A Bold Move Forward for Neoclassical Realism

Abstract

Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power. By Randall Schweller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. $29.95 (ISBN: 0-691-12425-6). Berating Kenneth Waltz for his “balancing proposition's” lack of predictive specificity has become a cottage industry among international relations theorists. What started with sympathetic emendations from Stephen Walt (1987) has blossomed into a scathing series of critiques of this core Waltzian proposition that the anarchic structure of the international system conditions states to respond to any accumulation of power by forming balancing coalitions. A recent volume edited by John Vasquez and Colin Elman (2003) is dedicated to exploring the validity of the balancing proposition. In it, Vasquez (2003), among others, contends that the lack of predictive specificity in Waltz serves to render the whole enterprise of structural neorealism into a degenerative research program—that is, one that provides no new knowledge but only creates loopholes that allow the agenda to survive another day. Unanswered Threats , by Randall Schweller, joins this cavalcade of voices criticizing Waltz, but it does so in a more constructive manner. Unlike other recent criticisms, Schweller posits an alternative theoretical explanation for state behavior in these situations. Schweller's explanation is less parsimonious than Waltz's original balancing proposition, but it has the merit of not only explaining previous anomalies in structural neorealism, but of offering testable hypotheses of its own. The core question in Unanswered Threats is why, despite the frequency of unbalanced power, does power balancing happen so infrequently. In other words, why do states “underbalance”? Schweller's answer goes beyond the specifics of this question to explore the question of effective resource mobilization more broadly. He argues that …