National Collective Identity: Chapter 2

National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems

Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)

1999

2. Social Identities and Social Systems

Dear friend, theory is all gray, and the golden tree of life is green.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Search men’s governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.

—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

A developing body of theory, which argues for recognition of the social construction of political structure, has called attention to the disparate motivational assumptions underlying theories of rational choice, and hermeneutical or phenomenological theories of agents. Theories of rational choice assume that human beings are primarily and causally motivated by an instrumental rationality. Newer approaches argue that they are motivated by complex belief systems, requiring analysts to “empathize with these beliefs before human actions can be comprehended and interpreted.” ₁

Alexander Wendt, drawing in part upon the structurationist sociology of Anthony Giddens and the norms-based critical theory of Friedrich Kratochwil and Nicholas Onuf, has proposed a “constructivist” approach to resolve this impasse with the assertion that “social structures are only instantiated by the practices of agents.” What interests us most from this discussion is Wendt’s derivative insight that social structures are “inseparable from the reasons and self-understandings that agents bring to their actions.” ₂ This insight is essential in forging the link between collective identities and the institutional forms of collective action derived from these identities.

Theories of rational choice attempt to avoid the problem of self-understandings of national agents with the assumption that they are rational actors impelled to action by instrumental rationality and systemic forces. However, many contemporary states view themselves as “national” actors: as communities of shared ethnicity, or language, or history, or belief, or heritage. They regard these linkages as transcending a purely political association which functions, corporately—as might the firm in the competitive market place—to maximize their gains from interaction with other international political units. These self-understandings produce state behaviors that cannot be explained solely by recourse to the prescriptions of rational instrumental action. Rational instrumentalism would, for example, argue for the maintenance and strengthening of multiethnic federation in order to maintain economies of scale, and to maximize bargaining leverage with respect to other international actors. How can we explain the recently observed movements in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, and even North America, toward political fragmentation solely by recourse to state-centric rational instrumentalism? The logic of state-centrism alone will not do.

One might argue that Slovenia was sufficiently economically better off than its former Yugoslav partners to rationally seek separation from Yugoslavia, but could a Bosnian Serb republic governed from Pale be economically viable? Quebec and “English Canada” might be economically, even militarily viable as independent entities, but neither could expect to receive better terms of trade or credit with the neighboring United States as independent entities. One recent analyst has gone so far as to suggest that Canada without Quebec might even petition for union with the United States! ₃ Rational instrumental accounts of the motivations and interests of international actors suggest that instrumental advantage accrues to the creation and maintenance of large states, not smaller, ethnically, linguistically or culturally homogenous states.

Wendt has argued for the assignment of equal ontological ₄ status to the state and to the system. His earlier work asserts that one cannot develop a coherent theory of international relations unless both the state and system are problematized. The theory must be capable of explaining the emergence of each and capture the “generative moment” of the system. I argue that the state is just the rational, bureaucratic, institutional manifestation of societal collective identity; of the nation, in the age of nationalism. The state is not coterminous with the nation. Historically the state has both preceded and followed the nation. Significantly, it is the legitimating principles of a given, historical, social order that privilege this rational bureaucratic manifestation of those principles as an institutional artifact of the system.

As the state is privileged at the level of the “system,” communities of shared identity construct states to serve their needs as “nations” in the course of systemic interaction. This was so in the past because the Westphalian system, organized under the legitimating principle of raison d’état, privileged the sovereign with rights and legitimacy. This is so in the newer era of national sovereignty, organized under the legitimating principle of national self-determination, because the state is still the privileged institutional form, with the provision that it must at least claim to serve as an institutional form of the collective action of a “national” collective identity. Thus I would ascribe equal ontological status to the nation (sovereign), as well as the state (institutional manifestation of sovereignty) and the system.

Collective Identity and International Systems

Nations and the international, national-state system, because they have a “template” to work with, are now a natural feature of the international political landscape. ₅ Political entities, because they privilege the rules, or incentive structure, of the contemporary international system, have enormous incentives to mold themselves into this landscape. But this was not always so. We must examine how this “template” was constructed if we are to clearly, conceptually delineate the nation from the state, and apprehend the nature and modes of differentiation of the primary units of a historically developing, rather than an ahistorically continuous international system. A central argument of this work is that change in the international system occurs with changes in the collective identity of crucial social actors who collectively constitute the units from which the system is comprised.

Figure 1 provides my view of how the system changes with changes in collective identity, in tabular form. The table describes the transformation of the European system from a post-Reformation system of largely independent dynasts, segmented by confessional distinctions, to a system of sovereign nation-states. The first column provides the relevant variables, which are subject to change in the historical development of the international system. Changes in these variables are strongly interrelated.

In the discussion to follow, I will provide either a causal or a constitutive linkage between the factors, or variables presented in the first column of figure 1. Historical changes in societal collective identity have causal significance for the principles by which domestic and international social orders are legitimated. Legitimate authority over domestic society, and the perception of the legitimacy of one’s rule by other societies and their governments is established by societal recognition that the exercise of this authority is consistent with principles ₆ (beliefs about the nature of legitimate authority) which are generally accepted among members of domestic society and by, at least, the elites of other societies.

My argument, expressed succinctly, is that changes in co-constituted individual and collective identity result in changes in the legitimating principles of global and domestic social order, and consequent changes in the institutional forms of collective action, through which that identity is expressed to other societies. The norms, rules and principles of social interaction within, and between, these new institutional forms of collective action are developed by social actors through practice to accommodate the new institutional structure. This new structure manifests the new societal identity and system change.

The institutional forms of collective action are historically contingent modes of social organization. Historically society has been organized into different institutional forms. Different forms serve, at different times, the needs of different societies which construct them. These forms strongly reflect prevailing concepts of the legitimate relationship of the individual member of society to the prevailing conception of legitimate authority. Lordship was a legitimate form of authority in feudal Europe, thus fiefs were constructed to institutionalize the relationship between lord and vassal. Absolute monarchy, in which the king was thought to hold authority to rule directly from God, was a legitimate form of authority in eighteenth-century Europe, thus the territorial-sovereign state was constructed to institutionalize his unmediated sovereignty over the peoples within the territory he administered. National self-determination of a sovereign people united into a community of shared language, ethnicity, culture, or history has more recently become an accepted form of legitimate authority. Thus the national-state has been constructed to institutionalize these communal affiliations, and to serve them with an institutional form that can manifest to the world the social action that this form of collective identity seeks to express.

Thus the institutional forms of collective action change with prevailing, historically contingent conceptions of societal collective identity. That which constitutes an appropriate institutional vehicle through which society may take social action is strongly conditioned by what form of polity the society considers itself to be. A society that rejects lordship as a agency of legitimate authority cannot employ the institution of vassalage to take social action. A society that regards itself as a historically continuous nation, constituted by the ancient common bloodlines of the Volk, cannot take the social action it wishes to take, and it cannot express its self-understanding through social action consistent with this understanding, through the institution of a polyglot territorial-sovereign state.

Thus it is no accident, for example, that as German national collective identity developed in the nineteenth century, it turned to relatively ethnically homogeneous Hohenzollern Prussia, and Berlin, rather than the polyglot Hapsburg court in Vienna, for a vehicle by which German national collective identity might receive an institutional form. It is no accident that German national collective identity opted for a Kleindeutsche boundary, incorporating only ethnic Germans to the extent possible, rather than a Grossdeutsche boundary that would have incorporated the Slavic and Magyar peoples bound up in the Hapsburg Empire.

The norms, rules, and principles of interaction in domestic and international society then develop in practice. They derive from the principles that legitimate the domestic and international social orders. Their development is mediated by the institutions that enshrine and reproduce these principles. To illustrate this assertion, norms of political allegiance develop within domestic society that are consistent with the principles that legitimate the prevailing form of political authority in that domestic society. Domestic institutions reproduce these norms of behavior until they become norms for behavior, or rules. The individual’s allegiance to the institutional manifestation of these principles of legitimate authority is not only expected by norms, but commanded by the rules developed to regulate institutional society in accordance with prevailing (and historically contingent) legitimate notions of sovereignty. Societies with different conceptions of the nature of legitimate authority choose to endow different elements of society with this authority. It is important to note that the choice of element(s) of society in which this sovereignty is lodged emerges as an artifact of societal collective identity. What or whom is regarded as sovereign is strongly conditioned by the self-understandings of members of domestic society with respect to legitimate authority. That which we call sovereign says a lot about who we believe ourselves to be as a polity, whether we are a passive polity (regarding ourselves as objects of authority) or an active polity (regarding ourselves as sources of authority).

Thus, with reference to figure 1, subjects of the dynastic-sovereign state gives their allegiance to the Prince, who rules domestic society, and to his creed. Subjects of the territorial-sovereign state give their allegiance to the sovereign of that state. Citizens of the national-sovereign state give their allegiance to the nation, to the imagined community of shared ancestry, culture, or history to which they believe themselves to be a part. Domestic law is given to domestic society by the prevailing sovereign. The sovereign is that person, institution, or community in which legitimate social authority is lodged in accordance with the legitimating principles of the social order.

The division of labor within and between societies also develops normatively, through practice and subsequent interaction. These arrangements are conditioned by the historically contingent, prevailing legitimating principles of social order as well. The emergence of an educated, literate lay class permitted the development of the rational accounting principles and the techniques of finance necessary for the development of a significant intersocietal trade in the Renaissance period proceeding the dynastic-sovereign era. Important as this division of labor became for the growth of the economy in the private sphere, it also permitted an expansion of the division of labor in the public sphere. Educated lay bureaucrats secularized the “clerisy” of which Gellner has written. This was an enormously important feature in the penetration of the state into the private sphere. ₇

As sovereign identity became segmented more in terms of territorial, rather than confessional or dynastic criteria, the wealth of the territorial-sovereign state became a paramount concern as a resource for use in the defense and expansion of the state. The private economy was encouraged. Surpluses of trade were sought and their proceeds skimmed off by the state to fill war chests for further expansion. Capitalist production relations ensued and the privatization of the extraction of surplus resources from society became a vehicle by which the state could harness activity in the private sphere to advance state capabilities. In the nationalist era, this division of labor expanded globally, as a byproduct of both European economic and cultural imperialism. For the first time, however, the global social order witnessed the emergence of transnational economic interdependence. The colonial periphery became dependent upon western manufactures and cultural products, and the west was in turn dependent on access to raw materials in the periphery for the production of finished luxury goods, and for an outlet for western surplus labor.

Most significantly, the norms, rules, and principles of intersocietal interaction (inter-state and inter-”national” relations) also developed in the practice of interaction. They are very much derived from the principles that legitimate the domestic and international social orders. Their development is mediated by the specific institutions that enshrine and reproduce these principles. In the text to follow, it will hopefully become clear that these institutions enshrine, at different times, a particular form of sovereign-identity, derived from the principles of the prevailing social order that legitimate this form of sovereign identity. The behavior of the institutional forms is strongly conditioned by this identity.

Thus, when in 1555 the German princes were de facto emancipated from the heteronomous influence of the late-medieval papacy, juridical anarchy ensued. Dynastic sovereign authority was legitimated no longer through the mediation, or the prop, of the legitimacy of a universal Church, but by the principle of the confessional and dynastic hegemony of the prince. The medieval feudal-theocratic order was transformed into a new system, which I call the dynastic-sovereign system, or Augsburg system. In 1648, when the conflictual results of the Augsburg system were surveyed at the end of the Thirty Years War, confessional hegemony was abandoned as a legitimate organizing principle. Sovereign identity was enhanced by its further emancipation from all sacral notions of legitimacy. Dynastic legitimacy remained valid, but became eclipsed and dominated by the principle of territoriality. The emergence of territoriality as an innovative principle of social closure is of considerable interest and will be treated in chapters 4 and 5. Problems of coordination of common objectives resulted in the development of games of coordination that blossom into the foundations of an embryonic international law. This coordination process matured throughout the territorial-sovereign era.

The emergence of national collective identity transformed sovereign identity within the state. The notion that nations—national communities based upon common language, ethnicity, culture or shared history—are the legitimate wielders of the sword of state sovereignty, has had causal significance for the norms, rules and principles of international as well as domestic society. The notion that the nation, however defined or segmented, is inherently sovereign and self-determining, has transformed the legitimate social purposes of state action. The conflict of competing national visions, many of which are housed in national-states bristling with arms, enhanced the urgency of coordination between national-states, providing impetus to the development of a more significant corpus of international law.

The discussion above provides a preliminary illustration of how historical transformations of societal collective identity ultimately result in transformation of the international system. I have made a strong claim here: that an essentially cognitive factor—the self-identification of social aggregates—has causal significance in effecting system change. I regard this to be the case and state the case unambiguously. I do not, however, argue that societal collective identity determines, of any necessity, the international system. Political structure exists. This structure constrains but does not determine the behavior of social actors and aggregates. Material factors such as geography and technology also have systemic consequences. The present study recognizes these contributors to the constitution of historical international systems both implicitly and explicitly. The purpose of the present theoretical discussion is not to develop a monocausal theory of systems change by replacing material and structural variables with cognitive or ideational variables. The purpose of this discussion is to illustrate that these cognitive factors have causal significance both for constituting the system and for explaining interaction within it. My purpose is to describe and explain a system that is dynamic rather than static. Change in the international system cannot be explained without recourse to the factors developed in these pages. If we do not consider the consequences of actor self-identification, we cannot apprehend either the nature, or the consequences of national-sovereignty or of the national-state.

Having briefly elaborated these ideas regarding systemic change with changes in collective identity, the reader will now hope for fuller elaboration of the interaction between these factors. I will therefore move to develop the concepts of individual and collective identity, legitimating principles, the institutional forms of collective action, and the norms, rules, and principles of interaction in an analysis intended to show how changes in the former result in changes in the latter. I will either constitutively or causally link these “variables” to one another theoretically, then move on to a fuller empirical illustration of their operation in the generation and transformation of empirically observable international systems. The linkage between individual and collective identity emerges as constitutive rather than causal.

Individual Identity

The self-identification of individuals (individual identity) is important inasmuch as it is in part defined in terms of their participation in a collective identity. This collective identity is subject to change by forces and events that are both endogenous and exogenous to domestic society. I might, for example, develop German national collective identity merely because I feel a cultural and linguistic affiliation with my neighbors and subjects of other German-speaking states, even though my culture and language were transmitted to me by my experience of growing up in Prussia, whose borders I may never have left. This is an endogenous source of collective identity. Conversely, I might develop German national collective identity because Napoleon’s armies rolled over Saxony and the rest of German-speaking Europe, occupied my home town, raped my mother, and shot my father, and it occurs to me to consider how this might have been prevented by the creation of a single political and military actor from all of the fragmented German-speaking states of early-nineteenth-century Europe. The experience of suffering at the hands of those ethnically and linguistically different from me can affect how I view myself as an individual, and as a member of a social collectivity. This is a societally exogenous source of collective identity. Thus this collective identity locates the individual’s identity both with respect to other actors, and to the global order.

Collective and individual identity are co-constituted. My individual identity acquires social significance only with reference to the identities of others, both within domestic society and within international society. If I say that I am, for example, a German-speaking Prussian (in the nineteenth century), I am also saying that I am a subject of the Hohenzollern dynasty, that I regard the crowned scion of that dynasty as sovereign (in possession of legitimate authority) and thus as sources of legitimate domestic law. When I say that I am a German-speaking Prussian, I am also saying that I am not a German-speaking Bavarian. I do not regard King Ludwig as a legitimate source of my domestic law. He does not exercise legitimate authority over myself or my people. On the other hand, if I were to simply say that I am a German, then I am saying something else entirely about whom I believe myself to be, and about what I regard as a legitimate source of authority. If your language and ethnicity is Czech, for example, and not German, I am also saying something about you. I am saying that you are not part of “us.” You are “other.”

Both Friedrich Kratochwil and William Bloom have illuminated the relationship between individual identity and collective identity in their analyses of the sociology of Durkheim. Kratochwil stresses Durkheim’s investigation of the emotive content of social life. In Kratochwil’s analysis, which draws here upon Freud, identity is obtained with reference to the structure of relations the individual desires with respect to cherished persons and institutions (“love objects”), and conversely with respect to persons and institutions that become “objects of aggression.” ₈ In other words, one identifies with those and that which one loves and cherishes, which are familiar and comfortable. We do not develop strong feelings for individuals and things with which we are unfamiliar. That which threatens our objects of affection, or our relationship with them, become objects of our aggression.

Bloom links individual identity to collective identity by invoking Durkheim’s notion of “collective consciousness” which, in Durkheim’s sociology, creates what he calls “organic solidarity...[among]...dissimilar individuals.” ₉ The nonemotive link between personal identity and collective identity in Durkheim is, in other words, provided through the process of the socialization of the individual into the behavioral norms of his or her society. Aided by Erik Erikson’s developmental psychology of identity formation, Bloom recognizes that Durkheim’s linkage of personal identity to collective identity through the socialization process may well have enormous emotive content as well. Nevertheless he stresses socialization because “[t]heoretically...socialization is the precise point at which the individual meets society, at which psychology meets sociology.” ₁₀

Put differently, socialization is a process by which we become familiar with and habituated to people, places, environments and institutions, and the modes of operation and rules of the latter. Socialization is not, in this context, a remorseless selection mechanism through which successful societal socializers are selected for survival by imitating successful behavior. ₁₁ This discussion of individual identity has, then, led us to three theoretically pertinent observations. (1) Socialization, in the context of identity formation, is a process in which the individual is habituated to his or her society, forms cognitive, and emotive attachments to it, and incorporates its features and norms into his or her identity. (2) The individual’s identity is not constituted independently of his or her membership in one or more social collectivities. (3) The individual forms and reforms identity commitments from experiences that result from forces both within, and external to domestic society.

Collective Identity

Through emotive identification (emotional attachment) and the forces of socialization, our individual identity—our ideas about who we regard ourselves to be—are derived in a social context. Individual identity and collective identity are co-constituted. Individuals do possess social agency. Individuals are self-regarding, but constrained by their nature as social organisms to self-identification with social collectivities. In the literature on developmental psychology, this self-identification with respect to others at the earliest stages of the development of the human being and continues much later in life. ₁₂

Durkheim’s intuitive theoretical construct of the “organic solidarity of dissimilar individuals” is given a fuller theoretical form, and receives empirical affirmation, in the literature on social psychology. This is particularly so in the literature on in-group bias. ₁₃ This bias helps center individuals with respect to others in the world. They help individuals to order and organize their understanding of the world, and enhance their self-esteem with by identification with the group. But the question of how this group identification becomes an impetus to social action remains. I have explained why the individual forms identity commitments to social groupings and the processes involved. I have explored the nature of the collective identity that helps to constitute individual identity. I have not, however, addressed the issue of how these collective identities generate social action with respect other groups, or with respect to members of another group. Daniel Druckman, who has addressed this issue in a recent analysis of the literature on in-group biases, suggests that:

Membership in a clan, religious group, or ethnic group becomes part of the individual’s self identity and critical to a sense of self-worth. The self is threatened by information that calls into question the groups to which one belongs. People learn to react based on their loyalties; they defend those groups that are important to their definition of who they are. Moreover, these loyalties differentiate whom in their environment is appropriate to support and whom to avoid. And such loyalties can foster a consensus among members that becomes self-fulfilling and difficult to change. The stronger the loyalty, the more likely members of a group are to hold similar views and endorse similar strategies. They approach the world in lockstep, perceiving and defining others in the world similarly. There is little, if any, chance for discrepant information to filter through or for reasons to change to be considered. ₁₄

This passage nicely captures both the emotive and socialization mechanisms that Kratochwil and Bloom have identified in Durkheim. It also suggests that collective identity and individual identity are not merely co-constituted, but are also mutually reinforcing and therefore likely to become institutionalized and to be reproduced. Collective identity carries with it the means by which it becomes institutionalized. This institutionalization mechanism is the will of the participants in a collective identity that the identity be perpetuated. This will-to-manifest-identity is an expression of the agency of the collective identity and constituted individual identities of those who share it.

It is worth pausing here to reflect upon what I have just argued in the context of the notion of “interests,” developed in the previous chapter. What is suggested by my assertion above is that to the extent that collective identity has causal significance for the construction of social collectivities—which become actors in the international political arena—interest may be explained in terms of the aggregated will-to-manifest-identity as well as in terms of the will-to-power of the realist tradition. Individual identity is threatened by hazards to those collective identities that are constitutive of individual identity. Therefore individuals perceive that their interest lies squarely in the defense and promotion of this collective identity. The fundamental, even primordial, motive (or “interest”) of self-preservation will then ensure that individuals will come fully to the defense of the collective identity that they see as fundamentally constitutive of their selves when they feel that collective identity is threatened.

Significantly, however, it does not necessarily follow that the individuals will invariably promote the aggrandizement of a collective identity that is constitutive of their individual identities under any and all circumstances. This is particularly so when the aggrandizement may threaten the collective identities of those others whom the individual does not perceive as a threat to his or her own (collective or individual) identity. With recourse to the domestic analogy so prolifically employed as an analytic device within realist scholarship, the significance of this assertion is revealed. In this context, individuals in domestic society who will react, and often react violently, when threatened will nevertheless not necessarily exhibit reflexive belligerence to others in the absence of threat. Significantly, some individuals do reflexively behave aggressively, boastfully, deviously, willfully, or violently even in the absence of threat. They must always be “on top.” They must always have “the last word.” We must be made aware of their accomplishments, and the insignificance of our own in comparison. We regard them as obnoxious at best, sociopathic at worst, and ostracize them from the company of polite society. Their personality disorders are seen as pathologies of inadequate socialization into domestic society. In the international context, when social collectivities exhibit similar behavior, they are regarded as “cultural attributes.” In either the domestic or international case, in the absence of threats to constitutive identity, the actor can either behave modestly and cooperatively, or immodestly or belligerently. There is a “will-to-power” in some individuals in the domestic context that is not present in others. So it is in the international context.

All social actors share the will-to-manifest-identity, however, in both international and domestic society. A physical threat of extermination is not required to threaten the will-to-manifest-identity in either domestic or international society. The will-to-manifest-identity may result in a new form of collectivity, a new form of sovereignty, legitimated in a new way. When this occurs, social transformation is in the wind. This can result in transformation of global social orders. When this occurs, the international system, while it may retain features of its previous manifestation, does not escape its own metamorphosis.

Legitimating Principles

Collective identity is closely coupled to the legitimating principles within which it is constituted and interpreted. Social order is predicated on conceptions of legitimate authority, as it is too costly to maintain a social order on the basis of coercion alone. As Kratochwil has explained, the nature of legitimate authority cannot be understood by recourse to Hobbesian analysis and premises alone. The relationship between the “sovereign” and the objects of authority is not one that leaves the sovereign in the state of nature with society. The disinterestedness of the authority cannot be assured under such circumstances; therefore “no ‘contract’, setting up a governmental authority would ever be possible” under these conditions. ₁₅

Rather, as Habermas, Kratochwil, and Weber all suggest in somewhat different contexts, the relationship between members of society, and constituted public authority, is mediated by what Weber refers to as the concept of legitimate social order. It is this order to which members of society, the objects of authority, feel a sense of obligation or duty. As Weber intones:

Action, especially social action which involves social relationships, may be oriented by the actors to a belief (Vorstellung) in the existence of a legitimate order....orientation to the validity of an order (Ordnung) means more than the mere existence of a uniformity of social action determined by custom or self-interest....such action in addition is determined by...[the individual’s]...subjection to an order, [and] the rules which impose obligations on him, which he is usually careful to fulfill, partly because disobedience would carry disadvantageous consequences to him, but usually also in part because it would be abhorrent to the sense of duty, which, to a greater or lesser extent, is an absolute value to him. ₁₆

Here Weber’s analysis suggests unambiguously that while, from the perspective of instrumental rationality, there are good reasons for the individual to comply with the injunctions that issue forth from legitimate authority, the act of compliance with these injunctions may not be said to have been explained without stricter analysis of motives for compliance. Certainly one good reason to comply with these injunctions is to avoid sanctions for noncompliance. A rational instrumental conception of interests can handily explain compliance with the directives even of illegitimate authority in this context: I must comply or I will be punished. Social actors acquire an interest in compliance with the injunctions and directives of legitimate authority because they value that authority. Their own notions of a moral order, those in which their identities have meaning and their compliance takes on a moral character are at issue.

Similarly, Kratochwil’s analysis uncovers Durkheim’s distinction between material and moral authority in the context of Durkheim’s analysis of “social facts.” He discovers that moral authority (legitimacy) helps to establish the notion of obligations, and justifies the threat of physical sanctions for noncompliance.

Durkheim maintains that certain social phenomena are best investigated by tracing their origin to a collective experience and that there are significant analogies between the sacred and the moral. This last claim allows for a clearer conceptualization of obligation....Sanctions are then no longer simply the penalties attached to certain actions by the Hobbesian sovereign, who thereby changes the utility calculations of the individual. As Durkheim emphasizes again and again, the term ‘moral authority’ is ‘opposed to material authority or physical supremacy.’...moral facts expressed in rules of conduct are valid not because of threatened deprivations, but because of their duty-imposing character, which is in turn the precondition for the legitimacy of physical sanctions. ₁₇

Thus Kratochwil reminds us that physical (material) sanctions, and the material authority whose agency they manifest in a social context, are legitimated not solely by their role in mitigating anarchy by enforcing order, but also by the belief that compliance with them is a moral act, the fulfillment of an obligation to a moral (legitimate) social order. People comply because they wish to comply to fulfill an obligation to the order they value as legitimate. The threat of physical sanctions is extended to the minority who have not apprehended this duty. No social order would be possible if the threat of physical sanctions alone stood in the way of noncompliance. It is not the existence of law, or of institutions dedicated to their enforcement alone that ensures compliance with the strictures of the social order. As Helen Milner recently reminds us regarding the questions of compliance with international law, and the strictures of its institutions:

It seems not to be their existence that matters, but their capacity for commanding obedience. This capacity depends much on their perceived legitimacy, as it does for domestic institutions. These institutions will have little influence internationally or domestically if they lack legitimacy....A sense of legitimacy is essential to the maintenance of any order. ₁₈

But notions of moral or legitimate social order are not static. They change over time. The analysis above helps us to understand how legitimate social order is upheld and reproduced, even in the absence of material or physical sanctions, or even the threat of them. It is not so helpful in explaining how notions of legitimate social order decay, become transformed, and are replaced. We need a framework of analysis that addresses the dynamic nature of societal notions of the legitimacy of social ordering principles. ₁₉ Why do notions of the legitimacy of the social order change? How do changes in collective identity transform the legitimating principles of social order, and thus generate a new order? I turn to the work of Habermas to establish further the link between specifically collective identity and the legitimating principles of social orders.

Significantly, Bloom observes that Habermas comes at the notion of identity from the epistemological perspective of philosophy rather than psychology (or sociology). For Habermas, the unraveling of the mysteries of identity and identification is a major task of philosophy. He argues that it is through the “self-reflective symbolism of identity” that both the individual and society attempt meaningfully to locate themselves in both their profane (immanent) and cosmic (transcendent) environment. ₂₀ Habermas proposes that this is accomplished by the individual or collective social actor with recourse to an “identity-securing interpretive system” (a system of beliefs about self-identity, collective identity, and social function in a legitimate social order). If this identity-securing interpretive system generally conforms to the experience of the social actor of the “realities of social existence,” the social order is legitimated. But “if there is not an appropriate symbolic mediation...between the individual or the group and the social structure, the anxious need for a secure and meaningful identification will manifest itself in either the change of the interpretive system [a new ideology of legitimate social order] or a demand for change in the social structure. If the interests inherent in identification are not met, then the system is not legitimated.” ₂₁

This is the “legitimation crisis” upon which, in the view of Habermas, social orders rise and founder. Crucially important to my argument is Habermas’s assertion that threats to social identity bring about these legitimation crises. In my own view, these threats result in the transformation of the legitimating principles upon which social orders rest. As Habermas observes:

Only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of a crisis....Crisis states assume the form of a disintegration of social institutions.

Social systems too have identities and can lose them; historians are capable of differentiating between revolutionary changes of a state or the downfall of an empire, and mere structural alterations. In doing so, they refer to the interpretations that members of a system use in identifying one another as belonging to the same group, and through this group identity assert their own self-identity. In historiography, a rupture in tradition, through which the interpretive systems that guarantee identity lose their social integrative power, serves as an indicator of the collapse of social systems. From this perspective a social system has lost its identity as soon as later generations no longer recognize themselves within the once-constitutive tradition. ₂₂

International relations theorists should be as capable as historians of differentiating between these different macro-level social phenomena. Habermas’s discussion above provides a plausible linkage between the ideologies that legitimate a social belief system and the principles of social action by which members of a society are socialized into that system. The belief system, or “interpretive system” links individual identity and a collective identity in a context in which meaning is provided to individual identity through its ideological subsumption in a collective. This provides the individual with a “transcendent” identity inasmuch as the collective will transcend the individual. The principles that legitimate the collective identity are the principles that legitimate the social order that provides an intersubjective social meaning to collective identity. These principles are institutionally reproduced and transmitted to the individual through his or her socialization into the society that is generated and regulated by this system of beliefs.

As Habermas observes, “ruptures” in this institutionally transmitted tradition occur when the interpretive system (ideology of identity) which legitimates social order, and gives meaning to collective identity, is challenged. The challenge deprives the interpretive system of its utility in locating individual identity in the social milieu. It does so by challenging the validity or legitimacy of the collective identity that is constitutive of individual identity. This challenge can arise from sources that are either endogenous or exogenous to domestic society. This challenge often involves the creation of what Kratochwil refers to as new “institutional facts.” ₂₃

It can also result from various discontinuities with tradition, specifically discontinuities in “community,” in “society,” and in “authority,” particularly if these occur rapidly so as to induce the discomfort of disorientation in the individual and in society. ₂₄ Discontinuities in community, society and authority can involve urbanization and industrialization, war and/or economic deprivation, and collapse of political regime, respectively. All of these social discontinuities can, however, have sources that are exogenous to domestic society. All can result in transformation in the orientation of a polity with respect to international society.

Most important, however, is the observation that the social order’s survival is crucially dependent upon the consent given to its legitimating principles by social actors. The social order must continue to provide an institutional framework for social action that is consistent with the dominant forms of societal collective identity. Neither legitimating principles or social orders can survive change in the other without being transformed. Thus the agency of collective actors is found in their tendency to express their collective identity through institutional forms that are consistent with that identity. These institutional forms must also be amenable to the social action that is characteristic of a particular form of collective identity. These institutional forms enshrine the principles that legitimate these identities. Agents of the societies whose principles these institutional forms represent take social action that is impelled by “interests” that are defined in terms of the will-to-power only to the extent that this social action promotes the will-to-manifest-identity that is enshrined in the legitimating principles and institutions of the new social order.

Instutional Forms of Collective Action

The next set of variables in the first column of figure 1, the institutional forms of collective action (Kingdom / realm, state, nation, etc.), are the institutional artifacts of the societal relations and authority patterns. I have suggested above that this authority is constructed from the prevailing collective self-identifications and self-understandings, and from the principles that legitimate these. Importantly, these institutional forms are constituted with, and by, prevailing conceptions of legitimate collective identity. These institutional forms are not fundamental. They are not theoretically or ontologically primitive. They are not enduring. These forms change with the prevailing conceptions of legitimate social order and with the collective identities consistent with this order. This observation calls into serious question the utility of state-centric theories precisely because the state is merely one of many possible and historically observed institutional forms of collective action.

It is not by accident that social revolutions within domestic society result in immediate transformation of domestic political institutions that are deemed constitutive of the despised regime that has been supplanted. The destruction of the institutions of the ancien regime in this context is a willful and public act of nullification of the principles which legitimated the social order that spawned these institutions. The first act of the French National Assembly, upon learning of the plans of Louis XVI to restore absolutist rule in France with the assistance of foreign armed force, was to radically assert the collective identity of the sovereign people of France by destroying the institution of the monarchy. In this case this was most effectively accomplished by the physical destruction of the incarnation of that institution, Louis. The American Revolution replaced a parliament with a congress, a king with a president, an aristocracy with a bureaucracy. The Bolshevik revolution similarly replaced a monarch with a politburo, a Duma with soviets, the Okhrana with the Chekists. ₂₅ When the Soviet Union gave up the ghost the entire political structure studied for decades by western scholars and intelligence analysts (“Kremlinologists”), diplomats, and journalists came down in an instant, like a bulldozed segment of the Berlin wall.

The fact that these institutions have been variously replaced by institutions modeled on those of liberal western states, or very often by nothing at all, reflects the ambiguity with which the successor states of the Soviet Union have addressed the task of defining and articulation the principles of the new social order, especially in Russia. But this does not attenuate the force of the reality of the destruction of the old institutions that had been identified with the old regime. Two of the most discredited of these institutions, the KGB and Red Army, have suffered the most. The former was almost entirely demolished, particularly with regard to its domestic surveillance function. The latter has been allowed to starve for lack of resources to the point of evident ineffectiveness. ₂₆ This outcome is as inexplicable within the confines of neorealist analysis as was the collapse of the Soviet state and its Eastern European compatriots. ₂₇ When we realize how closely that these institutions of state security are associated with the ancien regime in Russia, the rationale behind their neglect and demise becomes not only clear, but familiar, in spite of the loss of the security functions that they provided.

Significantly, Theda Skocpol, in her influential treatment of social revolution, defines social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state [institutional] and class structures.” ₂₈ I will pause here to briefly analyze Skocpol’s notion of social revolution in order to illuminate the distinction between this concept and my conception of transformation in a social order. First of all, Skocpol analyzes what is really a very much more circumscribed phenomena than transformation of a global social order. She analyzes social revolution in a domestic context while the social orders that interest us transcend state boundaries. Yet importantly she delineates between social revolutions and political revolutions in the domestic context and we should do no less in a broader context. While political revolutions can simply result in a change of personnel within a constant institutional context, or even can go so far as a change in personnel and institutional transformation, social revolutions are accompanied by “transformations of class relations.” ₂₉

In contrast, rebellions, even when successful, may involve the revolt of subordinate classes—but they do not eventuate in structural change. Political revolutions transform state structures but not social structures, and they are not necessarily accomplished through class conflict....What is unique to social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through intense sociopolitical conflicts in which class struggles play a key role. ₃₀

Skocpol’s structural Marxian heritage appears to predispose her to talk about “structures” in favor of agency. Yet her distinction between social and political revolution in the domestic context is useful because it demonstrates that social transformations that involve the ascendancy of one socioeconomic class over and in place of another, coupled with transformation of political institutions, are more fundamental than mere institutional transformation. This distinction is essential in understanding the radical distinction between the institutional forms of the territorial state, and the national-state. Not only was the territorial state constructed from institutions such as monarchy that the nation-state has dispensed with, but it also represented the interests of a different coalition of class actors than does the contemporary nation-state. The territorial-sovereign and national-sovereign states are legitimated by different principles, and these principles articulate a distinctly different structure of class interests as well as a very different range of prevailing societal identity commitments.

Norms, Rules, and Principles

The norms, rules, and principles for intrasocietal and intersocietal relations are developed, in practice by newly constituted social actors within and between societies. These norms, rules, and principles take forms that foster interaction among the prevailing institutional forms of collective action. They are distinct from, but derived from, the legitimating principles of these collective self-understandings. As they develop in practice I will defer further discussion of them to the following chapters, where their development and causal significance for the patterns of politics between the “units” of the three historical systems depicted in figure 1 will be developed in the course of empirical analysis of these systems.

In the preceding pages, I have outlined the principles by which the units are constituted and interact, and that the result is a “system.” This system is not static. Definition of its “structure” alone does not serve to tell us how the units interact, nor does this say much about the probable outcomes of interaction. ₃₁ The system may be transformed as well as reproduced. The system’s “structural form” is mediated as much by the interests of relevant social actors defined in terms of the will-to-manifest-identity as it is defined in terms of the will-to-power.

Figure 1 outlines the manner in which I regard changes in these variables in Western European history as having resulted in change from the Augsburg system that effectively sprung from the Reformation, and effectively ended the medieval feudal-theocratic order, to the Westphalian system that legally ended the wars that were one long-term result of the Reformation, to the present nation-state system that followed the age of nationalism. Systems reproduce themselves so long as the institutional forms of collective action are capable of providing modalities of social action for the prevailing expression of societal collective identity. Systems are transformed when they become structural impediments to the social action and self-conceptions of both domestic and international social actors, and the principles that legitimate these self understandings. The norms, rules, and principles by which the system functions are transformed, through subsequent practice, to regulate social action in accordance with the new legitimating principles of the new social order.

Thus these new norms, rules, and principles develop in practice to provide reasons for new forms of social action. Note that I delineate between causes and reasons here following Kratochwil’s observation that norms and rules should not be seen as “causal” in the sense that their prescriptive force causes a social actor to take a given action. Rather, they “provide ‘reasons’ which decisionmakers will find persuasive, and to which they will therefore defer...[such that]...all rules and norms are problem-solving devices for dealing with the recurrent issues of social life: conflict and cooperation.” ₃₂

Sequencing: Agents and Objects of Systemic Transformation

One topic of theoretical relevance that I have so far left untreated is the question of sequencing of the changes in the factors of variables of systemic transformation that I have linked causally in the preceding discussion. Must collective identity change within a given society, or all societies before the system changes? Can the converse be true? Can the system change and thus force changes in societal collective identity upon some members of international society? Do changes in collective identity at the level of domestic society result in changes in the rules of the international system, or is the converse the case? The answer, I believe, is actor specific. It depends upon whether a given international actor is a agent of systemic transformation or an object of systemic transformation, constrained to respond to the agency of others.

I believe that evidence may be presented that the causal sequencing of the variables I have sketched out in the matrix in figure 1 may work both ways, under specific conditions. As I suggested earlier, it does not appear to be the case that changes in collective identity must precede changes in the legitimating principles of the social order within which the collective identities have meaning. It is not clearly necessary for collective identities and legitimating principles to change first, in order to evoke changes in the institutional forms of collective action. It appears to be the case that the reverse sequencing can easily occur, under certain conditions. It is important to stress, however, that a given form of societal collective identity, a given legitimating principle for a global social order, and a given institutional form (which manifests that collective identity to other societies), must be prevailing and held in common by the recognized actors in the system for a system to be constituted, or to be transformed from a prior configuration of these variables. The legitimating principles of a social order privilege some institutional forms, and not others.

Once constituted, a given system can provide, as neorealist scholarship suggests in more Darwinian terms, ₃₃ enormous incentives for a given society to reconstitute itself in conformity with the privileged institutional forms, and to mold their identities and societal legitimating principles into collective identities and legitimating principles that are similarly privileged by these forms. Thus in the age of nationalism, for example, societies organized along traditional, tribal, or otherwise distinctly nonnational forms, may be impelled by the norms, rules, and principles of the national-sovereign state system, not only to construct states to provide rational bureaucratic agencies of their collective identity as an actor in the system, but also to construct nationalist movements and myths to legitimate their participation. ₃₄

Thus many societies that have suffered from the experience of European colonialism have set upon nation-building projects in order to construct national collective identities that will legitimate the institutional forms of collective action they have acquired as a colonial legacy. ₃₅ These nation-building projects in the postcolonial third world have been taken on precisely because the self-identifications of former colonial peoples have been rather rudely transformed by the colonial experience. They have learned that colonial occupation and exploitation were the consequences of failure to construct the rational bureaucratic organizational structures (states) that serve to manifest collective identity to other societies and ensure the maintenance of these identities (societal security). Having acquired states as institutional artifacts of the colonial experience, in the age of nationalism they have endeavored to construct the collective identities that are required to legitimate, in both domestic and international society, the institutional forms of collective action that are privileged in the national-sovereign system.

The development of national collective identity has both international and domestic (systemic and unit level, in neorealist parlance) sources. National collective identity can develop from a very large number of domestic sources of that identity, and then provide a new legitimating principle for a domestic social order. The new legitimating principles then require a new institutional form—leading to a new global social order and “system” when aggregated with those of societies which have achieved a similar collective identity by their own path. Conversely, national collective identity can develop in response to what might amount to a structural condition. This condition entails the privileging of a specific institutional form of collective action, and therefore, of specific legitimating principles of that institutional form. In shorthand:

Sequence 1:
{collective identity legitimating principles institutions domestic & international norms/rules/principles system}

or, conversely, under different conditions,

Sequence 2:
{system change in domestic & international norms/rules/principles institutions legitimating principles collective identity}.

The sequencing of this transformational logic, for a given society that is in route to a change in collective identity, depends strongly upon whether that society is experiencing transformations in domestic social relations (irrespective of whether the source of this transformation is exogenous to that society) and whether that society is in a position to make its agency felt throughout international society. This second of these criteria is, of course, fertile ground for bringing the structural variables of classical- and neo-realism into the analysis (such as the distribution of capabilities across the system) with the caveat that we must expand what counts as a capability to include, at a minimum, cultural resources.

Societies that experience rapid and/or far reaching transformations in domestic relations, and who are well positioned to exert influence on other societies, tend to follow Sequence 1. They constitute agents of systemic transformation. One example would be the advanced, industrialized, imperialist national-states of the late nineteenth century. Societies that are domestically socially conservative or stagnant tend to reproduce their social structure and institutions domestically and—to the extent that they are in a position to exert influence on other societies—to reproduce international systemic structure as well. If these domestically socially conservative societies are poorly positioned to exert influence on other societies, they tend to follow Sequence 2. They become objects of systemic transformation. One example would be the peripheral peoples of late-nineteenth-century Africa and Asia. The agency of those who follow Sequence 1 creates a systemic transformation, whose influential norms and rules the subject society cannot avoid.

To the extent that the norms and rules of the international system privilege an institutional form that is at variance with the institutional form of collective action of the target society, the latter experiences powerful incentives to replicate the privileged institutional forms, their legitimating principles and associated collective identities. These traditional societies find themselves under siege by the agency of the system transforming societies, irrespective of the form these traditions take. This is so precisely because the legitimating principles of the traditional social orders are challenged when their institutional forms cannot replicate the success (the agency, felt throughout the system) of the system transforming societies. In both of these sequences societies encounter the transience of institutional facts. In the first sequence societies are impelled to create new institutions. In the second sequence they are required to adapt to new institutional facts. The forms that these adaptations take encompass, but are not exhausted by, the structural neorealist concept of socialization of these actors by the structure qua agency of the international system. ₃₆

These sequences will be revisited and better illustrated in chapter 8 when I turn to the analysis of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century western imperialism.

Endnotes

Note 1: Little cites this assertion by Nicholas Onuf in Buzan, et. al., Logic of Anarchy, p. 103. See Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), especially pp. 35&-;65. For a comprehensive view of new approaches see Hayward R. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 2: Alexander Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 41 (3) (1987), p. 359. Back.

Note 3: See Conrad Black, “Canada’s Continuing Identity Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 74 (2) (1995): 99–115. Back.

Note 4: Ontologies are “the substantive entities and configurations the theory postulates.” They provide the “concrete referents of an explanatory discourse” and consist of “the real-world structures (things, entities) and processes posited by the theory and invoked in the theory’s explanations.” See David Dessler, “What is at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?,” International Organization 43 (Summer 1989): 444–45. Back.

Note 5: This is Anderson’s explanation for postcolonial nationalism in the third world. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 139–40. Back.

Note 6: The definition of principles employed in theories of international regimes is wholly applicable here. Stephen Krasner defines principles as “beliefs of fact, causation and rectitude.” It is specifically beliefs about the “rectitude” of authority that interest us in the present argument. See Stephen D. Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences,” in Stephen D. Krasner (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 1–21. Krasner’s definition of principles in the context of international regimes is found on p. 2. Back.

Note 7: Gellner argues that an educated “clerisy” provides a high culture through which legitimate social governance is effected, and through which the technical requirements of centralized social organization are derived. When the literacy and high culture of the clerisy is secularized and ultimately universally held, societal self-identification, in essence, derives from this culture that now pervades the entire society. “That is the secret of nationalism.” Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 9–18. Gellner is quoted here on p. 18. Back.

Note 8: Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 126 ff. Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy. Translated by D. F. Pocock. With an introduction by J.G. Peristiany (New York: Free Press, 1953). Back.

Note 9: William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations, pp. 14 ff. Back.

Note 10: Ibid. p. 15. Back.

Note 11: This is Waltz’s development of the term and of the concept of socialization in the context of international interaction. In this view, in the international arena, socialization functions only as a structural constraint on the behavior of international actors. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 74–77. Back.

Note 12: See, for example, Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968). Back.

Note 13: For persuasive examples of this literature, see W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups (New York: Basic Books, 1959), Vamik D. Volkan, Cyprus-War and Adaptation: A Psychoanalytic History of Two Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979); Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1988); and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Report no. 123, Us and Them, The Psychology of Ethnonationalism (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1987). Back.

Note 14: Daniel Druckman, “Nationalism, Patriotism, and Group Loyalty: A Social Psychological Perspective,” Mershon International Studies Review (Supplement to the International Studies Quarterly) 38, Supplement 1 (April 1994): 49–50. The emphasis is mine. Back.

Note 15: Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions, pp. 116–17. Back.

Note 16: Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Translated by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, Edited with an Introduction by Talcott Parsons (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964), p. 124. Emphasis in the original. Back.

Note 17: Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions, p. 124. Back.

Note 18: Milner, “The Assumption of Anarchy,” p. 74. Back.

Note 19: These social ordering principles are not to be confused with Waltz’s systemic “ordering principle” of anarchy. Back.

Note 20: Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations, p. 47. Back.

Note 21: Ibid. pp. 47–48. Back.

Note 22: Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 3–4. Also quoted in William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations, p. 48. The emphasis is mine. Back.

Note 23: Friedrich Kratochwil, “Regimes, Interpretation and the ‘Science’ of Politics: A Reappraisal,” pp. 270–72. Back.

Note 24: For the role of social change, especially rapid social change, in evoking mass societal transformation in conceptions of legitimate social order see William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959). For a related discussion in the context of developing societies see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). See especially chapters 1–3. Back.

Note 25: See, for example, Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual, Personal and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Collier Books, 1965). Back.

Note 26: See, for example, Benjamin S. Lambeth, “Russia’s Wounded Military,” Foreign Affairs 74 (2) (1995): 86–98. Back.

Note 27: For novel attempts to explain these transformations with a theoretical framework outside the realist tradition see Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil, “Understanding Change in International Politics: the Soviet Empire’s Demise and the International System,” International Organization 48 (2) (1994): 215–47, and Timur Kuran, “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the Eastern European Revolution of 1989,” World Politics 44 (1) (1991): 7–48. Back.

Note 28: Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, p. 4. The emphasis is mine. Back.

Note 29: Ibid. p. 5. Back.

Note 30: Ibid. pp. 4–5. Back.

Note 31: This assertion stands in opposition to the assertions of Waltz that an international system may be described fully by designating systemic structure, units, and interaction between these units. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 79. Back.

Note 32: Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, p. 69. Back.

Note 33: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 74–7 and pp. 127–28. Back.

Note 34: See Walker Connor, “The Nation and its Myth,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 33 (1992): 48–57. Back.

Note 35: Robert Jackson argues that postcolonial states in the third world have retained state-structures and juridical sovereignty left them by departing Europeans for precisely this reason. See Robert Jackson, “Quasi-states, Dual Regimes, and Neoclassical Theory: International Jurisprudence and the Third World,” International Organization 41 (4) (1987): 519–50. Back.

Note 36: Waltz’s discussion of structure as a causal agency may be found in Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 73–74. Back.