Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Understanding International Relations 

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which privileges all states (Ashley 1989c). The notion that states exist in order
to protect their populations from external dangers is legitimized in this way –
even though it is quite clear that most people most of the time are in far
more danger from their ‘own’ governments than they are from foreigners. The
private–public distinction which pervades Western conceptions of politics and
has characteristically supported the exclusion of women from public life in the
West rests on the same foundations as the Western way of warfare – the origi-
nal public figures were the soldiers who fought the set-piece battles of the
Greek cities (Elshtain 1987). In short, a state-centric conception of inter-
national politics carries with it a quite extensive amount of political baggage
from other areas of social life – the notion that international relations is differ-
ent from all other spheres of social life, and thus that International Relations is
a different kind of discipline from the other social sciences is one of the least
compelling propositions of conventional realist international thought.
These are thoughts that will be pursued in the rest of this book, which
begins with an attempt to cross-examine ‘anarchy’ in an essentially empirical
way. Is it actually the case that we live in an ungoverned system? Clearly there
is no ‘government’ in the conventional, Western sense of the term – a limited
set of institutions that makes and enforces authoritative decisions – but is
this the only available model of what a government is? Realists, neorealists,
neoliberals and international society theorists all stress that in international
relations, ‘in the last instance’ there is no ‘ultimate’ decision-making power.
Thus sovereignty is a defining feature of the system, and nothing has really
changed or ever will, short of the emergence of a world empire. But how
important is ‘the last instance’? It might well be argued that we only very
rarely and in extremis come close to reaching ‘the last instance’. Can the
network of quasi-governmental institutions within which the states system
is today embedded really be dismissed quite so readily? We may not have
world government, but perhaps we do have ‘global governance’, and it is to
this phenomenon that we now turn.
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Further reading
Classical texts on the balance of power by Brougham, Von Gentz and Cobden
are collected in M. G. Forsyth, H. M. A. Keens-Soper and P. Savigear (eds) The
Theory of International Relations (1970); a similar collection with a wider
remit is Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and N. J. Rengger (eds) International
Relations in Political Thought (2002). Hume’s excellent essay, ‘The Balance of
Power’, is very much worth reading 250 years on, and is most conveniently
found in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (1987).

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Understanding International Relations 
Modern ‘classics’ on the balance of power include E. V. Gulick, Europe’s
Classical Balance of Power (1955); Chapters 2 and 3 of Inis L. Claude, Power
and International Relations (1962); Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance
(1965); and essays by the editors, both entitled ‘The Balance of Power’, in
Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds) Diplomatic Investigations (1966)
as well as discussions in Morgenthau and other standard texts. Morton Kaplan,
System and Process in International Politics (1957), is a classic of a different
kind from the behavioural movement of the 1950s, containing an attempt to
pin down the rules of a balance system. J. N. Rosenau (ed.) International
Politics and Foreign Policy: A Reader (1969) contains extracts from Kaplan,
Waltz, Singer and others, still valuable over 30 years on. Contemporary debate
on the balance of power is dominated by Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International
Politics (1979) – see the articles from International Security in Michael E.
Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller (eds) The Perils of Anarchy
(1995), especially Stephen M. Walt, ‘Alliance Formation and the Balance of
World Power’ (1985); and Paul Schroeder, ‘Historical Reality vs. Neo-Realist
Theory’ (1994) for critiques and alternatives largely from within the neorealist
camp. A non-neorealist alternative to Waltz is provided by Hedley Bull, The
Anarchical Society (1977/1995/2002). A good, fairly conventional collection
on the balance of power is a Special Issue of Review of International Studies,
Moorhead Wright (ed.) ‘The Balance of Power’ (1989).
Lawrence Freedman (ed.) War (1994) is a very useful reader which contains
short extracts from a wide range of sources. The acknowledged classic on the
subject is Karl von Clausewitz, On War (1976): this edition/translation by
Michael Howard and Peter Paret contains extensive commentary and fine
introductory essays, and is to be preferred to all the many alternatives available.
Michael Howard, Clausewitz (1983), is the best short introduction. Beatrice
Heuser,  Reading Clausewitz (2002), synthesizes the main arguments in On
War, but more interestingly looks at how others have read (or misread) him.
Paret (ed.) Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age
(1986) is a reissue of a classic collection on the great strategists. Colin Gray,
‘Clausewitz Rules, OK! The Future is the Past with GPS’ (1999), is, in principle,
a defence of Clausewitzian ideas; in practice, it is a somewhat intemperate attack
on those authors unwise enough to think that one or two things might have
changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century (including the present
writer in the first edition of this book).
On the causes of war, two major studies stand out: Kenneth Waltz, Man, the
State and War (1959); and its only equal, Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of
War (1996), an earlier, brief version of which is ‘Bringing Order to the Causes of
War Debate’ (1990): Stephen Van Evera’s Causes of War: Power and the Roots
of Conflict (1999) is rightly highly regarded, but too much focused on the
offensive/defensive realist debate for non-rational choice oriented readers – a short
version is ‘Offense, Defense and the Causes of War’ (1998). The International
Security reader, M. E. Brown et al., Offense, Defense and War (2004b), is totally
focused on the debate, but brings together most major scholarship (including

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Van Evera’s shorter piece) to evaluate the positions. Other useful works include
Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (1988), and John G. Stoessinger, Why
Nations go to War (2005).
For more recent thinking on Just War and legal restraints on violence, see
Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (eds) Documents on the Laws of War (2000);
Geoffrey Best, War and Law since 1945 (1994); Michael Walzer, Just and
Unjust Wars (2000) and Arguing about War (2004); Terry Nardin (ed.) The
Ethics of War and Peace (1996), and, looking specifically at justice in the War
on Terror, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of
American Power in a Violent World (2004). Wider reflections on the changing
nature of warfare are to be found from a number of sources, some ‘academic’,
some not: a selection of recent books which raise serious questions about the
nature of war and its shape in the future would include John Keegan, The Face
of Battle (1978); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (1987); Victor Davis
Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (1989);
James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (1992) and
Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network
(2001); Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War (1993); Christopher Coker,
War in the Twentieth Century (1994), War and the Illiberal Conscience (1998)
and Humane Warfare: The New Ethics of Post-Modern War (2001); Michael
Ignatieff, Virtual War (2000). Ignatieff focuses on the Kosovo campaign of
1999 – interesting military strategic analyses of that conflict are Daniel A. Byman
and Matthew C. Waxman, ‘Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate’ (2000) and
Barry Posen, ‘The War for Kosovo: Serbia’s Political Military Strategy’ (2000),
both from International Security. Micahel E. O’Hanlon, ‘A Flawed Masterpiece’
(2002), is interesting on the Afghanistan campaign, while John Keegan, The
Iraq War (2004), tells the military side of the 2003 Iraq war very well.

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