Ted Hopf

The logic of habit in International Relations

IR theory is dominated by the logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. But Max Weber offered four logics of choice, not just two. Beyond the instrumental rationality of Zweckrationalität and the normative rationality of Wertrationalität are affect and habit. Drawing on Weber, James, Dewey, and Bourdieu, and habit’s microfoundations in neurocognitive psychology, I explore the logic of habit and its consequences for several fundamental puzzles in IR theory. The logic of habit necessarily precludes rationality, agency, and uncertainty, and so offers a different interpretation of cooperation, security dilemmas, enduring rivalries, and security communities in international politics. The logic of habit also fills a gap in mainstream constructivism’s theorization of intersubjective structures, returning the taken-for-granted lifeworld to the center of attention.

POLARITY, THE OFFENSE- DEFENSE BALANCE, AND WAR

Bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power, Kenneth Waltz argues. His empirical justification for this conclusion relies on the multipolar systems that preceded the two world wars and the bipolar Cold War. The weakness of Waltzs argument is the small number of cases and the failure to consider alternative explanations for different levels of war in the three periods. In another historical period of both multi- and bipolarity—Europe from 1495 to 1559—I have found that polarity cannot account for the constant level of instability across a change in polarity in the system. Instead, the offense-defense balance, which includes the technical military balance, the cumulativity of power resources, and strategic beliefs, explains instability in the period. Drawing on this alternative theory, I reassess the high level of stability associated with the Cold War and speculate on the level of stability we can expect in the post-Cold War period.

Common-sense Constructivism and Hegemony in World Politics

The IR literature on hegemony rarely combines attention to material power and ideas. Coxs neo-Gramscian work is a rare exception, but it too narrowly construes Gramscis conceptualization of common sense, reducing it to elite views on political economy. But Gramsci argued that hegemony had to reckon with mass quotidian common sense. If political elites do not take into account the taken-for-granted world of the masses, elite ideological projects would likely founder against daily practices of resistance. In this article, I show how mass common sense can be an obstacle to an elite hegemonic project aimed at moving a great power into the core of the world capitalist economy. In contemporary Russia, a ruling elite with a neoliberal project is being thwarted daily by a mass common sense that has little affinity with democratic market capitalism. Scholarly work on future Chinese, Brazilian, or Indian participation in constructing a new hegemonic order would do well to pay attention to the mass common senses prevailing in those societies

Managing Soviet Disintegration: A Demand for Behavioral Regimes

o n e could easily believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union is all to the good. The military threat that emanated from Moscow throughout the Cold War has been all but eliminated. Peoples whose identities were suppressed for three-quarters of a century under Communist rule, and as long as 250 years under Russian rule, can now exercise their right to national self-determination. Socialist economic practices are being consigned to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, these welcome consequences of Soviet disunion have a dark and dangerous side as well. While Western security is not threatened by the prospect of Soviet hegemony over Eurasia, it is affected by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to the new non-Russian republics. The exercise of national self-determination has led to nationalistic excesses against other national minorities within these new independent states. These excesses are not only morally repugnant, but they also have security implications, in that an aggrieved minority may effectively appeal for aid to its motherland-in most cases, Russia. The prospect of wars among the postSoviet republics is discouraging enough, but far worse are the spirals of hostility and arms racing that they are likely to set off. The result could easily be the resuscitation of the threat from Russia: a paranoid, insecure state, surrounded by hostile republics, that over-arms against all of them in response. An over-armed Russia would once again raise the specter of a threat to Western security that the collapse of the Soviet Union was to have forever buried. Russian security is a Western security interest. The West should adopt policies now that minimize the chances that this specter will reappear. The West should try to ensure that Russia’s security environment remains as

Identity, legitimacy, and the use of military force: Russia’s Great Power identities and military intervention in Abkhazia

An action is legitimate if the pertinent community deems it so. Most would agree that Russia’s conduct in the 1990s in Georgia was illegitimate. Military intervention in another state, unless the other state is preparing an imminent attack on one’s own territory, or is engaged in the systematic abuse of one’s own citizens, is a violation of the international norm of sovereignty, at a minimum. Some have argued that European politics has gone beyond this ‘territorial integrity norm’ to something more expansive, to a consensual renunciation of any and all territorial claims on other states. This was first codified in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.

The Limits of Interpreting Evidence

Mainstream political science and interpretivism have little to do with each other, intellectually and professionally speaking. It is thought that the concern of the mainstream for causal inferences from a large sample of a representative population in order to assess the comparative merits of hypotheses deduced from competitive theories has no room for the interpretivist concern with the ethnographic and discursive recovery of intersubjective realities. One could ask, what would have happened in a conversation about political science at a cocktail party between Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault and Robert Keohane, Gary King, and Sidney Verba? Mutual incomprehension, at best? Or a retreat to a more innocuous topic, at worst?

Making the Future Inevitable: Legitimizing, Naturalizing and Stabilizing. The Transition in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan

In discussions of post-communist transitional politics, it is common-place to find arguments that attribute regime stability to a governments capacity to legitimize its policies. And the most robust source of such legitimacy is often adduced to economic achievements appreciated by the public. But many political theorists have developed an important distinction between regime stability that comes about through legitimacy and that which derives from naturalization, the latter being a populations acceptance of a regime and its policies because of the unthinkability of any alternative. Legitimization is most often considered to be the result of democratic procedures, while naturalization does not need democratic conditions to effect political stability. Collective conversations in the form of focus group transcripts reveal that the transitions in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan evidence both forms of political stabilization. In Estonia, discourses of legitimization and naturalization are evident; in Uzbekistan, some legitimization, but little naturalization; but in Ukraine, neither source of support for the continuation of the transition is available.

Polarity and International Stability.

In his article in the June 1991 issue of this Review , Ted Hopf challenged the argument that bipolar systems are inherently more stable than multipolar configurations of power. He reported that the international situation in sixteenth century Europe became only marginally more stable with a shift from a multipolar to a bipolar system. He argued for attention to the offensive-defensive balance, rather than systemic polarity. Manus Midlarsky accounts for Hopfs findings, and for evidence of multipolarity and increased conflict in the early seventeenth and twentieth centuries, by proposing a relationship between polarity and war that is contingent on scarcity of desired international resources. Midlarsky argues for more attention to contingent relationships generally and draws implications for current and future probabilities of conflict in a multipolar world. Hopf responds by pointing out the need for further development of Midlarskys analysis, the possible compatibility between Midlarskys formulation and his own focus on the offensive-defensive balance, and the desirability of a productive unity of the two research programs.

‘Crimea is ours’: A discursive history:

Russia could have annexed Crimea anytime in the last 25 years. The fact that it did so only in March 2014 is a puzzle. I argue that the predominant discourse of Russian national identity by 2014 made the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine both thinkable and natural to Moscow. A history of the discursive terrain of Russia from 1992 to 2014 shows how Russia’s national identity has evolved over the years, both in response to Western inactions or actions and domestic developments. But Russian identity is not a sufficient explanation for Russian behavior in Ukraine. For that, we must pay attention to the event itself: Western support for the Maidan protestors, Western failure to adhere to the February 2014 agreements reached with Moscow on a transitional government in Ukraine with Yanukovych at its head and new elections in November, the presence of disgruntled Russians in Ukraine, and perhaps most important, over a decade of US unilateralism in foreign affairs.

Change in international practices

This article builds on the practice turn’s welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scope conditions for reflection during ongoing practice, which increase the probability of a change in practices, I also elaborate mechanisms by which ongoing practices may yield an endogenous source of change. I illustrate some of these conditions for change from recent International Relations scholarship on practices in world politics.