Sociology of international relations as a synthesis of sociology and international political doctrines.
Неделя 5. Тема : Modern schools and directions in the theory of international relations
Практическое занятие №5
Содержание практического занятия:
1.Neorealism and neo-realism. The subject and main points of the dispute between neo-realism and neoliberalism.
Traditional Liberalism, according to the terms used by Moravcsik and Baldwin, had three separate variants: ideational (or sociological) liberalism, commercial liberalism, and republican liberalism. Ideational (or sociological) liberalism refers to theories linking transnational interactions with international integration, which focuses on the compatibility of social preferences across fundamental collective goods like national unity, legitimate political institutions, and socio-economic regulation. Commercial liberalism refers to theories linking free trade and peace, which focuses on incentives created by opportunities for transborder economic transactions. Republican liberalism refers to theories linking democracy with peace, which focuses on the nature of domestic representation and the resulting possibilities for rent-seeking behavior (Baldwin 1993:4, Moravcsik 1997:524). Compared with the continuation and deviation from Realism to NeoRealism, Neoliberalism (or neoliberal institutionalism, as commonly termed (Baldwin 1993:10)) has a much weaker relationship with its putative classical counterpart, Liberalism. As Baldwin pointed out, the "immediate intellectual precursors of liberal institutionalism are theories of international regimes (Krasner 1983a)" (Baldwin 1993:4). Keohane explicitly states that "it is crucial to remember that [Neoliberalism] borrows as much from realism as from liberalism: it cannot be encapsulated as simply a 'liberal' theory opposed at all points to realism. Indeed it is almost as misleading to refer to it as liberal as to give it the tag of neorealism" (1993:272). Moravcsik also argued that "most of the analytic assumptions and basic causal variables employed by institutionalist theory are more realist than liberal" (1997:536). The borrowing from Realist assumptions and from cooperation theory in institutional economics (Knutsen 1997:269), in my opinion, constitute the most important aspects where Neoliberalism improves from Liberalism. Neoliberalism's assumptions have a lot in common with Neorealism. Neoliberalism retains the most important Realist assumptions of anarchy, egoism, and rationality (Keohane 1984:29) (hence the Liberal criticism that "like realism, institutionalism takes state preferences as fixed or exogenous" (Moravcsik 1997:536)). It also regards the states as the most important actors in international relations, and emphasized the role of power ("Relationships of power and dependence in world politics will therefore be important determinants of the characteristics of international regimes" (Keohane 1984:71)). These are important improvement on Liberalism, as they allow for "predictions about state behavior on the basis of relatively sparse information .... Knowledge of the structure of the situation facing decision-makers provides the analyst with clues to state action, since leaders, being rational egoists, will respond to the incentives and constraints provided by the environment in ways calculated to increase the wealth, security, and power of their states" (Keohane 1984:66). Therefore, instead of focusing on the Liberalist "configuration of state preferences", which is relatively complex and hard to specify as an analytic variable, Neoliberal institutionalism bridges the relatively simple and parsimonious Realist assumptions about world politics and "the formation of institutionalized arrangements, containing rules and principles, which promote cooperation" (Keohane 1984:67). Keohane also shows that Neoliberalism can survive the relaxation of the Realist assumption of rational egoist. Besides sharing basic assumptions with Realism, Neoliberalism also improves on Realism or Neorealism, first by emphasizing the existence of common or complementary interests, which is not given much attention in both Realism and Neorealism. By doing so, Neoliberalism was able to envision a much larger set of potential situations of international cooperation. For example, in a world with a hegemon, international cooperation is achieved not only because of the hegemonic power resources, but also because of the common or complementary interests of the hegemon and the lesser states, realized by international regimes based on shared purposes (Keohane 1984:137). Second, Neorealism emphasizes the valuable functions performed by international regimes of reducing the costs of legitimate transactions, while increasing the cost of illegitimate ones, of reducing uncertainty, and of affecting incentives for compliance by linking issues together. Therefore Neoliberalism provides us with a different picture of the effects of structural changes of state capabilities in the world. One of the most important predictions that Neoliberalism made was "in the contemporary world political economy, since it is endowed with a number of important international regimes, created under conditions of American hegemony but facilitating cooperation even after the erosion of U.S. dominance" (Keohane 1984:246). Postwar events, and especially those of the 1970's, appeared to support this view, as Grieco put it, "governments had not transformed their foreign policies, and world politics were not in transition, but states achieved cooperation through international institutions even in the harsh 1970's" (Grieco 1993:121).
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Neorealism and Neoliberalism help us better explain international politics in different ways. For Neorealism, Helen Milner (1991:70, 81-82) identifies the "discovery of orderly features of world politics amidst its seeming chaos" as "perhaps the central achievement of neorealists" (Baldwin 1993:5). As Waltz put it, "what emerges is a positional picture, a general desceiption of the ordered overall arrangement of a society written in terms of the placement of units rather than in terms of their qualities" (1979:99). Using the example of European Economic Community, Waltz shows that his theory "can describe the range of likely outcomes of the actions and interactions of states within a given system and show how the range of expectations varies as systems change. It can tell us what pressures are exerted and what possibilities are posed by systems of different structure" (1979:71). Therefore, Neorealism, by focusing on international structure and its interacting units, provided us with a succinct analytical framework to explain the contemporary international politics. The advantage of this positional picture is that many systems can be seen as similar regardless of the particular substantive context in which the units interact. As Stein tells us, "the view most widely held among international relations theorists, for example, is that the global distribution of power is the structural characteristic that determines the nature of global order" (1993:48). This contrasts, to a large extent, with the classical Realism, which offers a somewhat narrower and more particular explanation of international politics, exemplified, among others, by the following statement: "what gives the factors of geography, natural resources, and industrial capacity their actual importance for the power of a nation is military preparedness. The dependence of national power upon military preparedness is too obvious to need much elaboration" (Morgenthau 1960/85:139).
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Neorealism also offers a better explanation of international outcomes than Liberalism. In Man, the State and War, Waltz explains why the constraints that define the strategic setting in which the actors interact (the "third image" "within the state system" (Waltz 1959:12) provides us with a better explanation of international results than the "first image" ("from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulse, from stupidity" (1959:16)) and the "second image" (the internal organization of states"). Powell also gave a simple example from microeconomic theory (monopolized market versus competitive market) to illustrate the potential importance of third-image explanations (1994:315). On the other hand, Waltz also acknowledges that his explanations are limited to the international outcomes in world politics ("the third image describes the framework of world politics, but without the first and the second images there can be no knowledge of the forces that determine policy; the first and second images describe the forces in world politics, but without the third image it is impossible to assess their importance or predict their results" (1959:238); "A theory of international politics bears on the foreign policies of nations while claiming to explain only certain aspects of them" (1979:72)).
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Sociology of international relations as a synthesis of sociology and international political doctrines.
Sociology plays a role in the social sciences as the discipline associated with study of the particular form and content of modern society, seen as emerging from the ‘dual revolutions’ that took place in Europe at the end of the 18th century: an industrial (‘economic’) revolution in England and a democratic (‘political’) revolution in France (Nisbet 1967, chapter 2; Elias 1978). The institutionalization of Sociology along the lines of what Auguste Comte called a ‘science of the social’ was made in direct response to the tumult of these dual revolutions. Walter Benjamin (1999, 249) put the vocation of Sociology starkly—like the angel of history, Benjamin wrote, sociologists should concern themselves with ‘searching for order in the broken fragments of modernity’. Interestingly enough, although Martin Wight (1966) famously argued that there was no possibility of generating an international theory which stood as independent from study of the ‘good life’ afforded by the laws and norms of domestic societies, the canonical trinity of classical sociological theory—Durkheim, Marx and Weber—did seek to unravel the social content of the modern condition, defining this in terms strikingly reminiscent of the ‘outside’ of the good life; that is, as anomie, alienation and disenchantment, respectively.
Although IR often claims an inheritance drawn principally from political theory, international law and international history, it could be argued that there is relatively little in the discipline—at least in terms of IR theory—that stands outside from the influence of sociological approaches, theories and concepts. For example, although Kenneth Waltz (1979, especially 102–128) famously raided microeconomics in order to construct his theory of international politics; he also borrowed extensively—if inaccurately—from Émile Durkheim in generating his conceptualization of international anarchy. Most notably, Waltz differentiated between domestic and international orders by reference to Durkheim's distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. The international realm, Waltz argued, is characterized by mechanical solidarity—the lack of functional differentiation required by complex society's means that like-units (states) can only stand in loose relation to others. In short, Waltz rendered anomie in the form of anarchy. For Waltz, the domestic realm, in contrast to international politics, is characterized by organic solidarity, which Waltz understood to be a functionally differentiated space in which actors were bound together within an integrative, largely consensual, hierarchy.
A range of scholarship in IR has challenged Waltz's use of Durkheim. First, as many authors have noted, Waltz effectively misplaces conditions of anomie in mechanical rather than organic solidarity (Ruggie 1983; Larkins 1994; Barkdull 1995; Goddard and Nexon 2005). For Durkheim, traditional societies exhibit a mechanical form of solidarity in which individuals are bound to the ‘collective conscience’ directly—that is, without forms of institutional mediation. In this understanding, individuals in premodern societies can be effectively seen as inorganic matter, hence Durkheim's use of the concept ‘mechanical solidarity’ to describe the ways in which individuals are bound together in simple social orders (1964, 130). For Durkheim, under conditions of modernity, processes such as industrialization induce a specialization of tasks which, in turn, produce a complex division of labour in which individuals are organized into discrete areas of work, family, education and so on (354–361). As experiences are increasingly channelled through these intermediary roles, individuals come to understand their existence as one of ‘anomie’—a loss produced by the removal of the totalizing norms, codes and standards of conduct that defined premodern social orders (128, 361). Paradoxically, for Durkheim, the complex division of labour in modern industrial society actually gains its strength by encouraging the development of individual personalities. As such, because both the parts (individuals) and the whole (society) can be considered as ‘living’, modern society can be said to exhibit a novel, ‘organic’ form of solidarity (124–131). And in this way, Waltz misreads Durkheim by seeing anomie as a feature of international (mechanical) life rather than, as Durkheim intended, as a product of domestic (organic) orders—a fairly pronounced error.
Linked to this point is a second problem with Waltz's use of Durkheim. As some critics point out (Rosenberg 2010), by misplacing anomie in mechanical rather than organic social orders, Waltz undermines the sharpness of his distinction between domestic societies and the international realm. Indeed, where Durkheim applies the concepts ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ in order to indicate how progress takes place over time between simple and complex orders, Waltz uses the concepts to illustrate a static spatial distinction between domestic hierarchy and international anarchy. In this way, Waltz appears to hold two contradictory claims simultaneously: first, following Durkheim, that there is a (potentially temporary) temporal distinction between domestic and international orders based on complex forms of differentiation and; second, in his (mis)reading of Durkheim in the development of structural realism, that this distinction is an eternal (spatial) point of demarcation between anarchical and hierarchical orders. Seen in this light, structural realism can be said to contain an unsustainable—even incommensurable—sociological logic, albeit one which often appears as implicit rather than explicit to its hardcore assumptions.
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