poverty, but relevant UN and NGO bodies remain underfunded, so that any
progress is slow and haphazard. And so it goes. Change is possible in world affairs,
even progressive change, but the international level must always have its say.
Waltz has often been criticised for his commitment to his picture of this anarchic
international level as ‘enduring’, but enduring is not synonymous with ‘for all
time’. While emphasising the causal weight of the international system, he has
shown some openness to the idea that anarchy can have different meanings. He
wrote in 1986 that ‘states affect the system’s structure even as it affects them’,^37 and
his belief in order based on bipolarity (‘A system of two has many virtues’)^38 is
testimony to an assumption that anarchy is what the distribution of state capabilities
makes it. Such hints of anarchical variety are invariably contrasted sharply with
the developed notion of ‘cultures of anarchy’ associated with the distinctive
constructivist position of Alexander Wendt,^39 but the differences may not be as
wide as they seem. Few in either camp would disagree with the proposition that
multiple causes operate at every level, and that different combinations of factors
have different weight on different issues. Disagreements are about emphasis not
principle, and my guess is that they derive, ultimately, not from thinking theory
but from living life.
In the ‘Great Reckoning’ we face this century, the ideas informing the inter-
national level are obsolete; future challenges are unlikely to be overcome by the
ideas that helped bring human society to this situation in the first place. This is why
those who claim to have anything to say about who gets what, when, and how must
level with the international. To try to escape into a ‘World Politics’/’Global Politics’
approach that shows any disdain for ‘IR’ is to opt out of dealing with one of the
world’s inconvenient truths. Waltz understood this over three decades ago: ‘It is not
possible to understand world politics simply by looking inside of states... We can
say what we see, but we cannot know what it may mean.’^40 That meaning, deriving
from the international level, resists change. He wrote: ‘The texture of international
politics remains highly constant, patterns recur, and events repeat themselves
endlessly ... The enduring anarchic character of international politics accounts for
the striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia.’^41
The hardest test for all political and social theory is also one of the most long-lasting.
- According International Politics an architectonic role in the
Social Sciences
This book has been premised on the view that one cannot believe in just anything
when it comes to theorising international politics. In the first chapter I emphasised
that a good foundation for learning and teaching is a thorough understanding of the
classic literature. This has been part of the justification for celebrating Waltz’s work,
while simultaneously thinking that one needs to know much more than structural
realism in order to make sense of the world.
Levelling with Waltz is part of levelling with the international, but International
Politics as a discipline struggles in the resistant medium of the academy. Andrew
The inconvenient truth 337