particularly the decision to tie a primary turning point to 1500 CE, defined in terms
of an emerging global system. On the one hand, this assessment underestimates the
fact that other civilizations had been reaching outwards before this point, and on
the other, that distinct regional international systems persisted across the globe up
to the nineteenth century.^53 Nevertheless, we are in good company. Historical
materialists, such as Rosenberg, for example, have come under similar criticism.^54
We think that the English School provides the most promising approach for bringing
IR theory and world history together in a sustained conversation, and have
committed our future work to developing that line.
Conclusion
TIPhas had a huge impact on International Relations. Indeed, it can be argued that
most of the major theoretical advances made in the field over the last thirty years
have come about as the result of theorists attempting either to challenge or qualify
Waltz’s theoretical stance. His work still survives as a focal point for the field,
primarily because Waltz expresses his position in such clear and unequivocal terms.
In essence, his theory calls upon the process of balancing to account for the
reproduction of the anarchic structure of international politics. In developing his
argument, he makes the historical claim that the process of balancing is associated
with patterns of behaviour that have persistently recurred across history. From the
start, it has been this transhistorical claim that has been most frequently subjected
to criticism. The critics have almost invariably wanted to highlight how insensitive
his theory is to historical change and understanding. As Cox asserted, Waltz’s
attempt to achieve theoretical clarity comes at the cost of an ‘unconvincing mode
of historical understanding’.^55 Given that there is an almost inescapable method-
ological tension between generalizing theory and historical specificity, Waltz is not
alone here.
If this criticism is accepted, then it is perhaps unsurprising to find that Waltz’s
work has been essentially ignored by historians in general and world historians in
particular. But the criticism does, in fact, miss its target, because Waltz was never
attempting to accommodate historical change. His theory only claims to account
for historical continuity. Moreover, it is not just Waltz who has been ignored by
historians; so have the vast majority of IR theorists. Yet there are signs that the
situation may be changing. Certainly Eckstein, a formidable historian of antiquity,
has examined in detail the extensive literature spawned by Waltz’s TIP and accepts
that it provides the basis for a framework that enables him to offer a fresh and
convincing account of the rise of the Roman Empire.^56 From Eckstein’s perspective,
researchers working in this area have not acknowledged that the Mediterranean
region constitutes a system and they have been too preoccupied with unit-level
explanations, failing to recognize the extent to which the actors operating in this
region were profoundly influenced by the anarchic structure of the system.
Eckstein’s research, at the very least, reveals that Waltz’s theory, and the
theoretical developments that it has prompted, can have a clear heuristic value for
The paradox of parsimony 301