anarchy

anarchy, in political science and the study of international relations, the absence of any authority superior to nation-states and capable of arbitrating their disputes and enforcing international law. The term anarchy is derived from the ancient Greek root anarchos (“without authority”), denoting the absence of the rule of law or of settled government.

The prevalence of anarchy in the relations between states is the basic assumption of realism, a prominent school of thought in international relations theory. According to realists, international law in practice imposes few direct constraints on the behaviour of states, in part because there is almost no way of enforcing it. In the absence of a suprastate power or arbiter, there are no enforceable rules of conduct, especially for strong states. The harsh interstate environment is anarchic both in the strict sense of lacking enforceable international law and in the broader sense of being violently chaotic. The prevalence of this environment in turn requires that the primary goals of individual states be survival and security.

Some scholars, especially those associated with the liberal approach to international relations, believe that anarchy can be overcome, or “exited,” through international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and through the widespread acceptance of international law, especially by strong states. For realists, however, the UN, at least in its present form, is incapable of fulfilling that promise, since it has no coercive power that is independent of the will of the major powers. Thus, according to realists, unless the UN is fundamentally transformed or a genuine world state is created, the state of anarchy will endure.

Consequences of anarchy

Realists have argued that the prevalence of anarchy in the state system requires individual states to be ruthlessly self-seeking. Because there is no suprastate actor capable of enforcing international law, each state must provide for its own security. Thus, a structural anarchy is also inevitably a self-help regime: every government reserves the right to decide what is just or necessary for itself and to take up arms to pursue or enforce that decision. Because the best way to achieve security under anarchy is to be powerful (both militarily and economically), self-help leads naturally to power-maximizing behaviour. In an anarchic state-system, power-maximizing behaviour is therefore the normal behaviour of all states.

The combination of anarchy, ruthless self-help, and power-maximizing behaviour by all states leads to another realist assertion: in such an environment “war is normal,” as a leading realist theoretician, the American political scientist Kenneth Waltz, claimed. In other words, war, or the threat of war, is the primary means by which states under anarchy resolve conflicts of interest. The readiness of every state in an anarchic system to defend its interests through organized violence is the primary factor responsible for the development of internal cultures of militarism and bellicosity (and an emphasis on maintaining honour—i.e., international status).

Anarchy and the distribution of power

Political scientists also suggest that under anarchic conditions, there is a moment when the danger of large-scale war is most acute: when a sudden large shift in the distribution of power among states occurs. Political scientists refer to such a shift as a power-transition crisis. The shift can be either a dramatic increase in the capabilities of one of the main actors or a dramatic decrease in the capabilities of another main unit. But when the existing distribution of privilege, influence, and goods in a system becomes mismatched to the changing realities of power, the result tends to be large-scale war, which in turn creates a new structure, a new configuration of privilege, influence, and goods—one better matched to the actual distribution of power.

Thus, major realignments of power, influence, and status within anarchic state systems have tended to be accompanied by great violence—what political scientists call hegemonic war. World War I is a good example. Realists hold that power-transition crises and hegemonic wars often result from the attempt by a main actor to preserve its deteriorating position within the system; it acts while its governing elite feels it still can. But this is only a trend, for realists also agree that individual moments of decision making by governments are too idiosyncratic to be predictable. Hence, the power-transition crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union was handled without war, thanks to good diplomacy on both sides. Historically, however, a power-transition crisis tends to lead to hegemonic war to establish new leaders within anarchic systems.

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Critiques of the realist notion of anarchy

Modern realist thinking rose to prominence as a pessimistic response—first, to the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of World War I and to the terrible international events of the 1930s, which were followed by the cataclysm of World War II and then the onset of the decadeslong Cold War, despite many diplomatic efforts at detente. However, the peaceful denouement of the Cold War, and the relatively high level of interstate cooperation that accompanied it (1989–91), led in the 1990s to a resurgence of liberal-institutionalist (also called neoliberal) criticism of anarchy theory as too pessimistic. Liberal institutionalists, who held that state behaviour can be positively modified by interaction with international institutions such as the UN and the European Union (EU), argued that the realist view of interstate behaviour underestimated the extent of communal interest, interdependence, and cooperation that exists among modern states and that it underestimated as well the human desire for peace.

Realists responded by arguing that perceived national interest and little else—certainly not altruism—determined state actions at the end of the Cold War and that the relative success and smooth working of international institutions in the 1990s merely reflected the fact that they were supported by (and were useful to) the overwhelming power and prestige of the United States. They also pointed to the reemergence after the Cold War of a more internationally assertive Russia, as well as the rise in power of an increasingly nationalistic and militarized China, as demonstrating the persistence, pervasiveness, and ferocity of international competition.

Another major criticism, based on the constructivist theory of international relations, is that the notion of anarchy as realists deploy it constitutes an artificial and arbitrary discourse of competition and violence. That discourse itself has a detrimental effect on the international system because of its destructive impact on the expectations and perceptions of national leaders. In other words, the harsh paradigms of realist discourse constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy. For constructivists, the world of states is not objectively given but rather socially constructed by human beings acting on specific ideas. The interstate system may indeed be anarchic, without a guiding authority or effective means of enforcing international law, but anarchy is, in the words of the American political scientist Alexander Wendt, what “states make of it,” and the pessimistic theorizing of realism should be combated and replaced by a new communitarian discourse of interstate relations. Once such a discourse has replaced pessimistic and destructive anarchy discourse, a new and more benign international environment might be constructed—as similar communitarian discourses have accomplished in the past, according to constructivists, especially in the Middle Ages.

Realists, while acknowledging the impact of discourse on state action, have responded that such thinking gives too much power to words. They argue that the prevailing medieval communitarian discourse actually had little practical impact on the rivalrous and warlike real-world actions of medieval states within their anarchic state system. Moreover, the originators of constructivism were mostly American scholars writing in the 1990s, before the September 11 attacks of 2001, in a world that the United States dominated and in a society that (extraordinarily in history) had little experience of what it felt like to be acted on violently and decisively from the outside, by others. Only intellectuals ensconced in the safety of the American world of the 1990s, they argued, could have doubted a state’s need to establish security against a hostile world without law and order.