Anarchy Is What States Make Out of It, Essay Example

In his article “Anarchy is What States Make Out of It” Alexander Wendt calls our attention to the problem of studying state’s identities and interests. Wendt suggests that it should be studied and analyzed how anarchy influences and affects the identities and interests of the state. And the main aspect at this point is that these interests and identities should be studied as dependent variables. In his article the author explores “three ways in which identities and interests are transformed under anarchy [Y]: by the institution of sovereignty [X1], by an evolution of cooperation [X2], and by intentional efforts to transform egoistic identities into collective identities [X3].” (Wendt, 1992). But the key argument of Wendt’s article is that self-help international system doesn’t necessarily follow from anarchy.

I absolutely agree with some points of Wendt’s criticism of neoliberalism and neorealism. Neoliberalism truly has a drawback in concentrating too much on the process while explaining the question of cooperation between nation-states and thus failing to make an account for systematic variables that turn out to be quite important in the study of the system’s influence on the state’s identity and interests. The same failure has neorealism by observing structure as the primary determinant of state’s behavior and thus it can’t account for the changes in the system. But still, at some point I agree with neoliberalists (and Wendt also does) who say that the anarchic nature of international system is exaggerated. As Wendt is known to be one of the core social constructivist scholars he doesn’t criticize it. But it seems to me that constructivism is too occupied with theoretical discussions and thus fails to pay enough attention to the practical aspects of how identities are formed. Wendt favors constructivist approach, because he thinks that constructivism can account for the changes in the system due to the fact that threats are socially constructed. But it seems to me that only through the combination of constructivism and neoliberalism it is possible to realize how system affects the identities and interests of the state. I think so, because neoliberalism provides us with the possibility to analyze the structure and with the help of constructivism we can study changes in the system. I don’t think that we can look at the process without thinking about the structure, it is like attempting to understand a person’s behavior without knowing and comprehending how human brain functions.

But in general, I agree with Wendt in his statement that one aggressive state can force all the others to practice self-help power politics. But it doesn’t mean that anarchy necessarily results in hostility and conflict. It is like when a predatory state emerges into a system with a strong collective security identity, this state would be defeated by the rest without changing the dominant identity of the system. A good example is NATO. When Soviet Union collapsed it could be predicted that after this event NATO will also collapse, because member countries would start to be suspicious about one another, but this didn’t happen because of their strong collective identity. With such an example arguments of Wendt seem to be pretty convincing. Thus it is possible to understand that self-help international system doesn’t occur to be the logical result of anarchy, it “what states make out of it”.

References

Wendt, A. (1992). “Anarchy is What States Make Out of It: the Social Construction of Power Politics”. International Organization, 46 (spring): 391-425.