Session 9: Under the Structural Umbrella

While reading the fifth chapter on ‘Political Structures’ of Kenneth Waltz’s famous book “Theories of International Politics”, a few of his concepts and assertions jumped out at me more so than others. Following is my attempt to highlight some of these, albeit in an admittedly disjointed fashion.

Firstly, his emphasis on structure and how it is a beast of its own; I found it interesting how structure is a very valuable variable/factor to study within politics because of its generalisability. No matter how different two entities are, one can compare them on account of how they are arranged in relation to each other, what their functions are and what their relative capabilities are. The way Waltz has defined structure makes it an immensely powerful analytical and comparative tool in international politics.

Secondly, the heavy focus on structure and how the actors within it are restrained by it brought me back to the perpetual sociological debate of structure versus agency. Waltz applies that to why leaders always have constraints within which they must work, whether they are implicit (in case of the British Prime minister) or explicit (in case of the American president), they are ever present and will remain.

Thirdly, it is a given that as a realist Waltz will be a proponent of the state centric view of international politics. No surprises there. I fall somewhere mid-way on this issue (a tendency that funnily plagues me perpetually). Given my view point I could not help but chuckle at the irony of the following passage from the chapter:

“States are the units whose interactions form the structure of international political systems. They will long remain so. The death rate among states is remarkably low. Few states die, many firms do. Who is likely to be around 100 years from now-the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Egypt, Thailand and Uganda? Or Ford, IBM, Shell, Unilever, and Massey-Ferguson? I would bet on the states, perhaps even on Uganda.”

Well….he lost that bet just 12 years after writing this book. But I digress. It is probably unfair to laugh given how I have the benefit of hindsight that he did not. My take away is that everybody’s and every theory’s predictive capacity has limits and his ascertain is not inherently wrong (that states are, in fact, important units) but it is not fully right either (that states will forever remain the most important units). It left me wondering how he would perceive the international system today, whether he would still consider the states as THE unit of the international structure or would today’s era of increased economic integration, technological advancement, international interdependency, transnational-ism and globalization alter his views.