When States Choose to Die: Reassessing Assumptions About What States Want

Abstract

In order to explain the creation and maintenance of a number of important international institutions, scholars must reconsider a commonly held assumption about what states want. Structural realists show that the assumption that states desire survival explains a wide range of outcomes. Yet the survival assumption prevents both realists and liberal institutionalists from offering a plausible account of international organizations that are costly to autonomy. The cultures of anarchy argument helps explain when the desire to survive is more or less salient but is burdened with the survival assumption nonetheless. I argue that it is useful to assume that states pursue the national interest and that survival is only a potential means to that end. By employing this assumption within the cultures of anarchy framework, we can begin to formulate an explanation for the willingness of states to cede autonomy to international institutions. Recent events in world politics make it necessary for international relations scholars to reassess the utility of one of the most important and long-standing assumptions in international relations theory. For millennia, prominent political thinkers have suggested that the primary aim of independent political entities is survival. For Aristotle, the test of a good government is its staying power (The Politics: 6.5.1). Cicero is even more explicit, saying, ‘‘the state ought to be so organized that it will endure forever y when a state is destroyed y it is somewhat as ifFto compare small things with greatFthis whole world should perish and collapse’’ (On the Commonwealth: 3.23). And of course, Machiavelli’s The Prince, if taken literally, is a kind of how-to book for the survival of a regime, if not a state. He says, ‘‘[c]ruelty can be described as well used (if it is permissible to say good words about something evil in itself) when it is performed all at once, for reasons of self-preservation’’ (27). Modern international relations theory is no less enamored with the idea that states seek to survive, even if the claim is posited less in normative terms than as a useful way of explaining events in international affairs. For prominent realists, institutionalists , and constructivists, the survival motive is understood to be the best shorthand for the aims and desires of states. Indeed, in order to explain the degree of cooperation or conflict in the world, contemporary international relations scholarshipFalmost to a personF begins by positing a survival motive. This paper