PSC 1003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Symbolic Interactionism, Appeasement, Social Fact
Document Summary
Week 3, lecture 5, intro to international politics (cid:1006)/(cid:1005)/(cid:1005)7 readi(cid:374)gs (cid:862)co(cid:374)stru(cid:272)ti(cid:448)ist theories(cid:863) Anarchy is what states make of it alexander wendt, 391-425. Rationalism offers a fundamentally behavioral conception of both process and institutions, they change behavior but not identities and interests. 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. Neorealists believe anarchies are necessarily self-help systems which both central authority and collective security are absent. Self-help is not seen as an institution and as such occupies a privileged explanatory role vis- -vis process, setting the terms for and unaffected by interaction. 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 constitute states with self-interested identities exogenous to practice.
