Theory Talk #7: Joseph Nye

Joseph Nye on Teaching America to be more British

Theory Talks proudly presents a Talk with Joseph S. Nye Jr., the scholar behind the popular concept of ‘soft power’, by which he adds a dimension to the classic realist notion of ‘hard’, or military, power. Being one of the top-ten most influential IR-scholars in the world, Nye continues to criticize American unilateralism as simply not the right way to survive: in an increasingly interdependent world, even ‘success in the War on Terrorism depends on Washington’s capacity to persuade others without force’, and, as Nye constantly argues, that capacity is in dangerous decline. In this Talk, Joseph Nye subsequently argues why the future of international politics lies in cooperation, and why the US can learn from 19^th century Britain.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR?

One of our biggest challenges is understanding the way the information revolution is affecting power, and the way the world is changing from simple inter-state politics to global and world politics. This was caught by the rationalist/constructivist debate at the end of the Cold War, and the reaction against simple materialist definitions of power that underlay what structural realists such as Waltz considered “theory of international politics.” This does not mean that the nation-state or realist theory is obsolete, but it does mean that the stage of world politics is becoming more crowded with extra actors, the distinction between domestic and international is not so neat, and the politics of transnational relations and complex interdependence need an understanding of liberal and constructivist approaches as well as classical realism.

What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I have challenged what philosophers call the “concrete fallacy” in the definition of power by introducing the concept of soft power. If power is the capacity to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, you can do it with material sticks and carrots (coercion and payment), but also by affecting the preferences of others and attracting them to want what you want. I call this ‘soft power’. Classical realists like Machiavelli and Morgenthau understood this dimension, but in its search for parsimony, structural realism settled on a truncated and impoverished materialist view of power. In my work with Robert O. Keohane, I explored different models of power and interdependence including the mixed coalitions typical of the ideal type we labeled ‘complex interdependence’. I have applied this approach to current policy issues as well as theory.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I came into IR though a side door, so to speak. I was interested in how economic rationality and political ideology interacted in the structuring of markets in newly independent Africa. I did my dissertation in Africa on “Pan Africanism and East African Integration.” (Today it might be called constructivist analysis.) I came into IR through regional integration theory, and that led to broader work on transnational actor and interdependence. A spell in the State Department dealing with nuclear proliferation led to a book on called Nuclear Ethics (1986), which also discussed arms control and the future of American power. It may seem a winding path, but the guiding thread was my curiosity.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

I argue in my text Understanding International Conflicts (1997), that students should have a good grounding in realism, liberalism, and constructivist approaches. Then find some puzzles or interesting anomalies and see how the theoretical approaches can be combined with empirical investigation to illuminate the problem. Keep going back and forth between theory and history, and beware of the tendency to elegance that leads many in the field to say more and more about less and less.

In what kind of international world do we live?

We live in a hybrid world. Part of our positive and normative world is Westphalian and based on sovereignty, and part is post-Westaphalian in which transnational actors and the norms of international humanitarian law transgress sovereignty. Both are likely to persist for decades, so good positive and normative analysis will have to be able to account for both.

Keeping in account this configuration, how do you see the near future?

In interstate relations, we are seeing a gradual movement of power that is often summarized as the “rise of Asia.” Some see this as American decline, but as I argued in Bound to Lead (1990) and The Paradox of American Power (2003), I think this is mistaken: I have argued that power resources depend upon context, and that there are three quite different contexts in world politics, something like a three dimensional chess game.

• On the top board of military relations among states, the world is still unipolar and I do not see China, Europe or others surpassing the US in the near future.
• On the middle board of economic relations among states, the world is already multi-polar.
• On the bottom board of transnational relations that cross borders outside the control of governments – pandemics, climate change, transnational terrorism – power is chaotically distributed.

These issues can only be dealt with by cooperation among governments, and which is why the US, even as an undisputed military hegemony, cannot go at it alone.

Who should respond to the increasing scarcity of natural resources, states or the international society?

As the most powerful country, the United States should define its national interest broadly to include the provision of global public goods (as I spell out in The Paradox of American Power) much as Britain did in the 19^th century.

In the 21^st century, no one state can handle these issues alone, and it will be important to develop a broad range of more effective international institutions. This raises a number of interesting and difficult issues about participation, accountability and democratic theory within international institutions.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is also the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations and former Dean of the Kennedy School. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. In 2004, he published Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics; Understanding International Conflict (5th edition); and The Power Game: A Washington Novel.

Related links

About Nye

• Joseph Nye’s faculty profile at Harvard
• A 1998 interview with Joseph Nye by Harry Kreisler, Conversations With History (1998)

Nye’s work

• Read Nye’s monthly comments on (international) politics and leadership here (available in English, Spanish, French and other languages)
• Read Nye’s article Farewell to Arms Control (Foreign Affairs, 1986) here
• Read Nye’s influential Foreign Policy article Soft Power (1990) here (pdf)
• Read Nye’s article Think Again: Soft Power (Yale Global, 2006), in which he reviews his 1990-concept of ‘Soft Power’, here
• Read a review of Nye’s 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power here
• Read Nye’s observations on the implications of soft power for the contenders in the US presidential race here

Theory Talk #6: Klaus Dodds

Klaus Dodds on James Bond, the Final Argument for a Geopolitical Approach to International Relations, and a Russian flag on the bottom of the ocean

Klaus Dodds is part of a new generation of critical ‘geopoliticians’ and focuses his work on, amongst others, the representation of space in visual media like internet, movies and pictures. He is also engaged in research about the geopolitics of the South Pole. In this comprehensive Talk, Dodds introduces us to, amongst others, the International Relations of James Bond, the South Pole and talks about the importance of the military in Latin American IR.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR, and what is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I discern more than one principal issue in International Relations, and for me, the challenge of global governance is most certainly one of them. First of all, I have to be clear on what I mean exactly by ‘governance’: contrary to, for example, what Timothy Sinclair asserts in Theory Talk #5, I don’t see a distinction between ‘international institutions’ driven by state interests on one hand and global governance induced by private actors working very well, because the concept of governance is, if you like, too slippery for such a distinction: international institutions exist together with a whole range of other international structures and agents, and I think it to be very difficult to label some as serving exclusively state purposes and others exclusively private purposes.

For me, the main point about governance is that in our terribly unequal world, we should push for a significant deepening of institutions. Furthermore, any form of a more profound global governance should be based on rules, on law embedded in institutions. The ‘global’ side of ‘global governance’ is something social: it comes into being through the practices and discourses of human beings – as you can clearly see, for example, with the conception of the world in terms of the ‘War on Terror’, which denominates certain aspects of the world as dangerous based on a specific set of ideas on how the world works. Institutions should constitute the limits of these practices so as to not exploit our world or, as is generally the case, some specific part of it.

Another big issue is the role of space in international relations. Things do not just take place; everything takes place somewhere. In the formulation of theories on how international politics work, scholars often try to abstract from that spatiality, to conceive of ‘places’ as random and little relevant factors – like all politics could take place anywhere.

One aspect of this spatiality which is so important to me, is the visual one: how does the global get represented in visual culture, like movies or on internet? And how do principally large countries use these images to construct a story about what they are doing? In a very direct sense, you can see what I mean if you look at, for example, the web sites of environmental movements, which as a rule incorporate an image of the earth in its totality. This clearly conveys the feeling that ‘we are all living in this one earth’; since we share it, we also have to take care of it together. Another way of using the image of the world as a whole, is the cover of the book ‘Empire’ by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), which also displays the earth as a whole, but now conveying the strong message that it serves as the playground for empires. If one looks at the US and its strategy for their ‘global war on terror’, the authors might just have been right.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I interpret that question as asking about how I came to be so interested in the relationship between geopolitics and visual culture. Basically, I’ve studied a lot of IR that I found very dull. To be frank, I kept asking myself: ‘why are there just three big debates in IR?’ The mainstream IR is too insular for me, it excludes a lot of interesting and important issues. I am very fond of interdisciplinarity; using different approaches to answer questions and to understand what’s going on. I also try to bring International Relations back to popular culture; not only by linking notions of power to images, but also by making it accessible to a broader public. The implications of geopolitics affect everyone, and through such powerful media as television and images. Take the symbolic power something as common as saluting the flag has. So why let IR reside in an ivory tower?

But if that question refers to what motivated my to do geopolitics, I would name two big reasons: first of all, the fundamental notion that there is a very intimate relationship between power and knowledge; and second of all, the fact that most IR scholars have actually forgotten about the world. International Relations need a map to the world. Scholars that for me are related to these issues, are for example Edward Said, whose notion of ‘imaginative geographies’ I find particularly useful, and Noam Chomsky, whom I respect most of all for being a publicly engaged scholar.

In terms of real-world events that profoundly influenced me, I was particularly stricken by the fact that during the Cold War, al main discourses and with that public attention was basically fixed on the tension between the United States and Russia and their nuclear arsenals, while the whole Cold War had a much more profound impact in the South.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

Apart from, of course, a PhD, I would advice students to read as widely as possible. One should not be constrained by specific debates or issues, and most certainly avoid to consciously dedicate a whole career to one debate; not even the big debates (between, for example, rationalists and constructivists; Marxism, liberalism or realism; or between structure and agency) are worth it. That’s the reason why I publish in such different journals: it enables me to be involved in a lot of interesting issues and not to lose myself in one of them, so to speak.

As you’ve mentioned before, you constantly establish the connection between geopolitics and visual media. Can you give us an example?

I’ve just published an article titled ‘Have you seen any good movies lately?’ Geopolitics, International Relations and Film. There, I try to show, amongst others, that at times of crisis, Hollywood has often been more than willing and able to produce and market films designed to ‘raise’ national morale and spirit. Just after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush’s advisor Karl Rove met with Hollywood big shots to consider how the motion picture industry might contribute to the War on Terror. And in the following years, movies sympathetic to American military engagement have appeared while movies potentially critical about such issues, such as Buffalo Soldiers (2003), have been delayed and generally rejected by American audiences. Popular movies like Independence Day communicate and promote very specific views on how a nation should work and what the role of the United States is in regard to ‘external threats’. I’m trying to convey a sense about the role of such geopolitical notions essentially in elite cultures.

But geopolitics is not limited to film in culture: in geographical education, very specific notions of spatiality are being transmitted to pupils, in order to educate nations that think alike – and approvingly – of the politics their states are engaged in. Here, the example of the way the Malvinas are treated throughout all sections of society in Great Britain and Argentina, who have been in conflict over those islands for decades.

You take an interest in the difference between Latin American, European and American geopolitics. What’s the main difference between Latin American and, for example, the European strand of geopolitical thought, and what are the implications of this difference?

I was first of all surprised about the importance of military writers in the Latin American academia: they represent an authentic authority when it comes to geopolitics and everybody discussing it, is subsequently inclined to a realist conception of space: national security is seen as the main objective when discussing geography. That has much to do with the second big difference between Latin America and Europe in terms of their interpretation of geopolitics: in Latin America, borders matter. They are constantly being disputed, and the continent has a long history of conflicts over such issues as the exact denomination of borders (think about the conflict between Argentina and Chile over the Straight of Beard in the 90s) and the legitimate control over resources and territories. In Europe, this kind of issues has generally been settled a long time ago, which is why we engage in a different kind of geopolitical analysis.

You’ve published a lot on the Antarctic, like for example your 2002 book Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. What’s your interest in the Antarctic?

Apart from the fact that I’ve been there four times, I take an interest in the notion of ‘global commons’, or parts of the world that (should) belong to all of us. The Antarctic has been indicated as one of such places, but there are still a number of rival claims over who gets to govern or control the Antarctic. The conflict between Britain and Argentine over the Maldives fits into this broader interest I have for the region, and highlights – again – the importance of ‘place’ in International Relations.

To go from one side of the globe to another: we’ve recently heard that by 2015, the North Pole will be ice-free during the summer, a process that is irreversible. What are the implications hereof for the geopolitical imaginations of the poles?

I think this is very much related to something I wrote about recently: in 2007, a Russian submarine planted a flag on the bottom of the Arctic Basin, thus claiming a big stretch of that area. Many of its Arctic neighbors, and especially Canada, felt threatened, especially because there are vast amounts of oil estimated in the Arctic Basin. You would’ve expected the North Pole to become demilitarized after the Cold War, but now we’re witnessing the opposed: it is increasingly being seen as one of the ‘last regions to contest and divide’. If the North Pole is coming to be considered more and more as ‘just another stretch of ocean’, then the disputes over the legitimate exploitation of the resources in this region will increase – with all the consequences that implies: ecological problems, less space for the indigenous population, and so forth. Again, apart from these tacit practices, it all depends on how discourses of dominant actors about the North Pole will change and how those changes will be accepted by the public opinion. And again, we see what benefits global governance could reap.

We zoom in on a different part of the world: Africa. What would a ‘geopolitician’ say about our conceptions of the continent?

If you want to understand Sub-Sahara Africa, you have to start by taking into account the postcolonial geography of the (sub)continent. It sits very uneasy in the world, because of the sheer awkwardness of the application and occidental exigency of basically colonially determined conditions of statehood; that architecture not only doesn’t work, but Africans are furthermore condemned for failing to adapt to our imaginations of how the world should be divided. The continent has to deal with an awful lot, and the way we treat it doesn’t help in making things work.

You’ve published about James Bond. Can you explain us what his movies represent?

I use a lot of movies to make things clear to my students. James Bond movies are amongst my personal favorites, because they represent the inherent dynamics of geopolitical discourses and representations: if you compare the last James Bond, Casino Royale, to older ones such as From Russia with Love, you’ll see the very distinctness of which regions, persons and situations pose threats. I especially like Casino Royale for being the first Bond-movie to come out after 9-11: it represents a very gentle tackle of the whole ‘War on Terror’-issue: it treats it as global issue that ‘naturally’ requires a global response, but not as explicitly as could have been possible: it does not, for example, relate to religious fundamentalism. Also, this movie interesting enough uses Montenegro as the location for an illegal poker contest – which says a lot about the conception we have of Southeastern Europe.

Last question – geopolitics is not exactly (international) politics nor is it completely geography. Yet the first already incorporates notions of space and territory, as the latter incorporates notions of power. For the possible skeptics: what’s the ‘final argument’ for geopolitics as an approach?

First of all, events in International Relations always occur in places, a fact that makes an important difference. Those places, furthermore, are not reducible to States and their boundaries: a lot of events are localized (and significant) either at a more local level or at a more global level. Secondly, the (critical) geopolitics I’m engaged in, enable to ask who is able to represent the world and what that implies: when President Bush gives a speech, the whole world tunes in, something we don’t do for a president of what we consider to be ‘some’ Sub-Saharan country. And thirdly, the study of International Relations first and foremost has implications for global power relations, between people who are generally bound to specific and limited places. Critical Geopolitics enables us to study these relationships of power and place.

Klaus Dodds is professor of Geopolitics at the Department of Geography of the Royal Holloway University of London, director of the Politics & Environment Research Group (PERG), and published a number of books on geopolitics, amongst which Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Geopolitics in a Changing World (1999).

Related links

· Klaus Dodds Faculty Profile

· Read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s 2000 book Empire here for free (pdf)

Theory Talk #5: Timothy Sinclair

Timothy J. Sinclair on social forces, transnational corporations and global governance

Timothy Sinclair is well-known for his research on the politics of global finance and the power of private actors, especially the American bond rating agencies, in his The New Masters of Capital (2005), and for his book on and with Robert R. Cox, the influential critical theorist who introduced Gramsci to IR. Since their joint publication Approaches to World Order (1996), it is difficult to think about Sinclair’s work and not link it to notions of social forces, states and their relations to hegemony or world orders. In this Talk, Sinclair amongst others explains how not only states but also institutions form the stage for struggles between social forces and how global governance has a nature very different from that of international institutions.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR?

The major problem in IR is that it is a perspective on the world developed during the Cold War for the purposes of American policy, as Stanley Hoffmann suggested in the 1970s. Integrating capitalism and “the international” is therefore the challenge. The post-9/11 hysteria about terrorism retards this intellectual and practical project.

What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

We need to develop the analytical and political agenda of IR, moving away from the prevailing mainstream fixation with sovereignty and anarchy. To my mind, neither of these categories should be at the centre of our thinking.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR (and by that, I mean in your ideas on how the world works)?

Like most critical people, I read Marx. But I didn’t stop with the Paris Manuscripts of 1844. I also read the three volumes of Capital. Very few critical scholars seem to have read Capital, even self-professed Neo-Gramscians. Then, oddly perhaps, I worked as a policy adviser in the New Zealand Treasury, involved in rationalizing public sector expenditure and privatization. Subsequently, I encountered a more open, tractable Marxism at York University in Toronto, working with Stephen Gill and Robert Cox. This allowed me to make sense of the critical and liberal analysis I had been exposed to before leaving New Zealand in 1989. Since coming to England I have been strongly influenced by Ruggie, Katzenstein and John Searle.

What (skills, mindset, etc.) would a student need to become an IR-theorist like yourself?

Given my biography I think a rigorous immersion in classical theory has huge benefits. In my case this was Marx, but others would do just as well. I would also reinforce practical experience as theory is, after all, just a tool. This helps people see things in perspective – a rare quality in IR theory where extremes seem to rule. Last, I would say that international experience is essential. Inevitably, I have some difficulty understanding how IR scholars can do all their work in one country.

Your research focus has always circled around ways to check the market. Is the capitalist market something negative, and do international organizations serve actors (overcoming transaction costs, uncertainty or collective action problems) or do they offer civil society a means to govern them?

The market is an enormously powerful and often incoherent social system. My position is similar to that of the late Susan Strange. What we must deal with is the inherent tendency of capitalism, specifically global finance, to produce volatility, as revealed yet again by the subprime crisis. There is a good history of international cooperation in the monetary field, but I fear that the pace of change is so fast, that like domestic regulators, international actors have problems keeping up. We look to civil society for counter-hegemonic movement, but crisis will have to prove more damaging and persistent to produce mobilization.

How would you judge popular talk about globalization, which typically comprises the pervasive spread of capitalism as the only way of doing things, information technology as a means by which we can construct new social relations and more intense contact between people all over the world that will result in homogeneity?

This seems to be a dream for some and a nightmare for others. I see ‘location’ as key to the most globalized form of capitalism, finance, as Saskia Sassen shows. Proximity is necessary and adds value. So I don’t see this homogenized place-less world as a practical proposition any time soon.

Why is the literature on transnational corporations moribund?

The dominant theories of the 1960s and 70s, dependency theory and the elite or radical Weberian approach to political economy were largely descriptive and polemic, and so they burnt themselves out in the 1980s. Far better accounts of institutions have emerged from sociology and organizational theory since, in part by the authors that I’ve mentioned before as sources of inspiration and from scholars such as Harrison White and Oliver Williamson. Time is now ripe to apply these to Transnational Corporations.

In Europe and the States, there’s been a proliferation of attention for international labor standards, human rights and the like, which focuses mainly on the rest of the world. This can be seen as something positive (‘we finally make a stand against global injustices’) or as something negative (‘social standards as a way to curb competing companies from the developing world’). What’s your view on this instrumentalization of normativity?

In my view, this instrumentalization provides many opportunities for intervening in the affairs of subordinate countries, reinforcing their more marginal place in the world order.

You’ve asserted that ‘collective understandings can become powerful forces in world politics’. That assertion can be interpreted as a ‘Coxian’ assertion in its effects, and a constructivist one in its process. Are institutions always for someone and for some purpose? And can you give a concrete example of such a powerful collective understanding?

This takes us back to the state debate of the late 1960s and 1970s, about which Robert Cox and I have written extensively in Approaches to World Order. There, we explained that both states and world orders can be seen as the result of the struggle between social forces. The ideas, norms and values expressed in states, we argued, serve the interest of specific groups. I subsequently see institutions not as instruments, but as places in which conflict and accommodation take place between and within social forces.

An example often cited of a powerful collective understanding would be monetarism. Or, if you like, ‘collective disposition against inflation.’ This helped to delegitimize union wage demands in the 1980s, which again serves the purpose of a certain group, and certainly does not serve another.

In 2009, you’ll publish a book on global governance, in which you link governance to the infrastructure of private authority. Can you explain the main argument of this study?

It turns out that ‘global governance’ is a much more limited conception of cooperation than international organization. Global governance, I show, is in great measure the organization of the international by private actors. Unlike international institutions, which represent states and political actors, and are thus subject to criticism and politicization, private institutions find favor because they enable many otherwise political issues to be dealt with as technical matters to which normative issues do not apply easily.

Related links

Who influenced Timothy Sinclair

• Read An Annotated Bibliography of Susan Strange’s Academic Publications 1949-1999 (C. May, 2002) here (pdf)
• Read Robert Cox’s influential article Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory (1981) here (Sage, subscription or free trial required)
• Read Saskia Sassen’s (counterintuitive?) thoughts on the importance of the local in a globalized world in her article The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier (2001 lecture) here, and read her 2006 article Cities at the Intersection of New Histories here (pdf)

Sinclair’s work

• Read selections from The New Masters of Capital (2005) and journal articles at Sinclair's faculty profile at University of Warwick here

• Read Timothy J. Sinclair’s lecture Capitalism in the Information Age: Continuity or Change? (2001, lecture held at the United Nations University Global Seminar) here (pdf)
• Read the first chapter Beyond international relations theory: Robert W. Cox and approaches to world order from Approaches to World Order (1996, Robert W. Cox & Timothy J. Sinclair) here (pdf)

Theory Talk #3: Alexander Wendt

Alexander Wendt on UFO’s, Black Swans and Constructivist International Relations Theory

In 1992, Alexander Wendt shook up the world of International Relations Theory by publishing an article titled 'Anarchy is what States make of it: the social construction of power politics'. Wendt argues that anarchy can be a structural fact about the world that states inhabit, but that it is up to politicians (and IR scholars) to decide how to deal with that anarchy. Since then, Wendt’s social constructivist approach to International Relations has gained a lot of interest and one cannot talk about IR Theory without mentioning his work.

Theory Talks offers an exclusive interview with Wendt about what influenced him, constructivism, the dangers of methodology and the world state.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

Actually, I’m hesitant to name a specific debate. A standard answer for me would be, of course, the rationalist – constructivist debate, but in a sense I don’t care about that debate anymore. My own view – and what I tell my students – is that the most important thing to do, and maybe the hardest, is first to tell us something we don’t already know, and secondly to tell us something that makes people think about the world differently (otherwise, what’s the point?). That’s why I don’t feel much of a stake in the existing debates; my main interest these days is in new ideas, not old ones. And that’s also why I have PhD students doing research on the most diverse subjects possible, because I basically just ask them to tell me something I don’t know already.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I think the person who most influenced me was my graduate school advisor, Raymond Duvall at Minnesota, who introduced me to Marxism and post-structuralism in IR in the 80s. At that time, I actually considered myself a Marxist. I read a lot of Marxist state theory and about the internationalization of capital, and I guess I remain sympathetic to Marxism this day. But since then, I’ve developed philosophical issues with the body of Marxist theory, so although I’ve been very much influenced by the Marxist problematic – like a lot of scholars of my generation by the way – I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist anymore. Apart from that, I have also been influenced by the work of sociologists and scientific realists such as Anthony Giddens and Roy Bhaskar, but I guess the individuals who advised me were more important in the end.

Gradually I got very interested in the structure-agency issue, on which I published the article The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory in International Affairs in 1987. Since then, I continued studying constructivism, leading to the series of articles I published in the 90s and eventually my Social Theory of International Politics in 1999.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR like yourself?

If someone wants to specifically become a theorist, they need to be able to think very systematically and logically about an argument, which is a conceptual or analytical skill, and I think it helps a lot if one is familiar with the full range of theories that are out there, since otherwise there is a danger of becoming dogmatic. However, I actually don’t think that most IR scholars should be pure theorists: even amongst my own PhD students, there are relatively few that I tell to go and do pure theory. Not because they aren’t smart enough to be theorists, but because the job market generally favors those with a substantial empirical contribution (as well), and in the end we (the collective of IR scholars) are supposed to be students of the real world rather than of theory per se.

But if you want to become an IR specialist in general, I would say: get a PhD. Apart from that, I think it is very important – and even more than when I was a student in the 80s – to look outside of what is published strictly by IR scholars. There’s a lot of work that I would call “IR” that is published by sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers, philosophers, political theorists – I think that a lot of the most interesting questions are being raised outside of IR, so it is just a matter of getting outside of the little bubble that graduate students get trained in and we all live in. Even big canonical IR-theorists like Waltz and Keohane looked outside our field to rational choice theory, which stems from economics.

And why don’t you ‘do’ economics or economical theory yourself?

I actually appreciate game theory very much, and see it to be one of the greatest single contributions made by social scientists to our understanding of social life. But on the other hand I do worry about the tendency especially here in the States of economics increasingly becoming hegemonic, crowding out other ways of thinking, and it’s with that tendency to “do economics or nothing” that I would take issue.

You’ve indicated that you want to stay open to new stuff. Is it possible to stay flexible after having conceived, and being recognized for, a ‘big theory’? I don’t see, for example, Kenneth Waltz changing his theoretical stripes.

I think that’s a big challenge for all academics, especially if they get to middle age and they don’t have anything new to say. That’s one of the reasons why I, self-consciously, wanted to get out of the constructivist business: I’m trying to stay alive by focusing on other issues as well, like for example the quantum perspective of social science I’m currently investigating. For me, the important thing is to keep doing different things, otherwise you just get stale. But I think it’s hard, and there are a lot of incentives in the field to just keep defending what you’ve said in the past.

Due to the wide variety of different approaches available in IR, a student might feel kind of lost in the field. Is International Relations going through an identity crisis?

It certainly has become an incredibly diverse terrain. I don’t get the feeling that IR is having an identity crisis, but maybe we should have one. There are a lot of different – sometimes even contradictory – positions in IR, while in the United States for example a lot of people demand very rigorous science in order to find the Truth with a capital ‘T’, but I just don’t share that way of seeing things – in order to advance, one has to accept that there are interesting positions in other fields from which we can learn a lot.

Nasim Taleb argues in his popular science book ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ that the most high-impact events in social science (or, in your formulation: a very small number of very important events) are unforeseen by dominant theories such as Neorealism and Neoliberalism. In your Social Theory, you show that similar ‘UFO’s’ in IR are not accounted for by most approaches. That could make one doubt the predictive value of our work.

I don’t think IR theory has ever predicted anything we didn’t already know was going to happen. It’s important here to separate anomalies in specific theories from unforeseen events in history. There will always be new ideas and events that no one can foresee, because social life is intrinsically open-ended. Any given generalization about the whole world might cover the past, but never the future – which makes life interesting.

With respect to anomalies, constructivism can handle some that other theories cannot, but it doesn’t cover everything any more than any other theory does. I do hope the quantum argument I am developing will provide an umbrella to synthesize everything, but even that perspective won’t allow us to predict the future with any great ability, simply because of free will and creativity. So, if people criticize IR theory for not predicting wars, conflicts and the like, I would say that’s not what IR theory is for; predicting events in real world politics is what intelligence agencies are for, not social scientists (or at least theorists). Thus, I’m skeptical about IR scholars being able to prevent wars, except insofar as they can help us to think differently about world politics, which in the long run might stimulate a more peaceful situation.

In 2003, you’ve published an article with the daring title Why a World State is Inevitable. Why is a world state inevitable?

I think there are two main reasons. First of all, there’s the material argument: the cost of not submitting to a world state will become higher and higher over time, because the potential for catastrophic violence in the system is growing due to weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and so on. My main argument is basically that what individuals and groups most want is not security or power or wealth, but recognition of, and respect for, their rights. And since that can only be realized under law, we have a material basis for a world state.

Secondly, there is no good normative argument against a world state. The present system in effect empowers groups or states with the authority to kill foreigners without accountability. In an ideal world I think there is no good justification for having such a right. Especially liberals should not have any normative reason not to go for a world state. But it will take a long time.

Keeping in account the current configuration of the international system which seems increasingly dominated by resource scarcity, and your long term prediction of a world government, how do you see the near future?

I’ve actually not thought systematically about the impact of resource scarcity on my world state argument. I would think, though, that for the time being conflicts over resources will increase, but that in the long run human technological innovation will solve a lot of problems, including conflicts over resources.

In your Social Theory of International Politics you’ve distinguished between three cultures which can each be internalized in three degrees: a hobbesian culture, in which states perceive each other essentially as enemies; a lockean culture, in which states are rivals; and a Kantian one, in which they regard one another as friends. Parting from the title of a book on African IR, The African Challenge to IR Theory (2001), I would like to ask you how Africa can be better understood by your constructivism. For example, is Africa at state-level a lockean culture internalized to the 1^st degree, with frequent local setbacks to a hobbesian, or violent, culture?

I have little in-depth knowledge about Africa, but that I would agree that Africa is not a Hobbesian nor a Kantian world, but rather a Lockean, because African states in general do survive. However, I don’t know the level up to which this culture is internalized. Because of my teleological view of the world, I tend to agree with the view that African IR is just one or two steps behind Europe, but will eventually get there just like everyone else.

What are your thoughts on the different proposals for constructivist methodology?

My view on methodology has always been eclectic, in the sense that I believe that research should always be question-driven and not method-driven. Thus, I have no stake in which method comes to be seen as most appropriate; my only concern is that one method not drive out the others, and in particular that quantitative formal-theory methods not become seen as the only way to do things. That would make IR method-driven and effectively exclude all kinds of interesting questions just because they don’t fit inside that methodological frame. So if constructivists want to do quantitative work, great, but they shouldn’t feel obliged to do so.

You’re a purely theoretical IR-scholar. How do you feel about politics in ‘the world out there’?

Yes, especially these days my work is entirely theoretical. I treat what I know about real-world politics as a source of interesting problems for both me and my students, although I am relatively skeptical about using the “real world” as data against which to test theory. Sometimes it can be useful to test theories if it answers a specific question to which we don’t already at least implicitly know the answer, but I’m not sure we’ve learned as much about the world by testing our theories all the time, as some people seem to think.

You’re setting up a new IR Journal, called International Theory, which will be ready in about a year. Can you give the readers of Theory Talks a foretaste?

Well, the idea is to bring together people from IR Theory, International Legal Theory and International Political Theory, all of which have their own universes and journals; Duncan Snidal and I thought that it would be a good idea to let these communities interact. Also, it is quite frustrating that IR journals especially in the States seem to have all adopted something of an implicit formula that requires about five pages of theory followed by some twenty of empirical testing. That’s fine for many purposes, but I had the feeling that there was a need for a journal that would allow people to do straight theory if they wanted to.

Alexander Wendt is the Ralph D. Mershon Professor of International Security at The Mershon Center and Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science of the Ohio State University, and he is currently working on questions of global governance, IR Theory, and the philosophy of social science.

Who Influenced Wendt

• Prof. Raymond Duvall’s homepage
• Read Roy Bhaskar’s book A Realist Theory of Science (1975) online here (free)

About Wendt

• Wendt’s official homepage
• Official homepage of the journal International Theory

Wendt’s Work

• Read Wendt’s Anarchy is what States make of it: the social construction of power politics (International Organization, 1992) here (pdf)
• Read Wendt’s Why A World State is Inevitable (European Journal of International Relations, 2003) here (pdf)
• Read Wendt’s Social Theory as Cartesian Science: An Auto-Critique from a Quantum Perspective here (2005, pdf)

About Social Constructivism