Political structure
Waltz’s first book, Man, The State and War(1959), makes occasional use of the term
structurein discussing the three ‘images’ or coherent sets of ideas commonly invoked
to explain the incidence of war. Thus the chapter spelling out the second image is
subtitled ‘International conflict and the internal structure of states’.^10 We soon learn,
however, that, ‘the internal organization of states is the key to understanding war
and peace’. Structureand organizationare synonyms.
Waltz described the third image as an absence of ‘social structure’ – ‘institu-
tionalized restraints and institutionalized methods of altering and adjusting interests’
- and, as such, a condition that is conducive to war. While states have ‘political
structure’ and ‘military organization’, the absence of institutional arrangements
among states is itself ‘a general structure that permits them to exist and wreak their
disasters’. We see here an early version of Waltz’s famous claim that ‘international
anarchy’ has structure even if it has no discernible institutional features giving it a
social character.^11 How we would know what this structure is, in the absence of
institutional clues, he did not yet say.
A few years later, Waltz offered a clue in an essay entitled ‘International structure,
national force, and the balance of world power’ (1967). Here defined as ‘the pattern
according to which power is distributed’, structure reveals itself in the ‘global balance
of power’.^12 Treated by states’ leaders as a ‘game’ with its own rules, the balance of
power would seem to qualify as an institution, though an institution (unlike those
constituting the internal structure of states) conducive to at least limited war.^13 Had
Waltz construed the balance of power as an institution, he would have found
congenial company.^14 That he did not spared him the need to consider other
patterned features of international politics in institutional terms: international law,
diplomacy, great power concert and war itself.^15 Instead he distanced himself from
states’ relations, where social content expresses itself with kaleidoscopic complexity,
and took the balance of power to be a ‘model’ – whether his own model stipulating
the presence of at least two states, or the ‘old’ model based on three or more states.^16
Appearing in the same year (1967), Waltz’s second book, Foreign Policy and
Democratic Politicsis a straightforward consideration of the question: ‘Do the
institutions and processes of democracy make excellence in foreign policy difficult
to achieve?’^17 To answer this question, with its second image resonances, Waltz
compared ‘various characteristics of the British and American political systems’ to
see how ‘political structures differ and, in their differences, affect the processes and
policies of governments’.^18 Systems have structure; political systems, or states, have
political structures, political arrangements, governmental structures or, more simply,
governments. Waltz used these terms more or less interchangeably to characterize
institutions of a familiar kind.^19 They do not signal a theoretical stance about the
way Waltz’s three images might be related, and they carry no conceptual freight
beyond the standard concerns of political science at the time Waltz wrote the book.
When Waltz turned directly to theory-building in the following decade, we see
a continuing interest in ‘political structure’. Waltz’s definitive exposition of his
Structure? What structure? 91