6 - Three cultures of anarchy

Summary

In chapter 5 I argued that states are intentional, corporate actors whose identities and interests are in important part determined by domestic politics rather than the international system. Within domestic politics states are still socially constructed, of course, but this is a different level of construction; relative to the international system states are self-organizing facts. This means that if we are interested in the question of how the states system works, rather than in how its elements are constructed, we will have to take the existence of states as given, just as sociologists have to take the existence of people as given to study how society works. Systemic theory cannot problematize the state all the way down, in short, since that would change the subject from a theory of the states system to a theory of the state. The fact that state identities and interests are at least partly exogenous to the system, in turn, satisfies the first principle of individualist approaches to systemic theory, like Neorealism and Neoliberalism. However, these theories usually make the much broader assumption that all state identities and interests are exogenous, which does not follow. The fact that state agents are not constructed by system structures all the way down does not mean they are not constructed by them to a significant extent. The per se individuality of states may be given outside the system, but the meanings or terms of that individuality are given within. Having accepted a key individualist constraint on systemic theorizing, in this chapter I show that a holist approach can still tell us a lot about the structure of international politics which would elude a pure individualism.