The ethics of neorealism: Waltz and the time of international life
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066118760990 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Tom Lundborg |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118760990
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(1) 229 –249
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066118760990
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JR
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The ethics of neorealism:
Waltz and the time of
international life
Tom Lundborg
Swedish Defence University, Sweden
Abstract
This article addresses the question of what it means to think of a distinctly international
ethics by developing a radical reinterpretation of Waltzian neorealism from a Derridean
deconstructive perspective. The core argument of the article is that Derridean
deconstruction effectively explains why there is an ethics of neorealism in the first
place, and why this ethics cannot be easily overcome. Underpinning this argument is a
notion in Derrida’s philosophy of survival as an unconditional affirmation of life, which
finds an equivalent in Waltz’s theory of international life in the anarchic system. On
this basis, I claim that Waltz’s theory is ethical, not despite its focus on the structural
conditions of survival, but precisely because of it. Moreover, the article shows how this
notion of ethics renders universal ethical ideals, beyond relations of violence, not only
impossible, but undesirable. They are undesirable because to actually fulfil them would
be to undermine the conditions that make international life possible in the first place.
In this way, various attempts to theorize the meaning and implications of international
ethics that hold on to the notion of ethical ideals beyond relations of violence become
untenable. Instead of aspiring towards such ideals, the article concludes, international
ethics should be thought of as an unconditional affirmation of the incalculable future that
structures international life and inevitably exposes it to the worst forms of destruction,
but also enables the making of responsible decisions.
Keywords
Derrida, international ethics, neorealism, survival, time, Waltz
Corresponding author:
Tom Lundborg, Swedish Defence University, Drottning Kristinas v. 37, Box 27805, Stockholm 115 93,
Sweden.
Email: tom.lundborg@fhs.se
760990EJT0010.1177/1354066118760990European Journal of International RelationsLundborg
research-article2018
Article
230 European Journal of International Relations 25(1)
Introduction
What does it mean to think of a distinctly international ethics? This article addresses this
core question of International Relations (IR) theory by challenging what is arguably the
most common starting point of a wide range of previous attempts to answer it: the cri-
tique of neorealism. As is well known, neorealism is often depicted as a theory that rei-
fies a static picture of the world and is unable to account for moral progress in international
affairs. To think of international ethics on the basis of a critique of neorealism, whether
it draws on liberalism, critical theory, feminism, a Rawlsean-inspired ethics, constitutive
theory or even a return to classical realism, suggests that neorealism is inadequate for
thinking about what is implied by the term ‘international ethics’ in the first place. In
contrast, I shall argue, first, that neorealism already expresses an ethics and, second, that
the ethics of neorealism cannot be easily overcome by developing an international theory
that is supposedly ‘more’ ethical.
To advance these two arguments, the article provides a radical reinterpretation of
Kenneth Waltz’s neorealism from a Derridean deconstructive perspective. While phi-
losopher Jacques Derrida has mainly been used in IR for analysing practices of foreign
policy and self–other relations, I show how Derrida has much to offer when it comes to
grappling with the international. Especially, Derrida’s notion of ‘ethics’ shows how it is
possible to think of a distinctly international ethics that does not necessitate a move
away from neorealism, but rather sees ethics as intrinsic to the main assumptions on
which neorealism rests: the structure of anarchy and states’ desire to survive. In focusing
on these two assumptions, I provide a reading of Waltz’s work, in particular, his Theory
of International Politics (Waltz, 1979) (hereafter TIP), that is admittedly selective. I do
this in order to show that underlying the more explicit aim of TIP — to explain interna-
tional politics and specifically the recurrence of war — there is a much more significant
ethics.
Crucially, my understanding of the ethics of neorealism should not be equated with a
normative theory, based on ideas about what states and other agents should do in inter-
national affairs. Rather, here, ethics refers to an affirmation of the structural conditions
of survival and an unconditional openness to the uncertainty of the future in inter-state
relations. As the article will go on to demonstrate, the importance of reading Waltz’s
theory as an ethics relates to how it positively affirms these conditions and this openness.
In doing so, the main value of his theory is that it allows us to think of what I will be
referring to as the ‘time of international life’. Drawing on Martin Hägglund’s (2008)
notion of the ‘time of life’ in his novel interpretation of Derrida’s philosophy, I use a
similar phrase here to point to the central importance of temporal finitude for grasping
the underlying conditions of international life. To think of the possibility of an interna-
tional ethics, I argue, is to come to terms with these conditions and, in so doing, resist the
common urge to try to transcend them in the hope of fulfilling universal ethical ideals.
The first section provides a brief overview of how neorealism is commonly discussed
in relation to ethics: as an obstacle that needs to be overcome or at least resisted. It is
noted that such analyses tend to rest on a narrow understanding of both ethics and neore-
alism, which cancels out the possibility of reading the latter as an expression of the for-
mer. In a first step to overcome this limited view, the second section gives an account of
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