based on the interplay of anarchy, the statist survival ‘instinct’, and power
distribution, but a ‘good deal more’ is needed if world politics is to make sense in
relation to helping our fullest possible understanding of who gets what, when, and
how across the globe.
As was explained in Chapter 1, some scholars, impressed by structural realism as
the state system’s big picture, have wanted to get more out of it than it could provide
(hence their addiction to additives to the theory). They should have known better,
it was pointed out, given Waltz’s insistence that he was offering a systemictheory of
international politics, not a unit-leveltheory of foreign policy. Remembering the
different perspectives from the top and bottom of Constitution Hill, then, we could
say that Waltzian realism does not seek to explain boththe prevalence of couples and
families on the beach, andthe fact that some may be speaking Portuguese and
hugging. The latter needs a reductionist theory; it cannot be explained by the big
picture from the hill. ‘I essayed an international-political theory and not a domestic
one’, Waltz has written in his defence: ‘Students of international politics will do well
to concentrate on separate theories of internal and external politics until someone
figures out a way to unite them.’^6
Waltz’s theory therefore does not tell us all we want to know about international
politics, nor did he intend it to; nor did he claim it to be timeless (‘A theory applies
only so long as the conditions it contemplates endure in their essentials’).^7 In other
words, his theorising has not been that of a structural determinist, but Waltz has
remained impressed by the ‘causal weight’ of structure and the longevity of the
theory’s usefulness. But structure cannot provide a determinist explanation of
why France and Germany were at peace in 1910 yet at war in 1914 – or why they
established the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950. Waltz’s general
position is clear: ‘Theory, as a general explanatory system, cannot account for
particularities’.^8 Systemic theory can offer some pointers to reductionist explanations
(by identifying permissive factors and generally successful policies) but the relevant
French and German decision-makers could have made different choices to the ones
they actually made or the ones different types of realists might have recommended.^9
A full account of what happened in 1910, 1914, and 1950 requires unit-level
explanations in the context of the anarchical state system, but Waltzian realism does
not attempt to provide this, any more than Darwinian evolutionary theory offers a
developmental history of the world.
So, just as there is no history of the elephant’s trunk independent of the history
of the elephant, there can be no history of French and German foreign policy
decisions independent of the histories of France and Germany, and no history of
France and Germany independent of the history of the state system; and, one must
add, there can be no history of the state system independent of the history of world
politics.
328 The inconvenient truth