Sovereignty, Survival and the Westphalian Blind Alley in International Relations

DAREL E. PAUL1

Abstract. That states are sovereign units interacting under conditions of anarchy has long been the core assumption of the discipline of International Relations. Operating largely with an anthropomorphic conceptualization of the state, ‘statists’ create a stunted ontology of the international system dominated by the concepts of state survival and an assumed state survival interest. By constituting sharp lines of demarcation between being and non-being, between ‘life’ and ‘death’, statists ignore a host of more subtle changes in the ontological status of states which are ill-treated by reference to ‘survival’. This Westphalian ontology leads ultimately to a dead end, for such a deﬁnition rejects from the outset an ontology of overlapping political authorities in a single territory but at distinct scales which is characteristic not only of the present international system but of the so-called Westphalian era as well.

Introduction

That states are the primary actors on the international stage, sovereign units interacting under conditions of anarchy, has long been the core assumption of the discipline of International Relations. It is shared today among most mainstream scholars in the ﬁeld, whether neorealist, neoliberal or constructivist. I refer to those approaches which build their theories around sovereignty and the sovereign state as ‘statist’. The statist ontology has been taken to task on many occasions by constructivists seeking to demonstrate the importance of intersubjective meanings, constitutive rules and norms, and institutions in the international arena.2 They have focused particularly on the institution of sovereignty as central to the social identities of states.3 In doing so, however, constructivists have bypassed an even deeper

1 I would like to thank Raymond Duvall, Glenda Morgan, Himadeep Muppidi, Hans Nesseth, Ido Oren, Richard Price, the participants of the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this article. All shortcomings remain my own. 2 Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie, ‘International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State’, International Organization, 40 (1986), pp. 753–75; Alexander Wendt, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization, 41 (1987), pp. 335–70, and ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It: the Social Construction of Power Politics,’ International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 391–425; David Dessler, ‘What’s at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?’, International Organization, 43 (1989), pp. 441–73; Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, ‘Institutions and International Order’, in Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James N. Rosenau (eds.), Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges: Approaches to World Politics for the 1990s (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 51–73; Emanuel Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics,’ European Journal of International Relations, 3 (1997), pp. 319–63. 3 See for example the collection of essays in Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 217 218 Darel E. Paul critique of the statist ontology, one directed at the very definition of the state and at its core animating principle, the ‘survival interest’. Statists operate with a largely anthropomorphic conceptualization of the state. The language of ‘survival’ and ‘survival interest’ indeed implies the existence of a living corporeal entity. The result is an ontology constituted by sharp lines of demarcation between being and non-being, between ‘life’ and ‘death’. This ignores a host of more subtle changes in the ontological status of states which are ill-treated by reference to ‘survival’. For example, when the United Kingdom granted autonomy to the British Dominions, did Canada, Ireland, Australia and the other self-governing colonies only then come into existence? When Bavaria joined the Prussian- dominated North German Confederation in 1871 to create the German Empire, did Bavaria cease to exist? Now that the euro has been introduced, will the separate states of the European Union ‘disappear’? Statists tend to rely on sovereignty to answer such questions, for it is the sovereign state which is the foundation of their ontology. However, there is something more fundamental than sovereignty which defines a state’s existence. The British Dominions, prior to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, were clearly not sovereign yet exercised domestic authority and possessed a definite international capacity and personality, even holding membership in the League of Nations. Non-sovereign Bavaria exchanged ambassadors with sovereign states after the creation of the German Empire and signed treaties with them, a right which it exercised extensively from 1871 to 1918. Other diffuse polities such as the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the early United States, the German Bund, the Swiss Confederation, the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, not to mention contemporary federal states and even some decentralized unitary ones, are cases whose central and member states both exist(ed) and exercise(d) international capacities, the latter without the stamp of sovereignty. If it is true that ‘to be’ is not equivalent to ‘to be sovereign’, the very notion of a state survival interest becomes muddled to say the least. In an anthropomorphized world of corporeal states, the line between life and death is rather sharp, with an easily assumed actor preference for life. Absent such a state, and the difference between sovereignty and non-existence becomes instead a large zone of transition where preferences for one or another mode of being are not at all obvious. It may even be that federation, as among the thirteen confederated states of North America, or a pooling of sovereignty, as among the fifteen members of the Euro- pean Union, is a strategy precisely to promote state survival (albeit in a non- sovereign form), not renounce it. As Daniel Deudney notes in his study of the ‘Philadelphian system’ of the pre- Civil War United States, ‘Not every authoritative political order, state apparatus, territorially distinct polity, or internationally recognized sovereign is a real-state.’ 4 By claiming otherwise, statists create an ontology which confuses being with the terms of being. The source of these difficulties lies in what this paper calls the ‘Westphalian blind alley’. By defining the state as the sovereign Westphalian state, a monopolist of the use of legitimate force within a circumscribed territory, statists follow a pathway which ultimately leads to a dead end, for such a definition rejects

4 Daniel H. Deudney, ‘The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, circa 1787–1861’, International Organization, 49 (1995), p. 193. Sovereignty, survival and the Westphalian blind alley 219 from the outset an ontology of overlapping political authorities in a single territory but at distinct scales.5 The article is organized into four sections. The first two lay out the charge of statism against the rationalist approaches of neorealism and neoliberalism as well as against an unlikely bedfellow, the constructivist approach of Alexander Wendt. The third section demonstrates how both rationalists and Wendtian constructivists find themselves in the Westphalian blind alley and illustrates the deficiencies in con- ceiving of states as living beings with an interest in survival. Finally, the article critiques a promising constructivist escape route from this blind alley and offers instead a structural definition of the state capable both of incorporating a complex and nuanced geography of overlapping states and ultimately of offering Inter- national Relations a framework for studying states sovereign, post-sovereign and non-sovereign.

The statist approach I: Rationalism

Both broad rationalist approaches in International Relations, neorealism and neoliberalism, have been upbraided for their narrow approach to the discipline. John Ruggie and Rodney Bruce Hall and Friedrich Kratochwil have ably demonstrated neorealists’ inability to comprehend the medieval era of overlapping states and authority rights and claims, an anarchy without sovereignty. Richard Ashley has shown how the neorealist/neoliberal commitment to what he calls the ‘heroic practice’ simultaneously commits rationalists to an interpretation of the world through sovereignty, and thus makes them incapable of speaking of international relations outside the framework of anarchy and sovereignty. Rob Walker has demonstrated the neorealist afﬁnity for ‘the theme of Gulliver’, a penchant for seeing any international system different from the Westphalian one as simply a larger or smaller reproduction of the very same system of sovereign states, rather than one based on a relation other than sovereignty.6

5 Scale is a geographical term meaning ‘the level of geographical resolution at which a given phenomenon is thought of, acted on or studied . . . the focal setting at which spatial boundaries are deﬁned for a speciﬁc social claim, activity or behaviour’. See John Agnew, ‘The Dramaturgy of Horizons: Geographical Scale in the “Reconstruction of Italy” by the New Italian Political Parties, 1992–95’, Political Geography, 16 (1997), p. 100. For example, the spatial boundaries of the state of Bavaria overlapped with that of the 19th century German Bund. Both ‘states’ exercised authority over the territory of Bavaria. These two states existed ‘in’ the same territory but at different scales, one at the ‘Bund’ scale and one at the ‘Staat’ scale. 6 John Ruggie, ‘Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Towards a Neorealist Synthesis’, World Politics, 35 (1983), pp. 261–85, and ‘Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47 (1993), pp. 139–174; Rodney Bruce Hall and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, ‘Medieval Tales: Neorealist ‘science’ and the Abuse of History’, International Organization, 47 (1993), pp. 479–91; Richard Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique’, Millennium, 17 (1988), pp. 227–62; and R. B. J. Walker, ‘The Territorial State and the theme of Gulliver’, International Journal, 39 (1984), pp. 529–52. For excellent recent examples of the ‘theme of Gulliver’, see the treatment of the European Union in Kenneth Waltz, ‘The Emerging Structure of International Politics’, International Security, 18 (1993), pp. 44–79, and Jonathan Mercer, ‘Anarchy and Identity’, International Organization, 49 (1995), pp. 229–52. 220 Darel E. Paul

This article builds on these critiques, yet seeks to extend them further into rationalism’s individualist ontology as well as into the historical record. The concept of state survival acts as a useful entry point. Both neorealism and neoliberalism are grounded in the assumption that the core interest of all states is self-preservation, and it is this desire to survive which acts as the fundamental animating principle of the state and the bedrock upon which ‘self-interest’ rests.7 Students of International Relations have become so accustomed to seeing this assumption that they have likely developed an intuitive sense of its meaning. Nevertheless, this vague sense of understanding is just that, and there remains much left unsaid. What is this thing called the ‘state’ which wants to survive? What does ‘survival’ mean when speaking of the state? Kenneth Waltz relies upon an analogy between the international system and a market in comparing states to firms. He suggests that identifying states in the international system for the purposes of defining the structure of that system is a simple process of ‘counting’ them, just as the definition of market structure is done by counting firms.8 This process, however, is not quite as simple as Waltz portrays. How do we decide on a method for counting firms? For example, it is clear that General Motors and Ford are two distinct firms. What about General Motors and Saturn? Organizationally, Saturn is a division of GM and thus both are part of one overall entity. However, GM and Saturn are, according to law, distinct legal persons. Saturn can be sued without simultaneously dragging General Motors into court. Further- more, Saturn has a great deal of autonomy in making decisions and acting in the market. Clearly both entities exist as relatively autonomous market participants, and yet are not completely segmented as are GM and Ford. Robert Gilpin and Robert Keohane appeal more to classical realism, defining the state as a ruling organization or government, although Gilpin expands his meaning by intimately linking such an organization to the society over which it exercises authority. Thus Gilpin further defines the state, or as he prefers, the ‘nation-state’, as one historically specific form of ‘conflict group’.9 In defining the state as a ‘group’ or a kind of ‘tribe’, Gilpin offers a kind of synthesis of government and population, what Raymond Aron calls ‘the collectivity [leaders and led] constitute together’.10 Counting states, however, runs into many of the same difficulties encountered in counting firms. Clearly Canada and Cuba are two distinct ‘groups’. What about Canada and the United Kingdom? The 1931 Statute of Westminster formally granted Canada and the other Dominions status as sovereign states. Yet prior to 1939, none of the British Dominions possessed a recognized right to declare neutrality in a British war. Until 1947, the British Privy Council was the highest

7 For neorealism, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979); Joseph Grieco, Cooperation among Nations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); and John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security 19 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 5–49. For neoliberalism, see Robert O. Keohane, ‘Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond’, in Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 158–203; and James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, ‘A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era’, International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 467–91. 8 Waltz, Theory, pp. 98–9. 9 Robert Gilpin, ‘The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism’, in Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics, pp. 304–5. 10 Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), p. 72. Sovereignty, survival and the Westphalian blind alley 221

Canadian court of appeal and Canada was without its own passports or even citizenship. Until 1952 the Canadian Governor General was always a member of British royalty, not a Canadian. Even up until the ‘patriation’ of the Canadian constitution in 1982, the British parliament passed all Canadian constitutional legislation. For a current case, take the European Union and its member states. The EU is represented in its own capacity at meetings of the G-7 countries, GATT rounds, and in various multinational organizations such as the Council of Europe. It has its own powers of taxation and legislation, and now even its own monetary policy, yet these exist alongside the powers of its supposedly sovereign member- states, who also conduct foreign policies and negotiations in their own stead. These problems of differentiation are generally ignored by rationalists. The shortcomings of such neglect are manifest in their treatment of state survival. The most prevalent route to state demise in neorealist thinking is physical destruction.11 Joseph Grieco, for example, speaks of ‘using violence . . . to dominate or even destroy [states]’, and John Mearsheimer offers up ‘mass killing,’ ‘mass murder’ and ‘total destruction of the state’.12 By defining state survival in physical terms, such authors imply that the physical parameters of a state, its territory and population, define existence, just as (from a materialist perspective) the destruction of the human body marks the boundary of an individual person’s existence. It is obvious, however, that physical destruction of a state does not equal state demise. Many states or ‘tribes’ survive massive destruction of their physical and human populations. There must be something beyond physical destruction then that defines state survival. An alternative conceptualization is Kenneth Waltz’s likening of state demise to the bankruptcy of a firm, causing it to drop out of the market.13 Yet bankruptcy is a legal phenomenon usually spared the horrors of physical violence. This in turn makes the survival interest of firms quite unlike that of states, and thus the analogy is limited to say the least. It is apparent, nevertheless, from both conceptualizations that it is the demise of ‘actorhood’ which defines survival, and which returns us to the definition of the state-as-actor. To overcome the difficulties in ‘counting’ units of analysis embedded in complex relations with one another, rationalists synthesize state existence (under the label ‘survival’) with what is usually termed ‘independence,’14 or more sloppily,

11 Joseph Grieco is largely correct when he argues ‘Neoliberal theory does not give evidence of an awareness of the existence or impact of these perceived dangers [of war] for states attributed to anarchy by realism.’ However, as Robert Keohane notes, ‘we must understand that neoliberal institutionalism is not simply an alternative to neorealism, but, in fact, claims to subsume it. Under speciﬁed conditions—where mutual interests are low and relative gains are therefore particularly important to states—neoliberal theory expects neorealism to explain elements of state behavior.’ It is precisely when threats to state survival are present that this common ground under the feet of both neorealists and neoliberals would be expected to exist. See Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations,p.38, and Keohane, International Institutions and State Power (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 15–16. 12 Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations, p. 38; Mearsheimer, ‘False Promise’, p. 11. 13 Waltz, Theory,p.77. 14 For example, Grieco argues that ‘survival and independence constitute [states’] core interest’ singular, not interests plural. Keohane likewise equates ‘self-preservation’ ultimately with ‘national independence’. See Grieco, Cooperation Among Nations, p. 39 (emphasis added), and Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 121. 222 Darel E. Paul

‘sovereignty.’15 From this synthesis emerges the premise that ‘to be’ in the international system is ‘to be sovereign’. Likewise only sovereign actors actually exist or are incorporated into an ontology of the international system. The equation of survival and actorhood with independence and sovereignty, however, is both mis- taken and misleading. Survival is a matter of existence; independence or sovereignty deﬁne the terms of this existence. The two concepts, while closely related, are distinct, two elements of an ontology. As David Dessler notes, ‘an ontology is a structured set of entities; it consists not only of certain designated kinds of things but also of connections or relations between them’.16 Survival is concerned with the basic fact of the existence of the ‘things’ themselves. Sovereignty is a statement of the relations between them. Thus sovereignty is not a constituent element of the state. A state can certainly exist and yet not exercise the high degree of autonomy suggested by rationalists, such as the states of the Soviet bloc prior to 1989, Cuba under the Platt Amendment, or China during the 19th century. All these states were formally sovereign yet under the de facto if not de jure control of another or others. Formally non-sovereign states such as colonies, territories, or even member states of federal or confederal systems, are starker examples of states having an objective existence and even capabilities of international actorhood without being fully autonomous.

The statist approach II: Wendtian constructivism

There are many divergent strands of constructivism in International Relations theory today. Emanuel Adler discerns at least four approaches within the overall ‘mediative position’ of constructivism. The largest is a ‘modernist’ group establishing an empirical constructivist project in security studies.17 A leading theorist of this camp, as well as the most widely read and cited constructivist in the discipline, is Alexander Wendt. It is his work which acts as the leading voice of statism within constructivist thought in IR.18 Wendt has been a dogged critic of the rationalist approach in International Relations for over a decade. He has developed his alternative in direct response to

15 Waltz claims that ‘To say that a state is sovereign means that it decides for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems . . . States develop their own strategies, chart their own courses, make their own decisions’. Gilpin agrees, stating ‘The state is sovereign in that it must answer to no higher authority in the international sphere. It alone defines and protects the rights of individuals and groups.’ See Waltz, Theory, p. 96, and Gilpin, War and Change, p. 17. 16 Dessler, ‘What’s at Stake’, p. 445. 17 See Adler, ‘Seizing the Middle Ground’, pp. 319–363. Adler includes in this group: himself, Alexander Wendt, Michael Barnett, Martha Finnemore, Audie Klotz, Thomas Risse-Kappen, and the contributors to Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). See p. 352, fn. 39. 18 It is not clear to what degree other more empirically-minded constructivists can be included in this critique, in that they do not elucidate their theoretical position to the degree that Wendt does. Nevertheless, if it is true that the wide array of constructivists appearing in The Culture of National Security, for example, accept Wendt’s theory (as implied in Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt and Peter J. Katzenstein, ‘Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security’, in Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security, pp. 33–75 ; see especially pp. 37, 41) they then may be included. Other noted constructivists such as Adler and John Ruggie, however, are not statists in my evaluation and thus should not be included. Sovereignty, survival and the Westphalian blind alley 223 rationalism, seeking to provide a ‘sociological’ theory in opposition to the pre- dominant ‘economic’ approaches of neorealism and neoliberalism.19 Wendt maps his alternative by distinguishing constructivism from rationalist approaches along two continua: the ‘extent to which system structure is social’ and the ‘extent to which states are constructed by the system’.20 According to Wendt, constructivism scores ‘high’ on both dimensions. It argues against neorealism that system structure is primarily social rather than material. It also argues against both neorealism and neoliberalism that states are socially constructed rather than ontologically primitive. Thus state identities and interests are determined endogenously to the system rather than exogenously. It is here that Wendt makes his argument most forcefully, for he contends that rationalist approaches, which assume state self-determination, are unable to explain or even discuss changes in state interests and identities. For rationalists, these changes will always be taken as given and thus unexplained and untheorized. Constructivism, by treating them as a ‘dependent variable’, can offer accounts which neorealism and neoliberalism cannot. In evaluating Wendtian constructivism, we must first ask the same questions posed to rationalism: what is the state, and what is the meaning of ‘survival’? Wendt defines the state as the government, identifying it by means of its ‘corporate identity’, namely the ‘constituent individuals, physical resources, and the shared beliefs and institutions in virtue of which individuals function as a “we”’.21 The corporate identity of any state leads to certain ‘needs’ or ‘appetites’ with which rationalists have already familiarized us, the most important of which is ‘physical security, including its differentiation from other actors’.22 This objective need can be easily translated into the well-heeled realist state interest in ‘survival’,23 defined by Wendt as the preservation of the government as a coherent and differentiated organization.24 The analogy between persons and states is as prevalent in Wendt’s work as it is among rationalists, with Wendt going so far as to suggest states some- times get ‘killed’ and equating an end to state differentiation with individual persons ‘sacrific[ing] their lives for others’.25 Corporate identity, however, is only part of the state’s overall identity. The majority is composed of what Wendt calls ‘social identity’ and which most constructivists simply refer to as ‘identity’ without modification, defined as ‘sets of meanings that an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective of others, that is, as a social object’.26 A state’s social identity is something produced through interaction with other states, i.e. socially constructed. One of these social identities is as a sovereign state, constructed via the international institution of sovereignty.

19 Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is what States makes of it: the Social Construction of Power Politics’, International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 391–425. 20 Alexander Wendt and Daniel Friedheim, ‘Hierarchy under Anarchy: Informal Empire and the East German State’, International Organization, 49 (1995), p. 693. The graph is reproduced in Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein, ‘Norms, Identity, and Culture’, p. 38. 21 Alexander Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation and the International State’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), p. 385. 22 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 385. 23 Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein, ‘Norms, Identity and Culture’, p. 60. 24 Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 402. 25 Wendt, ‘Constructing International Politics’, International Security, 20 (Summer 1995), p. 80; ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 386. For a neorealist parallel, see Waltz’s depiction of states as entities which may ‘live, prosper, or die’, in Waltz, Theory,p.91. 26 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 385. 224 Darel E. Paul

Whereas neorealists in particular take sovereignty as an expression of a state’s internal capabilities, constructivists understand sovereignty to be an international institution of mutual recognition of governmental authority over a particular territory or territories. In a system of sovereign states, identities are primarily relational, not individual, because they are dependent upon recognition by others in the system. Wendt juxtaposes sovereignty against the ‘Hobbesian state of nature’ to demonstrate the difference the social construction of identity makes. In Hobbes’ world, states are differentiated in two ways, first by ‘domestic processes’, and second by the ‘material capacity to deter threats’. In a sovereign world, the first element remains. However, the second changes into ‘mutual recognition’ which provides a social rather than material base for state security.27 By defining sovereignty as a social institution, constructivism seeks to separate sovereignty from the state. Without sovereignty there would be no mutual recognition, yet there could still be states because sovereignty is an aspect of the state’s social, not corporate, identity. Wendt argues he can imagine non-sovereign states, for statehood itself ‘implies neither stable territoriality nor sovereignty’.28 Thus it would appear that constructivism, unlike rationalism, can accommodate a non-sovereign ontology of the international system. This stark difference between Wendt and the rationalists, however, is more apparent than real. According to the continuum which differentiates constructivism from rationalism, namely the ‘extent to which states are constructed by the system’, Wendt does not really answer ‘high’. He in fact admits as much when establishing his theoretical continuum of sociality in which ‘fully socialized’ Wendtian constructivism is situated between ‘undersocialized’ rationalism29 and an ‘oversocialized approach’ 30 advanced by postmodernists who deny any essential elements to the state.31 Wendt offers what he terms ‘a weak or essentialist social constructivism’ apparent from the above discussion of sovereignty and the Hobbesian world.32 Both systems contain the common ‘domestic processes’ element which differentiates states from one another and yet is not socially constructed. Instead, these processes are ‘prior to interaction’.33 Thus, at a very basic level, rationalism and Wendtian constructivism share common ground in positing ontologically primitive units which have certain given and immutable interests, in particular an interest in survival.34 Wendt creates this ‘weak constructivism’ through his use of symbolic interactionism pioneered by sociologist George Herbert Mead. Wendt’s debt to Mead is best evident in his distinction between the socially constructed ‘me’ aspect of the agent (‘social identity’) and the extra- or pre-social ‘I’ aspect (‘corporate identity’) which comes directly from Mead. The pre-social nature of state corporate identity is particularly evident in Wendt’s involved discussion of ‘states in the state of nature before their first

27 Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 412. 28 Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 402. 29 Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, p. 402. 30 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 385. 31 Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein, ‘Norms, Identity and Culture’, pp. 42, 46. 32 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 385. 33 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 385. 34 It is precisely on this note where constructivists such as Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett part company with the more rationalist work of Wendt, arguing that both a state’s social identity as well as its ‘domestic characteristics and practices’ can be socially constructed. See Adler and Barnett, ‘Governing Anarchy: A Research Agenda for the Study of Security Communities’, Ethics and International Affairs, 10 (1996), pp. 63–98, particularly p. 76. Sovereignty, survival and the Westphalian blind alley 225 encounter’ and the exchange between the ideal agents ‘ego and alter—encountering each other for the first time’.35 Ego and alter exist prior to interaction. Only their subjectivity is changed in the meeting. Neither their corporate identities nor the interests derived from them are either altered or defined through interaction. Wendt’s commitment to symbolic interactionism, however, does not sit well with his simultaneous, and in fact prior, commitment to structurationism. Anthony Giddens, one of the founders of structurationism, has many reservations concerning symbolic interactionism. According to Giddens, Mead treats the ‘I’ ‘as a given or unexplained component’.36 Giddens also notes that ‘the “I” appears in Mead’s writings as the given core of agency, and its origins hence always remain obscure’.37 He could have said quite the same thing of Wendt after reading the latter’s assertion that ‘a theory of the states system need no more explain the existence of states than one of society need explain that of people.’ 38 Indeed Giddens’s work, as a theory of society, makes no effort to account for the existence of persons. Of course, human beings are pre-social in a way in which groups or organizations such as states are not. There is a significant ‘natural’ element to human beings, be it our bodies, genes, psychological structure, etc., which is indeed ontologically primitive, and no theory of society need explain it. This does not mean, however, that everything about the human being, all its ‘constituent elements,’ are pre-social. Giddens argues that ‘the same structural characteristics participate in the subject (the actor) as in the object (society). Structure forms ‘personality’ and ‘society’ simultaneously—but in neither case exhaustively.’ 39 Personality is clearly the ‘I’ rather than the ‘me,’ and therefore Giddens claims, in Wendt’s terms, that the corporate identity of the actor is indeed socially constructed. Thus Giddens maintains a structurationist position regarding the human individual which Wendt will not even support for the state! The upshot is that the synthesis Wendt seeks to concoct between symbolic interactionism and structurationism is ultimately untenable. By placing state corporate identity outside the duality of structure, Wendt’s constructivism, like symbolic interactionism, has a starting point ‘rooted in the subject’ rather than in both subject and structure simultaneously.40 At its most basic level, Wendt’s approach is agent- centred and rationalistic, meaning that at least core interests and identities are determined exogenously to practice, despite claims otherwise. The dispute between rationalism and Wendtian constructivism thus becomes one of degree rather than of kind.

The Westphalian blind alley

Max Weber’s deﬁnition of the modern (International Relations would say ‘Westphalian’) state is perhaps the most famous and most travelled of all those in

35 Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, pp. 401, 404. 36 Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 121. 37 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: California University Press, 1984), p. 43. 38 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 385. 39 Giddens, Central Problems, p. 70. 40 Giddens, Central Problems, p. 121. 226 Darel E. Paul the social sciences. Weber defined the state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.’ 41 The appropriation of Weber’s conceptualization by statists is widespread.42 Realists and neorealists are quite explicit in their reliance on Weber. Hans Morgenthau says ‘‘‘State” is but another name for the compulsory organization of society, that is, for the legal order which determines the conditions under which society can employ its monopoly of organized violence’, or again that sovereignty is a characteristic of the ‘territorial state’ through which ‘the government . . . [exercises] supreme authority within the territory of the state.’ 43 Markus Fisher points out that ‘neorealism . . . defines the state as the monopoly of legitimate force over a given territory’.44 Such a conceptualization of the state lurks in the back- ground of Wendtian constructivism as well. Wendt suggests the state is a com- bination of both centralized authority and legitimate control.45 He also argues that ‘In the Westphalian state system, state agents and authority structures did coincide spatially which leads to the familiar billiard ball imagery of ‘states’ (actors, under which authority structures are subsumed) interacting under anarchy.’ 46 Such a definition leads straight into a blind alley because it cannot incorporate overlapping states, or states at multiple scales. If a state is defined as possessing a monopoly on the use of force in a particular territory, it is impossible to allow for the existence of multiple states in the same territory. This outcome is also quite consistent with the statist equation of statehood and independence. Thus the only state, or political authority if you will, possible in the statist’s ontology is the real- state: hierarchical, coercive, and sovereign.47 Rationalists will likely argue that this blind alley is nothing very serious. While limited in their ontology, in practice they will rely upon measures of relative power to identify their units. For them, sovereignty is mediated by power, and thus ultimately actor capabilities carry the day, not the legal status of states. However, this does not obviate the prior need to identify the units which have capabilities and exercise power. The Ottoman Empire was a sovereign yet notoriously decentralized state. The non-sovereign province of Egypt became increasingly autonomous under the reign of Muhammad Ali (1805–1849), even fighting two wars against the Ottoman Sultan. Nevertheless, Ali never declared himself independent of the Empire. After Ali’s death, Egypt gained the right to sign ‘nonpolitical’ treaties with sovereign states and to manage its military without oversight from the Sultan. Yet Egyptian rulers continued to pay tribute to Istanbul, accepted the presence of an Ottoman commissioner in the Egyptian government, went to the Sultan for per-

41 Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 78. 42 Despite this widespread appropriation throughout International Relations, the discipline has oddly ignored Weber’s general sociology. See Tarak Barkawi, ‘Strategy as a Vocation: Weber, Morgenthau and Modern Strategic Studies’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 159–84, particularly p. 165. 43 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), pp. 396, 209. 44 Fisher, ‘Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices’, International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 427–66, particularly p. 429. 45 Wendt and Friedheim, ‘Hierarchy under Anarchy’, p. 696. 46 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 392. 47 The incomplete appropriation of Weber by International Relations, more so than Weber himself, is responsible for the blind alley down which statists have travelled. I thank two anonymous reviewers for making this point clear to me. Sovereignty, survival and the Westphalian blind alley 227 mission to change Egyptian laws of succession, and submitted Egypt’s annual budgets to Istanbul for approval. Even after the British occupation in 1882, Egypt continued legally as a province of the Ottoman Empire. Did Ottoman capabilities include those of Egypt? The British Empire was similarly diffuse, if not as contentious. During World War I the Dominions, not the Empire, enacted con- scription and supplied London with men and materiel as matters of Dominion, not Empire, decision. This is difficult to reconcile with a notion of a single ‘British’ actor. On the other hand, if these are multiple states, how are we to account for reception in the Dominions of the British Parliament’s declaration of war as a declaration for the entire Empire? Rationalist practice tends to be to use sovereignty to answer these thorny questions. Those actors with recognized sovereignty become units, and those without are marginalized. It is sovereignty which allows them to ‘find’ their units in the world. Rationalists in effect adopt the international legal doctrine of sovereignty, prior to any analysis of power or autonomous authority, as their measure of state existence. Wendtian constructivism adopts the same method. Wendt, recall, claims that sovereignty is a social and contingent, not corporate and intrinsic, identity of states.48 He is able to say so only due to a sparse definition of sovereignty. Constructivism’s definition of sovereignty captures only its social dimension, and so it is not surprising that Wendt argues sovereignty is strictly a social identity. Yet Wendt, too, explicitly relies upon sovereignty to ‘find’ states in the world, and in this way sovereignty enters into the intrinsic nature of the state itself. Take Wendt’s empirical study (co-authored with Friedheim) of ‘informal empire’ and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as an example. Wendt admits the GDR was not an autonomous state. As part of the Soviet bloc for its entire existence, many of its core interests and even its identity were constructed from the outside. On the face of it, the GDR’s candidacy for ‘actorhood’ seems no better (nor worse) than that of non- sovereign states such as formal colonies or members of federal states. Yet for Wendt it was a state and eligible for status as a unit of analysis because of its juridical sovereignty, reflected particularly in its status as a subject of international law. This is what made the GDR a ‘country’ rather than a ‘colony’ and its government a ‘state’ rather than a ‘Soviet Socialist Republic’ such as Estonia or Ukraine. Wendt claims to be able to conceive of a system of states which are not sovereign in a social sense. However, he has no criteria for finding states other than juridical sovereignty and thus cannot conceive of non-sovereign states in an intrinsic sense. What would be the units of analysis in a non-sovereign world? How would Wendt identify them? 49 This is the Westphalian blind alley from which it is impossible to speak of states without sovereignty, of overlapping constituent identities, or of multiple scales. Rather than sift the relations between states empirically, statists choose instead to begin with a definition which ultimately telescopes the discipline and makes its students unable to clearly ask and answer questions pointed towards the most fundamental ontological relations between states.

48 Wendt, ‘Anarchy’, pp. 412–3; Wendt and Friedheim, ‘Hierarchy under Anarchy’, p. 698. 49 This logic is largely repeated by Wendt when he cites David Strang’s study of the movement of states from sovereign to dependent status as an issue not of sovereign statehood but of these units’ very ‘survival as entities’. See Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein, ‘Norms, Identity and Culture’, p. 35. For Strang’s article, see David Strang, ‘Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and Institutional Accounts’, International Organization, 45 (1991), pp. 143–60. 228 Darel E. Paul

It follows then that the assumption of a state survival interest is a poor and misleading basis for a theory of international relations. Since it is clear that a state can move from sovereign to non-sovereign status without suffering physical destruction or ontological demise, we must separate the interest in survival from the interest in sovereignty or independence. It follows then that the state interest in survival cannot act as a fundamental animating principle of agents in theories of IR. Those ‘states’ pursuing degrees of unification, such as members of the European Union or the German Empire or even the United States, Canada, and Australia, did not somehow lose an interest in continuing as loci of authority or as international actors. They instead defined their survival in a way which permitted limited amalgamation with other units. In cases of state disintegration, where apparently the state has lost its ‘will to live’, as in the former Czechoslovakia or Soviet Union, it is states at sub-national scales which orchestrate the demise precisely because they do want to survive. If we accept the British Empire of the 19th and early 20th centuries as a single sovereign state, we may include it here as well. If the existence of authority structures at multiple scales is not understood, then the demise (or at least ‘modification’) of these states is not understood either. More subtle still are centrally directed efforts towards state ‘decentralization.’ Since the 1960s this process has perhaps gone furthest in Canada. Certainly the Canadian state persists and the government in Ottawa seeks to preserve the federation. However, it has also allowed two referenda on secession in Québec and failed to reign in provincial autonomy in a host of areas. Federalization has occurred in Belgium, and important regional governments have been erected in Spain, France, Italy, and soon even in the United Kingdom, often at the direction of the centre. The most familiar case in Inter- national Relations is the integration rather than disintegration of state authority structures through international agreements. It has been central governments, often opposed by labour, environmental, or nationalist organizations, even by subnational governments, which have sought most to change the structure, the ‘state’, which constitutes their authority. The structural changes in Western Europe via the EU and in North America via NAFTA contradict statism even more, for the governments in these countries have pursued structural integration arguably to enhance their prospects for survival. Some have argued that the ‘pooling of sovereignty’ in supranational authority structures actually insulates governments from threats by turning political debates into technical issues and placing significant policy-making powers in the hands of less accountable organs. Significant decentralization of states has also been pressed by central governments in order to promote the ‘national’ economy abroad through the support of subnational governmental institutions. To the extent that these governments embody a distinct and partially autonomous institutional apparatus and authority structure with their own legislative, executive and judicial capacities, it can be said that sovereign states are promoting the growth of (non-sovereign) states at smaller scales within ‘their own’ territory. Wendt offers an unwittingly insightful comment that the state’s ‘basic interests or appetites’ include ‘differentiation from other actors’.50 Unfortunately, he never explores the content of this sweeping statement. Differentiation can take on a multitude of varied forms, but statism confines its analysis to only one. This is the atemporal universal structure assumed by so many mainstream theories of

50 Wendt, ‘Collective Identity Formation’, p. 385. Sovereignty, survival and the Westphalian blind alley 229

International Relations. If the discipline is to take the concept of differentiation seriously, it will have to formulate an alternative approach not subject to the shortcomings of statism.

Conclusion: from multiperspectivalism to overlapping structures

The best effort to date to conceptualize an ontology of the international system able to incorporate non-sovereign relations between overlapping states is that of John Ruggie.51 His concept of ‘multiperspectivalism’ as a distinct non-sovereign ‘mode of differentiation’ has done much to break the hold of sovereignty on the discipline. The development of this concept, however, only partially corrects statism’s deﬁciencies. Ruggie is able to conceive of non-sovereign states and the social construction of corporate identity, but his solution is to shift from the one actor/one structure model of sovereignty to a multiple actors/one structure model. Emanuel Adler, who applies Ruggie’s concept in the realm of security studies, makes this explicit in his discussion of ‘tightly coupled pluralistic security communities’.52 It is in these communities, such as the European Union and the North Atlantic community, where the principle of differentiation between states is transformed and the community becomes ‘something of a post-sovereign system’.53 States in such a community are no longer ‘originary voice[s]’ or ‘pure presence[s]’ presiding over and embodying distinct sovereign nations.54 Instead they become ‘agents of the transnational community’, ‘local agents of a regional good’.55 In that state authority and legitimacy are derived increasingly from the community, Adler conceives of the community as the structure and states as agents, each co-constructing the other.56 While this move towards multiperspectival polities is a positive one, Ruggie’s and Adler’s development of it is limited in two ways. First, both scholars relegate such non-sovereign relations to either a distant medieval past or an approaching neo- medieval or ‘post-sovereign’ future.57 Neither seems to recognize that non-sovereign relations between states have existed throughout the history of the Westphalian system. Even into the 19th century, the diffuse Ottoman Empire and its highly autonomous outlying regions, as well as the British Empire and its self-governing Dominions, seem to be good candidates for multiperspectivalism. The German Bund and the pre-Civil War United States occupied a rather shadowy position between confederation and sovereign statehood, and the pre-Risorgimento Italian states featured multiple modes of differentiation between the European powers, the Papacy, and one another.

51 Ruggie, ‘Continuity and Transformation’ and ‘Territoriality and Beyond’. 52 Adler and Barnett, ‘Governing Anarchy’; Adler, ‘Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations’, Millennium, 26 (1997), pp. 249–77. 53 Adler and Barnett, ‘Governing Anarchy’, p. 73. 54 Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’. 55 Adler and Barnett, ‘Governing Anarchy’, p. 79; Adler, ‘Imagined (Security) Communities’, p. 266. 56 Adler, ‘Imagined (Security) Communities’, pp. 266–7. This very much follows Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond’, p. 173. 57 Ruggie claims that the EU ‘may constitute the ﬁrst ‘multiperspectival polity’ to emerge since the advent of the modern era’, and Adler notes that the EU is the only tightly coupled pluralistic security community to date. See Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond’, p. 172, and Adler, ‘Imagined (Security) Communities’, p. 256. 230 Darel E. Paul

Second, the multiple agents/one structure conceptualization of a non-sovereign mode of differentiation has the danger of either losing sight of authority at the national (not to mention subnational) scale, or of muddling the distinction between agents and structures as well as the concept of the state itself by speaking of states as both ‘sovereign states’ and ‘agent-states’, as countries and governments simultaneously.58 By using the multiple agents/one structure framework, multiperspectivalism risks failure in capitalizing on its insights into overlapping authority. The community scale becomes privileged rather than the national, but there still remains a uniscalar analysis rather than a rich multi-scalar framework which can move the discipline towards a sophisticated study of non-sovereign relations among states. The first step towards such a goal is to redefine the state in a manner able to incorporate multiple scales and overlapping states. Rather than define the state as an agent, a fruitful alternative is to reserve agency for governments and define the state as a structure. Roger Benjamin and Raymond Duvall argue convincingly for such a treatment.59 They define the state in two ways, first as the principles organizing the ‘agencies and institutions of governance’ and second as the wider ‘institutional-legal order’ governing a society.60 In the interest of offering a definition sensitive to space and scale, tied to notions of rule and authority, the second is a more appropriate choice. A full redefinition of the state is thus as an institutional-legal structure of authority. If we define the state as such, then it is the ‘agencies and institutions of governance’ which become the most (but certainly not the only) relevant agents. This is, in fact, what most statists really mean when speaking of the state-as-actor. By redefining the state, we in turn redefine state survival or being. If a state is a specific institutional-legal structure of authority, it is nonsensical to speak of its survival in a physical sense. The ‘survival,’ i.e. continuation or reproduction, of such an order can only make sense as a legal-institutional matter. In this way we may then speak meaningfully of the gradual independence of the British Dominions, the centraliz- ation of the German Bund or the United States, or the breakup of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia as cases of change in the relationships between authority structures at multiple scales rather than in the mostly meaningless language of state survival. Armed with such a definition, we are also able to fully incorporate a nuanced and complex geography into International Relations. It is quite easy to conceptualize overlapping structures for it is inherent in the very notion of scale, which is merely a focal point. Structures can overlap ‘physically’, i.e. territorially, in ways which agents and their corporate identities cannot. How one might even conceive of a physical overlapping of two physical bodies is unclear, and the inability to do so finds its fruition in the Westphalian blind alley. By formulating an approach which allows for overlapping states, the historical structural transformation of states become a possible research agenda in Inter- national Relations. For example, decolonization can and should be a topic for International Relations as a matter of relations between ‘states.’ Decentralization of

58 Adler, ‘Imagined (Security) Communities’. 59 Roger Benjamin and Raymond Duvall, ‘The Capitalist State in Context’, in Benjamin and Stephen L. Elkin (eds.), The Democratic State (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985), pp. 19–57. 60 Benjamin and Duvall, ‘The Capitalist State’, pp. 23–4, 25. Sovereignty, survival and the Westphalian blind alley 231 contemporary sovereign states could in this manner also enter the discipline. Sociologist and state theorist Bob Jessop claims to see the gradual creation of a state form he calls the ‘hollowed out Schumpeterian workfare state’. He describes this process of creation and change as ‘a structural transformation . . . of the capitalist state’ involving ‘a reordering of the relations among state apparatuses on each level of political organization’.61 This calls out for a study of the interaction between states at various ‘local’, ‘federal’, ‘regional’, ‘national’ and even ‘supranational’ scales. Yet to do so we must accept the existence of sovereign, post-sovereign and non-sovereign ‘states’ overlapping across multiple scales in order to bring such a research agenda into the discipline. In abandoning what one might call ‘structural monism’ 62 and making the move from a single actor/single structure ontology to one of multiple actors/multiple structures, we commit the very act of turning around and walking out of the Westphalian blind alley, leaving behind the language of survival for a more sophisticated appreciation for the variety of relations between agents and states. A contemporary geographer has recently argued that ‘The presentation of a simplistic ‘choice’ between just two alternatives—life or death—obscures the possibility that something else is happening: a qualitative reshaping of states and nations, territoriality and sovereignty, which is not captured by notions of death or decline.’63 By escaping from the Westphalian blind alley, it is possible to begin to offer concrete answers to what ‘something else’ really entails, whether in the past, present, or future.

61 Bob Jessop, ‘The Transition to Post-Fordism and the Schumpeterian Workfare State’, in Roger Burrows and Brian Loader (eds.), Towards a Post-Fordist Welfare State? (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 24; and Jessop ‘Post-Fordism and the State’, in Ash Amin (ed.), Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 269. 62 Alexander E. Wendt, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization, 41 (1987), pp. 335–70, in particular p. 367. 63 James Anderson, ‘The Shifting Stage of Politics: New Medieval and Postmodern Territorialities?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14 (1996), pp. 133–53, in particular p. 135.