Structure & Balance of Power:
Waltz Strikes Back

In our last discussion on Kenneth Waltz's theory, the presentation may have seemed a bit chaotic. Today, we're continuing our journey through his ideas by focusing on Structure and Balance of Power.

Structure

Structure is everywhere - narrative structures, corporate structures, domestic political structures, legal structures, and architectural structures. But before Waltz, there weren't many attempts to understand the structure of international politics. Most previous attempts to explain phenomena in world politics looked at the characteristics of the state or country. Waltz believed this was limiting, and comparing it to understanding a person by looking at a human cell or a finger, he argued that the whole is different from the sum of its parts.

The whole person is analogous to the system of world politics that Waltz refers to. The system is composed of units - human cells for the body or nation-states for the international political world. The cells of the human body are not just haphazardly connected; they are arranged in a particular order, and their relationships have an impact on the shape of the whole body. This arrangement and relationship is what Waltz refers to as structure.

Waltz needed to find out how the states of the world are arranged, ordered, and related. He identified three principles of political structures by looking at domestic political structures:

1. Hierarchy: In domestic structures, there is a legitimate authority that branches of government and citizens must recognize and respect. However, in international politics, Waltz sees that there is no central government of nation-states. It is an anarchic system. The absence of a legitimate authority in world politics is the first principle of Waltz's conception of global structure. He calls this the "self-help system."

2. Functionally alike units: In domestic politics, different branches of government functionally do different things. In international politics, all nation-states are functionally similar. They all exercise sovereignty, meaning each state deals with internal and external problems independently.

3. Distribution of capabilities: Nation-states in the world have vastly different capabilities. Waltz decided that the structure of international politics is mostly influenced by the great powers of the era.

Balance of Power

What is the balance of power? There are many different versions, and Waltz aimed to create a new and improved version of the balance of power theory. He saw that previous theories often confused balance of power as a unit-level cause rather than a system-level effect.

Waltz conceptualized the balance of power as an effect, not a cause, of the international political system. He argued that the balance of power occurs regardless of whether states want it or not. The motives of states are separate from the result.

Linking Structure and Balance of Power

The structure of international politics imposes constraints on states, leading them to generally behave similarly. One of these recurring patterns of behavior is the balance of power. Balance of power is caused by the structure. So, if the structure changes, patterns of outcomes such as the balance of power would change as well.

Waltz's theory is not prescriptive; it doesn't dictate what states should do. It only suggests what they should keep in mind and generally expect from the world system, given that the theoretical assumptions are still useful.

In our next discussion, we will delve into the implications of different world structures: unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar worlds. It's important to understand that Waltz's theory is not designed to explain liberal outcomes such as international institutions, international cooperation, international aid, international law, norms, and values. However, he acknowledges that these things are important in reality.