“Kenneth Waltz, arguably the most influential international theorist since the Second World War, put it like this: ‘Students of international politics have had an extraordinarily difficult time casting their subject in theoretical terms’ (Waltz 1990, 21). IR students today might think this claim outdated. For it was made at the very moment when IR was experiencing a dramatic widening of its theoretical horizons. From the late 1980s onwards, traditional realist, liberal and Marxist approaches were being joined on the stage by numerous new theories: critical theory, constructivism, neo-Gramscianism, feminism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism and so on. As a result, IR theory today is a very crowded field. And yet Waltz never changed his mind. For him, most of the approaches studied as ‘international theories’ were nothing of the kind. Instead they were theories of domestic society that people were using to think about international affairs. Such theories, argued Waltz, are not useless, because domestic factors do play a large role in how governments behave internationally. But they cannot be the whole story, because at the international level states also have to deal with each other. And if one’s basic model of reality excludes that political multiplicity and its effects, then it cannot avoid wrongly reducing those effects to purely domestic causes.
What Waltz was identifying here is of course the knock-on effect in IR of the original problem of ‘methodological nationalism’ that goes all the way back to Classical Social Theory. But how (apart from importing numerous ‘reductionist’ theories) did IR itself become part of the confusion? The answer is that when Waltz saw there was a problem with social theories and the international, his response was not to fix the problem. It was to turn away and produce a completely separate theory of what they had excluded— namely geopolitics. And he advised everyone else to do the same: ‘Students of international politics will do well to concentrate on separate theories of internal and external politics until someone figures out a way to unite them’ (Waltz 1986, 340).
The trouble was that, brilliant though his new theory was, it was as incomplete in its own way as those he had criticised. They comprised theories of society without the international; and he now produced a theory of the international without society. As a result, there now existed two self-contained kinds of theory, neither of which was able to connect to the other. And yet even Waltz agreed that they must be put back together at some point: ‘I don’t see any logical reason why this can’t be done .... However, nobody’s thought of how to do it. I’ve thought about that a lot. I can’t figure out how. Neither can anybody else so far’ (Waltz 1998, 379–80).”
Justin Rosenberg suggests we revisit the idea of the uneven and combined development. “UCD is … an idea whose application is not limited to any one field. In principle, it can speak right across the social sciences and humanities. For all these disciplines study social practices and processes that are formed in the context of multiple interacting societies. And this thought points to an ironic conclusion: the final wisdom of the idea of UCD, an idea which can do so much to make intelligible the subject matter of IR, may be that to grasp the full significance of the international, we shall have to embrace much more than the discipline of IR.”
Uneven and Combined Development – the ‘International’ in Theory and History
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