Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

particular state; they are not understood as the product of the will of any
state or group of states, even though they clearly do operate to the benefit
of some states as opposed to others, by, for example, giving some more
options than others possess.
However, Waltz’s conception does not quite capture the full idea of struc-
tural power, because the states who make up the system have an existence
that seems to be independent of it, and they possess the ability not only to
exploit structural power in the manner that, say, capitalist enterprises
exploit the structural logic of capitalism, but also to interact with, and even
change the nature of, the rules of the game. Thus, in a bipolar system,
according to Waltz, the two states concerned have the ability to regulate
their competition and override the systemic imperative of ‘self-help’ which,
unless regulated, might otherwise be expected to lock them into an highly
destructive arms race. Even in a multipolar system where such regulation is
more difficult, states have the ability to misread the signals sent by the
system – whereas structural power which is really part of the common sense
of a society does not need to be read at all. It just is. Waltz’s system is a
strange hybrid in which states are sometimes agents, sometimes automatons –
too much of the latter for the foreign-policy analyst who looks for greater
autonomy, too much of the former for a truly structural account of the
system. Here we see, yet again, the impact of rational choice thinking on
International Relations; states are rational egoists operating under
conditions of anarchy and, however much Waltz wishes to deny it, his
model cannot avoid being actor-oriented.
Better versions of structural power can be found elsewhere in the
International Relations literature. From the realm of international political
economy, Susan Strange makes a compelling case for the existence of four
primary structures in world politics – the knowledge structure, the financial
structure, the production structure and the political structure (Strange
1988). Each of these structures has a logic of its own, independent of its
members, and structural power can be found in operation in each. The
historical sociologist Michael Mann also identifies four key structures – in
his case ideological, economic, military and political (Mann 1986/1993).
His is a work of large-scale historical sociology and he is concerned not sim-
ply with the ways in which each of these structures determines outcomes,
but also with changes in the relative importance of each structure over time.
What is interesting about these writers is that although both are, in some
sense, providing realist accounts of the operation of international relations,
neither accepts a state-centric view of the world, or a clear distinction
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between the domestic and the international – both of which are generally
seen as key criteria for identifying realists. Neither of these two criteria is
compatible with a truly structural account of the operation of power, and
their determination to provide such an account takes them away from
realism in the sense that the term has been used so far in this chapter and the
previous one. In effect, as with the matter of non-decisional power, struc-
tural power in the full meaning of the term is a not a category which works
from a realist state-centric perspective – which provides yet one more
reason for going beyond this perspective. However, before taking this step
there are still quite a few elements of the state-centric view of the world that
need to be established and investigated.