Anarchy in international relations theory: the neorealist-neoliberal debate.

Two of the most influential contemporary approaches to international relations theory are neorealism and neoliberalism. The debate between these two approaches has dominated much of international relations theory for the last decade. It is now commonplace for an article about some aspect of international relations theory to begin by locating itself in terms of this debate. These two approaches and the debate between them have failed to contribute as much as they might have to international relations theory. These approaches suffer from serious internal weaknesses and limitations that the neorealist-neoliberal debate often has tended to obscure rather than to clarify. Once we have exposed and clarified these weaknesses and limitations, we will be able to see several important directions for future theoretical work.

Two books, Neorealism and Its Critics and Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate, make significant contributions to this debate. The former offered a wide-ranging critique of neorealism when it was published in 1986. The latter, which has just been published, is more narrowly focused. It takes up where some of the critiques in Neorealism and Its Critics left off. A review of these two complementary volumes affords an excellent opportunity to begin to identify some of the weaknesses and limitations that the neorealist-neoliberal debate frequently has obscured.

In this review, I discuss four broad avenues of criticism that these volumes take in evaluating neorealism and specifically Kenneth Waltz's formulation of it.(1) The first three avenues are the origins of states' preferences, the agent-structure problem, and Waltz's specific definition of political structure. These criticisms generally do not challenge the logical coherence of neorealism. They focus instead on the limitations of the theory. The first two center on what neorealism takes for granted, e.g., preferences and intersubjective meanings and understandings. The third criticism finds Waltz's definition of structure too confining. The fourth avenue of criticism challenges the internal logic of neorealism directly. It argues that conclusions claimed to follow from the assumptions of neorealism actually do not. The neorealist-neoliberal debate lies along this fourth avenue.

Three issues lie at the center of the neorealist-neoliberal debate. In reviewing these issues, I try to bring important implicit assumptions to the fore and show that those assumptions account for many of the important differences between the two theories. Moreover, many of the differences that have been thought to be significant, such as the difference between relative and absolute gains, are not. The first issue at the heart of the debate is the meaning and implications of anarchy. Although the notion of anarchy has served as a central organizing concept for much of international relations theory, the emphasis on anarchy is misplaced. What have often been taken to be the implications of anarchy do not really follow from the assumption of anarchy. Rather, these implications result from other implicit and unarticulated assumptions about the states' strategic environment.

The second central issue is the problem of absolute and relative gains. I argue that the controversy surrounding this problem generally has mistaken effects for causes and that this mistake has handicapped analysis of the problem of international cooperation. More specifically, I try to demonstrate that the international relations literature generally holds, if at times only implicitly so, that the extent to whcih a state is concerned about relative gains depends on its strategic environment, for example, the offense-defense balance and the intensity of the security dilemma. But if this is the case, then the degree to which a state is concerned about relative gains is part of the outcome to be explained: it is an effect and not a cause. The extent to which a state is concerned about relative gains, therefore, does not explain the level of international cooperation. This realization should refocus our attention on what determines the degree of a state's concern about relative gains.

The third issue is the tension between coordination and distribution. There are often many ways to realize the joint gains from cooperation, and these alternatives often lead to different distributions of those gains. Thus, the potential for joint gains usually creates distributional disputes that tend to impede cooperation. Although these distributional concerns only recently have begun to receive attention in the debate between neorealism and neoliberalism, they hold the promise of clarifying some of the questions that actually do divide these two approaches.

Neorealism and the structural approach