marked by levels of violence interdependence previously only experienced at smaller
regional scales. This shift in the level of violence interdependence put the old
European regional system into a very novel situation. Where previously Europe had
been a second state-of-war anarchy, in which the major actors could survive without
exiting anarchy, the volumes and velocities of violence capabilities afforded by the
industrial revolution meant that Europe had become a first state-of-nature anarchy
marked by levels of violence interdependence sufficiently intense so as to necessitate
exit from anarchy. In the absence of such an exit, ruinous ‘total’ wars would bring
home the realities of the new situation. Beyond this basic line of agreement about
Europe, there was a fundamental and politically vital question of whether this exit
from anarchy would or should take the form of hierarchical empire-building sought
by Germany, or whether it would or should take the more confederal form of the
European Union, as foretold by Wells and pursued after the cataclysm of the Second
World War.
E.H. Carr on violence interdependence and European order
This argument about violence interdependence also appears forcefully in the work
of E.H. Carr, a widely hailed father of modern realism.^19 As a proponent of
appeasing Hitler and an admirer of Soviet Russia, the Carr that has canonical status
in American realism has been quite selective. Beyond these political indiscretions,
however, a major part of Carr’s realist theory of world politics has been almost
completely ignored. Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis(purged of its appeasement
punchline) remains widely used as a textbook in teaching international theory, but
his other works, most notably Conditions of Peaceand Nationalism and After, are long
out of print and almost never cited. Carr has ‘at least two different theories’, one
famous about hegemony, and one largely ignored about violence interdependence.^20
The well-known main argument of The Twenty Year’s Crisisis that the disarray
culminating in the Second World War was caused by the idealist harmony-of-
interests doctrine and the inability of Britain’s power resources to sustain her role as
international hegemon.^21 In Nationalism and After, however, and to a lesser degree
Conditions of Peace, the crisis is attributed to the disjuncture between ‘technological
interdependence and political parochialism’. The first theory sees a crisis in the
reigning ideology and in the relative power positions of leading states in the system;
the second posits a much more fundamental crisis of the national state and state-
system caused by a shift in the level of violence interdependence.
The central claim of Carr’s second theory is the obsolescence of the European
nation-state and state-system as an arrangement for providing military security
and organizing production.^22 Carr argues that ‘modern technological developments’
are making the nation-state ‘obsolescent as the unit of military and economic
organization’.^23 He sees the emergence of a ‘few great multinational units’ and
militarily characterized by ‘strategic integration’, essentially the same view widely
held by the global geopoliticans.^24 Carr sees the emergence of multinational units
in both the United States and the Soviet Union, and observes about the Second
26 Anarchy and violence interdependence