As a quantitative, empirically oriented, plausibly rationalist systemic theorist in the American tradition, I should have many reasons to dislike Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation. The authors explicitly eschew theory (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015, 9). To the extent that the book does contain a causal story, it’s a hot mess: ideologies of progress, industrialization, and rational state-building all slosh around together in a chaotic ferment that somehow separates core from periphery and ushers in modernity. To a scholar familiar with the history of the period,Footnote 1 the trends that the book documents will not come as much of a surprise. And, of course, the book contains not a single regression.
In fact, my reaction to the book was quite the opposite, in part because some of the issues I just mentioned are some of the book’s greatest strengths. The authors’ refreshingly immodest goal is to change how we think about international relations theory by exploring the ideational and material dynamics that comprise the context in which it evolved. The whole of the historical pieces that the book draws together toward that end – a hugely important emergent property, modernity – is considerably greater than the sum of its parts. Although American IR scholars might sniff at the idea of describing its emergence rather than coming up with a comprehensive theory (as, indeed, do other contributors to this symposium, even if this is not a view shared by Buzan and Lawson, as their response makes clear), to my mind description is precisely what’s called for. Because by definition the entities that combine to produce an emergent property lack its most important characteristics, theorizing about emergent properties is challenging, to say the least, without indulging in flagrant posthockery.Footnote 2 Perhaps most important, the authors’ claim that ‘little IR scholarship assesses the overall impact of the nineteenth century on either the development of the discipline or the emergence of modern international order’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015, 55) can hardly be doubted in light of the mass of evidence that they present. In all, Buzan and Lawson have fired an erudite and lucid shot across the bow of American international relations theory. The warning should be heeded.
My goal in this article is to provide a sketch of how I see The Global Transformation contributing both to ‘American-school’ systemic theory in IR and to more concrete, behavioral studies of state behavior. I will argue that the book prompts us to think not just about the importance of its empirical subject matter for extant theory but about how theories should feed in to one another more generally. Which phenomena create the context within which other phenomena arise? What can we hypothesize, not just about interactions but about changes in the logic of interaction, that might help us to understand more about international relations past, present, and future?
Systemic theory in the American tradition
What I call ‘American-school’ systemic theory – by which I mean scholarship that focuses on the impact of the structure of the international system on the behavior of states and, sometimes, on the impact of state behavior on the structure of the system as wellFootnote 3 – holds a very unusual place in the American IR literature. It is unusually widely read: the syllabus for most introductory IR seminars at the graduate level has at least 1 week on systemic theory, and by tradition most syllabi start off with it. There is an impressively long history of works that approach IR from a systemic perspective, and some of the most-cited works in the history of the field come from this tradition. As that fact might suggest, however, they are also among the most criticized works in the field.
The persistent appeal of American-school IR in the face of widespread criticism suggests that, despite their dissatisfaction with it, scholars consider the relationship between structure and agents in international relations to be an important one. Indeed, some have gone to great lengths to build on systemic theory in an attempt to render its predictions more determinate. Neoclassical realists have concluded that structural factors alone are underdetermining of state behavior and have sought to combine them with unit-level attributes in an attempt to produce more concrete insights (e.g. Wohlforth Reference Wawro and Katznelson1993; Schweller Reference Rosecrance1998; for a good review see Rose Reference Polanyi1998). Others have either tried to put systemic theory on more coherent logical footing and/or narrow down more specific, testable hypotheses about state behavior that follow from it (Niou, Ordeshook and Rose Reference Nettl and Robertson1989; Maoz Reference Maoz2011; Braumoeller Reference Braumoeller2012).
The reason for the popularity of American-school systemic theory has to do, I think, with the appeal of the basic intuition that drives it: that the structure of the international system is a fundamental component of the context within which international interactions play out. Scholars have argued that the logic of interaction in bipolar systems is fundamentally different than it is in multipolar ones (Waltz Reference Sprout and Sprout1979); there are important differences between the behavior of states in heterogeneous vs. homogeneous systems (Aron Reference Aron1966); systems with different patterns of interaction flows reflect the presence of different political communities (Deutsch Reference Craig and George1966); and a system’s ‘culture of anarchy’ – Hobbesian, Kantian, or Lockian – pervades much of the behavior within it (Wendt Reference Waltz1999).
What Buzan and Lawson’s book compels us to think about is the fact that, much as systemic theory in IR conditions interactions among states, the forces that gave rise to modernity condition systemic theory (Phillips offers a fascinating extension of this point in his contribution to this symposium). In other words, The Global Transformation raises an old theoretical issue with immense potential for modern IR theory: the relationship between generative and descriptive structures. Most IR theory is designed to explain interactions among states, between states and non-state actors, and so on. The great promise of systemic theory is that it can provide an understanding of the context within which those interactions take place. As Ruggie (Reference Rose1998) pointed out, however, American-school systemic theory (in particular, Waltz’s) lacks a deeper, generative structure that would help us to understand the underlying principles that condition the interactions among states. In other words, it lacks what Reus-Smit (Reference Wendt2016), following Gilpin (Reference Gaddis1981), refers to as ‘systems change’, or change from one kind of international system to another. Understanding these principles is precisely the goal that Buzan and Lawson set for themselves, and they succeed brilliantly.
Does this mean that American-school systemic theorists need to broaden our horizons – to construct theories that connect the global transformation described by Buzan and Lawson to foreign policy outcomes like treaties and military conflict by way of configurations of power and ideas? I hope not. Frankly, IR theorists already have a formidable task in attempting to boil their subject matter down to something comprehensible without losing sight of its essence in the process. Grappling with the logical implications of existing theories is probably sufficient unto the day. Admittedly, Waltz’s reliance on Durkheim’s concept of dynamic density makes him a fair target for critics who find his conceptualization of the structure of the system unsatisfying. But to my mind requiring a generative structure of systemic theory makes no more sense than insisting that evolutionary biologists study the origins of mountain ranges and forests. Insisting that we focus on generative structure privileges a particular, sociological notion of the international system that deserves to be explored rather than taken for granted – or critiqued, as the contribution by Owens to this symposium would have it. Any causal story has to choose a starting point, and criticizing a story that takes structure as given opens us up to wondering where the forces that produced structure came from, and where the forces that produced the forces that produced structure came from, and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang.
While I don’t think that explaining the origins of the structure of the system is a task that we should set for anyone who wants to write about that structure, I do think that understanding all of these theories in relationship to one another is a promising direction in which to work. That is because deeper (or more fundamental, or causally prior) phenomena provide the context within which states interact and, in so doing, preconfigure or condition that interaction. In so doing we can see that these theories do not compete, in any meaningful way: rather, more fundamental theories provide the scope conditions within which more specific theories of international interaction are operative.
The geology of IR theory
In short, I would argue that we should take very seriously the idea that theories at one level of analysis condition theories at another, and we should focus our attention on both the promise and the challenge that that fact represents. Rather than attempting to revisit stale paradigm wars, we should be thinking in a more integrative fashion and asking ourselves how the deeper, elemental forces of ideas, material power, and state structure alter our perspective on the sources of state behavior.
Consider, for example, Herz’s (Reference Hart1951, 133, 134) discussion of the special place of political realism in international relations theory:
While the facts observed by Political Realism constitute a kind of geological substratum, the old granite layer under a certain area, and thus determines the fundamental structure and formations of that area, on it there arise a multitude of geological and biological, and even human-social, phenomena which give the substratum now one, now another ‘finish.’ The granite understructure determines its basic features; but within that framework there are multitudinous possibilities of development.
Herz’s geological analogy helps us, immediately and intuitively, to understand the contribution that he claims for realism: rather than having a direct impact on behavior at surface levels, it conditions the landscape upon which interactions take place. Nearly 50 years later, Ruggie (Reference Rose1998, 152) used a similar analogy to help clarify his discussion of the role of generative structure in systemic theory:
Waltz strives for, but fails fully to achieve, a generative formulation of international political structure …. In a generative structure, it will be recalled, the deeper structural levels have causal priority, and the structural levels closer to the surface of visible phenomena take effect only within a context that is already ‘prestructured’ by the deeper levels. For example, we ask of the distribution of capabilities within the international system what difference it makes for the impact of the general organizational effects of the deep structure of anarchy, as mediated by the more specific effects of the institutional framework of sovereignty. That is how the systemic effects of changes in the distribution of capabilities are determined. We then go on to ask how these systemic effects condition and constrain outcomes.
The juxtaposition of the two quotes highlights my earlier concern that the process of digging deeper, once begun, has no particular logical end point: it’s probably turtles all the way down, from state behavior to structural distributions to sovereignty to anarchy (to biology to physics to, etc.), and there is no particular reason other than habit or disciplinary inertia to condemn a theorist for focusing on some turtles more than others. On the other hand, it does point to the potential utility of thinking of theories in relation to one another and focusing on which outcomes at one level of analysis are contingent on outcomes at other levels – outcomes that change over time. In so doing, it also brings to the fore the nature of theorizing itself – a recurring theme in this symposium as identified by Reus-Smit in his opening essay.
While it may be unrealistic or even counterproductive to attempt to bridge the gulf between a generative theory of the international system and a theory of foreign policy, therefore, it could be highly productive to reconsider systemic theories, or theories of interstate interaction, in light of the sort of historical dynamics that Buzan and Lawson describe.
In search of deeper answers
While it should be clear that The Global Transformation gives welcome empirical accompaniment to theoretical critiques of systemic IR theory that focus on its failure to address generative structures, it might be less obvious that the book holds great promise for a different body of scholarship: the quantitative mainstream American IR literatures on the sources of international conflict, the role and origins of international institutions, the genesis of civil wars, the nature of foreign policy decisionmaking, and so on. By situating the major material and intellectual trends of the 19th century together in broader perspective, Buzan and Lawson make a compelling argument that the past two centuries of international relations can best be understood as having taken place in, and having comprised, a dynamic, evolving international context. As Reus-Smit (Reference Wendt2016) and Phillips (Reference Wohlforth2016) claim, Buzan and Lawson consider these changes profound enough to constitute a ‘breakpoint change’, a dramatic transformation to a qualitatively new system. While this is a point that has been made before, it has rarely been made so pointedly or aimed so directly at American studies of international relations. On another level, then, The Global Transformation represents a challenge to IR researchers to think about how our understandings of the world might be contingent upon the larger historical context within which they are embedded and to re-think the question of how the interactions that we seek to understand are conditional on deeper material and ideational dynamics.
What kinds of questions might Buzan and Lawson’s arguments raise for empirical, quantitative IR scholars whose focus is the day-to-day interactions of states? A few possibilities come to mind. First, to what extent is the stuff of which the world is made the same stuff that it was made of in 1815? Buzan and Lawson (Reference Buzan and Lawson2015, 55) point out that
[a]lthough mention is often made of the Concert of Europe and changes to the nineteenth-century balance of power, what mainstream IR misses are issues beyond the distribution of power—in other words the transformation in the mode of power that was fuelled by industrialization, the emergence of rational states, and the novel ideologies associated with historical progress.
This argument strikes directly at the heart of one of the most commonly used metrics in statistical studies of IR: the Correlates of War national material capabilities index. The national material capabilities index measures relative capabilities as a function of a handful of factors, many of them industrial in nature. It does concede some rough discontinuities over time: pig iron production is utilized prior to 1900, for example, while steel production is utilized thereafter, and the scholars who oversee the project make an impressive attempt to generate a consistent measure of energy production given the considerable changes in energy technology over time. Buzan and Lawson’s critique is more fundamental, however: it suggests that how power was understood changed over time. To the extent that that claim is true, it represents an opportunity to improve the quality of our data on national capabilities.Footnote 4 Less narrowly, it represents an opportunity to improve our understanding of history via the modern metrics in which that history is embodied – to understand the 19th century as something more than ‘a neutral site for the testing of theoretical claims’ (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015, 56).
Similarly, the authors provide a compelling account of the growth of interaction capacity – both physical and social – throughout the 19th century (Buzan and Lawson Reference Buzan and Lawson2015, Ch. 3). Given that international interactions require both the opportunity to interact and the willingness to do so (Starr 1978), accounting for interaction capacity is a crucial and often-neglected component of modeling state behavior, whether our focus is pairs of states or (as is increasingly the case) networks. While early attempts to deal with this problem utilized a fairly arbitrary loss-of-strength gradient (Boulding Reference Boulding1962; Bueno de Mesquita Reference Bueno de Mesquita1981), at present most scholars follow the simple rule of thumb laid out by Maoz and Russett (Reference Lemke1993): pairs of states are ‘politically relevant’ if they are contiguous or if one of them is a major power. Only Lemke (Reference Kohn1995) has sought to improve on this measure of political relevance by using historical sources, and he only did so within a very narrow spatial and temporal domain. An improved measure of interaction capacity would be a fascinating study in its own right, and to the extent that present approximations of political relevance overstate interaction capacity, an improved measure would almost certainly uncover larger and more robust relationships between variables of interest to students of IR.
Digging still deeper, we might find that relationships of interest to us vary over time in a manner consistent with the unfolding of modernity. In my own work, for example, I find that the Great Powers were consistently able to alter the ideological and material balance of the international system – except in 19th century Europe, where the flowering of precisely the ideologies of progress described by Buzan and Lawson drove large changes in political ideology on the Continent that could not be accounted for by the activities of the Great Powers. Conversely, when I used a moving sum of averages test to explore the question of whether the Great Powers’ responsiveness to systemic incentives or ability to affect systemic outcomes had changed significantly across the 19th century, as Craig and George (Reference Reus-Smit1983) argue they had, to my surprise I found no evidence to that effect. While recent advances in political methodology by Wawro and Katznelson (Reference Starr2014) make it easier to explore the impact of historical context on outcomes in international relations, thoughtful scholars have been making this point for quite some time (e.g. Goertz 1994). What Buzan and Lawson add is a coherent and powerful account of the sorts of historical forces that should be taken into account when thinking about the context of international relations.
In short, the critique by Swedberg cited in the opening contribution to this symposium – that ‘theorizing has been reduced to choosing between pre-existing theories, as one chooses cereal in a supermarket’ – applies equally to the selection of pre-existing data sets and methodologies. Buzan and Lawson’s book makes a compelling case that we must do better.
Conclusion
As the other contributors to this symposium have pointed out, Buzan and Lawson’s contribution to IR theory and to the historical sociology of the 19th century is considerable. While echoing these points, I have also argued that their work has great (and probably underappreciated) potential to enrich the American, and especially quantitative, study of IR by focusing researchers’ attention on the ‘deeper’ phenomena that provide the context within which international interactions take place. I don’t know how many members of (say) the Peace Science Society will heed this call to incorporate the rich, dynamic history described by Buzan and Lawson into their work, but I am certain that, to the extent that they do, our understanding of IR will be very much improved as a result.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to George Lawson, the editors of International Theory, and three anonymous reviewers for thoughtful and constructive feedback.
