The ethics of neorealism: Waltz and the time of international life

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.

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 critique of neorealism. As is well known, neorealism is often depicted as a theory that reifies 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 philosopher 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 international 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 international 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 international 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 neorealism, which cancels out the possibility of reading the latter as an expression of the former. In a first step to overcome this limited view, the second section gives an account of the structural conditions of survival in Waltz’s theory. I then turn to Derrida in the third section, before offering a reinterpretation of neorealism in the fourth section. The fifth and sixth sections discuss what I take to be the most important implications of my reading of neorealism for thinking about international ethics, focusing in particular on the role of universal ethical ideals and the question of the future of international life.

Ethics, realism and neorealism

The so-called ‘ethical turn’ in IR is usually associated with a burgeoning literature after the end of the Cold War seeking to challenge the neorealist depiction of a supposedly static world order in which survival is the primary goal of states interacting in a self-help system. ¹ For example, in one of the most cited books in this body of literature, Mervyn Frost makes a key distinction between what he sees as a mere concern with survival that dominated IR during the Cold War, on the one hand, and ideas about a just world order that suddenly became possible after the Cold War had ended, on the other. Referring to what he regards as the lack of ethical theorizing during the Cold War, Frost (1996: 5) writes: ‘In a “life or death” struggle there did not appear to be much point in spending time and effort discussing the shape of a just world order — for the battle was portrayed as being about survival’. The same argument can be found in the realist literature, namely, that a preoccupation with survival automatically cancels out a serious engagement with questions of justice, morality and responsibility (see, e.g., Gilpin, 1984: 290).

The distinction between ethics and survival can also be said to reflect a modern disciplinary divide between IR and Political Theory. According to this divide, the study of the ‘international’ is associated with issues of survival, ‘life and death’, ‘national existence and national extinction’, rather than the ‘good life’ within the borders of the state (Wight, 1966: 33). Attempts to theorize the international through an ethical lens must therefore encounter a certain paradox whereby questions of justice and morality are transposed from the state to the international, which otherwise functions as a historically produced horizon for theorizing the relation between ethics and politics (see Hutchings, 1999: ch. 1; Walker, 1993: 33).

The question of how to transcend the limits of the inside/outside dichotomy of the modern state lies at the heart of the ethical turn in IR after the end of the Cold War. It was addressed most prominently in the cosmopolitan–communitarian debate (see Brown, 1992). This is by now an old debate that continues to circle around the question of whether or not duties of justice should be extended beyond the moral boundaries of the state and apply to all individuals irrespective of citizenship (Hurrell and Macdonald, 2012: 62). Different forms of cosmopolitanism provide different affirmative answers to this question, ranging from quasi-Kantian regulative ideals (see Archibugi, 1995) to historical-sociological accounts of moral progress in world politics (see Linklater, 2011). More recently, alternative approaches seeking to go beyond the cosmopolitan–communitarian divide include green political theory, feminism and post-colonialism (for an overview, see Bell, 2010a).

Placing neorealism next to any of these perspectives seems peculiar since it was precisely the absence of ethics in neorealism that, in many respects, prompted their development in the first place. Yet, it is important to make a distinction here between ‘ethics’ and ‘normative approaches’. As pointed out by Duncan Bell (2010b: 95), although realists are generally critical of normative prescriptions telling states and other agents what to do, they are not necessarily against ethics per se. In other words, while realists may be critical of what they see as an inherent moralism in normative theories, they do not automatically reduce all questions of ethics to a view of politics in which ethics has no role to play at all. This is evident, for example: in Hans Morgenthau’s classical realism, which stresses the importance of ‘prudence’ and the principle of a ‘lesser evil’; in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian reading of a realist ethics; and, before them, in Max Weber’s ideas about an ethics of responsibility (see Donnelly, 2008: 152, 157; Guzzini, 1998: 29, 228; Molloy, 2009; Williams, 2005: ch. 5).

Another way of thinking about realism as a theory concerned with ethics is by pointing to its inherent state-centrism (Guzzini, 1998: 203). Instead of being an objective description of international politics, realism (both classical and structural) tells us that the state ought to be seen as the most important actor and, sometimes, how states should behave (Bell, 2010b: 97; Pichler, 1998: 198). Neorealism is no different from classical realism in this respect since both approaches reaffirm the state as the primary unit that needs to be secured against outside threats.

The general picture of different forms of realism nevertheless remains one that gives ethics a limited role in the study of international politics. In addition, if there is an ethics of realism at all, it is often seen as secondary to issues of power and survival. ² A clear distinction between ethics and politics is therefore consistently drawn in realist accounts of ethics, not least in the classical realist tradition. As Morgenthau (1959: 7) writes:

Political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible — between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place.

It is precisely this view of the limits of ethics in realism that I wish to challenge and, in a sense, turn on its head by drawing on Waltz’s neorealism in this article. Especially, I will contest the common assumption of a prior distinction between what is ethically desirable, on the one hand, and what is possible in the practical and political sense, on the other. This distinction seems to inform almost all attempts to theorize the meaning of international ethics, including those that turn to classical as well as structural realism. Its main function, in brief, is to place universal ethical ideals beyond the sphere of international politics; ideals that may be impossible to achieve in practice but should nevertheless be aspired towards. For example, Jack Donnelly (2008: 154) argues that ‘anarchy does not require abandoning ethical goals of foreign policy. The difficulty of achieving particular ethical, economic, military, or political objectives in anarchic orders is no reason never to try’. In maintaining a clear distinction between the desirable and the possible, authors like Donnelly hold on to the notion of ethical goals and ideals to be aspired towards beyond relations of violence.

In contrast to Donnelly, I argue that rather than seeing the neorealist focus on the structure of survival as an obstacle that impedes ethical thinking and action, it should be seen as a primary condition for the very possibility of international ethics. This is not because it reaffirms the value of the state or prioritizes a particular balance of power considered more peaceful than others. Rather, the ethical importance of anarchy relates to how it enables an unconditional openness and constant exposure to the uncertainty of the future in inter-state relations. It is this openness and exposure to whatever happens, I argue, that constitute the ethics of neorealism. Before making this argument, however, it is necessary to return to the two core assumptions on which Waltz’s theory rests: the structure of anarchy and states’ desire to survive.

Anarchy and survival

As is well known, states’ desire to survive is, for Waltz, not an explanatory variable. As a systemic theory concerned with the third as opposed to the first or second image, only the structure of anarchy can be used to ‘explain’ international politics, more precisely, the origins and eternal recurrence of war. However, even if it does not serve an explanatory purpose, Waltz nevertheless asserts that the assumption that states wish to survive is necessary for his theory to work. In TIP he writes:

I assume that states seek to ensure their survival. The assumption is a radical simplification made for the sake of constructing a theory.… Beyond the survival motive, the aims of states may be endlessly varied; they may range from the ambition to conquer the world to the desire merely to be left alone. Survival is a prerequisite to achieving any goals that states may have, other than the goal of promoting their own disappearance as political entities. The survival motive is taken as the ground of action in a world where the security of states is not assured, rather than as a realistic description of the impulse that lies behind every act of state. (Waltz, 1979: 91–92)

Waltz’s assumption of the desire to survive is thus seen as a prerequisite for constructing a structural theory of international politics. ³ This does not mean that states cannot have other motives in addition to that of surviving. It does mean, however, that the desire to survive has to be seen as common to all, or most, states.

To survive in international politics is obviously different in Waltz’s view from surviving within a state: ‘A national system is not one of self-help. The international system is’ (Waltz, 1979: 104). Moreover, he stresses the difficulty of predicting what states will do on the basis of their desire to stay alive. On the one hand, this is because of the uncertainties generated by an anarchic system in which, ultimately, there can be no guarantees of any definite outcomes. On the other hand, this difficulty relates to the problem of knowing what it means to act rationally in the first place. ⁴ For these two reasons, Waltz is adamant that his structural theory of international politics cannot be translated into foreign policy analysis, or tied to a rational actor assumption (see, esp., Waltz, 1996). Rather than trying to predict what states will do, emphasis should therefore be put primarily on how the system shapes or affects the behaviour of states. According to Waltz:

structures shape and shove; they encourage states to do some things and to refrain from doing others. Because states coexist in a self-help system, they are free to do any fool thing they care to, but they are likely to be rewarded for behavior that is responsive to structural pressures and punished for behavior that is not. (Waltz, 1997: 915)

While this view of the system does not rule out making predictions, it does suggest that the outcomes produced by the system are too uncertain to make the study of international politics into an exact science. ⁵

The uncertainty that conditions international politics means, furthermore, that states are constantly exposed to the risks of war, destruction and, ultimately, death. While the future might bring peace and prosperity, it might also bring war. To grasp the ‘reality’ of international politics, it is therefore paramount to hold on to the view that war is inescapable. Put in a very crude way, the possibility of war must not be eliminated since the end of war would spell the end of international politics. Or, conversely, ‘the sure way to abolish war … is to abolish international politics’ (Waltz, 2000: 8). This inextricable link between international politics and war suggests that there is international life only insofar as it contains the constant possibility of war. ⁶ If the latter could be ruled out, the desire to survive would be meaningless and the international would be devoid of the vibrant life that makes up inter-state relations.

Waltz’s understanding of the relationship between international life and war is perhaps best articulated in his early essay on ‘Kant, liberalism, and war’ (Waltz, 1962). While philosopher Immanuel Kant’s political writings are commonly used in support of a liberal international order, mainly by drawing on his concepts of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace, Waltz demonstrates why such readings of Kant are untenable. According to Waltz, the main reason liberals often get Kant wrong is that they fail to appreciate the more fundamental insights of his critical philosophy from which his writings on politics and ethics spring (Waltz, 1962: 331). In brief, this philosophy teaches us that it is impossible to grasp the universal as such and that all we can know about the world is based on particular subjective experiences and different modes of representation. His critical philosophy thus emphasizes the distinction between subjective experience and what lies beyond experience: a noumenal world and the thing in itself. In this way, Kant articulates the necessary limits and finitude of the modern subject, who is cut off from the world outside his immediate experiences of the world (see Gaston, 2013: ch. 1).

Since the conditions of experiencing the world prevent direct access to the world, they also present the modern subject with the paradox of searching for the infinite within the boundaries of the finite. Trying to resolve this paradox, for example, by actualizing the notion of an eternal peace among states and eradicating the possibility of war, is, for Kant, only possible in the noumenal as opposed to phenomenal sense. ⁷ Moreover, since such attempts have to play out as a struggle between particular views of the meaning of the universal and how to attain it, they are likely to result in even more violence. According to Waltz (1962: 340):

Many liberals of Kant’s time and after have looked upon war as annoyance or aberration, as something, one might say, that lies outside of history. Kant, in contrast, at once condemns war and demonstrates that its occurrence is expected rather than accidental. In the end we are left not with a confident foretelling of ‘the end of wars and the reign of international law’ but with a deeper appreciation of the causes of war and the immense difficulty of doing anything about them.

As we shall see in the next section, Derrida takes this Kantian argument against the possibility of realizing the ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ even further by claiming that such metaphysical ideals are not only practically impossible, but essentially undesirable. They are undesirable not because of the values that are often attached to them, like, for example, justice, friendship, hospitality and responsibility. Rather, they are undesirable because any attempts to reach for these ideals in the pure metaphysical sense should, ultimately, be seen as attempts to eliminate the very conditions under which the finite subject is able to exist and desire anything at all. Desiring the fulfilment of pure metaphysical ideals thus becomes self-refuting.

Derrida and the violent opening of ethics

Arguably, the most common way of drawing on Derridean deconstruction in IR has been to analyse the violent constitution of identity in relation to difference (see Ashley, 1988, 1989; Campbell, 1998a, 1998b). Moreover, there have been prominent attempts to explore the ethical dimension of the self–other relationship from a Derridean deconstructive perspective. ⁸ Central to the latter is the idea of renegotiating the relationship between identity and difference, hence also renegotiating the violence of the encounter between self and other (see Bulley, 2009, 2017; Campbell, 1998b; Campbell and Shapiro, 1999; Doty, 2006; George, 1995; O’Callaghan, 2016). ⁹

In contrast to much of this previous literature drawing on Derrida in IR, the main focus of this article is not on the ethics of foreign policy and self–other relations. Nor is it on how Derrida might contribute with new ideas about subjectivity as a form of political resistance (cf. Hirst, 2015), or how his philosophy can help us problematize ideas about politics and ethics beyond citizenship and the state (cf. Hutchings, 2008: 168; Vaughan-Williams, 2005, 2007). What I wish to do here is different in the sense that I try to show how a very specific logic informing Derrida’s work — the logic of the trace and survival — can be used for thinking about international ethics. In this way, moreover, while agreeing with much of what has been written in IR about a Derridean approach to politics and ethics in general (see, in particular, Edkins, 1999: ch. 4; Zehfuss, 2009: 144–148), I transpose a particular element of Derrida’s work onto the international in a way that neither Derrida nor anyone drawing on his work in IR has previously done. While the self–other relation still has an important role in doing this, it is the structural condition of the international, which enables that relation to play out, that matters most to my analysis.

Admittedly and inevitably, there is a degree of violence and discrimination in how I use Derrida’s work along these lines. My intention is not, however, to provide a faithful reading of the whole of his work, whatever that might mean, or to try to replicate Derrida’s style of deconstructive reading in the context of IR (cf. Arfi, 2012). Referring to what Derrida himself has said about ‘inheriting’ the previous works of philosophers, Hägglund (2008: 12) writes: ‘To inherit is not simply to accept what is handed down from the master; it is to reaffirm the legacy in order to make it live on in a different way’. This notion of inheritance is crucial for how I draw on the works of both Derrida and Waltz in this article.

In turning to Derridean deconstruction to theorize international ethics, I place particular emphasis on the structural conditions of survival. While the theme of survival is rarely associated with the work of Derrida, at one point, he made clear that he ‘never stop[s] analyzing the phenomenon of “survival” as the structure of surviving, it is really the only thing that interests me, but precisely insofar as I do not believe that one lives on post mortem’ (quoted in Hägglund, 2008: 164). The theme of survival is crucial for Derrida because it relates to the problem of grasping the general conditions of life without a pre-existing metaphysical ground. The absence of a ground is best explained by Derrida’s notion of temporization, which states that there is no self-presence and that the present is irreducibly divided into past and future (Derrida, 1984a: 8). As soon as a moment comes to be, it disappears into the past, while the future is always yet to come. ¹⁰ This temporal division tells us that nothing is simply present to or in itself. It also means that in order for anything to live on, it must find a way to survive the lack of self-presence. This is possible through the becoming-space of time (Derrida, 1984a: 8), or the inscription of a spatial mark or trace, which, according to Derrida (1976: 61–62), conditions all forms of writing and experience.

The inscription of a spatial mark or trace can be understood as an attempt at retaining the past in spite of temporal succession. The trace is, as Hägglund (2008: 1) puts it, ‘the minimal condition for life to resist death in a movement of survival’. Crucially, this does not mean that the trace is an actual copy or a pure reflection of what has happened in a past present (Derrida, 1976: 66). Nor does it mean that the trace has an essence, which provides an answer to the ontological question ‘What is?’ (Derrida, 1976: 75). Following Derrida’s view of the irreducible division of the present into past and future: ‘One cannot think the trace … on the basis of the present, or of the presence of the present’ (Derrida, 1984a: 21). Hence, the trace should not be thought of as static and immune to change, and there can be no guarantees that whatever survives through the trace will continue to live on ‘as such’ in the future. All traces of the past — everything written, said, filed and archived — may survive but may also be erased (Derrida, 1996: 19). The same applies to life in general. There can be no ‘life’ that is immune to ‘death’. Since everything that lives is conditioned by finitude, survival implies a constant negotiation between life and death, or an always temporary deferral of death. Consequently, death does not occur to something that is first safe and secure and then becomes exposed to the risk of dying. Rather, death is integral to life itself. To think of a life free from this risk would be the same as trying to think of a pure presence that is immune to alteration. Such presence, Derrida (1976: 155) notes, ‘would be only another name for death’. It would thus cancel out the need for anything to survive since the presence of being, or the ‘being-present’, would be already given (Derrida, 1976: 47).

Conditioned by the trace, survival is thus inseparable from finitude and the constant threat of erasure (Derrida, 1976: 167). According to Derrida (1984b: 65, emphasis added): ‘it belongs to the trace to erase itself, to elude that which might maintain it in presence’. In this way, the trace also points to the elusiveness of life, and to the fact that nothing can ever guarantee the infinite existence of anything. It tells us that life is nothing but a ‘play of traces’, which lacks an absolute origin and is inherently mortal (Derrida, 1984a: 15). This play of traces brings us back to Hägglund’s notion of the ‘time of life’, which highlights the central importance of temporal finitude for grasping the general conditions of life. As he puts it: ‘This radical finitude of survival is not a lack of being that is desirable to overcome. Rather, the finitude of survival opens the chance for everything that is desired and the threat of everything that is feared’ (Hägglund, 2008: 1–2).

There is, then, an important ‘double bind’ to the tracing of time. On the one hand, it is because nothing is infinite, immortal or present in itself that new life can emerge. On the other hand, the lack of self-presence means that life can never be immune to alteration, contamination and death. In order for anything to live, it must consequently be mortal and open to unpredictable change (Derrida, 1976: 143). Even if an infinite and immortal life, free from dangers, might seem desirable, it would be a self-refuting desire since it implies desiring the end of the possibility to desire anything at all. More precisely, it would be the same as desiring the end of the continuous flow of time that allows new life to emerge while exposing everything that lives to the threat of coming to an end. Immortality cancels out the time of mortal life and renders survival obsolete. Counter-intuitively, Hägglund (2008: 32–33) thus notes, mortality can be seen as the ‘best’ or most desirable, while immortality is the ‘worst’ or least desirable. While this may seem like a rejection of life, it is, in fact, an affirmation of life. It positively affirms the chance to live precisely on the condition that inherent in any movement of survival is the risk of life coming to an end. Refusing this risk would be the same as refusing to live, since to live is to negotiate the relationship between life and death.

Temporal finitude is significant, moreover, not only for grasping the general conditions of life, but for explaining why any act of survival must encounter the uncertainty of the future. Returning to Waltz for a moment, it is precisely this uncertainty that makes it impossible to know if today’s friend will stay a friend or suddenly turn into an enemy: ‘In the absence of an external authority, a state cannot be sure that today’s friend will not be tomorrow’s enemy’, writes Waltz (2000: 10). If we were able to acquire full knowledge of if and when a friend becomes an enemy, we would bring the future under our control. However, then the future would no longer be a genuinely open future, in which the chance of survival is inseparable from finitude and mortality. Survival would then lose its value and become redundant as life turns into nothing but a calculable formula.

So, what are the implications of Derrida’s notion of survival and his critique of the ‘calculable’ for our understanding of ‘ethics’? First of all, it means that ethics cannot be translated into static ethical ideals. As Derrida has elaborated on in relation to a wide array of issues, including justice, responsibility, hospitality, friendship and the gift, ethics rather depends on maintaining openness to the perpetual coming of the future. This openness means that none of these issues can ever be linked to something pure, uncontaminated and incorruptible that is immune to unexpected alterations.

To take one specific example, hospitality is, for Derrida, crucial for thinking about ethics (see Derrida, 2000). This is because an act of hospitality suggests that the self does not simply exist in pure isolation of what lies ‘outside’ the self, but must always negotiate its relation with the non-self, that is, the other. Ethics is, for this reason, inseparable from hospitality since both terms highlight the necessity of relating to and opening up space for others. At the same time, hospitality cannot be ‘absolute’ or ‘pure’ in the sense of conforming to a static metaphysical ideal. For Derrida, not only would such an ideal be impossible to achieve in the Kantian sense ¹¹ , it would be essentially undesirable. This is because the very aspiration towards a pure metaphysical ideal would have as its aim the closure of the uncertainty that makes the self–other encounter possible in the first place. The welcoming of strangers must therefore always involve a chance as well as a threat: the chance of some sort of positive and friendly transformation, and the threat that the other turns into an enemy doing harm to the host (Derrida, 2000: 15; Hägglund, 2008: 103–105).

The only way to eliminate the potential threat inherent in any act of hospitality would be to make the self completely immune to the other. Such immunity, however, would close down the self–other encounter before it could happen at all. Derrida (2003: 129) thus rhetorically asks:

The visit might actually be very dangerous, and we must not ignore this fact, but would a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other, be true hospitality?

Derrida’s point here is that hospitality categorically cannot correspond to something pure, like a universal ideal situation beyond violence. This is because without the threat of violence, the very act of welcoming the other would not be possible in the first place. In order for this act to be ‘possible’, it must simultaneously be ‘impossible’, in the pure metaphysical sense (see also Bulley, 2017: 12; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 121).

While ethics is often linked to a seemingly self-evident desire to reach an absolute metaphysical ideal, Derrida’s philosophy contests the desirability of such ideals altogether and offers a stark warning against any attempt to immunize the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’, ‘peace’ from ‘violence’, ‘friends’ from ‘enemies’, and so on. This is why, in Derrida’s view, there has to be a violent or non-ethical opening of ethics (Derrida, 1976: 140; 1978: 128). To desire the closure of this opening would be the same as desiring the elimination of that which makes any ethics possible at all: its exposure to the uncertainty of the future, and the indestructible threat that inheres in all encounters with others. Rather than linking ethics to a desire for the purely good, ethics in the Derridean sense is therefore tied to an affirmation of the uncertainty of the future, which opens up to the ‘good’ as well as the ‘bad’.

The ethics of neorealism

Derrida’s notion of the violent opening of ethics fits remarkably well with the two core assumptions of Waltz’s theory of international politics: the anarchic structure of the international political system and states’ desire to survive within this system. On this basis, it can be argued that there is, indeed, an ethics of neorealism. It is found in the ‘Waltzian baseline’ rather than in attempts to use that baseline to establish law-like patterns of behaviour. ¹² To grasp the ethics of neorealism, it is therefore necessary to shift focus from causal laws and testable hypotheses, to the structural conditions that shape and affect the behaviour of states in a non-deterministic manner. ¹³ Hence, the ‘structure’ in Waltz’s theory has to be grasped as an open structure that leaves ample room for chance and contingency.

Crucially, if we could know for certain what states will do on the basis of either the structure of the system or some predetermined motives of the subjects within the system, the uncertainty of international life would disappear and the ‘politics’ of international politics would lose its meaning. ¹⁴ Rather than trying to rectify the lack of certainty by creating a stronger sense of certainty, it is therefore imperative to affirm the uncertainties created by the system. It is important, moreover, to oppose the distinction between ethical desirability and political possibility, since the reproduction of this distinction blocks from view the conditions of international life that make ethical thinking and action possible in the first place.

Positivist social science and liberal interpretations of Kant are thus, very crudely put, the main obstacles to grasping the ethics of international life. In resisting both moves, neorealism does not seek to close down the violent opening of ethics inherent in the structure of anarchy, for example, by formulating metaphysical ideals informing states how they should act or how they ought to become friends rather than enemies. There can be no absolute friendship between states, and no state can ever offer absolute hospitality to another state. At the heart of every inter-state relation, there is mistrust, uncertainty and incalculability. To positively affirm the latter is not to say that uncertainty or incalculability is good per se. Rather, it implies that they are seen as basic and irrefutable conditions of international life, which, consequently, are not even desirable to overcome. Hence, it also implies that as long as there is international life, there must be ‘the ominous shadow of the future [that] continues to cast its pall over interacting states’ (Waltz, 2000: 39). Crucially, Waltz’s reference to this shadow should not be read as an expression of determinism. It expresses rather an affirmation of uncertainty: the ‘uncertainty of each about the other’s future intentions and actions’ (Waltz, 1979: 105).

In order to give friendship in international politics a chance, so to speak, the possibility that a friend suddenly becomes an enemy must never be eliminated. Attempts to create absolute trust in inter-state relations are therefore not only impossible to achieve in the practical sense, but essentially undesirable. ¹⁵ Along similar lines, Derrida explains how friendship is possible only if one remains open to the deception of the other, since it is precisely the unconditional openness to whatever may happen in the encounter between self and other that makes it possible to develop any sort of friendship in the first place (Derrida, 2005: 219).

Even if we were to accept Alexander Wendt’s (1999) distinction between different ‘cultures of anarchy’, some of which are more ‘friendly’ than others, it is not self-evident that a culture in which friendship is prioritized over enmity is actually a better one. This is because in order to exclude the possibility that a friend may suddenly become an enemy, one must first eliminate the time of international life that makes the self–other encounter possible in the first place. For the same reason, the key message of democratic peace theory — that all states should become democracies in order to minimize or eliminate the possibility of wars — is not only practically impossible, but also ethically undesirable. It is impossible to verify because there is no democracy that is immune to corruptibility (Waltz, 2000: 10), but, in addition to that, it can be seen as undesirable since the notion that all states must conform to the same universal ideal cancels out their freedom to act, to take moral responsibility and so on.

The undesirability of a system that eradicates violence, borders and discrimination is further underlined by Waltz (1979: 111–114) in his discussion of the ‘virtues of anarchy’. Therein, he attacks the idea of transforming the international system into a world government. Not only would such a transformation ‘be an invitation to prepare for world civil war’ (Waltz, 1979: 112), but it would take away the constitutive violence at the heart of inter-state relations in the structure of anarchy. The constant possibility of war in the international system means that states will always be wary of provoking others in the search for security. As he puts it:

The constant possibility that force will be used limits manipulations, moderates demands, and serves as an incentive for the settlement of disputes. One who knows that pressing too hard may lead to war has strong reason to consider whether possible gains are worth the risks entailed.… The possibility that conflicts among nations may lead to long and costly wars has … sobering effects. (Waltz, 1979: 113–114)

In this way, the conditions of peace in the international system can be said to rest on the constant possibility of war. In making this point, Waltz argues against moral universalism. Hence, unwittingly or otherwise, he also opens up space for ethical negotiation by recognizing the finitude of the political subject, who is free to interact with others only on the condition that self and other do not have to conform to the ‘same’ universal ideal. The subject is thus able to take moral responsibility and ponder on how to make ethical decisions, which, without difference and alterity, would turn into a strictly formal procedure based on the ‘mechanical application of rules’ (Zehfuss, 2009: 146).

Responsibility and ethical decisions are, thus, made possible precisely by the impossibility of predetermining what is the ‘right’ decision in any given context. As Derrida argues, irrespective of how thorough the decision-making procedure is, and regardless of how much knowledge is acquired before taking a decision:

the instant of the decision, if there is to be a decision, must be heterogeneous to this accumulation of knowledge. Otherwise, there is no responsibility. In this sense only must the person taking the decision not know everything. Even if one knows everything, the decision, if there is one, must advance toward a future that is not known, that cannot be anticipated. (Derrida, 2002b: 231)

The impossibility of anchoring the decision in rational calculation is, in this sense, what creates the chance for any decisions to be taken at all. The instant of the decision belongs, then, not to a fully present moment in which the subject calculates the future consequences of the decision, but to a future that is incalculable (see Derrida, 2002a). It is precisely this incalculability, and the uncertainty of the future, that Waltz’s conception of anarchy positively affirms. Rather than making the instant of the decision obsolete by transforming the decision into a mere application of rules, anarchy makes the ethical decision ‘possible’.

Even if Waltz repeatedly claims that the desire to survive is a purely pragmatic assumption made strictly for the purpose of constructing an explanatory theory, it is not neutral or innocent. First and foremost, Waltzian neorealism expresses an ethics due to the way it affirms states’ desire to survive by stipulating the necessary conditions of their survival. More precisely, it affirms the uncertainty of international life by refusing to reduce the play of relations between states to a calculable formula or a regulative ideal, and that rather embraces chance and contingency as central features of the anarchic system — features that make states simultaneously free and insecure. ¹⁶ In this light, the primary significance of Waltz’s theory is not as an explanatory theory, but as a theory that affirms the time of international life, defined by the uncertainty of the future and the logic of the erasable mortal trace. ¹⁷ It is this notion of the future that makes it possible for states, as finite political subjects, not only to survive, but also to try to take moral responsibility and make ethical decisions.

Why universal ethical ideals are both impossible and undesirable

What are the implications of my reading of Waltzian neorealism as an ethics? First of all, it contributes to a new understanding of the difficulties inherent in any attempt to theorize what it might mean to replace the structure of anarchy with an international or world political order that is supposedly ‘more’ ethical. If ethics is inextricably interlinked with the structural conditions of survival, then any attempt to challenge neorealism from an ‘ethical’ perspective must do so by replacing one structure of survival with another, and there can be no guarantees that the new structure will be less violent. While this does not in any way prevent such attempts from being made, it does highlight the risky nature of trying to resolve problems of war and violence in international politics on ethical terms. For example, the idea of creating a new form of political community that transcends the exclusionary borders of states may seem naturally desirable (e.g. Linklater, 1982). Yet, regardless of how sophisticated theories become in terms of articulating the content and meaning of such a community, there can be no guarantees that attempts to actualize it will not result in even more violence. There are no guarantees, as John Mearsheimer (1994: 44) puts it, that ‘a fascist discourse far more violent than realism will not emerge as the new hegemonic discourse’.

Moreover, it is important to point out that the value of a neorealist ethics is not that it provides a ‘coherent ethical theory’. One interesting attempt to create such a theory is found in Frost’s (2009) Global Ethics: Anarchy, Freedom and International Relations. For Frost, the point of developing a coherent ethical theory is to demonstrate how international relations can be grasped primarily in ethical terms, rather than as a struggle for power and survival. His assumption is that ‘to engage in international relations at all … is to make ethical claims for oneself and to recognize the ethical standing of others’ (Frost, 2009: 19). Frost links his theory partly to the diverse practices that shape international interactions, and partly to an ‘ethical background theory which justifies the whole set of rules which constitute the practice’ (Frost, 2009: 27). While the background theory is based on an English School-inspired notion of the anarchic system/society of states, the practices added to it have the potential to shape international relations in a direction that is ethically desirable. Arguing for and against the ethical standing of our interlocutors, ‘we construct and reconstruct the social practices within which international relations are conducted’ (Frost, 2009: 94). The main goal of these practices, according to Frost, should be nothing less than resolving the tensions within the current international system between citizen rights and global human rights (Frost, 2009: ch. 3). In contrast to cosmopolitan theories, however, he argues that this goal is attainable within the anarchic structure of the system, through the ethical adjustment of that system (Frost, 2009: 113). This adjustment involves renegotiating the relationship between citizen rights and human rights through practice. Frost (2009: 173) writes: ‘Participants in global civil society and the society of states need to take their own values seriously and need to attempt to make them real for everybody everywhere’.

According to Frost, the segregating borders of states are thus meant to persist, while the violent forms of exclusion that these borders enable are to gradually fall away through the aspiration of a common goal that embraces everybody everywhere. From the perspective of my reading of a neorealist ethics, however, the notion of a common universal goal underpinning Frost’s ethical theory is not only impossible, but also undesirable. This is not because the ideal itself is ‘bad’. Rather, it is because it is precisely the absence of a common goal beyond segregating borders that makes ethical negotiation possible in the first place. As soon as such an ideal has been formulated, and the guidelines for how to attain it have been articulated, the incalculable future in which the encounter between self and other is allowed to play out is cancelled out. As previously noted, while this encounter might result in more or less violence, it is the uncertainty of the future that makes the encounter possible in the first place.

Frost’s attempt to formulate a universal ethical ideal that embraces everyone everywhere while, at the same time, retaining the segregating borders of the international system is thus problematic. The primary reason for this, then, is that in articulating a universal ethical ideal, his theory works to undermine the conditions of international life. In brief, what Frost fails to recognize is that what makes international ethics possible is also what makes impossible the aspiration of a universal ethical ideal that is applicable to everybody everywhere — like that of a perfect alignment of citizen rights and human rights. Rather than seeking to resolve these tensions, the tensions should be kept alive. Only in this way can we, moreover, maintain a distinctly international ethics without reverting to a ‘global ethics’. For the latter to make any sense, it has to be based on ideals that transcend the borders of states, whether those ideals are linked to a specific goal or just to a general attitude of openness to political negotiation and contestation (Hutchings, 2010: 215). Irrespective of what precisely they are supposed to entail, the ideals associated with a global ethics become problematic as soon as the attempt is made to transform difference and the plurality of wills into one and the same will. It is problematic for the same reason that philosophical attempts to create a new metaphysics that is supposed to resolve the violence of metaphysics. Such attempts can only have as their aim the ultimate destruction of the very possibility of philosophical thought and writing, which, per definition, are metaphysical and therefore violent (see Derrida, 1978).

The temporal horizon of neorealism

To argue against the desirability of universal ethical ideals is, essentially, to recognize the importance of finitude for thinking about international ethics. Waltz’s neorealist conception of international anarchy and of the desire of states to survive therein offers one way of affirming this notion of international ethics. This is not to say, however, that international anarchy in Waltz’s theory should be seen as a perfect ideal that all politics and ethics must aspire to maintain. In order for my deconstructive approach to the ethics of neorealism to make any sense, the international must also be seen as something finite and deconstructible, rather than as an end in itself.

To think of the finitude of the international, we do not have to look for something that ‘transcends’ or comes ‘after’ the international, like a world government or cosmopolitan community. ¹⁸ We only have to focus on the principles that, according to Waltz, are meant to keep the international order alive: the structure of anarchy and states’ desire to survive. While these are mutually dependent, they also point to a situation in which the struggle to stay alive might threaten the system in which this struggle takes place. To illustrate this point, consider the issue of nuclear deterrence, which Waltz controversially saw as a possible method of creating a more peaceful international order (see Waltz, 1990b). For Waltz, only if nuclear catastrophe remains a real possibility will states need to actively deter the nuclear threat. ¹⁹ Thus, nuclear deterrence ‘works’ only if nuclear war remains a constant possibility, hence only insofar as the problem of nuclear war is not permanently resolved (Waltz, 1990b: 743–744). What creates the possibility of nuclear war constitutes, in this sense, the conditions of international security and peace.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war different from other wars is, of course, the planetary scale on which its effects are likely to be felt. As such, it poses a threat not only to individual states, but also to the entire system of states. On this point, there is another parallel to be drawn between Waltz and Derrida, for whom apocalyptic discourses on nuclear war are interesting because they highlight ‘the absolute effacement of any possible trace’ (Derrida, 1984c: 28). Hence, these discourses raise the stakes of survival even further by pointing to the finitude of everything that lives, as well as to all those attempts at keeping the apocalypse at bay, deferring it through deterrence and so on (Derrida, 1984d: 29).

Understood as a global threat to the entire international order, nuclear war highlights the temporal horizon of the whole neorealist project as conceived by Waltz. This is the horizon of the horizon, or the structure of the structure, which gives meaning to the ‘international’ as a finite as opposed to infinite category shaping the behaviour of states. Rather than simply reaffirming a static world-view, which perpetually reproduces itself in a circular fashion, Waltz puts forward a notion of the international that is both finite and mortal. The international continues to live on in this sense, but only on the condition that it is exposed to the threat of coming to an end.

Other examples of how the international system may come to an end relate to the increased impact of global capital and global warming. While these are often depicted as typical examples of transnational phenomena, they nevertheless emanate from a system in which states are free to make sovereign decisions, for example, on how to deregulate the emissions of pollutants and financial markets. Individual states are thus free to actively contribute to setting in motion processes that might put an end to the system that conditions their survival. In this way, there is a self-destructive potential built into the system, which threatens to make it collapse from within and on its own terms (see also Frost, 2009: 163–168).

Crucially, the self-destructive potential of international politics does not contradict Waltz’s theory. After all, he argues that the system shapes, not determines, state behaviour. He recognizes that as long as states interact within an anarchic structure, they are simultaneously free and insecure. This freedom and insecurity mean that survival in international politics can never become a predictable science that is able to ‘remove the uncertainty of politics’ (Waltz, 1990a: 37). Sometimes, the struggle to survive does more harm than good to the ones seeking to survive. Sometimes, this struggle may even set in motion processes the effects of which will be felt on a planetary scale, provoking an irreversible decay of the entire system of sovereign states.

Conclusion

The ethics of neorealism, as argued in this article, stems from the mutual interaction of the two core themes of Waltz’s theory: the structure of anarchy and states’ desire to survive. Together, they affirm Derrida’s notion of the violent opening of ethics: the opening to a future that makes new life possible while exposing everything that lives to finitude and the threat of erasure. Ethics and violence are, thus, inextricably interlinked, which means that any attempt to immunize the former from the latter is untenable. Before any moral obligations, and before any normative commitments, the ethics of neorealism addresses the more fundamental problem of what it means for states to live and be free in a system that guarantees nothing. In this way, Waltzian neorealism articulates the basic conditions of international life, which all attempts to theorize international ethics, either by remaining ‘within’ the international system or by arguing in favour of its transcendence, must come to terms with.

One of the main challenges that springs from my reading of the ethics of neorealism relates to how universal ethical ideals not only become impossible to achieve in the practical sense, but are also fundamentally undesirable. They are undesirable because the desire to fulfil them undermines the conditions that make international life possible in the first place. On this basis, a whole range of attempts to theorize the meaning and implications of international ethics, which in various ways hold on to the notion of ethical ideals beyond the violence of inter-state relations within an anarchic structure, become untenable. This even includes classical realism and the thought of Morgenthau, whose sharp distinction between ethical desirability and political possibility dissolves in light of the neorealist ethics presented in this article. According to this notion of ethics, then, the desirable cannot be placed beyond political possibility since it essentially is political possibility: the possibility of whatever happens in the interaction among states in the structure of anarchy.

As was pointed out in the penultimate section of this article, there is also a temporal horizon of neorealism. This horizon is best illustrated by the threat of nuclear war and highlights the possible end of the entire international political system. The threat of nuclear war demonstrates why this system, just like the state, ought to be seen as a finite as opposed to infinite category. Stressing the finitude of the system means that there is no metaphysical truth, moral or otherwise, to which it either can or should conform. It also means that there is always space, and time, for an ongoing ethical-political negotiation. While the latter might very well include efforts to produce a ‘lesser violence’, its main force is that of a perpetual coming of the future. As long as this future is allowed to play out, there is, I believe, reason to be optimistic: optimistic not about the possible fulfilment of universal ethical ideals, but about the future itself, and whatever it holds for international life.