Richard Rosecrance

Bipolarity, multipolarity, and the future

Richard N. RoSeCranCe is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. A leading student of international systems and the dynamics that sustain and transform them, he has authored Action and Reaction in World Politics (1963) and Defense of the Realm: British Strategy in the Nuclear Epoch (1967), as well as edited The Dispersion of Nuclear Weapons (1966). In this selection Professor Rosecrance traces a structure of the global international system that falls midway between the contrasting structures identified in the two previous selections. His invigorating analysis should press the reader to reassess again the prevailing structure and stability of world politics in the nuclear age. [Reprinted from The Journal of Conflict Resolution, X (1966) 314-27, by permission of the author and the publisher. Copyright 1966 by the University of Michigan.]

Balancing, Stability, and War: The Mysterious Case of the Napoleonic International System

We seek to validate four assertions in this article: (1) The threat to the stability of the international system was surely as great during the Napoleonic imperium as it was during the period of Soviet threat, 1945–1989. (2) While actors balanced against the USSR, they did not balance against Napoleonic France, at least until the end (1813–1815). (3) The difference between the two periods cannot be accounted for in the typical manner, by regarding the post-World War II system as “bipolar” and the Napoleonic system as “multipolar”; neither system was “bipolar” in power terms; both, however, were “bipolar” in terms of threat. (4) Therefore, a new explanation is required for the presence or absence of balancing in international relations.

Has Realism Become Cost-Benefit Analysis?

Has Realism Become Cost-Beneat Analysis? Contemporary realism is at a crossroads. If realist claims are deaned speciacally—predicating particular responses by nations to deaned patterns of international power—they cannot be fully sustained. Nations do not respond predictably when confronted by superior power; nor do they always act as if a zero-sum game existed between countries. The amount of cooperation in the international system is not a constant. If, on the other hand—as has been happening recently—realist claims are deaned more generally—and preferences, beliefs, and institutions are admitted to have a causal role—the distinctive contribution of realism is lost in a welter of other variables. Deaned generally, realism is in danger of being reduced to cost-beneat criteria in which empirical outcomes are unclear. In Ruling the World, Lloyd Gruber furthers these generalist conceptions by interpreting modern international and supranational institutions in a new way in which national self-interest, rather than power compulsions, determines the outcome. His synthesis seeks to explain why institutions should be growing in power and membership and yet—from his point of view—large numbers of participants should be dissatisaed, preferring a now-unobtainable status quo ante. The points I seek to make are as follows: (1) Realism is moving away from relatively speciac, clear, and testable claims about the nature of the international system to a more generalist formulation in which outcomes are increasingly indistinct or opaque; (2) the original formulation—”speciac realism,” as I shall call it—laid great stress on the balance of power and balancing operations