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Вестник МГИМО-Университета. 2019. 1(64). С. 7-18 DOI 10.24833/2071-8160-2019-1-64-7-18
ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЬСКИЕ СТАТЬИ
ANARCHY IS WHAT EXPLAINS THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
William C. Wohlforth
Dartmouth College, USA
The article examines the major events of the two previous centuries of international relations through main concepts of political realism. The author argues that in order to understand the present dilemmas and challenges of international politics, we need to know the past. Every current major global problem has historical antecedents. History from the late 19th century constitutes the empirical foundation of much theoretical scholarship on international politics. The breakdown of the Concert of Europe and the outbreak of the devastating global conflagration of World War I are the events that sparked the modern study of international relations. The great war of 1914 to 1918 underlined the tragic wastefulness of the institution of war. It caused scholars to confront one of the most enduring puzzles of the study of international relations, why humans continue to resort to this self-destructive method of conflict resolution? The article shows that the main explanation is the anarchical system of international relations. It produces security dilemma, incentives to free ride and uncertainty of intentions among great powers making war a rational tool to secure their national interests.
Key words: anarchy, security, history, uncertainty, bargaining.
Anarchy and the Challenges of Security and Cooperation
Main actors of international relations are states or empires (great powers): sovereign territorial political units recognizing no higher authority. By the time of the late 19 th century the states had been formed over many centuries since the Middle Ages. As their governments acquired ever more control over their expanding territory, they engaged periodically in warfare against each other. In this intense, highly competitive environment governments of these major powers became ever better at extracting resources from their societies and tapping technological and organizational developments for the production of military power. They then went on to conquer or dominate most of the rest of the world. The late 19 th century «colonial
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Поступила в редакцию 28.01.2019 г. Принята к публикации 20.02.2019 г.
rush» represented the last stage of a process of domination of almost the entire world by powerful European states, their offspring in the new world (e.g. USA), or those few non-European polities that managed to compete with them in the generation of power (Japan).
The great powers that enter the scene in the late 19th century had survived a brutal centuries-long process of nearly constant warfare, creating a sovereign state system that dominated the globe. One of the most basic insights of international relations scholarship is that the political system that results when powerful, sovereign actors interact with each other is very different from other kinds of political systems. Recognizing no higher authority, great powers are sovereign, which means the political system they form is governed by anarchy: a system that lacks any higher authority that can enforce agreements the chief actors may make. This kind of system is in stark contrast to most domestic political systems that are formed on the basis of hierarchy, containing powerful, authoritative institutions that can enforce any contracts agreed to by parties within those political systems. Kenneth Waltz [5] called this anarchical system a «self-help» world, one in which each actor must provide for its own security, indeed must rely chiefly on its own efforts to achieve whatever objectives it may seek.
In this anarchical system, if two states sign an agreement - as, for example, when Germany and the Soviet Union signed a mutual pact of nonaggression, promising each not to attack the other - there is no third force to appeal to should one of the parties to the agreement decide to violate it, as of course happened with the Barbarossa invasion of June 1941. The treaties and agreements that states reach must somehow be self-enforcing. It must somehow be in the states' own interest to continue the agreement. If circumstances change, interests change, and the fact that there is a treaty committing a state to some path of behavior is only the weakest of constraints. And this applies not only to bilateral agreements like the Hitler-Stalin pact but also of course to larger and much more elaborate international institutions, such as the League of Nations or the United Nations. Each of those institutions had to rely in the final instance on their most powerful members - namely the great powers themselves - to enforce its provisions. As soon as those major stakeholders cannot come to a mutual understanding about the provisions of various treaties or the obligations states undertook by signing such treaties, those institutions lose force, as we see in case of the League of Nations and the UN.
In the anarchical system any state may decide to resort to the use of violent force -to unleash war - if it is unsatisfied with the bargain that may be offered by another state. Any state that determines that it can get a better deal by unleashing war may do so. There is, again, no third force to prevent any state's resort to force if it feels it is in its interest. To be sure, the community of states developed principles of international law surrounding the resort to force, but in practice these principles exert a fairly weak constraint on the war-and-peace decisions of states. Having developed within the sovereign system of states itself, international law always recognized the right to use force in self-defense. And, in practice, most states most of the time can come up with a defense
rationale for the use of force. And even if they can't, there is no third party to enforce violations of the international law of war, leaving it up to the other states to do so. And that feeds back into the problem of cooperation just discussed: if all states agree collectively to enforce international law there is no force other than their own self-interest to compel them to do so if doing so should harm their fundamental interests. This is the story of the failure of the League of Nations. This potential for any state to try to use force to get what it wants is thus an ever-present background reality in an anarchical system. It is the unwritten clause in every treaty.
Scholars of international relations disagree about how powerful a force this problem of anarchy actually is. Realists place the greatest emphasis on the effect of the absence of rule among states. Liberals and constructivists show that in some circumstances the effects of anarchy can be attenuated by the actions of states or even in some instances nonstate actors. But for our purposes the key point is that almost all scholars agree that the absence of governance authority in international politics does present special challenges to cooperation and conflict.
This debate over the effects of anarchy yields roughly two ways one can interpret the history of international relations. The more pessimistic reading is the realist view of these events as exemplifying the «tragedy of great power politics» [4], to use John J. Mearsheimer's apt phrase. The story begins with the attempt after the Napoleonic wars of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries to create a system of coordinating the policies of the great powers based on a few restraining norms and a practice of great power consultation on matters of common concern— the Concert of Europe or the Vienna system. In the lead up to 1914 the major powers increasingly exempted themselves from this system's already weak norms, pursuing their own self help in ways that ultimately primed Europe for war. Because of the unwieldy combination of alliances, commitments and security problems that had built up over the years, Vienna's effort to deal with what it thought were its existential security problems via punishing Serbia in 1914 morphed into a war which led to the destruction of not only the Austro-Hun-garian empire itself, but of the Ottoman and Russian empires as well. This massive war led to a concerted effort to try to cooperate in the fashioning of a more stable international system. Tragically, is that the Versailles Peace agreement that was reached by the powers in 1919 contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. The great powers' efforts to finally look ahead and tame the baleful consequences of anarchy through a new international institution, League of Nations, also fell afoul of the fact that any power could exempt itself from the system if it so chose, as the United States did by failing to participate in the first place.
By the 1930s it was clear that the powers were back in a world of self-help, but even here, their efforts to counter the threat emanating from revisionist powers to create a stable system using the traditional mechanisms balancing alliances once again failed with Germany's, Italy's and Japan's decisions to forcefully create a world order to their liking. The resulting conflagration, dwarfing the First World War in death, destruction and implications, once again led to a flawed attempt to create peace in 1945. The major
powers failed to reach peace settlements in both Europe and Asia, which ultimately led to the Cold War. And that intense rivalry hamstrung the more ambitious attempt at global governance, the United Nations. Even the effort at the end of the Cold War to get the United Nations to live up to its original potential seems to be falling prey yet again to the rise of great power rivalry, disagreements over the nature of international order, and the continuing permissive effect of anarchy, allowing states to resort to force to influence conflicts as they choose.
But there is a second more progressive and optimistic narrative: an endless and insistent effort by states and other international actors to try to regulate their behavior and cooperate in the interests of peace. While realists point to the tragic ends of major efforts at international cooperation, their liberal and constructivist colleagues are impressed by the fact that states and non-state actors never give up trying. The dramatically increased power and influence and authority of the United Nations, as imperfect as it is, when compared to all international institutions that preceded it, is a case in point. The massively increased ambition and scope of international law is another. Many note the heightened activity of the United Nations in peacekeeping, peace building, mediation and other crucial diplomatic activities with the end of the Cold War deadlock. And although they may see the emerging apparent increase in great power tensions and its effect of slowing down or indeed perhaps reversing the increased activity of the United Nations in peace and security affairs, they nonetheless see in the events of the last 25 years the potential for a more institutionally rich, more cooperative international setting, one that flies in the face of the tragic narrative so beloved of realists [2].
Whichever narrative is more compelling, the basic problem of anarchy identified in international relations theory gives one a toolkit of arguments and models that one can use to help understand the patterns of behavior and outcomes of international relations.
The Challenge of Bargaining in the Face of Changing Power Relations
With no higher authority to enforce agreements, great powers face a big challenge when their underlying capabilities change over time. When a state's relative capabilities change, so does its bargaining power. Under anarchy, any state that is dissatisfied with the terms on offer from another state can threaten to use force if it thinks that by so doing it may get a better deal. An agreement reached at one time may come to be seen as an intolerable imposition if increased relative power gives one party reason to believe that it could, if it made the deal today, secure much better terms. Treaties, agreements, norms, understandings, and even entire international orders are vulnerable to destabi-lization or revision as the underlying distribution of capabilities changes. And that, as historian Paul Kennedy pointed out, is an inescapable reality of international politics: «The relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the
technological and organizational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another». [3, p. xv-xvi].
And this was the fundamental problem of the period, that historian E. H. Carr called «the 20 years crisis»[1], that turbulent time between the first and second world wars. For the victorious powers in 1919 crafted a peace agreement highly disadvantageous to two states whose capabilities had most dramatically declined as a result of the war: Germany and the Soviet Union. What the crafters of the Versailles peace failed to plan for was the inevitable increase in these two countries' capabilities, and thus their bargaining power and consequently their dissatisfaction with the post-World War I order. This basic problem underlay the complex diplomacy of the entire inter-war period. France was too insecure to offer Germany the concessions needed to ease Berlin's dissatisfaction with international order. British statesmen ultimately understood that the best path to peace would be to try to engineer concessions to Germany as its power increased so as to avert a situation in which it was extremely dissatisfied. But in the early post war years Britain was incapable of offering France the security guarantees it would have needed to acquiesce to those concessions. Paris's problem was that many of the key concessions themselves would make Germany even stronger, which would then increase its bargaining capabilities even further. With no third force to provide security, France was unwilling to make adjustments to the restrictive terms imposed upon Germany. For its part, the Soviet Union needed above all to avoid a situation in which all of the «imperialist» states ganged up on it. So a constant concern of its diplomacy was to keep Germany and the Western powers at loggerheads, something it achieved brilliantly.
This fundamental challenge of bargaining under anarchy in a situation of rapidly changing power relations can be seen in almost every diplomatic endeavor of the period. E. H. Carr's view of the Locarno treaty is but one of a myriad of potential examples: «The first proposal for a treaty guaranteeing Germany's western frontier was made by Germany in December 1922, and was emphatically rejected by French prime minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Raymond Poincaré. At this period (it was the eve of the Ruhr invasion) Germany had everything to fear from France, and France nothing to fear from a helpless Germany; and the treaty had no attraction for France. Two years later the position had changed.... French fear of Germany was about equally balanced by Germany's fear of France; and a treaty which had not been possible two years
before, and would not have been possible five years later, was now welcome to both....
Ten years after its conclusion, the delicate balance on which it rested had disappeared. France feared Germany more than ever. But Germany no longer feared anything from France. The treaty no longer had any meaning for Germany» [1, p. 209].
The dilemma in Carr's story is clear: the convergence of interests required for the Locarno treaty was the result of Germany's achievement of a rough parity in capabilities with France. But because interests change with relative power, the passage of time undermines the interest convergence necessary for an agreement. The changing distribution of capabilities explains the Franco German divergence in 1922 - 23, conver-
gence in 1924, and divergence again in the 1930s. Peaceful change requires a smooth adjustment to the changed relations of power, but the deep challenges of bargaining make such adjustments an extraordinarily difficult task for diplomats. And that challenge is exacerbated by the classic problems of uncertainty and collective action.
The Challenge of Collective Action under Uncertainty
Bargaining under anarchy is hard enough in the face of shifting power, but it's complicated even further by uncertainty about the intentions of other states. In international politics, one of the main questions about intentions is how strongly committed a given state is to defend a particular status quo, or, conversely, how intent a state is on upsetting a given status quo. If two states are bargaining over whether to change a given international system and one likes things the way they are and the other wants to change them to better fit its interests, what each wants to know about the other is how committed it is to its stance. A major problem, however, is it is extremely difficult to discern another state's intentions.
Let's look at the problem from the standpoint of a state that is revisionist, that is, one that would like to alter the international system to better fit its interests. The revisionist must signal its dissatisfaction with the status quo, else there is no way to get the bargaining going. You need to express dissatisfaction with the status quo by making some claim against another state. A revisionist state cannot pretend not to be revisionist at all. But, revisionism comes in many varieties, ranging from a state that may just want a few small territorial adjustments to one that actually seeks a revolutionary overthrow of a given international order. If those states that like the existing international order knew for certain that the revisionist state had such revolutionary intentions, they would face powerful incentives to contain the power of that revisionist early in the bargaining game.
This is the meaning of Henry Kissinger's maxim that «it is only to posterity that revolutionaries seem unambiguous». For the revolutionary leader knows that to expose his true aims is to invite destruction while he is still weak. A revolutionary revisionist, therefore, faces incentives to portray itself as a reasonable, limited aims revisionist. The problem for the status quo states is that they know that the revisionist faces those incentives, and must somehow find a way to craft policies that would allow them to tell for certain whether the revisionist is a true threat to their fundamental interests, or one that can be accommodated. This can be seen as one of the most challenging tasks of statesmanship. That is the story of the efforts to deal with the phenomenon of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s. Obscured by the clarity of hindsight is the fact that for the statesman of the time there were really two Hitlers. There was the Hitler who thundered "Germany is just the beginning. We need Europe and its colonies" and the Hitler who outlined seemingly limited revisions to the unfair Versailles treaty. In private, he explained: «It is necessary to make pleas for peace and avoid any territorial claims until we have become strong». Not privy to most of these private discussions
at the time, external players could not be sure. Which was the real Hitler? It was hard to tell.
In addition to this challenge of uncertainty, efforts to contain the potential threat of Nazi Germany in interwar Europe faced a second dilemma, namely the problem of collective action. From the standpoint of the status quo states, a balance of power that would contain Germany's aspirations was a public good: a good that could be enjoyed by all members of a potential status quo coalition, whether or not any given state paid for it, and from which no member of the status quo coalition could be excluded once it was provided. The fundamental problem of such public goods is free riding. Because you can enjoy the good even if you don't pay for it, your strong incentive is to avoid paying for it if you think somebody else is going to do it. A credible alliance that would contain Hitler suffered from this core free riding problem. France and Great Britain would have been delighted if the Soviet Union would step forward and pay the costs of containing Hitler. Those costs would be measured along many dimensions, including reduced cooperation with Germany, increased defense expenditures, and, most important, the risk of receiving the full brunt of Germany's military power in case of war. The Soviet Union, naturally, faced exactly the same incentive - much better if the imperialists fight among themselves than if they gang up on the globe's sole socialist state.
So now we can see how the statesman of the 1930s confronted an extraordinarily difficult challenge. That challenge was further exacerbated by the fact that most of the governments of the time believed that defense tended to have the advantage in war over offense. This was a reasonable inference from the experience of the First world war, characterized by relatively static trench warfare in which defenders could wreak terrible destruction on attacking troops. If you believe the defense has the advantage, then free riding is even more tempting, because you don't expect the aggressor to be able quickly to seize territory and transform it into more capabilities that can then be turned against you. Rather, your expectation is of a bloodbath among whatever countries are unfortunate enough to be the first to go to war, leaving you to step in at the most opportune time to reap the greatest benefit at the least cost in blood and treasure. Needless to say, the one country that more by the luck of geography than by brilliant statesmanship managed to free ride until late in the game—the USA—radically improved its power position as a result of the war.
The failure of states to create a credible alliance against the threat emanating from Nazi Germany is often told as a morality tale. The evil, craven, capitalist appeasers in Paris and London, or the rapacious totalitarian autocrat in the Kremlin somehow suffered from some defect of character or intelligence or they were so blinded by ideology that they were unable to cooperate together to stop Hitler. Insights about uncertainty and collective action as developed in international relations theory point to the structure of the situation those inevitably flawed statesmen faced. Until late in the game, it remained very unclear just how big a threat Hitler was, and even as glimmerings of the true nature of the threat emanating from Berlin became evident, the incentives to seek your own national interest to avoid the horrific cost of containing Germany were overpowering.
The Challenge of the Security Dilemma
While the guns of the Second world war were still blazing, the major powers conceived and began to implement a new international institution meant to foster cooperation in the pursuit of peace and security, the United Nations. But the aspirations attendant upon this new undertaking increasingly ran up against a powerful coun-tercurrent: intense security competition between the erstwhile wartime allies, chiefly the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. As a result of this tension, World War II ended not with a big peace settlement a la Vienna or Versailles that would come to define the post war era. Rather, an unplanned new structure of international politics took shape that was itself the product of the superpower rivalry.
What explains this dramatic shift from alliance to Cold War? All the challenges already discussed played roles, chiefly the difficulty of bargaining and cooperating in an anarchical interstate system in the face of rapidly changing power. But the emergence of the superpower rivalry illustrates yet another major challenge in international politics, the problem of the security dilemma. This dilemma arises when the policies by which one state seeks to secure itself tend to decrease the security of another state, which takes compensatory actions that then feed back to the insecurity of the first state, reinforcing a spiral of mistrust, competition, arms racing and expensive, dangerous security competition.
The key insight of this model is paradoxical: even states solely interested in their own security - with no interest in expansion - may end up in a highly competitive rivalry that leaves them less secure. The emergence of the Cold War can be seen as a series of discrete choices by Moscow and Washington. Each choice can be thought of as a binary decision either to cooperate with the other side or to defect from cooperation in a unilateral search for security. For example, if your armies occupy territory, you can negotiate with the other side about the disposition of those territories or simply keep your army in place and use it as an instrument of power to transform the occupied territory into a member of your "camp." Both sides could dramatically lower the risks of war, and reduce the high cost of security competition, if they could avoid a competitive struggle to control territory. And yet as detailed in chapter 10 this is precisely what both superpowers did. The Soviet Union progressively and systematically transformed the territories occupied by its army into reliable «socialist» allies, a process of Sovietization that ultimately frightened many in the West, increasing their incentives to cooperate with each other in pursuit of security. The United States, for its part, steadily began to consolidate the Western parts of Germany and Europe into what would eventually become the NATO alliance.
Cumulated over time, these decisions left each superpower in an undesirable security posture from the standpoint of the ways they themselves had traditionally defined their security. Recall that for Moscow the chief object of foreign policy was to avoid an alliance of «imperialist» states that would amalgamate all of the power of the capitalist countries and direct it against the Soviet Union. Yet this precisely the effect its policies
in Central and Eastern Europe—as well as its «probes» in Iran and elsewhere—produced. For its part, the United States had a very long-standing tradition of wanting to avoid permanent security entanglements with Europe. Documentary records show high US officials as late as Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration desperately seeking to reduce the commitments to Europe that would ultimately entangle their country's security with that of the old world. And yet again they ended up adopting policies that produced precisely that effect, bringing their armies cheek by jowl with those of the Soviet Union and thus generating the geographical proximity that would feed intense arms races and crises for the next 45 years.
National historical narratives on both sides of the Cold War often portray the struggle as the result of a threat emanating from the other side. Often, the driving force is said to be the nature of the domestic ideology or institutions of the other side—revolutionary Marxism and totalitarianism versus bourgeois capitalist imperialism. International relations scholars tend to favor a security dilemma perspective. In this view both sides are to some degree expansionist in the sense that they sought to increase their power and influence over the international system compared to what they possessed before the Cold War. But as security dilemma theory sees it, each was driven to policies that appeared expansionist to the other primarily by insecurity. The key is that in all the interactions that result in the fateful decisions that generated their mutual Cold War, cooperation required that each side trusts the other side to reciprocate that cooperation. If the other side sought to exploit one's cooperative move the result could be devastating. Soviet leaders feared that if they did not consolidate Soviet style control in central Europe, Western forces would manipulate the domestic politics in such a way as to cause these states to adhere to a hostile bloc and bring a potential threat closer to Soviet borders. Having lost over 25 million lives in the Great Patriotic War, that was a risk they were reluctant to take. But the same went for the western side, fearing that if they failed to take action to provide security to displaced populations impoverished by the war, Moscow-friendly communist parties might take power and extend the reach of the Soviet Union all the way to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
Each side reasoned that the safer move was to defect rather than cooperate. Each side's reasoning in terms of the security dilemma model goes something like this. «If the other side suspects that I am going to defect and unilaterally take control, then it will defect. And in fact, I am tempted to defect, so they must assume that I'll defect which means they will defect, and that means I should defect». That same reasoning of course goes for both sides. It's driven by three features of international politics that theorists highlight: the uncertainty of intentions (it's impossible to know for sure the intentions of another state, especially what that state may intend to do in the future); risk aversion (in international politics, it often pays to be very reluctant to run the risk that a cooperative move might entail); and the downside costs of unreciprocated cooperation (cooperating when the other side defects and takes advantage of you leads to dramatic losses in security, as compared to the lower perceived risks of defecting when the other side cooperates). These three features that typified the setting in which Mos-
cow and Washington operated pushed the two superpowers toward competitive policies that seemed necessary and rational in each instance, but cumulatively left them less secure. If you think about it a bit, you can see how the same dynamic occurred when it came to the arms competition.
Conclusion: Lessons for 21st Century International Relations
The history of the Cold War's latter years and eventual end belies the claim that in an anarchic system states will always choose short-term unilateral security maximization over attempts to cooperate in the interests of more stable and longer-term security. After weathering frightening crises in Berlin and Cuba, and devastating wars and proxy wars in Asia and Africa, the superpowers did begin to cooperate in placing some boundaries on their rivalry. These measures demonstrated at least the glimmerings of a capacity to develop some level of trust, enabling the powers to choose to cooperate rather than defect in at least some key areas and so rendering the latter Cold War less frightening and somewhat less costly if measured in terms of the proportion of GDP spent on defense and the frequency of intense crises. As the world begins to adjust to a notable increase in great power rivalry, the experience of those years presents useful material for statesmen and scholars to study as they ponder optimal strategies.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of an effort to break out of the tragedy of international politics via strong cooperative moves is Mikhail Gorbachev's new thinking policy. In a way, the series of policies emanating from Moscow in the years after 1986 can be interpreted as an effort to break out of the Cold War security dilemma. Gorbachev and his fellow new thinkers were seeking to convince their erstwhile rivals chiefly in the West but also in Asia that the Soviet Union was motivated solely by its own security and was uninterested in expansion. Accepting terms for arms agreements that had previously been thought to be very unfavorable to Soviet interests, unilaterally reducing forces in central Europe that were seen in the West as threatening and opening up domestic discourse to reduce uncertainty about intentions were all meant to defuse the fear and mistrust that drove competitive Cold War policies. From today's vantage point, these policies might seem to have ill-served the state interest of the Soviet Union, which at this time began to enter an economic and political crisis that led to its demise. But the foreign policy and domestic policy pursued in this period were distinct. It is possible to imagine a USSR with a more resilient and robust domestic system potentially successfully de-escalating the Cold War via Gorbachev style policies and yet surviving at least in part. Again, if we are careful to distinguish the fate of Gorbachev's domestic initiatives from his foreign policy, those years may contain very useful lessons to today's statesman if they seek to avoid the dangerous and expensive spiraling competition that can emanate from a security dilemma.
But there may well be lessons, too, from the way the West, led by the United States, handled the final years of the Cold War and the first post-Cold War years. For what drove the innovative but also concessionary grand strategy of Gorbachev was in part
apprehensions of decline, concern that the USSR would not be able to sustain the material burden of an endless cold war struggle with the much richer US-led coalition. And there's at least some evidence that Western leaders perceived this reality and therefore made sure not to make too many concessions to Moscow. In particular, a redline for Western leaders was any concession that might call into question the core institutions of the Western alliance, chiefly NATO. In a sense the innovative strategy that began to bring the Cold War to an end was born of weakness, and the stronger side saw no need to make the concessions that would have been necessary to create a new, equitable order that included all of the Cold War's former protagonists.
In other words, the weaker side was doing most of the innovating, while the stronger side sought to preserve the core elements of the system it had created during the Cold War, one that it felt best reflected its security interests. Yet the post-Cold War order that emerged did have elements of fragility in that it never fully incorporated all of the Cold War's key protagonists. Once again, therefore, the law of the uneven development of power began to place stress on the order that emerged in the Cold War's wake. It might have suited the longer-term interests of the stronger side in the Cold War to have fashioned a more inclusive order, one more robust to changes in power relations. Perhaps it is not too late to engineer what historian E.H. Carr thought was needed in the interwar years, namely a «peaceful adjustment to the changed realities of power».
References
1. Carr E.H. The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. New York: Perennial, 1939. 244 p.
2. Ikenberry G. John. After victory: Institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of order after major wars. Princeton University Press, 2001. 312 p.
About the author:
3. Kennedy P. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Random House, 1987. 677 p.
4. Mearsheimer J. J. The tragedy of great power politics. WW Norton & Company, 2001. 592 p.
5. Waltz K.N. Theory of international politics. 1979. 251 p.
William C. Wohlforth - Daniel Webster Professor of Government, Department of Government, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH 03755, USA. E-mail: william.c.wohlforth@dartmouth.edu.
ИСТОРИЯ МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫХ ОТНОШЕНИЙ ОБЪЯСНЯЕТСЯ СТРУКТУРНОЙ АНАРХИЕЙ
У. Уолфорт
DOI 10.24833/2071-8160-2019-1-64-7-18
Дартмутский колледж, США
В статье рассматриваются основные события двух предыдущих веков международных отношений через основные концепции политического реализма. Автор утверждает, что для понимания нынешних дилемм и вызовов международной политики, нам необходимо знать прошлое. Каждая современная глобальная проблема имеет исторические корни. История конца XIX в. представляет собой эмпирическую основу многих теоретических исследований по международной политике. Развал Европейского концерта и начало всепожирающего глобального пожара Первой мировой войны дали старт современному изучению международных отношений. Эта война подчеркнула высокую человеческую цену института войны. Учёные сразу же столкнулись с одним из вечных вопросов относительно войны: почему люди продолжают прибегать к этому саморазрушающему методу разрешения конфликтов? В статье показано, что основным объяснением является анархическая система международных отношений. Она порождает дилемму безопасности, создает стимулы для проблемы «зайца», порождает неопределённость в намерениях великих держав. Всё вышеперечисленное приводит к тому, что война становится рациональным инструментом защиты национальных интересов.
Ключевые слова: анархия, безопасность, история, неопределенность, торг.
Список литературы:
1. Carr E.H. The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. New York: Perennial, 1939. 244 p.
2. Ikenberry G. John. After victory: Institutions, strategic restraint, and the rebuilding of order after major wars. Princeton University Press, 2001. 312 p.
Об авторе:
Уильям Уолфорт - профессор им. Дэниэла Вебстера Факультета управления Дартмут-ского колледжа. Hanover, NH 03755, USA. E-mail: william.c.wohlforth@dartmouth.edu.
3. Kennedy P. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Random House, 1987. 677 p.
4. Mearsheimer J. J. The tragedy of great power politics. WW Norton & Company, 2001. 592 p.
5. Waltz K.N. Theory of international politics. 1979. 251 p.
