Four Themes in U.S. Foreign Policy
As you went about this task of writing or coming to an understanding of our
foreign policy in the trajectory of our history looking backward, you
conceptualized it by talking about four schools or four themes that have been
the core of the American dialogue on U.S. foreign policy. Explain how you
came to that realization and what that realization was.
After I became increasingly aware of just how important foreign policy had been
throughout American history, I also started looking at the battles over foreign policy,
and I realized that they actually don't change that much. You could go back to George
Washington's administration. There's this huge debate: Do we side with the French
Revolution in a worldwide crusade for democracy, or do we realistically work with
Britain to secure our economic goals? Do we try to stay out of the whole thing and
defend our democracy at home? When France or Britain does something that annoys
us or insults our sovereignty, do we retaliate by force or with diplomacy? The
arguments that people advanced and the values that were at stake in those debates,
you'll find them in the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, and all the way up to the present day.
Or you look at the antiwar movements in American history. You look at the
opposition to the Mexican War. For that matter, Abraham Lincoln was against the
Mexican War. A lot of the arguments they brought up are very similar to the ones that
Mark Twain and some of the anti-imperialists brought up in 1898, but you hear them
again in the 1930s. You hear them again in the Vietnam era, during the Cold War, and
you've certainly heard them since September 11th. They tend to be the same kinds of
arguments.
As I looked at all of this, I found that these arguments were increasingly grouping
themselves into four categories. As I looked at those a little longer and tried to think
about what the connections and differences were, I came up with this theory, that
there are four approaches, four visions of foreign policy of the national interest that
shape the way Americans think and argue about the world.
And they are? Go over them very briefly.
I named them after heroes in American history. I really try in the book to be impartial,
to try to describe each school the way someone who belonged to that school would
describe it, rather than saying, "Well, this is my pet school and I hate all the others,
they're stupid."
The Hamiltonians are people who think the United States needs to become the same
kind of great power in the world that Britain was at its peak. We need to have a strong
economy. The federal government should be working hand-in-glove with large
corporations and great business interests to advance their interest in overseas trade.
We should try to build a global order of trade and economic relations that keep us so
rich that we can afford to do what Britain used to do, which is to keep any one country
from getting too strong in Europe and Asia to affect our vital interest, to threaten us.
And when a country threatens to take over, either Europe or Asia, then we should
build up a coalition against them and bring them down, either by peace or war. That's
been a vision that has moved a lot of people. George Washington to some degree had
this view of American foreign policy.
Then you've got its opposite, the Jeffersonian view, which says the United States
government should not go hand-in-glove with corporations. That will undermine
democracy. It'll get us involved with despots abroad. We'll be supporting evil dictators
because some American corporation has economic interest that is advanced by this.
And, also, this is going to undermine democracy at home. So you look at somebody
like Ralph Nader as a Jeffersonian, who sees the Word Trade Organization (WTO) as
a corporate, big-government plot against democracy at home and democracy abroad.
But at the same time, this Hamiltonian goal of a grand, global order gets us involved
in conflicts with people overseas. We're involved in the Middle East, so people hate
us in the Middle East, so they come and attack us as on September 11th. "If we'd
never set foot in the Middle East, we wouldn't have these problems," say
Jeffersonians. That's the logic of antiwar movements, and we've certainly seen a lot of
Jeffersonian [values] over the generations.
Wilsonians -- and I think we all intuitively know what that is -- hold the belief in the
United Nations, international law. The United States should be pushing our values
around the world and turning other countries into democracies whether they like it or
not. And the U.S. should also work multilaterally in institutions. We should be
supporting things like the International Criminal Court, the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty. And we should not be unilateralist in our approach. We should put human
rights ahead of trade, and so on.
Then finally, you've got a group called the Jacksonians, for Andrew Jackson. One way
I describe them is to talk about an incident in American history that illustrates a lot of
that school's values. When Andrew Jackson was a general in 1818, he was fighting a
war against the Creek Indians in Georgia. Because Florida at the time was still under
Spanish rule and there were two Englishmen in Florida selling arms to the Indians,
who were then attacking U.S. forces in Georgia. Jackson took the U.S. Army across
the international frontier into Spanish territory without any permissions or any U.N.
resolutions. He went in there, arrested the two Brits, brought them back to the United
States, tried them before a military tribunal and hanged them. And this did cause
outrage in Europe. They said "These people have no respect for international law."
But it made Jackson so popular in the U.S. that his election to the presidency was just
a matter of time after 1818. [The idea is]: "Don't bother with people abroad, unless
they bother you. But if they attack you, then do everything you can."
So in the 1930s, Hitler takes over Paris; we don't move an inch. He starts
exterminating the Jews; we don't move an inch. Japan is [carrying out aggression] all
over Asia. And on December 6, 1941, any opinion poll in the country would have said
that most Americans wanted to stay out of World War II. Then December 7th, Japan
attacks Pearl Harbor and suddenly the polls change. Jacksonians: when somebody
attacks the hive, you come swarming out of the hive and you sting them to death. And
Jacksonians, when it comes to war, don't believe in limited wars. They don't believe,
particularly, in the laws of war. War is about fighting, killing, and winning with as
few casualties as possible on your side. But you don't worry about casualties on the
other side. That's their problem. They shouldn't have started the war if they didn't
want casualties.
So, four schools.
I'm curious about your intellectual orientation at the time you wrote this.
The book was written in the nineties. The Cold War was over, so we were
groping for a strategy in the United States where it wasn't clear what our
relationship would be with the world, what would be the guiding strategy.
It's at this point that you're doing the study and exploring the history,
coming up with the schools and your notions about U.S. foreign policy. What
was it like to then try to apply your notions to the world of the 1990s? Did
that help you make sense of that world?
It did. One of the big things about the 1990s for someone like me who had been
around during preceding decades is that the politics of foreign policy stopped being
predictable. In the 1980s, if somebody was a dove on, say, intermediate missiles in
Europe, or didn't like Reagan's policies in Grenada or Central America, you could be
pretty sure that that person had been against the Vietnam War earlier on -- had been a
dove basically going as far back as the 1950s. And the same thing about hawks -- you
had hawks, you had doves, and that's what you had. And they didn't change, and you
could predict [where people would stand on issues].
People during the Cold War tended to work with very binary systems of discussing
American foreign policy -- internationalists, unilateralists, isolationists,
interventionists, realists, idealists, hawks, doves -- they sort of all boil down to the
same things, and they didn't change. Then in the 1990s, things did change and you had
all these humanitarian interventions. You'd look at something like Bosnia or Kosovo
and you would see an alliance of old hawks and doves being hawkish, but also an
alliance of old hawks and doves being dovish. So why were there ex-hawks now
doves and ex-doves now hawks? But also, some ex-hawks still hawks, and ex-doves
still doves? I guess that helped me start to think, "Can you subdivide these
realists/idealists, hawk/dove categories to try to figure out what would give you the
new political combinations that you're getting?"
That line of questioning got me to see, for example, that some idealist Jeffersonians
and Wilsonians favor a very muscular policy of expanding American values, and
some just want to keep American values safe at home and don't want to run risks
abroad, so that people who opposed the Vietnam War would disagree over Kosovo on
that side, and so on. What I found was that the new realities of the post - Cold War
world demanded a more complicated typology.
And it's the case that if one doesn't look back to history, one tends to see
each case -- Kosovo, the debate over NAFTA, relations with China -- as a
distinct, discreet case study with no overarching view of what it says about
our past or how it relates to our past and what it might say about our
future.
Yes. For example, in the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the Hungarians threw off the
Austrian yoke, but the Russians came in and crushed them. The leader of the
Hungarian resistance, Kossuth, came to America. His tour of American was an
amazing event. Thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands turned up. There was a
demand that the President of the United States receive him. People wanted the United
States to do something about the crushing of the Hungarian freedom movement and,
in general, the crushing of the democratic revolutions of 1848. We actually did send
the navy to Rome, where the papal forces had crushed the republican forces in Rome.
And we provided political asylum for the refugees of 1848. So we did end up
intervening a little bit. But to listen to the Bosnia/Kosovo debate, you would never
have thought -- and believe me, the 1848 event was not an isolated event, either, in
American history -- you never would have thought that these debates over
humanitarian interventions are something that go back to the eighteenth century in the
United States. And that, in general, the forces and the arguments that advocate and
resist these interventions tend not to change all that much over time.
Foreign Policy in Democracies
The prices we pay for not understanding or having a feel for our past are
many, and you enumerate them in a very interesting way. One is the bum rap
that democracy gets in the debates about foreign policy. You go on to show
how the ideal was "Continental realism" with a balance of power. But, in
fact, there is a complexity and richness to the way our messy process has
produced this successful foreign policy. Talk a little about that and how
these schools helped you get a feel for that.
It's definitely true that if there's one thing that there's a near-universal consensus about
in American foreign policy here and abroad, it's that America is no good at foreign
policy. We're not as subtle and sophisticated as the Europeans, many people will say,
whatever the specific allegations are. Some people say our foreign policy is evil and
conniving. We're murdering human rights, say advocates in developing countries.
Others say we're spineless and weak-kneed and can't stand up. Of course, everybody's
got a different stick they want to beat American foreign policy with. But, basically,
everybody agrees we're stupid and incompetent.
And, yet, if you really look at the last two hundred years, it's interesting to ask,
"Who's winning?" You compare the United States with the other great powers. Who's
gotten more of what they wanted? Whether we wanted the right things in a moral
sense, that's another issue, but whether, using this realist idea of the world as a
competition between states for resources, who's getting more of it with less effort? It's
clearly us.
So it's very interesting when you find that the foreign policy of the world's most
successful state has the lowest reputation of any state. My sense of why that is true is
that there's a very popular idea among political scientists that foreign policy needs to
be made, generally, by a small number of people, and that you have to have long-term
planning. Metternich plans Austria's foreign policy over thirty years, and no one gets
in his way, and if he wants to change alliances, he can. He doesn't have to worry that
the pro-French lobby will give him a hard time if he wants to switch to pressure. He
can just do it.
American foreign policy doesn't work that way. Secretaries of state aren't in there for
long. Our process if unbelievably messy. Congress is constantly sticking its oar in.
There's war between the different departments in the Executive branch. Everybody's
fighting over it. And yet, because this messy process allows the four different schools
and visions to be represented, over time our foreign policy seems to define and seek
the national interest better than the conventional, more orderly process of predemocratic states. I make the argument in the book that other countries, as they've
become more democratic (Germany and Japan being two very good examples), have
gone from having absolutely disastrous foreign policies to foreign policies that work
pretty well. So there's an argument that democratic debate doesn't weaken a state, but
strengthens it.
Interestingly, the book is being translated into Chinese. What I'm hoping and maybe
what some Chinese historians are hoping is that this will help legitimate the Chinese
debate, the idea that a free public discussion does not divide and weaken China.
Maybe that's a little bit of my "inner Wilsonian" coming out.
So in fact, you might hope that there are comparative implications for what
you're describing, that although you have attached certain labels from our
own history, you may have a comparable dynamic in other countries.
Right. I don't think it's going to be identical. You know, the Jacksonian [view] ...
probably every country has a kind of a populism, and in some elements, it may be
similar to our Jacksonian populism. But it won't be the same. For example, in
Germany and Japan, public opinion is more deeply pacifist than in the U.S. So you
can't just simply apply the American model. Countries really do have their own
cultures and their own histories. It's also true in some countries you have oligopolies
or oligarchies of families who control the economic fortunes of the country. So there,
the debate between Hamiltonians and other schools is also a debate about the role of
an oligarchy. And while many times our rich have tried to form an oligarchy, they've
rarely succeeded for long. The economy keeps expanding, and new power centers
keep coming up. So the relationship of the schools is going to be different in different
places.
If any large foundation out there wants to give me a big fat grant, I'm ready to
undertake comparative foreign policy studies!
The virtue of your school is that it gives those [interested] in the foreign
policy debate in this country more hope than they might have. We have a
tendency to see the road that we've just taken as the road that we'll always
be on. So that once you get Bosnia and Kosovo where the Wilsonians, one could
say, have the upper hand, there is a sense that, "Oh my God, we're going to
be intervening everywhere in the world to bring human rights and democracy.
There's a disaster down the road." But you're suggesting is that this very
messy process with four identifiable schools suggests that there will be a
balance over time, and a reassertion of the strengths of another school.
It's a little bit like our domestic political system. There's something in it that pulls
people back toward the center. We may go veering of the left, to the right, but,
ultimately, a kind of gravity reasserts itself. I think it's clear, for example, that a lot of
the voters were uneasy with what they saw as an excessive Wilsonianism, too many
humanitarian interventions, in the Clinton administration -- Kosovo, in particular,
where we found ourselves in this rather odd war with Yugoslavia. Thank God
Milosevic caved when he did, because if he hadn't, it's not clear whether we could
have gone on to the next step of ground troops or what would have happened.
So there was a sense in the country of wanting to pull back a little bit. I think that was
a factor in the 2000 election.
[Now] George Bush is in, and we have all this Jacksonian rhetoric. There's a
perceptible sense of unease in the country, not so much about [our] military
supremacy, because if you say to anybody, "What country do you want to see being
militarily superior to the United States?" no one's actually going to give you, "Oh,
well, China, that would be fine. And Russia, Germany, whatever." But [the Bush
administration] is insisting and beating the drum about it, or making a big deal out of
preemption rather than saying, "Obviously, in the last analysis, any country is going to
act to defend itself; but let's not get into the details"; when [policymakers] push it and
say, "This is going to be the foundation of our new foreign policy," people get
nervous. You can see how the Bush administration keeps getting pulled back toward
the Colin Powell view, even as the rhetoric remains very Rumsfeldian.
Which would be a Wilsonian view, to a certain extent?
Well, Rumsfeld is kind of a mix of that.
No, no, I mean Colin Powell.
Well, Colin Powell, no, I don't think Wilsonian ... I would call Colin Powell more a
Hamiltonian. Like Condie Rice. [Henry Cabot] Lodge, who fought Wilson on the
League of Nations, was a Hamiltonian. They don't mind international alliances and
organizations, but they don't think these organizations should have power over the
United States, to be able to veto something the U.S. wants to do, or be able to compel
the U.S. to do something it doesn't want to do. Wilsonians think that if France vetoes
it in the Security Council, then we shouldn't do it. Hamiltonians think the Security
Council is terrific but if you think we're going to let France stop us from doing
something we think we need to do, that's ridiculous. On the other hand, the
Jacksonians say, "Why even bother with these stupid international organizations?
They are just in the way. If you need to go get somebody, get somebody."
So the Jacksonian position was, "Don't go the Security Council for Iraq." The
Wilsonian position is, "You've got to go and if the Security Councils says no, you
can't do it." The Hamiltonian position is, "It's probably smarter to go, but in the last
analysis, if they won't go with you, you'll have to go alone, but don't do that unless
you have to." And you can see that the administration has been pulled away from the
Jacksonian position toward that more or a centrist kind of thinking.
Leadership and Public Dialogue
One of your concerns in writing a book, I've sensed, is the failure of
American leadership in the 1990s to have a script, so to speak, that they
could work with as they shaped our future course in world affairs. You say,
"The task facing serious students of American foreign policy and those who
aspire to lead the nation is to find within each of the enduring traditions
of American statesmanship ways to speak to the aspirations and values of the
American people, in order to win their firm and enduring support." Explain
what you meant there.
I'm one of these people who thinks that the twenty-first century is going to be a
century of danger and conflict. It was very unpopular in the 1990s, but I believed it
then, and since September 11th, I believe it more.
You finished your book in July of 2001.
That's right. So the book is pre-September 11th. But I don't feel the need to change a
word after September 11th. In this world of danger, the United States cannot escape
having an active and vigorous, and frankly, at times risky foreign policy, because our
interests connect us all over the world in all kinds of ways. The political leadership
has to find a way to reach the different parties, the different schools have to be able to
argue foreign policy, and the public has to find a way to say, "Okay, I believe you," or
"I don't believe you." And, "I trust you, and I am prepared to follow you." I think
that's inescapable.
In the 1990s, [interventions in] Bosnia and Kosovo were never particularly popular, or
the Haitian intervention. Foreign policy was driven, to a certain degree, by lobby
groups: "I want this and I'm an important constituency, so you have to give it to me."
It was the feeling that we were so strong and the world was so safe that you didn't
really have to lead. The first Bush administration, as well as the Clinton
administration, didn't have to think strategically, run risks, or get the serious, wellconsidered, profound support from the people that, say, the Cold War policies had.
Another question that you think is terribly important to discuss and debate
relates to a phenomenon, a characterization of America that we fail to
discuss, and that is empire, hegemony. You say at one point, "We need a
debate about American hegemony and its meaning for the national
interest." The New York Times reported the other day that if the new defense
budget goes through, it will be equal to all the defense budgets in the
world. What did you mean as you wrote these lines, even before 9/11?
I meant that history has brought the United States to a certain position of influence
and leadership in the world. Partly this is the result of our own choices in the past, and
partly it's the result of others' failures or mistaken choices. From the standpoint of the
American family, is this okay? Should we try to become stronger? Should we actually
try to be a little bit less out front and pass the buck? How do we even discuss it? What
are the alternative views and what are the costs and the risks? And what are our
criteria for saying that something is successful or not?
I don't think we have, yet, the kind of consensus that would give us the basis for the
debates that we need to have. After September 11th, some people said, "We're too
deeply involved in the Middle East, and maybe we're too committed both to Arab
dictatorships and to Israel. We should cut back on all of this." Then there are some
people who say, "No, no, no, we're not involved enough and we haven't pushed
enough. We should be pressing the Arab world to democratize." Then there are some
who say, "Let's just manage what we've got here. Dictators, democracies don't bother
me, but we need the oil and we need our relationships with the oil powers," and so on.
Well, why in all of those cases? What is your vision of the world? What are the likely
consequences? What is America about in the world?
I don't think that our political leadership has yet been able to give answers to that.
What is the kind of world America is trying to build? How much sacrifice for the
average family, whether it's money, whether it's blood, whether it's living in fear of a
terror attack, how much sacrifice are these goals worth?
The point of having a debate like this is to end up with a consensus, because whatever
we choose among all of these and other alternatives, we're going to have to stick to it
and make it work. Choosing one thing means turning your back on other things. If we
build democracy, we're going to have to deal with following through with foreign aid.
But also, we're going to have to deal with worse relations, maybe, with countries that
aren't democratic, whom we may need. On the other hand, if we decide to ignore
democracy and work with dictators, we have another set of problems. We need a more
informed debate about what we should we do, and why.
Implicit in your argument is that knowing the history, whether one disagrees
with your interpretation of the history, enriches that dialogue, and gives us
ideas about the decisions that go with the questions you just raised.
That's right.
One other thing I want to add to that is that [clarifying the debate] will help foreigners
understand us better. One of the real sources of instability and danger in the world
today is that foreigners find the United States very unpredictable. When you have a
very powerful country and you have no idea what it can do next, it is very unsettling.
For example, again, in Bosnia and Kosovo, [foreign] public opinion was that the
United States did not want a single casualty, wasn't willing to go to war. Now,
suddenly, after 9/11, the feeling is that the U.S. is an aggressive military machine and
God knows whom they'll invade next or what they'll do. And they turned on a dime.
Why? And are they going to keep going like this forever?
If foreigners understood our history better, they would also understand the way in
which we do keep our balance over time, [because] we are, in some ways, a fairly
predictable power. It would make it easier for them to live with us, and it could make
more fruitful forms of international cooperation possible.
What does our history tell us about our weakness for dealing with the world
that we're going to face? Do we have any? And what are the corrections?
We do have weaknesses. Each of the schools, in a way, has a weakness. You can take
the Jeffersonians wanting to stay fairly isolated from things. They have the tendency
to ignore problems until they've become overwhelming. A classic example: [the U.S.
and] Japan in the 1940s.
Then you've got the Hamiltonian approach. Again, left to itself, you get a country
[where the force of] globalization becomes universally unpopular around the world,
and the U.S. is associated with neoliberal economics: taking food stamps away from
hungry children in hundreds of countries, and a corporate, faceless bureaucracy at the
WTO. And so you get people burning down McDonald's over the world, and that's not
so great.
The Wilsonians can be very rigid in wanting to apply ideals where they may be
inappropriate. Clearly, it's a very tricky question. Do you impose your culture's values
on someone else? And how do you do it? When is it appropriate and when isn't it? I
don't think Wilsonians have good answers for those questions.
And Jacksonians' idea of ignoring the world until it does something you don't like and
then going out and swatting it means that your country is going to be militarily strong
when challenged. But that, alone, is probably not enough.
The four schools need to be operating to keep each other in check. Each of them has
strengths; each of them has weaknesses. I think, in a way, the war on terror is going to
be a good thing for American foreign policy because it has concentrated everyone's
minds on foreign affairs. There's a sense, unlike the 1990s, that this is life and death.
We have to take this seriously. We have to approach it responsibly, make choices, act,
and commit resources. Bush is spending $15 billion on AIDS in Africa. This is
tremendous; I think we're going to see more things like this. In the same way, during
the Cold War, fear of the Soviets had us giving a lot more foreign aid than we would
have, otherwise. Maybe we didn't always give it wisely, but you can learn.
I think the war on terror is going to be one of those events that brings the United
States to a higher level, ultimately, for more effective foreign policy. I think we're
going to surprise both our friends and our enemies over time at how effectively we
deal with this challenge.
Advice to Students
If students were to watch or read this interview, and they have an interest
in foreign policy -- either as a field of study or to work in foreign policy,
or as a citizen who wants to know more about it -- what advice would you give
them?
First of all, study history, and not just American history. Yes, study American history.
Study world history. I'd also say, get to know the United States, particularly if you're
going to an elite university like Berkeley or some of the private schools, and maybe
your family is a well-to-do family and you've lived in good suburbs and all that. Don't
just think, "Oh, man, I should learn about foreign cultures and go to Nepal and smoke
hashish." I'm sorry. Study their culture for six months. Or, "I should say go to Europe
or Africa, whatever." That's nice, and you probably should. But what about like going
to Topeka and working as a waiter or a waitress for a summer; working in a box
factory; teaching public school in some ordinary, white-bread, mayonnaise-eating,
lower-middle-class American part of the world, to understand your own country?
That's something I would advise; then maybe more specific career steps.
I'd definitely say read The Economist; probably read The Financial Times. Those are
probably the best news sources in English. Read Foreign Affairs.
There are increasingly going to be a lot of job opportunities in the field. There are a
lot of corporate opportunities for working overseas. I think there are tremendous
opportunities in the U.S. government for young people -- the Foreign Service.
Something people may not have considered, but military careers. I run across a lot of
military officers who've gotten advanced degrees paid for by the U.S. government.
People who have had extremely interestingly careers and do quite interesting things. I
would not rule that out, if I were young person. We at the Council hire a small number
of kids just out of college to be research associates, working for people like me, which
I'm sure is a pretty hideous job in many ways, but it is a chance to find out how people
in the field operate.
One of the tough things in our society is, you get educated in schools, where the
people that you meet, the adults you meet, are people who know how to do one thing,
which is work in schools and universities. Making that transition from the educational
world to the real world is actually one of the toughest things that people have to do.
Is it fair, for a final question, to conclude ... you said at the beginning
of this journey that you were sensitized to the myths of race relations in
[the Civil Rights era], and then you also became sensitized to how things
could change. That seems to be a theme that you have carried to your foreign
policy work. Is that fair?
Yes. I'm now half a century old and have seen an awful lot of change and an awful lot
of things that people took absolutely for granted which have disappeared or have
turned into their opposite. It's very easy to be involved in the tyranny of the present
and to think that the ideas that are fashionable today, the institutions that are powerful
today, the cultural norms that are dominant today, are going to last forever. They
aren't going to last forever. As an individual, you have to try to find a way of orienting
yourself in a world of constant change and upheaval. Find values that you can live by,
a grounding in a history that is bigger than just the history of your own life.
Walter, on that note, I want to thank you very much for writing this book,
and coming here to tell us about it, and also, lecturing to our foreign
policy class. Thank you very much.
It was a lot of fun, and thanks for having me.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History
The Return of Hamiltonian
Statecraft
A Grand Strategy for a Turbulent World
BY WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
September/October 2024
Published on August 20, 2024
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is Professor of Strategic Studies and Humanities at the Hamilton
Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, the Global View columnist at
The Wall Street Journal, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
The twenty-first century has seen the return to prominence of U.S. foreign
policy traditions once largely considered relics of an outmoded past.
Jacksonian national populism, once dismissed as an immature sentiment that
an enlightened nation had left behind, returned with a fury after 9/11. With
the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, Jeffersonian
isolationism—the belief that U.S. intervention abroad leads only to endless
war, the enrichment of corporate elites, and the erosion of American
democracy—also reemerged as a potent force on both the right and the left.
These two schools returned to prominence as the post–Cold War foreign
policy consensus broke up. After 1990, a broadly liberal and globalist
consensus defined the boundaries within which mostly Democratic liberal
internationalists competed against mostly Republican neoconservatives.
President Barack Obama’s retreat from humanitarian intervention following
the disastrous campaign in Libya in 2011 illustrated the waning hold of
liberal internationalism among Democrats. So did his restrained response to
Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Likewise, Donald Trump’s
shock victory in the 2016 Republican presidential primary contest signaled
the collapse of neoconservatism as a significant electoral force among the
Republican base. In both parties, restraint eclipsed intervention as the
dominant mode of foreign policy, and a commitment to free trade gave way
to various forms of protectionism and industrial policy.
The liberal, globalist consensus collapsed just as geopolitical competition
returned to the center of world affairs. Today, the security of the United
States and its allies, along with a variety of international public goods that
the Pax Americana once largely secured, is increasingly under threat. The
foundations of the U.S.-led world order are steadily eroding, with deepening
crises on Russia’s western frontiers, in the Middle East, and in the contested
waters around China. Effective responses to the growing challenges require
the kind of stable consensus that a politically fragmented America can no
longer provide.
U.S. foreign policy has turned in a widening gyre in the last quarter century,
as one president after the other—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden—
brought very different approaches to the White House. Allies and
adversaries alike began to discount the commitments of each president,
given the likelihood that his policies would be reversed or dramatically
modified by his successor. Although Jacksonian national populism and
Jeffersonian isolationism have their legitimate place in American foreign
policy debates, neither can fully address today’s challenges. Another
historical school of U.S. foreign policy, Hamiltonian pragmatism, is better
suited to the crises of the contemporary world. Based on the political
philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father and first secretary
of the treasury, this school offers a grand strategy that actively promotes U.S.
commerce, American patriotism, and enlightened realism in foreign affairs.
The Hamiltonian school lost its way in the “end of history” optimism of the
early post–Cold War era, but the pressures of a more sober era in world
history are leading to a rediscovery of the foundational ideas that make the
Hamiltonian tradition an essential component of successful American
foreign policy.
LIBERALISM UNDER FIRE
The driving force behind the Hamiltonian renewal is the rising importance
of the interdependence of corporate success and state power. In the heady
days of post–Cold War unipolarity, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and many
leading companies started thinking of themselves as global rather than
American firms. Moreover, it seemed to many foreign policy thinkers and
officials that the distinction between U.S. national interests and the needs
and requirements of the global economic and political system had largely
disappeared.
U.S. economic and security interests, the thinking went, required the
construction of a strong international system promoting liberal economic
and political values. It was increasingly anachronistic to think of U.S.
interests as opposed to those of the emerging U.S.-led world system. To
adapt the famous phrase of Charles Wilson, President Dwight Eisenhower’s
secretary of defense: in the post–Cold War, end-of-history era, what was
good for the world was good for the United States.
Today, that vision of a global liberal utopia is under fire from all sides. China
and other illiberal regimes seek to use and abuse state power to build up
economic challenges to leading U.S. tech firms. Companies such as
Alphabet, Apple, and Meta face growing legal and regulatory obstacles from
the governments of revisionist powers. Moreover, the growing trend toward
the use of subsidies and trade restrictions to promote climate goals increases
the degree to which government decisions drive private-sector investment
decisions and affect the profitability of businesses around the world. Never
has the strength of the state been so closely tied to the dynamism of the
corporate world. This connection operates most strongly at the most
advanced levels of tech and production: the information-finance-​business-
government complex is increasingly necessary to the prosperity and security
of the American state and people.
Meanwhile, geopolitical conflict poses actual and potential risk to the
business models of private-sector companies that rely on global supply
chains. Ragtag militias can throttle commercial navigation in a waterway as
vital as the Red Sea. A real crisis in the waters around Taiwan could block
commerce in and out of the island, denying global access to the most
advanced semiconductors. A crisis could also close those waters to shipping
to and from China, Japan, and South Korea, triggering the greatest
economic shock since World War II—and perhaps even nuclear war. The
information revolution is also driving the state and the corporate sector
together. Increasingly, the gathering, storage, and exploitation of information
is joining money as a critical element of the power of states. Information
today plays a growing role as the basis of military power, of the economic
strength that makes military power affordable, of a viable arms industry, and
of both defensive and offensive cybersecurity capabilities. Given the strategic
importance of the information sector, and the reality that only profitable
private firms can support the huge investments required to build a
sophisticated tech innovation culture that can allow a given state to compete,
states cannot avoid taking a strong interest in the health and prosperity of a
domestically based tech sector (or at least a friendly foreign one). Nor can
they view with indifference the success of businesses based in hostile or
unreliable countries.
Both business and government leaders are today discovering something that
Hamilton could have told them has long been true: economic policy is
strategy, and vice versa. The combined effects of the information revolution,
the massive mix of investment and regulatory activism by governments in
the energy complex involved in the fight against climate change, and the
continuing impact of the regulatory changes introduced in the wake of the
financial crisis have brought the corporate world and the American state
into intimate contact. The role of economic and technological competition
in the contest with China reinforces the marriage between the White House
and Wall Street.
The libertarian right will be disappointed that the nexus exists and that it
will inexorably deepen. The anticorporate left will be pained to realize that
states will choose, of necessity, to use their economic and political clout to
strengthen rather than check Big Tech. In the current era of geopolitical
competition, Washington is going to worry more about whether its leading
tech companies are strong enough and well resourced enough to stay ahead
of their Chinese rivals than about whether U.S. tech companies are
becoming too big. Future presidents are more likely to push back against
European Union efforts to impose heavy antitrust fines on U.S. tech
companies than to impose similar rules at home. The question of whether a
given tech company is a loyal and reliable partner for Washington will
matter more to the U.S. government than whether the company is too big or
too rich. That reality, in turn, will drive large tech companies to seek a modus
vivendi with the state.
The U.S. political system has become newly sensitive to the relationship
between business and national security. From the Trump administration’s
battle against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to the Biden
administration’s ban on Russian cybersecurity companies such as Kaspersky
Lab, policymakers are scrutinizing investment and purchasing activities by
private companies to identify potentially adverse consequences for national
security. Increasingly, U.S. economic diplomacy explicitly incorporates
security issues among its core objectives. Agreements such as AUKUS (the
nuclear submarine deal among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the
United States) open the doors to closer tech relationships with trusted
partners. Meanwhile, U.S. diplomats seek to influence decisions by
semiconductor manufacturers and friendly governments to prevent hostile
countries from gaining access to critical technologies.
The rise of populism is also driving business in self-defense to embrace the
nation-state. Populist nationalism views multinational corporations, big
business, and finance capitalism with deep suspicion. Companies seen as less
than loyal to the United States can face swift backlash from angry politicians
attacking them as either woke or pro-China, or both. For domestic as well as
international reasons, American corporate leaders are likely to find new
value in staying close to Old Glory.
PROSPERITY THROUGH PRAGMATISM
None of this would have come as a surprise to Hamilton. In 1772, he arrived
in New York from the Caribbean as a penniless teenager. He was a
formidable youth. When Princeton refused to admit him at a sufficiently
advanced level, he went to King’s College (now Columbia) in New York, but
he returned to the Princeton campus as a captain of artillery during the
Revolution and shelled Nassau Hall.
During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution and his time as
secretary of the treasury in George Washington’s administration, Hamilton
created both an intellectual framework and a practical foundation for
constitutional order, economic development, and foreign policy that
dominated almost all of U.S. history. The Hamiltonian tradition in political
life offers a mix of pragmatism, financial prudence, strategic focus, and,
when necessary, ruthlessness that has inspired generations of past American
leaders. Secretary of State Henry Clay in the early nineteenth century,
President Abraham Lincoln, and President Theodore Roosevelt all claimed
to stand in this tradition. From Washington through Secretary of State
Dean Acheson and Secretary of State George Shultz in the modern era,
many of the country’s greatest leaders used Hamilton’s ideas to shape the
United States’ success at home and abroad.
The Hamiltonian way is not a rigid system or an ideological straitjacket. It is
a way of thinking pragmatically about the relationship between the
requirements of market capitalism, the demands of domestic politics, and
the realities of the international system. It proposes a strong but limited
federal government that favors the development of a thriving business sector
at home and promotes U.S. security and trade abroad. Domestic policy
should be grounded on a sound financial system and a profound but not
rigid or doctrinaire embrace of pro-market economics. Foreign policy should
be based on a commonsense mixture of balance-of-power politics,
commercial interests, and American values.
Hamilton’s statecraft sought to adapt the most important features of the
British system for the United States—which is one reason it encountered
such deep hostility from Anglophobes such as Thomas Jefferson. As
Hamilton looked around the world for models that the newly independent
American republic could emulate, he realized that the essence of British
statecraft, adapted to American conditions, offered the best opportunity for
his country to achieve the prosperity and strength that could stabilize its
domestic politics. A powerful executive, a solid financial system supported by
an independent central bank and a stable management of the public debt, an
integrated national market supported by the rule of law and intelligent
government investments in infrastructure—all these elements would, given
the United States’ ample natural resources and entrepreneurial spirit, develop
a strong, dynamic, and technologically advanced national economy.
That economy, in turn, would allow the rising nation to support a navy that
could defend its global interests and an army powerful enough to address
the security threats that the United Kingdom, France, and Spain still posed
in the Western Hemisphere. Today, beyond ensuring supremacy in the
hemisphere, the United States’ foreign policy goals should be to preserve, at
the lowest possible cost, a balance of power on both ends of Eurasia while
keeping the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific open to U.S. trade.
“AMERICA FIRST” IN PRACTICE
Through more than two centuries of sometimes dramatic change, three ideas
stood at the heart of the Hamiltonian vision: the centrality of commerce to
American society, the importance of a strong national identity and
patriotism, and the need for an enlightened realism in foreign affairs. The era
after the Cold War, when much of the American establishment sought to
transcend the national element of Hamiltonian thought, reflected an
unusual and, as it turned out, short-lived period in American history, one in
which the construction of a global order appeared to have replaced the more
parochial tasks of safeguarding the interests of the American state and
American business. The separation of the business agenda from any sense of
a national or patriotic goal had profound and sharply negative consequences
for the political standing of pro-business politicians and interests in the
United States. It also encouraged the rise of antibusiness populism across
the political spectrum.
The shift from a focus on building a postnational order back to a more
nation-centric foreign policy will likely result in significant and, overall,
positive changes in U.S. foreign policy and in the political climate around it.
Such a shift could also promote the development of a more intellectually
robust and internationally viable understanding of what an “America first”
policy agenda would involve. A brief review of the three pillars of national
Hamiltonian thought should illustrate some of the ways in which the return
of an invigorated Hamiltonian voice to the U.S. foreign policy debate should
raise the level of that debate and, one hopes, help drive better outcomes at
home and abroad.
The first critical idea from Hamiltonian thought is that business is the
foundation not only of the United States’ wealth (and, therefore, of its
military security) but also of its social and political stability. Thanks to the
abundance of the country and the resourcefulness of its people, Hamilton
believed, the United States could be a society like no other. Unlike in
European countries, most of the people would be owner-entrepreneurs.
Widely distributed property ownership and prosperity would insulate the
American experiment from the tumultuous and revolutionary fate of
republics in European history.
The first business of government, therefore, is to ensure the conditions that
allow private business to flourish. A sound currency, a stable financial
system, and deep capital markets are key parts of the infrastructure that
sustains American life. A legal system that protects property and enforces
contracts, backed by competent police and military forces able to preserve
order, is another. Physical infrastructure—such as roads, harbors, and canals
in Hamilton’s day and, later, railroads, highways, and airports—is necessary,
as well. What can be called “infostructure” also matters: the legal and
regulatory frameworks that allow for the orderly conduct of business in the
complex fields of modern commerce, such as the regulation of the
electromagnetic spectrum and the definition of intellectual property.
A Hamiltonian government is pro-market, but it is not exactly laissez-faire.
It has economic policies beyond observing the operation of free markets. It
acts. It invests. It uses its power to promote some types of enterprise over
others. Hamilton saw tariffs as a way to tilt the balance of American
development away from agricultural commodities to manufactured goods
and financial services. His successors would adopt policies such as the 1862
Homestead Act, which gave public lands for free to those who would bring
them under cultivation, and support policies that subsidized mining and
railroad construction. These public-sector policies often resulted in massive
corruption, but they also created wealth for the nation as a whole. After
World War II, Hamiltonians supported initiatives such as the Marshall
Plan, which financed the rebuilding of Europe, and the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization. They
did so out of a belief that promoting economic recovery and integration
among the United States’ Cold War allies would both strengthen and
solidify the anti-Soviet coalition.
The second big Hamiltonian idea—the critical role of the nation and
national feeling—is likely to be at least as important in the coming era of
American politics. Hamilton was a patriot. Perhaps because he was an
immigrant without deep roots in a particular colony, he believed that the
bonds that hold Americans together mattered more than the ethnic,
regional, religious, and philosophical differences that divided them. For
Hamilton, and for Hamiltonians such as Lincoln and Roosevelt, the
preamble to the Constitution mattered. “We the people of the United
States,” the founders wrote, not “We the peoples.”
Then, as now, Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another.
Nationalism—or patriotism, for those allergic to the more common term—
is a moral necessity, not a moral failing. Americans are not just citizens of
the world but also citizens of the American republic. And just as individual
Americans have duties and ties to their family members that they do not
have to the public at large, they have obligations to their fellow citizens that
do not extend to all humankind. Hamilton risked his life fighting for a
nation that was just being born. His successors have characteristically made
patriotism the bedrock of their participation in political life. The sincerity of
patriotism, which led so many into military service, has helped to legitimize
the Hamiltonian vision for other Americans who were not instinctively
drawn to the Hamiltonian ideal.
Hamiltonians have understood that patriotism lends American business a
legitimacy without which its future is insecure. It is the patriotism of
businesspeople as a class that ultimately safeguards their property and their
lives. If a corporation considers itself a citizen of the world; is as at home in
China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as it is in the United States; and has
leaders who feel no special obligations toward the American people, why
would the American people support this business against unfair competition
from foreigners? Or for that matter, why would they not simply tax its
profits and confiscate its assets?
The shift from national Hamiltonianism to globalism across much of the
post–Cold War American elite has massive, although often overlooked,
implications for the immigration debate. If U.S. business leaders are not
committed, first and foremost, to the American people, populists will be free
to impugn corporate advocacy for higher levels of immigration as a sinister
plot against the well-being of the average American family.
Hamilton stood for an impassioned but enlightened patriotism. He risked
his life in battle for his country and dedicated himself to its service, at times
to his considerable financial or personal cost. He understood that the
security of property and liberty rests on the legitimacy of society’s leaders
and that if the great and the powerful are seen to despise the common good
and the common man, the social order will come crashing down. He was
neither a jingoist nor a xenophobe, but he understood that a commercial
society cannot flourish unless its social and business leaders are clearly,
conspicuously, and consistently identified with the flag.
This sense of the necessary connection between solid patriotism and the
political legitimacy of business and property was largely, although never
entirely, lost in the post–Cold War years. Elite universities moved ever
farther away from their old role of instilling patriotism in their students or
expecting it from their faculties. Hamilton would have condemned this as a
dangerous folly likely to end in attacks on the legitimacy of the state and the
security of property. Hamiltonians have long understood that elite privilege
can be justified only by a conspicuous adherence to a widely accepted vision
of the common good—and that serious patriotism is an indispensable
element of that adherence.
The third idea to recover from Hamilton’s legacy is the concept of realism in
foreign policy. The originality of the Anglo-American foreign policy
intellectual tradition is not sufficiently appreciated with respect to this idea.
Hamilton and his followers neither stand with the naive liberal
internationalists nor with the Machiavellian realpolitikers. Unlike the naifs,
he did not believe that humanity was naturally good or naturally disposed to
settle down in democratic and egalitarian societies, all harmoniously at peace
with one another. Short of divine intervention, he did not expect the arrival
of a perfectly just society, a perfectly honest government, or a perfectly fair
international order. He did not even expect a reasonable approximation of
these eminently desirable conditions to appear.
Hamilton believed that people were naturally flawed. They were selfish,
greedy, jealous, petty, vindictive, and sometimes extraordinarily brutal and
cruel. Elites were arrogant and grasping; mobs were ignorant and emotional.
With such material you could not build a perfect village, much less a perfect
nation or a perfect world order. Democratic peace theory, the idea that
democracies would never go to war with each other, had not received its
modern form, but Hamilton’s argument in “Federalist No. 6” (of The
Federalist Papers) is a sustained attack on what he saw as the delusional folly
behind such utopian dreams. And the idea that global institutions such as
the United Nations would ever have the wisdom, power, or legitimacy to
replace national governments would have seemed dangerously credulous. He
never accepted the idea that U.S. foreign policy should be about installing
democracies in other countries or establishing a global system of
government. He rejected Jefferson’s call for an ideological crusade at the side
of revolutionary France. But that view did not drive him, or those who
follow in his footsteps, to cynical depths of despair. Hamiltonians might not
be able to transform earth into heaven, but that did not mean they had to go
to hell. Following a tradition of Anglo-American thought grounded in
books such as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hamiltonians see
human nature offering the hope for limited and perhaps only temporary but
still real improvements in the human condition.
Through commerce, Hamiltonians have believed, U.S. foreign policy could
make the world at least somewhat more peaceful. By encouraging Germany
and Japan to reenter the global economy on equal terms after World War II,
American diplomats, such as Acheson and Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles, hoped to promote the integration of these countries into a peaceful
order.
ENLIGHTENED REALISM
But Hamilton was not a determinist. He did not think that textbook
maxims and social science “laws” of human development, either Marxist or
liberal, could explain the crooked course of human history. Economic
integration could create the possibility for the construction of a durable and
stable international system, but there was nothing automatic about this
process. Germany and Japan embraced a Hamiltonian capitalist system and
entered into new kinds of international relationships, but countries such as
today’s China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have made different choices.
Unlike so many policymakers and analysts in post–Cold War America,
Hamilton would not have been surprised by their rejection.
Law-based and democratic societies might tend toward more stable and less
violent international relations, but there is no guarantee that nations will
persist on this path and even less that all nations will ever embrace it. In this
wicked and imperfect world, the United States cannot unilaterally disarm. It
cannot afford to let down its defenses, and it cannot align its national
strategy with arcs of history that never quite bend when you want them to.
But neither can the United States turn its back on the world. The prosperity
on which Americans’ domestic peace and happiness depend has always been
bound up in overseas trade. When one country seeks to dominate Europe or
Asia, U.S. security at home quickly comes under threat. Engagement may
sometimes demand that, as during World War II, Washington aligns with
and actively supports mass murderers such as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
And it may sometimes require ruthless and decisive actions that test the
uttermost boundaries of what is morally permitted. But it equally requires
fidelity to some values beyond the United States’ own selfish interests,
narrowly conceived.
As Americans struggle to deal with a world in which powerful countries
have rejected the kind of order the United States hoped to build, they will
need both sides of the Hamiltonian vision: the enlightenment and the
realism. Hamiltonian policymakers can act ruthlessly in support of the
national interest; they can also be models of enlightened statecraft. They
choose their course of action depending on their reading of the
circumstances of the time.
The revival of national Hamiltonianism in American life is being driven by
the interplay of a new era of geopolitical competition with the dynamics of
the information revolution. The ideas and priorities that come with it are
essential if the United States is to regain its cultural and political balance at
home while navigating the increasingly challenging environment overseas.
American leaders must embrace the return of a set of ideas that in past
generations have done so much to make the United States, for all its
shortcomings, one of the richest, most powerful, most open, and most
progressive societies in history.
Copyright © 2024 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please visit
ForeignAffairs.com/Permissions.
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/return-hamiltonian-statecraftwalter-mead
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PRINCIPAL THEORIES
International Relations, Principal Theories
Anne-Marie Slaughter
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
G.
H.
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 1
Realism ................................................................................................................................................... 2
Institutionalism ....................................................................................................................................... 8
Liberalism ............................................................................................................................................. 14
Constructivism ...................................................................................................................................... 19
The English School ............................................................................................................................... 24
Critical Approaches .............................................................................................................................. 26
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 28
A. Introduction
1
The study of international relations takes a wide range of theoretical approaches. Some
emerge from within the discipline itself; others have been imported, in whole or in part,
from disciplines such as economics or sociology. Indeed, few social scientific theories
have not been applied to the study of relations amongst nations. Many theories of
international relations are internally and externally contested, and few scholars believe
only in one or another. In spite of this diversity, several major schools of thought are
discernable, differentiated principally by the variables they emphasize—eg military
power, material interests, or ideological beliefs.
B. Realism
2
3
4
For Realists (sometimes termed ‘structural Realists’ or ‘Neorealists’, as opposed to the
earlier ‘classical Realists’) the international system is defined by anarchy—the absence of
a central authority (Waltz). States are sovereign and thus autonomous of each other; no
inherent structure or society can emerge or even exist to order relations between them.
They are bound only by forcible → coercion or their own → consent.
In such an anarchic system, State power is the key—indeed, the only—variable of
interest, because only through power can States defend themselves and hope to survive.
Realism can understand power in a variety of ways—eg militarily, economically,
diplomatically—but ultimately emphasizes the distribution of coercive material capacity
as the determinant of international politics.
This vision of the world rests on four assumptions (Mearsheimer 1994). First, Realists
claim that survival is the principal goal of every State. Foreign invasion and occupation
are thus the most pressing threats that any State faces. Even if domestic interests, strategic
culture, or commitment to a set of national ideals would dictate more benevolent or cooperative international goals, the anarchy of the international system requires that States
constantly ensure that they have sufficient power to defend themselves and advance their
material interests necessary for survival. Second, Realists hold States to be rational actors.
This means that, given the goal of survival, States will act as best they can in order to
maximize their likelihood of continuing to exist. Third, Realists assume that all States
possess some military capacity, and no State knows what its neighbors intend precisely.
The world, in other words, is dangerous and uncertain. Fourth, in such a world it is the
Great Powers—the States with most economic clout and, especially, military might, that
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PRINCIPAL THEORIES
5
6
7
are decisive. In this view international relations is essentially a story of Great Power
politics.
Realists also diverge on some issues. So-called offensive Realists maintain that, in order
to ensure survival, States will seek to maximize their power relative to others
(Mearsheimer 2001). If rival countries possess enough power to threaten a State, it can
never be safe. → Hegemony is thus the best strategy for a country to pursue, if it can.
Defensive Realists, in contrast, believe that domination is an unwise strategy for State
survival (Waltz 1979). They note that seeking hegemony may bring a State into
dangerous conflicts with its peers. Instead, defensive Realists emphasize the stability of
→ balance of power systems, where a roughly equal distribution of power amongst States
ensures that none will risk attacking another. ‘Polarity’—the distribution of power
amongst the Great Powers—is thus a key concept in Realist theory.
Realists’ overriding emphasis on anarchy and power leads them to a dim view of
international law and international institutions (Mearsheimer 1994). Indeed, Realists
believe such facets of international politics to be merely epiphenomenal; that is, they
reflect the balance of power, but do not constrain or influence State behaviour. In an
anarchic system with no hierarchical authority, Realists argue that law can only be
enforced through State power. But why would any State choose to expend its precious
power on enforcement unless it had a direct material interest in the outcome? And if
enforcement is impossible and cheating likely, why would any State agree to co-operate
through a treaty or institution in the first place?
Thus States may create international law and international institutions, and may enforce
the rules they codify. However, it is not the rules themselves that determine why a State
acts a particular way, but instead the underlying material interests and power relations.
International law is thus a symptom of State behaviour, not a cause.
C. Institutionalism
Institutionalists share many of Realism’s assumptions about the international system—
that it is anarchic, that States are self-interested, rational actors seeking to survive while
increasing their material conditions, and that uncertainty pervades relations between
countries. However, Institutionalism relies on microeconomic theory and game theory to
reach a radically different conclusion—that co-operation between nations is possible.
9 The central insight is that co-operation may be a rational, self-interested strategy for
countries to pursue under certain conditions (Keohane 1984). Consider two trading
partners. If both countries lower their tariffs they will trade more and each will become
more prosperous, but neither wants to lower barriers unless it can be sure the other will
too. Realists doubt such co-operation can be sustained in the absence of coercive power
because both countries would have incentives to say they are opening to trade, dump their
goods onto the other country’s markets, and not allow any imports.
10 Institutionalists, in contrast, argue that institutions—defined as a set of rules, norms,
practices and decision-making procedures that shape expectations—can overcome the
uncertainty that undermines co-operation. First, institutions extend the time horizon of
interactions, creating an iterated game rather than a single round. Countries agreeing on
ad hoc tariffs may indeed benefit from tricking their neighbors in any one round of
negotiations. But countries that know they must interact with the same partners repeatedly
through an institution will instead have incentives to comply with agreements in the short
term so that they might continue to extract the benefits of co-operation in the long term.
8
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PRINCIPAL THEORIES
Institutions thus enhance the utility of a good reputation to countries; they also make
punishment more credible.
11 Second, Institutionalists argue that institutions increase information about State
behaviour. Recall that uncertainty is a significant reason Realists doubt co-operation can
be sustained. Institutions collect information about State behaviour and often make
judgments of compliance or non-compliance with particular rules. States thus know they
will not be able to ‘get away with it’ if they do not comply with a given rule.
12 Third, Institutionalists note that institutions can greatly increase efficiency. It is costly for
States to negotiate with one another on an ad hoc basis. Institutions can reduce the
transaction costs of co-ordination by providing a centralized forum in which States can
meet. They also provide ‘focal points’—established rules and norms—that allow a wide
array of States to quickly settle on a certain course of action. Institutionalism thus
provides an explanation for international co-operation based on the same theoretical
assumptions that lead Realists to be skeptical of international law and institutions.
13 One way for international lawyers to understand Institutionalism is as a rationalist
theoretical and empirical account of how and why international law works. Many of the
conclusions reached by Institutionalist scholars will not be surprising to international
lawyers, most of whom have long understood the role that → reciprocity and reputation
play in bolstering international legal obligations. At its best, however, Institutionalist
insights, backed up by careful empirical studies of international institutions broadly
defined, can help international lawyers and policymakers in designing more effective and
durable institutions and regimes.
D. Liberalism
14 Liberalism makes for a more complex and less cohesive body of theory than Realism or
Institutionalism. The basic insight of the theory is that the national characteristics of
individual States matter for their international relations. This view contrasts sharply with
both Realist and Institutionalist accounts, in which all States have essentially the same
goals and behaviours (at least internationally)—self-interested actors pursuing wealth or
survival. Liberal theorists have often emphasized the unique behaviour of liberal States,
though more recent work has sought to extend the theory to a general domestic
characteristics-based explanation of international relations.
15 One of the most prominent developments within liberal theory has been the phenomenon
known as the democratic peace (Doyle). First imagined by Immanuel Kant, the
democratic peace describes the absence of war between liberal States, defined as mature
liberal democracies. Scholars have subjected this claim to extensive statistical analysis
and found, with perhaps the exception of a few borderline cases, it to hold (Brown LynnJones and Miller). Less clear, however, is the theory behind this empirical fact. Theorists
of international relations have yet to create a compelling theory of why democratic States
do not fight each other. Moreover, the road to the democratic peace may be a particularly
bloody one; Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder have demonstrated convincingly that
democratizing States are more likely to go to war than either autocracies or liberal
democracies.
16 Andrew Moravcsik has developed a more general liberal theory of international relations,
based on three core assumptions: (i) individuals and private groups, not States, are the
fundamental actors in world politics (→ Non-State Actors); (ii) States represent some
dominant subset of domestic society, whose interests they serve; and (iii) the
configuration of these preferences across the international system determines State
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PRINCIPAL THEORIES
behaviour (Moravcsik). Concerns about the distribution of power or the role of
information are taken as fixed constraints on the interplay of socially-derived State
preferences.
17 In this view States are not simply ‘black boxes’ seeking to survive and prosper in an
anarchic system. They are configurations of individual and group interests who then
project those interests into the international system through a particular kind of
government. Survival may very well remain a key goal. But commercial interests or
ideological beliefs may also be important.
18 Liberal theories are often challenging for international lawyers, because international law
has few mechanisms for taking the nature of domestic preferences or regime-type into
account. These theories are most useful as sources of insight in designing international
institutions, such as courts, that are intended to have an impact on domestic politics or to
link up to domestic institutions. The complementary-based jurisdiction of the →
International Criminal Court (ICC) is a case in point; understanding the commission of
war crimes or crimes against humanity in terms of the domestic structure of a
government—typically an absence of any checks and balances—can help lawyers
understand why complementary jurisdiction may have a greater impact on the strength of
a domestic judicial system over the long term than primary jurisdiction (→ International
Criminal Courts and Tribunals, Complementarity and Jurisdiction).
E. Constructivism
19 Constructivism is not a theory, but rather an ontology: A set of assumptions about the
world and human motivation and agency. Its counterpart is not Realism, Institutionalism,
or Liberalism, but rather Rationalism. By challenging the rationalist framework that
undergirds many theories of international relations, Constructivists create constructivist
alternatives in each of these families of theories.
20 In the Constructivist account, the variables of interest to scholars—eg military power,
trade relations, international institutions, or domestic preferences—are not important
because they are objective facts about the world, but rather because they have certain
social meanings (Wendt 2000). This meaning is constructed from a complex and specific
mix of history, ideas, norms, and beliefs which scholars must understand if they are to
explain State behaviour. For example, Constructivists argue that the nuclear arsenals of
the United Kingdom and China, though comparably destructive, have very different
meanings to the United States that translate into very different patterns of interaction
(Wendt 1995). To take another example, Iain Johnston argues that China has traditionally
acted according to Realist assumptions in international relations, but based not on the
objective structure of the international system but rather on a specific historical strategic
culture.
21 A focus on the social context in which international relations occur leads Constructivists
to emphasize issues of identity and belief (for this reason Constructivist theories are
sometimes called ideational). The perception of friends and enemies, in-groups and outgroups, fairness and justice all become key determinant of a State’s behaviour. While
some Constructivists would accept that States are self-interested, rational actors, they
would stress that varying identities and beliefs belie the simplistic notions of rationality
under which States pursue simply survival, power, or wealth.
22 Constructivism is also attentive to the role of social norms in international politics.
Following March and Olsen, Constructivists distinguish between a ‘logic of
consequences’—where actions are rationally chosen to maximize the interests of a
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PRINCIPAL THEORIES
State—and ‘logic of appropriateness’, where rationality is heavily mediated by social
norms. For example, Constructivists would argue that the norm of State sovereignty has
profoundly influenced international relations, creating a predisposition for noninterference that precedes any cost-benefit analysis States may undertake. These
arguments fit under the Institutionalist rubric of explaining international co-operation, but
based on constructed attitudes rather than the rational pursuit of objective interests.
23 Perhaps because of their interest in beliefs and ideology, Constructivism has also
emphasized the role of non-State actors more than other approaches. For example,
scholars have noted the role of transnational actors like NGOs or transnational
corporations in altering State beliefs about issues like the use of land mines in war or
international trade. Such ‘norm entrepreneurs’ are able to influence State behaviour
through rhetoric or other forms of lobbying, persuasion, and shaming (Keck and Sikkink).
Constructivists have also noted the role of international institutions as actors in their own
right. While Institutionalist theories, for example, see institutions largely as the passive
tools of States, Constructivism notes that international bureaucracies may seek to pursue
their own interests (eg free trade or → human rights protection) even against the wishes
of the States that created them (Barnett and Finnemore).
F. The English School
24 The English School shares many of Constructivism’s critiques of rationalist theories of
international relations. It also emphasizes the centrality of international society and social
meanings to the study of world politics (Bull). Fundamentally, however, it does not seek
to create testable hypotheses about State behaviour as the other theories do. Instead, its
goals are more similar to those of a historian. Detailed observation and rich interpretation
is favored over general explanatory models. Hedley Bull, for instance, a leading English
School scholar, argued that international law was one of five central institutions
mediating the impact of international anarchy and instead creating ‘an anarchical society’.
25 Given their emphasis on context and interpretive methods, it is no surprise that English
School writers hold historical understandings to be critical to the study of world politics.
It is not enough simply to know the balance of power in the international system, as the
Realists would have it. We must also know what preceded that system, how the States
involved came to be where they are today, and what might threaten or motivate them in
the future. Domestic politics are also important, as are norms and ideologies.
G. Critical Approaches
26 The dominant international relations theories and their underlying positivist epistemology
have been challenged from a range of perspectives. Scholars working in Marxist,
feminist, post-colonial, and ecological fields have all put forward critiques of
international relations’ explanations of State behaviour (→ Colonialism; → Developing
Country Approach to International Law; → Feminism, Approach to International Law).
Most of these critiques share a concern with the construction of power and the State,
which theories like Realism or Institutionalism tend to take for granted.
27 For example, Marxist scholars perceive the emphasis on State-to-State relations as
obscuring the more fundamental dynamics of global class relations (→ Marxism). Only
by understanding the interests and behaviour of global capital can we make sense of State
behaviour, they argue (Cox and Sinclair). Similarly, feminists have sought to explain
aspects of State behaviour and its effects by emphasizing gender as a variable of interest
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PRINCIPAL THEORIES
(Ackerly Stern and True). This focus has lead, for example, to notions of security that
move beyond State security (of paramount importance to Realists) to notions of human
security. In such a perspective the effects of war, for example, reach far beyond the
battlefield to family life and other aspects of social relations.
H. Conclusion
28 While many theories of international relations are fiercely contested, it is usually
inappropriate to see them as rivals over some universal truth about world politics. Rather,
each rests on certain assumptions and epistemologies, is constrained within certain
specified conditions, and pursues its own analytic goal. While various theories may lead
to more or less compelling conclusions about international relations, none is definitively
‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Rather, each possesses some tools that can be of use to students of
international politics in examining and analyzing rich, multi-causal phenomena.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
I Kant Zum ewigen Frieden (Friedrich Nicolovius Königsberg 1795, reprinted by Reclam Ditzingen 1998).
H Bull The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Macmillan London 1977).
KN Waltz Theory of International Politics (Addison-Wesley Reading 1979).
RO Keohane After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton
University Press Princeton 1984).
RD Putnam ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games’ (1988) 42 IntlOrg 427–60.
JG March and JP Olsen Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (The Free Press New
York 1989).
DA Baldwin (ed) Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (Columbia University Press
New York 1993).
JJ Mearsheimer ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’ (1994) 19(3) International Security 5–49.
JD Fearon ‘Rationalist Explanations for War’ (1995) 49 IntlOrg 379–414.
AI Johnston Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton
University Press Princeton 1995).
A Wendt ‘Constructing International Politics’ (1995) 20(1) International Security 71–81.
ME Brown SM Lynn-Jones and SE Miller (eds) Debating the Democratic Peace (MIT Cambridge 1996).
RW Cox and TJ Sinclair Approaches to World Order (CUP Cambridge 1996).
MW Doyle Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (Norton New York 1997).
HV Milner Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton
University Press Princeton 1997).
A Moravcsik ‘Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics’ (1997) 51 IntlOrg
513–53.
ME Keck and K Sikkink Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Cornell
University Press Ithaca 1998).
R Powell In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton University Press
Princeton 1999).
KOW Abbott and others ‘The Concept of Legalization’ (2000) 54 IntlOrg 401–19.
A Wendt Social Theory of International Politics (CUP Cambridge 2000).
B Koremenos (ed) ‘The Rational Design of International Institutions’ (2001) 55 IntlOrg 761–1103.
JJ Mearsheimer The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Norton New York 2001).
MN Barnett and M Finnemore Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Cornell
University Press Ithaca 2004).
ED Mansfield and J Snyder Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (MIT Cambridge
2005).
BA Ackerly M Stern and J True (eds) Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (CUP Cambridge
2006).
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PRINCIPAL THEORIES
Published in: Wolfrum, R. (Ed.) Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law
(Oxford University Press, 2011) www.mpepil.com
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
FEATURE
One World, Rival Theories
The study of international relations is supposed to tell us how the world works. It's a tall
order, and even the best theories fall short. But they can puncture illusions and strip
away the simplistic brand names — such as "neocons" or "liberal hawks" — that
dominate foreign-policy debates. Even in a radically changing world, the classic theories
have a lot to say.
BY JACK SNYDER | OCTOBER 26, 2009, 6:58 PM
T
he U.S. government has endured several painful rounds of scrutiny as it tries to
figure out what went wrong on Sept. 11, 2001. The intelligence community faces
radical restructuring; the military has made a sharp pivot to face a new enemy;
and a vast new federal agency has blossomed to coordinate homeland security. But did
September 11 signal a failure of theory on par with the failures of intelligence and
policy? Familiar theories about how the world works still dominate academic debate.
Instead of radical change, academia has adjusted existing theories to meet new realities.
Has this approach succeeded? Does international relations theory still have something
to tell policymakers?
Six years ago, political scientist Stephen M. Walt published a much-cited survey of the
field in these pages (“One World, Many Theories,” Spring 1998). He sketched out three
dominant approaches: realism, liberalism, and an updated form of idealism called
“constructivism.” Walt argued that these theories shape both public discourse and
policy analysis. Realism focuses on the shifting distribution of power among states.
Liberalism highlights the rising number of democracies and the turbulence of
democratic transitions. Idealism illuminates the changing norms of sovereignty, human
rights, and international justice, as well as the increased potency of religious ideas in
politics.
The influence of these intellectual constructs extends far beyond university classrooms
and tenure committees. Policymakers and public commentators invoke elements of all
these theories when articulating solutions to global security dilemmas. President
George W. Bush promises to fight terror by spreading liberal democracy to the Middle
East and claims that skeptics “who call themselves ‘realists’…. have lost contact with a
fundamental reality” that “America is always more secure when freedom is on the
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
1/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
march.” Striking a more eclectic tone, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a
former Stanford University political science professor, explains that the new Bush
doctrine is an amalgam of pragmatic realism and Wilsonian liberal theory. During the
recent presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry sounded remarkably similar: “Our
foreign policy has achieved greatness,” he said, “only when it has combined realism and
idealism.” International relations theory also shapes and informs the thinking of the
public intellectuals who translate and disseminate academic ideas.
During the summer of 2004, for example, two influential framers of neoconservative
thought, columnist Charles Krauthammer and political scientist Francis Fukuyama,
collided over the implications of these conceptual paradigms for U.S. policy in Iraq.
Backing the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, Krauthammer argued for an
assertive amalgam of liberalism and realism, which he called “democratic realism.”
Fukuyama claimed that Krauthammer’s faith in the use of force and the feasibility of
democratic change in Iraq blinds him to the war’s lack of legitimacy, a failing that
“hurts both the realist part of our agenda, by diminishing our actual power, and the
idealist portion of it, by undercutting our appeal as the embodiment of certain ideas
and values.”
Indeed, when realism, liberalism, and idealism enter the policymaking arena and
public debate, they can sometimes become intellectual window dressing for simplistic
worldviews. Properly understood, however, their policy implications are subtle and
multifaceted. Realism instills a pragmatic appreciation of the role of power but also
warns that states will suffer if they overreach. Liberalism highlights the cooperative
potential of mature democracies, especially when working together through effective
institutions, but it also notes democracies’ tendency to crusade against tyrannies and
the propensity of emerging democracies to collapse into violent ethnic turmoil.
Idealism stresses that a consensus on values must underpin any stable political order,
yet it also recognizes that forging such a consensus often requires an ideological
struggle with the potential for conflict.
Each theory offers a filter for looking at a complicated picture. As such, they help
explain the assumptions behind political rhetoric about foreign policy. Even more
important, the theories act as a powerful check on each other. Deployed effectively, they
reveal the weaknesses in arguments that can lead to misguided policies.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
2/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
IS REALISM STILL REALISTIC?
At realism’s core is the belief that international affairs is a struggle for power among
self-interested states. Although some of realism’s leading lights, notably the late
University of Chicago political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau, are deeply pessimistic
about human nature, it is not a theory of despair. Clearsighted states can mitigate the
causes of war by finding ways to reduce the danger they pose to each other. Nor is
realism necessarily amoral; its advocates emphasize that a ruthless pragmatism about
power can actually yield a more peaceful world, if not an ideal one.
In liberal democracies, realism is the theory that everyone loves to hate. Developed
largely by European émigrés at the end of World War II, realism claimed to be an
antidote to the naive belief that international institutions and law alone can preserve
peace, a misconception that this new generation of scholars believed had paved the way
to war. In recent decades, the realist approach has been most fully articulated by U.S.
theorists, but it still has broad appeal outside the United States as well. The influential
writer and editor Josef Joffe articulately comments on Germany’s strong realist
traditions. (Mindful of the overwhelming importance of U.S. power to Europe’s
development, Joffe once called the United States “Europe’s pacifier.”) China’s current
foreign policy is grounded in realist ideas that date back millennia. As China
modernizes its economy and enters international institutions such as the World Trade
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
3/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
Organization, it behaves in a way that realists understand well: developing its military
slowly but surely as its economic power grows, and avoiding a confrontation with
superior U.S. forces.
Realism gets some things right about the post-9/11 world. The continued centrality of
military strength and the persistence of conflict, even in this age of global economic
interdependence, does not surprise realists. The theory’s most obvious success is its
ability to explain the United States’ forceful military response to the September 11
terrorist attacks. When a state grows vastly more powerful than any opponent, realists
expect that it will eventually use that power to expand its sphere of domination,
whether for security, wealth, or other motives. The United States employed its military
power in what some deemed an imperial fashion in large part because it could.
It is harder for the normally state-centric realists to explain why the world’s only
superpower announced a war against al Qaeda, a nonstate terrorist organization. How
can realist theory account for the importance of powerful and violent individuals in a
world of states? Realists point out that the central battles in the “war on terror” have
been fought against two states (Afghanistan and Iraq), and that states, not the United
Nations or Human Rights Watch, have led the fight against terrorism.
Even if realists acknowledge the importance of nonstate actors as a challenge to their
assumptions, the theory still has important things to say about the behavior and
motivations of these groups. The realist scholar Robert A. Pape, for example, has argued
that suicide terrorism can be a rational, realistic strategy for the leadership of national
liberation movements seeking to expel democratic powers that occupy their
homelands. Other scholars apply standard theories of conflict in anarchy to explain
ethnic conflict in collapsed states. Insights from political realism — a profound and
wide-ranging intellectual tradition rooted in the enduring philosophy of Thucydides,
Niccolò Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes — are hardly rendered obsolete because some
nonstate groups are now able to resort to violence.
Post-9/11 developments seem to undercut one of realism’s core concepts: the balance of
power. Standard realist doctrine predicts that weaker states will ally to protect
themselves from stronger ones and thereby form and reform a balance of power. So,
when Germany unified in the late 19th century and became Europe’s leading military
and industrial power, Russia and France (and later, Britain) soon aligned to counter its
power. Yet no combination of states or other powers can challenge the United States
militarily, and no balancing coalition is imminent. Realists are scrambling to find a way
to fill this hole in the center of their theory. Some theorists speculate that the United
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
4/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
States’ geographic distance and its relatively benign intentions have tempered the
balancing instinct. Second-tier powers tend to worry more about their immediate
neighbors and even see the United States as a helpful source of stability in regions such
as East Asia. Other scholars insist that armed resistance by U.S. foes in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and foot-dragging by its formal allies actually constitute
the beginnings of balancing against U.S. hegemony. The United States’ strained
relations with Europe offer ambiguous evidence: French and German opposition to
recent U.S. policies could be seen as classic balancing, but they do not resist U.S.
dominance militarily. Instead, these states have tried to undermine U.S. moral
legitimacy and constrain the superpower in a web of multilateral institutions and treaty
regimes — not what standard realist theory predicts.
These conceptual difficulties notwithstanding, realism is alive, well, and creatively
reassessing how its root principles relate to the post-9/11 world. Despite changing
configurations of power, realists remain steadfast in stressing that policy must be based
on positions of real strength, not on either empty bravado or hopeful illusions about a
world without conflict. In the run-up to the recent Iraq war, several prominent realists
signed a public letter criticizing what they perceived as an exercise in American hubris.
And in the continuing aftermath of that war, many prominent thinkers called for a
return to realism. A group of scholars and public intellectuals (myself included) even
formed the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, which calls for a more modest and
prudent approach. Its statement of principles argues that “the move toward empire
must be halted immediately.” The coalition, though politically diverse, is largely
inspired by realist theory. Its membership of seemingly odd bedfellows — including
former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart and Scott McConnell, the executive editor of the
American Conservative magazine — illustrates the power of international relations
theory to cut through often ephemeral political labels and carry debate to the
underlying assumptions.
THE DIVIDED HOUSE OF LIBERALISM
The liberal school of international relations theory, whose most famous proponents
were German philosopher Immanuel Kant and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson,
contends that realism has a stunted vision that cannot account for progress in relations
between nations. Liberals foresee a slow but inexorable journey away from the anarchic
world the realists envision, as trade and finance forge ties between nations, and
democratic norms spread. Because elected leaders are accountable to the people (who
bear the burdens of war), liberals expect that democracies will not attack each other and
will regard each other’s regimes as legitimate and nonthreatening. Many liberals also
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
5/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
believe that the rule of law and transparency of democratic processes make it easier to
sustain international cooperation, especially when these practices are enshrined in
multilateral institutions.
Liberalism has such a powerful presence that the entire U.S. political spectrum, from
neoconservatives to human rights advocates, assumes it as largely self-evident. Outside
the United States, as well, the liberal view that only elected governments are legitimate
and politically reliable has taken hold. So it is no surprise that liberal themes are
constantly invoked as a response to today’s security dilemmas. But the last several years
have also produced a fierce tug-of-war between disparate strains of liberal thought.
Supporters and critics of the Bush administration, in particular, have emphasized very
different elements of the liberal canon.
For its part, the Bush administration highlights democracy promotion while largely
turning its back on the international institutions that most liberal theorists champion.
The U.S. National Security Strategy of September 2002, famous for its support of
preventive war, also dwells on the need to promote democracy as a means of fighting
terrorism and promoting peace. The Millennium Challenge program allocates part of
U.S. foreign aid according to how well countries improve their performance on several
measures of democratization and the rule of law. The White House’s steadfast support
for promoting democracy in the Middle East — even with turmoil in Iraq and rising
anti-Americanism in the Arab world — demonstrates liberalism’s emotional and
rhetorical power.
In many respects, liberalism’s claim to be a wise policy guide has plenty of hard data
behind it. During the last two decades, the proposition that democratic institutions and
values help states cooperate with each other is among the most intensively studied in
all of international relations, and it has held up reasonably well. Indeed, the belief that
democracies never fight wars against each other is the closest thing we have to an iron
law in social science.
But the theory has some very important corollaries, which the Bush administration
glosses over as it draws upon the democracy-promotion element of liberal thought.
Columbia University political scientist Michael W. Doyle’s articles on democratic peace
warned that, though democracies never fight each other, they are prone to launch
messianic struggles against warlike authoritarian regimes to “make the world safe for
democracy.” It was precisely American democracy’s tendency to oscillate between selfrighteous crusading and jaded isolationism that prompted early Cold War realists’ call
for a more calculated, prudent foreign policy.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
6/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
Countries transitioning to democracy, with weak political institutions, are more likely
than other states to get into international and civil wars. In the last 15 years, wars or
large-scale civil violence followed experiments with mass electoral democracy in
countries including Armenia, Burundi, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Russia, and the former
Yugoslavia. In part, this violence is caused by ethnic groups’ competing demands for
national self-determination, often a problem in new, multiethnic democracies. More
fundamental, emerging democracies often have nascent political institutions that
cannot channel popular demands in constructive directions or credibly enforce
compromises among rival groups. In this setting, democratic accountability works
imperfectly, and nationalist politicians can hijack public debate. The violence that is
vexing the experiment with democracy in Iraq is just the latest chapter in a turbulent
story that began with the French Revolution.
Contemporary liberal theory also points out that the rising democratic tide creates the
presumption that all nations ought to enjoy the benefits of self-determination. Those
left out may undertake violent campaigns to secure democratic rights. Some of these
movements direct their struggles against democratic or semidemocratic states that they
consider occupying powers — such as in Algeria in the 1950s, or Chechnya, Palestine,
and the Tamil region of Sri Lanka today. Violence may also be directed at democratic
supporters of oppressive regimes, much like the U.S. backing of the governments of
Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Democratic regimes make attractive targets for terrorist
violence by national liberation movements precisely because they are accountable to a
cost-conscious electorate.
Nor is it clear to contemporary liberal scholars that nascent democracy and economic
liberalism can always cohabitate. Free trade and the multifaceted globalization that
advanced democracies promote often buffet transitional societies. World markets’
penetration of societies that run on patronage and protectionism can disrupt social
relations and spur strife between potential winners and losers. In other cases, universal
free trade can make separatism look attractive, as small regions such as Aceh in
Indonesia can lay claim to lucrative natural resources. So far, the trade-fueled boom in
China has created incentives for improved relations with the advanced democracies,
but it has also set the stage for a possible showdown between the relatively wealthy
coastal entrepreneurs and the still impoverished rural masses.
While aggressively advocating the virtues of democracy, the Bush administration has
shown little patience for these complexities in liberal thought — or for liberalism’s
emphasis on the importance of international institutions. Far from trying to assure
other powers that the United States would adhere to a constitutional order, Bush
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
7/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
“unsigned” the International Criminal Court statute, rejected the Kyoto environmental
agreement, dictated take-it-or-leave-it arms control changes to Russia, and invaded Iraq
despite opposition at the United Nations and among close allies.
Recent liberal theory offers a thoughtful challenge to the administration’s policy
choices. Shortly before September 11, political scientist G. John Ikenberry studied
attempts to establish international order by the victors of hegemonic struggles in 1815,
1919, 1945, and 1989. He argued that even the most powerful victor needed to gain the
willing cooperation of the vanquished and other weak states by offering a mutually
attractive bargain, codified in an international constitutional order. Democratic victors,
he found, have the best chance of creating a working constitutional order, such as the
Bretton Woods system after World War II, because their transparency and legalism
make their promises credible.
Does the Bush administration’s resistance to institution building refute Ikenberry’s
version of liberal theory? Some realists say it does, and that recent events demonstrate
that international institutions cannot constrain a hegemonic power if its preferences
change. But international institutions can nonetheless help coordinate outcomes that
are in the long-term mutual interest of both the hegemon and the weaker states.
Ikenberry did not contend that hegemonic democracies are immune from mistakes.
States can act in defiance of the incentives established by their position in the
international system, but they will suffer the consequences and probably learn to
correct course. In response to Bush’s unilateralist stance, Ikenberry wrote that the
incentives for the United States to take the lead in establishing a multilateral
constitutional order remain powerful. Sooner or later, the pendulum will swing back.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
8/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
IDEALISM’S NEW CLOTHING
Idealism, the belief that foreign policy is and should be guided by ethical and legal
standards, also has a long pedigree. Before World War II forced the United States to
acknowledge a less pristine reality, Secretary of State Henry Stimson denigrated
espionage on the grounds that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” During the
Cold War, such naive idealism acquired a bad name in the Kissingerian corridors of
power and among hardheaded academics. Recently, a new version of idealism — called
constructivism by its scholarly adherents — returned to a prominent place in debates
on international relations theory. Constructivism, which holds that social reality is
created through debate about values, often echoes the themes that human rights and
international justice activists sound. Recent events seem to vindicate the theory’s
resurgence; a theory that emphasizes the role of ideologies, identities, persuasion, and
transnational networks is highly relevant to understanding the post-9/11 world.
The most prominent voices in the development of constructivist theory have been
American, but Europe’s role is significant. European philosophical currents helped
establish constructivist theory, and the European Journal of International Relations is
one of the principal outlets for constructivist work. Perhaps most important, Europe’s
increasingly legalistic approach to international relations, reflected in the process of
forming the European Union out of a collection of sovereign states, provides fertile soil
for idealist and constructivist conceptions of international politics.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
9/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
Whereas realists dwell on the balance of power and liberals on the power of
international trade and democracy, constructivists believe that debates about ideas are
the fundamental building blocks of international life. Individuals and groups become
powerful if they can convince others to adopt their ideas. People’s understanding of
their interests depends on the ideas they hold. Constructivists find absurd the idea of
some identifiable and immutable “national interest,” which some realists cherish.
Especially in liberal societies, there is overlap between constructivist and liberal
approaches, but the two are distinct. Constructivists contend that their theory is deeper
than realism and liberalism because it explains the origins of the forces that drive those
competing theories.
For constructivists, international change results from the work of intellectual
entrepreneurs who proselytize new ideas and “name and shame” actors whose behavior
deviates from accepted standards. Consequently, constructivists often study the role of
transnational activist networks — such as Human Rights Watch or the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines — in promoting change. Such groups typically uncover
and publicize information about violations of legal or moral standards at least
rhetorically supported by powerful democracies, including “disappearances” during the
Argentine military’s rule in the late 1970s, concentration camps in Bosnia, and the huge
number of civilian deaths from land mines. This publicity is then used to press
governments to adopt specific remedies, such as the establishment of a war crimes
tribunal or the adoption of a landmine treaty.
These movements often make pragmatic arguments as well as idealistic ones, but their
distinctive power comes from the ability to highlight deviations from deeply held
norms of appropriate behavior.
Progressive causes receive the most attention from constructivist scholars, but the
theory also helps explain the dynamics of illiberal transnational forces, such as Arab
nationalism or Islamist extremism. Professor Michael N. Barnett’s 1998 book Dialogues
in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order examines how the divergence between
state borders and transnational Arab political identities requires vulnerable leaders to
contend for legitimacy with radicals throughout the Arab world — a dynamic that often
holds moderates hostage to opportunists who take extreme stances.
Constructivist thought can also yield broader insights about the ideas and values in the
current international order. In his 2001 book, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas
Shaped Modern International Relations, political scientist Daniel Philpott
demonstrates how the religious ideas of the Protestant Reformation helped break down
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
10/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
the medieval political order and provided a conceptual basis for the modern system of
secular sovereign states.
After September 11, Philpott focused on the challenge to the secular international order
posed by political Islam. “The attacks and the broader resurgence of public religion,” he
says, ought to lead international relations scholars to “direct far more energy to
understanding the impetuses behind movements across the globe that are reorienting
purposes and policies.” He notes that both liberal human rights movements and radical
Islamic movements have transnational structures and principled motivations that
challenge the traditional supremacy of self-interested states in international politics.
Because constructivists believe that ideas and values helped shape the modern state
system, they expect intellectual constructs to be decisive in transforming it — for good
or ill.
When it comes to offering advice, however, constructivism points in two seemingly
incompatible directions. The insight that political orders arise from shared
understanding highlights the need for dialogue across cultures about the appropriate
rules of the game.
This prescription dovetails with liberalism’s emphasis on establishing an agreed
international constitutional order. And, yet, the notion of cross-cultural dialogue sits
awkwardly with many idealists’ view that they already know right and wrong. For these
idealists, the essential task is to shame rights abusers and cajole powerful actors into
promoting proper values and holding perpetrators accountable to international
(generally Western) standards. As with realism and liberalism, constructivism can be
many things to many people.
STUMPED BY CHANGE
None of the three theoretical traditions has a strong ability to explain change — a
significant weakness in such turbulent times. Realists failed to predict the end of the
Cold War, for example. Even after it happened, they tended to assume that the new
system would become multipolar (“back to the future,” as the scholar John J.
Mearsheimer put it). Likewise, the liberal theory of democratic peace is stronger on
what happens after states become democratic than in predicting the timing of
democratic transitions, let alone prescribing how to make transitions happen
peacefully. Constructivists are good at describing changes in norms and ideas, but they
are weak on the material and institutional circumstances necessary to support the
emergence of consensus about new values and ideas.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
11/12
9/14/2020
One World, Rival Theories – Foreign Policy
With such uncertain guidance from the theoretical realm, it is no wonder that
policymakers, activists, and public commentators fall prey to simplistic or wishful
thinking about how to effect change by, say, invading Iraq or setting up an International
Criminal Court. In lieu of a good theory of change, the most prudent course is to use the
insights of each of the three theoretical traditions as a check on the irrational
exuberance of the others. Realists should have to explain whether policies based on
calculations of power have sufficient legitimacy to last. Liberals should consider
whether nascent democratic institutions can fend off powerful interests that oppose
them, or how international institutions can bind a hegemonic power inclined to go its
own way. Idealists should be asked about the strategic, institutional, or material
conditions in which a set of ideas is likely to take hold.
Theories of international relations claim to explain the way international politics works,
but each of the currently prevailing theories falls well short of that goal. One of the
principal contributions that international relations theory can make is not predicting
the future but providing the vocabulary and conceptual framework to ask hard
questions of those who think that changing the world is easy.
TAGS: 145, DEFAULT, FEATURE, FREE, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/26/one-world-rival-theories/
VIEW
COMMENTS
12/12
Stephen Walt One World Many Theories
Read aloud: China’s ascent is the latest example of the tendency for rising powers to alter the global
balance of power in potentially dangerous ways, esp as their growing influence makes them more
ambitious. What theory? Why?
Read aloud: The key to China’s future conduct is whether its behavior will be modified by its integration
into world makets and by the (inevitable?) spread of democratic values. What theory? Why?
Read aloud: Relations between China and the rest of the world will be shaped by issues of culture and
identity. What theory? Why?
Walt takes a deeper look at each of the three competing foundations of IR and also delves into areas
that we have briefly mentioned but not yet gone deeply into, specifically the impact the domestic has on
foreign policy and radical approaches to IR.
Anything new on Realism? In the section titled Realism Redux, how have realists tried to incorporate
ethnic conflict into a realist framework? (page 5) Walt continues to differentiate between offensive and
defensive realists. How does he define them? Difference between them?
Read page 6 on Europe – this was written in 1998. It is now 2013. Based on the evidence of
historical events, who is in a better position with regards to understanding Europe..offensive or
defensive realists?
Liberalism – page 3 Walt says there are three broad strands of liberal theory. What are they?
Economic interdependence
Spread of democratic principles
Institutions
What problems does he articulate regarding Democratic Peace Theory (page 7)
Radical Theories – specifically Marxism. How can you understand Marxism in terms of IR? Problems with
a Marxist approach?
Constructivist – emphasis on the impact of ideas “Anarchy is what states make of it.” Think the gun from
the first day. Show Canadian Bacon. How is this Constructivist?
Domestic Politics – Why for Walt are domestic politics important? Domestic interest groups can distort
the formation of state preferences and lead to suboptimal international behavior. Can you think of an
example? APAC and Israel. Mearshimer and Walt and Israel lobby argument.
Idea and importance of culture – Huntington clash of civilizations
According to Walt the IR world is still waiting for its X article to help frame future debate. Problems with
this?
Theory of
International
Politics
KENNETH N. WALIL
University of California, Berkeley
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
Don Mis, Onseid * Sydney
Preface
This book is in the
Addison-Wesley Series in Political Science
Theory is fundamental to science, and theories are rooted in ideas. The National
Science Foundation was willing to bet on an idea before it could be well explained.
The following pages, I hope, justify the Foundation's judgment. Other institutions helped me along the endless road to theory. In recent years the Institute of
International Studies and the Committee on Research at the University of California, Berkeley, helped finance my work, as the Center for International Affairs at
Harvard did earlier. Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and from the
Institute for the Study of World Politics enabled me to complete a draft of the
manuscript and also to relate problems of international-political theorv to wider
ise in the oilson of ie, ice paover une the alsopey dear:
ronment.
Robert Jervis and John Ruggie read my next-to-last draft with care and insight that would amaze anyone unacquainted with their critical talents. Robert
Art and Glenn Snyder also made telling comments. John Cavanagh collected
quantities of preliminary data; Stephen Peterson constructed the Tables found in
the Appendix; Harry Hanson compiled the bibliography, and Nadine Zelinski
expertly coped with an unrelenting flow of tapes. Through many discussions,
mainly with my wife and with graduate students at Brandeis and Berkeley, a
number of the points I make were developed.
Copyin-Weley Pub/ing Company. Publishing Company, Inc. Philippines copyright 1979 by
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording; or other-
Most of Chapters 2 and 3, and some of Chapters 1 and 6, appear in my 1975
essay; they were parts of the original plan for this book. Here and there I have
drawn passages from other essays and from an earlier book. These and other
sources appear in the bibliography near the end of the book.
Because a theory is never completed, I have been reluctant to declare the
manuscript done. I do so now-without a sense of completion, but with a deep
sigh of relief pred a dep sense of gratitude to the many organizations and individ-
Rubichie simula neousy in Canada. Lorary be Coles Prilos in the U. ed Sates of America.
Harborside, Maine
July 1978
K. N. W.
Contents
Chapter 1
1
Laws and Theories
Laws and Theories
Chapter 2
1
Reductionist Theories
18
Chapter3
Systemic Approaches and Theories
Chapter 4
I write this book with three aims in mind: first, to examine theories of international politics and approaches to the subject matter that make some claim to
being theoretically important; second, to construct a theory of international politics that remedies the defects of present theories; and third, to examine some
applications of the theory constructed. The required preliminary to the accomplishment
for
testingofthem.
these tasks is to say what theories are and to state the requirements
Reductionist and Systemic Theories
60
Chapter 5
Political Structures
Chapter 6
Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power
Chapter 7
Structural Causes and Economic Effects
79
102
129
Chapter 8 Structural Causes and Military Effects
Chapter 9
Appendix
161
Students of international politics use the term "theory" freely, often to cover any
work that departs from mere description and seldom to refer only to work that
meets philosophy-of-science standards. The aims I intend to pursue require that
definitions of the key terms theory and law be carefully chosen. Whereas two
definitions of theory vie for acceptance, a simple definition of law is widely
accepted. Laws establish relations between variables, variables being concepts
The Management of International Affairs
194
211
Bibliography
223
Index
241
that can take different values. If a, then b, where a stands for one or more
independent variables and b stands for the dependent variable: In form, this is the
statement of a law. If the relation between a and b is invariant, the law is abso-
lute. If the relation is highly constant, though not invariant, the law would read
like this: If a, then 6 with probability x. A law is based not simply on a relation
that has been found, but on one that has been found repeatedly. Repetition gives
rise to the expectation that if I find a in the future, then with specified probability
I will also find b. In the natural sciences even probabilistic laws contain a strong
imputation of necessity. In the social sciences to say that persons of specified
income vote Democratic with a certain probability is to make a law-like statement. The word like implies a lesser sense of necessity. Still, the statement would
not be at all like a law unless the relation had so often and so reliably been found
Laws and Iheories 3
2 Chapter 1
in the past that the expectation of its holding in the future with comparable probability is high.*
By one definition, theories are collections or sets of laws pertaining to a particular behavior or phenomenon. In addition to income, for example, associations may be established between voters' education, their religion, and their
parents' political commitment, on the one hand, and the way they vote, on the
other hand. If the probabilistic laws thus established are taken together, higher
correlations are achieved between voters' characteristics (the independent variables) and choice of party (the dependent variable). Theories are, then, more
complex than laws, but only quantitatively so. Between laws and theories no difference of kind appears.
This first definition of theory supports the aspiration of those many social
scientists who would "build" theory by collecting carefully verified, interconnected hypotheses. The following story suggests how most political scientists
think of theory:
Homer describes the walls of Troy as being eight feet thick. If his account is
true, then millenia later one should be able to find those walls by careful digging.
This thought occurred to Heinrich Schliemann as a boy, and as a man he put the
theory to empirical test. Karl Deutsch uses the story as an example of how newstyle theories are tested (1966, pp. 168-69). A theory is born in conjecture and is
viable if the conjecture is confirmed. Deutsch regards theories of the simple ifthen sort as "special theories," which may "later on become embedded in a grand
theory." He then gives other examples and in doing so shifts "from a yes-or-no
question to a how-much question." We should try to find out how much of a contribution "different variables" make to a given result (1966, pp. 219-21).
What is possibly useful in such a pattern of thinking, and what is not? Everyone knows that a coefficient of correlation, even a high one, does not warrant
saying that a causal relation exists. Squaring the coefficient, however, technically
permits us to say that we have accounted for a certain percentage of the variance.
It is then easy to believe that a real causal connection has been identified and measured, to think that the relation between an independent and a dependent variable has been established, and to forget that something has been said only about
dots on a piece of paper and the regression line drawn through them. Is the correlation spurious? That suggests the right question without quite asking it. Cor-
*One must be careful. The above statement is law-like only if it can be verified in various
ways. Counterfactual conditions, for example, would have to be met in this way: Person b
is in the income category of likely Republicans; if b's income were reduced to a certain
level, he would probably become a Democrat. More precisely, the law-like statement
establishes these expectations: If b is an R with probability x. and if a is a D with probability y, then if b becomes a, he thereby becomes a D with probability y.
relations are neither spurious nor genuine; they are merely numbers that one gets
by performing simple mathematical operations. A correlation is neither spurious
nor genuine, but the relation that we infer from it may be either. Suppose someone propounds a law, for example, by carefully establishing the relation between
the amount of push imparted to a cart and the amount of its movement. Th..
tion established, if conditions are kept constant and measurement is caretur. is
simply a fact of observation, a law that remains constantly valid. The explanation offered for that relation of push and movement, however, is radically different depending on whether we consult Aristotle or Galileo or Newton. The
uncritical acceptance of a number as indicating that a connection obtains is the
first danger to guard against. To do so is fairly easy. The next problem is more
important and harder to solve.
Even if we have satisfied ourselves in various ways that a correlation points
to a connection that reliably holds, we still have not accounted for that connection in the sense of having explained it. We have accounted for it in the way ?and
only in the way-that Aristotelian physics accounted for the relation between
push and movement. From a practical standpoint, knowledge of the high correlation between push and movement is very useful. That descriptive knowledge may
suggest clues about the principles of motion. It may as easily be grossly misleading, as indeed it turned out to be. Numbers may describe what goes on in the
world. But no matter how securely we nail a description down with numbers, we
still have not explained what we have described. Statistics do not show how anything works or fits together. Statistics are simply descriptions in numerical form.
The form is economical because statistics describe a universe through manipulation of samples drawn from it. Statistics are useful because of the variety of
ingenious operations that can be performed, some of which can be used to check
on the significance of others. The result, however, remains a description of some
part of the world and not an explanation of it. Statistical operations cannot
bridge the gap that lies between description and explanation. Karl Deutsch
advises us "to formulate, or reformulate, a proposition in terms of probability
and to say how much of the outcome could be accounted for by one element and
how much of the outcome could be accounted for from other elements or is
autonomous and free" (1966, p. 220). If we follow that advice, we will behave
like Aristotelian physicists. We will treat a problem as though it were like the one
of trying to say to what extent a cart's movement results from push and slope and
to what extent its movement is impeded by frictions. We will continue to think in
sequential and correlational terms. By doing so, results that are practically useful
may be achieved, although students of international politics have disappointingly
little to show for such efforts, even in practical terms. And if useful information
were uncovered, the more difficult task of figuring out its theoretical meaning
would remain.
4 Chapter 1
The "inductivist illusion," as structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss terms it,
is the belief that truth is won and explanation achieved through the accumulation
of more and more data and the examination of more and more cases. If we gather
more and more data and establish more and more associations, however, we will
not finally find that we know something. We will simply end up having more and
more data and larger sets of correlations. Data never speak for themselves.
Observation and experience never lead directly to knowledge of causes. As the
American pragmatist, C. S. Peirce, once said, "direct experience is neither certain
nor uncertain, because it affirms nothing?it just is. It involves no error, because
it testifies to nothing but its own appearance. For the same reason, it affords no
certainty" (quoted in Nagel 1956, p. 150). Data, seeming facts, apparent associations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles
that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at
all.
If we follow the inductivist route, we can deal only with pieces of problems.
The belief that the pieces can be added up, that they can be treated as independent
variables whose summed effects will account for a certain portion of a dependent
variable's movement, rests on nothing more than faith. We do not know what to
add up, and we do not know whether addition is the appropriate operation. The
number of pieces that might be taken as parts of a problem is infinite, and so is
the number of ways in which the pieces may be combined. Neither observationally nor experimentally can one work with an infinity of objects and combinations. In the following example, Ross Ashby offers an apt caution. Astrophysicists seek to explain the behavior of star clusters with 20,000 members. The
beginner, Ashby observes, "will say simply that he wants to know what the
cluster will do, i.e., he wants the trajectories of the components. If this knowledge, however, could be given to him, it would take the form of many volumes
filled with numerical tables, and he would then realise that he did not really want
all that." The problem, Ashby concludes, is how to find out what we really want
to know without 'being overwhelmed with useless detail" (1956, p. 113). The old
motto, "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is an appealing one, perhaps
because one can keep busy and at the same time avoid the difficult question of
knowledge for what. Because facts do not speak for themselves, because associations never contain or conclusively suggest their own explanation, the question
must be faced. The idea of "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" loses its
charm, and indeed its meaning, once one realizes that the possible objects of
knowledge are infinite.
Today's students of politics nevertheless display a strong commitment to
induction. They examine numerous cases with the hope that connections and patterns will emerge and that those connections and patterns will represent the frequently mentioned "reality that is out there." The hope apparently rests on the
conviction that knowledge begins with certainties and that induction can uncover
them. But we can never say with assurance that a state of affairs inductively
arrived at corresponds to something objectively real. What we think of as reality
is itself an elaborate conception constructed and reconstructed through the ages.
Reality emerges from our selection and organization of materials that are available in infinite quantity. How can we decide which materials to select and how to
arrange them? No inductive procedure can answer the question, for the very
problem is to figure out the criteria by which induction can usefully proceed.
Those who believe, oddly, that knowledge begins with certainties think of
theories as edifices of truth, which they would build inductively. They define
theories as hypotheses that are confirmed and connected. But empirical knowledge is always problematic. Experience often misleads us. As Heinrich Hertz put
it, "that which is derived from experience can again be annulled by experience"
(1894, p. 357). Nothing is ever both empirical and absolutely true, a proposition
established by Immanuel Kant and now widely accepted at least by natural scientists. And since empirical knowledge is potentially infinite in extent, without
some guidance we can know neither what information to gather nor how to put it
together
togetherso
sothat
thatititbecomes
becor comprehensible. If we could directly apprehend the
world that interests us, we would have no need for theory. We cannot. One can
reliably find his way among infinite materials only with the guidance of theory
Rather than being mere collections of laws, theories are statements that
explain them (cf. Nagel 1961, pp. 80-81; Isaak 1969, pp. 138-39). Theories are
qualitatively different from laws. Laws identify invariant or probable associations. Theories show why those associations obtain. Each descriptive term in a
law is directly tied to observational or laboratory procedures, and laws are established only if they pass observational or experimental tests. In addition to
descriptive terms, theories contain theoretical notions. Theories cannot be constructed through induction alone, for theoretical notions can only be invented,
not discovered. Aristotle dealt with real motion, that is with the ratios of effort to
movement that are matters of common experience. Galileo took bold steps away
from the real world in order to explain it. Aristotle believed that objects are
naturally at rest and that effort is required to move them; Galileo assumed that
both rest and uniform circular motion are natural and that an object remains in
either of these conditions in the absence of outside forces. Newton conceived of a
uniform rectilinear motion. The theory he devised to explain it introduced such
theoretical notions as point-mass, instantaneous acceleration, force, and absolute
space and time, none of which can be observed or experimentally determined. At
each step, from Aristotle through Galileo to Newton, the theoretical concepts
became bolder-that is, further removed from our sense experience.
A theoretical notion may be a concept, such as force, or an assumption, such
as the assumption that mass concentrates at a point. A theoretical notion does not
explain or predict anything. We know, and so did Newton, that mass does not
6 Chapter 1
Laws and Theories 7
concentrate at a point. But it was not odd of Newton to assume that it did, for
assumptions are not assertions of fact. They are neither true nor false. Theoretical notions find their justification in the success of the theories that employ
them. Of purported laws, we ask: "Are they true?" Of theories, we ask: "How
great is their explanatory power?" Newton's theory of universal gravitation provided a unified explanation of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. Its power lay
in the number of previously disparate empirical generalizations and laws that
could be subsumed in one explanatory system, and in the number and range of
new hypotheses generated or suggested by the theory, hypotheses that in turn led
to new experimental laws.
Aristotle concluded that, within limits, "a given body can be displaced in a
set time through a distance proportional to the effort available" (Toulmin 1961,
p. 49). Whether by ancient or modern mechanics, the high correlation of push
and movement holds true. But how is it to be explained? Such facts have
remained constant; the theories accepted as adequate for their explanation have
changed radically. Laws are "facts of observation"; theories are "speculative
processes introduced to explain them." Experimental results are permanent;
theories, however well supported, may not last (Andrade 1957, pp. 29, 242).
Laws remain, theories come and go.
Since I see no reason for wasting the word "theory" by defining it as a set of
two or more laws, I adopt the second meaning of the term: Theories explain laws.
This meaning does not accord with usage in much of traditional political theory,
which is concerned more with philosophic interpretation than with theoretical
explanation. It does correspond to the definition of the term in the natural
sciences and in some of the social sciences, especially economics. The definition
also satisfies the need for a term to cover the explanatory activity we persistently
engage in. In order to get beyond "the facts of observation," as we wish irresistibly to do, we must grapple with the problem of explanation. The urge to explain
is not born of idle curiosity alone. It is produced also by the desire to control, or
at least to know if control is possible, rather than merely to predict. Prediction
follows from knowledge of the regularity of associations embodied in laws. Sunrises and sunsets can be reliably predicted on the basis of empirical findings alone,
without benefit of theories explaining why the phenomena occur. Prediction may
certainly be useful: The forces that propel two bodies headed for a collision may
be inaccessible, but if we can predict the collision, we can at least get out of the
way. Still, we would often like to be able to exert some control. Because a law
does not say why a particular association holds, it cannot tell us whether we can
exercise control and how we might go about doing so. For the latter purposes we
need a theory.
A theory, though related to the world about which explanations are wanted,
always remains distinct from that world. "Reality" will be congruent neither with
a theory nor with a model that may represent it. Because political scientists often
think that the best model is the one that reflects reality most accurately, further
discussion is needed.
Model is used in two principal ways. In one sense a model represents a
theory. In another sense a model pictures reality while simplifying it say,
through omission or through reduction of scale. If such a model departs too far
from reality, it becomes useless. A model airplane should look like a real airplane. Explanatory power, however, is gained by moving away from "reality,"
not by staying close to it. A full description would be of least explanatory power;
an elegant theory, of most. The latter would be at an extreme remove from
reality; think of physics. Departing from reality is not necessarily good, but unless one can do so in some clever way, one can only describe and not explain.
Thus James Conant once defined science as "a dynamic undertaking directed to
lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems" (1952, p. 62).
A model of a theory will be about as far removed from reality as the theory it
represents. In modeling a theory, one looks for suggestive ways of depicting the
theory, and not the reality it deals with. The model then presents the theory, with
its theoreticaln o t i o n snecessarily omitted, whether through organismic,
mechanical, mathematical, or other expressions.
Some political scientists write of theoretical models as though they were of
the model airplane sort. For example, they first criticize the state-centric model of
international politics because it has supposedly become further and further removed from reality. Then they try earnestly to make models that mirror reality
ever more fully. If their efforts were to succeed, the model and the real world
would become one and the same. The error made is the opposite of the one
Immanuel Kant so cogently warned against, that is, of thinking that what is true
in theory may not be so in practice. As Kant well understood, his warning did not
imply that theory and practice are identical. Theory explains some part of reality
and is therefore distinct from the reality it explains. If the distinction is preserved,
it becomes obvious that induction from observables cannot in itself yield a theory
that explains the observed. "A theory can be tested by experience," as Albert Einstein once said, "but there is no way from experience to the setting up of a theory"
(quoted in Harris 1970, p. 121). To claim that it is possible to arrive at a theory
inductively is to claim that we can understand phenomena before the means for
their explanation are contrived.
The point is not to reject induction, but to ask what induction can and cannot accomplish. Induction is used at the level of hypotheses and laws rather than
at the level of theories. Laws are different from theories, and the difference is reflected in the distinction between the way in which laws may be discovered and
the way in which theories have to be constructed. Hypotheses may be inferred
from theories. If they are confirmed quite conclusively, they are called laws.
8
Chapter
1
Hypotheses may also be arrived at inductively. Again, if they are confirmed quite
conclusively, they are called laws. Ebb and flood tides were predicted by ancient
Babylonians with an accuracy unsurpassed until the end of the nineteenth century. Highly reliable knowledge of the law-like movement of tides did not enable
one to explain them. Hypotheses about the association of this with that, no
matter how well confirmed, do not give birth to theories. Associations never contain or conclusively suggest their own explanation.
Though in itself induction leads to a theoretical dead end, we nevertheless
need some sense of the puzzling connections of things and events before we can
worry about constructing theories. At the same time we need a theory, or some
theories, in order to know what kind of data and connections to look for. Knowledge, it seems, must precede theory, and yet knowledge can proceed only from
theory. This looks much like the dilemma suggested by the Platonic proposition
that we cannot know anything until we know everything. Take this thought literally, and one is driven to despair. Take it instead as a statement of the strategic
problem of gaining knowledge, and no more is suggested than the difficulties in
any field of getting onto an intellectual track that promises to lead to some progress.
If induction is not the way to get onto a useful track, what is? The leap from
law to theory, from the fashioning of hypotheses to the development of explanations of them, cannot be made by taking information as evidence and seeking
more of it. The leap cannot be made by continuing to ask what is associated with
what, but rather by trying to answer such questions as these: Why does this
occur? How does that thing work? What causes what? How does it all hang
together?
If theory is not an edifice of truth and not a reproduction of reality, then
what is it? A theory is a picture, mentally formed, of a bounded realm or domain
of activity. A theory is a depiction of the organization of a domain and of the
connections among its parts (cf. Boltzman 1905). The infinite materials of any
realm can be organized in endlessly different ways. A theory indicates that some
factors are more important than others and specifies relations among them. In
reality, everything is related to everything else, and one domain cannot be separated from others. Theory isolates one realm from all others in order to deal with
it intellectually. To isolate a realm is a precondition to developing a theory that
will explain what goes on within it. If the precondition cannot be met, and that of
course is a possibility, then the construction of theory for the matters at hand is
impossible. The question, as ever with theories, is not whether the isolation of a
realm is realistic, but whether it is useful. And usefulness is judged by the explanatory and predictive powers of the theory that may be fashioned.
Theories, though not divorced from the world of experiment and observation, are only indirectly connected with it. Thus the statement made by many
that theories can never be proved true. If "truth" is the question, then we are in
the realm of law, not of theory. Thus the statement made by James B. Conant, a
chemist, that "a theory is only overthrown by a better theory" (1947, p. 48). Thus
the statement made by John Rader Platt, & physicist, that "the pressure of scientific determinism becomes weak and random as we approach the great unitary
syntheses. For they are not only discoveries. They are also artistic creations,
shaped by the taste and style of a single hand" (1956, p. 75). And these statements
can all be read as glosses on the famous proof of the mathematician Henri
Poincaré that if one mechanical explanation for a phenomenon can be given, then
so can an infinity of others.* Theories do construct a reality, but no one can ever
say that it is the reality. We are therefore faced with both an infinity of data and
an infinity of possible explanations of the data. The problem is a double one.
Facts do not determine theories; more than one theory may fit any set of facts.
Theories do not explain facts conclusively; we can never be sure that a good
theory will not be replaced by a better one.
I have said what theories are and what they are not, but I have not said how
theories are made. How are they made? The best, but unhelpful, short answer is
this: "creatively." The word sets the problem without saying how to solve it.
How does one move between observations and experiments and theories that
explain them? The longest process of painful trial and error will not lead to the
construction of a theory unless at some point a brilliant intuition flashes, a creative idea emerges. One cannot say how the intuition comes and how the idea is
born. One can say what they will be about. They will be about the organization
of the subject matter. They will convey a sense of the unobservable relations of
things. They will be about connections and causes by which sense is made of
things observed. A theory is not the occurrences seen and the associations
recorded, but is instead the explanation of them. The formula for the acceleration
of a freely falling body does not explain how the body falls. For the explanation
one looks in classical physics to the whole Newtonian system?a package of
interconnected concepts, an organization of the physical world in which the pertinent happenings become natural or necessary. Once the system is understood.
once its principle of organization is grasped, the phenomena are explained. All of
this is well summed up in words that Werner Heisenberg attributes to Wolfgang
Pauli: " 'Understanding' probably means nothing more than having whatever
ideas and concepts are needed to recognize that a great many different phenomena are part of a coherent whole" (1971, p. 33).
By a theory the significance of the observed is made manifest. A theory
arranges phenomena so that they are seen as mutually dependent: it connects
*The proof is simply presented by Nagel (1961, p. 116n). One should add that the
explanations will not be equally simple and useful.
10 Chapter 1
otherwise disparate facts; it shows how changes in some of the phenomena necessarily entail changes in others. To form a theory requires envisioning a pattern
where none is visible to the naked eye. The pattern is not the sum of the substance
of our daily world. Scientific facts are highly special and relatively few as compared to all of the things that could conceivably be brought within explanatory
systems. A theory must then be constructed through simplifying. That is made
obvious by thinking of any theory, whether Isaac Newton's or Adam Smith's, or
by thinking of the alternative-to seek not explanation through simplification but
accurate reproduction through exhaustive description. Simplifications lay bare
the essential elements in play and indicate the necessary relations of cause and
interdependency-or suggest where to look for them.
Even by those who have authored them, the emergence of theories cannot be
described in other than uncertain and impressionistic ways. Elements of theories
can, however, be identified. The difficulty of moving from causal speculations
based on factual studies to theoretical formulations that lead one to view facts in
particular ways is experienced in any field. To cope with the difficulty, simplification is required. This is achieved mainly in the following four ways: (1) by isolation, which requires viewing the actions and interactions of a small number of
factors and forces as though in the meantime other things remain equal; (2) by
abstraction, which requires leaving some things aside in order to concentrate on
others; (3) by aggregation, which requires lumping disparate elements together
according to criteria derived from a theoretical purpose; (4) by idealization,
which requires proceeding as though perfection were attained or a limit reached
even though neither can be. Whatever the means?of
of simplifying may be, the aim
ain
is to try to find the central tendency among a confusion of tendencies, to single
out the propelling principle even though other principles operate, to seek the
essential factors where innumerable factors are present.
In addition to simplifications, or as forms of them, theories embody theoretical assumptions. Imagining that mass concentrates at a point, inventing genes,
mesons, and neutrinos, positing a national interest, and defining nations as unitary and purposive actors: These are examples of common assumptions. Theories
are combinations of descriptive and theoretical statements. The theoretical statements are nonfactual elements of a theory. They are not introduced freely or
whimsically. They are not introduced in the ancient and medieval manner as fictions invented to save a theory. They are introduced only when they make explanation possible. The worth of a theoretical notion is judged by the usefulness of
the theory of which it is a part. Theoretical notions enable us to make sense of the
data; the data limit the freedom with which theoretical notions are invented. Theorists create their assumptions. Whether or not they are acceptable depends on
the merit of the scientific structure of which they are a part.
Laws and I neories 11
Constructing theories involves more than the performance of logically permissible operations on observed data. By deduction nothing can be explained, for
the results of deduction follow logically from initial premises. Deduction may
give certain answers, but nothing new; what is deduced is already present either
in theoretical major premises or in empirical minor premises dealing with matters
previously observed. Induction may give new answers, but nothing certain; the
multiplication of particular observations can never support a universal statement. Theory is fruitful because it goes beyond the necessarily barren hypothetico-deductive approach. Both induction and deduction are indispensable in
the construction of theory, but using them in combination gives rise to a theory
only if a creative idea emerges. The task of constructing theories becomes both
more consequential and more complicated, and so does the task of verifying
them. The relation between theory and observation, or between theory and fact,
becomes puzzling.
As an example of this puzzling relation, consider the problem of defining the
terms used in a theory. Think of the distinct meanings in different physical theories of space, energy, momentum, and time. Obviously such notions have no
meaning outside of the theory in which they appear (Nagel 1961, pp. 17, 127f.).
That theoretical notions are defined by the theory in which they appear is easily
understood. In the field of international politics, think of the different meanings
commonly attached to the words in the following list: power, force, pole, relation, actor, stability, structure, and system. The meanings of such terms vary
depending on their user's approach to the subject. This is necessarily so in any
field where theories are contradictory. The contradiction of theories creates differences in the meanings of terms across theories. In international politics, as in
the social sciences generally, theories turn out to be weak ones. The weakness of
theories creates uncertainty of meanings even within a single theory. In international politics, whether because theories are contradictory or weak, discussion
and argument about many important matters-the closeness of national interdependence, the stability of particular configurations of power, the usefulness of
force-are made difficult or useless because the participants are talking about different things while using the same terms for them. Movement toward a remedy is
impeded by disinclination to treat the question of meaning as a problem that can
be solved only through the articulation and refinement of theories. The tendency
instead is to turn the problem of meaning into the technical one of making terms
operational. That won't help. Any of the above terms can be made operational in
most of the meanings our discourse assigns to them. "Poles" have clear empirical
referents, for example, whether defined as blocs or as great powers. By either
definition, "poles" can become descriptive terms in the statement of laws. The
technical usability of terms is unfortunately a weak criterion.
Laws and Theories 13
12 Chapter 1
Though it is easy to see that theoretical notions are defined by the theory in
which they appear, it is easy to overlook that even descriptive terms acquire different meanings as theories change. Stephen C. Pepper refers to the "close interdependence of fact and theory" (1942, p. 324). Thomas S. Kuhn specifies what
happens precisely in terms of the change of "similarity relations" in the transition
from one theory to the next. Objects of the same or of different sets in one theory
may be grouped in different or in the same sets by another theory, as with the
sun, the moon, Mars, and the earth before and after Copernicus. As Kuhn remarks, if two men are committed to different theories, "we cannot say with any
assurance that the two men even see the same thing, (that they] possess the same
data, but identify or interpret it differently" (1970, pp. 266-76). Do we only
know what we see, one may wonder, or do we only see what we know? Our
minds cannot record and make something of all of the many things that in some
sense we see. We are therefore inclined to see what we are looking for, to find
what our sense of the causes of things leads us to believe significant.
Changes of theory produce changes in the meaning of terms, both theoretical
and factual ones. Theories not only define terms; they also specify the operations
that can rightly be performed. In the sense used a moment ago, the operational
question is a minor or merely a practical one. In another sense, the operational
question is fundamentally important. Theories indicate what is connected with
what and how the connection is made. They convey a sense of how things work,
of how they hang together, of what the structure of a realm of inquiry may be. If
the organization of a realm affects the interactions of variables within it, it makes
no sense to manipulate data until the question of how variables may be connected
is answered. Nevertheless, correlational labors proceed as though in the international realm variables are directly connected without structural constraints
operating on them ?as though the phenomena we deal with are all at one level.
Coefficients of correlation are amassed without asking which theories lead one to
expect what kind of a connection among which variables.
Much pointless work is done because the three questions that should be
asked at the outset of an inquiry are so often ignored. They are:
? Does the object of investigation permit use of the analytic method of classical physics-examining the attributes and interactions of two variables
while others are kept constant?
? Does it permit the application of statistics in ways commonly used when the
number of variables becomes very large?
? Does the object of study permit neither approach, but instead require a
systemic one?
The answer to the last question will be "yes" if the object of study is both complex
and organized. Organized complexity, to use Warren Weaver's term, precludes
the use of traditional modes of investigation (1947, pp. 6-7). One must choose an
approach that is appropriate to the subject matter. The rules by which one's
inquiry proceeds vary from one approach to another. "Due process of inquiry,"
as Martin Landau has said, requires one to follow the logic and procedures that
one's methodology prescribes (1972, pp. 219-21). Most students of international
politics have not observed "due process of inquiry." Worse still, they have not
been able to figure out what the due process of their inquiries might be. They
have been much concerned with methods and little concerned with the logic of
their use. This reverses the proper priority of concern, for once a methodology is
adopted, the choice of methods becomes merely a tactical matter. It makes no
sense to start the journey that is to bring us to an understanding of phenomena
without asking which methodological routes might possibly lead there. Before
setting out we need to ask what different theoretical maps of the subject matter
might show. If we are not to waste time laboring without any idea of whether the
labor is mere muscular exercise, theoretical questions must be raised at the outset
of inquiry.
In examining international-political theories in the next two chapters, we shall
rely on the above discussion of the meaning of theory. If we should find some
constructions that look like theories, we will of course want to know how good
the explanations they offer may be. I conclude this chapter, therefore, by examining the problem of testing theories.
In order to test a theory, one must do the following:
1 State the theory being tested.
2 Infer hypotheses from it.
3 Subject the hypotheses to experimental or observational tests.
4 In taking steps two and three, use the definitions of terms found in the theory being
tested.
5 Eliminate or control perturbing variables not included in the theory under test.
6 Devise a number of distinct and demanding tests.
7 If a test is not passed, ask whether the theory flunks completely, needs repair and
restatement, or requires a narrowing of the scope of its explanatory claims.
The apparent failure of a theory may result from the improper accomplishment of one of these steps. Several of them require special emphasis. Since a
hypothesis derived from a theory is being tested (there being no way to test a
theory directly), a hypothesis proved wrong should lead one to reexamine the
second and seventh operations. Was the hypothesis rightly inferred from the
14 Chapter 1
theory? How, and to what extent, does the invalidation of a properly drawn
hypothesis bring the theory into question? The unfavorable results of tests should
not lead to the hasty rejection of theories. Nor should favorable results lead to
their easy acceptance. Even if all tests are passed, one must remember that a
theory is made credible only in proportion to the variety and difficulty of the
tests, and that no theory can ever be proved true."
Efforts by political scientists to infer hypotheses from theories and test them
have become commonplace. Much of the testing is done in basically the same
way. One effort to test propositions, an effort more careful than most, can therefore serve as an illustration of how the above requirements go unobserved.
Singer, Bremer, and Stuckey (1972) set out to evaluate "a number of equally
plausible, but logically incompatible, theoretical formulations" about certain
conditions that are said to be associated with peace and stability, or, alternatively, with war and instability. Having consolidated the "viewpoints" of the
opposing "schools," they offer "predictive models" in which concentration of
capability within the set of major powers, changes of that concentration, and
changes of capability among the powers are the three independent variables.
They then reach conclusions about whether and when the "parity-fluidity" model
or the "preponderance-stability" model makes the better predictions. The questions asked are these: Will international politics be more or less peaceful and
stable if power is more or less closely concentrated and if the ranking of great
powers changes more or less rapidly? What can one make of the answers given?
Very little. The deficiencies that account for this disappointing answer are revealed by running down our list of rules for the testing of theories.
Many testers of theories seem to believe that the major difficulties lie in the
devising of tests. Instead, one must insist that the first big difficulty lies in finding
or stating theories with enough precision and plausibility to make testing worthwhile. Few theories of international politics define terms and specify the connection of variables with the clarity and logic that would make testing the theories
worthwhile. Before a claim can be made to have tested something, one must have
something to test. In testing their models, Singer, Bremer, and Stuckey fail to
examine the theories they have attempted to model. The theories the authors
apparently have in mind are contradictory and confused about whether it is war
and peace, or conflict and harmony, or instability and stability that are the
expected alternative outcomes. One may, for example, think of a stable system as
one that survives the waging of wars. Singer and his associates nevertheless
finesse the question of what outcome should be expected by identifying war with
*For consideration of testing procedures and explanation of their importance, see
Stinchcombe (1968, Chapter 2).
Laws and Theories 15
instability and letting it go at that. They fail to explain how their expectations
accord with expectations derived from any particular theory.
The authors claim to be systematically and quantitatively evaluating contradictory "theoretical formulations." In gathering their data they necessarilv fix
upon certain definitions of the variables involved. As their key independent - iriable they choose concentration of power or of capabilities. They mention no
theory that in fact employs such a variable, and I know of none that does. The
well-known theories dealing with these matters refer to numbers of great powers
or to polarities. "Polarity," moreover, is variously defined in terms of countries
or of blocs. "Poles" are counted sometimes according to the physical capabilities
of nations or of alliances, sometimes by looking at the pattern of national interrelations, and sometimes by awarding or denying top status to those who get or fail
to get their ways. Unless the confused, vague, and fluctuating definitions of variables are remedied, no tests of anything can properly be conducted. The authors
have nevertheless arbitrarily introduced their new variables without even considering how they may alter one's expectation of outcomes. Though this crucial
problem is not even discussed, Singer and his associates announce that correlations between power-concentration variables, on the one hand, and war, on the
other hand, confirm or disconfirm the expectations of the two schools they so
vaguely refer to.
Rules one, two, and four are thus blithely ignored. The theories being tested
are not stated. How hypotheses may have been inferred from them is not
explained. Observations are made and data are generated without any effort to
define variables as they were defined in the theories presumably being dealt with.
The authors may be accomplishing something, but that something cannot be the
confirming or disconfirming of any school's expectations.
In the face of such failures, one finds it hard to believe that here, as so often
in the correlational labors undertaken by students of international politics, no
thought is given to the possible presence of perturbing variables. An exception
does not prove a rule or a theory, but if something can be shown to be exceptional, it does not provide any disproof either. One would expect variation in re
sults achieved to prompt a search for possible sources of perturbation omitted
from the models. In the instance before us, the "findings" for the nineteenth century differ from those for the twentieth. The discrepancy leads the authors only
to the barest speculation about what may have been omitted and to no speculation at all about what may have gone wrong in the way variables were originally
defined and interconnected. Rule five is no more heeded than the preceding ones.
Rule six calls for a number of different tests and for demanding ones. One
might think this instruction more than usually important since the model consists
merely of three highly similar and arbitrarily chosen variables and since the re-
16 Chapter 1
sults of the tests are inconclusive. The dubious quality of the results, however,
does not lead the authors to devise or to suggest further tests that might challenge
their models with some force.
The seventh rule calls for care in the drawing of conclusions from the negative results of tests. Do they defeat the theory, require its amendment, or call for
a narrowing of explanatory claims? Singer and his associates fail to consider such
questions. Instead they simply report the different correlations between powerconcentration and war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their conclusions are modest enough, but then what more could they say?
A general word of caution should be added to the many words of caution
just uttered. One would be scientifically most satisfied if rigorous, experimental
tests could be made. If a theory is stated in general terms, however, and if it gives
rise to expectations that fall within a range that is identifiable but unfortunately
wide, then to draw precise inferences and to try to check them experimentally is
to place more weight on the theory than it can bear. Rigorous testing of vague
theory is an exercise in the use of methods rather than a useful effort to test
theory. The early application of demanding tests may, moreover, cause poorly
developed theories to be discarded before their potential has unfolded (cf.
Rapoport, 1968).
What then can one do? Simply negotiate the seven steps set forth above in
ways appropriate to the theory at hand. Ask what the theory leads one to expect
rather than fixing arbitrarily on expectations that one's data and methods can
cope with. Check expectations against one's (often historical) observations before
trying for precise refinements and using elaborate methods. Unless a theory is
shown to be logical, coherent, and plausible, it is silly to subject it to elaborate
tests. If a theory is seen to be logical, coherent, and plausible, the rigor and complication of tests must be geared to the precision or to the generality of the expectations inferred from the theory."
I have dealt so far with the meaning of theory and with theory construction and
testing. Theories do not emerge from efforts to establish laws, even when those
efforts succeed. The construction of theory is a primary task. One must decide
which things to concentrate on in order to have a good chance of devising some
explanations of the international patterns and events that interest us. To believe
that we can proceed otherwise is to take the profoundly unscientific view that
everything that varies is a variable. Without at least a sketchy theory, we cannot
"See Chapter 6, part Ill, for further thoughts about testing.
Lans and Theories 17
say a hot s that ned to be elepe, ho it reight be alans, ypo which
(cf. Scheffler 1967, pp. 64-66; Lakatos 1970, pp. 154-77). To proceed by looking
for associations without at least some glimmering of a theory is like shooting a
gun in the general direction of an invisible target. Not only would much ammunition be used up before hitting it, but also, if the bull's eye were hit, no one would
know it!
The trick, obviously, is to link theoretical concepts with a few variables in
order to contrive explanations from which hypotheses can then be inferred and
tested. Our problem in the next two chapters is to see to what extent, and how
well, this has been done by students of international politics.
The End of the Long American
Century
Trump and the Sources of U.S. Power
BY ROBERT O. KEOHANE AND JOSEPH S. NYE, JR.
July/August 2025
Published on June 2, 2025
ROBERT O. KEOHANE is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at Princeton University and an
Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs.
JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., was University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Harvard’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Affairs and Director of the National Intelligence Council in the Clinton administration. He
is the author of A Life in the American Century, among other books.
They are the authors of Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. This essay draws
on some of Nye’s previous writings. Nye passed away in May, as this essay was being finalized. We
mourn his passing and are grateful to his family for granting permission to proceed.
President Donald Trump has tried both to impose the United States on the
world and to distance the country from it. He began his second term by
brandishing American hard power, threatening Denmark over the control of
Greenland, and suggesting he would take back the Panama Canal. He
successfully wielded threats of punitive tariffs to coerce Canada, Colombia,
and Mexico on immigration issues. He withdrew from the Paris climate
accords and the World Health Organization. In April, he sent global
markets into chaos by announcing sweeping tariffs on countries all over the
world. He changed tack not long after, withdrawing most of the additional
tariffs, although continuing to press a trade war with China—the central
front in his current offensive against Washington’s main rival.
In doing all this, Trump can act from a position of strength. His attempts to
use tariffs to pressure U.S. trade partners suggest that he believes that
contemporary patterns of interdependence enhance U.S. power. Other
countries rely on the buying power of the enormous American market and
on the certainties of American military might. These advantages give
Washington the leeway to strong-arm its partners. His positions are
consistent with an argument we made almost 50 years ago: that asymmetric
interdependence confers an advantage on the less dependent actor in a
relationship. Trump laments the United States’ significant trade deficit with
China, but he also seems to understand that this imbalance gives
Washington tremendous leverage over Beijing.
Even as Trump has correctly identified the way in which the United States
is strong, he is using that strength in fundamentally counterproductive ways.
By assailing interdependence, he undercuts the very foundation of American
power. The power associated with trade is hard power, based on material
capabilities. But over the past 80 years, the United States has accumulated
soft power, based on attraction rather than coercion or the imposition of
costs. Wise American policy would maintain, rather than disrupt, patterns of
interdependence that strengthen American power, both the hard power
derived from trade relationships and the soft power of attraction. The
continuation of Trump’s current foreign policy would weaken the United
States and accelerate the erosion of the international order that since World
War II has served so many countries well—most of all, the United States.
Order rests on a stable distribution of power among states, norms that
influence and legitimize the conduct of states and other actors, and
institutions that help underpin it. The Trump administration has rocked all
these pillars. The world may be entering a period of disorder, one that settles
only after the White House changes course or once a new dispensation
takes hold in Washington. But the decline underway may not be a mere
temporary dip; it may be a plunge into murky waters. In his erratic and
misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may
bring its period of dominance—what the American publisher Henry Luce
first called “the American century”—to an unceremonious end.
THE DEFICIT ADVANTAGE
When we wrote Power and Interdependence in 1977, we tried to broaden
conventional understandings of power. Foreign policy experts typically saw
power through the lens of the Cold War military competition. Our research,
by contrast, explored how trade affected power, and we argued that
asymmetry in an interdependent economic relationship empowers the less
dependent actor. The paradox of trade power is that success in a trading
relationship—as indicated by one state having a trade surplus with another
—is a source of vulnerability. Conversely, and perhaps counterintuitively,
running a trade deficit can strengthen a country’s bargaining position. The
deficit country, after all, can impose tariffs or other trade barriers on the
surplus country. That targeted surplus country will have difficulty retaliating
because of its relative lack of imports to sanction.
Threatening to bar or limit imports can successfully exert pressure on trading
partners. In terms of asymmetric interdependence and power, the United
States is in a favorable bargaining position with all seven of its most
important trading partners. Its trade is extremely asymmetric with China,
Mexico, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, all of which have
an export-import ratio of more than two to one with the United States. For
Japan (roughly 1.8 to 1), South Korea (1.4 to 1), and the European Union
(1.6 to 1), those ratios are also asymmetric. Canada enjoys a more balanced
ratio of around 1.2 to 1.
These ratios, of course, cannot capture the full dimensions of the economic
relationships between countries. Countervailing factors, such as domestic
interest groups with transnational ties to foreign actors in other markets or
personal and group relationships across borders, can complicate matters,
sometimes leading to exceptions or limiting the impact of asymmetric
interdependence. In Power and Interdependence, we characterized these
multiple channels of connections as “complex interdependence,” and in a
detailed analysis of U.S.-Canadian relations between 1920 and 1970, we
showed that they often strengthened Canada’s hand. For example, the U.S.Canadian automotive pact of the 1960s resulted from a process of
negotiation that began with Canada’s unilateral introduction of an export
subsidy for auto parts. In every analysis of asymmetric interdependence and
power, it is necessary to look carefully at countervailing factors that might
diminish the advantages that would normally accrue to the deficit country.
China appears weakest of all in the trade sector alone, with its three-to-one
ratio of exports to imports. It also cannot call on alliance ties or other forms
of soft power. But it is able to retaliate by exploiting countervailing factors,
punishing important American corporations that operate in China, such as
Apple or Boeing, or important American domestic political actors, such as
soybean farmers or Hollywood studios. China can also use hard power such
as cutting off supplies of rare minerals. As the two sides discover more
precisely their mutual vulnerabilities, the focus of trade warfare will shift to
reflect this learning process.
Mexico has fewer sources of counterinfluence, and it remains highly
vulnerable to the whims of the United States. Europe can exercise some
counterinfluence in the trade sector because it has more balanced trade with
the United States than do China and Mexico, but it still depends on NATO,
so Trump’s threats not to support the alliance could be an effective
bargaining tool. Canada has more balanced trade with the United States and
a web of transnational ties with American interest groups that make it less
vulnerable, but it is probably playing a losing hand on trade alone because its
economy is more reliant on the U.S. economy than the other way around. In
Asia, the asymmetry in U.S. trade relations with Japan, South Korea, and the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations is somewhat compensated for by
the U.S. policy of rivalry with China. As long as this rivalry continues, the
United States needs its East Asian and Southeast Asian allies and partners,
and it cannot take full advantage of its trade-derived leverage. The relative
influence of U.S. trade policy therefore varies depending on the geopolitical
context and on patterns of asymmetric interdependence.
REAL POWER
The Trump administration misses a major dimension of power. Power is the
ability to get others to do what you want. This goal can be accomplished by
coercion, payment, or attraction. The first two are hard power; the third is
soft power. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but
over the long term, soft power often prevails. Joseph Stalin is thought to
have once mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” But
the Soviet Union is long gone, and the papacy lives on.
The president seems inordinately committed to coercion and the exercise of
American hard power, but he does not seem to understand soft power or its
role in foreign policy. Coercing democratic allies such as Canada or
Denmark more broadly weakens trust in U.S. alliances; threatening Panama
reawakens fears of imperialism throughout Latin America; crippling the
U.S. Agency for International Development undercuts the United States’
reputation for benevolence. Silencing the Voice of America mutes the
country’s message.
Skeptics say, So what? International politics is hardball, not softball. And
Trump’s coercive and transactional approach is already producing
concessions with the promise of more to come. As Machiavelli once wrote
about power, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. But it is better
yet to be both feared and loved. Power has three dimensions, and by
ignoring attraction, Trump is neglecting a key source of American strength.
In the long run, it is a losing strategy.
And soft power matters even in the short run. If a country is attractive, it
won’t need to rely as much on incentives and penalties to shape the behavior
of others. If allies see it as benign and trustworthy, they are more
persuadable and likely to follow that country’s lead, although admittedly
they may maneuver to take advantage of a benign stance by the more
powerful state. Faced with bullying, they may comply, but if they see their
trading partner as an unreliable bully, they are more likely to drag their feet
and reduce their long-term interdependence when they can. Cold War
Europe offers a good example of this dynamic. In 1986, the Norwegian
analyst Geir Lundestad described the world as divided into a Soviet and an
American empire. Whereas the Soviets had used force to build their
European satrapies, the American side was “an empire by invitation.” The
Soviets had to send troops into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 to
keep the governments there subordinate to Moscow. By contrast, NATO
remained strong throughout the Cold War.
In Asia, China has been increasing its hard military and economic
investments, but it has also been cultivating its powers of attraction. In 2007,
President Hu Jintao told the 17th National Congress of the Chinese
Communist Party that China needed to increase its soft power. The Chinese
government has spent tens of billions of dollars to that end. Admittedly, it
has achieved mixed results at best, owing to two major obstacles: it has
stoked rancorous territorial disputes with a number of its neighbors, and the
CCP maintains tight control over all organizations and opinions in civil
society. China generates resentments when it ignores internationally
recognized borders. And it comes across poorly to people in many countries
when it jails human rights lawyers and compels nonconformists, such as the
brilliant artist Ai Weiwei, into exile.
At least before Trump’s second term began, China lagged far behind the
United States in the court of global public opinion. Pew surveyed 24
countries in 2023 and reported that a majority of respondents in most of
them found the United States more attractive than China, with Africa the
only continent where the results were even close. More recently, in May
2024, Gallup found that in 133 countries it surveyed, the United States had
the advantage in 81 and China in 52. If Trump keeps undercutting
American soft power, however, these numbers may change markedly.
To be sure, American soft power has had its ups and downs over the years.
The United States was unpopular in many countries during the Vietnam
War and the Iraq war. But soft power derives from a country’s society and
culture, not just the actions of its government. Even during the Vietnam
War, when crowds marched through streets around the world to protest
American policies, they did not sing the communist “Internationale” but the
American civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” An open civil society
that allows protest and accommodates dissent can be an asset. But the soft
power derived from American culture will not survive the excesses of the
U.S. government during the next four years if American democracy
continues to erode and the country acts as a bully abroad.
For its part, China is striving to fill any gaps that Trump creates. It sees itself
as the leader of the so-called global South. It aims to displace the American
order of international alliances and institutions. Its Belt and Road
infrastructure investment program is designed not only to attract other
countries but also to provide hard economic power. More countries have
China as their largest trading partner than have the United States as such. If
Trump thinks he can compete with China while weakening trust among
American allies, asserting imperial aspirations, destroying the U.S. Agency
for International Development, challenging the rule of law at home, and
withdrawing from UN agencies, he is likely to be disappointed.
THE SPECTER OF GLOBALISM
Looming over the rise of Western populists such as Trump is the specter of
globalization, which they invoke as a demonic force. In reality, the term
simply refers to increasing interdependence at intercontinental distances.
When Trump threatens tariffs on China, he is trying to reduce the economic
aspect of the United States’ global interdependence, which he blames for the
loss of industries and jobs. Globalization can certainly have negative and
positive effects. But Trump’s measures are misplaced, since they attack those
forms of globalization that are largely good for the United States and the
world while failing to counter those that are bad. On balance, globalization
has enhanced American power, and Trump’s assault on it only enfeebles the
United States.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British economist and
statesman David Ricardo established the widely accepted fact that global
trade can create value through comparative advantage. When they are open
to trade, countries can specialize in what they do best. Trade generates what
the German economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”: jobs
are lost in the process, and national economies are subject to shocks from
abroad, sometimes as a result of deliberate policy by foreign governments.
But that disruption can help economies become more productive and
efficient. On balance, during the last 75 years, creative destruction has
augmented American power. As the largest economic player, the United
States has benefited most from the innovation that generates growth and
the spillover effects that growth has had around the world.
At the same time, growth can be painful. Studies have shown that the
United States has lost (and gained) millions of jobs in the twenty-first
century, forcing the costs of adjustment onto workers, who have generally
not received adequate compensation from the government. Technological
change has also eliminated millions of jobs as machines have replaced
people, and it is difficult to untangle the interconnected effects of
automation and foreign trade. The usual strains of interdependence have
been made much worse by China’s export juggernaut, which is not letting
up.
Even as economic globalization enhances the productivity of the world
economy, these changes may be unwelcome for many individuals and
families. People in many communities are reluctant to move to places where
they might more easily find work. Others, of course, are willing to move
halfway around the world to find more opportunities. The last several
decades of globalization have been characterized by massive movements of
people across national borders, another major type of interdependence.
Migration is culturally enriching and offers major economic benefits for
countries that receive migrants by bringing people with skills to places
where they can use those skills more productively. Countries from which
people migrate may benefit from the relief of population pressure and from
emigrants sending remittances. In any event, migration tends to engender
further movement. In the absence of high barriers constructed by states,
migration in the contemporary world is often a self-perpetuating process.
Trump blames immigrants for causing disruptive change. Although at least
some forms of immigration are clearly good for the economy in the long
term, critics can easily characterize them as harmful in the near term, and
they may stir strong political opposition among some people. Sudden spikes
in immigration provoke strong political reactions, with migrants often cast
as responsible for various economic and social changes, even when they are
demonstrably not to blame. Immigration has become the dominant populist
political issue used against incumbent governments in nearly all democracies
in recent years. It fueled Trump’s election in 2016—and again in 2024.
It is much easier for populist leaders to blame foreigners for economic
upheaval than to accept the far more determinative roles of technological
change and capital. Globalization has presented challenges to incumbents in
many recent elections in many countries. The politician’s temptation in the
face of these stresses is to seek to reverse globalization by imposing tariffs
and other barriers to international exchange, as Trump is doing.
Economic globalization has been reversed in the past. The nineteenth
century was marked by a rapid increase in both trade and migration, but it
slowed precipitously with the beginning of World War I, in 1914. Trade as a
percent of global economic activity did not recover to its 1914 levels until
nearly 1970. This could happen again, although it would take some doing.
World trade grew extremely rapidly between 1950 and 2008, then more
slowly since the 2008–9 financial crisis. Overall, trade grew by 4,400 percent
from 1950 to 2023. Global trade could again lurch into decline. If the U.S.
trade measures against China lead to a more committed trade war, it is likely
to do a great deal of damage. Trade wars in general can easily morph into
enduring and escalating conflict, with the possibility of catastrophic change.
On the other side of the ledger, the costs of undoing more than half a
trillion dollars of trade are likely to limit the willingness of countries to
engage in trade wars and may generate some incentives for compromise.
And although other countries may act reciprocally toward the United States,
they will not necessarily limit trade with one another. Geopolitical factors
could also speed the unwinding of trade flows. A war over Taiwan, for
example, could bring trade between the United States and China to a
screeching halt.
Some analysts blame the wave of nationalist populist reactions in nearly all
democracies on the increased spread and speed of globalization. Trade and
migration accelerated in tandem after the end of the Cold War, as political
change and improved communications technology reduced the costs of
crossing borders and long distances. Now, tariffs and border controls may
slow down those flows. That would be bad news for American power, which
has been enhanced by the energy and productivity of immigrants
throughout its history, including during the last several decades.
PROBLEMS WITHOUT PASSPORTS
No crisis highlights the inescapability of interdependence better than
climate change. Scientists predict that climate change will have huge costs as
global icecaps melt, coastal cities flood, heat waves intensify, and weather
patterns shift chaotically later in the century. Even in the near term, the
intensity of hurricanes and wildfires is exacerbated by climate change. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been an important voice
articulating the dangers of climate change, sharing scientific information,
and encouraging joint transnational work. Yet Trump has eliminated support
for international and national action to counter climate change. Ironically,
while his administration is seeking to limit types of globalization that have
benefits, it is also deliberately undermining Washington’s ability to address
types of ecological globalization, such as climate change and pandemics,
whose costs are potentially gargantuan. The COVID-19 pandemic in the
United States killed over 1.2 million people; The Lancet has placed the
worldwide death toll at about 18 million. COVID-19 circulated the world
rapidly and was certainly a global phenomenon, fostered by travel that is an
integral part of globalization.
In other areas, interdependence remains a key source of American strength.
Networks of professional interaction among scientists, for instance, have had
tremendous positive effects in speeding discoveries and innovation. Until the
Trump administration came into power, the expansion of scientific activity
and networks had engendered little negative political reaction. Any catalog
of the pluses and minuses of globalization for human welfare must include it
on the positive side of the scale. For example, in the early days of the
COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020, Chinese scientists shared their
genetic decoding of the novel coronavirus with international counterparts
before they were stopped from doing so by Beijing.
That is why one of the strangest aspects of Trump’s new term has been his
administration’s gutting of federal support for scientific research, including
in fields that have yielded great returns on investment, are largely responsible
for the pace of innovation in the modern world, and have enhanced the
prestige and power of the United States. Although American research
universities lead the world, the administration has sought to stifle them by
canceling funding, seeking to curtail their independence, and making it
harder to attract the brightest students from around the world. This attack is
hard to understand except as a salvo in a culture war against putative elites
who do not share the ideology of right-wing populism. It amounts to a
massive, self-inflicted wound.
The Trump administration is also unwinding another key tool of American
soft power: the country’s espousal of liberal democratic values. Especially
during the last half century, the idea of human rights as a value has diffused
around the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991,
democratic institutions and norms spread to much of eastern Europe
(including, briefly, to Russia), as well as to other parts of the world, notably
Latin America, and gained some foothold in Africa. The proportion of
countries in the world that were either liberal or electoral democracies
reached slightly over 50 percent at its high point around 2000, and has fallen
a little bit since, remaining near 50 percent. Even though the post–Cold War
“democratic wave” has subsided, it has still left an abiding mark.
The wide appeal of democratic norms, and of human rights, has certainly
contributed to the soft power of the United States. Autocratic governments
resist what they see as interference in their sovereign autonomy by groups
supporting human rights—groups that are often based in the United States
and backed by nongovernmental and governmental resources in the United
States. For a while, autocracies were fighting a defensive, rearguard battle.
Not surprisingly, some authoritarian governments that have chafed under
U.S. criticism or sanctions have applauded the Trump administration’s
renunciation of support for human rights abroad, such as closing the State
Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, its Office of Global
Women’s Issues, and its Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations. Trump
administration policy will inhibit the further spread of democracy and
deplete American soft power.
A BET ON WEAKNESS
There is no undoing global interdependence. It will continue as long as
humans are mobile and invent new technologies of communication and
transportation. After all, globalization spans centuries, with roots extending
back to the Silk Road and beyond. In the fifteenth century, innovations in
oceangoing transport spurred the age of exploration, which was followed by
European colonization that shaped today’s national boundaries. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steamships and telegraphs accelerated
the process as the Industrial Revolution transformed agrarian economies.
Now, the information revolution is transforming service-oriented
economies. Billions of people carry a computer in their pocket packed with
an amount of information that would have filled a skyscraper 50 years ago.
World wars temporarily reversed economic globalization and disrupted
migration, but in the absence of global warfare, and as long as technology
continues its rapid advance, economic globalization will continue, as well.
Ecological globalization and global scientific activity are also likely to
persist, and norms and information will continue to travel across borders.
The effects of some forms of globalization may be malign: climate change is
a prominent example of a crisis that knows no borders. To rechannel and
reshape globalization for the common good, states will have to coordinate.
For such coordination to be effective, leaders will have to construct and
maintain networks of connection, norms, and institutions. Those networks
will in turn benefit their central node, the United States—still the
economically, militarily, technologically, and culturally most powerful
country in the world—providing Washington with soft power.
Unfortunately, the myopic focus of the second Trump administration, which
is obsessed with coercive hard power linked to trade asymmetries and
sanctions, is likely to erode rather than strengthen the U.S.-led international
order. Trump has focused so much on the costs of free-riding by allies that
he neglects the fact that the United States gets to drive the bus—and thus
pick the destination and the route. Trump does not seem to grasp how
American strength lies in interdependence. Instead of making America great
again, he is making a tragic bet on weakness.
Copyright © 2025 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please visit
ForeignAffairs.com/Permissions.
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/end-long-american-centurytrump-keohane-nye
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
GLOBAL
e Coming Anarchy
How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying
the social fabric of our planet
ROBERT D. KAPLAN FEBRUARY 1994 ISSUE
e Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many illnesses,
malaria especially, endemic in his country. ere was also an irrefutable sadness in
his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire.
Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the
background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "In forty- ve years I have never
seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed.
But what we have now is something worse—the revenge of the poor, of the social
failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." en he
referred to the recent coup in the West African country Sierra Leone. "e boys
who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this." e Minister jabbed
his nger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children. "In three months
these boys con scated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully
wrecked them on the road." e Minister mentioned one of the coup's leaders,
Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his
schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middleclass sponsors held over him."
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is now
part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more signi cant than any
coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was what my
friend—a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened were I to
identify him more precisely—really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes
West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the political
character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty- rst century.
e cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world.
Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars,
carjackers, and muggers proliferate. "e government in Sierra Leone has no writ
after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in the capital, Freetown,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
1/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the house of an American
man. ey tied him up and stole everything of value. Forget Miami: direct ights
between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring
Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of
Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A
State Department report cited the airport for "extortion by law-enforcement and
immigration officials." is is one of the few times that the U.S. government has
embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan,
effectively the capital of the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stickand gun-wielding guards who walk you the fteen feet or so between your car and
the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the
future. An Italian ambassador was killed by gun re when robbers invaded an
Abidjan restaurant. e family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed
at gunpoint in the ambassador's residence. After university students in the Ivory
Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their dorms, they executed them by
hanging tires around their necks and setting the tires on re. In one instance
Ivorian policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid to intervene.
Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with restless,
scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows,
demanding "tips" for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In
cities in six West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of
them. ey were like loose molecules in a very unstable social uid, a uid that was
clearly on the verge of igniting.
"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages of Africa it is perfectly
natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal
existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When
young men nd out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost.
ey join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process."
"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there is much less
crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination.
Here in West Africa we have a lot of super cial Islam and super cial Christianity.
Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society,
because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak
vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another." Many of
the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and the
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
2/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil ghting in
adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have "a young woman with them who
would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to
see where she was going. is made her invisible, so that she could cross to the
army's positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the rebels' chances of
success."
Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of
life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is
increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in
West Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother in one
place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family
structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates and the
explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism,
they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities. In
those cities African culture is being rede ned while deserti cation and deforestation
—also tied to overpopulation—drive more and more African peasants out of the
countryside.
A Premonition of the Future
West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental,
and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger.
Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee
migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and
the empowerment of private armies, security rms, and international drug cartels
are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa
provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to
discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the
way it will be a few decades hence—as I intend to do in this article—I nd I must
begin with West Africa.
ere is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive—where,
in fact, they tell such lies—as in West Africa. Start with Sierra Leone. According to
the map, it is a nation-state of de ned borders, with a government in control of its
territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government, run by a twenty-seven-year-old
army captain, Valentine Strasser, controls Freetown by day and by day also controls
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
3/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
part of the rural interior. In the government's territory the national army is an
unruly rabble threatening drivers and passengers at most checkpoints. In the other
part of the country units of two separate armies from the war in Liberia have taken
up residence, as has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. e government force
ghting the rebels is full of renegade commanders who have aligned themselves
with disaffected village chiefs. A pre-modern formlessness governs the battle eld,
evoking the wars in medieval Europe prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which
ushered in the era of organized nation-states.
As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally displaced,
280,000 more have ed to neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000 have ed to
Liberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have ed to Sierra Leone. e third largest city
in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp. With an additional
600,000 Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the borders dividing
these four countries have become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones none of
the governments except the Ivory Coast's maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and
police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty. e Koranko ethnic
group in northeastern Sierra Leone does all its trading in Guinea. Sierra Leonian
diamonds are more likely to be sold in Liberia than in Freetown. In the eastern
provinces of Sierra Leone you can buy Liberian beer but not the local brand.
In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in Ghana, most of the
primary rain forest and the secondary bush is being destroyed at an alarming rate. I
saw convoys of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal ports. When
Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of the
country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the
proportion has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. e deforestation has led to
soil erosion, which has led to more ooding and more mosquitoes. Virtually
everyone in the West African interior has some form of malaria.
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and
gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world:
the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains,
the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa
is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal
trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to
violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
4/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas Greene's vision implies a
certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his
celebrated novel e Heart of the Matter, it is omas Malthus, the philosopher of
demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West
Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.
Consider "Chicago." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a slum district of
Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area have named after the American city.
("Washington" is another poor section of Abidjan.) Although Sierra Leone is widely
regarded as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has been considered an African success
story, and Abidjan has been called "the Paris of West Africa." Success, however, was
built on two arti cial factors: the high price of cocoa, of which the Ivory Coast is
the world's leading producer, and the talents of a French expatriate community,
whose members have helped run the government and the private sector. e
expanding cocoa economy made the Ivory Coast a magnet for migrant workers
from all over West Africa: between a third and a half of the country's population is
now non-Ivorian, and the gure could be as high as 75 percent in Abidjan. During
the 1980s cocoa prices fell and the French began to leave. e skyscrapers of the
Paris of West Africa are a facade. Perhaps 15 percent of Abidjan's population of
three million people live in shantytowns like Chicago and Washington, and the vast
majority live in places that are not much better. Not all of these places appear on
any of the readily available maps. is is another indication of how political maps
are the products of tired conventional wisdom and, in the Ivory Coast's case, of an
elite that will ultimately be forced to relinquish power.
Chicago, like more and more of Abidjan, is a slum in the bush: a checkerwork of
corrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboard and black plastic wrap. It is
located in a gully teeming with coconut palms and oil palms, and is ravaged by
ooding. Few residents have easy access to electricity, a sewage system, or a clean
water supply. e crumbly red laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizards both
inside and outside the shacks. Children defecate in a stream lled with garbage and
pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In this stream women do the washing.
Young unemployed men spend their time drinking beer, palm wine, and gin while
gambling on pinball games constructed out of rotting wood and rusty nails. ese
are the same youths who rob houses in more prosperous Ivorian neighborhoods at
night. One man I met, Damba Tesele, came to Chicago from Burkina Faso in
1963. A cook by profession, he has four wives and thirty-two children, not one of
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
5/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
whom has made it to high school. He has seen his shanty community destroyed by
municipal authorities seven times since coming to the area. Each time he and his
neighbors rebuild. Chicago is the latest incarnation.
Fifty- ve percent of the Ivory Coast's population is urban, and the proportion is
expected to reach 62 percent by 2000. e yearly net population growth is 3.6
percent. is means that the Ivory Coast's 13.5 million people will become 39
million by 2025, when much of the population will consist of urbanized peasants
like those of Chicago. But don't count on the Ivory Coast's still existing then.
Chicago, which is more indicative of Africa's and the ird World's demographic
present—and even more of the future—than any idyllic junglescape of women
balancing earthen jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once a model
of ird World success, is becoming a case study in ird World catastrophe.
President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last December at the age of about
ninety, left behind a weak cluster of political parties and a leaden bureaucracy that
discourages foreign investment. Because the military is small and the non-Ivorian
population large, there is neither an obvious force to maintain order nor a sense of
nationhood that would lessen the need for such enforcement. e economy has
been shrinking since the mid-1980s. ough the French are working assiduously to
preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibility worse than a coup: an anarchic
implosion of criminal violence—an urbanized version of what has already
happened in Somalia. Or it may become an African Yugoslavia, but one without
mini-states to replace the whole.
Because the demographic reality of West Africa is a countryside draining into dense
slums by the coast, ultimately the region's rulers will come to re ect the values of
these shanty-towns. ere are signs of this already in Sierra Leone—and in Togo,
where the dictator Etienne Eyadema, in power since 1967, was nearly toppled in
1991, not by democrats but by thousands of youths whom the London-based
magazine West Africa described as "Soweto-like stone-throwing adolescents." eir
behavior may herald a regime more brutal than Eyadema's repressive one.
e fragility of these West African "countries" impressed itself on me when I took a
series of bush taxis along the Gulf of Guinea, from the Togolese capital of Lome,
across Ghana, to Abidjan. e 400-mile journey required two full days of driving,
because of stops at two border crossings and an additional eleven customs stations,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
6/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
at each of which my fellow passengers had their bags searched. I had to change
money twice and repeatedly ll in currency-declaration forms. I had to bribe a
Togolese immigration official with the equivalent of eighteen dollars before he
would agree to put an exit stamp on my passport. Nevertheless, smuggling across
these borders is rampant. e London Observer has reported that in 1992 the
equivalent of $856 million left West Africa for Europe in the form of "hot cash"
assumed to be laundered drug money. International cartels have discovered the
utility of weak, nancially strapped West African regimes.
e more ctitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authorities seem
to be in trying to prove otherwise. Getting visas for these states can be as hard as
crossing their borders. e Washington embassies of Sierra Leone and Guinea—the
two poorest nations on earth, according to a 1993 United Nations report on
"human development"—asked for letters from my bank (in lieu of prepaid roundtrip tickets) and also personal references, in order to prove that I had sufficient
means to sustain myself during my visits. I was reminded of my visa and currency
hassles while traveling to the communist states of Eastern Europe, particularly East
Germany and Czechoslovakia, before those states collapsed.
Ali A. Mazrui, the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State
University of New York at Binghamton, predicts that West Africa—indeed, the
whole continent—is on the verge of large-scale border upheaval. Mazrui writes, "In
the 21st century France will be withdrawing from West Africa as she gets
increasingly involved in the affairs [of Europe]. France's West African sphere of
in uence will be lled by Nigeria—a more natural hegemonic power. . . . It will be
under those circumstances that Nigeria's own boundaries are likely to expand to
incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the Republic of Benin (the
Yoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon."
e future could be more tumultuous, and bloodier, than Mazrui dares to say.
France will withdraw from former colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the Ivory
Coast, where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do so not only
because its attention will be diverted to new challenges in Europe and Russia but
also because younger French officials lack the older generation's emotional ties to
the ex-colonies. However, even as Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too, is likely to
split into several pieces. e State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and
Research recently made the following points in an analysis of Nigeria: "Prospects
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
7/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
for a transition to civilian rule and democratization are slim. . . . e repressive
apparatus of the state security service . . . will be difficult for any future civilian
government to control. . . . e country is becoming increasingly ungovernable. . . .
Ethnic and regional splits are deepening, a situation made worse by an increase in
the number of states from 19 to 30 and a doubling in the number of local
governing authorities; religious cleavages are more serious; Muslim fundamentalism
and evangelical Christian militancy are on the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety
over southern [Christian] control of the economy is intense . . . the will to keep
Nigeria together is now very weak."
Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the region—its population of roughly
90 million equals the populations of all the other West African states combined—it
is apparent that Africa faces cataclysms that could make the Ethiopian and
Somalian famines pale in comparison. is is especially so because Nigeria's
population, including that of its largest city, Lagos, whose crime, pollution, and
overcrowding make it the cliche par excellence of ird World urban dysfunction,
is set to double during the next twenty- ve years, while the country continues to
deplete its natural resources.
Part of West Africa's quandary is that although its population belts are horizontal,
with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and
toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the borders erected by
European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross-purposes with demography
and topography. Satellite photos depict the same reality I experienced in the bush
taxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastal corridor—indeed, the entire stretch of coast from
Abidjan eastward to Lagos—is one burgeoning megalopolis that by any rational
economic and geographical standard should constitute a single sovereignty, rather
than the ve (the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) into which it is
currently divided.
As many internal African borders begin to crumble, a more impenetrable boundary
is being erected that threatens to isolate the continent as a whole: the wall of
disease. Merely to visit West Africa in some degree of safety, I spent about $500 for
a hepatitis B vaccination series and other disease prophylaxis. Africa may today be
more dangerous in this regard than it was in 1862, before antibiotics, when the
explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton described the health situation on the continent
as "deadly, a Golgotha, a Jehannum." Of the approximately 12 million people
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
8/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
worldwide whose blood is HIV-positive, 8 million are in Africa. In the capital of
the Ivory Coast, whose modern road system only helps to spread the disease, 10
percent of the population is HIV-positive. And war and refugee movements help
the virus break through to more-remote areas of Africa. Alan Greenberg, M.D., a
representative of the Centers for Disease Control in Abidjan, explains that in Africa
the HIV virus and tuberculosis are now "fast-forwarding each other." Of the
approximately 4,000 newly diagnosed tuberculosis patients in Abidjan, 45 percent
were also found to be HIV-positive. As African birth rates soar and slums
proliferate, some experts worry that viral mutations and hybridizations might, just
conceivably, result in a form of the AIDS virus that is easier to catch than the
present strain.
It is malaria that is most responsible for the disease wall that threatens to separate
Africa and other parts of the ird World from more-developed regions of the
planet in the twenty- rst century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria, unlike AIDS, is
easy to catch. Most people in sub-Saharan Africa have recurring bouts of the disease
throughout their entire lives, and it is mutating into increasingly deadly forms.
"e great gift of Malaria is utter apathy," wrote Sir Richard Burton, accurately
portraying the situation in much of the ird World today. Visitors to malariaafflicted parts of the planet are protected by a new drug, me oquine, a side effect of
which is vivid, even violent, dreams. But a strain of cerebral malaria resistant to
me oquine is now on the offensive. Consequently, defending oneself against
malaria in Africa is becoming more and more like defending oneself against violent
crime. You engage in "behavior modi cation": not going out at dusk, wearing
mosquito repellent all the time.
And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the future while driving from
the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. e forty- ve-minute
journey in heavy traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish
Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence.
e corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls were coated with black slime.
Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers, junked cars, and jumbles of
wire mesh. e streets were one long puddle of oating garbage. Mosquitoes and
ies were everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as
numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead rats and the skeletons of cars were
exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eight years Guinea's population will
double if growth goes on at current rates. Hardwood logging continues at a madcap
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
9/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
speed, and people ee the Guinean countryside for Conakry. It seemed to me that
here, as elsewhere in Africa and the ird World, man is challenging nature far
beyond its limits, and nature is now beginning to take its revenge.
Africa may be as relevant to the future character of world politics as the Balkans
were a hundred years ago, prior to the two Balkan wars and the First World War.
en the threat was the collapse of empires and the birth of nations based solely on
tribe. Now the threat is more elemental: nature unchecked. Africa's immediate
future could be very bad. e coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut
down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through
dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we
are entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aid missions to be closed over the
next three years are in Africa—a prologue to a consolidation of U.S. embassies
themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa is set to go over the edge at a time
when the Cold War has ended, when environmental and demographic stress in
other parts of the globe is becoming critical, and when the post-First World War
system of nation-states—not just in the Balkans but perhaps also in the Middle
East—is about to be toppled, Africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics
will be like a few decades hence.
To understand the events of the next fty years, then, one must understand
environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the
transformation of war. e order in which I have named these is not accidental.
Each concept except the rst relies partly on the one or ones before it, meaning that
the last two—new approaches to mapmaking and to warfare—are the most
important. ey are also the least understood. I will now look at each idea, drawing
upon the work of specialists and also my own travel experiences in various parts of
the globe besides Africa, in order to ll in the blanks of a new political atlas.
e Environment as a Hostile Power
For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent upheavals
abroad mainly to ethnic and religious con ict. But as these con icts multiply, it will
become apparent that something else is afoot, making more and more places like
Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.
Mention e Environment or "diminishing natural resources" in foreign-policy
circles and you meet a brick wall of skepticism or boredom. To conservatives
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
10/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
especially, the very terms seem aky. Public-policy foundations have contributed to
the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmental studies replete with
technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just let pile up on their desks.
It is time to understand e Environment for what it is: the national-security issue
of the early twenty- rst century. e political and strategic impact of surging
populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air
pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the
Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and,
in turn, incite group con icts—will be the core foreign-policy challenge from
which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting
assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty- rst century water will
be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia,
and the southwestern United States. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia
over Nile River water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and
Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic case of how environmental
disputes fuse with ethnic and historical ones. e political scientist and erstwhile
Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy today in
the shape of a doughnut—lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center."
e environment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will
de ne a new threat to our security, lling the hole in Mandelbaum's doughnut and
allowing a post- Cold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than
by design.
Our Cold War foreign policy truly began with George F. Kennan's famous article,
signed "X," published in Foreign Affairs in July of 1947, in which Kennan argued
for a " rm and vigilant containment" of a Soviet Union that was imperially, rather
than ideologically, motivated. It may be that our post-Cold War foreign policy will
one day be seen to have had its beginnings in an even bolder and more detailed
piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the journal International Security.
e article, published in the fall of 1991 by omas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is
the head of the Peace and Con ict Studies Program at the University of Toronto,
was titled "On the reshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute
Con ict." Homer-Dixon has, more successfully than other analysts, integrated two
hitherto separate elds—military-con ict studies and the study of the physical
environment.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
11/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence will often arise from
scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and sh. Just as there will be
environmentally driven wars and refugee ows, there will be environmentally
induced praetorian regimes—or, as he puts it, "hard regimes." Countries with the
highest probability of acquiring hard regimes, according to Homer-Dixon, are those
that are threatened by a declining resource base yet also have "a history of state
[read 'military'] strength." Candidates include Indonesia, Brazil, and, of course,
Nigeria. ough each of these nations has exhibited democratizing tendencies of
late, Homer-Dixon argues that such tendencies are likely to be super cial
"epiphenomena" having nothing to do with long-term processes that include
soaring populations and shrinking raw materials. Democracy is problematic;
scarcity is more certain.
Indeed, the Saddam Husseins of the future will have more, not fewer,
opportunities. In addition to engendering tribal strife, scarcer resources will place a
great strain on many peoples who never had much of a democratic or institutional
tradition to begin with. Over the next fty years the earth's population will soar
from 5.5 billion to more than nine billion. ough optimists have hopes for new
resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, they fail to
note that, as the National Academy of Sciences has pointed out, 95 percent of the
population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world, where governments
now—just look at Africa—show little ability to function, let alone to implement
even marginal improvements. Homer-Dixon writes, ominously, "Neo-Malthusians
may underestimate human adaptability in today's environmental-social system, but
as time passes their analysis may become ever more compelling."
While a minority of the human population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put
it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a "post-historical" realm, living in cities and
suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and ethnic animosities have
been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be
stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural
dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to
till, and space to survive in. In the developing world environmental stress will
present people with a choice that is increasingly among totalitarianism (as in Iraq),
fascist-tending mini-states (as in Serb-held Bosnia), and road-warrior cultures (as in
Somalia). Homer-Dixon concludes that "as environmental degradation proceeds,
the size of the potential social disruption will increase."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
12/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
Tad Homer-Dixon is an unlikely Jeremiah. Today a boyish thirty-seven, he grew up
amid the sylvan majesty of Vancouver Island, attending private day schools. His
speech is calm, perfectly even, and crisply enunciated. ere is nothing in his
background or manner that would indicate a bent toward pessimism. A Canadian
Anglican who spends his summers canoeing on the lakes of northern Ontario, and
who talks about the benign mountains, black bears, and Douglas rs of his youth,
he is the opposite of the intellectually severe neoconservative, the kind at home
with con ict scenarios. Nor is he an environmentalist who opposes development.
"My father was a logger who thought about ecologically safe forestry before others,"
he says. "He logged, planted, logged, and planted. He got out of the business just as
the issue was being polarized by environmentalists. ey hate changed ecosystems.
But human beings, just by carrying seeds around, change the natural world." As an
only child whose playground was a virtually untouched wilderness and seacoast,
Homer-Dixon has a familiarity with the natural world that permits him to see a
reality that most policy analysts—children of suburbia and city streets—are blind
to.
"We need to bring nature back in," he argues. "We have to stop separating politics
from the physical world—the climate, public health, and the environment."
Quoting Daniel Deudney, another pioneering expert on the security aspects of the
environment, Homer-Dixon says that "for too long we've been prisoners of 'socialsocial' theory, which assumes there are only social causes for social and political
changes, rather than natural causes, too. is social-social mentality emerged with
the Industrial Revolution, which separated us from nature. But nature is coming
back with a vengeance, tied to population growth. It will have incredible security
implications.
"ink of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless
beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of
North America, Europe, the emerging Paci c Rim, and a few other isolated places,
with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest
of mankind, going in a completely different direction."
We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's and
Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. e other,
larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that is "poor,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
13/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
nasty, brutish, and short." Although both parts will be threatened by environmental
stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not.
e Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground water tables in the western
United States. He will build dikes to save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake
beaches from rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast of India,
sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia
recede, driving tens of millions of people inland where there is no room for them,
and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.
Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in his Toronto office. "e
darker the map color, the worse the degradation," he explains. e West African
coast, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central America have
the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related to winds,
chemicals, and water problems. "e worst degradation is generally where the
population is highest. e population is generally highest where the soil is the best.
So we're degrading earth's best soil."
China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential example of environmental
degradation. Its current economic "success" masks deeper problems. "China's
fourteen percent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power. It
means that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking place, is joining the
rest of the Paci c Rim. e disparity with inland China is intensifying." Referring
to the environmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav
Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of arable land in
interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that the quality of that land
has been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinization. He mentions
the loss and contamination of water supplies, the exhaustion of wells, the plugging
of irrigation systems and reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54
billion by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China has gotten its population
under control. Large-scale population movements are under way, from inland
China to coastal China and from villages to cities, leading to a crime surge like the
one in Africa and to growing regional disparities and con icts in a land with a
strong tradition of warlordism and a weak tradition of central government—again
as in Africa. "We will probably see the center challenged and fractured, and China
will not remain the same on the map," Homer-Dixon says.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
14/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
Environmental scarcity will in ame existing hatreds and affect power relationships,
at which we now look.
Skinhead Cossacks, Juju Warriors
In the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, of Harvard's
Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, published a thought-provoking article called
"e Clash of Civilizations?" e world, he argues, has been moving during the
course of this century from nation-state con ict to ideological con ict to, nally,
cultural con ict. I would add that as refugee ows increase and as peasants continue
migrating to cities around the world—turning them into sprawling villages—
national borders will mean less, even as more power will fall into the hands of less
educated, less sophisticated groups. In the eyes of these uneducated but newly
empowered millions, the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones:
those of culture and tribe. Huntington writes, "First, differences among civilizations
are not only real; they are basic," involving, among other things, history, language,
and religion. "Second . . . interactions between peoples of different civilizations are
increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness."
Economic modernization is not necessarily a panacea, since it fuels individual and
group ambitions while weakening traditional loyalties to the state. It is worth
noting, for example, that it is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in
India, Bombay, that has seen the worst intercommunal violence between Hindus
and Muslims. Consider that Indian cities, like African and Chinese ones, are
ecological time bombs—Delhi and Calcutta, and also Beijing, suffer the worst air
quality of any cities in the world—and it is apparent how surging populations,
environmental degradation, and ethnic con ict are deeply related.
Huntington points to interlocking con icts among Hindu, Muslim, Slavic
Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African
civilizations: for instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in India, Turkic Muslims
clashing with Slavic Orthodox Russians in Central Asian cities, the West clashing
with Asia. (Even in the United States, African-Americans nd themselves besieged
by an in ux of competing Latinos.) Whatever the laws, refugees nd a way to crash
official borders, bringing their passions with them, meaning that Europe and the
United States will be weakened by cultural disputes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
15/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
Because Huntington's brush is broad, his speci cs are vulnerable to attack. In a
rebuttal of Huntington's argument the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a
Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world beyond suburbia, writes in
the September-October, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, "e world of Islam divides
and subdivides. e battle lines in the Caucasus . . . are not coextensive with
civilizational fault lines. e lines follow the interests of states. Where Huntington
sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast
religious zeal . . . to the wind . . . in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward
Christian Armenia."
True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is
not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus. But that is only because he
has misidenti ed which cultural war is occurring there. A recent visit to Azerbaijan
made clear to me that Azeri Turks, the world's most secular Shi'ite Muslims, see
their cultural identity in terms not of religion but of their Turkic race. e
Armenians, likewise, ght the Azeris not because the latter are Muslims but because
they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915.
Turkic culture (secular and based on languages employing a Latin script) is battling
Iranian culture (religiously militant as de ned by Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic
script) across the whole swath of Central Asia and the Caucasus. e Armenians
are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans the Iranians.
Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a ashpoint of cultural and racial war.
But, as Ajami observes, Huntington's plate tectonics are too simple. Two months of
recent travel throughout Turkey revealed to me that although the Turks are
developing a deep distrust, bordering on hatred, of fellow-Muslim Iran, they are
also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish public
opinion, revising their group identity, increasingly seeing themselves as Muslims
being deserted by a West that does little to help besieged Muslims in Bosnia and
that attacks Turkish Muslims in the streets of Germany.
In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for nation-state war at the beginning of
the twentieth century, could be a powder keg for cultural war at the turn of the
twenty- rst: between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic
Byzantine con guration of Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the House of
Islam. Yet in the Caucasus that House of Islam is falling into a clash between Turkic
and Iranian civilizations. Ajami asserts that this very subdivision, not to mention all
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
16/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
the divisions within the Arab world, indicates that the West, including the United
States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated,
the West has proved capable of playing one part of the House of Islam against
another.
True. However, whether he is aware of it or not, Ajami is describing a world even
more dangerous than the one Huntington envisions, especially when one takes into
account Homer-Dixon's research on environmental scarcity. Outside the stretch
limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors,
in uenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds,
and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla con icts that ripple across
continents and intersect in no discernible pattern—meaning there's no easy-tode ne threat. Kennan's world of one adversary seems as distant as the world of
Herodotus.
Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense
change. But it is minor compared with what is yet to come. e breaking apart and
remaking of the atlas is only now beginning. e crack-up of the Soviet empire and
the coming end of Arab-Israeli military confrontation are merely prologues to the
really big changes that lie ahead. Michael Vlahos, a long-range thinker for the U.S.
Navy, warns, "We are not in charge of the environment and the world is not
following us. It is going in many directions. Do not assume that democratic
capitalism is the last word in human social evolution."
Before addressing the questions of maps and of warfare, I want to take a closer look
at the interaction of religion, culture, demographic shifts, and the distribution of
natural resources in a speci c area of the world: the Middle East.
e Past is Dead
Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital, exude
visual drama. Altindag, or "Golden Mountain," is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned
from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack were built on
top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward heaven—the heaven of
wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere else on the planet have I
found such a poignant architectural symbol of man's striving, with gaps in house
walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
17/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish
shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one.
To see the twenty- rst century truly, one's eyes must learn a different set of
aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with their
inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. ere are far too
many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real—whose raw energies and
desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the future into something
frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns are not all bad.
Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite.
e closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had
$1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler's checks in the
other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. e inside of
one house told the story: e architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal
and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home—order, that is, bespeaking
dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books
and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. ough the
streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the oors inside this house were
spotless.
Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped
to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea.
One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99
percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism.
Crime against persons is in nitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down
versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa),
making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.
My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence
demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is
made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once
again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. ose
peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be,
relatively speaking, the future's winners. ose whose cultures cannot will be the
future's victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities.
e mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
18/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with
natural muscle tone. Turks, history's perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.
e future of the Middle East is quietly being written inside the heads of Golden
Mountain's inhabitants. ink of an Ottoman military encampment on the eve of
the destruction of Greek Constantinople in 1453. at is Golden Mountain. "We
brought the village here. But in the village we worked harder—in the eld, all day.
So we couldn't fast during [the holy month of ] Ramadan. Here we fast. Here we
are more religious." Aishe Tanrikulu, along with half a dozen other women, was
stuffing rice into vine leaves from a crude plastic bowl. She asked me to join her
under the shade of a piece of sheet metal. Each of these women had her hair
covered by a kerchief. In the city they were encountering television for the rst
time. "We are traditional, religious people. e programs offend us," Aishe said.
Another woman complained about the schools. ough her children had
educational options unavailable in the village, they had to compete with wealthier,
secular Turks. "e kids from rich families with connections—they get all the
places." More opportunities, more tensions, in other words.
My guidebook to Golden Mountain was an untypical one: Tales From the Garbage
Hills, a brutally realistic novel by a Turkish writer, Latife Tekin, about life in the
shantytowns, which in Turkey are called gecekondus ("built in a night"). "He
listened to the earth and wept unceasingly for water, for work and for the cure of
the illnesses spread by the garbage and the factory waste," Tekin writes. In the most
revealing passage of Tales From the Garbage Hills the squatters are told "about a
certain 'Ottoman Empire' . . . that where they now lived there had once been an
empire of this name." is history "confounded" the squatters. It was the rst they
had heard of it. ough one of them knew "that his grandfather and his dog died
ghting the Greeks," nationalism and an encompassing sense of Turkish history are
the province of the Turkish middle and upper classes, and of foreigners like me who
feel required to have a notion of "Turkey."
But what did the Golden Mountain squatters know about the armies of Turkish
migrants that had come before their own—namely, Seljuks and Ottomans? For
these recently urbanized peasants, and their counterparts in Africa, the Arab world,
India, and so many other places, the world is new, to adapt V. S. Naipaul's phrase.
As Naipaul wrote of urban refugees in India: A Wounded Civilization, "ey saw
themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
19/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
their land for the rst time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of
community and self-help. For them the past was dead; they had left it behind in the
villages."
Everywhere in the developing world at the turn of the twenty- rst century these
new men and women, rushing into the cities, are remaking civilizations and
rede ning their identities in terms of religion and tribal ethnicity which do not
coincide with the borders of existing states.
In Turkey several things are happening at once. In 1980, 44 percent of Turks lived
in cities; in 1990 it was 61 percent. By the year 2000 the gure is expected to be 67
percent. Villages are emptying out as concentric rings of gecekondu developments
grow around Turkish cities. is is the real political and demographic revolution in
Turkey and elsewhere, and foreign correspondents usually don't write about it.
Whereas rural poverty is age-old and almost a "normal" part of the social fabric,
urban poverty is socially destabilizing. As Iran has shown, Islamic extremism is the
psychological defense mechanism of many urbanized peasants threatened with the
loss of traditions in pseudo-modern cities where their values are under attack, where
basic services like water and electricity are unavailable, and where they are assaulted
by a physically unhealthy environment. e American ethnologist and orientalist
Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam "has made possible the optimum
survival and happiness of millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished
environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period." Beyond its stark, clearly
articulated message, Islam's very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden.
It is the one religion that is prepared to ght. A political era driven by
environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and
refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensi cation of
Islam, already the world's fastest-growing religion. (ough Islam is spreading in
West Africa, it is being hobbled by syncretization with animism: this makes new
converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes for a
weakened version of the faith, which is less effective as an antidote to crime.)
In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardly forging a consensus with
modernization, a trend that is less apparent in the Arab and Persian worlds (and
virtually invisible in Africa). In Iran the oil boom—because it put development and
urbanization on a fast track, making the culture shock more intense—fueled the
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
20/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
1978 Islamic Revolution. But Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab world, has little oil.
erefore its development and urbanization have been more gradual. Islamists have
been integrated into the parliamentary system for decades. e tensions I noticed in
Golden Mountain are natural, creative ones: the kind immigrants face the world
over. While the world has focused on religious perversity in Algeria, a nation rich in
natural gas, and in Egypt, parts of whose capital city, Cairo, evince worse crowding
than I have seen even in Calcutta, Turkey has been living through the Muslim
equivalent of the Protestant Reformation.
Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another way vis-a-vis Arabs and
Persians. Turks may have little oil, but their Anatolian heartland has lots of water—
the most important uid of the twenty- rst century. Turkey's Southeast Anatolia
Project, involving twenty-two major dams and irrigation systems, is impounding
the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that Arabs and
perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by Turks. e project's
centerpiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are
emblazoned the words of modern Turkey's founder: "Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene"
("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").
Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's Revolution Dam, on the
Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a
predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge. On
a recent visit my eyes took in the immaculate offices and their gardens, the highvoltage electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep of giant
humming transformers, the poured-concrete spillways, and the prim unfolding
suburbia, complete with schools, for dam employees. e emerging power of the
Turks was palpable.
Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me that "while oil can be
shipped abroad to enrich only elites, water has to be spread more evenly within the
society. . . . It is true, we can stop the ow of water into Syria and Iraq for up to
eight months without the same water over owing our dams, in order to regulate
their political behavior."
Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from the oil elds of Dhahran,
on the Persian Gulf, to the water plain of Harran, in southern Anatolia—near the
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
21/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
site of the Ataturk Dam. But will the nation-state of Turkey, as presently
constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?
I very much doubt it.
e Lies of Mapmakers
Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of political reality outside
Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, Turkey, an organic outgrowth of two Turkish empires
that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has been among the most stable. Turkey's borders
were established not by colonial powers but in a war of independence, in the early
1920s. Kemal Ataturk provided Turkey with a secular nation-building myth that
most Arab and African states, burdened by arti cially drawn borders, lack. at
lack will leave many Arab states defenseless against a wave of Islam that will eat
away at their legitimacy and frontiers in coming years. Yet even as regards Turkey,
maps deceive.
It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on urban maps. Many
shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing—as are the considerable
territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban ma as. Traveling with Eritrean
guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in
"northern Iraq" with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus
controlled by a local ma a—to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa—led
me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create a
conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the political crack-up just
beginning to occur worldwide.
Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signi ed by a
bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is generally
an invention of modernism, speci cally of European colonialism. Modernism, in
the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and was
con rmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the irty Years' War—an event
that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which
together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly ush with an
enthusiasm to categorize, to de ne. e map, based on scienti c techniques of
measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw
puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them. Frontier is itself a
modern concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind. And as European nations
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
22/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
carved out far- ung domains at the same time that print technology was making
the reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a way of
creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.
In his book Imagined Communities: Re ections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map
enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a "totalizing
classi catory grid. . . . It was bounded, determinate, and therefore—in principle—
countable." To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an accountant's
ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the grammar" that would make
possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.
e state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century
applied to countries covering only three percent of the earth's land area. Nor is the
evidence compelling that the state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully
transported to areas outside the industrialized world. Even the United States of
America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder, consists of
"arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here."
Yet this in exible, arti cial reality staggers on, not only in the United Nations but
in various geographic and travel publications (themselves by-products of an age of
elite touring which colonialism made possible) that still report on and photograph
the world according to "country." Newspapers, this magazine, and this writer are
not innocent of the tendency.
According to the map, the great hydropower complex emblemized by the Ataturk
Dam is situated in Turkey. Forget the map. is southeastern region of Turkey is
populated almost completely by Kurds. About half of the world's 20 million Kurds
live in "Turkey." e Kurds are predominant in an ellipse of territory that overlaps
not only with Turkey but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union.
e Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a consequence of the 1991
Gulf War, has already exposed the ctitious nature of that supposed nation-state.
On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred to me what a risky idea
the nation-state is. Here I was on the legal fault line between two clashing
civilizations, Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in West Africa,
the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the people doing the
smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds. In such a moonscape, over
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
23/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
which peoples have migrated and settled in patterns that obliterate borders, the end
of the Cold War will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among existing
states. No longer will these states be so rmly propped up by the West or the Soviet
Union. Because the Kurds overlap with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on
account of their being cheated out of a state in the post-First World War peace
treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the natural selector—the ultimate reality
check. ey have destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt states that do not
offer them adequate breathing space, while strengthening states that do.
Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their growing economy, and the
social cohesion evinced by the most crime-free slums I have encountered, are on the
verge of big-power status, and because the 10 million Kurds within Turkey threaten
that status, the outcome of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more critical to the
future of the Middle East than the eventual outcome of the recent IsraeliPalestinian agreement.
America's fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, coupled with its lack of
interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one, is a function of its own domestic and ethnic
obsessions, not of the cartographic reality that is about to transform the Middle
East. e diplomatic process involving Israelis and Palestinians will, I believe, have
little effect on the early- and mid-twenty- rst-century map of the region. Israel,
with a 6.6 percent economic growth rate based increasingly on high-tech exports, is
about to enter Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, forti ed by a well-de ned political
community that is an organic outgrowth of history and ethnicity. Like prosperous
and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia
on the other, Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world,
however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across arti cial frontiers, fueled
by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent.
Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970—youths with
little historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial
attempts at nation-building, or any of the Arab-Israeli wars. e most distant
recollection of these youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented
Iraq in 1991. Today seventeen out of twenty-two Arab states have a declining gross
national product; in the next twenty years, at current growth rates, the population
of many Arab countries will double. ese states, like most African ones, will be
ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies. e Middle East analyst
Christine M. Helms explains, "Declaring Arab nationalism "bankrupt," the
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
24/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
political "disinherited" are not rationalizing the failure of Arabism . . . or
reformulating it. Alternative solutions are not contemplated. ey have simply
opted for the political paradigm at the other end of the political spectrum with
which they are familiar—Islam."
Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria,
and other Arab states are often contrary to cultural and political reality. As state
control mechanisms wither in the face of environmental and demographic stress,
"hard" Islamic city-states or shantytown-states are likely to emerge. e ction that
the impoverished city of Algiers, on the Mediterranean, controls Tamanrasset, deep
in the Algerian Sahara, cannot obtain forever. Whatever the outcome of the peace
process, Israel is destined to be a Jewish ethnic fortress amid a vast and volatile
realm of Islam. In that realm, the violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns
may be indicative of the coming era.
e destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less certain, but far more relevant to the kind
of map that will explain our future world. e Kurds suggest a geographic reality
that cannot be shown in two-dimensional space. e issue in Turkey is not simply a
matter of giving autonomy or even independence to Kurds in the southeast. is
isn't the Balkans or the Caucasus, where regions are merely subdividing into smaller
units, Abkhazia breaking off from Georgia, and so on. Federalism is not the answer.
Kurds are found everywhere in Turkey, including the shanty districts of Istanbul
and Ankara. Turkey's problem is that its Anatolian land mass is the home of two
cultures and languages, Turkish and Kurdish. Identity in Turkey, as in India, Africa,
and elsewhere, is more complex and subtle than conventional cartography can
display.
A New Kind of War
To appreciate fully the political and cartographic implications of postmodernism—
an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classi catory grid of nationstates is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states,
nebulous and anarchic regionalisms—it is necessary to consider, nally, the whole
question of war.
"Oh, what a relief to ght, to ght enemies who defend themselves, enemies who
are awake!" Andre Malraux wrote in Man's Fate. I cannot think of a more suitable
battle cry for many combatants in the early decades of the twenty- rst century. e
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
25/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
intense savagery of the ghting in such diverse cultural settings as Liberia, Bosnia,
the Caucasus, and Sri Lanka—to say nothing of what obtains in American inner
cities—indicates something very troubling that those of us inside the stretch limo,
concerned with issues like middle-class entitlements and the future of interactive
cable television, lack the stomach to contemplate. It is this: a large number of
people on this planet, to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is
utterly unknown, nd war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step
down.
"Just as it makes no sense to ask 'why people eat' or 'what they sleep for,'" writes
Martin van Creveld, a military historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in
e Transformation of War, "so ghting in many ways is not a means but an end.
roughout history, for every person who has expressed his horror of war there is
another who found in it the most marvelous of all the experiences that are
vouchsafed to man, even to the point that he later spent a lifetime boring his
descendants by recounting his exploits." When I asked Pentagon officials about the
nature of war in the twenty- rst century, the answer I frequently got was "Read Van
Creveld." e top brass are enamored of this historian not because his writings
justify their existence but, rather, the opposite: Van Creveld warns them that huge
state military machines like the Pentagon's are dinosaurs about to go extinct, and
that something far more terrible awaits us.
e degree to which Van Creveld's Transformation of War complements HomerDixon's work on the environment, Huntington's thoughts on cultural clash, my
own realizations in traveling by foot, bus, and bush taxi in more than sixty
countries, and America's sobering comeuppances in intractable-culture zones like
Haiti and Somalia is startling. e book begins by demolishing the notion that
men don't like to ght. "By compelling the senses to focus themselves on the here
and now," Van Creveld writes, war "can cause a man to take his leave of them." As
anybody who has had experience with Chetniks in Serbia, "technicals" in Somalia,
Tontons Macoutes in Haiti, or soldiers in Sierra Leone can tell you, in places where
the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been
mass poverty, people nd liberation in violence. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, I
vicariously experienced this phenomenon: worrying about mines and ambushes
frees you from worrying about mundane details of daily existence. If my own
experience is too subjective, there is a wealth of data showing the sheer frequency of
war, especially in the developing world since the Second World War. Physical
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
26/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
aggression is a part of being human. Only when people attain a certain economic,
educational, and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized. In light of the fact that
95 percent of the earth's population growth will be in the poorest areas of the
globe, the question is not whether there will be war (there will be a lot of it) but
what kind of war. And who will ght whom?
Debunking the great military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, Van Creveld, who may
be the most original thinker on war since that early-nineteenth-century Prussian,
writes, "Clausewitz's ideas . . . were wholly rooted in the fact that, ever since 1648,
war had been waged overwhelmingly by states." But, as Van Creveld explains, the
period of nation-states and, therefore, of state con ict is now ending, and with it
the clear "threefold division into government, army, and people" which statedirected wars enforce. us, to see the future, the rst step is to look back to the
past immediately prior to the birth of modernism—the wars in medieval Europe
which began during the Reformation and reached their culmination in the irty
Years' War.
Van Creveld writes, "In all these struggles political, social, economic, and religious
motives were hopelessly entangled. Since this was an age when armies consisted of
mercenaries, all were also attended by swarms of military entrepreneurs. . . . Many
of them paid little but lip service to the organizations for whom they had
contracted to ght. Instead, they robbed the countryside on their own behalf. . . ."
"Given such conditions, any ne distinctions . . . between armies on the one hand
and peoples on the other were bound to break down. Engulfed by war, civilians
suffered terrible atrocities."
Back then, in other words, there was no Politics as we have come to understand the
term, just as there is less and less Politics today in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri
Lanka, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, among other places.
Because, as Van Creveld notes, the radius of trust within tribal societies is narrowed
to one's immediate family and guerrilla comrades, truces arranged with one
Bosnian commander, say, may be broken immediately by another Bosnian
commander. e plethora of short-lived cease res in the Balkans and the Caucasus
constitute proof that we are no longer in a world where the old rules of state
warfare apply. More evidence is provided by the destruction of medieval
monuments in the Croatian port of Dubrovnik: when cultures, rather than states,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
27/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
ght, then cultural and religious monuments are weapons of war, making them fair
game.
Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted to a speci c territory. Loose
and shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders
will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and
control will mean more. "From the vantage point of the present, there appears every
prospect that religious . . . fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of
armed con ict" in the West than at any time "for the last 300 years," Van Creveld
writes. is is why analysts like Michael Vlahos are closely monitoring religious
cults. Vlahos says, "An ideology that challenges us may not take familiar form, like
the old Nazis or Commies. It may not even engage us initially in ways that t old
threat markings." Van Creveld concludes, "Armed con ict will be waged by men on
earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the struggles of
primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war." While another military
historian, John Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more
benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van
Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior societies operating at a time of
unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.
Van Creveld's pre-Westphalian vision of worldwide low-intensity con ict is not a
super cial "back to the future" scenario. First of all, technology will be used toward
primitive ends. In Liberia the guerrilla leader Prince Johnson didn't just cut off the
ears of President Samuel Doe before Doe was tortured to death in 1990—Johnson
made a video of it, which has circulated throughout West Africa. In December of
1992, when plotters of a failed coup against the Strasser regime in Sierra Leone had
their ears cut off at Freetown's Hamilton Beach prior to being killed, it was seen by
many to be a copycat execution. Considering, as I've explained earlier, that the
Strasser regime is not really a government and that Sierra Leone is not really a
nation-state, listen closely to Van Creveld: "Once the legal monopoly of armed
force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions
between war and crime will break down much as is already the case today in . . .
Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia."
If crime and war become indistinguishable, then "national defense" may in the
future be viewed as a local concept. As crime continues to grow in our cities and the
ability of state governments and criminal-justice systems to protect their citizens
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
28/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
diminishes, urban crime may, according to Van Creveld, "develop into lowintensity con ict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines." As
small-scale violence multiplies at home and abroad, state armies will continue to
shrink, being gradually replaced by a booming private security business, as in West
Africa, and by urban ma as, especially in the former communist world, who may
be better equipped than municipal police forces to grant physical protection to
local inhabitants.
Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases,
caused by environmental scarcity. ese wars will be subnational, meaning that it
will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens
physically. is is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades—and
with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other
states—peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own
strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them.
Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid,
globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than
of our similarities. To the average person, political values will mean less, personal
security more. e belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the
overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between
peoples?
e Last Map
In Geography and the Human Spirit, Anne Buttimer, a professor at University
College, Dublin, recalls the work of an early-nineteenth-century German
geographer, Carl Ritter, whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity" based on
regionalism and a constant, living ow of forms. e map of the future, to the
extent that a map is even possible, will represent a perverse twisting of Ritter's
vision. Imagine cartography in three dimensions, as if in a hologram. In this
hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop
the merely two-dimensional color markings of city-states and the remaining
nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead,
indicating the power of drug cartels, ma as, and private security agencies. Instead
of borders, there would be moving "centers" of power, as in the Middle Ages. Many
of these layers would be in motion. Replacing xed and abrupt lines on a at space
would be a shifting pattern of buffer entities, like the Kurdish and Azeri buffer
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
29/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
entities between Turkey and Iran, the Turkic Uighur buffer entity between Central
Asia and Inner China (itself distinct from coastal China), and the Latino buffer
entity replacing a precise U.S.-Mexican border. To this protean cartographic
hologram one must add other factors, such as migrations of populations, explosions
of birth rates, vectors of disease. Henceforward the map of the world will never be
static. is future map—in a sense, the "Last Map"—will be an ever-mutating
representation of chaos.
e Indian subcontinent offers examples of what is happening. For different
reasons, both India and Pakistan are increasingly dysfunctional. e argument over
democracy in these places is less and less relevant to the larger issue of governability.
In India's case the question arises, Is one unwieldy bureaucracy in New Delhi the
best available mechanism for promoting the lives of 866 million people of diverse
languages, religions, and ethnic groups? In 1950, when the Indian population was
much less than half as large and nation-building idealism was still strong, the
argument for democracy was more impressive than it is now. Given that in 2025
India's population could be close to 1.5 billion, that much of its economy rests on a
shrinking natural-resource base, including dramatically declining water levels, and
that communal violence and urbanization are spiraling upward, it is difficult to
imagine that the Indian state will survive the next century. India's oft-trumpeted
Green Revolution has been achieved by overworking its croplands and depleting its
watershed. Norman Myers, a British development consultant, worries that Indians
have "been feeding themselves today by borrowing against their children's food
sources."
Pakistan's problem is more basic still: like much of Africa, the country makes no
geographic or demographic sense. It was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of
the subcontinent, yet there are more subcontinental Muslims outside Pakistan than
within it. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan is a patchwork of ethnic groups, increasingly in
violent con ict with one another. While the Western media gushes over the fact
that the country has a woman Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, Karachi is becoming
a subcontinental version of Lagos. In eight visits to Pakistan, I have never gotten a
sense of a cohesive national identity. With as much as 65 percent of its land
dependent on intensive irrigation, with wide-scale deforestation, and with a yearly
population growth of 2.7 percent (which ensures that the amount of cultivated land
per rural inhabitant will plummet), Pakistan is becoming a more and more
desperate place. As irrigation in the Indus River basin intensi es to serve two
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
30/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
growing populations, Muslim-Hindu strife over falling water tables may be
unavoidable.
"India and Pakistan will probably fall apart," Homer-Dixon predicts. "eir secular
governments have less and less legitimacy as well as less management ability over
people and resources." Rather than one bold line dividing the subcontinent into
two parts, the future will likely see a lot of thinner lines and smaller parts, with the
ethnic entities of Pakhtunistan and Punjab gradually replacing Pakistan in the space
between the Central Asian plateau and the heart of the subcontinent.
None of this even takes into account climatic change, which, if it occurs in the next
century, will further erode the capacity of existing states to cope. India, for instance,
receives 70 percent of its precipitation from the monsoon cycle, which planetary
warming could disrupt.
Not only will the three-dimensional aspects of the Last Map be in constant motion,
but its two-dimensional base may change too. e National Academy of Sciences
reports that "as many as one billion people, or 20 per cent of the world's
population, live on lands likely to be inundated or dramatically changed by rising
waters. . . . Low-lying countries in the developing world such as Egypt and
Bangladesh, where rivers are large and the deltas extensive and densely populated,
will be hardest hit. . . . Where the rivers are dammed, as in the case of the Nile, the
effects . . . will be especially severe."
Egypt could be where climatic upheaval—to say nothing of the more immediate
threat of increasing population—will incite religious upheaval in truly biblical
fashion. Natural catastrophes, such as the October, 1992, Cairo earthquake, in
which the government failed to deliver relief aid and slum residents were in many
instances helped by their local mosques, can only strengthen the position of Islamic
factions. In a statement about greenhouse warming which could refer to any of a
variety of natural catastrophes, the environmental expert Jessica Tuchman
Matthews warns that many of us underestimate the extent to which political
systems, in affluent societies as well as in places like Egypt, "depend on the
underpinning of natural systems." She adds, "e fact that one can move with ease
from Vermont to Miami has nothing to say about the consequences of Vermont
acquiring Miami's climate."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
31/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
Indeed, it is not clear that the United States will survive the next century in exactly
its present form. Because America is a multi-ethnic society, the nation-state has
always been more fragile here than it is in more homogeneous societies like
Germany and Japan. James Kurth, in an article published in e National Interest
in 1992, explains that whereas nation-state societies tend to be built around a massconscription army and a standardized public school system, "multicultural regimes"
feature a high-tech, all-volunteer army (and, I would add, private schools that teach
competing values), operating in a culture in which the international media and
entertainment industry has more in uence than the "national political class." In
other words, a nation-state is a place where everyone has been educated along
similar lines, where people take their cue from national leaders, and where everyone
(every male, at least) has gone through the crucible of military service, making
patriotism a simpler issue. Writing about his immigrant family in turn-of-thecentury Chicago, Saul Bellow states, "e country took us over. It was a country
then, not a collection of 'cultures.'"
During the Second World War and the decade following it, the United States
reached its apogee as a classic nation-state. During the 1960s, as is now clear,
America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. e signs hardly
need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of
many and various kinds. William Irwin ompson, in Passages About Earth: An
Exploration of the New Planetary Culture, writes, "e educational system that had
worked on the Jews or the Irish could no longer work on the blacks; and when
Jewish teachers in New York tried to take black children away from their parents
exactly in the way they had been taken from theirs, they were shocked to encounter
a violent affirmation of negritude."
Issues like West Africa could yet emerge as a new kind of foreign-policy issue,
further eroding America's domestic peace. e spectacle of several West African
nations collapsing at once could reinforce the worst racial stereotypes here at home.
at is another reason why Africa matters. We must not kid ourselves: the
sensitivity factor is higher than ever. e Washington, D.C., public school system is
already experimenting with an Afrocentric curriculum. Summits between African
leaders and prominent African-Americans are becoming frequent, as are Pollyannaish prognostications about multiparty elections in Africa that do not factor in
crime, surging birth rates, and resource depletion. e Congressional Black Caucus
was among those urging U.S. involvement in Somalia and in Haiti. At the Los
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
32/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
Angeles Times minority staffers have protested against, among other things, what
they allege to be the racist tone of the newspaper's Africa coverage, allegations that
the editor of the "World Report" section, Dan Fisher, denies, saying essentially that
Africa should be viewed through the same rigorous analytical lens as other parts of
the world.
Africa may be marginal in terms of conventional late-twentieth-century
conceptions of strategy, but in an age of cultural and racial clash, when national
defense is increasingly local, Africa's distress will exert a destabilizing in uence on
the United States.
is and many other factors will make the United States less of a nation than it is
today, even as it gains territory following the peaceful dissolution of Canada.
Quebec, based on the bedrock of Roman Catholicism and Francophone ethnicity,
could yet turn out to be North America's most cohesive and crime-free nationstate. (It may be a smaller Quebec, though, since aboriginal peoples may lop off
northern parts of the province.) "Patriotism" will become increasingly regional as
people in Alberta and Montana discover that they have far more in common with
each other than they do with Ottawa or Washington, and Spanish-speakers in the
Southwest discover a greater commonality with Mexico City. (e Nine Nations of
North America, by Joel Garreau, a book about the continent's regionalization, is
more relevant now than when it was published, in 1981.) As Washington's
in uence wanes, and with it the traditional symbols of American patriotism, North
Americans will take psychological refuge in their insulated communities and
cultures.
Returning from West Africa last fall was an illuminating ordeal. After leaving
Abidjan, my Air Afrique ight landed in Dakar, Senegal, where all passengers had
to disembark in order to go through another security check, this one demanded by
U.S. authorities before they would permit the ight to set out for New York. Once
we were in New York, despite the midnight hour, immigration officials at Kennedy
Airport held up disembarkation by conducting quick interrogations of the aircraft's
passengers—this was in addition to all the normal immigration and customs
procedures. It was apparent that drug smuggling, disease, and other factors had
contributed to the toughest security procedures I have ever encountered when
returning from overseas.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
33/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
en, for the rst time in over a month, I spotted businesspeople with attache cases
and laptop computers. When I had left New York for Abidjan, all the
businesspeople were boarding planes for Seoul and Tokyo, which departed from
gates near Air Afrique's. e only non-Africans off to West Africa had been relief
workers in T-shirts and khakis. Although the borders within West Africa are
increasingly unreal, those separating West Africa from the outside world are in
various ways becoming more impenetrable.
But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore this dying region at our own
risk. When the Berlin Wall was falling, in November of 1989, I happened to be in
Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians. e future was in Kosovo, I
told myself that night, not in Berlin. e same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser
Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was
approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an
expanding desert. e real news wasn't at the White House, I realized. It was right
below.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write
to letters@theatlantic.com.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
34/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
35/36
9/14/2020
The Coming Anarchy - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/
36/36
The End of History?
Author(s): Francis Fukuyama
Source: The National Interest , Summer 1989, No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-18
Published by: Center for the National Interest
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The National Interest
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The End of History?
-Francis Fukuyama.
over the past decade or so, it is daily headlines. The twentieth century saw
IN WATCHING
the flow of events process that gives coherence and order to the
hard to avoid the feeling that the developed world descend into a paroxysm
something very fundamental has happened in of ideological violence, as liberalism contend
world history. The past year has seen a flood ed first with the remnants of absolutism, then
of articles commemorating the end of the Cold bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updat
War, and the fact that "peace" seems to be ed Marxism that threatened to lead to the ul
breaking out in many regions of the world. timate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the cen
Most of these analyses lack any larger con- tury that began full of self-confidence in the
ceptual framework for distinguishing be- ultimate triumph of Western liberal democ
tween what is essential and what is contingent racy seems at its close to be returning full
or accidental in world history, and are pre- circle to where it started: not to an "end of
dictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ideology" or a convergence between capital
ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah ism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to
proclaimed the millennium from a desolate an unabashed victory of economic and polit
Middle Eastern capital, these same commen- ical liberalism.
tators would scramble to announce the rebirth The triumph of the West, of the Western
of a new era of conflict. idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaus
And yet, all of these people sense dimly tion of viable systematic alternatives to West
that there is some larger process at work, a ern liberalism. In the past decade, there have
been unmistakable changes in the intellectual
Francis Fukuyama is deputy director of the State climate of the world's two largest communist
Department's policy planning staff and former countries, and the beginnings of significant
analyst at the rand Corporation. This article reform movements in both. But this phenom
is based on a lecture presented at the Univer- enon extends beyond high politics and it can
sity of Chicago's John M. Olin Center for In- be seen also in the ineluctable spread of con
quiry Into the Theory and Practice of De- sumerist Western culture in such diverse con
mocracy. The author would like to pay special texts as the peasants' markets and color tele
thanks to the Olin Center and to Nathan Tar- vision sets now omnipresent throughout
cov and Allan Bloom for their support in this China, the cooperative restaurants and cloth
and many earlier endeavors. The opinions ex- ing stores opened in the past year in Moscow,
pressed in this article do not reflect those of the Beethoven piped into Japanese depart
the rand Corporation or of any agency of the ment stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike
U.S. government. in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.
The National Interest—Summer 1989 3
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
What we may be witnessing is not just
the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of postwar history, but the
and not, as earlier natural right theorists
would have it, a collection of more or less fixed
"natural" attributes. The mastery and trans
end of history as such: that is, the end point
formation of man's natural environment
of mankind's ideological evolution and the
is not to say that there will no longer be events
through the application of science and tech
nology was originally not a Marxist concept,
but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists
whose historical relativism degenerated into
to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs's yearly sum
relativism tout court, however, Hegel believed
maries of international relations, for the vic
that history culminated in an absolute mo
ment—a moment in which a final, rational
universalization of Western liberal democracy
as the final form of human government. This
tory of liberalism has occurred primarily in
the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as
form of society and state became victorious.
yet incomplete in the real or material world.
It is Hegel's misfortune to be known now
But there are powerful reasons for believing primarily as Marx's precursor, and it is our
that it is the ideal that will govern the material misfortune that few of us are familiar with
world in the long run. To understand how this Hegel's work from direct study, but only as
is so, we must first consider some theoretical it has been filtered through the distorting lens
issues concerning the nature of historical
change.
of Marxism. In France, however, there has
been an effort to save Hegel from his Marxist
interpreters and to resurrect him as the phi
losopher who most correctly speaks to our
time. Among those modern French inter
THE NOTION
end of
is not of
an the
original
one.history
Its best
known propagator was Karl Marx, who be
lieved that the direction of historical devel
preters of Hegel, the greatest was certainly
Alexandre Kojève, a brilliant Russian emigre
who taught a highly influential series of sem
inars in Paris in the 1930s at the Ecole Practique
opment was a purposeful one determined by des Hautes Etudes.1 While largely unknown in
the interplay of material forces, and would the United States, Kojève had a major impact
come to an end only with the achievement of on the intellectual life of the continent.
a communist Utopia that would finally resolve Among his students ranged such future lu
all prior contradictions. But the concept ofminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre on the Left and
history as a dialectical process with a begin Raymond Aron on the Right; postwar exis
ning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by tentialism borrowed many of its basic cate
Marx from his great German predecessor, gories from Hegel via Kojève.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Kojève sought to resurrect the Hegel of
For better or worse, much of Hegel's his the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who pro
toricism has become part of our contemporary claimed history to be at an end in 1806. For
intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat
has progressed through a series of primitiveof the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena
stages of consciousness on his path to the pres the victory of the ideals of the French Rev
ent, and that these stages corresponded to con
crete forms of social organization, such as trib 'Kojève's best-known work is his Introduction à la
al, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally
lecture de Hegel (Paris: Editions Gallimard,
democratic-egalitarian societies, has become
inseparable from the modern understanding
of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to
speak the language of modern social science,
of Hegel arranged by Raymond Queneau, edited
insofar as man for him was the product of his
concrete historical and social environment
by Allan Bloom, and translated by James Ni
chols (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
1947), which is a transcript of the Ecole Practique
lectures from the 1930s. This book is available
in English entitled Introduction to the Reading
The National Interest—Summer 1989 .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
olution, and the imminent universalization of
issues, and consequently no need for generals
the state incorporating the principles of lib
or statesmen; what remains is primarily eco
nomic activity. And indeed, Kojève's life was
consistent with his teaching. Believing that
there was no more work for philosophers as
well, since Hegel (correctly understood) had
already achieved absolute knowledge, Kojève
left teaching after the war and spent the re
mainder of his life working as a bureaucrat
in the European Economic Community, until
erty and equality. Kojève, far from rejecting
Hegel in light of the turbulent events of the
next century and a half, insisted that the latter
had been essentially correct.2 The Battle of
Jena marked the end of history because it was
at that point that the vanguard of humanity (a
term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the
principles of the French Revolution. While
there was considerable work to be done after
his death in 1968.
1806—abolishing slavery and the slave trade,
To his contemporaries at mid-century,
Kojève's proclamation of the end of history
must have seemed like the typical eccentric
solipsism of a French intellectual, coming as
extending the franchise to workers, women,
blacks, and other racial minorities, etc.—the
basic principles of the liberal democratic state
could not be improved upon. The two world
it did on the heels of World War II and at the
wars in this century and their attendant rev
olutions and upheavals simply had the effect
of extending those principles spatially, such
that the various provinces of human civili
very height of the Cold War. To comprehend
zation were brought up to the level of its most
how Kojève could have been so audacious as
to assert that history has ended, we must first
of all understand the meaning of Hegelian
idealism.
advanced outposts, and of forcing those so
cieties in Europe and North America at the
vanguard of civilization to implement their
II
FOR HEGEL,
the exist
contradictions
drive history
first of all inthat
the
liberalism more fully.
The state that emerges at the end of his
realm of human consciousness, i.e. on the level
tory is liberal insofar as it recognizes and pro
tects through a system of law man's universal
of ideas4—not the trivial election year pro
posals of American politicians, but ideas in
right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it
the sense of large unifying world views that
exists only with the consent of the governed.
might best be understood under the rubric of
For Kojève, this so-called "universal homo
genous state" found real-life embodiment in
the countries of postwar Western Europe—
precisely those flabby, prosperous, self-satis
ideology. Ideology in this sense is not restrict
ed to the secular and explicit political doc
trines we usually associate with the term, but
can include religion, culture, and the complex
fied, inward-looking, weak-willed states
whose grandest project was nothing more he
2In this respect Kojève stands in sharp contrast to
roic than the creation of the Common Mar
contemporary German interpreters of Hegel
ket.' But this was only to be expected. For
human history and the conflict that charac
terized it was based on the existence of "con
pathetic to Marx, regarded Hegel ultimately
as an historically bound and incomplete phi
tradictions": primitive man's quest for mutual
losopher.
like Herbert Marcuse who, being more sym
recognition, the dialectic of the master and 'Kojève alternatively identified the end of history
with the postwar "American way of life," to
slave, the transformation and mastery of na
ture, the struggle for the universal recognition
ward which he thought the Soviet Union was
moving as well.
of rights, and the dichotomy between prole
tarian and capitalist. But in the universal ho This notion was expressed in the famous aphorism
from the preface to the Philosophy of History to
mogenous state, all prior contradictions are
resolved and all human needs are satisfied.
the effect that "everything that is rational is
There is no struggle or conflict over "large"
real, and everything that is real is rational."
The End of History ?
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
of moral values underlying any society as
well.
Hegel's view of the relationship between
the ideal and the real or material worlds was
or historical phenomena, and our disinclina
tion to believe in the autonomous power of
ideas. A recent example of this is Paul Ken
nedy's hugely successful The Rise and Fall of
an extremely complicated one, beginning the Great Powers, which ascribes the decline of
great powers to simple economic overexten
with the fact that for him the distinction be
tween the two was only apparent.5 He did not
believe that the real world conformed or could
sion. Obviously, this is true on some level: an
empire whose economy is barely above the
be made to conform to ideological preconcep level of subsistence cannot bankrupt its treas
tions of philosophy professors in any simple ury indefinitely. But whether a highly pro
minded way, or that the "material" world ductive modern industrial society chooses to
could not impinge on the ideal. Indeed, Hegel spend 3 or 7 percent of its GNP on defense
rather than consumption is entirely a matter
work as a result of a very material event, the of that society's political priorities, which are
in turn determined in the realm of conscious
Battle of Jena. But while Hegel's writing and
ness.
thinking could be stopped by a bullet from
The materialist bias of modern thought
the material world, the hand on the trigger
the professor was temporarily thrown out of
of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas
is characteristic not only of people on the Left
of liberty and equality that had driven the
who may be sympathetic to Marxism, but of
French Revolution.
many passionate anti-Marxists as well. In
For Hegel, all human behavior in the ma deed, there is on the Right what one might
terial world, and hence all human history, is label the Wall Street Journal school of deter
rooted in a prior state of consciousness—an ministic materialism that discounts the im
idea similar to the one expressed by John May portance of ideology and culture and sees man
nard Keynes when he said that the views of as essentially a rational, profit-maximizing in
men of affairs were usually derived from de dividual. It is precisely this kind of individual
funct economists and academic scribblers of
and his pursuit of material incentives that is
earlier generations. This consciousness may posited as the basis for economic life as such
not be explicit and self-aware, as are modernin economic textbooks.6 One small example
political doctrines, but may rather take the will illustrate the problematic character of
form of religion or simple cultural or moralsuch materialist views.
habits. And yet this realm of consciousness in
Max Weber begins his famous book, The
the long run necessarily becomes manifest in Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by
the material world, indeed creates the material noting the different economic performance of
world in its own image. Consciousness is
cause and not effect, and can develop auton
omously from the material world; hence the 'Indeed, for Hegel the very dichotomy between the
real subtext underlying the apparent jumble
ideal and material worlds was itself only an
of current events is the history of ideology.
apparent one that was ultimately overcome by
Hegel's idealism has fared poorly at the
hands of later thinkers. Marx reversed the
the self-conscious subject; in his system, the
material world is itself only an aspect of mind.
priority of the real and the ideal completely, "In fact, modern economists, recognizing that man
relegating the entire realm of consciousness—
does not always behave as a /»ro/ît-maximizer,
religion, art, culture, philosophy itself—to a
"superstructure" that was determined entire
ly by the prevailing material mode of pro
duction. Yet another unfortunate legacy of
Marxism is our tendency to retreat into ma
terialist or utilitarian explanations of political
posit a "utility" function, utility being either
income or some other good that can be max
imized: leisure, sexual satisfaction, or the pleas
ure of philosophizing. That profit must be re
placed with a value like utility indicates the
cogency of the idealist perspective.
The National Interest—Summer 1989 .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Protestant and Catholic communities
strictions on certain forms of economic be
havior,
throughout Europe and America, summed
up and other deeply ingrained moral
in the proverb that Protestants eat wellqualities,
while
are equally important in explaining
Catholics sleep well. Weber notes that
their ac
economic performance.7 And yet the in
tellectual weight of materialism is such that
cording to any economic theory that posited
not the
a single respectable contemporary theory
man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising
of economic development addresses con
piece-work rate should increase labor produc
sciousness and culture seriously as the matrix
tivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant
which economic behavior is formed.
communities, raising the piece-work within
rate ac
tually had the opposite effect of lowering labor
productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant ac
FAILURE
to understand
that lie
theinroots
of economic
behavior
the
customed to earning two and one-half marks
realm
of
consciousness
and
culture
leads
to
per day found he could earn the same amount
by working less, and did so because he valued
the common mistake of attributing material
leisure more than income. The choices of lei
causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal
sure over income, or of the militaristic life of in nature. For example, it is commonplace in
the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the the West to interpret the reform movements
Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the first in China and most recently in the Soviet
early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a Union as the victory of the material over the
ideal—that is, a recognition that ideological
be explained by the impersonal working of incentives could not replace material ones in
traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly
material forces, but come preeminently out of stimulating a highly productive modern econ
the sphere of consciousness—what we have omy, and that if one wanted to prosper one
labeled here broadly as ideology. And indeed, had to appeal to baser forms of self-interest.
a central theme of Weber's work was to prove But the deep defects of socialist economies
that contrary to Marx, the material mode of were evident thirty or forty years ago to any
production, far from being the "base," was one who chose to look. Why was it that these
itself a "superstructure" with roots in religion countries moved away from central planning
and culture, and that to understand the emerg only in the 1980s? The answer must be found
in the consciousness of the elites and leaders
ence of modern capitalism and the profit mo
tive one had to study their antecedents in the
realm of the spirit.
ruling them, who decided to opt for the "Prot
estant" life of wealth and risk over the "Cath
As we look around the contemporary olic" path of poverty and security.8 That
world, the poverty of materialist theories of
economic development is all too apparent.
The Wall Street Journal school of deterministic 'One need look no further than the recent per
formance of Vietnamese immigrants in the
materialism habitually points to the stunning
economic success of Asia in the past few dec
U.S. school system when compared to their
ades as evidence of the viability of free market
black or Hispanic classmates to realize that
economics, with the implication that all so
cieties would see similar development were
culture and consciousness are absolutely cru
they simply to allow their populations to pur
sue their material self-interest freely. Surely
cial to explain not only economic behavior but
virtually every other important aspect of life
as well.
free markets and stable political systems are 8I understand that a full explanation of the origins
a necessary precondition to capitalist econom
of the reform movements in China and Russia
ic growth. But just as surely the cultural her
is a good deal more complicated than this sim
itage of those Far Eastern societies, the ethic
ple formula would suggest. The Soviet reform,
of work and saving and family, a religious
heritage that does not, like Islam, place re
for example, was motivated in good measure
by Moscow's sense of insecurity in the tech
The End of History? .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
found itself on the eve of the reform, but in
sphere. I want to avoid the materialist deter
minism that says that liberal economics inev
itably produces liberal politics, because I be
stead came about as the result of the victory
of one idea over another.9
presuppose an autonomous prior state of con
change was in no way made inevitable by the
material conditions in which either country
For Kojève, as for all good Hegelians, un
derstanding the underlying processes of his
tory requires understanding developments in
the realm of consciousness or ideas, since con
sciousness will ultimately remake the material
world in its own image. To say that history
ended in 1806 meant that mankind's ideolog
lieve that both economics and politics
sciousness that makes them possible. But that
state of consciousness that permits the growth
of liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one
would expect at the end of history if it is
underwritten by the abundance of a modern
free market economy. We might summarize
the content of the universal homogenous state
ical evolution ended in the ideals of the
as liberal democracy in the political sphere
French or American Revolutions: while combined
par
with easy access to VCRs and stereos
the economic.
ticular regimes in the real world might in
not
implement these ideals fully, their theoretical
truth is absolute and could not be improved
upon. Hence it did not matter to Kojève that
the consciousness of the postwar generation
Ill
WE
in fact
reached
the
end
of Europeans had not been universalized HAVEof
history?
Are
there, in
other
words, any fundamental "contradictions" in
throughout the world; if ideological devel
human life that cannot be resolved in the con
opment had in fact ended, the homogenous
text of modern liberalism, that would be re
state would eventually become victorious
throughout the material world.
solvable by an alternative political-economic
I have neither the space nor, frankly, the
structure? If we accept the idealist premises
ability to defend in depth Hegel's radical ide
alist perspective. The issue is not whether He nological-military realm. Nonetheless, neither
gel's system was right, but whether his percountry on the eve of its reforms was in such
spective might uncover the problematica state of material crisis that one could have
nature of many materialist explanations wepredicted the surprising reform paths ulti
often take for granted. This is not to deny the mately taken.
role of material factors as such. To a literal
'It is still not clear whether the Soviet peoples are
minded idealist, human society can be built
as "Protestant" as Gorbachev and will follow
him down that path.
around any arbitrary set of principles regard
less of their relationship to the material world."The internal politics of the Byzantine Empire at
And in fact men have proven themselves able
to endure the most extreme material hard
the time of Justinian revolved around a conflict
ships in the name of ideas that exist in the
othelites, who believed that the unity of the
between the so-called monophysites and mon
realm of the spirit alone, be it the divinity of
Holy Trinity was alternatively one of nature
cows or the nature of the Holy Trinity.10
or of will. This conflict corresponded to some
But while man's very perception of the
extent to one between proponents of different
material world is shaped by his historical con
racing teams in the Hippodrome in Byzantium
sciousness of it, the material world can clearly
and led to a not insignificant level of political
violence. Modern historians would tend to
affect in return the viability of a particular
state of consciousness. In particular, the spec
tacular abundance of advanced liberal econ
seek the roots of such conflicts in antagonisms
between social classes or some other modern
omies and the infinitely diverse consumer cul
economic category, being unwilling to believe
ture made possible by them seem to both
that men would kill each other over the nature
foster and preserve liberalism in the political
of the Trinity.
The Notional Interest—Summer 1989 .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
laid out above, we must seek an answer to this
other great alternative to liberalism, com
question in the realm of ideology and con
munism, was far more serious. Marx, speaking
tively the challenges to liberalism promoted
contained a fundamental contradiction that
by every crackpot messiah around the world,
but only those that are embodied in important
could not be resolved within its context, that
social or political forces and movements, and
diction has constituted the chief accusation
which are therefore part of world history. For
against liberalism ever since. But surely, the
class issue has actually been successfully re
solved in the West. As Kojève (among others)
sciousness. Our task is not to answer exhaus
our purposes, it matters very little what
strange thoughts occur to people in Albania
or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what
one could in some sense call the common ideo
logical heritage of mankind.
In the past century, there have been two
major challenges to liberalism, those of fas
cism and of communism. The former" saw
the political weakness, materialism, anomie,
and lack of community of the West as fun
damental contradictions in liberal societies
Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society
between capital and labor, and this contra
noted, the egalitarianism of modern America
represents the essential achievement of the
classless society envisioned by Marx. This is
not to say that there are not rich people and
poor people in the United States, or that the
gap between them has not grown in recent
years. But the root causes of economic ine
quality do not have to do with the underlying
legal and social structure of our society, which
that could only be resolved by a strong state remains fundamentally egalitarian and mod
that forged a new "people" on the basis of erately redistributionist, so much as with the
cultural and social characteristics of the
national exclusiveness. Fascism was destroyed
as a living ideology by World War II. This groups that make it up, which are in turn the
was a defeat, of course, on a very material historical legacy of premodern conditions.
level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea
Thus black poverty in the United States is not
as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was
not universal moral revulsion against it, since
the inherent product of liberalism, but is rath
er the "legacy of slavery and racism" which
plenty of people were willing to endorse the persisted long after the formal abolition of
idea as long as it seemed the wave of the fu slavery.
ture, but its lack of success. After the war, it
As a result of the receding of the class
seemed to most people that German fascism issue, the appeal of communism in the devel
as well as its other European and Asian vari oped Western world, it is safe to say, is lower
ants were bound to self-destruct. There was
"I am not using the term "fascism" here in its most
no material reason why new fascist move
precise sense, fully aware of the frequent mis
ments could not have sprung up again after
the war in other locales, but for the fact that
use of this term to denounce anyone to the
expansionist ultranationalism, with its prom
right of the user. "Fascism" here denotes any
ise of unending conflict leading to disastrous
organized ultra-nationalist movement with
military defeat, had completely lost its appeal.
universalistic pretensions—not universalistic
The ruins of the Reich chancellory as well as
with regard to its nationalism, of course, since
the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of
consciousness as well as materially, and all of
the latter is exclusive by definition, but with
the proto-fascist movements spawned by the
would qualify as fascist while former strong
German and Japanese examples like the Pe
ronist movement in Argentina or Subhas
Chandra Bose's Indian National Army with
would not. Obviously fascist ideologies cannot
ered after the war.
regard to the movement's belief in its right to
rule other people. Hence Imperial Japan
man Stoessner's Paraguay or Pinochet's Chile
be universalistic in the sense of Marxism or
liberalism, but the structure of the doctrine
The ideological challenge mounted by the
can be transferred from country to country.
The End of History?
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
today than any time since the end of the First
planted to Japan were adapted and trans
World War. This can be measured in any
formed by the Japanese in such a way as to
be scarcely recognizable.12 Many Americans
are now aware that Japanese industrial or
ganization is very different from that pre
vailing in the United States or Europe, and
it is questionable what relationship the fac
tional maneuvering that takes place with the
governing Liberal Democratic Party bears to
number of ways: in the declining membership
and electoral pull of the major European com
munist parties, and their overtly revisionist
programs; in the corresponding electoral suc
cess of conservative parties from Britain and
Germany to the United States and Japan,
which are unabashedly pro-market and anti
statist; and in an intellectual climate whose
most "advanced" members no longer believe
that bourgeois society is something that ul
timately needs to be overcome. This is not to
democracy. Nonetheless, the very fact that the
essential elements of economic and political
liberalism have been so successfully grafted
onto uniquely Japanese traditions and insti
tutions guarantees their survival in the long
say that the opinions of progressive intellec
tuals in Western countries are not deeply
run. More important is the contribution that
pathological in any number of ways. But those
Japan has made in turn to world history by
who believe that the future must inevitably
be socialist tend to be very old, or very mar
ginal to the real political discourse of their
following in the footsteps of the United States
societies.
to create a truly universal consumer culture
that has become both a symbol and an un
derpinning of the universal homogenous
MAY argue that the socialist al
O'^NEternative
was never terribly plau
state. V.S. Naipaul travelling in Khomeini's
Iran shortly after the revolution noted the
omnipresent signs advertising the products of
sible for the North Atlantic world, and was
Sony, Hitachi, and JVC, whose appeal re
sustained for the last several decades primar
ily by its success outside of this region. But
mained virtually irresistible and gave the lie
it is precisely in the non-European world that
one is most struck by the occurrence of major
ideological transformations. Surely the most
remarkable changes have occurred in Asia.
Due to the strength and adaptability of the
indigenous cultures there, Asia became a bat
to the regime's pretensions of restoring a state
based on the rule of the Shariah. Desire for
access to the consumer culture, created in
large measure by Japan, has played a crucial
role in fostering the spread of economic lib
eralism throughout Asia, and hence in pro
moting political liberalism as well.
tleground for a variety of imported Western
The economic success of the other newly
ideologies early in this century. Liberalism in
industrializing countries (NlCs) in Asia fol
lowing on the example of Japan is by now a
Asia was a very weak reed in the period after
World War I; it is easy today to forget how
gloomy Asia's political future looked as re
familiar story. What is important from a He
cently as ten or fifteen years ago. It is easy to
has been following economic liberalism, more
forget as well how momentous the outcome
of Asian ideological struggles seemed for
slowly than many had hoped but with seem
ing inevitability. Here again we see the vie
world political development as a whole.
The first Asian alternative to liberalism
1JI use the example of Japan with some caution,
gelian standpoint is that political liberalism
to be decisively defeated was the fascist one
represented by Imperial Japan. Japanese fas
cism (like its German version) was defeated
formal arts, proved that the universal homog
by the force of American arms in the Pacific
enous state was not victorious and that history
war, and liberal democracy was imposed on
Japan by a victorious United States. Western
the end of the second edition of Introduction à
capitalism and political liberalism when trans
la Lecture de Hegel, 462-3.
since Kojève late in his life came to conclude
that Japan, with its culture based on purely
had perhaps not ended. See the long note at
10 The National Interest—Summer 1989 .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
tory of the idea of the universal homogenous scribe the dynamism, initiative, and openness
state. South Korea had developed into a mod- evident in China since the reform began,
ern, urbanized society with an increasingly China could not now be described in any
large and well-educated middle class that way as a liberal democracy. At present, no
could not possibly be isolated from the larger more than 20 percent of its economy has been
democratic trends around them. Under these marketized, and most importantly it con tin
circumstances it seemed intolerable to a large ues to be ruled by a self-appointed Communist
part of this population that it should be ruled party which has given no hint of wanting to
by an anachronistic military regime while Ja- devolve power. Deng has made none of Gor
pan, only a decade or so ahead in economic bachev's promises regarding democratization
terms, had parliamentary institutions for over of the political system and there is no Chinese
forty years. Even the former socialist regime equivalent of glasnost. The Chinese leadership
in Burma, which for so many decades existed has in fact been much more circumspect in
in dismal isolation from the larger trends criticizing Mao and Maoism than Gorbachev
dominating Asia, was buffeted in the past year with respect to Brezhnev and Stalin, and the
by pressures to liberalize both its economy regime continues to pay lip service to Marx
and political system. It is said that unhappi- ism-Leninism as its ideological underpinning,
ness with strongman Ne Win began when a But anyone familiar with the outlook and be
senior Burmese officer went to Singapore for havior of the new technocratic elite now gov
medical treatment and broke down crying erning China knows that Marxism and ideo
when he saw how far socialist Burma had logical principle have become virtually
been left behind by its ASEAN neighbors. irrelevant as guides to policy, and that bour
geois consumerism has a real meaning in that
country for the first time since the revolution.
BUT THE
power
the liberal
idea The the
various
slowdowns
in the
pace of
reform,
would
seemofmuch
less impressive
campaigns
against
"spiritual
pollution"
if it had not infected the largest and oldest and crackdowns on political dissent are more
culture in Asia, China. The simple existence properly seen as tactical adjustments made in
of communist China created an alternative the process of managing what is an extraor
pole of ideological attraction, and as such con- dinarily difficult political transition. By duck
stituted a threat to liberalism. But the past ing the question of political reform while put
fifteen years have seen an almost total dis- ting the economy on a new footing, Deng has
crediting of Marxism-Leninism as an econom- managed to avoid the breakdown of authority
ic system. Beginning with the famous third that has accompanied Gorbachev's perestroïka.
plenum of the Tenth Central Committee in Yet the pull of the liberal idea continues to
1978, the Chinese Communist party set about be very strong as economic power devolves
decollectivizing agriculture for the 800 mil- and the economy becomes more open to the
lion Chinese who still lived in the country- outside world. There are currently over
side. The role of the state in agriculture was 20,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S.
reduced to that of a tax collector, while pro- and other Western countries, almost all of
duction of consumer goods was sharply in- them the children of the Chinese elite. It is
creased in order to give peasants a taste of the hard to believe that when they return home
universal homogenous state and thereby an to run the country they will be content for
incentive to work. The reform doubled China to be the only country in Asia unaf
Chinese grain output in only five years, and fected by the larger democratizing trend. The
in the process created for Deng Xiao-ping a student demonstrations in Beijing that broke
solid political base from which he was able to out first in December 1986 and recurred re
extend the reform to other parts of the econ- cently on the occasion of Hu Yao-bang's death
omy. Economic statistics do not begin to de- were only the beginning of what will inev
The End of History? 11
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
itably be mounting pressure for change in the that virtually nobody in that country truly
political system as well. believed in Marxism-Leninism any longer,
What is important about China from the and that this was nowhere more true than in
standpoint of world history is not the present the Soviet elite, which continued to mouth
state of the reform or even its future pros- Marxist slogans out of sheer cynicism. The
pects. The central issue is the fact that the corruption and decadence of the late Brezh
People's Republic of China can no longer act nev-era Soviet state seemed to matter little,
as a beacon for illiberal forces around the however, for as long as the state itself refused
world, whether they be guerrillas in some to throw into question any of the fundamental
Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris. principles underlying Soviet society, the sys
Maoism, rather than being the pattern for tern was capable of functioning adequately out
Asia's future, became an anachronism, and it of sheer inertia and could even muster some
was the mainland Chinese who in fact were dynamism in the realm of foreign and defense
decisively influenced by the prosperity and policy. Marxism-Leninism was like a magical
dynamism of their overseas co-ethnics—the incantation which, however absurd and de
ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan. void of meaning, was the only common basis
Important as these changes in China have on which the elite could agree to rule Soviet
been, however, it is developments in the So- society,
viet Union—the original "homeland of the
world proletariat"—that have put the final TT7HAT HAS happened in the four
nail in the coffin of the Marxist-Leninist al- V V years since Gorbachev's coming
ternative to liberal democracy. It should be to power is a revolutionary assault on the most
clear that in terms of formal institutions, not fundamental institutions and principles of
much has changed in the four years since Gor- Stalinism, and their replacement by other
bachev has come to power: free markets and principles which do not amount to liberalism
the cooperative movement represent only a per se but whose only connecting thread is
small part of the Soviet economy, which re- liberalism. This is most evident in the eco
mains centrally planned; the political system nomic sphere, where the reform economists
is still dominated by the Communist party, around Gorbachev have become steadily more
which has only begun to democratize inter- radical in their support for free markets, to
nally and to share power with other groups; the point where some like Nikolai Shmelev
the regime continues to assert that it is seeking do not mind being compared in public to Mil
only to modernize socialism and that its ideo- ton Friedman. There is a virtual consensus
logical basis remains Marxism-Leninism; and, among the currently dominant school of So
finally, Gorbachev faces a potentially pow- viet economists now that central planning and
erful conservative opposition that could undo the command system of allocation are the root
many of the changes that have taken place to cause of economic inefficiency, and that if the
date. Moreover, it is hard to be too sanguine Soviet system is ever to heal itself, it must
about the chances for success of Gorbachev's permit free and decentralized decision-mak
proposed reforms, either in the sphere of eco- ing with respect to investment, labor, and
nomics or politics. But my purpose here is not prices. After a couple of initial years of ideo
to analyze events in the short-term, or to make logical confusion, these principles have finally
predictions for policy purposes, but to look at been incorporated into policy with the pro
underlying trends in the sphere of ideology mulgation of new laws on enterprise auton
and consciousness. And in that respect, it is omy, cooperatives, and finally in 1988 on lease
clear that an astounding transformation has arrangements and family farming. There are,
occurred. of course, a number of fatal flaws in the cur
Emigres from the Soviet Union have been rent implementation of th
reporting for at least the last generation now tably the absence of a t
12 The National Interest—Summer 1989
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
reform. But the problem is no longer a con
ceptual one: Gorbachev and his lieutenants
able. The essence of Lenin's democratic cen
ketization well enough, but like the leaders of
tralism was centralism, not democracy; that
is, the absolutely rigid, monolithic, and dis
ciplined dictatorship of a hierarchically or
a Third World country facing the IMF, are
afraid of the social consequences of ending
ganized vanguard Communist party, speaking
in the name of the demos. All of Lenin's vicious
seem to understand the economic logic of mar
consumer subsidies and other forms of de
polemics against Karl Kautsky, Rosa Lux
pendence on the state sector.
emburg, and various other Menshevik and So
In the political sphere, the proposedcial Democratic rivals, not to mention his con
changes to the Soviet constitution, legal systempt for "bourgeois legality" and freedoms,
tem, and party rules amount to much less thancentered around his profound conviction that
the establishment of a liberal state. Gorbachev a revolution could not be successfully made
has spoken of democratization primarily inby a democratically run organization.
the sphere of internal party affairs, and has
Gorbachev's claim that he is seeking to
shown little intention of ending the Com return to the true Lenin is perfectly easy to
munist party's monopoly of power; indeed,understand: having fostered a thorough de
the political reform seeks to legitimize andnunciation of Stalinism and Brezhnevism as
therefore strengthen the CPSU's rule." Nonethe root of the USSR's present predicament,
theless, the general principles underlying he needs some point in Soviet history on
many of the reforms—that the "people"which to anchor the legitimacy of the CPSU's
should be truly responsible for their own afcontinued rule. But Gorbachev's tactical re
fairs, that higher political bodies should bequirements should not blind us to the fact that
answerable to lower ones, and not vice versa, the democratizing and decentralizing princi
that the rule of law should prevail over arples which he has enunciated in both the eco
bitrary police actions, with separation of pow nomic and political spheres are highly sub
ers and an independent judiciary, that thereversive of some of the most fundamental
should be legal protection for property rights, precepts of both Marxism and Leninism. In
the need for open discussion of public issuesdeed, if the bulk of the present economic re
and the right of public dissent, the empowform proposals were put into effect, it is hard
ering of the Soviets as a forum in which the to know how the Soviet economy would be
whole Soviet people can participate, and of amore socialist than those of other Western
political culture that is more tolerant and countries with large public sectors.
The Soviet Union could in no way be
pluralistic—come from a source fundamen
described as a liberal or democratic country
tally alien to the USSR's Marxist-Leninist tra
now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely
dition, even if they are incompletely articu
lated and poorly implemented in practice. that perestroika will succeed such that the label
Gorbachev's repeated assertions that hewill be thinkable any time in the near future.
But at the end of history it is not necessary
is doing no more than trying to restore the
that all societies become successful liberal so
original meaning of Leninism are themselves
a kind of Orwellian doublespeak. Gorbachevcieties, merely that they end their ideological
and his allies have consistently maintainedpretensions of representing different and
higher forms of human society. And in this
that intraparty democracy was somehow the
essence of Leninism, and that the various lib
respect I believe that something very impor
eral practices of open debate, secret ballottant has happened in the Soviet Union in the
elections, and rule of law were all part of the past few years: the criticisms of the Soviet
Leninist heritage, corrupted only later by Sta
lin. While almost anyone would look good "This is not true in Poland and Hungary, however,
whose Communist parties have taken moves
compared to Stalin, drawing so sharp a line
toward true power-sharing and pluralism.
between Lenin and his successor is question
The End of History ? 13
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
system sanctioned by Gorbachev have been
of the good life, could not provide even the
so thorough and devastating that there is very
little chance of going back to either Stalinism
minimal preconditions of peace and stability.
In the contemporary world only Islam has
offered a theocratic state as a political alter
or Brezhnevism in any simple way. Gorbach
ev has finally permitted people to say what
native to both liberalism and communism.
they had privately understood for many years,
But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Mus
namely, that the magical incantations of
Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that So
viet socialism was not superior to the West in
any respect but was in fact a monumental
failure. The conservative opposition in the
lims, and it is hard to believe that the move
ment will take on any universal significance.
Other less organized religious impulses have
been successfully satisfied within the sphere
of personal life that is permitted in liberal
USSR, consisting both of simple workers
societies.
afraid of unemployment and inflation and of
The other major "contradiction" poten
tially unresolvable by liberalism is the one
party officials fearful of losing their jobs and
privileges, is outspoken and may be strong
enough to force Gorbachev's ouster in the
next few years. But what both groups desire
is tradition, order, and authority; they mani
fest no deep commitment to Marxism-Len
inism, except insofar as they have invested
much of their own lives in it.14 For authority
to be restored in the Soviet Union after Gor
bachev's demolition work, it must be on the
posed by nationalism and other forms of racial
and ethnic consciousness. It is certainly true
that a very large degree of conflict since the
Battle of Jena has had its roots in nationalism.
Two cataclysmic world wars in this century
have been spawned by the nationalism of the
developed world in various guises, and if those
passions have been muted to a certain extent
basis of some new and vigorous ideology
in postwar Europe, they are still extremely
powerful in the Third World. Nationalism
which has not yet appeared on the horizon.
has been a threat to liberalism historically in
"F WE ADMIT for the moment that
I1
the fascist and communist chal
Germany, and continues to be one in isolated
parts of "post-historical" Europe like North
ern Ireland.
lenges to liberalism are dead, are there any But it is not clear that nationalism rep
an irreconcilable contradiction in the
other ideological competitors left? Or putresents
an
other way, are there contradictions in liberal
heart of liberalism. In the first place, nation
society beyond that of class that are notalism
re
is not one single phenomenon but sev
solvable? Two possibilities suggest them
eral, ranging from mild cultural nostalgia to
selves, those of religion and nationalism. the highly organized and elaborately articu
The rise of religious fundamentalism lated
in
doctrine of National Socialism. Only
recent years within the Christian, Jewish, systematic
and
nationalisms of the latter sort can
Muslim traditions has been widely noted. One
qualify as a formal ideology on the level of
is inclined to say that the revival of religion
liberalism or communism. The vast majority
in some way attests to a broad unhappiness
with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity
'"This is particularly true of the leading Soviet con
of liberal consumerist societies. Yet while the
servative, former Second Secretary Yegor Li
emptiness at the core of liberalism is most gachev, who has publicly recognized many of
certainly a defect in the ideology—indeed, a the deep defects of the Brezhnev period.
flaw that one does not need the perspective
"I am thinking particularly of Rousseau and the
of religion to recognize's—it is not at all clear Western philosophical tradition that flows
that it is remediable through politics. Modern from him that was highly critical of Lockean
liberalism itself was historically a conse or Hobbesian liberalism, though one could
quence of the weakness of religiously-based criticize liberalism from the standpoint of clas
societies which, failing to agree on the nature sical political philosophy as well.
14 The National Interest—Summer 1989 .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
of the world's nationalist movements do not
have a political program beyond the negative
desire of independence from some other group
pect which, if not yet here, the last few years
have made a real possibility. How will the
overall characteristics of a de-ideologized
or people, and do not offer anything like a
comprehensive agenda for socio-economic or
world differ from those of the one with which
ganization. As such, they are compatible with
ture?
doctrines and ideologies that do offer such
agendas. While they may constitute a source
of conflict for liberal societies, this conflict
The most common answer is—not very
much. For there is a very widespread belief
among many observers of international rela
we are familiar at such a hypothetical junc
does not arise from liberalism itself so much
tions that underneath the skin of ideology is
as from the fact that the liberalism in question
a hard core of great power national interest
that guarantees a fairly high level of compe
tition and conflict between nations. Indeed,
is incomplete. Certainly a great deal of the
world's ethnic and nationalist tension can be
explained in terms of peoples who are forced
to live in unrepresentative political systems
that they have not chosen.
While it is impossible to rule out the sud
den appearance of new ideologies or previ
ously unrecognized contradictions in liberal
societies, then, the present world seems to
confirm that the fundamental principles of
socio-political organization have not advanced
terribly far since 1806. Many of the wars and
revolutions fought since that time have been
undertaken in the name of ideologies which
according to one academically popular school
of international relations theory, conflict in
heres in the international system as such, and
to understand the prospects for conflict one
must look at the shape of the system—for ex
ample, whether it is bipolar or multipolar—
rather than at the specific character of the
nations and regimes that constitute it. This
school in effect applies a Hobbesian view of
politics to international relations, and assumes
that aggression and insecurity are universal
characteristics of human societies rather than
claimed to be more advanced than liberalism,
the product of specific historical circum
but whose pretensions were ultimately un
masked by history. In the meantime, they
have helped to spread the universal homoge
nous state to the point where it could have a
stances.
significant effect on the overall character of
international relations.
IV
Believers in this line of thought take the
relations that existed between the participants
in the classical nineteenth century European
balance of power as a model for what a de
ideologized contemporary world would look
like. Charles Krauthammer, for example, re
cently explained that if as a result of Gor
bachev's reforms the USSR is shorn of Marx
ist-Leninist ideology, its behavior will revert
WHAT end
AREofthe
implications
of the to that of nineteenth century imperial Rus
history
for international
relations? Clearly, the vast bulk of the Third sia.16 While he finds this more reassuring than
World remains very much mired in history,the threat posed by a communist Russia, he
and will be a terrain of conflict for many years implies that there will still be a substantial
to come. But let us focus for the time beingdegree of competition and conflict in the in
on the larger and more developed states of the ternational system, just as there was say be
world who after all account for the greatertween Russia and Britain or Wilhelmine Ger
part of world politics. Russia and China are many in the last century. This is, of course,
not likely to join the developed nations of the a convenient point of view for people who
West as liberal societies any time in the forewant to admit that something major is chang
seeable future, but suppose for a moment that
Marxism-Leninism ceases to be a factor driv "See his article, "Beyond the Cold War," New Re
ing the foreign policies of these states—a pros
public, December 19, 1988.
The End of History? IS
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ing in the Soviet Union, but do not want to
accept responsibility for recommending the
radical policy redirection implicit in such a
in retrospect it seems that Hitler represented
In fact, the notion that ideology is a su
aggrandizement has been thoroughly discred
view. But is it true?
a diseased bypath in the general course of
European development, and since his fiery de
feat, the legitimacy of any kind of territorial
perstructure imposed on a substratum of per
manent great power interest is a highly ques
ited.17 Since the Second World War, European
tionable proposition. For the way in which
any state defines its national interest is not
any real relevance to foreign policy, with the
universal but rests on some kind of prior ideo
model of great power behavior has become a
nationalism has been defanged and shorn of
consequence that the nineteenth-century
logical basis, just as we saw that economic
serious anachronism. The most extreme form
behavior is determined by a prior state of con
of nationalism that any Western European
sciousness. In this century, states have adopt
ed highly articulated doctrines with explicit
foreign policy agendas legitimizing expan
sionism, like Marxism-Leninism or National
Socialism.
state has mustered since 1945 has been Gaul
lism, whose self-assertion has been confined
largely to the realm of nuisance politics and
culture. International life for the part of the
world that has reached the end of history is
far more preoccupied with economics than
EXPANSIONIST and compet
T'TIEitive
behavior of nineteenth-cen
with politics or strategy.
The developed states of the West do main
tain defense establishments and in the post
basis; it just so happened that the ideology war period have competed vigorously for in
tury European states rested on no less ideal a
driving it was less explicit than the doctrines fluence to meet a worldwide communist
of the twentieth century. For one thing, most threat. This behavior has been driven, how
"liberal" European societies were illiberal in ever, by an external threat from states that
sofar as they believed in the legitimacy of im possess overtly expansionist ideologies, and
perialism, that is, the right of one nation to would not exist in their absence. To take the
rule over other nations without regard for the "neo-realist" theory seriously, one would have
wishes of the ruled. The justifications for im to believe that "natural" competitive behavior
perialism varied from nation to nation, from would reassert itself among the OECD states
a crude belief in the legitimacy of force, par were Russia and China to disappear from the
ticularly when applied to non-Europeans, to face of the earth. That is, West Germany and
the White Man's Burden and Europe's Chris France would arm themselves against each
tianizing mission, to the desire to give people other as they did in the 1930s, Australia and
of color access to the culture of Rabelais and
New Zealand would send military advisers to
Molière. But whatever the particular ideolog block each others' advances in Africa, and the
U.S.-Canadian border would become fortified.
ical basis, every "developed" country believed
in the acceptability of higher civilizations rul
Such a prospect is, of course, ludicrous: minus
ing lower ones—including, incidentally, the Marxist-Leninist ideology, we are far more
United States with regard to the Philippines. likely to see the "Common Marketization" of
This led to a drive for pure territorial ag
world politics than the disintegration of the
grandizement in the latter half of the century
and played no small role in causing the Great
War.
EEC into nineteenth-century competitiveness.
"It took European colonial powers like France sev
The radical and deformed outgrowth of
nineteenth-century imperialism was German
fascism, an ideology which justified German
eral years after the war to admit the illegiti
y's right not only to rule over non-European
peoples, but over all non-German ones. But
victory which had been based on the promise
of a restoration of democratic freedoms.
macy of their empires, but decolonialization
was an inevitable consequence of the Allied
là Tbe National Interest—Summer 1989 .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Indeed, as our experience in dealing with Eu
rope on matters such as terrorism or Libya
prove, they are much further gone than we
down the road that denies the legitimacy of
the use of force in international politics, even
in self-defense.
The automatic assumption that Russia
shorn of its expansionist communist ideology
should pick up where the czars left off just
which there are no ideological grounds for
major conflict between nations, and in which,
consequently, the use of military force be
comes less legitimate. As Foreign Minister
Shevardnadze put it in mid-1988:
The struggle between two opposing systems is
no longer a determining tendency of the present
day era. At the modern stage, the ability to build
up material wealth at an accelerated rate on the
prior to the Bolshevik Revolution is therefore
a curious one. It assumes that the evolution
basis of front-ranking science and high-level tech
of human consciousness has stood still in the
and through joint efforts to restore and protect
meantime, and that the Soviets, while picking
up currently fashionable ideas in the realm of
niques and technology, and to distribute it fairly,
the resources necessary for mankind's survival
acquires decisive importance.18
economics, will return to foreign policy views
The post-historical consciousness repre
a century out of date in the rest of Europe. sented by "new thinking" is only one possible
This is certainly not what happened to China
future for the Soviet Union, however. There
after it began its reform process. Chinese com has always been a very strong current of great
petitiveness and expansionism on the world Russian chauvinism in the Soviet Union,
scene have virtually disappeared: Beijing no which has found freer expression since the
longer sponsors Maoist insurgencies or tries advent of glasnost. It may be possible to return
to cultivate influence in distant African coun to traditional Marxism-Leninism for a while
tries as it did in the 1960s. This is not to say as a simple rallying point for those who want
that there are not troublesome aspects to con to restore the authority that Gorbachev has
temporary Chinese foreign policy, such as the dissipated. But as in Poland, Marxism-Len
reckless sale of ballistic missile technology in inism is dead as a mobilizing ideology: under
the Middle East; and the PRC continues to its banner people cannot be made to work
manifest traditional great power behavior in harder, and its adherents have lost confidence
its sponsorship of the Khmer Rouge against in themselves. Unlike the propagators of tra
Vietnam. But the former is explained by com ditional Marxism-Leninism, however, ultra
mercial motives and the latter is a vestige ofnationalists in the USSR believe in their Sla
earlier ideologically-based rivalries. The new vophile cause passionately, and one gets the
China far more resembles Gaullist France
sense that the fascist alternative is not one that
than pre-World War I Germany.
The real question for the future, however,
has played itself out entirely there.
The Soviet Union, then, is at a fork in
is the degree to which Soviet elites have as the road: it can start down the path that was
similated the consciousness of the universal
staked out by Western Europe forty-five years
homogenous state that is post-Hitler Europe. ago, a path that most of Asia has followed, or
From their writings and from my own per it can realize its own uniqueness and remain
sonal contacts with them, there is no question stuck in history. The choice it makes will be
in my mind that the liberal Soviet intelli
highly important for us, given the Soviet
gentsia rallying around Gorbachev has ar
rived at the end-of-history view in a remark
8Vestnik Ministerstva Inostrannikb Del SSSR no. 15
ably short time, due in no small measure to
(August 1988), 27-46. "New thinking" does of
the contacts they have had since the Brezhnev
course serve a propagandistic purpose in per
era with the larger European civilization
suading Western audiences of Soviet good in
around them. "New political thinking," the
general rubric for their views, describes a
world dominated by economic concerns, in
tentions. But the fact that it is good propa
ganda does not mean that its formulators do
not take many of its ideas seriously.
The End of History? 17
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Union's size and military strength, for that Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azer
power will continue to preoccupy us and slow is, will continue to have their unresolved
our realization that we have already emerged grievances. This implies that terrorism and
on the other side of history. wars of national liberation will continue to
be an important item on the international
agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve
large states still caught in the grip of history,
THE PASSING
offrom
Marxism-Leninand the
theyscene,
are what appear to be passing from
ism first
China and then
from the Soviet Union will mean its death as The end of history will be a very sad time,
a living ideology of world historical signifi- The struggle for recognition, the willingness
cance. For while there may be some isolated to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the
true believers left in places like Managua, worldwide ideological struggle that called
Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, the forth daring, courage, imagination, and ide
fact that there is not a single large state in alism, will be replaced by economic calcula
which it is a going concern undermines com- tion, the endless solving of technical prob
pletely its pretensions to being in the van- lems, environmental concerns, and the
guard of human history. And the death of this satisfaction of sophisticated consumer de
ideology means the growing "Common Mar- mands. In the post-historical period there will
ketization" of international relations, and the be neither art nor philosophy, just the per
diminution of the likelihood of large-scale petual caretaking of the museum of human
conflict between states. history. I can feel in myself, and see in others
This does not by any means imply the around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time
end of international conflict per se. For the when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact,
world at that point would be divided between will continue to fuel competition and conflict
a part that was historical and a part that was even in the post-historical world for some
post-historical. Conflict between states still in time to come. Even though I recognize its
history, and between those states and those at inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feel
the end of history, would still be possible. ings for the civilization that has been created
There would still be a high and perhaps rising in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic
level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very pros
those are impulses incompletely played out, pect of centuries of boredom at the end of
even in parts of the post-historical world. Pal- history will serve to get history started once
estinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish again.
18 The National Interest—Summer 1989 .
This content downloaded from
74.71.117.242 on Mon, 14 Sep 2020 13:09:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambridge Review of International Affairs
ISSN: 0955-7571 (Print) 1474-449X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccam20
Hidden in plain sight: racism in international
relations theory
Errol A Henderson
To cite this article: Errol A Henderson (2013) Hidden in plain sight: racism in
international relations theory, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:1, 71-92, DOI:
10.1080/09557571.2012.710585
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2012.710585
Published online: 12 Feb 2013.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 7064
View related articles
Citing articles: 20 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccam20
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2013
Vol. 26, No. 1, 71–92, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2012.710585
Hidden in plain sight: racism in international relations
theory
Errol A Henderson
Pennsylvania State University
Abstract This article addresses the centrality of racism in international relations (IR)
theory; specifically, in realism and liberalism, two of the most prominent paradigms of IR.
It examines the extent to which these major paradigms of world politics are oriented by
racist—primarily, white supremacist—precepts that inhere within their foundational
construct, namely, anarchy. I maintain that due to the centrality of anarchy—and other
racially infused constructs—within these prominent paradigms, white supremacist
precepts are not only nominally associated with the origins of the field, but have an
enduring impact on IR theory and influence contemporary theses ranging from neorealist
conceptions of the global system to liberal democratic peace claims, and constructivist
theses as well.
Introduction
This article addresses the centrality of racism in international relations (IR) theory;
specifically, in realism and liberalism, two of the most prominent paradigms of IR. It
examines the extent to which these major paradigms of world politics are oriented by
racist—primarily, white supremacist—precepts that inhere within their foundational
construct, namely, anarchy. I maintain that due to the centrality of anarchy—and
other racially infused constructs—within these prominent paradigms, white
supremacist precepts are not only nominally associated with the origins of the
field, but have an enduring impact on IR theory and influence contemporary theses
ranging from neorealist conceptions of the global system to liberal democratic peace
claims, and constructivist theses as well. The article proceeds in several sections.
First, I briefly review the centrality of white supremacism in the origins of IR as an
academic field of study. Second, I discuss the role of white supremacism in the
foundational constructs of IR theory; namely, the social contract theses that inform IR
scholars’ conception of anarchy, which is the starting point for most paradigms of
world politics. I maintain that social contract theses that are often cast as ‘raceneutral’ actually suggest one type of relations for white people and their institutions
and states, and another for nonwhite people and their institutions and states. This
discourse provided the point of departure for subsequent IR theorizing among
realists, liberals and constructivists on the relations among states in the global
system. Therefore, third, I discuss how realism, liberalism and constructivism derive
their notions of anarchy from social contract theses that are based in a racist dualism
that dichotomizes humanity and the relations of states composed of different
q 2013 Centre of International Studies
72 Errol A Henderson
peoples. Before turning to this broader discussion, let’s consider the manner in which
racism influences IR, in general.
The study of race and racism in IR
Racism is the belief in, practice, and policy of domination based on the specious
concept of race (Henderson 2007). It is not simply bigotry or prejudice,
but beliefs, practices and policies reflective of and supported by institutional
power, primarily state power. For more than a century, social scientists, in general,
have maintained that race and racism are among the most important factors
in world politics. Prominent anti-racist scholars such as WEB Du Bois
(1961 [1903], 23) acknowledged at the outset of the last century that ‘the problem
of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker
to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa in America and the islands of the
sea’. Less appreciated today is the centrality of race and racism to the core
theorists of the incipient academic field of IR. Their early works were firmly
situated in the prominent social Darwinist evolutionary theses of the day which
assumed a hierarchy of races dominated by white Europeans and their major
diasporic offshoots in the Americas, Australia and South Africa, with nonwhites
occupying subordinate positions and none lower than blacks. A white
supremacist evolutionary teleology informed the domestic and international
policies of major Western states and rationalized their policies of white racial
domination epitomized in slavery, imperial conquest, colonization and genocide.
In this conception, whites were assumed to be favoured by God and biologically
distinct from nonwhites. Uniquely among the races, whites were assumed to
possess civilization while nonwhites were assumed to occupy a lower stage of
development characterized as either barbarism or savagery. Further, it was
assumed that in order to climb the evolutionary ladder to achieve civilization and
its attendant culture, nonwhites would have to be tutored by whites who would—
often magnanimously—assume this ‘white man’s burden’ so that the lesser races
might rise above their barbarism and savagery. The lesser races were assumed to
be not only biologically inferior to whites, but in a state of almost perpetual
conflict; therefore, the ‘civilizing mission’ of those who would take up the ‘white
man’s burden’ could be imposed by force. This orientation not only rationalized
enslavement, imperial conquest, colonization and genocide but also provided an
intellectual rationale to justify these pursuits. To the extent that the racial
hierarchy guided the international politics of the predominately white states in
their interaction with other polities, the IR of the time was more accurately
‘interracial relations’ (Du Bois 1915; Lauren 1988). Thus, it’s not surprising that the
early works that gave rise to the modern academic field of IR focused squarely on
race as its main axis of enquiry.
For example, in An introduction to the study of international relations, Kerr argued
that ‘one of the most fundamental facts in human history’ is that ‘[m]ankind is
divided into a graduated scale’ (1916, 142) ranging from the civilized to the
barbarian, which necessitated the colonization of the latter by the former (1916,
163). Giddings (1898) viewed the ‘governing’ of ‘the inferior races of mankind’ as
the duty of the civilized and drew on Kidd’s The control of the tropics (1898, 15),
which admonished superior races to assume their responsibility to cultivate the
Hidden in plain sight 73
riches of the ‘tropics’. The competition for these resources could lead to major
wars among ‘civilized’ states, as Hobson, Angell and Lenin would famously
argue. In fact, Du Bois (1915) had argued in ‘The African roots of the war’, prior to
publication of Lenin’s more famous tract, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism,
that World War I was largely the result of disputes over imperial acquisitions
which fused the interests of bourgeoisie and proletariat in European states in a
mutually reinforcing pursuit of racist and economic domination of African and
Asian nations. One brief aside: although Du Bois had published this argument
prior to Lenin’s more famous pamphlet, it is rarely anthologized or even
mentioned in contemporary IR textbooks, readers, or the discussion of
imperialism—much less the origins of World Wart I.
Earlier, Reinsch (1900, 9), whom Schmidt (1998, 75) maintains ‘must be
considered one of the founding figures of the field of international relations’,
noted in what may be considered the first monograph in the field of IR, World
politics at the end of the nineteenth century (Reinsch 1900), that ‘national imperialism’
was transforming the landscape of international relations as states attempted ‘to
increase the resources of the national state through the absorption or exploitation
of undeveloped regions and inferior races’ without ‘impos[ing] political control
upon highly civilized nations’ (1900, 14). Olson and Groom (1991, 47) note that
Reinsch’s work ‘suggests that the discipline of international relations had its real
beginnings in studies of imperialism’; and studies of imperialism at the time were
firmly grounded in racist assumptions of white supremacy. Moreover, Reinsch’s
(1905a, 154 –155) ‘The Negro race and European civilization’ concurred with
prominent anthropometric arguments that there were physiological differences
between the brains of blacks and those of whites, such that for the former ‘organic
development of the faculties seem to cease at puberty’; however, he also opined
that the development capacity of blacks could be facilitated under white tutelage,
which ‘amounted to an American variant of what British colonial reformers
would come to call the policy of “indirect rule”’ (Vitalis 2010, 932). In fact,
Reinsch’s Colonial government (1902) and Colonial administration (1905b) placed
him among the leading experts on colonial administration as well. In the 1920s,
Buell’s (1929) International relations, which Vitalis (2000, 353) describes as ‘the
most important US textbook’ of the decade, ‘opens with the classic trope of
the discipline, a man on the moon looking down upon an earth divided “into
different hues”’.
The centrality of race to the incipient field of IR is evident in the genealogy of
one of the most popular journals in international affairs, Foreign Affairs. Foreign
Affairs became the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1922 after
changing its name from the Journal of International Relations, as it had been named
since 1919; but from 1910 to 1919 the publication was known as the Journal of Race
Development (Iriye 1997, 67). Reeves (2004, 26) notes that ‘the move from race to
international relations would seem to represent both a qualitative and
quantitative change in subject matter, yet, to the journal editors, the change
was, obviously, less dramatic’ given that ‘Volume 10, the Journal of International
Relations, simply followed on from where Volume 9, the Journal of Race
Development, left off’. For her ‘the choices of the journal’s title tells us something
of what early IR scholars considered the subject of international relations to be
about’ (2004, 26). Following Vitalis, Blatt (2004, 707) views the Journal of Race
Development as central to a corpus of scholarship at the turn of the twentieth
74 Errol A Henderson
century that placed race at the centre of the study of world politics through its
association with a ‘racialized and biological understanding of “development”’.
Subsequent scholarship in the incipient field of IR retained a focus on race and
white racial supremacy; and in the interwar era it often projected, rationalized and
echoed alarmist sentiments that augured a race war that would result from the
teeming masses of nonwhite peoples who were becomingly increasingly assertive
(that is, ‘race conscious’). Figures on demographic growth in the colonial world
were brought to bear to justify the growing fear of ‘race war’ during the interwar
period and focused attention away from the genocidal schemes of the emerging
fascist regimes in Europe. For example, Spengler’s Decline of the West and
Stoddard’s The rising tide of color against white world supremacy heightened the sense
of impending inter-racial warfare between the white West and its colonized
darker minions—or, in fact, any of the ‘lesser races’ that were assumed to have
a ‘natural’ place in the hierarchy of races below white Europeans and their racial
kin. One result was that ‘every Western setback’ from the defeat of Russia by the
Japanese in 1905 to the Turkish defeat of the Greeks in 1923 ‘was a direct boost to
anti-white consciousness’ and augured greater conflicts to come (Furedi 1998, 58).
For example, one of the most influential British IR scholars, Zimmern (1926, 82),
noted at the time that the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905 was ‘the most
important historical event which has happened or is likely to happen, in our
lifetime; the victory of a non-white people over a white people’. Nevertheless,
given a concern about fomenting ‘race war’, a view emerged that ‘public displays
of white racial superiority had become dangerous since they invited an explosion
of racial resentment’ (Furedi 1998, 79). For the most part, ‘this was an approach
that self-consciously ignored the fundamental question of racial oppression and
focused its concern on the etiquette of race relations’ (1998, 79). In effect, it was the
intellectual rationalization of the separate but equal doctrine of apartheid or Jim
Crow, as ‘[t]he new racial pragmatism presented itself as an alternative to racial
supremacist philosophy’ (1998, 93) and even promoted, at times, notions of
cultural relativism. Actually, cultural relativism was quite compatible with white
supremacist tenets,1 and its ascendance in academia and policy circles simply
represented the most recent morphing of white supremacist discourse.2
The justification for white racism had progressed through several distinct but
often overlapping and at times mutually reinforcing rationalizations rooted
initially in theology, then biology and subsequently in anthropology. The religious
and biological justifications of white supremacy are well known. Boas is credited
with evolving the academic discourse of race away from biology and towards
anthropology and in so doing ushering in an era of cultural relativism and
1
These sentiments were echoed in the arguments of prominent cultural relativists such
as Bronislaw Malinowski, and they also resonated in the arguments of such prominent
political scientists as Burgess and such sociologists as Parks. For example, Furedi (1998, 93)
points out that ‘Malinowski was as scathing of Nordic supremacist theories as he was of
ideas of race equality’. Malinowski rationalized support for the ‘colour bar’ in his ‘A plea
for an effective colour bar’ in 1931. Burgess proffered a white supremacist hierarchy of races
in his The foundations of political science. Park’s social contact thesis portended racial conflict
as a result of contact between races.
2
On racial formation and re-formation, see Omi and Winant (1996). For a critique of
the mystification of white supremacism in racial formation theses, see Henderson (2007,
340– 343).
Hidden in plain sight 75
modern anthropological analyses of race. Boas (1911) challenged anthropometric
‘evidence’ of correspondence between cranial capacity of peoples of different
races and intelligence, and prevailing genetic arguments of racial heredity. For
example, he noted that immigrants to the United States (US) who had undergone
years of American socialization evinced cultural characteristics approximating
those of other Americans. Arguing against social Darwinism, he rejected the
notion of a hierarchy of culture and argued instead that all peoples have cultures
that reflect their own beliefs, values and practices and that are internally valid and
should be evaluated on their own terms and not in relation to some cultural
hierarchy. This perspective undermined the assumed scientific legitimacy of white
supremacism based on notions of white cultural superiority and ushered in
the discourse of cultural relativism in social science. Less well known is the
contribution to racial discourse of the first African American Rhodes Scholar,
Alain Locke, who accepted much of the Boasian perspective on culture—thus he
rejected the view that culture was determined by race, but argued against the
anthropological view of race—and aspects of Boas’s cultural relativism as well—
and suggested instead that race was mainly a sociological construct.
In the first of his series of five lectures at Howard University in 1916, entitled
‘The theoretical and scientific conceptions of race’, he argued that anthropology
had not isolated any permanent or static features of race. For Locke (1992 [1916],
11), ‘when the modern man talks about race[,] he is not talking about the
anthropological or biological idea at all. [He is really talking about the historical
record of success or failure of] an ethnic group’ but ‘these groups, from the point
of view of anthropology, are ethnic fictions’. Interestingly, he notes that ‘This does
not mean that they do not exist[,] but it can be shown [that these groups do] not
have as [permanent] designations those very factors upon which they pride
themselves.’ That is, ‘They have neither purity of [blood] nor purity of type’;
instead, ‘They are the products of countless interminglings of types[,] and they are
the results of infinite crossings of types’ and ‘maintain in name only this fetish of
biological [purity]’ (1992 [1916], 11).
On its face, Locke’s contention seems to be that of Boas; however, while Boas
rejected biological renderings of race in favour of anthropological ones, he,
nonetheless, opined that some elements of race might be rooted in heredity. This
understanding led Boas to propose racial intermarriage as a prescription for the
eradication of US racism. Locke disagreed. He insisted that there was neither
a biological nor an anthropological basis for race; and in this way transcended Boas’s
conceptualization of cultural relativism and laid the basis for his ‘critical relativism’.
That is, even as the scientific understanding of race progressed under Boas’s
influence from biological definitions to anthropological ones, Locke (1992, 10)
further argued that ‘[e]ven the anthropological factors are variable, and pseudoscientific, except for purposes of descriptive classification’; therefore ‘there are no
static factors of race at all’ (1992, 10). As Stewart (1992, xxiv) notes, for Locke, race
was sociological. It ‘was simply another word for a social or national group that
shared a common history or culture and occupied a geographical region’; but
‘as applied to social and ethnic groups’ race ‘has no meaning at all beyond that sense
of kind, that sense of kith and kin’; it is ‘an ethnic fiction’. For Locke, to the extent that
a person has a race ‘he has inherited either a favorable or an unfavorable social
heredity, which unfortunately is [typically] ascribed to factors which have not
produced [it,] factors which will in no way determine either the period of those
76 Errol A Henderson
inequalities or their eradication’ (1992, 12). Through this conceptualization, Locke
‘was standing racialist theories of culture on their heads: rather than particular races
creating Culture, it was culture—social, political, and economic processes—that
produced racial character’ (1992, xxv). Locke had removed race from its biological
and anthropological moorings and placed it ‘squarely on a cultural foundation’;
fundamentally, race was sociological—or, in today’s language, a ‘social construct’.
Locke’s contributions are as prescient and profound as they are ignored in
contemporary scholarship on racism in IR and political science, in general, and in
sociology, anthropology and philosophy as well.
To be sure, Locke’s arguments from his Howard University lectures of 1914–
1916 went unpublished in his lifetime, therefore the inattention of scholars to his
sociological thesis of race is to some extent understandable; however, even within
the ostensible mainstream of IR scholarship in the interwar era, there was the
little-appreciated—and rarely cited—analysis of race in domestic and international affairs of political scientist and future Nobel Laureate, Ralph Bunche
(1936). In his A world view of race he eschewed the alarmist tendencies of the day
and—informed in part by Locke’s earlier arguments—offered a sober analysis of
racism in world politics which focused on the non-scientific basis of race and the
often greater salience of class in ostensibly ‘racial’ conflicts; and in so doing
anticipated much of the postwar scholarship—including post-Cold-War scholarship—on racism in world politics.
Engagement in World War II against the Nazi regime compelled Western elites
to disassociate themselves at least superficially from the doctrine of the regime
that the West had defeated. Nevertheless, Du Bois (1987 [1946], 23) raised the
hypocrisy of Western condemnation of Nazi atrocities in light of the Western
nations’ practices in their colonies and asserted that ‘there was no Nazi atrocity—
concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or
ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which the Christian civilization of Europe had
not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name
of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world’. Subsequently, the
international order would not substantively alter the racial status quo even as it
promoted racial equality in major international institutions such as the United
Nations (UN), while continuing to countenance the subjugation of billions of
nonwhite people by the imperialist powers who were the victors of World War II.
The anti-colonial struggle in the third world would challenge this status quo and
issues of race and racism were increasingly examined in the postwar era to
address the decline of empires. Nevertheless, the postwar rise of ‘area studies’
situated many such analyses of race within the context of comparative politics
(or in the study of the domestic politics of individual states) and outside of IR,
such that even in such a prominent IR text as Politics among nations Hans
Morgenthau (1985 [1948], 369), one of the most influential IR scholars of the
twentieth century, could refer to ‘the politically empty spaces of Africa and Asia’.
To be sure, race and racism are not only foundational to the field of IR but were
seminal to the development of the field given their centrality in the conduct of
international affairs. For example, near the end of the Cold War, Lauren (1988, 4)
acknowledged that
The first global attempt to speak of equality focused upon race. The first human
rights provisions in the United Nations Charter were placed there because of race.
Hidden in plain sight 77
The first international challenge to a country’s claim of domestic jurisdiction and
exclusive treatment of its own citizens centered upon race. The international
convention with the greatest number of signatories is that on race. Within the
United Nations, more resolutions deal with race than any other subject. And
certainly one of the most long-standing and frustrating problems in the United
Nations is that of race. Nearly one hundred eighty governments, for example,
recently went as far as to conclude that racial discrimination and racism still
represent the most serious problems for the world today.’
Persaud and Walker (2001, 374) add that ‘the significance of race [in IR] goes much
beyond various multilateral and other diplomatic achievements’ because ‘race has
been a fundamental force in the very making of the modern world system and in
the representations and explanations of how that system emerged and how it
works’. For Persaud (2001, 116) ‘race . . . has been at the center of gravity for
a substantial part of the modern world system’.
The centrality of race and racism in the foundations of IR and their enduring
impact on world affairs towards the end of the millennium contrasts with the
relative dearth of mainstream scholarship on the subject in IR. For example, Doty’s
(1998, 136) survey of mainstream journals in IR for the period of 1945 –1993 (World
Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Conflict
Resolution, Review of International Studies) ‘revealed only one article with the word
race in the title, four with the term minorities and 13 with the term ethnicity’. Given
that at its inception IR focused heavily on issues of race and racism, the
marginalization of race and racism in mainstream IR journals (and textbooks) begs
the question of what accounts for the apparent disparity? Doty (1998, 145) argues
that ‘the dominant understandings of theory and explanation in International
Relations’ preclude conceptualizations of ‘complex issues/concepts such as race’
and result in their marginalization or force them ‘into constraining modes of
conceptualization and explanation’. For Krishna (2001, 401), the complexity is
related less to the issue of racism than to the methodological orientations that often
privilege abstract theorizing over historical analyses, which allows IR theorists to
whitewash the historical content of global affairs, especially ‘the violence,
genocide, and theft that marked the encounter between the rest and the West in the
post-Columbian era’. Ignoring the role of racism facilitates this whitewash. He adds
that ‘abstraction, usually presented as the desire of the discipline to engage in
theory-building rather than in descriptive or historical analysis, is a screen that
simultaneously rationalizes and elides the details of these encounters. By
encouraging students to display their virtuosity in abstraction the discipline
brackets questions of theft of land, violence, and slavery—the three processes that
have historically underlain the unequal global order we now find ourselves in’
(Krishna 2001, 401– 402). Further, ‘overattention’ on the part of scholars to issues
related to racism in IR ‘is disciplined by professional practices that work as taboo’
and may label such orientations as ‘too historical or descriptive’ and label such
students as ‘not adequately theoretical’ and ‘lacking in intellectual rigor’ (Krishna
2001, 402). Moreover, where the impact of race and racism is analysed, insufficient
attention is paid to the relevance of struggles related to race and racism to basic
conceptions of fundamental issues in world politics such as power, war, freedom or
democracy. For example, Persaud (2001, 116) maintains that ‘what needs to
be underlined is that the struggle for racial equality has been fundamental to the
emergence of democracy as a whole, not just for the colored world’ (2001, 116).
78 Errol A Henderson
Persaud and Walker (2001, 374) claim that race has not been ignored in IR as
much as it ‘has been given the epistemological status of silence’. This silence is
linked by Maclean (1981, 110) to ‘invisibility’, which ‘refers to the removal
(not necessarily through conscious action) from a field of enquiry, either concrete
aspects of social relations, or of certain forms of thought about them’. Vitalis (2000)
also acknowledges a ‘norm against noticing’ white racism throughout mainstream
IR discourse (also see Depelchin 2005). Each of these processes perpetuates the
racist assumptions embedded in the foundations of IR theory where they serve
as the ‘priors’ of the main propositions. These assumptions may be exposed by
tracing the racist claims that inform IR theory. This approach is different from that
undertaken in most studies of racism in IR, which usually focus on one of four
approaches: (1) examinations of the impact of non-racial factors on racial outcomes,
such as the geographical studies of Linneaus and the physical anthropological
works of Blumenbach and Kant, which attempted to determine the extent to
which environmental and climatic factors led to the creation of different races;3
(2) examinations of the impact of racial outcomes on non-racial factors, such as studies of
the effects of racial stratification on domestic outcomes (for example, development
or democracy), or the impact of racial differences on the likelihood of violence
within or between states (for example, Deutsch 1970; Shepherd and LeMelle 1970);
(3) examinations of the impact of racist practices on the IR of states and non-state actors,
such as studies of diplomatic historians on racist practices such as international
slavery, imperial conquest, colonialism, genocide, apartheid, occupation, or racial
discrimination, among single states, several states, or international organizations
(for example, Elkins 2004; Hochschild 1998; Tinker 1977; Vincent 1982; Winant
2001); and (4) examinations of the impact of racist ideology on the IR of states and nonstate actors, such as studies on the impact of racism on foreign policy (for example,
Hunt 1987; Lauren 1988; Anderson 2003), imperialism (for example, Rodney
1974), state-making (for example, Cell 1982; Fredrickson 1982; Mamdani 1996;
Marx 1998), diasporization (Harris 1982; Walters 1993) or international war
(Dower 1986).
While studies utilizing each of these approaches have contributed to our
understanding of the role of racism in world politics, they have largely ignored the
issue of primary concern to us here: how racism informs the major paradigms of
IR theory such as realism and liberalism.4 Racism informs IR theory mainly
through its influence on the empirical, ethical and epistemological assumptions
that undergird its paradigms. These assumptions operate individually and in
combination. For example, racist empirical assumptions bifurcate humanity on
the basis of race and determine our view of what/whom we study and how we
study it/them—privileging the experiences of ‘superior’ peoples and their
societies and institutions. These assumptions also lead us to privilege ethical
orientations of the ‘superior’ peoples which justify their privileged status. In such
a context, epistemological assumptions that reflect and reinforce the racist
dualism are more likely to become ascendant, and ‘knowledge’ that supports the
racist dichotomy—both the privileged position of the racial hegemon and the
3
Research on the social construction of racial identity also falls within this category
although its focus is on the role of the social rather than the physical environment in the
construction of racial categories (for example, Winant 2001).
4
Exceptions include Vitalis (2000) and Henderson (1995; 2007)
Hidden in plain sight 79
underprivileged position of the racial subaltern—is more likely to be viewed as
valid. Such knowledge drawn from the empirical domain becomes legitimized
through ethical justifications that ‘naturalize’ the racial hierarchy. In this way, the
separate dimensions often reinforce each other.
Whether or not the empirical, ethical and epistemological assumptions operate
singly or in combination, it is important to demonstrate the role of these
assumptions in IR theory today, especially given that mainstream IR also provides
prominent critiques of racism. Ignoring these critiques would misrepresent the
degree of racism in the field and disregard the challenge to racist discourse within
IR from IR theorists themselves. For example, few IR scholars openly embrace
a racist ontology that assumes for whites a higher order of being than for
nonwhites.5 Moreover, racist ethical assumptions usually receive the opprobrium
they deserve in present IR discourse. Racist epistemological assumptions are
largely challenged by the prevalence in IR theory of the view that our ‘knowledge’
of world politics usually requires us to have something approximating evidence to
determine the accuracy of rival truth claims. Finally, racist empirical assumptions
are checked by the dominant view in IR that our theses should be broadly
applicable across states and societies and should be substantiated by crossnational and cross-temporal tests. But the sanguine view of the propensity of IR
literature to check racist assumptions, or to generate non-racist theoretical
discourse for the field, begs a fuller exploration of how ethical, epistemological
and empirical assumptions underlie prominent theses in IR. The main sources of
these racist assumptions that inform our present IR discourse are the primary
theoretical constructs of most IR theory: the state of nature, the social contract and
the conception of anarchy that derives from them.
The racial contract as the basis of the social contract
International relations theory takes as its point of departure the state of nature and
the social contract, given that these constructs reflect and inform IR scholars’
conceptions of anarchy, which is widely perceived as the key variable that
differentiates international politics from domestic politics. Anarchy is ‘the Rosetta
Stone of International Relations’ (Lipson 1984, 22) and provides the conceptual
linchpin upon which the major paradigms of IR rest. Our conceptualization of
anarchy in IR theory derives from the insights of social contract theorists such as
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, whose characterization of the state of nature,
which is the hypothetical condition characterized by human interaction prior to
the establishment of society, was adopted by IR theorists to conceptualize the
global system. But Charles Mills (1997) insists that the social contract that is the
focus of each of these theorists is embedded in a broader ‘racial contract’. Unlike
5
There are exceptions: The Helsinki Sanomat international edition (12 August 2004)
reports that Tatu Vanhanen, former professor of political science at the University of
Tampere in Finland (and father of Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen), who studies the
role of democratization among African states, caused a stir when he insinuated that
evolution has made Europeans and North Americans more intelligent than Africans. He
argued that African poverty is largely a result of the low IQ of Africans as compared with
Europeans. Similar racist arguments are found in the strain of sociobiology and biopolitics
that focuses on international affairs.
80 Errol A Henderson
the social contract, which presumably proposes a singular homogeneous
humanity from which civil society will emerge, the racial contract established a
heterogeneous humanity hierarchically arranged and reflecting a fundamental
dualism demarcated by race. This racial dualism inherent in social contract theses
was passed on to the IR theory that drew from them; and it persists today in the
paradigms that rest on their assumptions.
For example, realism, the dominant paradigm in IR, roots its conception of
anarchy in the Hobbesian view of the state of nature. Hobbes’s state of nature is
depicted famously as a ‘warre of all against all’ wherein life is ‘nasty, brutish, and
short’. Mills argues that on one level Hobbes’s depiction may seem ‘non-racist’
and ‘equally applicable to everybody’; however, he asks us to consider Hobbes’s
view that ‘there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this’, nor was this
condition ever the general state of humankind throughout the world (Mills 1997,
64– 65). Nevertheless, Hobbes asserts that ‘there are many places, where they live
so now,’ for example ‘the savage people in many places of America’ (Mills 1997,
64– 65). Mills finds Hobbes’s assertion ironic insofar as ‘a nonwhite people, indeed
the very nonwhite people upon whose land his fellow Europeans were then
encroaching, is his only real-life example of people in a state of nature’ (1997, 65).
Hobbes continues that ‘“though there had never been any time, wherein
particular men were in a condition of warre one against another,” there is “in all
times” a state of “continuall jealousies” between kings and persons of sovereign
authority’. Mills challenges, ‘How could it simultaneously be the case that “there
had never been” any such literal state-of-nature war, when in the previous
paragraph he had just said that some were living like that now?’ (1997, 65).
Mills states that ‘this minor mystery can be cleared up once we recognize that
there is a tacit racial logic in the text: the literal state of nature is reserved for
nonwhites; for whites the state of nature is hypothetical’ (1997, 65– 66). Herein lays
the dualism that Mills argues inheres in social contract theses: there is one set of
assumptions for whites and another for nonwhites. Mills asserts that for Hobbes
the conflict between whites is the conflict between those with sovereigns, that is,
those who are already (and have always been) in society. From this conflict, one can
extrapolate . . . to what might happen in the absence of a ruling sovereign. But
really we know that whites are too rational to allow this to happen to them. So the
most notorious state of nature in the contractarian literature—the bestial war of all
against all—is really a nonwhite figure, a racial object lesson for the more rational
whites, whose superior grasp of natural law (here in its prudential rather than
altruistic version) will enable them to take the necessary steps to avoid it and not to
behave as ‘savages’. (Mills 1997, 66)
Mills views Hobbes as a transitional figure ‘caught between feudal absolutism
and the rise of parliamentarianism, who uses the contract now classically
associated with the emergence of liberalism to defend absolutism’; but he
contends that Hobbes is transitional in another way given that ‘in midseventeenth century Britain the imperial project was not yet so fully developed
that the intellectual apparatus of racial subordination had been completely
elaborated’ (1997, 66). In such a context, ‘Hobbes remains enough of a racial
egalitarian that, while singling out Native Americans for his real-life example, he
suggests that without a sovereign even Europeans could descend to their state, and
that the absolutist government appropriate for nonwhites could also be
Hidden in plain sight 81
appropriate for whites’ (1997, 66). For Mills, ‘the uproar that greeted his work can
be seen as attributable at least in part to this moral/political suggestion. The
spread of colonialism would consolidate an intellectual world in which this bestial
state of nature would be reserved for nonwhite savages, to be despotically
governed, while civil Europeans would enjoy the benefits of liberal parliamentarianism. The Racial Contract began to rewrite the social contract’ (Mills 1997, 66 –67,
emphasis in original). Such an orientation would be more clearly articulated in the
work of John Locke, which envisions a state of nature that stands in contrast to
that of Hobbes and is, in fact, quite civil.
For Mills (1997, 67), Locke’s state of nature is ‘moralized’ and ‘normatively
regulated by traditional (altruistic, nonprudential) natural law’ and is one in
which both private property and money exist. He notes that ‘Locke famously
argues that God gave the world “to the use of the Industrious and Rational,”
which qualities were indicated by labor. So while industrious and rational
Englishmen were toiling away at home, in America, by contrast, one found “wild
woods and uncultivated wast[e] . . . left to Nature” by the idle Indians’ (1997, 67).
Failing to add value to the land through ‘industrious and rational’ production,
Native Americans secure only non-property rights to the land, ‘thereby rendering
their territories normatively open for seizure once those who have long since left
the state of nature (Europeans) encounter them’ (1997, 67). In this way, Locke
provided a normative rationalization for ‘white civilization’s conquest of
America’ as well as ‘other white settler states’ (1997, 67).
Locke’s dualism is applicable to slavery as well. Mills notes that ‘in the Second
Treatise, Locke defends slavery resulting from a just war, for example, a defensive
war against aggression’, but while ‘Locke explicitly opposes hereditary slavery
and the enslavement of wives and children’, he ‘had investments in the slavetrading Royal Africa Company and earlier assisted in writing the slave
constitution of Carolina’. Mills concludes that ‘one could argue that the Racial
Contract manifests itself here in an astonishing inconsistency, which could be
resolved by the supposition that Locke saw blacks as not fully human and thus as
subject to a different set of normative rules. Or perhaps the same Lockean moral
logic that covered Native Americans can be extended to blacks also. They weren’t
appropriating their home continent of Africa; they’re not rational; they can be
enslaved’ (1997, 67 –68).
Turning to Rousseau, Mills asserts that his conceptualization seems even less
racialized than Hobbes’s or Locke’s given that it is peopled by the ‘noble savage’.
In Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality it seems clear that everyone regardless of race
had been in the state of nature (and therefore, had been ‘savage’); nevertheless,
Mills points out that ‘a careful reading of the text reveals, once again, crucial racial
distinctions’. His main point is that ‘the only natural savages cited are nonwhite
savages, examples of European savages being restricted to reports of feral children
raised by wolves and bears, child-rearing practices (we are told) comparable to
those of Hottentots and Caribs. (Europeans are so intrinsically civilized that it
takes upbringing by animals to turn them into savages)’ (1997, 68). He adds that
‘for Europe, savagery is in the dim distant past’, since Europe had long since
developed expertise in metallurgy and agriculture, which Rousseau argues gave
rise to the advanced civilization of Europe over other regions. ‘But Rousseau’,
Mills adds ‘was writing more than two hundred years after the European
encounter with the great Aztec and Inca empires; wasn’t there at least a little
82 Errol A Henderson
metallurgy and agriculture in evidence there? Apparently not: “Both metallurgy
and agriculture were unknown to the savages of America, who have always
therefore remained savages.” So even what might initially seem to be a more open
environmental determinism, which would open the door to racial egalitarianism
rather than racial hierarchy, degenerates into massive historical amnesia and
factual misrepresentation, driven by the presupposition of the Racial Contract’
(1997, 69). Mills major point is that, ‘even if some of Rousseau’s nonwhite savages
are “noble,” physically and psychologically healthier than the Europeans of the
degraded and corrupt society produced by the real-life bogus contract, they are
still savages. So they are primitive beings who are not actually part of civil society,
barely raised above animals, without language’ (1997, 60). It is necessary to leave
the state of nature in order to become ‘fully human moral agents, beings capable of
justice’ (1997, 69). Therefore, Rousseau’s ‘praise for nonwhite savages is a limited
paternalistic praise, tantamount to admiration for healthy animals, in no way to be
taken to imply their equality, let alone superiority, to the civilized European of the
ideal polity. The underlying racial dichotomization and hierarchy of civilized and
savage remains quite clear’ (1997, 69).
The racist dualism of the theses of the social contract theorists informed IR
discourse on anarchy, which drew on their conceptions of the state of nature. Mills
contends that Kant’s conceptualization of the social contract is in some ways the
best illustration of the racial contract and its centrality to social contract theses as
they inform IR theory. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Eze, which traces the
racist claims that are both implicit and explicit in Kant’s writings, he argues that
the orthodox view of Kant as the faithful father of ethical philosophy is ‘radically
misleading’, such that ‘the nature of Kantian “persons” and the Kantian
“contract” must really be rethought’. This conceptualization subsumes his major
theoretical arguments from his notions of the state of nature to his conception of
‘republican peace’, which is viewed widely as prefiguring the democratic peace
thesis (1997, 70). For example, according to Kant, blacks are inferior to whites. He
is clear that ‘so fundamental is the difference between these two races of man
(whites and Negroes), and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities
as in color’ (Kant 1960, 111). For Kant ‘talent’ was an ‘“essential,” natural
ingredient for aptitude in higher rational and moral achievement’ and talent was
unequally distributed across races, whites possessing the greatest ‘gift’ of talent
and blacks largely lacking it (Eze 1995, 227). In his Anthropology from a pragmatic
point of view, Kant argues that whites occupy the highest position in his ‘racial
rational and moral order’, ‘followed by the “yellow,” the “black,” and then the
“red”’ and this rank reflected their relative ‘capacity to realize reason and
rational –moral perfectibility through education’ (Eze 1995, 218). Therefore, ‘it
cannot . . . be argued that skin color for Kant was merely a physical characteristic’;
it was rather ‘evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality’ (Eze
1995, 218– 219). Mills (1997, 71) agrees that, ‘in complete opposition to the image of
his work that has come down to us and is standardly taught in introductory ethics
courses, full personhood for Kant is actually dependent on race’.
In Kant’s (1960, 113) Observations of the feeling of the beautiful and sublime, he
affirms that ‘this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what
he said was stupid’. He adds that ‘the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling
that rises above the trifling’ (Kant 1960, 110). For Kant they are incapable of
achieving the level of rationality required of moral agents. Negroes ‘can be
Hidden in plain sight 83
educated but only as servants (slaves), that is they allow themselves to be trained’
(Eze 1995, 215). Such training does not require reason but only repetition.
Cognitive inabilities of blacks require of their masters a stern disposition and
informed instruction Kant does not hesitate to supply in providing guidance on
the proper method of punishment for blacks: ‘Kant “advises us to use a split
bamboo cane instead of a whip, so that the ‘negro’ will suffer a great deal of pains
(because of the ‘negro’s’ thick skin, he would not be racked with sufficient agonies
through a whip) but without dying.” To beat “the Negro” efficiently therefore
requires “a cane but it has to be a split one, so that the cane will cause wounds
large enough that prevent suppuration underneath the ‘negro’s’ thick skin”’ (Eze
1995, 215). Neugebauer (1990, 264) agrees that Kant’s advice to use a split bamboo
cane instead of a whip was intended to ensure that the slave suffered—‘because of
the “negro’s” thick skin, he would not be racked with sufficient agonies through a
whip’—without actually dying. Only if the black person is not fully human can
one reconcile this instruction with Kant’s imperative that we always treat
humanity whether in our own person or that of any other, never simply as a
means, but always as an end as well. Blacks do not meet the minimal requirements
for moral agency and thus of personhood for Kant; personhood, for Kant, is
circumscribed by his white supremacism.
Nevertheless, prominent democratic peace advocates such as Ray (1995, 3)
insists that Kant provides ‘an important symbolic as well as substantive source of
inspiration for advocates of the democratic peace proposition’. For Doyle
(1997, 302), Kant’s thesis ‘lays a special claim to what world politics is and can be:
a state of peace’, and it ‘claims a special property right in what shapes the politics
of Liberal states—liberty and democracy’. Russett (1993, 4) is even more adoring
of Kant’s ‘republican constitutionalism’, which he asserts is ‘compatible with basic
contemporary understandings of democracy’. But Kant’s ethical and political
theory is unequivocally racist: it excises whole swaths of humanity from its
processes. The republicanism Kant espouses—in contrast to Russett’s claims—is
quite a distance from democracy popularly conceived: it is a Herrenvolk
democracy for whites that provides for ‘perpetual peace’. Mills explains that ‘the
embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is
that their most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years is also the
foundational theorist in the modern period of the division between Herrenvolk and
Untermenschen, persons and subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw.
Modern moral theory and modern racial theory have the same father’ (1997, 72,
emphasis in original).
Mainstream IR theory, in general, and the democratic peace literature,
in particular, are silent on this aspect of Kant’s writing and its implications for his
‘perpetual peace’. Similarly, constructivist arguments such as proffered by Wendt
ignore this aspect of Kantian thought which should inform their understanding of
a ‘Kantian’ state of nature that they insist is oriented towards amicable relations
among states and peoples. Even realist counterarguments to the Kantian claims of
liberal and constructivist neo-Kantians rarely evoke Kant’s racism as a factor
undermining his thesis.
What should be clear is that the social contract theses that underlie prominent
conceptions of the global anarchy in which world politics is situated for many
realists, idealists/liberals, constructivists and some Marxists suggest a racist
dualism that rests on a fundamental dichotomy with respect to the emergence of
84 Errol A Henderson
society and, thus, the conduct of social affairs for whites, who are constructed as
developmentally superior, and blacks, who are constructed as developmentally
inferior. Having discussed briefly the racist dualism in prominent conceptions of
the state of nature derived from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, in the next
section I discuss how the racism that inheres in the social contract theses became
central to the theses of IR theorists who drew on them to devise the paradigms that
continue to orient the field.
Anarchy and world politics: the tropical roots of IR theory
A racist conceptualization of anarchy became the centrepiece of the major
paradigms of world politics: realism and liberalism/idealism, and their recent
offshoot, constructivism. Today, realism is the dominant paradigm in world
politics; or, specifically, neorealism, which rests on Waltz’s revision of the
traditional realism of Schuman and Morgenthau. Neorealism asserts that
the international system is anarchic and that states are the dominant actors. The
anarchic structure of the system mandates a self-help orientation among the states
because absent an authority above them, individual states must ensure their own
security. In such a system, security is the basic objective of states and power is
essential to achieving state aims and resisting those of others. Realists argue that
states seek to maximize their power to ensure their security; but the security
dilemma ensures that, ironically, each state’s pursuit of its own security leads
ultimately to its greater insecurity. Balance of power practices become essential in
this conflict-laden global system in which power—especially military power—is
the ultimate arbiter of conflicts of interest. Liberalism (or idealism)—the
paradigmatic counterpoise of realism—is similarly grounded in a preoccupation
with anarchy. Idealists accept the view that the global system is anarchic and that
anarchy could lead to security dilemmas, balance of power politics, and interstate
war, but, unlike realists, they do not accept that these are the inevitable outcomes
of international interactions. Grounded in the Enlightenment belief in the
perfectibility of the individual, they transferred their view of domestic politics to
the international realm and argued that conflict and wars were largely a result of
‘bad’ institutions, such as autocratic regimes, and that by democratizing regimes,
facilitating international commerce and encouraging international institutions,
international cooperation would ensue. In this view, states are not destined to
predation borne of anarchy, the persistent pursuit of power, and the security
dilemma, as realists maintain. Instead, the spread of democracy, liberal
international trade policies, and international law should allow states to overcome
the security dilemma and cooperate with each other. Foreign policy is assumed to
reflect domestic policy such that states that are peaceful domestically (for
example, democracies) are more likely to be peaceful abroad and those that are
more violent domestically (for example, autocracies) are more likely to be violent
abroad.
One of the key idealists of the twentieth century, who is also viewed as one of
the progenitors of the field of IR, was Woodrow Wilson (Ray 1995, 7). But the view
that Wilson—especially Wilson of the post-1918 period—established IR is more
received wisdom than actual fact, obfuscating less salutary but more significant
factors leading to the field’s emergence. As noted above, at its birth IR was
Hidden in plain sight 85
concerned with issues of anarchy and power; however, this anarchy was largely
assumed to inhere in the ‘primitive’ polities of the ‘inferior’ races—primarily in
the tropical domains of what we’d now consider the ‘third world’. At the same
time, the relevant power was that wielded by the ‘civilized’ white race through
their ‘modern’ states. The mechanism of ‘efficient’ and ‘rational’ colonial
administration, many early IR theorists maintained, could insure that ‘anarchy’
did not spread to the ‘modern’ world and lead to violence among the major
(white) powers. So the concerns among realists and idealists with anarchy are
grounded in a racist discourse that is concerned with the obligations of superior
peoples to impose order on the anarchic domains of inferior peoples in order to
prevent the chaos presumed to be endemic in the latter from spilling over into the
former’s territories or self-proclaimed spheres of interest. Similarly, the realist and
idealist concern with power was grounded in a racist discourse concerned largely
with the power of whites to control the tropics, subjugate its people, steal
its resources and superimpose themselves through colonial administration.
Therefore, the roots of realism—the dominant paradigm in world politics—are
grounded in a rationalization of the construction of a hierarchical racial order to be
imposed upon the anarchy allegedly arising from the tropics, which begged for
rational colonial administration from whites. It is little more than an intellectual
justification for colonialism and imperialism in the guise of the ‘white man’s
burden’. Also, the roots of idealism are found less in idealized versions of classical
liberal precepts regarding the perfectibility of humanity, the primacy of ‘Godgiven’ individual rights, and the spread of democracy, free trade and the rule of
law, than with the imposition of a white racist order on indigenous peoples
throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Given the imperative for ‘progress’ and ‘development’ and the view that the
unspoiled lands were not being sufficiently exploited by the indigenous peoples,
realists and idealists agreed that the incentive for imperialist conquest could lead
to conflict among whites; therefore, a rational distribution of territory and its
appropriate administration by colonial agencies was necessary. Realists and
idealists disagreed on the implications of the global system for the interaction of
white peoples and their states and political institutions, but often they accepted or
justified the subjugation of nonwhites by whites. In this way they found
congruence in their policy recommendations for the domestic and international
spheres at least in this regard: they supported white racial domination through
racial discrimination against nonwhite minorities at home and white imperialism
through racial domination of nonwhite polities abroad. Nowhere were these racist
policies more evident than in Africa—and in the treatment of the racial minorities
of the African diaspora in Western Europe and the Americas.
While realism and idealism converge on a white supremacist logic that has
been evident since the establishment of the field of IR, I maintain that not only was
this racism present at the creation of the field, but it continues to inform the major
paradigms, primarily—though not uniquely—through their conceptions
of anarchy. For example, Sampson (2002, 429) argues that ‘the discourse of
international politics employs a particular conception of anarchy—tropical
anarchy—that portrays the international system as “primitive”’. This ‘tropical
anarchy’ the social contract theorists assumed was the primeval condition of
nonwhite peoples, which Kidd (1898), among many others, rationalized as a basis
for Western colonialism. The anarchical world—the state of nature—was the
86 Errol A Henderson
preserve of non-Europeans, primitive peoples. Sampson views anarchy as a ‘trope’
more than a ‘natural state of affairs’; but he is clear that ‘while scholars may define
anarchy variously, the primitive images that anarchy evokes remain constant’. Not
only are the paradigmatic roots of IR theory saturated by the racist stream of
tropical anarchy, but Sampson is even more explicit that ‘the foundation upon
which much of the discipline rests is not anarchy but rather an image of primitive
society popularized by British social anthropologists during the 1930s and 1940s’
(Sampson 2002, 429). For example, Sampson argues that Waltz’s thesis on system
structure derives from an obsolete, anarchic and in many ways racist
conceptualization of African primitive society by anthropologist SF Nadel.
Sampson (2002, 444) does not argue that Waltz’s definition of system structure—so
crucial to his rendering of ‘structural realism’—borrows from Nadel, ‘but the
structure Waltz employs is Nadel’s’ (emphasis in original). Waltz analogizes
Nadel’s view of the structure of African primitive societies to the global structure
in which international politics takes place. He adds that Waltz ‘derived all three
components of his theory of international politics (ordering principles, functional
differentiation, and the distribution of material capabilities) from a theory of
primitive society published by Nadel in 1957’ (2002, 430); and he documents
Waltz’s allusions to Nadel in his Theory of international politics (1979) as well as in
prior and subsequent works.
Sampson notes that ‘[p]rimitive societies have long intrigued theorists of
international politics’ but ‘[n]one of these theorists, however, challenge the
categorization of systems, societies, or peoples as primitive’ (2002, 431). While
since the 1960s anthropologists have ‘questioned the ‘ambiguous and
inconsistent’ notion of primitive society’, the field of IR ‘continues to recycle
definitions constructed nearly a century before’ (2002, 431). He explains, ‘In early
anthropology and social theory, primitive systems are portrayed as decentralized,
disorganized, and anarchic; modern ones are centralized, well organized, and
hierarchic. Primitive societies are simple, traditional, uncivilized, premodern, and
functionally undifferentiated; they resemble nonvertebrates like “polyps” or; if
they are slightly segmented, “earthworms.” Modern societies, on the other hand,
are complex, advanced, civilized, and functionally differentiated; they have
skeletons, central nervous systems, discrete organs, and heads with the capacity to
think and act rationally (unlike primitive societies, where actions are products of
passionate reflexes). Primitive peoples are described as devoid of individuality,
remarkable only through their homogeneity’ (2002, 431).
For Sampson, there are several ‘dangers of employing claims about
a supposedly primitive society to the foundation for analysis’ (2002, 429). First,
‘primitive systems and societies are inventions that no longer serve as valid
categories of classification’ (2002, 429). Second, taking an explicit focus of social
anthropology, the characteristics of ‘primitive African’ social systems, and
transposing them ‘into an implicit theoretical assumption’ about the structure of
the global system, ‘we prejudge the nature of international politics’ (2002, 429).
Third, ‘using primitive society as the starting point for scholarship creates an
inescapable logic that reduces possible policy responses to a simple choice: either
maintain the primitive’s status quo or civilize the world’ (2002, 429). For Sampson,
Waltz’s neorealism ‘selects the first option’, and Wendt’s social constructivism
‘chooses the second’ (2002, 429). He notes that, ‘[a]t first glance, one might find
it ironic that a theory “necessarily based on the great powers” and “states that
Hidden in plain sight 87
make the most difference” owes its existence to anthropological fieldwork in
Africa’ (2002, 430). Beyond irony, ‘Waltz’s appropriation of a theory originally
intended to help colonial administrators control primitive African societies
produces an image of international politics that privileges power over
progress, equilibrium over change, and preventative measures over curative
ones’ (2002, 430).
The neorealist conception of system structure is generally accepted by liberal
theorists, who mainly differentiate among states—particularly democratic states,
which they argue have assembled a separate peace among themselves, thus
overcoming the Hobbesian anarchy and replacing it with a Kantian one. It also
converges with the view of neoliberal institutionalists, who largely accept the
realist version of homo politicus as an egoistic, rational, expected utility maximizer
while retaining the liberal focus on interstate cooperation; however, in this
conceptualization cooperation is contingent not on democracy but on the actions
of state and non-state actors attempting to address recurring problems of market
failure (Henderson 1999; 2002). International anarchy, sovereignty and self-help
regularize the behaviour of states throughout the system, interstate cooperation
emerging from a homogenization process, ironically, similar to that proposed by
Waltz (1979, 73– 77); but, in the liberal view, cooperation ensues from a reduction
in transaction costs, decreased uncertainty and the formation of institutions
to reward cooperation and punish noncooperation—international regimes.
Importantly, (neo)realist and (neo)liberal arguments have as their point of
departure the global anarchy of Waltz, which is the tropical anarchy of ‘primitive’
African social systems.
For social constructivists the convergence with Waltz’s system structure is even
more apparent. The differentiation that Waltz fails to observe in world politics is
captured in Wendt’s distinction among Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian
international systems. Wendt views the essential relationships among sovereigns
in a Hobbesian anarchy as one of enemies, while in a Lockean anarchy it is one of
rivals, and, lastly, in a Kantian anarchy it is one of friends. His most culturally
evolved system, the Kantian, is one shared primarily by the Western powers, while
others exist within Lockean and Hobbesian contexts. This means that only the
Western states could be entrusted to transfer to the third world the requisites for
a higher level of social evolution to elevate them out of their lower condition.6
Therefore, ‘the “burden” of structural transformation, the responsibility of
“teaching” the rest of the world how to evolve, falls squarely on the shoulders of
great powers. Less powerful states have little or no hope of transforming the
international system on their own’ (Sampson 2002, 449). Sampson characterizes
Wendt’s ‘social theory of international relations’ as ‘remarkably un-international’.
He states that while Wendt chastises Waltz’s study for lacking a reference to ‘role’ in
its index, Sampson counters that, ‘discounting Montezuma and the Aztecs, one
might say the same of Wendt’s social theory for the entire “Third World”’ (Sampson
2002, 448 –449). He adds that ‘Wendt’s text is largely an attempt to explain how
Europe and the United States pulled themselves out of “nature’s realm.” It tells us
how NATO and Europe evolved into complex social kinds through a process
6
See Vitalis (2000) for a critique of racist conceptions in popular liberal academic
arguments on the evolution of Western ‘humanitarian’ norms.
88 Errol A Henderson
dubbed “cultural selection”. There is no mention of non-Western social kinds.
It is not even clear whether African or Asian states could “evolve” without the
help of bigger, more powerful “benefactors”’ (Sampson 2002, 449).
Sampson notes that, counter to the title of Wendt’s most popular article,
‘anarchy is only what some states make of it’. In fact it is as constrained by the logic
of tropical anarchy as is Waltz’s; only that where Waltz rationalizes the stasis of the
status quo equilibrium (the balance of power, or, by analogy, the maintenance of
Western power in the colonies), Wendt rationalizes the transformation of the
status quo within limits governed by the status quo powers (Kantian social
evolution, or, by analogy, the establishment of colonial administration in the
colonies as a function of the ‘white man’s burden’ or mission civilisatrice).
He concludes that ‘by arguing that “anarchy is what states make of it,” Wendt
suggests that powerful, civilized states have the capacity to lift weaker, primitive
states out of the heart of darkness and into the light of democratic peace. Thus
superpowers like the United States should shoulder the global burden of
civilizing international society. This reverses Waltz’s conclusions. Waltz seeks
system maintenance and equilibrium. Wendt seeks transformation. Waltz
privileges power over progress. Wendt suggests the opposite’ (Sampson 2002,
450). Waltz’s framework resurrects anthropology’s misrepresentation of African
political systems of the 1950s and Wendt reproduces anthropological debates of
the 1930s and 1940s (Sampson 2002, 451). Both paradigms converge on a notion
of tropical anarchy which reinforces a racist dualism in world politics that is
manifest, in turn, in prominent theses that derive from these paradigms.
Summary
Thus, it is not difficult to trace the historical and contemporary role and impact of
racism in IR theory. Racism has not only informed the paradigms of world politics;
it was fundamental to the conceptualization of its key theoretical touchstone:
anarchy. The social contract theorists rooted their conceptualizations of the state of
nature in a broader ‘racial contract’ that dichotomized humanity racially and
established a white supremacist hierarchy in their foundational conceptions of
society. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century IR theorists built on this
racist dualism as they constructed their conception of a global anarchy and the
role of ‘civilized’ whites in providing, maintaining and ensuring order within it by
means of a system of international power relations among whites—or, at
minimum, dominated by whites; and a system of colonial subjugation for
nonwhites—or those nonwhites who failed to successfully resist their domination
militarily. The impact and role of racism are manifest through the major
paradigms operative today—realism, neorealism, liberalism/idealism and
constructivism, mainly through their continued reliance on a racist conception
of anarchy; and in the case of neorealism through its grounding in African
primitivism, and in the case of Marxism in its reliance on and normalizing of a
Eurocentric teleology of economic development for the world.
To be sure, the dualism at the broad theoretical level of paradigms underscores,
guides and informs the more specific dichotomies at the level of theories, models
and theses that are derived from these paradigms—and especially those that are
applied to Africa’s political processes—and to other regions as well. In the case of
Hidden in plain sight 89
African international relations, they both contextualize and rationalize a black
African primitivism juxtaposed to a white Western progressivism, a black African
peculiar savagery and a white Western universalist humanity, resulting
in an enduring African tribal/ethnic warfare frame of reference contrasted to
an evolved Western democratic peace; in each case a static ossified ahistorical
permanence contrasted to a dynamic evolving transcendence. One result is that one
must endure what are considered to be ‘meaningful’ or ‘appropriate’ or even
‘incisive’ or ‘cutting-edge’ discussions of Africa’s domestic and international
politics that have as their point of departure loose and often obtuse references to
‘hearts of darkness’, ‘greed versus grievance’, ‘tribal warfare’, ‘warlordism’,
‘frontiersmen’ and a litany of other metaphors that would not pass the editor’s
desk at most top-tier academic journals as legitimate lenses through which to
observe and examine contemporary armed conflicts in the Western world. Notably,
rarely do those same journals publish work on the historical and enduring racism
embedded in the major paradigms of world politics, or discuss the implications
of such a condition if it is shown to obtain.
In fact, the ‘norm against noticing’ white racism is so intense that it engenders
a ‘silencing’ of those who would raise it; or it ensures against publication in
mainstream outlets for such work except that authors provide appropriate
euphemisms for the atrocities associated with white racism—especially against
blacks—or they provide the requisite ‘balance’ to emphasize the role of nonwhites
in their own subjugation—as if white supremacism and the imperialism,
colonialism, neocolonialism and internal colonialism that it has employed against
Africans, Asians, and Native Americans are somehow the responsibility of groups
other than the whites who created, maintained and continue to profit from them.
Thus, the racist dualism in world politics creates, in turn, a dual quandary for IR
scholars and many Africanists seeking to publish in Western journals—and many
non-Western ones, too—wherein white racist expectations of the appropriateness
of certain lines of inquiry often limit the discourse of African politics to hollow
phraseology and meaningless metaphors, while they simultaneously check
informed challenges to historical and contemporary expressions, practices and
institutions of white racism in academia by ensuring that such racism is rarely
confronted in the major publications in IR/world politics in clear and direct terms.
Another result is that the norm against noticing white racism leaves IR scholars
teaching a history of the development of IR which ignores the salience of
colonialism as central to the origins of the field. That is, in continuing to teach the
fiction that the field emerged following the devastation of World War I as ‘idealists’
led by Wilson and others such as Lowes Dickinson, Zimmern, Giddings and Kerr
sought to provide the institutional checks on the realpolitik that was implicated in
the ‘war to end all wars’, we belie the reality of the centrality of colonialism, race
development and white racial supremacy to the development of the academic field
of IR. Thus, our narrative creates an academic fiction that hovers outside of its own
history. The presence of this narrative is a testament to the white supremacism that
is a centrepiece of the field given its role in ensuring a ‘norm against noticing’ the
centrality of white racism in world politics. It simultaneously silences or
marginalizes perspectives that focus on the importance of white racism in the
development of the field of IR/world politics, and similarly, those who would raise
this as a legitimate research focus for the most sensible of reasons: it happens to be
true.
90 Errol A Henderson
Conclusion
In this article, I’ve attempted to address the centrality of racism in IR theory.
I examined the extent to which realism, liberalism and constructivism are oriented
by racist precepts grounded in the intellectual foundation of IR. Specifically, a
racist dualism inheres within the assumptions informing the foundational
construct of IR: namely, anarchy; and due to the centrality of this construct within
prominent theses that draw on it, racist precepts have an enduring impact on IR
theory today. In sum, a racist latticework undergirds major theoretical
frameworks that inform research and policy in IR. Theses that rest on racist
claims are not simply odious; they are untethered to the reality (world politics
itself) that they purport to explain. Vitalis (2000) is correct that there is a ‘norm
against noticing’ white supremacism in mainstream IR discourse. The failure to
address it leaves IR analysts ill equipped to address accurately the intellectual
history of IR, the theoretical development of the field and the prospects for theorybuilding in IR that will generate meaningful research and policy for the vast
majority of the world’s people.
Notes on contributor
Errol A Henderson (PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is associate
professor of political science at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park,
Pennsylvania, USA. His research interests include international relations/world
politics, analysis of war and peace, culture and conflict, African politics, and
Africana Studies. He has authored more than thirty scholarly publications, and he
recently completed a manuscript, African realism, which focuses on Africa’s
international wars. E-mail: eah13@psu.edu
References
Anderson, Carole (2003) Eyes off the prize (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University)
Blatt, Jessica (2004) ‘“To bring out the best that is in their blood”: race, reform, and
civilization in the journal of race development (1910 – 1919)’, Ethnic and Racial Studies,
27:5, 691– 709
Boas, Franz (1911) The mind of primitive man (New York: Macmillan)
Buell, Raymond Leslie (1929) International relations, rev edn (New York: Henry Holt)
Bunche, Ralph (1936) A world view of race (Albany: JB Lyons)
Cell, John (1982) The highest stage of white supremacy (Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press)
Depelchin, Jacques (2005) Silences in African history (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyoyta)
Deutsch, Karl (1970) ‘Research problems on race in intranational and international
relations’ in GW Shepperd, Jr and TJ LeMelle (eds) Race among nations (Lexington,
Massachusetts: DC Heath)
Doty, Roxanne (1998) ‘The bounds of “race” in international relations’ in Dominique
Jacquin-Berdal, Andrew Oros and Marco Verweij (eds) Culture in world politics
(New York: St Martin’s Press), 134– 155
Dower, John (1986) War without mercy: race and power in the Pacific War (New York: Random
House)
Doyle, Michael (1997) Ways of war and peace (New York: WW Norton)
Du Bois, WEB (1915) ‘The African roots of war’, Atlantic Monthly, 115, 707– 714
Du Bois, WEB (1961 [1903]) The souls of black folk (New York: Fawcett)
Du Bois, WEB (1987 [1946]) The world and Africa (New York: International Publishers)
Hidden in plain sight 91
Elkins, Caroline (2004) Imperial reckoning: the untold story of Britain’s gulag in Kenya
(New York: Henry Holt)
Eze, Emmanuel (1995) ‘The color of reason: the idea of “race” in Kant’s anthropology’ in
Katherine Faull (ed) Anthropology and the German Enlightenment (Lewisburg,
Pennsylvania: Bucknell University), 200– 241
Fredrickson, George (1982) White supremacy: a comparative study of American and South
African history (New York: Oxford University Press)
Furedi, Frank (1998) The silent war, imperialism and the changing perception of race
(New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press)
Giddings, Franklin (1898) ‘Imperialism?’, Political Science Quarterly, 13:4, 585– 605
Harris, Joseph (ed) (1982) Global dimensions of the African diaspora (Washington: Howard
University Press)
Henderson, Errol (1995) Afrocentrism and world politics: towards a new paradigm (Westport,
Connecticut: Praeger)
Henderson, Errol (1999) ‘Neoidealism and the democratic peace’, Journal of Peace Research,
36:2, 203– 231
Henderson, Errol (2002) Democracy and war: the end of an illusion? (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne
Rienner)
Henderson, Errol (2007) ‘Navigating the muddy waters of the mainstream: tracing the
mystification of racism in international relations’ in Wilbur Rich (ed) The state of the
political science discipline: an African-American perspective (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press), 325– 363
Hochschild, Adam (1998) King Leopold’s ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial
Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin)
Hunt, Michael (1987) Ideology and US foreign policy (New Haven: Yale University Press)
Iriye, Akira (1997) Cultural internationalism and world order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press)
Kant, Immanuel (1960) Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime, trans John
T Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press)
Kerr, PH (1916) ‘Political relations between advanced and backward peoples’ in AJ Grant,
Arthur Greenwood, JDI Hughes, PH Kerr and FF Urquhart (eds) An introduction to the
study of international relations (London: Macmillan)
Kidd, Benjamin (1898) The control of the tropics (New York: Macmillan)
Krishna, Sankaran (2001) ‘Race, amnesia, and the education of international relations’,
Alternatives, 26:4, 373– 376
Lauren, Paul (1988) Power and prejudice (Boulder, Colorado: Westview)
Lipson, Charles (1984) ‘International cooperation in economic and security affairs’, World
Politics, 37:1, 1– 23
Locke, Alain (1992 [1916]) Race contacts and interracial relations: lectures on the theory and
practice of race, ed Jeffrey Stewart (Washington: Howard University Press)
Maclean, John (1981) ‘Political theory, international theory, and problems of ideology’,
Millennium, 10:2, 102– 125
Mamdani, Mahmood (1996) Citizen and subject (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press)
Marx, Anthony (1998) Making race and nation (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press)
Mills, Charles (1997) The racial contract (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press)
Morgenthau, Hans (1985 [1948]) Politics among nations, 6th edn (New York: Alfred A Knopf)
Neugebauer, Christian (1990) ‘The racism of Hegel and Kant in Odera Oruka’ in Odera
Oruka (ed) Sage philosophy (Leiden: EJ Brill), 259– 272
Olson, Wiliam and AJR Groom (1991) International relations then and now (London:
HarperCollins)
Omi, William and Howard Winant (1994) Racial formation in the United States, 2nd edn (New
York: Routledge)
Persaud, Randolph (2001) ‘Re-envisioning sovereignty: Marcus Garvey and the making of a
transnational identity’ in Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw (eds) Africa’s challenge to
international relations theory (New York: Palgrave), 112 – 128
92 Errol A Henderson
Persaud, Randolph and RBJ Walker (2001) ‘Apertura: race in international relations’,
Alternatives, 26:4, 373– 376
Ray, James (1995) Democracy and international conflict (Columbia: University of South
Carolina)
Reeves, Julie (2004) Culture and international relations: narratives, natives, and tourists (New
York: Routledge)
Reinsch, Paul (1900) World politics at the end of the nineteenth century (New York: Macmillan)
Reinsch, Paul (1902) Colonial government (New York: Macmillan)
Reinsch, Paul (1905a) ‘The Negro race and European civilization’, American Journal of
Sociology, 11:2, 145– 167
Reinsch, Paul (1905b) Colonial administration (New York: Macmillan)
Rodney, Walter (1974) How Europe underdeveloped Africa (Washington: Howard University
Press)
Russett, Bruce (1993) Grasping the democratic peace (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press)
Sampson, Aaron (2002) ‘Tropical anarchy: Waltz, Wendt, and the way we imagine
international politics’, Alternatives, 27, 429 –457
Schmidt, Brian (1998) The political discourse of anarchy (Albany: SUNY Press)
Shepherd, GW and TJ LeMelle (1970) Race among nations (Lexington, Massachusetts:
DC Heath)
Stewart, Jeffrey (1992) ‘Introduction’ in Jeffrey Stewart (ed) Alain Locke. Race contacts and
interracial relations (Washington: Howard University Press), xix– lix
Tinker, Hugh (1977) Race, conflict, and the international order (London: Macmillan)
Vincent, RJ (1982) ‘Race in international relations’, International Affairs, 58:4, 658– 670
Vitalis, Robert (2000) ‘The graceful and generous liberal gesture: making racism invisible in
American international relations’, Millennium, 29:2, 331– 356
Vitalis, Robert (2010) ‘The noble American science of imperial relations and its laws of race
development’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:4, 909–938
Walters, Ronald (1993) Pan Africanism in the African diaspora (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press)
Waltz, Kenneth (1979) Theory of international politics (Reading, Massachusetts: AddisonWesley)
Winant, Howard (2001) The world is a ghetto (New York: Basic Books)
Zimmern, Alfred (1926) The third British empire (London: Oxford University Press)
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
The Fourth Founding
The United States and the Liberal Order
By Gideon Rose
January/February 2019
The peacemakers: at the World War I peace conference in Paris, 1919.
Edward Jackson/Library of Congress
The United States began as a radical experiment with grandiose ambitions. Its founders
believed in Locke’s idea that free individuals could escape the perils of anarchy by joining
together and cooperating for mutual benefit—and they created a country to show it wasn’t
just talk. The signers of the Declaration of Independence bound themselves in a common
political project, establishing a limited government to secure their rights and advance
their interests. That act, noted [http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-onindependence-day/] Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821, “was the first solemn
declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the
corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe.”
From the start, the United States was understood to be both country and cause, a distinct
national community and the standard-bearer of a global political revolution. Destiny
would take a long time to play out. Until it did, until the surface of the globe was covered
with a fabric of democratic republics, the good new country would have to survive in the
bad old international system. “Probably for centuries to come,” Adams guessed. So how
should the nation behave during the lengthy transition?
Coming at the problem a few decades into the experiment, Adams reasoned that the top
priorities for the fledgling republic should be protecting the revolution and perfecting the
union. And so just as President George Washington had warned
[http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp] about the dangers of alliances and balanceof-power politics, Adams warned about the dangers of ideological crusades. The United
States stood for universal principles, but it need not always export those principles or
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
1/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
enforce them abroad. It could be the “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all”
while being the “champion and vindicator” only of its own.
The American grand strategy that emerged in this era—continental expansion and
internal development combined with self-righteous aloofness from the world beyond the
seas—suited a commercial republic deep in the global periphery. It could work, however,
only because the United States was protected by geography and British naval
supremacy [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1993-09-01/defence-naval-supremacyfinance-technology-and-british-naval]. The country’s long rise during the nineteenth century was
made possible by its calm external environment, a public good provided by the liberal
hegemon of the day.
By the twentieth century, things had changed. British power had declined; American
power had risen. The United States now dominated the Western Hemisphere, patrolled
the oceans, drove the global economy, and needed a new grand strategy appropriate to its
new situation. American interests had once been served by keeping apart from the world.
Now those interests called for engaging with it. But what kind of engagement was
possible for a country built on a fundamental rejection of the old game?
After some experimentation, over the course of the century, the answer gradually
emerged, in fits and starts, by trial and error. It proved oddly familiar: apply lessons from
the country’s domestic founding to its foreign policy, taking the logic of the social contract
to the next level. If autonomous individuals in the state of nature could find ways to
cooperate for mutual benefit, why couldn’t autonomous countries? They didn’t have to
love one another or act saintly; they just needed to have some common interests and
understand the concept of a positive-sum game. The more countries played such games,
the more opportunities they would have to benefit by cooperation as well as conflict. And
gradually, interactions could turn into relationships and then communities—first
functional, eventually institutional, maybe one day even heartfelt.
This approach promised to resolve the tension between American interests and American
ideals by achieving them simultaneously, on the installment plan. The United States
would protect its interests by amassing power and using it as necessary, and it would
serve its ideals by nurturing an ever-growing community of independent countries that
played nicely with one another. Cooperation would lead to integration and prosperity,
which would lead to liberalization. Slowly but steadily, Locke’s world would emerge from
Hobbes’.
The new grand strategy produced the dense web of benign reciprocal interactions now
known as the liberal international order. That order developed in three stages. President
Woodrow Wilson first tried to found it after World War I. He failed but gave his
successors a model and some cautionary lessons. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
2/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
Harry Truman tried again during and after World War II, and this time, the order took hold,
at least in part of the world. Then, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton
refounded [https://www.american.edu/sis/news/20181203-Why-We-ll-Miss-George-H-W-Bush-America-sLast-Foreign-Policy-President.cfm] it for the post–Cold War era, extending it from the West to
the rest.
As the cooperative arrangements developed in one period prove inadequate for the next,
the order’s forward progress stalls, and pessimism spreads. In the past, the obvious
benefits of continued cooperation have ultimately led new generations to create new
arrangements so the good times keep rolling. Whether that pattern will continue is
unclear.
In 2016, Anglosphere voters rang down the curtain on the third phase of the order’s
history with Brexit and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, and for two years, the
world has drifted. Conventional wisdom says the order is finished, has failed, was always
a naive fantasy or a mere epiphenomenon of temporary surplus power.
And yet still, it moves. The order’s core insight about the potential for mutual gains from
voluntary, rules-based international cooperation remains sound. Most of the world has
bought into the project and wants to stick with it. No alternative approach offers as many
benefits, and most carry grave risks—for both the United States and the world at large. So
the conventional wisdom is likely wrong, and the administration after Trump’s will almost
certainly tack backward somewhat and try to revive the order yet again.
A fourth founding will be difficult. But it can be done and needs to be done, because the
stakes are huge. The catch is that it will take a sincere commitment by the world’s
dominant power to lead rather than win.
FIRST FOUNDING
When the Great War broke out, in 1914, the United States instinctively dove for cover.
That was the standard nineteenth-century playbook: not our problem. Yet it didn’t last
long in the twentieth century, because the country had grown too strong to be ignored. As
the fighting in Europe settled into a grinding war of attrition, the outcome increasingly
depended on the Allies’ access to the U.S. economy. So in 1917, Germany tried to cut off
transatlantic shipping. Unrestricted submarine warfare was designed to squeeze the
Allies into submission. Instead, it pulled the United States into the war, and the world, for
good.
Watching the slaughter as a neutral, Wilson had refused to normalize it. The whole
enterprise of war was evil, he was sure, not just any one belligerent. The root problem was
the ruthless jockeying for advantage that all European countries considered normal
foreign policy behavior. That whole mindset had to change. So from the sidelines, Wilson
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
3/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
called on the belligerents to declare the stalemated war a draw and move to a new kind of
postwar order based on collective security rather than competitive self-interest.
Soon afterward, Germany started torpedoing all the U.S. ships it could find. This
convinced Wilson that his vision couldn’t be realized unless Germany was reformed from
the inside out. So when the United States entered the war, it sought not only a postwar
collective security system but also the removal of “Prussian autocracy.”
Wilson thought regime change was necessary because dictatorships could not be trusted
to participate in his collective security system. His secretary of state, Robert Lansing,
thought democracies would be less warlike in general. The administration planned to
reinforce its institutionalized democratic peace with an open international trading order,
so benign commercial interactions would gradually bind the world together in peace and
prosperity. (That free trade would benefit the dominant United States most of all went
without saying.)
Woodrow Wilson, 1913.
Frank Graham Cootes / The White House Historical Association
International security, international economics, domestic politics abroad—all would have
to be transformed before the United States could be secure. But when it was, the world
would be, too. This was a postwar vision grand enough to justify the war’s carnage.
Pulling it off would be a long shot, however. Wilson needed to get his own country behind
him, keep the British and the French in check, and bring a revived, democratized
Germany back into the European balance. Talleyrand or Bismarck might have had a
chance; Wilson didn’t.
In the event, the cynical British and French pocketed American help during the war, paid
lip service to Wilson’s pieties, and kept on pursuing their individual short-term interests
just as before. The American people turned out to want not a negotiated truce and a
postwar balance of power but complete submission and just the sort of harsh treatment
of Germany that Wilson sought to avoid. And then, as the guns fell silent, the Kaiser’s
regime collapsed, to be followed eventually by a weak, unstable democratic successor
unable to defend itself at home or abroad. The British and the French happily took
advantage of the situation, imposing a more punitive settlement at Versailles than Wilson
wanted or the Germans felt they had been promised, and things went south from there.
The first attempt to found the order was in trouble by the end of 1918, was on life support
by the end of 1919, and died slowly and painfully in the years after.
SECOND TRY
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
4/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
Wilson’s failure seemed to confirm the wisdom of Adams’ prudence, and so during the
1920s and 1930s, the United States turned inward again. Just as before, however, the
realities of power made such a course impractical. The strongest country in the world
necessarily affected, and was affected by, what happened everywhere else. Retreating
into isolation now was like a toddler putting his head under a blanket: it made things look
better, but the outside world didn’t go away.
Sure enough, within a generation, the other great powers were back to their old tricks,
pursuing short-term individual interests, beggaring their neighbors, and so forth. This led
to a downward spiral of mistrust, predation, depression, and war. In 1941, just as in 1917,
the United States was attacked and dragged in because it was too powerful to be
ignored. And once again, roused from its geopolitical slumber and driving to victory,
Washington had to decide what to do next.
The Roosevelt administration was stocked with rueful Wilsonians. They continued to
believe that the best way to protect American interests was to use American power to
transform international politics. If anything, they believed it even more passionately than
before, given what had happened since. Still, having bungled the job once, they knew they
would have to up their game the second time around.
Retreating into isolation in the 1920s and 1930s was like a toddler putting his head under
a blanket: it made things look better, but the outside world didn’t go away.
They agreed among themselves about what had gone wrong. The Wilson administration
had tried to be soft on Germany and hard on Russia. It had permitted the United
Kingdom, France, and Italy to make secret agreements and hold acquisitive war aims. It
had waited until after the war to set up the League of Nations, designed it badly, and
failed to secure congressional approval of American participation. Because of these
mistakes, the victorious wartime alliance fractured, the league foundered, trade barriers
deepened the Depression, and eventually a despotic Germany rose up again and dragged
the world back into the maelstrom.
This remembered nightmare lay behind the entire complex of U.S. planning for the
postwar order. This time, the thinking ran, Germany and the other defeated Axis powers
would be occupied and democratized. The Soviet Union would be courted. A betterdesigned league would be set up during the war, with American participation locked in
from the start. And eventually, postwar harmony and prosperity would be maintained
through a combination of democratic peace, great-power concert, institutionalized
multilateral cooperation, and free trade.
By early 1945, the new framework seemed largely in place. Some things, such as
Germany’s future status, were left undecided because Roosevelt wanted it that way. (He
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
5/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
liked to improvise.) But the gaps did not seem crucial. Although somewhat concerned
about Soviet behavior in eastern Europe and the transition from a wartime to a peacetime
economy, the president died in April confident his hopes would be realized.
Actually, there were lots of big problems looming, not least how to square the great
juggler’s own conflicting promises to different constituencies. Because Roosevelt had
allowed no succession planning, the job of implementing his ambitious agenda in the
actually existing postwar world fell to his successor, Truman. And the job was tough.
The United Kingdom was weaker than expected and rapidly shedding its remaining
global commitments. Europe was in ruins, revolutionary nationalism was rising, the
Soviets were playing hard-ball, and the American public was quickly turning inward
again. After two years of watching the situation deteriorate, Washington decided to shift
course, putting aside the grand universal institutional framework it had just constructed
and building a smaller, more practical one in its place. The Bretton Woods system was
thus supplemented by the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO, a new set of
arrangements designed to revive and protect an American sphere of influence run along
liberal lines.
EXTENDING THE GAINS
Cooperation is difficult, especially with other people. Put together a group for a stag hunt,
Rousseau noted, and somebody will run off to chase a hare, letting the stag escape and
the others go hungry. Humans find it easier to bond over fear than hope. So a crucial
moment for the order came when hope and fear got yoked together to pull it forward.
In 1947, the Truman administration moved forward with its plan to pump American
capital into a revived and newly integrated European economy centered on Germany and
France. It offered generous aid to any country in the region willing to play by the rules of
the new system, and most grabbed the chance. But Moscow had no desire to be part of
any American system, so it refused and ordered its minions to do the same. A relieved
Washington then began building its order in the western half of the continent, as Moscow
did the same in the East. And so the second phase of the order’s history came to coincide
with the geopolitical conflict known as the Cold War.
American policymakers did indeed come to see the Soviet Union as a threat during the
late 1940s. But that threat was not to the U.S. homeland. It was to the order they were
trying to build, which extended well beyond American borders to the major industrial
power centers of Europe and Asia and the global commons and required a sustained
forward presence to maintain. Neither Congress nor the American public was clamoring
for the launch of such a grand new postwar project. They had their own problems and
were skeptical about authorizing large amounts of money to get Europe back on its feet.
So the Truman administration cleverly flipped the story, presenting its new approach not
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
6/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
as an independent project of American order building but as a response to a growing
Soviet threat. This got the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and other measures
approved. But it distorted what was really going on.
Containment was necessary to protect the order. But once containment was established
as Washington’s strategic frame, it dominated the narrative. Cooperative integration was
sold as something that was done to bind the American alliance together to win the
conflict rather than as something valuable in its own right. This went on so long that
when the Cold War finally ended, many were surprised that the order continued.
Nobody expected the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the collapse of the Soviet Union
two years later. It was the sudden realization of the vision that the diplomat George
Kennan had put forth [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sourcessoviet-conduct] decades earlier: the United States had held the line, waited, and eventually
watched its opponent cede the field.
What should come next for American foreign policy? At the time, this seemed like an
open question, and much ink was spilled in the “Kennan sweepstakes” as people
proposed replacements for containment. But the question was not really open, because
there was an obvious answer: stay the course.
The George H. W. Bush administration recognized that the Cold War had really been a
challenge to the order, and so when the challenger gave up, the order was free to expand
and flourish. Washington’s mission now wasn’t to write a new story. It was to write
another chapter in the old one, as Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, told
the president in a memo in 1989:
In his memoirs, Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson remarked that, in 1945, their task
“began to appear as just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of
Genesis. That was to create a world out of chaos; ours, to create half a world, a free half,
out of the same material without blowing the whole to pieces in the process.” When those
creators of the 1940s and 1950s rested, they had done much. We now have
unprecedented opportunities to do more, to pick up the task where they left off, while
doing what must be done to protect a handsome inheritance.
Bush’s comment: “Brent—I read this with interest!”
During the 1990s, therefore, the Bush [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1991-02-01/bushforeign-policy] and Clinton [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/haiti/1996-01-01/foreign-policy-socialwork] administrations refounded the order for the post–Cold War era. They weren’t sure
how long unipolarity would last and faced a skeptical public and Congress. So the
technocrats improvised and muddled through as best they could. Bush skillfully managed
the Soviet collapse, made a reunified Germany a pillar of the order, led a coalition to
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
7/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
stabilize the Persian Gulf after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, nudged Israel and the Arabs
toward peace, and managed U.S. finances responsibly.
Clinton continued the same general course. He advanced North American economic
integration, renewed the U.S.-Japanese alliance, expanded NATO to eastern Europe,
contained regional security threats in the Middle East and Asia, promoted the Arab-Israeli
peace process, and also managed U.S. finances responsibly. By the turn of the
millennium, the United States and the order were stronger, richer, and more secure than
ever.
U.S. President George H. W. Bush with U.S. military personnel after the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, November 1990.
Terry Bochatey / REUTERS
THE GREAT UNRAVELING
Two decades on, it’s complicated. By providing international public goods such as global
and regional security, freedom of the commons, and a liberal trading system, the United
States created what was by any historical standard a stable and benign global
environment, a planet-sized petri dish for human and national development. From 1989 to
2016, global product more than tripled. Standards of living skyrocketed. More than a
billion people were lifted out of poverty. Infant mortality plummeted. New technologies
continuously improved daily life and connected people in extraordinary new ways.
We did not go back to the future or miss the Cold War. Europe was primed for peace;
Asian rivalries did not ripen. Anarchy did not come; post–Cold War chaos was a myth. On
the big-ticket items—great-power peace and global prosperity—the realist pessimists
were wrong, and the liberal optimists were right.
But macrostability coexisted with regional disorder. The signal was hard to detect in all
the noise. And the architects of the current phase of globalization forgot that the spread
of capitalism is a net good, not an absolute one. Along with its gains come losses—of a
sense of place, of social and psychological stability, of traditional bulwarks against life’s
vicissitudes. Absent some sort of state intervention, its benefits are not distributed
steadily or evenly, producing anger and turbulence along with rising expectations.
Washington turbocharged globalization even as it cut back the domestic safety net,
shifting risk from the state back to the public just as the gales of creative destruction
started to howl.
More money created more problems. Roman-level power led to Roman-level decadence.
Uncontested dominance led to unnecessary, poorly planned crusades. Unregulated elites
stumbled into a financial crisis. And the technocrats running things got so wrapped up in
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
8/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
their cosmopolitan dream palaces that they missed how bad things were looking to many
outside.
On the big-ticket items—great-power peace and global prosperity—the realist pessimists
were wrong, and the liberal optimists were right.
As a result, liberalism’s project ended up getting hijacked by nationalism, just as
Marxism’s project had back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Large
segments of many Western populations came to think that the order wasn’t working for
them, and they increasingly saw no reason to defer to dysfunctional establishments bent
on lining their own pockets. As one reader of Foreign Affairs recently commented, “I’ll
simplify it for you: the average American rejects your Globalist, anti-American, anticonstitution, politically correct VOMIT.”
By the 2010s, the old arrangements were clearly broken, but thanks to political gridlock,
nothing changed. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy focused on trying to protect
the order’s core by retrenching from overextension in the periphery. And then came
Trump, a self-taught political genius who rode to office as an outsider denouncing all
existing government policy.
Foreign policy experts scoffed at Trump’s instinctive embrace of “America first” as a
campaign theme, because everybody knew that was the approach that had failed
disastrously just before the order succeeded brilliantly. But Trump didn’t care. The order is
a positive-sum game, and he lives in a zero-sum world. It is based on sustained
cooperation for mutual benefit, which is not something Trump does
[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-08-23/worst-deals-ever]. Ever.
Trump’s election thus created an interesting situation. The person now tasked with
running U.S. foreign policy wanted to take it back to the halcyon days of the 1930s. He
favored competition rather than cooperation, protectionism rather than free trade,
authoritarianism rather than democracy. And he felt that his election allowed him to
control the entire government by fiat and whim, the same way he controlled his company.
Others disagreed, and the tensions have never been resolved. At one point, Trump’s entire
national security apparat gathered in the basement of the Pentagon to explain the order
to him. The president was bored and implacable. (That was the meeting his then
secretary of state left calling him “a fucking moron,” according to Bob Woodward.)
Over his first two years in office, the president gradually worked out functional powersharing arrangements with Republicans in Congress, producing an administration
devoted to tax cuts, deregulation, conservative courts, military spending, and restrictions
on immigration and trade. Missing from the agenda: what one undocumented alien from
the last century famously referred to as “truth, justice, and the American way.”
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
9/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
In external affairs, torn between a volatile amateur president pulling one way and a sullen
professional bureaucracy pulling the other, lacking a grand strategy or even strategists,
the administration has offered little more than photo ops and irritable gestures. The
routine operations of global-order maintenance continue, but to increasingly less effect,
because everybody can see that the commander in chief scorns the underlying mission.
Living in a constant transactional present, Trump deploys national power instinctively to
grab whatever is in reach. Call it foreign policy as anti–social work.
NOW WHAT?
The next two years are likely to follow the same pattern, with Trump’s increasing control
of the executive branch offset by the Democrats’ control of the House of Representatives.
The order will not explode, but it will continue to corrode, heading toward what the
political scientist Barry Posen has called “illiberal hegemony.” And eventually, another
president will come in and have to figure out what to do next.
It might seem that the cleverest post-Trump foreign policy would be a kinder, gentler
Trumpism. The new president could pocket whatever gains Trump extracted, drop the
trash talk for sweet talk, offer some concessions, and nod toward the old ideals—even
while continuing to bargain hard with everybody about everything. The world would be
relieved to get past the crazy and would praise the new occupant of the Oval Office just
for not being Trump. With some token apologies for the unpleasantness and a renewal of
vows, life could go on sort of as before. (Maybe even better, now that everybody
remembers that the United States has claws beneath its mittens.)
That would be a huge mistake. For by the time Trump leaves office, the dial on U.S.
foreign policy will have moved from supporting the order to undermining it. During
Trump’s tenure, the United States will have broken the bonds of trust needed to keep the
common project moving forward, and without trust, the order will gradually start to come
apart. Unless there is a major change in course, other countries will follow Washington’s
lead and chase after hares, and nobody will get to eat venison for a long time.
Repairing the damage will require more than being not Trump. It will require being
reverse Trump: telling the truth, thinking for others as well as oneself, playing for the long
term. Trumpism is about winning, which is something you do to others. The order requires
leading, which is something you do with others. If the next administration appreciates
that distinction, it will get the opportunity to restart it yet again.
Inconceivable, cry skeptics. Even if one buys this fairytale view of what the order once
accomplished, its day is done. Americans don’t want it. The world doesn’t want it. U.S.
power is declining; China’s is rising. A return to great-power conflict is inevitable; the only
question is how far things will go.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
10/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
Such bold pronouncements, however, are rooted in an outdated conception of national
power. Realists focus their analysis exclusively on material factors such as military forces
and shares of global economic output. That might make sense in a world of billiard-ball
states constantly knocking one another around. But it turns out that large parts of modern
international life resemble not perfect competition but its opposite, what the political
scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye have called “complex interdependence.” In
those areas, countries are knit together in lots of relationships and networks, and life is an
endless series of stag hunts. Survival is not just about winning individual immunity
challenges; it requires a social game, the ability to bring groups together. And the United
States turns out, ironically, to have a pretty good social game—so good that it has long
since stopped conforming to realist theory and developed its own idiosyncratic approach,
one academics scramble afterward to capture with theoretical griffins: empire by
invitation, consensual hegemony, liberal leviathan.
The United States’ hard power has indeed declined in relative terms from its postwar
peak. But this fact does not have the significance realists assume, because the country’s
absolute hard power is greater than ever and is multiplied by its soft power. For
generations, the United States has done what realist theory said was impossible, playing
international politics as a team sport, not an individual one. On balance, it has considered
its role in the order to be the protector of a community, not the exploiter of hapless marks;
it has participated in alliances, not run a protection racket. Thanks to that, when it comes
time for crucial tasks of system maintenance, it can add its friends’ power to its own.
China’s situation is different. The speed and scale of its rise over the last 40 years have
been astonishing. China, too, took full advantage of the calm external environment and
open trading order provided by the liberal hegemon of its day. And now it, too, has grown
to become a global player, requiring a new strategy appropriate to its status. Yet because
China plays as an individual, its own hard power is pretty much all it has to offer. Apart
from North Korea, it has few allies; the cooperation it gets from others is purchased or
commanded. But love is not for sale.
Squinting only at the bilateral material balance, one might see a power transition in the
offing. But in the real world, Team Washington versus Team Beijing is a lopsided contest,
with the order backed by three-quarters of global defense spending, most of the largest
economies, and the world’s reserve currency. What theorists call “the Thucydides trap”
has been pried open by the possibilities of modernity.
Dealing with the Chinese challenge will involve the familiar task of herding international
cats. The United States joined with the United Kingdom, France, and Russia to beat
Wilhelmine Germany. It got the band back together plus nationalist China to beat Nazi
Germany and imperial Japan. Then it brought together a larger group plus communist
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
11/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
China to beat Soviet Russia. Now it needs to lead a still larger group in a dance with
contemporary China.
But some things are different now. During the Cold War, the United States traded with its
capitalist allies and glowered at its communist enemies. The modern fields of
international economics and security studies emerged during this period as separate tool
kits for each set of relationships. Now that China has risen to be an economic peer
without liberalizing its regime, it is playing a mixed game of cooperation and competition,
something that Washington has never had to deal with before at this level.
Neither engagement nor containment alone is a viable approach. The question is how to
mix them without sliding into conflict. That means combining measures across issue
areas into a coherent strategy, prioritizing objectives, and working closely with allies and
regional partners, bringing them along not through bullying but by patiently working out a
mutually acceptable compromise.
The order features an array of cooperative bilateral, regional, and functional groupings.
Because it has so many aspects and points of entry, countries not ready to sign up for the
whole package at once can ease into it over time, starting on the margins and progressing
toward the core at their own pace. That’s what the United States and its allies should try
to get China to do, in hopes that one day, it may indeed play the role of responsible
stakeholder in the system. If the approach succeeds, great. If not, blame for any future
conflict will fall on Beijing, not Washington.
Policymakers will also need to address the other great challenge of the day, the
turbulence and anxiety produced by the rapid advance of markets in the post–Cold War
era. One of the lessons from the 1930s was that for economic liberalism to be politically
sustainable in a democracy, the state had to step in to help shield citizens from being
whipsawed by market forces. The Europeans insisted on acknowledgment of this as the
price of their participation in the postwar system, and as a result, national economies
were not forced to open up rapidly or completely.
Today’s policymakers should recognize the wisdom of that earlier bargain, pairing their
international cooperation with a commitment to repairing their torn domestic social
safety nets and giving their societies time and space to catch their breath and regain a
sense of control over the pace of onrushing economic, social, and technological change.
This domestic side of the project is both valuable on its own and necessary to maintain
public support for the foreign policy side. For the real challenge to a fourth founding lies
not in theory or policy but in politics. The order is not a nation-building project, just a
functional set of cooperative arrangements designed to reduce the downsides of anarchy.
As such, it attracts minds, not hearts. Moreover, although the story told here is true, the
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
12/13
9/14/2020
The Fourth Founding | Foreign Affairs
narrative thread is clearer in retrospect, so its truth is not universally acknowledged. Many
Americans never bought into the project, and many still don’t. Without the Cold War, it
has proved ever more difficult to generate popular support for the country’s actual foreign
policy. And so each president since the collapse of the Soviet Union has come into office
promising to do less abroad than the previous one—only to be dragged by events into
doing more.
Since it is easier to mobilize on fear than on hope, some supporters of the order find a
silver lining in the growing Chinese threat, reasoning that it might be possible to re-create
a neo–Cold War consensus in yet another long, twilight struggle against a new opponent.
That could be where things are heading regardless. But it would be far better for
Washington to listen to the better angels of its nature and try to avert, rather than hasten,
such an outcome.
In 1945, at the peak of its relative power, when it could have done anything it wanted, the
United States rejected isolation and realpolitik and chose to live in a world of its design. It
did so, the dying Roosevelt explained, because:
We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is
dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live
as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the
world, members of the human community. We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson
said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
When Roosevelt said it, he meant it—and because he meant it, others believed and joined
him. The strategy of paying it forward worked. Three-quarters of a century later, the team
of free countries he assembled now runs the world in a loose, patchy, inefficient
consortium. When its members meet the next U.S. president, they will expect to hear the
usual rhetoric, and will clap politely when they do. And then they’ll watch to see whether
there is anything left beyond words.
GIDEON ROSE is Editor of Foreign Affairs.
Copyright © 2020 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please visit
ForeignAffairs.com/Permissions.
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-12-11/fourthfounding
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123409
13/13
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
How a World Order Ends
And What Comes in Its Wake
By Richard Haass
January/February 2019
Concert crashers: British officers during the Crimean War, 1855.
ROGER FENTON / LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A stable world order [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-12-12/world-order-20] is a rare
thing. When one does arise, it tends to come after a great convulsion that creates both the
conditions and the desire for something new. It requires a stable distribution of power
and broad acceptance of the rules that govern the conduct of international relations. It
also needs skillful statecraft [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/will-washingtonabandon-order], since an order is made, not born. And no matter how ripe the starting
conditions or strong the initial desire, maintaining it demands creative diplomacy,
functioning institutions, and effective action to adjust it when circumstances change and
buttress it when challenges come.
Eventually, inevitably, even the best-managed order comes to an end. The balance of
power underpinning it becomes imbalanced. The institutions supporting it fail to adapt to
new conditions. Some countries fall, and others rise, the result of changing capacities,
faltering wills, and growing ambitions. Those responsible for upholding the order make
mistakes both in what they choose to do and in what they choose not to do.
But if the end of every order is inevitable, the timing and the manner of its ending are not.
Nor is what comes in its wake. Orders tend to expire in a prolonged deterioration rather
than a sudden collapse. And just as maintaining the order depends on effective statecraft
and effective action, good policy and proactive diplomacy can help determine how that
deterioration unfolds and what it brings. Yet for that to happen, something else must
come first: recognition that the old order is never coming back and that efforts to
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
1/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
resurrect it will be in vain. As with any ending, acceptance must come before one can
move on.
In the search for parallels to today’s world, scholars and practitioners have looked as far
afield as ancient Greece [https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-08-15/china-vsamerica], where the rise of a new power resulted in war between Athens and Sparta, and
the period after World War I, when an isolationist United States and much of Europe sat
on their hands as Germany and Japan ignored agreements and invaded their neighbors.
But the more illuminating parallel to the present is the Concert of Europe in the
nineteenth century, the most important and successful effort to build and sustain world
order until our own time. From 1815 until the outbreak of World War I a century later, the
order established at the Congress of Vienna defined many international relationships and
set (even if it often failed to enforce) basic rules for international conduct. It provides a
model of how to collectively manage security in a multipolar world.
That order’s demise and what followed offer instructive lessons for today—and an urgent
warning. Just because an order is in irreversible decline does not mean that chaos or
calamity is inevitable. But if the deterioration is managed poorly, catastrophe could well
follow.
OUT OF THE ASHES
The global order of the second half of the twentieth century and the first part of the
twenty-first grew out of the wreckage of two world wars. The nineteenth-century order
followed an earlier international convulsion: the Napoleonic Wars, which, after the French
Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, ravaged Europe for more than a decade.
After defeating Napoleon and his armies, the victorious allies—Austria, Prussia, Russia,
and the United Kingdom, the great powers of their day—came together in Vienna
[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/castlereaghs-catechism] in 1814 and 1815. At the
Congress of Vienna, they set out to ensure that France’s military never again threatened
their states and that revolutionary movements never again threatened their monarchies.
The victorious powers also made the wise choice to integrate a defeated France, a course
very different from the one taken with Germany following World War I and somewhat
different from the one chosen with Russia in the wake of the Cold War.
The congress yielded a system known as the Concert of Europe. Although centered in
Europe, it constituted the international order of its day given the dominant position of
Europe and Europeans in the world. There was a set of shared understandings about
relations between states, above all an agreement to rule out invasion of another country
or involvement in the internal affairs of another without its permission. A rough military
balance dissuaded any state tempted to overthrow the order from trying in the first place
(and prevented any state that did try from succeeding). Foreign ministers met (at what
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
2/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
came to be called “congresses”) whenever a major issue arose. The concert was
conservative in every sense of the word. The Treaty of Vienna had made numerous
territorial adjustments and then locked Europe’s borders into place, allowing changes only
if all signatories agreed. It also did what it could to back monarchies and encourage
others to come to their aid (as France did in Spain in 1823) when they were threatened by
popular revolt.
An engraving of the Congress of Vienna, 1814.
Jean-Baptiste ISABEY
The concert worked not because there was complete agreement among the great powers
on every point but because each state had its own reasons for supporting the overall
system. Austria was most concerned with resisting the forces of liberalism, which
threatened the ruling monarchy. The United Kingdom was focused on staving off a
renewed challenge from France while also guarding against a potential threat from Russia
(which meant not weakening France so much that it couldn’t help offset the threat from
Russia). But there was enough overlap in interests and consensus on first-order questions
that the concert prevented war between the major powers of the day.
The concert technically lasted a century, until the eve of World War I
[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2003-01-01/war-end-all-wars-lessons-world-war-irevisited]. But it had ceased to play a meaningful role long before then. The revolutionary
waves that swept Europe in 1830 and 1848 revealed the limits of what members would do
to maintain the existing order within states in the face of public pressure. Then, more
consequentially, came the Crimean War. Ostensibly fought over the fate of Christians
living within the Ottoman Empire, in actuality it was much more about who would control
territory as that empire decayed. The conflict pitted France, the United Kingdom, and the
Ottoman Empire against Russia. It lasted two and a half years, from 1853 to 1856. It was a
costly war that highlighted the limits of the concert’s ability to prevent great-power war;
the great-power comity that had made the concert possible no longer existed.
Subsequent wars between Austria and Prussia and Prussia and France demonstrated that
major-power conflict had returned to the heart of Europe after a long hiatus. Matters
seemed to stabilize for a time after that, but this was an illusion. Beneath the surface,
German power was rising and empires were rotting. The combination set the stage for
World War I and the end of what had been the concert.
WHAT AILS THE ORDER?
What lessons can be drawn from this history? As much as anything else, the rise and fall
of major powers determines the viability of the prevailing order, since changes in
economic strength, political cohesion, and military power shape what states can and are
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
3/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
willing to do beyond their borders. Over the second half of the nineteenth century and the
start of the twentieth, a powerful, unified Germany and a modern Japan rose, the
Ottoman Empire and tsarist Russia declined, and France and the United Kingdom grew
stronger but not strong enough. Those changes upended the balance of power that had
been the concert’s foundation; Germany, in particular, came to view the status quo as
inconsistent with its interests.
Changes in the technological and political context also affected that underlying balance.
Under the concert, popular demands for democratic participation and surges of
nationalism threatened the status quo within countries, while new forms of
transportation, communication, and armaments transformed politics, economics, and
warfare. The conditions that helped give rise to the concert were gradually undone.
Because orders tend to end with a whimper rather than a bang, the process of
deterioration is often not evident to decision-makers until it has advanced considerably.
Yet it would be overly deterministic to attribute history to underlying conditions alone.
Statecraft still matters. That the concert came into existence and lasted as long as it did
underscores that people make a difference. The diplomats who crafted it—Metternich of
Austria, Talleyrand of France, Castlereagh of the United Kingdom—were exceptional. The
fact that the concert preserved peace despite the gap between two relatively liberal
countries, France and the United Kingdom, and their more conservative partners shows
that countries with different political systems and preferences can work together to
maintain international order. Little that turns out to be good or bad in history is inevitable.
The Crimean War might well have been avoided if more capable and careful leaders had
been on the scene. It is far from clear that Russian actions warranted a military response
by France and the United Kingdom of the nature and on the scale that took place. That
the countries did what they did also underscores the power and dangers of nationalism.
World War I broke out in no small part because the successors to German Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck were unable to discipline the power of the modern German state he
did so much to bring about.
Two other lessons stand out. First, it is not just core issues that can cause an order to
deteriorate. The concert’s great-power comity ended not because of disagreements over
the social and political order within Europe but because of competition on the periphery.
And second, because orders tend to end with a whimper rather than a bang, the process
of deterioration is often not evident to decision-makers until it has advanced considerably.
By the outbreak of World War I, when it became obvious that the Concert of Europe no
longer held, it was far too late to save it—or even to manage its dissolution.
A TALE OF TWO ORDERS
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
4/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
The global order built in the aftermath of World War II consisted of two parallel orders for
most of its history. One grew out of the Cold War between the United States and the
Soviet Union. At its core was a rough balance of military strength in Europe and Asia,
backed up by nuclear deterrence. The two sides showed a degree of restraint in their
rivalry. “Rollback”—Cold War parlance for what today is called “regime change”—was
rejected as both infeasible and reckless. Both sides followed informal rules of the road
that included a healthy respect for each other’s backyards and allies. Ultimately, they
reached an understanding over the political order within Europe, the principal arena of
Cold War competition, and in 1975 codified that mutual understanding in the Helsinki
Accords. Even in a divided world, the two power centers agreed on how the competition
would be waged; theirs was an order based on means rather than ends. That there were
only two power centers made reaching such an agreement easier.
The other post–World War II order was the liberal order that operated alongside the Cold
War order. Democracies were the main participants in this effort, which used aid and
trade to strengthen ties and fostered respect for the rule of law both within and between
countries. The economic dimension of this order was designed to bring about a world (or,
more accurately, the non-communist half of it) defined by trade, development, and wellfunctioning monetary operations. Free trade would be an engine of economic growth and
bind countries together so that war would be deemed too costly to wage; the dollar was
accepted as the de facto global currency.
The diplomatic dimension of the order gave prominence to the UN. The idea was that a
standing global forum could prevent or resolve international disputes. The UN Security
Council, with five great-power permanent members and additional seats for a rotating
membership, would orchestrate international relations. Yet the order depended just as
much on the willingness of the noncommunist world (and U.S. allies in particular) to
accept American primacy. As it turns out, they were prepared to do this, as the United
States was more often than not viewed as a relatively benign hegemon, one admired as
much for what it was at home as for what it did abroad.
Both of these orders served the interests of the United States. The core peace was
maintained in both Europe and Asia at a price that a growing U.S. economy could easily
afford. Increased international trade and opportunities for investment contributed to U.S.
economic growth. Over time, more countries joined the ranks of the democracies. Neither
order reflected a perfect consensus; rather, each offered enough agreement so that it was
not directly challenged. Where U.S. foreign policy got into trouble—such as in Vietnam
and Iraq—it was not because of alliance commitments or considerations of order but
because of ill-advised decisions to prosecute costly wars of choice.
SIGNS OF DECAY
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
5/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
Today, both orders have deteriorated. Although the Cold War itself ended long ago, the
order it created came apart in a more piecemeal fashion—in part because Western efforts
to integrate Russia into the liberal world order achieved little. One sign of the Cold War
order’s deterioration was Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, something Moscow
likely would have prevented in previous years on the grounds that it was too risky.
Although nuclear deterrence still holds, some of the arms control agreements buttressing
it have been broken, and others are fraying.
Although Russia has avoided any direct military challenge to NATO, it has nonetheless
shown a growing willingness to disrupt the status quo: through its use of force in Georgia
in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014, its often indiscriminate military intervention in Syria, and
its aggressive use of cyberwarfare to attempt to affect political outcomes in the United
States and Europe. All of these represent a rejection of the principal constraints
associated with the old order. From a Russian perspective, the same might be said of
NATO enlargement, an initiative clearly at odds with Winston Churchill’s dictum “In
victory, magnanimity.” Russia also judged the 2003 Iraq war and the 2011 NATO military
intervention in Libya, which was undertaken in the name of humanitarianism but quickly
evolved into regime change, as acts of bad faith and illegality inconsistent with notions of
world order as it understood them.
The liberal order is exhibiting its own signs of deterioration. Authoritarianism is on the
rise not just in the obvious places, such as China and Russia, but also in the Philippines,
Turkey, and eastern Europe. Global trade has grown, but recent rounds of trade talks have
ended without agreement, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proved unable to
deal with today’s most pressing challenges, including nontariff barriers and the theft of
intellectual property. Resentment over the United States’ exploitation of the dollar to
impose sanctions is growing, as is concern over the country’s accumulation of debt.
The UN Security Council is of little relevance to most of the world’s conflicts, and
international arrangements have failed more broadly to contend with the challenges
associated with globalization. The composition of the Security Council bears less and less
resemblance to the real distribution of power. The world has put itself on the record as
against genocide and has asserted a right to intervene when governments fail to live up to
the “responsibility to protect” their citizens, but the talk has not translated into action. The
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty allows only five states to have nuclear weapons, but there
are now nine that do (and many others that could follow suit if they chose to). The EU, by
far the most significant regional arrangement, is struggling with Brexit and disputes over
migration and sovereignty. And around the world, countries are increasingly resisting U.S.
primacy.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
6/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
Russian soldiers in military armored personnel carriers on a road near Sevastopol,
Crimea, March 2014.
Baz Ratner / REUTERS
POWER SHIFTS
Why is all this happening? It is instructive to look back to the gradual demise of the
Concert of Europe. Today’s world order has struggled to cope with power shifts: China’s
rise, the appearance of several medium powers (Iran and North Korea, in particular) that
reject important aspects of the order, and the emergence of nonstate actors (from drug
cartels to terrorist networks) that can pose a serious threat to order within and between
states.
The technological and political context has changed in important ways, too. Globalization
has had destabilizing effects, ranging from climate change to the spread of technology
into far more hands than ever before, including a range of groups and people intent on
disrupting the order. Nationalism and populism have surged—the result of greater
inequality within countries, the dislocation associated with the 2008 financial crisis, job
losses caused by trade and technology, increased flows of migrants and refugees, and the
power of social media to spread hate.
Meanwhile, effective statecraft is conspicuously lacking. Institutions have failed to adapt.
No one today would design a UN Security Council that looked like the current one; yet
real reform is impossible, since those who would lose influence block any changes. Efforts
to build effective frameworks to deal with the challenges of globalization, including
climate change and cyberattacks, have come up short. Mistakes within the EU—namely,
the decisions to establish a common currency without creating a common fiscal policy or
a banking union and to permit nearly unlimited immigration to Germany—have created a
powerful backlash against existing governments, open borders, and the EU itself.
The United States, for its part, has committed costly overreach in trying to remake
Afghanistan, invading Iraq, and pursuing regime change in Libya. But it has also taken a
step back from maintaining global order and in certain cases has been guilty of costly
underreach. In most instances, U.S. reluctance to act has come not over core issues but
over peripheral ones that leaders wrote off as not worth the costs involved, such as the
strife in Syria, where the United States failed to respond meaningfully when Syria first
used chemical weapons or to do more to help anti-regime groups. This reluctance has
increased others’ propensity to disregard U.S. concerns and act independently. The Saudiled military intervention in Yemen is a case in point. Russian actions in Syria and Ukraine
should also be seen in this light; it is interesting that Crimea marked the effective end of
the Concert of Europe and signaled a dramatic setback in the current order. Doubts about
U.S. reliability have multiplied under the Trump administration, thanks to its withdrawal
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
7/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
from numerous international pacts and its conditional approach to once inviolable U.S.
alliance commitments in Europe and Asia.
MANAGING THE DETERIORATION
Given these changes, resurrecting the old order will be impossible. It would also be
insufficient, thanks to the emergence of new challenges. Once this is acknowledged, the
long deterioration of the Concert of Europe should serve as a lesson and a warning.
For the United States to heed that warning would mean strengthening certain aspects of
the old order and supplementing them with measures that account for changing power
dynamics and new global problems. The United States would have to shore up arms
control and nonproliferation agreements; strengthen its alliances in Europe and Asia;
bolster weak states that cannot contend with terrorists, cartels, and gangs; and counter
authoritarian powers’ interference in the democratic process. Yet it should not give up
trying to integrate China and Russia into regional and global aspects of the order. Such
efforts will necessarily involve a mix of compromise, incentives, and pushback. The
judgment that attempts to integrate China and Russia have mostly failed should not be
grounds for rejecting future efforts, as the course of the twenty-first century will in no
small part reflect how those efforts fare.
The United States also needs to reach out to others to address problems of globalization,
especially climate change, trade, and cyber-operations. These will require not resurrecting
the old order but building a new one. Efforts to limit, and adapt to, climate change need to
be more ambitious. The WTO must be amended to address the sorts of issues raised by
China’s appropriation of technology, provision of subsidies to domestic firms, and use of
nontariff barriers to trade. Rules of the road are needed to regulate cyberspace. Together,
this is tantamount to a call for a modern-day concert. Such a call is ambitious but
necessary.
The United States must show restraint and recapture a degree of respect in order to
regain its reputation as a benign actor. This will require some sharp departures from the
way U.S. foreign policy has been practiced in recent years: to start, no longer carelessly
invading other countries and no longer weaponizing U.S. economic policy through the
overuse of sanctions and tariffs. But more than anything else, the current reflexive
opposition to multilateralism needs to be rethought. It is one thing for a world order to
unravel slowly; it is quite another for the country that had a large hand in building it to
take the lead in dismantling it.
All of this also requires that the United States get its own house in order—reducing
government debt, rebuilding infrastructure, improving public education, investing more in
the social safety net, adopting a smart immigration system that allows talented foreigners
to come and stay, tackling political dysfunction by making it less difficult to vote, and
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
8/9
9/14/2020
How a World Order Ends | Foreign Affairs
undoing gerrymandering. The United States cannot effectively promote order abroad if it
is divided at home, distracted by domestic problems, and lacking in resources.
The major alternatives to a modernized world order supported by the United States
appear unlikely, unappealing, or both. A Chinese-led order, for example, would be an
illiberal one, characterized by authoritarian domestic political systems and statist
economies that place a premium on maintaining domestic stability. There would be a
return to spheres of influence, with China attempting to dominate its region, likely
resulting in clashes with other regional powers, such as India, Japan, and Vietnam, which
would probably build up their conventional or even nuclear forces.
A new democratic, rules-based order fashioned and led by medium powers in Europe and
Asia, as well as Canada, however attractive a concept, would simply lack the military
capacity and domestic political will to get very far. A more likely alternative is a world with
little order—a world of deeper disarray. Protectionism, nationalism, and populism would
gain, and democracy would lose. Conflict within and across borders would become more
common, and rivalry between great powers would increase. Cooperation on global
challenges would be all but precluded. If this picture sounds familiar, that is because it
increasingly corresponds to the world of today.
The deterioration of a world order can set in motion trends that spell catastrophe. World
War I broke out some 60 years after the Concert of Europe had for all intents and
purposes broken down in Crimea. What we are seeing today resembles the midnineteenth century in important ways: the post–World War II, post–Cold War order
cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis. Now is the
time to make sure one never materializes, be it from a breakdown in U.S.-Chinese
relations, a clash with Russia, a conflagration in the Middle East, or the cumulative effects
of climate change. The good news is that it is far from inevitable that the world will
eventually arrive at a catastrophe; the bad news is that it is far from certain that it will not.
RICHARD HAASS is President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of
A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order.
Copyright © 2020 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please visit
ForeignAffairs.com/Permissions.
Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-12-11/how-world-order-ends
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1123411
9/9