State of Nature

Seems the revealing comments of a non-Western diplomat about the anarchic nature of the international states-system are causing consternation among Western foreign-relations establishment types, liberal internationalists that they are. These folks need to reread their Hedley Bull.

As a devotee of my former professor Kenneth Waltz’ neorealist theory of international politics, (AFAIK the only such formulation to come close enough to actual theoretical structure to be called a “theory,” by the way), this is no surprise. Compared to domestic Western politics, the international political sphere’s relatively nasty and brutish, its grounding in raw force less easily concealed by diplomatic or academic niceties.

Years before I ever owned a gun, one of the things that drew me to Waltz’ theory, in addition to its relentless logic, was its corollary that the more widespread the ownership of nuclear weapons, the less nuclear war there’d be. Sound familiar? I thought so.

When you decide to carry concealed as you go about your day, you are implicitly recognizing the anarchic nature of interpersonal human relations in extremis — the international states-system writ small, so to speak — because for all intents and purposes, you expect the government, in the form of the police, to be absent during any armed encounter. For that hopefully brief period of time during which you are defending yourself, it is as if they don’t exist at all.

Here’s a transcript of a fascinating conversation with Waltz.

Here’s some videos:

Enjoy.

UPDATE: Link fixed, sorry about that.