7 - Process and structural change

Summary

In chapter 6 I argued that the deep structure of an international system is formed by the shared understandings governing organized violence, which are a key element of its political culture. Three ideal type cultures were discussed, Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian, which are based on and constitute different role relationships between states: enemy, rival, and friend. The chapter focused on structure, mirroring the focus on agency in chapter 5. Little was said in either chapter about process – about how state agents and systemic cultures are sustained by foreign policy practices, and sometimes transformed. In this chapter I address these questions.

Although this discussion of process comes after my discussions of structure and agency, there is a sense in which it is prior to both. Structures and agents are both effects of what people do. Social structures do not exist apart from their instantiation in practices. As structures of a particular kind this is true also of corporate agents, but even individuals are just bodies, not “agents,” except in virtue of social practices. Practices are governed by preexisting structures and entered into by preexisting agents, but the possibility of referring to either as “preexisting” presupposes a social process stable enough to constitute them as relatively enduring objects. Agents and structures are themselves processes, in other words, on-going “accomplishments of practice.” Ultimately this is the basis for the claim that “anarchy is what states make of it.”

The import of this claim nevertheless depends partly on the ease and extent to which agents and structures can be changed.