The new anarchy: Globalisation and fragmentation in world politics
| Author | Alex Prichard,Philip G Cerny |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088217713765 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088217713765
Journal of International Political Theory
2017, Vol. 13(3) 378 –394
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088217713765
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The new anarchy: Globalisation
and fragmentation in world
politics
Philip G Cerny
Emeritus, University of Manchester and Rutgers-Newark
Alex Prichard
University of Exeter, UK
Abstract
Modern International Relations theory has consistently underestimated the depth of
the problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring
this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks
and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border
wars, and internally disaggregated and transnationally connected state actors, leads to
a complex and multidimensional restructuring of the global, the local and the uneven
connections in between. We ought to abandon the idea of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics,
‘inside’ and ‘outside’ once and for all. This does not remove the problem of anarchy
but rather deepens it, involving multidimensional tensions and contradictions variously
described as ‘functional differentiation’, ‘multiscalarity’, ‘fragmegration’, disparate
‘landscapes’, the ‘new security dilemma’ and ‘neomedievalism’. Approaching anarchy
from the perspective of plural competing claims to authority and power forces us to
think again about the nature of global order and the virtues of anarchy therein. Will the
long-term outcome be the emergence of a more decentralised, pluralistic world order
or a quagmire of endemic conflict and anomie?
Keywords
Anarchy, critical international political economy, globalisation, neopluralism, network
theory, the state
Corresponding author:
Alex Prichard, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ,
UK.
Email: a.prichard@exeter.ac.uk
713765IPT0010.1177/1755088217713765Journal of International Political TheoryCerny and Prichard
research-article2017
Article
Cerny and Prichard 379
Introduction
The modern nation-state is supposed to bring together four fundamental features that lie
at the heart of political philosophy, more generally: political cohesion, including under-
lying bonds of social identity and loyalty; structural differentiation, where the state is
seen as an institutional structure distinct from others in society and economy; institu-
tional ‘relative autonomy’ and the legitimate authority of the state itself (Weber, 1958)
and, especially, multifunctionality. These combine in a single, ideal-type institutional
structure characterised as ‘sovereign’ (Krasner, 1999). States, especially modern nation-
states, have been described as ‘arenas of collective action’ domestically and effective
unit actors able to make ‘credible commitments’ internationally (Spruyt, 1994). This
perception has led, in particular, to what has been called the ‘levels of analysis distinc-
tion’ (Hollis and Smith, 1990), with the state as the axis combining levels in a ‘two level
game’ (Putnam, 1988), an image of world politics in which anarchy exists at the third,
highest level of politics, which lacks that which the state has: government.
This ‘interstate’ system has been seen as fundamentally anarchic in the specific sense
of lacking a coherent governmental structure above and beyond the states that compose
it. As a result, international politics is torn between, on the one hand, disorder, stalemate,
the dominance or hegemony of particular states and their alliances, and on the other
hand, various forms of fragile often transient cooperation. This conceptualisation leads
to a fundamental ‘security dilemma’ in which the attempt of particular nation-states to
strengthen their own security can lead to a vicious circle in which other states respond in
kind, leading to the breakdown of cooperative arrangements and reducing security all
round, leading to increasingly suboptimal outcomes, especially war and even the break-
down of the ‘inter-national’ system (Herz, 1950; cf. Cerny, 2000).
In this article, we challenge this view of anarchy by drawing on a range of theories
emanating from the study of globalisation that question the nature of the state, not in
order to dismiss anarchy but rather to reframe its contours and to explore the implications
of seeing anarchy as central to all social processes. Globalisation theories focus not
merely on non-state actors per se but rather on the restructuring of international relations
– better identified as ‘world politics’ – around more complex, multilayered and overlap-
ping structures; institutions and processes that challenge and increasingly undermine the
capacity of states and the interstate system to control, manage or shape what goes on in
the world. These processes often lead to the disaggregation of the state itself (Slaughter,
2004), while not leading to effective forms of global government (Hameiri and Jones,
2015; Kütting and Cerny, 2015).
We develop an account of anarchy that links three important contributions to the anar-
chy debate: the relativisation of order in Ashley’s (1988) deconstructive critique, the func-
tional pluralism of Milner’s (1991) account of politics, and Rosenberg’s (2013, 2016)
account of the generative force of capital in the global process of uneven and combined
development, and intersocietal multiplicity. We move towards a neopluralism of intersect-
ing and crosscutting forces (Cerny, 2010; cf. Prichard, 2013) that are functionally differ-
entiated, but lacking in directionality, and existing in a fundamentally anarchic social
structure, one which has been ushered in by global capital and is rapidly undercutting the
nation-state and increasing anomie and ‘derangement’ of actors whose benchmarks are
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