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Anarchy in International Relations

Anarchy—from the Greek a (no) and archè (dominion/authority)—in international relations refers to the situation that the international system lacks an agency that if necessary can force the members of the system, even the most powerful ones, to abide by the rules and keep their promises. Like all anarchical systems, the international system is a self-help system: it does not have bailiffs.

Anarchy and Sovereignty

Although circles of friends or gangs of criminals are also examples of anarchical systems, the present-day system of states is without doubt the best-known example of such a system. This system originated on the European continent and is the outcome of an evolutionary process that took about 500 years. It started at the end of the 13th century, with the conflict between King Philip IV (the Fair) of France and Pope Boniface VIII concerning the right claimed by Philip to impose taxes on the churches in his kingdom without the pope's prior consent, and symbolically ended with the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The old, medieval order under the spiritual and secular authority of the pope and the emperor was gradually replaced by a new one that was based on territorially separate units that recognized one another as sovereign equals. Sovereignty means that the states do not attempt to exercise authority on another state's territory and do not recognize any authority above them. This latter “external” aspect of sovereignty implies that anarchy and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin. They are mutually constitutive. Sovereignty as a property of the state cannot exist without anarchy as a property of the structure of the system of states. An anarchical system is therefore necessarily identical with a self-help system—a system, that is, in which no authority exists that can bring redress where one party has been wronged by another party.

It has become part of the “unproblematic background knowledge” in the study of international relations that the ground rules of the states system were laid down in the Peace of Westphalia of October 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War. For this reason, the states system is very often referred to as the Westphalian system. Andreas Osiander has quite recently exposed this as a myth. The peace consisted of two treaties, the Treaty of Münster between the French king and the German emperor, and the Treaty of Osnabrück between the queen of Sweden and the German emperor. These treaties settled many questions, but they did not constitute a break with the past or establish a new international order based on the principle of sovereignty. Rather, they confirmed the ancient rights and liberties of the estates of the empire—including their right to conclude alliances with “strangers” for their preservation, provided these were not directed against the emperor or the empire—but made no mention of the estates being sovereign or having sovereign rights.

Anarchy and the State of Nature

Anarchy constitutes what John Ruggie has called the “deep structure” of the states system. Many students of international relations have concluded that the absence of a central authority must therefore explain why wars are endemic in the international system. But anarchy never can be the only factor that explains why states go to war because states can also coexist peacefully in anarchy. The history of the states system shows that states can be unreliable partners, continuously engaged in war or the preparation for war, as well as faithful allies cooperating with one another quite extensively. The European integration process since the 1950s moreover makes clear how far cooperation can go between states, the anarchical nature of the states system notwithstanding. One should also realize that organized acts of violence in the form of civil wars are a recurrent feature of hierarchical systems. Nevertheless, it can hardly be claimed that anarchy increases the chances of successful cooperation between actors in a system. In an anarchical system, conflict is more likely to lead to violence to settle the issue than in a hierarchical system where actors can appeal to an agency that can adjudicate between them and enforce a settlement. As a result, the anarchical structure of the states system has led many authors to describe life in that system in the gloomiest terms. The image they evoke of the situation the states find themselves in largely corresponds with Thomas Hobbes's famous depiction of the state of nature in his Leviathan. Like Hobbes, these authors argue that anarchy implies that every state is the potential enemy of every other state and therefore must lead to a relentless security competition, that a division of labor—and consequently, prosperity—is impossible to realize, and that the life of states can be no more than “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

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