Waltz for this week’s chapters focuses on political
structures and anarchic order and the balance of power and its consequences.
While talking about structures, he talks about how structures define
arrangement and parts of the system. Structure is what sets the road to what is
going to follow. The domestic political structure for Waltz is defined by three
principles, which are according to the way by which it is ordered, specification
of the functions of formally differentiated units and distribution of
capabilities across these units. Political structure shapes the political
processes domestically within a state. Once a structure is shaped and
understood, a state runs on that structure. While governments might come and
go, the state and structure are difficult to transform and substitute- a feat
many try to achieve through processes such as revolutions. This highlights the
ever famous state vs. government debate in the field of political science.
Having said that about domestic system, the international
state system has no aver arching body to maintain the political processes.
Since Waltz is a firm Realist, the concept of anarchy in the international
system comes up. There remains a friction between the states and balance of
power becomes an important factor which fuels the anarchy present in the
international arena. While in the domestic structure, government has monopoly
over legitimate force, in the anarchic orders, states are residing in a system
of self-help and when the balance of power starts tilting in one super powers favor,
war becomes inevitable as it sets a chain reaction of moral agitation.
In different epochs of history, we can see that whenever the
balance of power has tilted, it has given a rise to conflicts. Hitler in World
War 2 and his aggressive foreign policies along with his Lebensraum ideology to
attain land for the ‘superior’ Aryan race is kind of what caused agitation within
the Western powers, which led to one of the greatest wars in the history of
mankind.
Imbalances in the balance of power are a source of conflict and this is why Waltz argued a multipolar system is the most stable.
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