Week 5: Is Anarchy Really What States Make of it?

Hey all, I'm in the process of getting back into the swing of things, expect backlogged postings to come over the next day or two.  I'm maybe not fully back up to full capacity yet, but at this point I need something to keep myself focused on.

For this week I wanted to tackle the question of whether the international system can be remade and whether change is possible in the system in a bit of a roundabout way - by examining whether the possibility for change has been built into the current organizing structure of the international system.

I'm going to begin by taking the cynical view on most states' pathways to change - that most all states are trapped in the "Hobbesian state of nature" of autonomous states with impermeable boundaries.  There's an interesting argument that says that the development of the modern nation-state is really inevitably intertwined with the development of armies and military technology during the Renaissance and Enlightenment.  This argument states that as pikes and muskets became the primary weapons of war, armies needed to grow and so too did the bureaucracies and government agencies to manage them - the replacement of mercenary armies which required a large tax collecting agency to be able to fund with professional standing armies paid with regular wages and afforded certain extra benefits of the state representing the last major shift in organization.  I think this argument can fairly easily be extended to the modern-day state in the international system, although the scale has certainly expanded greatly during the 20th Century.  If security is the key function of every state, this is sort of an inevitable outcome - that each state would begin to take on similar forms in order to manage the army most capable of defending itself and its interests against other modern armies with similar capabilities.

Here, I'd like to dive into Waltz' exploration of anarchy as permissive cause of war.  While it seems obvious that states will inevitably go to war with each other in absence of anything to stop them, the advent of bodies that intend to crack down on the outbreak of warfare hasn't put a stop to warfare entirely - it's merely changed the way states think about war.  The "proxy" wars as seen in Ukraine, Yemen, and Syria recently are examples of this shift - getting around limits to the permissible "just" causes of war has become as much of a concern for major powers as much as the warfare being carried out itself.  Despite the best efforts of international organizations such as the UN, war yet breaks out, and as recent actions by Russia have indicated, the international system won't always be capable of preventing it.

I agree that the practice of sovereign territoriality has to go (or at least undergo significant change) if we're to be able to shake off warfare and the anarchy that serves as catalyst for warfare, but with recent political trends in Europe and the US, I'm not convinced that we're close to doing so - while many clamor for stronger borders and more definite expressions of sovereignty/territory in the forms of border walls and immigration bans (such as that recently voted on by Hungary), we are to remain stuck in this territorial mode of organization.

I'll likely edit this post throughout the week to flesh out my ideas more thoroughly and clearly, I've still got a bit to say on the subject.