Conceptualizing Politics

1.   The anarchical international society
In this picture of international relations, a number of independent states share under 
themselves the world in an adversarial way, as it is defined at any given moment. This 
element differs a lot over time: in early modernity the world was still the European-
Mediterranean area of the Roman empire plus its ‘Holy’ medieval extension to 
Northern and Central Europe, though confronted on its southern rim with a new 
civilisation and polity (first the Caliphate, then the Islamic follow-up states) and 
opening up in the direction of the Americas; in this century it’s the planet, plus the 
outer space and perhaps in the future one or two other planets where humans may 
try to settle. Every state looked after its chief ’s and its citizens’ interest in survival 
and welfare, in a competitive environment in which nearly everything is permitted. 
Cases of cooperation and alliance existed, but the absolute primacy of self-interest 
made them shaky. Self-reliance remained the safest resource and anarchy (
ἀναρχία/
lack of government), meaning the absence of a common superior power – a tertius 
super partes/a Third over the parties – the fundamental connotation of this world. 
Historically, this became more visible as the old universal forces, the Holy Roman 
Empire and the Roman Church, which in the Middle Ages were theoretically 
entitled to settle disputes and wars, lost all their power; they however acted mostly 
as particularistic rather than universalistic instances, though it took centuries before 
the other powers or countries felt free to behave regardless of what the emperor or 
the pope had to say.

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The states  109
In this scenario disagreements between international actors found settlement 
in diplomatic action or could not lead but to war. This has always happened – let 
us look back for example at the city states of ancient Greece. But the structure we 
are now outlining came about with all its features only in modern Europe, as a 
true if restless polyarchy of fully independent and equal states, fairly different in its 
constitution not just from the Greek poleis,
1
 but also from the warring kingdoms of 
ancient China or the likewise warring tribes or nations of Native Americans. A war 
is still an event in which human beings kill other human beings, but being or not 
the killing embedded in a grid of legal norms and diplomatic customs (formal and 
informal institutions) may change the frequency, the duration, the intensity of the 
war and the procedures for peace.
The concept of war will keep us busy in the next section, but let us now note 
that going to war in order to solve a dispute is tantamount to admitting that both 
diplomacy and the system of international law and tribunals has failed: in the 
absence of a judge and of an enforcement authority it is military (supported by 
economic) force that decides whose right will prevail. Every body’s asserted right is 
admitted to the race, and force will design the winner. International anarchy is the 
sheer state of nature among nations. Once war has broken out, as a bottomline, silent 
inter arma leges/the laws are speechless among arms, as the Romans said.
2
  The Thirty 
Years’ War, which ravaged large swaths of Europe and along with the ensuing pes-
tilences caused enormous suffering to the population, came near to the regression 
of social relationships into a state of nature.
3
We have so far outlined the structure of international relations as it can be 
reconstructed by their history in various epochs and regions, and with the help of 
formulations drawn from modern classics of political philosophy, primarily Thomas 
Hobbes. This anarchical core structure is and remains a substantial help for the 
understanding of international politics. But to grasp its configuration in our time 
we have to pay attention to three major revolutions that occurred between early 
modernity and now:
• 
the rise of the anarchical society after the Peace of Westphalia, which set an end 
to  the Thirty Years’ War  (1648)
• 
the two World Wars of the twentieth century and the birth of collective secu-
rity and international organisation
• 
the globalisation of politics, both in the aftermath of economic globalisation and 
as emergence of global/lethal challenges that require rethinking politics altogether.
We are going to now examine only the two changes high on the list, but this will 
be enough to modify the all-anarchical image of international relations we have just 
described. The core structure does not disappear, it was full at work in the Second 
World War and could under (for the time being unlikely) certain circumstances 
regain the central stage, but its modifications seem to be here to stay.
What is anarchical society?
4
 It’s first of all an oxymoron, in which the adjec-
tive ‘anarchical’ contradicts the noun ‘society’, whose meaning indicates peaceful 

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110  World politics and the future of politics
coexistence or even cooperation aimed at everyone’s advantage. We could likewise 
say ‘societal anarchy’. In it the absence of a higher power adjudicating controversies 
remains, but is tempered by a common interest in stability (lest one’s own position 
is damaged) and by shared norms, followed as long as they serve one’s own advan-
tage and the costs for breaking them imposed by the partners exceed the gains 
one could receive from freeriding. In anarchical society, we meet again the notion 
of political order we have learned about in Chapter 3, along with the goals politi-