Week 5: Can there be fundamental change in IR?

This week’s lecture asked a very interesting and exciting question: can there be fundamental change in International Relations, or is the present configuration the best it could ever be? Since I became interested in international relations and during my undergraduate studies I was asking myself this question many times.

I am a big Star Trek fan, and when this question comes on the table, I always remind myself of the Federation of Planets and how this federation must have come about. After all, it developed over many, many years. But it was eventually possible to create such a federation. So, maybe it is possible for the world, as we know it to fundamentally change into something like a Federation of the World?

Professor Jackson mentioned in his lecture that when there is a lot of agency that there is a potential for change. Actors have agency. There are a lot of actors in the world, so there is a lot of agency, which means that there is potential for change. That means, then, that there is a possibility for fundamental change in the world. But, there is also structure. Structure is stability, and structure is the opposite of agency. In international relations, this structure comes from anarchy and the resulting balance of power system. So, even though there is a lot of agency, there is no fundamental change because there is also structure.

The balance of power system under anarchy, unfortunately, always allows for wars to occur. As Professor Jackson mentioned, war cannot be eradicated because in our world under anarchy war is a possibility. In the realists’ view, because there is anarchy, war is a structural induced problem and, therefore, there is no other option but to go to war. In the 2x2, realists fall under the upper left hand corner, autonomy and impermeable boundaries, because they believe that no change in possible in this system.

From the liberalists’ view, however, there is another option. Liberalists believe that war is not a structural induced issue but instead happens because of rational calculations. Actors have agency over war, and, therefore, there are other options than having to go to war. In the 2x2, liberalists fall under the upper right hand corner, attunement and impermeable boundaries. They believe that some change is possible because of recalculations of what states’ interests are.

Kenneth Waltz offers some new ideas about realism: neorealist theory. While I appreciate that neo-realism adds the effects of structure in its unit-level explanations of war, I do not agree that the neorealist theory can explain all the wars over the past millennia. For example, neorealist theory cannot explain the rise of Islamic terrorism and the resulting War on Terror. Also, Waltz writes that the post-World War II peace exists because of the bi-polar world (1998, p. 624). However, there is no bi-polar world anymore since the fall of the Soviet Union.  I also cannot agree with Waltz that nuclear weapons are another reason for peace because states do not go to war with each other because there is the chance of a nuclear war (1988, p. 625). This was true during the Cold War, but now there are terrorists who try to acquire nuclear weapons.

References

Waltz, Kenneth. 1988. “The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4: 615-628. Accessed September 30, 2016. https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.ironline.american.edu/Jackson+International+Relations/Readings/Waltz+-+The+Origins+of+War+in+Neorealist+Theory.pdf