodernist approaches to the social world, but rather to show that even these typically anti-science approaches can also be grounded on scientific foundations. In order to do this, Wendt sought to marshal a realist philosophy of science to sweep away the ‘unnecessary philosophical barriers’ that have been built over time, both by traditional positivist hesitations and reluctance toward the study of ideas, and by post-positivist objections to any ‘scientific’ study of the social world. As a whole, this is a laudable project, one that all scientific realists in social science would likely support at the philosophical level, even if some would not agree with his emphasis on ideas at the substantive level. What has made many realists uncomfortable is the way in which he went about presenting and deploying SR in the service of this project. In order to retain scientific legitimacy within a field whose dominant understandings of philosophy of science had not yet discarded or moved on from the mistaken conflation of science (in general) with positivism (a particular approach to science), Wendt sought to construct a path between the alleged positivist/interpretivist conflict over whether social phenomena can be studied in a ‘scientific’ (i.e. ‘positivist’) way (2006: 182). As Wendt rightly points out, ‘after their “Third Debate” most IR scholars today seem to think the idea of such a Via Media is incoherent; one must be either a positivist or an interpretivist’ (2006: 182). More precisely, Wendt describes his philosophical goals in Social Theory of International Politics (STIP) in the following way: ‘I tried to do something that, in a justly classic paper, Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie (1986) in effect said could not be done: find a via media between positivism and interpretivism by combining the epistemology of the one with the ontology of the other’ (2006: 182). More recently, Wendt appears to agree with Guzzini and Leander’s claim that his Via Media might be better described as a synthesis of the two rather than a middle way (2006: 182). Of course, what is called the ‘Third Debate’ in IR created this dichotomy; scholars do tend to think one’s philosophical position with regard to the social world must either be positivist and scientific, or interpretivist and antiscientific. Under these conditions, providing a synthesis or compromise of these two approaches may indeed be a very appealing project, but philosophically to call this realism can be very misleading. Of course, a great deal of confusion continues to exist about what is meant by SR, and more importantly, why does it matter? This section will show that, in our opinion, the benefits of SR stem precisely from the fact that it is wholly different from both, and therefore to present it as a combination of the two undermines both its potential and its appeal. In IR, the dominance of positivism has been under attack since at least the 1980s from what have been called interpretivist, hermeneutical, reflectivist,

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perspectivist and post-structuralist critiques, and which often are grouped together under the heading of ‘post-positivist’. From the point of view of these interpretivist or post-positivist critiques, the positivist approach to social science is philosophically inappropriate for studying social phenomena. However, these post-positivist critiques are seen, by defenders of positivism, as producing not just ontological relativism, but also as leading to the use of methods and practices in social science which lack rigour, are unscientific, and are possibly even incoherent (Patomäki and Wight, 2000: 13; see also Isaac, 1987 and Gunnell, 1995). As Patomäki and Wight point out, a common resolution to this dichotomy in IR has been to try to build a middle-ground position. Wendt’s Via Media epitomises this kind of compromise. But, as Patomäki and Wight argue, there are two problems with these compromise positions: 1. Staking out a ‘middle ground’ between two problematic approaches does not resolve, but rather reproduces, the problems inherent in both; and 2. Positivism and interpretivism actually entail many common assumptions and arguments (which realists see as being at the root of their problems). Sometimes these philosophical discussions can sound quite arcane, but the argument is relatively straightforward: both positivism and interpretivism entail anti-realist ontological positions and base these on their anthropocentric (empiricist and interpretivist, respectively) epistemologies. Thus, both ultimately share a subjective or relativist ontology (Patomäki and Wight, 2000: 215). Essentially, for both positivists and interpretivists, all discussion and postulation about the nature and existence of the world must depend on how it is that we know it. Wendt acknowledges this (1999: 52–3), but by creating a synthesis of the two, he reproduces it. Both approaches also share another key position that philosophical realists fundamentally reject: an acceptance of the positivist representation of what ‘science’ is3 (including the empiricist notion of reality, the Humean ‘constant conjunction’ understanding of causation, the deductive–nomological model of explanation, the Hempelian ‘covering law’ model of scientific laws, an instrumentalist approach to theoretical terms, the reductionist view of entities and structures, and the symmetry of explanation and prediction). This understanding of science is then used by positivists to endorse its application in the social sciences (i.e. naturalism) and used by post-positivists to either reject applying ‘scientific’ methods to social phenomena (i.e. anti-naturalism) or to challenge the project of ‘science’ altogether (i.e. anti-scientism) (Patomäki and Wight, 2000: 216–17; see also Hollis, 1996: 303–4; Isaac, 1987). It is on these crucial issues that realism is so radically different. As Wendt rightly notes, SR is premised on ‘the following three principles: (1) the world is independent of the mind and language of individual observers; (2) mature scientific theories typically refer to this world; (3) even when it is not directly observable’

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(Wendt, 1999: 51). Taken to their logical conclusions, the implications of these positions produce a rejection of epistemological objectivism, ontological relativism and all of the above-mentioned aspects of the positivist model of science (Sayer, 1992; Collier, 1994; Lawson, 1997). Thus, we think realism is not a middle ground, compromise or synthesis between these two (quite similar) positions, but rather a radical break which provides an altogether different set of solutions to the problems associated with the Third Debate in IR. However, as Wendt has noted, the political science and IR debates over the appropriate philosophy of science have been dominated by positivism and the interpretivist reaction to positivism, and have largely ignored realism as an alternative to both (Wendt, 1999; Patomäki and Wight, 2000; see Isaac, 1987 for a similar argument). While various forms of realism have become central in the philosophy of natural science since the ‘overthrow’ of positivism in the 1960s and 1970s (for a classic outline of this overthrow see Suppe, 1977), there appears to be little awareness of this shift in the social sciences in general (Gunnell, 1995: 925) and in IR in particular where positivism and science continue to be conflated and where ‘post-positivist’ alternatives are largely reactions against positivism. As the editor of a recent compilation on philosophy of methods in the social sciences has noted, ‘Despite repeated attempts by social theorists and researchers to drive a stake through the heart of the vampire, the disciplines continue to experience a positivistic haunting’ (Steinmetz, 2005: 3).4 The unfortunate fact remains that the philosophical conflicts in IR, particularly those deriving from the Third Debate, are mired in this dispute between positivism and post-positivism, and to progress we need a better understanding of philosophical alternatives. In fact, despite the extensive debate over positivism, there even has been much confusion over what positivism really means (see Wight, 2002: 26 for many examples of this confusion), which brings us back to the confusion created by Wendt’s Via Media. While claiming to be a scientific realist, Wendt declared, ‘I am a “positivist” ’ (1999: 39), and did so, as Chernoff notes, just when positivism was losing credibility in IR and in the social sciences ‘particularly outside the realms of statistical modeling and rational choice theory’ (Chernoff, 2002: 194). This is all the more confusing because STIP contains an excellent exposition and summary of the problems inherent in the central elements of positivism: empiricism, reductionism, deductivism and instrumentalism (Wendt, 1999: 47–91). To be fair, Wendt has indicated he sees this as a ‘red herring … since I think it is pretty clear that unless otherwise noted my use of the term “positivism” has always been with a “small p”, which is to say equivalent to naturalism or science’ (2008, personal communication) . However, we hold that the distinction is crucial. As Wight correctly points out, ‘This is an impossible position to hold. One cannot be both a scientific realist and a positivist; the two accounts of science are diametrically opposed

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on some very fundamental issues … Positivism, in this sense, has lost all meaning’ (2002: 36). As Milan Brglez notes, ‘This might come as a surprise since [Wendt] has been able to see and argue that both positivists and post-positivists within IR share a latent anti-realist philosophical ontology. It is simply inconsistent to accept any kind of positivism after one makes and uses such arguments for developing his ontology’ (2001: 347). There is not the space needed to engage in a discussion of these issues here, but as Chernoff has correctly pointed out, ‘For those familiar with the history of the debates over positivism in the philosophical literature, this is an idiosyncratic definition’ (2002: 194). More importantly, it is also problematic because the model of science entailed by positivism is radically different from that entailed by SR. It is one of the goals of this book to show how a better understanding of SR in IR can overcome the obstacles that the continuing positivist ‘haunting’ of our notions of science creates toward better theorising and the conduct of research in the social sciences (for examples of these obstacles, see Wendt, 1987; 1999; Dessler, 1989; Patomäki and Wight, 2000 and Wight, 2006a). And while interpretivists are right to reject the application of the positivist model of science to the study of the social world (since it is fundamentally flawed even in the study of the natural world), Wendt’s conflation of the two has hindered realists in their project of overcoming the interpretivist objections to social science altogether. Or, as Guzzini and Leander put it in a different context, ‘The real issue at stake is not positivism versus post-positivism, but what exactly this non-positivist “social science” is all about’ (2006: 80). As I will argue, despite recognising the fundamental flaws of positivism, Wendt still held on to a great deal of the positivist model of science, and thus created other problematic outcomes.5

12.3 Philosophy inverted: realism with a subjective ontology and an objective epistemology? This brings us to the crux of the problem: What exactly is the nature of Wendt’s compromise between positivism and interpretivism? Essentially, as Wendt puts it, ‘Epistemologically I have sided with positivists … on ontology – which is to my mind the more important issue – I will side … with post-positivists’ (1999: 90). Or, as Krasner puts it, Wendt has tried to show, ‘In John Searle’s felicitous formulation it is possible to have a subjective ontology but an objective epistemology’ (2000: 131). Thus, to be clear, Wendt’s Via Media adopts: • a subjective ontology (i.e. the dependence of social structure on ideas; anarchy is what states make of it; states are people too, etc.) and • an objective epistemology (i.e. ‘The epistemological issue is whether we can have objective knowledge of these structures’) (Wendt, 1995: 75).

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In fact, these two positions are quite remarkable because they are an inversion of what we think a coherent SR implies: • an objective (realist) ontology (i.e. social structures can be independent of interpretations) and • a subjective (fallibilist and relativist) epistemology (we can never have an objective knowledge of these structures). Indeed, as is argued by critical realists, philosophical realism can be summarised as a combination of ontological realism and epistemological relativism (producing judgemental rationalism) (Bhaskar, 1975; 1979; 1986; 1989; Porpora, 1989; Collier, 1994; Archer, 1995; Joseph, 2002; Patomäki and Wight, 2000). In contrast, Wendt’s subjective ontology is relativist and indeed is much closer to the empiricism (and even phenomenalism) of positivism and the idealism of interpretivism. Figure 12.1 illustrates the extent of the difference between Wendt’s Via Media and what we think SR entails. What is probably most surprising to those still mired in the positivist/interpretivist dichotomy is that scientific realists argue that positivism’s objectivist epistemology is actually connected to a subjective ontology that is remarkably similar to that of interpretivism, and that realism is therefore the only approach that entails a truly realist ontology. Positivism is fundamentally premised on empiricism. The empiricist ontological position is that reality consists merely of the empirical world (i.e. the observable world, the objects of experience, or more fundamentally, the observation data themselves). Empiricists came to this ontological position from the empiricist epistemological position that all knowledge claims must be grounded in empirical observation. Empiricists therefore argued that any talk of reality which is not directly derived from observation is anti-scientific. This continued to be the basic ontological position of some branches of positivist philosophy of social science as late as the 1970s (as typified by behaviouralism). It is important to understand how empiricists arrived at this position to understand fully its implications. Early empiricists, such as Hume, argued that all we can know to be real is observation data (i.e. the sense data themselves, not even that to

Philosophy of science

Epistemology

Ontology

Positivism

Objective (empiricist)

Subjective (‘empirical realism’)

Interpretivism

Subjective

Subjective (ideational)

Wendt’s Via Media

Objective (and explicitly positivist)

Subjective (ideational)

Subjective (fallibilist, relativist)

Objective (realist) (the only position which is realist)

vs Scientific realism

Figure 12.1 Wendt’s Via Media vs scientific realism

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which sense data refer). From this, they derived the ‘true empiricist’ position that only observation data are real. This was a truly subjective ontological position and seemed to defy common sense. However, if this empiricism was combined with an objectivist epistemology (i.e. that observation produces an objective understanding or account of the object of study), then they could claim to posit and believe in the objective existence of a real world. But realists argue that this objective existence still hinges on it being observable, and therefore its existence is not really independent of our ability to know it. At most, their form of ‘realism’ is what is called ‘empirical realism’, i.e. that the real is limited to the empirical. By definition, observation data are not independent of observation, and therefore cannot be objective. One must distinguish between the actual and the empirical. Thus, even ‘empirical realism’ is ontologically subjective and remains fundamentally anti-realist (Hollis, 1996: 303 also makes the point that the empiricism of positivism is actually a form of anti-realism). The basic characteristic that distinguishes philosophical realism from other philosophies of science is its realist ontology. Realism means an acceptance of the existence of a reality regardless of human observation or knowledge of it. A coherent philosophical realism should encompass all that this implies. In contrast to the objectivist epistemology of positivism, it is important to emphasise that a consistent ontological realism inherently implies fallibilist and subjectivist epistemological positions. Many critiques of SR incorrectly state that SR implies scientific theories must be true. This is false. Realists argue that observation of reality can never be truly objective (as [1] all observation is theory-laden, and [2] different observations of the same object of study can produce different empirical results), and therefore that epistemology must inherently be subjective (incorrect descriptions of SR as having an objectivist epistemology unfortunately have been made in IR: e.g. Wendt, 1999 and Smith, 1996). Realists argue that positivism’s objectivism combined with its empiricism actually produces a clear-cut subjective ontology as their ontology depends on their observations but their observations are believed to be objective. For positivists, ‘reality’ in the end boils down to experience. Interpretivists have made their subjectivist epistemological critique of positivism’s objectivist epistemology a central component of their reaction against the dominance of positivism in social science; realists would agree with this critique. However, interpretivists have also argued that because we cannot know the world outside of our knowledge of it (a subjective epistemology) then we cannot posit that it exists beyond our interpretation of it (a subjective, or relativist, ontology). Statements made in constructivist IR, such as ‘the material world does not come classified, and that, therefore, the objects of our knowledge are not independent of our interpretations and our language’ (Adler, 2002: 95), regularly reinforce this view. It is this move from their epistemological position to their ontological position with

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which realists disagree (again, the ‘epistemic fallacy’). Realists agree with a subjectivist epistemology but argue that it does not imply a rejection of a realist ontology. Rather, they claim that the interpretivists’ relativist ontology is actually just an altered form of empiricism and therefore much more like positivism. Thus, realists argue that positivists and interpretivists share much in common and are much more analogous to each other than either is to realism. As Patomäki and Wight put it, ‘From an ontologically orientated perspective both the positivists and the post-positivists share a common metaphysical structure … What can be considered real always bears the mark, or insignia, of some human attribute; in effect, an anthropocentric philosophy’ (2000: 217). Wendt rightly points out that all observation is theory-laden, but he ended up endorsing the objectivist epistemology of positivism. This is why statements by Wendt about adopting an objective epistemology can appear to us to be so confusing. I believe that the reason Wendt adopted an objectivist epistemology is that he accepted the positivist position that confuses a ‘scientific’ understanding of something as requiring an ‘objective’ understanding of it. His presentation engaged in the same conflation of ontological objectivity with epistemological objectivity in which positivists and interpretivists engage. This should not be surprising as he is producing a Via Media between the two. His presentation of these issues therefore produced confusion over the relationship between these approaches and realism. Thus, as can be seen more clearly in the four-quadrant diagram in Figure 12.2, Wendt’s Via Media is a compromise between positivism and interpretivism but to us seems far from SR. These positions have important implications for understandings of social structures, both for the social and for the structures. With regards to natural phenomena, many self-described ‘positivists’ today would recognise the actual world (as opposed to the empirical world) as real, but when it comes to social phenomena most positivists still hold to empiricism; they continue to deny that entities such as the state, the economy, class or community are real. These social entities are still understood in an empiricist manner (i.e. since we cannot observe them, they are not real). Interpretivism also commits to the ontology of true empiricism with regards to social phenomena, arguing that our subjective interpretations of the social world are all that could be real. Often positivists or interpretivists claim that material reality can be distinguished from the empirical observation of it (in other words, that it is actual), but that social reality cannot (i.e. that social reality is inherently subjective and has no external reality beyond human consciousness or cognition). The social is thus seen as inherently relativist. With regard to structures, while positivists may distinguish between the actual and the empirical (in other words, between events and perceptions of those events), they reject the distinction between the actual and the structural, causal or generative (in other words, between events and the often

212 Scientific Realism and International Relations Objectivist Empirical realism

ONTOLOGICAL

Wendt’s “Via Media”

AXIS

EPISTEMOLOGICAL

AXIS

Realist

Relativist

“True empiricism”

Interpretivism

Scientific realism

Subjectivist Figure 12.2 Mapping the ontological and epistemological positions of positivism, interpretivism, Wendt’s Via Media and SR

unobservable underlying structures which cause or generate those events). This form of empiricism does not accept that there are hidden, unobservable, unknown or unrecognised mechanisms really generating actual events. In fact, the Humean model of causation, which underlies positivism as an approach in philosophy, explicitly rejects this possibility. The interpretivist reaction to positivism also denies the separate reality of the generative or structural domain. As Wendt points out, ‘postmodernists agree with empiricists that we should eschew the search for unobservable deep structures, and focus instead on surface phenomena’ (1999: 62). Thus, whether or not there is recognition of the difference between perception and event, empiricism denies the existence of an unobservable, generative or structural level of reality (Collier, 1994; Sayer, 1992). The next section turns to what these positions imply for social theory and how they relate to Wendt’s approach. I will use one of the central theoretical issues in social theory – the relationship between agents and structure – to provide a discussion of both the social science implications of a subjective ontology and of the vestiges of positivist reductionism to be found in Wendt’s social theory.

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12.4 Approaches to the agent–structure relationship Although the agent–structure debate in IR had been touched on6 prior to Wendt’s influential 1987 article, Wendt deserves credit for bringing an explicit awareness and discussion of the agent–structure problem to the forefront of social theory in IR. In this and later works, Wendt rightly tried to overcome the problems inherent in the two historically dominant theoretical approaches to the agent–structure relationship: individualism and holism. In lieu of these two approaches, Wendt tried to employ what he labelled a ‘realist’ approach. However, a careful examination shows that, because of his subjective (relativist rather than realist) ontology, Wendt’s approach – following Giddens’ structurationism – actually fails to ontologically distinguish structures from agents in that, in his conception, structures are ultimately reduced to and entirely dependent on the understandings and practices of the agents whose behaviour ‘instantiates’ them. In short, Wendt conflates structures with both their causes and their consequences. In the process, the ontological reality and the emergent properties and causal powers of structures end up being denied (see Porpora, 1989; Wight, 2006a; Archer, 1995 and Bhaskar, 1979 for similar discussions; for other discussions in IR, see Dessler, 1989, 1991; Hollis and Smith, 1990, 1992, 1994; Patomäki, 1991 and Carlsnaes, 1992). Since the following realist critiques of structurationist arguments are both controversial and not widely understood in IR and political science, I begin with a very brief overview of individualism and holism and then turn to a discussion of the structurationist approach which conflates the two, and of which Wendt’s approach is a version. The last section contrasts this with a deeper ontologically realist understanding which clearly distinguishes and differentiates structures from agents. I finish by arguing that Wendt’s metaphysics ended up determining his substantive social theory, thus highlighting what, for us, are the serious repercussions of his Via Media. ‘Social structure’ is a foundational concept in social science. However, it is understood and deployed in radically different ways. These differences are tremendously important because particular understandings can rule out other ways of conceptualising, theorising and therefore explaining what happens in the social world. Two broad approaches to social structure have historically predominated in social science. The first approach, which has variously been called individualism, reductionism or microfoundationalism, is most closely associated with methodological individualism, Weberian voluntarism and the microfoundationalist approaches associated with neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. In this conception, ‘social structures’ are simply particular configurations of aggregate individual behaviour that exhibit some temporal pattern or stability (Porpora, 1989: 339–40). Social structures do not actually exist, but rather they are solely the behaviour of agents that produce the patterns that we then call social structures.

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This approach views the use of social structural terms in social science, such as ‘the state’, ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘class’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘the international system’ as simply abstractions or theoretical constructs posited to understand aggregated individual behaviour. Being just abstractions, social structures cannot have any independent causal force and are therefore epiphenomenal. Social structures do not cause actions or behaviour; they are simply a product of behaviour (Porpora, 1989: 341; see also Wendt, 1999; Wight, 2006a). This approach is rooted in the empiricism, instrumentalism and reductionism of positivism, and is therefore regularly touted by its adherents as the only ‘scientific’ conception of social structures. The empiricist position on the unreality of unobservables, as well as the instrumentalist position on the unreality of theoretical terms, is regularly used to argue that unobservables such as ‘the state’ or ‘class’ cannot actually exist (e.g. Arrow, 1951; Downs, 1957; Olson, 1965; Monroe, 1991 and Levi, 1997 provide very good discussions of these issues). In short, individuals are all we can observe, so individuals are all that are real. The reductionist position claims that science explains things solely by explaining their component elements. These empiricist and reductionist claims have been used to argue that any social theory, to be ‘scientific’, must be built on ‘solid microfoundations’ (i.e. individuals). The second approach, often called holist or structuralist, has its roots in the Durkheimian tradition in social science, especially in structural sociology, as well as with Parsonian structural-functionalism, but can also be found in continental structuralism, Wallersteinian world-systems theory, some versions of macrostructural historical sociology (an archetypal example is Skocpol, 1979), and some positivist representations or interpretations of ‘structural Marxism’ (Porpora, 1989; Wendt, 1999; Wight, 2006a). In this holistic approach to social phenomena, structures are seen as being real and having real causal effects, whereas the actions of agents are portrayed as solely being a product of these effects. This approach comes in many forms, including quantitative, positivist, ‘covering-law’ versions; historical macrostructural versions; and more hermeneutical, ideational and interpretivist versions. As Porpora puts it, the more positivist and quantitative version divorces social facts and group properties entirely from the subjective and psychological domains and ‘represents social structure as something entirely devoid of the influence of human agency’ (1989: 342). The macrostructural sociology versions explicitly or implicitly reject voluntarism or agency as being significant in macro-outcomes.7 The more hermeneutical and ideationally oriented versions treat discourses and ideas, of which individuals simply become the carriers, as intersubjective structures that constitute and drive human behaviour. While there is not enough space to detail these various approaches, the crucial point is that all versions portray the behaviour of units as being solely a product of the structures in which they are embedded. Agency is replaced by structural determination. Thus, in contrast to the reductionist approach, the benefits of this holist approach are that it recognises

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the emergent quality of structures (going back at least to Durkheim who was explicit about this) and emphasises the extent to which structures constitute agents and influence their behaviour. But the drawbacks are the tendency to portray agents as the passive carriers of the effects of structures and the privileging of deterministic structural forces over the capacity of agents to act otherwise. What is lost in this approach is the free will, or ‘agency’, of actors (Porpora, 1989). The third approach arose out of critiques of the first two, and for my purposes here is best represented by Giddens’ ‘structurationist’ approach since Wendt relied heavily on Giddens’ structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1981, 1984) to outline his own approach. It is also often found in some versions of post-structuralism and postmodernism where it is claimed that ‘nothing exists outside of discourse’ (Campbell, 2001: 444). In fact, it can be argued that Giddens’ approach is a ‘soft’ form of, and a precursor to, the post-structuralist understanding of social structure (Porpora, 2001: 264). Porpora also associates this approach ‘with ethnomethodologists, some symbolic interactions, and other sociologists who employ a linguistic model to conceptualize social structure’ (1989: 340). This approach aims to avoid the extremes of the first two by taking a kind of compromise position between them in which neither agency nor structure is granted primacy. Giddens essentially ends up arguing that agents and structures cannot be conceived of apart from one another and Wendt adopts this argument. One should emphasise and commend Wendt’s goal of avoiding the problems inherent in solely agentic or solely structural approaches. Unfortunately, from our point of view, he fails to do so fully, and – in another example of how his Via Media derails his other scientific goals – this failure again comes from Wendt’s relativist rather than realist ontological position. The focus here will be solely on the key aspects of Giddens’ approach that make it conflationist.8 The jumping off point is that Giddens differentiates ‘social system’ from ‘social structure’: A distinction is made between structure and system. Social systems are composed of patterns of relationships between actors or collectivities reproduced across time and space. Social systems are hence constituted of situated practices. Structures exist in time-space only as moments recursively involved in the production of social systems. Structures have only a virtual existence. (Giddens, 1981: 26, quoted in Porpora, 1989: 345) For Giddens, patterns of social relationships are not themselves social structures but rather social systems without any causal power that are the product of (i.e. ‘structured by’) social structures. In turn, these social structures are, for Giddens, the rules and resources associated with those social relationships. In short, rules establish social relationships that then have differences in resources. Crucially, as Porpora puts it, ‘Giddens gives analytical priority

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to rules and in fact denies that the relationships of a social system have any causal properties independent of the rule-following activity of human actors’ (1989: 350). Thus, what others might refer to as ‘social structures’, i.e. patterns of social relationships or distributions of material capabilities, do not themselves have any causal power (Callinicos, 1985; Porpora, 1989; Archer, 1995 and Wight, 2006a all emphasise this point). The attraction to a constructivist such as Wendt is clear: Giddens conceptualises causally effective ‘social structures’ as ‘shared rules’ rather than as the relational or material properties of ‘social systems’. Giddens characterised himself as a philosophical realist in that he claims that the rules that structure social systems are real causal mechanisms with real causal powers (Giddens, 1979, 1984) and it is this ‘realism’ that Wendt wants to deploy (see Wendt, 1987 for a clear exposition of this). However, on closer inspection, Giddens’ realism is actually quite shallow. Very much like the reductionists and methodological individualists, Giddens insists that the social relationships themselves do not have any independent causal powers (Porpora, 1989; Archer, 1995 and Callinicos, 1985 all make this point). This allowed Giddens to be able to claim that structures (i.e. rules) are real while still remaining in adherence to the dominant view of a ‘scientific’ approach to the social world by accepting that they only have causal force through the practices of the agents which instantiate them. In fact, Giddens explicitly rejects – as naive – theories in which structure is seen as something existing external to the agent (Porpora, 1989: 346–8). Of course, this is precisely the anti-realist objection to the realist view of structure. In other words, for Giddens, the problem with a truly ontologically realist portrayal of structure is that ‘“structure” here appears as “external” to human action, as a source of constraint on the free initiative of the independently constituted subject’ (1984: 16). In contrast, rules, norms, ideology and symbolic orders are all ‘internal’ to agents as a whole as intersubjectively shared cultural constructs. As Porpora concludes, ‘Thus, on Giddens’s own rendering, we are talking about the difference between a concept of social structure as an objective reality and a concept of structure as an intersubjective reality’ (1989: 346, emphasis added). Boiled down, the existence of Giddens’ ‘structure’ depends on the knowledge, or at least tacit acknowledgement, of agents. Structures are neither objective nor material but only subjective and ideational (see Wight, 2006a: 137–54, for a detailed discussion of Giddens’ structuration theory). The fundamental split between a deeper understanding of social structures and Giddens’ instantiationist version hinges on the independent causal power of objective social relationships. In effect, this is the difference between having a (realist) objective ontology and an (interpretivist) subjective ontology. It is here where the interpretivist half (the subjective ontology) of Wendt’s Via Media compromise rears its anti-realist head. Wendt claims his approach is grounded in realism and he groups Bhaskar and Giddens together in his discussion of social structures, but I argue that his inversion of

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the two realist positions on ontology and epistemology leads him to adopt an instantiationist view of social structures that is ultimately anti-realist. Despite Wendt’s goals, in the end he endorses a conflationist approach to social structure that fails to distinguish between structure and agency. Wendt makes this quite clear: ‘Because of this chapter’s bias toward structure, however, the following point cannot be emphasized too strongly: structure exists, has effects and evolves only because of agents and their practices. All structure, micro and macro, is instantiated only in process’ (1999: 185, emphasis in original). The claim is being made by Giddens and Wendt that structure is being treated as real, but in fact, both are explicit that the reality of structure is dependent on instantiation by the practices of the agents. It reduces structure to an epiphenomenon of practices. As has been shown elsewhere, this conflationist approach is ultimately a more complex version of the microfoundationalism of the individualist approach (Callinicos, 1985; Bhaskar, 1989; Porpora, 1989; Archer, 1995; Wight, 2006a). Practitioners of both individualism and conflationism find it hard to accept that social structures, separate from the practices of agents, could themselves be real. Our understanding of scientific realism rejects this microfoundationalism because it rejects the empiricism, instrumentalism and strict reductionism that have characterised positivism (Collier, 1994 has a straightforward discussion of this; see Porpora, 1989 and Archer, 1995 for more detailed comparisons of these approaches). Here, the complete break with positivism is crucial. For us, SR instead entails a causal and emergentist understanding of structures. The key is to recognise that in the realist conception of science, it is the structured relationships of an entity that not only make it what it is but which give it its properties and causal powers. In other words, entities are really structures – that is to say, sets of structured relationships – and their properties and capabilities are a function of these relationships. This is just as true of social entities as it is of natural ones. The causal powers of entities are a product of the generative mechanisms constituted by each entity’s internal and external structure.9 What actually happens in the world, in turn, is a product of the interaction of many different structures exerting their own causal effects, capabilities, forces and tendencies (Outhwaite, 1987; Collier, 1988, 1994; Porpora, 1989). According to the realist understandings of causality and of explanation, the role of science is to explain the causal powers of an object of study in terms of these structures, and to explain actual events or state of affairs in terms of conjunctures of the causal powers of these structures. Emergence, in turn, has important implications not only for the reality of social structures but also for conceptions of agency. Thus, emergence is critical not only to the realist rejection of reductionism but also to the rejection of holism (or ‘structuralism’).10 A key feature of social phenomena that cause them to be emergent from biological phenomena is the human capacity for choice. This produces the reality of ‘agency’ (as the word is used

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in the social sciences). As such, agency is a property of social actors which prevents them from simply being the carriers of structures as the holist or structuralist approach entails. Agents may be influenced, constrained, affected and even constituted by larger social structures, but their behaviour is not determined by these structures. Agency is also a feature of human behaviour which ensures that social systems are always open systems (as opposed to the closed systems entailed in controlled experiments). This means that human behaviour can never be predicted in a deductive–nomological fashion in the way that positivist methodological individualist approaches to social science attempt to do, such as neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. It is impossible to isolate ‘laws’ of human behaviour, such as one could in a closed system, not just because it is difficult to construct human experiments, but more importantly because humans can always choose to do other than what these ‘laws’ predict (see Archer and Tritter, 2000 for specific arguments about this). Humans can always choose to act in ways other than what ‘rational actor’ models predict.

12.5 An alternative realist conception of the agent–structure relationship Taking all these realist arguments into account, there is a conception of the agent–structure relationship which is left out of Wendt’s approach. This fourth approach sees social structures as being enduring sets of social relationships. Broadly speaking, these structured relationships could come in many forms: social positions and roles, the distribution of material things (e.g. factors of production, resources, wealth, or military capabilities), or ideational structures (e.g. distributions of norms, values, rules, beliefs, knowledge). In essence, from a realist point of view, any set of relatively enduring and structured relationships that are a product of social activity and have an effect on the social world could be a social structure. The difference between this realist conception of social structure and that of Giddens is that this can include the actual relations of society,11 rather than being limited to the rules and roles that produce these relations (this point is emphasised by Collier, 1994; Porpora, 1989; Archer, 1995 and Joseph, 2002). The structured relationships themselves can have causal powers and properties.12 From a realist understanding of science, their causal powers reside in and derive from the causal mechanisms that are constituted by the structure of these relationships among social positions. These causal mechanisms can then exert a force or produce an effect. Of course, that force or effect can be neutralised, cancelled out, counteracted, diffused, constrained, modified, or in some manner interfered with, by other mechanisms.13 Together, both the effects of social structures and the actions of agents produce the patterns and regularities of the social world (Bhaskar, 1975; 1979; Porpora, 1989; Collier, 1994; Archer, 1995; Carter, 2000; Joseph, 2002; Wight, 2006a).

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This understanding of social structures can accommodate both the first (individualist) or second (holist) conceptions of social activity and social facts without denying the other. In fact, Wendt correctly makes the point that ‘Any theory of society can be [re-] interpreted in realist terms’ (1999: 51). However, and most crucially, unlike with the third (conflationist) approach, the social structures, once produced, can endure and thus be clearly distinct from and not just instantiated by the agents which may encounter or inhabit them. This position goes far beyond Wendt’s, and therefore entails a real dualism of structure and agency – that is, that structure and agency are truly distinct and irreducible to each other. The claim about the ontological independence of structures from agents’ practices is conceptually difficult to accept for those working within either the empiricist or interpretivist traditions. And it appears to be true for Wendt as well. This difficulty comes directly from the fact that social structures are ‘activity dependent’ for their creation, so it would seem that they must also be ‘activity dependent’ for their continued existence. As Archer explains, the source of this difficulty comes from the conceptual leap often made from the truism ‘no people: no social structures’ to the belief ‘this particular social structure: because of these particular people here present’ (1995: 141). This difficulty can be overcome if one focuses, as Archer says, on the question ‘specifically whose activities are responsible for what and when?’ (1995: 141, emphasis added). Giddens’ approach avoids this question, by arguing that social structures only become real when instantiated by the current actions of agents. Furthermore, he claims the activities that produce this instantiation are dependent upon the knowledge of contemporary agents about their actions. Thus, Giddens makes the leap to ‘this particular social structure, because of these particular people here present’. Wendt reproduces this leap in STIP. It is certainly true that some social structures may be dependent on current practices for their instantiation, but that is not to say that all social structures are.14 This is a substantive question that must be answered by the empirical study of different structures. Wendt relied on Bhaskar for his discussion of social structures and overlapped Bhaskar’s approach with that of Giddens’ structurationism (1987, 1992, 1999). But, by emphasising the pre-existence and autonomy of social structures, Bhaskar was definitely avoiding the conflation of structure and agency, as Archer thoroughly demonstrates (1995: 137–61), and which Bhaskar makes clear in his later works (1986; see also Archer, 1995). The crucial characteristic with both of these aspects of social structures which establish their ontological independence from the actions of agents is temporality. In contrast to Giddens’ ‘instantiationism’, Bhaskar’s model has distinct before (the pre-existing social structures), during (the process of interaction between particular agents and those structures), and after (the reproduced or transformed social structures) conceptions of the relationship between structure and agency (1979; see Archer, 1995: 139 for a comparison

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of the two approaches). Pre-existence reflects that, at any moment in time, society pre-exists the people who inhabit and eventually reproduce, perpetuate or transform it. At any moment in time, social positions and social roles, such as president, general, CEO, teacher, priest or spouse pre-exist the individuals who inhabit those roles. Similarly, the distributions of material factors such as the means of production or the means of destruction pre-exist their use, reproduction or transformation by the agents who interact with them. Religious beliefs pre-exist their being believed by an individual. Of course the interaction between agents and these structures can change (or reproduce) them (this is discussed below), but that does not mean the structures did not exist prior to the interaction. Humans produce new distributions of wealth out of old ones. They produce new ideas out of old ones. States produce a new balance of power out of an old one. Norms, values, rules and many other intersubjective structures pre-exist their being reinforced, reformulated or rejected (Bhaskar, 1979, 1986). In summary, pre-existence refers to the fact that social structures are not necessarily the creation of contemporary actors. Autonomy refers to the fact that their current effects are not necessarily dependent upon current acts of human instantiation (Archer, 1995: 138). Thus, there are really four conceptions of what social structures are and how they relate to agents. While these are variously described in the literature (Bhaskar, 1979, 1986; Archer, 1995), I will call them: 1. Reductionism: i.e. ‘agents-only’ (e.g. methodological individualism, Weberian voluntarism, microfoundationalism); 2. Holism: i.e. ‘structures-only’ (e.g. Durkheimian structuralism, continental structuralism, structural-functionalism); 3. Conflationism: i.e. ‘no difference’ (e.g. Giddensian structurationism, some post-structuralism, some ethnomethodology, Wendtian constructivism); 4. Dualism: i.e. ‘both are real, distinct, and causal’. This approach is truly realist and emergentist (this approach can encompass causal mechanisms and explanations from any of the previous three, but some explicit examples include network theorists, Marxists and Bourdieu).

12.6 Implications for some key elements of social science This last section turns to some important implications of the difference between Wendt’s presentation of SR and the approach we support here. I start with the point that Wendt explicitly denies the objective existence of social structures separate from process: ‘… structure has no existence or causal powers apart from process’ (1992: 394–5). A brief examination of Archer’s Morphogenetic model of the structure–agency relationship and social change will help us compare Wendt’s approach with an approach that has a deeper realist structural ontology (1995: 135–61). This model

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is designed to call attention to the temporality and relatively enduring property of social structures by emphasising the before, during, and after phases in the relationship between structures and agents. The before phase is the existing configuration of structural relations which pre-exist and are therefore autonomous from and irreducible to the social agents who confront them. In the during phase, agents engage in social behaviour within the confines of these structural conditions, including making choices and forming and pursuing their subjective interests/preferences. The social interactions produce an after phase in which they have left unaltered, reproduced, modified or transformed the pre-existing configuration of structural relations. The interactions may also have reconstituted the actors themselves. This leads to the beginning of another cycle. In other words, some relationships simply pre-exist the agents (or their practices) who enter into them. The distribution of material resources, for example, is unlikely to be solely a product of current practices. Indeed, whether someone is born into a rich or poor country (or family) is not a product of that person’s ‘practices’. Whether a country today is a ‘First World’ or ‘Third World’ country is not solely a product of current practices or current rules. Social relations can have deep histories, enduring qualities and emergent causal powers, which are not reducible to current agents or their practices. However, agents, through their practices, may (intentionally and unintentionally) reproduce, modify or transform the autonomous and antecedent structural relations they encountered in the before phase (1995: 135–61). There are also tremendous implications regarding other concepts fundamental to social science, such as ‘interests’. Wendt has denied the objective existence of interests (e.g. ‘without ideas there are no interests’ (1999: 139; see also 1992: 398)). This claim is frequently made in constructivist and post-structuralist IR and it is commonly deployed against both neo-realist and Marxist theories. This may be applicable to ‘perceived interests’ or ‘subjective interests’ but the denial of the reality of ‘objective interests’, which is typical of philosophically anti-realist approaches, is surprising coming from an explicitly ‘realist’ author who claims to recognise the objective existence of social structures. Again, it is Wendt’s subjective ontology that leads him to conflate two very different things in social science: subjective ‘preferences’ and objective ‘interests’. From a realist point of view, the objective existence of structured social relations and their structured properties would mean that the positions in these relationships may in fact entail objectively structured interests that are independent of the particular actors who occupy these positions and/or how they themselves perceive them. A position in a relationship may have certain objective interests that are independent of whether the agent (who inhabits or has found him/herself in that position) holds, recognises or is even aware of those interests (Bhaskar, 1989; Collier, 1994; Carter, 2000). A widely recognised example is the Marxist understanding of class relations. Being positions in sets of structured relationships, rather

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than being ‘things’ in themselves, classes can have properties or characteristics inherent in their positions without these properties or characteristics being ‘essential’ to the actual individuals in the relationships and regardless of their subjective interests. A person who does not have access and control over any means of production may have particular objective interests that are very different from those of someone who does have this access and control, regardless of who these people are and whether they recognise these interests (Collier, 1988). Finally, the fundamental differences between Wendt’s approach and ours can also be seen with regard to the effects of social structures. Wendt claims that material structures only have effects on the practices and patterns in social life because of the meanings agents give them (e.g. ‘The distribution of capabilities only has the effects on international politics that it does because of the desiring and believing state agents who give it meaning’ (1999: 185). However, from what we argue would be a more consistent realist approach, the practices and patterns of international politics may also be generated directly by objectively existing social structures (such as the distribution of material capabilities). A major feature of SR that distinguishes it from the anti-realism of both positivism and interpretivism is the recognition of this intransitive nature of social structures. The nature of reality is transfactual in that the way things appear to actors is not necessarily the way they really are (Collier, 1994). Indeed, some social relations may be completely unrecognised but still intransitively exist. Let us return to class relations as one example of generative structures in the social world. Just as, say, ‘the presidency’ is a position in a set of structured social relations which pre-exists, and is not solely dependent on the particular individual who inhabits that position, the same could be true, for example, of structured positions such as ‘capitalist’ and ‘worker’. Class relations can be antecedent to and autonomous of the individuals who inhabit their positions. However, unlike the presidency, these social relations are not solely a product of roles and rules and therefore are not necessarily directly understood or even recognised by their inhabitants.15 Structured class relations could exist independently of agents’ consciousness (Collier, 1988). Being intransitive, these positions do not depend for their existence on the meaning attached to them by their inhabitants or indeed even on the knowledge of their existence. As such, these particular relationships could generate social patterns, such as inequality of income, class conflict or imperialist wars, irrespective of whether the individuals involved give meaning to or even acknowledge their existence (Collier, 1988). In fact, some generative structures, such as class relations, may only be identifiable and understood through their effects. This would not deny their existence, however. The existence of their effects would demonstrate the reality of the generative structures even if the actors do not know of them, similar to the way falling out of a window demonstrates the reality of gravity despite the unobservable nature of gravity and regardless

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of the victim’s knowledge or understanding of gravity (Carter, 2000). Thus, the distribution of material capabilities could indeed produce effects that are independent of the meanings actors give them. Whether these effects are large or significant would be an empirical question. Thus, Wendt’s philosophical critique of Waltzian neo-realism is unfounded. It may indeed be the case, as neo-realism asserts, that the distribution of capabilities may produce effects on system structure and state behaviour independent of how states give them meaning. Whether these theories are correct in their assertions is a wholly separate empirical matter. But Wendt should not dismiss them a priori by way of philosophical arguments. More importantly, however, many social theories would be more coherent if their explanatory mechanisms were reformulated in this realist manner. For example, in IR, Waltzian neo-realism, if reformulated to reject its microfoundationalist ontological reductionism, would be less internally contradictory. Unfortunately, because Waltz was working within a positivist model of science, he adopted an ontologically reductionist approach to structure, claiming that agents are all that really exist. Waltz’s approach was thus internally contradictory in that he claims that structure explains outcomes yet structure does not really exist. As a result, the coherence of his structuralism has been undermined. Yet, while Wendt (1987, 1999), Ashley (1984) and others claim that this means his approach is not truly ‘structural’, Wight (2006a) is correct in pointing out that this critique is confusing Waltz’s ontology (which is individualist) with his explanatory mechanism (which is structural), and that in fact Waltz’s approach is structural in the sense that it is the system structure that explains outcomes in his theory. Thus, while Wendt claimed his approach was more structural than Waltz’s, I would point out that, whereas Waltz’s approach denies structures their reality while granting structures causal power, ironically it is Wendt’s approach which denies their causal power independent of agents (by conflating the two) while claiming to grant them an ontological reality. Both Wendt’s and Waltz’s approaches would be more internally consistent and convincing if they were reformulated in this realist way: structures are both causally effective and real. However, by having employed neo-realism and Marxism as examples, it is important not to give the impression that it is necessary for these social structures to be material relationships in order to have enduring, emergent properties and causal powers (see e.g. Patomäki, 2002 for a focus on ideational structures). In fact, I will use one of Wendt’s own theories to provide an example of an enduring and causal ideational structure that does not require practices for its continued existence nor for its causal power. As part of his alternative to Waltz’s theory of international system structure, Wendt replaces Waltz’s materialist understanding with ‘an idealist view of structure as a “distribution of knowledge”’ (1999: 16). Wendt argues that the selfhelp/power-politics version of international anarchy is not inherent to the

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structure of anarchy as Waltz claims, but rather could originally have been a product of predatory state practices engaged in the distant past. Crucially, Wendt argues that it does not matter whether any state today identifies or behaves in a predatory manner. Wendt correctly points out that, despite this, the resultant knowledge structure today confronts states as a real thing. According to Wendt, the mere knowledge of past states having behaved in such a predatory manner is enough to cause states to behave ‘as if’ other states are predatory, even if they are not, because of the uncertainty that the structure of anarchy creates about state intentions (1992). If examined carefully, it is clear that in this argument this ‘knowledge structure’ was created by past (predatory) practices, but (1) clearly continues to exist after those practices may have long ended, (2) continues to exert a causal force on current practices, and (3) current practices do not have to instantiate the knowledge structure itself. Thus, in Wendt’s own telling, even ideational structures do not depend on current practices for their continued existence nor for their causal power.

12.7 Conclusion To conclude, I turn to the way in which Wendt’s philosophy and ontology determined his substantive theory. Many authors have been confused by the ‘rump materialism’ found in Wendt’s version of constructivism, arguing that Wendt appears to want to have it both ways. For example, Smith argues: The problem is that Wendt seems to alter his view of the relationship between the material and the ideational. Sometimes the former has ‘some intrinsic causal powers’, at other times the ideational constitutes the material. Thus he wants to ‘defend a “rump” materialism which opposes the more radical constructivist view that brute material forces have no independent effects on international politics.’ … Yet in other places, Wendt argues the opposite: ‘the effects of anarchy and material structure depend on what states want’; ‘it is only because of their interaction with ideas that material forces have the effects they do’; ‘Ultimately it is our ambitions, fears, and hopes – the things we want material forces for – that drive social evolution, not the material forces as such’… I think that these quotes reveal a confusing and ambiguous picture of the relationship between the material and the ideational … (2000: 154) I think this confusion arises from the lack of a clear division between Wendt’s philosophical approach (the material world exists and possibly constrains the social world) and his substantive theory (the independent effects of the material world end up being negligible outside of how they are constituted by ideas). Were these two (philosophical vs substantive) positions clearly separated, Smith’s criticisms would be invalid. Seen this way,

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these two positions are perfectly compatible. But Wendt is, to a great extent, responsible for this confusion because his philosophical arguments adopt an explicitly interpretivist (subjective) ontology. This subjective ontology (rather than substantive evidence) then does much of the actual work of showing that the material world has very little independent effect. Indeed, Krasner pointed out that Wendt’s STIP is primarily a set of theoretical arguments with very little empirical evidence (2000: 135). Wendt’s (subjectivist) ontology has determined his (constructivist) social theory which in turn shaped his (‘anarchy is what states make of it’) IR theory. In other words, his idealist philosophy of science privileged his constructivist substantive theory. Most notably, his idealist variation of SR essentially excludes or rules out materialist approaches such as neo-realism or Marxism. This shaping of substantive theory by philosophical approach is precisely what he says social scientists should not do (1999: 51, 91). This justifiably produces the confusion between what should be separate philosophical and substantive arguments, and unfortunately, as Smith’s comments illustrate, makes SR appear to be confusing and incoherent. Because of the tremendous influence of Wendt’s work, this has had a negative impact on how the fields of political science and IR view SR. The aim of this chapter was to present an alternative understanding of SR, highlighting the central differences and crucial implications for ontology, epistemology, the structure–agent relationship, and the emergent, enduring and causal properties of both material and ideational social structures.

Notes 1. Indeed, it would be hard to overemphasise the widespread impact of Wendt’s work in IR. Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (STIP), where his philosophical vision was most thoroughly explicated, has been remarkably influential, winning the ISA’s ‘Best Book of the Decade Award’, and being called one of the ‘key books in the field’ by the editors of Review of International Studies (Footnote 1: 123 of (2007), also pp. 26, 123–4). Alker went so far as to suggest that Wendt has become what Carr, Morgenthau, Kaplan and Waltz each were in the earlier evolution of our discipline (2000: 141). Robert Keohane, for example, stated, ‘Wendt’s book is virtually certain to become a classic work on international relations theory, standard on graduate reading lists’ (2000: 125). Alker similarly wrote that STIP ‘is so impressive an achievement that it has a good chance to become a standard text of the mainline, American-oriented, professional International Relations literature’ (2000: 141). Steve Smith has also said that ‘Wendt’s book is likely to be as influential as Waltz’s ... The book is likely to become the standard account for those working within the social constructivist literature of International Politics’ (Smith, 2000: 151). Guzzini and Leander have similarly stated that ‘Wendt’s work has rapidly become one of the main reference points of the theoretical debate in International Relations (IR)’ (2006: xvii). It is through STIP and Wendt’s other works that IR scholars are most familiar with SR. Of course, one product of this success is that Wendt’s work on the subject of SR is widely considered authoritative

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

in IR. Stephen Krasner, for example, declared Wendt’s ‘discussion of SR ought to be required reading for any student of international relations, or political science for that matter’ (2000: 131). As Guzzini and Leander have noted, STIP ‘was acclaimed and contested even before it was published in 1999’ and has since ‘been the issue of special panels at many conferences, of a forum in the Review of International Studies … and in Cooperation and Conflict … to name just two. It became the object of an interminable series of book reviews, including a paragraph in The Economist (3–9 March 2001: 89), an event perhaps unique for any theoretical treatise in IR’ (2006: xvii).Others, such as Fred Chernoff, while disagreeing with some parts of Wendt’s presentation of the philosophical issues involved, note that, ‘The recent increase in interest in scientific realist foundations for international relations theory [has been] spearheaded by Wendt in various works, most fully articulated in his Social Theory of International Politics’ (2002: 189). As a final note, this chapter is not necessarily an engagement with Wendt today, as he has stated elsewhere that he is ‘already reconsidering [STIP’s] argument from the ground up’ (2006: 184), but rather with regard to his arguments in STIP because of their widespread influence and impact. Wight makes this point for IR (2002: 25); see Gunnell (1995: 925) for political science; see Taylor (1987) for an example of this conflation in political theory; see Bhaskar (1986) and Collier (1994) for a fuller exposition and critique of this in the philosophy of science. See also Smith (1996: 11) for the claim that the importance of positivism comes not from self-labelling but that it ‘has determined what could be studied because it has determined what kinds of things existed in international relations’. Having made these points, I also want to emphasise the many areas where Wendt’s presentation is accurate, incisive and informative (a few of which I will come back to in the course of discussing the other issues in this chapter), including: his excellent critiques of empiricism and instrumentalism, and of the deductive–nomological (D-N) model of explanation; his brief yet highly explanatory summary of abductive inference to the best explanation (IBE); his descriptions of many of the primary and relevant aspects of philosophical realism; his recognition that realism implies a fallibilist approach to knowledge; his claims that positivism has long been abandoned in the natural sciences and the implication that it should be in the social sciences as well; and his argument that ideas and other socially constructed phenomena are nonetheless real. Primarily through the related but different issue of level of analysis; see Wight (2006a: 104–19), for a clear differentiation of these two issues. For the structure– agency debates in IR, see Ashley (1984), Wendt (1987, 1999), Dessler (1989), Hollis and Smith (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994), Patomäki (2002), Carlsnaes (1992), Doty (1997) and Wight (2006a). Skocpol, for example, identified the role given to ‘deliberate effort’ on the part of actors as the primary flaw of non-structuralist approaches, and instead adopts an explicitly non-voluntarist, structural perspective (Skocpol, 1979: 13–15) that focuses only on structurally determined ‘objective relationships and conflicts among variously situated groups and nations, rather than the interests, outlooks, or ideologies of particular actors in revolutions’ (Skocpol, 1979: 291). Again, there simply is not enough space for a detailed discussion of Giddens’ structuration theory, but the interested reader could return to Wendt’s excellent exposition. See also Callinicos (1985), Porpora (1989), Archer (1995) and Wight (2006a: 137–54) for outstanding critiques.

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9. Hausman (1989), Fleetwood (2002), Collier (1994), Sayer (1992), Outhwaite (1987), Lawson (1997) and Kurki (2002) all provide good descriptions of the realist critique of, and alternative to, the positivist conception of cause and explanation. 10. See the chapters by David Leon and by Jonathan Joseph for detailed discussions of emergence; see also Collier (1994) and Archer (1995). 11. ‘The poor’ or the ‘less developed countries’, for example, do not inhabit these positions relative to ‘the rich’ or the ‘developed countries’ solely because of the rules and roles surrounding poverty or lack of development. The position in the relationship is itself likely to also be a product of its direct relationships to other material structures. And in contrast to what Giddens and Wendt claim, these relationships to the material world may be a cause of actor behaviour in that they could constrain or shape the behaviour independent of any meanings, norms, identities or rules attached to their associated ‘roles’. Indeed, these material relationships may help to constitute the very identities of the actors and the associated rules themselves, rather than simply be a product of these identities and rules. This is not to say that what produces the positions in social relationships are only material. They could be material, ideational or both (a subject I will return to below). It is an empirical matter to determine the causal weight of these material or ideational factors. One cannot determine this a priori. Materialist theories, such as neo-realism or Marxism, may a posteriori claim that the material world matters more (similarly, idealist theories could claim the reverse), but this should be based on the weight of the empirical evidence drawn from research on the object of study, not on the basis of philosophical positions. These are substantive claims about the way in which the social world works, are open to empirical disconfirmation and cannot be established through philosophical arguments. 12. Porpora’s (1989) and Archer’s (1995) explanations are probably the most wellknown for this understanding of social structures. For an application of realist understanding of structures to ‘hegemony’ in IR, see Joseph (2002). 13. Thus, the mechanisms which generate the ‘tendency of the rate of profit to decline’ in capitalism, or the ‘law of comparative advantage’ in trade, or the ‘thesis of declining terms of trade’ for countries in the periphery, may indeed exist, but in particular contexts the effects they generate may be counteracted by other mechanisms. The fact that an actual outcome is not a Humean constant conjunction does not, in itself, disprove the ‘law’ because the law refers to the effects of the causal mechanism, not their empirical instantiation through event regularities. 14. An example that stands out in IR could be the global distribution of wealth. 15. The example of class relations is used here for explanatory purposes, but the arguments can apply equally to other systems of social relations (Porpora, 1989). Carter (2000), Realism and Racism, is an excellent illustration of how this would apply to social positions based on race; see also Wight (2003). Similar arguments could be made about social positions based on, for example, nationality, ethnicity, gender, citizenship/immigration status or family structure. In international politics, relationships may be based, for example, on military capabilities; on positions in the world economy; on membership in international organisations such as the UN Security Council, IMF, World Bank and OECD; or, as Wendt argues, on Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian cultures and identities.

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Index accountability 54 actual relations 218 agency 217–18 corporate 78 emergent view of 56–7 state 69 and structure see structure–agency relationship aggregated behaviour 214 aggregativity 37–8 failure of 38 agrarian economy 122 agreement and disagreement 56 al-Qaeda 94 Alker, Hayward 163 amalgamation 50 American politics 90–2 paranoid style 93, 95 analytical convenience 36 analytical narrativity 73 analytical reductionism 33 anarchy 192 Anderson, Benedict 108 Anghie, Antony 27, 101, 106–9 Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law 106 anti-naturalism 206 anti-realism 9, 42 anti-reductionism 42, 45 anti-scientism 206 Appiah, K. Anthony 107 Archer, Margaret 20, 76, 102, 112 Argentinean crisis 118 Armey, Dick 96 Ashley, Richard K. 52–3 Asian Financial Crisis 128 association 55 Atta, Mohammed 94 autonomy 220 autopoiesis 102–4

Banks, Michael 173 basic science 11–12 Bayesian theory 157–61 beggar-thy-neighbour policy 161 behaviour, aggregated 214 behaviouralism 168 Bhaskar, Roy 2–3, 7, 20, 29–30, 102, 111, 129 A Realist Theory of Science 102, 150 Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom 102, 149, 154 epistemic fallacy 10, 170, 187, 211 Plato etc. 102 Realist Theory of Science 168 The Possibility of Naturalism 102, 111–12 transitive vs intransitive objects 13, 18 Biden, Joseph R. 97 Bitzer, Lloyd, rhetorical situation 90 black boxes 31, 33, 53 Bodin, Jean 127 bottom-up view 53 Bourdieu, Pierre 4 habitus 15 bourgeois capitalism 135, 191 Brady Plan 119 Brenner, Neil 82 Brenner, Robert 60 Bretton Woods 162 Brglez, Milan 208 BRIC countries 198 bridge laws 37 Brown, Chris 3, 120, 167, 184 Brubacker, Rogers 112 Nationalism Reframed 101 Brunnée, Jutta 103 Bunge, Mario 4 Bush, George W. 93 Byrd, Robert C. 97

Baker, James 96 Baker Plan 120 Bank for International Settlements 118

Cabral, Amilcar 109 capital logic 182 capital–labour relation 61 251

252

Index

capitalism 181–2 emergence of 59 and private property 62–3 reactionary/fascist 136 single logic 61 totalisation of 184 variegated 186, 194–6 Card, Andrew 92 Carter, Robert, Realism and Racism 227 causal explanation 125, 126, 134, 137, 138, 146, 218 causality 50, 67, 89 Humean notion of 170 chaotic systems 152–3, 186 Chase-Dunn, Christopher 60–1 Cheah, Pheng, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation 106, 108–9 Chernilo, Daniel 82 Chernoff, Fred 4–5, 226 Chimni, B.S. 110 choice 217 civilising process 54 class relations 222 Cline, William 119 Clinton, Hillary 100 closed systems 28, 149–57, 218 definition of 150 in physics 150–1 Coleman, James 36 collective consciousness 78–9 collective identity 78 Collier, Andrew 87 colonialism 106 common interest 80 communism 136 concrete objects 179–80 concrete utopia 166 conditionality 116 configurational analysis 73 conflationism 217, 220 consciousness 76 collective 78–9 constant conjunctions 11, 206 constitution 67 constitutive theorising 11 constructive empiricism 4 constructivism 1, 24, 56–8, 66 competing philosophies 110–11

postmodern legal critique 109–10 vs scientific realism 111–13 contestation 83 contrastive demi-regularity 153 corporate agency 78 corporate identity 78 Critical Legal Studies movement 111 critical realism 1–7, 70, 88–100, 167–85 analysis of democratisation 129–47: contributions 139–43; limitations 144–5 interparadigm debate 173–7 shift from epistemology to ontology 168–73 see also Marxism; scientific realism critical theory 1 customs and conventions 55–6 Cutright, Philip 132 damages 56 Daschle, Thomas 97 debate 90 American political situation 90–2 creation of exigence 92–5 paranoid style 93, 95 setting the agenda 95–7 Debt Crisis 115, 116, 117–18, 119, 124 decision-making processes 88 dehistoricisation 24 DeLanda, Manuel 4 delinquent states 125 democracy economic variables 131–5 levels of 139 democratisation 27 analysis of 129–47 economic determinants of 130 and philosophy of science 131–8 Derrida, Jacques 111 Dessler, David 21 destratification 24 determinism, detrimental influence of 65 developed countries 227 disaggregation 35 disputes 56 distribution of knowledge 56, 223 Douzinas, Costas 111 downward causation 45

Index dualism 220 Durkheim, Emile 103, 214–15 Eagleburger, Lawrence 96 economic variables 131–5 ego involvement 90 Ely, John Hart 97 embedded liberalism 84 emergence 25, 31–2, 38–47, 56–7, 62, 67, 217–18 conceptual map 39–43 features of 38–9 meaning of 63 philosophical positions 41 emergent levels 75–7 emergent ontology 12, 25 emergent social features 63 empirical realism 9–10, 187, 210 empiricism 37, 169, 170, 209, 211, 214, 217 constructive 4 Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology 179, 195 English School 53–6, 66, 67 entropy 150–1 epistemic fallacy 10, 170, 187, 211 epistemically recessive case 151 epistemological monism 9 epistemological opportunism 9 epistemological predeterminism 149 epistemological relativism 12–13, 141, 209 epistemology 8–9, 168–73 objective 204, 208–12 subjective (fallibilist/relativist) 209 transitive dimensions 92 equality 55 equity 55 Eurocentrism 54 Europe 60 exigence, creation of 92–5 explanation 88, 89–90 explanatory critique 23 explanatory reductionism 56 Extended Fund Facility 118 fallibilism 12–13, 209 Fanon, Franz 109 Feingold, Russell 97 feminism 1

253

Ferraro, Geraldine 95 feudalism 181 Fordism 119, 124, 197 Foucault, Michel 104 Franck, Thomas M. 107 Frank, Andre Gunder 173 Friedman, Thomas 41 functionalism 60 futurology 153 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 119 general will 80 generative mechanisms 171, 176 geopolitics 183 Gephardt, Dick 97 Giddens, Anthony 103 instantiationism 20, 219 structurationism 20, 56–7, 176, 177, 204, 213, 215–16, 219, 220 global civil society 200 global future, shaping of 154–7 global military catastrophe 155, 156–7 global reform 155–6, 160–1 global warming 156–7, 163 globalisation 73, 82, 196 neo-liberal 190 spatial extension 298 temporal compression 298 waves of 165 globalisation theory 41, 73 golden straitjacket 41 good governance 107 Goodman, Nelson 49 Gramsci, Anthony 84–5 Gulf War 90–2, 93–5 Congressional response 97–100 Guzzini, Stefano 102, 103, 174, 225 Habermas, Jürgen 104 communicative action theory 102 linguistic turn 102 habitus 15 Halliday, Fred 69, 167 Hegel, Chuck 96 hermeneutics 16, 22 Higgins, Rosalyn 110 historical comparativists 135–7 historical sociology 1, 135–7 Hobbes, Thomas 127

254

Index

Hobson, John 69 holism 51, 52, 59, 220 Hollis, Martin 9 Human Genome Project 49 human rights, realism in 101–14 Hume, David 6, 209 Humeanism 45, 170 Hussein, Saddam 94, 95, 98, 99 Hyde, Henry 98 hypersecuritisation 157 idealism 88 transcendental 30 ideational structure 223 identity collective 78 corporate 78 image politics 91 imperialism 181 individualism 40, 51, 52–3, 57–8, 213, 217 injuries 56 instantiationism 20, 219 institutional ensembles 79–81 multiscalar 70, 81–5 institutionalisation 27, 35–6, 46–7, 84, 86 instrumentalism 175, 214, 217 inter-theoretic reduction 33–6 interconnectedness 165 interdependence theory 18 interests 221 common 80 international anarchy 38 International Criminal Court 84, 101, 105 international law 27 realism in 101–14 and social constructivism 104–6 International Monetary Fund 118, 120, 126 Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility 120, 126 Extended Fund Facility 121, 126 Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility 121, 126 Structural Adjustment Facility 120 Supplemental Reserve Facility 128 international politics 17 international relations 5, 167–85 how to study 23–5

post-positivist phase 1 reframing 72–3 and scientific realism 16–22 international society 74 internationalisation 196 interparadigm debate 173–7 interpretivism 203, 210–11 assumptions of 206 ontological/epistemological positions 212 vs positivism 208–12 subjective ontology of 204 intersubjective structures 103 intransitive objects 11, 13, 18, 170–1, 174, 222 Jackson, Patrick 74 Jackson, Robert 55 Jervis, Robert 75 Jessop, Robert, strategic–relational theory 79–80, 81 Jones, Branwen Gruffydd 24 Joseph, Jonathan 76, 86, 103, 112, 167, 178 judgemental rationalism 9, 12–13, 209 jus cogens 113 Kant, Immanuel 29–30 vision of perpetual peace 101–2 Kelsen, Hans 110 Kennedy, David 111 Kennedy, Duncan 107 Keohane, Robert 225 Keynesianism 160 knowledge 22 distribution of 56, 223 relative 22 knowledge construction 12–13 Koskenniemi, Martti 102, 109, 110 From Apology to Utopia 109 Krasner, Stephen 121, 226 organised hypocrisy 121, 124 Kratochwil, Friedrich 205 Kritsiotis, Dino 27, 101, 105 Krueger, Anne 125 Kuhn, Thomas 173 Kurki, Milja 169 Lakatosian model of scientific progress 35

Index latitudes of acceptance 95 of non-commitment 95 of rejection 95 Laughlin, Robert 33 Lawson, Tony 153 Leander, Anna 148, 162, 225 legitimacy 54 legitimate interests 55 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 108 less developed countries 227 levels of analysis 65, 70, 71–7 liberal international relations theory 35 liberalism, embedded 84 lifeworlds 200 Lipset, Seymour 131–2 Locke, John 6 logic of capital 196–9 London Club 117 Luhmann, Niklas 104 Luxemburg, Rosa 109 Mabee, Bryan 86 McDougal, Myers 110 Machiavelli, Nicolo 6 macroreductionism 31, 40–1, 50 macrostructures 57 macrotheory 51 Mainstream International Law Scholarship 110 Maitland, Frederic 122 major conflict scenarios 155, 156–7, 161–3 Manichaeism 164 Marks, Susan 113 International Law on the Left 109 Marx, Karl Capital 179 essential relations 102 Grundrisse 179 The German Ideology 189, 195 The Theories of Surplus Value 179 Marxism 3–4, 18–19, 23–4, 28, 29, 51, 58–61, 66, 167–85 reductionist view 58–9, 62 structural 214 and totality 177–84 see also critical realism; scientific realism materialism 57, 88

255

Maxwell, Grover, ‘The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities’ 36 Mearsheimer, John 102 membership 55 mental processes 19 methodological individualism 36–7 methodological nationalism 82 methodological pluralism 141, 142 methodological variationism 194 Mexican crisis 117, 118 microfoundationalism 31, 32, 36, 40, 47, 213 microstructures 57 microtheory 51–3, 65 Miéville, China 111 Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic 39 mode of production 63 model of science 208 moderate interpretivism 137 modernisation theory 131 Mondale, Walter 95 Monteiro, Nuno 5 Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy 135 moral responsibility 125 Moravcsik, Andrew 53 Morgenthau, Hans 71 Politics Among Nations 71 multiple realisability 42 multiple true descriptions 42 multiscalar institutional ensembles 70, 81–5 multiscalar state power 82–5 Næss, Petter 150 national container view 71 naturalism 206, 208, 211 Nauru islanders 107 neo-imperialism 155 neo-liberal globalisation 190 neo-liberal institutionalism 18, 54, 104 neo-liberalism 2, 53, 102, 155 policies of 197 neo-realism 2, 18, 26, 51–3, 102, 173 detrimental influence of 64–5 neo-realist structuralism 176, 178 Neumann, Iver B. 71 new idealists 104 new sovereigntists 96 New Stream 111 Nexon, Daniel 74

256

Index

nominalism 49 non-intervention 120–4 non-reductive individualism 31, 40, 41–4 non-reductive materialism 177 North–South relations 17, 24–5 Obama, Barack, election of 159–60 objective epistemology 204, 208–12 objective ontology 209 O’Donnell, Guillermo 136 offences 56 ontological determination 149 ontological individualism 36–7 ontological realism 9–12, 169, 209, 213 ontology 8–9, 168–73 objective (realist) 209 subjective 204, 208–12 Onuf, Nicholas 102, 175 open systems 28, 149–57, 218 organised complexity 44 organised hypocrisy 121, 124 panpsychism 78 paranoid style 93, 95 Parsonian structural-functionalism 214 Patomäki, Heikki 64, 78 The Political Economy of Global Security 147–8, 154, 162, 164 Pelosi, Nancy 98 phenomenalism 49 philosophy of science 4–5, 6, 89–90, 129–46 approach to 7–9 and democratisation 131–8 philosophy of social science 32–8 Plato 6 pluralist view 55 political processes 19 politics geopolitics 183 image 91 international 17 US 90–2, 93, 95 Popper, Karl 36 Porpora, Douglas 20 positivism 1–2, 9, 17–18, 34, 64, 88, 203, 205 assumptions of 206 vs interpretivism 208–12

model of science 208 objective epistemology of 204, 208–12 ontological/epistemological positions 212 overthrow of 207 positivist science 131–5 post-positivism 1–2, 72–3, 205, 206 post-structuralism 104, 215 postmodernism 1, 212 power-containers 81, 202 pre-emptive strike 93 predictability 134 preference formation 35 problematic state-centrism 73 Przeworski, Adam 134 reactionary/fascist capitalism 136 Reagan, Ronald 93 realism 18, 85, 101–14, 203–27 critical see critical realism empirical 9–10, 187, 210 importance of 69–87 Marxist see Marxism ontological 9–12, 169, 209, 213 scientific see scientific realism transcendental 169 Via Media 204–12 realist model 14 reality, levels of 170 reciprocity 55 recognition 55 reductionism 31, 37–8, 45, 61, 67, 213, 214, 217, 220 analytical 33 detrimental influence of 65 explanatory 56 and Marxism 58–9 regulation 46 reification 15 relationships structure–agency see structure-agency relationship structured 217 reparations 56 representation 103 responsibility 54, 115 ex ante 115 ex post facto 115 resultants 39

Index Reus-Smit, Christian 27 The Politics of International Law 101, 104 rhetorical effect 36 rhetorical situation 90 Rice, Condoleezza 96 rights 55 Rivas, Jorge 162 roadmaps 75 Rosenberg, Justin 75 Rove, Carl 99 Ruby, Keven 5 Ruggie, John 103, 205 embedded liberalism 84 rump materialism 204, 224 Sawyer, R. Keith 41 Sayer, Andrew 113 Schmitt, Carl 111 scientific laws 11 scientific realism 1–7, 8, 61–4, 186, 187–8 and international relations 16–22 vs constructivism 111–13 vs positivism/interpretivism 203 premises of 206–7 see also critical realism; Marxism Searle, John 78 Sending, Ole Jacob 71 sense-data 37 shared knowledge 177 Shaw, Malcolm 110 Singer, J. David, levels of analysis 72 single logic 61 Skålnes, Lars S. 148 Skocpol, Theda 60, 226 Smith, Steve 1, 225 Smith, Thomas 127 social action 14–15 social bodies 196 social constructivism 102–4, 187 and international law 104–6 social emergence 87 social explanation 43–7 social forms 14 social ontology 71, 72 social practice 6–7 social reality 2–3 social relations 62, 74 social science 5, 6, 13–16, 22–3, 33–6, 153, 208 philosophy of 32–8, 205

257

social structure 67, 213–14 autonomy 219 endurance of 219, 221 pre-existence 219 temporality 221 social ties 74 social transformation 21–2 social world interpretation of 211 relativism of 211 societal integration 200 societies 14 sociogenomics 49 solar system 151–2 solidarist view 55 Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism 126 sovereignty 121–2, 192 Crown as corporation sole 122 Crown vs Parliament 122 state agency 69 state persons 80 state power 86, 192–4 framing: configurations as ‘levels’ 73–5; emergent levels 75–7 multiscalar 82–5 state space 82–3 state system 182–3 state theory 69–87 states 26–7, 192–4 behaviour of 72 as institutional ensembles 79–81 ontological status 77–81 as people 69–70, 78–9 strategic–relational theory 79–80 strategic selectivity 81 strategic–relational theory 79–80 structural adjustment 116 structural realism 43, 52 structuralism 57, 172, 174, 175 neo-realist 176, 178 structurationism 20, 56–7, 176, 177, 204, 213, 215–16, 219, 220 structuratum 87 structure–agency relationship 20–1, 176, 187, 203 alternative conception 218–20 approaches to 213–18 phases of 221 structured relationships 217

258

Index

subjective ontology 204, 208–12 Suter, Christian 123 synthetic emergentism 31, 39, 40, 43–7 system–unit theory 51–8, 67 Teubner, Gunther 101, 104 Third Debate 205, 207 Tilly, Charles 74, 86 Toope, Stephen 103 totality 171, 182 and Marxism 177–84 totalisation 172 Töttö, Pertti 150 traditionalism 169 transcendental idealism 30 transcendental realism 169 transitive objects 13, 18, 171 understanding 88, 89–90 Unger, Roberto 4 United Nations Charter 113 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 113 Van Fraassen, Bass 4 variegated capitalism 186, 194–6 Vergesellschaftungsprinzip 200 Verstehen 89 Via Media 203, 204, 206 nature of 208–12 problems of 206 realism as 204–8 vs scientific realism 209 voluntarism 15, 172, 213 Wallerstein, Immanuel 60, 66, 173, 182 holism of 59 world-systems theory 57, 58–61, 66, 214 Waltz, Kenneth 52 as individualist 52–3, 57–8 levels of analysis 72 neo-realism 223

structural realism 43, 52 Theory of International Politics 4, 16–17, 44, 174–5 War Powers Act 91, 95 Watkins, J.W.N. 36 Weber, Max 103 Weberian ‘ideal type’ 71, 75 Weeramantry, Judge Christopher 106–7 Wendt, Alex 1, 4, 29, 52–3, 203 constitutive theorising 11 constructivism 56–8, 66 corporate agency 78 scientific realism 69 Social Theory of International Politics 205, 225 state personhood 69–70 structure vs agency 20–1 Via Media 203, 204, 206, 208–12 Westphalian sovereignty 117, 121, 123, 127, 192 Whitehead, Lawrence 141 Wight, Colin 70, 112, 175, 207 state action 80 Williams, Michael 71 Williams, Patricia, The Alchemy of Race and Class 114 Wilson, Woodrow 108 Winch, Peter 6 Wippman, David 27, 101, 105 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 6 Wolfers, Arnold 69, 85 Wood, Ellen 181 World Bank 24, 25 world market 189–92 variegated capitalism 194–6 world polity 192–4 world society 199–201 world systems perspective 173 world systems theory 57, 58–61, 66, 214 functionalism in 60 Zehfuss, Maja 109