The Critical View on Kenneth Waltz’s Approach to International Relations
The theory of International Relations as a subject emerged not so many decades ago, only in 1919. Thus, this field provides a good platform for discussions and debates around what the main drivers of international relations are, what the main factors are, what does determine the behaviour of states. The theory of International Relations is not less complex than international relations themselves are. There are many theories explaining the behaviour of major actors and factors that influence them. Kenneth Waltz is a neorealist, who presented his views on how the international relations work in the late 1970s. He met some criticism from neoliberal representatives such as David Baldwin, Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and Helen Miller. Mainly, debate is caused around what determines state behaviour- the anarchy or the interdependence, the possibility of an effective international cooperation.
Kenneth Waltz published his book Theory of International Politics in 1979 to propose a scientific vision of International Relations. In a discipline once dominated by the disputes over the nature of man, he changed the terms of the debate. Waltz focused on numbers, game theory and rational calculation. He believed that states cannot know one another’s motives. Since there is no authority above the states to keep peace, they fear one another. Any state could attack another at any time. For Waltz, all states share one goal - survival. Waltz believed that state of affairs was the product of anarchy - in the formal sense meaning absence of government. He also thought anarchy results in a ‘power balancing’ determined solely by relative military power. Culture, religion, government - they are all irrelevant to Waltz’s theory. Communist, authoritarian and democratic regimes will all behave in the same way because all want to survive. To explain how the system works in conditions of anarchy, Waltz used the model of billiard table. The table represents the system of international relations. Balls on the table represent individual states. When a player takes a shot, the balls bounce off, each affected equally by it’s contact with others. This is a multipolar system, which is called so because the mass in the system is equally distributed amongst many balls. In bipolar system, along with the equally sized balls there are two huge balls on the top of the table. These balls represent super-powers, which dominate the whole system. If a player shoots a smaller ball at one of these larger ones, it will bounce off it without having much effect. But if a larger ball is shot, many of the balls on the table have to move. There is no communist ball, no capitalist ball, no moral or immoral ball. Just billiard balls and their relative size, reflecting military power. On multipolar table the balls affect one another - every one has influence. However, in bipolar system, the mere fact that the bigger balls exist affects what is possible for other balls. Players could try to …
