Correspondence Neoclassical Realism and Its Critics

Nessun abstrac

Foreign policy, bipartisanship and the paradox of post-September 11 America

The attacks of September 11 and the resulting war on terrorism present a puzzle to conventional explanations of foreign policy bipartisanship. Public anxiety about the international environment increased sharply after the attacks in 2001, but this did not translate into greater foreign policy consensus despite the initial predictions of many analysts. In this article, we advance a theory of foreign policy bipartisanship that emphasizes its domestic underpinnings to explain the absence of consensus in Washington. We argue that bipartisanship over foreign policy depends as much on domestic economic and electoral conditions as on the international security environment. Using multivariate analysis of roll call voting in the House of Representatives from 1889 to 2008, we show that bipartisanship over foreign policy is most likely not only when the country faces a foreign threat but also when the national economy is strong and when party coalitions are regionally diverse. This was the case during the Cold War. Despite concern about terrorism in recent years, economic volatility and regional polarization have made bipartisan cooperation over foreign policy elusive

“Anarchy is what states make of it”: true in a trivial sense; otherwise, wrong

The claim “Anarchy is what states make of it” is true in the trivial sense that states’ identities are not carved in stone, but can change, and that international affairs are “cultural” or “social,” not natural phenomena. In this sense, the claim is trivially true; only the common 1990s misinterpretation of Waltz’s writings as a crude form of materialism could make it sound like highly original. The claim may also refer to something more specific, namely that states are embedded in shared normative belief systems. In this second sense, the claim is wrong. Wendt makes the non-controversial point that states must recognize each other as the key actors with which they interact, and in so doing they form a primitive “cultural” system, but his larger claim is that states act on the basis of their “culture” in the more specific sense of common norms that shape states’ identities. Wendt is known for the second point, but as I demonstrate he never shows that states share such common norms, only that they share a “culture” in a broad, socio-cognitive sense. Wendt’s famous claim is taken to be representative of a more widespread malaise that plagues IR theory, and the implications are discussed