Daniel Deudney

The Philadelphian system: sovereignty, arms control, and balance of power in the American states-union, circa 1787–1861

A rediscovery of the long-forgotten republican version of liberal political theory has arresting implications for the theory and practice of international relations. Republican liberalism has a theory of security that is superior to realism, because it addresses not only threats of war from other states but also the threat of despotism at home. In this view, a Hobsons choice between anarchy and hierarchy is not necessary because an intermediary structure, here dubbed “negarchy,” is also available. The American Union from 1787 until 1861 is a historical example. This Philadelphian system was not a real state since, for example, the union did not enjoy a monopoly of legitimate violence. Yet neither was it a state system, since the American states lacked sufficient autonomy. While it shared some features with the Westphalian system such as balance of power, it differed fundamentally. Its origins owed something to particular conditions of time and place, and the American Civil War ended this system. Yet close analysis indicates that it may have surprising relevance for the future of contemporary issues such as the European Union and nuclear governance.

The nature and sources of liberal international order

Debates about the future of relations among the advanced industrial countries after the Cold War hinge on theories about the sources of international political order. Realism advances the most defined—and pessimistic—answers drawing on theories of anarchy, balance, and hegemony. But these theories are not able to explain the origins and continuing stability of relations among the United States and its European and Asian partners. This article develops a theory of liberal international order that captures its major structures, institutions, and practices. Distinctive features mark postwar liberal order—co-binding security institutions, penetrated American hegemony, semi-sovereign great powers, economic openness, and civic identity. It is these multifaceted and interlocking features of Western liberal order that give it a durability and significance.

Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History

The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems that comprise over 2000 years of international politics. Our findings are inconsistent with any theory that predicts a tendency of international systems toward balance. The factors that best account for variation between balance and hegemony within and across international systems lie outside all recent renditions of balance-of-power theory and indeed, international relations scholarship more generally. Our findings suggest a potentially productive way to reframe research on both the European and contemporary international systems.

The Unravelling of the Cold War Settlement

Twenty years ago, as the Cold War was being ushered to a close, American and Russian leaders crafted a settlement with principles and arrangements intended to constitute a great-power peace as well as to extend the liberal international order. Today, the promise these arrangements once held now seems distant. For both sides, relations are now marked by a sense of grievance, disappointment and dashed expectations. The new administration of President Barack Obama sees the repair of the relationship with Russia as a major foreign-policy objective, and is ambitiously attempting to reset it and place it on a more positive footing. Already this new policy has provoked a chorus of condemnation that the United States is appeasing Russia and sacrificing both its national interests and the interests of democratic allies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet region. In reality, the Obama policy is a move toward recovering some of Americas most successful foreign-policy approaches that reached a zenith at the end of the Cold War under the later Reagan administration and the George H.W. Bush administration.

Geopolitics as Theory:: Historical Security Materialism

Despite its previous centrality in Western political science, materialist arguments in contemporary theories of security politics are neglected and attenuated due to several political and intellectual developments. The extensive geopolitical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was theoretically unsophisticated, deterministic and reductionist, but it was, along with classical Marxism, a branch of a broader attempt to historicize earlier materialist arguments in response to the industrial and Darwinian revolutions. In order to reformulate geopolitics as a more conceptually robust and sophisticated theory, I employ a generalized version of the apparatus of Marxian historical (production) materialism to construct geopolitics as historical security materialism. In this model, the forces of destruction, constituted by the interaction of geography and technology, determine the security functionality of different modes of protection. Two competing modes of protection, the real-state and the federal-republican, distilled from realist and republican (proto-liberal) security practices, entail differing forms of arms control and patterns of institution-building (asymmetrical binding vs co-binding), and in turn generate differing political structures (anarchy and hierarchy vs republics and states-unions). The security viability of these modes and their attendant structures is hypothesized to vary across three different sets of forces of destruction (early-modern, global-industrial and planetary-nuclear). Simple security, the absence of violence applied to bodies, can result either from the presence of a violence-poor material context, or the presence of political restraints on violence. Real-state practices and structures are security functional in material contexts characterized by low violence volume and velocity and dysfunctional in material contexts of high violence volume and velocity, while the converse is true for federal-republican practices and structures. The role of ancillary concepts of contradiction, reification and idealism is suggested and an agenda for further conceptual work and empirical research is outlined.

Who Won the Cold War

The end of the Cold War marks the most important historical divide in half a century. The magnitude of those developments has ushered in a wide-ranging debate over the reasons for its end-a debate that is likely to be as protracted, controversial, and politically significant as that over the Cold Wars origins. The emerging debate over why the Cold War ended is of more than historical interest: At stake is the vindication and legitimation of an entire world view and foreign policy orientation.

Publius Before Kant: Federal-Republican Security and Democratic Peace

Reflecting American and allied ascent, Liberal IR theorists have revived earlier theorists, notably Kant and democratic peace, constructing neoclassical liberalism to challenge Realism. Republican security theory (RST) begins in antiquity and reaches a conceptual watershed in the Enlightenment, not in Kant, but in Publius = Federalist. Pessimistic, RST assumed republics were small and expansion would fatally deform, a conclusion derived from Roman history. In a pivotal advance, Publius advanced federal union, suggesting the federal-republican security hypothesis — federal union enables republican viability in competitive interstate systems. Kant does not address the logically and historically prior question of how democracies come to populate competitive state systems sufficiently to make pacific unions. The historical record of the global industrial state system suggests federal-republican security is more important than democratic peace.

Soviet reform and the end of the Cole War: explaining large-scale histrical change

Introduction After years of retirement in the academy, macro’historical commentary on contemporary events has returned to fashion. Radical domestic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and new patterns ofEast’West relations-in short, the collapse of communism and the end othe Cold War’mark the end of an era and present an invitation to international theorizing. 1 Few would deny that these changes are momentous, but there is little consensus concerning their origins, trajectory, and implications. Explaining these events will necessitate a reweighing of fundamental theoretical issues. Thesize and speed of these changes were largely unexpected,reminding us how primitive our theories really are and encouraging us to broaden our theoretical perspective. To capture these events, theorists must reach across the disciplinary divides of Sovietology, international relations theory political economy, and political sociology.

Greater Britain or Greater Synthesis? Seeley, Mackinder, and Wells on Britain in the global industrial era

At the zenith of British power at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a widespread recognition that Britains position in the emerging global industrial inter-state system was increasingly precarious and that widespread adjustments would be needed. One solution, the ‘imperial federalism’ of Seeley and Mackinder, proposed the political integration of the scattered British settler colonies into a ‘Greater Britain’. Alternatively, Wells predicted that Britain would become integated into an Anglo-American ‘greater synthesis’, and that Europe would be unified on ‘Swiss confederal’ rather than German authoritarian lines. These proposals and prophesies were based upon interpretations of the changing material context composed of technology interacting with geography, and were seriously flawed. Extensive debates on these schemes indicate that the range of grand strategic choice was broader than that conceptualized by contemporary realism. The failure of British national integration due to geographic factors and the endurance of the Anglo-American special relationship casts the roles of the nation-state and the Western liberal order in a new perspective.

Realism, Liberalism and the Iraq War

Of the many conventional wisdoms of American foreign policy, none is more misleading than the notion that the Iraq War was a product of liberalism.