The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism

Barry Buzan, Charles Jones and Richard Little

New York

Columbia University Press

1993

12. Vertical Sectors and Disaggregated Power

 

This chapter returns to the Neorealist project of aggregating state capabilities into a single concept of power, already discussed in Section I. The intention here is to build on this earlier discussion and relate it to our proposal for a division of the international system into vertical sectors. These issues are pursued through further consideration of the relationship between the economic and the political, though now of a more practical character than in the previous chapter. The exercise also provides a preliminary opportunity to reflect upon our own use of metaphor in the exposition of the earlier sectoral development of Structural Realism and, in doing so, to spell out in a little more detail what is implied in the "idealism" or "utopianism" of Realism, referred to earlier, and to begin to suggest how the rhetorical turn of chapter 11 may be contained within a Structural Realist approach.

A first step must be to toss into the ring, precisely in order to dismiss them, some proposals for what might be termed "strong sectoring," in which different arenas of international power are inhabited by quite distinct sets of actors. Strong sectoring is subsequently abandoned in favor of the more muted form of sectoring proposed in Section I, in which international relations are perceived of as less than the totality of social or inter-human relations, centering rather on the performance of states in relation to each other and to non-state actors in a multiplicity of differently ordered sectors or modes--coercive, political, ideological, and economic--each of which has, besides states, its own distinctive actors, its own structural logic, and its own meta-discourse or science. But here the importance of metaphor in reinforcing this bare statement, left implicit in the original outline of our position, is more clearly spelled out. A brief coda does little more than hint at the close support this Structural Realist account of the variety and fungibility of international power can provide for empirical studies.

 

A System of Firms

From Waltz comes a clear but sparse picture of the structure of the international political system to which we and many others have already suggested revisions. The question to start from is, "Can a similar picture be drawn of an international economic system, or of other global systems such as those we referred to in Section I as societal, strategic, etc.?" This idea will be entertained with particular reference to the possibility of a rival global economic structure, even though this will not in the end be accepted.

There are two reasons for proceeding along this path. First, demonstrating the grave difficulties that lie in the way of expressing such alternative structures in common terms, which is to say in a single conceptual vocabulary permitting discussion about, for example, the effects of the world economic system on the world political system, may help sustain our general case for the importance, indeed the power, of language. It has become conventional, in presenting international political economy to students, to admit this problem by distinguishing at the outset a number of incompatible ideological frameworks--Marxian, liberal, etc.--within which such questions may be answered and by frankly accepting the value of eclecticism, even while making clear the authors' own final positions (Gilpin 1987:25; Gill and Law 1988:17-24; McKinlay and Little 1986). Distinct disciplinary discourses, able to be distinguished from ideological differences though related to them, are perhaps equally incommensurable, but it is generally the ideological differences that have been of primary importance to students of international relations, being at one and the same time a chief object of study and a major impediment to consensus.

The second reason is that, because of this objection and others, there is good reason to argue against multiplication of structures as a way of softening or liberalizing structuralism, opting instead for the method, implicit in Section I, of admitting the de facto primacy of a single global system of sovereign states in the modern international system, while proposing a multiplicity of interpretations of this structure (and indeed even the playful positing or entertainment of alternative structures) as utopian rhetorical strategies for overcoming the least satisfactory characteristics of the prevailing system. This admission amounts less to a privileging of states than an open recognition and proclamation that states have seized and are seized of privileges; the Realism it countenances acts less as ideology than as critique. But it is distinct from the more radical neoliberal critiques in resisting the temptation to attack the state directly and generally.

Returning, then, to the project of building a global economic structure to rival the international system, units are first of all required. A first impulse might be to look for avowedly "economic" units or actors. Very large business corporations seem the obvious choice. This, indeed, is what Lenin went for in his structuralist (pace Waltz) account of the international system at the turn of the century. States had by 1900 acquired all the non-European territory available and had turned from relatively amicable division to hostile redivision of the world. Analogously, the major capitalist trusts had expanded into all available markets and could now only compete for market share. The easy phase of expansive growth had ended circa 1900 for giant firms as for states. In Lenin's terminology, competitive capitalism had given way to a more aggressive form, monopoly capitalism, competition without a safety valve. The move from an open to a closed system had produced a system change (Lenin 1939).

This kind of comparison has a certain allure, not least because it chimes in with the analogy to which Waltz resorts so frequently, and which we have discussed extensively, between the balance of power and oligopolistic competition.

But it is the wrong picture. It is wrong in its own terms because it is premised on what has already been exposed in chapter 11 as a naive understanding of competitive processes. Much more important, it can also be regarded as methodologically flawed because, owing to the legal subordination of the firm to the state, it collapses back so easily into a story about a single, political, international system of the sort favored by Waltz. Firms, it would be argued, do not together form more than a contingently anarchic system; each is an agglomeration of units formed under and constrained by national law. They may fight battles with states and win some. But the resources at their disposal and the terms on which the battles are fought are ultimately determined by states.

This is not the end of the story, because a Marxist might respond that all this talk of the supremacy of the state is sheer mystification, and that law is used here to conceal the naked truth, that ultimate social power under capitalism rests with the owners of capital, and, under monopoly capitalism, with the controllers of massive bureaucratic business corporations, which do, therefore, constitute a necessary anarchy. But in opposition to this view it could easily be claimed that the Marxist account of society with its talk of class "war" and economic "power" is essentially figurative, shot through with metaphors parasitic on more fundamental, common sense uses of language that derive from politics, and therefore implicitly admit its primacy. In turn might come the almost Nietzschean response that the pretense that is so clearly evident in recent and evidently utopian metaphorical systems such as the Marxist or Freudian accounts of the world is there just the same in the dead metaphors that pass for sober description of the world. The supposedly literal ground of political discourse could doubtless also be picked apart and exposed as a tissue of dead metaphors, simply hallowed by time.

There is no way of settling this argument; attempts to do so will founder on the broad incommensurability of two elaborate discourses. But before abandoning the notion of giant corporations as autonomous actors in an international economic anarchy or world market, it may be worth considering two ways, Marxist and liberal, in which the story might be elaborated, simply because of the way in which each claims to recognize real structures underlying the appearance conveyed in our ordinary talk about the social world, perhaps reifying what begin as conceptual differences?

It is clearly possible to construct a Marxist story in which the capitalist state functions as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. To be at all plausible these days, the story would have to concede, as Marxists did increasingly beginning in the middle 1970s, the relative autonomy of the state. This can be told (though it is hardly kosher to do so) as a public choice story about why leaderships don't do what members want. It is, if you like, Marx crossed with Mancur Olson. Broadly, the state is allowed enough autonomy from its paymasters to recognize the collective interest of capital and act against the perceived interest of powerful sectors of the bourgeoisie in collaboration with foreign capital or popular elements in domestic society. When individual corporations or industrial sectors complain that they have been hurt by such policies, the public-choice Marxist replies "You are simply understating your true demand for the public good of long run social order. You hope to free ride. But we know better. Unless you are willing to take on the onerous task of running the executive committee yourself you had better shut up and pay up!"

But though the state has this much autonomy it remains fundamentally representative of capital. Its broad strategy is to ensure the smooth running and reproduction of a system of which a bourgeoisie, composed now of controllers as much as legal owners of capital, are the chief beneficiaries. The primary purpose of this system is extraction of surplus through the production and exchange of commodities. The most efficient organizational forms for achieving this objective are determined through the market, and it is in market relations and hierarchical relations within firms, and in the way in which the mode of production is constantly transformed through the process of reproduction of the economy, that the basic dramas of social power are constantly played out. But because so exploitative a system could hardly endure if it were once fully understood by the exploited, a vast and elaborate edifice of statehood, law, religion, and pre-capitalist social custom, much of it centuries old, has been retained, albeit in a poor state of repair--the roof leaking, rot in the timbers, vermin in the larder--to house and comfort the masses. Through the filthy and distorting windows of false consciousness the lineaments of reality are scarcely decipherable.

Now for the liberal version, or, better, a liberal version. Here the story would start with Tom Paine or someone of the sort telling us how well civil society can manage in the absence of the state. When the American colonists rose against the British there was for a time no effective government in parts of North America. This did not unleash a torrent of antisocial behavior that had been lurking there, waiting for the state to relax its vigilance. Instead, the story goes, the persistence of order in anarchic conditions demonstrated that it is the state itself that represents social violence imposing itself, parasitically, upon a civil society that neither needs nor wants it, yet that cannot evade capture without forming, in its own defense, something state-like of its own, to be kept in the dark fastness of a liberal constitution lest it taste blood and turn savage.

Radicals in this tradition would, of course, have been appalled at the growth of scale of firms since the early nineteenth century and the emergence of transnational corporations. The main line of their critique seems to be a conservative one. Civil society, once threatened by militaristic and dynastic states, reached the verge of a successful constitutionalist revolution only to fall victim to a new threat, this time from a diseased form of capitalism which destroyed customary work practices, replacing them with patterns which, even if they were less exploitative in a merely pecuniary sense, were culturally corrosive, and quite clearly incompatible with those affective and family relationships so essential to social solidarity and the living of the good life.

This story runs easily into a North American, populist, muckraking kind of a tale in which the watchdog down in the dungeon, pluralist beast that she is, is fundamentally trustworthy, but needs to be observed with special care when ready for a male to make sure that she does not couple with the wild corporate and sectional dogs clustering around the castle gate.

Laying some of the metaphors aside for a moment, it will be recalled that in this version of events the constitutional state, artificial though it may be, is permitted because it is the only way of protecting natural civil society against un-civilized coercion. What is originally objectionable about the unconstitutional state is its militarism and the injustice supposedly embodied in its hereditary principle. Later, the emphasis moves from coercion to enlarged scale or self-consciousness, or both, as the antonym of civility or naturalness. Populism is about small people--often small capitalists--who see themselves as the foundation of civil society, facing impersonal, remote, bureaucratic, knowing, conspiratorial, overgrown institutions--whether public or private.

Back to the watchdog. She must, above all else, be kept from impregnation by the trusts, lest she grow big with their progeny, which is the antipopular uncivilized state that the Marxists say already walks the earth. She looks pretty fat, down in her dungeon; her bureaucracy grows. Is she pregnant? Perhaps it is just the enforced lack of exercise in this confinement which she endures to avoid the feared confinement. So long as she is undefiled there is hope. And so long as she is untouched the transnational corporations may surely be seen to constitute a distinct, rival, and antidemocratic world system. This, translated into the world of contemporary politics, represents the Global Reach approach to transnationals. It is the view held by liberals who believed, in the 1970s, that transnational corporations operating in oligopolistic markets posed a serious exogenous threat to the state system and that this was bad news because states were, on balance and for all their sins, our best hope of responsible and autonomous political institutions.

Plainly these people are not Realists. They think there are good states and bad states; that some states are more natural than others. They surely would not accept Rousseau's view that, since all states are unnatural and can judge power only relative to one another, all are governed by the logic of the security dilemma, so that the best that can be hoped for is that each may be kept in relative isolation. Although they appear to agree with (some) Marxists on the substantive issue of the centrality of giant firms in the international economic system, the agreement is an empty one, since they differ in their conceptions of the state, of class, and of civil society and its natural development. In short, language is not and cannot be a medium of agreement, supporting their superficially common position on the importance of giant firms, since it is so clearly, as it is bound to be, an instrument of each larger political program.

 

A System of Nations

Returning, notwithstanding these considerations, to the story. Let us say that we were, for the sake of argument, to accept the earlier dismissal of large corporations from the scene on the ground of their legal dependence on sovereign states. There would then remain just one other candidate to be the archetypical actor in a world economic system. This is the national economy: civil society itself in its workaday clothes.

Here is another liberal story. Finding it deeply implausible I daresay I shall not tell it very well. Giuseppe Mazzini, with his thesis of a division of labor between whole nations, would manage much better. It starts by accepting Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. It then attacks the existing territorial demarcations between states. It proceeds as follows.

Granted a complete absence of tariffs and quantitative restrictions on trade, comparative advantage will yield gains from trade, even though they may be unevenly distributed, regardless of political frontiers. The gains will accrue to all through their free participation in markets. But in this simple model the division of the world into states, and the use of territorially defined national economies as the fiscal bases of rival states, will lead to a system of accounting in which the gains from trade are conceptualized as accruing to national economies, not to an undifferentiated mass of traders. The lack of economic frontiers in this model seems to ensure that global efficiency is maximized. For good measure it will also be assumed that all states rely for their income on a standard method of direct taxation levied at a uniform rate. But if it is allowed that the utility of citizens and their incentive to produce is influenced by the distribution of state expenditure, it will follow that there will be efficiency gains to be had from drawing territorial boundaries in such a way as to maximize global confidence in the probable distribution of the social wage. This may require the dissolving of multinational states, the unscrambling of different religious or ethnic communities, or the breakup of empires; it may correspondingly provoke strong resistance from church, minorities, and empires. For Mazzini, it plainly required the unification of Italy on the ground that nationality was somehow a natural or just basis for political organization and was also a prerequisite for an effective division of labor between states. This would need, of course, to be set against possible welfare losses resulting from possible diseconomies of scale in the practice of government arising out of the initially preferred set of frontiers.

To anyone who thought in this way--a liberally--inded nationalist--the idea of a natural order of national economies as the reality underlying the appearance of the arbitrary system of states could clearly act both as a framework for analysis and the basis for policy. Faced with the Realist's affirmation of the centrality of the state and its ultimate monopoly of coercive power, Mazzini, along with his more patient cousins in Eastern Europe can proclaim: "The state and its power are rooted in our acquiescence and in the taxes we pay. Ultimately, states are dependent on nations, who will only resource them if they are given adequate incentives and conditions." Such forces reshaped Europe in the nineteenth century and are at work again today.

This story, in which national economies figure as the units of a world economic system, yields a distinctive and autonomous anarchic system just as the story about firms does. There are fewer units this time. There might be more than in the existing state system (Croatia, Ukraine, and so on); there might be fewer (the European Community). Some are bigger than others. The system is broadly oligopolistic in character, but less so than the world of corporations. Those who identify with it are clearly intent on pushing and shoving the system of states into consistency with it, just as those who identify more closely with states would hope to pull and shove the system of national economies and identities into conformity with their own preferences. This might plausibly be told in the nineteenth century as a story of class war between rising (nationalist, capitalist) bourgeoisie and established (statist, precapitalist) aristocracy. In the twentieth century it dissolves for two generations into a rather different story about the effective mobilization of industrial resources for war.

Each story, the one about business corporations and the one about national economies, suggests a world economic system that is anarchic in structure. But there the resemblance--between the two of them and between each and Waltz--ends. This is implicit in the discussion of the varieties of microeceonomics, aside from traditional theory of imperfect competition, earlier called up by Waltz's invocation of analogy. The economic system in which corporations are units has a vast number of independent economic actors, ranging from individual proprietorships, through small partnerships, to giant transnational corporations, state corporations, even states, when acting as free participants in markets. Individuals may participate in more than one unit. Units have widely differing functions. Capabilities are extremely unevenly distributed, with a few immense units controlling a very substantial percentage of total resources and skills. Competition in specific markets follows a dialectical or oscillatory pattern, resonating with other, related, markets. Similar differences can be provided to distinguish the world of competing national economies from that of states. So while it would be absurd to try to exclude either of these systems from the field of International Relations, they are clearly not closely comparable in organization or in competitive logic with the system of states and, like it or not, have failed to express their power through the same range of media or with anything like the level of effectiveness customarily achieved by major states.

These fairy stories have not obviously, if at all, yielded an international economic system offering possibilities of structural comparison through the analogy of microeconomics and the balance of power as reformulated in chapter 11. What, then, has been their point? First of all it has been to suggest that all those views which seriously entertain ideas of a world economic system parallel to, and substantially independent of, the state system--a world economic system in which transnational corporations or national economies are the dominant actors--turn out, on examination, to rest on layer after layer of the remains of earlier intellectual dwellings. Each of the two traditions discussed above perceives the giant firm so differently that there is little hope of consensus, and a large measure of the disagreement results from radically differing conceptions of the state underlying perceptions of giant firms themselves. To throw up one's hands and say simply: "Liberals think this way, Marxists that way, and there is no conclusion to be reached other than within some set of ideological blinkers" is a desperate counsel. We hope to have offered something more eclectic and more fruitful.

Secondly, the fairy stories, though they are caricatures, are sufficiently accurate to carry one critical point, namely that attempts to build descriptions of the economic sector in terms of a single category of non-state actor, just like attempts to describe international politics solely in terms of states, do violence to common experience, and that, moreover, they have in common the desire to create a secure ground from which to attack the primacy of the state. They constitute, in short, rhetorical strategies as much as scientific analyses. This is only to be expected. Our argument is that they are mistaken strategies, because, in restricting the apparent scope of states to the "political," narrowly defined, they opt to marginalize instead of develop an institution that still has tremendous potential for constructive reform in response to the whole range of human needs.

Not long ago, Richard Rorty sketched a new characterization of utopian politics in which "the method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of non-linguistic behavior, for example the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions" (Rorty 1989:9). Whatever else they have been doing, the principal schools of International Political Economy have been engaging in this kind of utopianism. The battle will go to whichever group succeeds in winning acceptance for its favored description of international relations; but it will be no victory if the winner helps, however inadvertently, to reproduce a system of states narrowly defined in terms of their coercive functions.

Realists live among the ruins of a very different city; they build in a different style and from a different kind of rubble; they have distinct rallying points; they do not speak the same language. Their vocabularies may sometimes overlap with those of the schematic varieties of liberals and Marxists portrayed here, but this merely misleads. The single advantage they possess is that the state does not intrude, uninvited, into their attempts to describe some distinct global economy in which transnational firms or national economies are the typical actors. Instead Structural Realism, no less involved than the other players described so far in this chapter in the utopian contest for an acceptable description of the international system, allows from the start for an international economic sector in which disaggregated state power facilitates sectorally specific participation by states, even where the typical actor may be a giant firm or a national economy, and the sectoral logic best captured in microeconomic theory. There are the beginnings, here, not of the marginalization, capture, or destruction, but of the taming and humanizing of the state.

 

Realist Variations

To a textbook Realist, the stories sketched so far in this chapter would be unacceptable because that Realist accepts at face value the primacy of the state system, welcomes the privileging of the nexus of law-state-coercion as the supreme expression of social power, and therefore takes entirely literally, not metaphorically, such things as the legal dependence of corporations and citizens alike upon the state.

We find the stories equally unacceptable, but for quite different reasons. They are not referred to as "stories" because we are in any doubt about the possibility of truths, but because none is, as yet, generally accepted. For this reason each retains an air of pretense. We might therefore still resort to the traditional conservative response to the metaphor that has not yet died and become invisible, literal, and "factual," dismissing it as merely fashionable or decadent (Rorty 1989:48). Also, they divorce the state far too emphatically from the international economy, both in principle and in practice.

Like many Realists, we incline toward maintaining some sense of the primacy of the state within the political sphere, but have argued in chapter 10 that this primacy results from the practical and wholly contingent dominance of modern sovereign states rather than any uniquely necessary character of the anarchy of states as compared with the anarchies of a multiplicity of firms or civil societies or belief-systems. It is, moreover, a primacy puffed up by dubious assumptions regarding the continuity of key descriptive terms which, in turn, has permitted excessive claims for an actual continuity of events. Yet it is a useful primacy.

Unlike many Realists, we have tried to suggest, throughout this volume, that Structural Realism is consistent not simply with the reproduction but also with the transformation of structures, including the possibility of a displacement of the state system from primacy among other global systems. Our utopian purpose favors the suggestion of multiple and open possibilities over the determination of some preferred utopia from among them. The project of the modern sovereign state consisted in planting a finger in every pie. It led to totalitarian excess, but it made the state peculiarly central among other social institutions, and that is why we continue to take the view that states, for all their deficiencies, currently offer the best available way of opening conduits between what is unconscious, personal, and customary, and what is self-conscious, public, and legal. We reject the standard utopias, sketched just now, because they propose to idealize or destroy the state, rather than to demystify and humanize it.

To announce this aim might seem self-defeating. This would be true if the only way metaphor could gain acceptance and so make new realities were by creeping unnoticed into currency. But if it is sufficiently attractive, metaphor may be openly proposed and openly adopted. The claim that the state is the ultimate arbiter of social relations while also a pretense--no more than a band of brigands: bastards, but our own bastards--is little different to parallel claims considered earlier with respect to other fields: "The literal (last hope of meaning) is just dead metaphor" or "The self (last hope of Being) is contingent" or "My knowledge (last hope of certainty), just like everyone's, is socially constructed."

Exposure of this sort does not subvert, let alone destroy, the state but, on the contrary, liberates it and opens up the utopian possibility of making out of it a medium in which expression of individual liberty is always possible. Indeed it offers a possible referent for the puzzling Marxist idea of the state "withering away."

Since the first step to this apotheosis, rather oddly, has been a provisional admission of the supreme, if arbitrary, nature of the state, it will pay us to don the old Realist suit for a little, and see how this feels. It seems to be a man's suit. It is well-worn, probably of Harris Tweed though perhaps, having fallen upon hard times, of corduroy, and smelling slightly of pipe smoke. Having tried it on, we might try to describe the international economic system, like the international political system, as a system of states, not of national economies, and certainly not of corporations. We would look, for example, at the size of each state's budget relative to GNP and ask how effective each state is at raising taxes and how dependent on borrowing, from its own citizens and from abroad. We would want to know how much of its resources have to be spent on military forces in order to maintain its position vis ;aga vis other states, how well able its administration was to mobilize the resources of the citizens, and to maintain their support through its influence over religious and cultural institutions, and how open the national economy was, how rich in strategic materials.

Waltz, consistent in his emphasis upon the ultimate aggregation of power within the state, but at odds with his own assertion of the distinctiveness of the political from other social realms, including, surely, the economic, describes just such a system when he treats the functions common to all states, but expands it to embrace those which in most large countries are functions of civil society, not of the state. Contrary to his view, each state does not ordinarily supply "most of the food, clothing, housing, transportation, and amenities consumed and used by its citizens" (Waltz 1979:96). Elsewhere, again, when arguing for the ranking of states by the distribution of aggregated power, he writes of the "economic, military, and political capabilities of nations," when what are clearly referred to are capabilities of states (Waltz 1979:131).

These slips, even if they are no more than slips, indicate the indifference of Neorealism to the analytical distinction toward which we have been laboring in this chapter, between a global economic system, constituted by firms or national economies, and that aspect of international or inter-human relations, broadly conceived, which is constituted by the behavior of states acting in their economic capacities. The distinction is a very real one, but one that slips through Waltz's fingers. It deserves to be held in mind because it suggests a global system along the following lines. A necessarily anarchic economic sector relates to other equally anarchic sectors, including the international political system. Yet the latter, which is on our account necessarily anarchic, at times appears not to be, because, in its economic (or ideological, or coercive) aspect, it takes on not only a distinct, internally derived distribution of capabilities but also something of the purely reflected color of the logic of relations between non-state actors in the sector in question. This is why international political economy is so slippery, and why it seemed appropriate to circle the airfield, in the first two sections of this chapter, before coming in to land. We hope to have arrived at a formulation of the combined effects of sectoring and the disaggregation of state power that respects the relative autonomy of activity in different sectors of the international system while identifying the chameleon state in each.

 

Sectoral Metaphors

If one way of driving home this position was to recite tales of misleading attempts at strong sectoring in which the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, then another, possibly more effective, may be to examine the metaphors employed in chapter 3, when the sectoral division of the international system was originally put forward. The first was a textile metaphor. "In thinking about any historical event it is difficult to disentangle the economic, political, societal and strategic threads that make up the whole. Because each sector is a partial view of the whole, sectors necessarily overlap and interweave." This is immediately followed by a mapping or territorial metaphor. "sectors are not separated by clear boundaries."

The second of these metaphors offers a spatial model of clarity that is unattainable in practice when trying to subdivide the international system. The first offers a compromise, a way round this problem. Cloth is a single entity made up of a multiplicity of elements (threads) often running more or less parallel to one another, but for it to hold together there must also be threads running across the warp. The metaphor is especially helpful because generally, in the finished cloth, the separateness of the threads is hardly perceived, being overwhelmingly dominated by the cloth itself. The idea of cloth carries, also, notions of richness and texture that help convey what is intended. The metaphor seems to imply what has indeed been the case: that we have been looking for a way of enriching structuralism without fragmenting it.

But a third metaphor in our original discussion of disaggregation enables us to steer well clear of the commitments still implicit in those already examined to multiple systems with distinct sets of actors: firms, states, etc. The metaphor of viewpoints stresses that "sectors do not represent subdivisions of the whole system, but partial views of the whole." Further help comes from the metaphor of the lens. "The partial systems identified by sectors are not subsystems in the normal sense of units located within a larger set, and containing fewer units than the whole. Instead they are views of the whole through some selective lens which highlights one particular aspect of the relationship and interaction among all of its constituent units.= . . . Even though the object observed remains the same (ignoring Heisenberg), different lenses highlight different aspects of its reality."

It is hard to think of a more creative metaphor. The language attaching to lenses, filters, X-rays, provides a tremendous resource for working out the issues under discussion here. It offers the possibility that some entities might be visible in one set of circumstances but not in another, and, at the same time, that a set of entities might appear very different at one time than another. Thus it offers a way of finessing the issue of disaggregation in a way in which that term itself, and the physical-mechanical metaphor from which it derives, plainly does not. Any idea of physical separation of economy, society, polity, etc., like so many pebbles or threads, is incoherent. The idea that in some circumstances one is aware only of the political, the economic, or the social because each, say, is of a particular color, and will show up only when viewed through the right filter, is coherent, and, what is more, remains coherent when elaborated to include the possibility that the same entity--the state, for example--may exhibit a distinct distribution of capabilities when each different filter is employed.

Thus, the lens image, pursued and elaborated, offers to facilitate a genuinely plural conception of the world system that sets states, acting simultaneously in their economic, cultural, judicial, and other modes, in a web of tensions with firms, ethnic groups, individuals, and cultures; and it does so without encouraging a stultifying reification of parallel structures and analogous sets of units. In short, there is no need to expect that it should be possible to produce a neat matrix of the kind we offer for the international political sector, extended to cover a number of discrete sectors. Indeed, optical metaphors offer the possibility that it may be impossible to see all there is to see at one and the same time. The very terms "aggregate / disaggregate," "structure," "grid," "vertical," "horizontal," and so on, through the dead spatial-physical metaphors they embody, obscure more than they display.

This leaves an important question. What is tenor to the lens's vehicle? What, putting it another way, is the literal of which "lens" "filter," "viewpoint," etc. are the embellishment? It is, surely, the investigator, and what the metaphor claims is just what was claimed as the heart of the Realist position at the outset, namely that the observer is also a participant, that viewpoint makes a difference to what is perceived, and that far from rendering objectivity unattainable, this participation in the observed world is the very condition of scientific understanding. It is hard to better Dilthey's characterization of the position of the social scientist. "The special character of life is understood by means of categories which do not apply to our knowledge of physical reality. Here, too, the decisive point is that these categories are not applied a priori to life as something strange but that they are part of it. The attitude expressed abstractly in them is the exclusive point of departure for the understanding of life. For life is only to be found in the special relationship between a whole and its parts; and, if we abstract these relations as categories, we find that the number of these cannot be determined and their relations to each other cannot be reduced to a logical formula" (Rickman 1961:105).

The great promise held out by disaggregation of power and vertical sectoring, whatever metaphors are used to convey it, is that they offer a greatly enriched potential for employing structuralist analysis to discuss social change at a cost of a very small, and necessary, sacrifice in elegance. The principal reason for this is that, alongside the structurationist approach of Section II, they point to a possibility of generating change within what otherwise appears an entirely synchronic system. It is as though disaggregation turned off the stroboscope to reveal that what had appeared to be static had in fact been rotating rapidly.

Whatever structural differences might be anticipated between a particular oligopolistic market and a multipolar balance of power, it might be anticipated that each facet of the interstate system would be similar in structure. But we have already seen that each facet can be characterized by a different distribution of capabilities at any one time, and, moreover, each facet may reflect a differently structured world of non-state actors. This yields interesting plays and possibilities of change.

The most obvious example of this possibility of generating change out of a multi-faceted state system, chosen here for its central position in the history of the field, is the opposition of economically declining but politically dominant status quo power and economically vigorous revisionist states outlined by Carr on the eve of the Second World War and discussed again in recent years by Paul Kennedy, Waltz himself, and numerous others in the context of relative United States decline and European and Japanese resurgence. It is plain that relationships of suzerainty, dependence, and even colonization may well respond to the dual logics of the prevailing condition of the balance of power and the relative strength or weakness of different states with respect to civil society within their home territories. Without reifying inelegant structures parallel to the state system, one can still easily see in these past struggles tensions between the balance of power, conventionally described, and the ideological bipolarity of liberalism and communism or the economic hegemony of the United States at its peak. The immediate point is that the claims we have made for the disaggregation of state power, for differentiation of function of actors, for possibilities of system transformation arising out of the mutual constitution of agents and structures, and for discourse about these matters as one among the multiplicity of interacting structures together make possible the discussion of detail and change alongside structure and continuity in a discourse which can claim to be at once practical and, in the best sense, theoretical. In short, they justify the move from an overly restrictive and exclusivist Neorealism to a more complex, operational, and integrative Structural Realism, which is what this book has been about.