'Second State Debate' in International Relations: Theory Turned Upside-Down
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Review of International Studies (2001), 27, 395–414 Copyright © British International Studies Association The ‘second state debate’ in International Relations: theory turned upside-down JOHN M. HOBSON Abstract. This article argues that conventional understanding of how IR theory concep- tualizes the state is in need of revision. By relocating IR theories of the state within the ‘second state’ debate, we find that neorealism underestimates the power of the state in world politics, while neoliberal institutionalism exaggerates its power. Moreover, liberalism, con- structivism, Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘second-wave’ Weberian historical sociology, all endow the state with greater degrees of agential power in the international realm than does neorealism. The significance of the second state debate will be not merely to reconfigure our understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state, but to turn conventional under- standing of IR theory upside-down. Introduction In this article I argue that conventional interpretive frameworks for understanding how IR theory conceptualizes the state are highly problematic, and are accordingly in need of revision. In particular, I argue that we can reconfigure traditional under- standing through the lens of what I propose to call the ‘second state debate’. In the process, I suggest that we emerge with a more accurate and nuanced understanding of IR theories of the state as well as of IR theory more generally. This essentially involves relocating IR theories of the state within the agent-structure problematic. In particular, I introduce two concepts when understanding the state: (1) domestic agential state power, (2) international agential state power. For the purposes of this article the most significant concept is the international agential power of the state. Here I examine how much agential power each of the major theories of IR accord the state. Of course, the conventional understanding is that neorealism reifies the state (state-centricity) while liberalism, Marxism, constructivism and postmodernism all downgrade the state’s importance (if not ignore it altogether). But viewed through the lens of the second state debate, I argue that neorealism actually under- estimates (ignores) the international agential power of the state in world politics, while conversely, neoliberal institutionalism exaggerates the state’s degree of agential power in the international system. Moreover, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, postmodernism and ‘second-wave’ Weberian historical sociology, all endow the state with much greater degrees of international agential power than does neorealism. In this way then, the significance of the second state debate will be not merely to refine our understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the state, but to turn conven- tional understanding of IR theory upside-down. This article proceeds in five parts. Part I lays out the conventional understanding of how IR theory conceptualizes the ‘power’ of the state, through what I call the 395 396 John M. Hobson lens of the ‘first state debate’. Part II introduces the second state debate and its central concepts. These concepts are then applied to understanding neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism in Part III, and Part IV briefly situates the major theories of international relations within five generic forms of state theory that emerge from the second state debate. Finally in Part V, I explore a sociological resolution to the second state debate. I. State theory in the first state debate Across the spectrum of the social sciences a variety of theorists in different disci- plines have situated theories of the state within two generic frameworks. The first comprises normative theories of the state which consider what the most desirable or appropriate form of state and political community might be. The second comprises explanatory theories of the state which consider who controls, or what forces shape, the state and its behaviour. Of course, in practice the line that separates these two generic forms is fuzzy, given that normative concerns often creep into explanatory theory and as one commentator put it, political philosophers often ‘see what they think the state ought to be like in the state as it is’.1 To the extent that it is at all possible to maintain this ‘division’, this article is primarily interested in ‘explanatory’ state theory. The basic claim is that it is possible to discern two state debates within ‘explanatory’ state theory, both of which can be found across a variety of disciplines. Within Sociology, Comparative Politics and Political Science, a ‘first state debate’ emerged in the 1970s but took off in the early 1980s. This was based around the issue of ‘social autonomy versus state autonomy’. Thus neo-Marxists and pluralists argued for the autonomy of social forces over the state,2 while by the late 1970s, neo- Weberians and statists insisted that state autonomy takes precedence over social forces.3 Similarly in the 1980s, within Comparative Political Economy, statists critiqued Marxists and liberals by arguing that the successful rise of the East Asian ‘tigers’ could be explained by the pronounced autonomy that each of these states had over their societies.4 However, I suggest that this first state debate has now been superseded by a second state debate. This new state debate rejects the polarities of its predecessor. In seeking to transcend the ‘state-centric versus society-centric’ problematic, the second state debate in Sociology and Comparative Politics/CPE enquires into how state structures and social forces mutually constitute each other. Thus while many neo-Marxists now concede that states have some autonomy,5 and 1 D. Held, ‘Central Perspectives on the Modern State’, in G. McLennan, D. Held and S. Hall (eds.), The Idea of the Modern State (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1984), p. 31. 2 For the former, see especially, R. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1973); for the latter, see R.A. Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971). 3 The classic statements remain T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and P.B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); also S.D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 4 C. Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982); R. Wade, Governing the Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 5 P. Cammack, ‘Review Article: Bringing the State Back In?’, British Journal of Political Science,19 (1989), pp. 261–90; B. Jessop, State Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 275–88; F. Block, Revising State Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). The ‘second state debate’ in IR 397 statists and neo-Weberians increasingly concede that states are embedded in society,6 so we can conclude that the traditional ‘great divide’ between Marxist and statist theories of the state has considerably narrowed in the second state debate within Sociology and CPE. But what of International Relations (which is the primary focus of this article)? While it is the case that the first state debate in Sociology and Comparative Politics/Economics influenced the discipline of IR, nevertheless its impact has been much greater within IPE than in mainstream International Politics. Moreover when the first state debate in Sociology and Comparative Politics/Economics really took off in the early 1980s, it made no impact within mainstream International Politics because both neoliberal institutionalism and neorealism effectively ignored state- society relations and focused exclusively on the state and the international system. Arguably Robert Keohane’s shift from his ‘pluralist’ phase in the 1970s,7 to his neoliberal institutionalist phase after 1980, was determined by his attempt to challenge Waltzian neorealism on its own grounds, which required him to explicitly bracket state-society relations (see Part III below). It is also possible to discern two state debates in IR, the first of which constitutes the familiar means through which (explanatory) state theory is understood. The first state debate emerged in the 1970s with the rise of interdependence theory and the radical/pluralist challenge to neorealism. As in Sociology and elsewhere, the essence of this first debate lay upon the fundamental issue of state-centrism versus social- centrism. That is, both sides fought over the issue as to whether autonomous states constitute the central actors in world politics. Radical pluralists and Marxists argued that global capitalism and economic interdependence had come to outflank the sovereign state, rendering it increasingly anachronistic,8 which in turn prompted the neorealist counter-attack, which reasserted the continuing primacy of anarchy and the sovereign state.9 Interestingly, this first debate has continued on down to the present as a whole host of writers assert the primacy of globalization or global structures over the state,10 only to be countered by the familiar claims of neorealists.11 However, while this debate is still very much alive, I suggest that it suffers from three fundamental limitations. Because it is founded upon a binary ‘either/or’ logic (either social-centrism or state-centrism), the debate effectively leads into a cul-de-sac 6 M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); P.B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); L. Weiss and J.M. Hobson, States and Economic Development (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); J.M. Hobson, The Wealth of States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); L. Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). 7 R.O Keohane and J.S. Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1977). 8 For the former see: J.W. Burton, World Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); R.W. Mansbach, Y.H. Ferguson and D.E. Lampert, The Web of World Politics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976). For the latter, see R.J. Barnett and R.E.