can be an insightful way of approaching problems, focusing questions, introducing
structural explanations, and sorting out complex answers. It can open eyes. Over
the years, before tackling Waltz in the seminar room, I have found it interesting to
ask students: ‘How do you explain your presence on this course this morning?’
Invariably, answers are at the individual student level: ‘I am here because I was
interested in this course’. Most are then surprised by how much more complex it
becomes when one starts setting such voluntaristic (agential) explanations within
causal (structural) explanations in terms of departmental timetables, faculty standard
operating systems, parental background/class structure, national educational pri-
orities, gender, and so on. One can then add the international level and a historical
developmental model, showing that if they (at least the young men in the class) had
been born in a different era, then as 19-year-olds they may well have been con-
scripted to fight wars rather than cajoled into read Man, the State and War.
In that book, Waltz influentially identified three distinct sites (images/levels) of
theorising about ‘the major causes of war’.^32 While locating the ‘nexus of important
causes... within man, within the structure of the separate states, [and] within
the state system’, he importantly emphasised the ‘bewildering... variety’ and
‘contradictory qualities’ of the various explanations of the causes of war. By the time
he published Theory of International Politics, Waltz had moved beyond the causes of
war to a ‘systemic’ theory, emphasising the causal power of the anarchical structure
of the international system. He now collapsed his earlier ‘man’ and ‘states’ levels into
one, and called such unit-level explanations ‘reductionist’; he warned about the
variety and contradictory character of theories; he drew attention to the difficulty
of keeping ‘the levels of a system consistently distinct and separate’; he often
reminded readers that his picture of a bounded international realm was never as rigid
as it has invariably been portrayed; and he pointed to the different ‘causal weights’
of unit- and system-levels in different systems.^33 His work has often been much less
dogmatic than his critics have claimed, but he has never ceased to emphasise the
causal power of the international. In a key passage in Theory of International Politics
he emphasised the causal weight of the international as follows:
In the history of international relations ... results achieved seldom correspond
to the intentions of actors. Why are they repeatedly thwarted? The apparent
answer is that causes not found in their individual characters and motives do
operate among the actors collectively... the situation in which they act and
interact constrains them from some actions, disposes them towards others, and
affects the outcomes of their interactions.^34In the same spirit, in calling this final section ‘levelling with the international’, I
mean very much more than reaffirming the value of a level of analysis framework
to thinking about some of the things that puzzle us. We need to levelwith the
international – being frankabout the world by being realisticabout international
politics – because human society faces a global crisis.^35 In academic practice, levelling
with the international involves recognising International Politics as the inconvenient truth
The inconvenient truth 335