ANARCHY OR RULE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HETERONOMOUS INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE

This author has argued in a recent paper written with N. G. Onuf that the neorealist literature in International Relations is founded upon an inappropriate distinction between anarchy and rule. While Waltz's hierarchical rule constitutes a mutually exclusive alternative to anarchy, Onuf and this author have identified two nonhierarchical forms of rule, heteronomy and (Gramscian) hegemony, which are not alternatives to anarchic political relations. Indeed, heteronomous rule depends crucially upon the formal autonomy of agents posited by the anarchy problematique. Informed by the empirical assumption that historical manifestations of politics generally have been characterized by enduring and pervasive patterns of asymmetry or rule, this dissertation seeks to develop the contention that anarchic international relations are, nevertheless, stable relations of super- and subordination. The author develops the rule problematique by constructing a theory of heteronomous rule in which a condition of stable rule obtains from the optimizing behavior of rational and formally autonomous (or sovereign) states which strategically interact with each other through economic exchange relations and which are constrained by an asymmetrical distribution of wealth endowments.;Specifically, the international system is assumed to be a neorealist anarchy in which states are formally free to choose the form and degree of their participation in international politics and in which no obvious patterns of coercion obtain (such as colonialism). The conditions under which relations of rule emerge from such ostensibly uncoercive circumstances are developed in the following manner. First, the author presents a game theoretic and microeconomic analysis of the mechanism through which heteronomy operates--the contingent relationship between economic exchange and political influence. Aside from grounding Marx's and Hirschman's analyses of coercive exchanges in a sound analytical foundation, this analysis identifies the preference orderings which must obtain if heteronomous influence is to emerge as the rational outcome of agent interaction. Second, this dissertation shows how these preference orderings imply asymmetrical relations of heteronomous rule by developing a logical relationship between heteronomous preference orderings and an asymmetrical distribution of wealth. In so doing, the author provides choice theoretic foundations for the basic categories of world system theory.