He was the preeminent international theorist of the post-war period, a thinker who produced not just one iconic work, but three: Man, the State and War , Theory of International Politics and The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better Waltz began his career as a political rather than an international theorist.
Man, the State and War , which started life as a PhD thesis, plundered the history of political thought for rare snippets of thinking about relations between states that might be put to good use. From these snippets Waltz assembled three 'images' of international relations: one that explained the behaviour of states in terms of the drives, faults and possibilities inherent in human nature and individual human leaders; one that explained it in terms of the character of the domestic politics of states; and one that explained it in terms of the structure of the international system.
Waltz dismissed the first and second images as unhelpful to theorists. This was a bold, possibly even career-wrecking move for a young scholar, for it cast aside almost all the work done in the field of international relations for more than thirty years by many eminent professors. Both classical realism and liberalism, the two theoretical schools that had vied for influence since the s, relied on the first or second images to explain world politics.
For classical realists like Hans Morgenthau, war and competition in international relations arose from the hunger for power in 'men' as they put it ; for liberals like Alfred E Zimmern, war was rife because tyrants were unrestrained by law within and outside their states.
Waltz's dismissal didn't quite consign these theories to the dustbin of history, but he did damage to both, demanding their reconsideration. In Theory of International Politics , Waltz turned from destruction to construction and tried to do two things. First, he argued that the behaviour of states was best explained by the third 'image'. The structure of the international system, he argued, conditioned and thus explained state behaviour.
Because that structure is anarchical, lacking a sovereign to make and enforce the law, cooperation between states was difficult and competition endemic. Because the states that make up the system are equal in formal terms, but very unequal in their capabilities, being rich and strong or poor and weak or somewhere in between, they do however sometimes cooperate to balance against particularly powerful states that threaten others.
He thought in terms of incentives and constraints. The broad patterns of relations among states are largely determined by their position in the hierarchy of power. Many were amazed that France and Germany found peace after the Second World War given their long history of violent conflict. Waltz was not.
Both had fallen from the ranks of the great powers, and the primary axis of conflict had shifted to the two poles of the bi-polar world. That made the European Community and later the European Union possible. Waltz argued famously and controversially that nuclear proliferation or, as he preferred to say, the spread of nuclear weapons makes major war less likely. Nuclear-armed states — be they the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, India and Pakistan during the Kargil War, or a nuclear-armed Iran and its rivals in a future conflict — are less likely to fight a major war against each other than they would be if they did not have nuclear weapons.
More weapons and more nuclear options did not make things safer or more dangerous; they only wasted money. In the fall of , Waltz joined a group of other international relations scholars in opposing the coming war with Iraq. But it is impossible not to acknowledge that it decisively shifted the terms of debate in international theory, returning realism to the mainstream, where it has remained ever since.
In the s, s and s, the field was defined by a series of arguments between the realists and their critics, as first the neo-liberal institutionalists and then various bands of constructivists, feminists, postmodernists and critical theorists lined up to attack Waltz and his students.
For that reason alone, he will be remembered as one of the great thinkers of the field. He has published on the intellectual history of International Relations and on Indian foreign and security policy. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing. E-IR is an independent non-profit publisher run by an all volunteer team. Your donations allow us to invest in new open access titles and pay our bandwidth bills to ensure we keep our existing titles free to view.
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