an open letter to waltz - rosenberg

Anarchy in the Mirror of 'Uneven and Combined Development'

An Open Letter to Kenneth Waltz

Paper presented at The British-German IR conference

BISA/DVPW 16-18 May 2008

Arnoldshain, Germany

Justin Rosenberg Department of IR

University of Sussex [email protected]

This paper was written as a contribution to a forthcoming intellectual biography of Kenneth Waltz

by Cornelia Beyer.

Not for quotation without permission.


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Dear Ken, I’m seizing the welcome occasion of this volume to repay a letter that I’ve owed you for too long.1 About two years ago, I wrote to tell you how my view of your work had altered. I hadn’t expected this change. Like many of my intellectual generation, and fortified no doubt by the Marxist, historical sociological cast of my own studies, I had begun in the 1980s by seeing in your work the most extreme, the most elaborate, and the most obfuscating essentialising of international relations which the Realist tradition had yet produced (Rosenberg 1990)! Indeed, when we first met, and in the interview which you gave to Fred Halliday and myself, this was still the register of my engagement. How, I wondered, could we ever be satisfied with a theory of international politics which was indifferent to the vast and continuing his-torical transformation expressed in the emergence of the modern, industrial capitalist world?2 Did we not rather need, in IR as everywhere else, theory that was both historical and sociological (Waltz 1998: 382-3)? In subsequent years, however, my continuing attachment to historical sociol-ogy was gradually overtaken by a suspicion that, as you had long argued, those of us working in that idiom had never quite got to grips theoretically with the phenomenon of ‘the international’.3 Instead, it seemed, we had os-cillated between trying to dissolve it via an ‘inside-out’ reductionism, and trying to absorb it as a purely empirical addendum to social theories which themselves remained internally unaffected by it. And increasingly I felt that neither of these approaches was working. In the first case, the question of number (i.e. what follows from the multiplicity of societies) cannot after all be resolved back, in its entirety, to a question of form (i.e. what follows from the specific internal character of the societies involved); and in the second case, as Theda Skocpol once insisted, there is a limit (grossly exceeded here) to how consequential ‘empirical’ factors can become in applying a given theory before they start to tell against the explanatory pretensions of the the-ory itself.4 Reinforced in this conclusion by an engagement with ‘globalisation theory’, (Sociology’s latest and perhaps most unoriginal denial of ‘the international’ so far),5 I next had to formulate a positive theoretical understanding of what ‘the international’ is - contra post-structuralism, contra liberalism and, if

1 For helpful comments and criticisms, I thank Alex Anevias, Chris Boyle, Simon Bromley, Alex Callinicos and Beate Jahn. 2 I refer to your emphasis on the ‘sameness in the quality of international life throughout the millennia’ (1979: 66). 3 I use this term to denote ‘that dimension of social reality which arises specifically from the coexistence within it of more than one society’ (Rosenberg 2006: 308). And I include the scare-quotes in deference to the obvious objection that, while this di-mension exists in all historical periods, nation-states do not. 4 Barrington Moore had described the postwar international circumstances favouring the success of Chinese Communists as ‘fortuitous in the sense that they did not de-rive from anything taking place in China itself…’ Noting how regularly Moore in-voked international causes in his analyses, Skocpol asked ‘Can an explanatory factor so systematically resorted to really be “fortuitous”?’ (Skocpol 1973: 29) 5 It is so unoriginal, in fact, that your critique of interdependence theory (1979: 138-60) can be deployed against globalization theory today with only minor adjustments.


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necessary, contra my own Marxism too (2000, 2005, Callinicos & Rosen-berg 2008). And it was my movement down this road which eventually made your own work reappear in a new light. It now seemed to me that in earlier objecting to your analytical separation of domestic and international phe-nomena (because of the danger it carried of essentialising ‘the interna-tional’), I had myself unintentionally avoided engaging with the real object of your procedure - namely the facticity of ‘the international’ as a dimension of the social world, a dimension which is not reducible to the sum of its parts. No-one has done more than you to render this phenomenon theoreti-cally visible. This, for me, is what makes both Man, the State and War and Theory of International Politics enduring classics of the field. And it is re-markable, by contrast, how much theory, even in IR, still proceeds on the as-sumption - spoken or otherwise - that ‘the international’ in this sense does not really exist. When I wrote to you, I enclosed an article (Rosenberg 2006) in which I’d tried to work out a social theoretical understanding of ‘the international’, and on which you kindly commented. And I’d like now to reply to two of your comments. In the first of these you took up my renewed charge of ‘reifica-tion’ against realism. In a Durkheimian phrase which reminded me how mis-leading it can be to oppose your neorealism to classical social theory, you noted: ‘I would, incidentally, distinguish between reification and “social facts”’. And in the second comment, you questioned my suggestion (2006: 328) that realism incompletely specifies anarchy and underestimates its sig-nificance. ‘Most people’, you wrote,

would say that realists natter on about anarchy endlessly, and any-way theories as such are always underspecified. Specification takes place when one tries to test or apply them.

Coming from an approach, (Marxist historical sociology), which has argua-bly contributed very little to the theorisation of anarchy per se, this charge that realism has somehow underplayed the latter must appear shallow - aim-ing for a cheap effect, and correspondingly empty of real substance. Can I defend it? The context of both charges, you’ll recall, was an exposition of ‘uneven and combined development’, an idea which I’ve taken from Leon Trotsky but have elaborated in directions somewhat different from his. As I'll detail be-low, Trotsky deployed it to explain why capitalist world development was necessarily non-linear. He occasionally referred to unevenness as ‘universal’ and ‘the most general law of the historic process’ (Trotsky 1980:5). But he did not discuss the implications of such references for social theory. And yet I have come to the conclusion that those implications are enormous - and in ways that relate specifically to the procedures of your own work. It will take me a few paragraphs to explain how.

A Problem Unsolved As you've often tried to make clear, your call for a structural theory of inter-national politics never entailed a claim that 'domestic' (or even non-political) phenomena were necessarily unimportant in producing international political


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outcomes. Your actual claim, directed as much at earlier realists as at anyone else,6 was rather that inside-out forms of explanation were unable, by their nature, to grasp any causal factors which were specifically international in their constitution. And insofar as the latter were 'in play', therefore, such forms of explanation would be insufficient on their own. Some further theo-retical procedure was required to deal with these factors – a procedure which presupposed the possibility of identifying them in the first place. Distin-guishing system-level from unit-level phenomena was therefore necessary, but this was no doctrine of factual separation. 'I went to such lengths to em-phasise in Theory of International Politics that you have to bring national politics and international politics together to understand or explain anything' (Waltz 1998: 380). Nor, having separated out the emergent, structural deter-minations from the unit-level ones, did you prioritise the former in such a way that could justify a charge that you had stood one (unit-level) reduction-ism on its head only to produce another (system-level) one.7 On the contrary, you specifically invoked ‘unit-level processes as a source both of changes in systems and of possible changes of systems’ (1986: 328). You even averred that ‘[c]hanges in, and transformation of, systems originate not in the struc-ture of a system but in its parts’ (1986:343). In other words, your theory al-ways allowed for much more traffic between domestic and international ob-ject domains than some of us critics acknowledged. All manner of intercon-nection was allowed for – required, even - in the explanation of concrete events. Still, there must have been some reason for the storm of controversy which greeted your formulation of neorealism. And in truth we critics had not en-tirely imagined things: the object domains themselves did remain conceptu-ally distinct. And hence the traffic between them did not itself form part of the object of the theory. ‘Students of international politics will do well’, you wrote, ‘to concentrate on separate theories of internal and external politics until someone figures out a way to unite them’. (1986: 340) After all these years, and despite my changed understanding of your work, this statement still niggles with me. And that’s not just because it goes against my own in-stincts, but also because you yourself have been so careful not to seal it with an a priori insistence of any kind. After all, you might have argued that this separation was not just enduring but even desirable, on the oft-repeated grounds that ‘if you can’t think of it in itself, then you can’t have a theory of it’ (1998: 385). But generally this has not been the whole of your position. Indeed, in your interview in Review of International Studies, you said that ‘I’d be delighted not to make that choice’ between an internal and an external theory; that a unified theory, were it possible,

...would be a lot better than a simple theory of international poli-tics; [and that] I don’t see any logical reason why this can’t be

6 The error of 'predicting outcomes from attributes' had been, you wrote, 'made by almost everyone, at least from the nineteenth century onwards' (1979: 61). 7 ‘A theory of international politics… can tell us what international conditions na-tional policies have to cope with. To think that a theory of international politics can itself say how the coping is likely to be done is the opposite of the reductionist er-ror.’ (1979: 72)


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done… However, nobody’s thought of how to do it. I’ve thought about that a lot. I can’t figure out how. Neither can anybody else so far. (1998: 379-80)

True. But this does leave the issue open. And, (if I may borrow a phrase), ‘one is... always tempted to try again’ (1997: 913) . For surely this scenario – in which an entire branch of social causality ('the international') resists being conceptualised as continuous with the wider social world in which we know it inheres – is a standing reproach to our social scientific imagination. So, if there’s no ‘logical reason’ for the separation, why does it resist at-tempts to overcome it? I can think of three possible explanations. One is that this separation is a premise of realist thought, and its arbitrary persistence therefore reflects the deep hold of that approach on international theory. Though perhaps once plausible,8 this idea has lost credibility over the years as ‘critical’ approaches, despite being non-realist, have themselves repro-duced the same separation.9 Thus even if, as I believe, some of the limita-tions of realism are symptomatic of this problem, they cannot any longer be said to be its cause. Perhaps then, and secondly, it simply is impossible, in principle, to ‘unite’ theories of domestic and international phenomena. But, like you, I cannot find the reasoning to underpin such a claim and dare not therefore build any-thing upon it. This leaves a third, though rather embarrassing, possibility: perhaps the ulti-mate source of the problem has always secretly lain not with the realist the-ory which some of us so confidently dismissed, but rather with the alterna-tive conceptions of the social world with which we thought we could replace it. Perhaps there’s something about the way the ‘domestic’ side of things has been conceptualized in classical and subsequent social theory (including Durkheim, incidentally) which automatically generates ‘the international’ as not just a spatial but also a theoretical externality. This is the conclusion to which I’ve been driven. And although it does mean a helping of humble pie for me,10 I think the pie may be worth the eating. For with it comes a possi-bility that the separation could in principle yet be overcome - not by criticis-ing realism again, but instead by adjusting the premises of social theory. How so?

8 Actually, was it ever credible? After all, you criticised the failure of realism to ob-serve this separation; and some realists (such as Snyder (1991: 19)), in reply, have been among those most strongly asserting the need to overcome it. 9 Reviewing the developing contribution of historical sociology (HS) to IR, Martin Hall identified ‘a danger that HS serves to strengthen the dichotomization of “the in-ternational” and “the domestic”. Although in [all three books he was reviewing] in-ternational and domestic forces interact or combine to produce a certain outcome, analytically they are still distinct.’ (1999: 108 emphasis added) 10 In 1994 I advocated a fuller application of classical social theory in IR, drawing especially on the arguments of C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination (1959) – and alluding to it in the title of my own piece: 'The International Imagination' etc. Missing from my argument, however, was any real suggestion that there was a spe-cifically international imagination to be had – as opposed to a field of IR waiting to be lit up by the arrival of (sociological) imagination from elsewhere.


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That sociological theory has in the main operated with a conception of soci-ety as ‘ontologically singular’ has often been noted (e.g. Skocpol 1974, Gid-dens 1985, Mann 1986, Tenbruck 1994). I take this phrase to mean that theo-rization of any given type of society has generally proceeded by first model-ing its inner relational composition (social structure), and then examining how its iterated reproduction in this form gives rise to immanent sources of development and change. International phenomena - which arise not from the particular inner form of any given society, but rather from the co-existence of more than one of them - might subsequently be allowed any amount of contingent empirical weight in a sociological analysis; but they do not appear in the theorization of what a society is. And this I take to be the reason that attempts to work from sociological to international theory have tended towards reductionism: this form of reflection, after all, can derive the international only as the domestic world of phenomena extended outwards or writ large. How can one get around this problem of 'ontological singularity'? Not, un-fortunately, by simply adding on the additional premise of multiplicity - that societies always co-exist with others - as Skocpol, Giddens and Mann have variously done (and had of course already done, long before I belatedly reached that particular way-station in 2000). For the addition is an external one, not derived from the nature of society itself.11 Indeed it introduces de-terminations over and above those derivable from the latter: it is the embryo of a separate theory. In this way, in terms of theoretical procedure, the most advanced works of historical sociology have in fact reproduced your own schema - one theory for domestic phenomena and a second, sourced sepa-rately, for international ones. To get past this point, what we now need is not further models of how domestic and international phenomena interact - you, from the other side, have already allowed for an indefinite series of such models. Rather we need a conception of society in which ‘the international’ is an intelligibly emergent property; only then will international determina-tions no longer appear as supra-sociological (and extra-theoretical) phenom-ena, needing to be reintroduced post hoc into one’s conception of the social world. And this brings me back to ‘uneven and combined development’. Even in its existing version, (Trotsky’s analysis of late Czarism), this idea builds ‘the international’ into a theory of social development. That is to say, it includes causal factors (identified below) which operate specifically through the circumstance of inter-societal multiplicity. But that existing ver-sion itself is pregnant with a much more foundational claim about the intrin-sically uneven character of socio-historical development per se. In the re-mainder of this letter, I shall argue that this more basic claim renders ‘the in-ternational’ sociologically intelligible, interpretable, and even theorisable. In doing so, it proves able to register that facticity of ‘the international’ which neorealism has thus far made its own – but without incurring the separation discussed above. As I shall try to show, this in turn enlarges the object do-main across which the consequences of anarchy can be seen to extend – ena-bling me to answer those two queries you put to me in your letter.

11 In a colourful metaphor, Michael Mann later described the (re)discovery of states and geopolitics in sociological theory during the 1980s as the act of a Sociological ‘raiding party’ which, looting IR for useful materials, ‘immediately grabbed for the Realist state’. (Mann 1995: 555)


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But it also, possibly, enables something far more significant. Remarkably, the idea of 'uneven and combined development' seems to meet the require-ments which you yourself have specified for a broadening of international theory beyond the neorealist core of geopolitical analysis (1990: 31-2); and it does this in part by revealing the existence of additional irreducibly interna-tional structures of the social world (over and above the strictly geopolitical one identified by neorealism). If this could be demonstrated, it would add even more weight to your own arguments about the need for a genuinely in-ternational theory. But it might also, if you accepted it, allow you finally to respond positively to the most persistent criticism that neorealism has had to face, a criticism which thirty years of methodological recital and rebuttal from your side have, alas, not succeeded in shaking off: namely, that neoreal-ism grasps ‘the international’ in a way that simultaneously drains it of socio-historical content and renders its explanations – for all their rigour – some-how unsatisfying. You may think that this criticism speaks only to the theo-retical illiteracy of its proponents: '...don’t these people understand anything about what a theory is?' (1998: 379). However, I want to suggest that you could actually satisfy them by a means that would only underline further your central insight about the importance of anarchy. In effect, 'uneven and combined development' enables 'a long step [from neorealism's 'interna-tional-political theory' (1979: 38)] towards a general theory of international relations', a step which you've never refused in principle, arguing only that 'no one has shown how to take it' (1990: 32).12 But, once again, I must do some work to explain how this might be.

A Possible Solution?

a. intelligible What, then, does it mean to assert a premise of ‘universal unevenness’? First, it means that one registers theoretically a well-known empirical fact which is attested by every World History text: namely that the phenomenon of human social development, taken as a whole, is not a uniform, homogeneous proc-ess. Whether viewed at a single moment globally or, a fortiori, in its transhistorical entirety, it always involves a variety of (interconnected) forms of society proceeding in different ways, at different levels, on different scales at different rates of change, and so on. And second, adopting unevenness as a theoretical premise means asserting that this characteristic of social devel-opment is both intrinsic to what the latter is, and causally consequential for how it proceeds – to the extent that its causal mechanisms must form part of any theory of social development. One might ask how the lack of something could function as a premise for any successful theoretical exploration. Theory, as you’ve pointed out, ‘deals

12 Elsewhere (Callinicos & Rosenberg 2008) I have argued that uneven and com-bined development is not itself a theory. To avoid confusion therefore, I should make it clear that in this letter I am working specifically with your conception of theory. And I am doing so in order to enable the exercise proposed above. I thank Alex Anevias for alerting me to the need for this clarification.


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in regularities and repetitions and is possible only if these can be identified’ (1988: 615). Unevenness therefore seems at first untheorisable. But you yourself have met with just this challenge in the case of anarchy.13 The solu-tion is that one looks for ‘regularities and repetitions’ not in the negative phenomenon itself, but rather in ‘its’ consequences.14 A key consequence of unevenness is political multiplicity – which, in turn, has all the further anar-chical effects which you've mapped out. And this is why I say that the prem-ise of universal unevenness renders the very existence of ‘the international’ (for the first time?) sociologically intelligible - derivable, that is, from a con-ception of ‘society’. For once this premise is in place, political multiplicity - anarchy in general - no longer appears as something to be asserted over against the (‘domestic’) phenomenon of social development. Rather it is visibly a dimension of the latter, resulting from its unevenness. Moreover this theoretical premise, quite aside from the conceptual difficul-ties it surmounts, also has an overwhelming empirical warrant. As soon as one reflects world-historically on the natural and social bases of uneven-ness,15 it becomes apparent that any conception of society, or social devel-opment, which did not specify it as uneven and hence politically multiple would be an abstraction which had excised a very major and near-universal component of its real-world object. There might be legitimate occasions for doing this, (for cleaving, that is, to an 'ontologically singular' conception of society); but the conceptualising of the object domain of social development (a shared ambition of most classical social theory) was surely never one of them. And in our field, we live every day with the heavy consequences of this error: international theories which must dislocate themselves from social theory in order to make sense of their object of analysis; social theories which cannot comprehend ‘the international’ and which therefore generate reductionist analyses whenever they’re applied to it. You’re right of course to say that theory must involve radical simplification and must work by ab-stracting from most of reality. ‘To achieve “closeness of fit”’, you write, ‘would negate theory’ (1990: 31). And again: ‘Theory, after all, is mostly omissions’. Still, I’m sure you’d also agree that it matters what is omitted. Get that wrong, and the result is not just ‘looseness of fit’ but positive misfit. Perhaps this is why it's proven so difficult to unite 'theories of internal and external politics'. How else can we account for the persistence of a separa-tion for which we ‘can’t see any logical reason’? All in all, then, it might appear truistic to say that anarchy is an emergent property of social development, rather than being an extraneous condition operating over and against it. But if we don’t say it, and if we can’t explain how this obtains, then we will have only ourselves to blame when these two

13 ‘Structure is an organizational concept. The prominent characteristic of interna-tional politics, however, seems to be the lack of order and of organization. … In looking for international structure, one is brought face to face with the invisible…’ (1979: 89) 14 Strictly, of course a non-existent phenomenon cannot have consequences. Their actual source must lie in whatever it is that operates in the absence of the former. In this respect, what the concept of 'unevenness' actually theorises is interconnected variation, just as the real object of 'anarchy' is in fact multiplicity. 15 I have found Eric Wolf’s survey of ‘The World in 1400’ (1982: 24-72) to be a very rich text in this regard.


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later reappear as if they were indissolubly separate from each other. Besides, I’d like to know where this obvious point has been thought through in its implications for the problems of both social and international theory. In view of its ability to find a starting point ‘behind’ the familiar separation of the two, such a thinking through seems worth a try.

b. interpretable After all, if I’m right that the original source of this separation lies in social theory, then the ontological revision just effected should make a difference: it should now be possible to mount a genuinely sociological interpretation of international phenomena which is no longer reductionist. Let me try, using Trotsky's analysis of late nineteenth century Russian development as an ex-ample. What Trotsky needed to explain was why Russian society, though now un-dergoing the same process of industrialisation which had earlier transformed the societies of Western Europe, was not coming to resemble them in terms of either the make-up of its internal class structure or (consequently) the di-rection of its political development. If Marx's theory of capital had general validity, and if capital’s tendency was to 'create a world after its own image' (Marx & Engels 1973: 71), then how could it be that 'England in her day re-vealed the future of France, considerably less of Germany, but not in the least of Russia and not of India' (Trotsky 1980 Vol. III, p.378)? In answer, Trotsky invoked three irreducibly international causes. First, a 'whip of external necessity' (in the form of Western military and de-velopmental advances) had imposed upon the Czarist elite a geopolitical im-perative to industrialise, or lose its external independence. In this way, Rus-sian society was 'compelled to follow after' a course of development which had been initiated elsewhere (Trotsky 1980: 4); and, as Marx had anticipated, capitalist industrialisation was indeed spreading. But the mechanisms by which it was spreading were not only (or even mainly) those directly given within its own nature as a social process. In Russia it neither ignited sponta-neously nor arrived under its own steam. It was actively imported, funded, implemented and controlled by a state organisation responding to the geopo-litical consequences of its development elsewhere. It might seem banal to say that, by definition, a 'whip of external necessity' presupposes multiple societies. Yet this same point becomes less banal when viewed from the an-gle of the presupposition itself. Turned around in this way, it entails that the multiplicity of societies adds a causal dimension of its own to the sociology of industrialisation. And this first mechanism of 'combined development' - geopolitical pressure - is only one of several specifically international causes to which this dimension gives rise. A second one, which Trotsky called 'the privilege of historic backwardness', immediately qualifies (and multiplies) the implications of the first. This sec-ond mechanism of inter-societal causality begins to explain why the outcome of responses to the 'whip of external necessity' is not, (and cannot be), a re-tracing of the developmental sequences (scientific, economic and socio-political) whose results were now being emulated. Once again, the source of the mechanism is specifically the international co-existence of (advanced


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and backward) societies. But this time the mechanism itself is not a geopo-litical pressure but rather the openings created by the asynchronicities of development among multiple societies. Specifically, the results of advanced development (technological, financial, organisational, ideological etc.) were available ready-made to latecomers, in ways they had not been for the pio-neers, requiring no re-invention. This enormous advantage, especially when added to the geopolitical pressure, meant that the development of a late-comer society could 'make leaps', by comparison not only with what it would otherwise have been, but also with the earlier experience of its now more ad-vanced predecessors. That is to say, as a direct result of asynchronous but in-teractive co-existence, latecomer societies would be 'skipping a whole series of intermediate steps' (5), through which the original process of discovery had required the pioneer societies to pass. Viewed another way, this amounted to a compressing or ‘drawing together of separate steps’ (6). (And this compression was in fact the core of Trotsky's original definition of ‘combined development’.) And yet its outcome would be no straightforward linear acceleration of an ultimately unidirectional developmental process. Not only could the techni-cal products of development unfold new possibilities when transferred from their original social setting into a new one;16 but there was also a socio-political 'curse of [historic] backwardness' too. The 'whip of external neces-sity' meant that the pressure to industrialise would fall on backward societies irrespective of the nature and level of their prior development. And in those cases, (the overwhelming majority), where that prior development did not al-ready include the rise of a powerful capitalist class (which had been a central feature of the original English case), the directive role in industrialisation would necessarily fall instead to 'archaic' political groups – like the Czarist elite. The ascendancy of these groups, however, was rooted in the very social structures which full-blown industrialisation would dissolve. And here lies a third international mechanism affecting the spread of social processes from one society to another. This third mechanism is a compound of the other two (geopolitical pressure and the 'leaps' of asynchronous development); but it issues in a quite different class of effects, relating this time neither to the stimulus for development nor its accelerated speed but rather its ramifying social structure. In an earlier age, Peter the Great had deployed advanced military technology and bureaucratic models imported from the West to reinforce social struc-tures which the West had already left behind, creating in the process a hybrid of Eastern and Western, advanced and 'backward' social formations. The same now applied to the process of industrialisation. Because there was no indigenous capitalist class, the state had to undertake this process itself – but that very substitution, though pursued as a form of emulation, itself radically differentiated the socio-political structure of late-comer industrialisation from the much more liberal pattern of the original case. Furthermore, be-cause the state itself remained rooted in, and dependent upon, the social structures of an agrarian society, it could not replicate the behavior of the English capitalist landlords who, through Parliamentary enclosure Acts, had

16 Though Trotsky had some inkling of the mechanisms here, they were much better explored by Thorsten Veblen (1915/1964, especially pages 23-39).


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dissolved rural society to their own advantage. In Russia, industrialisation had to reinforce the existing social structure of Czarism, else Czarism would not undertake it. It had to be produced as a resource for the state, and to co-exist side by side with, and not threaten, other (preindustrial) resources. The result was that peculiar combination of social structures which so baf-fled contemporary Marxist observers:17 a rapidly growing working class, empowered by concentration in huge, technologically advanced factories and radicalised by struggle against a repressive semi-feudal autocracy – but lack-ing a politically significant middle class to lead it in a struggle for liberaliza-tion; the creation of the fifth largest industrial sector in the world – in a soci-ety where 86% of the population remained peasants, tied to the land in near subsistence conditions. In Russia, social actors whose English predecessors had been separated in time by the very course of development, were now meeting directly and interacting, (while others, partly as a result, were failing to materialise at all). A semi-feudal autocracy marched on beyond its own epoch and came face to face with an industrial working class. Socialist revo-lutionaries turned up in the wrong scene, surrounded by a predominantly peasant social formation. Capitalism was emerging, and yet the hour of the 'bourgeois revolution' was not approaching. Trotsky's 'brilliant intuition', his 'creative idea' which captured 'a sense of the unobservable relations of things' (Waltz 1979: 9), was to see that this appar-ently paradoxical outcome was not the anomaly it appeared to be. On the contrary, this was the mundane sociology of combined development, the consequence of capitalism's emergence within a politically and developmen-tally multiple socio-historical process. As so often with this topic, the key point can be further clarified by consider-ing its hypothetical obverse. In order to imagine the spread of capitalism cre-ating 'a world in its own image', one would need in effect to postulate its spread as even (i.e. homogenous) because it was not combined (i.e. as if it simply took its own course in a series of different national settings without the results in any one case impacting upon the others). That is to say, one would have to postulate the fact of multiplicity without the consequences of multiplicity; the existence of many societies without the resultant inter-societal dimension to the nature of those societies; geopolitically plural de-velopment without the causal fabric of 'the international'. In this fallacy – so obvious once uncovered – lies the whole problem of 'the international' for social theory. And in one sense, Trotsky's entire innovation – which also 'ap-pears quite obvious once it is grasped' (Anderson 1986: 19) – was simply to correct theoretically for the wild errors which resulted from such a postulate: 'This statement', he wrote of one of Marx's formulations, 'takes it cue from capitalist society conceived as a single type...' (1980 III: 378) (And 'Trotsky', you wrote in your letter, referring to this quotation, 'is exactly right.') Faced with this Czarist social ‘amalgam', this combination of capitalist and non-capitalist societies, it was perhaps not so fanciful for Trotsky to seek an analogy between the 'drawing together of separate steps' in the technological

17 For a brief contextualization of Trotsky’s views in relation to Russian Marxist thought in 1905, see Knei-Paz (1978: 27ff).


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development of backward countries and an equivalent possibility of socio-political leaps, enabled by the reshuffled co-ordinates of social structure. At the very least, he was right to say that the developmental paths of England and France could not offer direct guidance for political action in Russia. 1905, (and, a fortiori 1917), could not re-stage 1688 or even 1789 – the dramatis personae were too different and differently configured. (Indeed it was partly due to the international effects of those English and French devel-opments that the structure of Russian society, and hence the co-ordinates of political judgment and action, differed so much.) On the other hand, if back-ward Russia could still not achieve a 'proper' bourgeois revolution, it could also – and for the same reasons – not avoid the politically organised working class playing a leading role in the approaching breakdown of Czarism and its aftermath, injecting that breakdown with political possibilities not yet real-ised even by the most 'advanced' working class movements in the West. Con-torted by the international (uneven and combined) texture of the historical process, Russian society appeared to be 'drawing together' the bourgeois and socialist revolutions into a single 'combined' event: the (misleadingly named) 'permanent revolution'.18 At any rate, the solution to the theoretical puzzle of Russia's divergence lay in causal mechanisms inseparable from the international system. And Trot-sky's idea interpolated these into a theory of capitalist development by reconceptualising it as uneven (involving a staggered sequence of national industrial revolutions) and combined (in the triple sense of geopolitically in-terconnected, temporally compressed and sociologically hybridised). And yet, this result might appear at first sight to be not at all what we’re looking for. I promised a sociological interpretation of international phenom-ena, not more demonstrations of the impact of international phenomena upon sociological ones. Such demonstrations leave us still in the realm of two theories. And in this case, the causa causans appears as a stubbornly geopo-litical ‘whip of external necessity’, intruding upon a separately constituted pattern of social development. Indeed all three causal mechanisms arise fun-damentally from developments occurring outside the pattern of (Russian) so-cial stratification we are trying to explain. ‘The international’ could hardly appear more external to the sociological. That, however, is but a trick of the light. Let’s watch what happens to this same scene when we visualise it once again in the context of Trotsky’s idea, but viewing the latter this time as a general premise about social develop-

18 Wild as Trotsky's prognosis might seem, (and I myself disagree with his political conclusions), it should be recalled that if the causes of 'permanent revolution' were tied by him to international phenomena, then so too were its prospects. Without im-mediate and massive assistance from revolutions in more advanced countries, nota-bly Germany, Bolshevism would, he argued, succumb either to the internal dead-weight of its social and material backwardness or to the external pressure of capital-ist blockade. Hence the depth of his opposition to Stalin's 'socialism in one country'. One may dispute whether his continued adherence to 'world revolution' made Trot-sky the craziest of utopians or the ultimate realist. But it would be hard to deny that both of his predictions came true: inner degeneration and external pressure did in-deed seal the fate of the Soviet Union – albeit they took seven decades to complete their work.


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ment (rather than an empirical observation about some circumstances which affected the spread of capitalist industrialisation in particular). As I suggested earlier, this means that we start with the assumption that every historical process materialises and unfolds within a concrete setting of uneven devel-opment, and we then actively seek out what additional causal dimensions this adds to the movement of the process itself. What happens? Suddenly, the external source of international phenomena (inter-societal multiplicity) is ex-ternal no more - for it has no being apart from the intrinsic unevenness of development (or, more accurately, the consequences of that unevenness). And the international phenomena themselves can therefore now appear as what they must actually be: a class of (previously unidentified?) sociological causes arising specifically from the intrinsic unevenness of social develop-ment and expressed and refracted through its primary consequence: inter-societal multiplicity. Thus, the geopolitical ‘whip of external necessity’, far from being a supra-sociological object, is itself a sociological cause. On the one hand, it arises from that unevenness in general which makes inter-societal multiplicity a normal characteristic of social reality. And on the other hand, it expresses (in this case) that concrete unevenness of historical development which syn-chronised the start of European industrialisation with the climax of Russian absolutism. The ‘privilege of historic backwardness’ too is a normal feature of socio-historical development – once again, a product of the latter's un-evenness, expressed specifically via the corollary of inter-societal multiplic-ity. (In Jacquetta Hawkes’s account, its operation reaches back at least as far as the interconnected development of the very first civilisations in Sumer and Egypt (1976: 66-7).) We seem therefore to have found a sociological interpretation of interna-tional phenomena (including geopolitical ones) which precisely does not seek to reduce them to a particular kind of society (e.g. capitalism) or social process (such as industrialisation) per se. The premise of unevenness allows for the derivation of causal phenomena which are both visibly sociological in provenance (because they are attributed to the very nature of social devel-opment) and irreducibly international in their genesis and operation (because without a multiplicity of societies, they would not arise). Unlike all those Marxist, Liberal and even realist approaches which you criticised in Theory of International Politics, this premise enables a non-reductionist, sociologi-cal interpretation of ‘the international’. Is this just verbal trickery? The insistence that geopolitical phenomena are themselves sociological phenomena might turn out to be mere tautology. And certainly the question of whether it can inform a theory has yet to be faced. But before I get to that, let me see if I can use the points made so far to answer those two questions of yours - about reification and anarchy - which I mentioned earlier on. By ‘reification’ I mean the fallacy of treating social artifacts as self-constituted entities, and vesting in them powers, attributes and dispositions which in fact they exhibit only by virtue of their social relational and agen-tial content. Since no-one actually denies that geopolitics is a social practice, this fallacy operates in the case of realism more by default than by design:


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because the anarchical premise of realism is not derived sociologically, (and in fact is routinely counterposed to sociological premises), all the results which flow from it do indeed seem to flow from ‘it’ as an irreducible and supra-social ‘fact’ about the world. Until this ‘it’, whose inscrutable, thing-like quality reflects some reification, is shown to be a human social product, the parsing out of its consequences - be it ever so accurate - will simultane-ously spread a veil of reification over them, disguising their actual origins and nature. It is in this context that your letter invokes Durkheim's category of 'social facts'. The generic consequences of anarchy, I take you to be saying, do in-deed flow from the condition itself and not from any attributes of the partici-pating units. Moreover, considered as a social fact, anarchy is an outcome which, being more than the sum of its parts, cannot be 'reduced' to relations operating at any other level than the structural one at which it subsists. Once it exists, the difference it makes and what can be known about it concern the consequences which flow from it, rather than any 'underlying' constitutive being – for it is constituted precisely not below, but at an apex. The charge of reification, you seem to be saying, therefore has, in principle, no ontological object. Now, as I understand it, Durkheim’s argument about ‘social facts’, even though it includes the sensational injunction to ‘consider social facts as things’ (Durkheim 1938: 14), does not quite point that way. Durkheim’s use of the term ‘thing’ was not at all intended to attribute self-sufficiency to the phenomena so described. (Hence the nomenclature of ‘social facts’ does not entail that the danger of ‘reification’ is unreal or unimportant.) Its purpose was rather ‘to claim for the higher forms [of being] a degree of reality at least equal to that which is readily granted to the lower’ (1938: xliii) - to as-sert, that is, the facticity of the social. And on closer inspection, this turns out (unsurprisingly) to be a doctrine of emergence, not of autonomy. True, this is consistent with your own position, specifically with your critique of the ‘analytic fallacy’ (Waltz 1979: 64). But the consequence is that while the social (and natural) world is indeed full of combinations of elements produc-ing ‘phenomena… the very germ of which cannot possibly be found in any of the separate elements’ (Durkheim 1938: 102), this ban on reductionist ex-planation does not become a license to treat ‘social facts’ as pre-given start-ing points.19 On the contrary, ‘[t]he determining cause of a social fact’, he concludes, ‘should be sought in the social facts preceding it…’ (1938: 110). And ‘[w]e must, then, seek the explanation of social life in the nature of so-ciety itself’ (1938: 102). But that, you might say, is exactly what you already do, showing how the contrasted nature of anarchical and hierarchical realms - which you equate to Durkheim’s ‘solidary and mechanical societies’ (Waltz 1979: 116n) - ex-

19 True, Durkheim does also say that facts 'constitute the point of departure of sci-ence' (27), and even that 'there is nothing to be gained by looking behind them to speculate on their reason for being...' (xl). But I take these statements to be a rejec-tion of psychological or biological explanations, not a denial of causal 'depth' to the social world per se – else how could he speak of a 'substratum' to social facts (3), or avoid an empty circularity in his injunction to 'seek the explanation of social life in the nature of society itself' (102)?


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plains the different patterns of social life at the domestic and international levels. Where’s the reification in that? The answer lies buried in the very use of a comparative analysis here, as if national and international were equivalents as forms of society, such that they could be compared with each other in the way that individual societies (or types of societies) can. Actually, however, and quite unlike Durkheim’s successive historical forms of ‘mechanical’ and ‘solidary’ society, domestic and international object domains are in a relation of emergence.20 The ‘soci-ety’ whose ‘nature’ must do the explaining here is thus in the first instance the one which comprehends them both as simultaneous, interrelated parts. And the first thing it must be called upon to explain is this conjunction of mechanical and solidary dimensions 'in the nature of society itself'. Other-wise, ‘the geopolitical’ will lack that ‘substratum’ (1938: 3) in society whose identification Durkheim believed was necessary for explaining ‘social facts’. This question of why ‘the international’ exists in the first place - why there are multiple societies - seems not to have formed a prominent part of either realist or non-realist theory. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Realism, after all, works by reasoning from this fact, not towards it. And non-realist theories have tended, in one way or another, to emphasise the historical variations in its form rather than its existence as a phenomenon in itself. Either way, how-ever, the fact of it seems hereby to have been taken for granted. And yet it is only by posing this apparently childish question - why are there many socie-ties? - that we can force ourselves to treat ‘the international’ as something other than an irreducible ‘happenstance’ about the world. And it is only by answering it, as Durkheim would say, in reference to ‘the nature of society’ that we can properly constitute geopolitics as a social fact, and avoid it func-tioning instead as the reified obstacle to a social theory of ‘the international’. ‘Reification’, you’ve suggested, ‘is often merely the loose use of language or the employment of metaphor to make one’s prose more pleasing…’ (1979: 120). Loose language, however, can be tightened. The sense of a metaphor can be spelled out in ordinary language. But the reification of anarchy in Re-alist thought submits to no such easy clarification. On the contrary, it turns ‘the international’ into an insoluble riddle, a sociological phenomenon that has taken on a life of its own and cannot any longer be reconnected to its own social foundations: ‘I’ve thought about that a lot. I can’t figure out how. Neither can anybody else so far’ (1998: 380). But how on earth, to move to the second question, could realism be said to underestimate the significance of anarchy? Like the charge of reification just discussed, this suggestion seems at first obviously false. If we define ‘the in-ternational’ - as I think you do21 - as the object domain of polities’ behaviour

20 I mean that ‘the international’ is an emergent result of the unevenness of ‘the so-cial’. You also, though differently, posit a relation of emergence. As you put it, ‘Structures emerge from the co-existence of states.’ (1979: 91) And again: ‘...structure is a generative notion; and the structure of a system is generated by the interactions of its principal parts’ (1979: 72). 21 Incidentally, a curiosity of your work is that, to my knowledge, you nowhere pro-vide an explicit definition of 'the international'. You tell us what it is like (Durk-heim's mechanical society), and how it is organised (according to an anarchical prin-ciple), but not what it is.


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in relation to each other, then it seems at first impossible to rank the signifi-cance of anarchy any higher: from it follows, as you’ve so compellingly shown, the entire complex of structural determinations which form its ‘me-chanical’ character, which in turn contrasts so starkly to the ‘solidary’ nature of domestic society. Since your declared intention is an international politi-cal theory, perhaps I shouldn’t cavil at an exclusively geopolitical definition of ‘the international’. Still, it has this effect: it matches the substance of the latter to (one side of) an inside-outside division which then restricts our abil-ity to gauge its causal significance for the social world as a whole. If our definition of the object domain were broader, it might reveal consequences of anarchy extending beyond the direct relations of polities. If these proved important, we would have a warrant for saying that realism underestimated the significance of anarchy. Perhaps, in other words, the true measure of an-archy is not how completely it dominates the horizon of geopolitics alone, but rather what is the scale of its significance for the social world as a whole. To gauge that, however, one would need, at least momentarily, to switch pro-cedures from analysing it as a distinct, contrasted form of sociation (e.g. ‘mechanical’ as opposed to ‘solidary’); one would need instead to picture how it articulates with the rest of the social world from which neorealism separates it analytically. Consider Trotsky’s analysis of Russia, one last time, in this light – that is, in terms of the possible significance of anarchy for the wider social world. Eventually, the pattern of late Czarist combined development did result in a paradoxical 'revolution of backwardness' as Trotsky had predicted. And few would contest that the Bolshevik Revolution was an event of considerable consequence for the sociology as well as the geopolitics of 20th century world history. And yet to what, if not to anarchy, did Trotsky attribute the production of this phenomenon? It was after all anarchy (as the existence of politically multiple entities) which had allowed for the historical prolifera-tion of paths and temporalities of socio-cultural development (such that Eng-lish industrialisation coincided with post-feudal remnants in Europe, ancient empires in the Middle East and Asia, and scatterings of chiefdoms, king-doms, city-states, tribal societies, nomadic pastoralist bands and even hunter-gatherer communities across the major land masses of the world). It was an-archy too, (now viewed as the geopolitical co-existence of these societies), which entailed that the inequalities of development and power resulting from this pattern of variation could produce developmental opportunities and pressures - not just the ‘whip of external necessity’ but also ‘the privilege [and the 'curse'] of historic backwardness’ And it was, finally, anarchy, (now additionally expressed as the independent decision-making authority of elites entrenched in existing forms of society), which ensured that the transmission of social and technological elements between societies produced innovative fusions rather than sociological photocopies of the originating developmental process. All of these 'anarchical' mechanisms of socio-historical change op-erated powerfully in the Russian case. Indeed without them there would ar-guably have been no Bolshevik Revolution, no Stalinism, perhaps no fas-cism, and certainly no Cold War as we knew it. Of course Trotsky did not use this language (of 'anarchy'). And even in my own adaptation of his idea, anarchy is not a free-standing explanans: it is a phenomenon in and through which the consequences of unevenness are ex-


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pressed. Still, if there is any cogency to this line of thinking, then two con-clusions must follow. First, anarchy is a basic and systemic ingredient of so-cial development - despite the fact that it’s normally counterposed to it. And second, when we view it in this way we can see that anarchy is responsible for a dialectical, inter-societal dimension to the mechanisms of historical change. This dimension is a real as any of Durkheim’s ‘social facts’, but it is inaccessible to unilinear (ontologically singular) theories of social develop-ment. And it will not appear either in any international theory of anarchy which is built upon a counterposition of geopolitical and sociological object domains. (For it comprises a class of social facts which traverse the two.) In this way, then, it can be argued that realism underspecifies anarchy - be-cause it misses a series of specifiable causal mechanisms which follow just as logically from it as does the balance of power. And it underestimates it - because those consequences reach wider and deeper into the world of social facts than any purely geopolitical theory can visualise. By contrast, Trotsky's idea traces out both those consequences and the specifically inter-societal mechanisms producing them.

c. theorisable? ‘But not in a theory!’ I can hear you immediately replying.

A theory... has to meet certain standards whether it's a natural sci-ence theory or a social science theory. Beyond that, I would call it interpretation, philosophy, history: all good things, I don't put those things down, can't live without them... but not all explana-tions are theories; and interpretations surely are not. (1998: 380, 386)

Well, a theory is ‘a picture, mentally formed, of a bounded realm or domain of activity’ (Waltz 1997: 913). As you've said more than once, it is 'a depic-tion of the organization of a domain and of the connections among its parts' (1988: 615, 1990: 26). 'Rather than being mere collections of laws, theories are statements that explain them' (1979: 5) – statements based ultimately on 'a creative idea... [which captures] a sense of the unobservable relations of things' (1979: 9). And '[s]uccess in explaining, not predicting, is the ultimate criterion of good theory' (1997:916). The root of our difference so far lies not in any of these general points, but rather in the substantive delimitation of the bounded realm. As I tried to show in the last section, I believe that my delimitation of ‘the international’ - ‘that dimension of the social world which arises specifically from the co-existence within it of more than one society’ (Rosenberg 2006: 308) – can be made exact and discriminating. But in seek-ing to move from an 'international-political theory' to a 'general theory of in-ternational relations' it does cross-cut your definitional boundary between in-ternational and national politics, and hence between system-level and unit-level phenomena. Have I, as a consequence, blurred the focus on explaining specifically international politics?22 Have I been led to this by a surreptitious confusion of theory with explanation? And how can I hope to say anything simple (a mark, I agree, of successful abstraction) about an object domain

22 ‘Blurring the distinction between the different levels of a system has, I believe, been the major impediment to the development of theories about international poli-tics.’ (1979: 78)


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which I’ve so willfully begun by complicating? In ‘uneven and combined development’, have I found an idea which might make ‘the international’ in-telligible (in its existence), even interpretable (as a sociological phenome-non), but not theorisable (as a behavioural realm)? To find out, I must try and complete for Trotsky's idea that procedure of the-ory construction which, you've repeatedly argued, (e.g. Waltz 1979: 116, 1990: 31-2), would be necessary in order to widen the scope of international theory beyond the geopolitical core of neorealism. The procedure has three steps. Having already established my alternative delimitation of the object domain, I must next identify patterns of law-like behaviour within that do-main; and these patterns must then, thirdly, be explained systematically through the furnishing of a theory. In order to clear the decks for this exercise, let me first briefly answer my own question about simplicity. We look for simplicity not in the application of a theory, but in its logical core. As a proposition about the nature of socio-historical development, the core of Trotsky’s idea could hardly be simpler: because development is intrinsically uneven, it is therefore always com-bined. Unevenness entails multiple paths and multiple entities - a geopoliti-cal environment; and combined development, in which societal reproduction is interactive as well as immanent, is the consequence. Like structural real-ism which, at its highest level of generality, explains one big thing (‘war’s dismal recurrence’ (Waltz 1988: 620)), Trotsky’s idea also explains one big thing: why history does not move in straight lines (either at the level of the parts, which are subject to each others’ influence in ways that pre-empt purely immanent logics of development, or at the level of the whole, which consequently acquires a complex inner dialectic of development.) ‘Blurring the distinction between the different levels of a system has’, you once wrote, ‘been the major impediment to the development of theories about interna-tional politics.’ (1979: 78) Yet here we seem to have a theoretical idea about ‘the international’ which, while retaining the intellectual precision and sim-plicity of neorealism, cannot be formulated without reaching across those levels. Still, that alone is not sufficient to address the key question, to which I must now return: does the idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ enable an extension of strictly international theory beyond the analysis of geopolitical structure? Or does it - as you’ve so often said of your critics’ proposals - mistake the empirical fact that ‘everything is related to everything else’ (1979: 8 emphasis added) for a methodological requirement that any theory must include everything in itself? Faced with this question, I am reminded of your own discussion of the dif-ference between 'neorealist theory' and the pre-existing field of 'realist thought' whose mental object neorealism so dramatically re-visualised (Waltz 1990). Like neorealism, Trotsky’s idea also illuminates an object do-main which has already been visited by other thinkers; many of these have had brilliant insights about its parts; indeed, I will suggest that their insights have revealed the existence of further strictly international social structures beyond that of geopolitical anarchy; and yet they have fallen short of theoris-ing these. Still, so important is their achievement – enabling me, in effect, to


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conduct the second step of your procedure - that I must pause to lay out an example. And an ideal candidate is Alexander Gerschenkron’s remarkable work on Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. What, then, did Gerschenkron see? And what did he not? Gerschenkron sought to explain the variety of outcomes which the single historical process of industrialisation had generated, as it spread across Europe during the long nineteenth century. And he did this via a model de-signed ‘to systematize the deviations from the English paradigm by relying on the degree of backwardness as the organizing concept’ (Gerschenkron 1962: 360). As the industrial revolution repeated itself across space and time, the developmental gap between its pioneers and new cohorts of entrants widened. And this, he argued, had law-like consequences for how the experi-ence of latecomers differed from that of the societies they were emulating. Three of these in particular defined the shape of his model. First, the longer industrialisation was delayed, the wider was the developmental gap; hence the greater were the windfall gains to be reaped by introducing advanced technologies from elsewhere; and hence also the greater were the possibili-ties of accelerating the process. Thus late industrialisation, by reason of its lateness, tended to be rapid. Second, the more severe the degree of initial backwardness, the less it was possible to replicate the social conditions which promoted the first industrial revolution, and hence the greater was the need for alternative institutions (banks, state authorities etc.) to substitute their own financial and coercive agency. Thus late industrialisation, again by virtue of its lateness, exhibited a markedly different political economy. And finally, the quicker and more disruptive the process of change, and the more it diverged institutionally from the original cases, the greater was its need to be legitimised by statist, collectivist ideologies. Late industrialisation, though sparked by liberal example, was thus unlikely to be liberal. Using this model, sharply differentiated experiences of industrialisation - from the ‘classic case’ of England, through the already very different examples of France and Germany, and all the way to the contrasting extreme of the Soviet Union – could be resolved into ‘an orderly system of graduated deviations’ (44) from the original (English) instance, broadly governed by the single variable of distribution in time. The similarities with Trotsky's analysis of 'combined development' are obvi-ous – so obvious that when I first encountered Gerschenkron's argument, I took it for a monumental piece of plagiarism.23 Over time, however, my judgment softened as I realised that Gerschenkron had imparted a social sci-entific rigour to ideas which Trotsky had expressed rather impressionisti-cally. And he did so in a way that helps me to meet the requirement of your second step in theory construction: after one has delimited an object domain, one must next find behavioural regularities operating across it which signal

23 Gerschenkron's biography and profession – a Russian emigre who, as well as be-ing an economic historian, was also a specialist in 20th century Russian thought – surely make it impossible for him to have been unfamiliar with Trotsky's writings. Indeed his analysis of premodern Russian state formation and his choice of quota-tions from Marx against which to counterpose his own prognoses of social develop-ment are quite uncannily similar to Trotsky's own. To my knowledge, however, he does not reference Trotsky's work.


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the existence of social structures (which can then, in step three, become the object of a theory). And this, surely, Gerschenkron did. Gerschenkron’s work identifies the systematic effects of a structure which stretches across the expanded object domain of my redefinition of ‘the inter-national’. He observes a pattern in the (domestic) social structural differen-tiation of successive industrial revolutions. And he correlates this qualitative differentiation broadly to the size of the (international) developmental gap between the societies involved, a gap which (because the first comers con-tinue to advance after their initial industrialisation) is significantly governed by the (linear, quantitative) variable of historical timing. Now, I shall find occasion in a moment to criticise the limitations of Gerschenkron's approach; but first I need to register the basic point which I want to draw from it. It is perhaps obvious that the causal factors through which this differentiation operates are inseparable from ‘the co-existence… of more than one society’. 'Backwardness, of course,' says Gerschenkron himself, almost making the point, 'is a relative term. It presupposes the existence of more advanced countries' (1962:42). Yet within these obvious points a much less obvious one seems also to be contained: namely that ‘the co-existence… of more than one society’ is itself here imparting to industrialisation (but the mecha-nism applies much more widely) a dialectical (inter-societal) dimension which significantly and intelligibly inflects its overall movement. It is this dimension which explains why the European spread of industrialisation nec-essarily produced not many Englands but differentiated French, German and Russian experiences, whose differences nonetheless made up a recognizable pattern. And if that is the case, then the result I need for step two is already here: Gerschenkron's work shows that anarchy generates a developmental structure as well as a geopolitical one. Why then (for the purpose of step three) do I deny the term ‘theory’ to Ger-schenkron’s enterprise? His idea is certainly ‘a picture, mentally formed, of a bounded realm or domain of activity’ (the phenomenon of industrialisation). And ‘[b]y simplification, [it] lay[s] bare the essential elements in play and indicate[s] necessary relations of cause and interdependency…’ (1997:913) – well, some of them anyway. And yet it reminds me of a description of pre-classical economics which you once borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter. William Petty, said Schumpeter, created ‘for himself theoretical tools with which he tried to force a way through the undergrowth of facts’ (cited in Waltz 1990: 23). All manner of localised empirical conjectures could be formulated in this way. What was lacking was a conceptualisation of the economy as a whole and in itself, of the kind which you say the Physiocrats finally provided. Only then would it become possible not simply to draw to-gether these varied speculations about the unit-level interactions of the parts but also to paint in the entire class of system-level determinations to which the latter gave rise. An equivalent leap, you say, or rather the failure to take it, is what distinguishes realist thought from neorealist theory. Now, I think something similar applies to Gerschenkron. Gerschenkron’s analysis was genuinely insightful, rigorous and productive. And yet there was, for all that, something ‘pre-Physiocratic’ about it. I say this because al-though many of the causal links entailed in his model were implicitly inter-


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active, the explicit register of the model remained comparative. Obviously this was not because Gerschenkron underestimated the empirical signifi-cance of the real-world interconnections involved.24 But the interactive co-existence of multiple societies did not enter the theoretical model itself, which mainly comprised strictly economic mechanisms, together with the accompanying political and ideological exigencies to which a society indus-trialising by this route would be subject. And hence although even the ‘or-ganizing concept’ (360) of the whole approach - ‘backwardness’ - was clearly a relational (international) one, the causal mechanisms which it un-covered also remained focussed on explaining national outcomes: different degrees of backwardness produced different political economies of industri-alisation. The consequence of this is that Gerschenkron’s conceptualisation of indus-trialisation remained co-extensive with his accumulating analyses of its na-tional parts – 'successive explorations', he called them (1962:2) - at no point making the leap to a re-theorisation of its overall movement as a global his-torical process. Such a leap would have forced a theoretical reckoning with that enormous, but purely empirical, premise of Gerschenkron’s argument: namely the context of an international system in which the very co-existence of multiple societies (and not just their unequal development) has systematic causal implications for the course of any process occurring across them. In Gerschenkron's model the consequences of developmental inequality were formally theorized, while those of societal multiplicity, though they operated within the same phenomena being analysed, were not. And yet of course the developmental inequality between, say, eighteenth century England and France is something more than, say, that between Manchester and York writ large. Whatever they share in terms of economic theory is, in the first case, supplemented by geo-social and geopolitical dynamics quite absent in the second. In this respect, then, Gerschenkron had forged 'for himself theoreti-cal tools with which he tried to force a way through the undergrowth of facts'. And good tools they were too. But not quite good enough. They did not, in the end, trigger that (re)conceptualising of the phenomenon of socio-historical development as a whole and in itself which his analysis so strongly implied. To have done so, it would have been necessary for him, in your terms, to separate out the structural characteristics of ‘the international’ it-self. And that, of course, (even on my own expanded definition of the inter-national), cannot be done using the unit-level attribute of ‘backwardness’ as one's 'organizing concept'. One would need rather to focus upon the struc-tural attribute of the system which finds expression in the phenomenon of backwardness among (some of) the parts. One would need, that is, the theo-retical concept of ‘unevenness’.25

24 He several times mentions military considerations to which, like Trotsky, he gives an overwhelming significance in Russian history; he cites 19th century Denmark as a case where interaction (with the British economy) actually precluded the phenomena he analysed from coming into play at all; and he regularly insisted that ‘one cannot understand the industrial development of any country, as long as it be considered in isolation… etc.’ (42) 25 The distinction here resembles your own between capabilities (which belong to units) and their distribution (which is a property of structure) (1979: 98).


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My view of Gerschenkron's work is thus necessarily an ambivalent one. I can think of no clearer and more concrete demonstration of the existence of additional international structures to the geopolitical one which you've ana-lysed. And yet Gerschenkron builds his model around the effects of this structure (theorising some but leaving others simply presupposed) without fully conceptualising the structure itself. Something more will therefore be needed if I'm now to take the third and final step in your method of intellec-tual construction: provision of the explanatory theory itself. And since, in the course of this letter, I've already several times made the case for this step (i.e. proposing uneven and combined development as a theory of 'the interna-tional') in the abstract, I'd like to end by rehearsing it in relation to a particu-lar historical event. The debate on the causes of the First World War has, like so many others, replicated in the field of historiography that basic separation between 'social' and 'international' factors with which I began this letter. Writers have gravi-tated towards either a unit-level pole (where the contradictions of German social development are held to explain the belligerence of the Kaiserreich and, with it, the outbreak of the war) or a system-level pole (where the struc-ture of European geopolitics in 1914 explains the increasing difficulty of peaceful crisis management). Over the years, the debate has swung back and forth between these two, with the 1950s 'comfortable consensus' (of shared responsibility) being violently overthrown by the work of Fritz Fischer and his followers, which has in turn lost ground to a resurgence of internation-ally-oriented approaches.26 You yourself have contributed to the debate, using neorealist theory to ex-plore, inter alia, the generic instability of internally balanced coalitions (Waltz 1988). I don't think you hold this instability to have been the cause of the war. Rather, it is the aspect of the war's causation which, being the result of a particular structure of international politics, can be the object of an in-ternational theory. Much more than this went into the actual production of the conflict, but to pursue that would carry us (if I understand you correctly) beyond the realm of theory and into that of concrete explanation. And it's just here, on this question of how far (international) theory can reach into historical explanation, that I want to take my stand. For theory has of course also been attempted on the other, 'social', side of the debate. At least one writer, the diplomatic historian Michael Gordon (1974), decided quite early on that the Fischer thesis, and behind it the entire Son-derweg literature on German development, needed to be placed on a firmer and clearer theoretical footing, so that its presuppositions and logical coher-ence could be tested and strengthened. And the theoretical framework which he chose for this exercise was – lo and behold – Alexander Gerschenkron's model of economic backwardness. Specifically, Gordon sought to explain the contrasted behaviour of the Brit-ish and German states, before and during the July Crisis of 1914, by refer-ence to their different locations in Gerschenkron’s schema. Britain, he ar-

26 For useful recent surveys, see Seligmann & McLean (2000), Mombauer (2002), Hamilton & Herwig (2004), Joll & Martel (2007).


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gued, was the ‘classic case’ of a society which had moved both early and (hence) gradually in acquiring the attributes of a modern nation state in four key areas: economic development, national community, governmental insti-tutions and political participation. Germany, by contrast, exemplified the op-posite: late, and consequently rapid, development. And by drawing out the disruptive impact of this accelerated change in all four areas, Gordon identi-fied a series of ‘spillover mechanisms’ by which the peculiar tensions of late development found expression in an aggressive and counterproductive for-eign policy. By 1914, he argued, Imperial Germany’s autocratic elite felt it-self doubly encircled: internally by the rise of new political forces created by industrialisation, and which its policies of repression and demagogy had failed to deflect; and externally by a ‘nightmare of coalitions’ largely pro-duced by the international consequences - whether deliberate, miscalculated or unintended - of its struggle with domestic social change. And it was this, he concludes, which explains why it was Germany (rather than Britain, whose external position was, if anything, much more obviously in relative decline) which opted for a showdown in the July Crisis. Now you might take this for a return to reductionism, an inside-out form of argument which might legitimately contribute to historical explanation, but whose subject matter is quite external to international theory. And it's true that Gordon does largely proceed via a comparative, rather than interactive, analysis. But this, as I earlier suggested, is a limitation of Gerschenkron's approach which is not given in the object of that approach. On the contrary, the historically staggered and socially differentiated experiences of industri-alisation were outcomes of an international structure (the dialectical structure of socio-historical development) generated by anarchy. Their production fol-lows as logically from the circumstance of anarchy as do all of those phe-nomena (including the relative stability of differently configured alliances) which you analyse using small number theory. Anarchy then, it turns out, spreads its causal implications invisibly but powerfully into the 'social' side of the debate as well as the 'geopolitical' one. The question therefore arises: if both sets of phenomena (geopolitical and developmental) are bound up with specifically international structures of the social world, then why can we not have a single international theory which can make sense of both of them – rather than being condemned to drift back again when the current post-Fischerite tide recedes in its turn? That recession will surely come because neither side of the debate can really be said on its own to 'lay bare the essential elements in play and indicate necessary rela-tions of cause and interdependency'. Neither is able to 'picture' July 1914 in a way that does not exclude elements (theorised by the other) which are simply too significant to leave outside the theorisation itself. Eric Hobsbawm's dis-missal (1987) of the fact of Germany's aggression – 'trivial' he twice calls it – seems as problematic as Fischer's much criticised neglect of the role of the other powers in the July Crisis. Clearly, this impasse is a theoretical one. If we could find a single idea which would not just explain both sets of law-like phenomena separately but also picture them in terms of the 'necessary relations of cause and interdependency' of a larger whole, or structure, then we could have the beginnings of that fuller international theory which you've often said 'would be a lot better than a simple theory of international poli-tics', if only someone could work out 'how to do it' (1998: 379-80). How then


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would the idea of uneven and combined development apply to the debate over the First World War?27 The pattern of Nineteenth Century German social development painted by Fischer, Wehler and their successors (not to mention such predecessors as A.J.P. Taylor, Thorsten Veblen and, in an earlier guise, Alexander Ger-schenkron too) is a near-classic inventory of the elements of Trotsky's 'com-bined development'. A (Junker) pre-capitalist political elite in Prussia, almost liquidated in the Napoleonic Wars, confronts a 'whip of external necessity' produced by the unevenness of development; it embarks on a process of par-tial reform (Stein and Hardenberg) and later attaches itself to a process of industrialisation which simultaneously exhibits both the advantages of (eco-nomic) backwardness and the retarding control of an anti-liberal state. In thus fusing a technologically advanced economy with 'archaic' political structures, the result combines 'stages' of development which elsewhere suc-ceeded each other and, in doing so, generates a unique and novel social for-mation, with correspondingly different developmental tendencies. Nothing was more emblematic of all this than Bismarck's constitution of 1871, his at-tempt 'to overthrow parliamentarism... by parliamentary means' (cited in Wehler: 53): extension of a universal (male) franchise for a national legisla-ture which, however, could not form a government, whose writ could not override that of more powerful 'lower' institutions (notably the Prussian Diet whose three-class franchise continued to entrench Junker power on the ground), and to which the actual royal executive itself was not responsible.28 Contrived by Bismarck partly on the additional assumption that Germany's rural population would deliver a reliably conservative majority, the potential stability of this formula was undone by the very spread of German industri-alisation, which produced, inter alia, a rising electoral tide of Social Democ-racy. And against the perceived threat of this tide to the old political order, Bismarck himself never offered more than demagoguery, repression and (largely orchestrated) war scares. In their classic critique of the Sonderweg literature, historians David Black-bourn and Geoff Eley made several of these connections. Indeed, they called for (though did not themselves fully revive) 'something like the classical marxist concept of “uneven and combined development”' (1984: 85) in or-der to render these ‘peculiarities of German history’ intelligible as part of a unified narrative of capitalist world development. But if the unevenness and combinations of development thus reached deeply into the internal production of the aggressor of 1914, their role in configur-

27 I am currently developing the argument which follows in an article entitled ‘Klad-deradatsch: 1914 in the History of Uneven and Combined Development’. I expect the finished result to be different, perhaps very different, from that summarized here. However, the burden of the argument – that the cause of the war can best be theo-rized by analysing the specifically uneven and combined course of European devel-opment during the long nineteenth century – will, I hope, remain. 28 For this reason, I have to dispute your recently reiterated claim that 'Germany, prior to World War I, was as democratic a state as any major state in the world, in-cluding Britain, France and the United States.' (Waltz forthcoming: 2) In general I agree with your critique of the democratic peace thesis, but this seems to me an un-necessarily weak element of that critique.


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ing the international conjuncture (comparatively neglected by Blackbourn and Eley in 1984) was no less important. Consider, after all, their accumu-lated effects by the eve of the war. A chain of interconnected industrial revo-lutions, staggered in space and time, stretched across northern Europe's long nineteenth century. Germany's, in terms of combined weight and speed the most dramatic of these, was placed (both in geographical space and in his-torical time) between those of Britain and France in the West, which it was emulating, and that of Russia in the East, by which it already felt itself des-tined to be overshadowed. This East-West plane of unevenness already contained many sources of ten-sion. The historical timing of German industrialisation contributed to its ac-celerated speed; but it also entailed that on arrival as an industrial great power, Germany would find the major opportunities for expansion – Conti-nental or colonial – already closed off by earlier processes of state formation and imperialism.29 This disequilibrium between the trappings and the reali-ties of power fueled a smouldering grievance and an ultimately incohate search for recognition (a 'place in the sun') expressed in an unpredictable and bullying diplomacy. In the meantime, rapid alterations in the Continental balance of power, themselves attendant upon the dynamic historical uneven-ness of industrialisation across Europe, undermined established geopolitical configurations.30 Prussia's longstanding Russian partner drifted into surpris-ing alliance with its erstwhile republican nemesis, France. Her longtime Aus-trian rival for German hegemony became her only significant ally. And Eng-land moved out of isolation and towards co-operation with its two strongest colonial rivals, France and Russia. And it was not only through changes in the distribution of power that the unevenness of European industrialisation worked these realigning effects. The very speed of the German take-off meant that accumulated capital was mostly consumed domestically in pro-ductive reinvestment, heavily restricting the role that German financial mar-kets could play – above all in the foreign loans needed for Russian invest-ment. Russia's momentous re-orientation from German to French ally had multiple causes. But France's high savings rate, connected to the slowing of its own industrial revolution by the social outcome of the French Revolution, made it the financial partner to Russian industrialisation which Germany could not be. However, onto this existing plane of unevenness supervened the effects of a second one, comprehending the restless but irregular expansion of the capi-talist world market. For in the 1870s the industrialisation of transport finally brought huge quantities of New World grain to Europe, a shock which, co-inciding with the major expansion of grain exports by which Russia was planning to fund its industrialisation, superimposed a collapse of agricultural prices onto the secular industrial downturn of 1873. The result was the so-called Great Depression, which discredited liberal policies across Continen-

29 David Calleo (1978) makes this point, among others, especially well. 30 Thus, Russian power was high in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, had de-clined drastically by mid-century, and rose strongly again by its end, when industri-alization finally took off. Prussia, the weakest of the Great Powers in 1815 became Imperial Germany. And the Hapsburg Empire, battered by Prussian defeat in 1866, became the internally deadlocked Austria-Hungary, its external capabilities sinking steadily.


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tal Europe, but most significantly in Germany. There it cemented the fusion of Junker and large-industrial interests around tariff protection – the 'mar-riage of iron and rye', that political formula of combined development which dominated German politics and society, albeit in increasingly crisis-ridden ways, right down to the War itself. Thus in the 1870s, combined develop-ment prevented Germany from repeating England's 1846 (which, paradoxi-cally, had earlier enhanced the Junkers' own support for free trade); and the Junker refusal to adjust internally to changed world market conditions (Ger-schenkron 1943) placed it instead on a developmental and geopolitical 'colli-sion course' (Gordon: 207) with Russia. And yet in order to theorise the actual war of 1914, (rather than just listing conditions which made a war likely), we need to picture a third plane of un-even development, intersecting the first, and running roughly from North-west to Southeast. This third plane differentiated (and interconnected) those societies whose prospects were being enhanced by the overall process of in-dustrialisation from those for whom it spelled paralysis and decline. And among the latter category, the Ottoman Empire and Austria Hungary stood to the fore: agrarian, multinational empires which found themselves co-existing with adjacent processes of industrialisation and national state-formation which they themselves were ill-fitted to replicate – and indeed for which their own territories seemed destined to provide raw materials for others. Among the patterns of combined development which resulted from this re-gional unevenness, none was more remarkable – or more consequential – than the fate of the Hapsburg Empire. Battered first by French and then by Prussian defeat, in 1867 this empire half fell apart into two territorial parts, (Hungary and Austria), under Magyar and German domination respectively, creating ‘a political monster of a sort never seen before’ (Lafore 1966:60). This peculiar amalgam of nationalist and imperial monarchical forms would be further destabilized - thrown into paralysis in fact – when uneven indus-trialization in its (German dominated) Western half led to rising Czech de-mands for national recognition within the Empire. It was, however, the con-sequences of a fourth national demand, running to the quite different tempo-rality of Ottoman decline and Balkan state-formation, which were to prove fatal. Ejection from Italy and Germany had changed the internal balance of Austria Hungary and reoriented it externally to the South and East. But it had also created an internal log-jam (in the form of Magyar and German ascendancy) which would render constitutionally insoluble the South Slav problem which now came increasingly to the fore. The terms of this problem were set as early as 1878 when the Congress of Berlin, seeking to manage the latest ef-fects of Ottoman decline, (and to reverse Russia’s alarming advances in the Balkans), recognized both the independence of Serbia and the Austria-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The future leader of South Slav irredentism (and chief Russian proxy in the Balkans), and the expansion which would make Austria-Hungary an obvious target of that irredentism were now both in place. And in the following year the Dual Alliance tied German geopolitical calculations to the consequences of Austria-Hungary’s future dilemmas.


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In this Eastern Question, therefore, the East-West plane of unevenness within industrializing Europe, and the North-South one between Europe and its wider geopolitical environment intersected.31 And it was to be a series of fur-ther crises arising at this intersection – 1908, 1912, 1914 – which, increasing in intensity, eventually detonated the Great War.

So if we ask the big question empirically – what was the cause of the First World War? - we are led into a complex story about how a process of indus-trialisation, which had begun in Britain, quite rapidly spread to the Conti-nent; how it took different forms in different countries, often fusing old and new in contradictory and destabilising ways; how its irregular progress pro-duced a series of dramatic shifts in the geopolitical balance – both among the industrialising states and between these and their near and far peripheries; and how, in the end, it was the interconnection (in the Eastern Question) of these two vectors (metropolitan and peripheral) of accumulated tensions which allowed an apparently (but only apparently) remote and random assas-sination to trigger the Kladderadatsch, or general collapse, of August 1914. But if we pose the same big question theoretically, where does it now point? Not, I think, to the Leninist theory of inter-imperialist rivalry. Eric Hobsbawm's attempt to apply the latter to the war is arguably the most so-phisticated we have, and yet it proves to be tone-deaf to the developmental dissonances which played such an important role. Unevenness, while inter-polated empirically in impressive detail, is accorded no theoretical weight at all. And the war itself is (inconsistently, I think) attributed to the illimitabil-ity of capital accumulation as a social process. What then of neorealism? Well, I'm actually very sympathetic to your argument about the role of mul-tipolarity in multiplying uncertainty and danger in early 20th century alliance politics. But that argument, as I've already noted, does not pretend to map the constellation of causes whose conjunction would explain the actual out-break of the war. It does not offer to theorise the concrete event itself. And here we come finally to the crux. 'What theory possibly could do that?' you might ask. Answer: a theory which foregrounds the plural and interactive dimensions of socio-historical development in such a way that the complex twists and turns of the empirical story, in both its sociological and geopoliti-cal aspects, become intelligible in terms of specifiable causal mechanisms of historical process; a theory which can therefore bring under a single explana-tory rubric sociological and international factors which are otherwise pitted endlessly against each other in inconclusive debate; a theory which, in turn, can do this because it is the abstraction of what is essential to 'the interna-tional' as a whole – i.e. inter-societal multiplicity and interaction – and not just of one of its parts, like geopolitics or economic unevenness; a theory which, finally, is in that happy position because it has stumbled upon a way to define 'the international' inside its conception of social development, rather than in counterposition to it. At an empirical level, the claim that World War I was caused by uneven and combined development appears so obvious that it seems not to warrant a second look, and certainly not to be of any intellectual moment. But what if

31 Meanwhile, the two major crises, (the Moroccan Crises of 1905-6 and 1911), which sealed the Anglo-French configuration which Germany would fight on its Western Front were also staged in the theatre of Ottoman decline.


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it were not just an empirical claim? What if it were the application to a given case of a hypothesis about the causal role of interactive multiplicity in social development? What if it proved able to trace how that dimension was in-volved in producing the hostile protagonists of 1914 and to identify the spe-cific causal mechanisms through which it operated? In that case, surely, em-pirical obviousness would change its meaning: it would function instead as an indication of explanatory power. It would suggest that the hypothesis in question, the 'creative idea' which posited specific 'unobservable relations of things' had indeed laid 'bare the essential elements in play and indicate[d] necessary relations of cause and interdependency'. 'Rather than being mere collections of laws,' you wrote, 'theories are statements which explain them.' (1979: 5) If I take you at your word, then uneven and combined development would be that comparative rarity in the social sciences: a theory. 'Any given war', you wrote in 1988

is explained not by looking at the structure of the international-political system but by looking at the particularities within it: the situations, the characters, and the interactions of states (1988: 620).

This must be so. And yet it matters nonetheless what proportion of the rele-vant particularities can be explained in terms of a given theory. By what else, after all, is the explanatory power of any theory to be measured? In the de-bate on the First World War, the major positions are problematic not because they are wrong about the causes they directly treat, but rather because they are forced, methodologically, and in equal and opposite ways, to leave so much out. Must it not follow that a theory which has overcome that meth-odological limitation can produce a correspondingly better explanation? This is what I hope to show in my future writing on this war.

Conclusion For now, however, have I done enough? Have I succeeded in taking those three steps which would be needed in order to produce a more inclusive in-ternational theory?32 Let me end by summarising how I've tried to meet your challenge, and where the exercise has led me in terms of assessing your own achievements. For the first step – demarcation of the expanded object domain itself - I pro-ceeded not by adding on excluded fields wholesale (the economy, culture, domestic politics etc.), but rather by altering the principle of delimitation: in effect, I changed the definition of 'the international' from 'the external rela-tions of polities' to 'any feature of the social world which arises specifically from the co-existence within it of more than one society'. Despite the appar-ently permissive ‘any’, this formula creates a strictly ‘bounded realm’, delim-ited by that criterion which, after all, is actually definitive of ‘the interna-tional’. But, crucially, and unlike the familiar counterposition of ‘the interna-

32 It would be necessary, you said, first to show how an expanded definition of ‘the international’ constitutes a delimitable object domain. One would next need to iden-tify the structures characterising this domain. And finally, one would have to ‘de-velop a theory to explain actions and outcomes within it’ (1990: 31).


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tional’ to ‘the domestic’, it does not prejudge the reach of the ‘necessary rela-tions of cause and interdependency’ (1997: 913) which compose this realm; it leaves that to be determined instead by what investigation of those rela-tions reveals about the shape of ‘the international’ as a dimension of the so-cial world. For the second step - the identification of structures - I endorsed your choice of ‘anarchy’, which I interpreted as a general term for the emergent conse-quences of societal multiplicity. But to its significance for the logic of geo-political behaviour I added, in the first instance, its implications for the dia-lectical quality of socio-historical development too. I took Gerschenkron’s work as evidence that these implications are sufficiently systematic to be ca-pable of theorisation, and Gordon’s to show how such a theorisation might contribute to explaining a quintessential ‘international event’ such as the outbreak of the First World War. Still, when it came to the third step, I reserved the designation of ‘theory’ it-self to some version of the idea of uneven and combined development. For it is this idea alone which can show how the geopolitical structure of anarchy which you’ve analysed and the differentiated political economies of industri-alisation examined by Gerschenkron are both expressions of the anterior so-ciological fact of unevenness, refracted through its primary consequence of inter-societal multiplicity. And this is not a purely abstract accomplishment: it can also be shown to increase the explanatory power of international the-ory in relation to concrete historical events. 'Students of international politics', you've written, 'have had an extraordinar-ily difficult time casting their subject in theoretical terms' (1990: 21). In this regard, your insistence on separating out specifically international causal phenomena is rightly seen as an advance which sets the bar for all subse-quent theorisations of 'the international'. But 'a theory is never completed' (Waltz 1979: Preface); and it does appear that neorealism could now over-come a key problem of its own by pursuing the implications of anarchy into the sphere of social development where, in any case, they already extend, with large consequences for international affairs. This 'key problem' is as follows. Neorealism avers that system-level factors must be combined with unit-level ones in any historical explanation. But it does not itself provide the means of combining these levels: it theorises only the first of them, and does not identify those structures which, though consti-tuted at the system level, mediate or cross-cut the two. Insofar as this latter kind of structure exists, it is not merely an empirical complaint, and it is not a confusion of theory with explanation, to say that – precisely as a theory – neorealism 'leaves too much out'. But where, in the end, does this problem (of 'leaving too much out') come from? The answer, though foreshadowed in the early sections of this letter, still startles me with the counter-intuitive role-reversal which it seems to en-tail. Albeit on heuristic (and not ontological) grounds, neorealism proceeds via a very particular sociological analogy: it likens the contrast of domestic and international realms to Durkheim’s historical contrast of organic and mechanical types of society. Not only does this procedure, as I've noted


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above, separate them through counterposition. Perhaps even more impor-tantly, it is a counterposition of two ‘ontologically singular’ conceptions of society. Unable therefore to focus the relation of emergence between these two, neorealism deals in a conception of 'the international' to which socio-logical foundations cannot be imputed. This, I believe, is why it consistently attracts the charge of being an abstraction which is either sociologically empty or overloaded with reification. At any rate, it seems that even neoreal-ism has not escaped the paradoxical legacy of classical social theory. And bi-zarre as it must seem for me (a historical sociologist) to be saying this to you (a proponent of 'pure' international theory), it is perhaps that legacy of classi-cal sociology, its inability to register 'the international', which now, even in your work, most needs to be made fully visible and transcended. Trotsky's alternative idea does not contradict what neorealism says about the political structure of anarchy. But it re-grounds it in an encompassing con-ception of ‘the social’, in which geopolitical phenomena compose one of several structures intelligibly emergent in the unevenness of socio-historical process. And I wonder whether, when you contemplate the result, you might indulge the intellectual route, so different from your own, by which it has been reached. For, arguably, it is only in this mirror of 'uneven and combined development' that the full meaning of anarchy itself is revealed. Perhaps then, as I believe, this idea will enable that expanded international theory whose spirit has hovered so alluringly around neorealism since its birth - now finding voice in your critics’ words, now in your own. Perhaps not. But I’d love to know what you think. With best wishes, BIBLIOGRAPHY

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an open letter to waltz - rosenberg

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