THE THIRD IMAGE: 
INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT AND INTERNATIONAL ANARCHY

For what can be done against force without force?
CICERO, The Letters to His Friends

With many sovereign states, with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its grievances and ambitions ac¬cording to the dictates of its own reason or desire – conflict, sometimes leading to war, is bound to occur. To achieve a favorable outcome from such conflict a state has to rely on its own devices, the relative efficiency of which must be its constant concern. This, the idea of the third image, is to be examined [here]. It is not an esoteric idea; it is not a new idea. Thucydides implied it when he wrote that it was "the growth of the Ath¬enian power, which terrified the Lacedaemonians and forced them into war." John Adams implied it when he wrote to the citizens of Peters¬burg, Virginia, that "a war with France, if just and necessary, might wean us from fond and blind affections, which no Nation ought ever to feel towards another, as our experience in more than one instance abun¬dantly testifies." There is an obvious relation between the concern over relative power position expressed by Thucydides and the admonition of John Adams that love affairs between states are inappropriate and dan¬gerous. This relation is made explicit in Frederick Dunn's statement that "so long as the notion of self-help persists, the aim of maintaining the power position of the nation is paramount to all other considerations."
In anarchy there is no automatic harmony. The three preceding state¬ments reflect this fact. A state will use force to attain its goals if, after as¬sessing the prospects for success, it values those goals more than it values the pleasures of peace. Because each state is the final judge of its own cause, any state may at any time use force to implement its policies. Be-cause any state may at any time use force, all states must constantly be ready either to counter force with force or to pay the cost of weakness. The requirements of state action are, in this view, imposed by the cir¬cumstances in which all states exist.
In a manner of speaking, all three images are a part of nature. So fun¬damental are man, the state, and the state system in any attempt to un¬derstand international relations that seldom does an analyst, however wedded to one image, entirely overlook the other two. Still, emphasis on one image may distort one's interpretation of the others. It is, for example, [p.130] not uncommon to find those inclined to see the world in terms of either the first or the second image countering the oft-made argument that arms breed not war but security, and possibly even peace, by pointing out that the argument is a compound of dishonest myth, to cover the interests of politicians, armament makers, and others, and honest illusion entertained by patriots sincerely interested in the safety of their slates. To dispel the illusion, Cobden, to recall one of the many who have argued this way, once pointed out that doubling armaments, if everyone does it, makes no state more secure and, similarly, that none would be endangered if all military establishments were simultaneously reduced by, say, 50 per-cent.  Putting aside the thought that the arithmetic is not necessarily an accurate reflection of what the situation would be, this argument illus¬trates a supposedly practical application of the first and second images. Whether by educating citizens and leaders of the separate states or by improving the organization of each of them, a condition is sought in which the lesson here adumbrated becomes the basis for the policies of states. The result? – disarmament, and thus economy, together with peace, and thus security, for all states. If some states display a willingness to pare down their military establishments, other states will be able to pursue similar policies. In emphasizing the interdependence of the policies of all states, the argument pays heed to the third image. The optimism is, how¬ever, the result of ignoring some inherent difficulties. [Here Waltz takes up Rousseau's view of man in the early state of nature. – Ed.]
In the early state of nature, men were sufficiently dispersed to make any pattern of cooperation unnecessary. But finally the combination of in¬creased numbers and the usual natural hazards posed, in a variety of situ¬ations, the proposition: cooperate or die. Rousseau illustrates the line of reasoning with the simplest example. The example is worth reproducing, for it is the point of departure for the establishment of government and contains the basis for his explanation of conflict in international relations as well. Assume that five men who have acquired a rudimentary ability to speak and to understand each other happen to come together at a time when all of them suffer from hunger. The hunger of each will be satisfied by the fifth part of a stag, so they "agree" to cooperate in a project to trap one. But also the hunger of any one of them will be satisfied by a hare, so, as a hare comes within reach, one of them grabs it. The defector obtains the means of satisfying his hunger but in doing so permits the stag to escape. His immediate interest prevails over consideration for his fellows.
The story is simple; the implications are tremendous. In cooperative action, even where all agree on the goal and have an equal interest in the project, one cannot rely on others. Spinoza linked conflict causally to man's imperfect reason. Montesquieu and Rousseau counter Spinoza's analysis with the proposition that the sources of conflict are not so much in the minds of men as they are in the nature of social activity. The difficulty is to some extent verbal. Rousseau grants that if we knew how to receive [p.131] the true justice that comes from God, "we should need neither govern¬ment nor laws." This corresponds to Spinoza's proposition that "men in so far as they live in obedience to reason, necessarily live always in har¬mony one with another." The idea is a truism. If men were perfect, their perfection would be reflected in all of their calculations and actions. Each could rely on the behavior of others, and all decisions would be made on principles that would preserve a true harmony of interests. Spinoza em¬phasizes not the difficulties inherent in mediating conflicting interests but the defectiveness of man's reason that prevents their consistently making decisions that would be in the interest of each and for the good of all. Rousseau faces the same problem. He imagines how men must have be¬haved as they began to depend on one another to meet their daily needs. As long as each provided for his own wants, there could be no conflict; whenever the combination of natural obstacles and growth in population made cooperation necessary, conflict arose. Thus in the stag-hunt exam¬ple the tension between one man's immediate interest and the general in¬terest of the group is resolved by the unilateral action of the one man. To the extent that he was motivated by a feeling of hunger, his act is one of passion. Reason would have told him that his long-run interest depends on establishing, through experience, the conviction that cooperative ac¬tion will benefit all of the participants. But reason also tells him that if he forgoes the hare, the man next to him might leave his post to chase it, leaving the first man with nothing but food for thought on the folly of being loyal.
The problem is now posed in more significant terms. If harmony is to exist in anarchy, not only must I be perfectly rational but I must be able to assume that everyone else is too. Otherwise there is no basis for rational calculation. To allow in my calculation for the irrational acts of others can lead to no determinate solutions, but to attempt to act on a rational calcu¬lation without making such an allowance may lead to my own undoing. The latter argument is reflected in Rousseau's comments on the proposi¬tion that "a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable." In the first place he points out that such a society "would not be a society of men." Moreover, he says, "For the state to be peaceable and for harmony to be maintained, all the citizens without exception would have to be [equally] good Christians; if by ill hap there should be a single self-seeker or hypocrite… he would certainly get the better of his pious compatriots."
If we define cooperative action as rational and any deviation from it irrational, we must agree with Spinoza that conflict results from the irra¬tionality of men. But if we examine the requirements of rational action, we find that even in an example as simple as the stag hunt we have to assume that the reason of each leads to an identical definition of interest, that each will draw the same conclusion as to the methods appropriate to meet the original situation, that all will agree instantly on the action required by any chance incidents that raise the question of altering the original plan, [p.132] and that each can rely completely on the steadfastness of purpose of all the others. Perfectly rational action requires not only the perception that our welfare is tied up with the welfare of others but also a perfect ap-praisal of details so that we can answer the question: Just how in each situ¬ation is it tied up with everyone else's? Rousseau agrees with Spinoza in refusing to label the act of the rabbit-snatcher either good or bad; unlike Spinoza, he also refuses to label it either rational or irrational. He has noticed that the difficulty is not only in the actors but also in the situations they face While by no means ignoring the part that avarice and ambition play in the birth and growth of conflict, Rousseau's analysis makes clear the extent to which conflict appears inevitably in the social affairs of men.
In short, the proposition that irrationality is the cause of all the world's troubles, in the sense that a world of perfectly rational men would know no disagreements and no conflicts, is, as Rousseau implies, as true as it is irrelevant. Since the world cannot be defined in terms of perfection, the very real problem of how to achieve an approximation to harmony in co-operative and competitive activity is always with us and, lacking the pos¬sibility of perfection, it is a problem that cannot be solved simply by changing men. Rousseau's conclusion, which is also the heart of his theory of international relations, is accurately though somewhat abstractly sum¬marized in the following statement: That among particularities accidents will occur is not accidental but necessary. And this, in turn, is simply an¬other way of saying that in anarchy there is no automatic harmony.
If anarchy is the problem, then there are only two possible solutions: (1) to impose an effective control on the separate and imperfect states; (2) to remove states from the sphere of the accidental, that is, to define the good state as so perfect that it will no longer be particular. Kant tried to compromise by making states good enough to obey a set of laws to which they have volunteered their assent. Rousseau, whom on this point Kant failed to follow, emphasizes the particular nature of even the good state and, in so doing, makes apparent the futility of the solution Kant sug¬gests. He also makes possible a theory of international relations that in general terms explains the behavior of all states, whether good or bad.
In the stag-hunt example, the will of the rabbit-snatcher was rational and predictable from his own point of view. From the point of view of the rest of the group, it was arbitrary and capricious. So of any individual state, a will perfectly good for itself may provoke the violent resistance of other states. The application of Rousseau's theory to international poli-tics is stated with eloquence and clarity in his commentaries on Saint-Pierre and in a short work entitled The State of War. His application bears out the preceding analysis. The states of Europe, he writes, "touch each other at so many points that no one of them can move without giving a jar to all the rest; their variances are all the more deadly, as their ties are more closely woven." They "must inevitably fall into quarrels and dis¬sensions at the first changes that come about." And if we ask why they must "inevitably" clash, Rousseau answers: Because their union is [p.133] "formed and maintained by nothing better than chance " The nations of Europe are willful units in close juxtaposition with rules neither clear nor enforceable to guide them. The public law of Europe is but "a mass of contradictory rules which nothing but the right of the stronger can reduce to order: so that in the absence of any sure clue to guide her, reason is bound, in every case of doubt, to obey the promptings of self-interest – which in itself would make war inevitable, even if all parties desired to be just." In this condition, it is foolhardy to expect automatic harmony of in¬terest and automatic agreement and acquiescence in rights and duties. In a real sense there is a "union of the nations of Europe," but "the imper¬fections of this association make the state of those who belong to it worse than it would be if they formed no community at all."
The argument is clear. For individuals the bloodiest stage of history was the period just prior to the establishment of society. At that point they had lost the virtues of the savage without having acquired those of the citi¬zen. The late stage of the state of nature is necessarily a state of war. The nations of Europe are precisely in that stage.
What then is cause: the capricious acts of the separate states or the system within which they exist? Rousseau emphasizes the latter:
Every one can see that what unites any form of society is community of inter¬ests, and what disintegrates [it] is their conflict; that either tendency may be changed or modified by a thousand accidents; and therefore that, as soon as a society is founded, some coercive power must be provided to co-ordinate the actions of its members and give to their common interests and mutual obliga¬tions that firmness and consistency which they could never acquire of themselves.

But to emphasize the importance of political structure is not to say that the acts that bring about conflict and lead to the use of force are of no im¬portance. It is the specific acts that are the immediate causes of war, the general structure that permits them to exist and wreak their disasters. To eliminate every vestige of selfishness, perversity, and stupidity in na¬tions would serve to establish perpetual peace, but to try directly to elimi¬nate all the immediate causes of war without altering the structure of the "union of Europe" is Utopian.
What alteration of structure is required? The idea that a voluntary fed¬eration, such as Kant later proposed, could keep peace among states, Rousseau rejects emphatically. Instead, he says, the remedy for war among states "is to be found only in such a form of federal Government as shall unite nations by bonds similar to those which already unite their in-dividual members, and place the one no less than the other under the au¬thority of the Law." Kant made similar statements only to amend them out of existence once he came to consider the reality of such a federation. Rousseau does not modify his principle, as is made clear in the following quotation, every point of which is a contradiction of Kant's program for the pacific federation:
[p.134] The Federation [that is to replace the "free and voluntary association which now unites the States of Europe"] must embrace all the important Powers in its membership; it must have a Legislative Body, with powers to pass laws and ordinances binding upon all its members; it must have a coercive force capa¬ble of compelling every State to obey its common resolves whether in the way of command or of prohibition; finally, it must be strong and firm enough to make it impossible for any member to withdraw at his own pleasure the mo¬ment he conceives his private interest to clash with that of the whole body.

It is easy to poke holes in the solution offered by Rousseau. The most vulnerable point is revealed by the questions: How could the federation enforce its law on the states that comprise it without waging war against them? and How likely is it that the effective force will always be on the side of the federation? To answer these questions Rousseau argues that the states of Europe are in a condition of balance sufficiently fine to pre¬vent any one state or combination of states from prevailing over the others. For this reason, the necessary margin of force will always rest with the federation itself. The best critical consideration of the inherent weakness of a federation of states in which the law of the federation has to be enforced on the states who are its members is contained in the Feder-alist Papers. The arguments are convincing, but they need not be re¬viewed here. The practical weakness of Rousseau's recommended solu¬tion does not obscure the merit of his theoretical analysis of war as a consequence of international anarchy.
Используя текст в начале данного отрывка [стр.54-55 пособия], воспроизведите логику политических реалистов в отношении значения «анархии» для действий государств.
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