Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics Alexander Wendt The debate between realists and liberals has reemerged as an axis of contention in international relations theory.1 Revolving in the past around competing theories of human nature, the debate is more concerned today with the extent to which state action is influenced by "structure" (anarchy and the distribution of power) versus "process" (interaction and learning) and institutions. Does the absence of centralized political authority force states to play competitive power politics? Can international regimes overcome this logic, and under what conditions? What in anarchy is given and immutable, and what is amenable to change? The debate between "neorealists" and "neoliberals" has been based on a shared commitment to "rationalism."2 Like all social theories, rational choice directs us to ask some questions and not others, treating the identities and interests of agents as exogenously given and focusing on how the behavior of This article was negotiated with many individuals. If my records are complete (and apologies if they are not), thanks are due particularly to John Aldrich, Mike Barnett, Lea Brilmayer, David Campbell, Jim Caporaso, Simon Dalby, David Dessler, Bud Duvall, Jean Elshtain, Karyn Ertel, Lloyd Etheridge, Ernst Haas, Martin Hollis, Naeem Inayatullah, Stewart Johnson, Frank Klink, Steve Krasner, Friedrich Kratochwil, David Lumsdaine, M. J. Peterson, Spike Peterson, Thomas Risse-Kappen, John Ruggie, Bruce Russett, Jim Scott, Rogers Smith, David Sylvan, Jan Thomson, Mark Warren, and Jutta Weldes. The article also benefited from presentations and seminars at the American University, the University of Chicago, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Syracuse University, the University of Washington at Seattle, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yale University. 1. See, for example, Joseph Grieco, "Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism," International Organization 42 (Summer 1988), pp. 485-507; Joseph Nye, "Neorealism and Neoliberalism," World Politics 40 (January 1988), pp. 235-51; Robert Keohane, "Neoliberal Institutionalism: A Perspective on World Politics," in his collection of essays entitled International Institutions and State Power (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 1-20; John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 13 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-56, along with subsequent published correspondence regarding Mearsheimer's article; and Emerson Niou and Peter Ordeshook, "Realism Versus Neoliberalism: A Formulation," American Journal of Political Science 35 (May 1991), pp. 481-511. 2. See Robert Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly 32 (December 1988), pp. 379-96. International Organization 46, 2, Spring 1992 © 1992 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 392 International Organization agents generates outcomes. As such, rationalism offers a fundamentally behavioral conception of both process and institutions: they change behavior but not identities and interests.3 In addition to this way of framing research problems, neorealists and neoliberals share generally similar assumptions about agents: states are the dominant actors in the system, and they define security in "self-interested" terms. Neorealists and neoliberals may disagree about the extent to which states are motivated by relative versus absolute gains, but both groups take the self-interested state as the starting point for theory. This starting point makes substantive sense for neorealists, since they believe anarchies are necessarily "self-help" systems, systems in which both central authority and collective security are absent. The self-help corollary to anarchy does enormous work in neorealism, generating the inherently competitive dynamics of the security dilemma and collective action problem. Self-help is not seen as an "institution" and as such occupies a privileged explanatory role vis-a-vis process, setting the terms for, and unaffected by, interaction. Since states failing to conform to the logic of self-help will be driven from the system, only simple learning or behavioral adaptation is possible; the complex learning involved in redefinitions of identity and interest is not4. Questions about identity- and interest-formation are therefore not important to students of international relations. A rationalist problematique, which reduces process to dynamics of behavioral interaction among exogenously constituted actors, defines the scope of systemic theory. By adopting such reasoning, liberals concede to neorealists the causal powers of anarchic structure, but they gain the rhetorically powerful argument that process can generate cooperative behavior, even in an exogenously given, self-help system. Some liberals may believe that anarchy does, in fact, constitute states with self-interested identities exogenous to practice. Such "weak" liberals concede the causal powers of anarchy both rhetorically and substantively and accept rationalism's limited, behavioral conception of the causal powers of institutions. They are realists before liberals (we might call them "weak realists"), since only if international institutions can change powers and interests do they go beyond the "limits" of realism.5 3. Behavioral and rationalist models of man and institutions share a common intellectual heritage in the materialist individualism of Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham. On the relationship between the two models, see Jonathan Turner, A Theory of Social Interaction (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 24-31; and George Homans, "Rational Choice Theory and Behavioral Psychology," in Craig Calhoun et al., eds., Structures of Power and Constraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 77-89. 4. On neorealist conceptions of learning, see Philip Tetlock, "Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy," in George Breslauer and Philip Tetlock, eds. ,Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 24-27. On the difference between behavioral and cognitive learning, see ibid., pp. 20-61; Joseph Nye, "Nuclear Learning and U.S.-Soviet Security Regimes," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987), pp. 371-402; and Ernst Haas, When Knowledge Is Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 17-49. 5. See Stephen Krasner, "Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables," in Stephen Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 355-68. Anarchy 393 Yet some liberals want more. When Joseph Nye speaks of "complex learning," or Robert Jervis of "changing conceptions of self and interest," or Robert Keohane of "sociological" conceptions of interest, each is asserting an important role for transformations of identity and interest in the liberal research program and, by extension, a potentially much stronger conception of process and institutions in world politics.6 "Strong" liberals should be troubled by the dichotomous privileging of structure over process, since transformations of identity and interest through process are transformations of structure. Rationalism has little to offer such an argument,7 which is in part why, in an important article, Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie argued that its individualist ontology contradicted the intersubjectivist epistemology necessary for regime theory to realize its full promise.8 Regimes cannot change identities and interests if the latter are taken as given. Because of this rationalist legacy, despite increasingly numerous and rich studies of complex learning in foreign policy, neoliberals lack a systematic theory of how such changes occur and thus must privilege realist insights about structure while advancing their own insights about process. The irony is that social theories which seek to explain identities and interests do exist. Keohane has called them "reflectivist";9 because I want to emphasize their focus on the social construction of subjectivity and minimize their image problem, following Nicholas Onuf I will call them "constructivist."10 Despite important differences, cognitivists, poststructuralists, standpoint and postmod- ern feminists, rule theorists, and structurationists share a concern with the basic "sociological" issue bracketed by rationalists—namely, the issue of identity- and interest-formation. Constructivism's potential contribution to a strong liberalism has been obscured, however, by recent epistemological debates between modernists and postmodernists, in which Science disciplines Dissent for not defining a conventional research program, and Dissent celebrates its liberation from Science." Real issues animate this debate, which 6. See Nye, "Nuclear Learning and U.S.-Soviet Security Regimes"; Robert Jervis, "Realism, Game Theory, and Cooperation," World Politics 40 (April 1988), pp. 340-44; and Robert Keohane, "International Liberalism Reconsidered," in John Dunn, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 183. 7. Rationalists have given some attention to the problem of preference-formation, although in so doing they have gone beyond what I understand as the characteristic parameters of rationalism. See, for example, Jon Elster, "Sour Grapes: Utilitarianism and the Genesis of Wants," in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 219-38; and Michael Cohen and Robert Axelrod, "Coping with Complexity: The Adaptive Value of Changing Utility," American Economic Review 74 (March 1984), pp. 30-42. 8. Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie, "International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State," International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986), pp. 753-75. 9. Keohane, "International Institutions." 10. See Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). 11. On Science, see Keohane, "International Institutions"; and Robert Keohane, "International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint," Millennium 18 (Summer 1989), pp. 245-53. On Dissent, see R. B. J. Walker, "History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations," Millennium 18 (Summer 1989), pp. 163-83; and Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, 394 International Organization also divides constructivists. With respect to the substance of international relations, however, both modern and postmodern constructivists are interested in how knowledgeable practices constitute subjects, which is not far from the strong liberal interest in how institutions transform interests. They share a cognitive, intersubjective conception of process in which identities and inter- ests are endogenous to interaction, rather than a rationalist-behavioral one in which they are exogenous. My objective in this article is to build a bridge between these two traditions (and, by extension, between the realist-liberal and rationalist-reflectivist debates) by developing a constructivist argument, drawn from structurationist and symbolic interactionist sociology, on behalf of the liberal claim that international institutions can transform state identities and interests.12 In contrast to the "economic" theorizing that dominates mainstream systemic international relations scholarship, this involves a "sociological social psychological" form of systemic theory in which identities and interests are the dependent variable.13 Whether a "communitarian liberalism" is still liberalism does not interest me here. What does is that constructivism might contribute significantly to the strong liberal interest in identity- and interest-formation and thereby perhaps itself be enriched with liberal insights about learning and cognition which it has neglected. My strategy for building this bridge will be to argue against the neorealist claim that self-help is given by anarchic structure exogenously to process. Constructivists have not done a good job of taking the causal powers of anarchy seriously. This is unfortunate, since in the realist view anarchy justifies disinterest in the institutional transformation of identities and interests and thus building systemic theories in exclusively rationalist terms; its putative causal powers must be challenged if process and institutions are not to be subordinated to structure. I argue that self-help and power politics do not follow either logically or causally from anarchy and that if today we find ourselves in a self-help world, this is due to process, not structure. There is no "Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in Interna- tional Studies," International Studies Quarterly 34 (September 1990), pp. 367-416. For an excellent critical assessment of these debates, see Yosef Lapid, "The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era," International Studies Quarterly 33 (September 1989), pp. 235-54. 12. The fact that I draw on these approaches aligns me with modernist constructivists, even though I also draw freely on the substantive work of postmodernists, especially Richard Ashley and Rob Walker. For a defense of this practice and a discussion of its epistemological basis, see my earlier article, "The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987), pp. 335-70; and Ian Shapiro and Alexander Wendt, "The Difference That Realism Makes: Social Science and the Politics of Consent," forthcoming in Politics and Society. Among modernist constructivists, my argument is particularly indebted to the published work of Emanuel Adler, Friedrich Kratochwil, and John Ruggie, as well as to an unpublished paper by Naeem Inayatullah and David Levine entitled "Politics and Economics in Contemporary International Relations Theory," Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y., 1990. 13. See Viktor Gecas, "Rekindling the Sociological Imagination in Social Psychology," Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 19 (March 1989), pp. 97-115. Anarchy 395 "logic" of anarchy apart from the practices that create and instantiate one structure of identities and interests rather than another; structure has no existence or causal powers apart from process. Self-help and power politics are institutions, not essential features of anarchy. Anarchy is what states make of it. In the subsequent sections of this article, I critically examine the claims and assumptions of neorealism, develop a positive argument about how self-help and power politics are socially constructed under anarchy, and then explore three ways in which identities and interests are transformed under anarchy: by the institution of sovereignty, by an evolution of cooperation, and by inten- tional efforts to transform egoistic identities into collective identities. Anarchy and power politics Classical realists such as Thomas Hobbes, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans Morgenthau attributed egoism and power politics primarily to human nature, whereas structural realists or neorealists emphasize anarchy. The difference stems in part from different interpretations of anarchy's causal powers. Kenneth Waltz's work is important for both. In Man, the State, and War, he defines anarchy as a condition of possibility for or "permissive" cause of war, arguing that "wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them."14 It is the human nature or domestic politics of predator states, however, that provide the initial impetus or "efficient" cause of conflict which forces other states to respond in kind.15 Waltz is not entirely consistent about this, since he slips without justification from the permissive causal claim that in anarchy war is always possible to the active causal claim that "war may at any moment occur."16 But despite Waltz's concluding call for third-image theory, the efficient causes that initialize anarchic systems are from the first and second images. This is reversed in Waltz's Theory of International Politics, in which first- and second-image theories are spurned as "reductionist," and the logic of anarchy seems by itself to constitute self-help and power politics as necessary features of world politics.17 This is unfortunate, since whatever one may think of first- and second-image theories, they have the virtue of implying that practices determine the character of anarchy. In the permissive view, only if human or domestic factors cause A to attack B will B have to defend itself. Anarchies may contain dynamics that lead to competitive power politics, but they also may not, and we can argue about when particular structures of identity and interest will emerge. 14. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 232. 15. Ibid., pp. 169-70. 16. Ibid., p. 232. This point is made by Hidemi Suganami in "Bringing Order to the Causes of War Debates," Millennium 19 (Spring 1990), p. 34, fn. 11. 17. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 396 International Organization In neorealism, however, the role of practice in shaping the character of anarchy is substantially reduced, and so there is less about which to argue: self-help and competitive power politics are simply given exogenously by the structure of the state system. I will not here contest the neorealist description of the contemporary state system as a competitive, self-help world;181 will only dispute its explanation. I develop my argument in three stages. First, I disentangle the concepts of self-help and anarchy by showing that self-interested conceptions of security are not a constitutive property of anarchy. Second, I show how self-help and competitive power politics may be produced causally by processes of interac- tion between states in which anarchy plays only a permissive role. In both of these stages of my argument, I self-consciously bracket the first- and second- image determinants of state identity, not because they are unimportant (they are indeed important), but because like Waltz's objective, mine is to clarify the "logic" of anarchy. Third, I reintroduce first- and second-image determinants to assess their effects on identity-formation in different kinds of anarchies. Anarchy, self-help, and intersubjective knowledge Waltz defines political structure on three dimensions: ordering principles (in this case, anarchy), principles of differentiation (which here drop out), and the distribution of capabilities." By itself, this definition predicts little about state behavior. It does not predict whether two states will be friends or foes, will recognize each other's sovereignty, will have dynastic ties, will be revisionist or status quo powers, and so on. These factors, which are fundamentally intersubjective, affect states' security interests and thus the character of their interaction under anarchy. In an important revision of Waltz's theory, Stephen Walt implies as much when he argues that the "balance of threats," rather than the balance of power, determines state action, threats being socially con- structed.20 Put more generally, without assumptions about the structure of identities and interests in the system, Waltz's definition of structure cannot predict the content or dynamics of anarchy. Self-help is one such intersubjec- tive structure and, as such, does the decisive explanatory work in the theory. The question is whether self-help is a logical or contingent feature of anarchy. In this section, I develop the concept of a "structure of identity and interest" and show that no particular one follows logically from anarchy. A fundamental principle of constructivist social theory is that people act toward objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the 18. The neorealist description is not unproblematic. For a powerful critique, see David Lumsdaine, Ideals and Interests: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949-1989 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). 19. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 79-101. 20. Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). Anarchy 397 objects have for them.21 States act differently toward enemies than they do toward friends because enemies are threatening and friends are not. Anarchy and the distribution of power are insufficient to tell us which is which. U.S. military power has a different significance for Canada than for Cuba, despite their similar "structural" positions, just as British missiles have a different significance for the United States than do Soviet missiles. The distribution of power may always affect states' calculations, but how it does so depends on the intersubjective understandings and expectations, on the "distribution of knowledge," that constitute their conceptions of self and other.22 If society "forgets" what a university is, the powers and practices of professor and student cease to exist; if the United States and Soviet Union decide that they are no longer enemies, "the cold war is over." It is collective meanings that constitute the structures which organize our actions. Actors acquire identities—relatively stable, role-specific understandings and expectations about self—by participating in such collective meanings.23 Identi- ties are inherently relational: "Identity, with its appropriate attachments of psychological reality, is always identity within a specific, socially constructed 21. See, for example, Herbert Blumer, "The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism," in his Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 2. Throughout this article, I assume that a theoretically productive analogy can be made between individuals and states. There are at least two justifications for this anthropomorphism. Rhetori- cally, the analogy is an accepted practice in mainstream international relations discourse, and since this article is an immanent rather than external critique, it should follow the practice. Substan- tively, states are collectivities of individuals that through their practices constitute each other as "persons" having interests, fears, and so on. A full theory of state identity- and interest-formation would nevertheless need to draw insights from the social psychology of groups and organizational theory, and for that reason my anthropomorphism is merely suggestive. 22. The phrase "distribution of knowledge" is Barry Barnes's, as discussed in his work The Nature of Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); see also Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). The concern of recent interna- tional relations scholarship on "epistemic communities" with the cause-and-effect understandings of the world held by scientists, experts, and policymakers is an important aspect of the role of knowledge in world politics; see Peter Haas, "Do Regimes Matter? Epistemic Communities and Mediterranean Pollution Control," International Organization 43 (Summer 1989), pp. 377-404; and Ernst Haas, When Knowledge Is Power. My constructivist approach would merely add to this an equal emphasis on how such knowledge also constitutes the structures and subjects of social life. 23. For an excellent short statement of how collective meanings constitute identities, see Peter Berger, "Identity as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge," European Journal of Sociology, vol. 7, no. 1,1966, pp. 32-40. See also David Morgan and Michael Schwalbe, "Mind and Self in Society: Linking Social Structure and Social Cognition," Social Psychology Quarterly 53 (June 1990), pp. 148-64. In my discussion, I draw on the following interactionist texts: George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality; Sheldon Stryker, Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version (Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings, 1980); R. S. Perinbanayagam, Signifying Acts: Structure and Meaning in Everyday Life (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); John Hewitt, Self and Society: A Symbolic Interactionist Social Psychology (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1988); and Turner, A Theory of Social Interaction. Despite some differences, much the same points are made by structurationists such as Bhaskar and Giddens. See Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); and Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 398 International Organization world," Peter Berger argues.24 Each person has many identities linked to institutional roles, such as brother, son, teacher, and citizen. Similarly, a state may have multiple identities as "sovereign," "leader of the free world," "imperial power," and so on.25 The commitment to and the salience of particular identities vary, but each identity is an inherently social definition of the actor grounded in the theories which actors collectively hold about themselves and one another and which constitute the structure of the social world. Identities are the basis of interests. Actors do not have a "portfolio" of interests that they carry around independent of social context; instead, they define their interests in the process of defining situations.26 As Nelson Foote puts it: "Motivation ... refer[s] to the degree to which a human being, as a participant in the ongoing social process in which he necessarily finds himself, defines a problematic situation as calling for the performance of a particular act, with more or less anticipated consummations and consequences, and thereby his organism releases the energy appropriate to performing it."27 Sometimes situations are unprecedented in our experience, and in these cases we have to construct their meaning, and thus our interests, by analogy or invent them de novo. More often they have routine qualities in which we assign meanings on the basis of institutionally defined roles. When we say that professors have an "interest" in teaching, research, or going on leave, we are saying that to function in the role identity of "professor," they have to define certain situations as calling for certain actions. This does not mean that they will necessarily do so (expectations and competence do not equal perfor- mance), but if they do not, they will not get tenure. The absence or failure of roles makes defining situations and interests more difficult, and identity 24. Berger, "Identity as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge," p. 111. 25. While not normally cast in such terms, foreign policy scholarship on national role conceptions could be adapted to such identity language. See Kal Holsti, "National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy," International Studies Quarterly 14 (September 1970), pp. 233-309; and Stephen Walker, ed., Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987). For an important effort to do so, see Stephen Walker, "Symbolic Interactionism and International Politics: Role Theory's Contribution to International Organization," in C. Shih and Martha Cottam, eds., Contending Dramas: A Cognitive Approach to Post-War International Organizational Processes (New York: Praeger, forthcoming). 26. On the "portfolio" conception of interests, see Barry Hindess ,Political Choice and Social Structure (Aldershot, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1989), pp. 2-3. The "definition of the situation" is a central concept in interactionist theory. 27. Nelson Foote, "Identification as the Basis for a Theory of Motivation," American Sociological Review 16 (February 1951), p. 15. Such strongly sociological conceptions of interest have been criticized, with some justice, for being "oversocialized"; see Dennis Wrong, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology," American Sociological Review 26 (April 1961), pp. 183-93. For useful correctives, which focus on the activation of presocial but nondetermining human needs within social contexts, see Turner,/! Theory of Social Interaction, pp. 23-69; and Viktor Gecas, "The Self-Concept as a Basis for a Theory of Motivation," in Judith Howard and Peter Callero, eds., The Self-Society Dynamic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 171-87. Anarchy 399 confusion may result. This seems to be happening today in the United States and the former Soviet Union: without the cold war's mutual attributions of threat and hostility to define their identities, these states seem unsure of what their "interests" should be. An institution is a relatively stable set or "structure" of identities and interests. Such structures are often codified in formal rules and norms, but these have motivational force only in virtue of actors' socialization to and participation in collective knowledge. Institutions are fundamentally cognitive entities that do not exist apart from actors' ideas about how the world works.28 This does not mean that institutions are not real or objective, that they are "nothing but" beliefs. As collective knowledge, they are experienced as having an existence "over and above the individuals who happen to embody them at the moment."29 In this way, institutions come to confront individuals as more or less coercive social facts, but they are still a function of what actors collectively "know." Identities and such collective cognitions do not exist apart from each other; they are "mutually constitutive."30 On this view, institutionalization is a process of internalizing new identities and interests, not something occurring outside them and affecting only behavior; socialization is a cognitive process, not just a behavioral one. Conceived in this way, institutions may be coopera- tive or conflictual, a point sometimes lost in scholarship on international regimes, which tends to equate institutions with cooperation. There are important differences between conflictual and cooperative institutions to be sure, but all relatively stable self-other relations—even those of "enemies"— are defined intersubjectively. Self-help is an institution, one of various structures of identity and interest that may exist under anarchy. Processes of identity-formation under anarchy are concerned first and foremost with preservation or "security" of the self. Concepts of security therefore differ in the extent to which and the manner in which the self is identified cognitively with the other,31 and, I want to suggest, it 28. In neo-Durkheimian parlance, institutions are "social representations." See Serge Moscov- ici, "The Phenomenon of Social Representations," in Rob Farr and Serge Moscovici, eds. ,Social Representations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 3-69. See also Barnes, The Nature of Power. Note that this is a considerably more socialized cognitivism than that found in much of the recent scholarship on the role of "ideas" in world politics, which tends to treat ideas as commodities that are held by individuals and intervene between the distribution of power and outcomes. For a form of cognitivism closer to my own, see Emanuel Adler, "Cognitive Evolution: A Dynamic Approach for the Study of International Relations and Their Progress," in Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 43-88. 29. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 58. 30. See Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory; and Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, "Institutions and International Order," in Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 51-74. 31. Proponents of choice theory might put this in terms of "interdependent utilities." For a useful overview of relevant choice-theoretic discourse, most of which has focused on the specific case of altruism, see Harold Hochman and Shmuel Nitzan, "Concepts of Extended Preference," 400 International Organization is upon this cognitive variation that the meaning of anarchy and the distribution of power depends. Let me illustrate with a standard continuum of security systems.32 At one end is the "competitive" security system, in which states identify negatively with each other's security so that ego's gain is seen as alter's loss. Negative identification under anarchy constitutes systems of "realist" power politics: risk-averse actors that infer intentions from capabilities and worry about relative gains and losses. At the limit—in the Hobbesian war of all against all—collective action is nearly impossible in such a system because each actor must constantly fear being stabbed in the back. In the middle is the "individualistic" security system, in which states are indifferent to the relationship between their own and others' security. This constitutes "neoliberal" systems: states are still self-regarding about their security but are concerned primarily with absolute gains rather than relative gains. One's position in the distribution of power is less important, and collective action is more possible (though still subject to free riding because states continue to be "egoists"). Competitive and individualistic systems are both "self-help" forms of anarchy in the sense that states do not positively identify the security of self with that of others but instead treat security as the individual responsibility of each. Given the lack of a positive cognitive identification on the basis of which to build security regimes, power politics within such systems will necessarily consist of efforts to manipulate others to satisfy self-regarding interests. This contrasts with the "cooperative" security system, in which states identify positively with one another so that the security of each is perceived as the responsibility of all. This is not self-help in any interesting sense, since the "self in terms of which interests are defined is the community; national interests are international interests.33 In practice, of course, the extent to which Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 6 (June 1985), pp. 161-76. The literature on choice theory usually does not link behavior to issues of identity. For an exception, see Amartya Sen, "Goals, Commitment, and Identity," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 1 (Fall 1985), pp. 341-55; and Robert Higgs, "Identity and Cooperation: A Comment on Sen's Alternative Program," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3 (Spring 1987), pp. 140-42. 32. Security systems might also vary in the extent to which there is a functional differentiation or a hierarchical relationship between patron and client, with the patron playing a hegemonic role within its sphere of influence in defining the security interests of its clients. I do not examine this dimension here; for preliminary discussion, see Alexander Wendt, "The States System and Global Militarization," Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1989; and Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett, "The International System and Third World Militarization," unpublished manuscript, 1991. 33. This amounts to an "internationalization of the state." For a discussion of this subject, see Raymond Duvall and Alexander Wendt, "The International Capital Regime and the Internation- alization of the State," unpublished manuscript, 1987. See also R. B. J. Walker, "Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice," in R .B. J. Walker and Saul Mendlovitz, eds., Contending Sovereignties (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1990), pp. 159-85.